A New Song (38 page)

“Speakin’ of fleas, did you hear what Rodney Underwood just got to hunt criminals, you’d never guess.”

“True. I wouldn’t.”

“A rockwilder! You should see people scatterin’ when it trots down th’ street, Adele Hogan walks it every morning and it drags Joe Joe Guthrie around every evening, I’d hate to be a criminal in this town! Speakin’ of criminal, have you heard what Miss Pattie’s done now?”

Miss Pattie was a Hope House resident whose mind had been lost some years ago and was found only on the rarest of occasions. Her antics had long been of particular interest to Emma.

“Miss Pattie’s too old to get into mischief, I should think.”

“Well, think again, she steals everything she can get her hands on in Mr. Berman’s room, then goes and throws it out her window.”

“No!”

“His money, his bedroom shoes, his good leather belt, you name it. He got undressed the other night and looked around for his pajamas and they weren’t there, so he draped himself in a blanket like a red Indian and called the nurse and told her if Miss Pattie didn’t stop this mess, his son will sue for a million dollars.”

“Can’t the staff
do
something?”

“They locked her window, that’s the best they can do, they say she’s going through a phase.”

“What does Mr. Berman say?”

“He says she has a terrible crush on him.”

“That makes sense,” he said, recalling that Mr. Berman was a very handsome old man.

“Speakin’ of crazy people, Coot Hendrick actually believes he’s going to win th’ election. Can you
imagine
havin’ a mayor who’s two san’wiches short of a full picnic?”

He suddenly realized that Emma’s sluice gate had opened and he was being swept along as if by a raging torrent.

“So, Emma, glad to hear you had a great time in New Orleans. Let me know what you find out about Ed Sikes.”

He hung up and wiped his face with his handkerchief.

 

The search committee was meeting regularly, chatting each other up in the churchyard, whispering among themselves in the parish hall, polling the congregation for general opinion, and basically going about the task of replacement as if eager to unload their interim.

When he laughed with Sam Fieldwalker about their apparent urgency, his senior warden insisted that quite the opposite was true. The committee was hastening to do their job, yes, but in fact, several parishioners had expressed a desire to have their interim remain full-time. Besides, Father Tim was too young to retire. Hadn’t Father Grace served St. John’s until he was eighty-seven?

Not every interim was urged by the parish to stay on. In fact, many were viewed with suspicion and some with utter disregard. He remembered what one of his early bishops was fond of saying—that the interim who didn’t make enemies was a man who wasn’t doing his job. The job, it was popularly supposed, was to stir things up, to throw out the old and make way for the new.

Who could, after all, forget Father Harry?

Father Harry, who was seventy-one when his life as an interim began, thoroughly relished the task of disrupting the comfort level of a parish. His style was to barge in and take command before they knew what hit them.

If the congregation was attached to Rite Two, he celebrated Rite One. If they were stubbornly fond of traditional music, he switched them to praise songs. If they venerated their choir and organ, he had them sing a cappella for weeks on end. If they believed children should be seen and not heard, he invited the small fry to take up collection and read simpler Epistles. If their former priest had avoided the very mention of mammon, Father Harry talked about it at considerable length, with special emphasis on tithing. Further, he enjoyed reinstituting the observance of Morning Prayer, which, if not entirely forgotten by most parishes, was thought to be quaintly antique.

When the incoming priest was finally in place, the congregants were so relieved to be done with the old troublemaker, they went for almost anything the newcomer cooked up.

Father Harry could get the job done, all right. As for himself, Father Tim leaned rather more to what C. S. Lewis had said about worship procedures in
Letters to Malcolm.

“A good shoe is a shoe you don’t notice. . . . The perfect church service would be one we were almost unaware of; our attention would have been on God. But every novelty prevents this. It fixes our attention on the service itself, and thinking about worship is a different thing from worshipping.”

He relished a note left on his desk by nine-year-old Margaret Wheeler.

 

 

 

Displaying her skills with the ability to fax directly from her computer, he found Emma’s note at the office.

 

 

He couldn’t believe this was happening.

As he approached Morris Love’s place on an afternoon walk, his dog suddenly lurched forward with all the power and muscle of a horse. The leash jerked from his unsuspecting hand and Barnabas dove under the gate in a flash. Déjà vu!

His anger erupted with such violence, he was astounded.
“Barnabas!”
he thundered.

Was he so dim-witted he couldn’t have prepared for this, anticipated it,
expected
it to happen? He would never walk this way again, Barnabas was confined to the yard and the back porch ’til doomsday. He’d been treated like a king for years and was now exercising royal privileges. Father Tim couldn’t believe the stubborn, willful, selfish disobedience of a dog he’d done everything for. . . .

“Barnabas!
Come now!
” He hardly recognized his own voice; it gave him a positive chill. If he were a dog, he’d either flee the county at the sound of it or slink back to face the music and get it over with.

Hearing the booming bark fade deeper into the Love jungle, he scaled the wall and dropped down on the other side, breathing hard. He didn’t want to go through this nonsense again, he really didn’t. He certainly didn’t want his churlish neighbor ranting at him as if he were some rum-nosed chicken poacher. So what if Morris Love had had a hard time of it? Hadn’t plenty of other people, and was that any excuse for refusing to exercise at least a modicum of human kindness toward a neighbor?

He was huffing and blowing as if he’d done the Nags Head Wood Run instead of a mile-long lap through the neighborhood.

He hadn’t, for some time, been forced to use Holy Scripture on his dog, a ploy that worked best to keep Barnabas from leaping into the arms of the unsuspecting, or giving their ears and noses a good licking. Though he had no precedent for the current circumstances, it was worth a try.

“ ‘I delight to do thy will, O my God,
yea
, thy law is within my
heart
!’ ” He fairly bellowed the line from the psalmist; he thought he’d made the leaves tremble on a bush.

Silence. He felt like a maniac.

Ah, well.

What if he simply gave up and went home? Barnabas would follow eventually; he’d be lying outside their front door in no time flat, looking doleful. But what would that solve? It would only give his dog the dumb notion he could do it again anytime he liked. No, indeed, he was going in after his dog and dragging him home by the collar, and no treats for a week, maybe a
month. . . .

He stormed down the driveway as if going to a fire, whistling and calling right and left. There was an occasional thrashing in the bushes. Birds started up and flew above him, chattering. A squirrel dashed across his path as he came upon the house.

Beside the drive as it curved toward the front door was something he hadn’t noticed before. It was an antiquated verdigris plaque set into a concrete slab and nearly taken by ivy. A house marker, he supposed. He stooped and squinted at the engraving:
Nouvelle Chanson, 1947.