by Jan Karon
He stood up and took Dooley’s money box off the shelf. “Well, then, we’ll talk more later. Do you want to work tomorrow? You’ve got eighty-eight dollars in your bicycle account.”
“I don’t want t’ work tomorrow n’r any other day. I’m tired of haulin’ them ashes out of th’ basement and cleanin’ out all that ol’ junk. We filled up Luther’s truck three times.” Dooley went into the bathroom and slammed the door.
Lord, the rector prayed, I am not very good at this. Thank you for being this boy’s Father, and teach me a trick or two, while you’re at it. One thing he needed to do right away, he realized, was get Dooley enrolled in Sunday school, in Jenna Ivey’s class.
He heard the toilet flush, and Dooley threw open the door. “You know what was in my poop jis’ then?”
“I cannot imagine,” he said, gruffly.
“Corn. Big whole pieces of that corn I eat for lunch. That reminded me of what I’m goin’ t’ do for ’at ol’ horse.”
"Really.”
“I’m goin’ to clean out ’er stable. There’s no tellin’ how long she’s been steppin’ in ’at stuff.”
Esther Cunningham called before he left the office.
“I was goin’ to ask you to come by in the mornin’ for coffee and a sausage biscuit, but the dern mildew’s so bad in here, I’m thinkin’ of movin’ to the fire depot. Anyway, I’ve got big news.”
"Let me have it before J.C. Hogan gets it crossways and backwards.”
“You’ll be proud to know you’ve been elected to officiate at . . . tah dah! . . . The Festival of Roses!”
“What happened to the pansies and the hollyhocks and all that crowd?”
“Outvoted! Here’s the deal. We rope off Main Street, put a big garland of roses around the town monument, make speeches—that’s where you come in—invite the governor, have house and garden tours—oh, and yours is on, by the way, just say yes—and sell potpourri and rosebushes and have flower arranging, and quilts, and I don’t know what all. Not to mention food, of course— box lunches, cakes, pies, Winnie’s doughnuts, you name it.”
“You people sure don’t mind shoveling out a load of work for the rest of us,” said the rector.
“Honey, wait’ll you hear what some folks are gonna be doin’. You got off light. Now, you’re in big with Miss Sadie, and we’d like to use her house for a tour, but not one of us has the guts to ask.”
“What makes you think I have?”
“Let’s just say I’m countin’ on you, Father. Anyhow, it’s a long way off, not ’til next summer. Be thinkin’ of somethin’ good to say in your speech, an’ I gotta go, Ray’s out here blowin’ the horn, got supper cookin’ at the house.”
One thing he could say for Esther Cunningham. She made people feel almost good about being harassed, talked down to, and generally bossed around.
“You go and get house help and that’s the last we see of you,” said Percy Moseley, wiping down a booth table. “One of my best reg’lars has fell off to a total stranger.”
The rector sighed. “But what’s a man to do? When you’ve got somebody at home three days a week cooking and baking and making a fuss over you, you don’t walk home anymore, you run. That is, if you’ve got the sense God gave a billy goat.”
“You missed my latest special. Had it on the menu so long, it’s about to go off.”
“Bring it.”
“But I ain’t even told you what it is.”
“Surprise me. I need more surprises in my life.”
As he sat down and opened his sermon notebook, he heard two women enter the booth behind him.
“Well, of course, I love it here, but there’s never anything to do!”
“Do you know this little town has more bachelors than practically Miami Beach?”
“Oh, sure. And where are they? Listed on the war monument?”
"There’s J.C. Hogan, you know . . .”
“Too fat!”
“And Andrew Gregory. He’s Italian!”
“Too old!”
“What about Harold Newland?”
“Too bashful. Besides, he’s taken.”
“Maybe Avis Packard, then. He could teach you how to flambé something. Or roast a goose.”
“Ha! I roasted my own goose when I moved to this hick town.”
“Marlene, bein’ picky is no way to find somethin’ to do around here. What about that rector over at Lord’s Chapel? He’s kind of cute.”
