Shepherds Abiding Read online

  His mother furrowed her brow and looked at the rain lashing the windows. Peggy stirred batter in a bowl, shaking her head.

  “What shall we serve, Peggy? Certainly, we want your wonderful yeast rolls!”

  “Yes, ma’am, an’ Mr. Kavanagh will want his ambrosia and oyster pie.”

  His mother smiled, her face alight. “Always!”

  “An’ yo’ famous bûche de Noël!” said Peggy. “That always get a big hand clap.”

  “What is boose noel?” he asked, sitting on the floor with his wooden truck.

  “Buoosh,” said Peggy. “Bu like bu-reau. Buoosh.”

  “Boosh.”

  “No, honey.” Peggy bent down and stuck her face close to his. He liked Peggy’s skin, it was exactly the color of gingerbread. “Look here at my lips . . . bu . . .”

  “Bu . . .”

  “Now . . . law, how I goin’ t’ say this? Say shhhh, like a baby’s sleepin’.”

  “Shhhh.”

  “That’s right! Now, bu-shhh.”

  “Bu . . . shhh.”

  “Run it all together, now. Bushhh.”

  “Bushhh!”

  “Ain’t that good, Miz Kavanagh?”

  “Very good!”

  Peggy stood up and began to stir again. “Listen, now, honey lamb, learn t’ say th’ whole thing—bûche de Noël.”

  “Bûche de Noël!”

  “He be talkin’ French, Miz Kavanagh!”

  He was thrilled with their happiness; with no trouble at all, he’d gotten raisins and a Brazil nut for talking French.

  “What does it mean, Mama?”

  “Log of Christmas. Christmas log. A few days before Christmas, you may help us put the icing on. It’s a very special job.”

  “Icin’ on a log?”

  “A log made from cake. We had it last year, but you probably don’t remember—you were little then.” His mother smiled at him; he saw lights dancing in her eyes.

  “Yes, ma’am, and now I’m big.”

  “You ain’t big,” crowed Peggy, “you my baby!”

  He hated it when Peggy said that.

  Don’t count your chickens before they hatch.

  She’d heard that all her life. But in this thing she was praying and believing could be done, she wanted to get started.

  Why not spend the days of waiting, acting as if it were going to happen?

  If it didn’t happen, she would take the penalty of great disappointment as her just and rightful lot. Of course, if it didn’t happen, what would she do? She didn’t want to leave Mitford, not at all.

  If Edith Mallory refused to give her the lease, Helen’s moving truck would come and everything would be crated up and taken to Florida, leaving the store empty for an as-yet-unknown occupant. She had a fleeting image of herself, standing in the middle of the large and vacant room. . . .

  But, no! She mustn’t think that way. How, then, might she begin acting as if it were going to happen?

  “Dear God. . . ,” she whispered.

  No matter what the future held, the big room upstairs, long used for storage, would have to be cleaned out. She took a deep breath and allowed herself to examine again the wondrous possibilities.

  In that light-filled room, there would be space for all three of her bookcases.

  She would be able to use her mother’s lace curtains at the windows facing Main Street—without having measured, she knew they would fit.

  The faded Aubusson rug, which had for years been her grandest possession, would look beautiful on the old pine floor.

  Though customers had come in, she raced up the stairs to look again at the room with its three handsome, albeit unwashed, windows.

  Halfway along the stairs, she paused.

  What would she do for heat in the attic of this creaky old building? Suddenly weary, she sighed and sat down on the step.

  Then, a proverbial truth struck:

  Heat rises.

  “By George!” Father Tim fairly whooped.

  “What is it?” asked Andrew, looking up from a book on the Nativity.

  “See here, sanding the surface makes this hateful color almost pleasing to the eye.”

  “Why, yes! I agree. It’s just the color of my good wife’s pumpkin soup with a dash of cream, not bad at all. And I like the way the gilt underpainting comes forth on the sleeve.”

