Shepherds Abiding (10 page)

From the window above Happy Endings, Hope Winchester peered down upon the straggle of walkers making their way to First Baptist while holding on for dear life to their sheet music.

“Lift up your heads, ye mighty gates;

Behold, the King of glory waits;

The King of kings is drawing near;

The Savior of the world is here! . . .

Fling wide the portals of your heart;

Make it a temple, set apart . . .”

She was happy that she could hear most of the words, liking especially “Fling wide the portals of your heart.”

In the music floating up to her, she was struck by a deep, resonant voice that was clearly able to bind the
other voices together. She looked for its source, but couldn’t locate it, and was turning away from the window when someone peered up at her and waved.

She waved back, glad to be noticed, and stood and watched the toboggans and flapping coattails disappear beneath the green awning.

She turned to go downstairs, but stopped instead and gazed at the large room, now delivered of the detritus of more than two decades. It was empty, clean, and bright with the dazzle of winter light.

It had been six long weeks since she’d sent the letter, but she hadn’t heard a word from Mrs. Mallory. Possibly she intended to lease the building to someone else and hadn’t informed her, nor did Helen know anything. If Helen’s movers had to come and take everything away, the packing needed to begin at once; only the stock she was conserving for Christmas sales could wait until the last minute.

Then there was the letter to her landlady, who would need to know something immediately. . . .

She found she was wringing her hands, a habit she had tried without success to break.

But, no! She would not give up.

Even with concerns that sometimes overwhelmed her, she refused to abandon her belief in a glad outcome.

Don’t worry about anything, Hope,
Father Tim had said,
but in everything, by prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving . . .

“ ‘ . . . make your requests known unto God,’ ” she recited aloud, going quickly down the stairs, “ ‘and the peace that passes all understanding will fill your heart and mind through Christ Jesus!’ ”

Finding Margaret Ann at her feet, she picked her up and held her close and stroked her orange fur.

She would have to let her secret out to Mrs. Havner. She would go and speak with her at once . . .

 . . . then she would call Louise and say she might be moving home to live with her in their mother’s house, with its overgrown garden of hollyhocks and foxglove . . .

 . . . and she would call Scott and ask if he would come for spaghetti and meatballs this evening—it was the only dish she knew how to make for company. . . .

Her heart skipped a beat at the thought of cooking for Scott and setting the table for the two of them. With everything else before her, it was almost too much even to consider, but she remembered how she
would feel in his company—she would feel happy and unafraid.

She stopped for a moment, leaning against the newel-post at the foot of the stairs; Margaret Ann’s rhythmic purr resonated upon her heart. Though she and Helen hadn’t discussed it, they both knew that Margaret Ann would find a new home with Hope.

Whatever happens, she thought, I must continue to believe in a glad outcome—but I must also prepare for whatever else may lie ahead.

She suddenly felt purposeful, and relieved, as if a great weight had flown from her shoulders.

“I’m makin’ a list and checkin’ it twice,” said Fred.

Fred had volunteered to give him a hand today, an offer that might not be valid any other Sunday this month.

“You’ve got your five sheep, you’ve got your donkey, and you’ve got your first shepherd knocked out,” said Fred. “That’s seven down an’ a dozen or so to go.”

All sanding and priming was done, and the seven finished pieces stood lined up on a shelf above the sink.

“Hallelujah!” said Father Tim, slipping into a green bib apron. “Ol’ time, it is a-flyin’!” He hadn’t made the deadline to put the shepherds and all the sheep on the sideboard today. Now the plan was to set out the complete scene on Christmas Eve.

Freshly ground coffee dripped into the pot; two slices of pumpkin pie, as frozen as bricks since Thanksgiving dinner at the yellow house, sat thawing on the drain board of the sink.

“You got four ewes an’ a ram to go. You want me to keep doin’ sheep?”

“Keep doing sheep!” said Father Tim. “And God bless you for it!” He rolled up his sleeves and sat down at his worktable across from Fred. “For several years, it seemed that every Christmas season, the Lord would send me a Christmas angel, somebody who came along at just the right time, to give me a hand or help me over a hurdle. I believe you’re my Christmas angel this year, and I thank you.”

Fred ducked his head, shy. “An’ I thank you, Father, for lettin’ me sit in on this. My wife’s glad to get me out of th’ house. She’s got two quilts to get done.”

“Would you call me Tim?”

“Nossir, I can’t do that.”

“Why not?”

“I never call a preacher by a first name.”

“Does this mean I have to call you Mr. Addison?”

Fred laughed. “Nossir, that’s what the IRS called me last spring, an’ I’ve had a dislike for th’ sound of it ever since.”

“What would I do if I had to stipple this whole flock?” Father Tim threw up his hands. “I’d be here ’til lambing time!”

“I like stipplin,’ but I wouldn’t want to fool with
wings
or
robes—
and ’specially wouldn’t want to fool with
skin;
nossir, you’re th’ Skin Man. Look at that shepherd on th’ shelf! Real as life!”

And, by heaven, it was. Father Tim was amazed that the shepherd had started out with a horrific case of jaundice and now looked merely well tanned, which would certainly be expected in his line of work.

The damaged hand, however, had been another matter. He and Fred and Andrew had all had a go at it, and the effort-by-committee showed. But there was no looking back. The hand was done, they were not Michelangelos around here.

