ROY
Sunday, October 5, 2008
“Daddy?” Rose tried to twirl the spaghetti casserole with her fork into her wide spoon as they sat at the long antique table in the rectory dining room. The table had belonged to the original owner of the home, a local judge, who had left it as a housewarming gift for the first rector when St. Michael’s purchased it toward the end of the eighteenth century.
“You hear me, Daddy?” the little girl said. Roy reached out and patted her hand. “I’m sorry, Rosebud.” His mind was on the woman who had collapsed in church that morning. He had found her address in the directory and walked over to see about her, but the husband met him at the front door and said she was sleeping.
Roy had seen a lot of things during his few short years as a priest, but he’d never heard the kind of suffering expressed in that woman’s shriek. It was as if she were choking or burning from the inside out, and he had felt helpless, which both angered and terrified him.
He rotated his shoulder and smiled at his child. “I’m all ears. Go ahead.”
“Did a lady start screaming in church today?” Rose had a worried look on her face. She glanced at the twisted noodles on her fork and put them down. “I think you better cut up the pasta for me. That’s what Granny does.”
“Okay.” He reached over with a knife and fork. “And to answer your question, yes, a lady did scream in church today. In fact, that’s what I was just thinking about.”
“I saw her.” Rose stared at him with wide eyes. “When the teacher was walking us over from children’s chapel. I saw a man carrying her and then I heard some folks talking about it at the coffee hour.” She looked down at her cut pasta and took a bite. “Why do you think she did that?”
“I don’t know,” Roy said. “I tried to go over to her house and see her when you were on your play date, but she was resting.”
“Mmm.” Rose took a sip of milk and wiped the little mustache off of her face. “I wonder what’s wrong with her.”
“Me too,” he said.
Roy’s installation was scheduled for that Thursday, October 9th. The Parish Hall was remarkably hectic that week with Ms. B. and her team polishing silver, ironing linens, cooking and baking, and arranging the flowers.
More than four hundred people had responded positively to the invitation, and she decided to double her order of wine and coffee-ice-cream punch and crab cakes and shrimp-salad finger sandwiches from Miss Hamby’s.
There was a pang in Roy’s heart as he stood at the window of his office looking down on Broad Street at the worker bees who hurried in and out of the ornate wrought-iron gates of his church, carrying tables and china and blocks of oasis and baskets of greenery clipped from their gardens.
He felt the Lord led him to St. Michael’s, though the part about actually being here still unnerved him. And there was something else. He sensed a heaviness as he looked out at the faces of the people who walked up and down Broad Street— the worker bees and the businessmen, attorneys, real estate agents, and tour guides.
He didn’t know much about the financial world. He made sure to keep his life real simple where money was concerned. He only owned one credit card, which he paid off every month, and he’d bought his used truck outright and paid off his student loans right after he graduated, thanks to his little inheritance from his father. As for his homes, they had been owned through the church ever since he took his first job, and he didn’t know what it was like to have a mortgage or be upside down in one. But he understood enough to know that the economy was nosediving, and the people around him, in their designer clothes and luxury cars, must be suffering.
He thought back to the woman in church last Sunday. Her terrifying shriek had instantly brought to mind the dream he’d had of the city South of Broad with the dark, rectangular windows and the people still as stones. Back in Ellijay, folks wore their troubles on their coat sleeves. You could see it in their gait, in their well-worn clothes, in their sagging jowls. And they rarely hesitated in opening up and telling all, in hopes someone would lend them a hand. Everybody knew everyone else’s business anyhow, so it was silly to pretend like all was well when it wasn’t. But in downtown Charleston, people’s mental and emotional states were difficult to discern. Fear and suffering could easily be masked with a fine hairdo, a tailored suit, and a stiff, white-toothed smile, and he worried that he might not be able to put his finger on the very needs of the flock the Lord had called him to shepherd.
Of course, what they needed was the love of Christ. And the joyful expectation of an eternity with him. That was always the answer for everyone, no matter what their circumstances. But how to find the door that leads to someone’s heart? The search always started with identifying someone’s longings and needs, and at the moment, this remained a mystery to him.
His first sermon with the Alpha promotion was met with very little response. Only two people outside of the vestry and staff had signed up for the program that started next week, and Roy was feeling discouraged about it.
