by Jan Karon
He dialed Betty Craig at the little house where Dooley’s grandfather Russell Jacks had lived out his last years in a spare bedroom.
“Betty! It’s s ...”
“Father Tim! I know your voice, an’ I know why you’re callin’ me.”
“Now, Betty ...”
“You want me to go an’ sit with Miss Rose while Uncle Billy’s in th’ hospital!”
What could he say? “Will you do it?”
Long, pondering silence. “My rates have gone up!” she blurted.
“Not a problem.”
“It’s not?”
Betty Craig, who had tried for several years to retire from registered nursing, was too kind to refuse outright this onerous opportunity.
“Not at all. In truth, you’ve been needing to raise your rates.”
“I have?”
“Can you go over this morning and take care of the laundry and change the sheets and do a little cooking?”
“Well, but...”
“Why don’t we raise your rate by twenty percent? Does that sound fair?”
“Oh, very fair.”
“Whatever you need at The Local, put it on my account. Thank you, Betty, and of course, when Uncle Billy comes home, we’ll need you to do all the good things you did last time he was sick. God bless you, you’re an angel. Let me know your hours.”
He hung up quickly, took a deep breath, and dialed again.
“Buck?”
“... in a hole ...” Static.
“Call me at the farm.You have my number?”
Static. “Down th’ mountain...” Static. Dial tone.
He checked his e-mail.
Five messages.
He didn’t have all day, he had to get up to Holy Trinity and meet with Agnes at... he looked at his watch... nine-thirty Good. He had an hour.
He dialed.
“Hello?”
Babies howling.
“Puny! it’s ...”
“Hey, Father! Can you hear ’em bawlin’? Law, these boys is a handful.”
“I’ll bet.”
“But I love ’em, we all love ’em! Got to go, Father, you never seen s’ many dirty diapers. I never knowed boys make more dirty diapers than girls, did you ever hear that?”
“Never did. May I stop by in a few days?”
“Call me first, this house is upside down an’ backwards, you should’ve seen me packin’ Joe Joe’s lunch this mornin’, I put a stuffed bear in ’is lunch box and laid ‘is sandwich on th’ toy shelf. Guess I’ll eat it myself.
“Oh, law, got to go.” Click.
He pulled the keyboard toward him, and rolled up the sleeves of his flannel shirt.
He selected a font. He clicked on a border. He chose a type size. He formatted the page. He scratched his head. He typed.
He hit “print” and ordered twenty-five copies, then saw how good they looked, and duplicated the first order.
He stuck the whole caboodle in a folder, and trotted to the kitchen, feeling upbeat. Though he was sales and service, not marketing, this effort nonetheless pleased him.
He swung by the window seat where the easel was up, the watercolors were out, and February was toeing the mark. “What do you think?” He stuck a flyer under her nose.
“I love it!”
“It could have been, um, more exciting copy. But in the end, I decided to keep it simple.”
“Always the best approach!” She gave him a laudatory kiss.
What more did a man need in this world?
He blew by Green Valley Baptist Church and gave the wayside pulpit message two thumbs up.
COINCIDENCE IS WHEN GOD CHOOSES TO REMAIN ANONYMOUS.
Agnes met him at the wall, where they stood looking down at clouds collected in the hollows after last night’s rain. Then, carrying the tea basket, and the folder under his arm, he walked with her to the nave.
He saw it at once and drew in his breath.
“Beautiful!” he exclaimed, hurrying ahead of her to the pulpit placed on the gospel side of the aisle.
He smelled the familiar scent he associated only with churches and his mother’s parlor; the pungent wax that had been rubbed so carefully into the oak would long after release its sweet savor upon the air.
She came behind him on her cane. “Clarence made it four years ago, when God renewed our conviction that He would send someone. It sat here only a short time, and then we took it to the schoolhouse where it would be safe.”
The polished oak glowed in the light from the window above the altar. “Exquisite!” he said.
“He brought it over on Sunday evening, and with great joy, we installed it. Do you like where it’s placed?”
“Couldn’t like it better! What became of the original?”
“It was stolen many years ago. The vandals who did this were not thieves, but desecrators of another stripe.”
She pointed to the initials rudely carved into the left side of the pulpit. “Just there ... ‘JC loves CM.’ We were at first greatly distressed, then I realized what we might take it to signify: Jesus Christ loves Clarence Merton.”
He laughed. “Lemons into lemonade, and gospel truth into the bargain! And look here! Such elaborate detailing. He did this, as well?”
“Yes, with the old carving tools given him long ago.”
He ran his fingers over the tooled oak, tracing the path the knife had taken before him.
A crown of thorns.A heart.A dove.A dogwood blossom. And in the center of these, a cross.
“Agnes...” That’s all he could find to say.
She was moved, proud. “Yes.”
“Let’s thank God!” Indeed, it was pray—or bust wide open.
He took her hand in both of his, and they bowed their heads.
“We praise You, Lord, we thank You, Lord, we bless You, Lord!
