At Home in Mitford (34 page)

“Why pay a fortune to fly to Sligo for a month,” he asked aloud in the gathering dusk, “when I can spend an hour or two on Mitford Creek?”

He hardly noticed the car that drove slowly toward them across the narrow bridge, its lights on low beam, but Barnabas did. He barked viciously, lunging with all his might as the car slowed down and seemed about to stop.

Just then, one of Rodney Underwood’s men came down Lilac Road in a patrol car.

He could barely control the furious energy straining at the leash, as the rusted Impala gunned the engine and shot past them, belching fumes of noxious exhaust.

When he arrived at church the following Sunday, he found his missing Bible lying open on the pulpit. He was flooded with relief, as if a picture hanging crooked on the wall had been set nearly straight again.

Rodney Underwood called on Monday afternoon.

“I’ve just read an in’erestin’ article, says a ring of English antique dealers has been shippin’ jewels over here in holler table legs and secret desk drawers. Says, ah, let’s see, says three English dealers are currently under suspicion of shippin’ rare stolen gems and antique jewelry in furniture transported by ship in sealed containers. So far, authorities have not been able to seize a shipment, as those destined recently for America were diverted to other, unknown ports.

“You don’t reckon your jewels could have anything to do with this, do you?”

Please don’t call them my jewels! he thought. “I don’t think so. Fact is, I just searched the church, thinking that . . . well, in any case, I didn’t find anything. Nothing but a lone candy wrapper, to tell the truth.”

“Candy wrapper? What kind of candy wrapper?”

“Almond Joy.”

“Where’d you find it?”

“In the loft. It was absolutely the only thing up there, as we never use that space at all.”

“What would it be doin’ up there?”

“I haven’t the vaguest idea.” He felt a creeping alarm that Rodney might deploy fingerprinting crews over the entire church grounds, on account of a harmless candy wrapper.

“You better let me look at that wrapper,” Rodney said.

“If you want to run by the house and ask Puny to look in my brown pants pocket, I think that’s where I put it.”

“I’ll send over a cruise car,” said Rodney, seemingly pleased with this turn of events.

The police chief called back in an hour. “You sure you searched th’ church good? Did you look in behind things?”

“I went over it with a fine-tooth comb. Of course, I didn’t pry up any floorboards or look behind the bookcases.”

“We got th’ wrapper, and th’ candy on it’s still fresh. You say nobody ever goes in th’ attic?”

“Nobody.”

“Well, th’ wrapper’s covered with prints. But since you handled it, we’ll have to come and take a set of your prints to see what’s what and who’s who.”

Here we go, he thought.

“Nobody’s prints but yours,” said Rodney, when he called the rectory in the evening. “But I’ll tell you one thing.”

“What’s that?” he asked, sitting down on his study sofa with the cordless phone.

“No other fingerprints means that whoever ate that Almond Joy was wearin’ gloves. Y’see what I mean?” he asked the rector, who clearly didn’t. “Anybody wearin’ gloves to eat a candy bar is up t’ no good.”

“Aha.”

“What I’m sayin’ is, I believe I better come down there tomorrow with th’ boys and go over th’ place.”

Well, and why not? Perhaps the whole thing could be laid to rest.

“Come ahead,” he said.

When he arrived at the office the next morning, the phone was ringing.

“Father!” said the caller, “Pete Jamison.”

“Pete Jamison?”

“You know, Father, the man you saved.”

The stranger in the nave! “Let me say at once that it was not I who saved you, Pete—that power belongs only to God. How are you, my friend?”

“Coming along, I think. When I get your way again, I’d like to drop by and see you. Right now, I’m calling from a coffee shop in Duluth, Minnesota. I just wanted to say thank you. Thank you for being there. May I call you again?”

“I’ll be disappointed if you don’t,” said the rector, who heard an unmistakable difference in Pete Jamison’s voice.

Throughout the day, Rodney, Joe Joe Guthrie, and another officer searched Lord’s Chapel. They looked for floorboards that might have been freshly pried up. They pounded on walls, searching for unexpected hollows. They peered under rugs in the nursery, examined the ceilings for loose tiles, removed the covers of heating vents, and generally raised a cloud of dust that caused the rector to cough and sneeze throughout the day.

They looked in the gardens for any sign that might indicate the planting of something other than bulbs. They put on gloves and masks to remove strips of insulation in the loft. They shone flashlights into the belfry, searched under the kitchen sink of the parish hall, and peered behind the doors of the retable.

Their search, however, revealed nothing more than a long-lost prayer book that had belonged to Wilma Malcolm’s grandmother, a box of Palm Sunday bulletins from 1947, and several squirrel nests containing a store of pecans from trees at the rear of the churchyard.

“Dadgummit!” said Rodney, with considerable feeling.

Toward the end of the afternoon, the rector felt like walking to The Local and buying a box of Little Debbies, any variety, and devouring the entire contents in the privacy of his kitchen. Nor would he wait for the kettle to boil for tea.

In the fading afternoon light, Absalom Greer’s slim frame might have been that of a twenty-year-old as he hurried down the steps of the old general store.

“Welcome to God’s country!” he said, opening the door of the Buick. “Get out and come in, Father!”

The rector was astonished to see that the face of his eighty-six-year-old host was remarkably unlined, and, what was more astounding, he had a full head of hair.

“I was looking for an elderly gentleman to greet me. Pastor Greer must have sent his son!”

The old man laughed heartily. “I can still hear an ant crawling in the grass,” he said with satisfaction, “but there’s not a tooth in my head I can call my own.”

The country preacher led the village rector up the steps and into the dim interior of the oldest store in several counties.

