Shepherds Abiding

  It had been six long weeks since she’d sent the letter, but she hadn’t heard a word from Mrs. Mallory. Possibly she intended to lease the building to someone else and hadn’t informed her, nor did Helen know anything. If Helen’s movers had to come and take everything away, the packing needed to begin at once; only the stock she was conserving for Christmas sales could wait until the last minute.

  Then there was the letter to her landlady, who would need to know something immediately. . . .

  She found she was wringing her hands, a habit she had tried without success to break.

  But, no! She would not give up.

  Even with concerns that sometimes overwhelmed her, she refused to abandon her belief in a glad outcome.

  Don’t worry about anything, Hope, Father Tim had said, but in everything, by prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving . . .

  “ ‘ . . . make your requests known unto God,’ ” she recited aloud, going quickly down the stairs, “ ‘and the peace that passes all understanding will fill your heart and mind through Christ Jesus!’ ”

  Finding Margaret Ann at her feet, she picked her up and held her close and stroked her orange fur.

  She would have to let her secret out to Mrs. Havner. She would go and speak with her at once . . .

  . . . then she would call Louise and say she might be moving home to live with her in their mother’s house, with its overgrown garden of hollyhocks and foxglove . . .

  . . . and she would call Scott and ask if he would come for spaghetti and meatballs this evening—it was the only dish she knew how to make for company. . . .

  Her heart skipped a beat at the thought of cooking for Scott and setting the table for the two of them. With everything else before her, it was almost too much even to consider, but she remembered how she would feel in his company—she would feel happy and unafraid.

  She stopped for a moment, leaning against the newel-post at the foot of the stairs; Margaret Ann’s rhythmic purr resonated upon her heart. Though she and Helen hadn’t discussed it, they both knew that Margaret Ann would find a new home with Hope.

  Whatever happens, she thought, I must continue to believe in a glad outcome—but I must also prepare for whatever else may lie ahead.

  She suddenly felt purposeful, and relieved, as if a great weight had flown from her shoulders.

  “I’m makin’ a list and checkin’ it twice,” said Fred.

  Fred had volunteered to give him a hand today, an offer that might not be valid any other Sunday this month.

  “You’ve got your five sheep, you’ve got your donkey, and you’ve got your first shepherd knocked out,” said Fred. “That’s seven down an’ a dozen or so to go.”

  All sanding and priming was done, and the seven finished pieces stood lined up on a shelf above the sink.

  “Hallelujah!” said Father Tim, slipping into a green bib apron. “Ol’ time, it is a-flyin’!” He hadn’t made the deadline to put the shepherds and all the sheep on the sideboard today. Now the plan was to set out the complete scene on Christmas Eve.

  Freshly ground coffee dripped into the pot; two slices of pumpkin pie, as frozen as bricks since Thanksgiving dinner at the yellow house, sat thawing on the drain board of the sink.

  “You got four ewes an’ a ram to go. You want me to keep doin’ sheep?”

  “Keep doing sheep!” said Father Tim. “And God bless you for it!” He rolled up his sleeves and sat down at his worktable across from Fred. “For several years, it seemed that every Christmas season, the Lord would send me a Christmas angel, somebody who came along at just the right time, to give me a hand or help me over a hurdle. I believe you’re my Christmas angel this year, and I thank you.”

  Fred ducked his head, shy. “An’ I thank you, Father, for lettin’ me sit in on this. My wife’s glad to get me out of th’ house. She’s got two quilts to get done.”

  “Would you call me Tim?”

  “Nossir, I can’t do that.”

  “Why not?”

  “I never call a preacher by a first name.”

  “Does this mean I have to call you Mr. Addison?”

  Fred laughed. “Nossir, that’s what the IRS called me last spring, an’ I’ve had a dislike for th’ sound of it ever since.”

  “What would I do if I had to stipple this whole flock?” Father Tim threw up his hands. “I’d be here ’til lambing time!”

