A Light in the Window (49 page)

Conversing with this crowd was about as reviving as lugging a rock straight uphill. “Well, then, tell us about your book. How does it ... begin?”

She deftly piled green beans on the back of her fork. “It begins as the horror itself began.”

“Aha.”

“One morning in 1845, an Irish farmer discovered that something was dreadfully amiss. The book opens with what he had to say, and I quote:

“‘It was a warm day when I saw a thick white fog gradually creeping up the sides of the hills. When I entered it, I was pained with the cold. I at once feared some great disaster. The next morning when I traveled about ... I found the whole potato crop everywhere blighted. The leaves were blackened and hanging loosely on their stems, and a disagreeable odor filled the air.”’

“Gross,” said Dooley.

“Moving,” said the rector, knowing how that tragic event had scattered, and nearly destroyed, a nation. Oddly, the longest speech he had heard her make was someone else’s.

“When do you expect the book to be finished?”

“It will be done when it is done.”

“I see. And how long do you think you ... might be with us?” Among the Irish, cousins from across the pond were treated with great favor, but he didn’t know how much more favor he could fork over.

She pushed her hair behind her ears and gazed at him soberly. “As long as you’ll have me, Cousin.”

He went to his desk and numbly opened the lower drawer where he kept her letters and laid the envelope on top. He stared into the drawer for a moment, trying to focus his thoughts.

He could have sworn the pile of letters had been deeper, that there had been many more. But then, everything now seemed less than it had been.

That was precisely how the conversation would proceed. It might as well be scripted on a piece of paper.

He was suddenly faced with persuading two people to do something they had absolutely no intention of doing. Why was a preacher expected to be so all-fired able to accomplish the impossible when that, clearly, was God’s job?

The Lord had never spoken to him in an audible voice, not once. But there were times He had spoken to his heart and in no uncertain terms.

As he labored in prayer on Friday morning, he received a strong but simple message:

This message, which he felt no keen delight to receive, was persistent. Not only did it come when he was on his knees, but again as he washed his hands at the office sink and, later, as he jogged to the hospital.

He knew the consequences of delay when it came to obeying what he’d been asked to do. Oswald Chambers had found this topic of special interest. “It is one thing to choose the disagreeable and another thing to go into the disagreeable by God’s engineering. If God puts you there, He is amply sufficient.

“... There must be no debate,” Chambers had gone on to say. “The moment you obey the light, the Son of God presses through you in that particular....”

If a parson could not reach out to the desperate, then who could—or who would?

On the way to the site of Hope House, he made a decision to speak simply. No games, no hidden agendas, no beating around the bush. And let the chips fall where they may.

Buck Leeper was alone in the trailer. He swiveled around in the creaking desk chair and looked up.

“I’d like to talk,” said the rector.

“What about?”

“I don’t know, to tell the truth. Just talk. Get to know you better.” The superintendent took a long drag off his cigarette and inhaled deeply. “Sit down,” he said.

Leeper swung his feet onto the desktop and crossed his legs. In your face, his muddy boots seemed to say, but the rector sat across the desk from them, unflinching.

“You probably need to know I don’t like preachers.”

“You wouldn’t be the first.”

“This hill is not a missionary field.”

“I’m off-duty.” That was a lie, but he told it, anyway.

“My granddaddy was a preacher,” Buck said, narrowing his eyes.

“So was mine. Baptist.”

“Ditto.”

“Did you know your grandfather?”

“Never knew him. Heard about him all my life. Nothin’ good.” He stubbed his cigarette in the ashtray.

“Your dad’s father?”

Leeper toyed with a silver lighter, and the rector saw where his fingers were missing. “Yeah. He turned my old man into the meanest preacher’s kid in Mississippi.”

“You’re from Mississippi?”

“Born and bred.”

“Same here.”

Leeper barked an expletive. “Small world.”

“What part?”

“Northeast. Booneville.”

“Holly Springs,” said the rector. “Forty miles from Booneville, as the crow flies.”

Another expletive and an odd laugh. “Son of a gun.”

Leeper glanced at his watch.

“Maybe you’ll join us at the rectory for dinner—one of these days.”

The superintendent pulled a cigarette from an open pack in his shirt pocket. He lit it with the lighter and inhaled. “I don’t think so.”

“Drop by the office, then, for a cup of coffee ... anytime.”

Leeper suddenly got to his feet and walked to the door, where he took a jacket and hard hat off the hook. The rector followed him.

“That redheaded kid yours?”

“Dooley?”

“I don’t know his name. Tell him if he comes messin’ around on this job again, I’ll kick his butt. That goes for his sidekick, too.”

“They ...”

“Tell him I mean business. You can get killed out there.”

Leeper opened the door. The machinery vibrated the trailer as if it were a toy. “Got to get to th’ hole,” he said, putting on his hat. “Some people have to work in this town.”

Springtime was on its way, no doubt about it.

Hessie Mayhew’s gardening column made its annual appearance in the
Muse,
under a photograph of the author taken thirty years ago. The first column of the season always disclosed Lady Spring’s current whereabouts.

It seemed she was tarrying on a bed of moss and violets down the mountain, where the temperature was a full ten degrees warmer.

Lest anyone forget what a wild hyacinth looked like, Hessie had done a drawing from memory that J.C. reproduced with startling clarity.