A Light in the Window (62 page)

“Think about it. You’re smart enough to know that’s stupid.”

Sending him off to school could now seem a punishment instead of a privilege. But that’s the way it was and no turning back.

“For Tommy, the agony will last more than ten hours. It’ll be ten weeks, three months, maybe six months ’til that leg heals up. And when he gets off crutches, he could walk with a limp.”

He didn’t mention that the boy could lie for weeks in a coma or that serious complications could result from the head injury.

Maybe what Dooley Barlowe needed wasn’t talk but a good hiding. Frankly, he couldn’t manage giving him one, but perhaps that’s why they were in this predicament.

Dooley didn’t speak again until they turned into the garage. “Yeah,” he said slowly. “It was stupid.”

He sat at his kitchen table with Cynthia, having a bowl of her leek soup and talking about what had happened.

He heard the guest room door open. If Meg Patrick came down his stairs and along his hall and into his kitchen where he was trying to sit peacefully with his neighbor, he would dump her in the street, bathrobe and all, followed by her suitcases that approximated the weight of a pair of 1937 Packard sedans.

His cousin must have read his mind, because he heard the door close firmly.

“Nobody’s perfect,” Cynthia said.

“To roughly paraphrase Paul, why do I do what I don’t want to do and don’t do what I want to do? I find it one of the most compelling questions in Scripture.”

She nodded.

“Why can’t I get it right, Cynthia? Right with you, right with Dooley? Blast it, a man’s life has to count for more than getting it right in the pulpit once in a blue moon.

“Speaking of which, my sermon for tomorrow is as rough as a cob. I’m going to toss it and ask the Holy Spirit to take over—start to finish. After what I’ve seen today, it makes the whole thing seem... insipid.”

He stood up and paced the kitchen. “I’m sick of preaching, anyway. ”

“Timothy! You can’t mean it.”

“Oh, but I do mean it. I’m sick of boundaries and twenty-minute sermons and man-made rigmarole. I meant it when I said I want the Holy Spirit to be in control. I don’t want to go into the pulpit with anything in my hands... ‘in my hands no typewritten pages I bring, simply to Thy cross I cling.’

“I’m tired of trying to hold on to the reins and go in this direction or that direction because that’s where the propers are leading me, or the congregation is pulling me, or the signs of the times are yanking me. Tomorrow, I’m going to talk about rules—and about breaking them—and what it costs when we choose any means at all to satisfy our own shallow and insatiable longings.”

She gazed at him steadily.

“I’m glad you’re here,” he said, feeling suddenly weak and exhausted.

She came and put her arms around him and held him and patted him gently on the back, and he realized something he hadn’t realized before:

Cynthia Coppersmith was his friend.

He wasn’t going to wait any longer. He was going to catch up and stay caught up.

After the second service, he would talk with Tommy’s parents and confess his neglect in warning Dooley, then commit his help throughout the long ordeal ahead.

Next, he would talk with Dooley and lay out the school proposition. Maybe the time wasn’t right, but waiting for the right time had caused this whole tragic episode in the first place.

Finally, he owed an apology to Buck Leeper, plain and simple.

He went into the first service fired with an energy and conviction that lasted through the second, and he delivered a message that made his scalp tingle.

He had prayed for years to find the spiritual gall, the faith, to let go completely of his notes. That prayer had been answered, he knew it. He felt some oppressive weight fly off him.

Tommy’s mother said, “Nobody’s perfect.”

“But if I had come down on Dooley, reinforced the rules ...”

“It might have worked—we can’t be sure. What’s done is done, Father. It’s hard being a parent.”

Truer words were never spoken.

He stood by the bed of the still-unconscious boy and held hands with his parents and prayed. Dooley sat in the waiting room and stared out the window.

“Let him go in for a moment,” he implored the nurse. “They’re best friends.”

