He handed Russell a crisp hundred-dollar bill.
“In the name of the Lord, Russell, get the boy a tree, and string some lights, if you can.”
“I thank you, Father,” Russell said, looking embarrassed and relieved. “Do you reckon th’ Lord would mind if we had a nice ham out of th’ change?”
“Mind? Why, I think He’d mind if you didn’t! And here, this is for that cough.” He took a twenty-dollar bill out of his pocket.
The sexton folded the bills respectfully and tucked them into his overalls pocket. “I thank you, Father. We finished mulchin’ them rhododendrons before it snowed, I thought you orght t’ know.”
Rhododendrons. Mulch. Ashes!
He remembered the fall day he’d gone around to the side door where Russell was mulching. He’d found ashes that looked like somebody had cleaned out their barbecue grill. He remembered asking Russell where the ashes came from, and then he’d borrowed Russell’s gloves and worked the ashes into the soil.
Suddenly, he knew it just as sure as he was sitting there. He’d buried the remains of the double-dealing Parrish Guthrie in the church rhododendron bed.
In the fall, somebody had emptied the ashes out the side door. Then, he reasoned, they’d put the jewels in the clean urn, where they thought they’d be safe. In most churches, columbariums were not often moved about, and their own had not been touched in fully three years.
He was horrified to think it was a parishioner. Yet, who else but a parishioner would know about the closet, and know that the door was scarcely ever opened? He found he was going over and over the list of members, questioning each name. It was a process that left him angrily depressed. The discovery of those stones had been a wicked intrusion that had robbed him of peace and tranquillity during a season in which both were greatly longed for.
The concert reading and musicale drew a packed house, and the choir had, in his opinion, reached a new pinnacle of praise. After the event at church, the choir proceeded out the church doors and along Main Street, caroling in the chill evening air, carrying lanterns. They made a glowing procession along the old street, stopping here and there in an open shop for hot cider and cookies.
A tenor and a baritone broke away from the choir and went along the dark, cold creek bank, to the little house of Homeless Hobbes, where they warmed themselves by the wood stove and lustily sang, together with their host, as many carols as they had strength left to deliver.
The rector had the caroling choir finish up at the rectory, where he laid a fire in the study and spread out a feast that Puny had spent days preparing. Curried shrimp, honey-glazed ham, hot biscuits, cranberry salad, fried chicken, roasted potatoes with rosemary, and brandied fruit were set out in generous quantities.
The little group gathered around the roaring fire and, as the last carol of the evening, sang something they knew to be their rector’s great favorite.
“In the bleak midwinter,” ran the first lines of Christina Rossetti’s hymn, “frosty wind made moan, earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone . . .”
Then, the poignant last verse: “What can I give him, poor as I am? If I were a shepherd, I would bring a lamb; if I were a wise man, I would do my part; yet what I can I give him . . . give my heart.”
That’s the key! he thought, as they pulled on heavy coats and gloves, mufflers and boots. Then, with much laughter and warm hugs, they trooped out the door and into the biting wind.
“The Lord be with you!” he called, his breath forming gray puffs on the stinging air.
“And also with you!”
For a long time afterward, he sat by the fire, feeling the joy of Christmas, and knowing with unsearchable happiness that Christ did, indeed, live in his heart. Not because he was a “preacher.” Not because he was, after a fashion, “good.” But because, long ago, he had asked Him to.
He was working on his homily, which he intended to deliver on Christmas morning, glad to be by the study fire instead of out in the howling wind. He was glad, too, for the soup Puny had left simmering on the back burner, for it gave the house not only a mouthwatering fragrance, but a certain cheer.
When his mind wandered from the homily, he admired the tall spruce, garlanded with strings of colored lights like he remembered from his childhood in Holly Springs, and hung with ornaments that, somehow, had made it through dozens of Christmases past.
There was such a quantity of gifts stacked under the tree that he was mildly embarrassed.
Walter and Katherine had sent what he foolishly believed to be an electric train. Miss Sadie had given him a very large package tied with a red bow. Dooley had made him a present in school. Winnie Ivey wrote on hers:
I didn’t bake this, but I hope you enjoy it, anyway.
