by Jan Karon
Uncle Billy Watson brushed the leaves and twigs from last night’s storm off the seat of a rusting dinette chair and sat down in the backyard of the Porter house, a.k.a. Mitford’s town museum.
He gazed dolefully into the sea of towering grass that extended to the rear of the house and then beyond his view. The town crew was supposed to mow the grass once every twelve days; by his count, it was fourteen going on fifteen, and a man could get lost out here and not be heard from again; it was a disgrace the way the town put every kind of diddledaddle ahead of mowing something as proud and fine as their own museum. If he could do it himself, he would, but his arthritis hardly allowed him to get up and down the steps, much less scour a full acre and a quarter with a rusted push mower. He hoped that when he got to Heaven, the Lord would outfit him with a new body and give him a job that required something of a man.
But he hadn’t come out here to get his dander up. He’d come out to noodle his noggin about a joke to tell at the preacher’s wedding, back in that room where they’d all eat cake and ham after the ceremony. Though nobody had said a word about it, the old man knew the preacher would be expecting a joke, he’d be counting on it, and it was his responsibility, his civic duty to tell the best joke he could come up with.
He would never say this to a soul, but it seemed like the preacher getting married so late in life was sort of a joke in itself. It would be a different thing if the father had been married before and had some practice, but as far as anybody knew, he hadn’t had any practice.
But who was he to judge other people’s setups? Half the town thought he was crazy as a bedbug for living with Rose Watson; even his uncle—who’d come to see them years ago when Rose was still as pretty as a speckled pup—his uncle had said, “They ain’t no way I’m understandin’ how you put up with this mess.”
Her illness seemed to start right after they married, though he’d witnessed, and ignored, warning signs from the day they met. For years, he’d told himself that it was something he’d done wrong, that he hadn’t cherished her like the vows said, and maybe God was punishing them both for his ignorance and neglect. Then the doctors found out about the disease he couldn’t spell and could barely pronounce, schizophrenia.
On the worst days, he squeezed his eyes shut and remembered the girl he’d seen in the yard of this very house, more than—what was it?—forty-five, maybe fifty years ago. She was barefooted and had her hair tied back with a ribbon. Ragged and dirty from working in the fields since daylight, he’d come up from the valley with a wagonload of tomatoes and roasting ears, carrying a sack of biscuits and fried side meat for his dinner. He’d gone around the village looking for a spot to park his wagon and sell his produce, and saw her standing in her yard. At first he thought she was a statue. Then she moved and the light fell on her in a certain way and he called out, “Would you let a man park his wagon on your road?” And she’d walked out to him and smiled at him and nodded. “Get on down,” she said. He’d always remember her first words to him: Get on down. He was ashamed that he wasn’t wearing shoes, but then he saw that she wasn’t, either. She had hung around, looking at him in a way that made him feel uneasy, then happy, and he’d shared his biscuits and side meat with her and she’d gone in the house and brought out a Mason jar of tea so cold and sweet it hurt his teeth. Between times when customers came and went, she talked about herself more than a little. Her beloved brother, Willard, was dead in the war, buried across the ocean in France, and she was looked after by a woman who paid no attention to her. By early afternoon, he’d sold everything but two tomatoes, which he gave to Rose, who said she’d allow him to park his wagon there next week.
They married eighteen months later, against the wishes of his family in the valley, whom he never went back to visit. And there he was, a rough valley boy with no education to speak of, married to a girl with a big inheritance including the finest house in Mitford, and him caning chairs and making birdhouses and doing whatever else he could to hold up his end of the bargain.
But he wouldn’t go back and do it any different. Nossir. He’d loved that long-legged girl with the wild eyes more than anything in this world, and could never forget how she used to cling to him and call him Billy Boy and Sweet William, and kiss him with all the innocence of a woods violet.
His chin dropped to his chest and he jerked awake. Here he was sleeping when he had a job to do.
What was the job? For a moment, he couldn’t remember. Then it came to him.
