Miss Rose Watson sat silent as a stone, concerned that the Ziploc bags of turkey and dressing would shift under her coat.
Goodbyes were said, hugs were given out, and everyone shook the hand of the rector and his new wife, thanking them for a fine Feast. Several inspected Dooley’s school blazer and commented that he’d shot up like a weed.
The contingent organized to deliver baskets waited impatiently as the packers worked to fulfill a list of sixteen recipients. These included Miss Sadie and Louella, Homeless Hobbes, and Winnie Ivey, who had shingles.
“You doin‘ a basket run?” Mule asked the rector.
He nodded. “Over to Miss Sadie’s new digs on Lilac Road, then back here to help clean up. What about you?”
“Headed to Coot Hendrick’s place. His mama’s weak as pond water since th‘ flu.”
“I thought J.C. was coming to the Feast this year.”
“He probably boiled off a can of mushroom soup and ate what he didn’t scorch.”
“It’s a miracle he’s alive.”
“Ain’t that th‘ truth?” Mule agreed.
“There’s nothin‘ wrong with J.C. that a good woman couldn’t cure,” said Fancy, who was dressed for today’s occasion in fuchsia hot pants, spike heels, V-neck sweater, and a belt made of sea shells sprayed with gold paint.
“Don’t hold your breath on that deal,” said Mule.
Sophia came over and hugged the rector around the neck, as Liza clasped his waist and clung for a moment. “We love you, Father,” said Sophia. He leaned down and kissed Liza on the forehead.
“Lord have mercy,” said Mule, as Liza and Sophia left. “I don’t know what these people will do when you retire. I hate t‘ think about it.”
“Then don’t,” snapped the rector.
He saw the surprised look on his friend’s face. He hadn’t meant to use that tone of voice.
“Line up and collect your baskets,” hollered Esther Cunningham, “and hot foot it out of here! This is not a cold-cut dinner you’re deliverin‘.”
The delivery squad obediently queued up at the kitchen door.
“If you could knock th‘ Baptists out of this deal,” said Charlie Tucker, “we’d have somethin’ left to go in these baskets. Baptists eat like they’re bein‘ raptured before dark.”
“It wasn’t the Baptists who gobbled up the turkey,” said Esther Bolick, appearing to know.
“Well, it sure wasn’t the Methodists,” retorted Jena Ivey, taking it personally. “We like fried chicken!”
“It was the dadgum Lutherans!” announced Mule, picking up the basket for Coot Hendrick’s mother. “Outlanders from Wesley!”
Everyone howled with laughter, including the Lutherans, who had personally observed the Episcopalians eating enough turkey to sink an oil freighter.
Abner Hickman came in the back door of the parish hall, returned from taking his kids home.
“Y‘all want to see a sunset?”
A little murmur of excitement ran through the cleanup crew. Mitford was a place where showy sunsets were valued.
“Better get up to th‘ wall,” declared Abner, “and step on it.”
Esther Bolick parked her carpet sweeper in a corner. “Drop everything and let’s go! Life is short.”
They piled into vans and cars and screeched out of the parking lot, gunning their engines all the way to the steep crest of Old Church Lane, where they tumbled out and raced to the stone wall that overlooked the Land of Counterpane.
“Good heavens!”
“That’s a big ‘un, all right.”
Little by little, the sharp intakes of breath and the murmurs and whooping subsided, and they stood there, lined up along the wall, gazing at the wonder of a sunset that blazed across the heavens. Where the sun was sinking, the skies ran with molten crimson that spread above the mountains like watercolor, changing to orange and pink, lavender and gold. A cool fire of platinum rimmed the profile of Gabriel Mountain and the dark, swelling ridges on either side.
He put one arm around Dooley’s shoulders and the other around Cynthia’s waist. The fullness of his heart was inexpressible.
All is safely gathered in ...
He knew it could not always be this way. No, nothing ever remained the same. If he had learned anything in life, he had learned that such moments were fragile beyond knowing.
Ere the winter storms begin ...
CHAPTER FOUR
Passing the Torch
THE LIGHT from the street lamp in front of the rectory shone through the hall window, reflected into the mirror at the top of his dresser, and bounced softly onto the bedroom ceiling.
Because a mimosa tree had grown up beside the old street lamp, the light gleamed through its leaves, casting shadows overhead. He could tell when a breeze was up, as the shadow of the leaves danced above him.
“Timothy?”
“Hmmm?”
Cynthia turned over and lay facing him. “I can feel you lying there stiff as a board. Something’s on your mind, I just know it. Can’t you tell me?”
He didn’t want to say it to himself, much less to anyone else. “It’s Dooley.”
“Yes.”
“What’s happened to him?”
“I’ve been wondering that, too.”
“He’s different. Was I so wrong to send him away to school?”
“I don’t know.” She sighed. “At least he isn’t saying ‘ain’t.’ But that’s no consolation.”
“God’s truth, as much as I fought him on it, I miss hearing him say it.”
Cynthia turned and lay on her back. “The wind is up,” she said, looking at the ceiling.
“I sense something hard in him, something harder than before.”
“He hates that school.”
