The next eighteen months went by so swiftly for Esme. The ancient seasons of the liturgical year, with its balance of fasts and feasts resting lightly on older pagan foundations, wove in with the slightly different rhythms and observances of the Methodist calendar. In her new pastoral appointment, she went softly with the inevitable changes her personality brought.
She had been asked at her first interview with the circuit stewards: “What will you do for the young people? What will you do to involve the Sunday school in worship? What will you do to improve the profile of the church in the community? What will you do about the falling numbers at Wiles Green?”
Her answer to all those questions had been, “Nothing. I will watch, and wait, and listen. Nothing for a year, at the very least. Then, when I have seen enough to understand, where change seems helpful, it can begin. But at first, nothing. Until they trust me. Let them get familiar with the sound of my voice.”
One of the strangest and most surprising things to Esme in her first probationer appointment had been the unsettling accuracy of the simile describing a congregation and their pastor as sheep and shepherd. The relationship centers in the voice of the shepherd. “My sheep know my voice,” Jesus had said once, long ago, and Esme had grown up thinking that to be a reference to spiritual call, but she had found it in practice to be simpler and more basic than that. When a faith community comes to know and trust a leader, that leader’s voice can bring them to peace. As the pastor’s voice opens the worship of the community, the trust implicit in the relationship gathers the people of God into one, so that their prayer and praise arises in one peaceful drift of incense smoke finding its way to heaven.
In her first year and a half with her new congregations, already there had been the usual trickle of domestic tragedies and small emergencies. A troubled mother had poured out to Esme her concerns about a child truanting from school and making friends on the fringes of the drug world. There had been two bereavements in Portland Street families—one SIDS—and one of her Brockhyrst Priory pastoral visitors had died after a very swift illness. At Wiles Green a much-loved member of the congregation in her nineties had been diagnosed with cancer—Gladys Taylor, a sweet and gentle white-haired lady who hosted the Bible study in her small room in the almshouses by St. Raphaels Church. Gladys, unfailingly kind and understanding, restored Esme’s faith in old ladies; it was with a pang of real sadness that she heard of the diagnosis. As Esme spent time with these and others passing through trouble and anxiety, word went around that when they needed her she came. She chaired her business meetings with competence, insisting that they close no later than half-past nine—well, twenty minutes to ten if “Any Other Business” turned out heated. Her stewards in all three chapels worked well with her, and all her pastoral visitors did their work with diligence. The usual cold wars and simmering feuds seemed temporarily dormant: After eighteen months Esme relaxed enough to consider her own life beyond the occasional visit to her mother or day off window-shopping and enjoying a cappuccino in Brockhyrst Priory.
Her minister’s diary was printed to span well beyond a year, and though she had begun her new one in September at the beginning of the Methodist year, the old one still lay on her desk, handy when required for transferring details of this year’s engagements made far in advance. She intended to trawl through noting down all engagements still forthcoming and all the valuable margin notes of addresses and telephone numbers and personal details; but so far she had not found the time, and last year’s diary had not yet outlived its usefulness.
In February, as Lent began, Esme looked in her old diary—the one that had been new when first she sat at her desk on those August days at the beginning of this appointment—to check the memoranda pages for details of services and study courses held jointly with churches of other denominations at this season of the year.
As she flicked through the pages, she came across her long-forgotten entry:
Bikes Jabez Ferrall, Wiles Green, behind the Old Police House, 50 yards beyond the pub.
She paused and reread it and looked at it for a while. The watery sun of early spring streamed through the window onto her desk. The tree that overhung her driveway was developing sticky red buds that one day soon would unfurl in crumpled new green leaves. When she drove out to Wiles Green for Sunday worship or to lead the Wesley Guild, the dog mercury was advancing cautious early shoots on the verges of the lanes. The air smelt fresh and inviting. A bike, she thought. Why not?
Not today, but one day soon. And time went on, but the idea stayed with her, so that on the Tuesday of Holy Week, before the days erupted into the liturgical marathon of Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Holy Saturday, culminating in Easter Sunday’s multiple Eucharists, Esme made a space to investigate the possibility of buying a bike.
It must be somewhere near here, then.
Nosing through the narrow street, Esme tried to be mindful of the traffic and look out for the Old Police House at the same time. With almost nothing to boast in the way of commercial premises at Wiles Green, the pub stood out proudly, and “A bit beyond the pub, fifty yards, no more—set back a little from the road,” Marcus had said.
Esme pulled up at the roadside, just straddling what pavement there was, and found that the square and solid pink painted house, behind the neatly trimmed privet hedge alongside her car, bore an engraved plate: OLD POLICE HOUSE. So the unmade track half-grown with weeds and rutted with potholes that disappeared around the back of the house must be the path she was looking for.
She climbed out of the car and looked up the little lane. Walking up it she passed on her left the Old Police House and on her right the brick wall that formed the side of a house that fronted the road. A few tender shoots of early weeds and the hopeful beginnings of buddleia sprouted from the base of the wall. Ahead of her, self-seeded hawthorns and elder overhung the path. She could smell wood smoke. Beyond the limits of the back-garden walls that flanked the way, the path finished at a low picket fence lichened and leaning with age, pushed out of place somewhat by an unruly planting of lavender, rosemary, and sage; and a confused burden of honeysuckle vines that sprouted the beginnings of their leaves among the dry, climbing, thorny stems of wild rose. Behind this fence, two gnarled apple trees bowed over the tangle of grass and herbs. A few brown hens wandering there muttered to each other and remarked on the finds, their fierce eyes detected in the undergrowth. In the fence a gate stood ajar, opening onto a damp brick path, home to a multitude of small, early weeds, leading directly to the front door of a cottage. The cottage windows were small and low, the walls red brick, and the door painted green. On the lintel of this door, a hand-painted sign said JABEZ FERRAL—BICYCLE REPAIRS. And a grey-weathered table to the left of the door held a collection of jars with a card propped against them that read LOCAL HONEY, alongside a tray of eggs, a cardboard basket of last year’s apples, and a jam jar for callers to leave their money.