“Thank You for the marvel and mystery of this place, for these thirty remarkable years of devotion, for Your unceasing encouragement to the hearts and spirits of Your servants, Agnes and Clarence, for Your marvelous gifts to Clarence of resourcefulness and creativity, and for Your gift to them both of a mighty perseverance in faith and prayer.
“We thank You for this nave above the clouds in which Your holy name has been, and will continue to be, honored, praised, and glorified. Thank You for going ahead of us as we visit our neighbors, and cutting for each and every one a wide path to Holy Trinity. Draw whom You will to the tenderness of Your unconditional love, the sweetness of Your everlasting mercy, and the balm of Your unbounded forgiveness.
“In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.”
“Amen,” they said together.
“Well, then!” He felt ten feet tall, and growing. “I got the flyer done up; want to see it?”
“I do!”
He produced a copy from the folder. “And I brought tape so we can tape it to the door if someone’s not home, and thumbtacks for power poles and fence posts.”
“You’ve thought of everything!” she said, sharing his excitement.
Holy trinity Episcopal Church
Wilson’s Ridge
Est. 1899
Will reopen its doors
Sunday, May 1st
At ten o’clock in the morning
With the glad celebration of
Morning Prayer and the Order of
Holy Communion
Come one, come all
“‘The Order of Holy Communion’ should have gone on a line all its own,” he confessed. “I didn’t know how to set the thingamajig.”
“It’s just right,” she said. “I like your border.”
“Today, we can read the litany for Ash Wednesday, and finish our visitation list, and... what else?”
“I’ll show you the cemetery.”
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“And in the morning, we’ll set out first thing, if that’s all right. I’ll pick you up at ten o’clock?”
“I’ll be ready,” she said, happily, “with a thermos of tea.”
“In the meantime, I’m mighty eager for the next installment of your story.”
She looked tentative. “Do you really want to hear it? I’m not proud of all I’ll be bound to tell you, Father.”
“I want to hear it.Very much.”
In the front pew, she took the mugs from the basket, and he unscrewed the cap from the thermos and poured the steaming tea.
Though the morning sun was warm on the flanks of the mountains, the nave was distinctly chilly. He kept his jacket on, and she had drawn her old cardigan closer about her thin frame.
“I’d also like to hear about everyone who came on Sunday. Rooter and his grandmother ...”
“Granny isn’t Rooter’s blood grandmother. She was a neighbor who took him in as a baby when his parents abandoned him.”
His heart felt the blow of that.
“Is there no end to it, Agnes?”
“No, Father, there isn’t. The world is harsh and unforgiving, which is but one of the reasons you find me here today.”
“Here?”
“On this ridge, seemingly so far from the cruelty that everywhere assaults us if we let it.”
“And Clarence?”
“He’s happy here, very happy; this is where Clarence finds himself. He has a workshop in our yard and creates lovely things from wood, which he sells to a man who travels around to the mountain shops.” She lowered her eyes, modest. “Clarence has won many awards.”
“Wonderful! I don’t doubt it. And tell me about Robert.”
“Robert was in prison for eleven years; he lives alone, just down the road.”
He saw the quickening of sorrow in her countenance.
“Why was he in prison?”
“He’s said to have killed a man.”
“Do you know him well?”
“No one knows him well.Yet I believe him innocent. He pled innocence all along. The man he was convicted of killing was his grandfather.”
“I see a great hunger in his eyes. Robert wants to know God.”
“Yes. He does. Though he may not know or even imagine that he does. I sense that he’s unbearably lonely.”
He put his elbows on his knees and leaned forward in the pew and gazed without seeing at the pine floorboards. “And Lloyd?” He hoped for a brighter story about Lloyd.
“He’s a good man. He, too, found the world hard, albeit instructive, and came home again, hoping to find all things golden, as in his boyhood.” Agnes laughed softly. “Of course, he’s been gravely disappointed!”
He sat up and leaned back, comfortable on the wooden pew seat. “I hope to go home again one day; it’s been years since I visited Holly Springs in Mississippi. I think I’m afraid of... I’m not certain... finding it so changed, or worse, finding it all too familiar.”
“I understand.”
“But please, start where you left off.You and Jessie and Little Bertie endured the Great Baptizing. What happened then?”
She smiled and sipped her tea, inhaling the heady scent of sassafras, undiluted on this occasion by the common grace of mint.
“We found that we loved the people, and found also that we were loved by them. I came to understand that the people here weren’t objects to which one does good, but true hearts whom I wanted more than anything to help.
“Jessie and I pled with the diocese to send every thread of clothing they could collect, we even went to Asheville on two momentous occasions, to sound a special plea for winter coats and shoes.You can’t imagine the want we found here in those days.”
He smiled. “I was a young clergyman in the backwaters of Mississippi nearly forty years ago. So, I can imagine.”
“I’m sure you’ve had long experience with all sorts of souls. Forgive my boldness, but perhaps one day you’ll tell your story.”
“Deal!” he said.
“We used our Buick Town Car to ferry people to the doctor, sometimes all the way to Holding. It took a full day to go to Holding and back, we often forded the creek well past dark.”
