by Jan Karon
Mitford takes care of its own, its own,
Mitford takes care of its own!
Over the village rooftops, the plane spelled out the rest of the message.
O . . . F . . . I . . . T . . . S . . . O . . . W . . . N . . .
TAKES soon faded into puffs of smoke that looked like stray summer clouds. CARE OF was on its way out, but ITS OWN stood proudly in the sky, seeming to linger.
“If that don’t beat all!” exclaimed a woman from Tennessee, who had stood in one spot the entire time, holding a sleep-drugged baby on her hip.
Dogs barked and chickens squawked as people clapped and started drifting away.
Just then, a few festivalgoers saw them coming, the sun glinting on their wings.
They roared in from the east, in formation, two by two.
Red and yellow. Green and blue.
“Four little home-built Pitts specials,” said Omer, as proudly as if he’d built them himself. “Two of ’em’s from Fayetteville, got one out of Roanoke, and the other one’s from Albany, New York. Not much power in y’r little ragwings, they’re nice and light, about a hundred and eighty horses, and handle like a dream.”
He looked at the sky as if it contained the most beautiful sight he had ever seen, and so did the rector.
“I was goin’ to head th’ formation, but a man can’t fly with a busted foot.”
The crowd started lying on the grass. They lay down along the rock wall. They climbed up on the statue of Willard Porter, transfixed, and a young father set a toddler on Willard’s left knee.
People pulled chairs out of their booths and sat down, looking up. All commerce ceased.
The little yellow Pitts special rolled over and dived straight for the monument.
“Ahhhhhh!” said the crowd.
As the yellow plane straightened out and up, the blue plane nose-dived and rolled over.
“They’re like little young ’uns a-playin’,” said Uncle Billy, enthralled.
Miss Rose came out and stood on the back stoop in her frayed chenille robe and looked up, tears coursing down her cheeks for her long-dead brother, Captain Willard Porter, who had flown planes and been killed in the war in France and buried over there, with hardly anything sent home but his medals and a gold ring with the initials SEB and a few faded snapshots from his pockets.
The little planes romped and rolled and soared and glided, like so many bright crayons on a palette of blue, then vanished toward the west, the sun on their wings.
Here and there, a festivalgoer tried getting up from the grass or a chair or the wall, but couldn’t. They felt mesmerized, intoxicated. “Blowed away!” someone said.
“OK, buddy, here you go,” Omer whispered.
They heard a heavy-duty engine throbbing in the distance and knew at once this was serious business, this was what everyone had been waiting for without even knowing it.
The Cunningham daughters hugged their children, kissed their mother and daddy, wept unashamedly, and hooted and hollered like banshees, but not a soul looked their way, for the crowd was intent on not missing a lick, on seeing it all, and taking the whole thing, blow by blow, home to Johnson City and Elizabethton and Wesley and Holding and Aho and Farmer and Price and Todd and Hemingway and Morristown . . . .
“Got y’r high roller comin’ in, now,” said Omer. The rector could feel the mayor’s brother-in-law shaking like a leaf from pure excitement. “You’ve had y’r basic smoke writin’ and stunt flyin,’ now here comes y’r banner towin’!”
A red Piper Super Cub blasted over the treetops from the direction of the highway, shaking drifts of clouds from its path, trembling the heavens in its wake, and towing a banner that streamed across the open sky:
ESTHER . . . RIGHT FOR MITFORD, RIGHT FOR MAYOR.
The Presbyterian brass band hammered down on their horns until the windows of the Porter mansion rattled and shook.
As the plane passed over, a wave of adrenaline shot through the festival grounds like so much electricity and, almost to a man, the crowd scrambled to its feet and shouted and cheered and whistled and whooped and applauded.
