A New Song (3 page)

“Not quite. I wasn’t expecting you ’til in the morning.”

“I’m coming in th’ morning, I just wanted to run by and tell you all th’ late-breakin’ news. But,” she said, arching one eyebrow, “I haven’t told you everything, I saved th’ best ’til last.”

His dog wandered into the study and crashed at his master’s feet, panting.

“If you say you already know this, I’ll never tell you another thing as long as I live. On my way here, I saw Mule Skinner, he said he’s finally rented your house.”

She drew herself up, pleased, and gulped the lemonade.

“Terrific! Great timing!” He might have done a jig.

“He said there hadn’t been time to call you, he’ll call you tonight, but it’s not a family with kids like Cynthia wanted.”

“Oh, well . . .” He was thrilled that someone had finally stepped forward to occupy the rectory. He and Harley had worked hard over the last few months to make it a strong rental property, putting new vinyl flooring in the kitchen, replacing the stair runners, installing a new toilet in the master bath and a new threshold at the front door . . . the list had been endless. And costly.

“It’s a woman.”

“I can’t imagine what one person would want with all that house to rattle around in.”

“How quickly you forget!
You
certainly rattled around in there for a hundred years.”

“True. Well. I’ll get the whole story from Mule.”

“He said she didn’t mind a bit that Harley would be livin’ in the basement, she just wanted to know if he plays loud rock music.”

Emma rattled the ice in her glass, gulped the last draught, and got up to leave. “Before I forget, you won’t believe what else I found on th’ Internet—church bulletins! You ought to read some of th’ foolishness they put out there for God an’ everybody to see.”

She fished a piece of paper from her handbag. “‘Next Sunday,’” she read, “‘a special collection will be taken to defray the cost of a new carpet. All those wishin’ to do somethin’ on the new carpet will come forward and do so.’”

He hooted with laughter.

“How ’bout this number: ‘Don’t let worry kill you, let th’ church help.’”

He threw his head back and laughed some more. Emma’s life in cyberspace definitely had an upside.

“By th’ way, are you takin’ Barnabas down there?” She enunciated “down there” as if it were a region beneath the crust of the earth.

“We are.”

“I don’t know how you could do that to an animal. Look at all that fur, enough to stuff a mattress.”

Barnabas yawned hugely and thumped his tail on the floor.

“You won’t even be able to
see
those horrible sandspurs that will jump in there by th’ hundreds, not to mention
lodge in his paws.
”

Emma waited for an argument, a rationale—something. Did he have no conscience? “And th’
heat
down there, you’ll have to shave ’im bald.”

Father Tim strolled across the room to walk her to the door. “Thanks for coming, Emma. Tell Harold hello. I’ll see you in the morning.”

His unofficial secretary stumped down the hallway and he followed.

He was holding the front door open and biting his tongue when she turned and looked at him. Her eyes were suddenly red and filled with tears.

“I’ll miss you!” she blurted.

“You
will
?”

She hurried down the front steps, sniffing, searching her bag for a Hardee’s napkin she knew was in there someplace.

He felt stricken. “Emma! We’ll . . . we’ll have jelly doughnuts in the morning!”

“
I’ll
have jelly doughnuts,
you’ll
have dry toast! We don’t want to ship you down there in a coma!”

She got in her car at the curb, slammed the door, gunned the motor, and roared up Wisteria Lane.

For one fleeting moment, he’d completely forgotten his blasted diabetes.

 

“I’m out of here,” he said, kissing his wife.

“Get him to leave something for the island breezes to flow through, darling. Don’t let him cut it all off.”

“You always say that.”

“Yes, well, you come home looking like a skinned rabbit. I don’t know what Joe Ivey
does
to you.”

Considering what Fancy Skinner had done to him time and time again, Joe Ivey could do anything he wanted.

 

“Leavin’ us, are you?” Joe ran a comb through the hair over Father Tim’s left ear and snipped.

“Afraid so.”

“Leavin’ us in th’ lurch is more like it.”

“Now, Joe. Did I preach to you when you went off to Graceland and left me high and dry?”

Joe cackled. “Thank God I come to m’ senses and quit that fool job. An’ in th’ nick of time, too. I’m finally about t’ clean up what Fancy Skinner done to people’s heads around here, which in your case looked like she lowered your ears a foot an’ a half.”