His hand trembled as he propped his cane against the tree. “Lord,” he said aloud, “I hope You don’t mind me askin’ You to provide a good joke for th’ preacher, don’t you know. . . .”
Mayor Esther Cunningham couldn’t help herself. Every time she thought about Father Tim getting married, she thought about the way she and Ray had met and courted, and her eyes misted. She did not like her eyes to mist; she had quit crying years ago when her daddy passed. Whenever she felt like crying, she had learned to turn it inside, where it sometimes felt like a Popsicle melting. She had read an article in a magazine at Fancy Skinner’s which said that if you turn sorrow in, it will come out—as cancer or something worse, though she couldn’t think of anything worse. The article had gone on to say that intimacy with your husband was good for your health, and no matter what else might happen in this life, she and Ray had that in spades; forty-seven years later, they were still holding hands just like on their first date.
Before Ray, Bobby Prestwood had tried everything to get in her good graces, including making a fool of himself in Sunday School when he stood up one morning and told what he was thankful for. “I’m thankful for my Chevy V-8, my mama and daddy, and Esther Lovell!” She didn’t give a katy what Bobby Prestwood was thankful for, and told him so at the picnic, which was where she met Ray. Ray had come late with his cousins, carrying a basket of fried chicken and coleslaw, which he’d made himself. She couldn’t believe that anybody that big and tall and good-looking could cook, much less chop cabbage; it just amazed her. She had eyed him up and down to see if he was a sissy, but found no evidence of this. When the cousins invited her to sit with them, she accepted, ate three pieces of Ray’s fried chicken with all the trimmings, and took home a wing wrapped in a napkin. Two months later, they were married.
To this day, she’d never met another woman whose husband rubbed her feet, or maybe people just never mentioned it. And not only did Ray rub her feet after she’d worked like a dog all day and half the night in meetings at town hall, he’d have her supper in the oven, which she sometimes took to bed and ate sitting up watching TV, with him lying there patting her leg. “Little darlin’,” he might say while he patted.
If she ever had to climb in a bed without Ray Cunningham in it, she would die, she would go morte, as Lew Boyd liked to say.
She picked up the phone and dialed home.
“Ray . . .”
She heard Teensy barking in the background. “Hey, sugar babe! It’s hot as blazes today, I’ll run you up a jar of lemonade in a little bit. What else you need?”
She wouldn’t have told him that all she needed was to hear his voice.
Uncle Billy shuffled to the dining room and rifled through stacks of newspaper that the town inspector had threatened to haul off, but had forgotten to do. He was after some copies of The Farmer’s Almanac that he’d saved for the jokes.
Sweat beaded his forehead and upper lip as he worked through the piles, but not a trace of a Farmer’s Almanac with its red cover could he find. Dadgummit, he’d hid things in here for years and always managed to find them, and now, not a trace.
He worked his hand around in the pile of Mitford Muses, which occupied a space next to the kitchen door, and felt for the familiar shape of an almanac. What was that? He pulled it out and looked. A twenty-dollar bill! He wanted to whoop, but knew better.
If Rose got wind of this twenty, she’d connive every way in creation to yank it out of him. No, by jing, he’d do something he hardly ever did, but oft
en thought about: he’d walk down to the Grill and get an order of fries and bring Rose a surprise milkshake. Besides, he’d gotten two or three of his best jokes at the Grill—maybe that was where he’d find this one.
Careful to put the twenty in the pants pocket without the hole, he abandoned the search for the almanacs and instituted a hurried quest for any other currency he’d once hidden in the vicinity.
Louella Baxter Marshall sat by the window in the sewing room, now her bedroom at Fernbank, looking at the catalog.
The light was good in here and she could clearly see the picture of the dress she’d be wearing to the wedding.
After two days of praying about it and going back and forth from page 42 to page 47, she had showed Miss Sadie her pick. “Green or lavender?” she asked her lifelong friend and sister in Christ.
Miss Sadie didn’t hesitate. “Lavender!” she said. “You always looked good in lavender.”