Father Tim felt as if he’d walked into a Rembrandt painting, for the last of the sunlight had turned the color of churned butter, casting a golden glow upon the chestnut walls and heart-of-pine floors.

“My daddy built this store when I was six years old. It’s got the first nails I ever drove. It sold out of the family in 1974, but I bought it back and intend to keep it, though it don’t do much toward keeping me.

“Let me give you a little country cocktail,” said his host, who was dressed in a neat gray suit and starched shirt. He selected a cold drink from an icebox behind the cash register, opened it, and handed it to the rector.

“You’re looking at where I do my best preaching,” he said, slapping the worn wood of the old counter. “Right here is where the rubber hits the road.

“Like the Greeks said to Philip, ‘Sir, we would see Christ.’ If they don’t see him behind this counter six days a week, we might as well throw my Sunday preaching out the window. Where is your weekday pulpit, my friend?”

“Main Street.”

“That’s a good place. Some soldiers set around and smell the coffee and watch the bacon frying, but the battle is waged on your feet.”

“Absalom,” said a quiet voice from the back of the store, “Supper’s ready. You can come anytime.”

A door closed softly.

“My sister, Lottie,” the old man said with evident pride. “She lives with me and does the cooking and housekeeping. I can assure you that I never did anything to deserve her ministry to me. She is an angel of the Lord!”

His host turned the sign on the front door to read “Closed,” and they walked the length of the narrow store on creaking floorboards, passing bins of seeds and nails, rows of canned goods, sacks of feed, thread, buttons, iron skillets, and aluminum washtubs.

Absalom Greer pushed open a door and the rector stood on the threshold in happy amazement. Before him was a room with ancient, leaded windows gleaming with the last rays of sunlight. In the center of the room stood a large table laid with a white cloth and a variety of steaming dishes, and on it burned an oil lamp.

In the corner of the room, a fire crackled in the grate, and books lined the walls behind a pair of comfortable reading chairs. A worn black Bible lay on the table next to one of the chairs, and an orange cat curled peacefully on the deep windowsill.

He thought he’d never entered a home so peaceable in spirit.

A tall, slender woman moved into the room from the kitchen, wearing an apron. Her blue dress became her graying hair, which was pulled back simply and tied with a ribbon. She smiled shyly and extended her hand. “Father Tim,” said Absalom Greer, “Lottie Miller! My joy and my crown, my earthly shield and buckler, and my widowed sister.”

“It’s my great pleasure,” said the rector, feeling as if he had gone to another country to visit.

“My sister is shy as a deer, Father. We don’t get much company in here, as I do all my pastoring at church or in the store. Why don’t you set where you can see the little fire on the hearth, it’s always a consolation.”

After washing up in a tidy bathroom, Father Tim sat down at the table, finding that even the hard-back chair seemed comforting.

“I left school when I was twelve,” said Absalom Greer over dinner, “to help my daddy in the store, and I got along pretty good teaching myself at night. One evenin’, along about the age of fourteen—I was back here in this very room, studyin’ a book—the wind got to howling and blowing as bad as you ever heard.

“Lottie was a baby in my mother’s arms. I can see them now, my mother sitting by the fire, rocking Lottie, and humming a tune, and I was settin’ right there on a little bed.

“My eyes were as wide open as they are now, when suddenly I saw a great band of angels. This room was filled with the brightness of angels!

“They were pure white, with color only in their wings, color like a prism casts when the sun shines through it. I never saw anything so beautiful in my life, before or since. I couldn’t speak a word, and my mother went on rocking and humming, with her eyes closed, and there were angels standing over her, and all around us was this shining, heavenly host.

“Then, it seemed as if a golden stair let down there by the door, and the angels turned and swarmed up that staircase and were gone. I remember I went to sobbing, but my mother didn’t hear it. And I reached up to wipe my tears, but there weren’t any there.

“I’ve thought about it many a time over the years, and I think it was my spirit that was weeping with joy.”

Lottie Miller had not spoken but had passed each dish and platter, it seemed to the rector, at just the right time. He had a second helping of potatoes that had been sliced and fried with rock salt and chives, and another helping of roasted lamb, which was as fine as any lamb he’d tasted in a very long time.

“It’s a mystery how I could have done it, but I completely forgot that heavenly vision,” said the preacher, who was buttering a biscuit.

“Along about sixteen, I got to feeling I had no soul at all. They’d take me to hear a preaching, and I couldn’t hear. They’d take me to see a healing, and I couldn’t see. My daddy said it was the name they’d put on me—Absalom! A wicked, rebellious, ungodly character if there ever was one, but my mother was young when I was born, and heedless, and she liked the sound of it, and I was stuck with it. Later on, when I got to reading the Word, I got to understanding Absalom and his daddy, and that pitiful relationship, and the name got to be a blessing to me instead of a curse, and, praise God, some of my best preaching has come out of my name.

“Well, along about twenty, I kissed my mother and daddy good-bye, and my baby sister, and I walked to Wesley and took the train, and I went out West carrying a cardboard box tied with twine.

“Times were so hard, I couldn’t get a job. I ended up putting the cardboard from that box in the bottoms of my shoes. A fella told me the bottom of one foot said “Cream of Wheat,” and the other said “This Side Up.”

“I walked on that box for three months ’til I got work in a silver mine. Way down in that mine, in that deep, dark pit, I heard the Lord call me. ‘Absalom, my son,’ He said as clear as day, ‘go home. Go home and preach my Word to your people.’

“Well, sir, I didn’t know his Word to preach it. But I up and started home, took the train back across this great land, got off at Wesley, walked twelve miles to Farmer in the middle of the night with a full moon shining, and I got to my mother’s and daddy’s door right out there, and I laid down with the dogs and went to sleep on a flour sack.