A New Song (49 page)

“Oh, fine, just fine.”

“You can come stay with us, and I mean it. Mildred said she’d love to have you. Now the kids are off at school you’d have th’ whole basement to yourselves, just y’all and our two dogs, Paul and Silas, they wouldn’t hurt a fly.”

“Thanks, Stanley, we’ll hunker down at Mid-Way for a little while, shouldn’t be long.”

“What else’ll you folks need Sunday?”

“I just learned our organist broke her hip.”

“Uh-oh. Well, no problem, we’ve got a crackerjack organist, and come to think of it, he’s played a few Anglican services here and there. I’ll talk to him and let you know tomorrow. Run by First Baptist in the morning around eight. I’ll show you the ropes, give you a key an’ all.”

“You’ll get a crown for this, Stanley!” he called as his colleague dashed into the rain.

Coleman stove! That was the ticket.

Stanley ducked back under the tent. “Oh, shoot, I forgot we can’t have organ music without power.”

“True enough. How quickly we forget.”

“Well, see you in th’ morning.”

A cappella, then, and no two ways about it.

 

Less than half the expected crew had shown up at Dove Cottage and, after hauling furniture out of the pit and stuffing it into the study, were tearing out the living room flooring.

According to Otis, the maverick porch had pulled the front wall away, causing the floor joists to collapse. The wall would have to be winched back before they could replace the flooring, and when that was done a crew would come in to do the refinishing. Bottom line, they were looking at a minimum of two or three weeks to complete the job, and the crew couldn’t get to the porch before spring.

Hearing this exceedingly unwelcome news, he thought of Earlene Ferguson, who, lacking a porch at the retirement home, simply “dropped off in the yard like a heathen” when exiting her front door.

“Don’t worry,” said Otis, “I’ll have some of my boys from th’ Toe put your porch back on. I ain’t scared of drivin’ a few nails myself.”

Shivering in the raw October air, Sam, Leonard, Otis, and Father Tim waited for the contractor, and surveyed the fallen limbs and debris littering the churchyard.

“We ought to stack th’ limbs,” said Leonard, impatient to get moving.

“No use stackin’ limbs in this weather,” said Otis.

Rain drummed on the tent roof.

Sam sighed. “Goodness knows, it’s sad to see that old tree half ruined.”

“It was probably two hundred years old, maybe more. Marjorie and I’ve seen any number of people married under that tree.” Leonard poured coffee from a thermos. “Did you know there are trees still living since before the time of Christ?”

“Where at?” asked Otis.

Leonard blew on his coffee. “I don’t know, I forgot. It was in a magazine.”

“I ain’t believin’ it,” said Otis.

When the contractor still hadn’t arrived at eleven o’clock, Otis bit the end off a cigar, lit it, and, fuming, blew the smoke out his nostrils.

“I’m goin’ to be kickin’ some butt from here to Chincoteague,” he declared, stomping from the tent.

 

“How’ll we let everybody know where we’re holding the service?” Marshall Duncan asked Father Tim. “And how will they know it’s at ten, not eleven?”

Ray Gaskill hammered down on his toothpick. “Put a sign at th’ post office today, so word gets around. Then put one in th’ churchyard, people’ll be comin’ by to see th’ damage.”

The road crew roared past St. John’s in a parade of heavy equipment, waving at the assembly under the tent.

“You want to see the basement?” Leonard asked Father Tim.

“Is it safe?”

“I wouldn’t go down there,” said Ray. “No, sir, not me.”

“I believe I’ll pass. Besides, I’ve got to run to the motel and take lunch to my wife.”

“Where you goin’ to get lunch?” asked Ray.

“Mona’s.”

“Not unless you want to stand in line in th’ rain. I just come by there, it ain’t a pretty sight. You could go to the grocery store, get you some Vienna sausages in a can, tuna in a can, all kinds of things in a can, and a loaf of bread, some mayonnaise . . .”

“Aha.”

“And if I was you,” said Ray, “I’d keep th’ underside of your Mustang hosed off, you’re gonna be eat up with rust.”

 

He said nothing to Cynthia about the predicted duration of the job at Dove Cottage. If the thought of three weeks at the Mid-Way was enough to make him crazy, there was no telling what it might do to his wife.