Emma, who always liked to reveal the identity of her presents, had given him a gift certificate from the Collar Button, with which he planned to buy the first new pajamas he’d owned in years.
On and on, the presents went. And who was there to open them with him? There was the rub for a bachelor.
Occasionally, he would go to the garage and stand looking at the red bicycle. None of the presents under his tree inspired the excitement he felt in helping give Dooley Barlowe the desire of his heart.
He had tied a huge bow on the handlebars and made a card that read:
To Dooley from Dooley, and also from his friend, the preacher. When you see this, please don’t go to hollerin’.
When he heard the knock, he thought it was Barnabas scratching.
Then, he heard it again.
Dooley Barlowe stood at the back door, out of breath and shivering in a thin jacket.
“Granpaw’s bad off sick,” he said, looking desperate. “You got t’ come.”
He gave the boy a down jacket, gloves, and a wool hat, and, with the icy wind scorching their faces, the two sped off on the motor scooter toward Russell Jacks’s house.
This time next year, he thought, I’ll be driving my car again. It is eight long years since I gave it up for Lent, and that’s long enough.
“Pneumonia,” said Hoppy.
The rector wasn’t surprised.
When he and Dooley arrived at Russell’s house, they had found the old man in bed, scarcely able to breathe and with a frightening rattle in his chest. He had stoked up the embers in the stove, covered the sexton with blankets from Dooley’s cot, and, because there was no telephone, rode to the hospital where he ordered the ambulance to fetch his friend, along with the frightened boy.
Hoppy had come on the run from his house three blocks away. “We’ve got our work cut out for us,” he said. “He’s in bad shape. Has the boy got a place to go?”
Father Tim looked at Dooley, whose face was ashen. “He’ll come home with me.”
"Are you two on that bloody motor scooter?”
"We are.”
“Park it in the hospital garage, for God’s sake. I’ll send you home with Nurse Herman.”
“You really don’t . . .”
“Oh, but I really do! It’s twenty degrees and dropping, and if I’m going to be a church regular, I’d like to have a live preacher in the pulpit.”
When they came home from the hospital, Barnabas bounded to the back door, put his front paws on Dooley’s shoulders, and licked his face with happy abandon.
" ’is ol’ dog’s got bad breath.”
“He spoke well of you,” replied Father Tim, helping Dooley out of the down jacket.
“Is granpaw goin’ t’ die?”
“I don’t think so.”
Dooley took off his hat and gloves, dropped them on the floor, and walked away.
“Dooley . . .”
He looked up at the rector.
The rector looked down at the hat and gloves. A long moment passed before the boy sighed heavily and picked them up. “Stayin’ around here ain’t goin’ t’ be any fun,” he muttered.
“If I were you, I wouldn’t make that decision just yet. Put your hat and gloves right here in the bin. Hang your coat on this peg. Then I’ve got something to show you.”
When they stepped into the study, which was still warm from the fire on the hearth, Dooley saw the fragrant spruce that reached all the way to the beamed ceiling. It twinkled with hundreds of colored lights, and underneath were presents, dozen upon dozen. “Maybe stayin’ around here ain’t goin’ t’ be ’at bad,” he said.
Dooley stepped into Father Tim’s pajama pants, pulled the drawstring tight, and rolled the legs above his ankles. Then he buttoned the top over his undershirt and pulled on a pair of green socks. Over this, he put a burgundy terry cloth robe, which just touched the floor, and tied it with a sash.
“Well, what do you think?” asked the rector, who had also changed into a robe and pajamas, and was filling soup bowls at the counter.
“It’s good you’re short,” said Dooley, pointing to the hem of the robe. “’is ol’ thing’s jis’ right on me.”
The phone rang.
“Looks like viral pneumonia,” said Hoppy. “That’s a tough one, because it doesn’t respond to treatment with antibiotics. We’re giving him oxygen, and we’ve removed a piece of lung tissue, so we’ll know more tomorrow. I’ll call you.”
“You’re in my prayers.”
“That’s a good place to be,” said Hoppy, hanging up.
“Is granpaw goin’ t’ die?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Let’s eat, then,” said Dooley.
