A New Song Read online

  He sighed.

  “Better to take it now than call long-distance and have me ship it down there for three dollars.”

  Hope appeared next to him, looking wise in new tortoiseshell glasses.

  No doubt about it, Hope had his number.

  He raked the book off the shelf, and snatched Jonathan Edwards’s The Freedom of the Will from another. He noted that his forehead broke out in a light sweat.

  Oh, well, while he was at it . . .

  He grabbed a copy of Lewis’s Great Divorce, which had wandered from his own shelves, never to be seen again, and went at a trot to the cash register.

  “I’m sure you’re excited about your party!” Hope said, ringing the sale. Margaret jumped onto the counter and glowered at him. Why did cats hate his guts? What had he ever done to cats? Didn’t he buy his wife’s cat only the finest, most ridiculously priced chicken niblets in a fancy tinfoil container?

  “Party? What party?”

  “Why, the party Uncle Billy and Miss Rose are giving you and Cynthia!”

  “I don’t know anything about a party.” Had someone told him and he’d forgotten?

  “It’s the biggest thing in the world to them. They’ve never given a party in their whole lives, but they want to do this because they hold you in the most edacious regard.”

  “Well!” He was nearly speechless. “When is it supposed to be?”

  “Tomorrow night, of course.” She looked at him oddly.

  Tomorrow night they were working a list as long as his arm, not to mention shopping for groceries to feed Dooley Barlowe a welcome-home dinner of steak, fries, and chocolate pie.

  He mopped his forehead with a handkerchief. He’d be glad to leave town and get his life in order again.

  “I’ll look into it,” he muttered, shelling out cash for the forbidden books. “And if you don’t mind, that is, if you happen to see Cynthia, you might not mention that, ah . . .”

  Hope Winchester smiled. She would never say a word to the priest’s wife about his buying more books. Just as she certainly wouldn’t mention to him that Cynthia had dashed in only this morning to buy copies of Celia Thaxter’s My Island Garden, and the hardback of Ira Sleeps Over.

  He knocked on the screen door of the small, life-estate apartment in the rear of the town musuem.

  “Uncle Billy! Miss Rose! Anybody home?”

  He couldn’t imagine the old couple giving a party; his mind was perfectly boggled by the notion. Rose Watson had been diagnosed as schizophrenic decades ago, and although on daily medication, her mood swings were fierce and unpredictable. To make matters worse for her long-suffering husband, she was quickly going deaf as a stone, but refused to wear hearing aids. “There’s aids enough in this world,” she said menacingly.

  He put his nose against the screen and saw Uncle Billy sleeping in a chair next to an electric fan, his cane between his legs. Father Tim hated to wake him, but what was he to do? He knocked again.

  Uncle Billy opened his eyes and looked around the kitchen, startled.

  “It’s me, Uncle Billy!”

  “Lord if hit ain’t th’ preacher!” The old man grinned toward the door, his gold tooth gleaming. “Rose!” he shouted. “Hit’s th’ preacher!”

  “He’s not supposed to be here ’til tomorrow!” Miss Rose bellowed from the worn armchair by the refrigerator.

  Uncle Billy grabbed his cane and slowly pulled himself to a standing position. “If I set too long, m’ knees lock up, don’t you know. But I’m a-comin’.”

  “Tell him he’s a day early!” commanded Miss Rose.

  “Don’t you mind Rose a bit. You’re welcome any time of th’ day or night.” Uncle Billy opened the screen and he stepped into the kitchen. The Watsons had cooked cabbage for lunch, no two ways about it.

  “Uncle Billy, I hear you’re giving . . . well, someone said you’re giving Cynthia and me . . . a party?”

  The old man looked vastly pleased. “Got a whole flock of people comin’ to see you! Got three new jokes t’ tell, you’re goin’ t’ like ’em, and Rose is makin’ banana puddin’.”

  Father Tim scratched his head, feeling foolish.

