Out to Canaan

by Jan Karon

  He cleaned the kitchen and swept up a broken glass on the back stoop, while Pauline sat in a chair with her head in her hands. He sensed that she was crying, though she made no sound. Then he turned off the downstairs lights, except for the lamp in the living room and the light in the hallway. Buck didn’t stir and he didn’t wake him. He would deal with this tomorrow.

  He drove Pauline home and they sat in the car in front of the house where her father, son, and daughter were sleeping.

  The hilarity and weeping had passed; she was silent as a stone, her face turned away from him.

  “We need to talk,” he said.

  She nodded.

  “Sunday afternoon, if you can.”

  She nodded again. “I’m so sorry,” she whispered.

  He got out of the car and opened her door and helped her up the sidewalk. The temperature had dropped considerably and she was shivering in a sleeveless dress. “Will you wake anyone?”

  “Don’t worry,” she said, still avoiding his gaze. “I won’t let nobody see me like this.”

  When he came in from the garage, Cynthia met him in the hallway.

  “It’s Esther!” she said. “She had an accident, and they say it looks bad. They want you to come to the hospital at once!”

  Esther! He raced to the bathroom, splashed water on his face, took his jacket off the hook in the kitchen, and once again backed the Buick out of the garage, tires screeching.

  There were many ways to lose an election. He prayed to God this wasn’t one of them.

  “What happened?” he asked Nurse Kennedy in the hospital corridor.

  “She fell off a ladder, broke her left wrist, broke the right elbow, and . . .” Nurse Kennedy shook her head.

  “And what?”

  “Fractured her jaw. Dr. Harper is wiring her mouth shut as we speak.”

  “Good Lord!”

  “But she’ll be fine.”

  “Be fine? How could anybody be fine with two broken limbs and her mouth wired shut?”

  “It happens, Father.” Nurse Kennedy sighed and continued down the hall.

  He wound his way along the corridor to the waiting room, where Gene Bolick sat on a Danish modern sofa in shock.

  “Where’s Ray?” he asked Gene. Why wasn’t Ray Cunningham here? Didn’t he know his wife had had a terrible accident?

  “Ray who?” queried Gene, looking stupefied.

  “Esther’s husband!”

  “I’m Esther’s husband,” said Gene, as plainly as he knew how.

  “You mean . . . you mean, the mayor didn’t fall off a ladder?”

  “I don’t know about th’ mayor, but Esther sure did, and it busted her up pretty bad.” He appeared disconsolate.

  “Good heavens, Gene, I’m sorry. Terribly sorry.” He sat beside his parishioner on the sofa. “How is she?”

  “Not so good, if you ask me. She was down at th’ parish hall on a ladder, puttin’ up signs—you know, Kitchen Goods, Clothing Items, such as that, and went to step down and . . .” Gene lifted his hands.

  “And crashed.”

  “Where is everybody?” Usually, when someone was rushed to the hospital in Mitford, a whole gaggle of friends and family showed up to pray, make a run on the vending machines, and rip recipes from outdated issues of Southern Living.

  “They’re down at th’ parish hall, I reckon, where they’ve been for th’ last forty-eight hours.”

  “I’ll get the prayer chain going,” said the rector. He sped along the hall to the phone, where he called his wife to put the chain in motion.

  “How bad is it?” asked Cynthia.

  “There’s a break in both arms, and they’re wiring her jaws shut.”

  She gasped. “Good heavens!”

  “I’ll be here for a while.”

  “Poor Esther. How awful. Please tell Gene I’m sorry, I’ll go see Esther tomorrow, and I’ll call the chain right now. Love you, dearest.”

  “Love you. Keep my place warm.”

  Hurrying down the hall, he stopped briefly at a vending machine for a pack of Nabs and a Sprite.

  He’d just finished praying with Gene for Esther to be knit back together as good as new when Hessie Mayhew rushed into the waiting room. He looked at his watch. Eleven o’clock. Hardly anyone in this town stayed up ’til eleven o’clock.

  “How is she?” asked Hessie.

  “Doped up,” said Gene.

