“Dad?” Fern called toward her dad's office. “Elliott Young is here to see you.”
“Invite him in Fern!” Joshua Taylor called from the recesses of the room.
“Please come in, Mr. Young,” Fern said.
Elliott Young shoved his hands in his pockets and let Fern lead him into her father's office. There are various churches and denominations in Pennsylvania. Some say it's a state where God still has a foothold. There are lots of Catholics, lots of Methodists, lots of Presbyterians, lots of Baptists, lots of everything. But in Hannah Lake, Joshua Taylor ran his little church with such care and commitment to the community that it didn't matter to him what you called yourself, he was still your pastor. If you didn't sit in his pews each Sunday, it really made no difference to him. He preached from the bible, kept his message simple, kept his sermons universal, and for forty years he had labored with one goal: love and serve–the rest would take care of itself. Everyone called him Pastor Joshua, whether he was their pastor or not. And more often than not, when someone was soul-searching, they found themselves at Pastor Joshua's church.
“Elliott!” Joshua Taylor stood from his desk as Fern led Elliott Young into the room. “How are you? I haven't seen you in a while. What can I do for you?”
Fern pulled the French doors shut behind her and walked into the kitchen, wishing desperately to hear the rest of the conversation. Elliott was Ambrose's dad. Rumors were, he and Ambrose's mother were splitting up, that Lily Young was leaving town. Fern wondered if that meant Ambrose would leave too.
Fern knew she shouldn't do it, but she did. She sneaked into the pantry and positioned herself on a sack of flour. Sitting in the pantry was almost as good as sitting in her father's office. Whoever had framed up the house must have scrimped on the wall that divided the back of the pantry from the little room her father used for his office, because if Fern wedged herself into the corner, not only could she hear perfectly, she could even see into the room where the sheet rock didn't quite reach the corner. Her mother was at the grocery store. She was safe to listen without getting caught, and if her mother suddenly came home, she could swoop up the full trash and pretend like she was just doing her chores.
“. . . she's never been happy. She's tried, I think. But these last few years . . . she's just been hiding out.” Elliott Young was talking. “I love her so much. I thought if I just kept loving her, she would love me back. I thought I had enough love for both of us. For all three of us.”
“Is she determined to leave?” Fern's father asked softly.
“Yes. She wants to take Ambrose with her. I haven't said anything. But that's the hardest part. I love that boy. If she takes him, Pastor, I don't think I will survive. I don't think I'm strong enough.” Elliott Young wept openly and Fern felt sympathetic tears well in her own eyes. “I know he's not mine. Not biologically. But he's my son, Pastor. He's my son!”
“Does Ambrose know?”
“Not everything. But he's fourteen, not five. He knows enough.”
“Does Lily know you want the boy to stay, even if she leaves?”
“He is legally my son. I adopted him. I gave him my name. I have rights like any father would. I don't think she would fight it if Ambrose wanted to stay, but I haven't said anything to Brosey. I guess I keep hoping Lily will change her mind.”
“Talk to your son. Tell him what is happening. Just the facts–no blame, no condemnation, just the fact that his mother is leaving. Tell him you love him. Tell him that he is your son and that nothing will change that. Don't for one minute let him believe that he doesn't have a choice because of blood. Let him know he can go with his mother if that is his wish, but that you love him and want him to stay with you if that is what he wants.”
Elliott was quiet for several long minutes, Joshua Taylor too, and Fern wondered if that was all that was going to be said. Then Joshua Taylor asked softly, “Is that all that's bothering you, Elliott? Is there something else you want to talk about?”
“I keep thinking that if I just looked different, if I looked more like him, none of this would be happening. I know I'm not the best looking guy in the world. I know I'm a little on the homely side. But I exercise and I keep myself trim and I dress nice and wear cologne . . .” Elliott Young sounded embarrassed, and his voice drifted off.
“Looked more like who?” Joshua Taylor asked gently.
