A Light in the Window (50 page)

The old sexton was sitting in a chintz-covered armchair, fixing Betty Craig’s alarm clock. The contents of the clock were scattered over the top of a lamp table.

“You look comfortable,” said his caller, sitting on the side of the bed.

“Dadgum clock’s been stuck on high noon since I moved in here. How are you, Father?”

“Fine as frog hair.”

Russell Jacks laughed and emitted a racking cough. “Lord have mercy,” he said, his eyes watering.

“Might as well tell you straight out, Russell. We’ve found somebody to look after the gardens. He’s not your caliber, not by a long shot. I don’t think there are any true gardeners left out there for hire. But we had to have help, and it’s going to take time for you to knit. When the doctor gives you a clean bill of health, we’ll put you back. How’s that?”

“Fair enough. I thought I could hold on t’ my job, but I cain’t. I’m tryin’ to help Miss Betty all I can. How’s our boy? Is he troublin’ you?”

“No, sir. Not a bit.” His heart sank. Here goes, he thought. “Russell, I was wondering if you’d agree to ... if you’d let us send him off to a fine school next fall, where’d he learn more, think harder ...”

“Send ’im off?”

“Maybe to Virginia. Close by. You and I could drive up once in a while to see him, and he’d come home for holidays.”

Russell studied two small clock springs in the palm of his hand, silent. Finally, he said, “What do you want t’ do, Father?”

“I don’t want him to go. I’d like to keep him right here in Mitford, but we have an opportunity. Someone is offering to pay his tuition, give him a once-in-a-lifetime chance.” He stared at the rug, feeling a chill in the room. “I think we should let him go.”

“I want t’ do what you want t’ do,” said Russell.

“I’ll bring the papers when the time comes.”

His heart felt heavy as a brick when he left Betty Craig’s house, and he hadn’t even gotten to the hard part yet.

He got no providential word on what to do about Edith Mallory. And he had exhausted every foolish possibility he could think of.

What was the worst scenario?

He could go and talk to her—plead for the continuity, the history, the tradition of the Grill and the place it occupied in the heart of the village. Then he thought of her hand on his leg or being trapped in that blasted car at a speed that did not warrant leaping to safety.

If Percy Mosely and Mule Skinner and J.C. Hogan and Ron Malcolm knew what theyd asked of him, they would never have asked it. After all, they were friends. A man wouldn’t ask this of his worst enemy.

Of course, all they expected him to do was give it a shot, just one. Nobody said he should keep going back for punishment.

They tried to puff him up by saying how Edith would listen to anything he said, do anything he wanted. To hear them talk, he might have been the pope. But he saw through it; they didn’t fool him. While they had aimed straight for his ego, he’d seen it coming-and ducked.

On Sunday, Ron dragged him to the country club after church, while Dooley begged to go home and make a sandwich and ride bikes with Tommy.

He saw Buck Leeper at a table in the corner, eating with a man in a business suit.

“The honcho,” said Ron. “Came to check on the job. They’re here as my guests. I figured you wouldn’t care to join them.”

“I went up to see Mr. Leeper the other day.”

“No kidding.”

“We were born forty miles apart—in Mississippi.”

“I’ll be darned. Amazing. What did he think of that?”

The rector repeated what the superintendent had said, expletive and all. “End of quote.”

Ron laughed heartily. In fact, he hadn’t gouged such a good laugh out of anybody since the opening remarks of a recent sermon on spiritual apathy.

“We’ll drop by the table on the way out. You’ll like Emil Kettner. Devout. Solid. He’s protective of Buck, views him as a real cornerstone of the company.”

“What does he think about his drinking ... about the way he pushes himself?”

“He knows it. He keeps after him-makes it mandatory for him to get a physical every six months.”

“The goose that laid the golden egg ...”

“In a way. But it’s more than that. I think Emil loves the son of a gun.”

Andrew Gregory stopped to say hello, appearing, as far as the rector could determine, more charming than the last time he’d seen him. His mother’s warm Italian blood had clearly fought it out with his father’s English reserve and won.

“I have a book you might enjoy looking over. Very early. Splendid engravings, gorgeous binding. Drop by for coffee one morning. Ron, I hope you’ll do the same. For you, a book on bridges. German. Eighteenth-century.”

“Consider it done,” said the rector.

“I’ll look forward to it,” said the retired building contractor. “Who knows what you might learn from an old book?”

“Our priest and our building-committee chairman!” exclaimed Edith Mallory. He thought she swooped down at their table like a crow into a cornfield.