  “I’ve got to see her,” insisted the Bane co-chair. Given her wide eyes and frazzled hair, Hessie looked as if she’d been plugged into an electrical outlet.

  “You can’t see ’er,” said Gene. “Just me an’ th’ Father can go in.”

  “Do you realize that at seven in the morning, the Food Committee’s gettin’ together at my house to bake twelve two-layer orange marmalades, and we don’t even have th’ recipe?”

  Gene slapped his forehead. “Oh, Lord help!”

  “I’m sure it’s written down somewhere,” suggested the rector.

  “Nope, it’s not,” said Gene.

  “That’s right. It’s not.” Hessie pursed her lips. “If I’ve told her once, I’ve told her a thousand times to write her recipes down, especially the orange marmalade, for heaven’s sake.”

  “It’s in her head,” said Gene, defending his wife.

  “Well,” announced the co-chair, looking determined, “we’ll have to find a way to get it out!”

  He arrived at the office the next morning, feeling the exhaustion of half a night at the hospital.

  At two a.m., he’d left Esther resting, one arm in a cast, the other in a cast and a sling, and unable to speak a word even if she wanted to. Gene slept by her bed on a hospital cot.

  How on earth anybody was going to get a cake recipe out of Esther Bolick was beyond him. In any case, Hessie had postponed the baking session until Thursday afternoon, which meant the cakes would be squeaking in under the wire—if at all.

  “We have to have Esther’s orange marmalades,” she had said flatly. “People expect Esther’s marmalades. At twenty dollars per cake times twelve, that’s two hundred and forty dollars, which is nothing to sneeze at.”

  He yawned and sat wearily at his desk.

  He was rubbing his eyes as Buck Leeper opened the door and walked in, taking off his hard hat.

  “Good morning,” said the rector.

  Buck stood in the doorway, uneasy. “I need to talk.”

  “Sit down.”

  “I can’t stay. I came to tell you I’m . . .” Buck looked at the floor, then met the rector’s gaze. “I’m sorry. That was bad, what happened. I took a drink, I offered her one, and it went from there.”

  “Did you know she’s an alcoholic? An addict?”

  “Yes.” Buck’s voice was hoarse. “I got to tell you, I talked her into it, I shouldn’t have done it, I’m sick to my gut about it.”

  “There’s help, Buck.”

  The superintendent scraped his work boot on the floor, looking down. “No. I can beat this, I’ve been beatin’ it, this is th’ first time in . . . in a while. I wanted to tell you I’m movin’ out, one of the crew knows a house for sale, but thinks they’ll rent.”

  “Before we talk about that, let’s name the problem. It has a name. It’s your alcoholism. Your addiction.”

  Buck stiffened and turned away, but didn’t walk to the door.

  “How long have you been drinking, seriously drinking?”

  “I was thirteen when my old man started pourin’ it down my gullet. The first time, he made me drink ’til I puked.” He faced the rector. “Bourbon. Sour mash. He liked it when I got to where I could drink him under the table, not many people could. When he died, I swore I’d never touch th’ stuff again.”

  “But you did, and now you’re suffering on your own account as well as Pauline’s. Do you care for Pauline?”

  “Yeah. I care for her.”

  “Why?”

  “I respect what she’s been able to do, to come back like that, out of her
hell, and find faith. God, I hate what I did.”

  “You did it together. It takes two.”

  “And her kids. They’re great kids. Who deserves kids like that? Nobody, not even people who have it all together, who never took a drink! I thought that maybe I could . . . maybe we could . . .”

  “You can.”

  “No.” His voice was hard. “It’s too late for me.”

  “What if you had somebody in this thing with you, somebody who’d stick closer than a brother, somebody who’d go to bat for you, help you through it—help you over it?”

  “Oh, Jesus Christ!” Buck said with disgust, moving toward the door.

  “That’s who I had in mind, actually.”

  Buck’s face colored. “That crap don’t work for me.”

  “How long have you hauled the pain of your dead brother in your gut? And how much longer do you want to haul it? Stop, friend. Stop and look at this thing that cheats you out of all that’s valuable, all that’s precious.”

  The superintendent turned and stared out the window, his back to the rector.