  “I like stipplin,’ but I wouldn’t want to fool with wings or robes—and ’specially wouldn’t want to fool with skin; nossir, you’re th’ Skin Man. Look at that shepherd on th’ shelf! Real as life!”

  And, by heaven, it was. Father Tim was amazed that the shepherd had started out with a horrific case of jaundice and now looked merely well tanned, which would certainly be expected in his line of work.

  The damaged hand, however, had been another matter. He and Fred and Andrew had all had a go at it, and the effort-by-committee showed. But there was no looking back. The hand was done, they were not Michelangelos around here.

  Father Tim took the second shepherd from the shelf and examined it, turning it in his hands. “I think I’ll start with the robe—any ideas?”

  Fred scratched his head. “Seems like shepherds would’ve stayed pretty ragged-lookin.’ I reckon they slept under bushes or rocks or like that.”

  “Actually, shepherds around Bethlehem lived in caves. Caves made safe places for their flocks at night.”

  “Maybe somethin’ th’ color of a burlap sack?”

  “That might be hard.” He took a deep breath. “But let me see what I can do.”

  He squeezed a bit of paint from three tubes into a saucer and blended the colors with a plastic knife. He wanted to get his fingers in the stuff, but the telltale signs of oil glaze were hard to remove, and harder still to hide from an inquisitive wife.

  He showed the contents of the saucer to Fred. “What do you think?”

  “You goin’ for burlap?”

  “Going for burlap.”

  “I’d say a little more brown.”

  “Done!”

  They worked for a time, silent, oblivious to the Mozart concerto on the radio.

  “These tails are way yonder longer’n we used to do at my gran’daddy’s. We docked ’em pretty short when I was comin’ along.”

  “How many sheep did you have?”

  “Four hundred!”

  “Man!” he said, quoting Dooley.

  “We raised Dorset, mostly, and a few Blue Face. I was what you might call a shepherd, myself, now an’ again.”

  Father Tim figured he’d been seven or eight years old the Christmas he determined to do what the Bethlehem shepherds had done.

  Reverend Simon, a fervent Bible scholar and his mother’s much-loved Baptist preacher, explained the passage from Luke to the Sunday School class of eight- to ten-year-olds. Reverend Simon had them all toeing the mark; he was a big man with unruly hair and spectacles that enlarged his eyes in a frightening way. Someone said he had ruined his eyes reading the Bible, and knew more about everything in it than anyone alive. He taught their class the way he taught the congregation, with extravagant gestures and studied pauses and bursts of song in a rich, baritone voice that rattled the windowpanes.

  “Who were these shepherds?” he thundered. His magnified brown eyes roamed the small classroom as if demanding an answer, but no one raised a hand.

  “They were merely a few local boys from over the hill! Boys like you, Tom, and you, Chester, and you, Timothy!

  “When they received the word from the heavenly host and recovered from their fright, what did they do? They didn’t dillydally, they didn’t put it off ’til morning, they didn’t wait ’til they’d fried up some bacon, they made haste! ‘And they came with haste,’ St. Luke tells us, they came lickety-split toward that bright and shining star, to see the wonder of the Savior, to experience His glory, to observe His mystery.

  “Now, children, how do you think they got there?”

  Though Reverend S
imon had no intention of soliciting an answer, Mary Jane Mason raised her hand with fear and trembling, and replied with the only transport known to her. “In a Dodge sedan?”

  “My dear child, they had no Dodge sedan nor even a Buick Town Car, they had no mules or oxen or donkeys or carts or wagons. Indeed, they had no mode of transport save their own two feet!”

  Reverend Simon lifted one exceedingly large foot, shod in a shoe as black as a washpot, to demonstrate.

  “Indeed, they would have trod the several miles to the inn, almost certainly barefoot . . .”

  Here, Reverend Simon shivered mightily, wrapped an imaginary cloak about his large frame, and peered at them over his spectacles. “ . . . and in the bristling cold . . .”

  A long pause as he looked around at them.

  “ . . . in the bristling cold of a dark and wintry night!”

