Come Rain or Come Shine (18 page)

The first order of business was to clean up the broken glass and china. Cynthia was to get on the phone to Marge and Olivia and the Flower Girls and ask them to bring whatever plates and glasses could be spared. As Harley was on the road to Charlotte to fetch Henry, there was no one to run to Mitford and divest the Kavanagh cupboards of china and glassware.

Mink Hershell arrived with his chainsaw and a newer-model tractor, using the rear entrance in order to avoid tracks in front of the barn. They heaved the old maple off the shed roof and dropped it on the ground to be sawed into firewood and seasoned under cover. It would warm thrice, similar to Thoreau's observation, those who brought it down, cut it into logs, and took pleasure from the fire.

In the morning light, the astonishing shallowness of its
root system was exposed for the first time to human view. Indeed, the root ball, so easily plucked up by wind, was a depository of artifacts.

Dooley hefted Jack Tyler onto his shoulders so he could see the Cheerwine bottle cap lodged in the dirt near a taproot.

Over here was a hand-wrought nail most likely used for shoeing a horse.

And there, a shard of blue and white pottery—all of it proclaiming those gone before us, the communion of saints.

Jack Tyler wanted the shard and was allowed to dig it out with his own hands. He would wash it and keep it, he said, and be careful not to cut himself on it.

A thorough exam of the shed structure discovered it stable enough for merrymaking. And though the tree removal had been a muddy piece of business, Willie put a shine on things. The rain had stopped around three-thirty, he said, and the forecast for today was seventy-two degrees with sunny skies. Meaning that by afternoon, the moisture would be wicked away with the same haste it had come, leaving them as dry as Ezekiel's bones.

High five.

A storm in the middle of the night. Beth and I slept through it and so did Jack Tyler. Limbs all stacked in one spot in the
yard and the tree taken off the shed roof. Thank you, God, for everything!

The wedding program we printed two weeks ago at the clinic does not have Jack Tyler's name in it. He is willing to be the ring bearer but only under certain conditions! He cried this morning but is a truly brave boy~ so thoughtful and restrained. D says he will give JT a chance to ‘fly apart' tomorrow in case he needs to. Just added JT's name and Amanda will run off the copies. Bumps in the road! Glad we did not set the wedding time for morning as first planned ages ago.

Note: We decided to add five words to the vows, the words Dooley's granpa used to say to him. And the processional hymn was Miss Sadie's favorite. We love remembering them.

Our family motto, decided today:

A cord of three strands is not quickly broken. Ecclesiastes 4:12

Henry Winchester had never been to North Carolina. He had spent his adult life traveling the rails from New Orleans to Chicago and back again.

There had been no other world, nor had he ever wanted any other than the rocking and creaking and gliding of the train. It was a womb, a cradle, all that and more, and the
years spent working his way along the corporate ladder had been infinitely pleasing and endlessly absorbing. He had managed to love all of it, perhaps especially those long-ago last days of the sleeping-car porters. During the few months he was a proud member of the brotherhood, he had never minded being called George a time or two; he was proud of a designation born out of ignorance but resonant with the imperial riches of men who had stood up and been counted and changed things forever.

On the train from Birmingham to Charlotte, he had traveled a pretty flat bed, and now this magnificent countryside with the world's oldest mountains—hard to believe as that may seem—right outside the window of this truck. Compared with the upstart juveniles of, say, the Alps or Everest, the Blue Ridge mountains were worn to a nub. In these elders was some divine wisdom he might have picked out like a walnut from its shell if he had more time.

But here was this good driver with what's called ‘a lead foot,' this slightly built man with as strange a speech as any in Mississippi, albeit a far more rapid kind of speaking which his adoptive school-principal father would have enjoyed immensely. ‘It's what they call hillbilly talk,' Harley Welch said in good humor.

They were riding on something called the Parkway, a world that, but for Timothy, he would never have seen. He was astonished that such a land existed, though he knew in his head that it did; he'd seen it in the pages of
National
Geographic
, his favorite reading material. This landscape spoke to him in a private and oddly familiar way—it was fearsome and consoling at the same time, like life itself.

