At Home in Mitford

by Jan Karon

  “Absolutely!”

  She leaned over her typewriter and peered at him. “Are you all right? You look pale. When’s the last time Joe gave you a trim? Have you been seein’ your neighbor? Oh, and how’s her cat— don’t cats make you sneeze? I drove by your house this morning and saw her yard. You should offer to mow it.”

  Very likely, Emma Garrett was the penance he’d been ordained to pay for the delight of employing Puny Bradshaw.

  “So Rose said t’ me, she said, ‘Bill Watson, I’m goin’ t’ give you a piece of my mind,’ and I said, ‘Just a small helpin’, please.’ ” He grinned broadly at the rector.

  “Yessir, I told Rose what you said about givin’ th’ house to th’ town, an’ them givin’ her a nice, modern place all fixed up in th’ back, and she said th’ only way she’d do it was if the statue was like Sherman or Grant or one of them, don’t you know. That’s when I said he ought t’ be settin’ down, and she like to th’owed a fit.”

  Uncle Billy chuckled. “Preacher, I took Rose f’r better or worse, but I declare, she’s s’ much worse than I took ’er for!

  “Maybe we ought t’ let ’er have that statue standin’ up. I dread another winter, don’t you know, with th’ wind a blowin’ through th’ cracks, and th’ oil a settin’ in th’ tank.”

  The rector doubted that Miss Sadie would be able to drive past such a statue without a shudder, but that was not the issue. “It might be possible to have at least one room modernized by winter, with a bath to go with it, if we can agree on this matter right away.”

  “Law,” said the old man, “I’d dearly love to have me a hot bath, if arthur’ll let me set in a tub.”

  “Why don’t we move forward with the standing version. If we carry on too long about whether he sits or stands, you might go out of here lying down.”

  “You hit the nail on th’ head. Why don’t you do th’ talkin’ and I’ll do th’ duckin’?”

  “We can move ahead on the Porter place,” he said to Esther Cunningham when he dropped by her office. “If I were you, I’d have some renderings done right away, so Miss Rose can feel involved, or she could change her mind on the whole thing. The D.A.R. crowd ought to know about statues and monuments and who does that sort of thing. Of course, we’ll need to talk with her attorney at once, and I’d hope we could have them in a snug room and bath by winter.”

  “We’ll start by dumpin’ all th’ Rose Festival proceeds in the restoration fund.” The mayor’s face had started to blotch with red spots, as it usually did when she was excited. “This thing’s goin’ to cost a king’s ransom; we’ll have to depend on some big shots around here to help get it done. How about if you . . .”

  “Don’t go appointing me to raise any money. I can see it in your eyes.”

  The mayor laughed heartily. “You’re quick.”

  “I have to be quick to dodge the bullets you’d fire if I gave you half a chance.”

  “Speakin’ of—our boy’s lookin’ good, wanted mashed potatoes and gravy for supper last night. Puny carried him a bowlful.”

  “What do you think about that girl?”

  “She calls herself a Bradshaw, but she’s Cunningham through and through. We love ’er to death. Ray says he wouldn’t take a war pension for the way she cuts up and sasses him.”

  “Well, maybe now that she’s got Ray, she’ll leave off sassing me.”

  “I wouldn’t hold y’r breath,” said the mayor.

  It was Olivia.

  “Father, I just called to say I love you.”

  “You did? Why, what a wonderful thing to hear.” He felt as if someone had poured a bucket of warm water over him. Love! Sometimes, the very sound of that word conjured the feeling itself.

  “I’m missing your sermons. Hoppy gives me a report when we talk, but sometimes he forgets the point!”

  He laughed happily. “Let me mail you my sermons each week, shall I? The Holy Spirit often sends more than you’ll find typed out, but at least it will be something from home.”

  “Thank you! I have a proposition.”

  “Don’t keep me waiting.”

  “How would you like to fly to Boston with Hoppy and spend a few days? It would be such good medicine to see you. And you could meet Leo. You’d enjoy each other so much. It would be lovely!”

  After nearly thirteen years of staying put, it was suddenly “Come to Ireland!” “Come to Boston!” Feast or famine.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Homecoming

  Are you in the mood to have your bed dug?” he asked through the screen door.