Miss Sadie was a little bit like a mama, for it was Miss Sadie who knew Louella’s history, who said things like, “When you were a baby, you hated apple butter,” or “I remember the time I pulled you to town in the wagon—you hopped out and chased Perry Mackey down the street for a lick on his peppermint stick. You nearly scared him to death!”
Louella didn’t remember any of the events Miss Sadie liked to recall, but she’d heard them so often, they’d become as good as real memories. She savored the image of chasing a little white boy down the street to lick his candy, and wondered why on earth she loved apple butter now if she hated it then.
“How you know I always look good in this color?”
“When you were about six years old, Mama made you a lavender dress with smocking on the bodice. Don’t you remember it, with little pearl buttons? It was such a pretty dress I was half jealous!”
She was disgusted with herself for not remembering. “Don’ you think this big white collar too fancy for my face?”
“Posh tosh! Your face may be too fancy for that collar!”
They had both laughed and laughed, then they’d zeroed in on the business of Miss Sadie’s final choice. Page 36 was too drab; page 37 was too high in the waist; page 40 was not only shapeless, it had three-quarter-length sleeves, which, as anybody knew, were unflattering all the way back to the pharaohs. Page 41, however, showed promise.
“I like the way it’s cut,” said Miss Sadie, peering at the dress through a magnifying glass, “but I’m too gray-headed for this color.”
“Why, listen at that! Gray-headed is what look good wit’ blue.”
“But it’s a pale blue, and it might wash me out.”
“No, honey, you might wash it out!”
They had laughed again, like children, and decided on the pale blue French crepe with smocked bodice.
Louella held the catalog closer to the window and squinted at the picture.
She wished Moses Marshall could see her all dressed up for the father’s wedding. He would look at her and be so proud. Oh, how she’d loved that man from the day she laid eyes on him!
She closed her eyes to rest them and held the picture against her heart, and saw her husband-to-be walking into the kitchen of the Atlanta boardinghouse.
She was fifteen years old, with her hair in cornrows and the sense that something wonderful was about to happen.
Moses Marshall flashed a smile that nearly knocked her winding. She had never seen anybody who looked like this when she was growing up in Mitford. The only people of color in Mitford were old and stooped over.
“Who’s th’ one baked them good biscuits for supper?” he asked.
She’d been scarcely able to speak. “What you want to know for?”
“ ’Cause th’ one baked them good biscuits, that’s th’ one I’m goin’ to marry.”
She had looked at old Miss Sally Lou, who had to stand on tiptoe to peer into a pot on the stove. She was so little and dried up, some said she was a hundred, but Louella knew she was only eighty-two, and still the boss cook of three meals a day at the boardinghouse.
She had pointed to Miss Sally Lou, afraid to say the plain truth—that she, Louella Baxter, had baked the biscuits herself, three pans full and not one left begging.
Moses Marshall looked his bright, happy look at Miss Sally Lou and walked over and picked her up and swung her around twice before he set her down like a doll. “Fine biscuits, ma’am. Will you jump th’ broom wit’ me?”
“Git out of my way ’fore I knock you in th’ head!” said Miss Sally Lou. “Marry that ’un yonder, she th’ one do biscuits, I does yeast rolls.”
She was sixteen when they were married at her grandmother’s house in Atlanta, where she’d gone to live after leaving Mitford. Her grandmother had cooked the wedding feast, which was topped off with fresh peach cobbler. “Why eat cake when you can eat cobbler?” was what her grandmother always said.
Her years with Moses had been the happiest years of her life, next to those with Miss Sadie. But the Lord had taken Moses home when he was just thirty-nine, and then He’d taken her precious boy in a terrible wreck, leaving her a grandson living in Los Angeles....
She looked out to the green orchard and nodded her head and smiled. “Moses Marshall,” she said, “I invite you to sit wit’ me at th’ weddin,’ an’ don’ be pinchin’ and kissin’ on me in front of th’ good Lord an’ ever’body. . . .”
