At Home in Mitford

by Jan Karon

  To say that he was surprised would have been totally inaccurate. He was astounded. It had slipped his mind entirely that today, June 28, was his birthday.

  He saw Pearly McGee in a wheelchair, with a hospital nurse. There was Hoppy Harper towering over the crowd, grinning, Miss Sadie in a pink straw hat. Hal and Marge, with Barnabas on his red leash. Miss Rose and Uncle Billy, holding hands on the front row. And Percy Mosely, Mule Skinner, Avis Packard, and Winnie Ivey.

  He saw Andrew Gregory from the Oxford Antique Shop across the lane, Mayor Esther Cunningham, and more than a dozen others. Who in the dickens was running the town?

  “Look up!” said Emma, pointing above his head at the front of the stone office building. He did as he was told and saw a large banner strung above the door. Happy Birthday, Father Tim, the Big Six-O was printed in bold, red letters.

  “What you thought was a squirrel on the roof this morning was Avis Packard on a ladder, hangin’ that thing!”

  “Way to go, Avis!” The crowd gave a round of applause.

  “See why I told you to wear that dern sport coat?” Emma said as Miss Sadie pinned a rosebud on his jacket. “It’s got a lapel!”

  J.C. Hogan was already on his second roll of TX 400, declaring that this was better than the turnout for the American Legion barbecue.

  Then, Hoppy stepped forward with a handshake and a hug for the honoree. He’d come straight from the hospital and was wearing his white coat, which Emma thought looked romantic. “A young Walter Pidgeon!” she whispered to the mayor.

  “According to Avis, who takes note of such things,” Hoppy declared, “it’s been seven years since you gave up your car for Lent.”

  “Exactly!” he said, able at last to say anything at all.

  “Well, we feel that a man of your distinction should have himself some wheels. But unfortunately, this bunch could afford only two.”

  He heard a loud, explosive sound behind the hemlock hedge in the lot next door.

  “Let ’er rip!” shouted Percy, and from behind the hedge roared what someone later called “a sight for sore eyes.”

  It was Mule Skinner in a double-knit, chartreuse, yard-sale outfit, weaving wildly back and forth across the lane on a red Vespa motor scooter.

  Barnabas led the group in scattering to the sidewalk.

  “How do you stop this thing?” Mule yelled.

  Hal leaped in front of his pregnant wife. “Turn off the key!”

  Mule made a wobbly U-turn, turned off the key, dragged his foot to brake the scooter, and glided smoothly to a stop in front of Father Tim, visibly shaken.

  To a loud chorus of “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow,” led by Esther Cunningham, the astonished rector got on the scooter, a bit pale beneath his tan, and drove with a mixture of excitement and foreboding to the first rose arbor on the lane, then back again.

  By the time he parked it on the sidewalk and put the kickstand down, he noticed that he couldn’t stop grinning.

  “You don’t have to make a speech, since you already make one twice every Sunday,” said Mule, slapping him vigorously on the back.

  “We know it’s not new,” said Hoppy, “but it’s in great shape. We got it off a little old lady who drove it only on Sundays.”

  “Nineteen eighty-two, 125 cc, good as new,” said Percy, kicking a tire.

  “Looky here,” Percy said, “you got your horn . . .” He opened up on the horn and everybody clapped.

  “You got your high beam and your low beam.” He demonstrated, which seemed to be another crowd-pleaser.

  “And get a load of these turn signals. Ain’t that a sight? I rode this thing all the way from Wesley, purred like a kitten.”

  “Wide open,” said Mule, “I followed ’im in th’ truck.”

  Emma cupped her hands to her mouth and made an announcement. “You’re all invited in for cake and iced tea. But you’ll have to do it in shifts, so step right in and don’t tarry. We can take four at th’ time.”

  She had produced a cake from her bottomless bottom drawer, and two gallon jugs of tea with Styrofoam cups.

  Hal and Marge filled the cups with ice, and Father Tim cut the cake, as J.C. Hogan shot another roll of black and white, and Esther Cunningham played the kazoo.

