Hoppy sat in their study, looking anxious and exhausted. Any improvement Father Tim had seen in his doctor two days ago had clearly vanished. There was no small talk, no mention of the weather, which was currently sullen with rain, nor any reference to the new study, which Hoppy had never seen until today.
“You’ve been through a dangerous patch. It will take a while to recover your stamina.”
“Yes,” he said. He had the sure sense that an axe was about to fall. His wife sat with him on the sofa and held his hand. He thought she looked unwell. This whole thing had been too much….
“But you’re in a familiar place now, with the best nurse in the county, outside Kennedy. And I believe you’re strong enough to hear what we have to tell you.”
But he didn’t want to hear anything more….
“When you blacked out at the wheel of your car, you did hit the stop sign at Little Mitford Creek.”
“If there’s any damage, Rodney knows I’ll take care of it.”
“You also hit Bill Sprouse.”
He looked at his wife, disbelieving, and saw that all color had drained from her face. Her hand tightened on his.
“And his dog, Sparky,” she whispered.
Something like ice formed in his veins.
“Bill is at the hospital with several fractures and a mild concussion. His room was right down the hall from yours. I’m sorry, Father.”
Everyone knew and loved First Baptist’s jovial pastor, who was devoted to his dog and regularly seen walking Sparky around Mitford.
“What else?” The pounding of his heart was nearly unbearable.
“Sparky was found under the rear wheel of your car; we think he died instantly.”
Lord have mercy, Christ have mercy. He put his head in his hands. “Why didn’t you tell me this before?”
“We wanted to wait ’til you were stronger. Not everybody would have handled it this way, but it seemed the best thing to do.”
Father Tim had a fleeting thought that this was only a terrible dream…
“Here’s the good news. Bill is going to be all right, though he’ll need several weeks to rest and heal. They’re looking for someone to supply his pulpit.”
…but no, it was a waking nightmare.
Dooley sat with him on the sofa, unspeaking. Barnabas left the slipcovered chair, came to his master, and lay down at his feet.
The clock ticked. The hand moved from 3:10 to 3:11.
“I’m sorry,” Dooley said at last.
“I know,” he replied.
“I would do something if I could.”
“I know,” he said again.
“I’ve been praying for you.”
“Don’t stop.”
“No, sir. I won’t.”
“Bill will be all right. But his dog…”
“Yes, sir.”
The hand passed from 3:13 to 3:14. A June breeze poured through the open windows, bearing a scent of rain and leaf mold.
“I’d better go,” said Dooley.
“I know.”
The boy stood; Father Tim looked at him, stricken.
“I love you,” Dooley said with courage. His voice shook.
I love you back, he thought, but could not speak.
He sat in the study as Cynthia, looking disconsolate, went up to bed. He knew he should do something to reassure her, she who had reassured him again and again. But he could not.
He took his Bible off his desk and opened it to Second Corinthians, and closed his eyes and prayed for Bill Sprouse and his wife. Afterward, he sat with the Bible in his lap for a long time, praying again.
Then he lifted the book into the warm circle of light from the lamp. Though he knew the passage by heart, he wanted to see it in print.
“‘My grace is sufficient for thee,’” he read, barely whispering the words, “‘for my strength is made perfect in weakness….’”
CHAPTER EIGHT
Tender Mercies
Unlike the arrival of spring, which in Mitford always seemed dilatory, summer came this year precisely on time.
On the day of solstice, the weather changed as if driven by a calendar date, and temperatures rocketed into the high eighties from the previous day’s low seventies.
Hessie Mayhew’s deck, which was known to enjoy cool breezes from the west, became by noon a veritable broiler and Hessie an unwilling capon as she arranged flowers for a wedding at the Methodist chapel. Rescuing buckets of roses, wild larkspur, yellow heliopsis, and Madonna lilies from the perilous heat, she dumped the whole shebang in her kitchen, regretful that her screened porch was currently a storage bin with no room to skin a cat.