  “Do you think we can get away with sanding only? No painting?” One could dream.

  “We can’t know until you get at each one, but I’d say no, too easy. Let me have a go at one.”

  Andrew put the book down and was examining an angel as Fred came in.

  “What about me sittin’ in on this?” asked Fred, looking eager.

  “Here’s a sheet of sandpaper, pull up a chair,” said Andrew. “The doorbell will tell us if we have visitors. Probably won’t see a soul ’til the Charleston decorator arrives at two.”

  “I b’lieve I’ll try a sheep. My gran’daddy raised sheep, he let me feed th’ orphans on a bottle.”

  “Splendid,” said Father Tim. “Go to it!”

  “This figure has a truly beautiful countenance,” said Andrew. “What about her missing wing?”

  “I don’t think I’ll tackle it.” Truth be told, he was frightened of trying to build something so crucial with plaster, which was as yet a foreign material to him—it could result in an onerous lump instead of an arched and lovely wing. And then there were the feathers he’d be forced to create in the wet plaster. No indeed, this was Nativity 101, not Rodin’s atelier. “Besides, think how the missing wing depicts the human condition!”

  “A somewhat esoteric thought,” said Andrew, pulling at his chin. “Nonetheless, I’m in!”

  As the men worked with easy absorption, Father Tim smelled the fresh coffee on the hob; he heard the busy whisk, whisk of sandpaper, and Beethoven’s “Pastorale” pouring from Andrew’s radio.

  He felt a happy contentment flowing up in him, as a spring from a hidden source.

  When Scott called in the afternoon, Hope told him all that she was thinking. He said he’d drop by after she closed the store, if that was OK, and help out. Would she like pizza with everything, or just cheese?

  As long as she could remember, she’d had it with just cheese.

  “Everything!” she said, suddenly filled with unspeakable happiness.

  “Well, I’ll be . . .”

  Avis Packard had locked up The Local and was going to his car in the alley, when he glanced north along the twilit street. It was the first time in memory that he’d seen a light above the bookstore.

  As he walked Barnabas to the monument a little after nine o’clock, Father Tim noticed it, too.

  He drew his wool scarf close against the chill October wind and mused how the light seemed to cheer the hushed and empty street.

  The first Sunday of Advent dawned bitterly cold and clear beneath the platinum sheen of a half moon.

  Random gusts of wind whistled around houses, rattling shutters and downspouts. Smoke was snatched from the chimneys of early risers and hurtled east by a freezing westerly blow.

  At the yellow house on Wisteria Lane, Father Tim let Barnabas into the yard, and whistled him in again. Then he read the Morning Office in his study and carried two mugs of coffee upstairs, where Cynthia opened the first door on their Advent calendar.

  Propped in bed against the pillows, she read aloud the supplication from the prophet Isaiah.

  “ ‘Let the sky rain down justice, and the earth bud forth a saviour!’ ”

  “Amen!” he said, handing her a mug.

  He leaned over and kissed her on the forehead. “A blessed Advent to you, beloved.” She put the palm of her hand to his cheek. “And to you, dearest.”

  “I’ve set out your little crèche.”

  “Oh, that ragged thing!”

  “Fourteen years old, and sewing robes for those clothespins!” He recklessly counted this among the most endearing things he knew about his wife.

 
; “Phoo, darling!”

  “I want to thank you for something.” He sat on her side of their bed and took a sip of the strong, black brew. “I want to thank you for encouraging me to retire.”

  “But you’ve struggled with it so.”

  “I know. I think most people do. But I was exhausted all the time; I never knew how to rest or take a break, or how to refuel. I think God is at last teaching me something about that.”

  “Hoppy said if you hadn’t retired, your health would have suffered greatly.”

  “I wish I’d spent the last couple of years enjoying retirement instead of fighting it. But now I believe I can.” He grinned. “I’m giving up the book of essays. It’s a blasted nuisance.”

  “Hallelujah, darling! You always looked woeful when you sat down to an essay.”