Esme pushed the gate fully open, half-surprised to find it swung silently, hung precisely on perfectly oiled hinges. She took a few steps along the brick path and stopped, entranced. Whoever lived here? Something in the sight of it tugged at the heart of her. It looked peaceful and simple. Quiet and left to be. And a green fragrance of herbs and earth hung about it all. Entirely still on the path she stood, and took it all in, and loved it.
“Can I help you?”
The quiet voice with its country burr startled her, coming from behind, and she turned quickly, flustered momentarily by a sense that she had intruded—an unfamiliar sensation to her these days, accustomed by years of pastoral visiting to a warm and grateful reception by people in any state.
I am so glad I came here, Esme thought, as she looked at the owner of the voice. I am so glad I didn’t miss this in my life.
“Mr. Ferrall?” she said.
Jabez Ferrall looked at her shyly; a little sideways, from under his eyebrows, which were wiry and silver grey. He would have made five feet, seven inches, in his work boots if he had not stood, with the habit of years, slightly hunched. Clothed in faded and shabby green corduroy trousers below a battered brown waxed cotton jacket that was far too big for him, his hair in a waterfall of silver and white almost to his waist, and his beard straggling to a stop somewhere in the middle of his chest, Esme could almost have believed one of the characters from her childhood fairy stories had come to life before her. She gazed at him in delight.
He stood his ground, but something in his habitual stance gave the odd impression that he was backing away from her.
Very bright and clear was his glance when his eyes briefly met hers. A half-formed impression of something very transparent and truthful, and yet wary—no, guarded—no, only shy, Esme thought.
“Yes,” he said, and again, “can I help you?”
“My name’s Esme Browne. I’m the Methodist minister for the chapel here—” Esme registered in herself a sense of surprise as Jabez Ferrall inclined his head slightly—the smallest movement, but clearly indicating that this was not news “—and I’d like to buy a bicycle. I was recommended to come here.”
A flicker of amusement came into his eyes.
“From me?” he said. “Who told you to come to me to buy a bike?”
Esme felt mildly irritated. He didn’t seem to be taking her seriously.
“Well, it’s what you do, isn’t it?” she rejoined crisply, “—bicycle repairs?”
“Yes, but—” he looked at the ground a moment, and when he raised his face to glance at her again, the flicker of amusement had become a lopsided grin, “—come and have a look.”
The path was narrow for two people to pass, and Jabez Ferrall hesitated; once again the bright look he darted at her gave her the odd feeling of coming from behind something, from a place of hiding. As though he saw her more accurately than she might have wished but kept himself hidden.
“Shall I come by you?” he asked, and stepped on to the grass to pass in a careful circle around her. “This way.” He looked over his shoulder at her, and she followed him along the path, which progressed from brick to gravel and mud between a vigorous growth of assorted weeds, around the back of the cottage to a yard paved with stone flags. They crossed the yard, passing the back door of the cottage, where a cast-iron frame supporting an old-fashioned grindstone stood against the wall, to the entrance of a long, low shed built out from the side of the cottage and in the same red brick. As they went across the yard, Esme looked at the small and antiquated green open truck that stood parked rather haphazardly against the hedge that bordered the yard. Does he paint everything green? she wondered. Perhaps he’d had a job lot to use up. A memory stirred somewhere. Hadn’t she seen that truck before? Following Jabez into the shed, which was his workshop, Esme stopped for a moment to allow her eyes to adjust to the gloom. A window, not very big, was set into the same wall as the door, but Esme thought he could have done with at least one large roof light.
Inside the workshop, the walls were lined entirely with a combination of shelves storing an assortment of containers—rusty biscuit tins, mostly, and margarine tubs relabeled with paper and adhesive tape—and things hanging from nails hammered into the brickwork—bicycle parts, machine parts, garden implements, and tools. In the center of the workspace stood a zinc bath of water, the surface of the water made a rainbow with a film of oil. Esme looked at it all; at the cluttered workbench under the window which (she thought) would have admitted more light with fewer cobwebs; the bike stands supporting various frames, a sturdy table spread with newspaper on which stood cleaning cloths, a can of three-in-one oil, and some dismantled machinery that meant nothing to her. There was so much to take in, she did not at first register, against the furthest right-hand wall of the shed, a spreading bed of ashes, in the midst of which lay a small heap of smoldering logs, their lazy smoke drifting up into a brick canopy leading into the flue above. No grate. Not even a fireplace in any very structured sense. A large cat lay dozing on the edge of the mound of ashes.
Jabez meanwhile was picking his way through the clutter of machinery that occupied the periphery of the shop.
“I do have a ladies’ bike, as it happens,” he said, “but it may not be what you had in mind. It’s here.”
He moved aside a bike stand supporting a frame with no rear wheel, pushed a coiled length of hosepipe out of the way with his foot, and brought into the space in the middle of the workshop a very elderly bicycle, in admirable condition, but definitely a creation of yesterday.
