In This Mountain (7 page)

“So who’s going to the movie with you?” he asked Dooley. He thought the boy looked unusually handsome; his bones were fitting together nicely these days.

“Tommy.”

“I know about Tommy. Anybody else?”

“Jenny. And Tommy’s date.”

“Aha.”

“Jenny,” murmured his wife, arching an eyebrow. Their young neighbor in the house with the red roof had moved in and out of Dooley’s life with some frequency over the years.

“Isn’t Lace home yet?” asked Father Tim. He’d heard Lace was visiting a roommate on her way from school to Mitford.

Dooley shrugged.

“We’ll just ring up to the Harpers and see,” said Cynthia, bolting from the table. “Excuse me!”

“Wait!” said Dooley, looking alarmed. “Don’t call. I don’t want to know if she’s home.”

“You don’t want to know?” asked Cynthia, clearly not concerned about being obvious. “What could it hurt to
know
?”

With some haste, the boy folded his napkin, a civility drilled into him at school, and stood. “I’ve got to go. Thanks for dinner.”

“You’re welcome,” said Father Tim, feeling the tension in the air.

“Lunch tomorrow, right?”

Dooley left the kitchen without looking back. “Be there or be square!” he called over his shoulder, and was gone down the hall.

Father Tim peered at Cynthia, who had a positively wicked gleam in her eye. “You see?” she said.

“See what?”

“He’s dying to know if Lace is at home!”

He sighed without meaning to. “He could have asked around town if he wanted to find out. Maybe he really doesn’t want to know if she’s home.”

“It’s not that we’re trying to
force
him into anything,” said his wife.

“Of course not,” he said. “
Certainly
not!”

He wasn’t taking Dooley to the Grill, no way. J.C. and Mule and Percy would want to know everything about school, girls, cars, grades, it was too much. Besides, Dooley did not hold the Grill in high estimation, as the menu still offered livermush and fries that were decidedly on the limp side.

He’d read somewhere that a place in Wesley was now selling wraps. He didn’t know exactly what a
wrap
was, but it sounded modern and upbeat. He got the new number from information, called to find out the address, and Dooley hied them there in the Mustang with the top down.

“So what do you think?” he asked as they looked around the wrap place. There was a considerable crowd of young people with nose rings and tattoos, there was music that sounded like…he couldn’t be certain what it sounded like, maybe like someone breathing heavily into an empty coconut shell.

“Cool,” said Dooley.

“And how was the movie?” he asked as they unwrapped their wraps.

“Neat.”

What had happened to the boy’s vocabulary? At the stunning cost of twenty-two thousand a year, it had been reduced to that of a mynah bird. Of course, he and Cynthia had found Dooley’s grades to be first-rate, so there was no complaint in that department.

“How’s Jenny?”

Dooley took a huge bite. Father Tim took a huge bite; stuff from the other end of the wrap thudded into his lap.

“Great,” said Dooley.

At the age of eleven, and with hardly any schooling, Dooley Barlowe had been able to speak in complete sentences. Father Tim couldn’t understand this drastic decline—he couldn’t blame it on one lone year at the University of Georgia; it must have taken root at that fancy school in Virginia.

“Wouldn’t you, ah, like to at least say hello to Lace before you go out to Meadowgate?”

“Say hello? She doesn’t want to say hello to me. The last time I called her from school, she was too busy to say hello, she never even called me back, I wish you’d quit bringing up her name all the time, Lace, Lace, Lace, I could care less.” The boy’s face flamed.

“Sorry,” said Father Tim, meaning it.

“You just dropped lettuce in your lap,” said Dooley.

“This is the coolest car in the whole town,” Dooley told him on the way home. “Mitford doesn’t have any really cool cars.”

“Come on! There’s Miss Sadie’s 1958 Plymouth still sitting in the Fernbank garage. Some people would give their eyeteeth to get their hands on a car like that.”

As Dooley wheeled right around the monument, Father Tim threw up his hand to Bill Sprouse, out for a walk with his dog, Sparky. Father Tim thought Sparky looked precisely like the head of a kitchen mop pulled along by a leash.

“There aren’t any neat girls in Mitford, either.”

According to Cynthia and Puny, there were no men; according to Dooley, there were no girls.

