Tumbleweeds (38 page)

So was Trey, forty, divorced, the glory days over, coming home to warm his backside at Cathy’s hearth?

Another surge of unease, like an electrical shock, made John go inside, and he caught sight of himself in the glass door. He stepped back from it, running his hand through his hair, and inspected his reflection for the first time in years. He had regained much of the weight he’d lost in Central America. He’d come home looking as if a wind had raced through his body and sucked his skin to his bones, but his muscle tone had been good and his body strong. Despite the years showing in his face, the gray in his sideburns, he could still see a trace of the looks that used to vie with Trey Don Hall’s. Overall, time
had been relatively benevolent to him, but the rigors of his avocation had definitely left their mark. He wondered if the same was true of TD Hall.

Going in to take his shower, John speculated what toll the years had taken on Trey after two failed marriages, messy divorces, legal battles, money problems, a serious concussion that took him from the game, and a nonstop life in the fast lane. Not much, John was willing to bet. Trey Hall had always lived a life impervious to consequences, and at forty his face and body probably proved it.

As John always did when leaving Harbison House, he stopped by the kitchen to say good-bye to Betty and leave word where he could be reached. He knew she expected and appreciated the courtesy. It satisfied a certain maternal need when he told her where he would be for the day and when he would be home. “I’m going by St. Matthew’s to hear confessions after I leave Kersey, but I’ll be back in time to meet our guest,” he said.

“And you’ll be where in Kersey, Father?”

“At Bennie’s. I have to speak with Cathy Benson.”

Betty’s lips cracked open in her thin smile. “So that’s the reason you won’t be eating breakfast here.”

“Guilty,” he said. He heard the usual boisterous breakfast noise coming from the big dining room where the residents of Harbison House—ten children aged six to twelve, abandoned all—ate their meals. He was anxious to see Cathy and decided not to step in to say good morning. They would be all over him, begging him to play ball, check out their vegetable plots, animals, achievements at the easel, piano, and archery range. Felix, a mutt adopted from the highway, had been let in. John gave him his morning pat and headed out.

He steered his truck down the drive that in June was littered with lacy white blossoms from two ancient mock orange trees flanking the gate. They fell like lazy snowflakes on the hood of his pickup as he passed under them, their gentle drift normally lifting his spirits, but
they had no effect this morning. Trey had probably had a laugh years ago when Aunt Mabel told him that the Harbisons had turned their farmhouse over to the diocese as a home for unwanted children with the stipulation that Father John Caldwell be appointed its director. John had heard the sardonic amusement behind Trey’s remark last night, “That must be nice for you,” when he mentioned that the Harbisons helped him run the place.

He’d been the pastor of St. Matthew’s less than a year when Lou and Betty Harbison made an appointment to speak with him. It was November, almost to the day they had found their son in the barn nineteen years before. John had dreaded the month’s arrival ever since, so ushering them into his parish office on a golden afternoon of the anniversary of their son’s death had increased his melancholia. He couldn’t imagine why they’d asked to see him. They lived devout lives.

“How may I help you?” he’d asked.

They’d presented their proposal, asking only that they be allowed to stay on in their home as housekeeper and overseer of the property.

John had been dumfounded and struck with the blasphemous image of God in His heaven, observing the scene below in smirking amusement. “Why?” he asked. “Why would you give up title to your family home and serve as employees there?”

“It’s for Donny,” they answered.

“Donny?”

“Our son,” Betty said. “Don’t you remember him, Father? You used to lay flowers on his grave. He… died when he was seventeen. His death was… an accident. He’d… be your age now.”

She’d spoken haltingly, in obvious pain and embarrassment.

“But he was a good boy,” Lou avowed in a tone urgent for John to believe him. “He was a devoted son.”

“I have no doubt,” John said, clearing the obstruction from his throat. He pushed some papers aside and leaned forward, deciding
in the flash of a second to risk everything—his reputation, his calling, his and Trey’s freedom—to give the Harbisons the assurance their grief cried for. “Your son needs no absolution for anything he may have done upon this earth,” he told them. “Let your hearts no longer be troubled. Donny died in a full state of grace. You do not need to sacrifice your home to atone for him.”

They had stared at him in wonder, astounded by his insight into the root of their pain and the authority with which he spoke of a boy he’d barely known. John’s breath had held while he waited for the question that would have led him to confess everything.

How can you be so sure?

But they had accepted his pronouncement as typical of something a priest would say, and Betty had said, “Thank you for your confidence, Father, but we’ve made up our minds. If the bishop agrees, we wish to bestow our property to the diocese in memory of our son.”

The bishop had agreed, and John had moved to the upper floor of the sprawling farmhouse while the Harbisons kept their old room and turned the rest of the space over to “Father John’s children,” the little castoffs who trooped in and out of their lives yearly.

The change in his quarters and the enlargement of his pastoral duties had occurred almost four years ago. John had never been happier or more at peace in his life and work. The shadow of his old sin still lurked in the background, but he hardly felt its chill anymore. Some days he thought he was almost too happy, too at peace. Had TD Hall come home to change all of that?

F
rom the living room window of her former home, Betty Harbison watched Father John’s Silverado pull away. The almost-like-new pickup had belonged to a parishioner, now deceased, who had bequeathed it to the home. In years past, the parish vehicle had been a Lexus, donated by the late Flora Turner, but that was long before Father John’s time. Betty observed the truck passing under the mock orange trees and out the gate with relief that it had replaced Father’s old station wagon clunker. At least that was one prayer for his safety that God had answered. Others for his well-being she could not be sure of. She’d glimpsed the scars Father John had brought home from his days in Central America.

