‘No, thanks, Thomas, and much obliged for the coffee. I have everything I need.’
He checked his pocket, making sure the letter was there. ‘Absolutely everything.’
• • •
HE WAS BREATHING HARD as he came around the bend at the Methodist chapel, looking neither right nor left, and ignoring the thought of the bench—there would be no more sitting, he was done with sitting. He was flying now, zooming, really, in some rare transport he’d seldom known. And while there was no real need to stop by Esther’s—he could call, Cynthia could call—he liked the idea of seeing his old parishioner and personally delivering his OMC order. Besides, three miles was three miles, nobody said he couldn’t make stops along the way.
How could he top such a letter? He could not, and anyway, topping it was not the point. That she could say such things to him, as woolly as he’d been of late, was yet another testament to her own boundless generosity. As for the pitiable effort sitting unfinished in his desk drawer, surely he would get his wind—be able to go deeper, step up higher, somehow hit the mark.
He would be wringing wet by the time he reached Esther Bolick’s; maybe he should call her, after all. And maybe he should order a three-layer, not a two. While the two-layer was heaven’s gate, the three-layer was heaven itself.
There went the mailman tooling along in his mail cart; he threw up his hand in salute, reminded that he was feeling letter-challenged. He couldn’t seem to finish the one to Henry, either. He would give a shout to Holly Springs on Sunday—voice-to-voice was always good—and say hello to Peggy while he was at it.
As a boy, he had prayed with desperation for a brother—roughly sixty years later, he had one. For that reason alone, the business of Henry was beyond blood or color or Matthew Kavanagh’s duplicity. The smart, sensitive, considerate Henry Winchester was a tailor-made brother with whom he shared major understanding from the get-go.
He remembered their talk while sitting on Henry’s garden bench in the frying heat of a Holly Springs morning. They had connected on a level too profound to plumb straight off, but which, with time, might be plumbed for the rest of their lives.
In the end, his mother’s memory could not be shamed by a gift from God. Don’t worry about me, she would say, and never worry what others may think. I worried too much about what others thought—I can tell you it’s a tragic waste of time and energy and pokes God in the eye.
Yes, yes, and yes. If allowed, the dead still spoke.
On his left, Lord’s Chapel, built of stone laid by local workmen in the early twentieth century. He glanced toward the rose garden, but the trees had grown up considerably in just a few years, and he couldn’t see much that lay beyond.
This had once been the center of the universe for him; sixteen years of memories stored in a vault to which he alone held the key. Dooley’s confirmation, his own wedding day with the church packed and the bride late and the groom on search-and-rescue and the organist hammering away to fill the gap and the two of them running, no, racing down Main Street, and how she ever did it in high heels was beyond him. Uncle Billy’s funeral, which turned into a laugh-in he’d never forget; the long procession of cars with people paying their last respects to Sadie Baxter, his favorite parishioner of this life or any other; the annual Advent Walk and everyone’s freezing fingers warmed by the heat of apple cider in a paper cup; the annual All-Church Thanksgiving that made ecumenism so lively and quick in these mountains . . .
He noted a bit of trash caught in the overgrown hemlock hedge, and stopped, blowing like a horse. He removed the bandanna and wiped his head and face and neck. What salve was the common bandanna.
But if he picked the stuff out of the hedge, where would he put it?
A fast-food wrapper, a plastic fork, a grocery receipt, a baby diaper, of all things, and the inevitable plastic bag, which he stuffed with the other detritus. He hadn’t noticed the trash before, perhaps because he’d been running on the opposite side of the street. Trash had never lingered in the hedge when he was priest. Dooley’s now-deceased grandfather and church sexton, Russell Jacks, had seen to that.
He moved along, stooping, filling the bag. Where did this stuff come from? Tourists, some might accuse, but that dog wouldn’t necessarily hunt.
He straightened up, looked at the church building in the September light. There was a spirit about it that he didn’t quite recognize—something—he searched for the word—doleful, perhaps. As they were members now of the Wesley cure, he hadn’t kept up with his old parish—it was, in fact, against church tradition for him to meddle in the business of a former congregation. Some hierarchy hadn’t been thrilled that he’d chosen to remain in Mitford—most retiring priests moved to other pastures to make the severance complete.
