“Poor Nancy,” she said.
Jim lay in bed that night, unable to sleep. He kept listening for a knock at the door, a tap on the window. All he heard was the wind in the maples, the rattling of the window glass with every gust. Several times he crawled to the end of his bed and pulled back the curtains to stare out into the yard. They had never bothered with curtains before the media people started coming around. There were no neighbours, no one to spy on them.
There was no one out there now, as far as he could tell. He crawled back under his eiderdown. He found his mind drifting, going over what he had heard in church on Sunday, the tape of Father Fisher praying. He could still hear the voice in his head, so eerie, like someone in a trance. But some of the words seemed vaguely familiar.
As Thy transfigured Son, Jesus Christ, our Saviour, commanded His disciples on the mountain to keep what they had seen to themselves, may our secret sins be something just between us.
It was cold outside the covers; Jim didn’t want to leave his bed. But curiosity got the better of him. He climbed out and made his way down the creaking stairs to the parlour. He flipped on a light, blinked in the brightness of it. In a corner by the front window stood a lectern with a large Bible sitting on it. The passage was somewhere in the synoptic gospels, he seemed to recall. It was a special passage for any parishioner of the Church of the Blessed Transfiguration. He flipped through Matthew, scanning the headings.
And there it was. Chapter Seventeen, the Transfiguration of Christ.
“And after six days Jesus taketh Peter, James, and John, his brother, and bringeth them up into a high mountain apart, and was transfigured before them: and His face did shine as the sun, and His raiments were white as the light.”
The transfiguration was a story well known to Sunday schoolers at the Blessed T., for the church was dedicated to the mysterious happening on the mountain when God came down in a great bright cloud and told the disciples that Jesus was His Son and to listen to Him and do what He told them.
Jim thought about the passage. His father had read the Bible, a fair bit. He was interested in Biblical history, too, and he kept a few books, companion volumes, on a shelf near the lectern.
Jim turned there now. He took down a Dictionary of Christian Lore and Legend.
Suddenly the rooster crowed, startling him.
He went to the window, peeking out through the curtains towards the barn. It was a long way until morning. A floodlight illuminated the yard almost to the doors of the barn. The wind picked up and leaves danced but he saw nothing else move. The rooster crowed again.
“Stupid bird,” Jim muttered to himself. His father had once told him that roosters dreamed of sunrise and that was why they sometimes crowed in the middle of the night. But the sound disturbed Jim. He flipped off the light and took the dictionary up to his bedroom, where he perused it by flashlight.
It didn’t take long to discover what he was looking for, but it stunned him all the same. Another bit of the puzzle. He turned off his bedside light and lay there listening to the dark.
He closed his eyes and prayed she would come around. And into the darkness he whispered, “Ruth Rose, have I got news for you!”
11
The fall rains came, hard as sticks, churning up the front yard until it looked like a muddy battlefield. Leaves in soggy wavelets lapped against the steps of the farmhouse.
Jim went out into the rain with a sign he had made under his coat. He had wrapped the sign in a clear plastic bag. With safety pins he attached it to Gladys out at the dam. The sign read, “I know who Tabor is.”
A week passed.
At church, Jim watched Father Fisher, watched his every move, half expecting to see clues drop off him like buttons. Or lip balm dispensers. After the service Jim lined up at the door and shook the pastor’s hand. He looked into his eyes and came face to face with someone looking hard into his own eyes, and they were both looking for the same person.
The rain was so bad Monday afternoon that Everett pulled the bus over at the bottom of the cut road. He turned in his seat to look back at his only passenger.
“This is what you’d call raining cats and dogs, eh, Jimbo? Mind if we wait up a bit? I can’t see a thing and I hate getting them cats and dogs smeared all over the undercarriage, know what I mean?”
Jim minded, all right, but what could he do? The windshield wipers could barely keep up with the downpour. Cats and dogs didn’t begin to describe the deluge. More like beavers and bears.
On the floor of the bus lay a canary yellow notice with muddy shoe marks on it. Jim had one in his binder; all the kids were taking them home. It was about Father Fisher’s Kosovo Relief Fund. They were going to adopt a town in that war-torn Serbian province, a town the size of Ladybank, a few kilometres northeast of Srbica where refugees were flooding. The title of the notice read, “From Ladybank to Ljivno.”
Jim looked up and saw Everett leaning back in his chair reading the same notice. He was wagging his head. “And we think we’ve got problems, eh, Jimbo?”
Jim turned back to the window. Being stuck in the rain was one thing; getting caught up in a one-way conversation with Everett was another.
Suddenly he sat bolt upright in his seat. What was he thinking? Everett had grown up in these parts. And he was Father’s age, more or less.
Jim got up and walked to the front, pretending that all he wanted to do was look out the windshield to check on the road. The hill up ahead — what he could see of it — looked more like a river.
He plunked himself down in the front seat. Everett smiled at him, folded up the notice and tucked it in his pocket.
“Hear they’re nicknamin’ it the Father Plan,” he said.
Jim nodded. “Father Fisher sure gets himself involved, doesn’t he? Was he always like that?”
Everett hooted. “Well, you could say that. But involved in what, would be the question.”
“Like he was wild, kind of?”
“He was a real caution,” said Everett. He whooped again, punched the horn to emphasize the point. Then he leaned towards Jim and whispered behind his hand, as if there was anyone to overhear. “Drinkin’, carousin’ — you name it. Wheelin’ and dealin’. Always near the cow plop but never got his shoes soiled, if you know what I mean.”
“So what changed him?”
Everett leaned back in his seat, scratched his belly. “I guess it was after the fire. The Tufts boy dyin’. You hear about that?” Jim nodded. “Fisher, he just dropped outa sight, eh. Gone. Next thing his drinkin’ buddies hear he’s in Ohio somewhere at theology school. Boy, did that get a few laughs. But people laughed out the other side of their face when he come back, a reg’lar sobersides with a dog collar to boot.”
“Must have come as a shock,” said Jim.
Everett nodded. “Oh, jeez, yeah. His father was fit to be tied. Oh, boy, Wilf Fisher. Now there was a piece of work, if I ever seen one.”
“But the fire…” said Jim, sensing that he was losing Everett.
“Oh, the fire. Well, that was somethin’ else. I chummed around with Stan Tufts a bit — Frankie’s little brother —’til they moved down to Brockville. He and I even wrote once or twice when they headed down to Mississippi. Pen pals, like. Baton Rouge. Hot down there, so I hear.”
This was the trouble with Everett. He could keep his bus on the road, more or less, but not a conversation.
“She was following up on her Acadian roots, Laverne Tufts — except her maiden name was Roncelier, see — French. Never liked it here. So she left that old slug-a-bed Wendall Tufts in Brockville and highed off south with little Stanley. I guess after Frankie died…”