by Jan Karon
CHAPTER TWO
Step by Step
He was missing her.
How many times had he gone to the phone to call, only to realize she wasn’t there to answer?
When Sadie Baxter died last year at the age of ninety, he felt the very rug yanked from under him. She’d been family to him, and a companionable friend; his sister in Christ, and favorite parishioner. In addition, she was Dooley’s benefactor and, for more than half a century, the most generous donor in the parish. Not only had she given Hope House, the new five-million-dollar nursing home at the top of Old Church Lane, she had faithfully kept a roof on Lord’s Chapel while her own roof went begging.
Sadie Baxter was warbling with the angels, he thought, chuckling at the image. But not because of the money she’d given, no, indeed. Good works, the Scriptures plainly stated, were no passport to heaven. “For by grace are you saved through faith,” Paul wrote in his letter to the Ephesians, “and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God—not of works, lest any man should boast.”
The issue of works versus grace was about as popular as the issue of sin. Nonetheless, he was set to preach on Paul’s remarks, and soon. The whole works ideology was as insidious as so many termites going after the stairs to the altar.
Emma blew in, literally. As she opened the office door, a gust of cold spring wind snatched it from her hand and sent it crashing against the wall.
“Lord have mercy!” she shouted, trying to snatch it back against a gale that sent his papers flying. She slammed the door and stood panting in front of it, her glasses crooked on her nose.
“Have you ever?” she demanded.
“Ever what?”
“Seen a winter that lasted nine months goin’ on ten? I said, Harold, why don’t we move to Florida? I never thought I’d live to hear such words come out of my mouth.”
“And what did Harold say?” he asked, trying to reassemble his papers.
“You know Baptists,” she replied, hanging up her coat. “They don’t move to Florida; they don’t want to be warm! They want to freeze to death on th’ way to prayer meetin’ and shoot right up to th’ pearly gates and get it over with.”
The Genghis Khan of church secretaries wagged her finger at him. “It’s enough to make me go back to bein’ Episcopalian.”
“What’s Harold done now?”
“Made Snickers sleep in the garage. Can you believe it? Country people don’t like dogs in the house, you know.”
“I thought Snickers was sleeping in the house.”
“He was, ’til he ate a steak off Harold’s plate.”
“Aha.”
“Down th’ hatch, neat as a pin. But then, guess what?”
“I can’t guess.”
“He threw it all up in the closet, on Harold’s shoes.”
“I can see Harold’s point.”
“You would,” she said stiffly, sitting at her desk.
“I would?”
“Yes. You’re a man,” she announced, glaring at him. “By the way . . .”
“By the way what?”
“That bump on your head is the worst-lookin’ mess I ever saw. Can’t you get Cynthia to do somethin’ about it?”
Then again, maybe works could have an influence. Exercising the patience of a saint while putting up with Emma Newland for fifteen years should be enough to blast him heavenward like a rocket, with no stops along the way.
Emma booted her computer and peered at the screen.
“I nearly ran over Mack Stroupe comin’ in this morning, he crossed th’ street without lookin’. I didn’t know whether to hit th’ brakes or the accelerator. You know that hotdog stand of his? He’s turnin’ it into his campaign headquarters! Campaign headquarters, can you believe it? Who does he think he is, Ross Perot?”
The rector sighed.
“You know that mud slick in front that he called a parkin’ lot?” She clicked her mouse. “Well, he’s having it paved, the asphalt trucks are all over it like flies. Asphalt!” she muttered. “I hate asphalt. Give me cement, any day.”
Yes, indeed. Straight up, right into a personal and highly favorable audience with St. Peter.
“Something has to be done,” he said.
“Yes, but what?”
“Blast if I know. If we don’t get a new roof on it soon, who can guess what the interior damage might be?”
Father Tim and Cynthia sat at the kitchen table, discussing his second most worrisome problem—what to do with the rambling, three-story Victorian mansion known as Fernbank, and its endless, overgrown grounds.