Joy springs all radiant in my breast
, he thought, limning a line of Dunbar. '
Tis wealth enough of joy for me / in summer time to simply be
.

With his mother gaining on ninety-seven years and his own vigor unpredictable, he wasn't likely to come this way again.

But he was glad he came this time, oh yes, and thank God and Brother Timothy for the good health to do it.

He managed a thirty-minute nap and rummaged through the contents of his sock drawer, now in a grocery bag to be loaded into Cynthia's car. He needed a handkerchief and here it was, clean but unironed—this was not a household for ironing handkerchiefs.

It had been six or seven years since that long patch in Memphis by Henry's hospital bed. The doctors had removed stem cells from his bloodstream and conducted them into Henry's. The chances of a match between half brothers had been less than five percent. Yet he and Henry, his junior by a decade, had won the lottery, a triumph that dosed them and the medical staff with gratitude and astonishment.

He looked out the window of the bedroom and saw the
truck pulling in. Harley had judged the drive time almost to the minute.

His heart hammered as he raced downstairs. ‘It's Henry!' he called to whoever was listening as he blew past the kitchen and out to the glider porch.

Henry was stepping down from the truck, looking the tall, refined gentleman that he assuredly was, and more like their father than he remembered.

My God. Henry. Here!

The tears came freely for both as he embraced the man whose heart pumped Kavanagh blood to the full extent of his own. There was the backslapping, the shy embarrassment of open feeling, and they stood away then and pulled out their handkerchiefs at precisely the same moment.

They looked with wonder at their similar white squares, one monogrammed with
W
, one with
K
, but nothing fancy.

‘Value pack,' he told Henry, and they wiped their eyes and laughed. A good, deep, relieving laugh.

There was Lace's dad wheeling into the driveway in his ancient Volvo, windows down as usual.

Dooley threw up his hand as he walked out to the car. ‘Hey, Doc!'

They did a high five through the open window.

His soon-to-be father-in-law grinned. ‘Hey, Doc yourself.'

‘DPAW,' whispered the Clergy Spouse.

This was code for Don't Pray Around the World, and short for Do Not Let This Hot Breakfast Get Cold.

Whenever he was headed into a big occasion with full vestments—and bless her heart, she couldn't help it—his wife suddenly became higher and mightier than her usual self, dispensing directives of every stripe. But how could he not pray around the world, as it were? How could he not? Look at this bountiful table, at the people God had joined together out of the seeming blue. Look at the weather, the minor miracle of
that
.

He was somewhat breathless as he held the chair for Lace and for once was nearly speechless. He had not prepped for this giving of thanks and praise and felt oddly small, as if, in accordance with Absalom Greer's old saying, he could crawl under a snake's belly wearing a top hat.

He had prayed in cathedrals and at the bedsides of two or three bishops, but never with more to give thanks for than this day, in this generous place where they were celebrating a marriage, a child, a new home, family ties, a new business, the completion of academic studies, and of course all those further, though often unseen, blessings bestowed by Almighty God made known through Jesus Christ.

He sat and spread his napkin across his lap and looked down the kitchen table.

At the far end, Lace to Dooley's left, Jack Tyler on the right—a family formed overnight.

And there was Sammy looking confident and sort of streamlined, you might say, what with his cable TV pool-shooting competitions, and Harley and Willie and Marge and Hal and Rebecca Jane and his amusing and upbeat Clergy Spouse and Jessie, Dooley's teenage baby sister, next to her brother Pooh with the familial crop of red hair, and Beth, Lace's college friend and financial guru, and her mother Mary Ellen, an attractive fiftysomething widow, and then Hoppy Harper, his former physician and parishioner who could have been a stand-in for Walter Pidgeon, next to the lovely Olivia Harper, and at his right, Henry. Olivia and Henry, each delivered from certain death—one with a new heart, the other with new stem cells.

And now everyone holding hands and forming the small but mighty link that was its own bread.

‘Almighty God.' He cleared his throat, concerned that he may choke up. Then again, how could he not?