“No doctor in Mitford?”
“Only on occasional days. Like a clergyman, he rode the circuit. And none of us cared for the sour old fellows in Wesley—they were twins, and both looked as if they’d eaten a bucket of green persimmons!
“But everyone loved our Buick. So many had never ridden in a car at all. They’d pile up in the backseat like taters in a basket, as Jessie used to say, and all clinging to the hand ropes for dear life. I think I was a very fast driver in those days, some said Miss Agnes just whipped around these back roads.”
She laughed. “I remember there would be a knock on the door and two or three unwashed young ‘uns saying ‘Miss Agnes, can we set in your automobile?’ And one winter night Jessie went out to put two squash pies in that cavernous trunk—which we also used for refrigeration—and there were three neighbor children dead asleep under our lap robe on the backseat. They’d come to spend the night in Miss Agnes’s car! It was quite the thing to do for a year or two.
“Of course, not everyone in these parts enjoys the notion of automobiles. There are a few, even today, who don’t fancy hurtling down the side of a mountain in a vehicle.”
“I’m one of them, actually.”
“Jubal Adderholt hasn’t been off this ridge in fourteen years. He’s someone I’d like us to visit tomorrow.” She gazed away. “Perhaps...”
“Perhaps?”
“Perhaps we should be making our plan for visitation, instead of sitting here like turnips.”
“Ten more minutes?”
She hesitated, then nodded her assent.
He thought a shadow passed over her face then, but perhaps he was mistaken.
“We know the roads today aren’t always the best, but in those days, they were immeasurably worse. Touring a Buick Town Car around the poorest county in the state may sound adventurous or even romantic, but all that wear and tear took a great toll on everything from tires to engine.
“Not long ago, I asked an elderly lady what she’d found most remarkable in her long life. ‘Men on the moon!’ I thought she might say, but she looked at me with the firmest conviction and declared, ‘Good roads, Agnes, good roads!’
“Parts were frightfully expensive then, as I hear they are today. We had parts shipped from Bangor, Maine, for several years, because we could trust the dealer; but as you know, far-fetched is dear-bought. I suppose it was a blessing, really, when our grand old automobile simply gave out, and we were forced to make a transition ... to a truck....”
She looked beyond the high window above the altar to the branches of an oak. He felt she’d forgotten he was there.
“Are you all right?”
She crossed herself. “Yes,” she whispered. She turned then, and looked at him steadily.
“I know I’m going to tell you everything, Father; it simply must be done.”
She glanced behind him, and he saw the anxious expression of her face at once transformed. “Clarence!”
He turned and saw Clarence’s large frame silhouetted in the doorway.
“I never got to speak more than a word to him on Sunday. This is a blessing!” He rose from the pew as Clarence came toward them along the aisle.
“Clarence ...” He extended his hand. “It was a very happy pleasure to serve with you, and I’m absolutely astonished at the beauty of our pulpit.”
Agnes used her hands in what Father Tim recognized as sign language.
Clarence smiled with unmistakable happiness as he extended a large, calloused hand to Father Tim. Then he signed to his mother, who translated his greeting to the vicar.
“He says we have waited a long time. And he rejoices that you have come.”
Clarence closely observed his mother as she spoke, and nodded in assent.
“My son is
completely deaf, Father, nor can he speak. His heart converses, instead.”
“Look, Stuart, I know you’re busy...”
“Not too busy to talk with you, old friend. How’s it going with Holy Trinity?”
“Did you know the building and grounds have been maintained for three decades by a woman and her son?”
“I didn’t know it, actually, until after I e-mailed you in December. Then I decided not to mention what I found out, so you could discover it for yourself. Besides, I didn’t know how much of what I heard was true. It sounded like some Appalachian folktale.”
“It’s no tale. And the woman, Agnes Merton, is a deaconess, a remnant of the old mission church deaconesses. I didn’t know there were any left.”
“A few, of course. One in Virginia, one or two in New England, maybe more, I don’t know. It’s a lost part of church history.”
“Now I know why you said you were patently envious.”
Stuart laughed. “Did I say that?”
“You did.”
“And I am.You’ve never seen so much high muckety-muck as the trifold event of cathedral consecration, my retirement, and the installation of the new bishop. We’re all just this side of stroke. And there you are on your untrammeled mountaintop, birds eating from your hand, mountain panthers lying curled at your feet...”
“Right. Precisely.”
“Truth be told, you sound fifteen years younger, possibly twenty. Uh-oh, have to trot. Keep me posted. See you in June!”
“You’re ever in my prayers.”
“And you in mine. May He provide all you need for Holy Trinity.”
“I can hardly believe what He’s provided thus far. But I’ll tell you everything another time. You and Martha must come here, you must.”
“Perhaps next fall. After the consecration, we’re headed to the islands for a month. I have no idea what I’ll do with all that time.”
“You’ll figure it out,” said the vicar.
A month? In the islands! He couldn’t begin to imagine such a thing for himself. He knew only that he was glad to be where God had planted him—looking down upon the clouds, at roughly forty-five hundred feet above sea level.