“It’s a nice bike.” Jabez looked at it thoughtfully. “Got some components added in the ’40s and ’50s, but a lot of it still original—celluloid-covered bars and mudguards. BSA three-speed hub gear with a panhandle changer. Monitor rear brake. Challis bell—I put that on. I’ve still got the original saddle, but I thought this one would be more comfortable. New tires, of course. I mean, I’ve overhauled it properly, stripped it down, and cleaned it, done all that was needed and waxed the frame and everything. Just depends, as I say, if that’s what you had in mind.”
Again the bright, swift, amused glance that took in more than it gave away.
Esme decided the best course would be to abandon her defensiveness and let him help her.
“I don’t know anything at all about bikes,” she said. “I mean, I can ride one, but I haven’t done for years. I just felt I had to get some exercise and lose some weight. Why shouldn’t I have a bike like this in mind?”
And the honesty seemed to pay off. He looked at her more openly; and this time she saw a kindness that she felt obscurely grateful for. Almost unnoticed, a thought passed the edge of her mind, This man will never cheat me.
“Modern bikes, like you might get in Barton’s Bikes in Southarbour—which I think is also nearer your home for repairs and such—have more sophisticated gears, much lighter aluminum frames; they make for easier cycling, especially on the hills. Cost you more, of course.”
“What are the prices?” Esme asked him.
“Well—maybe you’ll pick up a good modern second-hand bike for two hundred pounds, if you’re lucky and you don’t mind waiting. I’d ask you fifty for this. Because of the tires, and the work I’ve done on it. I didn’t pay for it; Miss McPherson had no more use for it, and she sent it along to me in case I could make anything of it. Nice bike, as I say, but you’d use less puff and muscle on a modern job, there’s no doubt about it.”
“If I buy this bike from you—” Esme hesitated; she had a feeling this was a man who could see through pretense to ulterior motive; “—would you maintain it for me? Help me look after it, I mean. Because they need oiling and stuff, don’t they? You have to know things.” And, which she didn’t say, I just love this place and you so intrigue me, I must find a reason to come back.
Esme had rightly detected Jabez Ferrall’s capacity for insight, but he had a certain humility that prevented him ever imagining Esme to be interested in him. And he was very familiar with other people’s inability to care for their own bicycles.
“It’s how I earn my living,” he said. “I expect you’ll find it easier to do all the routine stuff at home—tire pressures and lubrication, brake blocks, and whatnot—but you can always bring it to me for servicing or if you have any problems or the wheels go out of true.”
Esme looked at him aghast. “I don’t think I can do any of that,” she said. “I’m only just about going to be able to ride it without killing myself.”
His eyes met hers then with a definite twinkle: “You wouldn’t be the only one. I spent most of last Wednesday getting mud and nettle stalks and grass and heaven knows what else out of Mrs. Norman’s axles. Mud’s a bit out of her sphere of experience it would seem. Whatever. I can help.”
“Then I’d like it,” Esme replied, “but I’m not quite sure how I’ll get it home. Is there a bus that comes out here from Southarbour?”
“Was. But not since 1973.”
“Oh.” Esme felt a bit out of her depth. “Well … I expect I could ask someone from chapel to give me a lift over here, only …”
He waited, and raised his eyebrows at her enquiringly. To her considerable embarrassment she could feel herself blushing. “I’d just rather they didn’t know I was getting a bike. In case it turns out that I never really ride it. I’d feel so silly.”
Jabez chuckled. Smoker’s teeth, Esme registered.
“Are you sure you want to buy a bike?” he said. “Why don’t you go home and think about it. I’m not likely to sell this in a hurry.”
Then came a moment of inspiration.
“Could I come here a few times and watch what you do to maintain a bike? So I’d feel more confident?”
Jabez didn’t reply at once.
“Yes … yes, I suppose so,” he said reluctantly, after a moment’s hesitation. He seemed a little taken aback.
“Not if you’d rather I didn’t.”
“No. No, it’s all right. It’s just people don’t come here much; it’s a bit of a refuge.”
Esme took a deep breath. She was unsure how much this man would understand.
“I promise not to be ‘people,’” she said softly, “and I would be very grateful to have temporary admission to a refuge.”
Jabez shifted his grip on the bicycle frame and looked down at it. “Let me just put this away,” he said, and turned from her to reposition the bike against the wall. Having done so, he stayed a moment longer with his back to her, buried his hands in his pockets as he turned again to face her.
“You would be welcome,” he said, “anytime.” But it was quietly spoken and, Esme sensed, somewhat costly. A man who deeply valued his privacy.
“I won’t get in the way.” Her tone beseeched him, and he sighed, moved his head a little impatiently. He returned the hosepipe back to its original position with his foot. He wouldn’t look at her. She saw she had imposed too much on his seclusion.
“Is any time better than another?” she persisted, ashamed at intruding, but determined not to lose this enchanted place.
He shook his head, his gaze averted still. “Anytime.”
The tabby cat rose to its feet among the ashes, elongated its body in a long, shaky stretch and ambled across the shed to wind itself around his ankles, scattering a light fall of the ash that clung to its fur. It had a purr like a diesel engine. Jabez bent to scratch its head, and the cat raised its chin appreciatively, closing its eyes in slow ecstasy.
“Thank you, Mr. Ferrall, for your understanding and your help,” said Esme.