He started his run again, jogging to the curb, where he paused before crossing Main.
The limo was moving south, flying. Headed down the mountain, apparently, and too fast for a good look at the license plate. Either George Clooney had closed the deal with the realtor and was in a hurry to get home, or Elvis was after barbecue on the bypass in Holding.
He continued up Old Church Lane toward the minuscule office he had shared, for what seemed eternity, with Emma Newland. How had he done that? Emma, Emma, Preacher’s Dilemma, someone had said. But she was loyal. Oh, yes, and to a fault. She would flog any man, woman, or child who stepped out of line with her erstwhile boss.
And there was the time he’d been minding his sermon and Russell Jacks brought his grandson to that very door. He could see as plain as day the barefoot Dooley Barlowe in filthy overalls, looking up at him. ‘You got anyplace where I can take a dump?’
Right there, their lives had changed forever. X marks the spot.
He was wiping out too quickly this morning, but avoided looking at the memorial bench under the tree on the office lawn. That’s pretty much where he’d been standing when half the parish showed up for his Big Six-Oh. They had wheeled in a red motor scooter for their priest, who had given up driving a car eight years prior, and set him on the thing and turned the key. Drunk with astonishment and adrenaline, he had gunned it up the hill and out of view with everybody whooping and hollering like pagans.
Ah, but his bit of carless Lenten devotion had been exactly what was needed to put him on the street. Wearing out shoe leather was how he got to know his parish up close and personal—he wouldn’t take anything for those years. Was he looking for something like that again, and if so, wasn’t he bound to be disappointed?
He surprised himself by hooking a right straight to the bench, where he sat clutching the trash bag, grateful for shade. He felt the letter in his pocket, and considered taking it out and reading it again.
‘Timothy?’
Father Talbot stood in the doorway of the office, athletic, tall, and good-looking. It was as if the Search Committee had been mandated to pick the polar opposite of Tim Kavanagh. A head full of chestnut-colored hair streaked with silver and a poster boy for the dazzling smile, Henry Talbot was said to wear a ‘piece’ and bleach his teeth, and what was wrong with that, after all?
The man had aged considerably since he had seen him before the Holly Springs trip. Talbot had come over to him at Rotary and wished him a happy birthday.
‘How did you know such a thing?’ he asked, flattered.
‘A very busy grapevine,’ Talbot had said.
He stood and shook the hand of his successor at Lord’s Chapel. ‘Just using your bench for a little R&R. How are you, Henry?’
‘You’re looking fit.’
‘Not so fit as yourself,’ he said. Talbot was what he would call a serious runner, replete with Nikes, who kept himself trim through all weathers. ‘Still running?’
‘When I can,’ Talbot said.
‘What’s your route?’
‘Up the hill and through the woods. There’s a path, you know, behind the h
ospital. No exhaust fumes.’
What was he sensing in Talbot’s demeanor? Exhaustion, perhaps, maybe depression, a kind of shocked daze, in any case. Perhaps it was something like his own daze during the early stages of diabetes. Burned out, strung out, a condition endemic to clergy, diabetic or not—that would be enough right there to cause rumors.
He felt he needed to keep moving, but was oddly stuck, uneasy.
‘Your laundry?’ asked Talbot in an attempt at humor.
‘Picked up a bit of trash.’
‘Ever helpful,’ Talbot said.
‘Well, then, off I go, and great to see you.’
‘Perhaps we could . . .’
In the north light, Talbot’s blue eyes were the color of water.
‘. . . get together . . .’
‘The tea shop,’ he said. ‘Lunch?’ He would have suggested a time, but Henry turned to go inside.
‘Best wishes to Mary.’
He sensed that Henry had purposely turned away at the offer of a meeting.
Depression—he could smell it. But surely this wasn’t the ‘grave matter’ the bishop wished to discuss. Depression was merely the heavy bear that went with a rising majority of the priesthood.