Father Tim felt suddenly inspired. “Let’s don’t go home! Let’s drive to Farmer.” The road to Farmer was the road Dooley had practiced driving on, the road Dooley had crashed Harley’s old truck on…it was a road of memories, it was a day that felt like summer; he wanted to savor every minute with the boy who was growing up so fast, too fast.

Dooley looked at his passenger and grinned. “Cool,” he said.

They had stopped at a country store and taken their cold drinks out to a table and wooden benches under a maple tree. Father Tim relished its mentholated shade. There was even a small breeze blowing.

“I’ve been wanting to talk with you about something,” he told Dooley. He paused a moment and lifted a silent prayer. “It’s about Sammy and Kenny.”

“I don’t want to talk about them anymore.”

“But we’ve got to do it once and for all, we’ve got to find your brothers. It’s been on my mind a lot, and finally I have a good idea.”

“It won’t work. There’s no use lookin’ for ’em, we’ll never find ’em, it’s been too long. Buck looked, you looked, and…”

“And what?”

“And you prayed.”

“Always.”

“Plus Cynthia prayed, Mama prayed, and I prayed. Even Jessie and Poo. It didn’t work.”

“Right. Not yet.”

Dooley looked at his drink bottle. “What kind of idea?”

“If we’re going to find your brothers, especially Sammy, I think we’ve got to find somebody else first.”

“Who?”

This was the part he dreaded. “Your father.”

“No,” said Dooley, getting up from the bench. “No.” All color drained from his face; he took several steps backward.

“He’s the one who can give us leads. Sammy was with him when he was last seen. It’s a chance we’ve got to take, son.”

“I thought you wanted to be my father.” Dooley had backed to the maple and stood there, defiant.

“I want to give you everything a father can give, but I can’t give you any clues about Sammy like I believe your birth father can. Help me in this, Dooley.”

“I hate his guts!” shouted Dooley. Tears escaped onto his freckled face. “I don’t want to see him, I don’t want him hanging around, bein’ drunk and knockin’ everybody in th’ head and callin’ me names.”

“Yes, but—”

“He might find Mama and hurt ’er, or try to take Jessie and Poo.”

“I’ll be in Tennessee, but I’ll manage to go to wherever he is. Or Buck—Buck will go. But you’ve got to help us figure out where he might be, what some of his habits were.”

Dooley had less than two days left with them, and now this hard thing in the midst of the only private time they’d had together….

But one couldn’t wait forever to tackle hard things.

Dooley wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. “I can’t remember,” he said. “Besides, maybe he’s dead. I hope he’s dead.”

“Come on. Sit down. Try to remember. Kenny is seventeen now, Sammy is fifteen, only four years older than you were when I saw you the first time.” As clearly as if it had happened yesterday, Father Tim recalled the image of an eleven-year-old Dooley Barlowe, barefoot and in filthy overalls, peering in his office door.
You got anyplace I can take a dump?

“Let’s do our best, let’s give it another shot,” he said. “After all, life is short.”

He had a terrible lump in his throat—for Sammy and Kenny, for Dooley, for the hard things of life in general.

Was he jealous of his wife’s fame? He wrenched a dandelion from the damp earth and tossed it on the pile. On the other hand, could two women in muumuus be called a bona fide indication of fame? His face burned as he thought of being spoken to as if he were the yard man.

He made it a point to pray—asking for humility, for help in swallowing down his pride. At least it appeared on the surface to be pride. Was there a deeper issue? Surely he couldn’t be jealous of any honor accruing to his wife’s long years of hard work and dedication.

Whatever it was existed at a level deeper than jealousy. He thumped into the grass near the fence, took off his work gloves, and leaned against the pine tree. So what was really making his gut wrench?

Fear.

It was that simple.

He was afraid she’d somehow be taken from him, swept away on a tide they couldn’t anticipate or control.

“How’s the new book coming?” he asked as they lay in bed. He was rubbing her neck, as he often did when she was slaving over a drawing board. He’d long ago given up hope that she wouldn’t do this to herself anymore; no, she loved it too much. Just as preaching had been what he did, writing and illustrating books was what she did, it was how she processed her life.

“Umm. Good, dearest. More to the right, there’s an awful crick on the right.”

“I need to adjust the chair at your drawing table again.”

“Would you, Timothy?”

“Of course. First thing tomorrow. Tell me about the book.”

“I’m dismayed, it won’t come right. I should have listened to myself when I said I wouldn’t do any more Violet books. I think I may put it aside ’til we come home from Tennessee.”

