Out to Canaan

“Now, Uncle Billy . . .”

  “I hate t’ say it, Preacher, but me ’n Rose think you could’ve waited on this.”

  The rector made his way down Main Street, staring at the sidewalk. It was the only time in his life he hadn’t come away from Bill Watson feeling better than when he went.

  At the corner of Main and Wisteria, he saw Gene Bolick coming toward him, and threw up his hand in greeting. It appeared that Gene saw him, but looked away and jaywalked to the other side.

  June.

  Something about June . . .

  What else was happening this month? His birthday!

  Dadgum it, he’d just had one.

  In fact, the memory of his last birthday rushed back to him with dark force. His wife had brought him coffee in bed and wished him happy birthday, then the phone had rung and he’d raced to the hospital and discovered that a woman who would be irrevocably fixed in his life had been horribly burned by a madman.

  He sat back in his swivel chair and closed his eyes. Wrenching, that whole saga of pain and desperation. And days afterward, only doors down the hall from Pauline, Miss Sadie had died.

  No wonder he’d come close to forgetting his birthday. When was it, anyway? He looked at the calendar. Blast. Straight ahead.

  How old would he be this year? He could never remember.

  He called Cynthia at home. “How old will I be this year?”

  “Let’s see. You’re six years older than I am, and I’m fifty-seven. No, fifty-six. So you’re sixty-two.”

  “I can’t be sixty-two. I’ve already been sixty-two, I remember it distinctly.”

  “Darn!” she said. “Then you’re sixty-three?”

  “Well, surely I’m not sixty-five, because I’m retiring at sixty-five.”

  “So you must be sixty-three. Which makes me fifty-seven. Rats.”

  He realized as he hung up that they could have used their birth years to calculate the answer. What a pair they made! He hoped nobody had tapped his phone line and overheard such nonsense.

  “I’ve been thinking,” said Emma.

  Please, no.

  “I might as well retire when you retire.”

  “Well!” He was relieved. “Sounds good!”

  She looked at him over her half-glasses. “But I wasn’t expecting you to give up so soon.”

  “Give up?”

  “I guess you can’t take it anymore, the pressure and all—two services every Sunday, the sick and dying . . .”

  “It has nothing to do with pressure, and certainly not with the sick and dying. As you know, I’ve committed to supply pulpits from here to the Azores.”

  “Yes, well, that’s vacation stuff, anybody can go supply somewhere and not get involved.”

  He felt suddenly furious. Thank God he couldn’t speak; he couldn’t open his mouth. His face burning, he got up from his desk and left the office, closing the door behind him with some force.

  There! he thought. Right there is reason enough to retire.

  He deserved a medal for putting up with Emma Newland all these years—which, he realized only this morning, would be a full sixteen in September.

  Sixteen years in an office the size of a cigar box, with a woman who made Attila the Hun look sensitive and nurturing?

  “A medal!” he exclaimed aloud, going at full trot past the Irish Shop.

  “There he goes again, talking to himself,” said Hessie Mayhew, who had dropped in to share a bag of caramels with Minnie Lomax.

  “What do you think it is?” asked Minnie, who hoped the caramels wouldn’t stick to her upper plate.

  “Age. Diabetes. And guilt,” she announced darkly.

  “Guilt?”

  “Yes, for leaving those poor people in the lurch who’ve looked after him all these years.”

  “My goodness,” said Minnie, “we don’t look after our preacher at all. He looks after himself.”

  “Yes, but you’ve got a Baptist preacher. They’ve been raised to look after themselves.”

  “I declare,” said Minnie, who had never considered this possibility.

  At The Local, he saw Sophia Burton, who wasn’t even a member of Lord’s Chapel, and was flabbergasted when she burst into tears by the butcher case.

  “I’m sorry,” she told him.

  “Don’t be sorry!” he implored, not knowing what else to say.

  “It’s just that . . . it’s just that you’ve been so good to us, and . . . and we’re used to you!”

  Didn’t he despise change? Didn’t he hate it? And here he was, inflicting it on everyone else. If his wife wasn’t so excited about the whole adventure of being free, he’d call Stuart up, and . . . no, he wouldn’t do any such thing. Actually, he was excited, himself.