“Too short!”
“OK, OK! I’ve got it! Here’s one to die for. Hoppy Harper!”
“Too handsome.”
“Too handsome? Are you crazy?”
“Good-looking men are always stuck on themselves.”
“Marlene, one of these days, you’ll have nothin’ to hold on to but your convictions!”
“What in the world are you laughin’ at?” asked Percy, setting a plate in front of him.
Father Tim looked down at his meal with genuine alarm.
Liver!
“Why’d you stop laughin’?” Percy wanted to know.
“How do you like your new neighbor?” Emma was putting on her lipstick to meet Harold Newland at the hardware, where they would pick out brass towel rings to give her condo more appeal when they put it on the market.
“Oh, fine, just fine.”
“What does she do?”
“Do? I haven’t the faintest idea. She has a cat.”
“Does she work?”
“I don’t know, she didn’t say.”
“Well, she sure can’t be rich, livin’ in that little house not big enough for a doll and a tea set. So she must work.”
“Like I told you, I don’t know.”
“What does she look like?”
“Short, I think. Small.”
“Short, small, has a cat. You’re a fount of information!” She looked in a compact and pressed her lips together. “And you still don’t know what’s killin’ Olivia Davenport?”
“No, I do not. Olivia Davenport is highly involved in living, not dying, and we do not discuss it.”
“How’s she doin’, readin’ the Bible to sick people?”
He hadn’t felt particularly well this morning, in addition to having some guilt about how slack his running schedule had become.
“Emma,” he said crisply, “you are the one who should have a reporter’s job on the Muse.” And perhaps you’d like to go and inquire about a position this very day, he thought, yanking the cover off his typewriter.
He was following Miss Sadie along the upstairs hall at Fernbank.
“I don’t know when I’ve been so excited!” she said, moving quickly in her tennis shoes. “Having Louella come and live with me will be the best medicine in the world. Did you know they say people who live alone die earlier than people who don’t? Now, here, this is the first room I want you to look at and see what you think.”
The years had definitely taken their toll on the former glory of Fernbank. The rooms smelled musty and airless, and wallpaper was peeling in great patches. Still, it was hard to dim the beauty of Mitford’s grandest house.
“This little room was Mama’s sewing room. Look at all the good light it gets, and the view. Don’t you love this view? Step right up to the window and you can look down on Mitford. See? There’s your office! We could put the bed over there, Dooley could help, and the dresser here. What do you think?”
“How far down the hall is it from your room?”
“Oh, a good ways down.”
“Let’s look at the room right next to yours,” he suggested.
There he found a sitting room with large, airy dimensions, a love seat and two comfortable chairs, a single bed, a warm rug for winter, and a view of the orchard through the tall windows.
“Miss Sadie, I think you and Louella need to be next door to each other.”
“Well, if that’s what you think,” she said, “that’s what we’ll do. You know, Father, I’ve decided to stay right here in Papa’s house, no matter what. We’
ll just fall apart together, and when I die, I’ll leave it to the church, like I always planned, and let you fix the roof and patch the walls.”
He wondered how much more of Miss Sadie’s generosity Lord’s Chapel could stand.
“Now I ask you,” she said, shaking the dust out of a needlepoint pillow on the love seat, “how many ladies have a priest who’ll come and say which room to put somebody in?”
He laughed. “I try to be versatile.”
“Since we’re up here, would you like to see another painting Papa bought in Europe?”
“Maybe I should be getting back . . . ,” he said, heading for the stairs.
“Now, Father, this is no pretend Vermeer. This is a real Monet!”
He followed Miss Sadie into her bedroom, where he admired a small, vibrant oil that depicted a party of bathers. But what intrigued him more were the old photographs in tarnished silver frames, which sat on a table in front of the windows.
A very striking, dark-haired woman with luminous eyes looked out at him. “Why, how extraordinary! This woman is the very image of Olivia Davenport!”