“Ambrose's father. The man Lily can't seem to get out of her system. He wasn't nice to her, Pastor. He was selfish and mean. He pushed her away when he found out she was pregnant. He told her he wanted nothing to do with her. But he was handsome. I've seen pictures. Looks just like Brosey.” Elliott's voice broke when he said his son's name.
“I've often thought that beauty can be a deterrent to love,” Fern's father mused.
“Why?”
“Because sometimes we fall in love with a face and not what's behind it. My mother used to pour the grease off the meat when she cooked, and she stored it in a tin in the cupboard. For a while, she used a tin that had once held those long, praline-covered cookies with hazelnut crème inside. The expensive ones? More than once I got that tin down thinking I'd found my mom's secret stash, only to take off the lid and see smelly mounds of grease.”
Elliott laughed, getting the point. “The container didn't matter much at that point, huh?”
“That's right. It made me want cookies, but that container was major false advertising. I think sometimes a beautiful face is false advertising too, and too many of us don't take the time to look beneath the lid. Funny, this reminds me of a sermon I gave a few weeks back. Did you hear it?”
“I'm sorry, Pastor. I work nights at the bakery, you know. Sometimes Sunday morning I'm just too tired,” Elliott said, his guilt over missing church evident, even through the pantry wall.
“It's okay, Elliott.” Joshua laughed. “I'm not taking roll. I just wanted to know if you'd heard it so I wouldn't bore you silly.” Fern heard her father turning pages. She smiled a little. He always brought everything back to the scriptures.
“In Isaiah 53:2 it says, “For he shall grow up before him as a tender plant, and as a root out of dry ground: he hath no form nor comeliness; and when we shall see him, there is no beauty that we should desire him.”
“I remember that verse,” Elliott said softly. “It always struck me that Jesus wasn't handsome. Why wouldn't God make his outside match his inside?”
“For the same reason He was born in a lowly manger, born to an oppressed people. If He had been beautiful or powerful, people would have followed him for that alone–they would have been drawn to him for all the wrong reasons.”
“That makes sense,” Elliott said.
Fern found herself nodding in agreement, sitting there on a sack of flour in the corner of the pantry. It made sense to her too. She wondered how she had missed this particular sermon. It must have come when she sneaked her romance novel in between the pages of the hymnal a few weeks ago. She felt a twinge of remorse. Her father was so wise. Maybe she should pay more attention.
“There's nothing wrong with your face, Elliott,” Joshua said gently. “There's nothing wrong with you. You are a good man with a beautiful heart. And God looks on the heart, doesn't he?”
“Yeah.” Elliott Young sounded close to tears once more. “He does. Thanks, Pastor.”
After Elliott Young left, Fern sat in deep contemplation in the pantry, her hands clasped around her knees. Then she went upstairs and began writing a love story about a blind girl searching for a soul mate and an ugly prince with a heart of gold.
Iraq
“I would really like to see a woman that wasn't wearing a tent over her head. Just once! And I would appreciate it if she was blonde or even better, redheaded!” Beans moaned one afternoon after guarding a lonely checkpoint for several hours with only a handful of women clad in burkas and children coming through to make them feel useful. Maybe it was ironic that Beans longed for a blonde when he was Hispanic. But he was American, and A
merica had the most diverse population in the world. A little diversity right now would be welcome.
“I'd be happy to never see another burka again.” Grant wiped the sweat and dust from his nose and flinched up at the sun, wishing it would take a break.
“I heard that some guys, especially in places like Afghanistan, don't see their wives at all until after they are married. Can you imagine? Surprise, sweetie!” Jesse batted his eyelashes as he made a hideous face. “What's wrong? Don't you think I'm pretty?” he said in a high falsetto and contorted his face even more.
“So how do they even know who it is they're marrying?” Paulie asked, flummoxed.
“Handwriting,” Beans said seriously. But his nostrils flared slightly, and Ambrose rolled his eyes, knowing that Beans was telling a tale.
“Really?” Paulie gasped, falling like a brick. It wasn't his fault he was so gullible. It came with the sweet temperament.
