A New Song (6 page)

“Little while later, he come back. Had two ham san’wiches. Give one t’ her. She looked at that san’wich, lifted th’ top off, said, ‘You mulehead, I told you t’ write it down, I wanted mustard on mine!’”

Loving the sound of laughter in the cavernous room, Uncle Billy nodded to the left, then to the right.

“One more,” he said, trembling a little from the excitement of the evening.

“Hit it!” crowed the mayor, hoping to remember the punch line to the vanilla ice-cream story.

“Wellsir, this census taker, he went to a house an’ knocked, don’t you know. A woman come out, ’e said, ‘How many children you got, an’ what’re their ages?’

“She said, ‘Let’s see, there’s th’ twins Sally and Billy, they’re eighteen. And th’ twins Seth an’ Beth, they’re sixteen. And th’ twins Penny an’ Jenny, they’re fourteen—’

“Feller said, ‘Hold on! Did you git twins ever’ time?’

“Woman said, ‘Law, no, they was hundreds of times we didn’t git nothin’.’”

The old man heard the sound of applause overtaking the laughter, and leaned forward slightly, cupping his hand to his left ear to better take it in. The applause was giving him courage, somehow, to keep on in life, to get out of bed in the mornings and see what was what.

 

Uncle Billy and Miss Rose looked considerably exhausted from their social endeavors; the old man’s hands trembled as they stood on the cool front porch.

“I’d like to pray for you,” said Father Tim.

“We’d be beholden to you, Preacher, if you would,” said Uncle Billy, “but seems like we ought t’ pray f’r you, don’t you know.”

Hardly anyone ever did that, he thought, moved by the gesture. “I’d thank you for doing it.”

Cynthia slipped into the circle and they joined hands.

“Now, Lord . . .”—the old man drew a deep breath—“I ain’t used t’ doin’ this out loud an’ all, but I felt You call me t’ do it, an’ I’m ex-pectin’ You t’ help me, don’t you know.

“Lord Jesus, I’m askin’ You t’ watch over th’ preacher an’ ’is missus. Don’t let ’em git drownded down there, or come up ag’in’ meanness of any kind. You tell ’em whichaway to go when they need it.”

Uncle Billy paused. “An’ I ’preciate it. F’r Christ’s sake, a-men!”

“Amen!”

Father Tim clasped his arms around his old friend. “Uncle Billy—”

“I hope they give you plenty of fried chicken down there!” squawked Miss Rose. She’d always heard preachers liked fried chicken.

He didn’t know how many more goodbyes he could bear.

 

It wasn’t that he and Cynthia hadn’t wanted to go to Whitecap to see and be seen. They had carefully planned to go for five days in March, but the weather had turned foul, with lashing rains and high winds that persisted for days along the eastern shoreline.

He had then tried to set a date for April, but most of the Whitecap vestry, who were key players in any approval process, would be away for one reason or another.

“Don’t sweat it,” Stuart Cullen had said in a phone call. Stuart was not only his current bishop, but a close friend since seminary days. “They know all about you. They’re thrilled you’ll do the interim. Bishop Harvey agrees it’s a match made in heaven, so don’t worry about getting down there for the usual preview.”

“It’s a little on the pig-in-a-poke side, if you ask me.”

Stuart laughed. “Believe me, Timothy, they need exactly what you’ve got to offer. Besides, if you don’t like each other, Bill Harvey and I will give you your money back.”

“How about telling me the downside of this parish? All Bill Harvey talks about is the church being so attractive, it ends up on postcards.”

“Right,” agreed Stuart. “He also vows he hears the nickering of wild ponies through the open windows of the nave, though I don’t think Whitecap has wild ponies these days.”

“What I’d rather know is, who’s likely to stab the interim in the back? And who’s plotting to run off with the choir director?”

He was joking, of course, but equally serious. He wanted to know what was what in Whitecap, and nobody was telling him.

“Ah, well, Timothy, there isn’t a choir director.” His bishop sounded strained.

“Really? Why not?”

“Well . . .”

“Stuart!”

“Because the choir director ran off with the organist.”

“Is this a joke?”

“I wish.”