  “I’m . . . pretty excited, myself,” he muttered weakly.

  “That’s easy for you to say!” Mona Gragg, a former Lord’s Chapel Sunday School teacher, strode up to him, clutching a sack of corn and tomatoes. For some reason, Mona looked ten feet tall; she was also mad as a wet hen.

  “When I heard that mess on Sunday, I just boiled. Here we’ve all gotten along just fine all these years, plus . . . you’re still plenty young, and no reason in the world to retire. Did Grandma Moses quit when she was sixty-five? Certainly not! She hadn’t even gotten started! And Abraham, which Bishop Cullen was so quick to yammer about on Sunday . . . he moved to a whole new country when he was way up in his seventies and didn’t even have that kid ’til he was a hundred!”

  Mona stomped away, furious.

  “One of my ah, parishioners,” he said, flushing.

  Sophia wiped her eyes and smiled. “Father, now I can see why you’re retiring.”

  He checked out, liking the sight of Dooley bagging groceries at one of Avis’s two counters.

  “How’s it going, buddy?”

  Dooley grinned. “Great! Except for people raisin’ heck about you retiring.”

  “Ah, well.” For some reason he didn’t completely understand, Dooley seemed to approve of his plans. It wasn’t the first time Dooley had stood up for him. A year or so ago, when Buster Austin had called the rector a nerd, Dooley had proceeded to beat the tar out of him.

  As he left The Local, he saw Jenny parking her blue bicycle at the lamppost.

  He left one end of Main Street feeling like a million bucks, and reached the other end feeling like two cents with a hole in it.

  Up and down the street, he was besieged by people who had heard the news and didn’t like it, or, on the rarest of occasions, proffered him their sincere best wishes.

  Rodney Underwood was shocked and, it seemed, personally insulted.

  Lew Boyd shook his head and wouldn’t make eye contact. Why in heaven’s name his car mechanic was piqued was beyond him.

  The owner of the Collar Button rushed into the street and extended his deepest regrets. “What a loss!” he muttered darkly, sounding like a delegate from a funeral parlor.

  A vestry member called him at the rectory. “This,” she announced, “is the worst news since they found somethin’ in Lloyd’s limp nodes.”

  He phoned Stuart Cullen.

  “Gene Bolick crossed to the other side of the street!” he said, feeling like a ten-year-old whining to a parent.

  “Denial! If he doesn’t have to talk to you, he doesn’t have to acknowledge the truth. He’ll get over it. It takes time.”

  “And some people are mad because I’m retiring so early! I feel like a heel, like I’m running out on them.”

  “Let them squawk!” Stuart exclaimed. “When people don’t express their anger, it turns into depression. So, better this than a parish riddled by resentment and low morale.”

  “Then,” Father Tim said miserably, “there are those who feel it’s merely a blasted inconvenience.”

  “They’re right about that,” said Stuart. “By the way, your Search Committee is already up and running, but it’ll be a long process. So hang in there.”

  His bishop hadn’t been any help at all.


  The hasty trim he’d gotten from his reluctant wife had carried him through Stuart’s visit, but wouldn’t carry him a step further. And blast if Fancy Skinner wasn’t booked. That was the way with those unisex shops, he thought, darkly. He made an appointment for a month away, and deceived himself that he could talk Cynthia into an interim deal.

  “No, a thousand times no. I can’t cut hair! Go to Wesley, where they have the kind of barbershop you like, where men talk trout fishing and politics!”

  “I know zero about trout fishing, and even less about politics,” he said. “Where did you get that idea?”

  “Oh, phoo, darling!” she said, waving him away.

  “I’ll trim you up!” said Harley, who was getting ready for the party in his basement.

  “Oh, I don’t—”

  “Law, Rev’rend, I’ve cut hair from here t’ west Texas, they ain’t nothin’ to it, it jis’ takes a sharp pair of scissors. Now, th’ right scissors is ever’thing. I’ve cut with a razor, I’ve cut with a pocketknife, but I like scissors th’ best. I ain’t got a pair, but I got a good rock I use t’ sharpen m’ knife, so you git me some scissors, an’ we’re set. What’re you lookin’ for—mostly t’ git it off y’r collar, I reckon.”