  “You can’t beat this alone, Buck. You’ve tried for years and it never worked. Bottom line, we’re not created to go it alone, we’re made to hammer out our lives with God as our defender. Going it alone may work for a while, but it never has and never will go the mile.”

  Buck shrugged his shoulders, still looking out the window. “Pauline knows about God and she couldn’t make it.”

  “No, but she’s going to. In any case, we don’t come to God to attain perfection, we come to be saved.”

  “You remember my grandaddy was a preacher. There’s no way I could be good enough to get saved or whatever you call it. No way.”

  “It isn’t about being good enough.”

  Buck turned to him, furious. “So what is it about, for Christ’s sake?”

  “It’s about letting Him into our lives in a personal way. You can do that with a simple prayer you can repeat with me. When we let Him in, He guarantees that we become new creatures.”

  “New creatures?” Buck laughed bitterly. “Who wants to be a new creature when you can’t even get the old one to work?”

  “New creatures make mistakes, too, they stumble around and fall in a ditch. But once the commitment is made with the heart, He takes it from there.”

  “It always sounded like a lot of bull to me.”

  Father Tim got up and stood beside his desk. “I could tell you all day what you’d gain by making that commitment—but look at it another way: What do you have to lose?”

  For a time, the only sound was the ticking of the clock on the bookshelf.

  “Listen,” said Buck, “I’ll be out of the house in a couple of days.”

  He moved suddenly to the door and opened it, then went down the walk to his truck, not looking back.

  “The fields are white . . .”

  “Buck!” said the rector. “Wait . . .”

  But he didn’t wait.

  “They want to buy me out and let me run it,” said Winnie, looking anxious. “What do you think?”

  If he ever had to mess with another real estate deal . . .

  “What do you think?” he asked.

  “It sounds like a good idea. I mean, I do the work and get a regular paycheck, and they have all th’ headaches.” She sighed. “That might be refreshin’.”

  “Weren’t you going to wait ’til after the cruise to make a decision?”

  “They want an answer right away. Soon.” She wrung her hands. “At once!”

  He didn’t feel he had the credentials to counsel Winnie on what amounted to the next few years of her life. “What’s God saying to you about all this?”

  “I still have that stuck feelin’, like I don’t know which way to turn.”

  Definitely not a good sign, but what more could he say?

  “Your hair . . .” said Emma.

  “What about it?” he snapped.

  “Dearest,” said Cynthia, “about your hair . . .”

  “Don’t touch it!” he said. So what if he had hacked on it himself? At least it wasn’t draping over his collar like so much seaweed.

  “Man!” exclaimed Mule, eyeing him with interest.

  “You don’t like it?” he asked. “I never say anything about your hair, I never even notice your hair, why you can’t do the same for me is beyond all imagining—”

  “Gee whiz,” said Mule, looking perplexed. “I was just goin’ to ask where you got that blue shirt.”

  When he walked into Esther’s hospital room on Thursday morning, her bed was surrounded by Bane volunteers. One of them held a notepad at the ready, and he felt a definite tension in the air.

  They didn’t even look up as he came in.

  Hessie leaned over Esther, speaking as if the patient’s hearing had been severely impaired by the fall.

  “Esther!” she shouted. “You’ve got to cooperate! The doctor said he’d give us twenty minutes and not a second more!”

  “Ummaummhhhh,” said Esther, desperately trying to speak through clamped jaws.

  “Why couldn’t she write something?” asked Vanita Bentley. “I see two fingers sticking out of her cast.”

  “Uhnuhhh,” said Esther.

  “You can’t write with two fingers. Have you ever tried writing with two fingers?”

  “Oh, Lord,” said Vanita. “Then you think of something! We’ve got to hurry!”

  “We need an alphabet board!” Hessie declared.

  “Who has time to go lookin’ for an alphabet board? Where would we find one, anyway?”

  “Make one!” instructed the co-chair. “Write down the alphabet on your notepad and let her point ’til she spells it out.”

  “Ummuhuhnuh,” said Esther.

  “She can’t move her arm to point!”

  “So? We can move the notepad!”