Straightening, he looked from under his eyebrows at her; appraised her carefully for a matter of seconds.
“I expect it had better be ‘Jabez,’” he said.
Esme stowed this treasure in her heart with joy.
When she said good-bye and left him in his workshop, Esme became aware of a happiness that had been absent so long its quality had become unfamiliar. She had become used to the satisfaction of a job well done, and the pleasant company of decent people who were disposed to be nice to her; used to the appreciation and delight called forth in her by a sunny day or dewdrops on a cobweb or the first sight of new lambs in the spring, and used to the comfortable feeling of five minutes longer in a warm bed on a chilly morning, or the relaxation of a cup of coffee enjoyed curled in an armchair at the parsonage after the end of a long business meeting. Life held many comforts and consolations. But not for a long time had she felt this song of delight that came from meeting someone whose soul she recognized as—what? A kindred spirit, maybe? Someone whose being spoke to her destiny? At any rate, someone to whom her own soul gave its unhesitating “yes.”
I think, she reflected as she paused by the front door of his cottage to buy a pot of honey and half a dozen eggs, Jabez Ferrall is going to become a friend.
As she motored peacefully back along the narrow lanes in their dappling of sun and shade, through the wooded hillsides and pastureland around Wiles Green toward Southarbour with its banked terraces of Victorian red-brick dwellings clinging to the steep coastal hills, Esme decided to disregard her standard plan of preaching from the lectionary so as to offer an ordered but varied theological diet of careful scriptural exegesis. Once Easter had gone, and they were back to ordinary time, as a change, she thought she might preach on contentment. Something about the wisdom of staying where you are, being at peace with what life has offered you, living quietly and simply, recognizing when you have enough, and finding satisfaction in daily work, in what is ordinary—even, maybe, a little old-fashioned. Philippians 4 would do nicely as a scriptural basis. The whole of it—possibly trimming Evodia and Syzygus off the beginning and the same with Epaphroditus at the end. And for a text, majoring on the assertion, “I have learned how to be content with whatever I have.” She might even have a point to make about the countryside with its little cottages, and the virtues of the bicycle as compared with the motorcar—always recognizing of course that some people needed cars and even small trucks to fulfill the requirements of their occupations. Worth pointing out though that bicycles have an important part to play in a green future. Especially the older, recycled, less garishly painted kinds of bikes.
Changing down to negotiate a sharp bend, Esme slightly adjusted her thinking to lower the profile of the bikes in her sermon plan. The spiritual potential of cycling she felt sure might be considerable, but its theological application was perhaps limited. Though there again … Her thoughts were interrupted as she pulled out of the bend and spotted ahead of her a line of cars behind an elderly tractor making valiant progress but nonetheless creating an obstruction. On an ordinary day this might have irritated her. Today she chose to regard the tractor as a form of angel, a protective escort gentling the excesses of accelerated modern living, promoting longevity in the rabbit population and inner peace and patience in the lengthening queue of motorists in her rearview mirror. Esme hummed a little tune and felt disinclined to overtake even when the opportunity came.
As the traffic became more congested in the approach to the town, so also the road signs proliferated and the view changed to one of faded advertisement hoardings, bus stops, edge-of-town supermarkets with huge parking lots and adjacent garages, all huddled in against the railway station with its taxi rank and little fruit stall and the inexplicable piles of rusted metal girders and broken-up concrete. Esme felt its familiarity challenged by a new sense that the small country chapels and the village communities in which they were set had a special value, deserving at least as much pastoral attention as a larger town church. Possibly more. The town church could probably look after itself. Up to a point.
When Esme got in, she found thirteen new messages on her answer-phone (all countering her notion that a larger town church could in any sense manage its pastoral or administrative tasks without the assiduous attentions of its minister) and a late mail delivery comprising of a complicated letter about changes to the ministerial pension scheme, the local preachers’ quarterly magazine, and the draft minutes and agenda for next month’s meeting from the church council secretary.
Esme applied her usual solution of a large mug of coffee and a chocolate flapjack. And then another chocolate flapjack. She felt even guiltier and disliked the round contours of her face and the disappearance of her ribs, but it staved off the moment she had to go into her study, begin returning telephone calls, prepare her Sunday sermon, and give a little advance attention to the agendas of her three forthcoming church general meetings.
Easter. Light. Morning light dawning into the darkness of the tomb. New life coming with the light. Living. Living lightly, she thought. The way of the poor carpenter of Nazareth: simplicity, anonymity. Detachment from all the baggage that weighs down human beings: complications of material possessions and relational possessions too—just of being possessive. Jesus let things go maybe; perhaps that’s why they let him go too—the way parting to let him walk through death into life alight and unlimited. His presence reversed cling and effected freedom. Death could not hold him. He lived lightly. He arose. Jabez Ferrall, she thought, you are a most extraordinary man. Easter. Light. The power to be free. Simplicity. Soaring. Flight. Even the sparrows are numbered. Do not be afraid to live simply. Do not be afraid to soar and to fly. Easter. Living lightly. Simplicity. Do not be afraid. Jabez—in the Bible, isn’t it? Where is that?
