Out to Canaan

by Jan Karon

  “Now, don’t try to talk while I’m puttin’ this on your face, OK? It’ll get hard and you have to lay like this for thirty minutes without sayin’ a word or th’ whole thing’ll crack off and fall on th’ floor and that’s forty bucks down the tubes. You ought to see this nice green color, it’s got mint in it, and cucumber, and I don’t know what all, I think there’s spinach in here, too, and burdock—my granmaw used to dig burdock for whoopin’ cough medicine!

  “Don’t that feel good, don’t you just feel your skin releasin’ all those toxins? And those wrinkles on your forehead, I bet you pucker your forehead when you think, you seem like th’ type that thinks, well, you can kiss your wrinkles goodbye, honey, ’cause I’m talkin’ sayonara, adios, outta here . . . .”

  Lying in Fancy’s chair had given him a headache, not to mention a crick in his neck that seemed to extend to his upper shoulders and into most of his spinal column. Oh, well. A small price to pay for looking forty-eight on his sixty-third birthday.

  Fancy had urged him not to look in the mirror at Hair House. “Why look in the mirror,” she asked in what he considered a marvelous burst of philosophy, “when you can see th’ real difference by lookin’ in her eyes?” She winked at him hugely and blew a bubble, which wasn’t easy to do with sugarless spearmint gum.

  Not wanting to seem ungrateful, he tipped her five dollars, noting that she hadn’t offered a discount for clergy on this particular deal.

  He couldn’t help himself. The minute he came in the back door, he turned and looked in the mirror.

  Good Lord!

  His face was . . . green.

  Unbelievable! Surely not. Was it the dim natural light in the kitchen? He switched on the overhead fixture, fogged his glasses, and looked again.

  It wasn’t the light.

  He dialed 555-HAIR from the kitchen phone, his heart beating dully. No answer.

  He raced up the stairs to the bedroom and looked in the mirror he was accustomed to using.

  Green.

  His watch said five p.m. He’d invited Cynthia to come over at seven.

  The birthday dinner, the champagne, the roses . . . the whole deal dashed. Blown on the wind.

  He went to the bathroom and lathered his hands with soap and warm water and scrubbed his face.

  Who would want to dance the tango with someone whose face was green? And how could he possibly confess that he’d had a facial, something which no other man in the village of Mitford would ever do in a hundred—no, a million—years?

  He splashed his face and dried it and looked in the medicine cabinet mirror, which was topped by a 150-watt bulb that never lied.

  Green. No two ways about it.

  He stood gazing into the mirror, stunned. That’s what he got for being a weak-minded sap, unable to say no to a woman in a pair of Capri pants so tight they looked as if they’d been robbed from a toddler.

  He wanted to dig a hole and crawl in it.

  They had dined, they had danced, they had remarked upon the extraordinary fragrance of the roses. She had raved about his cooking, she had sung a rousing “Happy Birthday,” and she’d given him a book about himself and the parish of Mitford, which she had written and illustrated.

  He was visibly moved and completely delighted. To have a book in which he saw himself walking down Main Street and standing on the church lawn in his vestments . . . Now he knew how Violet must feel.

  He thought it immensely good of her not to comment on anything unusual in his appearance, though he was certain that he saw her staring a time or two, once with her mouth open.

  He poured a final glass of champagne.

  “This is like . . . like a date!” she said, flushed and happy.

  “Which we never had, except for that movie where you ate all my Milk Duds.”

  “I detest dating!” she said. “I think it should be reserved for marriage.”

  “Amen!”

  He served the poached pears he’d served the first time she came for dinner, drizzling hers with chocolate sauce.

  “Dearest,” she said, as they lolled on the study sofa, “there’s something I’ve been wanting to say . . . .”

  Here it comes, he thought, his heart sinking.

  “You aren’t looking well at all. You seem . . . a little green around the gills. I’m worried about you, Timothy.”

