Shepherds Abiding Read online

  But the car didn’t appear along the driveway, and, shortly after dark, Peggy took him down the lane to her house and fed him cornbread and milk and mashed sweet potato with molasses, and made him a pallet of worn quilts by the fireplace.

  He would always remember the way Peggy’s house smelled—like fireplace ashes and fried bacon and cold biscuits; it was a smell that made him feel safe. Nor would he ever forget how the kerosene lamp on the kitchen table made shadows flicker and dance along the walls that night, and the way Peggy prayed, aloud and urgent, raising her hands heavenward and talking to God as if He were right there in the room.

  Here it was nearly Christmas, an’ he thought th’ good Lord had forgot, but, nossir, he’d been settin’ on th’ side of th’ bed this mornin’ when th’ idea started comin.’ Hit was like turnin’ on a spigot an’ gettin’ a little squirt or two, then, first thing you knowed, hit was gushin’ out.

  A jewelry tray! By jing, that was th’ ticket.

  Her brother, Willard, had sent ’er a brooch from France when he was in th’ war; she kep’ it in th’ dresser drawer. An’ Willard had give ’er a string of pearls another time, which she kep’ in a little whatnot in th’ kitchen. He, hisself, had give ’er earrings one time, which she’d laid up on the mantelpiece some years back, which was where they laid to this day. A jewelry tray would collect all that. Maybe he’d put a little dab of felt on th’ bottom.

  Boys, was he glad t’ git that notion over with!

  He pulled on his old robe and shuffled up the hall to the kitchen and looked out the window to the frozen grass, then went to the counter and lifted the lid on the cold pot.

  Yessir, hit was pinto bean weather, all right. He drained the soaking water off the beans and held the pot under the spigot and added fresh, then set the pot on the stove and turned on the burner. With a little dab of cornbread an’ some chopped onion, boys howdy, him an’ Rose would have a feast. . . .

  He was countin’ hisself a happy man, amen and hallelujah.

  Outfitted in running gear, Father Tim made the trek to Hope House with a shopping bag over his arm and Barnabas on the red leash. In recent months, he’d been allowed to leave Barnabas at the main-floor nurses’ station, instead of leashed to a post in the lobby.

  “For you, my friend,” he said to Ben Isaac Berman in Room Number Seven, the only domicile in Hope House with a CD player.

  “Bach!” said Ben Isaac, looking with sparkling eyes at his new CD. They embraced with affection. “Thank you, Father! When are you coming for a long visit? We must have our talk about Marcus Aurelius!”

  “Ah, yes,” said Father Tim. “Marcus Aurelius—the department-store magnate!”

  He liked to hear the handsome old man laugh.

  “Here’s a quote from the emperor himself,” said Father Tim, “and a fine one it is: ‘The first rule is to keep an untroubled spirit. The second is to look things in the face and know them for what they are.’ ”

  Ben Isaac considered this and nodded, approving. “I must write that down.”

  “I’ll see you the first week of January,” Father Tim promised. “Book it! And if I don’t see you again beforehand, Happy Hanukkah!”

  “Merry Christmas, Father!” Ben Isaac called after him. “What was that first rule again?”

  “Keep an untroubled spirit!”

  He moved along the hall to Miss Pattie’s room, where he found her sleeping. He prayed for her silently, asking God for a shower of blessings as she looked toward her ninetieth year.

  Though Louella’s door was open, there was no Louella.

  “Louella! Are you here?”

  Doris Green trundled by on her walker, with a pack of Camels and a lighter in the basket. “She’s workin’ today.”

  “Working?”

  “Baking biscuits. In the kitchen. Once a week. Four hours. Eight dollars an hour.”

  “Thank you, Doris.” A fount of information!

  He found Louella in the kitchen, wearing an apron and using a pint Mason jar to cut biscuits from a sheet of risen dough.

  “Louella!” He was dumbfounded, to say the least.

  She looked up and grinned broadly. “Hey, honey.”

  “What on earth are you doing?”

  “Earnin’ me some Christmas money.”

  “Well, I’ll say.”

  “Ever’body took a fit over my biscuits a while back, so I say I’ll bake once a week ’til Christmas, but lunch only an’ no breakfast, an’ they say, ‘Here’s a apron.’ Last time you come, I forgot t’ tell you!”

  “My goodness.” Would wonders never cease? “You’ll need someone to take you Christmas shopping!” She could go with him when he dashed to Wesley. . . .

  “No, honey, I done ordered online.”

  “Online? You’re online?”