Father Tim took the second shepherd from the shelf and examined it, turning it in his hands. “I think I’ll start with the robe—any ideas?”

Fred scratched his head. “Seems like shepherds would’ve stayed pretty ragged-lookin.’ I reckon they slept under bushes or rocks or like that.”

“Actually, shepherds around Bethlehem lived in caves. Caves made safe places for their flocks at night.”

“Maybe somethin’ th’ color of a burlap sack?”

“That might be hard.” He took a deep breath. “But let me see what I can do.”

He squeezed a bit of paint from three tubes into a saucer and blended the colors with a plastic knife. He wanted to get his fingers in the stuff, but the telltale signs of oil glaze were hard to remove, and harder still to hide from an inquisitive wife.

He showed the contents of the saucer to Fred. “What do you think?”

“You goin’ for burlap?”

“Going for burlap.”

“I’d say a little more brown.”

“Done!”

They worked for a time, silent, oblivious to the Mozart concerto on the radio.

“These tails are way yonder longer’n we used to do at my gran’daddy’s. We docked ’em pretty short when I was comin’ along.”

“How many sheep did you have?”

“Four hundred!”

“Man!”
he said, quoting Dooley.

“We raised Dorset, mostly, and a few Blue Face. I was what you might call a shepherd, myself, now an’ again.”

Father Tim figured he’d been seven or eight years old the Christmas he determined to do what the Bethlehem shepherds had done.

Reverend Simon, a fervent Bible scholar and his mother’s much-loved Baptist preacher, explained the passage from Luke to the Sunday School class of eight- to ten-year-olds. Reverend Simon had them all toeing the mark; he was a big man with unruly hair and spectacles that enlarged his eyes in a frightening way. Someone said he had ruined his eyes reading the Bible, and knew more about everything in it than anyone alive. He taught their class the way he taught the congregation, with extravagant gestures and studied pauses and bursts of song in a rich, baritone voice that rattled the windowpanes.

“Who were these shepherds?” he thundered. His magnified brown eyes roamed the small classroom as if demanding an answer, but no one raised a hand.

“They were merely a few local boys from over the hill! Boys like you, Tom, and you, Chester, and you, Timothy!

“When they received the word from the heavenly host and recovered from their fright, what did they do? They didn’t dillydally, they didn’t put it off ’til morning, they didn’t wait ’til they’d fried up some bacon, they made
haste!
‘And they came with
haste,
’ St. Luke tells us, they came
lickety-split
toward that bright and shining star, to see the wonder of the Savior, to experience His glory, to observe His mystery.

“Now, children, how do you think they got there?”

Though Reverend Simon had no intention of soliciting an answer, Mary Jane Mason raised her hand with fear and trembling, and replied with the only transport known to her. “In a Dodge sedan?”

“My dear child, they had no Dodge sedan nor even a Buick Town Car, they had no mules or oxen or donkeys or carts or wagons. Indeed, they had no mode of transport save their own two
feet!
”

Reverend Simon lifted one exceedingly large foot, shod in a shoe as black as a washpot, to demonstrate.

“Indeed, they would have
trod
the several miles to the inn, almost certainly
barefoot
 . . .”

Here, Reverend Simon shivered mightily, wrapped an imaginary cloak about his large frame, and peered at them over his spectacles. “ . . . and in the
bristling cold . . .
”

A long pause as he looked around at them.

“ . . . in the
bristling
cold of a
dark
and
wintry
night!”

Wishing to move beyond the carved and static figures of their Nativity scene, and enter somehow into the miracle itself, he had asked Tommy to walk around the barn with him the night before Christmas. He was convinced that something as fraught with risk and danger as this would responsibly equal the shepherds’ longer trek to the inn.

“I ain’t walkin’ around no barn at night,” said Tommy. “An’ I ’specially ain’t doin’ it barefooted.”

“But the shepherds had to do it, they had to walk all the way from the sheep pasture to Bethlehem while it was
pitch-black dark.
”

“I ain’t doin’ it,” said Tommy.

He had screwed up his courage then and, after donning an old sheet tied at his waist by a piece of jump rope, sat on the top porch step and waited for nightfall. He had checked the feet of the shepherds in their
Nativity scene, and, to his enormous relief, they were wearing shoes.

On her way home to the little house down the road, Peggy stopped on the porch and patted his head. “Your mama say come back soon as you does this.”

He nodded.

At the foot of the steps, she turned and looked at him. “An’ don’t you be lettin’ any spooks git my baby.”

He had heard that, on Christmas Eve, animals talked, which seemed spooky enough. He wondered if he’d hear their two cows talking in the barn. The thought gave him a funny feeling in his stomach; he couldn’t imagine cows talking or what they might say. What if they busted out talking while he was down there by himself, in the dark?

His mouth had been dry with fear, yet he wanted more than anything to somehow be one with those privileged to be first.

“What are you doing?” His father approached the foot of the steps, seemingly annoyed to find his son wearing a sheet over his clothes and, worse still, accomplishing nothing of consequence.

“I’m going to walk around the barn when it gets
dark.” He said this louder than he might have done. “Sir.”

His father looked at him as he often did—without appearing to see him.

“Like the shepherds,” he said, eager to explain, and thereby make himself seen.