  The following Monday, the Mitford Muse ran two front-page stories on the local Episcopal church community.

  A picture of Father Tim on the motor scooter was mistakenly given this bold headline: “Lord’s Chapel Rector Receives Gift Worth Five Million Dollars.” The story and picture of Miss Sadie giving the rector a cashier’s check had no headline at all and referred to the donor as “Sudie bixter.”

  Mule Skinner looked at the front page and sighed.

  “Law, law,” he said, "J.C.’s done it again.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  Dooley

  Hay lay in the fields in fat, round bales.

  Blackberries were greening on bushes along the roadside.

  Lacy elder flowers bloomed in the meadows.

  In his opinion, all was right with the world. Except, of course, for the bitter disappointment of his daylilies. While they had been sold to him as rare and peach colored, they bloomed a fatal orange, just like the commoners in the hedge. In fact, he found them a good deal less attractive, for their color was insipidly pale, compared to the bold hue of their country cousins.

  He complained to Emma.

  “If daylilies were all I had to complain about in this world, I’d be a happy woman.”

  “What do you have to complain about, then?” he asked cheerfully.

  She gave him a hard stare, and he noticed that her lower lip trembled. He wisely turned in his swivel chair to face the bookcase, searching, presumably, for a reference work.

  That swivel chair was a blessing out of heaven, he mused for the hundredth time. When there was nowhere to go in that infernally small space, one could always swivel in the other direction.

  He saw that he was facing a volume on stress in the workplace. He took it off the shelf and opened it at once, daring to hope for a telling insight.

  “Well,” said Emma, after a considerable silence, “don’t you care?” He did not turn around. He was consulting the index.

  “Care about what?”

  “What I have to complain about.”

  “I asked you what you have to complain about.”

  “Yes, but you didn’t care.”

  The rector cleared his throat. He was not accustomed to this sort of thing in his own relationships, although he had seen it in the relationships of countless others.

  Slowly, he turned to face his friend and part-time secretary.

  “Actually, I am very interested,” he said, as kindly as he could.

  Tears filled Emma’s eyes and splashed down her cheeks.

  “Well, then, if you must know,” she said, “I’m complaining because I think I’m . . . because I’m falling in love with Harold Newland!”

  “Aha,” he said, thinking helplessly of Harold Newland’s legs in his summer shorts uniform.

  “I suppose you’re shocked,” she said, barely able to speak.

  “Not a bit, not one bit. Tell me about it.”

  She blew her nose on some toilet tissue she’d put in her purse this morning, and composed herself. “Well, whenever I’d get to the office early, he started bringing the mail inside because he saw my car out front.

  “Pretty soon, we were talking about this and that, and one evening we went to Wesley to a movie, and then we went to Holding for barbecue, and, well . . . the first thing you know, I was . . . I was cooking for him.”

  Emma inspected her rector’s face and pressed on. “I hate to tell you this, but that big birthday dinner I brought you was leftovers from Harold’s supper the night before.”

  “Two birds with one stone,” he said agreeably.

  She wiped her eyes. “You know how long Charlie’s been gone.”

  "Ten years.”

  “Ten long years,” she said, weeping
again.

  He waited.

  “Harold is such good company. He can fix nearly anything. He even glued three pieces of my good china back together; you can hardly see where. I’d given up ever getting that done! And you know how hard it is to break new ground.”

  “Oh, I do.”

  “But he made a little garden out back with nothing but a hoe, and put in a dozen Big Boys.”

  “That will come in mighty handy around the end of next month.”

  Emma had warmed to her subject. “And you know those attic stairs that I could never get down? They come down easy as grease, now! Not to mention that he installed new ceiling insulation while he was at it.”

  “Terrific!” exclaimed her interested listener.

  “Plus, he fixed the leak in the basement that mildewed all the clothes I’d saved back for the rummage.” Emma wondered if he was getting the point. “You know how things can go down in ten years.”

  “Around my place, in ten days!”

  There was a comfortable silence.

  “Does Harold have a church in Mitford?”