She leaned back in her chair and reached across to the shelf her concordance shared with several translations of the Bible, the Constitutional Practice and Discipline manual (volumes 1 and 2) of the Methodist church, its Worship Book, and its Minutes of Conference and Directory. Her favorite translation of the Bible was seriously in danger of losing the cover to its spine, and the cello tape patches holding the concordance together had long since yellowed and lost their grip. Must get a replacement copy—I think I can set that against income tax—darn! I haven’t filled in my tax return form, she thought as she turned the fragile browning pages to the “J” section. She found Jabez in 1 Chronicles, in a complicated genealogy of the lineage of King David. He had only a sentence or two, but it had to do with relief from distress. His mother had so named him because of the pain and distress she experienced in giving birth to him. And Jabez prayed to the Lord asking that the divine hand might be stretched over him—but here the texts differed as to the desired outcome; some making the prayer a plea for protection from distress in his own life, others a plea for his own distress to cease, but one curiously interpreting his words as a prayer for God’s blessing to restrain him from evil, so that he would never again be a cause of pain. How strange, Esme thought, as she pondered the texts; I wonder why Jabez Ferrall’s parents chose …? Or maybe they just liked the name Jabez. Anyway, the prayer of his life seemed to be directed toward healing and peace, and in 1 Chronicles God had granted what he asked.
On Good Friday, Esme had an afternoon service out at Wiles Green. It was a circuit tradition to hike the four and three-quarter miles across country along the footpaths from Brockhyrst Priory. The walkers were joined at Wiles Green Chapel by the lazy and the infirm and kept watch for an hour in a vigil meditating on the cross and passion of Jesus before emerging into the Sunday school room for a robust bring-and-share tea.
Along with two or three others, Esme left her car at the chapel and returned as a passenger to the start of the walk. The wind blew chilly but the sun shone, and Esme enjoyed chatting with the various members of her churches, getting to know them a little better as they strolled along the hedgerows or stopped from time to time to admire the pastureland rolling away from the brow of a hill. As they walked together, Esme asked two of her church members, a husband-and-wife couple who ran the newsagency at Brockhyrst Priory, if they knew of Jabez Ferrall. They laughed, saying, “Oh yes, Mr. Ferrall, yes, known him for years.” Before he retired, when Maeve, his wife, was still alive, they said, he’d had a newspaper delivered regularly, but like so many of the old people he had to cut back once he became a pensioner. They asked where Esme had come across him, and she said Marcus had mentioned him to her. They agreed that Mr. Ferrall was a bit of an oddity; then to her excitement Esme spotted a bullfinch, and the conversation moved on to recent sightings of birds.
On arrival at the chapel, the walkers had an opportunity to refresh themselves with a cup of tea before the service. Esme reflected that the sheer quantity of teacups washed up in the course of the afternoon overall required a stoicism worthy of Good Friday on the part of her Wiles Green congregation, nearly all of them well over seventy. As she came in through the door of the chapel, where the trestle tables ready with teacups and milk jugs and huge brown enamel teapots stood in the Sunday school room that formed an anteroom to the worship space, Esme paused to watch her church treasurer, Miss Lucy Trigg, divesting herself of her felt hat and plum-colored tweed coat. Miss Trigg, local preacher and senior steward at Wiles Green, had the entire congregation under her thumb. Though she was raised as a Strict and Particular Baptist, she had found her way to this chapel when still only a teenager and unstintingly lavished her considerable energies upon its spiritual welfare ever since. The Southarbour circuit preachers’ meeting had neither the backbone nor the foresight to refuse to accredit her as a preacher and had suffered the effect of her extraordinary gospel of chimera and retribution ever since. Esme had heard Miss Trigg preach, on one of the Sundays in August before she had taken up her appointment. Miss Trigg always came in handy for August. Ministers might be moving, preachers with schoolchildren in the family necessarily taking their holiday then; but you always could rely on Miss Trigg.
Esme remembered the sermon, vividly. Miss Trigg had preached about the Virgin Mary, with reference to the lamentable slippage of traditional interpretation in the credo of the modern church.
“The Lord Jesus Christ was born of a pure virgin,” she had asserted, more aggressively than was necessary judging by the nods of agreement here and there in her congregation. “He had to be born of a virgin, because if he hadn’t have been, his blood would have been the same kind of blood as yours and mine. And our blood’s no good—no good at all for salvation. Jesus Christ wasn’t born with blood like yours and mine in his veins. He had God’s blood—God’s blood that had to be shed on the cross for our salvation, to save sinners like you and me from the eternal punishment that awaited us. Quite rightly awaited: ‘Deliver us from evil,’ the Lord’s Prayer says, and note that word evil. Evil is not just knocking folks on the head and bumping them off but a hundred and one little things that you and me get up to every hour of every day. We are born evil, sinners from the day of our birth. Little children are evil, however innocent they may look. You leave a child alone in a room with a bowl of sweets on the table, and you can guarantee that child will eat one, for children are thieves and evil by nature until they are saved from the thrall of Satan by the precious blood of the Lamb; and brought to the mercy seat by the free grace of Jesus Christ who gave himself a sacrifice for sin and laid down his life in our place: For the wages of sin is death and only his blood could atone as an acceptable offering to a holy God. ‘Vengeance is mine,’ saith the Lord. We are not called to understand, only to accept. Never be ashamed of the virgin birth.”
Esme had listened to this in some amazement but had over the months come to a workable relationship with her Wiles Green senior steward. Miss Trigg disapproved of her appointment because Esme was not only a woman but also a divorced woman. But she was gracious enough to relinquish none of her offices and maintain her usual grip on the life of the chapel at Wiles Green. Sometimes Esme felt that grip amounted to a stranglehold and was occasionally tempted to the view that if the congregation justified its existence in nothing else it did so by the community service of keeping Miss Trigg contained in the chapel. Still, she kept the books well enough, lived nearby, and was always willing to let in the builders and the man from the electricity board. She terrorized the leaders of the Mothers and Toddlers group that met in the Sunday school room every Thursday and the cleaner employed to come in on a Friday (not today, Good Friday, but that lady was expected to attend the act of worship instead).
