Light From Heaven (17 page)

“Well, then!” He felt ten feet tall, and growing. “I got the flyer done up; want to see it?”

“I do!”

He produced a copy from the folder. “And I brought tape so we can tape it to the door if someone’s not home, and thumbtacks for power poles and fence posts.”

“You’ve thought of everything!” she said, sharing his excitement.

“‘The Order of Holy Communion’ should have gone on a line all its own,” he confessed. “I didn’t know how to set the thingamajig.”

“It’s just right,” she said. “I like your border.”

“Today, we can read the litany for Ash Wednesday, and finish our visitation list, and... what else?”

“I’ll show you the cemetery.”

“And in the morning, we’ll set out first thing, if that’s all right. I’ll pick you up at ten o’clock?”

“I’ll be ready,” she said, happily, “with a thermos of tea.”

“In the meantime, I’m mighty eager for the next installment of your story.”

She looked tentative. “Do you really want to hear it? I’m not proud of all I’ll be bound to tell you, Father.”

“I want to hear it.Very much.”

In the front pew, she took the mugs from the basket, and he unscrewed the cap from the thermos and poured the steaming tea.

Though the morning sun was warm on the flanks of the mountains, the nave was distinctly chilly. He kept his jacket on, and she had drawn her old cardigan closer about her thin frame.

“I’d also like to hear about everyone who came on Sunday. Rooter and his grandmother ...”

“Granny isn’t Rooter’s blood grandmother. She was a neighbor who took him in as a baby when his parents abandoned him.”

His heart felt the blow of that.

“Is there no end to it, Agnes?”

“No, Father, there isn’t. The world is harsh and unforgiving, which is but one of the reasons you find me here today.”

“Here?”

“On this ridge, seemingly so far from the cruelty that everywhere assaults us if we let it.”

“And Clarence?”

“He’s happy here, very happy; this is where Clarence finds himself. He has a workshop in our yard and creates lovely things from wood, which he sells to a man who travels around to the mountain shops.” She lowered her eyes, modest. “Clarence has won many awards.”

“Wonderful! I don’t doubt it. And tell me about Robert.”

“Robert was in prison for eleven years; he lives alone, just down the road.”

He saw the quickening of sorrow in her countenance.

“Why was he in prison?”

“He’s said to have killed a man.”

“Do you know him well?”

“No one knows him well.Yet I believe him innocent. He pled innocence all along. The man he was convicted of killing was his grandfather.”

“I see a great hunger in his eyes. Robert wants to know God.”

“Yes. He does. Though he may not know or even imagine that he does. I sense that he’s unbearably lonely.”

He put his elbows on his knees and leaned forward in the pew and gazed without seeing at the pine floorboards. “And Lloyd?” He hoped for a brighter story about Lloyd.

“He’s a good man. He, too, found the world hard, albeit instructive, and came home again, hoping to find all things golden, as in his boyhood.” Agnes laughed softly. “Of course, he’s been gravely disappointed!”

He sat up and leaned back, comfortable on the wooden pew seat. “I hope to go home again one day; it’s been years since I visited Holly Springs in Mississippi. I think I’m afraid of... I’m not certain... finding it so changed, or worse, finding it all too familiar.”

“I understand.”

“But please, start where you left off.You and Jessie and Little Bertie endured the Great Baptizing. What happened then?”

She smiled and sipped her tea, inhaling the heady scent of sassafras, undiluted on this occasion by the common grace of mint.

“We found that we loved the people, and found also that we were loved by them. I came to understand that the people here weren’t objects to which one does good, but true hearts whom I wanted more than anything to help.

“Jessie and I pled with the diocese to send every thread of clothing they could collect, we even went to Asheville on two momentous occasions, to sound a special plea for winter coats and shoes.You can’t imagine the want we found here in those days.”

He smiled. “I was a young clergyman in the backwaters of Mississippi nearly forty years ago. So, I can imagine.”

“I’m sure you’ve had long experience with all sorts of souls. Forgive my boldness, but perhaps one day you’ll tell your story.”

“Deal!” he said.

“We used our Buick Town Car to ferry people to the doctor, sometimes all the way to Holding. It took a full day to go to Holding and back, we often forded the creek well past dark.”

“No doctor in Mitford?”

“Only on occasional days. Like a clergyman, he rode the circuit. And none of us cared for the sour old fellows in Wesley—they were twins, and both looked as if they’d eaten a bucket of green persimmons!

“But everyone loved our Buick. So many had never ridden in a car at all. They’d pile up in the backseat like taters in a basket, as Jessie used to say, and all clinging to the hand ropes for dear life. I think I was a very fast driver in those days, some said Miss Agnes just whipped around these back roads.”

