A New Song (11 page)

“Yes, sir. I will.”

“We love you.”

“I love you back.” Dooley said it fair and square, looking them in the eye. Then he turned and ran to his red bicycle, leaped on it, and pedaled toward Main Street. Before he reached the corner, he stopped, looked back, and waved. “’Bye, Cynthia, ’bye, Dad!”

They waved as Dooley disappeared around the rhododendron bush.

Father Tim jingled the keys in his hand. “Harley, reckon you can sell the Buick for me?”

Harley looked skeptical, scratched his head, and gazed at the sidewalk.

“Would you . . . like to drive it while I’m gone?”

“Rev’rend, I ’preciate th’ offer, but I’ll stick to m’ truck.”

“Aha.” Clearly, he had a vehicle he couldn’t even give away, much less sell.

“Well, Harley . . .” He put his arm around the shoulders of the small, frail man who was now holding down the fort.

“Rev’rend, Cynthia . . . th’ Lord go with you.” Harley’s chin trembled, and he wiped his eyes with his sleeve.

“’Bye, Harley,” said Cynthia. “We love you.”

Father Tim opened the passenger door and put the seat forward. “Come on, fellow, get in.”

Barnabas leaped onto the leather seat, sniffed Violet’s cage, and lay down, looking doleful.

“Don’t even think about crying,” he told his wife as they climbed in the car.

“The wind in our hair . . . ,” she said, laughing through the tears.

He started the engine. “The cry of gulls wheeling above us . . .”

“The smell of salt air!”

He turned around in a driveway at the end of Wisteria Lane. Man alive, he liked the way this thing handled, and the seat . . . the seat felt like an easy chair.

They waved to Harley, who was rooted to the spot and waving back.

After hooking a right on Main Street, he drove slowly, as if they were a parade car. J. C. Hogan was just trotting into the Grill.

Father Tim hammered down on the horn and J.C. looked up, dumbstruck, as they waved.

Then he stepped on the gas and whipped around the monument, consciously avoiding a glance in the rearview mirror.

CHAPTER FOUR

He was loving this.

“You’re loving this!”crowed his wife.

He couldn’t remember ever having such a sense of perfect freedom; he felt light as air, quick as mercury, transparent as glass.

And hot as blazes.

He looked into the rearview mirror. Barnabas, currently sitting up with his head riveted into the scorching wind, was attracting the attention of all westbound traffic.

“You must stop and get a hat!” his wife declared over the roar of an eighteen-wheeler. “Your head is turning pink!”

“Lunch and a hat, coming up,” he said, reluctant to delay their journey, even if it was into the unknown.

 

They were barreling toward Williamston, through open tobacco country.

“Flat,” said Cynthia, peering at the landscape.

“Hard to have an ocean where it isn’t flat.”

“Hot,”
she said, reduced to telegraphic speech.

“Don’t say we weren’t warned. Want to put the top up?”

“Not yet, I’m trying to get the look of an island native.” His wife was wearing shorts and a tank top, sunglasses and a Mitford Reds ball cap. All exposed areas were slathered with oil, and she was frying.

“I think we need to get Barnabas under cover before long. We’ll put it up at Williamston.”

Whoosh.
A tractor-trailer nearly sucked them out of the car. He reached up and clamped his new hat to his head.

“Did Miss Pringle say why she left Boston to live in Mitford?”

“No. Didn’t say.”

“And you didn’t ask?”

“Never thought to.”

“Why on earth would she pick Mitford? And for only six months! Can you imagine hauling a piano from Boston for only six months? Does she have friends or relatives in Mitford?”

“I don’t think so, but I’m not sure.”

“Darling, how can you ever
know
things about people if you don’t ask?”

As a priest, he usually managed to find out more than he wanted to know, though hardly ever through asking.

She sat thinking, with Violet asleep at her feet on the floorboard.

“Remember that chicken salad we had for lunch?” she inquired.

“Only vaguely.”

“It’s becoming a distant memory to me, too. I’m starved. Actually, during the entire lunch, I was dreaming of something finer.”

“Oh?”

“Esther’s cake.”

“Aha.”

“In the cooler. . . .”

“Umm.”

“I’ve been thinking how moist it is, how cold and sweet, how velveteen its texture. . . .”

“That’s Esther’s cake, all right.”

“And those discreet little morsels of bittersweet rind that burst in your mouth like . . . like sunshine!”

“You’re a regular Cowper of cake.”

“Don’t you think we should have some?” she asked.

“Now you’re talking.”

“Did you bring your pocketknife?”

“Always,” he said, producing it from his pocket.

She got on her knees in her seat and foraged around on the floorboard in back, cranking off the cooler top and fetching out the foil-wrapped mound.

“Oh, lovely. Nice and cold on my legs. Well, now. How shall we do this?” she asked, peeling back layers of foil. “This is the cake that nearly sent you to heaven in your prime. You probably shouldn’t have a whole slice.”

“If you recall,” he said, “it was
two
slices that nearly sent me packing. I’ll have one slice, and would appreciate not being able to see through it.”

She carefully carved a small piece and put it on a napkin from the glove compartment. “Don’t keel over on me,” she said, meaning it.

Driving to the beach in a red convertible, eating Esther’s cake—how many men wouldn’t crave to be in his shoes? The sweetness and delicacy of the vanishing morsel in his hands were literally intoxicating.
Priest Found Drunk on Layer Cake . . .

“Darling, you talked in your sleep last night.”

“Uh-oh.”

“You said ‘slick’ several times; you were very restless.”