“Surely you can come up with something slicker than that. Good heavens, man, we had a jewel thief living in the attic at Lord’s Chapel, not to mention a parishioner who tried to buy the last mayoral election. Tell me something I can get my teeth into.”

“Sorry. But I’ve just given you the plain, unvarnished truth.”

There was a long silence. “What else do I need to know?”

The bishop told him. In fact, he told him a great deal more than he needed to know.

 

He stepped into the downstairs bathroom and took his glucometer kit from the medicine cabinet. With all the hoopla going on, and the radical changes in his diet, he figured he should check his sugar more often.

Once or twice, he’d felt so low, he could have crawled under a snake’s belly wearing a top hat. Other times, his adrenaline was pumping like an oil derrick.

He shot the lance into the tip of his left forefinger and spilled the drop of blood onto a test strip. Then he slid the strip into the glucometer and waited for the readout. 130.

Excellent. He didn’t need any bad news from his body. Not now, not ever.

“Thank you, Lord,” he murmured, zipping the case shut.

 

He and Dooley loped across Baxter Park with Barnabas on the red leash, then turned left and headed up Old Church Lane.

They ran side by side until the hospital turnoff, where Dooley suddenly looked at him, grinned, and shot forward like a hare.

As he watched the boy pull away toward the crest of the steep hill, he saw at once the reason for his greater speed. Dooley Barlowe’s legs were six feet long.

He huffed behind, regretting the way he’d let his running schedule go. Oh, well. Whitecap would be another matter entirely. All that fresh salt air and ocean breeze, and a clean, wide beach that went on for miles . . .

He would even walk to his office, conveniently located in the basement of the church, only two blocks from Dove Cottage. Nor was he the only one whose physical fitness would take an upturn. Cynthia was sending her old blue Schwinn down with their household shipment, and would leave her Mazda in Mitford. For an island only eleven miles long and four miles wide, who needed a car? Even many of the locals were said to navigate on two-wheelers.

“Better watch your step down there,” Omer had advised. “Them bicycles’ll mow you down, they ride ’em ever’ whichaway.”

“Wait up!” he shouted to Dooley.

Dooley turned around, laughing, and for a crisp, quick moment, he saw the way the sun glinted on the boy’s red hair, and the look in his blue eyes. It was a look of triumph, of exultation, a look he had never, even once, seen before on Dooley Barlowe’s face.

He didn’t know whether to whoop, which he felt like doing, or weep, which he dismissed at once. Instead, he lunged ahead, closing the gap between them, and threw his arm around the boy’s shoulder and told him what must be spoken now, immediately, and not a moment later.

“I love you, buddy,” he said, panting and laughing at once. “Blast if I don’t.”

 

They sat on the cool stone wall, looking into the valley, into the Land of Counterpane. There beyond the trees was the church spire, and over there, the tiniest glint of railroad tracks . . . and just there, the pond next to the apple orchard where he knew ducks were swimming. Above it all, ranging along the other side of the valley, the high, green hills outlined themselves against a blue and cloudless sky. It was his favorite view in the whole of the earth, he thought.

“There’s something I’d like you to know,” he told Dooley. “I believe we’ll find Sammy and Kenny.”

Father Tim had gone into the Creek with Lace Turner and retrieved Dooley’s younger brother, Poobaw. Later, he’d driven to Florida on little more than a hunch, and located Dooley’s little sister, Jessie. Now two of the five Barlowe children were still missing. Their mother, Pauline, recovering from years of hard drinking, had no idea where they might be. As far as he could discover, there were no clues, no trail, no nothing. But he had hope—the kind that comes from a higher place than reason or common sense.

“Will you believe that with me?” he asked Dooley.

A muscle moved in Dooley’s jaw. “You did pretty good with Poo and Jessie.”

Barnabas crashed into the grass at Dooley’s feet.

“I believe we’re closer to deciding on some colleges to start thinking about.”

“Yep. Maybe Cornell.”

“You’ve got a while before you have to make any decisions.”

“Maybe University of Georgia.”

“Maybe. Their specialty is large animals; that’s what interests you. Anyway, that’s all down the road. For now, just check things out, think about it, pray about it.”

“Right.”

“We’re mighty proud of you, son. You’ll make a fine vet. You’ve come—we’ve all come—a long way together.”