“No wonder you’re having a problem with it. That cat’s already done everything there is to do—been to see the Queen, learned to play the piano, gone to the beach, stayed in a hotel in New York, taken up French as a second language—”

“Right there! Ugh, it’s sore. What did you and Dooley talk about at lunch?”

“About finding his father, to see if we can learn something about the boys. Any involvement with his father frightens him, of course. It could be like stirring a nest of hornets.”

“I understand. But it’s a good idea, Timothy.”

“He remembered that his father had a best friend, a drinking buddy he hung out with, got in trouble with. The name came to Dooley very clearly—Shorty Justice. He lived in Holding, worked on the highway. I’m going to get Emma on it.” His erstwhile secretary, who had helped locate Jessie Barlowe, liked nothing better than to spread a dragnet in cyberspace.

“I’ll help you any way I can,” said Cynthia. “I’ll do anything.”

He leaned down and kissed her shoulders, loving the feel of her living flesh. She was balm to him, she was everything he might ever want or dream of having, she was his best friend, his encourager. How had he ever bumbled along in that odd dream state of bachelorhood, thinking himself sane?

“I love you,” he said.

“I love you back, sweetheart.” She yawned and rolled over and put her arms around his neck. “You
are
still my sweetheart?”

He grinned. “‘Until heaven and then forever!’” he said, quoting the inscription engraved on his wedding band.

Emma Newland thumped into his leather chair in the study, adjusted the needlepoint pillow behind her back, and opened her laptop.

It was her custom to arrive at the yellow house at eight-thirty every Tuesday morning, with the express purpose of inputting the latest portion of his current essay, sending various e-mails in her erstwhile employer’s stead, munching tortilla chips to maintain appropriate levels of blood sugar, and tidying his desk whether he wished it tidy or not.

She considered this stint, generally four hours in length, to be her “bounden duty,” having made a pact with God. She had committed to serve her helpless former priest ’til death did them part if only God would spare her the agony and aggravation of arthritis—which, at least in recorded history, had afflicted every female in her family. So far, she had suffered only a minor twinge in her right thumb, which she blamed on excessive use of the mouse.

Far be it from her former priest to mention such a thing, but he thought her eyebrows appeared singed this morning, or even missing, as if she’d failed to jump back when lighting an outdoor grill. He’d always thought her eyebrows incredibly similar to woolly worms that had grown extra-thick coats for winter. In truth, his secretary’s face looked so oddly denuded that he was embarrassed.

“What’re you lookin’ at?” she demanded, without glancing away from the screen.

He felt like a schoolboy, caught releasing a toad in the girls’ rest room. “Nothing!”

She fiddled with the thing in her lap. “So have you had your spring cold yet?”

“I don’t expect to have a spring cold,” he said.

“How on earth you’ll escape it, I don’t know…all that drinkin’ out of th’ cup with everybody and his brother and shakin’ a hundred hands at th’ Peace.”

He didn’t comment.

“Now that you don’t
have
to drink out of the cup every Sunday, you ought to start dippin’ your wafer, that’s what I did before I went back to bein’ a Baptist.”

He bit his tongue.

“I guess you heard the Methodists are gettin’ a woman preacher.”

He didn’t like it when Emma heard news before he did, especially news from the ecclesiastical realm. It was petty of him, but…“Well, well.”

“I’m goin’ to see if you’ve got e-mail,” she said, “then we’ll go lookin’ for Dooley’s daddy.”

He swiveled around to his desk and began final revisions to the essay on Wordsworth’s postulations, wondering whether he’d have to endure Emma Newland’s close company even in heaven. No, surely not, as that would somehow smack of the other place….

He tried to disclaim his excitement that she might indeed be able to trace Clyde Barlowe, right here in this room, today. He didn’t want to get excited about a shot in the dark, though his Alabama bishop had once chastised him about that very thing.

The Right Reverend Paul Jared Sotheby had wagged his finger like a schoolmarm. “Timothy, stop this nonsense of preparing for the worst and spend your time preparing for the best!” This counsel had never been forgotten, though he was seldom able to follow it.

Emma stared at the screen, making a light whistling noise between her teeth. Pop music wasn’t his strong point, but it sounded like the first two lines of “Delta Dawn,” repeated ad infinitum.

“Lookit,” she said, “you’ve got mail!”