  Esther raised the forefinger of her right hand.

  “One finger. One! Right, Esther? If it’s yes, blink once, if it’s no, blink twice.”

  “She blinked once, so it’s yes. One! One what, Esther? Cup? Teaspoon? Vanita, are you writin’ this down?”

  “Two blinks,” said Marge Crowder. “So, it’s not a cup and it’s not a teaspoon.”

  “Butter!” said somebody. “Is it one stick of butter?”

  “She blinked twice, that’s no. Try again. One teaspoon? Oh, thank God! Vanita, one teaspoon.”

  “Right. But one teaspoon of what? Salt?”

  “Oh, please, you wouldn’t use a teaspoon of salt in a cake!”

  “Excuse me for living,” said Vanita.

  “Maybe cinnamon? Look! One blink. One teaspoon of cinnamon!”

  “Hallelujah!” they chorused.

  Esther wagged her finger.

  “One, two, three, four, five . . .” someone counted.

  “Five what?” asked Vanita. “Cups? No. Teaspoons? No. Tablespoons?”

  “One blink, it’s tablespoons! Five tablespoons!”

  “Oh, mercy, I’m glad I took my heart pill this morning,” said Hessie. “Is it of butter? I just have a feelin’ it’s butter. Look! One blink!”

  “Five tablespoons of butter!” shouted the crowd, in unison.

  “OK, in cakes, you’d have to have baking powder. How much baking powder, Esther?”

  Esther held up one finger.

  “One teaspoon?”

  “Uhnuhhh,” said Esther, looking desperate.

  “One tablespoon?” asked Vanita.

  “You wouldn’t use a tablespoon of baking powder in a cake!” sniffed Marge Crowder.

  “Look,” said Vanita, “I’m helpin’ y’all just to be nice. My husband personally thinks I am a great cook, but I don’t do cakes, OK, so if you’d like somebody else to take these notes, just step right up and help yourself, thank you!”

  “You’re doin’ great, honey, keep goin’,” said Hessie.

  “Look at that!” exclaimed Vanita. “She’s got one finger out straight and the other
one bent back! Is that one and a half? It is, she blinked once! I declare, that is the cleverest thing I ever saw. OK, one and a half teaspoons of bakin’ powder!”

  Everyone applauded.

  “This is a killer,” said Vanita, fanning herself with the notebook. “Don’t you think we could sell two-layer triple chocolates just as easy?”

  “Ummunnuhhh,” said Esther, her eyes burning with disapproval.

  Hessie snorted. “This could take ’til kingdom come. How much time have we got left?”

  “Ten minutes, maybe eleven!”

  “Eleven minutes? Are you kidding me? We’ll never finish this in eleven minutes.”

  “I think she told me she uses buttermilk in this recipe,” said Marge Crowder. “Esther,” she shouted, “how much buttermilk?”

  Esther made the finger and a half gesture.

  “One and a half cups, right? Great! Now we’re cookin’!”

  More applause.

  “OK,” commanded the co-chair, “what have we got so far?”

  Vanita, being excessively near-sighted, held the notepad up for close inspection. “One teaspoon of cinnamon, five tablespoons of butter, one and a half teaspoons of baking powder, and one and a half cups of buttermilk.”

  “I’ve got to sit down,” said the head of the Food Committee, pressing her temples.

  “It looks like Esther’s droppin’ off to sleep, oh, Lord, Esther, honey, don’t go to sleep, you can sleep tonight!”

  “Could somebody ask th’ nurse for a stress tab?” wondered Vanita. “Do you think they’d mind, I’ve written checks to th’ hospital fund for nine years, goin’ on ten!”

  “By the way,” asked Marge Crowder, “is this recipe for one layer or two?”

  He decided to step into the hall for a breath of fresh air.

  Hammer and tong. That’s how one Bane worker said they went at it on Friday.

  The weather was glorious, the parish hall was full to overflowing with both goods and people, the lawn was adorned with three white tents, sheltering from any possible bad weather everything from fine antiques and children’s toys to hot meals and homemade desserts. Three tour buses stood parked at the curb, signaling the penultimate event of the year.