When Miss Sadie died last year, she left Fernbank to the church, “to cover any future needs of Hope House,” and there it sat—buffeted by hilltop winds and scoured by driving hailstorms, with no one even to sweep dead bees from the windowsills.
In Miss Sadie’s mind, Fernbank had been a gift; to him, it was an albatross. After all, she had clearly made him responsible for doing the best thing by her aging homeplace.
There had been talk of leasing it to a private school or institution, a notion that lay snarled somewhere in diocesan red tape. On the other hand, should they sell it and invest the money? If so, should they sell it as is, or bite the bullet and repair it at horrendous cost to a parish almost certainly unwilling to gamble in real estate?
“We just got an estimate on the roof,” he said.
“How much?”
“Thirty, maybe thirty-five thousand.”
“Good heavens!”
They sat in silence, reflecting.
“Poor Fernbank,” she said. “Who would buy it, anyway? Certainly no one in Mitford can afford it.”
He refilled his coffee cup. Even if they were onto a sour subject, he was happy to be hanging out with his wife. Besides, Cynthia Kavanagh was known for stumbling onto serendipitous solutions for all sorts of woes and tribulations.
“Worse than that,” she said, “who could afford to fix it up, assuming they could buy it in the first place?”
“There’s the rub.”
After staring at the tablecloth for a moment, she looked up. “Then again, why worry about it at all? Miss Sadie didn’t give it to you . . .”
So why had he worn the thing around his neck for more than ten months?
“ . . . she gave it to the church. Which, in case you’ve momentarily forgotten, belongs to God. So, let Him handle it, for Pete’s sake.”
He could feel the grin spreading across his face. Right! Of course! He felt a weight fly off, if only temporarily. “Who’s the preacher around here, anyway?”
“Sometimes you go on sabbatical, dearest.”
He stood and cranked open the kitchen window. “When are we going up there and pick out the token or two that Miss Sadie offered us in the letter?”
She sighed. “We don’t have a nook, much less a cranny that isn’t already stuffed with things. My house next door is full, the rectory is brimming, and we’re retiring.”
She was right. It was a time to be subtracting, not adding.
“What have the others taken?” she wondered.
“Louella took the brooch Miss Sadie’s mother painted, and Olivia only wanted a walnut chest and the photographs of Miss Sadie’s mother and Willard Porter. The place is virtually untouched.”
“Did anyone go sneezing through the attic?”
“Not a soul.”
“I absolutely love sneezing through attics! Attics are full of mystery and intrigue. So, yes, let’s do it! Let’s go up! Besides, we don’t have to shop, we can browse!”
Her eyes suddenly looked bluer, as they always did when she was excited.
“I love it when you talk like this,” he said, relieved.
At least one of the obligations surrounding Fernbank would be settled.
Fernbank was only his second most nagging worry.
What to do about Dooley’s scattered siblings had moved to the head of the line.
Over the last few years, Dooley’s mother, Pauline Barlowe, had
let her children go like so many kittens scattered from a box.
How could he hope to collect what had been blown upon the wind during Pauline’s devastating bouts with alcohol? The last that Pauline had heard, her son Kenny was somewhere in Oregon, little Jessie’s whereabouts were unknown, and Sammy . . . he didn’t want to think about it.
Last year, the rector had gone with Lace Turner into the drug-infested Creek community and brought Dooley’s nine-year-old brother out. Poobaw was now living in Betty Craig’s cottage with his recovering mother and disabled grandfather, and doing well in Mitford School.
A miracle. But in this case, miracles, like peanuts, were addictive.
One would definitely not be enough.
“This news just hit the street,” said Mule, sliding into the booth with a cup of coffee. “I got it before J.C.”
“Aha,” said the rector, trying to decide whether to butter his roll or eat it dry.
“Joe Ivey’s hangin’ it up.”
“No!”
“Goin’ to Tennessee to live with his kin, and Winnie Ivey cryin’ her eyes out, he’s all the family she’s got in Mitford.”