  “Y’ see, th’ church give you ’uns a nice, big party an’ all, but hit seemed mighty official, hit was anybody an’ ever’body, kind of a free-for-all. I said, ‘Rose, we ought t’ give th’ preacher an’ ’is missus a little send-off with ’is friends!’” The old man leaned on his cane, grinning triumphantly. “So we’re a-doin’ it, and glad t’ be a-doin’ it!”

  “Well, now—”

  “Hit’s goin’ to be in th’ museum part of th’ house, so we can play th’ jukebox, don’t you know.”

  “Why, that’s wonderful, it really is, but—”

  “An’ me an’ Rose took a good bath in th’ tub!”

  He had seen the time when Uncle Billy and Miss Rose could empty two or three pews around their own. . . .

  Miss Rose, in a chenille robe and unlaced saddle oxfords, stood up from her chair and looked him dead in the eye. He instantly wished for the protection of his wife.

  “I hope you didn’t come expecting to eat a day in advance,” she snapped.

  “Oh, law,” said her mortified husband. “Now, Rose—”

  She turned to Uncle Billy. “I haven’t even made the banana pudding yet, so how can we feed him?”

  “Oh, I didn’t come to eat. I just came to find out—”

  “You march home,” said Miss Rose, “and come back tomorrow at the right time.”

  Uncle Billy put his hands over his eyes, as if to deny the terrible scene taking place in front of him.

  “And what time might that be?” shouted Father Tim.

  “Six-thirty sharp!” said the old woman, looking considerably vexed.

  His wife went pale.

  He felt like putting his hands over his own eyes, as Uncle Billy had done.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t know how to say no. Uncle Billy is so excited. . . . They’ve never given a party before.”

  “Why in heaven’s name didn’t they let us know?”

  “I think they invited everybody else and forgot to invite us.”

  “Lord have mercy!” said his overworked wife, conveniently quoting the prayer book.

  They had collapsed on the study sofa for the Changing of the Light, having gone nonstop since five-thirty that morning. He had made the lemonade on this occasion, and served it with two slices of bread, each curled hastily around a filling of Puny’s homemade pimiento cheese.

  “I can’t even think about a party,” she said, stuffing the bread and cheese into her mouth. “My blood sugar has dropped through the soles of my tennis shoes.”

  Ah, the peace of this room, he thought, unbuttoning his shirt. And here they were, leaving it. They built it, and now they were leaving it. Such was life in a collar.

  “Timothy, are you really excited about going to Whitecap?”

  “It comes and goes in waves. One moment, I’m excited—”

  “And the next, you’re scared to death?”

  “Well . . .”

  “Me, too,” she confessed. “I hate to leave Mitford. I thought it would be fun, invigorating, a great adventure.” She lay down, putting her head on one of the faded needlepoint pillows that had also made it through the hedge. “But now . . .” Her voice trailed off.

  “We’re pretty worn out, Kavanagh. This is a stressful thing we’re doing, pulling up stakes. I’ve hardly been out of Mitford in sixteen years. But we’ll get there and it will be terrific, wait and see. You’ll love it. The freedom of an island . . .”

  “The wind in our hair . . .”

  “Gulls wheeling above us . . .”

  “The smell of salt air . . .”

  It was a litany they’d recited antiphonally over the last couple of months. It always seemed to console them.

  He pulled her feet into his lap. “How about a nap? We’ve got a tight schedule ahead.”

  “Tonight,�
� she said, “Puny helps us clean out all the cabinets. . . . Dooley comes tomorrow evening just before the Watson party, and will have supper with his mother. Then a day of shopping with our threadbare boy and moving him in with Harley, followed by your meeting with the new tenant, and Dooley’s steak dinner. Then, of course, there’s the grand opening at Lucera on Thursday night after we finish packing the car, and on Friday morning we’re off. I don’t think,” she said, breathless, “that we’ll have time to celebrate your birthday.”

  His birthday! Blast! This year, he would be sixty-six, and just think—in four short years, he would be seventy. And then eighty. And then . . . dead, he supposed. Oh, well.

  “Don’t be depressed,” she scolded. “And for heaven’s sake, dearest, relax. You’re sitting there like a statue in a park.”

  “Right,” he said, guzzling the lemonade.

