Not a Sparrow Falls (25 page)

Alasdair nodded. The professor’s wife, rest her soul, had put him in mind of Winifred on a bad day.

“Clive was stirring things up, moving toward a vote to have me ousted. But I mounted a preemptive strike. Called together the ruling elders I knew were behind me, and we went house to house mustering support. Numbering the troops, so to speak. We thought we had him beaten, but we’d underestimated his persuasiveness. At the congregational meeting we were nearly equally split. Stalemated. Neither of us had the majority necessary to win. Neither side was willing to concede. Well, the fight raged, as you might imagine.” The professor paused to take a sip of tea, and Alasdair realized he was tense, waiting to hear how the story ended. But instead of finishing, Cuthbert rose stiffly, rearranged the logs with a poker, sending up a shower of sparks. He apparently decided another log was called for. By the time he’d extricated it from the box, added it to the fire, closed the screen, and replaced the poker, Alasdair was ready to scream.

“Well?” he prompted. “What happened?”

Cuthbert sat down and took another sip of tea before he answered. When he did his eyes were filled with what looked like fresh pain. “I won,” he said. “I kept the pulpit. But it was a hollow victory, I can tell you.”

“In what way?” Alasdair asked, not sure he wanted to hear the answer.

“Ichabod.”

Alasdair’s eyes widened. Ichabod. Hebrew for “the glory of the Lord has departed.” After a moment Cuthbert carried on but with sadness rather than animation.

“The building was mine. The congregation was mine. Newby left. Took some members with him, but we were basically unscathed. The only problem was, the hand of the Lord seemed to have stopped moving among us. He’d set us aside. And I knew why. I’d forgotten what I was about, why I was left here on earth. I’d gotten my calling confused with my job.” He gazed at Alasdair’s face, but Alasdair knew
he was seeing the past. “I kept on preaching, but it was no good. After a year or so I took the job at the seminary. The church carried on with someone else. You see,” he finished, a bittersweet smile on his lips, “I’d forgotten who really was captain of the ship. The church wasn’t mine, but His.”

“So what then?” Alasdair responded, his surge of anger coming out through his voice. “I’m supposed to just let someone come in and wrest it away from me?” The pirate analogy was a stupid comparison, and he wished he’d never made it.

“No, but have you asked God whether or not He wants you to have it?”

“What would He do?” Alasdair shot back. “Tape a note to the refrigerator?” His voice was sharp.

Neither one of them said anything for a long while. Alasdair broke the silence first. “I’m sorry.”

Cuthbert smiled. “You’re forgiven.”

They sat together, the only sound the hiss and crack of the log on the fire. The glory of the Lord had departed. Alasdair tried to remember the last time he’d sensed God’s presence or heard His voice. He couldn’t recall just now.

He began speaking without making a conscious decision to do so. “A darkness seems to have settled over my home,” he said. “Samantha is troubled. I don’t care for her friends, but I don’t forbid them because she has so few. She hates me. I can feel it. It almost radiates from her when I enter the room. I don’t give Cameron and Bonnie the attention they need. I feel a heaviness I can’t seem to shake. Sometimes the darkness seems literal. I keep turning on lights, but nothing helps.”

“I’m sorry.” Cuthbert’s eyes shone with kindness and concern. “I thought you might be struggling, but I didn’t know absolutely.”

“The worst of it is that I feel like what you just described. The glory of the Lord has departed. I preach, and there’s no movement of the Spirit. I pray and sense no answers. I read the Scriptures, but they are only words. They don’t seem to touch me. Not like they used to.” He didn’t quite know what
he expected Professor Cuthbert to say, but he was surprised at his response.

“You know, Alasdair, the older I get, the more I realize only one thing matters.”

“What is that?”

“To know Him. To walk with Him. Just as Adam did in the garden in the cool of the day. There’s nothing else.”

Alasdair felt a hollow ache, a coldness in his chest. “Well, He doesn’t seem to be returning my calls these days.”

“He seems to have left you to your own devices,” Cuthbert said after a pause.

“I suppose He has.”

“I wonder why,” the professor mused, his head tipped slightly, as if he were pondering a particularly intriguing puzzle.