“Why is he hanging it up?”
“Kidneys.”
Velma appeared with her order pad. “We don’t have kidneys n’more. We tried kidneys last year and nobody ordered ’em.”
“Meat loaf sandwich, then,” said Mule. “Wait a minute. What’s the Father having?”
“Chicken salad.”
“I pass. Make it a BLT on whole wheat.”
“Kidneys?” asked the rector as Velma left.
“I don’t have to tell you Joe likes a little shooter now and again.”
“Umm.”
“Lately, he’s been drinkin’ peach brandy, made fresh weekly in Knox County. The other thing is, varicose veins. Forty-five years of standing on his feet barbering, his legs look like a Georgia road map.” Mule blew on his coffee. “He showed ’em to me.”
Except for a couple of visits to Fancy Skinner’s Hair House, Joe Ivey had been his barber since he came to Mitford. “I hate to hear this.”
“We all hate to hear it.”
There was a long silence. The rector buttered his roll.
“I despise change,” said Mule, looking grim.
“You and me both.”
“That’s why Mack won’t call it change, he calls it improvement. But you and I know exactly what it is . . . .”
“Change,” said Father Tim.
“Right. And if Mack has anything to do with it, it won’t be change for the better.”
What the heck, he opened the container of blackberry jam left from the breakfast crowd and spread that on, too. With diabetes, life may not be long, he thought, but the diet they put you on sure makes it seem that way.
“Have you thought of the bright side of Joe getting out of the business?” asked Father Tim.
“The bright side?”
“All Joe’s customers will be running to your wife.”
Mule’s face lit up. “I’ll be dadgum. That’s right.”
“That ought to amount to, oh, forty people, easy. With haircuts at ten bucks a head these days, you and Fancy can go on that cruise you’ve been talking about, no problem.”
Mule looked grim again. “Yeah, but then Fancy’ll be gettin’ varicose veins.”
“Every calling has an occupational hazard,” said the rector. “Look at yours—a real estate market that’s traditionally volatile, you never know how much bread you can put on the table, or when.”
J.C. threw his bulging briefcase onto the bench and slid into the booth.
“Did you hear what Adele did last night?”
“What?” the realtor and the rector asked in unison.
The editor looked like he’d just won the lottery. “She busted a guy for attempted robbery and probably saved Dot Hamby’s life.” Adele was not only a Mitford police officer, but J.C.’s wife.
“Your buttons are poppin’ off in my coffee,” said Mule.
“Where did it happen?”
“Down at the Shoe Barn. She parked her patrol car in back, went in the side door, and was over behind one of the shoe racks, tryin’ to find a pair of pumps. Meanwhile, this idiot walks in the front door and asks Dot to change a ten, and when Dot opens the cash register, he whips out a gun and shoves it in her face. Adele heard what was going on, so she slipped up behind the sucker, barefooted, and buried a nine-millimeter in his ribs.”
“What did she say?” asked Mule.
“She said what you’re supposed to say in a case like that. She said, ‘Drop it.’ ”
Mule raised his eyebrows. “Man!”
J.C. wiped his face with a handkerchief. “His butt is in jail as we speak.”
“Readin’ casserole recipes out of Southern Living,” said Mule. “It’s too good for th’ low-down snake.”
“It’s nice to see where my recyclin’ is ending up,” said the editor, staring at Mule.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I just read it takes twenty-six plastic soda bottles to make a polyester suit like that.”
“Waste not, want not,” said Mule.
J.C. looked for Velma. “You see what Mack’s doing up the street?”
“We did.”
“A real improvement, he says he’s throwing a barbecue soon as the parking lot hardens off. Live music, the whole nine yards. I might give that a front page.”
Mule appeared frozen.
“What’s the deal with you not liking Mack Stroupe?” asked J.C. “The least you can do is listen to what he has to say.”
“I don’t listen to double-dealin’ cheats,” snapped Mule. “They don’t have anything to say that I want to hear.”
