Out to Canaan

by Jan Karon

  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?”

  “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.

  After Esther Bolick agreed to chair the historic church event, she went home and asked her husband, Gene, to have her committed. The Bane and Blessing was known, over the years, for having put two women flat on their backs in bed, nearly broken up a marriage, and chased three families to the Lutherans in Wesley.

  Besides, hadn’t she virtually retired from years and years of churchwork, trying to focus, instead, on cake baking? Wasn’t baking a ministry in its own right? And didn’t she bake an orange marmalade cake at least twice a week for some poor soul who was down and out?

  In the first place, she couldn’t remember saying she’d do the Bane. She had been totally dumbfounded when the meeting ended and everybody rushed over to hug and thank her and tell her how wonderful she was.

  In the end, she sighed, determined that it should be done “as unto the Lord and not unto men.”

  “That’s the spirit!” said her rector, doling out a much-needed hug.

  He wouldn’t have traded places with Esther Bolick for all the tea in China. Esther, however, would do an outstanding job, and no doubt put an unprecedented amount of money in the missions till.

  Because it was the most successful fund-raising event in the entire diocese, the women who pulled it off usually got enough local recognition to last a lifetime, or, at the very least, a couple of months.

  “October fourth,” Esther told Gene.

  “Eat your Wheaties,” Gene told Esther.

  He’d rather be shot. But
somebody had to do it.

  “Hey,” said Dooley, knowing who was on the phone.

  “Hey, yourself. What’s going on up there?”

  “Chorus trip to Washington this weekend. We’re singing in a church and a bunch of senators and stuff will be there. I bought a new blazer, my old one got ripped on a nail. How’s ol’ Barnabas?”

  “Sitting right here, licking my shoe, I think I dropped jam on it this morning. There’s something I need to talk with you about.”

  Silence.

  “Hal Owen hired an assistant.”

  He may as well have put a knife in the boy, so keenly could he feel his disappointment.

  “That means he’ll have help this summer, and the fellow will be . . .”—he especially hated this part—“be staying in your room until he gets situated.”

  “Fine,” said Dooley, his voice cold.

  “Hal had to do it, he’s been asked to vet a riding stable that’s moving in up the road. He’s got his hands full and then some.”

  He couldn’t bear Dooley Barlowe’s silences; they seemed as deep as wells, as black as mines.

  “Hal and Marge want you to come out for two weeks when you get home from school. They’ll . . . miss having you for the summer.”

  “OK.”

  “You might want to think about a job.”

  More silence.

  “Tommy’s going to have a job.”

  “Where?”

  “Pumping gas at Lew’s. He’ll probably have a uniform with his name on it.” It was a weak ploy, but all he could come up with. He pushed on. “Summer will give you time with your brother. Poobaw would like that. And so would your granpaw.”

  Give him time to think it over. “Listen, buddy. You’re going to have a great summer, you’ll see. And we love you. Never forget that.”

  “I don’t.”

  Good! “Good. I’ll talk with you Saturday.”

  “Hey, listen . . .” said Dooley.

  “Yes?”

  “Nothin’.”

  “OK. God be with you, son.”

  He took out his handkerchief and wiped his forehead.

  “He who is not impatient is not in love,” said an old Italian proverb.

  Well, that proved it right there, he thought, leaving his office and hurrying up Main Street toward home.

  Why did he feel such excitement about seeing his wife, when he had seen her only this morning? She had brought them coffee in bed at an inhuman hour, and they’d sat up, drinking it, laughing and talking as if it were high noon.

  A woman who would get up at five o’clock in order to visit with her husband before his prayer and study time was a saint. Of course, he admitted, she didn’t make a habit of it. And didn’t that make it all the more welcome?

  Cynthia, Cynthia! he thought, looking at the pink dogwood in the yard of the tea room across the street. Like great pink canopies, the trees spread their lacy shade over emerald grass and beds of yellow tulips.

  Dear Lord! It was nearly more than a man could bear—spring coming on like thunder, and a woman who had kissed him only hours ago, in a way he’d never, in his bachelor days, had the wits to imagine.

  It wouldn’t take more than a very short memory to recall the women who’d figured in his life.

  Peggy Cramer. That had taught him a thing or two. And when the engagement broke off while he was in seminary, he’d known that it was a good thing.

  Then there was Becky. How his parish had worked to pull that one off! She was the woman who thought Wordsworth was a Dallas department store. He hoofed it past Dora Pugh’s hardware, laughing out loud.

  Ah, but he felt an immense gratitude for his wife’s spontaneous laughter, her wisdom, and even her infernal stubborness. He snapped a branch of white lilac from the bush at the corner of the rectory yard.

  He raced up his front steps, threw open the door, and bounded down the hall.

  “Cynthia!”

  As if he had punched a button, a clamor went up. Puny Guthrie’s red-haired twins, Sissy and Sassy, began squalling as one.

  “Now see what you’ve done!” said Puny, standing at the ironing board in the kitchen.

  “I didn’t know you’d still be here,” he said lamely.

  “An’ I just rocked ’em off to sleep! Look, girls, here’s your granpaw!”