He often envisioned the tall and beautiful woman in the bell tower. Anne Brumley. He had thought about her more than once since she sat on his piazza sipping tea. With a little research, he’d found out that the bell ringers practiced every Thursday evening at five, and somehow he always found himself walking toward the corner of Meeting and Broad around that time, but he hadn’t seen her yet. She was one of the few people he’d met thus far who didn’t hide her faith or what was truly on her heart. This gave him hope, somehow. He prayed he might cross paths with her again.
He called the home of the Doctors Sutton each day that week, but he always got the answering machine. On the afternoon of his installation, while his mama took Rose to pick up the dress Ms. B. had picked out for her at a children’s boutique on King Street, Roy walked on over to Legare Street again and knocked on the door.
A woman who introduced herself as the housekeeper answered, but he could see the woman from church, Dr. Lish Sutton, sitting in a chair in a drawing room just beyond the foyer, and he could hear a baby crying somewhere else in the house.
“I was hoping to check in on Dr. Sutton. To see how she’s feeling.”
The woman looked at his clerical collar and then over to Dr. Sutton. “She’s not all the way awake right now.”
The baby’s cry grew into a wail that echoed through the two-story foyer. The housekeeper looked up to the stairs and back to him. Then she called over her shoulder. “Miss Lish, the preacher’s here to see you. I’m going to let him in and go feed the baby.”
The woman sitting in the chair looked toward the foyer. She was squinting her eyes as though she were trying to see him from a long distance away.
The housekeeper shook her head in what seemed to be exasperation. “Come on in, Father,” she said. “I don’t see how it could hurt.” She walked to the kitchen, grabbed a bottle, and made her way up the stairs as the baby wailed on.
Roy ambled carefully into the sitting room and kept a good distance from the woman. He didn’t want to startle her.
“Dr. Sutton, I’m Roy Summerall, the new rector at St. Michael’s.” He reached out his hand, but she didn’t move to shake it, so he put it gently down at his side. He tried to meet her eyes. “I just came by to see about you.”
The woman continued to stare at him through an invisible haze. He figured she was on some kind of medication. There must be something mental going on, and he didn’t want to press her or upset her.
“May I pray with you?” he asked.
She looked down and nodded her head slowly.
“Thank you,” he said. He didn’t want to lay hands on her like he usually did with someone who was ill, so he stood right where he was, lifted out his hands, and uttered, “Come, Holy Spirit. Be present in this home. Take care of Dr. Sutton and her family. Heal any ailment that exists. Flood her heart with your love.”
As he uttered the words, he watched her almost go limp for a moment, and he was afraid she might fall forward out of her chair. He stepped closer so he could catch her if need be. But in a few moments, she sat back up and squinted at him again.
Before long, the housekeeper came downstairs with a red-cheeked baby girl who gave him a wide, gummy smile. His heart did a flip. Oh, he wanted another baby. Was there anything like having one? When the child reached for him, the housekeeper said, “You can hold her.” He took her in his arms as the woman went over to Dr. Sutton with a glass of water and a pill.
When the baby started to fuss, the housekeeper said, “See if she’ll burp.” And she put a cloth on his shoulder and he patted the child’s back as he walked back and forth in the foyer admiring all of the family photos.
Suddenly he saw a picture of three little girls, arm in arm on a bench at The Battery and he recognized the redhead at once. It was Anne Brumley who had spent her summers in this home. Then he scanned the other pictures on the wall and found a recent image of Anne, her long wavy hair draped across her shoulders with a big smile and her arm around Dr. Sutton and another woman.
Then he heard, in the distance, the tenor bell being rung up in preparation for the two forty-five-minute peals that would both precede and follow his installation.
He prayed a blessing over the child, then walked into the kitchen where the housekeeper was pulling a roast out of the oven. “I’ve got a service soon. Mind if I give her back to you?”
“Yes, sir.” She opened her arms.
He looked toward the living room and back again. “I hope you all will call on me if I can help in any way.”
The housekeeper nodded. “I’ll let Mr. Drew know you came by.”
“Thank you,” he said. He kissed the baby on the forehead and said good-bye to Dr. Sutton, who seemed to have fallen asleep upright in the chair, though her eyes weren’t completely closed.