“Come on, that incident was years ago.”
“He won’t get my vote, let me put it that way.”
J.C.’s face flushed. “You want to stick your head in the sand like half the people in this town, go ahead. For my money, it’s time we had something new and different around here, a few new businesses, a decent housing development.
“When they staffed Hope House, they hired twenty-seven people from outside Mitford, and where do you think they’re living? Wesley! Holding! Working here, but pumping up somebody else’s economy, building somebody else’s town parks, paying somebody else’s taxes.”
The rector noticed that Mule’s hand was shaking when he picked up his coffee cup. “I’d rather see Mitford throw tax money down a rat hole than put a mealymouthed lowlife in Esther’s job.”
“For one thing,” growled J.C., “you’d better get over the idea it’s Esther’s job.”
The regulars in the back booth had disagreed before, but this was disturbingly different.
The roll the rector had eaten suddenly became a rock.
“Just a little off the sides,” he said.
“Sides? What sides? Since you slipped off and let Fancy Skinner do your barberin’, you ain’t got any sides.”
What could he say? “We’ll miss you around here, Joe. I hate like the dickens to see you go.”
“I hate like the dickens to go. But I’m too old to be doin’ this.”
“How old?”
“Sixty-four.”
Good Lord! He was hovering around that age himself. He instantly felt depressed. “That’s not old!” he said.
“For this callin’, it is. I’ve tore my legs up over it, and that’s enough for me.”
“Where are you moving in Tennessee?”
“Memphis. Might do a little part-time security at Graceland, with my cousin. I’ll be stayin’ with my baby sister—Winnie’s th’ oldest, you know, we want her to move up, too.”
Winnie gone from the Sweet Stuff Bakery? Two familiar faces missing from Mitford, all at once? He didn’t like the sound of it, not a bit.
“Here,” said Joe, handing him a bottle with an aftershave label. “Take you a little pull on this. It might be your last chance.”
“What is it?�
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“Homemade peach brandy, you’ll never taste better. Go on and take you a snort, I won’t tell nobody.”
For fifteen years, his barber had offered him a nip of this, a shooter of that, and he had always refused. The rector had preached him a sermon a time or two, years ago, but Joe had told him to mind his own business. Without even thinking, he unscrewed the cap, turned the bottle up, and took a swig. Holy smoke.
He passed it back, nearly unable to speak. “That’ll do it for me.”
“I might have a little taste myself.” Joe upended the bottle and polished off half the contents.
“Are you sure you poured out the aftershave before you poured in the brandy?”
Joe cackled. “Listen here,” he said, brushing his customer’s neck, “don’t be lettin’ Mack Stroupe run Esther off.”
“I’ll do my best.”
“Look after Winnie ’til she can sell her bake shop and get up to Memphis.”
“I will. She’s a good one.”
“And take good care of that boy, keep him in a straight line. I never had nobody to keep me in a straight line.”
“You’ve done all right, Joe. You’ve been a good friend to us, and you’ll be missed.” He might have been trying to swallow down a golf ball. He hated goodbyes.
He got out of the chair and reached for his wallet. “I want you to take care of yourself, and let us hear from you.”
Tears stood in Joe’s eyes. “Put that back in your pocket. I’ve barbered you for fifteen years, and this one’s on me.”
He’d never noticed that Joe Ivey seemed so frail-looking and pallid—defenseless, somehow. The rector threw his arms around him in a wordless hug. Then he walked down the stairs to Main Street, his breath smelling like lighter fluid, bawling like a baby.
The date for the Bane and Blessing sale was official, and the annual moaning began.
No show of lilacs, no breathtaking display of dogwoods could alleviate the woe.
Three ECW members suddenly developed chronic back trouble, and an Altar Guild member made reservations to visit her sister in Toledo during the week of the sale. Two Sunday School teachers who had, in a weak moment, volunteered to help trooped up the aisle after Wednesday Eucharist to pray at the altar.