  “Aha.” He had paid good money to look fifteen years younger, and wound up looking sick and infirm. He would never step foot in Fancy Skinner’s place again, not as long as he lived, so what if the round-trip to Memphis would take eighteen hours’ hard driving?

  “All that business about your retirement and the worry over Fernbank, and whatever this new, urgent project is for the mayor . . . I think it’s time for a retreat.”

  His wife specialized, actually, in the domestic retreat. It was, to a worn-out clergyman, what retreads were to a tire. Once they’d had a picnic in Baxter Park, once a picnic overlooking the Land of Counterpane, and once she’d carried him off to the little yellow house where they had reclined on her king-size bed like two dissolute Romans, drinking lemonade and listening to the rain.

  “Right,” he said. “A retreat.”

  She peered at him again, her brow furrowed.

  “Definitely!” she said, looking concerned.

  While they partied in the study, Barnabas had stood up to the kitchen counter like a man and polished off what was left of the lamb. He also helped himself to two dinner rolls, half a stick of butter, a bowl of wild rice, and all the mint jelly he could lick off a spoon in the dishwasher.

  At two in the morning, the rector felt a large paw on his shoulder. This was major, and no doubt about it.

  He hastily pulled on his pants and a shirt, slipped his feet into his loafers, and thumped downstairs behind his desperate dog.

  He barely got the leash on before Barnabas was out the back door and across to the hedge.

  Barnabas sniffed his turf. Possums, raccoons, hedgehogs, squirrels, and cats had passed this way, not to mention the rector’s least favorite of all creatures great and small, the mole. The place was a veritable smorgasbord of smells, apparently causing his dog to forget entirely why he had barreled outside in the middle of the night, dragging his master behind like a ball on a chain.

  “Sometime in this century, pal?”

  More sniffing.

  Suddenly Barnabas had the urge to go around the house . . . then across the yard . . . then out to the sidewalk . . . then up the street.

  “Not the monument!” he groaned.

  Barnabas strained forward with the muscle and determination of a team of yoked oxen. They were going to the monument.

  He trotted behind his dog, noting the peace of their village when no cars were on the street. There seemed an uncommon dignity in the glow of the streetlights tonight and the baskets brimming with flowers that hung from every lamppost.

  They had a good life in Mitford, no doubt about it. Visitors were often amazed at its seeming charm and simplicity, wanting it for themselves, seeing in it, perhaps, the life they’d once had, or had missed entirely.

  Yet there were Mitfords everywhere. He’d lived in them, preached in them, they were still out there, away from the fray, still containing something of innocence and dreaming, something of the past that other towns had freely let go, or allowed to be taken from them.

  How much longer could the Esther Cunninghams of the world hold on? How much longer could common, decent, kind regard hold out against utter disregard?

  Like the rest of us, he thought, the mayor may have her blind spots, but I’ll take my chances with Esther any day.

  He’d almost forgotten what he’d come out here for; he’d been walking as in a dream. Then, thanks be to God, his dog found a spot behind the hedge surrounding the monument.

  He stood there as Barnabas did his business, and looked at the summer sky. Cassiopeia . . . the Three Sisters . . . the Bear . . .

  He nearly missed seeing the car as it went arou
nd the monument and headed down Lilac Road.

  Lincoln. New. Black. Quiet.

  He felt alarmed, but couldn’t figure why. The car seemed to remind him of something or someone . . . .

  He had the strange thought that it didn’t seem right for a car to be so quiet—it was oddly chilling.

  “What’s the scoop?” he asked Scott Murphy.

  “Interesting. I can’t figure it out exactly. When they come to see Homeless on Wednesday night, they don’t have much to say, but they seem to sense something special about being there, as if they’re . . . waiting for something.”

  They are, he thought, suddenly moved. They are.

  “I hate to tell you this,” he said, glancing at his wife as they weeded the perennial bed next to her garage. The town festival was tomorrow, and all of Mitford was scurrying to look tidy and presentable. Certainly he was looking more presentable. The greenish cast to his skin had disappeared altogether.

