“I’ll be arriving sometime, probably late afternoon, on Monday, Ms. Brinson. I’ve studied the plans and the photographs you sent me, and I do believe I can have your church looking brand-new in a few weeks. I look forward to taking on the task.”
“Please, call me Rosemary,” she’d stammered, in spite of trying to sound professional and all-business. “And you’re sure you don’t need a place to stay?”
“No, I have my trailer. I’ll be comfortable there.” A slight pause, then, “It’s home, after all.”
Home. A travel trailer with another trailer full of equipment attached to it. What kind of home was that?
“The kind a wandering soul likes to hang out in,” she reminded herself now as she finished her toast and mayhaw jelly. “Apparently, our steeplejack likes to travel light.”
She was still amazed that the church board had agreed to let her use such an unusual, yet highly traditional, means of doing the work on the steeple. The old-timers had balked at first, but once Rosemary had convinced them that a steeplejack would be much more thorough and less expensive than cranes and scaffolding, they’d reconsidered and voted to back her.
“We have you to thank, Rosemary,” the Reverend Clancy had told her yesterday as she’d closed down the church day care attached to the educational building across from the main sanctuary. “We’da never raised all that money without you in charge of the committee. You sure know how to get things done.”
“Only because I wanted this so much, Preacher,” she’d replied. “This church means a lot to this town, and to me. We have to preserve it.”
This morning, as she stood sipping the last of her coffee before heading off to her job as director of education for the church school, she had to wonder why she’d poured her heart into renovating the old Gothic-designed church.
Maybe it was because she’d been christened there as a baby, as had her older brother, Danny. Maybe it was because Danny had married his high-school sweetheart there, and Reverend Clancy had christened Danny’s new daughter, Emily, within the peaceful confines of the spacious sanctuary, illuminated all around by beautiful stained-glass windows. They’d been members of the church all of their lives, after all.
Maybe it was because Rosemary had sat there, through her mother’s funeral last year, and somehow, she’d survived a grief so brutal, so consuming, that she wanted the church that had held her in its arms to survive, too.
Or maybe she’d taken on the task of renovating the old church because she needed to stay busy at something tangible, something worth fighting for, something that would bring about hope and rebirth, instead of despair and death.
Pushing away thoughts of the past year’s unhappiness, Rosemary turned around to find her father staring at her with the dull, vacant look she’d come to recognize and dread.
“Coffee, Dad?” she asked as she automatically headed for the cabinet by the sink to get a cup. “Your toast is on the stove. Would you like a scrambled egg with it?”
Clayton Brinson stood just inside the kitchen door, his bloodshot gray eyes wandering over the bright, sunny kitchen as if in search of something, someone. He wore old, worn khaki work pants, left over from his thirty years as a line supervisor at the local manufacturing company, and a once-white ribbed undershirt that stretched across the noticeable paunch hanging over his empty belt loops. His sparse salt-and-pepper hair stood out in stubborn tufts on his receding hairline, its determined stance as stoic and firm as the man who refused to comb it—the man who refused to accept that his wife was dead and gone, the man who refused to even get dressed most mornings, who blamed God and his daughter for the death of his beloved wife, Eunice.
“Toast and coffee, girl,” he said in a gruff, early-morning voice. “How many times do I have to tell you, that’s all I ever want for breakfast?”
Rosemary didn’t reply. She was used to her father’s cold nature and curt remarks. It was, after all, part of the punishment, part of the penance she must endure. That she must endure was an unspoken agreement between the shell of the man to whom she’d once been so close and the shell of the woman she’d become.
Clayton had always been a hard, distant man. Strong, hardworking, a good father and husband, he’d never fully understood her mother’s devotion to the church. But because he loved Eunice, because she made him smile and laugh, he’d indulged her by dutifully attending services and giving money to the church. The pretense had ended with her death, though. Clayton existed these days on bitterness and loneliness, but Rosemary refused to give in or give up on Clayton. God would lead him home. She knew this in her heart. This morning, she’d asked for patience to see her father through, and guidance for herself. And she remembered how things once were.
Once, not so very long ago, her father would have bounded into the kitchen with a cheerful smile plastered on his face, to demand his eggs and grits. Once, her mother would have been standing at this window, admiring the spire of her church down the street, thanking God for the new day.
Eunice would have turned to lift a dark eyebrow at her husband. “Hungry this morning, Clayton?”
“Yep, and in a hurry. Got things to do down at the mill. A man’s work never ends.”
“Nor does a woman’s.”
Once, Rosemary would have come up on this scene, and she would have smiled at the good-natured bantering between her parents, before she’d gone off to school, or later, after work. Even after she’d moved out of the house to attend college, and then later to live in her own garage apartment just down the street, she could always count on finding her mother in the kitchen with a fresh-baked pie and her father humming and nuzzling her mother’s slender neck before he headed off to work.
Once, her father would have greeted her with a smile and a kiss, and a teasing, “Found a fellow yet?”
Once.
As she searched the refrigerator for the raspberry jam her father liked on his toast, she thought about the fellow she’d found and lost, and thought about the life she’d planned with that same fellow, and lost.
“Here’s your toast, Dad,” she said as she set the plate in front of him. “I’ll see you at lunch.”
“And don’t be late today,” he called without looking up. “Twelve noon, girl.”
“I won’t. I’ll be here at five till.”
She escaped the house, her breath coming deep and long to take in the fresh air of the coming spring. The nearby foothills were near bursting with it, their greens as fresh as mint, their white dogwood blossoms as delicate as fine lace. A new beginning. A new season.
This morning, this fine new spring morning, Rosemary Brinson looked to God to show her what her purpose was, and asked Him to help her find a new season. She needed a time to heal.
Then she looked up at the towering, ornamental spire of her church and reminded herself—today would be different.
Today, the steeplejack was coming.
In spite of herself, she couldn’t wait to meet him.
Kirk Lawrence turned his rig off Highway 441 to follow the Welcome sign to Alba Mountain, Georgia, population ten thousand. He couldn’t wait to get started on the renovations for the First United Methodist Church of Alba Mountain. As always, he felt the hum of a challenge, felt the rush of adrenaline a new job always brought, felt the nudge of a new town, with new faces, calling to him.
Alba had called him just as he was finishing work on a two-hundred-year-old church in Maryland. Alba, or Alba Mountain, depending on whom you were talking to, was a small town on the southern