  “Why, yes!” she said, turning around from the stove.

  “Good, because I’m in the mood to dig it.”

  “Come in and have a cup of tea, the kettle’s hot, and I’ll get dressed. My, you’re an early riser. For heaven’s sake, stop looking at me,” Cynthia said, fleeing from the kitchen in her bathrobe.

  He took a spoonful of tea out of the canister, put it in the silver caddy, poured boiling water into the mug, and sat down on the stool by the wall phone. It was nice to have a change of scenery, to get up and sit in someone else’s kitchen and look out someone else’s back door. For another change, he’d rested well and, since it was Saturday, hadn’t set the alarm. Then he had run along Church Hill by the orchards and looked down upon the village in its spring finery. He had felt such a tenderness of heart for the little town tucked so neatly at the foot of the hill that he had stopped to sit on the stone wall.

  Sitting on a stone wall, idly gazing, scarcely thinking. Stuart Cullen would have been proud.

  “There!” said Cynthia, who had caught her blonde hair in a yellow bow and was wearing blue jeans, a sweatshirt, and sneakers. He thought she didn’t look a day over twenty.

  “Any word from your agent?”

  “She called last night. She’d like to see more people in it, not just animals. So, I was thinking. Would you be a wise man?”

  “Me being a wise man would be a foolish contradiction. Is this drawing to be from life . . . or the other?”

  She laughed. “It depends. If you’ll go to a party at the Sturgeons’ with me, it will be from life. If you refuse to go, it will be from . . . the other.”

  Digging a bed was no job for the fainthearted, he thought, especially when it was a king-size bed.

  “Just dig around here,” she said, walking it off in her sneakers, “and then come around like this.” She paced the circumference of what might have been a small ball field.

  “Cynthia,” he said, wiping his brow, “that is not a bed, that is your entire backyard.”

  She pushed her glasses up on her nose and peered around.

  “A job for a backhoe!” he exclaimed, hoping to make his point. “A John Deere tractor! A team of mules!”

  “Oh, well, whatever you think, then,” she said, cheerfully.

  He dug the long, narrow bed near the sidewalk, away from the shade of the oak tree. “Do you have something we can break up the clods with, and then rake it fine?”

  She came back with a motley assortment of her dead uncle’s garden tools, which, he reasoned, should be in grand condition, since he’d never used them. She plunked them down proudly at the edge of the bed.

  “Well, then,” he said, unable to identify little more than an ancient bulb planter. “Let’s just break up the clods with our hands, I see you’ve got good gloves. Then we’ll rake it. How’s that?”

  “Perfect!” she said, with redeeming eagerness.

  “What are you going to put in?” he asked, as they knelt side by side and went to work.

  “Canterbury bells. Delphinium. Foxglove. Cosmos. And in the fall, double hollyhocks. Gobs and gobs of things!”

  Just then, he heard an oddly familiar sound, somewhere. What was it? Still on his knees, he raised his head to listen.

  It was the great and booming bark, as deep as the bass of the organ at Lord’s Chapel.

  Before he could rise or turn around, he was knocked sprawling int
o the loam of his neighbor’s perennial bed, and a warm and lavish bath was administered at once to his left ear.

  Barnabas had come home.

  He rolled on his back, shouting with joy and trying to get up, but Barnabas immediately stood on his stomach, finding it a good base from which to administer a bath to Cynthia’s face. “Timothy!” she shrieked. “Say a Scripture and step on it!”

  “ ‘And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God!’ ” he shouted.

  Barnabas sat on the rector’s stomach and sighed.

  There he lay in the dirt, with an enormous, mud-caked dog sitting on top of him, while his astonished neighbor was thrashed by a wagging tail the size of a kitchen broom. He laughed until the tears came.

  “I’d like t’ have a Kodak picture of this deal,” said a voice overhead.

  He looked up into the face of Homeless Hobbes.

  “This critter was at my door at daylight this mornin.’ He was s’ starved, I give ’im half a cake of cornbread and it was gone in one bite. Then I poured up last night’s soup and he eat that. I give ’im two Moonpies and he chased ’em down with a bucket of water. I was doin’ m’ wash and had t’ wait f’r my shirt t’ dry, so I put a rope around his neck and staked ’im to my’ cot. In a little bit, we come on up here, an’ when he heard you talkin’, he like t’ pulled me down, so I let ’im go.”

