by Jan Karon
“He ain’t doin’ too good,” she said, indicating the pale, small man who lay in the guest room bed.
For someone devoid of a single tooth, Harley Welch’s smile was infectious, the rector thought. “I am, too, Rev’rend, don’t listen to ’er. She’s makin’ me walk a chalk line.”
“He ain’t eat nothin’ but baby puddin’.”
“Cain’t have no black pepper, no red pepper, no coffee, and no choc’late candy,” said Harley. “They say it makes you gastric. Without a little taste of candy, I’d as soon be dead.”
“You nearly was dead!” said Lace.
“How’s your setup?” asked the rector. “Do you have everything you need?”
“Everything a man could want, plus Lace an’ your missus an’ Puny to look after me. But I feel it’s my bounden duty t’ tell you I run liquor most of my early days, and I been worryin’ whether th’ Lord would want me layin’ in this bed.”
“Seems to me the Lord put you in this bed,” said the rector.
Harley’s birdlike hands clutched the blanket. “I’ve not always lived right,” he announced, looking the rector in the eye.
“Who has?” asked Father Tim, looking back.
“I pulled y’r shades down,” Lace said, “ ’cause he cain’t have no sunshine, he’s on this tetra . . . cyline stuff four times a day f’r three weeks. He’s got t’ take all that’s in this other bottle, too, an’ look here—Pepto-Bismol he’s got t’ swaller twice a day.”
“I ain’t never lived as bad as all that,” said Harley.
Father Tim sat on the side of the bed. “Dr. Harper says you’re going to be all right. I want you to know we’re glad to have you and want you to get strong.”
“He has t’ eat six times a day. It ain’t easy f’r me’n Cynthia t’ figure out six snacks f’r somebody with no teeth.”
“Teeth never give me nothin’ but trouble,” said Harley, grinning weakly. “Some rotted out, some was pulled out, and th’ rest was knocked out. I’ve got used t’ things th’ way they are. Teeth’d just take up a whole lot of room in there.”
“I’m comin’ after school an’ stayin’ nights,” Lace announced. “Olivia and Cynthia said I could.”
“Good, Lace. Glad to have you around. You’ve got a fine friend, Harley.”
Harley grinned. “She’s a good ’un, all right. But awful mean to sick people.”
“Well, you’re lying on your money and your truck’s over at Lew Boyd’s getting the oil change you mentioned, so you can rest easy.”
“I hate that I’ve let my oil go, but here lately, I’ve had t’ let ever’thing go. I didn’t mean f’r you t’ do that, Rev’rend, I’m goin’ t’ do somethin’ for you an’ th’ missus, soon as I’m up an’ about.”
“Oh, but I wasn’t saying—”
“I know you wasn’t, but I’m goin’ t’ do it, I’m layin’ here thinkin’ about it. Lace tol’ me you got a Buick with some age on it, I might like t’ overhaul your engine.”
Father Tim laughed heartily. “Overhaul my engine?”
“After my liquor days, I was in car racin’.”
Was he imagining that good color suddenly returned to Harley Welch’s cheeks? “You were a driver?”
“Nossir, I was crew chief f’r Junior Watson.”
“Junior Watson! Well, I’ll say!”
Harley’s grin grew even broader. He didn’t think preachers knew about such as that.
That explains it, mused the rector, going downstairs. Yesterday, he had headed Harley’s old truck onto Main Street, thinking he’d have to nurse it to Lew Boyd’s two blocks away. When he hammered down on the accelerator, he saw he had another think coming. He had roared by Rodney Underwood’s patrol car in a blur, as if he’d been shot from a cannon.
He had never gone from Wisteria Lane to the town monument in such record time, except on those occasions when Barnabas felt partial to relieving himself on a favorite monument boxwood.
“Landscaping,” announced Emma, her mouth set like the closing on a Ziploc bag.
“Landscaping?” he asked.
“Mack Stroupe.”
“Mack Stroupe?”
