Out to Canaan

by Jan Karon

  “Good fellow.”

  “I’ve been meaning to tell you we got the garden in at Hope House, fourteen of the residents are able to plant and hoe a little, we have peas coming up.”

  “You’re everything Miss Sadie wanted,” said the rector. “You’re making Hope House live up to its name.”

  “Thank you, sir. Mitford is definitely home to me. Maybe I can buy Miss Ivey’s little cottage when she sells the bakery and moves to Tennessee—I don’t know, I’m praying about it.”

  They rounded the bend in the footpath and saw Homeless Hobbes sitting on the front step of his small, tidy house, a colorful wash hanging on the line.

  “Lord have mercy, if it ain’t town people!” Homeless got up and limped toward them on his crutch, laughing his rasping laugh. His mute, brown-and-white spotted dog crouched by the step and snapped its jaws, but no sound escaped. Luke and Lizzie barked furiously.

  “Homeless!” The rector was thrilled to see his old friend, the man who’d given up a fast-lane advertising career, returned to his boyhood home, and gone back to “talkin’ like he was raised.”

  “I’m about half wore out lookin’ for company! I told Barkless a while ago, I said somebody’s comin’, my nose is itchin’, so I put somethin’ extra in th’ soup pot!”

  The rector embraced Homeless and handed over the bag. “For the pot. And this is Scott Murphy, the chaplain at Hope House. He works sixteen hours a day and still has time to meddle in Creek business.”

  Homeless looked at the tall, lanky chaplain approvingly. “We need meddlin’ in here,” he said.

  “I’d like to see th’ dozers push th’ whole caboodle off th’ bank, and good riddance!”

  Homeless had brought out two aluminum folding chairs that had seen better days, and set them up for his guests. He sat on the step, and the dogs lay panting in a patch of grass.

  “They say th’ whole thing’ll be a shoppin’ center in a couple of years. Where all them trailers is parked—Wal-Mart! Where all them burned-out houses is settin’—Lowe’s Hardware! Where you could once go in and get shot in th’ head, you’ll be able t’ go in an’ get you a flush toilet.

  “Still an’ all, two years is a good bit of time, and you could do a good bit of work on the Creek, if you handle it right. Now, you take ol’ Absalom Greer, he come in here and preached up a storm and some folks got saved and a good many lives were turned around, but Absalom was native and he was old, and they let him be.

  “They won’t take kindly to a young feller like yourself if you don’t give ’em plenty of time to warm up.

  “What I think you ought to do is come to my place on Wednesday night when I make soup for whoever shows up, and just set an’ talk an’ be patient, an’ let th’ good Lord do a work.”

  “I’ll be here,” said Scott.

  Homeless grinned. “I wouldn’t bring them dogs if I was you. Jack Russells are a mite fancy for my crowd.”

  “We lost our dining room manager last week,” Scott said on the walk back home. “A family problem. Everybody’s been pitching in, it’s kind of a scramble.”

  “I like scrambles,” said the rector, who was currently living in one.

  Sometimes, a thought lodged somewhere in the back of his mind and he couldn’t get it out, like a sesame seed stuck between his teeth.

  Walking down Old Church Lane the following day, his jacket slung over his shoulder, he tried to focus on the place—was it in his brain?—that had something to tell him, some hidden thing to reveal.

  Blast! He hated this. It was like Emma’s aggravating game, Three Guesses. He couldn’t even begin to guess . . . .

  A job. Why did he think it had to do with a job?

  We lost our dining room manager last week, Scott had said.

  Yes!

  Pauline!

  Hanging on to his jacket, he started running. He could go to the office and call from there, but no, he’d run across Baxter Park, through his own backyard, and then up the hill and over to Betty Craig’s house. Why waste a minute? Jobs were scarce.

  He was panting and streaked with sweat when he hit the sidewalk in front of Betty’s trim cottage. He stopped for a moment to wipe his face with a handkerchief when Dooley blew by him on his red bicycle.

  “Hey!” shouted Dooley.

  “Hey, yourself!” he shouted back.

