Out to Canaan (14 page)

Tears suddenly filled Pauline's eyes, but she managed to smile. “OK,” she said, turning to look at her son. “I can do it.”

“Right!” said Dooley. He charged through the door and raced down the steps and was away on his red bicycle, but not before the rector saw the flush of unguarded hope on his face.

“I'll be back,” said Father Tim. “Wear that blue skirt and white blouse, why don't you? I thought you looked very . . .”—he wasn't terribly good at this; he searched for a word—“nice . . . in that.”

She gazed at him for a long moment, almost smiling, and disappeared down the hall.

An attractive woman, he thought, tall and slender and surprisingly
poised, somehow. Her old life was written on her face, as all our lives are written, but something shone through that and transformed it.

In his opinion, Hope House might have done a notch better on their personnel director, Lida Willis.

“How long have you been sober?” asked the stern-looking woman, eyeing Pauline.

“A year and a half.”

“What happened to turn you around?”

“I prayed a prayer,” said Pauline, looking fully into the director's cool gaze.

“You prayed a prayer?”

Though he sat well across the room, feigning interest in a magazine, Father Tim felt the tension of this encounter. God was calling Pauline Barlowe to come up higher.

“Yes, ma'am.”

“Are you in AA?”

“No, ma'am.”

“Why not?”

“I don't know. I . . . feel like God has healed me of drinkin'. I don't crave it no more.”

“Shoney's fired you for drinking on the job?”

“Yes. But they said that . . . when I was sober, I was the best they ever had.”

“Miss Barlowe, what makes you think you might be right for this job?”

“I understand being around food, I get along real well with people, and I'm not afraid of hard work.”

The director sat back in her chair and looked at Pauline, but said nothing.

“I need this job and would be really thankful to get it. I know if you call Sam Ward at Sam and Peg's Ham House in Holding, he'll tell you I do good work, I never missed a day at th' Ham House, my station was fourteen tables.”

“Were you drinking when you worked there?”

Pauline looked down for a moment, then looked straight at Lida Willis. “Not as bad as . . . later.”

“Has your personal injury handicapped you in any way?”

“Sometimes I don't hear as good out of my left ear, but that's all. My arm works wonderful, it's a miracle.”

“I appreciate your honesty, Miss Barlowe.” She stood up. “Please don't call us. We'll be in touch.”

Pauline stood, also. “Yes, ma'am.”

Dear God, he wanted this job for Pauline. No, wrong. He wanted this job for Dooley.

He saw Scott Murphy in the hall. “If there's anything you can do,” he said under his breath as Pauline drank at the water fountain. “Your dining room manager's job . . .” He never begged anyone for anything, but this was different and he didn't care.

Scott looked at him, knowing.

“She can do it,” he told the chaplain.

He was looking something up in his study when he heard a noise in the garage. It sounded like his car engine revving.

Surely Harley wasn't already working on . . .

He went through the kitchen, carrying J. W. Stevenson's rare volume on his ministry in the Scottish highlands.

Dooley was sitting in the Buick, gunning the motor. Barnabas sat on the passenger side, looking straight ahead.

“What's going on?” Father Tim asked through the open car window.

“Nothin'.”

“Nothing, is it? Looks like you're gunning that motor pretty good.”

“I'm checking it out for Harley.”

“Really?”

“He didn't ask me to, but I thought it would help him to know how it sounds.”

“Right. Well, you're out of there, buddy. Come on.”

Dooley gave him an aloof stare. “Jack's dad lets him—”

“Look. What Jack's dad does is beside the point.” Was it, really?
He didn't have a clue. Why would people let fourteen-year-old kids drive a car, two years before they could get a license? Or was that the going thing and he was a stick-in-the mud? “Maybe one day we can drive out to Farmer . . . .”

Dooley turned off the ignition: “Cool,” he said. “Your engine's got a knock in it.”