  He had noted over the last few days that the late June light reached its pinnacle when it fell upon the brass angel. Because of the exterior overhang of the room, the direct light moved no higher than the mantel, where the angel stood firm on its heavy base of green marble.

  He had found the angel in the attic at Fernbank, Miss Sadie’s rambling house at the top of the hill, now owned by Andrew and Anna Gregory. Only months before she died in her ninetieth year, Sadie Baxter had written a letter about the disposition of her family home and its contents. One thing she asked him to do was take something for his own, anything he liked.

  As Cynthia rambled through Fernbank seeking her portion of the legacy, he had found the angel in a box, a box with a faded French postmark. Though the attic was filled with a bountiful assortment of inarguable treasures, he had known as surely as if someone had engraved his name upon it that the angel in a box belonged to him.

  The light moved now to the angel, to its outspread wings and supplicating hands. It shone, also, on the vase of pink flowering almond next to the old books, and the small silhouette of his mother, which Cynthia had reframed and hung above the mantel.

  As long as he could remember, he’d been afraid to sit still, to listen, to wait. As a priest, he’d been glad of every needy soul to tend to; every potluck supper to sit to; even of every illness to run to—thankful for the fray and haste. He’d been frightened of any tendency to sit and let his mind wander like a goat untethered from a chain, free to crop any grass it pleased.

  He was beginning to realize, however, that he was less and less afraid to do what appeared to be nothing.

  In the end, he wasn’t really afraid of moving to Whitecap, either; he’d given his wife the wrong notion. He had prayed that God would send him wherever He pleased, and when his bishop presented the idea of Whitecap, he knew it wasn’t his bishop’s bright idea at all, but God’s. He had learned years ago to read God’s answer to any troubling decision by looking to his heart, his spirit, for an imprimatur of peace. That peace had come; otherwise, he would not go.

  He inhaled the freshness of the breeze that stole through the open window, and the fragrance of oak and cherry that pervaded the room like incense.

  Then, lulled by the sight of his dozing wife, he put his head back and closed his eyes, and slept.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Social Graces

  Rose Watson set out what most people would call an outrageous assortment of cracked, chipped, and broken china, including mismatched cups and saucers that teetered atop a tower of salad plates anchored on a turkey platter.

  After standing back and gazing at the curious pile with some satisfaction, she decided to flank the arrangement with a medley of soup bowls.

  The large plastic container of banana pudding sat on the electric range, bristling with two serving spoons jabbed into its yellow center. For napkins, Uncle Billy supplied a roll of paper towels, which he stood on one end next to the pudding.

  “Don’t set paper on a stove!” Miss Rose snatched the roll and moved it like a pawn on a chessboard to the kitchen table.

  “What about spoons?” shouted her husband. He was fairly benumbed with the idea of having a swarm of people descend on their living quarters, though it had been his notion in the first place.

  “Pull out the drawer! They can help themselves.”

  He did as he was told, thinking that his wife sometimes had a good idea, and wasn’t half as crazy as most people thought. Mean-spirited, maybe, but that was her disease.

  He had tried to read about schizophrenia in the Mitford library, one of the few times he had ever stepped foot in the place. He had looked for the oldest volunteer he could find, thinking she would be the boss, and asked her to lead him to a volume on a disease whose name he could not spell. He had then taken the book to a table and sat and asked the Lord to give him some kind of wisdom about what was so terribly, horribly wrong with his wife, but he couldn’t understand anything the book had said, nothing.

  “That’s good thinkin’!” he shouted.

  “You say somethin’s stinkin’ ?” She turned and looked at him.

  “Dadgummit, Rose, I said—”

  “It might be your upper lip, Bill Watson.” She suddenly burst into laughter.

  There it was! The laughter he heard so seldom, had almost forgotten, rushing out like a bird freed from a cage, the laughter of the girl he’d known all those years ago. . . .

  He stood, stunned and happy, tears springing to his eyes as suddenly as her laughter had come.

  Father Tim found the china assortment fascinating. He could spot several pieces of French Haviland in a pattern his grandmother had owned, and not a few pieces of Sevres.