“Hedges. Shrubs. Bushes.” In her fury, his secretary had resorted to telegraphic communications. “Grass,” she said with loathing.
He didn’t recall ever seeing grass in Mack’s yard. Dandelions, maybe . . .
“Plus . . .”
“Plus what?”
Emma looked at him over her half-glasses. “Lucy Stroupe is getting her hair dyed today!”
Manicures, landscaping, dyed hair. He didn’t know when his mind had been so boggled by political events, local or otherwise.
He thought he’d never seen his garden look more beautiful. It filled him with an odd sense of longing and joy, all at once.
Surely there had been other times, now forgotten, when the beauty and mystery of this small place, enclosed by house and hedges, had moved him like this . . . .
The morning mist rose from the warm ground and trailed across the garden like a vapor from the moors. Under the transparent wash of gray lay the vibrant emerald of new-mown grass, and the unfurled leaves of the hosta. Over there, in the bed of exuberant astilbe, crept new tendrils of the strawberry plants whose blossoms glowed in the mist like pink fires.
It was a moment of perfection that he would probably not find again this year, and he sat without moving, almost without breathing. There was the upside of a garden, when one was digging and planting, heaving and hauling, and then the downside, when it was all weeding and grooming and watering and sweating. One had to be fleet to catch the moment in the middle, the mountaintop, when perfection was as brief as the visit of a butterfly to an outstretched palm.
For this one rare moment, their garden was all gardens, the finest of gardens, as the wild blackberry he’d found last year had been the finest of blackberries.
He remembered it distinctly, remembered looking at its unusual elongated form, and putting it in his mouth. The blackberry burst with flavor that transported him instantly to his childhood, to his age of innocence and bare feet and chiggers and freedom. The blackberry that fired his mouth with sweetness and his heart with memory was all the blackberry he would need for a very long time, it had done the work of hundreds of summer blackberries.
He gazed at the canopy of pink dogwoods he had planted years ago, at the rhododendron buds, which were as large as old-fashioned Christmas tree lights, and at the canes of his French roses, which were the circumference of his index finger.
Better still, every bed had been dressed with the richest, blackest compost he could find. He had driven to the country where the classic makers of fertilizer resided, and happened upon a farmer who agreed to deliver a truckload of rotted manure to his very door. He’d rather have it than bricks of gold . . . .
He took a deep draught of the clean mountain air, and shut his eyes. Beauty had its limits with him, he could never gaze upon great beauty for long stretches; he had to take rest stops, as in music.
“Praying, are you, dearest?”
His wife appeared and sat beside him, slipping her arm around his waist.
He nuzzled her hair. “There you are.”
“I’ve never seen it so lovely,” she whispered.
A chickadee dived into the bushes. A junco flew out.
“Who loves a garden still his Eden keeps,” she said, quoting Bronson Alcott.
He had looked upon this Eden, quite alone, for years. The old adage that having someone to love doubles our joy and divides our sorrow was, like most adages, full of plain truth.
He wanted to say something to her, something to let her know that having her beside him meant the world to him, meant everything.
“I’m going to buy us a new frying pan today,” he said.
She drew away and looked at him. Then she burst into laughter, which caused the birds to start from the hedge like cannon shots.
He hadn’t meant to say that. He hadn’t mea
nt to say that at all!
CHAPTER FOUR
A Full House
He put two pounds of livermush and a pack of Kit Kats in a paper sack, and set out walking to Betty Craig’s.
Thank heaven his wife wasn’t currently working on a book—they’d sat up talking like teenagers until midnight, feeling conspiratorial behind their closed bedroom door, and coming at last to the issue of Dooley’s siblings.
“I don’t know, Timothy,” she said, looking dejected. “I don’t know how to find lost children.”
Why did he always think his wife had the answers to tough questions? Even he had the sense to believe that milk cartons, though a noble gesture on someone’s part, probably weren’t the answer.
“You must press Pauline for details,” Cynthia told him. “She says she can’t remember certain things, but that’s because the memories are so painful—she has shut that part of herself down.” His wife leaned her head to one side. “I wouldn’t have your job, dearest.”
