All for a Song Read online

  Now, watching him in her kitchen, some of those same feelings stirred within her, like so many blossoms set loose in a spring breeze. And yet there was an anchoring deep within, like a root growing straight through her body into the kitchen floor. She’d never known any home other than this, never seen any man in this room other than her father and her brother. Suddenly, here was Brent, looking completely at ease, like he’d been here all along. Like he’d be here forever. And the thought of both felt inexplicably frightening.

  “I don’t think I ever saw my pa do dishes.” She hoped the introduction of her father would push away some of the thoughts that would have undoubtedly brought about his displeasure.

  “He must not have lived many years as a bachelor.”

  “Guess not.”

  She drained her coffee and handed him the empty cup as the clock in the front room let out a single quarter-hour chime.

  “It’s late.” Brent dried his hands with the tea towel draped over a thin rod beneath the sink.

  “Just think, if I hadn’t been so late for supper, you’d already be safe and snug in your own home.”

  “Well then, I’m glad. Gives us more time together.”

  He was leaning against the countertop with both hands in his pockets. A lock of hair had dropped below one eye. She stared down at the familiar blue-and-white-checked cloth that covered the kitchen table and worked her finger around one of the squares. “Had some extra time with my ma, too.”

  “I did.”

  The ticking of the clock carried clear into the kitchen, the silence between them thick as pudding. She felt his eyes on her but kept her own downcast, even when she knew he’d come around the table—close enough that she could feel his sleeve brush against her arm.

  She looked up. “What did you talk about?” As if she didn’t know, as if Ma hadn’t been corralling the two of them toward each other since the first Sunday Reverend Brent Logan came before the church board last winter.

  He smiled. “Ecclesiastes. I’m drafting a sermon series. Wisdom for These Wicked Times.”

  “Do you really think these times are wicked?”

  “No more than they ever have been, I guess.” He’d come closer. Had the little lamp burned like the sun, she’d be consumed in his shadow. “But your ma has some pretty clear ideas about how to avoid the pit of certain temptations.”

  “Does she? Well then, I’m surprised she left us here alone.”

  “And I, for one, am glad she did.”

  He hooked his finger under her chin and tilted her face for a kiss. “You know I care for you.”

  “I know you do.”

  He kissed her, long and deep—such a thing to happen right there in her mother’s kitchen. The strength of it wobbled her, and she reached down to the table to steady herself. Her hand brushed against the cobbler dish as she tasted the spiced sweetness on his lips.

  “I probably shouldn’t take such liberties,” Brent said, drawing away.

  “Then you prob’ly should be headin’ home.”

  Before either could have a change of heart, she took his hand. “We’d best go out through the kitchen door, lest Ma get a splinter in her ear from listenin’ so close. I’ll walk with you to the path.”

  He looked down. “You don’t have your shoes on.”

  His grin broke the tension, and she lifted one foot, arranging her toes in a way that, to her, seemed provocative. “Are you scandalized?”

  “Merely impressed.”

  He led the way, holding the door open to the damp spring night and touching the small of her back as she walked past. Once they were off the narrow set of steps, she felt her hand encased in his. The warmth of it centered her. Together they walked around to the front of the house, her steps instinctively taking them to the worn stone path that connected their home to the main road.

  “Cold?” he asked.

  “A bit.” She tucked herself closer to him.

  “Can I ask you a question?”

  There was little walking left to do, and he seemed to be slowing their pace to allow for conversation.

  “Of course.”

  “Where were you today? What kept you so late into the evening? I mean, when you came home, you looked positively—”

  “Wild?”

  “For lack of a better word, I guess.”

  She looked up past him, to the velvet sky dotted with diamond stars. The tips of the trees looked like a bric-a-brac border.

  “There’s a grove in yonder.” She pointed vaguely up the road. “Like a fairy clearin’ in the middle of the forest. Been goin’ since I was a little girl. And when I have myself a mostly empty day—” she shrugged—“I go.”

  “And summon the fairies?”

  “No.” She traced her toe along a ragged edge of stone. “I write.”

  “Stories?”

