Love Comes Home (25 page)

“Don’t be silly, Tanner. You can’t sing.”

“But you can,” he told her as the organist crashed out some gathering notes. Then a woman with tightly coifed gray hair added piano notes to the organ music. She was supposed to play for Birdie. That was how they’d been doing the church visits. Birdie sang out of the hymnbook and hoped somebody at the church would be willing to play the songs for her. If not, Birdie sang without accompaniment. Jay liked her singing best that way, her voice pure and unhindered.

The congregation stood for the opening hymn. Jay mouthed the words. Birdie was right. He wasn’t much of a singer.

His roundabout pep talk must have been enough. As soon as the song leader spoke Birdie’s name, she popped up and headed toward the front without the slightest sign of nerves. She was like Kate that way. Ready to embrace opportunity and seize whatever life had to offer.

He wanted to think he was the same, but most of his life, he’d had his fists up, ready to sock life in the nose instead of embracing it. With cause. Life had a way of blindsiding him. But that was before Kate. Everything was different in Rosey Corner. Life was good there.

Birdie launched into her first song. “Just a Closer Walk with Thee.” That’s what Aunt Hattie would tell him made being in Rosey Corner good. Made everything good. Opening his heart up to the Lord. Sometimes Jay was still surprised the Lord had hunted him up. Aunt Hattie would say that wasn’t true either. She’d say the Lord was there with him all along. It just took Jay awhile to open his eyes and see him. Aunt Hattie could outpreach most anybody.

Not that he didn’t agree with her. He did. He didn’t know how he would have made it through the war without the Lord. Even so, often as not, he felt closer to the Lord while he was running the corn grinding machine at the feed store than he did in churches like the one he was in this night.

Kate couldn’t understand that. Being in a church pew every Sunday was important to her. Even necessary. A worry wriggled awake in him. It wasn’t normal for Kate not to want to come with them. Wanting to had nothing to do with it, she’d insisted. She needed to get the article done for the Edgeville paper. She’d promised. But Kate never wrote on Sundays.

She wasn’t feeling good. He could see that on her face, but she kept saying she was fine. Putting up a front. That was Kate too. The one who made everything fine. She did make things fine for him, but he hadn’t been able to keep his worry about being a father completely hidden. Kate knew him too well. So to keep him from worrying more, she pretended to be all right when he could see she wasn’t.

They were both doing too much pretending. Losing that closeness he’d so treasured when he first got home. Now for whatever reason, they seemed to be stepping back into their own shadowy corners where neither one of them was willing
to reveal what they were thinking. That needed to change. He wanted that to change. He was glad Kate was strong, but he wanted her to lean on him when she needed to. He wanted to put his arms around her and be a good husband. A good father.

He stared at the men in front of him. Family men. Some maybe home from the war like him. But comfortable there in the Lord’s house with their children beside them. Next year that could be him and Kate with a baby between them. Not between them. Tying them even tighter into a family. He was ready for that. He really was, but at the same time he needed time to get used to families and churches. Things were so different from the war days.

A man in the Army didn’t get much chance to sit in church pews. Jay’s best churchlike times had been under the stars, talking to Sarge about the Bible. Sarge knew his Bible. He didn’t have to open it to tell the men in their unit what it said. He had verse after verse hidden in his heart so no enemy could ever steal the Word of God from him.

There were good times to be had at church too, if Jay could keep his mind from straying from whatever the preacher had to say. When that happened, when he stopped hearing the preacher and started hearing the echo of artillery instead, that’s when he needed to be moving and not a sitting duck for memories of blood and dying. He shut out those thoughts now and concentrated on Birdie singing. With a panicked look, she stuck the word “mountain” in where mountain didn’t fit, but then the right words came back to her.

She let her eyes slide over him. A person could maybe get teary and sing, but not laugh and do any good singing. As she usually did at revival meetings, she sang “Amazing Grace” last. Every eye in the church was on Birdie as her voice wrapped
around them. Even the babies were quiet. Jay had heard her sing that song dozens of times, but it never failed to put chills down his back. He sent up a thankful prayer for the grace he’d been granted and the love he’d been given. For Kate. For Birdie. For living through the war and making it home to Rosey Corner.