  At least he thought it was Sevres. He picked up a bread-and-butter plate and peered discreetly at the bottom. Meissen. What did he know?

  He certainly didn’t know what to do about the banana pudding. Everyone except themselves had been asked to bring a covered dish, so there was plenty to choose from. Miss Rose, however, stood like a sentinel by the stove, making sure that all comers had a hefty dose of what had taken her a full afternoon to create.

  All those cracks in the china, he thought, all those chips and chinks . . . weren’t they a known hideout for germs, a breeding ground? And hadn’t he sat by the hospital bed of a woman who had put her feet under Rose Watson’s table and barely lived to tell about it?

  He could remember the story plainly. “Lord knows, I hadn’t hardly got home before my stomach started rumblin’ and carryin’ on, you never heard such a racket. Well, Preacher, I hate to tell you such a thing, but you’ve heard it all, anyhow—five minutes later, I was settin’ on th’ toilet, throwin’ up on my shoes.”

  He had not forgotten the mental image of that good lady throwing up on her shoes. He certainly hadn’t forgotten her dark warning never to eat a bite or drink a drop at Rose Watson’s house.

  “Fill y’r plates and march into th’ front room!” Their host’s gold tooth gleamed. “Some’s already in there, waitin’ for th’ blessin’.”

  Cynthia served herself from the pudding bowl as if she hadn’t eaten a bite since Rogation Sunday.

  “Fall to, darling,” she said, happy as a child.

  Oh, the everlasting gusto of his spouse! He sighed, peering around for the ham biscuits.

  He found that everyone was oddly excited about being in a place as prominent as the town museum. It was a little awkward, however, given that not a single chair could be found, and they all had to mill around with their plates in their hands, setting their tea glasses on windowsills and stair steps.

  The jukebox boomed out what he thought was “Chattanooga Shoeshine Boy,” and laid a steady rhythm into the bare floorboards.

  He and Cynthia made a quick tour of the exhibits, which he’d never, for some reason, taken time to study.

  There was a copy of Willard Porter’s deed to what had been the Mitford Pharmacy and was now Happy Endings Bookstore. There was also a handwritten list of pharmaceuticals that Willard had invented and patented, including Rose Cough Syrup, named for his then-ten-year-old sister, and their hostess for
the evening.

  There was the framed certificate declaring the Wurlitzer to be a gift to the town from the owner of the Main Street Grill, where it was unplugged on June 26, 1951. It had been fully restored to mint condition, thanks to the generosity of Mayor Esther Cunningham.

  He examined the daguerreotype of Coot Hendrick’s great-great-grandfather sitting in a straight-back chair with a rifle across his knees.

  It had been Coot’s bearded ancestor, Hezikiah, who settled Mitford, riding horseback up the mountain along an Indian trading path, with his new English bride, Mary Jane, clinging on behind. According to legend, his wife was so homesick that Mr. Hendrick had the generosity of spirit to give the town her maiden name of Mitford, instead of Hendricksville or Hendricksburg, which a man might have preferred to call a place settled by dint of his own hard labors.

  “’At’s my great-great-granpaw,” said Coot Hendrick, coming alongside the preacher and his wife. He’d been waiting to catch someone looking at that picture. For years, it had knocked around in a drawer at his mama’s house, and he’d hardly paid any attention to it at all. Then somebody wanted it for the town museum and it had taken on a whole new luster.

  “He looks fearless!” said Cynthia.

  “Had twelve young ’uns!” Coot grinned from ear to ear, which was not a pretty sight, given his dental condition. “Stubs!” Mule Skinner had said, marveling at how he’d seen people’s teeth fall out, but never wear down in such a way.

  “Six lived, six died, all buried over yonder on Miz Mallory’s ridge. Her house sets right next to where him and my great-great-granmaw built their little cabin.”

  “Well!” said Father Tim.

  “Hit was a fine place to sight Yankees from,” said Coot.

  “I’ll bet so.”

  “There probably weren’t many Yankees prowling around up here,” said Cynthia, who’d read that, barely a hundred and fifty years ago, an Anglican bishop had called the area “wild and uninhabitable.”