She absolutely despised working a wedding in a kitchen the size of a cocktail napkin, but more than that, she hated what rode in on her plant materials—caterpillars, spiders, beetles, mosquitoes, gnats, aphids, bees, inchworms, ladybugs, creatures too weird and disgusting to identify, and, depending on the season, chiggers and fleas.
Feeling rivulets of sweat streaming down her spine, she opened the refrigerator door to cool her backside and declared aloud to the Ken-more stove that this was it, this was her last year to be every Tom, Dick, and Harry’s step-and-fetch-it flower arranger—she was getting out of the business once and for all and, come hell or high water, was prepared to let Social Security show her what it was made of.
And another thing. That ridiculous “Lady Spring” column, which she’d slaved over every year for ten years, was history. She’d done the first on a lark, after forcing herself to read Wordsworth and Cowper and all those other old poets who liked to hang around in the country searching for violets and stuffing their pockets with nuts. When she saw what a kick Father Tim got out of it, she did it another year, then another and another, until she was practically senseless, and all for a measly fifteen dollars a clip, which J. C. Hogan appeared to regard as a cool million before taxes.
Hessie yanked up her dress and tucked the hem into the legs of her underpants, so that she assumed, overall, the look of a mushroom turned upside down on its stem.
All these years of scrambling for her livelihood, running around like a chicken with its head cut off, and still no air conditioner, not even a window unit! And here it was, getting hotter and hotter in the mountains every blessed summer—gone were the days when people sometimes wore a sweater in August!
Hessie jabbed the rubber stopper into the drain of her kitchen sink and turned on the tap. Some people said all this weather mess was the greenhouse effect. Pretty soon the icebergs would be melting in the north and the terrible floods hurtling in this direction, which meant that, once again, the South would be taking the brunt of things.
Rankled by the doomed and unfair outcome of fuel emissions, she plunged the stems of forty-seven lilies into the tepid water. “Drink up!” she commanded.
At that moment, she realized she’d never heard a single, civilized word from Father Kavanagh about the garden basket she sent to his hospital room nearly three weeks past. She’d certainly heard straight back from Rachel Sprouse about the lovely vase of yellow roses.
She grabbed a coffee mug and smashed a worm on the countertop. What was the matter with people these days? Had common courtesy gone completely out the window? People nattered on about their sex lives ’til they were blue in the face, but there was scarcely a soul left standing who’d bother to say a simple please or thank you.
On the other hand…
She was stunned at the thought—had she really taken the father a basket, or had she dreamed it? Had she planned it so carefully, in every detail, that she only imagined she’d done it? To tell the truth, she couldn’t remember delivering it. And no wonder—since the middle of May, she’d made so many garden baskets, slogged to the hospital so many times, and done flowers for so many weddings, that it all seemed a blur….
A dull heaviness settled on her heart. Poor Father Kavanagh, with everything that had happened to him, and not a civilized word from Hessie Mayhew.
She
felt like the worm she’d just sent to its reward.
A few blocks south, Uncle Billy Watson carried a packet of seeds and a rusted hoe to the backyard of the town museum.
He liked the way the seeds rustled in their colorful packet. The sound encouraged him in what he was about to do. The dadjing things had cost a dollar at Dora Pugh’s hardware, and he’d made such a fuss about the price, she gave him an old pack from last year’s inventory, warning him they may not germinate but don’t come crying to her about it.
What he was out to accomplish was a beautification plan for the town museum, since the town was too trifling to do the beautifying themselves. He would show them what a man with a little get-up-and-go could do, which ought to put the whole lot of the town crew to shame. Before long, people would be driving by and taking notice, like they did down at Preacher Kavanagh’s place every summer—those pink roses blooming up the side of his wife’s yellow house…now, that was a sight for sore eyes.
He laid the packet on the seat of a rusted metal dinette chair that had sat under the tree for several years, and considered the roots of the tree, which were exceedingly prominent. He’d better not go to digging around tree roots, Lord knows what trouble that might stir up; if he was to mess with that tree, it could end up falling on the house, and this was the side his and Rose’s bedroom was on.
