“Sing what?”
“ ‘Come, My Way,’ that hymn I told you about. That’s what it’s called. You must know it.”
Did she know he was a priest? Spurlock wondered, his heart knocking louder. Had she recognized him? But then he remembered the book he’d requested. Surely an expert on Herbert would know the words.
“Yes, I do know it,” he said, hearing the tune in his head, a common hymn, frequently sung in his church. He’d not known the words had been written by George Herbert, but then again, he’d not known of George Herbert until he’d read Oppen’s testament. “ ‘Come, My Way,’ ” he said, “I know it well. Your father sang it to you?”
“Before bed,” she said. “One of those childhood memories.” She had lifted the stack of books to take them to wherever she was taking them.
Spurlock, however, had stood up and was facing her.
“Miss Abend…,” he said, “if I may call you that.”
She stopped and stiffened. A long second passed before he grasped what he had just said. “Miss Oppen, I should say.”
“May I help you?” she said, her face ticking a half degree to one side.
“I must tell you—” he said. “I must tell you the real reason I’ve come here. I have something to deliver to you.”
“To me?”
“You are Miss Em Oppen, no?”
“And you, you are…?”
“My name is Spurlock, Father Nelson Spurlock, rector of the Church of the Incarnation in New York. We met some years ago, when you came to my church. You wanted to know then whether your father had sent you something, in my care.”
“Spurlock—” she said.
“I had a beard then,” he said, adding inanely, “I was younger then.” He was now holding the envelopes, holding them out to her, both of them, the smaller airmail envelope and the larger bulk of Oppen’s testament. When she saw the packets, her face took on a gray sheen.
“Maybe—” she said, “maybe we’d better go outside.”
—
The rain had turned to a tight mist that beaded minutely, he noticed, on her hair as they walked. They had passed from the library through the quadrangle. A sort of converted golf cart, bristling with gardening tools, was parked to one side of the path where a groundskeeper on all fours troweled up a flower bed. “Afternoon, Emmy,” he said as they walked by.
“Hey there, Ray,” she said. “Is the arboretum open this time of year?”
“The arb?” he said. “Don’t know how we’d close it….”
—
The hinges sang when she swung open the arboretum gate, and together they walked along a broad cinder path that crunched beneath their feet. The path wound past clumps of sumac and blackthorn, between swaths of long brown grass flattened by winter, disturbed here and there by first green. Although the fine rain had not quite let up, the clouds had broken up in chunks, pried apart, it seemed to Spurlock, by the late light leaning in oblique beams. Bare branches vibrated in the freshened chill. “Cold front,” she said, “looks like.
“Welcome to my office,” she said, pointing to a U-shaped stone bench beneath a stand of evergreens overlooking a swale of new-mown grass.
—
“You came here from New York just to give me these?” She had taken both envelopes, hefting their weight.
“You should have them,” he said.
“But what are they?”
He felt she had had to force herself to ask the question.
“They are for you.”
“But the big one isn’t even addressed to me. It’s addressed to you.”
“They are both for you.”
“Who sent them?”
Spurlock hesitated, then said, “I don’t know,” moved by the sense that his response was both dishonest and true.
“You are going back to New York now,” she said. It was a statement, not a question.
“My flight leaves tomorrow.”
“So it wasn’t really our extensively unremarkable George Herbert holdings that brought you here,” she said with something not quite a smile.
“I’ll look up that hymn when I get back.”
“You should know it. You’re a priest.”
“So they insist.”
“I could tell you to come back and visit, but people never do.”
“Do you ever get back to New York?” he asked.
“One day I’ll go back. See what it’s been up to.”
“Pretty here,” he said, imagining how in the warmth of the coming months, students would gather on this slope to sun themselves.
For a while she did not speak but at last stood up from the bench. “I’m going to go now,” she said. “I’m going to find a place where I can read these things.” Spurlock, awkwardly, stood up too. “Do you need directions back to the hotel? If you get lost you’ll be the first in town history.” She gave a little laugh. “I don’t want to seem ungrateful. I just don’t know what to say. You made the trip, which I cannot believe. Thank you. That’s what I should say, all I should say.”
“I don’t know if you should thank me,” said Spurlock. “And I don’t know if I should say you’re welcome. But I hope you will be in touch if the spirit moves.”
Somewhere beyond the field’s edge, a crow’s percussive cry dislodged a series of echoes. Another crow answered, and for a moment the overlapping echoes contended in free air. She was gone.
—
Later that night, having returned to the bench where she had led him, Spurlock sensed that daybreak was not far off. The last darkness had settled now into the trees like a sediment cast from the sky, the sky not lighter now but clarified. Spurlock felt the tug of the old summons. Now, he thought, now would be the moment to pray, to tap into the silence and stillness hidden under the surface of his being, like the dome of a water table beneath an irregular terrain. Now would be the moment, but this unfamiliar landscape pressed upon him the weight of an absolute solitude. His task accomplished, he had expected a wave of relief, the satisfaction of release after long suffering: that old knot finally loosened, that barb at last freed from the bone. But there