 

“There’s no way to patch it,” said Sewell Joiner. “We’re talkin’ shore up, tear out, strip off, an’ set straight—it’s goin’ to look a lot worse before it looks better.”

“Whatever it takes,” said Father Tim.

“We’ll have to excavate part of th’ basement and tear out and rebuild th’ wall. You got a bad crack in th’ bed joints of th’ masonry—”

“We’re more in’erested in th’ sanctuary right now,” said Otis. “What’s it goin’ to take to get us back in business?”

“First thing we’ll do is get some rollin’ scaffold inside and tear off th’ plaster that’s not already fallen off th’ ceilin’ joists and studs. We’ll be tearin’ off some sheathin’ an’ shingles and replacin’ that busted roof joist, then we’ll use a come-along to straighten th’ whole thing up again an’ put on a new roof.”

“I’d like you to get your boys started in th’ mornin,” said Otis.

“Tomorrow’s Saturday,” said the contractor.

“Go on and get ’em over here, we want to move on this thing. It’s depressin’ to ever’body not to see some action.”

“Fine,” said Sewell Joiner. “I can do that.”

Otis unwrapped a cigar. “How long to get th’ job done?”

“Two, three months if we got th’ weather on our side. That’ll include gettin’ replastered and repainted.”

Two or three months?
Father Tim’s heart sank like a stone.

 

At three o’clock, a crowd of parishioners had assembled under the tent, looking for a report on the damage, volunteering to help, offering consolation, and fervently commiserating. The rain drew on, shrouding the churchyard in a dusky gloom.

“I’ve got these little bitty mushrooms growin’ between my toes,” said Orville Hood, who kept St. John’s oil tank filled.

“Let me
see
!” squealed Penny Duncan’s youngest.

“I was sittin’ in th’ livin’ room workin’ a crossword when I thought th’ world was comin’ to an end.” Maude Proffitt was swaddled in a yellow slicker and rain hat, with only her eyes visible. “Boom, somethin’ hit right above my head. Honey, it was the
ceiling
, it just cracked open like a hen egg. Well, don’t you know I jumped across th’ room, my feet never touched th’ floor! Thank th’ Lord I didn’t stay in that recliner another minute, or I’d’ve been pushin’ up daisies right over yonder.”

“Have a brownie,” said Marjorie Lamb. “I baked these yesterday before the power went off.”

“Law, what I wouldn’t give for a cup of coffee to go with this,” said Maude, eating the brownie in two bites.

Sue Blankenship’s glasses kept trying to slide off her wet nose. “Did you hear th’ Father’s poor wife was hit by a picket fence?” she asked a baritone in the choir.

“No way! A whole fence?”

“Well, maybe just a picket.”

Ann Hartsell, newly arrived from her nursing job across, saw the church and burst into tears. This caused her two youngsters, just fetched from day care, to erupt in a storm of sympathetic weeping.

“Have a brownie!” implored Marjorie, stooping to their level with the plastic tray.

“Th’ trouble with this storm,” said Ray Gaskill, “is mainly th’ trees. It’s
trees
that’s done th’ damage.”

“ ’Til I moved here, I never knew islands
had
trees,” said Edith Johnson, who was an ECW bigwig.

Jean Ballenger shivered in her winter coat. “We nearly got the Last Supper finished, we’re just working on the tablecloth. That much white seems to take forever. If you ask me, I don’t believe all those men would have
used
a tablecloth.”

“Do you think we should still try to have th’ Fall Fair?” asked Mildred Harmon, handing around a plate of ham biscuits.

Father Tim turned aside from talking with the contractor. “Yes,
indeed
,” he said. “Rain or shine!”

Jean patted her bangs in place. “What a relief! I couldn’t bear the thought of all that work lying in a drawer ’til next year.”

Early the following morning, the rain stopped.

He drove Cynthia, Jonathan, and Violet to Marion’s, popped by First Baptist, and arrived at St. John’s at eight-thirty as the five-man work crew blew in, on time and ready to roll.

By eleven o’clock, the sun came out, the temperature rose seven degrees, and a third of the north end regained running water.

“Hallelujah!” shouted Father Tim, tossing his rain hat in the air.

Otis stubbed out his cigar and pocketed the butt. “OK, boys, let’s stack limbs.”