At the end of the services, the preacher extended the invitation hymn through five extra verses. Then, most every person there wanted to tell Birdie how much they enjoyed her songs, so it was full dark by the time they got on the road home. Birdie was keyed up the way she always was after singing.

“Did I sound all right?” Birdie didn’t wait for him to answer. “Don’t just say what you think I want to hear. Tell me what you really thought. Did the people like it?”

“You heard them. They thought you were great.”

“But what do you say?” Birdie pushed him for an answer.

Jay glanced over at her. “You know I think you’re great. You give me the holy shivers when you sing.”

“Even when I sing the wrong word?” She made a face and put her hand to her head. “I can’t believe I did that. Didn’t you want to laugh out loud?”

“Seeing as how that bunch seemed pretty straightlaced, I decided I’d better hang on to my solemn look.” Jay grinned at her.

“I know, but I almost got tickled.”

She laughed now. An easy sound that warmed Jay’s heart. She’d changed so much while he was in the Army. Grown nearly as tall as him and become a young woman. He’d been afraid she wouldn’t feel the same about him as she had when she was ten, but they were still buddies.

He laughed with her. “Nothing wrong with laughing in church. I’m thinking the Lord probably laughs at us plenty when he looks down on us at church.”

“That’s what Mike’s always saying too. Or he used to before the war.” Birdie sighed, her laughter gone. “Do you think he’ll ever be like he used to be?”

“Mike had a hard time in that German prison camp. War can test a man’s faith.”

“But you found faith.”

Jay gripped the steering wheel. What he believed still sometimes seemed too raw and fresh to put into words, but he wanted to be able to talk about it to Birdie. “That started with you and Kate here in Rosey Corner before I went off to the war. And believe it or not, Graham. He has a way of setting a man’s thinking straight. That doesn’t mean I didn’t have plenty of testing times during the war. But I didn’t get captured. I stayed free to keep fighting.”

Birdie reached across the seat to give his arm a butterfly touch. “I prayed for you every night, Tanner. Right after I said my name.”

“I felt those prayers, Birdie. Mike knew you were praying for him too. I’m sure the whole church was praying for Mike, but everything has always been sort of easy for Mike. A good family. Knowing what the Lord intended for him early on. Falling in love with Evangeline. Your church here thinking he was the best preacher they ever had.”

“He was the best. I don’t know anybody who didn’t like Mike.” Birdie hurried to change her words. “Everybody still likes Mike. Do you think he’ll start preaching again?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. He’s talking about it again some.”

He’d talked about it to Jay last Sunday. The day was sunny,
so they’d walked out to lean on the fence and watch Mr. Merritt’s two cows in the pasture.

Mike broke the silence between them. “Evangeline wants me to get a church.”

“Why?” Jay asked. “The Lord been talking to her?”

“You don’t have to sound like you don’t think that possible. He talked to you, didn’t he?”

“Yeah, nobody was more surprised about that than me.” Jay looked over at Mike. “So is that what happened? She get a sign from the Lord to prod you back onto the preaching road?”

Mike stared back out at the field and let out a long sigh. “Just the sign coming in with all our bills. With her having to quit her job, things are a little tight. If I had a church along with my job, that would bring in extra money for the baby and all.”

“Babies don’t need a lot.”

“That’s what I thought before Evangeline let me know different. You’ll see when Kate starts talking about fixing up a nursery.”

Jay didn’t say anything. They both knew that while Kate and Evie were sisters, they weren’t much alike. Somebody from the church would loan Kate a cradle and baby blankets and she’d be fine with that. Not Evie. She wanted everything to look like the pictures in the magazines. “Preaching isn’t the only kind of extra job you could get.”

“I know, but it’s not just the money. She thinks I’d be happier if I’m preaching.” Mike kept his eyes straight ahead. “She needs me to be happier with the baby coming.”

“You’re happy about that, aren’t you?”

“I am. I dreamed about getting home and having a family
while I was in Gulag 5. It was all that kept me sane at times. How about you? Did you feel that way too?”

“I wanted to come home for sure.”