“Yeah. They write letters back and forth for a year or more. Then at the ceremony, she signs her name along with a promise that she'll always wear her burka in front of other men. He recognizes her handwriting and that’s how he knows it’s her beneath her veil.”
Grant was scowling. “I've never heard anything like that. Handwriting?”
Jesse had caught on and was trying not to laugh. “Yeah. Just think, if Ambrose and Fern had lived in Iraq, he never woulda figured out that it was Fern writing him those letters instead of Rita. Fern could have roped him into marriage. Ambrose would have seen her handwriting at the wedding and said, 'yep, it's Rita, all right!'“
Ambrose's friends howled with laughter, even Paulie, who had finally figured out that it was just a set-up to rib Ambrose about Fern. Again.
Ambrose sighed, his lips twitching. It was pretty funny. Beans was laughing so hard he was wheezing, and he and Jesse were making each other laugh even harder as they reenacted the moment the burka was removed and Fern stood beneath it instead of the buxom blonde, Rita.
Ambrose wondered what his friends would think if they knew he'd kissed Fern. Really kissed her. Knowing full well who he was kissing. No need of subterfuge. Or burkas. He wondered absentmindedly if the burka was such a bad idea. Maybe more guys would make better decisions if they weren't distracted by the packaging. For that matter, maybe guys should wear them too. 'Course, his packaging had always worked in his favor.
He pondered whether Fern would have even wanted him if he was packaged differently. He knew Rita wouldn't have. Not because she wasn't a nice enough girl, but because they had nothing in common. Take away the mutual physical attraction, and they had nothing.
With Fern, there was a possibility of a lot more. At least, the letters made him think there could be more. The tour was up in two months. He decided when he got home he would find out. And his friends would never let him hear the end of it. They would torment him for the rest of his life. He sighed and checked his weapon for the umpteenth time, wishing the day would end.
It was just a routine patrol--five army vehicles taking a turn around the southern part of the city. Ambrose was at the wheel of the last Humvee, Paulie in the passenger seat beside him. Grant was driving the vehicle in front of Ambrose, Jesse riding shotgun, Beans in the turret--the last two vehicles in the small convoy of five.
Just out for a routine patrol. Out for an hour, back to base. Up and down the crumbling, embattled streets of Baghdad along the assigned route. Paulie was singing the song he'd made up about Oz. “Iraq may not have munchkins, but it sure as hell has sand. I haven't got my girlfriend, but I've still got my hand . . .”
Suddenly, a group of kids were running along the side of the road, shrieking and running their fingers across their throats. Little boys and girls of various ages, shoeless, limbs slim and brown, clothing leached of color in the simmering heat. Running, yelling. At least six of them.
“What are they doing?” Ambrose grunted, confused. “Are they doing what I think they're doing? Do you think they hate us that much? They want our throats slashed? They're just kids!”
“I don't think that's what they're doing.” Paulie turned, watching the kids fall back as the convoy passed. “I think they were warning us.” He had stopped singing, and his face was still, contemplative.
Ambrose checked his rearview mirror. The kids had stopped running and stood in the road unmoving. They grew smaller as the convoy continued down the road, but they remained in the street, watching. Ambrose turned his attention back to the road in front of them. Except for the convoy, it was completely empty, abandoned. Not a single soul in sight. They would turn the corner on the next street, circle around the block, and head back to base.
“Brosey . . . do you feel that?”
Paul's face was tipped as if he was hearing something in the distance, something Ambrose couldn't hear, something he definitely couldn't feel. It reminded Ambrose of the way Paulie had looked when they made their clandestine visit to the memorial of Flight 93, when he'd asked the very same question. It had been almost too still that night at the memorial, as if the world had bowed its head for a moment of silence and never lifted it up again. It was too still now. The hair rose on Ambrose's neck.
And then Hell shoved a gnarled hand up through the hard packed road and unleashed fire and flying shards of metal beneath the wheels of the Humvee in front of Ambrose and Paulie, the Humvee that carried Grant, Jesse and Beans--three boys, three friends, three soldiers from Hannah Lake, Pennsylvania. And that was the last thing Ambrose Young remembered, the very last piece of Before.