  “I thought I had to stay busy with something important, that I had no right to rest. Of course, I want to keep myself open to any use He might make of me.”

  “Look at the use He’s made of you in supplying so many pulpits, and the lives that were changed in that wonderful year at Whitecap, and the way you found Sammy. . . .”

  “Ah, well,” he said, mildly flustered. Though he had no knack for totting up such things, his wife definitely possessed a certain skill. “I have a confession to make about the essays—I’ve just realized it in the last few days. I thought I had to keep up, somehow, with my successful wife.”

  “But you don’t.”

  “But I don’t.”

  “I love you,” she said.

  “I love you back.”

  They were silent for a moment, comforted, as the wind keened around the north corner of the house.

  “We used to talk about what we might do when I retired,” he said. “You always wanted to travel. Truth be told, it’s something I’m beginning to think I’d like to do.”

  “Your old fear of flying—is it going away?”

  “A lot of my fears seem to be going away.”

  “Remember how I used to be afraid you’d leave me?” she asked. “That fear has vanished completely.”

  He raised his coffee mug in a glad salute. “After our year at Meadowgate, how would you like to go to Ireland?”

  “Ireland! I’d love to go to Ireland!”

  “See the Kavanagh family castle, muck about with the cousins, do rubbings of gravestones . . . like that.” His heart lifted up.

  She set her coffee on the bedside table and opened her arms to the man whom she’d always believed, even when others didn’t suspect it, to be wise and romantic, witty and ardent, generous and brave—in the end, the truest soul she had ever known.

  At the end of an unpaved road, in a white frame house surrounded by three acres of pines, Lew Boyd sat up in bed and yawned. He didn’t know if he wanted to go to church this morning or not.

  If he remembered right, this afternoon was the annual Advent Walk. A horde of locals would start out at the Episcopalians, then march around to the Presbyterians and Methodists, enjoying a brief service at each stop and singing hymns and carols along the way. The whole caboodle would end up at First Baptist, with all the hot cider, cookies, and whatnot a man could hold.

  If he showed up at church this morning, the elders would be after him to join the walkers this afternoon and fill in the bass. You’d think a town church, especially Baptist, would have more than one poor rube to sing bass, but no deal—it was his luck to be the spotted monkey. Over and over again, they’d tried to trick him into joining the choir in order to regulate his churchgoing, but even he wasn’t dumb enough to go for that stunt.

  In the great commotion outside, he heard his garbage can slam against the side of the house.

  A man couldn’t sing bass in gale-force winds and freezing temperatures! Besides, he’d just worked six days at a hard run; why would he want to go walking? Come to think of it, now that he had cable, he ought to just hole up at home and get it over with. Of course, Earlene would be asking if he was going to church. . . .

  He checked his Timex. About now, she’d be taking her mama’s little dab of breakfast up the stairs and fluffing the pillows so her mama could sit up in bed and eat, with Earlene feeding her every bite. Then, in a little bit, the next-door neighbor would come over and Earlene would go off to church, looking pretty as a speckled pup and toting the chess pie she’d baked last night for the Coffee Minute.

  That’s the way Earlene was, she cared about people. Nearly forty-five years ago, when he’d won a blue ribbon in that pickle contest, Earlene had run over and kissed him, then run off, embarrassed half to death by what she’d done.

  He’d never forgotten that moment, even when he was married to Juanita.

  “Why’d you do that?” he asked when he and Earlene met again a few years ago. “I didn’t even hardly know you.”

  “I didn’t know I was goin’ to do it ’til I did it!” she said, blushing. “I secretly liked you, and I just felt so . . . happy’cause you’d won!”

  In his heart, he was sometimes hard on Earlene for not being here. But he was disgusted with himself for this. She didn’t deserve it. Taking care of her failing mama was what she’d committed to do; plus, she wanted to work another few months at the flour company to get her retirement benefits—she’d told him right up front that this is how it would be, and he’d accepted it and married her.