People were always telling him that.
He peered through Betty Craig’s screen door and called out.
“It’s th’ Father!” Betty exclaimed, hurrying to let him in.
He gave her a hug and handed over the bag. “The usual,” he said, laughing.
“Little Poobaw’s taken after livermush like his granpaw! This won’t go far,” she said, peering at the contents.
Russell Jacks shuffled into the kitchen with a smiling face. “It’s th’ Father, Pauline! Come an’ see!” The old sexton had run down considerably, but there would never be a finer gardener than this one, thought the rector. A regular Capability Brown . . . .
The two men embraced.
“He’s buildin’ me a little storage cupboard, go and look!” said Betty Craig, pulling at his sleeve.
“I know you b’lieve if a man can build a cupboard, he can keep th’ church gardens,” said Russell, “but I’ve not got th’ lung power t’ plant an’ rake an’ dig an’ all.” He looked abashed.
“I understand, I know. And the leaf mold, that’s not good for your lungs.”
Russell looked relieved as they walked out to the back porch. “See this here? That was a wood box, I’m turnin’ it into a cupboard for waterin’ cans an’ bird seed an’ all. Puttin’ some handles on it that we took off th’ toolshed doors. If I was stout enough to do it, I’d pull that shed down before it falls down.”
“Dooley and I might give you a hand with it this summer. He’ll be home in two weeks, you know.”
“Yessir, and it’ll do his mama a world of good. She’s not found a job of work nowhere, it’s got to ’er a good bit.”
“I understand. But something will come through, mark my words.”
“Oh, an’ I do mark y’r words, Father. I been markin’ y’r words a good while, now. About fifteen year, t’ be exact.”
Poobaw came to the screen door and peered out shyly, his mother standing behind him. “Father?” she said. Tears sprang to her eyes at once and began coursing down her cheeks.
“Oh, law,” sighed Russell, looking at the porch floor.
“I don’t know,” Pauline said. “I don’t remember.”
Her storm of weeping had passed and she sat quietly with him in the small rear bedroom of Betty Craig’s house.
“You’ve got to remember.”
He noticed the patch of skin on the left side of her face, only one of the places where grafting had been done—it was a slightly different color, with a scar running along its boundaries like pale stitching on a quilt. Her long brown hair, tinged with red, covered her missing left ear and hid most of the grafting on her neck. A miracle that she was sitting here . . . .
They sat for a time, wordless. He wouldn’t try to chink the cracks of silence with chitchat. He would force her, if he could, to do what she dreaded. But he dreaded it more. He didn’t want to force anyone into sorrow. Yet, without this, he couldn’t help her do the thing he’d promised when she lay mute and devastated from the horrific burns.
“Holding,” she said, turning away from him.
“You were living in Holding?”
“Yes. Mama’s second cousin, Rhody, she came and took Jessie. I never told Daddy who done it.” She continued to look away from him. “I remember missin’ Jessie th’ next morning, and there was a note. Rhody said she was taking Jessie for life and for me not to look for her.” There was a long silence and Pauline bent her head. “I didn’t look. By then, things were so bad . . .”
She was suffering, but without tears.
He waited.
“ . . . I knew I couldn’t take care of her, I might hurt her, I used to lose my temper and throw things. I remember hitting Dooley, it was Christmas . . . .”
She put her head in her hands.
“He’d rode down the mountain on his new bicycle to see me, he was living with you then. I hurt him awful bad when I hit him, and he never said a word back . . . .”
Dooley! He wanted to get in the car and drive to Virginia and find him in his classroom and bring him home and love him, take him fishing, though he didn’t have a clue how to fish. He remembered seeing the abandoned boy in overalls for the first time, and his eager, freckled face . . . .
“I remember he rode off on his bicycle and I thought . . . I’ll kill myself, I don’t deserve to live. And I tried to, Father, I did. I tried to kill myself with drinkin’.”
He prayed for her silently.