Lost in nostalgia and memory, Betty remained at the window long past the disappearance of the pickup onto the road leading to the highway. How many Junes ago had she stood right here and watched her teenage son drive off in his father’s pickup and vanish behind a cloud of white, her heart in prayer for his safe return? He’d had his driver’s license for a year when he died. She’d had only one June to stand staring at the empty space where his truck had disappeared.

“Father John off somewhere this morning?” her husband asked behind her.

“To Kersey,” Betty said, blinking the wetness from her eyes and assuming her stoic expression. “We’re going to have company for a few days. He didn’t say who. I better go air out the guest room.”

Lou caught her arm gently. “That feeling come over you again, Betty?”

There was no hiding anything from Lou. He could sense when she was having one of those spells that could pierce as sharp and sudden as a knife thrower’s blade. “You’d think that after all these years…,” she said.

“Sweet darling, time makes no matter mind to a sorrow like ours, but at least we’ve got Father John, same age as Donny would have been. God was good to give him to us.”

Lou was right about that, she would have said, had the old wedge not lodged in her throat. At least they had Father John, a son to them in every way but one of birth. He had come to them as their parish priest after the nineteenth summer their boy had been gone. She and Lou had noted his concern for deserted and abused children and the lack of a facility in which to shelter them. One day they had come home from mass to their huge and empty house ringing with loneliness since Cindy had moved away to California with her husband and their children. Betty had said to Lou, “What if we offered this place to the Church as a home for unwanted children and asked for Father John to be its director?”

Lou’s face had brightened as she hadn’t seen it in years. “Why not?” he’d said.

So it was done. Father John had moved in with them and, together with the children, they had made a family. Gradually the ache in her grew less, the emptiness in her filled. A day did not arrive but that she didn’t think of Donny, but never a day passed that she did not give thanks to God for giving them Father John.

J
OHN HAD CALLED AHEAD
to make sure Cathy would be available to speak in private with him. This time of the morning, she and Bebe were usually in a huddle to discuss the day’s business before supervising serving lunch to a packed crowd.

“Of course, John, but what’s the occasion? You sound… mysterious.”

“I’ll tell you when I see you, Cathy. In your office about nine?”

She’d agreed and told him to tell Betty to go easy on his breakfast, that she’d have fresh cinnamon rolls and coffee waiting.

A few minutes to the hour, he drove around to the back of the café and parked next to Cathy’s white Lexus. He’d driven past the front, taking in Bennie’s through Trey’s eyes, and wished he could see TD’s face when he saw the changes in the place. Even the partially walled-in rear entrance was a far cry from the days when Odell Wolfe used to come scrounging for a meal at the back door. In those days, the staff parking lot had been a storage area for overflowing garbage cans and old café equipment and a catchall for anything the wind blew in off the street.

“The junk and smell keep other cars out,” Bennie had defended the looks of his personal parking space, but Cathy had cleaned it up, built an attractive shed for the trash cans, and put up a polite sign that read: P
LEASE
… S
TAFF AND
D
ELIVERY
O
NLY
, and the lot had been respected as off-limits to all other vehicles since.

Except for his.

John climbed the short flight of stairs and rang the bell. Multicolored snapdragons in large urns on each side of the stoop waved in the mild June breeze. He stuck the tip of an index finger into a velvety throat, but there was no easing of the apprehension that a simple creation of God’s usually induced. He sensed a gathering of shadows—those long, reckoning shades cast by old sins that time cannot disperse.

Cathy opened the door. As always, the sight of her stirred something tender inside him. Once it had been desire, unrequited and
unrevealed, a secret between him and his groin, but he had expunged that longing years ago. Now, only the deep and abiding love of friendship remained. She wore the day uniform of the café: a cornflower-blue denim painter’s smock embroidered with yellow daisies, the trademark colors of her dining establishment.

“Come into this house, Father John,” she said, using her grandmother’s old form of greeting that held just a hint of the teasing she couldn’t seem to resist when calling him by his title. “I’m dying to hear why I’ve taken precedence over the homily you usually write on a Friday morning.”

He could not lift his mood to match her bantering tone. “What have you done with Bebe?” he asked, entering an office whose sunny yellow walls, abundance of houseplants, and white window shutters gave it the pleasing charm of a morning room in a southern mansion.

“She’s taken a deposit to the bank. I told her to take her time.” Cathy eyed him, looking puzzled. “I can see you’re going to keep me in suspense.”

He could not bring himself to tell her yet. He took a seat before her desk, where neat stacks of paperwork had been laid aside to make room for a coffee butler and plate of the café’s famous yeast cinnamon rolls. “I see from the number of cars out front that the coffee wing is a success,” he said, alluding to the new addition set apart from the dining room that Cathy had built as a place for local retirees and businessmen, farmers, and ranchers to congregate for mid-morning coffee. Cathy had explained it as a gesture to make up for the time she had to kick Bennie’s cronies to Monica’s and the courthouse benches. Bullshitters, Bebe called them. They served and cleaned up after themselves and were on their honor to pay for the coffee and cinnamon rolls they consumed. The only other stipulation was that they were to be gone by eleven o’clock, when the café opened and the space was needed for an overflow lunch crowd.

“It’s one of the wisest business decisions I’ve ever made,” Cathy
said, sitting down behind her desk. “I had no idea the room would be in such instant demand as a meeting place. It’s been booked through December and should pay for itself in a year.” She set their cups into saucers. “You’ll have to pop your head in and say hello before you leave. The men will love it.”

“If I have time,” John said. “I’m a little pressed for it this morning.”

Cathy unscrewed the top of the coffee butler to release its pressure, and steam poured from the spout. “Why is that?”