Read Online Clear Light of Day by Penelope Wilcock - Free Book Online

speaking. Esme began to wonder if he had heard her, when he said, “You’re back. Welcome. I can well do with a second pair of hands in a moment when I’m sharpening these blades.”
    He glanced around at her briefly. “Unless you’d rather not. You’re not really dressed for stripping down a lawnmower.”
    Esme smiled. “I’d like to help,” she said, perching on the edge of a kitchen chair standing out in the yard. She felt a bit self-conscious in her clerical collar and her neat black skirt but was pleased to be not entirely superfluous.
    She watched Jabez lay aside the brush and reach for the metal key to undo the nut holding the blade in place. “You got to have it turned this way so the oil doesn’t run into the carburetor,” he remarked, as he laid the blade aside with the nut placed carefully beside it and began to loosen the sump plug under the engine.
    â€œBeen at church?” He shot a glance of friendly inquiry at her as he got to his feet and lifted the lawnmower upright over a battered enamel pudding basin to bleed away the old oil.
    â€œYes,” she said. “It’s Good Friday.”
    He looked up at her. “I do know,” he said. “I thought about you in the service.”
    He had an old glass meat dish handy for his next task, which was flushing out the sump, after which he set the machine on the ground again and squatted down to dismantle the air filter attached to the carburetor on the side of the engine. “Excuse me a minute,” he said, and carried the outer gauze of the filter in through the open door of his kitchen. She could hear him at the sink, not far within the door, the tap running, and scrubbing, the tap running again, and then he reemerged patting it dry with a dishtowel, and propped it against the house wall at an angle so the air could finish the drying.
    He blew the dust off the cardboard section of the filter and set it aside with the gauze. Then, moving light and quick, he crossed the yard to his workshop from where he returned with a big box wrench for the spark plugs.
    As he bent over the machine, examining the plugs, he remarked, “I sit in the porch sometimes and listen to the hymns. Even to the service in the summertime if they leave the doors open. I don’t come in, but I sit in the porch sometimes.”
    He cleaned off the carbon deposits carefully, fishing in the back pocket of his trousers for a piece of fine sandpaper to rub everything clean.
    Esme watched his face, bent over his work, giving nothing away. She felt the by now automatic response of her soul going on alert. This happens to ministers, she had discovered. There is a professional interest that sends a shaft down into the fabric of a minister’s being as tenacious as a dandelion root. “Why don’t you come in?” she asked, with what she hoped was a casual air.
    Jabez smiled at the transparency of her proselytizing but continued to concentrate on resetting the gap using his thumbnail as a gauge as he replaced the clean plugs. He dusted the terminals, brushed them lightly with his sandpaper, and refitted the high-tension lead.
    â€œBecause I don’t like the church,” he said.
    Esme watched him as he checked and blew clean the carburetor jets before he began to reassemble the filter. She liked the composure and focus of his face as he worked.
    â€œBut you believe in God?” she ventured.
    He glanced up at her momentarily.
    â€œI believe …” he hesitated, searching for the words to say what he wanted. He turned aside and reached for the sump plug, replaced it. “You got to make sure this is tight.”
    He paused in what he was doing, rested his weight forward on his knees on the stone flags of the yard. “I believe in the stories you hear of people who died and were resuscitated. Those stories about a long tunnel leading up to the light. And the light is full of love and truth. I