  Father Tim got to his feet and embraced his friend from the creek, as Barnabas collapsed into the dirt with a contented moan. “Homeless, meet my neighbor, Cynthia Coppersmith. Cynthia, meet Samuel K. Hobbes.”

  “Mr. Hobbes,” she said, throwing her arms around him, “you will surely get a blessing for this!”

  “I believe I just got my blessin’.”

  Father Tim examined Barnabas as well as he could through the muddy coat. “Looks like he’s been on the road for a while. See here, his feet have been bleeding, not to mention he’s a bag of bones under all this hair. I’ll have to get him to Hal this afternoon.”

  Barnabas home! How unbelievable, how extraordinary. He felt as if some part of him had been returned, like an arm, perhaps, or a leg. He felt strangely, suddenly whole. What was needed was something to suit the occasion—shouting, maybe, or anything loud and recklessly fervent!

  Just then, Violet strolled around the side of Cynthia’s house, and Barnabas shot away from him like an arrow to its mark. The blur of white raced across the grass and disappeared down the coal chute as Barnabas filled the air with sufficient noise to suit the occasion.

  Homeless sat at the kitchen counter while the rector brewed a pot of coffee and an exhausted Barnabas lay sleeping by his food bowl at the door.

  “It’s a treat to have you in my kitchen, for a change,” he told his friend from the creek. “You know, you’ve brought me something I thought I’d never find again.”

  “That brings up m’ own point,” said Homeless. “Somethin’ I lost has been found, too.”

  “And what’s that?” asked the rector, leaning against the sink.

  “My faith. It looks like it’s come back. An’ t’ tell th’ truth, it’s a whole lot stronger than it was when it left.”

  “I’m glad to hear it. You don’t know how glad.”

  “Well, I took down th’ New Testament you brought me, an’ I said, I b’lieve I’ll just crack this open f’r a minute—I knew I didn’t want t’ go gettin’ no religion out of it, nossir.

  “So I baited me a hook and I put it on my’ fishin’ line and went ’n’ sat on th’ creek bank, an’ done somethin’ I hadn’t done since I was a boy— I tied th’ line on m’ big toe. You know, that makes sense, you don’t have t’ mess with a pole. That way, when you get a bite, you know it, and all y’ have t’ do is just pull ’er in. Time savin’!

  “So I was settin’ there an’ I commenced t’ read, and first thing you know, I was dead into it. I’d catch me a crappie, take it off th’ hook, bait up again, and go back t’ readin’. I done that all day, and by th’ time I’d fried me some fish and eat a good dinner, it come to me plain as day that m’ faith was back. God Almighty had put his hand on me again after all these years. You know what I figure?”

  “What’s that?”

  “I figure what can y’ lose? Jesus said, ‘Verily, I say unto you, he that believeth on me hath everlasting life.’

  “Well, sir, what if that’s a lie? If it’s a lie, then you live in sin, and die in sin, and the worms consume y’r flesh, anyway. But if it’s th’ God’s truth, like he says it is, you win. Y’r sins are forgiven, you get a clean start, and when you die, you live for eternity.

  “It seems t’ me that’s a deal a man cain’t pass up. Number one, it’s free. Number two, you cain’t lose.” Homeless grinned happily. “It’s a good feelin’. Kind of like I’ve found a home.”

  “Your heart is saying you’re not homeless anymore.”

  “’Course, I don’t know what I’m goin’ t’ do about it, yet.”

  “Just enjoy it!” said the rector. “You’ll know soon enough. And when you’re ready, we’ll talk about it, if you’d like.”

  “Dandy!”

  He poured coffee into a mug for his guest. “I don’t have a drop of cream, but there’s sugar.”

  “I give up cream when I give up likker. No connection, that’s just th’ way it fell out.”

  “You know, they’ll be wanting to present you with that twenty-five hundred dollars right away.”

  “Well, I ain’t takin’ it,” Homeless said, blowing on the steaming coffee. “But I’ve got a idea.”