Once free of her coat, Miss Trigg got busy with the teapot. Her scones were her own recipe and her tea hot and powerfully strong. Much like the gospel she preaches then, Esme thought as she approached the trestle table, saying, “Lovely day, Miss Trigg—thank you for all this; I know what hard work it is. Half a cup will be plenty, I’ll add some hot water from the urn in the kitchen.”
Sometimes Miss Trigg remembered that smiling was her Christian duty; today she was concentrating on pouring the tea. Age made her hands a little unsteady, but she scorned to acknowledge this. She wanted the Lord to find her at her post when he came again. The second coming caused her a certain amount of consternation because of the amount of traffic on today’s roads, which would inevitably be thrown into mayhem by the selective nature of the rapture. She walked to church when she could, on the days when her sciatica didn’t play her up too badly.
Silently, she held out a half-filled cup to Esme. Their eyes met. “Nice day,” said Miss Trigg gruffly, prompted by the requirements of Christian charity. “Enough?”
Esme knew that shameless flattery and many expressions of solicitous concern for her health could melt that seemingly implacable exterior, but today she felt disinclined.
“Yes. Thank you very much,” she said, taking her drink with her to the refuge of the small and spotless kitchen where some of the ladies of her congregation stood chatting, with dishtowels at the ready.
“I’ve got some neat tea here, needs diluting,” Esme said as she made her way to the urn. They laughed. Esme thought it an undeserved kindness that her church members would usually laugh at her jokes, however feeble. They had many ways of surrounding their ministers with tacit encouragement. She stayed with them, enjoying their good-humored company, while she drank her cup of tea. It occurred to her to ask them about Jabez Ferrall, whom all of them knew. They told her how his wife had died some five or six years ago, and how they thought the bereavement had aged him. They agreed on his devotion to her, especially in nursing her through three or four years of grueling illness; terrible, they said; started in her breast and went to her liver in the end, poor woman. They mused for a little while on his avoidance of chapel people; they said his mother used to be a member at Wiles Green Chapel, years ago, and Mr. Ferrall’s name must surely be in the baptism register somewhere. But they thought there’d been some kind of upset with members of the prayer group while his wife was ill—not that that had stopped him coming because he never came near the place anyway. They agreed that he was a funny old so-and-so and that the old lady who lodged with him was even funnier than he was, and they chuckled as they considered the household. But they all agreed that Mr. Ferrall would be the man to go to if she had any household repairs needing attending to—“He’s handy is Mr. Ferrall, and very honest,” they concluded. Then they took Esme’s cup to wash up as she went into the church to prepare for worship.
They sang the passion hymns of mourning and told again the terrible story of Christ’s betrayal and agony, and this year as every year, despite the resolute habits of ordinary cheerfulness that conditioned their lives, the dark narrative took them down with itself into the eerie dank silence of the tomb.
It was right to remember, Esme thought afterward, but right also to restore people afterward with the conviviality of a chapel tea. This annual event was well supported by all the chapels in the circuit and was an important highlight of the year for Wiles Green.
Eventually, having circulated well and spoken to almost everyone, and having thanked the ladies in the kitchen, Esme slipped away to her car, parked out on the road where others could not box it in.
“Home to finish my Easter sermon,” she said to herself, but she knew she wasn’t going home quite yet.
She could have driven out along Chapel Lane down the back way to Southarbour, but instead she drove into the village, as far as the Old Police House, where she drew up, parking carefully to keep well out of the way of passing traffic but leaving enough space for any pedestrians to pass on the inside as well. For a moment she sat in the car, undecided, unwilling to intrude where she felt unwelcome, aware that such a short time had gone by since last she had called in.
She put her hand on the keys still in the ignition, almost went to turn them and fire the engine again, but instead took them out and got out of the car.
The cottage had all the enchantment of her first visit. She hesitated on the path, wondering whether to knock at the front door, choosing instead to follow the way around to the backyard and the workshop. As she came around the house, she heard the clank and scrape of metal on stone and coming around the corner into the yard, she found Jabez squatting on the ground brushing clean the underneath of a rotary mower that lay on its side in front of him.
He didn’t look up at first, when Esme said hello. For a few seconds, he continued brushing the odd corners and the bottom of the engine without speaking. Esme began to wonder if he had heard her, when he said, “You’re back. Welcome. I can well do with a second pair of hands in a moment when I’m sharpening these blades.”
He glanced around at her briefly. “Unless you’d rather not. You’re not really dressed for stripping down a lawnmower.”
Esme smiled. “I’d like to help,” she said, perching on the edge of a kitchen chair standing out in the yard. She felt a bit self-conscious in her clerical collar and her neat black skirt but was pleased to be not entirely superfluous.
She watched Jabez lay aside the brush and reach for the metal key to undo the nut holding the blade in place. “You got to have it turned this way so the oil doesn’t run into the carburetor,” he remarked, as he laid the blade aside with the nut placed carefully beside it and began to loosen the sump plug under the engine.
“Been at church?” He shot a glance of friendly inquiry at her as he got to his feet and lifted the lawnmower upright over a battered enamel pudding basin to bleed away the old oil.
