Julia Spencer-Fleming - All Mortal Flesh

Well. She might not come up to snuff in any other way, but she had the troubled spirit and the broken and contrite heart down pat.

She pulled on her parka and gloves and went out to shovel her car free. The clouds had shaken out all their snow and moved on overnight, leaving the morning stars burning clear and bright in an indigo sky. Her brand-new Subaru, purchased with a combination of insurance proceeds and what she couldn’t help thinking of as blood money from the family of the man who destroyed her last vehicle, was a featureless mound of white. She brushed off the windows, the lights, and the door handles, then attacked the driveway behind the car. She figured two paths, each about ten feet long, would give her tires enough traction to make it the rest of the way down the long, narrow road. She was carrying two twenty-five-pound bags of kitty litter in the trunk and had her own snow shovel wedged in the backseat. Between them, she ought to be able to get out of any deep spots.

By the time she finished, she had stripped off both her parka and her sweater and was working in a sweat-dampened turtleneck. She tossed her coat into the Subaru and went inside to put the wash in the dryer. She packed her clothes and her rucksack, wiped down the kitchen and straightened the stack of old New Yorker magazines, knocked the snow off her snowshoes and poles, and had the whole shebang loaded in her car by the time the dryer was finished. She folded the sheets, left them on the end of the bed, and walked out of the cabin for the last time.

The rising sun made Mondrian patches of reddish-orange between the black lines of the trees. She got into the car and watched it ascending in her rearview mirror. She had spent an hour and a half in a continual round of motion. She had not stopped sorrowing for a single moment.

She leaned her head against her hands, folded atop the steering wheel. “A little help, here, God,” she said.

She turned the ignition, and David Gray poured out of her big, balanced speakers. Well if you want it, come and get it, for cryin’ out loud. The love that I was giving you was never in doubt…

She wondered what it said about her spiritual fitness that her clearest messages from the Almighty seemed to come from the alternative rock station.

At the rectory, she debated acknowledging she was back on the job by wearing clericals, versus pissing the new deacon off by meeting her in her civvies. She compromised by wearing a black blouse, dog collar, and subdued black cardigan over a pair of old undress-green fatigues.

“Interesting look,” Lois said when Clare checked in for a report on the past week.

“It’s a clerical mullet,” Clare said. “Business on the top, party on the bottom.” She took the handful of pink message slips the St. Alban’s secretary handed her. “Miss me?”

“If I say yes, will I get a raise this year?”

“You have to miss the vestry and the finance committee for that, I’m afraid. I could preach a special sermon for your birthday, though.”

Lois tucked a shining strand of her strawberry blond bob behind one ear. “Please. At my age, my birthday’s already a religious holiday. Passover.”

Clare grinned, while one part of her head marveled that she could smile at all. She shuffled through the messages. “The Ketchums want to know about baptism-” She looked up at Lois. “Why didn’t they bring the kid in on January sixth?”

“They were still vacationing in the Caribbean on the Feast of the Epiphany.”

“Well, they’ll have to wait until Easter with the rest of them.” She laid that one on Lois’s desk. “Mrs. Thomas wants a home visit, okay, Mr. Stevenson… Mrs. Darnley-what does it say about our parish when half the congregation is either shut-in, at the Infirmary, or in the hospital?”

“It says it’s time for a membership drive at the Adirondack Community College?”

“It’s scary that I’m one of the youngest attendees of my own church.” She flipped through a few more. “Abigail Campbell wants me to perform a funeral service for a lamb ?”

“She said it was the children’s 4-H project. Something got into their byre and tore the poor thing up, and the kids were devastated.”

Clare waved the slip at Lois. “What was this lamb’s fate going to be, before it became coyote chow?”

Lois steepled her fingers. “Easter dinner.”

“Which they would have asked me to bless, I suppose.” She shook her head. “I’ll have to think about this one.” She glanced up at the office clock. “Look, if anyone calls this morning, I’m going to be unavailable a little longer. I’m expecting a visitor. Reverend Elizabeth de Groot. She’s been assigned to us by the bishop. As our new, prepaid, full-time deacon.”

The secretary’s perfectly shaped brows rose, and Clare found herself thinking, No Botox for her! You go, Lois.

“When is she starting?”

“Uh… now, I guess.”

“Now? Today? Nice of the diocese to notify us.”

Clare wanted Lois to form her own opinion of the new deacon, so she skipped over the reason they were receiving the bishop’s largesse. “It was a surprise to me, too.”

Lois sat ramrod stiff in her typing chair. “Well, it’s not going to be my fault she’s not in the new directory. It went to press last Friday.”

“Don’t worry about it. And think of it this way-she’ll be another willing worker. Many hands make light labor, and all that.”

A calculating look crept over Lois’s face. “You mean she wouldn’t just be doing pastoral work?”

“Of course, her focus will be on assisting me with the counseling and the services. But I don’t see why she couldn’t help out in other ways.” After all, a very busy deacon was less likely to have extra time to poke her nose into Clare’s business.

Lois smiled. It was not a beatific sight. “Oh, yes. I can think of lots of jobs I could use some help on.”

“There you go. Now, before I get sidetracked, I’m going to need-”

“Excuse me.”

Clare and Lois both turned around. The woman standing in the office doorway didn’t look anything like the mental image Clare had built up of the Reverend Elizabeth de Groot, which ran heavily to Dame Judi Dench. This woman was younger, for one thing, maybe a decade or so older than Clare herself. She was petite-bird-boned, as Clare’s grandmother Fergusson would have said. Noticeably skinnier than Lois, who at a size six was usually the thinnest woman in the room. But Lois was close to Clare’s height. This woman could have walked underneath both their chins without mussing her beautifully blown-out ash blond mane. She was wearing a little black suit with her collar that looked like Chanel, if Chanel made clerical garb.

Clare could feel the ghost of her own seventeen-year-old self stretching to reclaim her skin. Her wrists, poking out from beneath her sweater, seemed huge and bony. Her hair was already coming out of the knot at the back of her head. She was sure that if she looked, she would see the same grease around her fingernails that had been her permanent badge when she worked on airplane engines with her dad.

“I’m Elizabeth de Groot.” The woman smiled pleasantly. No wonder. It was undoubtedly a wonderful thing to be Elizabeth de Groot. Her smile grew more fixed, and Clare realized she hadn’t responded.

“Hi! I’m Clare Fergusson.” She stuck out her hand-a quick peek proved that no, there wasn’t any more grease on it now than there had been fifteen minutes ago-and shook. “This is our church secretary, Lois Fleming.”

“I hope this doesn’t come as a total surprise to you, Ms. Fergusson. Please tell me the diocese let you know I was going to be assigned to St. Alban’s.”