“My wife says don’t cut it too short.”

“If I listened to what wives say, I’d of been out of business forty years ago. Do you know how hot it gits down there?”

If he’d been asked that once, he’d been asked it a thousand times. There was hardly anything mountain people despised more than a “hot” place.

“I’m an old Mississippi boy, you know.”

“An th’ mosquitos . . . !” Joe whistled. “Man alive!”

“Right there,” he said, as Joe started working around his collar. “Just clean it up a little right there, don’t cut it—”

Joe proceeded to cut it. Oh, well. Joe Ivey had always done exactly as he pleased with Father Tim’s hair, just like Fancy Skinner. What was the matter with people who serviced hair, anyway? He had never, in all his years, been able to figure it out.

“I hear it’s a ten-hour trot t’ get there,” said Joe, clearly fixated on the inconvenience of it all.

“Closer to twelve, if you stop for gas and lunch.”

“You could go t’ New York City in less’n that. Prob’ly run up an’ back.”

“There’s a thought.”

Joe trimmed around his customer’s right ear. “I’m gettin’ t’ where I’d like t’ talk . . .”—Joe cleared his throat—“about what happened up at Graceland.”

“Aha.”

“I ain’t told this to a soul, not even Winnie.”

There was a long pause.

Father Tim waited, inhaling the fragrance from Sweet Stuff Bakery, just beyond the thin wall. Joe’s sister, Winnie, and her husband, Thomas, were baking baklava, and he was starting to salivate.

“You couldn’t ever mention this to anybody,” said Joe. “You’d have to swear on a stack of Bibles.”

“I can’t do that, but I give you my word.”

Joe let his breath out in a long sigh. “Well, sir, there towards th’ end, I got to where I thought Elvis might be . . .”

“Might be what?”

“You know.
Alive.
”

“No!”

“I ain’t proud t’ admit it. Thing is, I was gettin’ in th’ brandy pretty heavy when I went up there. My sister’s husband, he was laid off and things was pretty tight. Plus, their house ain’t exactly th’ Biltmore Estate when it comes to room, so ever’ once in a while, I’d ride around after supper t’ give Vern and my sister a little time to theirselves.”

“That was thoughtful.”

“I took to lookin’ for Elvis ever’where I went, ’specially at th’ barbecue place, they all said he was a fool for barbecue. My sister, when she heard I was lookin’ to sight Elvis, she started pourin’ my brandy down th’ toilet. A man can’t hardly live with somebody as pours ’is brandy down th’ toilet.”

“That would create tension, all right.” Heaven knows, he’d tried for years to get Joe to quit sucking down alcohol, but Joe had told him to mind his own business. Something, however, had happened in Memphis that sent his barber home dry as a bone.

“Then one night I was drivin’ around, I said to myself, I said, Joe, Elvis wouldn’t be cruisin’ through a drive-in pickin’ up a chopped pork with hot sauce, he’d
send
somebody. So I said, if
I
was Elvis, where would I be at?

“Seem like somethin’ told me to go back to Graceland, it was about eleven o’clock at night, so I drove on over there and parked across th’ street with my lights off. I hate to tell you, but I had a pint in the glove department, and I was takin’ a little pull now and again.”

Joe took a bottle off the cabinet and held it above his customer’s head. “You want Sea Breeze?”

“Is the Pope a Catholic?”

“First thing you know, I seen somethin’ at th’ top of the yard. There’s this big yard, you know, that spreads out behind th’ gate an’ all. It was somethin’ white, and it . . .”—Joe cleared his throat—“it was movin’ around.”

“Aha.”

Joe blasted his scalp with Sea Breeze and vigorously rubbed it in. “You ain’t goin’ to believe this.”

“Try me.”

Joe’s hands stopped massaging his head. In the mirror, Father Tim could see his barber’s chin quivering.

“It was Elvis . . . in a white suit.”

“Come on!”

“Mowin’ ’is yard.”

“No way!”

“I said you wouldn’t believe it.”

“Why would he mow his yard when he could pay somebody else to do it? And why would he do it in a suit, much less a
white
suit? And why would he do it at
night
?”