“Yes,” she said. “It’s Good Friday.”
He looked up at her. “I do know,” he said. “I thought about you in the service.”
He had an old glass meat dish handy for his next task, which was flushing out the sump, after which he set the machine on the ground again and squatted down to dismantle the air filter attached to the carburetor on the side of the engine. “Excuse me a minute,” he said, and carried the outer gauze of the filter in through the open door of his kitchen. She could hear him at the sink, not far within the door, the tap running, and scrubbing, the tap running again, and then he reemerged patting it dry with a dishtowel, and propped it against the house wall at an angle so the air could finish the drying.
He blew the dust off the cardboard section of the filter and set it aside with the gauze. Then, moving light and quick, he crossed the yard to his workshop from where he returned with a big box wrench for the spark plugs.
As he bent over the machine, examining the plugs, he remarked, “I sit in the porch sometimes and listen to the hymns. Even to the service in the summertime if they leave the doors open. I don’t come in, but I sit in the porch sometimes.”
He cleaned off the carbon deposits carefully, fishing in the back pocket of his trousers for a piece of fine sandpaper to rub everything clean.
Esme watched his face, bent over his work, giving nothing away. She felt the by now automatic response of her soul going on alert. This happens to ministers, she had discovered. There is a professional interest that sends a shaft down into the fabric of a minister’s being as tenacious as a dandelion root. “Why don’t you come in?” she asked, with what she hoped was a casual air.
Jabez smiled at the transparency of her proselytizing but continued to concentrate on resetting the gap using his thumbnail as a gauge as he replaced the clean plugs. He dusted the terminals, brushed them lightly with his sandpaper, and refitted the high-tension lead.
“Because I don’t like the church,” he said.
Esme watched him as he checked and blew clean the carburetor jets before he began to reassemble the filter. She liked the composure and focus of his face as he worked.
“But you believe in God?” she ventured.
He glanced up at her momentarily.
“I believe …” he hesitated, searching for the words to say what he wanted. He turned aside and reached for the sump plug, replaced it. “You got to make sure this is tight.”
He paused in what he was doing, rested his weight forward on his knees on the stone flags of the yard. “I believe in the stories you hear of people who died and were resuscitated. Those stories about a long tunnel leading up to the light. And the light is full of love and truth. I believe that. Light that sears and light that dances, exquisite to take your breath away, blinding bright. Light that could cut like a laser but also nourish and heal and clean like sunshine. I believe in that. And that one day I will find my way home there. Or maybe not. Is that God—what I believe in?”
Esme stared at him. “Jabez, that’s beautiful!”
Irritation twitched somewhere in his look, because he hadn’t meant beauty, he’d meant truth.
“You ready to help me with this blade, then?” he said, reaching down for it without looking at her, getting to his feet again, and crossing the yard.
He showed her how he wanted her to turn the handle on the grindstone that revolved in a water bath supported by a cast-iron frame. As she did so, he held the blade against it for sharpening.
“But it doesn’t matter what I believe, I still don’t like the church,” he said, with a sort of stillness of determination that Esme guessed ran very deep.
“Did we hurt you?” she asked, gently. She hoped her tone sounded ingenuous. It wouldn’t do to let him know she’d had the gossip of several church members about him, but she wanted to know about his wife and what it was the prayer group had done to upset him.
Jabez looked suddenly very tired. Sharing his soul had become unfamiliar. He felt unsure about this intrusion.
“That’s fine, you can stop,” he remarked, as he lifted the blade and turned back to the lawnmower again.
Esme wondered if her question would be left unanswered, but as Jabez knelt to reposition the blade on the mower, he glanced at her narrowly from under the wiry silver eyebrows, saying, “I think you may know a bit more about me than you pretend.”
That moment was a crossroads for them. Esme had to decide then whether she wanted Jabez to be an acquaintance or a friend, whether she was to be the minister of the chapel to him, or just herself, Esme.
It is understood that a pastoral relationship is without the quality of truthfulness that a friendship has. The transactions between ministers and their flocks are ritualized; there are expectations and therefore pretenses. This is understood and part of the world of formal relationships undertaken by people in the public eye. But a friend approaches barefoot with needs as unadorned as a beggar’s bowl, or the gift of self like a flower held in the hand.
She might have stayed as a minister then, evaded his rebuke with a joke, retreated to safe footing—“Oh! Sorry! Didn’t mean to intrude!” Esme knew it was possible to make comments of that sort in just such a tone as to imply the other is prickly, oversensitive; there was no need to admit one’s own dishonesty. She might have taken that course, but in her few years as a minister she had learned to know how rare a thing it is to be offered the chance to be truthful. Reality is always so demanding. Not many attempt its rigors.
Jabez refitted the blade as she considered this and tightened the nut with his key, afterward slipping it into his pocket.
“Yes, I do know a bit about you already.” Esme felt ashamed as she said it. “I’ve asked several people about you. I know you were married, and that your wife died; and that something happened there to do with our chapel prayer group. I wanted to find out about it. Just nosy I suppose. It’s none of my business. I’m sorry, Jabez.”
And as simply as that, they crossed over into friendship—his offer of truthfulness and her shamed acceptance. Esme thought later, what slight moments are the occasions of human transformation.
Jabez sat down beside the lawnmower and felt in the pocket of his jacket for a tin of tobacco, inside which were also cigarette papers. He rolled a cigarette, carefully, very thin, and patted his pockets to locate the matches with which to light it. Esme sat on the edge of the wooden chair again and waited for what he would say. Recovery time needed, it seemed. He drew on the cigarette.