“Really?” He leaped up and crouched over her shoulder. “Aha!” Marion Fieldwalker, his former parishioner and good friend in Whitecap Island.

“I gave her my e-mail address, bless ’er heart, so she could keep in touch.”

He straightened up, clutching his back.

“Wait!” she said. “There’s more.”

“My back…,” he said, feeling a creak in every joint.

“If you weren’t too cheap to buy a printer, you wouldn’t have to read your mail hangin’ over my shoulder!”

Blast and double blast today’s technology. He’d stood firm for years until just the other day when he’d finally sold out and let Puny teach him to work the microwave. It was a watershed moment, something he wasn’t proud of, but in the space of a few heartbeats his tepid tea was steaming. Maybe he did need to buy a printer.

“Look,” she said. “Your pal in Mitford, England.”

“Move it this way, there’s a glare on the screen.” He bent closer, battling the heavy scent of My Sin that rose from his secretary like a cloud off Mount Saint Helens. “The type is too small!”

“Your back hurts, there’s a glare on the screen, the type is too small. The answer is to get your own laptop, like a normal person!” She snorted. “Sit down, I’ll read it to you. ‘Dear Father…’”

She blinked and looked up. “You know, I can get you online in a heartbeat!”

“I don’t
want
to be online!”

“Anytime! Just let me know.”

“No way,” he said, meaning it.

“Stick your head in the sand, let life pass you by,” she muttered.

“‘Dear Father…’”

A sudden shower pecked at the windows. He heard his wife’s radio playing in her workroom.

“‘What a thumping good idea to have your Mitford and ours become sister villages. I’m sure the whole business wants a bit of pomp to make it official. I can’t think what sort but I’m certain my wife Judy can make it click. She’s known for pulling off the best jumble sales in the realm, and our vicar is clever at this sort of thing, as well. We’ll all of us put our heads together and come up with something splendid, I’m sure. Sincere best wishes on your mission work in Tennessee, I believe that’s where a considerable amount of your whisky comes from. Will keep in touch through your good sec’y. Yours sincerely, Cedric Hart, Esq.’”

“Terrific,” he said. “Anything else?”

“That’s it. Anything you want to send before I look for Clyde Barlowe?”

“This,” he said, handing her a piece of paper on which he’d scrawled a quote for Stuart Cullen.

“You could do it yourself,” she said.

“Blast it, Emma…”

Church architecture
, she typed,
ought to be an earthly and temporal fulfillment of the Savior’s own prophesy that though the voices of men be still, the rocks and stones themselves will cry out with the laud and praise and honor due unto the King of kings and the Lord of lords. Michel di Giovanni, medieval builder and designer.

“Who to?” she asked.

“The bishop.”

He watched her move the mouse around. “Done! Now. Ready if you are.”

“Excellent!” He was on the edge of his seat.

“But don’t get your hopes up,” she said, peering over her half-glasses.

“Oh, no,” he said.

“This will take a little time.”

“Right.”

She waved her hand at him. “So do what you have to do to your essay so I can input it before I leave.”

Trying to cast the search from his mind, he created two paragraphs from one and crossed out a line that he’d formerly thought stunning. He noted by the faded type that the ribbon on his Royal manual was wearing through, a circumstance that Emma wouldn’t favor in the least when transcribing.

The clock ticked, the rain pecked, the radio played Brahms. Couldn’t she somehow just go to the B’s and
find
it? What was taking so long?

He deleted a paragraph, transposed two lines, and capitalized Blake as in William. Thirty minutes to find one ordinary name?

“Lookit!” she exclaimed.

“What?”

“I’ll be darned.”

“What?”

“Well, well,” she said, paying him no attention at all.

There was nothing to do but get up and look over her shoulder.

“See there?” She jabbed her finger at a list of names.

“Where?”

“Right there. Cate Turner. Idn’t that Lace Turner’s daddy’s name?”

“Why, yes.”

“There’s only one Cate Turner on th’ list, and he’s livin’ in Hope Creek, that little town close to Holding.”

“Lace isn’t anxious to know where her father is. Far from it. Keep looking.” In truth, Lace had been legally adopted by the Harpers and had taken their surname, though most Mitfordians, out of habit, still referred to her as Lace Turner.

“Why are you in the
T’
s, anyway?” he asked, irritated. “You can’t find Barlowe in the
T’
s.”