At six-thirty, Barnabas was finishing up last week's meat loaf, Violet was sneering down from the refrigerator, Cynthia was running a garlic clove around the salad bowl, Dooley was taking one of his endless showers, and Lace was stuffing a snack down a reluctant Harley Welch.

Father Tim still couldn't get over the fact that only three or four years ago, the rectory had been quiet as a tomb. No dog, no boy, no wife in an apron, no red-haired babies, and hardly ever a soul in the guest room, with the agonizing exception, of course, of his phony Irish cousin and an occasional overnight visit by Stuart Cullen, his seminary friend and current bishop.

“Can I talk t' you som'ers?” Lace wanted to know.

Harley was sitting on the side of the bed, fully dressed, but looking weak. He scraped the last bite from a cup of peach yogurt and wiped his mouth with his sleeve.

“Rev'rend, Lace has got a notion I cain't argue 'er out of. Don't pay no attention to 'er if she talks foolish.”

“I don't believe I've ever heard Lace talk foolish,” he said. “You look a little peaked today, Harley. How're you feeling?”

“Wore out. We was up an' down an' aroun' ever' whichaway, th' doc said I needed exercise. I been eatin' like a boar hog an' layin' up in this bed 'til I was runnin' t' fat.”

“We could go down t' y'r basement,” said Lace, tugging at her hat brim.

“My basement?”

“I hate like th' dickens I couldn't talk 'er out of this,” said Harley. “She's pigheaded as a mule, always has been since I knowed 'er as a baby.”

“What's the deal?” he asked as they trooped down the basement stairs.

“You'll see,” she said.

The musty smell of earth came to him, and he remembered the cave he and Cynthia had been lost in only last year. They had wandered in circles for fourteen agonizing hours, until the local police, led by Barnabas, brought them out.

He shuddered and flipped the switch that lit the dark hallway.

There was the bathroom that hadn't been used since he moved here fifteen years ago, and the two bedrooms and the little kitchen—which had served, during the tenures of various rectors, as a mother-in-law apartment, a facility for runaways and later for elderly widows, a home office, an adult Sunday School, a church nursery, and storage space for the detritus of nearly a century of clergy families.

Lace folded her arms across her chest. “This is what I think.”

“Shoot.”

“When me'n Harley was ramblin' around today outside, we seen y'r basement door. F'r somethin' t' do, I tried t' git th' door open and had t' nearly bust it in.”

“Really?”

“But it ain't broke, it was just stuck.”

“Good!”

“So we seen how this is a place t' live, with a toilet an' kitchen an' all. An' I got to thinkin' how if Harley goes back to th' Creek, how he ain't goin' t' take care of hisself, an' besides, somethin' bad could happen to 'im.”

“Aha.”

“So I thought if you was to like th' idea, Harley could live down here and go t' work f'r you an' Cynthia.”

He pulled at his chin.

“Harley can work, you ain't never seen 'im work, you just seen 'im laid up sick. Harley can rake, he can saw, he can hammer, he can paint.”

“I'll be darned.”

“An' he wouldn't charge you a cent to keep you an' Cynthia's cars worked on.”

She looked at him steadily under the dim glow of the bulb.

“Well, I don't know. I'd have to think about it, talk to Cynthia about it.”

“He wouldn't be no trouble. They wouldn't be no cookin' or nothin' to do for 'im, he could take care of hisself. He could paint this place for you, fix it up, I'd help 'im.”

She paused, then said: “You ought t' do it, it'd be good for ever'body.”

Lace Turner had made her case, and rested it.

“Can he draw cats?” asked Cynthia. “He could do my next book.”

Uh-oh. “Your next book?”

“I've been meaning to tell you, dearest. I'm starting a new book. You know how I said I'd never do another Violet book?”

“You definitely said that. Several times.”

“I lied.”

“Aha.”

“You won't believe the advance they'll give me to do another Violet book.”

It was true. When she told him, he didn't believe it. “Come on. That's four times what they gave you for the bluebird book.”