Alasdair would have smiled if he hadn’t felt such empty misery. “I don’t know,” he said. Quickly. Flatly.

Cuthbert’s eyebrow raised a millimeter.

Alasdair tensed.

“Perhaps, as in my case, the Lord’s work has led you away from the Lord,” the professor speculated, his voice soft.

Alasdair relaxed and felt a momentary relief. This was on the target but not dead center. The probe had landed just short of the abscess. Still, there was truth here, unpleasant truth. He felt bitter amusement at the irony. He hadn’t even had the momentary pleasure of sin, the oblivion of an alcoholic binge, the surge of euphoria from a drug-induced high, the sensual release of illicit sex, the wanton satiation of greed. His had been a cold, gray sin, but it had led him to the exact same spot of desolation. The most insidious of the enemy’s tactics had been unleashed on him. Success. And success that was unassailable. Success in the work of the Lord.

“Well, there’s nothing I can do about that now.” It was too late for a career change. Much too late for many things.

Cuthbert lifted a brow and took another small sip of his tea. “I disagree,” he said.

Alasdair frowned and waited for him to explain.

“You could stop doing it.”

Alasdair frowned at the ridiculousness of the suggestion. “How would I make a living? What would I do?”

“Or more to the point, who would you be?”

Alasdair felt a strike of irritation and didn’t bother to hide it. “I can’t see the point of abandoning the good along with the bad. Even if I have misaligned my priorities”—a point that remained to be established, he added to himself—“I hardly think resignation is the cure for the ill.”

Cuthbert didn’t answer. He didn’t react at all. Taking a cigar from his pocket, he unwrapped it, then put it in his mouth and gave an imaginary puff or two, a habit that had always seemed ridiculous to Alasdair and now irritated him almost beyond endurance. “You don’t need to be salaried to do the work of the Lord,” Cuthbert said around the mouthful of tobacco.

“Paul was a tentmaker. You could shine shoes and do the work of the Lord. He doesn’t need your speaking engagements and radio programs. The work of the Lord is nurturing souls. For that you don’t need a commission to preach.”

“You’re suggesting I should walk away from everything I’ve worked so hard to attain, given up so much to achieve.”

Cuthbert shrugged. “I’m not telling you what to do. I’m simply pointing out alternatives. One always has a choice.”

Alasdair shook his head slightly. His emotions roiled, though they hadn’t yet settled between anger and despair.

Cuthbert spoke again, this time taking out the cigar. “I imagine it would be like picking a loose thread on a sweater,” he observed dispassionately. “Admitting you’d made a mistake.”

Alasdair frowned.
What in the world are you babbling about?
he wanted to shout.

Cuthbert turned the oddly penetrating eyes on him once again. “What I mean is, where would it end?”

Alasdair set down his mug. He wanted nothing more than
to leave. He didn’t though, and after a moment the professor gracefully picked up the conversation like a lost thread, wound it around to books and articles, their old familiar ground. Finally Alasdair felt he could depart graciously. “I suppose I should go,” he said when the conversation paused.

“You haven’t eaten your sandwich.”

Alasdair looked at the untouched plate. He’d lost his appetite. He stood up, and the professor followed him to the door and out onto the stoop; then the two of them paused, awkward at this last good-bye. It was snowing, and when Alasdair looked across the darkened street, he could see a small circle of light around the streetlamp. The flakes came from nowhere, floated across it, soft and yet relentless, then disappeared into its glowing penumbra, that region where light met dark and neither reigned.

“Alasdair—”

He turned. The top of the professor’s head shone in the light from the streetlamp.

“Forgive me if I spoke out of turn. Please don’t hold an old man’s bluntness against him.”

“I never would,” Alasdair promised him, and after one last handclasp, he stepped out into the cold night and walked over snow-carpeted sidewalks to the train. He would not hold his words against him. But neither would he forget that one last question.
“Where would it end?”
It would end in the churchyard, in the corner in the back, at a small square of earth marked
Anna Williams MacPherson.
That particular journey, were he to take it, would undoubtedly end there.

Twenty-One

“How in the world did you do that?” Lorna asked as she stood by the front door, preparing to leave for her night job. Bridie smiled. Lorna sounded as amazed as if Cam and Bonnie had learned to fly instead of just peepee in the toilet and sleep through the night.