When the phone rang early Monday morning, the Taylor family looked at each other with bleary eyes. Fern had stayed up all night writing and was looking forward to crawling back into bed after she ate her Cheerios. Joshua and Rachel had plans to head to Loch Haven College for a symposium for the next couple of days and wanted to get an early start. Fern couldn't wait to have the house to herself for a few days.
“It's only six-thirty! I wonder who that is?” Rachel said, puzzled.
As the local pastor, calls at odd hours weren't unusual–but the odd hours tended to be from midnight to three am. People were usually too tired at six-thirty in the morning to get in trouble or bother their pastor.
Fern jumped up and grabbed the receiver and chirped a cheerful hello, her curiosity getting the best of her.
An official-sounding voice asked for Pastor Taylor and Fern handed her father the phone with a shrug. “They want Pastor Taylor,” she said.
“This is Joshua Taylor. How can I help you?” Fern's father said briskly, standing up and moving to the side so that he didn't have to stretch the curly cord across the table. The Taylor's hadn't invested in anything as sophisticated as a cordless phone.
He listened for all of ten seconds before he sat down again.
“Oh. Oh, dear God.” He groaned and closed his eyes like a child trying to hide.
Rachel and Fern looked at each other in alarm, breakfast forgotten.
“All of them? How?”
Another silence.
“I see. Yes. Yes. I'll be ready.”
Joshua Taylor stood once more and walked to the wall unit, hanging up the ancient phone with a finality that made Fern's heart quake in her chest. When he turned toward the table, Joshua Taylor's face was sickly grey and his eyes bleak.
“That was a man named Peter Gary. He's an army chaplain assigned to casualty assistance. Connor O'Toole, Paul Kimball, Grant Nielson and Jesse Jordan were killed by a roadside bomb in Iraq yesterday.”
“Oh, no! Oh Joshua,” Rachel's voice was shrill and she covered her mouth, as if to push the words back in, but they reverberated throughout the kitchen.
“They're dead?” Fern cried in disbelief.
“Yes, Fern. They are.” Joshua looked at his only daughter and his hand shook as he reached for her, wanting to touch her, wanting to console her, wanting to fall to his knees and pray for the parents who had lost their sons. Parents he was going to have to notify in less than an hour’s time.
&n
bsp; “They contacted me because I am the local clergy. They want me to go with the officers assigned to the team to tell the families. They will have a vehicle here in half an hour to pick me up. I have to change,” he said helplessly, looking down at his jeans and favorite T-shirt that asked “What Would Jesus Do?”
“But they were scheduled to come home next month! I just saw Jamie Kimball in the store yesterday. She's been counting down the days!” Fern said, as if the news couldn't possibly be true for that reason. “And Marley! Marley's been planning her wedding. She and Jesse are getting married!”
“They're gone, Fernie.”
The tears had started to fall, the initial shock turning into teary devastation. Pastor Taylor's eyes swam with grief, Rachel was weeping quietly, but Fern sat in stunned silence, unable to feel anything but sheer disbelief. She looked up suddenly, horrified as a new question exploded into her mind.
“Dad? What about Ambrose Young?”
“I didn't ask, Fern. I didn't think. They didn't mention Ambrose. He must be okay.”
Fern shuddered with relief and immediately felt remorse that his life was more important to her than the others. But at least Ambrose was alive. At least Ambrose was okay.
Half an hour later, a black Ford Taurus pulled up to the Taylor residence. Three officers in full uniform stepped from the inauspicious vehicle and walked up the walk. Joshua Taylor was in a suit and tie, freshly showered and pressed into his most respectful attire, and he opened the door to the three men. Rachel and Fern hovered in the kitchen, listening to the surreal conversation in the next room.
One man, whom Fern assumed was the chaplain who had called her father, briefed the pastor on the procedure, giving him the information that he knew, asking advice on whom to inform first, on who might have family that they would need to gather from distances, who would need the most support. Fifteen minutes later the four men, including Pastor Taylor, drove off.