  Then there were her sisters, who said if the word leaked out that they were married, it would kill her mama. Lord knows, he didn’t want to be party to a thing like that, no way. Except for telling Father Tim, he’d kept the whole blooming thing a secret. He knew as well as anybody that news travels—it’d run straight up to Knoxville on both legs, hard as it could go.

  Next weekend, he’d take Saturday off and go see her. He’d stay with his old Aunt Bess, as usual, and do a few odd jobs for his elderly relative, like fix her top porch step and put a new shelf in her pantry.

  In the evening, Earlene’s neighbor would come in to sit, and he’d take his bride out to a nice dinner, maybe surf and turf. He felt a little shiver of happiness as he imagined helping her up in his new truck, and giving her a big kiss.

  They’d hold hands and sit together on the same side of the booth, and he’d try not to say a word about how hard it was to keep living like this. And he dern sure wouldn’t say, like he’d said one time before, Well, sugar, how long do you think it’ll take your little mama to die? Nossir, he’d never do that again. He should’ve been strung up by his feet.

  He sniffed the cold air of the bedroom. The new coffeemaker with the timer had kicked on in the kitchen.

  After drinking two mugs of engine oil and knocking back a couple of Pop-Tarts, maybe he’d spend the day laid up in bed watching the Titans shut down the New York Giants.

  Whop. The garbage can slammed against the porch rail.

  “Go, Titans!” he hollered.

  Around ten o’clock, the winds increased; leaves that had fallen during a hard November rain were blown upon the sharp, clean air like coveys of startled quail.

  On Main Street, a red scarf was snatched from the shoulders of a churchgoer and hurled aloft, dipping and tossing like a Chinese kite, before it landed on the green awning of Sweet Stuff Bakery.

  The Kavanaghs observed the wonderment of the flying scarf as they drove to Wesley for the ten o’clock service at St. Paul’s.

  “It definitely won’t be an Advent Walk,” said Cynthia. “More like an Advent Run!”

  “I may leave the walk a mite early this afternoon.”

  “Really?”

  “And I may be a tad late for dinner.”

  “Whatever for?”

  He smiled, his eyes on the road. “Christmas is coming, you know.”

  She looked at him, beaming. “Of course, dearest! That explains everything!”

  “Come, thou long expected Jesus,

  Born to set thy people free;

  From our fears and sins release us, Let us find our rest in Thee.

  Israel’s strength and
consolation,

  Hope of all the earth Thou art;

  Dear desire of every nation,

  Joy of every longing heart. . . .”

  The walkers sang lustily as they processed from an inspiring service at the Methodist chapel and turned north on Main Street. They were hard by the fire station when Lew Boyd saw Father Tim weaving his way quickly through the procession, moving south.

  “You’re goin’ th’ wrong way!” hollered Lew, in case the Father didn’t know they were headed back to First Baptist for hot cider and all the trimmings.

  “A blessed Advent!” shouted Father Tim. He raised a gloved hand in salute and kept going, the wind at his back.

  From the window above Happy Endings, Hope Winchester peered down upon the straggle of walkers making their way to First Baptist while holding on for dear life to their sheet music.

  “Lift up your heads, ye mighty gates;

  Behold, the King of glory waits;

  The King of kings is drawing near;

  The Savior of the world is here! . . .

  Fling wide the portals of your heart;

  Make it a temple, set apart . . .”

  She was happy that she could hear most of the words, liking especially “Fling wide the portals of your heart.”

  In the music floating up to her, she was struck by a deep, resonant voice that was clearly able to bind the other voices together. She looked for its source, but couldn’t locate it, and was turning away from the window when someone peered up at her and waved.

  She waved back, glad to be noticed, and stood and watched the toboggans and flapping coattails disappear beneath the green awning.

  She turned to go downstairs, but stopped instead and gazed at the large room, now delivered of the detritus of more than two decades. It was empty, clean, and bright with the dazzle of winter light.