Free Shepherds Abiding by Jan Karon Page B

flocks at night.”
    “Maybe somethin’ th’ color of a burlap sack?”
    “That might be hard.” He took a deep breath. “But let me see what I can do.”
    He squeezed a bit of paint from three tubes into a saucer and blended the colors with a plastic knife. He wanted to get his fingers in the stuff, but the telltale signs of oil glaze were hard to remove, and harder still to hide from an inquisitive wife.
    He showed the contents of the saucer to Fred. “What do you think?”
    “You goin’ for burlap?”
    “Going for burlap.”
    “I’d say a little more brown.”
    “Done!”
    They worked for a time, silent, oblivious to the Mozart concerto on the radio.
    “These tails are way yonder longer’n we used to do at my gran’daddy’s. We docked ’em pretty short when I was comin’ along.”
    “How many sheep did you have?”
    “Four hundred!”
    “Man!” he said, quoting Dooley.
    “We raised Dorset, mostly, and a few Blue Face. I was what you might call a shepherd, myself, now an’ again.”
    Father Tim figured he’d been seven or eight years old the Christmas he determined to do what the Bethlehem shepherds had done.
    Reverend Simon, a fervent Bible scholar and his mother’s much-loved Baptist preacher, explained the passage from Luke to the Sunday School class of eight- to ten-year-olds. Reverend Simon had them all toeing the mark; he was a big man with unruly hair and spectacles that enlarged his eyes in a frightening way. Someone said he had ruined his eyes reading the Bible, and knew more about everything in it than anyone alive. He taught their class the way he taught the congregation, with extravagant gestures and studied pauses and bursts of song in a rich, baritone voice that rattled the windowpanes.
    “Who were these shepherds?” he thundered. His magnified brown eyes roamed the small classroom as if demanding an answer, but no one raised a hand.
    “They were merely a few local boys from over the hill! Boys like you, Tom, and you, Chester, and you, Timothy!
    “When they received the word from the heavenly host and recovered from their fright, what did they do? They didn’t dillydally, they didn’t put it off ’til morning, they didn’t wait ’til they’d fried up some bacon, they made haste! ‘And they came with haste, ’ St. Luke tells us, they came lickety-split toward that bright and shining star, to see the wonder of the Savior, to experience His glory, to observe His mystery.
    “Now, children, how do you think they got there?”
    Though Reverend Simon had no intention of soliciting an answer, Mary Jane Mason raised her hand with fear and trembling, and replied with the only transport known to her. “In a Dodge sedan?”
    “My dear child, they had no Dodge sedan nor even a Buick Town Car, they had no mules or oxen or donkeys or carts or wagons. Indeed, they had no mode of transport save their own two feet! ”
    Reverend Simon lifted one exceedingly large foot, shod in a shoe as black as a washpot, to demonstrate.
    “Indeed, they would have trod the several miles to the inn, almost certainly barefoot  . . .”
    Here, Reverend Simon shivered mightily, wrapped an imaginary cloak about his large frame, and peered at them over his spectacles. “ . . . and in the bristling cold . . . ”
    A long pause as he looked around at them.
    “ . . . in the bristling cold of a dark and wintry night!”
    Wishing to move beyond the carved and static figures of their Nativity scene, and enter somehow into the miracle itself, he had asked Tommy to walk around the barn with him the night before Christmas. He was convinced that something as fraught with risk and danger as this would responsibly equal the shepherds’ longer trek to the inn.
    “I ain’t walkin’ around no barn at night,” said Tommy. “An’ I ’specially ain’t doin’ it barefooted.”
    “But the shepherds had to do it, they had to walk all the way from the sheep pasture to Bethlehem while it was pitch-black