The Book of Joby (53 page)

“Yeah, she’s great.” Joby smiled, gathering up his packages again. “And I’d better get back there with all this, or she’ll think I jumped ship. Thanks again for your help, and, uh, welcome back to Taubolt, I guess.”

“Same to you, Joby,” Solomon said amiably. “Merry Christmas.”

“Hey, yeah! You too,” Joby said, resuming his progress toward the inn. He
looked back a moment later, intending to invite the man over for a visit, but Solomon had vanished, back around the corner, he presumed.

Mrs. Lindsay’s breakfast was magnificent: fresh-squeezed orange juice and champagne; chanterelle omelets with Edam cheese; home-canned peaches; fried potatoes with rosemary; and a pastry wreath dripping in a brown sugar cinnamon glaze with walnuts and cherries baked into the crusty top of every fluffy bite.

Despite their rough night, her guests were surprisingly jovial.

“That was something!” said a grinning young man at the table’s far end. He turned to his pretty wife and joked, “Just think! We nearly missed it, honey!”

His wife smiled ruefully at everyone. “We had reservations at some motel down the coast. But we stopped here for gas, and it was just so charming, we figured, why drive all that way for some other place we’d never seen?” She shook her head. “I can’t believe you put all this food together without any power or water, Mrs. Lindsay! I’d have just huddled in my sleeping bag ’til the National Guard came.”

“We’re used to making do here in the country,” Mrs. Lindsay said modestly.

“You know,” remarked a fashionable-looking woman at the other end of the table, “I’m here by accident as well. Isn’t that strange? Three days ago, I drove up the coast intending nothing but a day at the beach somewhere. When I found this place, I had to buy everything from toiletries to extra clothing here in town.” She smiled at Mrs. Lindsay. “Can’t say I’m sorry though. Been the best three days I’ve had since my husband died, and I’ll certainly have better holiday stories now than any of my friends.”

The older couple seated next to Mrs. Lindsay exchanged a look and laughed. “We were going to spend the holidays visiting friends up in Ferndale,” the man said gleefully, “but they both came down with the flu.”

“It was disappointing,” his wife added, “but they’d made us reservations at a B&B up there, and it seemed a little late to invite ourselves for Christmas with our daughter so we drove up anyway.”

“Took the scenic route,” her husband said, “and just stopped here for lunch.”

“But like they all said, it’s just so charming!” his wife laughed. “So here we are, someplace we never heard of, for the storm of the century.”

“Well, I, for one,” said the young husband who’d begun the conversation, “would be happy to help out with repairs this morning, Mrs. Lindsay.”

“Me too,” said the widowed woman. “I’m pretty good with a rake.”

They all jumped on the bandwagon, and Mrs. Lindsay happily offered a free night’s lodging to everyone on what she called her “chain gang.” After breakfast, Joby marveled to watch these well-heeled vacationers cheerfully attack the ruined yard and house with rakes, saws, and hammers. With so many hands, they’d gotten breakfast cleaned up, all the broken windows covered in plastic, the ruined fence and shed mostly cleared away, and the fallen tree limbs half sawed up by eleven thirty, when Mrs. Lindsay announced that everyone should take a break while she and Joby went to church.

They were nearly late to Mass and had to stand in back with a crowd that overflowed onto the steps outside by the time everyone stood up to sing “Away in a Manger,” as Father Crombie made his slow way toward the altar, nodding cheerfully to people along the aisle.

After Lindwald’s death, attending church had seemed too hypocritical to face. Later, simple despair had displaced painful concepts like hope or trust—in himself
or
God. Now, all at once, here he was. After more than a decade away from church, Joby didn’t remember enough to do much more than follow along until the scripture readings were finished and Father Crombie stood to deliver his sermon.

“I am told,” Father Crombie began, “that Tom and Margie Faulkand found themselves lying in the manger quite literally this morning.” He turned to grin at a stout, balding man and a plump, rosy woman near the front of the church, who blushed and smiled at those around them. A ripple of quiet laughter spread as those who knew the story started passing it to those who didn’t. “Seems the roof of Joe Lima’s barn, a good deal of hay, and a chicken, if I’ve been correctly informed, blew across the road and right through Tom and Margie’s bedroom wall,” Crombie continued.

“Oh dear!” Mrs. Lindsay gasped, craning her neck to inspect the couple more carefully. “Was anyone hurt?” she asked the man next to her, as if expecting he’d know.

“Not a scratch on either one is what I heard,” smiled the man, “though I did hear somethin’ ’bout a chicken dinner at the Faulkands’ tonight, so I can’t vouch for the bird.”

“Happily, however,” Father Crombie said when the laughter had died down, “despite the real losses many are coping with this morning, I’ve not heard of a single person seriously injured or, God forbid, killed last night. Has anyone heard otherwise?”

There was a silence filled with shaking heads and pensive smiles.

“Then I trust it will not seem too out of touch,” he smiled, “to say, Merry Christmas, my friends!”

