Out to Canaan (96 page)

Actually, it was more like he'd gone a few rounds with Mike Tyson.

Standing helplessly by the coffeepot, he'd fallen prey to Puny's plea that he “watch” the twins while she did the floors upstairs. Cynthia and Jessie had gone next door, out of the fray, and here he was, drinking strong coffee in the study behind closed doors, as Sassy bolted back and forth from the bookcase to the desk, laughing hysterically, and Sissy lurched around the sofa with a string of quacking ducks, occasionally falling over and bawling. Barnabas crawled beneath the leather wing chair, trying desperately to hide.

“Ba!” said Sissy, abandoning the ducks and taking a fancy to him. “Ba!”

“Ba, yourself!” he said.

With the vacuum cleaner roaring above his head on bare hardwood, and Sissy banging his left knee with a rattle, he read Oswald Chambers.

“All your circumstances are in the hand of God,” Chambers wrote, “so never think it strange concerning the circumstances you're in.”

The fact that this piece of wisdom was the absolute gospel truth did not stop him from laughing out loud.

Pauline and Jessie were sitting at the kitchen table as he cooked dinner.

They heard Dooley coming down the hall.

“It's Dooley,” said Pauline, gently pushing Jessie toward her brother as he walked into the kitchen.

Dooley was suddenly pale under his summer tan.

“Jess?”

It had been three years, the rector thought, and for a five-year-old, three years is a long time.

“Jess?” Dooley said again, sinking to his knees on the kitchen floor.

Jessie looked at him soberly. Then, standing only a couple of feet away, she slowly lifted her hand and waved at her brother.

“Hey, Jess.”

“Hey,” she murmured, beginning to smile.

It came to him during the night.

At seven o'clock on Sunday morning he called Hope House,
knowing she would be sitting by the window, dressed for church and reading her Bible.

“Will you do it?” he asked

“Law, mercy . . .” she said, pondering.

“For Miss Sadie? For all of us?”

Louella took a deep breath. “I'll do it for Jesus!” she said.

Harley Welch was dressed in a dark blue jacket and pants, a dress shirt that Cynthia had plucked out of Bane contributions and washed and ironed, and a tie of his own. It was, in fact, his only tie, worn to his wife's funeral thirteen years ago, and never worn since.

“You look terrific!” exclaimed Cynthia.

“Yeah!” agreed Dooley.

“Here!” said the rector.

Harley took the box and opened what had been hastily purchased at a truck stop in South Carolina.

“Th' law, if it ain't a Mickey watch! I've always wanted a Mickey watch! Rev'rend, if you ain't th' beat!”

There went Harley's grin . . . .

Driving his crew to Lord's Chapel, he thought how it was Harley who was the beat. Harley Welch all rigged up for church and wearing a Mickey Mouse watch was still another amazing grace from an endlessly flowing fountain.

He stood in the pulpit and spoke the simple but profound words with which he always opened the sermon.

“In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, amen.”

Then, he walked over and sat in the chair next to the chalice bearer, leaving the congregation wondering. This morning, someone else would preach the top part of the sermon—an English clergyman, long dead, and one of his own parishioners, very much alive.

In the middle of the nave, on the gospel side, Louella Baxter Marshall rose from her pew and, uttering a silent prayer of supplication,
raised the palms of her hands heavenward and began to sing, alone and unaccompanied.

Amazing grace! how sweet the sound
that saved a wretch like me!
I once was lost but now am found
was blind, but now I see.

The power of her bronze voice lifted the hymn of the Reverend John Newton, a converted slave trader, to the rafters.

'Twas grace that taught my heart to fear,
and grace my fears relieved;
how precious did that grace appear
the hour I first believed!

The Lord has promised good to me,
his word my hope secures;
he will my shield and portion be
as long as life endures.

The words filled and somehow enlarged the nave, like yeast rising in a warm place. In more than one pew, hearts swelled with a message they had long known, but had somehow forgotten.

For those who had never known it at all, there was a yearning to know it, an urgent, beating desire to claim a shield and portion for their own lives, to be delivered out of loss into gain.

The rector's eyes roamed his congregation. This is for you, Dooley. And for you, Poo and Jessie, and for you, Pauline, whom the hound of heaven pursued and won. This is for you, Harley, and you, Lace Turner, and even for you, Cynthia, who was given to me so late, yet right on time . . . .

Through many dangers, toils, and snares,
I have already come;
'tis grace that brought me safe thus far,
and grace will lead me home . . . .

Today was the day. He was ready.

Ron Malcolm, who had priced Fernbank at three hundred and fifty thousand, suggested they accept an offer of no less than two ninety-five. Fernbank was not only an architecturally valuable structure, even with its flaws, but the acreage was sizable, chiefly flat, and eminently suited for development. At two hundred and ninety-five thousand, give or take a few dollars, it would be a smart buy as well as a smart sell.

The rector looked toward Fernbank as he walked to the Grill. He couldn't see the house, but he could see the upper portion of the fern-massed bank, and the great grove of trees.

A spa?

As hard as he tried, he couldn't even begin to imagine it.

“Softball?” said Percy. “Are you kiddin' me?”

“I am not kidding you. August tenth, be there or be square.”

“Me'n Velma will do hotdogs, but I ain't runnin' around to any bases, I got enough bases to cover in th' food business.”

“Fine. You're in. Expect twenty-five from Hope House, twenty or so players . . . and who knows how many in the bleachers?”

Percy scribbled on the back of an order pad. “That's a hundred and fifty beef dogs, max, plus all th' trimmin's, includin' Velma's chili—”

“Wrong!” said Velma. “I'm not standin' over a hot stove stirrin' chili another day of my life! I've decided to go with canned from here out.”

“Canned chili?” Percy was unbelieving.

“And how long has it been since you peeled spuds for french fries? Years, that's how long. They come in here frozen as a rock, like they do everywhere else that people don't want to kill theirselves workin'.”

“Yeah, but frozen fries is one thing, canned chili is another.”

“To you, maybe. But not to me.”

Velma stalked away. Percy sighed deeply.

The rector didn't say anything, but he knew darn well their conversation wasn't about chili.

It was about a cruise.

He turned into Happy Endings to see if the rare book search had yielded the John Buchan volume.

Hope Winchester shook her head. “Totally chimerical thus far.”

“So be it,” he said. “Oh. Know anybody who plays softball?”