  A long silence ensued as he pulled knotgrass from among the foxgloves.

  “Well? Spit it out, Timothy!”

  “I did some simple arithmetic . . .”

  “So?”

  “ . . . and I was sixty-four yesterday.”

  “No!”

  “Yes.”

  “I thought you were sixty-three! This means I’ll be fifty-eight, not fifty-seven. Oh, please!”

  Her moan might have ricocheted off the roof of the town museum two blocks away.

  “The neighbors . . .” he said.

  “We don’t have any, remember? Since I moved to the rectory, we don’t have any neighbors, which means I can wail as loud as I want to.”

  “Good thinking, Kavanagh.”

  Sixty-four! He felt like letting go with a lamentation of his own.

  “Th’ volts was down t’ ten,” said Harley, wiping his hands on a rag. “Hit was runnin’ off the battery. Why don’t you take it out and spin it around, I tuned it up some while I was at it.”

  “We thank you, Harley. This is terrific.”

  “Hit ought t’ go like a scalded dog.”

  The rector opened the door and Barnabas jumped into the passenger seat, then he got in and backed his wife’s Mazda out of the garage.

  What a day! he thought as he drove up Main Street, glad to see the bustle of commerce. In a day of shopping malls on bypasses, not every town could boast of a lively business center.

  He saw Dooley pedal out of The Local alleyway on his bicycle, wearing his helmet and hauling a full delivery basket. He honked the horn. Dooley grinned and waved.

  There was Winnie, putting a tray of something sinful in the window of the Sweet Stuff, and he honked again but was gone before Winnie looked up.

  As he approached the monument, he saw Uncle Billy and Miss Rose, stationed in their chrome dinette chairs on the lawn of the town museum, where everybody and his brother had gathered to put up tents, booths, flags, tables, umbrellas, hand-lettered signs, and the much-needed port-a-john, which this year, he observed, appeared to lean to the right instead of the left.

  He honked and waved as Uncle Billy waved back and Miss Rose looked scornful.

  How in the dickens he could have lived in this town for over fifteen years and still get a kick out of driving up Main Street was beyond him. He’d liked living in his little parish by the sea, too, but the main street hadn’t been much to look at, and often, during the hurricane season, their few storefronts had stayed boarded up.

  Count your blessings, his grandmother had told him. Count your blessings, his mother had often said.

  He eased around the monument and headed west on Lilac Road.

  Did anyone really count their blessings, anymore? There was, according to the world’s dictum, no time to smell the roses, no time to count blessings. But how much time did it take to recognize that he was, in a sense, driving one around? Hadn’t Harley Welch just saved them a hundred bucks, right in his own backyard?

  Besides, if there were no time in Mitford, where would there ever be time?

  “Ah, Barnabas,” he said, reaching over to scratch his dog’s ear. Barnabas stared straight ahead, a behavior he’d always considered appropriate to riding in a car.

  He turned on the radio and heard Mozart straining to come across the mountains from the tower in Asheville, and fiddled with the dial until he got a weather report. Sunshine all weekend. Hallelujah!

  He realized he was grinning from ear to ear.

  How often did he feel as if he didn’t have a care in the world? Not often. He’d been equipped, after all, with a nature that could run to the melancholy if he didn’t watch it.

  “Serious-minded!” a neighbor had said of him as a child, putting on his glasses to get a better look at the tyke who stood before him with a large book under his skinny arm.

  He thought of last night, of his vibrant and unstoppable wife sitting up in bed, reading to him, knowing how he loved this simple sacrifice of time and effort. He had put his head in her lap and reached down and held the warm calf of her leg, knowing with all that was in him how extraordinarily rich he was.

  He had heard Dooley come in, racing up the stairs on the dot of his curfew, and afterward, the sound of his dog snoring in the hall . . . .