  Nothing in his face or voice mocked her, and if whatever she felt for him was ever going to turn to pure love, it would begin at this moment.

  “Not so much. More like poems, I guess. Or even prayers. Whatever the Lord brings to my mind. And sometimes I have my guitar—”

  “Guitar?”

  They were at the end of the path, fully stopped. Dorothy Lynn tossed a wistful glance toward the darkened porch.

  “Ma hates it. Says it’s not fit for a lady. It was my brother’s. He left it to me when he went off to the war, so I play it. At first just to help me feel closer to him. These days, I guess, just for me. And then sometimes what I write, well, it gets to be a song.”

  She waited for him to protest. Or laugh. Or, worse, give her the equivalent of a pat on the head and proclaim her hobby as something delightful.

  “I’d love to hear one of your songs sometime.”

  Dorothy Lynn let out her breath. “No one’s ever asked that of me before. Fact is, I never told nobody. Sometimes in the evenin’ I used to play for the family, just singin’ hymns and all. But never my own songs. I don’t think Pa would have taken to such vanity.”

  “I’m not your pa. But I wish he were here. I’d like to talk to him. As it is, I’ve gone to the Lord, praying for guidance, for him to show me—” He broke off and took a step back, holding Dorothy Lynn at arm’s length. “Dorothy Lynn Dunbar, I’ve loved you since the moment I laid eyes on you. Do you remember that day?”

  Even after nearly a year, she remembered it perfectly.

  “You and Pa were workin’ on the baptistery—”

  “And you brought us a bucket lunch from home. You were wearing a white dress with a pink sash.”

  She remembered how Ma had practically pushed her out the door to run the errand. Always there had been this inextricable link between them—Brent under Pa’s guidance, Brent the object of Ma’s insistence.

  “Sometimes I worry that I’ll get this all mixed up,” she said, “you comin’ along so soon after Pa took sick. Havin’ you here at night, in his chair, readin’ his books. It warms me, but—”

  He interrupted her with what started as a quick kiss, probably just to stop her from her rambling, but she drew him close before he could pull away. There in the night he became a man different from any she had known as he lifted her clear off her feet, weightless as the mist.

  The engagement was not made official until the third Sunday in May, when Brent, having patiently waited through the litany of prayer requests, announced that not only had he found a home in Heron’s Nest First Christian Church, but he’d also found a bride in its midst. If gossip were to be believed, nobody was truly surprised, and they erupted into applause—something more frowned upon than not. Brent walked out from behind the pulpit and stood at the top of the aisle—the groom awaiting his bride. At Ma’s subtle insistence, Dorothy Lynn joined him there, looking out into the sea of faces as familiar as her very own. Afterwards, Dorothy Lynn took her place in the front-row family pew where she’d spent nearly every Sunday of her entire life. Ma sat to her left, but the rest of the bench loomed empty, just as it had for years. For a moment, it s
eemed very little had changed.

  Brent took his place in a high-backed chair, like a prince on a throne. Not a king, for the Heron’s Nest congregation would recognize no man other than Jesus as king. As he sat, the church’s eldest deacon and music leader, Rusty Keyes, came to the pulpit.

  “Now if you’ll join me in the reading of the psalm.”

  This was something Pa had started in his declining health, asking Deacon Keyes to read a psalm to make up for his own inability to preach the entire hour. Near the end, the deacon often bloviated, progressing from mere reading to something more akin to preaching. Since his ascension, Brent sometimes had to stand and clear his throat as a gentle signal that the prince was ready to take the pulpit.

  As the room filled with the whispers of turning Bible pages, Dorothy Lynn felt the weight of a gaze. Brent was looking straight at her in a way that would leave any member of the congregation without a doubt of their dark-parlor antics over the past few weeks. Heat rose along the back of her neck, trapped under the weight of her hair coiled and pinned at the nape.

  Ma cleared her throat and nudged her daughter’s arm. Dutifully, Dorothy Lynn lifted her Bible to her lap. “Where arewe?”

  Ma pointed a silent finger to the top of the page of her own well-worn Bible, and with just one more glance at the prince, Dorothy Lynn quickly turned to hers.

