A New Song by Jan Karon Page B

then pressed the button repeatedly, to no avail. Dear God, help. . . .
    “The boot!” Cynthia cried.
    He leaped out, dangerously close to the highway on which cars were still racing, and fumbled to remove the side edges of the boot clip from under the side belt moldings. It took an eternity, and they were drowning.
    Back in the car, he pressed the button, and the top began rising. They were taking on water like a bottomless canoe.
    The top rose midway and, like a sail on a boat, was instantly filled with wind and driving rain. The top appeared to freeze in midair.
    “We’ll have to do it manually!” he shouted above the roar. “Get out!”
    Help us, Lord, he prayed, as they hauled the thing over, straining against the terrible force of the wind, then brought it down and opened the doors and sloshed into the brimming seats. They turned the levers and secured the top, and sat back, panting, daunted now by the deafening thunder on the roof.
    “The towels!” she shouted. “In the back!”
    He strained around and reached behind her seat and found the wrapped bundle of a dozen terry towels, which had been cunningly advertised as “thirsty.” They were sodden.
    Violet howled in Cynthia’s lap.
    “If we wring them out, we can mop our seats!”
    They wrung the water onto the floorboard at their feet, afraid to open the windows, and swabbed the leather seats. It sounded as if the pounding rain would tear through the canvas and swamp them utterly.
    Then the lightning began, cracking over their heads.
    Barnabas returned to the front in a single leap, and landed in Father Tim’s lap, trembling.
    The windows were fogged completely, his glasses were useless. He took them off and put them in his shirt pocket. As he held on to his dog, all he could see from their red submarine were the stabbing streaks of lightning.
     
     
    The rain that began so violently at two-thirty stopped at three o’clock, then returned around three-thirty to pummel the car with renewed energy, as lightning cracked around them with a vengeance.
    Sitting on the shoulder since the last downpour began, they briefly considered trying to get back on the highway and drive to a service station, a bridge, anything, but visibility was zero.
    Pouring sweat in the tropical humidity of the car, they found the air-conditioning was no relief. Its extreme efficiency made them feel frozen as cods in their wet clothing.
    If only they were driving the Buick, he thought. The feeble air-conditioning his wife had so freely lambasted would be exactly right for their circumstances. In fact, his Buick would be the perfect security against a storm that threatened to rip a frivolous rag from over their heads and fling it into some outlying tobacco field.
    The temperature in the car was easily ninety degrees. He remembered paying ten pounds for an hour’s worth of this very misery in an English hotel sauna, without, of course, the disagreeable odor of steaming dog and cat fur.
    “When life gives you lemons . . . ,” he muttered darkly.
    “. . . make lemonade,” said his wife, stroking her drenched cat.
    “Four o’clock,” he said, pulling onto the highway. “We’ve lost nearly two hours. That means we’ll get into Whitecap around dark.”
    “Ah, well, dearest, not to worry. This can’t go on forever.”
    He hoped such weather would at least put a crimp in the ridiculous notion of wearing grass skirts tomorrow night.
     
     
    The aftermath of the storm was not a pretty sight. Apparently, they’d missed the worst of it.
    Here and there, billboards were blown down, a metal sign lying in the middle of the highway advertised night crawlers and boiled peanuts, and most crops stood partially immersed.
    “Our baptism into a new life,” he said, looking at the dazzling light breaking over the fields.
     
     
    At a little after seven o’clock, the rain returned and the wind with it. No lightning this time, but a heavy, insistent pounding over their heads that clearly meant