  His house help, for whom he would be eternally grateful, was determined that he be a granpaw to her infants, whether he liked it or not.

  “So, looky here, you hold Sissy and I’ll jiggle Sassy, I’ve got another hour to finish all this ironin’ from th’ tea.”

  He took Sissy and, as instantly as Sissy had started crying, she stopped and gazed up at him.

  “Hey, there,” he said, gazing back.

  “See? She likes you! She loves ’er granpaw, don’t she?”

  He could not take his eyes off the wonder in his arms. Because Puny was often gone by the time he arrived home, or was next door at the little yellow house, he hadn’t seen much of the twins over the winter. And now here they were, nearly a full year old, and one of them reaching up to pull his lower lip down to his collar.

  Puny put Sassy on her hip and jiggled her. “If you’d jis’ walk Sissy around or somethin’, I’d ’preciate it. Lord, look at th’ ironin’ that come off of that tea, and all of it antique somethin’ or other from a bishop or a pope . . . .”

  “Where’s Cynthia?”

  “I’ve not seen ’er since lunch. She might be over at her house, workin’ on a book.”

  As far as he knew, his industrious wife was not working on a book these days. She’d decided to take a sabbatical since last year’s book on bluebirds.

  “I’ll just take Sissy and go looking,” he said.

  “If she cries, jiggle ’er!”

  Wanting to be proactive, he started jiggling at once.

  He walked through the backyard, ignoring the dandelions that lighted his lawn like so many small, yellow fires. No, indeed, he would not get obsessive over the dandelions this spring, he would not dig them out one by one, as he had done in former years. Dandelions come and dandelions go, and there you have it, he thought, jiggling. Wasn’t he a man heading into retirement? Wasn’t he a man learning to loosen up and live a little?

  Sissy gurgled and squirmed in his arms.

  “Timothy!”

  It was his wife, trotting through the hedge and looking like a girl.

  “You’ll never guess what!”

  “I can’t guess,” he said, leaning over to kiss her. He tucked the branch of lilac in her shirt pocket as Sissy socked him on the chin.

  “Thank you, dearest! Mule just called to say someone’s interested in Fernbank! He tried to ring you at the office, but you’d left. Can you imagine? It’s someone from out of town, he said, a corporation or something. Run and call him, and I’ll take Sissy!”

  Why didn’t he feel joyful as he went to the phone in his study? He didn’t feel joyful at all. Instead, he felt a strange sense of foreboding.

  He lay on his side, propped up on his elbow. “I thought about you today,” he said, shy about telling her this simple thing.

  She traced his nose and chin with her forefinger. “How very odd! I thought about you today.”

  “It was the five o’clock coffee that did it,” he said, kissing her.

  “Is that what it was?” she murmured, kissing him in return.

  Perhaps almost anyone could love, he thought; it was the loving back that seemed to count for everything.

  He tossed the thing onto a growing pile.

  A man who had time to dig dandelions was a man with time to waste, he thought.

  While he had no time at all to do something so trivial, he found he couldn’t help himself. He’d been lured into the yard like a miner lured to veins of gold.

  There were, needless to say, a hundred other things that needed doing more:

  The visit to Fernbank’s attic, and get cracking now that a possible buyer was on the scene.

  Fer
tilize the roses.

  Mulch the beds.

  Get up to Hope House and talk to Scott Murphy . . . .

  Scott was the young, on-fire chaplain that he and Miss Sadie had hired last year. Ever since he’d come last September, they’d tried to find time to run together, but so far, it hadn’t worked. Scott was like the tigers in a favorite childhood story—he was racing around the tree so fast, he was turning into butter.

  The new chaplain not only held services every morning, but was making personal rounds to every one of the forty residents, every day.

  “It’s what I was hired to do,” he said, grinning.

  In addition, he’d gotten the once-controversial kennel program up and running. In this deal, a Hope House resident could “rent” a cat or a dog for up to two hours a day, simply by placing an advance order for Hector, Barney, Muffin, Lucky, etc. As the rector had seen on his visits to Hope House, this program doled out its own kind of medicine.

  Evie Adams’s mother, Miss Pattie, who had been literally out of her mind for a decade, had taken a shine to Baxter, a cheerful dachshund, and was, on certain days, nearly lucid.

  Every afternoon, the pet wagon rolled along the halls at Hope House, and residents who weren’t bedridden got to amuse, and be amused by, their four-legged visitors. There were goldfish for those who couldn’t handle the responsibility of a cat or dog, and, for everyone in general, Mitford School kept the walls supplied with bright posters.

  “I’ll be dadgum if I wouldn’t like to move in there,” said several villagers who were perfectly able-bodied.

  He sat back on his heels and dropped the weed-puller. What about the Creek community? Hadn’t he and Scott talked last year about doing something, anything, to bring some healing to that place? It was overwhelming even to think about it, and yet, he constantly thought about it.

  And Sammy and Kenny and Jessie . . . there was that other overwhelming, and even more urgent issue, and he had no idea where to begin.

  He dug out a burdock and tossed it on the pile.

  And now this. A corporation? That didn’t sound good. Mule hadn’t known any details, he had merely talked on the phone with a real estate company who was making general inquiries about Fernbank.