  “Law, no, not me. Doris Green! She be hooked up all over Creation, she even talk to ’er grandson on a Navy boat in th’ ocean.”

  “Good gracious.” CyberMitford!

  “But this is th’ last of my workin’ days right here, you’re lookin’ at ’em. It messes with my soaps.”

  “Aha. Well. We’re looking forward to seeing you on Christmas Day; Scott will pick you up and I’ll bring you home. I left a little something in your room.”

  “Is it what I think it is?”

  “It is!”

  “Bright Cherry?”

  “The very same!”

  “I done gouged down in my ol’ tube ’til they ain’t a scrap left! I’m so pale I be lookin’ like white folks.”

  “You look like a million bucks after taxes,” he said, kissing her on the cheek.

  He found himself grinning all the way down the hall.

  Something was stirring in him; something strong and deep and definite. Suffice it to say he was beginning to know that Christmas was coming—not just on the calendar but in his very soul.

  This morning, Cynthia’s reading had explained everything:

  “ ‘The Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen His glory.’ ”

  “I’m sorry,” Helen said. “I know you wanted it badly, but really, Hope, you’ve dodged a bullet. Look how we’ve struggled over the years! Why you’d want to perpetuate such misery is beyond me.”

  “Yes, but things are beginning to change. And this is our best Christmas season ever.”

  The phone line crackled sharply as it often did during their daily talk after locking up Happy Endings; it was Helen’s cell phone as she strolled about on her terrace overlooking the pool.

  “Come to Florida, for heaven’s sake, where the sun kisses your cheeks and sea breezes ruffle your hair. I always thought that little knot thing you do with your hair makes you look like an old maid. When you get here, we’ll cut it short and highlight it—I have just the person. . . .”

  “No,” said Hope. “I’m not coming to Florida. It’s settled—I’m going to live with Louise.”

  “You know what I have to say about that dead end.”

  She did indeed know, and could not bear to hear it again. “Customer!” said Hope. “They’re knocking on the door, I must run.” She and Helen were in agreement about one thing: Customers rule.

  She ran to the door and unlocked it, and felt at once a shiver of happiness. Scott was wearing his usual good-humored smile and a toboggan that made her burst into laughter.

  “Are you a customer?” she asked.

  “Absolutely!” He withdrew a piece of paper from his jacket pocket. “And here’s my list to prove it.”

  “Oh, good!” she said, relieved that she hadn’t deceived Helen. “I was just going up to turn on the tree lights. Want to come with me?”

  “I do! Several people are out front waiting for the lights to come on—it’s becoming a special Main Street attraction, I think.”

  “Our tree!” she said, incredulous. “A special attraction!”

  He held out his hand, and she took it, and together they walked across the creaking floor and up the stairs to the ro
om above the shop.

  Instead of heading to the monument, he walked south with Barnabas to the Oxford, where, in the glow of the streetlamp, he unlocked the door and stepped inside.

  “ . . . unto us a child is born,

  Unto us a Son is given,

  God himself comes down from heaven.

  Sing O sing, this blessed morn.”

  Someone had left the CD player on. He went to the cabinet to turn it off, but chose instead the glad company of music.

  Though he seldom made a visitation at night, he felt oddly at home in this dark and wax-scented room, secure somehow against the vagaries of a world where wars and rumours of wars perpetually threatened, and hardly anything seemed dependable.

  His work, however, was practically calling his name. With Barnabas at his heels, he quickened his step to the back room, eager as a child to see what he and Fred and Andrew had accomplished, and how far they’d come. . . .

  Though what he was doing had no deep or earthshaking significance, God seemed to care that he didn’t blow it; He seemed to be guiding his hands, his instincts, his concentration.

  Sometimes he and Fred would work for an hour or more without uttering a word, so deep was their absorption. When he regained consciousness, as it were, he often felt he’d been somewhere else entirely, where he felt entirely at peace.

  Perhaps this was the benediction of working with one’s hands instead of one’s head. Indeed, he had hotly pursued the life of the mind nearly all his life. His mother had ardently believed in a healthy balance of physical, mental, and spiritual activity, but as he’d gone away to school and entered into the fray of the world, the balance had slipped, and activity of the mind and spirit had triumphed. His hands, except for gardening, cooking, and washing a dog the size of a double-wide, had engaged in little more than turning the pages of a book.

  And look what he’d missed! The figures in a row on the shelf were a marvel to him. Though he was hastening to get it all finished, he would be sorry to see it all end. . . .