He moved away from the tree and into the yard, where the tall grass awaited the town crew and their mowing machines two days hence. How he would get a patch of this tall grass dug up was more than he could figure, but he was going to do it, and that was that.
He raised the hoe and gave the ground a good lick, but the hoe bounced out of his hand and landed two feet away. Uncle Billy said a word he hadn’t said in a good while, then shuffled over and bent down stiffly to pick it up. “Lord have mercy,” he said, wiping the sweat from his eyes.
Without returning to the original spot, he gave the ground another good lick and this time made a dent. The hoe blade turned up a smidgen of earth as red as a brick and nearly as hard. Seeing dirt gave him a feeling of confidence; he struck the ground again, but missed the opening he had just created and scored a second dent several inches from the first.
“Dadgummit!”
He was having a hard time drawing a breath, and his heart was flipping this way and that, like a fish on a creek bank.
Not to mention he was hot as a depot stove, and no wonder—he was wearing Rose’s brother’s old wool britches, which were not only burning him up, but itching him half to death. It was enough to make a man run around buck-naked.
He considered going to the house and changing clothes, but it was too much trouble. Besides, if he went in, Rose would start harping about this or that, and first thing you know, he’d be hauling out garbage or peeling potatoes or sharpening a knife blade that wouldn’t cut butter. She might even send him to the basement for that jar of pickles Lew Boyd had brought a while back, and the thought of all those jumping spiders was enough to make his scalp prickle.
Nossir, he was going to knock this thing in the head, and by October—or was it September?—they would have a bait of yellow chrysanthemums that a man could see all the way from the town monument. It would be a help if Preacher Kavanagh would walk by with his dog, the preacher would definitely know the best way to do this job of work, but he hadn’t seen the preacher in a good while, owing, he supposed, to the bad thing that had happened. He would go down the street in a day or two and tell him the two new jokes he’d learned from one of his almanacs. He would do the same for Preacher Sprouse, but there was no way in creation he could make it up that long hill to what most people called Sprouse House.
He took the hoe handle firmly between his arthritic hands, raised it as high as he was able, and whacked the ground with all his might.
By johnny, that did it. A tall stand of grass keeled over, exposing a shallow hole the size of a man’s hand.
“Hallelujah!” he hollered.
He looked toward the house to see if Rose was watching. As far as he could see, which wasn’t very far, she wasn’t.
He decided to sit a minute and catch his breath, but the dadblame chair was halfway to China. He dropped the hoe in the grass and hobbled toward the tree, clutching his lower back, where a shooting pain bubbled up like carbonation in a soft drink.
He thumped down in the chair on the packet of seeds, wiped his forehead with his sleeve, and considered the satisfying hole he had just dug with only one whack.
How many whacks would it take to make room for a handful of seeds? How long would it take to see sprouts? Would he have to build a fence around the bloomin’ things to keep the town crew from…
He dozed, dreaming of the creek near his boyhood cabin, the creek where he caught his first tadpole and saw his first bear and got bit by a snake. In this dream, however, there were no snakes, just his mama standing in the bend of Little Jack Creek, stooped over and washing out his school britches and humming “Redwing.”
At Happy Endings Bookstore, Hope Winchester opened the front door, looked at her watch, then trotted to the rear of the shop and unlocked the back door, which led to the loading dock. She didn’t care if the flies came in the back door, which had never had a screen, she would deal with it, she was absolutely craving a breath of cool air.
Cross-ventilation! Wasn’t that the crux of all important southern architecture? She slid a box of paperbacks across the floor to hold the back door open and, satisfied that she might make it until the air-conditioning was repaired on Tuesday, returned to her stool by the cash register and picked up her 1913 edition of Aunt Olive in Bohemia, which had mistakenly been shipped with an order of rare and used books.