“That was my mother,” said Miss Sadie, “and when I met Olivia Davenport several Sundays ago, I was nearly speechless. I felt as if I were a little child again, looking at my beautiful mother. It was such a queer sensation that I was a bit shaken by it. I think it is the eyes, especially. There’s an attitude of . . . of . . .”
“Victorious overcoming!”
“Why, yes. That’s the very thing I was trying to say!”
The man in the photograph next to Rachel Livingstone Baxter was strikingly handsome and intense; in his twenties, perhaps.
“May I ask who this is?”
“That was the young man I met in Paris. That was Miss Rose Watson’s brother, Willard Porter.”
They descended Fernbank’s broad staircase, hand in hand.
“I had hoped to walk down these stairs in my bridal gown,” she said, “and be taken into the parlor on Papa’s arm. I imagined it so clearly, for so long, that years later I would sometimes forget, and think it had really happened.
“In my mind, Willard was standing at the fire-place in the parlor, which Mama and China Mae had decorated with white hydrangeas in silver urns. I liked to imagine that Papa had gotten up on the ladder and strung wild grapevine around the archway, and that I’d twined it with tea roses from the garden.”
When they reached the landing, she turned to him.
“In all these years, I’ve never told anyone my love story. I know that I don’t want to die without sharing it with someone. And I’ve been hoping, Father, that you’d be the one.”
“I’d look upon it as a privilege.”
“Considering my age, perhaps we shouldn’t wait too long,” she said, smiling. “So, one day, when you’ve nothing to do but listen to an old lady ramble, perhaps some rainy day when you’ve no heart for your chores, well then . . .”
“I’ll remember,” he said.
“When I’ve finished telling you my story, you’ll be the only other living soul who knows what really happened the night of that terrible fire.”
He felt a chill. And though it passed quickly, it was a feeling he didn’t like.
CHAPTER TEN
A Grand Feast
“I wish I could make you some cornbread,” Puny said, wistfully. “I just crave to do that.”
“And you don’t know how I appreciate it, and thank you for the thought,” he said, eating a tuna sandwich made with whole wheat, and no mayonnaise. “But I can’t eat cornbread because of this aggravating diabetes.”
“I could leave out th’ bacon drippin’s, and use vegetable oil. But it wouldn’t be no good.”
“That’s right!”
“If my granpaw didn’t git cornbread once a day, he said he couldn’t live. I’d bake him a cake at night, he’d eat half of it hot. Then he’d git up in the night and eat what was left, crumbled up in milk.”
“Really?”
“Stayed a string bean all his life, too. He said preachin’ the word of God kept the fat wore off.”
“It has never served me in that particular way, I regret to say.”
Puny filled the scrub bucket and went to work with her brush.
Seeing her scrub the floor on her hands and knees continued to be among his least favorite sights. “Puny, may I be so bold to ask why someone with your fine abilities has never married?”
“Th’ good Lord ain’t sent the right one, is why.”
“And your family, is there family?”
She looked up. “My daddy died when I was little, and Mama raised me and my two sisters ’til we was all in junior high. My twin brothers went off to live with my aunt, ’cause she could send ’em to school. After that, Mama took sick and lingered.
“She said she lingered for one reason only, and that was to prepare us for life.”
Puny sat back on her heels.
“She knowed she was dyin’, and ever’ night after we done our schoolwork and got th’ supper dishes washed, Mama would call us in to set on her bed.
“ ‘Tonight I’m goin’ to talk to you about hard work,’ she might say. ‘I’ve only got one thing to say about it, and that is—don’t be afraid of it.’
“That was all the lesson on hard work, and she’d lay back and we’d brush her hair and paint her nails and just kind of play with ’er, like a doll.
“She liked that and would fall off to sleep that way, with us pettin’ ’er. Another night, she might say, ‘Girls, I’m goin’ to talk to you about men, and here’s what I’ve got to say: Don’t let a man pick you. You do the pickin’.’
“You know, if that’s all somebody has to say about somethin’, you’ll think about it more’n if they rattle on and on.”