Dooley Barlowe was trying to be happy, but he figured he didn’t know what that was supposed to mean. He felt around inside himself, around the area of his heart, maybe, and tried to see if he could make things seem good and right about Father Tim and Cynthia getting married. He’d seen what happened when people lived together under the same roof: They yelled and screamed and fought and said terrible things to each other. He’d seen his daddy go at his mama with a butcher knife more than once, and after his daddy ran off, he’d seen his mama leave for two and three days at a time and depend on him to mind the kids and feed them without any money to buy stuff with.
He remembered stealing a pork loin from the grocery store and getting it home and not knowing how to cook it. He had dropped it in a pot of boiling water with oatmeal and let it cook ’til the water boiled out on the stove, then he carved the meat in five chunks and they tried to eat it and got so sick, he thought they’d all die in the night. Once he’d stolen five cans of creamed corn, so they could all have exactly the same thing and not fight over who got what and how much, and the store manager had caught him and jumped on him really bad, but he’d let him have the corn, saying if he ever did it again he’d be sent to the penitentiary. A woman who overheard the commotion had gone and gotten a can of Harvard beets, a loaf of Wonder bread, a pound of M&Ms, and a quart of buttermilk and gave the items to him in a plastic bag. He remembered that he couldn’t stomach buttermilk and the kids wouldn’t drink it, either, but they couldn’t bear to throw it out and it sat in the refrigerator for maybe a year.
He didn’t like to think about these things, he wanted to forget everything that had ever happened before he came here, but sometimes he couldn’t. He especially wanted to forget about his little sister, Jessie, because thinking of her being gone and nobody knowing where made him want to cry, and he tried to keep his face as hard and tight and straight as possible so nobody would ever be able to tell what he was thinking.
Sometimes, at night especially, he remembered trying to help his mama when she was drunk, and would suddenly feel a great love for her welling up in him. Then he’d be angry with himself for being stupid, and feel the old and shameful desire for her to die.
Things were just fine for him and Father Tim; he felt safe, finally, like things would be all right. But now he didn’t know what would happen. He liked Cynthia, but what if she didn’t like him, what if she tried to get him to leave or go back to his mother, if anybody could even find his mother? Or what if Cynthia tried to be his mother? His heart felt cold at such a thought. He wanted his own mother, even if he did hate her and wish he would never see her again as long as
he lived.
He was glad that Barnabas came to his room and jumped on the foot of his bed, because it felt good to have a friend. Besides, Barnabas would never tell anyone that he was crying and couldn’t stop.
CHAPTER SIX
The Letter
His heart was nearly bursting with a kind of longing, though he had no idea why. After all, he was blessed with everything this life could afford, everything and more.
He sat at his desk in the study and looked out the window into the gloaming as it settled over Baxter Park. Cynthia was working on an illustration that had to go out tomorrow by FedEx, or he would have been at her side, as magnetized to her living presence as his grocery list to the refrigerator.
He drummed his fingers on the desktop.
He didn’t want to work on his sermon. He didn’t want to take a shower and crawl into bed with a wellloved book from his well-stocked shelves, and he most certainly did not want to turn on the TV and have the clamor pour into this quiet place like some foul Niagara. He was unable to think of anything he wanted to do; there was no seduction in any of the usual pursuits.
Aha. His fingers grew still upon the desktop.
There it was, plain as day:
He wanted to record, somehow, the joy of this breathless thing that had swept him up and overpowered and mesmerized him. Perhaps for most people, people who had been in love again and again, it would not be such a beauteous experience, but it was new to him and dazzling. Yet even in its newness, he felt it slipping away, becoming part of a personal history in which the nuances, the shading, would be lost forever; buried within the consciousness, yes, but paled by time, and then, he feared, vanished altogether.
He opened the desk drawer and took out a writing pad and one of the commercial pens he’d grown to prefer. Though the ink had a noxious odor, he liked the way it flowed onto the page—black, bold, and able.