  “The Lord is the portion of mine inheritance and of my cup: thou maintainest my lot.” Deacon Keyes half read, half sang the words. “The lines are fallen unto me in pleasant places; yea, I have a goodly heritage.”

  This morning the lines of Dorothy Lynn’s lot seemed very clear. They stretched no farther than this pew, the pulpit, and the man in the high-backed chair who was to be her husband. She looked up to see Brent Logan offering yet another opportunity for a passing glance. It might be fine for the pastor to be engaged to the former pastor’s daughter—after so much courting and going to her home for suppers and taking the occasional walk and such—but making lovey eyes during Deacon Keyes’s reading was downright disrespectful.

  She lifted her brows, sending a clear warning.

  In response, Brent straightened in his chair and drew his spectacles out of his breast pocket, settling them on his face even as he settled into the Scripture.

  Pleasant places.

  The phrase rattled around in Dorothy Lynn’s head, taking up too much space to allow any commentary to peek in.

  Pleasant places. Familiar faces.

  She brought her hand to her mouth, ostensibly to stifle some cough or yawn or sneeze, and mouthed the words silently, relishing the warm pop of air against her fingers.

  “O church, let our hearts be glad,” Deacon Keyes intoned from the pulpit.

  Dorothy Lynn barely had the presence of mind to chime in with a soft amen with the rest of the congregation. She rummaged in her handbag, finally producing a stub of pencil, and found a scrap of paper within the pages of her Bible—a detailed flyer about the previous summer’s Fourth of July celebration. The information on the front was useless, but the back was covered margin to margin with scribbled lines and verses. She found one empty corner and prayed for enough time to record her words before they disappeared from her mind.

  My world is full of pleasant places,

  Surrounded by familiar faces,

  Yet sometimes I yearn for life beyond these lines.

  The Lord has given me this cup,

  And I’ll trust him to fill it up

  With the—

  By now the scratching of the pencil was audible. Enough to attract Ma’s attention, anyway. A victim of a sidelong glare, Dorothy Lynn folded the paper in a guilty palm and slipped it into her dress pocket. Deacon Keyes hadn’t noticed; he waved his hands and kept his eyes above the heads of the congregants, delivering his lines with the pomp of a great orator. But Brent openly stared, his head cocked to one side, a curious grin granting her forgiveness for such distraction.

  At the end of the hour, after Brent had made his final, thoughtful point and the congregation relinquished the last note of “Jesus Is All the World to Me,” the church was emptied, save for mother and daughter Dunbar, Brent, and the deacon charged with sweeping the floors. Ma had left a pot of ham and beans simmering on the stove and was laying out the rest of the Sunday menu to Brent, whose attention seemed equally divided between Mrs. Dunbar’s daughter and biscuits.

  “You all are free to start without me,” Dorothy Lynn said. “I’ll telephone Darlene.”

  Ma frowned and checked the watch pinned to her blouse. “Are you sure? It seems early.”

  “Maybe I’ll be first in line.” Dorothy Lynn dug around in her handbag and then her pockets, where the folded, unfinished poem called to her. “Or I’ll wait if I have to. But I don’t seem to have a dime.”

  “Here.” Before she’d finished speaking, Brent had extended his hand with the shiny, oddly tiny coin resting in the middle of it.

  “Thank you.” She allowed his fingers to close around hers briefly in taking it. “I’ll tell my sister you’re paying for the call, so she’ll have to be nice.”

  “And tell her to be sure she’s drinking enough milk. Three glasses a day; that’s what I did.” Ma’s voice was raised nearly to a holler to impart this wisdom to her disappearing daughter. The sweeping deacon reprimanded the entire group with a “Hush!” so severe Dorothy Lynn giggled all the way down the church steps.

  With so many people already home from their time of worship, the streets of Heron’s Nest were deserted. Not that they were ever bustling. For that matter, it was a stretch to say that Heron’s Nest had streets in any conventional sense. The roads sprawled and curved and intersected one another in ways that made the town more nest-like than not. Some were even paved to better accommodate the automobiles that made their way through town every now and again. But it was obvious to anybody that the town was not the end result of any settlers’ preconceptions. There had once been just a lumber mill. Then came a dry goods store, then a church, then a blacksmith, then a laundry, and on and on with dwellings of various sizes sprinkled in between. The roads were nothing more than formalized paths stretching namelessly from door to door.

