Out to Canaan

by Jan Karon

  “Blast!” he said.

  “Is that some kind of cussin’?” asked Lace.

  “In a manner of speaking,” he replied.

  He was running late for dinner, and he had no idea how he would explain it all to his wife.

  Of course, she was vastly understanding about most things, he had to hand her that. So far, she hadn’t run him out of the house with a broom or made him sleep in the study.

  This, however, could definitely turn the tide in that direction.

  She was standing at the back door, looking for him, when he walked up to the stoop with Lace Turner and a weak and failing Harley Welch.

  She said only “Good Lord!” and came out to help him.

  Hoppy Harper was on his way, possibly the last of that sterling breed of doctors who made house calls.

  Heaving Harley up the stairs to the guest room was worse than hauling any armoire along the same route. Though shockingly frail, Harley’s limp body seemed to have the weight of a small elephant. It took three of them to get Harley on the bed, where the rector undressed him and bathed him with a cloth, which he dipped in a pan of soapy water.

  Harley looked comic in the rector’s pajamas, which had to be changed immediately, given Harley’s inability to make it to the adjoining bathroom on time. “I didn’t go t’ do that,” said Harley, whose flush of embarrassment returned a bit of color to his face.

  What had he gotten into? Father Tim wondered. He didn’t know. But when Harley Welch looked at him and smiled weakly, the rector felt the absolute wisdom of this impulsive decision, and smiled back.

  He went to bed, exhausted. Lace had gained permission to stay over, sleeping in Dooley’s room next to Harley’s, and keeping watch.

  He reached for his wife, and she took his hand. “Am I dead meat around here?” he asked.

  She rolled toward him and kissed him softly on the nearly bare top of his head.

  “I married a preacher,” she said. “Not a banker, not an exporter, not an industrialist. A preacher. This is what preachers do—if they do it right.”

  Nobody on the vestry had heard a word from the real estate company that had made inquiries around town.

  Oh, well, they’d thrown out the line and there would be another bite at another time. But had they made the bait attractive enough? They couldn’t worry about that. They couldn’t install additional bathrooms in the hope that Fernbank would lure a bed and breakfast. They couldn’t cut up the ground floor into classrooms in the hope it would lure an academy. In the end, they couldn’t even afford to paint and roof it, hoping to lure anyone at all.

  At eight in the morning he dropped by Town Hall and sat in a Danish modern chair that once occupied the mayor’s own family room. He declined the weak coffee in a Styrofoam cup.

  “Barbecue?” growled the mayor. “Barbecue? Two can play that game. Ray Cunningham makes the best barbecue in the country—outside the state of Texas, of course.”

  “I don’t know if I’d fight barbecue with barbecue,” he said. “I hear Mack’s planning to have these things right up ’til election day.”

  The mayor was just finishing her fast-food sausage biscuit. “Why do anything at all, is what I’d like to know! I don’t see how that snake could oust me, even if I was the most triflin’ mayor ever put in office.”

  “Any town in the country would be thrilled to have you running things, Esther. Look at the merchant gardens up and down Main Street, look at our town festival that raised more money than any event in our history. Look at Rose Day, and how you put your shoulder to the wheel and helped turn the old Porter place into a town museum! Look how you rounded up a crew and painted and improved Sophia’s little house . . . . The list is endless.”

  “And look how I don’t take any malarkey off the council. You know we’ve got at least two so-and-sos who’d as soon put a paper plant and a landfill in here as walk up th’ street.”

  “You’ve never taken your eyes off the target, I’ll hand you that.”

  “So what do you think?” asked Esther, leaning forward. The rector saw that she’d broken out in red splotches, which usually indicated her enthusiasm for a good fight.

  “I think I’d wait a while and see how things go in the other camp.”

  “That’s what Ray said.”

  “In the meantime, I hope you’ll have a presence at the town festival. I hear Mack’s setting up quite a booth.”

  “You can count on it! Last year I kissed a pig, this year I’ll be kissin’ babies. And one of these days, I want to do somethin’ for the town, thanking them for their support all these years. Lord, I hope talkin’ to you doesn’t infringe on any laws of church and state!”

  He laughed. “I don’t think so. By the way—how about laying off the sausage biscuits for a while? I’d like to see you make it through another couple of terms.”

  She wadded up the biscuit wrapper and lobbed it into the wastebasket. “You’re off duty,” she said. “So I’ll thank you not to preach.”

  School would be out in two weeks and Dooley would be home.

  Where in the dickens would he find the boy a job, or where would Dooley find one for himself? It would have to be in Mitford, which was no employment capital. He’d talk to Lew Boyd when he filled up his tank, or maybe the fellow who was looking after the church grounds could use a helper . . . .

  Another thing. Maybe he and Cynthia could do something he’d never done in his life: take a week at the beach, rent a cottage—his wife would know how to do that. As for their mutual dislike of sand and too much sun, weren’t there endless compensations—like time to read, the roar of the ocean, and seafood fresh from the boat?

  Dooley would like that, and he could take Tommy. They’d load the car and head out right after Dooley’s two weeks at Meadowgate Farm.

  A vacation! For a man renowned for his stick-in-the-mudness, this was a great advance.

  Whistling, he headed toward home.

  Lace Turner was still wearing the battered hat. But her life with the Harpers had revealed a certain beauty. Her once-tangled hair was neatly pulled away from her face, dramatizing the burning determination in her eyes.

  “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 teet
h.”

  “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 meant 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 . . . .