“Well, the potty training was helped along with M&M’s,” Bridie answered. “Besides, they were ready. And as far as their sleeping goes, I Ferberized them.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Dr. Ferber. He’s a pediatrician who wrote a book. I checked it out of the library. Basically, you love them up all day and then ignore them when they cry at night.”

Lorna smiled. “Well, they look more cared for than they have in ages,” she said, and her pretty brown eyes filled with tears. “Cameron’s saying words. Even Samantha seems happier. You are a treasure, Bridie.”

Bridie felt a flush of pleasure.

“Just look at all this,” Lorna went on, gesturing around her at the house. “Everything looks wonderful. I just can’t get over it.”

Bridie nodded. She was pleased herself. Somehow painting and scrubbing and fixing things up had rearranged her insides as well. Taking care of a home and children had brought back memories of being mother to her brother and sisters. She’d often seen their faces in her mind’s eye this past week as she painted and cuddled and cooked. It hurt, but it was a sweet pain, and she wouldn’t wish it gone.

Samantha thumped down the stairs just then and twirled around. “Ta-dumm,” she sang, holding out her arms.

“Oh, it looks beautiful!” Bridie exclaimed.

“Samantha, is this the dress you’ve been working on?” Lorna’s voice was filled with amazement.

Samantha nodded with pride.

“Why, it’s lovely.”

“The collar’s a little crooked,” Samantha apologized.

“Where?” Bridie protested.

“I’m not sure I got the hem exactly even.”

Bridie shook her head. “It looks good to me. Besides, it’ll never be noticed on a galloping horse. That’s what my grandmother used to say.”

Lorna stood, eyes tearing again, looking back and forth at the two of them as if they’d just graduated or gotten married. Bridie hoped all the emotion didn’t spook Samantha. She needn’t have worried. Samantha was preening in front of the mirror on the coatrack. “It
is
pretty, isn’t it?” she asked.

Bridie looked past the puckered side seams and the off-center collar. “It’s beautiful. And you did it yourself. You should be proud.”

Samantha turned and looked at her, met her eyes for just a minute. “Thanks,” she said shortly. She darted for the stairs before Bridie could answer.

“My pleasure,” she said softly to Samantha’s retreating back.

****

Samantha carefully hung her dress on the padded hanger Bridie had scrounged from the attic. It
was
pretty. She held it up again. She wanted to look at it, not put it in the closet. She looked around for someplace to hang it and settled for the back of the closet door. Her
Misfits
poster was covered up, but oh well. She put on her pajamas, then turned down her bed and got under the covers. They were soft, not scratchy, and they smelled like roses instead of Clorox since Bridie had been doing the laundry.

After a minute she went and got the box and pulled it close to her bed. Maybe she would do it tonight.

She stared at it. Her heart started beating hard and her mouth got dry.

All she had to do was reach down and pick up a journal. Just pick it up and start to read.

Samantha wanted to know her mother. She really did. She had pulled that box by her bed every night. She looked at the scrapbooks inside. She’d picked up each one and checked the dates in the front and put them in order. Every night she took the first one out and held it on her lap. She just couldn’t manage to get any farther than that. She sighed and stared at the box. Dad would be back tomorrow. Then Bridie wouldn’t be here at night anymore. She liked having Bridie here at night. The house felt full when she was here. It annoyed her that she liked it.

She picked a book from the middle of the box. She flipped it open.

I keep watching Samantha play with her blocks. She patiently builds a house, bit by bit, then when she is finished, she knocks it down. She stares at the mess for a moment, then begins building again. I think I know how it would feel to be a tiny person in that house of blocks. To build your world, piece by laborious piece, only to have a mysterious hand reach down from time to time and sweep it to bits.

Samantha closed the book hard. She threw it back into the box, then sat and stared at it, blinking. She heard feet on the steps. Her door was open, and if she didn’t want company, she should close it. Bridie came closer, then poked her head into the room.

“Hey. I thought you’d be asleep by now.”

She almost said obviously not, but decided not to. “Not yet.” She glanced toward the box by the side of the bed. Bridie looked where she was looking. Her face didn’t change at all.

“Can I come in?” she asked, all casual-like.