The installation was glorious. The bishop, dressed in his long, heavy robe and high hat and shepherd’s crook, gave a stirring homily about the mystery of grace, and the church presented Roy with a variety of symbolic gifts for his ministry, including an antique key, a silver chalice, a miniature bell attached to a pulley, and a King James Bible that had been handed down by each of the preceding rectors dating back to 1751.
Roy’s mama was all dressed up for the ceremony in a purple lacy cocktail dress from the Myrtle Beach Outlet Mall, and Rose looked like an angel herself in a pale pink dress with puffy sleeves and a wide sash, which Ms. B. informed him was made of something called raw silk. And Ms. B. had pulled Rose’s hair back in a bun, into which she had tucked some pink rosebuds. Roy felt a lump in his throat when he saw those roses in her shiny black hair.
Even Chick wore a coat and tie for the occasion. He and Nikki and the kids had made the trip, and his boys looked terribly uncomfortable in the clip-on ties and polyester oxford shirts their granny had bought them at the Marshall’s in Darlington.
Skeeter and Candy Mills were there, too, their faces and hair all fixed up, sporting the jewelry they only wore at Christmas and Easter time. They both gave him a warm embrace. And Candy presented Ms. B. with some bright orange cupcakes from the Piggly Wiggly with candy corn on top. The elderly lady graciously accepted the contribution and immediately moved them from their plastic container to an ornate silver tray. She put them front and center on the sweets table alongside the petits fours and lemon squares and slices of hummingbird cake.
Roy stood in a receiving line for over an hour with Rose by his side and Mama nearby in case the little girl grew weary of shaking hands. She didn’t. She wanted to know everyone’s name, and he was surprised how she looked each person in the eye, smiled a genuine smile, and answered their rote questions about her age and grade.
The bishop was the last in line, and he embraced Roy hard and said, “This is good, son. Very good.”
“I sure hope so,” Roy said.
The bishop grabbed the young priest’s bum right shoulder and looked him in the eye. He pounded the staff once on the linoleum floor and nodded hard. Then he turned around and headed for the beef tenderloin at the end of the table.
Roy could hear the bells as the ringers continued to change ring from the steeple for a good hour after the installation, and when they finally came down to the parish hall to partake of the festivities, he looked around for the beautiful redhead, but she was nowhere to be seen.
After the last guest left, his mama took Rose home to bed and then Roy helped Samuel, the sexton, break down the tables. When the last chair was stacked, he shook Samuel’s hand, then walked into the kitchen where Ms. B. and her team were putting all the leftovers in plastic containers and pulled her aside.
“Ms. B., do you know Anne Brumley?”
The lady raised her trim eyebrows and smiled. “Yes, I do.” She clamped down the top of a container full of cheese straws. “She’s a lovely lady. A bit tall, but that wouldn’t bother someone as secure in their skin as you.”
He felt his cheeks redden. “I didn’t mean . . .”
The blush gave him away. Ms. B. cocked her head and stacked the container on top of a box of finger sandwiches. “Well, that might be good because Anne Brumley is in England.”
“What?”
“She did an exchange program through a bell ringer association, and she’s over there for some time, I believe.”
“Oh,” he said. He tried not to look too disappointed. He washed his hands and started loading two silver trays full of lemon squares into plastic containers.
After he helped Ms. B. and the worker bees clean the dishes (in spite of their passionate pleas that he not clean up after his own party), he ambled home and found Mama and Rose asleep on her Barbie bed and Donny sawing logs on the sofa in the den with ESPN replaying the NASCAR Talladega race. (Tony Stewart had won after Regan Smith was penalized for his pass.)
When Roy climbed into bed, he looked out of his window at the steeple and the bell tower. It was a clear night and a nearly full moon was hanging beyond the steeple, and he imagined it illuminating the choppy water of the harbor just two blocks away.
It had been a beautiful occasion. So much work on his behalf. He felt both thankful and unworthy. Yet despite Ms. B.’s tireless efforts and the bishop’s stalwart support and the presence of his close-knit family filling up his big house with the sound of their snoozes and snores, he felt alone in this world. Alone like he did in those dark days after he had laid Jean Lee’s body into the earth. Alone like John the Baptist must have felt after Herod had imprisoned him. Roy remembered when John sent word to Christ, saying, “Are you really the One? Or should we expect another?” It was tough to trust in God’s plan for your life when the black void of loneliness engulfed you. When you longed for someone to reach out and hold you, to rest her head against your wide chest and relax in a moment of solace and contentment. Roy braced himself for the awful self-pity that usually followed moments like this. In an effort to stave it off, he put his head in his hands and prayed, “Comfort me. Comfort me, Lord Jesus.”
