Music for Wartime (8 page)

Reverend Hewlett’s name was Jack. This was increasingly easy for him to forget. He’d become John, and then—in the bulletins and on the sign outside the church—Rev. J. Hewlett, and since there was no one in Little Fork who didn’t know him as the Reverend, since even the few Catholics who drove to services in Shearerville greeted him as “Rev” or sometimes, slipping, as “Father,” he hadn’t heard his own name in three years. Annette no longer wrote to him at all, no longer extended the tail of the J down like the first letter of a chapter.

And why had he left her? And why had he come here? Because he was needed. Because his mentor at seminary had said, “God is calling you there. God is calling me to send you there.”

And that man, with his great beard, his walls of books, his faith in the hand of God, could not have been wrong.

That night there was a dance at the Garden Club, on the east end of town. It was Little Fork’s version of a debutante ball, the same youngsters debuting themselves each year, in the same white dresses, until they were too old for these things, or married. Only tonight they were soaked through. Reverend Hewlett stood against the wall watching—his mere presence, everyone agreed, was salubrious—and observed the boys in their sopping bowties, hair plastered to their heads, and the girls wrapped against their will in their mothers’ shawls. No boy would see through a wet dress tonight. Heaps of galoshes and umbrellas by the door.

They coupled and uncoupled in patterns that seemed casual, chaotic, but of course were not. Every move, every flick of the eyes, was finely orchestrated. There were hearts being broken tonight. You just couldn’t tell whose.

Gordon Pipsky sidled up and offered a sip from his flask. Gordon’s son was out there dancing, a girl on each arm. When Hewlett accepted, Gordon winked and grinned. “I’ll never tell,” he said. Even though he saw the Reverend take the Eucharist every Sunday. Perhaps what he meant was, “I’ll never tell that you’re just a man like me.”

Was it a secret, really? He’d never been anything else.

He had felt like an impostor when he first put on his robe—but then everyone felt like an impostor, he’d learned in seminary. And now, after all this time, he rarely considered himself a fraud. But nothing had changed, really. Except that he had grown used to that robe, that second skin, just as he’d grown used to God’s silent ways.

There was Stella Blunt, dancing in white. A debutante still.

The next morning, the rain stopped. Not the kind of pause that makes you worry the sky is just gathering more water, but a true, clear stop, the air bright and clean and dry.

And then the wind started.

For the first few hours, it just shook the windows and door hinges and made people sneeze—all that new mold now flying through the air—but by nightfall, it was bringing down tree branches and shingles. By morning, it had knocked down phone lines and garden fences and was tearing at the awnings on Center Street.

And worse: By late afternoon, with most of the surface water gone (blown to Shearerville, everyone said), the tarp blew off the old pool. No one was outside to see that part, but a fair number were witness to it flying smack up against the library, five blocks south, before continuing on its way. It took folks a while to realize what it was—and by that point, there was gravel skittering down the streets nearest the pool. There was moldy hay in everyone’s yard.

Gwendolyn Lake came banging on the parsonage door to tell Reverend Hewlett. His first thought was to run and see if the elephant was uncovered, but his second thought was of Stanley, who should be kept from the pool. Stanley, who would want to run there but would regret it later. Who might take it all as some sort of sign.

Hewlett told Gwendolyn to get her brothers. “Use sheets,” he said, “and bricks.” He himself ran in the opposite direction, toward Center Street. The wind wasn’t constant but came in great lumps: Every three or four seconds, a pocket of air would hit him, would lift him from beneath. If he’d had an open umbrella, he’d have left the ground. Trees were down, garbage blew through the streets, the bench in front of the barbershop was overturned.

Sally Thoms ran crying down the other side of the road, blond hair sucked straight up like a sail. “My cat blew away!” she cried. “He was in a tree and he just blew away!”

“I’ll pray for you!” the Reverend called, but the wind ate his words.

He pulled with his full weight on the door beside the one that read
STANLEY’S DINER
, the door that everyone knew led up to the real place. Stanley stood in the kitchen, peeling carrots.

He said, “You’re early for lunch, Rev.”

For some reason—even later he couldn’t figure out what had possessed him—the Reverend said, “I’d be happy if you called me Jack.”

“Sure,” Stanley said, and laughed. “Jack. You want to peel me some carrots, Jack?”

They stood side by side at the counter, working.

“What do you make of this apocalypse, Jack?”

He began to answer as he always did of late—something about God wanting to test us now and then, maybe something about Job—but instead he found himself telling a joke. “You hear about the man who couldn’t see what the weather was like, because it was too foggy?”