  Wishing to move beyond the carved and static figures of their Nativity scene, and enter somehow into the miracle itself, he had asked Tommy to walk around the barn with him the night before Christmas. He was convinced that something as fraught with risk and danger as this would responsibly equal the shepherds’ longer trek to the inn.

  “I ain’t walkin’ around no barn at night,” said Tommy. “An’ I ’specially ain’t doin’ it barefooted.”

  “But the shepherds had to do it, they had to walk all the way from the sheep pasture to Bethlehem while it was pitch-black dark.”

  “I ain’t doin’ it,” said Tommy.

  He had screwed up his courage then and, after donning an old sheet tied at his waist by a piece of jump rope, sat on the top porch step and waited for nightfall. He had checked the feet of the shepherds in their Nativity scene, and, to his enormous relief, they were wearing shoes.

  On her way home to the little house down the road, Peggy stopped on the porch and patted his head. “Your mama say come back soon as you does this.”

  He nodded.

  At the foot of the steps, she turned and looked at him. “An’ don’t you be lettin’ any spooks git my baby.”

  He had heard that, on Christmas Eve, animals talked, which seemed spooky enough. He wondered if he’d hear their two cows talking in the barn. The thought gave him a funny feeling in his stomach; he couldn’t imagine cows talking or what they might say. What if they busted out talking while he was down there by himself, in the dark?

  His mouth had been dry with fear, yet he wanted more than anything to somehow be one with those privileged to be first.

  “What are you doing?” His father approached the foot of the steps, seemingly annoyed to find his son wearing a sheet over his clothes and, worse still, accomplishing nothing of consequence.

  “I’m going to walk around the barn when it gets dark.” He said this louder than he might have done. “Sir.”

  His father looked at him as he often did—without appearing to see him.

  “Like the shepherds,” he said, eager to explain, and thereby make himself seen.

  “The shepherds?”

  “That went to worship the Baby Jesus. I know they didn’t walk around the barn, but . . .”

  In the leaden winter sky, a star or two had already appeared, and a sliver of moon. A bird called somewhere by the rabbit pen.

  “Timothy . . .”

  Something in his father’s voice was suddenly different; his eyes shone with a tenderness his son had never seen before.

  His father gazed at him for an instant more, then walked up the steps and into the house.

  He had sat there, numb with a mixture of joy and bewilderment. In one brief and startling moment, he realized that he was, after all, seen—and perhaps even loved. His heart beat faster, and his breath nearly left him.

  As dusk faded toward nightfall, he prayed again and walked down the steps onto frozen grass that crackled beneath his shoes like dry leaves.

  More stars had appeared; he looked above the ridge of the barn roof and picked a bright star that he might follow.

  He had reached the barn and touched its silvery, unpainted wood when he heard footsteps behind him. He whirled around and, in the twilit gloom, saw the figure of his father.

  “Timothy . . .”

  His father had walked with him then, neither of them speaking. When he, Timothy, stumbled over a castaway bucket, he instinctively flung out his hand, and his father caught it and held it in his own, and, in the cold and velveteen darkness, they continued around the silent barn, toward the house in which every window gleamed with light.

  “This pie’s thawed,” said Fred, sticking his forefinger into the filling.

  “I’m sorry—what did you say?”

  Timothy . . . The memory of that single and astonishing connection with his father might be lost for years at a time, only to return when least expected. . . .

  “Pie’s thawed. You want coffee?”

  “Sure,” he said, hoarse with feeling.

  He walked home along the empty sidewalk, illumined by a choir of angels. Formed by hundreds of tiny lights, the angels gleamed from every lamppost on both sides of their modest Main Street, giving it the look of a large and gracious boulevard.

  Gouging funds out of the town budget for a host of angels had, in his opinion, been the finest hour of their former mayor, Esther Cunningham.

  “You’ve been scarce as hens’ teeth,” said Mule.

  “Busy,” said Father Tim, thumping into the rear booth.

  “Big deal. Everybody’s busy this time of year. I’ve been havin’ to do breakfast and lunch solo.”

  “What’s J.C. doing? Starving to death?”