  “I don’t know about this, Harley.”

  Harley looked at him soberly. “You ought t’ let me do it f’r you, Rev’rend. I don’t want th’ Lord sayin’ ‘What did you do f’r th’ Rev’rend?’ an’ me have t’ tell ’im, ‘Nothin’, he wouldn’t let me do nothin’!’ I know what th’ Lord’ll say, he’ll say, ‘Harley, that ain’t no excuse, you jis’ git on down them steps over yonder, I know hit’s burnin’ hot, but . . .’ ”

  “Oh, for Pete’s sake,” said the rector. “I’ll get the scissors.”

  There went Harley’s grin, meeting behind his head again.

  “Ummm,” said Cynthia, looking at him as he dressed for Harley’s housewarming party.

  “Ummm, what?”

  “Your hair . . .”

  “What about it?”

  “It’s sort of scalloped in the back.”

  “Scalloped?”

  “Well, yes, up, down, up, down. What did Harley use—pinking shears?”

  “Scissors!”

  “Not those scissors I cut up chickens with, I fondly hope.”

  “Absolutely not. He used the scissors from my chest of drawers, which I keep well sharpened.”

  “You would,” she said, looking at him as if he were a beetle on a pin. “Why don’t you sit on the commode seat and let me sort of . . . shape it up? You know I hate doing this, but you can’t go around with that scalloped look.”

  Certainly not. He sat on the commode seat, draped with a bath towel, glad he’d soon have the whole dismal business behind him.

  Cynthia had done the deed and dashed downstairs. He was putting on a clean shirt when Dooley wandered into the bedroom.

  He looked at the boy, fresh from a day’s work, and now fresh from the shower. Clean T-shirt, clean jeans; hair combed, shoe laces tied. Upstanding! Getting to look more like a millionaire every day!

  The rector might have been a statue in a park, the way Dooley walked around him, staring.

  “Man . . .” said Dooley.

  “What are you looking at?”

  “Your hair.”

  “What about my hair?” He was beginning to feel positively churlish at any mention of his hair.

  “It’s cut in a kind of V in the back. I’ve never seen that before.”

  “A V? What do you mean, a V?”

  He stomped to his dresser and, with his wife’s hand mirror, looked at the back of his neck in the trifold mirror. It wasn’t a V, exactly, it was more like a U. What was the matter with people around here, anyway?

  “I’ll trim it up for you,” said Dooley, “if you’ll let me drive your car Saturday.”

  “Dooley . . .”

  “You can drive as far as Farmer, and I can take over at the cutoff.”

  “This is no time—”

  “Anyway, you better let me fix your hair. I know how to do it.”

  “You’re kidding me.”

  “I’m not kidding you. I’ve cut Tommy’s hair bunches of times.”

  “A likely story.”

  “I swear on a stack of Bibles.”

  “I wouldn’t do that. The Bibles you so casually stacked up ask us not to swear.”

  “That V is hanging down over your collar.”

  He would drive to Memphis next week, it was only nine or ten hours one way, and see Joe. While he was there, maybe Joe would give him a tour of Graceland . . . .

  He sighed deeply. For the third time that day, he got his scissors out of his dresser drawer and handed them over. This time, however, he had the good sense to pray about it.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Housewarming

  The showy pudding cake had been reduced to crumbs, the fruit bowl ransacked, the cookies demolished. All that remained in the glass pitcher were two circles of lemon and a few seeds.

  In the freshly painted sitting room, Harley opened the last of his housewarming presents.

  “Oh, law!” he said, holding up the framed picture of Jesus carrying a sheep. “Hit’s th’ Lord an’ Master, ain’t it?”

  “Bingo!” said Cynthia, who had given him the print to go over his bed.

  “That sheep was lost,” Dooley announced. “Tell about it,” he said, looking at the rector.

  “Why don’t you tell about it?”

  Dooley scratched his head. “Well, see, it’s like . . . if you had a hundred sheep and one of ’em ran off and got lost, you’d go after it, you’d go to the mountains and all, looking for it. And like, when you found it, it would make you feel really good, I mean better than you even feel about the ninety-nine that didn’t run off.”