He thought she had a point.
“Mama always told us, ‘I don’t want to look down from heaven and see my girls makin’ fools of theirselves.’ ”
“Well, I’m sure she’s pleased, Puny, for you’re a hardworking, good-spirited young woman who’d make any mother proud.”
“After Mama died, th’ church took my sisters, sent ’em hither an’ yon, an’ I quit school to go look after granpaw. Lived all by hisself out in th’ country, but he had a pretty little place, neat as a pin, wouldn’t hardly a leaf fall in th’ yard till he was out there sweepin’ it up. He was tough as a old turkey gobbler, but I liked ’im. He could preach up a storm! Make the windows rattle!” She looked at him soberly. “How’s your preachin’?”
“There’s any number of opinions on that subject,” he said, laughing. “You’ll just have to come and see for yourself.”
Puny had left baked chicken and green beans cooked with new potatoes, one of his favorite meals. He laid a tray and took his supper into the study to watch the news. World events continually reminded him of how blessed he was to live and work in the peace and tranquillity of Mitford. It was only by the grace of God, some said, that their village was still largely unspoiled.
A lot of the credit, of course, belonged to Esther Cunningham. The mayor was like a great, clucking hen, sitting on a nest which was the fragile ecology of their little town, and she was ready to defend it to the death.
Still, development had sprung up around the edges, like weeds encroaching on a garden. Just beyond the big curve from Lew Boyd’s Esso was the bright yellow motel with a huge green cactus outlined in neon. There was growing pressure for a shopping center, and a food store chain was pawing the very ground where the town limit sign was erected. It was only a matter of time, was the general consensus at the Grill. “Over my dead body,” said Esther, who stood firm on three Churchillian words: Never give up.
After the news, he put the dishes in the sink and went to his desk to make notes on his sermon. He was considering what J. Hudson Taylor, the English missionary to China, had said, in reflecting on the verse from Matthew: “Where could we get enough bread in the wilderness to fill such a great multitude?”
“What God
has given us,” Taylor had written, “is all we need; we require nothing more. It is not a question of large supplies—it is a question of the presence of the Lord.”
That was a sermon that was almost unpreachable in today’s world. Why take off along that narrow and difficult path, when wide boulevards were generally more inviting to a congregation?
Barnabas barked gruffly, then leaped across the study floor and into the kitchen, where he put his front paws on the back door and barked again.
He heard a small knock.
“Your sugar!” Cynthia Coppersmith said when he opened the door. He was holding Barnabas firmly by the collar.
“You shouldn’t have bothered. Really! I’m just finishing up some notes, and we were going to settle in for a bit of Wordsworth . . .”
“I love Wordsworth!” she exclaimed, handing him the cup of sugar.
He was unable to think of anything to reply, when years of social training came to his rescue. “Won’t you come in?” he blurted, much to his surprise.
“Well . . . yes! Yes, I will, if you’re sure you don’t mind.”
Blast! he thought, tucking his shirttail in with one hand and holding Barnabas with the other.
As he almost never had unexpected company in the evening, he hardly knew how to proceed. A drink? Didn’t people offer drinks? Well, he didn’t have any to offer. It would have to be sherry, perhaps, or tea, and a plate of . . . what? Shortbread.
Giving himself time to think it through, he took Barnabas to the rear hedge, leaving his neighbor happily inspecting his bookshelves.
When he returned, she was sitting on the study sofa, poring over a book of lectures by Oswald Chambers and appearing oddly at home among the jumble of worn needlepoint pillows.
She looked up, quoting the Scottish teacher who happened to be one of his favorite writers. “ ‘Faith by its very nature must be tried,’ he says. Do you agree?”
He sat down in his wing chair, suddenly feeling more at home with his company. “Absolutely!”
“I’ve never been one for physical exercise,” she said, “but what God does with our faith must be something like workouts. He sees to it that our faith gets pushed and pulled, stretched, and pounded, taken to its limits so its limits can expand.”