A Light in the Window (63 page)

“Then I took th’ kid out on the job one night and put him in th’ cab, and showed him the hole I’d been digging, and let him dig a bucketful. It had rained for a week, and the ground was mush. I’d pulled the hoe too close to the edge of the hole and when we raised the boom with the dirt on it, the dirt caved away under the stabilizer.”

He took a long drag on the cigarette.

“The machine pitched into the hole, and I jumped out. But it... knocked the kid off and pinned him under. When we got the hoe off, he was ...”

Buck wheeled around from the window and slung the bottle at the fireplace chimney, where it smashed against the rock. Shards of glass rained to the floor and rattled across the hardwood.

Tears coursed down his face. “That kid,” Buck said hoarsely, “was my brother.”

The violent storm of weeping and cursing went on around him for hours, as he sat it out with the man who had nowhere left to go with his pain.

At one point, Buck picked up a wooden chair and hurled that, too, at the stone of the fireplace, smashing it apart. The rector flinched as a leg careened over the floor and landed at his feet. Any fool, he thought, would run from this violent place, but he could not run.

The bile of bitterness and suffering and impotence and hatred poured from a man who was fighting for his life, as he cursed God, his father, and then, himself.

Yet, as the venom spewed out of Leeper, a deep peace entered into the rector. He didn’t try to understand what was happening, and he didn’t try to speak. He only sat, praying silently, and went through it with him.

It was ten o’clock when he left Buck Leeper sleeping on the sofa where he had fallen, and went out the door and down the steps to his car.

“You won’t believe this,” said Emma. “Three guesses what Velma and Percy are goin’ to do.”

Emma had two infernally favorite games: Three Guesses and Last Go Trade. He despised both.

“Do I have to?”

“Yes,” she said, sounding final.

“They’re ah ...” He had never been good at this sort of thing. “They’re going to Hawaii!” he said with abandon.

She looked shocked. “How did you guess?”

“You mean they are? Good heavens! I simply picked the most far-fetched thing I could think of.”

“That’s exactly where they’re goin’. You must have ESP. Their kids passed th’ hat and collected enough money for a cruise. Velma called me last night. Does that beat all? Velma Mosely has never been outside the county, as far as I know, except to visit her cousin—and then she got carsick.”

Percy and Velma in Hawaii? That did, indeed, beat all.

Emma answered the phone.

“Hold on a minute, Evie.”

Emma held the receiver against her bosom. “Do you want to talk to Evie?” she whispered.

No, he didn’t want to talk to Evie. What could he possibly do? Go by after lunch and watch Miss Pattie stare out the window? Hold Evie’s hand and pray, once again? He didn’t think he could bear to see any more suffering. No, he didn’t want to talk to Evie.

He reached for the phone. “Hello, Evie.”

“Hello, Father! For a change, I’m not calling to ask you for anything ...”

“That’s all right,” he said, hearing an odd lightness in her voice. “Ask me for something.”

“I just wanted to say that Mother had a lucid moment this morning and wanted me to call and give you a message.”

“She did?”

“She wanted me to call,” said Evie, choking up, “and say that she loves you.”

He felt as if he were punched in the chest. “Please tell her I love her, too.” He did, of course. He’d merely forgotten it for a moment. “Tell her I’ll come by after lunch and give her a hug.”

He hung up the phone, beaming.

“What’s Miss Pattie done now?” asked Emma.

Percy called to report how lease negotiations had gone with Edith’s lawyer. Apparently, the town inspector hadn’t found much to be concerned about, outside the rotten joists and flooring. Minor repair was needed to correct the roof leak, and the washroom plumbing would have to be replaced. Bottom line, the Grill was set to reoccupy the premises on August 15.

“I’ll bring you one of them wild shirts,” said Percy.

“Father?” It was Tommy’s mother. “Tommy is trying to talk.”

He ran with Barnabas from the office and met Dooley coming out of school alone with his book bag. He thought he had never seen him look so desolate.

“Tommy’s trying to talk,” he said, swallowing hard.

Dooley’s face was transformed. If the rector had never witnessed pure joy, he had now.

With Barnabas straining ahead of them on the leash, they ran all the way home.

On a scale of one to ten, his energy level was hovering around two and a half.

Age, blast it, and diabetes. And no chocolate cake when a man would give his eyeteeth for a slice.

He thought of taking Cynthia to Wesley for a decent dinner in that place with the green tablecloths, but recalled Edith Mallory’s brown cigarette smoldering in the ashtray and didn’t think he could stomach it.

Every day after school, he was driving Dooley to the hospital, where Tommy’s recovery was brutally slow.

Tommy was stringing words together now, but when he arrived at the end of a sentence, he had forgotten what he said. Blinding headaches accompanied all the repercussions of his accident and the surgery.

The rector sat at his desk in the office, staring through the high windows at the trees. Maybe he should take vitamins.

“Miss Sadie,” he said when she answered the phone, “I’m feeling an old, worn-out clergyman. May I walk up and hear the story of the ballroom ceiling? I’ll bring lunch.”

“Don’t bring pizza,” she said, “it gives me heartburn!” Apparently, even Miss Sadie had tried the new drive-through pizza franchise on the highway. “Let’s have something plain, like sandwiches on white bread—you bring the filling.”

An hour later, carrying a sack from The Local, he climbed the hill to Fernbank and delivered a bag containing sliced turkey, sliced ham, and a jar of honey mustard into the hands of his hostess.

“We forgot to tell you, Father—we don’t like olive loaf.” She peered into the bag suspiciously. “Is this olive loaf?”

“No, indeed.”

“Good! I said, ‘What if he brings olive loaf?’ and Louella said, ‘We’ll eat it anyway. It’s the right thing to do!’ ”

Throughout lunch, they clinked the ice in their tea glasses, laughed over nothing at all, and Louella called him “honey.”

During dessert, which was a plate of Fig Newtons, he told them how well they were looking, and they, in turn, commented on his jacket and his good color and his trim size, and before he knew it, he wasn’t feeling like an old clergyman anymore; he was feeling like a boy.

Miss Sadie pushed open the door to the ballroom with her cane.

“It’s the first day I haven’t had workmen in here, and I can’t tell you how glad I am for the peace.

“I don’t know how we’re making it through all the uproar, except by the grace of God. Have you ever had your house torn up, Father?”

“I’ve had a washing machine flood the kitchen.”

“Poshtosh! You’ve led a sheltered life.”

She took his arm as they stood and surveyed the scene.

“Sadie Baxter’s folly, that’s what it is. But it’s going to be more beautiful than it was the evening President Wilson danced right over there with my lovely mother.”

He felt the sense of new life, of renovation, that permeated the vast room. There was freshness to it, and hope. “Has Olivia seen what’s going on?”

“Oh, no! And she won’t, until the day of the reception. I pray she’ll think she’s stepped into heaven itself. Oh, Father, in all my life, I’ve never wanted something to be so perfect! What do you think?”

“I think your prayers are being answered,” he said, looking at the freshly restored windows that ran from ceiling to floor and the scaffolding built to lift workmen to the water damage on the ceiling and walls.