  He thought of the old needlepoint sampler his grandmother had done, framed and hanging in the rectory kitchen. He had passed it so often over the years, he had quit seeing it. The patient stitching, embellished with faded cabbage roses, quoted a verse from the Sixty-eighth Psalm.

  “Blessed be the Lord,” it read, “who daily loadeth us with benefits.”

  “Loadeth!” he exclaimed aloud. “Daily!”

  The car was running like a top, thanks to his live-in mechanic, but he didn’t want to turn around and go home; he had a sudden taste for a view of the late-June countryside, maybe a little run out to Farmer, four miles away, then back to help Cynthia bake for the church booth tomorrow.

  And while he did the run to Farmer, he would do a seemingly childish thing—he would count his blessings as far as he could.

  Quite possibly the list could go on until Wednesday, for he knew a thing or two about blessings and how they were, even in the worst of times, inexhaustible.

  It came to him that Patrick Henry Reardon had indirectly spoken of something like this. He had copied it into his sermon notebook only days ago.

  “Suppose for a moment,” Reardon had said, “that God began taking from us the many things for which we have failed to give thanks. Which of our limbs and faculties would be left? Would I still have my hands and my mind? And what about loved ones? If God were to take from me all those persons and things for which I have not given thanks, who or what would be left of me?”

  What would be left of me, indeed? he wondered. The very thought struck him with a force he hadn’t recognized when he copied it into his notebook.

  He put his hand on his dog’s head and hoarsely whispered the beginning of his list:

  “Barnabas . . .”

  He saw her standing at the corner of Main Street and Wisteria, looking toward the rectory. He had never seen her before in his life, but he knew exactly, precisely, who she was.

  He felt himself loving her at once, as she held out her arms and smiled and started running toward him. He tried to run, also, to meet her, but found he moved as if through sand or deep water, and was dumbstruck, unable to call her name.

  His wife was shaking him. “Wake up, dearest!”

  “What . . . what . . . ?”

  “You were dreaming.”

  He sat up with a pounding heart.

  “We have to find Jessie,” he said.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Political Barbecue

  There was plenty of talk on the street. As early as seven-thirty on the morning of the festival, he couldn’t walk from the south end to the north without picking up new funds of information.

  Dora Pugh, who was setting flats of borage, chives, and rosemary outside the hardware door, asked if he’d seen the billboards on t
he highway. They must have been put up in the middle of the night, she said, because when she drove home yesterday, she certainly hadn’t noticed Mack Stroupe’s ugly mug plastered on three new boards, all the way from Hattie Cloer’s market to the Shoe Barn.

  “That,” she snorted, “is three times more of that cracker than I ever wanted to see.” Dora once lived in Georgia, where “cracker” had nothing to do with party snacks.

  At the Sweet Stuff, Winnie Ivey hailed him in.

  “I’m experimenting,” she said, tucking a strand of graying hair under her bandanna. “My license says people can sit down, so I thought I should try fixin’ things to where people don’t have to stand at th’ shelf.”

  The shelf along the wall had come down, replaced by posters of mountain scenery, and in the long-empty space in front of her display cases stood three tables and a dozen chairs.

  “I’m tryin’ to do all I can to bring in business. If I’m goin’ to sell out, I want my ledgers lookin’ good,” she said.

  “I’m proud of you, Winnie! And to think you’ve done all this by yourself!”

  “I have to do whatever it takes, Father! Of course, it’s just coffee and sweets, as usual, except now you get a chair to sit in—but I might add sandwiches next week. And soup in the winter. What do you think?”

  “I think you should!”

  She brightened. “It helps to have advice.”

  “Don’t I know it!” Weren’t his parishioners full of it?

  “My husband, Johnny, used to know what to do about things, but he died so many years ago, I can hardly remember his face. Do you think that’s bad?”

  He could seldom recall his father’s face. “No,” he said, “it can happen like that . . . .”