He huffed his way up Old Church Lane, carrying the plastic bag and remembering why it isn’t good to stop along the way—one lost momentum, and an extra push was needed to regain it.
There was Esther’s house at the end of the pebble drive, with its baskets of geraniums gasping their last since the first nipping frost, and how could he not knock on the door and say hello and tell her he was remembering Gene, and that he wouldn’t forget? The trouble with dying is that the living so quickly forgot.
He jogged up the drive.
Suffering. That’s what he’d tried to put his finger on. Henry Talbot was suffering.
• • •
EVEN ESTHER BOLICK SEEMED OLDER since he’d seen her last, and smaller. How could she be stout last June and fragile in September? What was going on with people?
‘Come in, Father, come in, I’m tickled to see you.’
She was wearing what his grandmother had called a ‘housecoat’ and old slippers resembling rabbits with whiskers.
‘No, no, I won’t come in, Esther. Too sweaty. Just stopping to order an OMC and say I miss seeing Gene, I think of him often.’
‘He was my taster,’ she said, taking a tissue from her pocket.
‘I know.’
She wiped her eyes. ‘If you won’t come in, I’ll get you a glass of water and come out. You sit over there in the swing, you’re just what the doctor ordered.’
No way would he argue with the legendary baker of his wedding cake. He watched a female cardinal at the feeder until Esther came out.
‘I’m done, Father. That’s that.’ She handed him the glass of water and sat in a wicker chair. ‘You’ll be takin’ your cake orders up th’ street. From this day on, Sweet Stuff is bakin’ th’ OMC.’
‘Good Lord, Esther. Surely not. Only you can bake the OMC.’ He was an ardent fan of her celebrated orange marmalade cake, even if it had nearly taken him out—one slice at the wrong time and he’d plunged into a nonketotic coma in which he enjoyed a lengthy dinner with Charles Spurgeon.
‘People have bootlegged my recipe for a hundred years without so much as a thank-you-ma’am. And what do they do with it? They change it—to make it their own, they say. Oh, no, they say, this is not Esther’s recipe, this is my recipe, new an’ improved.
‘Mangled is what it is, when they get through dumpin’ nuts in th’ batter—nuts! Not to mention th’ screwy bunch that pours in a bucket of Cointreau. Can you believe it? No, you can’t believe it, because that is unbelievable.’
‘Absolutely!’ He was riled, himself.
‘Fame,’ she said, ‘is a wicked thing.’
‘Indeed it is.’ Not that he’d ever had any. ‘But why?’
‘My legs an’ my back. It’s either this or knee replacements.’ She gave him a fierce look. ‘Bakin’ is hard work, Father.’
‘It is, it is.’ He had baked a cake once, it half killed him. ‘But with you, it’s also an art form.’
‘I don’t want to quit,’ she said. ‘I’d bake th’ OMC ’til th’ cows come home, but my bakin’ days are over. Winnie and I signed th’ letter of agreement yesterday afternoon. It says she’ll never, under any circumstances, add, delete, or falsify any part of th’ recipe. Where it says one tablespoon grated zest, that’s what I mean. One tablespoon grated zest. Where it says five large eggs . . .’
‘You do not mean small or medium.’
‘That’s correct,’ she said, ‘I do not.’
‘I don’t know, Esther, this is kind of like losing the town monument.’
‘It’ll be advertised as Esther’s OMC, made from th’ recipe I’ve used for forty years. And you’ll never guess what she’s askin’ for every two-layer ten-inch she sells.’
He drained the glass, afraid to guess.
‘Thirty-five dollars! In this town! How ’bout them apples?’
‘People will come from all over,’ he said. ‘Wesley, Holding . . . shoot, maybe even Charlotte!’
‘And every one that flies out of her case, I get ten percent—for sittin’ on my behind readin’ Danielle Steel.’
‘Gene would be proud.’
‘Every cake I baked, he tasted th’ batter before it went in th’ pan. Hon, he’d say, this’ll be your best yet.’ She looked away, wistful. ‘Did you see th’ sign over town for Fancy’s sister? I ought to go up and get my hair dyed, I’ve never had my hair dyed. They’re runnin’ a special.’
