Out to Canaan (244 page)

Four days before Christmas, and he was running ragged like the rest of crazed humanity. He resisted glancing at his watch again, and set her down gently as the front doorbell gave a blast.

If that wasn't a fruitcake from the ECW, he'd eat his hat. Or, more likely, it was the annual oranges from Walter.

“I came to say . . . so long.” Buck Leeper stood in the stinging cold, bareheaded.

He had dreaded this moment. “Come in, Buck!”

“I can't, I'm on my way to Mississippi, I just—”

“Buck!” Jessie came trotting down the hall and grabbed the superintendent around the legs, as Barnabas raced in from the kitchen, barking.

“Please,” said the rector, standing back for Buck to come in. “We're keeping Jessie while Pauline shops for pots and pans. Come on back, we'll scare up something hot for the road.”

“Well,” Buck said, awkward, then stooped and picked Jessie up in his arms.

They walked down the hall and into the study, where a fire simmered on the hearth. Buck stood in the doorway as if in a trance, taking in the tree ablaze with tiny lights and the train running around its base.

Suddenly the rector saw the room with new eyes, also—the freshly pungent garlands over the mantel and the candles burning on his desk, reflected in the window. He had been passing in and out of this room for days, scarcely noticing, enjoying it with his head instead of his heart.

Buck abruptly set Jessie down and squatted beside her on one knee. “Look, you have a good Christmas,” he said, speaking with some difficulty.

Her eyes filled with tears. “Buck, please don't go off nowhere!”

“I've got to,” he said.

She threw her arms around his neck, sobbing. “Me an' Poo wanted you to live with us!”

Buck held her close and covered his eyes with his hand.

“Don't cry,” said Jessie, clinging to him and patting his shoulder. “Please don't cry, Buck.”

He stood and wiped his eyes on the sleeve of his jacket. “Thanks for . . . everything. Your job is in good hands. I'll let myself out.”

Buck stalked out of the study and up the hall, closing the front
door behind him. The rector had been oddly frozen in place, unable to move; Jessie stood at the study door, crying, holding her doll.

The clock ticked, the train whistled and clacked, the fire hissed.

He walked over to her with a heavy heart and touched her shoulder.

She looked up at him, stricken. “Buck shouldn't of done that,” she said.

Seven-thirty a.m., and he'd already gone through yesterday's mail, typed two letters, and been to see Louella.

Surely he could take ten minutes . . .

He walked to the end of the corridor and opened the door without knocking, just as he'd always done.

“Oh, rats, I might have known that was you,” said Esther Cunningham, using both hands to hide something on her desk.

“What's the deal? What're you hiding? Aha! A sausage biscuit!”

“It's no such thing, it's a
ham
biscuit!”

“Sausage, ham, what's the difference?”

“I specifically spoke to th' Lord about
sausage,
” she said, her eyes snapping, “so lay off.”

“Esther, Esther.”

He sat down and put his feet up on the Danish modern coffee table, grinning.

She grinned in return, gave him a thumbs-up, then threw back her head and roared with laughter.

Ah, but it was good to hear the mayor laughing again.

As a bachelor, he had wondered every year what to do on Christmas eve. With both a five o'clock and a midnight service, he struggled to figure out when or what to eat, whether to open a few presents after he returned home at nearly one a.m. on Christmas morning, or wait and do the whole thing on Christmas afternoon while he was still exhausted from the night before.

Now it was all put into perspective and, like his bishop who loved being told what to do for a change, he listened eagerly to his wife.

“We're having a sit-down dinner at two o'clock on Christmas Eve, and we'll open one present each before we go to the midnight service. We will open our presents from Dooley on Christmas morning, because he can't wait around 'til us old people get the stiffness out of our joints, and after brunch at precisely one o'clock, we'll open the whole shebang.”

She put her hands on her hips and continued to dish out the battle plan.

“For brunch, of course, we'll invite Harley upstairs. The menu will include roasted chicken and oyster pie, which I'll do while you squeeze the juice and bake the asparagus puffs.”

All she needed was a few military epaulets.

“After that, Dooley will go to Pauline's and spend the night, and our Christmas dinner will be served in front of the fire, and we shall both wear our robes and slippers!”

She took a deep breath and smiled like a schoolgirl. “How's that?”

How was that? It was better than good, it was wonderful, it was fabulous. He gave her a grunting bear hug and made her laugh, which was a sound he courted from his overworked wife these days.

He reached up to the closet shelf for the camera and touched the box of his mother's things—the handkerchiefs, her wedding ring, an evening purse, buttons . . .

He stood there, not seeing the box with his eyes, but in his memory. It was covered with wallpaper from their dining room in Holly Springs a half century, an eon, ago. Cream colored roses with pale green leaves . . .

He would not take it down, but it had somehow released memories of his mother's Christmases, and the scent of chickory coffee and steaming puddings and cookies baking on great sheets; his friends from seminary gathering 'round her table; and the guest room with its swirl of gifts and carefully selected surprises, tied with the signature white satin ribbon.

He stood there, still touching the box, recalling what C.S. Lewis had said. It was something which, long ago, had expressed his own feelings so clearly.

“With my mother's death,” Lewis wrote, “all settled happiness, all that was tranquil and reliable, disappeared from my life. There was to be much fun, many pleasures, many stabs of Joy; but no more of the old security. It was sea and islands now; the great continent had sunk like Atlantis . . . .”

“Mother . . .” he whispered into the darkened warmth of the closet. “I remember . . . .”

He wasn't surprised that he hadn't seen Mack Stroupe again at Lord's Chapel. It appeared that even his hotdog stand was closed—perhaps for the holidays, he thought.

He didn't want to consider whether he'd ever see Edith Mallory again.

“I do this every year!” said Cynthia, looking alarmed.

“Do what?”

“Forget the cream for tomorrow's oyster pie. And of course no one will be open tomorrow.”

It was that lovely lull between the five o'clock and midnight services of Christmas Eve, and he was sitting by the fire in a state of contentment that he hadn't felt in some time. Tonight, after the simplicity of the five o'clock, which was always held without the choir and the lush profusion of garlands and greenery, would come the swelling rush of voices and organ, and the breathtaking spectacle of the nave bedecked, as if by grace, with balsam, fir, and the flickering lights of candles.

He roused himself as from a dream. “I'll run out and find some. I think Hattie Cloer is open 'til eight.”

“I'm so sorry.”

“Don't be. You cook, I fetch. I get a much better deal.” He took her face in his hands and kissed her on the forehead, then went to the kitchen peg for his jacket.

“Man! What's that terrific smell?” He sniffed the air, homing in on the oven.

“Esther's orange marmalade cake! Vanita Bentley gave me a bootleg copy of her recipe. She ran off dozens on her husband's Xerox.”

“Where's your conscience, Kavanagh?”

“Don't worry, this is legal. I called Esther and she gave me permission to use it. Have at it! she said.”

“Oh, well,” he sighed, feeling diabetic and out of the loop.

“You can have the tiniest sliver, dearest. I'm sure your food exchange will allow it.”

If she only knew. “Harley!” he called down the basement stairs. “Want to run to the highway?”