  He saw the boy throw the bicycle down by Betty’s front steps, fling his helmet in the grass, and race to the door.

  “Mama! Mama!” he called through the screen door.

  Pauline appeared at the door and let him in as the rector walked up to the porch.

  “Mama, there’s a job at Hope House! Something in the dining room! I heard it at the store, they need somebody right now.”

  “Oh.” Pauline grew pale and put her hand to the left side of her face. “I . . . don’t know.”

  “You’ve waited tables, Mama, you can do it! You can do it!”

  He saw the look on Dooley’s face, and tried to swallow down a knot in his throat. In only a few years, this boy on a bicycle would be worth over a million dollars, maybe two million if the market stayed strong. Dooley wouldn’t know this until he was twenty-one, but the rector could see that Sadie Baxter had known exactly what she was doing when she drew up her will.

  “Come on, Mama, get dressed and go up there, I’ve got to get back to The Local or Avis’ll kill me, I got five deliveries.”

  “I’ll take you,” the rector told Pauline. “I’ll go home and get the car, won’t be a minute.” Hang the meeting in the parish hall at two o’clock.

  Pauline looked at him through the screen door, keeping her hand over the left side of her face. “Oh, but . . . I don’t have anything to . . . I don’t know . . .”

  “Don’t be afraid,” he said.

  Tears suddenly filled Pauline’s eyes, but she managed to smile. “OK,” she said, turning to look at her son. “I can do it.”

  “Right!” said Dooley. He charged through the door and raced down the steps and was away on his red bicycle, but not before the rector saw the flush of unguarded hope on his face.

  “I’ll be back,” said Father Tim. “Wear that blue skirt and white blouse, why don’t you? I thought you looked very . . .”—he wasn’t terribly good at this; he searched for a word—“nice . . . in that.”

  She gazed at him for a long moment, almost smiling, and disappeared down the hall.

  An attractive woman, he thought, tall and slender and surprisingly poised, somehow. Her old life was written on her face, as all our lives are written, but something shone through that and transformed it.

  In his opinion, Hope House might have done a notch better on their personnel director, Lida Willis.

  “How long have you been sober?” asked the stern-looking woman, eyeing Pauline.

  “A year and a half.”

  “What happened to turn you around?”

  “I prayed a prayer,” said Pauline, looking fully into the director’s cool gaze.

  “You prayed a prayer?”

  Though he sat well across the room, feigning interest in a magazine, Father Tim felt the tension of this encounter. God was calling Pauline Barlowe to come up higher.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Are you in AA?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know. I . . . feel like God has healed me of drinkin’. I don’t crave it no more.”

  “Shoney’s fired you for drinking on the job?”

  “Yes. But they said that . . . when I was sober, I was the best they ever had.”

  “Miss Barlowe, what makes you think you might be right for this job?”

  “I understand being around food, I get along real well with people, and I’m not afraid of hard work.”

  The director sat back in her chair and looked at Pauline, but said nothing.

  “I need this job and would be really thankful to get it. I know if you call Sam Ward at Sam and Peg’s Ham House in Holding
, he’ll tell you I do good work, I never missed a day at th’ Ham House, my station was fourteen tables.”

  “Were you drinking when you worked there?”

  Pauline looked down for a moment, then looked straight at Lida Willis. “Not as bad as . . . later.”

  “Has your personal injury handicapped you in any way?”

  “Sometimes I don’t hear as good out of my left ear, but that’s all. My arm works wonderful, it’s a miracle.”

  “I appreciate your honesty, Miss Barlowe.” She stood up. “Please don’t call us. We’ll be in touch.”

  Pauline stood, also. “Yes, ma’am.”

  Dear God, he wanted this job for Pauline. No, wrong. He wanted this job for Dooley.

  He saw Scott Murphy in the hall. “If there’s anything you can do,” he said under his breath as Pauline drank at the water fountain. “Your dining room manager’s job . . .” He never begged anyone for anything, but this was different and he didn’t care.

  Scott looked at him, knowing.

  “She can do it,” he told the chaplain.

  He was looking something up in his study when he heard a noise in the garage. It sounded like his car engine revving.