Joe’s eyes were misty. He shook his head, marveling. “I never have figured it out.”

“Well, well.” What could he say?

“I set there watchin’. He’d mow a strip one way, then mow a strip th’ other way.”

“Gas or push?”

“Push.”

“How could he see?” Father Tim asked, mildly impatient.

“There was this . . .
glow
all around him.”

“Aha.”

“Then, first thing you know . . .”—Joe’s voice grew hushed—“he th’owed up ’is hand and waved at me.”

Father Tim was speechless.

“Here I’d been lookin’ to see ’im for I don’t know how long, and it scared me s’ bad when I finally done it, I slung th’ bottle in th’ bushes and quit drinkin’ on th’ spot.”

His barber drew a deep breath and stood tall. “I ain’t touched a drop since, and ain’t wanted to.”

Father Tim was convinced this was the gospel truth. Still, he had a question.

“So, Joe, what’s that, ah . . . bottle sitting over there by the hair tonic?”

“I keep that for my customers. You don’t want a little snort, do you?”

“I pass. But tell me this . . . any regrets about coming back to Mitford?”

“Not ary one, as my daddy used to say. It’s been a year, now, since I hauled out of Memphis and come home to Mitford, and my old trade has flocked back like a drove of guineas. Winnie gave me this nice room to set my chair in, and th’ Lord’s give me back my health.”

Joe took the cape from his customer’s shoulders and shook it out. “Yessir, you’re lookin’ at a happy man.”

“And so are you!” said Father Tim. “So are you!”

After all, didn’t he have a new haircut, a new parish, and a whole new life just waiting to begin?

 

He couldn’t help himself.

As the bells at Lord’s Chapel pealed three o’clock, he turned into Happy Endings Bookstore as if on automatic pilot. He had five whole minutes to kill before jumping in the car and roaring off to Wesley for a bicycle pump, since Dooley’s had turned up missing.

“Just looking,” he told Hope Winchester. Hope’s ginger-colored cat, Margaret, peered at him suspiciously as he raced through General Fiction, hung a right at Philosophy, and skidded left into Religion, where the enterprising Hope had recently installed a shelf of rare books.

He knew for a fact that the only bookstore on Whitecap Island was in the rear of a bait and tackle shop. They would never in a hundred years have Arthur Quiller-Couch’s
On the Art of Reading
, which he had eyed for a full week. It was now or never.

His hand shot out to the hard-to-find Quiller-Couch volume, but was instantly drawn back. No, a thousand times no. If his wife knew he was buying more books to schlepp to Whitecap, he’d be dead meat.

He sighed.

“Better to take it now than call long-distance and have me ship it down there for three dollars.”

Hope appeared next to him, looking wise in new tortoiseshell glasses.

No doubt about it, Hope had his number.

He raked the book off the shelf, and snatched Jonathan Edwards’s
The Freedom of the Will
from another. He noted that his forehead broke out in a light sweat.

Oh, well, while he was at it . . .

He grabbed a copy of Lewis’s
Great Divorce
, which had wandered from his own shelves, never to be seen again, and went at a trot to the cash register.

“I’m sure you’re excited about your party!” Hope said, ringing the sale. Margaret jumped onto the counter and glowered at him. Why did cats hate his guts? What had he ever done to cats? Didn’t he buy his wife’s cat only the finest, most ridiculously priced chicken niblets in a fancy tinfoil container?

“Party? What party?”

“Why, the party Uncle Billy and Miss Rose are giving you and Cynthia!”

“I don’t know anything about a party.” Had someone told him and he’d forgotten?

“It’s the biggest thing in the world to them. They’ve never given a party in their whole lives, but they want to do this because they hold you in the most edacious regard.”

“Well!” He was nearly speechless. “When is it supposed to be?”

“Tomorrow night, of course.” She looked at him oddly.

Tomorrow night they were working a list as long as his arm, not to mention shopping for groceries to feed Dooley Barlowe a welcome-home dinner of steak, fries, and chocolate pie.

He mopped his forehead with a handkerchief. He’d be glad to leave town and get his life in order again.

“I’ll look into it,” he muttered, shelling out cash for the forbidden books. “And if you don’t mind, that is, if you happen to see Cynthia, you might not mention that, ah . . .”