“Merry Christmas, Father!” the congregation roared back.

“Our Savior must have experienced dismay very like the Faulkands’,” Crombie smiled, “when He woke on that first Christmas to find Himself, not in Heaven where He’d gone to bed, but in the feeding trough of a drafty barn, with a long hard haul ahead of Him. On this Christmas morning, we are blessed with an opportunity to have
compassion
for that little child, as He had
compassion
for us.” He swept the congregation with a gentle smile. “True compassion does not just reach down to help the suffering, but joins them in whatever they endure—
and
in whatever they celebrate. This, my wonderful neighbors, is what
you
have taught
me
in the years since God brought me to this marvelous town. You who do suffer trials this morning know you will not suffer them alone. We will join with you. And what I most wish to say to you all this Christmas morning is simply
thank you,
. . . each of you, for being who and what you are, every day. You are all God’s greatest gifts to me. As you celebrate today, may God bless you all, and, through you, everyone you meet. Amen.”

He returned slowly to his chair beside the altar and sat in quite contemplation before continuing the Mass.

It was, without a doubt, the shortest sermon Joby had ever heard; also the most genuine, and, to Joby’s dismay, the most distressing. The obvious affection between Crombie and his parish spoke straight to the heart of everything Joby had once believed in and aspired to, which left him feeling now as if all his deepest wounds had been torn open, every desire he’d ever put painfully to sleep awakened against its will. The temptation to hope that all those lost dreams might be redeemed at last here in Taubolt was as painful as it seemed suddenly impossible to suppress. Afraid he might be going to cry, Joby held himself very still and shoved down hard on everything he felt, praying only for control. In the still moment of reflective silence that Crombie allowed to linger, Joby’s prayer was answered. The turmoil within him solidified into a hard, aching lump somewhere between his Adam’s apple and his heart; painful, but blessedly contained.

This respite was short-lived, however. Mere moments later, as Father Crombie raised the ceramic Eucharistic chalice, Joby’s attention was drawn by a chance trick of light on its plain exterior. There were sudden rainbows in the glaze; subtle but astonishingly beautiful colors. As Joby stared, something
in the sheen itself returned him entirely to an instant in his boyhood. He could feel the sunlight on his back, see his old storybook open on the ground before him, smell the pages and the scent of cut grass, hear the
clack
of grasshoppers in the field beyond his parents’ fence, the trill of a mockingbird. . . .
My king, I would serve you with my life, only name the—

Joby covered his eyes, and bowed his head, as if in prayer, to hide a sudden surge of inexplicable grief and the tears streaming down his face, indifferent to his efforts to prevent them.
Stop this!
he demanded silently, whether of himself or some ethereal persecutor he wasn’t sure.

He spent the entire Eucharistic prayer hidden behind his hands. When he finally dared look up again, the cup was just a cup once more, but he no longer quite trusted it, or himself. When communion was distributed, the profound reverence on Mrs. Lindsay’s face as she started forward made Joby feel like an unworthy pretender, and he could not follow her. As the communion line dwindled, he caught Father Crombie looking at him with an expression of unnerving sadness.

When the Mass was ended, it was all Joby could manage not to rush from the church as Mrs. Lindsay lingered to chat with virtually every person there. When they started walking home at last, Joby glanced out toward the headlands west of town, and was greeted with yet another puzzling site. At the edge of an isolated grove of gnarled old cypress trees, seven adolescent children stood with hands joined in a ring around one partially blackened trunk leaning away from its fellows, and, as Joby watched, began a careful stepping dance counterclockwise around it. That’s when Joby recognized the two girls he’d startled out of hiding on the headlands only yesterday.

Hadn’t they spoken of some grove?
Sunday . . . And Hawk for seven.
Now, here they were, it seemed. Joby wondered idly which one of them was Hawk.

Mrs. Lindsay’s Christmas dinner was clearly going to be a banquet of legendary dimensions. To everyone’s delight, power had been restored to Taubolt at around three, and her guests had gone upstairs to enjoy long forestalled showers now that water could be pumped again from the inn’s well. Apparently, it was Mrs. Lindsay’s tradition to have a few friends join her guests for Christmas dinner, and the invitation list had expanded after church to include Tom and Clara Connolly, and their daughter Rose, whose house had been so badly damaged across the street.

At five o’clock, just as Joby finished helping Mrs. Lindsay get the quail in
the oven, a man’s voice called from somewhere near the parlor, “Anybody home?”

Mrs. Lindsay straightened with a smile. “You know perfectly well where I am, Jake,” she called back. “And I’ve got plenty of help already, so it’s safe to come in.”

A tall, blond, thirty-something man with remarkably blue eyes walked into Mrs. Lindsay’s kitchen with one large, callused hand wrapped around the necks of two bottles of white wine, and a raffish grin on his face. He seemed instantly familiar to Joby, though he couldn’t think why.