“Hello, hello!” she said.

Both men stood. “Edith ...”

“Timothy, I thought your sermon was excellent. Believe me, I needed to hear all you had to say about fear. I was absolutely eaten up with it for days when I was waiting for the tests to come back. I loved what you said about-what did you call it, the prayer of re ... re ...”

“Relinquishment.”

“Yes! Just turn it all over. Give it to God.”

“How are you feeling!”

“Great! Never better. Can’t you tell?” She grasped his hand, and he saw that her blouse was cut considerably lower than he’d noticed at the church door an hour ago.

Seeing Ron Malcolm gaping like a boy, she fingered a diamond pendant at her neck. “A little momentum Pat gave me,” she crooned.

“Aha ...”

“I can tell you’re having boy talk, so I’ll get back to my veal chop. I’ll call you sometime tomorrow, Timothy—just a weensy thing I’d like to get settled before I go to Spain in May.
Hasta vista!”

Ron shook his head as she walked away. “There for a minute, I thought she was going to have
you
for lunch-forget the veal.”

He felt queasy. “That crowd at the Grill is sticking me between a rock and a hard place.”

“Don’t I know it?” his friend said, grinning.

Buck Leeper had disappeared toward the men’s room as they got up to leave. Ron introduced the rector to Emil Kettner and was snared by the club treasurer for a five-minute meeting.

Kettner was a big man, cordial, with steel-gray hair, steel-rimmed glasses, and penetrating blue eyes.

The two men sat over a cup of coffee.

“Well, Father, I hope Buck isn’t more than you bargained for.”

“He is, actually.”

They laughed.

“I like your candor. Of course he is. I don’t know how we get away with sending him to certain jobs. But then, we couldn’t get away with not sending him. This is a big project, Hope House.”

“Agreed.”

“I’m here to look it over, check it out. It’s a courtesy to your building committee. The job is humming like a top.” He paused. “Buck has it in for clergy, you may have noticed.”

“I think I noticed, yes.”

“His grandfather was a preacher who was brutal to his son. It passed right on down the line. The sins of the fathers are visited upon the children ...”

“... unto the third and fourth generation,” said the rector, completing the scripture from the Book of Numbers.

“Buck’s work is the one place he doesn’t fail or mess up. There’s not a better man in the business.”

“I believe you.”

“I make no excuses for him. But something happened to him a long time ago, while he was still in Mississippi. Nobody back here ever got the gist of it, exactly. Some loss, something tragic. He felt responsible. That’s all I know.”

“Thanks for your candor.”

“Thanks for your understanding. I’m going to walk over the job again, then bust out of here to Memphis.” He took a business card from his jacket pocket. “I’m at your disposal if you need me.”

The superintendent came back to the table, grabbed his jacket off the back of the chair, and nodded curtly to Father Tim.

“Let’s hump it,” he said to Emil Kettner.

“I’ve got it,” J.C. announced on Monday morning. “I was up ’til two a.m. trying to knock this thing in the head. This is it. This’ll work.”

Mule caught Percy’s attention. “Can you step here a minute, buddyroe? J.C. says he’s got it knocked.”

Percy came over from the grill. “Make it snappy. I got enough bacon goin’ to feed a camp meetin’.”

J.C. took out a handkerchief and wiped his face. “Didn’t ol’ Pat Mallory come draggin’ in here every morning of his life after he retired? Didn’t he think he’d died and gone to heaven every time he ate Percy’s sausage with Velma’s biscuits? Didn’t he hole up in that first booth and read the paper ’til it fell apart? I was pacin’ the floor last night when
boom
—it hit me.”

J.C. paused and looked at his listeners. “We change the name to
Pat’s
Grill. Anybody’s widow would go for that one.” He sat back as if he’d divested himself of the brightest idea since sliced bread. “What do you think?”

“Over my dead body,” said Percy. He threw his hand towel over his shoulder and stalked back to the bacon.

“Oh, well,” said Mule.

“Dadgummit,” snorted the editor.

“Good try,” said the rector. For a few blissful moments, their eyes had been on J.C. Hogan. Now, every head once again swiveled in his direction.

They waited for the crowd to thin out, so Percy could have a cup of coffee with the rear booth. “Kind of like sittin’ up with the dead,” said Mule.

“Do you think you’ll get a rent hike for upstairs?” Father Tim asked J.C.

“I got the letter yesterday. No rent hike, but I can’t run my presses ‘til after seven o’clock at night. That burned me. I thought this was th’ land of the
free
press.”