A few days later, he found a note in his box and recognized Ms. B.’s writing. It simply read:
Miss Anne Brumley
c/o The Central Council of Church Bell Ringers
35 A High Street
Andover, Hampshire County
SP10 1LJ United Kingdom
abrumley@gmail.com
For a few days he kept the little piece of paper tucked in his Bible. He wondered what to do. Should he write? Or
e-mail? Should he contact her at all? He prayed, but he did not receive any sort of confirmation, so he didn’t do a thing.
Alpha started the following week and it was just the staff and the vestry minus Heyward, who had been missing in action for everything except a brief appearance at the installation. Even one of the people who had signed up after his first sermon dropped away, citing a work conflict. The first session was titled “Who is God?” and Nicky Gumbel went to work answering this question on the video screen as Roy and Ms. B. served up fresh-baked flounder with grits and sliced tomatoes to the participants.
Ms. B. seemed discouraged as well that night. When they were washing dishes, she said, “Roy, I think you ought to include a description of Alpha in your next sermon and see if we can get more people for next week. I can think of a good hundred people that need to be here.”
He took the Pyrex dish she handed him and began to dry it. “I sense that too.”
“Of course you do.” She dipped a pair of salad tongs into the soapy water and he watched three bubbles fly up into the air and thought of Rose.
His right shoulder ached and he rubbed it for a moment. “You know, I worry sometimes, Ms. B. That I don’t understand these folks too well. I’m country come to town. We both know that. But I think I’m supposed to be here—”
“I know you are.” She handed him the tongs.
“Well, how do you think I can reach these folks? I mean, what makes them tick?”
She turned for a moment and faced him head-on. “Why don’t you ask them?”
Roy blinked hard and wondered how to go about that. The thought occurred to him—the Advent prayers. He had once attended a church in seminary where the priest prayed for every member and their specific needs during Advent. Why couldn’t he do that? He would pass out the cards over the next few Sundays and ask folks to put their specific requests down.
“Wow.” He smiled at Ms. B. who had already piled three trays beside him by the time he came to. “You sure are a wise woman.”
“Lady.” She winked at him and her twinkly gray eyes smiled.
“Yes, ma’am,” he said. “Don’t ever stop correcting me.”
The following week when Roy picked Rose up from school, she dissolved into tears in the back seat of his truck before the teacher had even closed the door.
“What’s wrong, baby?” She had been adjusting to her new life so beautifully. She’d made friends at school and church and had so many invitations to parties and play dates that he could hardly keep up.
He pulled over just beyond the pickup line. Then he got out and moved to the back seat beside her, where he took her in his arms. “What in the world is wrong, Rosebud?” He rubbed her bony little back. “Tell me, now.”
He noticed a bright yellow piece of paper that she had crumbled in her hand. She opened it up for him to see. It read:
Margaret is turning seven
Hooray! Hoorah! Yippee!
And she’d like you to come
To a Mother-Daughter tea!
Wear your fancy dress
And bring your Mom along.
We’ll provide the white gloves
And tea cakes and song.
October 22, 2008
4 pm
124 Tradd Street
RSVP to Margaret’s Mom at 224-6741
When he finished reading the invitation, he looked over to Rose, who was staring at him with a kind of righteous fury in her eyes.
“Oh, honey,” he said. “It’ll be okay. We could ask Granny to come down for this, or I bet Ms. B. would be downright delighted to take you.”
She bit her lip and her round chin puckered as the tears came again.
“I don’t want Granny or Ms. B!”
He pulled a strand of dark hair out of her eyes. “I could take you then. Wouldn’t that be neat?”
“No!” She looked out through the back window as one smiling, well-dressed mother after another picked up a child from the carpool line.
Then she turned back to him. “I want a mother!”
Roy fell back against the seat.
She pounded him on his arm. Hard. “I wish you would find one. And so does Granny.”
He leaned his head back against the headrest. He could feel her staring him down.
“I’ve been praying about this, sweetie.”
“I’m tired of you praying, Daddy.” She sat up until he looked at her. “I want you to do something about it!”
He furrowed his thick dark eyebrows and pulled her close to him.