  “We had lunch at th’ tea shop yesterday, and breakfast th’ day before.”

  “You just said you’d been eating solo.”

  Mule grinned. “I said that to make you feel sorry for me.”

  “It isn’t working.”

  Father Tim opened the single-fold menu. He was up for something different today. Enough already with tuna on dry toast.

  “Tell you what,” said Mule, “I’ll let you order for me! How’s that? You know what I like—order me whatever you want to!”

  “I can’t order for you, buddyroe, you can’t even order for yourself.”

  Mule shrugged. “I don’t have a clue what I want.”

  “There’s the rub.” As for himself, maybe he’d try the taco salad. Or the pimiento cheese on whole wheat . . .

  “I guess you heard what’s movin’ into this buildin’ when Percy leaves.”

  “Nope. I’ve been out of the loop for a while.”

  “A shoe store!”

  “Great news!”

  “That’s what I said. A man shouldn’t have to drive to another town to buy shoes.”

  “You don’t drive to another town to buy shoes,” said Father Tim. “All your shoes come from yard sales in Mitford.”

  “A penny saved is a penny earned. So what am I havin’?” Mule leaned forward in anticipation, as Velma swooped over like a crow from a pine tree.

  “Let me tell ’im what he’s havin’!” She shot her glasses down her nose, meaning business; she didn’t have all day to yank an order out of Mule Skinner. “He’s havin’ a bowl of vegetable soup with a hot cornstick! Today’s special!”

  Mule gave Velma a dark look. “What’s in th’ vegetable soup?”

  “Vegetables,” she said, tight-lipped.

  “Wait. Whoa.” Father Tim knew where this was headed. “Bring him a bacon cheeseburger, everything but onions, with fries on the side and a Diet Coke. And . . .” Should he do this?

  “And. . . ?” Velma’s pencil was poised in the air.

  “And I’ll have the same!” He exhaled.

  Speechless, Velma adjusted her glasses and stumped away.

  “Did you know,” said Father Tim, “that the average American eats over sixteen pounds of fries per year? As I’ve had only two or three orders in the last decade, I figure I’m due roughly a hundred and fifty-nine pounds.”

  “There’s only one problem,” said
Mule.

  “What’s that?”

  “Th’ grease Percy uses for fries is th’ same he uses for fish. I don’t much like fish.”

  “So I’ve been wondering—how is J.C. getting upstairs to his pressroom since he refuses to set foot in this place?”

  “He’s usin’ th’ window on th’ landin’.”

  “There’s more than one way to skin a cat.”

  “Just shoots up th’ bottom sash, slips in like a house burglar, and up th’ steps he goes. By th’ way . . .”

  He thought Mule looked pained. “Yes?”

  “Fancy don’t like me to eat bacon.”

  “I forgot to ask Percy who won the photo contest. Did you hear?”

  “Lew Boyd.”

  “Great. That was a good shot.”

  “Plus. . . ,” said Mule.

  “Plus what?”

  “Plus Fancy wants me to cut out cheese. Too constipatin’.”

  “So! If you could have anything you want, what would you like for Christmas?”

  “Anything I want? Price no object?”

  “Right.”

  “A Rolodex watch!”

  “Aha!” said Father Tim, as their orders arrived with more than the usual flourish.

  He was glad Cynthia was out to a tea at Olivia Harper’s when Dooley called.

  “Hey,” said Dooley.

  “Hey, yourself, buddyroe! What’s up? When are you headed home?”

  “December twentieth.”

  “We can’t wait. I’ll have something to show you, but you mustn’t tell Cynthia.”

  “I won’t, I promise.”

  “I’m working on an old Nativity scene—twenty-odd pieces! Angels, shepherds, wise men, sheep—we’ve got ten sheep, total, a whole flock!”

  “You sound excited.”

  “I am. It’s great. Wait ’til you see it. I’m painting shepherds now. Next come angels.”

  “Sounds hard.”

  “It is hard.” He realized he was grinning. “But it’s . . .” He thought a moment. “It’s fun.”