“Ha!” He wasn’t sure he’d ever heard Stanley laugh before. It was more a word than a laugh. Stanley said, “I know an old circus one. Why’d the sword swallower swallow an umbrella?”

“I—I don’t know.”

“Wanted to put something away for a rainy day.”

It was a terrible joke, but Hewlett started laughing and couldn’t stop—perhaps because he was picturing Stella Blunt’s bearded fire eater, an umbrella blossoming in his throat just as the baby had stretched Stella’s figure. This wasn’t funny either, but the laughter came anyway.

He went to the sink for a glass of water, to cure his laugh and the cough that followed it. As he drank, he looked out the back window, over the yards behind Fifth Street and the abutting yards behind Sixth Street. Down below, on the other side of the block-long stockade fence, the Miller family had ventured out into the yard with baby Eloise. In the time between gusts, they were examining the damage to the old well, the top of which had tumbled into a pile of stones. A summer of baking and a summer of rain must have loosened everything, and all it took was a day of wind to knock things about. There was Ed Miller, peering down the hole, and there was Alice Miller, holding the baby, when a blast of wind—up here Jack Hewlett could see and hear but not feel it—tore limbs from trees and tore shutters from houses and tore Eloise from her mother’s arms and into the air and across the yard. He must have made a noise, because Stanley rushed to peer over his shoulder just in time to see the baby, her pink face and her white dress, go flying over the garden and over the next yard and finally into the Blunts’ yard, where, just as she arced down, there he was, Mayor Blunt, running toward the child. He caught her in his arms.

Hewlett heard Stanley inhale sharply. Neither man moved.

The mayor had been outside alone—presumably inspecting the maple that had fallen across his yard, the one that, were it still standing, the baby would have blown straight into—but now his wife ran out, and his son, and Stella. The two men watched from above as Stella leaned over the baby, covering her own mouth. Her mother’s hand was on her back, and Hewlett wondered if she was crying, and—if she was—how she’d explain it. Well, who wouldn’t cry at a baby landing in their yard?

The wind took a break, and Mayor Blunt handed the baby to Stella and wrapped his coat around her front, covering them both. Hewlett imagined what the man would have said: something about “You know I can never hold a baby right.” Or “This should be good practice for you!” And the mayor led a procession around the front of the house and down the street to the Millers’. Hewlett hadn’t thought to look back to the Millers for a while—they weren’t in their yard. Ed Miller had scaled the fence to the lawn between his and the Blunts’ and was running through the bushes, around the trees, behind the shed. Alice Miller stood out front, hands to her head, shouting for help. She ran toward the Blunts when she saw them, but she couldn’t have known what was under Stella’s coat until the mayor pulled it back, chest puffed out, proud of his miracle. He handed the baby back himself. Alice Miller covered the infant with kisses and raced her into the house, Mayor and Mrs. Blunt following. Stella stayed out on the walk a minute, looking at the sky. What she was thinking, Hewlett couldn’t even guess.

“Well,” Stanley said. “Pardon the expression, but Jesus Christ.” The carrot and peeler, still in his hands, were shaking.

Hewlett wanted to run down, to see if Stella was all right, to make sure the baby wasn’t hurt. But he wasn’t a doctor. And he couldn’t leave Stanley alone, couldn’t let him think of checking on the pool. So he just said, “I think we’ve seen the hand of God.” He wasn’t at all sure this was true. Part of him wondered if he hadn’t seen a miracle at all but its precise and brutal opposite—a failure of some kind, or the evidence of chaos. Whatever he’d just seen, it troubled him deeply. Was God in the wind, blowing that baby back to Stella where she belonged? Or was God in the catch, in the impossible coincidence of the mayor being in the right spot, in the return of the child to the Millers? Or—and this was the thing about a crack in faith, he knew, the way one small fissure could spread and crumble the whole thing into a pile of rocks—was God in neither place?

Stanley put his carrot down and turned. His face was soft and astonished, blue eyes open wider than Hewlett had ever seen them. He looked like a man who’d just survived an auto crash, a man who’d taken part in something bizarre and terrifying, not just witnessed it from above. “It’s not true, is it?” Stanley spoke slowly, working something out. “What I said before, about Nineveh. We’re—we’re all where we’re supposed to be. I was supposed to wind up here.” He braced himself on the counter, as if he expected God to blow him across town next. “A beast brought Jonah to Nineveh, and a beast brought me here.”

Hewlett said what he’d said so many times before. “The thing is to be listening when God speaks.”

By the time Reverend Hewlett walked home that night by way of the old pool, Davis Thoms and Bernie Lake were down there mixing batch after batch of cement and pouring it into the hole. For the first time in more than a year, there was both enough water to mix the stuff, and not so much water falling from the sky that it would turn to soup.