“Slick?”

“Yes, and once I think you said ‘Tommy.’ ”

“Aha!” The dream flooded back to him instantly. His boyhood friend, Tommy Noles, and that miserable experience that earned him his nickname, a nickname he’d never mentioned to his wife. . . .

“Who is Tommy?” she queried.

“Tommy Noles, my old friend from Holly Springs.”

“The one who always knew the make and model of cars.”

“Right.”

“What were you dreaming?”

As usual, his inquisitive wife wanted to know everything. Should he tell her?

“Well, let’s see. I was dreaming about . . . well, about the time when . . .”

“When what?”

Weren’t couples supposed to tell each other their fondest wishes, their deepest secrets, their blackest fears? He’d never thought much of that scheme, but so far, it had worked. In fact, he’d found that for every one of his deepest secrets, Cynthia Kavanagh would pour forth two or three of her own; it was like winning at slots.

“. . . when I got my nickname.”

“Are you blushing or is that the sun?”

“The sun,” he said.

“What about when you got your nickname? I never knew you had one.”

Tommy Noles had lived right up the road, next to his attorney father’s gentleman’s farm. Mr. Noles was a history teacher and a packrat. He hauled every imaginable oddity to his seven acres, and parked it around the property as if it were outdoor sculpture. A rusting haymow, an antique tractor, a gas tank from a service station, a prairie schooner, a large advertising sign for tobacco . . .

Mr. Noles mowed around these objects regularly and with great respect, but neglected to trim the grass that grew directly against them, so that each was sheathed in a colorful nest of sedge and wildflowers, which, as a boy, the young Tim had found enhancing.

His father found none of it enhancing, his father who idolized perfection above all else, and no son of his would be allowed to play with Tommy Noles.

But he had, in fact, played with Tommy Noles, wading in the creek, building a fort in the woods, constructing a tree house, fishing for crappie, searching for arrowheads in the fields.

Tommy Noles had wanted to be a fighter pilot in a terrible war, and he, Timothy Kavanagh, wanted to be a boxer or an animal trainer or, oddly enough, a bookbinder, for hadn’t he been outrageously smitten with the smell and the look of his grandfather’s books?

He remembered training Tommy’s dog, Jeff, to catch sticks in midair, and to roll over and play dead. It had been deeply satisfying to finagle another living creature into doing anything at all, and he longed for a dog of his own, but his father wouldn’t allow it. Dogs had fleas, dogs scratched, dogs defecated.

He grew uneasy thinking about how it had happened.

Tommy Noles, urged by the others and unbeknownst to him, had put dog poop just inside the double doors of the schoolhouse, two piles of it.

Bust in through those doors, runnin’,
Tommy said to him,
and we’ll give you a nickel.

Why?
he asked. The teachers were in a meeting in the gym, and he smelled trouble brewing.

He still didn’t know why he did it, he didn’t remember wanting the money especially, perhaps he did it because he was the scrawny one, the geek, the one who loved to read and write and think and ponder words and meanings.

Without caring, he just did it; he burst through the doors running, and hit the piles and skidded down the hall as if he’d connected with a patch of crankcase oil. Just outside Miss McNolty’s classroom, he lost his balance and crashed to the floor.

He heard the boys screaming with laughter at the front door as he got up, stinking, and tried to scrape the slimy stuff off his shoes. It was slick as grease. . . .

He walked toward them, his heart thundering. He had never picked a fight or been in one; he would have run first, not looking back.

But this was different. His friend had betrayed him.

They watched him coming toward them and backed down the steps.

Hey, Slick!
somebody yelled. Three boys who were laughing and holding their noses suddenly turned and ran to the oak tree, where they stopped and peered from behind it. Lee Adderholt and Tommy Noles stood fast near the bottom of the steps, looking awed, mesmerized.

What had they seen on his face? He would never know.

I . . . I’m sorry, Tim,
Tommy said.

He felt something building in himself, something . . . towering. He seemed to be suddenly six feet tall, and growing.

I really am!
wailed Tommy.

He never remembered what happened, exactly, he just knew that he plowed into Tommy Noles without fear, without trembling, and beat the living crap out of him.

Then he was sitting in the principal’s office—thank God it was Mr. Lewis, who was too tenderhearted to whip anybody. Mr. Lewis had looked at him for what seemed a long time, with what appeared to be kindness in his face, but the young Kavanagh couldn’t be sure.

He knew, sitting there, that he had liked beating the tar out of Tommy Noles. But most of all, he had liked making him cry in front of the people who had hooted and laughed, holding their noses.

Your father will never hear this from me,
Mr. Lewis said.
But if anyone tells him and he asks, I will, of course, be required to . . .

For the first time in his life, he had been glad, thrilled, that everyone he knew, his classmates and friends, were terrified of his father, and wouldn’t dare speak to him, much less reveal the dark transgression of his son brawling in a fistfight.

What happened, Timothy?
asked his mother.

He dropped his head. He had never lied to his mother.

She studied him.
I’m sure he asked for it,
she said, simply.

He hadn’t ever done it again; he hadn’t needed to. It had been the fight of his life, the Grand Inquisition. In his rage, he had taken on the very world with his two hands, and somehow, oddly, won.

The scrawny kid with the scrawny arms and the penchant for reading large books and making straight A’s had been suffused with a new aura. They gave him a wide berth when they called him Slick, for they had seen his rage, and witnessed his consuming power, and hadn’t understood it and never would. He was Timothy Kavanagh, not to be messed with.