 

Father Tim popped into the nave now and again to check the crew’s progress. He was over the sick feeling, wanting only to see the work move ahead quickly.

Though pews and pulpit were under tarps, and plaster dust covered everything, the stained-glass window at the rear of the sanctuary was unharmed, with only minor cracking and pulling around the frame. The strong early light illumined the image sharply, casting color onto the white tarps.
Come unto me. . . .
That was sermon enough for this storm, he thought, or for any storm.

Each time he went inside, he glanced nervously at the choir loft, anxious for the safety and protection of the organ.

“No problem,” said Sewell, who, Father Tim learned, was known to constituents as Sew, pronounced
Sue.

He decided to stop worrying. If he couldn’t trust a two-hundred-and-fifty-pound man who could kick in the remaining portion of a concrete-block basement wall, who could he trust?

 

He’d seen smaller crowds show up for Sunday worship.

By noon, more than half the parish had arrived, many with lunch bags from Mona’s, some with family picnics. As the ground was too wet to sit on, they sat in parked cars, doors open, calling to one another, ambling through the tent where Sam had set up a folding table and a forty-two-cup coffeepot powered by a portable generator.

“Doughnut holes!” Jean Ballenger plunked down a box from the shop next door to her mainland hairdresser.

“Lookit!” said Ray Gaskill, who didn’t want to miss out on the action. He lifted the lid of a bakery box, exposing half a cake, inscribed
HDAY TO RAY
in lime-green icing. “I was sixty-seven last July . . . that’s August, September, October, it ain’t but four months old and been in th’ freezer th’ whole time, help yourself.”

Penny Duncan arrived with a gallon of sun tea, made before the rains began, and a freezer bag of thawed oatmeal cookies. Mona Fulcher dispatched Junior Bryson with a vast container of hot soup, a pot of chili, and a sack of cups and plastic spoons. Stanley Harmon dropped by with two thawed loaves of homemade bread from the freezer at First Baptist, along with a quart of apple juice he’d nabbed from the Sunday School.

Not knowing that his priest had already asked a blessing, and feeling his own heart so inclined, Sam Fieldwalker offered a fervent psalm of praise and petition.

“A double shot!” remarked someone who had happily bowed for both prayers.

Leonard Lamb popped a doughnut hole in his mouth. “We need a double shot,” he said.

 

At two o’clock, his adreneline still pumping, he drove to the motel to fetch Barnabas for a run along the beach.

The heater had raised the temperature of the room to that of a blast furnace. He turned the heater off, snapped on the leash, and was out of there with a dog so relieved to be rescued that he slammed his forepaws against Father Tim’s chest and gave his glasses a proper fogging.

The beach was more littered than usual, but nothing compared to the pictures he’d seen of Whitecap beaches in the aftermath of worse storms.

His brain felt petrified; he could scarcely think. For a man who’d been accused of thinking too much, it was an odd feeling, as if he were living his life in a dream, reacting to, rather than initiating, the circumstances that came his way.

He did know one thing for certain—he had to get his crowd out of the Mid-Way Motel, pronto.

Dodging the detritus of the storm, he ran easily, chuffing south toward the lighthouse and glancing at a sky so blue it might have been fired onto porcelain. The sea beneath was azure and calm, the water lapping gently at the sand.

He saw it, but thought nothing of it. Then, several yards down the beach, he stopped and looked again.

It was a little plane, bright red against the cloudless sky. He thought of his two jaunts into the wild blue yonder with Omer Cunningham, and the time Omer flew him to Virginia so he could attend Dooley’s school concert. Blast, he missed the boy terribly. It had been four months since he saw him vanishing around the corner of Wisteria and Main on his bicycle.
“ ’Bye, Dad . . .”

Barnabas skidded to a stop and barked furiously as the plane dipped toward the wide beach, then veered out over the water.

Father Tim stood and watched as it gained altitude and headed south. Did he see someone waving at him from the cockpit?

Probably not, but he waved back, just in case.

 

He was sitting on the bottom step of the walkway through the dunes, tying a shoelace, when he heard it.

Holy smoke, that plane was not only coming this way again, it was coming in low. Very low.

In fact, it was
landing. . . .

It blew past him, contacted the sand, and bounced lightly along the beach. As it slowed, farther along the strand, the tail came up, then settled again.