Authors: Jan Karon

A New Song (31 page)

BOOK: A New Song

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Headed for the town grocer with the windshield wipers on high, he mulled over the coming event.

They’d already gone to the beach and taken a blanket, but they hadn’t gone to the beach and taken a blanket and a Coleman stove.

Just down the strand from the old Miller cottage with the red roof, he would set everything up in their favorite spot.

They would watch the sunset and he would grill fresh mahimahi and corn in the shuck.

He would cut a ripe, sweet melon—he didn’t think it was too late in the season to find one—and pour a well-chilled champagne. He noted that he’d have to go across to find a decent label, but while he was there, maybe he could also find something to drink it from, since all they had in the cabinet were what appeared to be top-of-the-line jelly glasses.

For dessert, of course, he’d make her sworn favorite—poached pears—the very thing he’d served Cynthia Coppersmith the first time she came to dinner at the rectory.

All in all, pretty creative thinking for a country parson . . .

As for entertainment, they could search the night sky for Arcturus and Andromeda, maybe Pegasus. He’d bought a book at Ernie’s that told very plainly how to find something other than the Big and Little Dippers, which, he’d been disappointed to learn, weren’t even constellations.

He went over the list again.

Leonard and Marjorie Lamb had offered to babysit, and were scheduled to arrive at Dove Cottage at six-thirty. . . .

What had he forgotten?

He realized he was holding his breath, and exhaled. All bases covered. Consider the thing done!

Had it been four years ago when he’d raced through the sacristy into the nave of Lord’s Chapel, trembling like a leaf in the wind, late for his wedding through no fault of his own, and spied his bride, also late and flushed from running, who appeared like a vision in the aisle?

If ever he’d known the definition of a waking dream, that had been it.

He remembered standing there, terrified that he’d burst into tears with half the congregation, and noted that he’d never seen so many handkerchiefs waving in the breeze. Under the swell of the organ music, there had been a veritable concerto of sniffing and nose-blowing by men and women alike.

And then, there she was, standing with him. He later admitted to his cousin, Walter, that the earth had moved at that moment. He felt it as surely as if the long-inactive fault running from somewhere in the Blue Ridge Mountains to Charleston, South Carolina, had suddenly heaved apart.

He remembered thinking, with a glad and expectant heart, I’m in for it now.

They were out of Jonathan’s favorite milk at the grocer’s, so back he schlepped to Ernie’s, clobbered by rain.

“We had doubles developed,” said Ernie, showing him three-by-five glossies of Junior. “These are th’ two that went off Friday, what do you think?”

In the first snapshot, Junior had a pained expression, as if he were sitting on a carpet tack. The other was of a red-eyed Junior standing like a statue in front of the drink boxes. He didn’t believe Junior had gotten around to ironing his shirt, after all.

“What about these red eyes?” he asked, concerned for the outcome of the whole deal.

“I don’t know what that is. Seems like Junior’s camera wadn’t too swift.”

“Well ...”

“It’s been five or six days an’ he hadn’t heard back.”

This didn’t look promising. . . .

“Tell me about Junior,” he said. “He seems a good fellow. Any family?”

“Junior lost his mama when he was pretty young, and his daddy’s not much account. Me an’ Roger and Roanoke try to see after him, kind of help raise him.”

“Doesn’t seem like he’d need much raising at the age of thirty-six.”

“Well, but th’ thing is,” said Ernie, lowering his voice, “Junior’s not the sharpest knife in the drawer.”

“Who is?”

“We’d like to see him settle down, get married, have a family. He’s a hard worker, got money saved, has a little house, and there’s not a bigger heart on Whitecap. Helps look after his next-door neighbor, she’s blind as a bat. . . .”

“Good fellow!”

Ernie removed his glasses and squinted at Father Tim. “Roanoke told me he barbered you.”

“Even my wife was pleased,” he said, taking a gallon of milk from the cooler.

“We got a bad storm comin’ Thursday.”

“I hope it clears out by Friday evening.”

Ernie opened the register and gave him change. “Big doin’s on Friday?”

“Yep. Fourth anniversary.”

“I got one comin’ up here sometime, I can’t recall when.”

“Let it pass and you’ll be stepping over something worse than a yellow line.”

“You got a point,” said Ernie. “By th’ way, I’m readin’ that Wads-worth book.”

“How do you like it?”

“He sure does a lot of runnin’ up hill an’ down dale. Seems like he takes notice of every little thing, keeps his eyes an’ ears peeled. . . .”

“Just like Louis L’Amour!”

“I wouldn’t have thought of that,” said Ernie, looking pleased.

He hauled the thing from the box.

“A VCR!” His wife was beaming.

He fetched something from a bag. “Not to mention . . .”

“Peter Pan!”
she whooped. “Thanks be to God!”

He fetched something else from the bag.

“
Babe!
I’ve always wanted to see that.”

“Now I’ve made two people happy,” he said, feeling like a hero.

Jonathan flew ahead of them, running at sandpipers, shouting at gulls, squatting to examine a shell.

The sun had looked out an hour ago, and they agreed they should take advantage of it. Barefoot and holding hands on the wide sweep of rain-soaked beach, he knew that what he’d told Marion and Walter was true—they were happy in Whitecap.

He stooped and picked up an old Frisbee and threw it for Barnabas, who loped along the sand in pursuit. Watching the boy and Barnabas tumble for the Frisbee, something came swimming back to him across time. He was nine years old in Pass Christian, Mississippi, and in love with a dog. He’d completely forgotten, and the sudden memory of that summer took his breath away.