  “Well, not right in. More out. Harold has a farm, you know, eleven acres. He goes to a Baptist church in the country. He said he gave his heart to the Lord when he was a boy.”

  He had to confess he didn’t know much about Harold Newland, since he’d been on their route only a year. Occasionally, if their paths crossed, they’d stop and talk at the mailbox out front.

  “Well, then. He goes to church, and knows what for. He owns a farm, he has a job, he’s handy around the house, and he likes your cooking. What could you possibly have to complain about?”

  Her chin began to quiver. “It’s so embarrassing!” she said, wiping fresh tears with the small wad of tissue. “That’s why the tomato patch is in the backyard instead of at the side that gets the most sun.”

  “Whatever can that mean?”

  “Well, nobody can see you in the backyard like they can at the side of the house, and I didn’t want anybody to see Harold setting out my tomato plants, because . . . well, because . . .”

  “Because why, for heaven’s sake?”

  “Because he’s only forty-five!” Emma wailed.

  He was quiet for a moment. “Pardon my asking so directly, but how old are you?” He thought he remembered that she was two years his junior.

  “Fifty-four!”

  “Scout’s honor.”

  “Fifty-eight,” she said, exhausted by the ordeal of confession.

  “I’ve got an appointment in less than twenty minutes, and I’d like to ask you to think about something.”

  He looked at her with a gentle franknesss. “As Paul wrote to Timothy, ‘God has not given us the spirit of fear, but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind.’ ”

  She blew her nose. “Could you write that down?”

  “Who’s the secretary around here?” he asked, grinning.

  One morning in early August, as he was running on Church Hill Drive, Barnabas came to a sudden halt, which caused him to crash headlong into a ditch filled with the last of the summer sweet peas.

  When he limped toward the office later than usual, he was inclined to tell Emma a lie about the whole affair.

  “What in God’s name have you done to yourself?” she snapped.

  He couldn’t tell a lie. “We were running. Barnabas stopped, I fell over him. Landed in a ditch.”

  “Barnabas!” she said, with venom. “From the day you let that creature fool you into taking him home, look what’s happened! You got diabetes, your daylilies bloomed out orange, and now here you are black-and-blue, not to mention half-crippled!”

  “It goes without saying that it was not a premeditated act.” He eased himself into his swivel chair and felt a sharp pain stab his left knee.

  “That does it!”

  “Does what?” he asked, not really wanting to know.

  “That’s it, that’s absolutely it!”

  If she had a gift, he thought, it was for parable and double-talk. And, while showing off Harold Newland in public had recently sweetened her temperament, he could see a real backsliding under way.

  “Do you remember how many times we’ve all tried to make you get house help?”

  “Oh, I remember, all right.”

  “And how many times you have flatly refused?”

  “Over and over again, as I recall.”

  “Well, that dog has just been the cause of you gettin’ it, whether you want it or not!”

  “What in the dickens does that mean?”

  “That means the vestry had a meeting behind your back, to do something you won’t do for yourself! You’re on medication, you do your own cooking, you’ve got a big house and a yard and a busy parish and two services on Sunday, and you won’t take a vacation, and now this!

  “They said just say when, and we’ll hire ’im some help. We’ll send ’em on over to the rectory every Wednesday and Friday morning at eight o’clock sharp, but we want you to tell him, because we’re scared to do it!”

  House help! He felt as if he’d just been delivered a blow to the solar plexus.

  He could give himself time to think this over, he reasoned, by swiveling around to face the bookshelves. On the other hand, he could call Harry Nelson at once and attempt to overturn the vestry’s decision.

  Instead, he did at last what Emma Garrett had so often, in recent weeks, made him feel like doing.

  He got up from his desk, walked to the door, and left the office without speaking a word.

  He walked briskly to the corner and turned right. At the Oxford Antique Shop, Andrew Gregory invited him in for coffee, but he didn’t even slacken his pace. When your vestry goes behind your back and your secretary hates your dog, he thought, there’s no place like the Grill to drown your sorrows.