  Surely Harley wasn’t already working on . . .

  He went through the kitchen, carrying J. W. Stevenson’s rare volume on his ministry in the Scottish highlands.

  Dooley was sitting in the Buick, gunning the motor. Barnabas sat on the passenger side, looking straight ahead.

  “What’s going on?” Father Tim asked through the open car window.

  “Nothin’.”

  “Nothing, is it? Looks like you’re gunning that motor pretty good.”

  “I’m checking it out for Harley.”

  “Really?”

  “He didn’t ask me to, but I thought it would help him to know how it sounds.”

  “Right. Well, you’re out of there, buddy. Come on.”

  Dooley gave him an aloof stare. “Jack’s dad lets him—”

  “Look. What Jack’s dad does is beside the point.” Was it, really? He didn’t have a clue. Why would people let fourteen-year-old kids drive a car, two years before they could get a license? Or was that the going thing and he was a stick-in-the mud? “Maybe one day we can drive out to Farmer . . . .”

  Dooley turned off the ignition: “Cool,” he said. “Your engine’s got a knock in it.”

  At six-thirty, Barnabas was finishing up last week’s meat loaf, Violet was sneering down from the refrigerator, Cynthia was running a garlic clove around the salad bowl, Dooley was taking one of his endless showers, and Lace was stuffing a snack down a reluctant Harley Welch.

  Father Tim still couldn’t get over the fact that only three or four years ago, the rectory had been quiet as a tomb. No dog, no boy, no wife in an apron, no red-haired babies, and hardly ever a soul in the guest room, with the agonizing exception, of course, of his phony Irish cousin and an occasional overnight visit by Stuart Cullen, his seminary friend and current bishop.

  “Can I talk t’ you som’ers?” Lace wanted to know.

  Harley was sitting on the side of the bed, fully dressed, but looking weak. He scraped the last bite from a cup of peach yogurt and wiped his mouth with his sleeve.

  “Rev’rend, Lace has got a notion I cain’t argue ’er out of. Don’t pay no attention to ’er if she talks foolish.”

  “I don’t believe I’ve ever heard Lace talk foolish,” he said. “You look a little peaked today, Harley. How’re you feeling?”

  “Wore out. We was up an’ down an’ aroun’ ever’ whichaway, th’ doc said I needed exercise. I been eatin’ like a boar hog an’ layin’ up in this bed ’til I was runnin’ t’ fat.”

  “We could go down t’ y’r basement,” said Lace, tugging at her hat brim.

  “My basement?”

  “I hate like th’ dickens I couldn’t talk ’er out of this,” said Harley. “She’s pigheaded as a mule, always has been since I knowed ’er as a baby.”

  “What’s the deal?” he asked as they trooped down the basement stairs.

  “You’ll see,” she said.

  The musty smell of earth came to him, and he remembered the cave he and Cynthia had been lost in only last year. They had wandered in circles for fourteen agonizing hours, until the local police, led by Barnabas, brought them out.

  He shuddered and flipped the switch that lit the dark hallway.

  There was the bathroom that hadn’t been used since he moved here fifteen years ago, and the two bedrooms and the little kitchen—which had served, during the tenures of various rectors, as a mother-in-law apartment, a facility for runaways and later for elderly widows, a home office, an adult Sunday School, a church nursery, and storage space for the detritus of nearly a century of clergy families.

  Lace folded her arms across her chest. “This is what I think.”

  “Shoot.”

  “When me’n Harley was ramblin’ around today outside, we seen y’r basement door. F’r somethin’ t’ do, I tried t’ git th’ door open and had t’ nearly bust it in.”

  “Really?”

  “But it ain’t broke, it was just stuck.”

  “Good!”

  “So we seen how this is a place t’ live, with a toilet an’ kitchen an’ all. An’ I got to thinkin’ how if Harley goes back to th’ Creek, how he ain’t goin’ t’ take care of hisself, an’ besides, somethin’ bad could happen to ’im.”

  “Aha.”