She laughed. “I remember there would be a knock on the door and two or three unwashed young ‘uns saying ‘Miss Agnes, can we set in your automobile?’ And one winter night Jessie went out to put two squash pies in that cavernous trunk—which we also used for refrigeration—and there were three neighbor children dead asleep under our lap robe on the backseat. They’d come to spend the night in Miss Agnes’s car! It was quite the thing to do for a year or two.

“Of course, not everyone in these parts enjoys the notion of automobiles. There are a few, even today, who don’t fancy hurtling down the side of a mountain in a vehicle.”

“I’m one of them, actually.”

“Jubal Adderholt hasn’t been off this ridge in fourteen years. He’s someone I’d like us to visit tomorrow.” She gazed away. “Perhaps...”

“Perhaps?”

“Perhaps we should be making our plan for visitation, instead of sitting here like turnips.”

“Ten more minutes?”

She hesitated, then nodded her assent.

He thought a shadow passed over her face then, but perhaps he was mistaken.

“We know the roads today aren’t always the best, but in those days, they were immeasurably worse. Touring a Buick Town Car around the poorest county in the state may sound adventurous or even romantic, but all that wear and tear took a great toll on everything from tires to engine.

“Not long ago, I asked an elderly lady what she’d found most remarkable in her long life. ‘Men on the moon!’ I thought she might say, but she looked at me with the firmest conviction and declared, ‘Good roads, Agnes, good roads!’

“Parts were frightfully expensive then, as I hear they are today. We had parts shipped from Bangor, Maine, for several years, because we could trust the dealer; but as you know, far-fetched is dear-bought. I suppose it was a blessing, really, when our grand old automobile simply gave out, and we were forced to make a transition ... to a truck....”

She looked beyond the high window above the altar to the branches of an oak. He felt she’d forgotten he was there.

“Are you all right?”

She crossed herself. “Yes,” she whispered. She turned then, and looked at him steadily.

“I know I’m going to tell you everything, Father; it simply must be done.”

She glanced behind him, and he saw the anxious expression of her face at once transformed. “Clarence!”

He turned and saw Clarence’s large frame silhouetted in the doorway.

“I never got to speak more than a word to him on Sunday. This is a blessing!” He rose from the pew as Clarence came toward them along the aisle.

“Clarence ...” He extended his hand. “It was a very happy pleasure to serve with you, and I’m absolutely astonished at the beauty of our pulpit.”

Agnes used her hands in what Father Tim recognized as sign language.

Clarence smiled with unmistakable happiness as he extended a large, calloused hand to Father Tim. Then he signed to his mother, who translated his greeting to the vicar.

“He says we have waited a long time. And he rejoices that you have come.”

Clarence closely observed his mother as she spoke, and nodded in assent.

“My son is completely deaf, Father, nor can he speak. His heart converses, instead.”

“Look, Stuart, I know you’re busy...”

“Not too busy to talk with you, old friend. How’s it going with Holy Trinity?”

“Did you know the building and grounds have been maintained for three decades by a woman and her son?”

“I didn’t know it, actually, until after I e-mailed you in December. Then I decided not to mention what I found out, so you could discover it for yourself. Besides, I didn’t know how much of what I heard was true. It sounded like some Appalachian folktale.”

“It’s no tale. And the woman, Agnes Merton, is a deaconess, a remnant of the old mission church deaconesses. I didn’t know there were any left.”

“A few, of course. One in Virginia, one or two in New England, maybe more, I don’t know. It’s a lost part of church history.”

“Now I know why you said you were patently envious.”

Stuart laughed. “Did I say that?”

“You did.”

“And I am.You’ve never seen so much high muckety-muck as the trifold event of cathedral consecration, my retirement, and the installation of the new bishop. We’re all just this side of stroke. And there you are on your untrammeled mountaintop, birds eating from your hand, mountain panthers lying curled at your feet...”

“Right. Precisely.”

“Truth be told, you sound fifteen years younger, possibly twenty. Uh-oh, have to trot. Keep me posted. See you in June!”

“You’re ever in my prayers.”

“And you in mine. May He provide all you need for Holy Trinity.”

“I can hardly believe what He’s provided thus far. But I’ll tell you everything another time. You and Martha must come here, you must.”

“Perhaps next fall. After the consecration, we’re headed to the islands for a month. I have no idea what I’ll do with all that time.”

“You’ll figure it out,” said the vicar.

A
month?
In the
islands!
He couldn’t begin to imagine such a thing for himself. He knew only that he was glad to be where God had planted him—looking down upon the clouds, at roughly forty-five hundred feet above sea level.

The e-mail raved on at some length. Clearly, Emma was scared out of her wits about flying across the pond, and had gone ballistic.