  Dorothy Lynn walked along such a path, humming a new tune just under her breath. Her shoes were unfashionably brown and sturdy, but they made a pleasant rhythm with her unhurried steps. Already the fresh, crisp air had revived her from the heaviness of conviction, and her mind played with the phrase “pleasant places,” winding it around the images of her hometown. A candy shop with pink awnings covering the window, the younger children’s school with the bright-blue door and tire swings on the trees surrounding it. The narrow, tin-roofed structure that people knew to be a saloon but were too polite to say so.

  She ignored the rounded curve of the road and cut through the barber’s yard to arrive at her destination—Jessup’s Countertop Shop. Already there were five people queued up at the locked door. Still, Dorothy Lynn picked up her step and trotted to take her place in line.

  While the town of Heron’s Nest had a strict ordinance prohibiting any kind of commercial sales on the Lord’s Day, an unwritten exception was made for Sunday afternoons at Jessup’s. This was not a typical store. No goods lined the shelves, because there were no shelves. It was one long, narrow room with a gleaming oak countertop lining one wall and five narrow booths lining the other. Behindeach booth’s folding door was a single chair and a telephone. This, then, was the heart of the shop. Jessup had been the first man in Heron’s Nest to have a telephone line, and though other aspiring citizens had put in their own since then, most continued to take advantage of Jessup’s original generosity. One phone call, one nickel. Twice that for long distance, which most calls were. After all, why call a person when you could stand on any given porch and holler for their attention? During the week, telephone customers could also purchase a cold Coca-Cola from the icebox in the far corner or a candy bar from one of the baskets along the counter. But on Sundays the icebox remained closed,
and piles of Hershey’s chocolate bars remained untouched as honorable citizens waited to give far-flung loved ones their weekly conversation.

  Jessup, still dressed in his Sunday suit, smiled through the window of his shop as he opened the door. He was a tall man and thin, with a long, narrow nose that ended in a bulbous lump just above his stubbled lip. Smiling, he greeted each customer with a warm “Afternoon,” while standing a respectable distance from the jar on the countertop.

  “Hello, Jessup.” Dorothy Lynn dropped in her dime and settled back against the counter with her elbows up on the varnished wood.

  “You gonna call that sister of yours?”

  “Yes, sir, if she don’t call me here first. It’s her turn, but you never know.”

  “Not that I begrudge the business, but seems to me your pa should have put a telephone out at your own place, bein’ the preacher and all.”

  “That’s just it.” Dorothy Lynn leaned forward and lowered her voice to guard her words from the few people gathered behind her. “Bad enough we get people on our doorstep day and night. Can you imagine if anyone could just pick up the phone and call? Pa always said he’d have to wear his waders to get through the gossip, how people are.”

  Jessup touched the end of his nose and winked. “Ain’t easy bein’ a keeper of secrets. That machine in there makes spreadin’ stories easy as hot butter on bread. Not that I’m ever listenin’.”

  Dorothy Lynn winked too. “Of course not. By the way, I know my brother has the number here, should he ever need to call. You’d tell me if he did?”

  “Child, I’d keep the line open and run for you myself.”

  “Thanks.”

  In a move so sneaky she almost missed it, Jessup slid a Clark Bar across the counter and whispered, “For the walk home.”

  She smiled a thanks so as not to call attention to the gift and turned her eyes toward the row of closed louvered doors. Intermittent conversation seeped through, punctuated with laughter and a few incredulous shouts. When a door finally opened, Mrs. Philbin—a middle-aged, pear-shaped woman—came out. No doubt she had spent the last ten minutes speaking with her worthless son who’d just been arrested for running moonshine in Virginia, as she kept her eyes downcast in a failing effort to hide her tears. From the corner of her eye, Dorothy Lynn noticed that Mrs. Philbin got a candy bar too.