A few also waved and jumped up and down, and nearly all of them remembered what Esther had done, after all, putting the roof on old man Mueller’s house, and turning the dilapidated wooden bridge over Mitford Creek into one that was safe and good to look at, and sending Ray in their RV to take old people to the grocery store, and jacking up Sophia’s house and helping her kids, and making sure they had decent school buses to haul their own kids around in bad weather, and creating that thing at the hospital where you went and held and loved a new baby if its mama from the Creek was on drugs, and never one time raising taxes, and always being there when they had a problem, and actually listening when they talked, and . . .
. . . and taking care of them.
Some who had planned to vote for Mack Stroupe changed their minds, and came over and shook Esther’s hand, and the brass band nearly busted a gut to be heard over the commotion.
Right! That was the ticket. Esther was right for Mitford. Mack Stroupe might be for change, but Esther would always be for the things that really counted.
Besides—and they’d tried to put it out of their minds time and time again—hadn’t Mack Stroupe been known to beat his wife, who was quiet as a mouse and didn’t deserve it, and hadn’t he slithered over to that woman in Wesley for years, like a common, low-down snake in the grass?
“Law, do y’all vote in th’ summer?” wondered a visitor. “We vote sometime in th’ fall. I can’t remember when, exactly, but I nearly always have to wear a coat to the polls.”
Omer looked at the rector. The rector looked at Omer.
They shook hands.
It was done.
CHAPTER NINE
Life in the Fast Lane
“What I done was give you thirty more horses under y’r hood.”
“Did I need thirty more horses?” He had to admit that stomping his gas pedal had been about as exciting as stepping on a fried pie. However . . .
Harley gave him a philosophical look, born from experience. “Rev’rend, I’d hate f’r you t’ need ’em and not have ’em.”
What could he say?
On Monday morning, he roared to the office, screeching to a halt at the intersection of Old Church Lane, where he let northbound traffic pass, then made a left turn, virtually catapulting into the parking lot.
Holy smoke! Had Harley dropped a Jag engine in his Buick?
Filled with curiosity, he got out and looked under the hood, but realized he wouldn’t know a Jag engine from a Mazda alternator.
“Can you believe it?” asked Emma, tight-lipped.
He knew exactly what she was talking about. “Not really.”
For a while, he thought they’d lost his secretary’s vote to Esther Cunningham’s competition. Last week, however, had turned the tide; she’d heard that Mack Stroupe had bought two little houses on the edge of town and jacked up the rent on a widow and a single mother.
“Sittin’ in church like he owned th’ place, is what I hear. Why th’ roof didn’t fall in on th’ lot of you is beyond me.”
“Umm.”
“Church!” she snorted. “Is that some kind of new campaign trick, goin’ to church?”
He believed that particular strategy had been used a time or two, but he didn’t comment.
“The next thing you know, he’ll be wantin’ to join. If I were you, I’d run his hide up th’ road to th’ Presbyterians.”
He laughed. “Emma, you’re beautiful when you’re mad.”
She beamed. “Really?”
“Well . . .”
“So, what did he do, anyway? Did he kneel? Did he stand? Did he sing? Can you imagine a peckerwood like Mack Stroupe singin’ those hymns from five hundred years ago, maybe a thousand? Lord, it was all I could do to sing th’ dern things, which is one reason I went back to bein’ a Baptist.”
She booted her computer, furious.
&
nbsp; “I heard Lucy was with him, wouldn’t you know it, but that’s the way they do, they trot their family out for all the world to see. Was she still blond? What was she wearin’? Esther Bolick said it was a sight the way the crowd ganged up at the museum watchin’ the air show, and that barbecue sittin’ down the street like so much chicken mash.”
She peered intently at her screen.
“Well,” she said, clicking her mouse, “has the cat got your tongue? Tell me somethin’, anything! Were you floored when he showed up at Lord’s Chapel, or what?”
“I was. Of course, there’s always the possibility that he wants to turn over a new leaf . . . .”
“Right,” she said, arching an eyebrow, “and Elvis is livin’ at th’ Wesley hotel.”