“I was lookin’ for Caldecott Turner, my high school sweetheart, we called him Cal.”

“Emma, Emma…”

“I already looked in th’ Barlowes.”

“
And?”

“And I hate to tell you, but there’s no Clyde Barlowe.”

“There’s got to be a Clyde Barlowe. Both names are common to this area.”

“I looked in all fifty states and everywhere in Canada, including Nova Scotia and the Yukon, plus—”

“But it’s such a simple name. Surely—”

“See for yourself.” She stood up, thrusting the laptop in his direction. “Just sit down right here and fool with it while I go to the johnny.”

He backed away, grinning in spite of himself. “Oh, no, you don’t! I’m not falling for your flimsy ploy to get me hooked on this miserable contraption.”

Emma chuckled, a rare thing to witness. “You’ll be hooked sooner or later. Might as well be sooner.”

“When you come back,” he said, ignoring her prediction, “I’d like you to look for a fellow named Shorty Justice.”

But there was no Shorty Justice, either.

As he walked Emma to the front door, he knew he’d ask, and he knew he’d regret it.

“Ummm. Your eyebrows…”

“What about my eyebrows?” she snapped.

“They just look…” He shrugged.
“Different!”
Didn’t he know that curiosity killed the cat?

“Do I ask about
your
eyebrows?”

“Well, no, but there’s nothing different about mine.”

“Oh,
really
? Have you looked in the mirror lately?”

She swept out the door, blowing him in the ditch.

He went at once to the downstairs powder room. Consulting the mirror, he saw there was absolutely nothing different about, much less wrong with, his eyebrows.

“Do my eyebrows look funny?” he asked Cynthia.

She studied him soberly. “No. Why?”

“Emma said I should look in the mirror at my eyebrows.”

“Why would she say that?”

“I don’t know. I guess because I asked about hers, they seemed…different.”

“Oh, that! Of course, they
are
different! Which is to say she doesn’t
have
any! Fancy Skinner talked Emma into thinning her eyebrows, and instead of plucking them, Fancy used a wax thing that pulled off the whole shebang.”

“Oh, boy.”

“When I croak, Timothy, remember my instruction. You
do
remember?”

He remembered. This instruction was handwritten and paper-clipped to his wife’s will, which specified burial instead of the increasingly popular cremation.
TIMOTHY,
Do not let Fancy Skinner touch my hair!!!
Yours from above and beyond, C.

Dooley’s Wrangler was at Lew Boyd’s, where Harley was working on the stick shift, which was, in fact, living up to its name and sticking.

“I’ll drive you to your mom’s,” said Father Tim. He didn’t want Dooley to leave, not at all, but of course he wouldn’t mention it….

“Can I have your car tonight since mine won’t be ready ’til tomorrow?”

“
Can
you?”

“May I?”

Father Tim smiled, waiting.

“Please!”

“Yes, you may,” said Father Tim, tossing him the keys. “Thanks, Dad!”

“You’re welcome.”

He was touched that the boy gave him a good punch on the arm.

All the books they could possibly wish to read or refer to while in Tennessee were at last in boxes. He noticed they were virtually the same books they’d schlepped to Whitecap, with the addition of a crate of children’s books.

He stood back and scratched his head. What else? Ah! He’d want the Tozer and the complete works of George Macdonald, which were upstairs, he’d forgotten about those; then there was the business about the Galsworthy….

He recalled that his wife had preached him a sermon about popping into Happy Endings for any reason other than to say goodbye to Hope Winchester. The drill was that neither he nor Cynthia was permitted to add another ounce to their current shipping charges.

He hadn’t promised her he wouldn’t buy another book, though he did say he considered her counsel wise. That was, of course, before he realized how much he needed the Galsworthy volume. One little book! And a paperback, at that! How much could it weigh, after all? He wouldn’t put it in the book crates, anyhow, he’d stuff it in his duffel bag, he’d tote it in his rolled-up pajamas. Some men chased women, some were smitten with fast cars. Big deal, he liked books.

Before going on his mission, he opened the refrigerator door and spied the cache of Cokes they kept for Dooley’s comings and goings. He realized he’d been ignoring his pressing thirst, and though he shouldn’t do this, the can was already open…probably flat, but what the heck, just a sip. He drained the contents, rinsed the can, flattened it, and tossed it in the recycle bin in the garage.