When Dooley left Tommy’s room, the rector searched the boy’s face for information. A place the boy had long and fiercely guarded in himself had somehow been broken into. A process that might have taken years had instead taken minutes.

He sat on Dooley’s bed. “There’s something you need to know.”

Dooley looked up from the veterinary book. “What’s ’at?”

“I love you,” he said.

He laid it all out, exactly as it was, and told him why going away to school was important and that he believed in him and in his special skills and abilities and so did Miss Sadie and his teachers.

“It’s going to be a busy summer. You’ll need some tutoring, we’ll make a couple of trips to visit schools—and you’ll want to spend time with Tommy. He’s going to have a tough time adjusting.”

He spoke his heart to the boy and waited for the script he had worked out in his mind to be executed: Dooley would say he wasn’t going to do it, and a battle of wills would ensue.

Dooley stared at the book in his lap.

Perhaps he might do a little more selling, treat it as a real campaign, but no, he had made it plain and simple and he rested his case.

He leaned over and gave the boy a hug. He didn’t flinch or move away.

He went to the house in the woods, finding it at the end of a rough lane, and saw Buck Leeper’s truck sitting in the yard.

Except for trips along the creekbank to see Homeless Hobbes, he seldom ventured off the beaten path. He stood for a moment in the yard, looking into the woods and hearing birdsong.

The smell of sour ashes in a cold fireplace carried through the screened door as he stepped onto the porch and knocked.

Buck came down the hallway carrying a glass in his hand. He didn’t walk to the door but stopped in the middle of the room. He swayed slightly on his feet. “What do you want?”

“I want to talk to you.”

He stood, blocking the light from the other end of the hall, a dark, featureless apparition whose face the rector couldn’t read. He swirled the liquid in his glass and swallowed it down. “It’s open.”

Father Tim opened the door and stepped inside. He still couldn’t see Buck’s face. “I’d like to apologize.”

There was a pause. “Help yourself.”

“You asked me to keep the boy off the job site, and I didn’t speak to him about it. I meant to, but I didn’t. I’m sorry for the turmoil it brought to all concerned. I regret it deeply.”

“ ‘The road to hell is paved with good intentions.’ Isn’t that the saying? You ought to know.”

Buck flicked his cigarette into the fireplace. “Sit down,” he said, moving into the light from the windows.

He might have sat in the chair near the door but instinctively walked to the sofa, going deeper into the private territory of a private man. Buck left the room and came back with a bottle, then took a chair opposite him and poured a glass of vodka. He sat hunched over, his elbows on his knees, holding the bottle. “You came to talk? Talk.”

He hadn’t come to talk; he had come to apologize. “I looked for you at the hospital this afternoon.”

Buck drank from the glass. “I was there this morning.”

“Right.”

There was a long silence. The sour smell of the fireplace ashes permeated the room.

“Drink?” said Buck, tipping the neck of the bottle toward him.

“No, thanks.”

“Put hair on your chest.” When Buck Leeper laughed, it growled up from him like something boiling on a stove. “Why don’t preachers give a crap when it gets down to where the rubber hits the road?”

“What do you mean?”

“You preach eternal life but don’t give a crap about this life.”

“I do care about this life,” he said.

“Not enough to watch out for a couple of stupid kids who’re lookin’ to get killed.” His eyes narrowed. “You should have been all over their butts about it.”

“Have you ever meant to do something right and failed?”

Buck drained the glass and cursed.

“Have you? You talk to me.”

Buck got up and walked to the windows. Keeping his back to the rector, he looked out into the woods. The silence lasted a long time, then he said, “I got a kid killed.”

Through the windows, the rector saw a squirrel leap from one branch to another. He didn’t speak.

“It was my first construction job. I was seventeen. I was crazy about those machines. The power in them, even the colors, excited me. My old man turned me loose with a back hoe. He said if I didn’t do good, he’d kick my butt all the way to the Mississippi.” Buck set his glass on the windowsill and lit a cigarette, cursing his father.