  The weather was making it possible for Andrew Gregory to do a thing he liked very much indeed. And that was sit inside the open double doors of the Oxford Antique Shop, on an eighteenth-century bench that was not for sale, and let the breeze drift in while he read from his rare-book collection.

  When customers came in, he preferred them to sit on the matching bench as a kind of prelude to the sale, and talk about politics, golf, the gold market, the royal family, Winston Churchill, Italian old masters, and a dozen other subjects that intrigued him.

  Without any formal decision to do it, Andrew had become a specialist, not only in old and rare books, but in eighteenth-century partners’ desks, English bronzes, hearth fenders, needlepoint chairs, and, for his younger trade, pine farm tables.

  He presented these treasures plainly, without even a bowl of potpourri on a tabletop. Yet, the very soul of elegance pervaded the atmosphere.

  The aged, heart-of-pine floors glowed under a regular coat of wax, which he applied himself. And the furnishings got a good rubbing with lemon oil every month, all of which gave the Oxford its seductive signature fragrance.

  As a widower, the proprietor of the town’s finest antique shop occasioned a good deal of talk. After all, he was attractive, he was trim, he knew how to dress with some flourish, and, because of his early years in Italy, his habits betrayed a certain European gentility.

  Also, it did not go unnoticed that he tanned well and was invariably kind to women.

  “Five years a widower, and no interest in anybody that we can see. No hope, I’d say,” a customer told Winnie Ivey at the bakery.

  “There’s always hope,” said Winnie. Though she was not personally interested, she felt that Andrew Gregory, like her day-old pastries, must not go to waste.

  There had once been some talk of Andrew and Emma Garrett, but Emma dismissed it as nonsense.

  “Too smart for me!” she said. “And besides, who could live with that ol’ dark furniture all over the place?” Emma, who liked sunflower decals on her patio door and kept a vase of artificial tiger lilies on her desk at the office, could not imagine a Georgian highboy in her Danish Modern dining room, or a husband who rattled on ab
out Winston Churchill.

  Since he had children in Connecticut, some wondered why he stayed on in Mitford. The truth was, he had grown increasingly happy with his life in the village, and the village was equally happy with him.

  It was Andrew Gregory whom the town council sent to visit Myra of Myra’s Beauty Bar, to explain why she could not have a shop awning of bubble gum pink instead of the traditional green.

  And, when the uproar started over the selling of valley produce through The Local, it was Andrew who was sent to the state capital to set the matter straight.

  Still, he was the only Italian in town, and some said, you know how Italians are. They thrive on lots of hugging, kissing, big weddings, and family feasts, hardly any of which was available locally.

  Yes, except for those days when he longed for the blue calm of the Mediterranean and a bold sun that made flowers bloom as big as breakfast plates, he was content.

  Father Tim was feeling the confusion of too many options in his personal life. For years, he had risen at five, had morning prayer, studied for his sermon, and then made coffee and dressed.

  Afterward, he visited the hospital, dropped by the Grill for breakfast, and headed to the office, walking.

  It was that simple.

  Now, there were decisions to make every new day.

  Whether to take Barnabas running if the weather was bad, or leave him at home. Whether to take Barnabas to the office or leave him in the garage. Whether to walk to work or be bold and start riding his motor scooter.

  He’d even been considering something he thought would never cross his mind: Whether to start drinking decaf in the mornings.

  At his birthday party, Hoppy had reminded him of a tougher decision he needed to make:

  When he was going on vacation.

  “Go see Walter and Katherine,” said his doctor. But he did not want to go to New Jersey, especially in the summer.

  “Come out and spend a week with us,” said Hal. But he hated to impose for an entire week, with Marge nearly six months pregnant.

  He’d never relished planning his own recreation; he simply wasn’t good at it. He was prone to turn recreation into something practical, to justify the time and expense, like he’d done with his two-month sojourn in Cambridge. He had intended to make that trip for sheer pleasure, using money from his mother’s estate. But he could find no excuse whatever for pleasure alone. So, while he was there, he researched and wrote the paper on C. S. Lewis, which was received with some acclaim.