“My wife, Maeve,” he said, affecting a hard and matter-of-fact tone, “died of cancer.” He paused, and looked suspiciously at his cigarette, and with good reason, because it had gone out. Esme waited while he relit it. He drew on it, looked at it, and flashed her one quick glance.
“It was awful. Horrible. She lost her hair, and she had a lot of pain. Her arm swelled and her medicines made her sick—desperately sick—and her belly filled up with fluid, and she smelled bad, and she knew she did, and she got so thin she looked as though her teeth didn’t belong in her face anymore. She wanted to stay here, so I nursed her.”
He stopped. Esme waited. He drew on the cigarette, relit it because it was out again. Esme waited.
“And then—we were clutching at straws I think—someone from the chapel,” he did not look at her, but gazed steadfastly ahead at nothing, “asked if a group of them could come to the cottage and pray for Maeve and me. I don’t know what possessed me to agree to it, but—well … perhaps you can imagine. We were short on hope.”
He stopped speaking for a moment, his face set and still, remembering.
“So they came. Here, in our cottage, they came. Not Miss Trigg, she isn’t into all that, but a woman that twittered and a woman with a silent enigmatic smile and a man who stood too close when he talked to me and a little bald bloke who was deaf. To pray for Maeve and me. Maybe you know them. I don’t. I haven’t been to chapel for years, and I think a lot of those that worship there now aren’t the old ones but run out from Southarbour to keep it from closing down.
“Anyway, they said could they lay hands on her for healing, and she wanted it so I said yes. I didn’t want to raise Maeve’s hopes but, you know, her eyes that had been so dull and enduring suddenly looked alive again. I felt angry and helpless because I knew it would be no good. But I went along with it. I helped her into a chair in the middle of the room, and the four of them jostled around her into a group with their eight hands plastered on her thin, wasted shoulders and her poor bald head. A bit excessive. And they started to pray. D’you know the kind of thing? Do they still do it? ‘Lord, send your Spirit, Lord, to heal and bless her, Lord; make her free from pain, Lord, blah, blah, blah.’”
He drew on his cigarette. It was out. He didn’t bother to relight it, but let his hand come down to rest on his knee. He glanced at Esme, but only for a moment.
“I remember it sinking in with such appalling clarity that Maeve was going to die. I hadn’t really faced it till then, till I heard their church-speak full of unreality and realized what reality held for us. I was standing by the table, an onlooker, trying to get under control the grief that was suddenly going crazy inside me. I was trying to put it on one side to deal with later, when the deaf man must have found his moment to get a prayer in edgeways because he startled me by booming out like a foghorn, I mean really in capital letters, ‘OH LORD, WE PRAY FOR MAUVE!’ And it was at that moment that I lost it all. To that extent I suppose he prayed with power, because his prayer certainly had an effect on me. ‘Mauve!’ Inside me it all muddled together; all at once something laughed and something wept and something died. Apart from her funeral and sitting eavesdropping in the porch some Sundays, I never go near chapel nor church. Well, to be fair I hadn’t anyway, not for years.”
A brief, wry grin twisted his face. “You’d have been proud of me though. I made them a cup of tea before they went. And I gave them a biscuit.”
The desolation of this story moved in the center of Esme’s soul. She felt the sharpness of its anguish and was at a loss what to say.
After a moment, “What did Maeve think of the prayer?” she asked. “Did she find it helpful?”
Jabez nodded slowly. “She did. She did, but she died.”
He looked thoughtfully at the lifeless remains of his cigarette in his hand and flicked it back over his shoulder in the direction of the orchard grass that grew down to meet the flags of the yard.
“Esme, I don’t like the church. I don’t like its hypocrisy, and its need to be right and to control everybody. It works by fear and manipulation and doublespeak and to be honest I got no time for it at all. Now if you’ll excuse me—” he got up and lifted the lawnmower into the back of his truck and fetched a can to decant the used oil for recycling; “—I must take this mower down the road to Mr. Griffiths before the afternoon’s over. It was nice to see you.”
There was a definite dismissal in his tone that went beyond the requirements of the afternoon’s tasks. Esme stood up and straightened her skirt. She looked at him, but he didn’t meet her gaze.
“Am I a part of all that, then?” she asked. “The church?”
His eyes flickered, and he stood looking down at the metal can in his hand, slowly screwing down the cap.
“Well, yes,” he said, quietly. “I guess you are.”
Esme felt a sharp pain of disappointment: The moment of honesty that brought intimacy between them seemed to have been lost, and the clarity between them had slipped away, leaving them back as they were, little more than strangers.
“But it’s still okay to come here?” Leave it, Esme, a voice inside her warned. But somehow she couldn’t leave it; she had to be sure.
He sighed, impatiently.
“I run a business here,” he said, adding with a quick glance around his yard and an involuntary laugh, “if I may be permitted to dignify it by calling it that. Anyone can call in anytime. You asked to see how bikes are maintained. That’s all right. Apparently you’re interested in lawnmowers, too. As far as it goes, that’s all fine. But—look—I’m not a mission field. Can we be clear on that?”
Esme felt her color rise. He was denying the pure truth that had shone between them, and she felt belittled and shut out by the way he spoke.
“Most certainly,” she shot back defensively. “You make yourself perfectly clear. I won’t hold you up any longer.”
She left very swiftly, without looking back.