  “So I thought if you was to like th’ idea, Harley could live down here and go t’ work f’r you an’ Cynthia.”

  He pulled at his chin.

  “Harley can work, you ain’t never seen ’im work, you just seen ’im laid up sick. Harley can rake, he can saw, he can hammer, he can paint.”

  “I’ll be darned.”

  “An’ he wouldn’t charge you a cent to keep you an’ Cynthia’s cars worked on.”

  She looked at him steadily under the dim glow of the bulb.

  “Well, I don’t know. I’d have to think about it, talk to Cynthia about it.”

  “He wouldn’t be no trouble. They wouldn’t be no cookin’ or nothin’ to do for ’im, he could take care of hisself. He could paint this place for you, fix it up, I’d help ’im.”

  She paused, then said: “You ought t’ do it, it’d be good for ever’body.”

  Lace Turner had made her case, and rested it.

  “Can he draw cats?” asked Cynthia. “He could do my next book.”

  Uh-oh. “Your next book?”

  “I’ve been meaning to tell you, dearest. I’m starting a new book. You know how I said I’d never do another Violet book?”

  “You definitely said that. Several times.”

  “I lied.”

  “Aha.”

  “You won’t believe the advance they’ll give me to do another Violet book.”

  It was true. When she told him, he didn’t believe it. “Come on. That’s four times what they gave you for the bluebird book.”

  “Well, you see, I refused so fiercely to do another Violet book, they had to make me an offer I couldn’t resist.”

  “You’re tough, Kavanagh.”

  “So kiss me!” she said, laughing.

  He kissed her, inhaling the elusive scent of wisteria. “Congratulations! We can build a boat and retire to the Caribbean and spend our lives cruising and fishing.”

  “Where did you get an idea like that?”

  “From Mike Jones at Incarnation in Highlands. He said that’s what he wants to do when he retires—the only problem is, he’s never mentioned it to his wife.”

  “The only problem is,” she said, “we’ll need gobs of money to enlarge my little yellow house to contain a man, an ocean of books, and a dog the size of Esther Bolick’s Westinghouse freezer.”

  “Well, then. What do you think?”

  “I think we should let him have the basement and fix it up. I love Harley. He’s funny and good-hearted and earnest. And it would be wonderful
to have some more help around here. For openers, your garage could use a cleanup and my Mazda needs a new alternator.”

  “What do you know about alternators?”

  “Absolutely nothing. Which means it would be nice to have Harley living in the basement. We’ll buy the paint and I’ll make his kitchen curtains.”

  “Done!” he said.

  A new book? He knew what that meant. It meant his wife would be working eight hours a day or more, complaining of a chronically stiff neck, staring out the window without speaking, getting headaches from eye strain, and crashing into bed at night as lifeless as a swamp log.

  Oh, well. He sighed, trudging up the stairs with his dog to tell Harley the news.

  “Goodnight, buddy.”

  He had left Harley’s room and stepped down the hall to sit on the side of Dooley’s bed.

  “ ‘Night.”

  “We’re praying that your mother gets the job.”

  “Me, too.”

  “How about your job? You like it all right?”

  “It’s neat. But I’m about give out.”

  When Dooley was tired or angry, Father Tim noted, he often lapsed into the vernacular. He grinned. That prep school varnish hadn’t covered the boy’s grain entirely. “Are you going to run a booth at the town festival?”

  “Yep. Avis wants Tommy and me to do it. Avis’ll be the bigwig and take the money.”

  “Sounds good. What will you do?”

  “We’ll sell corn and stuff from the valley. Avis has buckets of blackberries and strawberries comin’ in from Florida, and peaches from Georgia and syrup from Vermont and all. He’s calling it ‘A Taste of America.’ ”

  “Great idea! That Avis . . .”

  “I’m about half killed.”

  “Well . . . see you at breakfast.”

  “What were you doing up at Mama’s today? Taking livermush to Granpaw?”

  “Just dropped by to say hello, that’s all, and check on Poobaw.”

  “He likes to be called Poo now.”

  “I’ll remember that. I’m glad you heard about the job at Hope House and didn’t waste any time.”