Out to Canaan

by Jan Karon

  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 . . . .

  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 whethe
r 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.”

  “You’re stronger today.”

  “Yessir, I am. I ain’t never laid up in such style as this in m’ life, we had it hard when I was comin’ up in Wilkes County. We was s’ poor, all we had t’ play with was a rubber ball, an’ th’ dog eat half of that.”

  “Kind of hard to judge which way it would bounce,” said the rector.

  “Shoot, we was s’ poor, I went t’ school one time, I was wearin’ one shoe. Th’ teacher said ‘Harley, have you lost a shoe?’ an’ I said, ‘No, ma’m, I found one.’ ”

  “Don’t lie,” said Lace. “It ain’t right.”

  Harley looked doleful. “I ain’t lyin’! Another thing, Rev’rend, I’m gittin’ out of this bed tomorrow, sure as you’re born. I looked out that back winder and seen y’r yard, you need some rakin’ around that hedge.”

  Lace glared at Harley from beneath her hat brim. “You ain’t movin’ ’til Doc Harper gives you th’ green light.”

  “Lord have mercy! Git that girl a job of work t’ do.”

  The rector laughed. “She’s got a job of work to do! And you leave my hedge alone, buddyroe.”

  “I hate t’ be hangin’ on you an’ th’ missus like a calf on a tit.”

  “I don’t want to hear about it. Eat your banana bread.”

  “Law, now they’s two of ’em,” said Harley, taking a bite.

  “An’ drop y’r crumbs on y’r napkin,” said Lace.

  “Lace has real beauty.”

  “But she hides it with that dreadful hat. We let her wear it in the house, of course, but never to school or church.”

  “Sounds fair,” he said.

  Cynthia had gone next door for a cake pan, and Olivia was finishing a cup of tea with him.

  “It represents something to her,” said Olivia. “It’s a defense of who she is, I think, of something she doesn’t want us to change.”

  “You’re doing a grand job, you and Hoppy, we’re seeing a difference.”

  “We love her. She’s quite extraordinary.” Olivia stirred her tea, thoughtful. “Perhaps what we want more than anything . . . is for Lace to be able to cry.”

  “What I wanted more than anything was for Dooley to be able to laugh.”

  Olivia smiled. “The two things aren’t so different, perhaps. Laughter, tears . . . it’s all a way of letting something out, letting something go. Forgiveness . . . somehow, I think that’s the answer. Did I tell you she’s making straight A’s?”

  “Amazing!”

  “She hasn’t had much schooling, really, yet she loves to learn, it comes naturally to her. She keeps her nose in a book, with the radio tuned to a country music station.”

  They sipped their tea.

  “She adores Hoppy, of course,” Olivia said.

  “I’m sure she cares for you, too.”

  “I don’t know. She . . . fights me.”

  “Ah, well. I know about that.”

  “I take her to see her mother twice a week.”

  “What’s her mother like?”

  Olivia shook her head slowly. “Hard and unkind. I hoped she’d be different. Lace has taken care of her mother all her life, Lila Turner has been ill since Lace was a toddler. I think the only person who ever really cared about Lace, who loved her, is Harley.”

  “Was Harley ever married? Any children of his own?”

  “His wife died years ago, he loved her deeply and never quite got over her death. There weren’t any children.” Olivia finished her tea. “Well, on to brighter things,” she said, smiling. “Our school is out in two weeks. When is Dooley coming home?”

  “Next Friday,” he said. “He’ll come in with a friend’s parents. Avis wants him at The Local for the summer.”

  “Lovely! How does he feel about Meadowgate not being there for him?”

  “He’ll tough it out. After a couple of weeks at The Local, and hanging around with Tommy, and a few days at the beach . . .” He shrugged, hopeful.

  “All the best,” she said, her violet eyes bright with feeling.

  “All the best to you,” he replied, meaning it.

  Avis wanted Dooley ASAP, which could mean three days at the farm and four at the beach. Or no days at the beach and a week at the farm. Another thought: Maybe Dooley would like to take Poobaw to the beach and let Tommy fill in for him at The Local before Tommy went to work at Lew Boyd’s.

  Why did something so simple boggle his mind? Should he call Dooley and tell him he had a job that would place some constraints on the farm? Should he even mention the beach? Should he just wait ’til Dooley came home and deal with it then?

  “Lord . . .” he sighed, lifting his hands.

  “A billboard,” said Emma.

  “A billboard?”

  “Mack Stroupe.”

  Mack on a billboard? Is that why Mack had gotten a manicure? He didn’t know how these things worked.

  “On the highway after you pass Hattie Cloer’s market. Right in your face. It’s enough to make you jump out of your skin, that thing loomin’ up on you. You talk about ugly, his nose takes up half th’ board. And those bushy eyebrows, and that egg-suckin’ grin . . .” Emma shivered.

  “What does
it say?”

  “It says Mack for Mitford, Mitford for Mack, Vote Stroupe for Mayor. I told Harold to stop the car while I puked.”

  “A billboard. Amazing.” Who was repackaging Mack Stroupe?

  “Have you seen Lucy since she got her hair dyed? Blond! Can you believe it? Her hair’s been the color of a church mouse for a hundred years. You know Mack made her do it. Lucy Stroupe would no more think of dyin’ her hair blond than I’d think of runnin’ a marathon. But—do you think blond hair will keep Mack Stroupe from cheatin’ on his wife with that black-headed hussy in Wesley? I don’t think so.”

  Emma glowered at him as if he were personally responsible for the whole affair. “Are you goin’ to his barbecue on Saturday?”

  “Dooley’s coming in Friday, and we’ll be spending the day at Meadowgate on Saturday.”

  “Good! I hope th’ whole town stays away in droves.”

  “Unfortunately, a lot of people love barbecue.”

  “You can bet your boots that Harold and I won’t be staying more than fifteen minutes.”

  “You’re going?”

  “Of course we’re going, I want to see what the lowlife has to say. How can you knock the opposition when you don’t know what they stand for?”

  “Aha,” he said.

  Dooley was home and Barnabas was wild with excitement. The rector wondered if the joy that people seemed so expert at containing somehow transferred to their dogs, who had nothing at all to hide.

  “Hey, Barn! Hey, buddy!”

  Barnabas licked Dooley on every exposed area with special attention to his left ear. “Say a Scripture!” he yelled.

  The rector laughed. “You say a Scripture!”

  “Ah . . . the Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want!” Dooley thundered.

  Barnabas crashed to the floor and sighed.

  “A miracle, if I ever saw it,” said Cynthia, of the only dog anyone had ever known whose behavior could be controlled by Scripture recitation.