“I can’t help but wonder if I should bail him out. Or trust the old adage that time heals all wounds. Maybe it’s just a matter of time until he puts down roots where he is. He put roots down here—his very first—then I hauled him off to Virginia. Transplanting is always risky business.”
“Look what happened,” she said, “when I moved my white lilac in the middle of summer. How did I know it should be moved in early spring?”
“Yes. Maybe it was timing, maybe we should have waited a year to send him away.”
“Have you talked to him?”
“He won’t talk. He’s hard as stone—face, heart, spirit.”
“He needs to spend time with Tommy,” she said. “He’s avoiding his best friend.”
He despised losing sleep over any issue. Broad daylight was the time for fretting and wrestling—if it had to be done at all. “Don’t worry about anything,” Paul had written to the church at Philippi, “but in everything, by prayer and supplication, make your requests known unto God. And the peace that passes all understanding will fill your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus.” In the last hour, he had twice given his concerns to God and then snatched them back, only to lie here staring at the ceiling, worried.
“What were you like when you were thirteen? What was going on in your life? Maybe that will help us.”
“My best friend was named Tommy, also. We did everything together. My father despised him.”
“Your father. What was it, Timothy, that made him so cold? Did you ever do anything that pleased him?”
He thought about it. No. He really couldn’t remember doing anything that pleased his father. His grades had been very good, but never good enough. There was the incident with the bicycle, but he didn’t want to remember that. He didn’t want to talk about his father. It was the middle of the night and he suddenly felt the weight lying on his chest.
“Let me rub your neck,” he said, turning to her. “I know you had a long day over the drawing board.”
“But, dearest—”
“There. How’s that?”
“Lovely,” she murmured.
The softness of her skin, the warmth of the down comforter, the leaves moving softly above them ...
He was asleep in two minutes.
He drove to the country to see the ninety-year-old preacher he’d hooked up with Homeless Hobbes and the residents of Little Mitford Creek.
Every Wednesday night, in clement weather, Homeless cooked a vast pot of soup and fed any who would come to his one-room shack on the creek bank. Homeless’s broader concern for their spiritual feeding had moved the rector to ask Absalom Greer to preach a summer meeting, his last call before retiring from his “little handfuls” at three mountain churches.
The old parson had willingly gone into the desperately impoverished area, where alcohol, drugs, and violence had eaten into the Creek like cancer.
“I quit!” said Absalom Greer, opening a cold bottle of Orange Crush and passing it to the rector.
“I hate to hear it,” said Father Tim.
“Every time I try to get loose of preachin‘, there’s somebody who hates to hear it, and so I fall to doing it again, goin’ like a circle saw. But this is it, my brother, as far as churches and camp meets go. The Lord paid me off, showed me the gate, and told me to trot.”
The two men sat by the ancient soft-drink box in Absalom Greer’s country store, twelve miles from Mitford. Among the comforts of this life, the rector once said, was sitting in Greer’s Store in the late afternoon, with the winter sun slanting across heart-of-pine floors laid nearly a century ago.
“I’ll do my preaching from the drink box, from here on out. There’s many a lost soul comes down that road looking to quench their thirst, thinkin‘ they can do it with a Pepsi.”
The rector nodded.
“Used to, I could give ‘em a soft drink and a sermon for a nickle. Now the drink companies gouge a man for the best part of a dollar.” The preacher’s pale blue eyes twinkled. “Some days, it’s hard to come up with a dollar’s worth of preaching.”
“Amen!”
The rector gazed with affection on the man who, more than sixty years ago, tried to win the hand of Sadie Baxter, and lost—the self-educated man who, to the horror and delight of his parishioners, had supplied the pulpit at Lord’s Chapel while Father Tim hustled off to Ireland last year. What was more extraordinary was that Absalom Greer had packed them in—after the initial shock wore off.
“Tell me about your stint on the Creek. Homeless said wonderful things happened.”
“My brother, they were a rough bunch—a handful and a half! I was preaching on sin, and they didn’t like it a bit—same as the fancy churches, where the very mention of sin empties the pews.
“But a man has to start somewhere, and that’s where the Lord told me to start—with sin and repentance.
“Folks like to think sin is what everybody else is doing, but the mighty book of Romans lays it out plain and simple—‘For all have sinned and come short of the glory of God.’
“I didn’t go on about drinking and fornicating, or backbiting and stealing. Nossir, I jumped right to the heart of the matter and preached the taproot of sin, which is found in the middle of the word, itself—I! I want this, I want that, and I want it right now. I want to run things, I want to call the shots, I want be in charge....
“When we turn from our sin, and have the blessed forgiveness of the Almighty, then we can ask Him to run things, and let Him be in charge. But boys howdy, folks don’t want to hear that, either.
“Nossir, they like to keep control, even if their little boat’s pitchin‘ around in the storm and takin’ on water and about to be swamped.”
Preacher Greer took a long swallow of his cold drink.
“I got to chasing rabbits there for a minute. You asked how it went.
“Wellsir, you know how you stick a seed in the ground and you squat down and look where you planted it, and you get up and walk around a little bit, waiting for something to happen, and the rain falls and the sun shines, and you water that seed some more ... and still nothing pokes up. So after a while, you’re tempted to go off and lay down under a tree, and plumb quit on that seed.