Hope had seen immediately that this was not literature, it was shallow entertainment, but perhaps she should loosen up just this once and read something light and unimportant, which was precisely what most of her customers enjoyed. With the exception, course, of her good clientele from the college in Wesley or Mrs. Harper and Lace Turner and Mr. Gregory and a sprinkling of others, not to mention her favorite customer, Father Kavanagh.
She sighed, suddenly miserable at the thought of what had happened to him, and how inauspicious the whole dreadful thing had been. She wished she could do something to help, but there was nothing she could do. Two people had told her they were praying for him and suggested she might do the same, but she didn’t believe in prayer, she was a lifelong friend of optimism and reason.
She had succeeded in avoiding her deepest feelings all morning, as they served only to inspire a wild swing between morbid anxiety and sheer exhilaration. Indeed, she would concentrate her energies on reading this innocuous book, keeping the shop cool, and satisfying the needs of her customers, should she have one. Whatever she did, she would make a strict and disciplined effort to keep firm control of her imagination, which had always been wayward and fitful—a problem, according to her mother, caused by too much reading.
She glanced at her watch again, and opened the book to Chapter Three.
It was nearly seven o’clock in the evening, and through one of the windows of the newly-furnished studio a shaft of sunlight had found its way. It formed a patch of light on the blue drugget on the floor, and caught the corner of an oak dresser on which the old Worcester dinner service was arranged…
Hope thought the imagery deft enough and liked very much the word drugget, which she’d never before seen or heard. It must surely be a rug, but as she’d never learned anything by guessing, she put the book down and hurried to the dictionary on the little stand by the front door, placed there for customers to peruse at their leisure.
…a rug from India, of coarse hair with cotton or jute…
She felt the breeze then, so cool and sweet against the back of her neck that she let down her guard and closed her eyes and found herself standing on a moor in England, her long, dark cape snapping in the wind and George Gaynor riding toward her on a gray steed—
“Good morning, Miss Winchester. I hope it?
??s all right if I’m early.”
She shot awake from her dream, burning with mortification and alarmed by the uncontrolled pounding of her heart. She was struck dumb before the tall, lean silhouette of George Gaynor standing in the shop door, the afternoon light shining behind him.
Hélène Pringle stood at the upstairs bedroom window in what had once served as the rectory for the Chapel of our Lord and Savior, otherwise known as Lord’s Chapel.
She felt terribly perplexed and anxious—on pins and needles, really—trying to decide what might be proper.
Should she go next door and pay her respects and possibly be thought intrusive at this sensitive time? Or wait until things were back to normal and perhaps be thought cold and uncaring for not calling sooner? She had always been a worrier, and often found herself torn between complete opposites of choice and affection.
Before and after piano lessons and visits to her mother at Hope House, she had been glued to this window, thinking she may find some clue to what was transpiring at the Kavanaghs’. But the yellow house next door might have been a sepulchre; she had seen Cynthia only once, dashing from her front door in robe and pajamas, picking up the newspaper, and running in again. Since the Muse was delivered on Monday and this was Saturday, it had literally been days since she’d witnessed movement. Of course, she couldn’t see the new garage side of the house, where people probably came and went all the time, and certainly nothing could be seen through their upstairs windows, as they were always shuttered on the side facing her own.
Her cat, Barbizon, rubbed himself against her ankles, though she took no notice.
She couldn’t bear this dreadful anxiety another moment, and certainly not another day.
How was the dear man? Was his diabetes so advanced that his life might be threatened? Was he grieved beyond telling? As someone of infinite sensitivity, and a dog lover to boot, he would have taken this thing very, very hard.
While shopping at The Local, she had questioned Avis Packard about Reverend Sprouse and learned he must endure another several weeks of bed rest, but would recover. Further, Reverend Sprouse was stricken about the loss of his dog, but made every attempt to remain jovial and to lift the spirits of others. She hadn’t the courage to inquire about Father Tim, afraid that Mr. Packard might interpret the depths of her concern as odd or extreme.