‘Well, got to get these dry bones moving. It’s wonderful to see you.’
He went to her and stooped and kissed her forehead. Esther without Gene was a lost Esther.
She squinted up at him. ‘Do you think Mitford still takes care of its own? I’ve been thinkin’ about it. I don’t know.’
He didn’t know, either. Indeed, he had nearly left her house without offering what was needed most. ‘May I pray for you?’
‘I thought you’d never ask,’ she said. ‘It’s certainly nothin’ Father Talbot ever troubled himself to do. Set your bag down right there and go for it.’
• • •
‘I DIDN’T WANT TO SAY anything ’til th’ sign went up and it was official.’
He hadn’t seen Winnie look so solemn since Edith Mallory tried to sabotage the lease on Sweet Stuff.
‘I mean, while I’m truly honored to bake th’ OMC, I’m against th’ whole idea.’
‘You are?’
‘Totally,’ she said. ‘Esther shouldn’t quit bakin’ th’ OMC, it’s her joy.’
He agreed.
‘But its official, Father, and I’m ready to put th’ sign in th’ window. Or do you think it should go on th’ door?’
‘On the door.’
They stood on the sidewalk and stared at the computer-generated sign, not speaking for a time.
‘The end of an era, Winnie.’
She looked at him. ‘Eras have a way of endin’ all over th’ place.’
• • •
PUNY MET HIM at the side door and took the bake shop bags.
‘They was a man here to see you,’ she said. ‘In a black car with tinted windows.’
He was floored. ‘What did he want?’
‘He wanted to see you an’ I said you were out runnin’ and then ’is cell started beepin’ an’ he answered an’ said yes, ma’am, a whole lot of times an’ then he said they had to git down th’ mountain an’ off he went in a hurry.’
‘It wasn’t Ed Coffey?’
‘Definitely not Ed Coffey. Had on these really dark wraparound glasses an’ a uniform like I never seen on anybody. But not armed services or anything.’
‘He said they had to go?’
‘That’s what he said.’
‘Did he say anything else?’
‘Nothin.’ Miss Cynthy told me to answer th’ phone an’ th’ door, she’s workin’.’
‘How did he ask for me?’
‘He said, Is Father Timothy Kavanagh available? That’s when I said you were out runnin’.’
‘He didn’t ask where?’
‘No, that’s when ’is cell phone beeped.’
‘He said they had to go down the mountain? Those were his words?’
‘Exactly.’
Yes, ma’am. The driver was southern. They. There would have been another person with him, or two. Down the mountain. Usually only people who lived on the mountain said down the mountain.
He sat on a kitchen stool, fairly whipped from the run and the heat. ‘Aren’t you here late?’
‘I’m leavin’ in ten minutes. I tol’ Miss Cynthy I have to bring th’ babies to work on Monday. Can you stand it?’
‘I’ll eat my Wheaties,’ he said. ‘Any calls?’
‘Mr. Skinner left a message, I couldn’t git to th’ phone right then. He said, Tea shop today, high noon. Th’ only other call was th’ man who said bring your car in tomorrow mornin’—first thing, he said, or it’ll be late next week ’til he can take a look at it. Here’s your raisins.’
He ate the raisins, dutiful, walked Barnabas to their side of the hedge, went to the studio and looked at what his wife had done today, which was bloody amazing, thanked her for the letter, and said, More later, and went upstairs and showered and put on a knit shirt and a pair of khakis. He had time to clean the outdoor grill for tonight before he went to lunch. Run, clean the grill, go to lunch. Life was short, how long could he afford to do nothing? In the afternoon, he would work on his own letter. God help him.
So Mule was over his huff about the tea shop, and J.C. would probably show up, too.
What next? What now?
And how long could he avoid J.C.? The answer was, not long. Nobody had mentioned the Muse piece today, so he wasn’t the only one dismissing local reportage as rubbish and twaddle. He crossed himself, lifted a prayer, forgave the old so-and-so, and went downstairs to report the real news, which was Esther’s.