Light From Heaven (23 page)

“Out to
dinner
? At
Lucera?
In
Lent
?”

“I need to start courting you again.”

She gazed up at him, happy. “I didn’t realize you’d stopped.”

He made the sign Agnes had shown him.

“I love you, too!” she said.

“How’d you know that?”

“When I taught Sunday School, the children and I learned it.”

She pointed to the fireplace, and the ashes that lay about the hearth, then rolled her eyes heavenward and shrugged and threw up her hands.

Now
there
was gestural and facial for you.

He sat on the side of the bed and watched her pluck pink curlers from her hair, as she’d done on the day of their September wedding.

What a day that had been, with his bride-to-be locked in her bathroom in a chenille robe the age of his English boxwoods, while the organist at Lord’s Chapel hammered down for dear life and the choir checked their watches.

Chances are, half the congregation supposed she’d skipped town rather than exchange vows with their bachelor priest. Though to a man, his parishioners were known to adore him, they couldn’t imagine that anyone else actually would.

Alarmed by her uncharacteristic lateness, he’d run all the way to the yellow house in his dress shoes and tuxedo, liberated her from the bathroom, waited in a panic as she dressed in five minutes flat, then raced back to Lord’s Chapel, his fiancee huffing at his side in high heels, and covering the distance with flabbergasting speed.

“Why you didn’t fall and break your neck...” he mused aloud.

“What on earth are you talking about?”

“Our wedding day. I was just thinking of our wedding day, and how you plucked the curlers out of your hair like so many chicken feathers; they were raining around us—and then the Talladega thing we did to church; you were flying, Kavanagh!”

She laughed as she spritzed herself with the stuff that turned the room into an arbor of wisteria.

Perhaps it was the memory of that day in September, or the relief of coming home after a long and productive sojurn among his new parish—or both.

Whatever it was, he realized he was happier than he remembered being in a long time.

Before they left for Mitford, he popped into the library. Wind shuddered along the tin roof as he checked phone messages.

“Father, Buck here. Lon Burtie don’t have a clue where Sammy is. He says Clyde Barlowe cut out a few weeks ago, an’ he thinks Sammy saw his chance an’ took off. Lon said he gave it a couple of weeks to see if Sammy turned up, but he was ready to call us when I called him. He said Sammy had been talkin’ about goin’ out on his own. Th’ only thing worries Lon is that Sammy tells Lon everything, an’ Sammy up an’ left without sayin’ a word. I went around to th’ drugstore, th’ poolroom, th’ usual, but nobody’s seen ’im. I’m wonderin’ if we should get the police in on this. Give me a call.”
Beep.

“Tim, it’s your one and only cousin. Piece of cake. All you do is file a petition with the circuit court. The name issue is separate from the issue of adoption, but both can be filed on the same petition. Fortunately, he’s twenty-one-makes things a whale of a lot simpler, and no parental assent of any kind is required. The procedure basically terminates their right to the biological child.

“So you’re on your way, buddy, and congratulations. I’m personally delighted that the family name, however tattered or torn, will be perpetuated. Happy Easter, and love to Cynthia.” Beep.

“Father Tim! It’s Emma! Gene’s back in th’ hospital an’ not doin’ too good, you need to go see Esther if you can catch ’er at home. She’s a basket case.”

Emma was apparently eating something known for its high-performance crunch.

“Th’ wind’s been blowin’ up a storm all day. If you’re out in it, I hope you’ve got your head covered up. I read where bald-headed people get sick twice as fast as people with hair.”

Slurping something through a straw ...

“Somebody said the queen goes to her country place in May, so I’m over even
thinkin’
about runnin’ into her, which I’m glad of since I nearly broke my neck tryin’ to curtsy by your directions.”

More crunching...

“Anyway, ten weeks to go and I’m out of here. Say hey to Cynthia, I hope y’all aren’t turnin’ into a bunch of
hayseeds.
Ha-ha.”

Agitated barking ...

“Oh, hush up! That was Father Tim, you remember him. No, no, get down, you wouldn’t like pork rinds. Too salty. You’d drink a gallon of water and wee wee in th’ closet, because I’m
definitely
not runnin’ you down th’ driveway in
this
wind...”
Beep.

The fatigue returned, but he was going through with their dinner at Lucera, and no two ways about it.

When they opened the front door, it nearly blew off the hinges. He shut it at once. “Holy smoke!”

He wife looked at him, imploring. “Dearest—let’s don’t go.”

She leaned her head to one side, smiling. “You can court me at home, can’t you?”

“Oh, boy,” he said, vastly relieved. “Can I ever.

He and Cynthia read Evening Prayer from the 1928, and before turning off the bedside lamp, he entered a quote by Will Rogers in his journal:
Go out on a limb
—
that’s where the fruit is
.

That would preach ...

He peered at the other scribbling he’d done on the back of an old receipt from The Local.

“And it will come to the question of how much fire you have in your belly.” Directly beneath the first entry, he jotted this wisdom by Oliver Wendell Holmes, then turned to a blank page and gazed at it for a time, pensive.

Mr. Dooley Kavanagh,
he wrote.

With some wonder, he considered what he had penned, then wrote again.

“Look,” he said to Cynthia.

She raised her head and saw what he’d written, and smiled.

“Yes,” she said. “Yes!”

He was on his feet before he realized what he was doing. A terrible crash somewhere below, dogs barking their brains out ...

Cynthia sat up in bed. “Good Lord!”

“I’m going downstairs,” he said, pulling on his robe.

The smell of ashes and wood smoke, the infernal howling of the wind ...

He raced into the hall and turned on the light above the landing and flew down the steps, Barnabas at his heels. It was something in the kitchen; he heard a loud crumbling sound, then a tremendous
thunk
against the side of the house that rattled the shutters.
Lord, not the old oak
...

He snapped on the light at the kitchen door.

The room was clouded with the dust of ashes; rubble lay on the hearth and about the floor. Mortar, soot, broken bricks ... he took a handkerchief from his robe pocket and held it over his nose, dumbfounded.

Bodacious clung to the sofa; the other dogs crowded to the perimeter of the debris, barking wildly at the intrusion.

“It’s the chimney,” he said as Cynthia came into the room. “I heard something hit the side of the house. Stay by the sink, who knows what else may come down. I’ll go out and look.”

The gale was from the northwest; he had to push hard against the door to open it.

Roughly half the brick chimney had collapsed in the wind; he saw the jagged outline against the first light of Maundy Thursday.

Willie had installed a piece of plywood over the fireplace opening to keep soot from continuing to come in; but it was too little too late. The wind continued to thrum down the hollow until Willie at last rounded up the plywood and the hole was covered. Particles of ash hung in the air.

Her forehead streaked with soot, Cynthia sat across the table, looking red-eyed and disconsolate.

He held his hand over his warm coffee mug to keep the stuff from sifting into it. “Willie knows a brick mason, he said he’d try to get him out here today or the first of next week. The chimney is more than a century old, so no wonder.”