Sometime in the early morning, he woke up. While Barnabas snored, he stared at the ceiling, praying for Russell Jacks and Hoppy Harper, for Cynthia Coppersmith and Homeless Hobbes, and anyone else the Holy Spirit called to mind.
At times like these, his mind let down its daytime defenses, and the names of people whom he hadn’t remembered in months or even years came before him.
Suddenly, he sat straight up.
The red bicycle!
It was standing in the garage, in plain view of anyone who cared to look.
He crept out of bed, slid his feet into the old leather slippers, and quietly put on his robe. “Stay,” he said to Barnabas, who opened one eye, closed it again, and beat the bed with his tail. He did not want an alarmed Barnabas barking his head off and waking Dooley.
The streetlamp shone through the wide hall window and was the only light he ever used to go downstairs at odd hours.
He padded softly down the steps and along the hall, then opened the garage door and turned on the light.
The bicycle stood next to his long-unused car. With its vast red ribbon and handmade card, it had transformed the garage into something quite magical.
What if the boy had seen it standing there in broad daylight? All those carefully laid plans— dashed!
He took several blankets from a storage cabinet and wrapped them around the bicycle. Then he gently laid the bicycle on its side, in the corner, and out of sight from the study door. On top of this bundle, he placed stacks of the
Mitford Muse
.
“Excellent!” he said, standing back to survey his camouflage.
He turned off the light, walked quietly to the stairs, and started up. He had nearly reached the landing when he felt a sudden and violent explosion in his head.
As he reeled backward in a half circle and slammed against the stair railing, he saw a blinding light that was followed by a shooting pain in his temples, and then, everything went black.
When he came to, he was sitting on the stairs.
Dooley Barlowe was crying and staring urgently into his face. Barnabas was licking his ear.
“What in God’s name . . . ,” he began, weakly.
“I didn’t know it was you!” Dooley sobbed. “I thought it was a dern burglar tryin’ to git me!
He felt exactly as if a train had struck him, but it was only Dooley’s tennis shoe, one of the very pair, ironically, that he had bought the boy before school started.
“One time, a burglar broke in my mama’s house and it was jis’ us young ’uns by ourselves, an’ you sounded jis’ like ’im, a creepin’ up the stairs in th’ dark.” Dooley’s fear suddenly gave way to a rising anger. “How come you t’ creep up your own dern stairs, anyway? How come you couldn’t jis’ walk up ’em, like anybody else, so this wouldn’t ’ve happened?”
Later, drifting toward a restless sleep, he murmured a deep truth. “It’s different having a boy in the house.”
Tell Rodney about jewels—after Christmas.
Talk to Hoppy about Olivia—after Christmas.
On his list of things to do, these delicate issues hung suspended like icicles from a limb.
The day following the incident on the stairs, Mitford was enclosed by a thick blanket of fog and rain. And since his parishioners were obviously busy with other affairs, he left the office early and went home. Even with the Tylenol, his head pounded furiously.
“Dadgum!” Percy said with admiration, when he stopped at the Grill to pick up a cup of soup. “Somebody busted you good.”
“I’ll say.”
He paid $1.69 for the soup, which he thought was outrageous, and left without giving Percy the details. As he passed the window, he saw Percy standing at the cash register with a hurt look. If there was anything Percy thrived on, he mused, it was details.
At four o’clock, he helped Dooley with his homework and put a cold washcloth on the enlarging bump that was slowly turning black, blue, and chartreuse.
“I’m sorry,” Dooley said, miserably.
“No sorrier than I. But all in all, I think you were brave.”
“You do?”
“Indeed I do. I have only one complaint.”
“What’s ’at?”
“You might have looked before you struck. There was, after all, some light on the stairs, so you could have seen the top of my head shine.”
“I seen it shine! But you ain’t th’ only man in the world gittin’ bald-headed, y’ know. Burglars git bald-headed, too.”
At nine o’clock, they had a report on Russell Jacks. Not faring well, but resting. Age was against viral pneumonia, Hoppy said. While Dooley took a bath, the rector made two calls asking for prayer and gave Miss Sadie an update.