The Island of Heavenly Daze Read Free Page B

anniversary would do as an excuse for celebration. Last month Charles and Babette Graham had held a birthday party for their five-year-old—except that the party was meant to celebrate the fact that their precocious, squirmy son had turned five and one-half years old.
    â€œGoing forth with weeping, sowing for the Master . . .”
    As Micah sang on, Winslow’s thoughts turned toward his anniversary. Ten years! Hard to believe that he and Edith had passed so much time on this island. When they accepted the call, they’d been a middle-aged couple suffering from college tuition payments and the pangs of an empty nest. Heavenly Daze had seemed a true shelter, a quiet community where they could regroup and discover God’s purpose for their later years. And so Winslow had left the Bible college where he’d been serving as a professor of Old Testament minor prophets and moved to an island as beautiful in summer as it was brutal in winter.
    A lot had happened in ten years. The church building had begun to sag a bit, and the roof, new in 1980, had begun to leak, though the steeple looked as good as new. He had married Barbara and Russell Higgs, officiated at a baby dedication for little Georgie Graham, and buried Cleta Lansdown’s mother in the cemetery between the church and the sea. Tragedy had struck—in ’97 the ferry went down in a storm, drowning twenty-two tourists and a man from Ogunquit, and for the rest of the summer the folks of Heavenly Daze wondered if the pall of gloom would ever lift from the island. But winter’s arctic breath blew away the last vestiges of sorrow, and when spring dawned again, bright and green, hope returned to Heavenly Daze.
    Winslow smiled at the thought. Hope bloomed eternal on the island, and he couldn’t quite put his finger on the reason why. The people here were typical Maine folk— stoic, direct, and hardworking—but more than once Winslow had walked into a situation where the hair at the back of his neck began to tingle with the inexplicable feeling that he had stumbled across people who were uniquely blessed by the hand of God. They had their problems, they had more eccentricities and quirks than most folk, but they were quite . . . singular.
    Especially the Smiths. There were six Smiths on the island, one living in each of the original six houses, each as different as noses. Winslow had once asked Micah Smith if he was related to Caleb Smith, and for an answer received only a bashful smile and an odd response. “Aren’t we all related, Pastor?” Micah asked. “After all, we have all sprung from the Lord’s hand.”
    Winslow got a more satisfactory answer from Vernie Bidderman, who had lived on the island since the day of her birth and knew everybody who was anybody in southeastern Maine. “They’re not related, and they’re not locals,” she told Winslow with an emphatic snap of her head. “They’re from away, every one of ’em. And if they’re odd, that’s probably why. You have to be born with the sea salt in your face to get Heavenly Daze in your blood.”
    Winslow’s face burned as he remembered Vernie’s comment. She hadn’t seemed to realize that in labeling the Smiths as outsiders, she’d smacked the same label on him and Edith. After all, they’d been born and reared in Boston, not Maine, and they knew nothing of the sea until they stood on the dock of the ferry that brought them and all their worldly possessions to the parsonage beside the whitewashed church . . .
    The sound of a dramatic piano arpeggio snapped him back to the present. Beatrice Coughlin ended every hymn that way, with a triumphant YA-ta-ta-DA-ta-ta-DUM, her fingers rippling from left to right over the keyboard as if she would tame the rattling ivories once and for all. Micah stepped back, tossing Beatrice his customary look of pleased surprise, then Winslow stood and made his way to