“I can feel your wheels turning,” declared his wife.

“Pass Christian,” he said, as if in a dream. “We drove all the way from Holly Springs to the beach at Pass Christian, it’s on the gulf near Gulfport and Biloxi. A wonderful place.”

“Tell me everything!” she implored.

“It was the year my father decided I should invite a friend on our summer trek; he thought I was too studious, too much a loner. I wanted to take Tommy Noles, but . . .”

“But the Great Ogre refused.”

“Oh, yes. He picked the friend I should take.”

“Who was it?”

“Drew Merritt, the son of my father’s colleague at his law office.”

His wife never liked stories about his father. He should probably keep his mouth shut, but he wanted to talk, he wanted to let go of the constraints he felt he was eternally placing on his memories, on his feelings. If he couldn’t talk freely here by the ocean, which lay perfectly open to the sun and the sky . . .

“Drew wasn’t someone I wanted to spend two weeks with. He was selfish, short-tempered, demanding. I remember we took a jigsaw puzzle of the nation’s Capitol . . . he insisted I do the cherry blossoms and he’d work on the Capitol building. Instead of piece by piece, we worked on it section by section. I didn’t want to do cherry blossoms.”

“But you did them,” she said, “because you’re nice.”

“Nice has its advantages,” he said.

She squeezed his hand. “I love you.”

“I love you back.”

“Finally, after we’d been there a few days, Drew found a crowd to hang with, and I started wandering off on my own. It was a safe place, of course, plenty of kids came and went, reporting in to parents during the course of an afternoon. We stayed at an old hotel, I wish I could remember the name. Anyway, one day I went down to the beach and met . . . a dog.”

She smiled, loving even the simplest of his stories.

“It was a red setter, and he didn’t seem to belong to anyone, though he was certainly no maverick. I remember his coat was long and silky, it shone when it blew in the wind. He was like something from heaven, we connected instantly.
Click
—just like that, he was mine and I was his.”

“I wouldn’t let Barnabas hear you talking this way.”

He put his arm around her shoulder, laughing.

“No, Jonathan, don’t touch it!” Cynthia cried. The heavy rain had helped the sea disgorge flotsam of great variety.

“We started meeting in the afternoons, I never saw him in the morning. I took a little red ball with me every day and threw it to him. He always brought it back.” He was able to recall his sense of freedom, and the unutterable joy of having, at last, the dog that had long been forbidden at home.

“I named him . . . Mick,” he said, suddenly uneasy with the confession of a time he’d never mentioned to anyone.

“Mick!” she said. “I love that name!”

“I remember the morning we left to go back to Holly Springs.” More than five decades later, his heart could recall the grief of that morning.

“My father decided we should leave a day early, and I . . . hadn’t said goodbye. I took a napkin full of biscuits down to the old house where we usually met, but of course he wasn’t there, it was too early in the day, so I left the biscuits under the steps.”

“I love that you did that.”

“Ah, Kavanagh, what don’t you love?”

“Husbands who can’t talk about their feelings, sand in the bed, and maps that won’t refold properly.”

“Let’s go fold into a rocker on our porch,” he said.

“Yes, let’s!” She turned and gazed at him, then put her hand to his cheek.

“I’d like to remember you just this way . . . every line of your dear face at this moment.”

To his amazement, tears stood in her eyes, and she put her arms around him and kissed him with an odd tenderness.

Jonathan tugged at Cynthia’s shorts.

“I got to poo-poo!” said the boy, looking urgent.

The tropical depression moved north from the Caribbean, hung a left toward the Outer Banks of North Carolina, migrated across Whitecap, and dumped six inches of rain inland to Smithfield. Not a hurricane, thanks be to God, but with severe high winds. On Friday morning, it seemed to relish pausing directly over Dove Cottage and unleashing itself for a full two hours.

He padded around the house in his robe the entire morning, working on his sermon, looking over the music for Sunday, scribbling in his quote notebook, reading whatever came to hand. As thunder rolled and wind howled, Barnabas and Violet hid themselves at various points under chairs and beds. Miraculously, Jonathan slept through much of it, while his wife worked at the end of the hall on her new book.

Oh, the ineffable peace of a house darkened by a storm, and the sound of rain at its windows. Though quite unknown to his Irish genealogy, he thought he must have a wide streak of Scot in him somewhere.

So what if his plans for the evening were dashed? Didn’t all the world lie before them with, God willing, time to celebrate on the beach even without a special occasion?

He sat in his chair in the study and listened to the rain and wind and the beating of his heart.

Bottom line, wasn’t life itself a special occasion?

When the storm abated around six-thirty, they had their anniversary dinner in the kitchen.

Then the entire troop piled onto their bed, Barnabas and Violet at the foot, and Jonathan next to Cynthia, who was propped like a czarina against down pillows.

“And now,” he announced, “a movie . . .
in a box
!”

He held the video box aloft for all to see.

“Peter Pan!”
exulted Jonathan, clapping his hands.

He gave Cynthia a profound look. “You’ll never know what you missed tonight.”

“It’s OK, darling,” murmured his contented wife. “I love
Peter Pan
!”

They blew through
Peter Pan
and plugged in
Babe
, adrenaline up and pumping.

“I’m crazy about this movie!” crowed his wife. “But
ugh,
I despise that cat.”

“Bad cat!” said Jonathan.

Actually, the cat reminded him of someone. Who was it?

Of course. That cat reminded him of Edith Mallory.

He awoke at two in the morning and listened for the rain. Silence. The storm had passed over, and the room was close and humid.

He went to the window and cranked it open.