“Please, Daddy!” She relaxed into his arms and whispered. “Please try. I didn’t know Mama, except through what you’ve told me. But I know she’d want me to have a mother.”
He pulled back and kissed the top of her head. “You’re right,” he whispered. “She would.”
“So you’ll try?” She wouldn’t let him out of her gaze.
He took a deep breath and swallowed. He nodded, and she unfolded the crumpled paper.
“If you’ll really try, then let’s ask Ms. B. to take me to this.” She handed him the invite. “’Cause I know it doesn’t happen that fast.”
That night, Roy got out his paper and pen and wrote Anne Brumley a good old-fashioned letter.
Dear Miss Brumley,
I hope this finds you well. Rose and I kept hoping we would cross paths with you again, but I recently learned that you are in England for an extended period of time. How long?
I hope you are enjoying your exchange program. It must be exciting to study with the experts in the field. I often imagine what it might be like to work for Nicky Gumbel or Billy Graham or C.S. Lewis (if he were still alive). Those are my heroes.
Anyway, I hope you don’t mind me writing to you. The truth is, I’ve been thinking about you ever since we met. This may be unmannerly and forward, but I want you to know I’m a widower. I have been for almost six years now, and my daughter and I both feel as though we are missing a vital member of our family. Kind of like a three-legged stool without the second leg. I haven’t been on a date since my wife died, but I think it might be time.
If you’re at all interested in getting to know me in that regard, write back and we can begin a dialogue. If you’re not, please don’t feel bad. And don’t feel strange about coming back to St. Michael’s after your exchange program.
I’m trusting God in this, and I know he’ll bring the right person at the right time for me and for you if you so desire.
Sincerely,
Roy Summerall
That Sunday, he gave a heartfelt sermon based on the passage from Matthew 6:25–33 about how the Lord clothes the lilies of the field and feeds the birds of the air, so be certain in these uncertain times that he will take care of you. How much more valuable are you than the birds and lilies? Much more. He had the ushers hand out little pieces of paper with “Prayer Requests” written on top, and he asked everyone to put down one request from their heart. (They could sign their name, but they didn’t have to.) And he would pray for each member of the congregation. Then he concluded with a second invitation to Alpha the following Tuesday.
Two days later, forty-three new people showed up at the church for the program! Ms. B. quickly pulled casseroles out of the freezer and sent some members of her hospitality committee down to the Harris Teeter to get some salad makings and bread, and she served a delicious hodgepodge supper that included lasagna, chicken Divan, egg-and-sausage casserole, and a garden salad.
“It was a loaves-and-fishes miracle!” she said to Roy after he walked the last surprise participant to their car. “The freezer just kept producing Pyrex dishes with frozen meals. I had no idea we had so many in there!”
Two weeks later he received a letter with unfamiliar handwriting and a stamp of Queen Elizabeth on the front.
He tucked it in his Bible, and after he got Rose down that night, he unsealed it.
Dear Mr. Summerall,
Thank you for your letter. It was a true surprise, and I must admit—a delightful one. Yes, I am learning a great deal here. I am committed to a six-month exchange program where I’ll ring many of the oldest bells around the country with changing ringers who are masters and even composers of this rare ministry and art form. Last week I rang a two-ton tenor bell in a church in Bath! It nearly lifted me off the floor on the first hand stroke. Like the change ringers in Charleston, it is a warm, friendly, and eclectic group, and I am quite at home here. (I spent several months in London when I was in college, and I very much enjoy the people and the culture, from the charming accents to the time set aside for tea and scones every afternoon!)
As for your request, I must answer, yes; I would be interested in getting to know you better. I am single, and I have never been married. If we’re going to be perfectly honest, I might as well say it has been a longstanding, fervent prayer of mine to meet someone. It may not be what God has in store for my life, but I am willing to take another step down this road if you are. I’ll look forward to hearing from you.
Sincerely,
Anne Brumley (Please call me by my first name from now on. Also, in the interest of time, I am happy to receive e-mails as well. I’m at abrumley@gmail.com)
Doggone if his heart didn’t skip a beat when he read and reread the letter! After the third time, he immediately thanked God and sat down at his computer where he spent the next hour typing Anne Brumley an e-mail, telling her whatever popped in his mind about him, his family, and his ministry. It was ten paragraphs by the time he pressed Send. He hoped she would write back soon.