  “By jing!” said Harley.

  Lace sat forward in the chair. “What th’ story’s about,” she said, “is when somebody’s lost and Jesus finds ’em an’ they give their heart to ’im, it makes ’im feel happier than He feels about all them other’ns that wadn’t lost.”

  Dooley looked at her coldly.

  “I reckon that’s what th’ Lord done with me,” said Harley. “Searched through th’ mountains lookin’ t’ find me, an’ brought me here.” He grinned. “And I ain’t lost n’more.”

  The rector was captivated by an odd confidence—a new maturity, perhaps—in Lace Turner.

  “Well, now, I want t’ thank ever’ one of you’ns,” said Harley, tears coming to his eyes. “I ain’t never had a Bible with m’ name on it, I ain’t never had a ’lectric fan that moves to th’ left an’ right . . .”

  He took a paper napkin from his pocket and blew his nose.

  “ . . . I ain’t never had a picture t’ hang on m’ wall ’cept of m’ mama as a little young ’un . . . an’ Lord knows, I ain’t never had a . . .” Harley patted Scott’s gift, which lay beside him on the sofa. “What d’you call this what you give me?”

  “That’s an afghan,” said the chaplain, grinning. “One of our residents crochets those. They’re a big hit on the hill.”

  “What exactly is it f’r, did you say?”

  “It’s to keep you warm in winter when you lie on the sofa and watch TV.”

  “I’ll use it, yes, sir, I will, and I thank you, but I ain’t goin’ t’ be layin’ on no sofa watchin’ TV, I’m goin’ t’ be workin’.”

  “Harley’s going to change my alternator!” announced Cynthia.

  “I’d sure appreciate it if you’d take a look at my brakes,” said Scott. “They’re sticking.”

  “Might be y’r calibers.”

  “I’ll pay the going rate.”

  “Th’ only rate goin’ for you ’uns is no rate,” Harley declared.

  Scott Murphy glanced at his watch and stood. “I’ve got to look in on my folks before they get to sleep. Thanks for inviting me, sir . . . Mrs. Kavanagh—”

  “Cynthia!” said Mrs. Kavanagh.
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  “Cynthia! I had a really good time. Harley, come up and see me at Hope House. And let me know when you can look at my brakes.”

  Scott left by the basement door, as the rest of the party said their goodbyes to Harley, then trooped up the stairs to the rectory kitchen and along the hall to the front stoop.

  “Soon as I get my stuff, I’m going to Tommy’s house!” Dooley raced up the steps to his room, Barnabas at his heels. “His dad’s waitin’ for me, we’re going to Wesley to rent a video.”

  The rector stood on the front walk and talked with Cynthia and Olivia as Lace searched under the bench on the stoop. Then she came down the steps to the yard and peered into the boxwoods near the steps.

  “Lace—what is it?” asked Olivia.

  “Somebody’s stoled my hat,” she said. “My hat ain’t where I left it at.”

  “Where did you leave it?” wondered Cynthia.

  “I asked her to leave it on the bench,” Olivia confessed, looking concerned.

  “I’ll have a look with you,” said the rector, going to the boxwoods. “It probably fell . . .”

  “It didn’t fall nowhere!” Lace shouted. “It’s gone!”

  The screen door slammed and Dooley ran down the steps.

  “It was you that stoled my hat, won’t it? I ought t’ bash y’r head in!”

  She lunged toward Dooley, and Olivia moved almost as quickly, catching Lace’s jumper. There was a ripping sound as the skirt tore from part of the bodice.

  “Look what you done t’ my new outfit!” Lace struggled to free herself from Olivia. “Let me go, I’m goin’ t’ knock his head off—”

  “Lace! Don’t.” Cynthia caught her wrist.

  “I ought t’ kill you, you sorry, redheaded son of a—”

  Dooley’s face was crimson. “Why would I steal your dirty, stinking, stupid, beat-up hat?”

  The rector put his hand on the boy’s shoulder. “Easy, son.”

  “Well, why would I?” he yelled.

  “You better give it back and give it back now!” Lace trembled with rage, her own face ashen.