  “Keep talking.”

  “Up on th’ hill behind th’ creek is a lot of folks who need it worse’n I do. There’s little bitty babies in there that don’t get fed right, an’ old people that needs medicine and a hot meal. They’re people that slip through th’ cracks, somehow or ’nother. I’d like t’ see that money go in an emergency fund t’ help th’ ones that need it th’ most.

  “Give ol’ Fred money t’ buy ’is own britches instead of wearin’ mine to look f’r work. Buy that little ol’ Pritchard baby somethin’ t’ wear, instead of it runnin’ around naked. Get ol’ woman Harmon a pair of shoes, she’s been half-barefooted f’r two winters. Maybe have a free supper once a week, I’ll do th’ cookin’.”

  “I guess I thought there’d be social service agencies in there.”

  “There’s this kind of social service and that kind of social service, if y’ know what I’m sayin’.”

  “I know.”

  “So, if th’ reward money’s goin’ t’ be doled out anyway, I’d like t’ see it go in a special fund, somethin’ we could get to without a lot of flimflam. Maybe we could call this fund th’ Creek Bank.”

  “What a grand idea, in every way!” Barnabas looked up when he heard his master laugh. “See there, old fellow, what you’ve done? You’ve helped buy Fred a new pair of pants.”

  “Homeless man refuses check for $2,500,” read the Muse headline on Monday.

  That the story touched hearts throughout the newspaper’s circulation base was no surprise. The surprise was the additional money that poured in, bringing the total to $3,800 in just one week.

  The front-page headline on the following Monday gave an update: “Creek Bank Overflows.”

  “Right there,” said Mule Skinner, “is th’ single best headline J.C. Hogan ever wrote.”

  He was doing everything right, including using the food exchange system, which he found to be the very soul of aggravation. But somehow, he didn’t feel right. He noticed that his hand shook on several mornings as he read the paper, that his vision blurred occasionally, and his thirst was more pronounced. While all of that had happened before, with no dire consequence, he was relieved that Hoppy would check it out in just two days.

  Perhaps the time when he felt most stable and at peace was when he’d wake in the middle of the night and feel Barnabas at the foot of the bed. The comfort of that was so great, that it seemed to alleviate some of the othe
r, milder disorders. Lying awake, he often wondered how a vacation in a foreign country, sleeping in strange beds, and eating strange food, could possibly make one feel better.

  He wrote George Gaynor and gave him a complete update on all church doings, including one death and two new members of the nursery.

  “Who’re you writing’?” asked Emma.

  “The man in the attic.”

  “Do you think I ought to send him some fudge?”

  “That’s a splendid thought.”

  “I’m makin’ Harold a big batch tonight, he’s so skinny I have to shake th’ sheets to find him. I’ll just make a double batch and mail it tomorrow. Do you think they’ll X-ray it for files or razor blades or whatever?”

  “Probably.”

  “If they’re doin’ their job, they will,” she said with authority. “Do you know what we sang Sunday?”

  “What’s that?” he muttered, looking in his desk drawer for some glue to repair his bookend.

  “ ‘Amazing Grace.’ ”

  “Aha.”

  “If Episcopalians would sing that more, instead of all that stuff with no tune, you’d be amazed how people would flock in.”

  “Is that a fact? I suppose you think a Baptist wrote that hymn.”

  “Well, of course a Baptist wrote it, they sing it all th’ time.”

  “My dear Emma,” he said with obvious impatience, “that hymn was written by an Episcopal clergyman.”

  “He was prob’ly raised Baptist,” she said, huffily.

  Esther Bolick was standing at the front door of the rectory, with a cake carrier. Instantly, he knew that he must not, at all costs, let her give him whatever it contained.

  “Father?”

  “Esther, come in!”

  “Oh, I can’t,” she said. “I’ve left the car running, and Gene’s home waiting for his supper, but I was baking today, and I know how you like my orange marmalade cake, and so I baked one for Gene’s birthday tomorrow, and one for you, and, oh, I do hope you like it, because I think it’s the best I’ve ever made!”

  There. That did it. Looking into those bright and expectant eyes, he knew that he could no more refuse that cake than he could run along Church Hill Drive stark naked.