  Thanks be to God, he’d completely released the anxiety that his artistic wife would find the work amateurish or heavy-handed. It was amateurish! It was heavy-handed! But, by heaven, it was also something else, something higher, though he couldn’t say what.

  He shucked off his warm jacket and gloves and picked up a brush and studied it carefully, wondering if he should choose a larger size, which would cover the surface faster.

  But, no. He didn’t want the Holy Family to go faster. He’d developed a special tenderness toward the last of this worshipful assembly, and wanted to give them his best effort, his deepest concentration.

  Indeed, it seemed to be the wont of most people in a distracted and frantic world to blast through an experience without savoring it or, later, reflecting upon it.

  For him, working on the figures had slowed him down, forced him to pay attention and to savor the work of his hands. This also reminded him daily that Christmas hadn’t begun the weekend after Halloween, as the shops in Wesley and even Mitford would have one think. The time of preparation was yet under way, as the crèche was yet under way—the darkness before the light was still with the world.

  His heart lifted up as he dipped his brush into the glaze that would deepen the hues in Joseph’s robe. . . .

  “Lord,” he said aloud, “thank You for being with me in this. . . .”

  “Come out of there, Kavanagh! It’s ten-thirty, for Pete’s sake!”

  “Go stand in the kitchen so I can open the door!”

  He went to the kitchen and heard her lock up the workroom, which contained the mysterious creation that, sight unseen, already gave him a certain joy.

  Oddly, he couldn’t wait to see her, he was famished to see her. Her angel-tree project was a bear, and she was handling it, together with Olivia Harper, like a trouper.

  She breezed in and gave him a hug and rubbed her warm nose against his cold one and looked into his eyes with frank and happy pleasure.

  “Your eyelashes are going up and down, and little stars are coming out of you,” he said.

  They were leaving the room when Hope saw it.

  It was the smallest bit of paper sticking up between the old pine floorboards, where boxes of out-of-date schoolbooks had sat for years.

  Hope knelt on one knee and removed a pin from her hair, using the pin to catch the paper and ease it upward. It was an envelope, brittle with age and bearing no postmark.

  “Look!” she whispered. Scott knelt, too.

  The pin slipped from her fingers and fell into the crack, along with the envelope. She took another pin from her hair, engaged the envelope once more, and pulled it from the crack.

  “Good work,” said Scott.

  She lifted the flap and saw that it contained a letter.

  “ ‘For my little sister at Christmas,’ ” she read aloud from the faded inscription on the envelope.

  They stood and walked into the circle of light cast by the tree, where she lifted the flap and removed the letter. The message was written on a single sheet; the once-black ink had paled to a faint reddish color, like the stain of berries.

  Slowly, and with reverence, she spoke what was written in a careful hand on the yellowed paper.

  Christmas, 1932

  My dear little sister,

  I am thinking of you this year with special feeling. I know how you enjoy having notes from me, and I must admit you are a very fine note-writer yourself.

  I would like to take this opportunity to say that you are dear to me, and I am proud of you. You please me very much with your fine reading, which I can say from experience is a hard thing to grasp.

  It is my fond hope that you will like your gift. Please know that it was chosen with much affection, and hope for your bright future by

  Your devoted brother

  “Oh,” she said, moved. She held the letter as if it were something deeply personal and long desired.

  “Hope.”

  “Yes?” She felt her hair slipping loose from its careful bun.

  “It’s amazing that this letter says some of the things I’ve been wanting to say to you.”

  “Really?”

  He stood behind her and put his arms around her and held her close; the lights of the tree turned the empty room into a prism of color.

  “I’d like to take this opportunity to say that you are dear to me, and I am proud of you.”

  She felt a slow warmth rising in her, a quiet and surpassing joy.

  “It is my fond hope,” he said, reading from the letter in her hand, “that you will like your gift. Please know that it was chosen with much affection, and hope for your bright future by your devoted friend and brother in Christ.”

  She held her breath, unspeaking; her hair fell to her shoulders.

  “I’ve been wondering how to say it,” he told her. “And someone said it for me, all those years ago.”

  He placed a small box in her hand. “Please don’t open ’til Christmas,” he whispered, holding her in his arms as if there were all the time in the world to stand in this room with the glittering tree, and the letter, and the sense of promise that lay ahead.

  He wasn’t much on checking his e-mail these days, and was flattered and mildly thrilled when he saw a queue of sixteen messages waiting.

  Where to begin?

  Where any priest with common sense would begin—with his bishop.

 
 
 
 
 
  ll, by the way, that you’re spending next year at the Owens’ farm, and this would not be a conflict).

 
 
 
 
 
  <†Stuart

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