As much as he liked mail, and the surprise it was capable of bringing, he let the pile sit on Emma’s desk until she came back from lunch.
“No way! I can’t believe it!” She held up an envelope, grinning proudly. “Albert Wilcox!”
She opened it. “Listen to this!
“ ‘Dear one and all, it was a real treat to hear from you after so many years. My grandmother’s prayer book that gave us such pain—and delight—sits on my desk as I write to you, waiting to be handed over to the museum in Seattle, which is near my home in Oak Harbor . . . .’ ”
She read the entire letter, which also contained a great deal of information about Albert’s knee replacement, and his felicitations to the rector for having married.
“Have you ever? And all because of modern technology! OK, as soon as I open this other envelope, I’ve got a little surprise for you. Close your eyes.”
He closed his eyes.
“Face the bookcase!” she said.
He faced the bookcase.
He heard fumbling and clicking. Then he heard Beethoven.
The opening strains of the Pastorale fairly lifted him out of his chair.
“OK! You can turn around!”
He didn’t see anything unusual, but was swept away by the music, which seemed to come from nowhere, transforming the room.
“CD-ROM!” announced his resident computer expert, as if she’d just hung the moon.
He went home and jiggled Sassy and burped Sissy, as Puny collected an ocean of infant paraphernalia into something the size of a leaf bag.
After a quick trot through the hedge to say hello to his hardworking wife, he and Dooley changed into their old clothes. They were going to tear down Betty Craig’s shed and stack the wood. He felt fit for anything.
“Let’s see those muscles,” he challenged Dooley, who flexed his arm. “Well done!” He wished he had some to show, himself, but thinking and preaching had never been ways to develop muscles.
What with a good job, plenty of sun, and a reasonable amount of home cooking, Dooley Barlowe was looking good. In fact, Dooley Barlowe was getting to be downright handsome, he mused, and tall into the bargain.
Dooley stood against the doorframe as the rector made a mark, then measured. Good heavens!
“I’ll be et for a tater if you ain’t growed a foot!” he exclaimed in Uncle Billy’s vernacular.
Soon, he’d be looking up to the boy who had come to him in dirty overalls, searching for a place to “take a dump.”
They were greeted in the backyard by Russell Jacks and Dooley’s young brother.
“I’ve leaned th’ ladder ag’inst th’ shed for you,” said Russell.
“Half done, then!” The rector was happy to see his old sexton.
Poo Barlowe looked up at him. “Hey!”
“Hey, yourself!” he replied, tousling the boy’s red hair. “Where were you on Saturday? We missed you at the town festival.”
“Mama took me to buy some new clothes.” The boy glanced down at his tennis shoes, hoping the rector would notice.
“Man alive! Look at those shoes! Made for leaping tall buildings, it appears.”
Poo grinned.
“Want to help us pull that shed down?”
“It ain’t hardly worth pullin’ down,” said Poo, “bein’ ready t’ fall down.”
“Don’t say ain’t,” commanded his older brother.
“Why not?”
“ ’Cause it ain’t good English!” Realizing what he’d just said, Dooley colored furiously.
Father Tim laughed. He’d corrected Dooley’s English for three long years. “You’re sounding a lot like me, buddy. You might want to watch that.”
Betty Craig ran down the back steps.
“Father! Law, this is good of you. I’ve been standin’ at my kitchen window for years, lookin’ at that old shed lean to the south. It’s aggravated me to death.”
“A good kick might be all it takes.”
“Pauline’s late comin’ home, she called to say she’d be right here. Can I fix you and Dooley some lemonade? It’s hot as August.”
“We’ll wait ’til our work is done.”
“Let’s get going,” said Dooley.
Father Tim opened the toolbox and took out a clawhammer and put on his heavy work gloves. He’d never done this sort of thing before. He felt at once fierce and manly, and then again, completely uncertain how to begin.
“What’re we going to do?” asked Dooley, pulling on his own pair of gloves.