“Week after week, I was preaching the living redemption of our Savior, and I look out and see dead faces and stony hearts. A rough life had killed back their feelin’s like a hard freeze on a peach crop.
“Some nights I’d go home and cry like a baby for the way they were hangin‘ on to their hurt.
“But I plowed on. One evenin‘, we preached the Word where it tells us the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ.
“We told how Christ died for us out of love, which is mighty hard to understand, saved or unsaved.
“Then, we preached that noble verse from Revelation that makes me shiver to hear it—‘Behold, I stand at the door and knock! If any man hears my voice and opens the door, I’ll come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with me.’
“I said the Lord Jesus will knock and keep knocking ‘til you let Him come in and make you a new creature. He’ll never break down the door. Nossir, the Lord is a gentleman. He waits to be invited.”
The bell jingled, and a customer walked in. “Brother Greer, I need a box of oatmeal!”
“Comin‘ up,” said Absalom, leaving his guest.
The rector noted the slowness of the old man’s gait as he walked toward the shelves. He hadn’t seen that last year and felt troubled by it. Deep down, he expected the people he loved to live forever, no matter how many funerals he had performed during his years as a priest.
Absalom rejoined the rector and sat again.
“My brother, I was in deep prayer as I preached, that the Holy Ghost would knock through the crust on every heart along that creek—but I have to tell you, my own heart was sinking, for it looked like the vineyard wasn’t givin‘ off a single grape.”
“I hear you.”
“That’s the way it was goin‘ when I noticed a young girl sitting on a limb of that big tree by the water.
“Usually, a good many young ‘uns would sit up there for the preaching, but somebody had put a board across some rocks that evenin’, and all the young ‘uns but her was sitting on the board. I pay a good bit of attention to young ’uns, having been one myself, but I’d never spotted Lacey Turner before.
“You talk about listening! Her eyes like to bored a hole in me. If a preacher had a congregation to sit up and take notice like that, he’d be a happy man. It seemed like every word the Holy Ghost put in my mouth was something she craved to hear. I got the feeling my words were like arrows, shooting straight at that long-legged, barefooted girl, but still missing the souls on the ground.
“Wellsir, that young ‘un slid off that limb and landed on her feet right in front of me, blam!
“Strikin‘ the ground like that kicked the dust up around her feet. I looked at that dust and looked at that girl, and I knew the Lord was about to do a work.
“She said, ‘I’m sorry for th’ bad I’ve done, and I want to git saved.‘ It was as matter-of-fact a thing as you’d ever want to hear.
“Well, the young ‘uns on the board, they started in laughing, but that girl, she stood there like a rock, you should have seen her face! She was meaning business.
“I said, ‘What would you be repenting of?’ And she said, ‘Bein’ generally mean and hatin‘ ever’body.‘ ”
“My brother, that’s as strong an answer as you’re likely to get from anybody, anywhere.
“I said, ‘Do you want to be forgiven of meanness and hatred?’ and she squared back her shoulders and said, ‘That’s what I jumped down here for.’
“I said, ‘Well, jump in here and say a prayer with me and turn your heart over to Jesus.’ And we both went down on our knees right there by the water, saying those words that’s changed the lives of so many lost and hurting souls.
“ ‘Lord Jesus,’ she prayed in behind me, ‘I know I’m a sinner. I believe You died for my sins. Right now, I turn from my sins and receive You as my personal Lord and Savior. Amen.’
“Wellsir, I looked up and half the crowd had moved over to that big tree and was goin
g down on their knees, one by one, and oh, law, the Holy Ghost got to working like you never saw, softening hearts and convicting souls ‘til it nearly snatched the hair off my head.
“We stayed kneeling right there, and I led first one and then another in that little prayer, and before you know it, brand-new people were getting up off their knees and leaping for joy!
“Oh, you know the lightness that comes with having your sins forgiven! It’s a lightness that fills you from one end to the other and runs through your soul like healing balm.”
The rector could feel the smile stretching across his face.
“My brother, I scrambled down the bank to that creek, and that little handful swarmed down over rocks and roots, some crying, some whooping for joy, and we baptized in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost ‘til I was sopping wet from head to toe.
The old preacher was silent, then he smiled. “I’ve never seen anything to top it.”
“Nor I,” said the rector.
Absalom got up and set his empty bottle in a crate.
“You can baptize anywhere you’ve got water,” he said, “but to my way of thinking, you can’t beat a creek. It’s the way ol‘ John did it—out in the open, plain and simple.
“Only one thing nags me,” he told the rector. “Who’s goin‘ to disciple those children of God?
“What’s goin‘ to become of Lacey Turner, as pert and smart a young ’un as you’ll ever see, with a daddy that’s beat her all her life, and a mama sick to death with a blood ailment?
“I can’t keep goin‘ back in there. My arthritis won’t hardly let me get down the bank from the main road.”
The old man shook his head. “It grieves me, brother, it grieves me.”
The knot in the rector’s throat was sizable. “I don’t know right now what we can do,” he said, “but we’ll do something. You can count on it.”