“And now here you are settled down with a baby on the way.” Mike smiled over at Jay. “Funny how things work out. Us being best buddies and marrying sisters and now both of us about to be dads.”

“Yeah, funny.” Jay kept his smile on. It wasn’t the time to talk about his worries about being a dad. It was time to help his friend figure out how to be happier again. “Do you want to preach again, Mike?”

“I loved preaching. You know that, Jay.” He gazed up at the clouds drifting across the sky as if searching among them for the right words. “It was good to share the gospel with my church family and be part of their lives in good times and bad.”

“Then why aren’t you preaching now?”

Mike stared down at the ground. “I don’t know.”

“Do you still believe?”

Mike whipped his head around toward Jay. “Of course, I believe. Nothing could ever change that.”

“Okay, so what’s the problem?”

Mike looked back out at the field. When he finally spoke again, his voice was so low Jay had to strain to make out his words. “I was afraid, Jay. I didn’t have enough faith. A man of God shouldn’t have a spirit of fear.”

“You reading the same Bible I am?” Jay didn’t give him time to answer. “Because in my Bible, people get scared all the time.”

“Daniel didn’t. Or Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. Or David when he faced Goliath.”

Jay couldn’t argue about that. Staring at sure death in a fiery furnace or going up against a giant with nothing but a slingshot was more than he could imagine doing without trembling no matter how much he believed. He had charged into enemy fire, but he couldn’t say it was without fear. He ran his hand over the weathered wood fence rail and said the only thing that came to mind. “You didn’t have a slingshot.”

“I could have made one.”

“It wouldn’t have been much good against machine guns.”

“David’s brothers didn’t think a slingshot would be much good against giants with eight-foot swords.”

“But it never says he wasn’t afraid.”

“It doesn’t say he was,” Mike said. “What it does say is that David trusted the Lord.”

“Yeah, but that didn’t mean his heart wasn’t jumping up in his throat when Goliath was stomping down toward him. But even if it wasn’t, even if he wasn’t afraid, there are plenty of others in the Bible who were.” Jay picked at a piece of cedar bark on the fence post while he tried to remember his Bible stories. “What about Elijah running to hide in a cave right after he brought fire down from heaven? Or Moses cowering in front of that burning bush telling God he had the wrong man? Or Peter saying he never knew Jesus? What about those? Afraid in the presence of miracles the likes of which we’ll never see.”

“But they went on and did what God had for them to do.”

“Exactly.” Jay peeled the bark off the post and pitched it into the field.

Mike laughed. “I can’t believe we’re talking Bible and you’re the one trying to convince me instead of the other way around.”

“Things change.”

Those words echoed in his head now as Birdie brought him back to the present by saying, “Mama says he’ll never come back to preach at our church.”

“She could be right.” He pulled out the same words he’d told Mike. They were just as true for Birdie as for Mike. “Things change. People the most of all.”

“You haven’t changed.”

“That’s where you’re wrong. Way wrong. I’m as changed as can be. From a loner to a man with family on every side. Here coming home from church with my little sister.” Jay stared out at the road. “You can’t imagine how different that is to how I was before I came to Rosey Corner.”

“And now you’re going to be a daddy.”

“I am.” Jay kept his eyes on the road and made his hands relax on the steering wheel. He could do this. Men became fathers all the time. But was that the same as being a daddy?

“You have a sister, don’t you?” Birdie asked.

Her question caught him off guard. “I’m surrounded by sisters. You, Tori, Evie. When you marry a Merritt girl, you are gifted with sisters. But I do have one favorite sister.” He glanced over at Birdie. “Since she was the first sister to really like me.”

She covered her mouth to hide her pleased smile. “You were funny.”

“Funny, huh? That’s me. Jay like the bird good for a million laughs.”

“That’s what Fern calls you. See, she thinks you’re funny too.”

“I didn’t think Fern thought anything was funny.”

“She laughs.” When Jay shot her a look, she added, “It’s
just that her laugh is so rusty, hardly anybody knows she’s laughing.”

“Maybe she needs a bottle of laughing oil.”

“See, if she heard you say that, she’d laugh. Fern’s not like everybody thinks she is. She really loves us.”

“You anyway.”