He looked at the shed. Blast if it wasn’t bigger than he’d thought. “We’re going to start at the top,” he said, as if he knew what he was talking about.
He had removed the rolled asphalt with a clawhammer, pulled off the roofboards, dismantled the rafters, torn off the sideboards with Dooley’s help, then pulled nails from the corners of the rotten framework, and shoved what was left into the grass.
Running with sweat, he and Dooley had taken turns driving the rusty nails back and pulling them out of every stick and board so they could be used for winter firewood.
Dooley dropped the nails into a bucket.
“Wouldn’t want t’ be steppin’ on one of them,” said Russell, who was supervising.
They paused only briefly, to sit on the porch and devour a steaming portion of chicken pie, hot from Betty’s oven, and guzzle a quart of tea that was sweet enough to send him to the emergency room.
Betty apologized. “Hot as it is, your supper ought to be somethin’ cold, like chicken salad, but you men are workin’ hard, and chicken salad won’t stick to your ribs.”
“Amen!”
“I want you to come and get your kindlin’ off that pile all winter long, you hear?”
“I’ll do it.”
After they ate, he and Dooley and Poo carried and stacked and heaved and hauled, until it was nearly nine o’clock, and dark setting in.
“You’ve about killed me,” grumbled Dooley.
“I’ve done sweated a bucket,” said Poo.
“I’m give out jis’ watchin’,” sighed Russell.
As for himself, the rector felt oddly liberated. All that pulling up and yanking off and tearing down and pushing over had been good for him, somehow, creating an exhaustion completely different from the labors surrounding his life as a cleric.
And what better reward than to sit and look across the twilit yard at the mound of wood neatly stacked along the fence, with two boys beside him who had helped make it happen?
Dooley was inspecting Poo’s new, if used, bicycle, Russell had shuffled off to bed, and Betty had gone in to watch TV. He sat alone with Pauline.
He didn’t see any reason to beat around the bush. “We need to talk about Jessie.”
There was a long silence.
“I can do it,” she said.
“I need to know everything you can possibly tell me, and the name of the cousin who took her and where you think they might be, and the names of any of your cousin’s relatives—everything.”
He heard the absolute firmness in his voice and knew this was how it would have to be.
As she talked, he took notes on a piece of paper he had folded and put in his shirt pocket. Afterward, he sat back in the rocker.
“If we find Jessie, can you take care of her?”
“Yes!” she said, and now he heard the firmness in her own voice. “I think about it all the time, how I want to rent a little house and have a tree at Christmas. We never had a tree at Christmas . . . maybe once.”
His mind went instantly to all that furniture collecting dust at Fernbank. He and Dooley would load up a truck and . . . But he was putting the cart before the horse.
“There’s something we need to look at, Pauline.”
“Is it about the drinking?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t crave it anymore.”
“Alcohol is a tough call. Very tough. Do you want help?”
“No,” she said. “I want to do this myself. With God’s help.”
“If you ever want or need help, you’ve got to have the guts to ask for it. For your sake, for the kids’ sake. Can you do that?”
Betty switched the porch light on, and he saw Pauline’s face as she turned and looked at him. “Yes,” she said.
“Didn’t want y’all to be setting out there in the dark,” said Betty, going back to her room.
They were silent again. He heard Poo laughing, and faint snatches of music and applause from Betty’s TV.
“There’s something you need to know,” she told him.
He waited.
“I won’t make trouble, I won’t try to make Dooley come and live with us. He’s doing so well . . . you’ve done so much . . .
“If he wants to, he can come and stay with us anytime he’s home, but I want you to be the one who . . . the one who watches over him.”
She was giving her boy away again. But this time, he fervently hoped and prayed, it was for all the right reasons.
He kissed her on the cheek as he came into the bedroom.
“Kavanagh . . .” he said, feeling spent.
“Hello, dearest,” she said, looking worn.
After he showered, they crawled into bed on their respective sides and were snoring in tandem by ten o’clock.