There was an awkward silence between them.

“What’s on your mind?” asked Father Tim.

“Nothing.”

“Let’s talk about it.”

Dooley turned to him, glad for the invitation. “It looks like you could let me borrow the money and I’ll pay you back. Working six days a week at five dollars an hour, I’ll have sixteen hundred dollars. Plus I figure three yards a week at an average of twenty apiece, I’m countin’ it seven hundred bucks because some people will give me a tip. Last year, I saved five hundred, so that’s two thousand eight hundred.”

He had the sudden sense of being squeezed between a rock and a hard place. . . .

“Nearly three thousand,” said Dooley, enunciating clearly. “I could prob’ly make it an even three if I cleaned out people’s attics and basements.”

Aha. He hadn’t counted on three thousand bucks being a factor in the car equation. He gazed out to the view, unseeing.

“This just isn’t the summer for it. We can’t be here, and that’s a very crucial factor. Besides, you know we agreed you’d have a car next summer. If we’re still at Whitecap, you’ll come there, and everything will be fine.” He looked at Dooley. “Call me hard if you like, but it’s not going to happen.”

Dooley turned away and said something under his breath.

“Tell you what we’ll do. Cynthia and I will match everything you make this summer.” It was a rash decision, but why not? He still had more than sixty thousand dollars of his mother’s money, and was a homeowner with no mortgage. It was the right thing to do.

Dooley stared straight ahead, kicking the stone wall with his heels. If Dooley Barlowe only knew what he knew—that Sadie Baxter had left the boy a cool million-and-a-quarter bucks in her will, to be his when he turned twenty-one. He knew that part of Miss Sadie’s letter by heart:
I am depending on you never to mention this to him until he is old enough to bear it with dignity.

“Look. We gave you a choice between staying in Mitford and a summer at the beach. That’s a pretty important liberty. We didn’t force you to do anything you didn’t want to do. Give us credit for that. The car is a different matter. We’re not going to be around to—”

“Harley’s going to be around all the time, he’s going to let me drive his truck, what’s the difference if I have my own car?”

Well, blast it, what
was
the difference? “But only once a week, as you well know, with a curfew of eleven o’clock.”

Father Tim stood up, agitated. He never dreamed he’d be raising a teenager. When he was Dooley’s age in Holly Springs, Mississippi, nobody he knew had a car when they were sixteen. Today, boys were given cars as casually as they were handed a burger through a fast-food window. And in fact, a vast number of them ended up decorating the grille of an eighteen-wheeler, not critically injured, but dead. He was too old to have a teenager, too old to figure this out the way other people, other parents, seemed to do.

“Look,” he said, pacing alongside the stone wall, “we talked about this before, starting a few months ago. You were perfectly fine with no car this summer; we agreed on it. You even asked me to hunt down your bicycle pump so you could put air in the tires.”

He knew exactly what had happened. It was that dadblamed Wrangler. “Is Tommy getting a car this summer?”

“No. He’s working to raise money so he can have one next year. He’s only saved eight hundred dollars.”

This was definitely an encouragement. “So, look here. Harley was going to mow our two yards once a week, but why don’t I give you the job? I’ll pay twenty bucks a shot for both houses.”

“If Buster Austin did it, he’d charge fifteen apiece, that’s thirty. I’ll do both for twenty-five.”

“Deal!”

He looked at the boy he loved, the boy he’d do anything for.

Almost.

 

It rained throughout the night, a slow, pattering rain that spoke more eloquently of summer to him than any sunshine. He listened through the open bedroom window until well after midnight, sleepless but not discontented. They would make it through all this upheaval, all this tearing up and nailing down, and life would go on.

He found his wife’s light, whiffling snore a kind of anchor in a sea of change.

 

Bolting down Main Street the next morning at seven o’clock, he saw Evie Adams in her rain-soaked yard, dressed in a terry robe and armed with a salt shaker.

“Forty two!” she shouted in greeting.

He knew she meant snail casualties. Evie had been at war with snails ever since they gnawed her entire stand of blue hostas down to nubs. Some years had passed since this unusually aggressive assault, but Evie had not forgotten. He pumped his fist into the air in a salute of brotherhood.