“I don’t know where Rhody is, I wisht I could say she’s a good person, but . . . she’s not. I think she was glad to see me go down, glad to run off with one of my kids.” Pauline took a deep breath. “I’ve tried to forgive her. Sometimes I can, sometimes I can’t. But . . . maybe Jessie was lucky that someone took her.”
One thing at a time, his heart seemed to say. This wasn’t the day to talk about Sammy and Kenny.
They walked around the sagging toolshed, checking it out.
Why beat around the bush? “Russell, tell me about your wife’s cousin Rhody.”
The old man looked at him somberly.
“Double-talkin’ is what I say. Two-faced. I ain’t seed much of ’er since Ida passed.”
“How can I find her?”
“Be jinged if I know. Her man run out on ’er, he used t’ work at th’ post office in Holding, but I don’t know what come of ’im. Her mama died, I guess they won’t much left in Holding to keep ’er. Seems like th’ last I heard, she was off in Florida som’ers.”
“Any recollection of where in Florida?”
“Law, I cain’t recollect. Seem like it started with a L. Los Angelees, maybe.”
“Aha,” he said.
When he retired from Lord’s Chapel and moved out of the rectory, the yellow house next door would be home. And not enough room inside those four walls to skin a cat.
It was time, and then some, he reasoned, to get an architect to tell them how to add a sunroom and study, enlarge the downstairs bath and Cynthia’s garage.
Speaking of expansion projects, it was also time to call the president of Buck Leeper’s company, the people who’d done such a shining job of constructing Hope House, and see whether he could get in line for Buck as superintendent of the church attic project.
That, and find Dooley a job. And go through Miss Sadie’s attic. And figure out what to do with Fernbank before it ran down so badly there’d be nothing to do with it, period.
It was no surprise that he’d never made it up the ladder to bishop; it was all he could do to say grace over being a country parson.
He was hoofing it toward home when Avis Packard stepped out of The Local, wearing his green apron. The screen door slapped shut behind him.
“I don’t reckon you’d be havin’ a boy who’d like to bag groceries this summer?”
Bingo!
It was different having a full house.
Olivia was in and out, helping Cynthia with the responsibility of a man who wasn’t yet able to help himself. Lace arrived after school and did
her homework in Harley’s room, where she was clearly good medicine for what ailed him.
Violet was spending more time at the rectory, since her mistress wasn’t often at the little yellow house, and Barnabas lay in wait for the glorious opportunity of finding Violet on the floor instead of the top of the refrigerator, which she had claimed as permanent headquarters with a potted gloxinia.
“Perfect!” said Cynthia, who set Violet’s food up there as nonchalantly as if all cats lived on refrigerators.
With the increased workload of the household, Puny was sometimes still there with the twins when he came home.
Five o’clock in the afternoon might have been ten in the morning, for all he could see. It was not unusual for the washing machine to be running, the vacuum cleaner roaring, the blender turning out nutrition for the toothless and infirm, and the twins jiggling in their canvas seats suspended in the kitchen doorway.
During all this, Barnabas sat patiently in front of the refrigerator, blocking traffic and gazing dolefully at Violet, who scorned his every move.
A madhouse! he thought, grinning. Blast if it wouldn’t run most men into the piney woods. But after more than sixty years of being an only child and a bachelor into the bargain, the whole thing seemed marvelous, a veritable circus of laughing and slamming and banging and wailing. He wouldn’t wish it on his worst enemy, but for himself, he liked the novelty of it.
“Come in, Rev’rend!” Harley was sitting up in bed, having one of his multiple snacks.
“How’re you?” Lace asked, without taking her eyes off the patient.
A civil greeting! Olivia was making headway with her indomitable thirteen-year-old charge. “I’m fine. How about you?”
“I’m OK. Harley, if you hide that banana bread an’ don’t eat it, I’ll knock you in th’ head.”
Harley grinned. “See there? A feller don’t have a chance, she’s like a revenue agent lookin’ f’r liquor cars, got eyes in th’ back of ’er head.”