by Jan Karon
Hoppy slipped his arm around Lace’s shoulders. “Dooley’s right, actually. The girls at Mrs. Hemingway’s are very smart, indeed. Gifted, as well. Lace and several of her classmates will spend next summer in Tuscany, studying classical literature and watercolor—on scholarships. We’re very proud of Lace.”
Father Tim saw on the girl’s face the kind of look he’d seen when he caught her stealing Miss Sadie’s ferns—the softness had disappeared, the hardness had returned.
Lace sat straight as a ramrod in the chair, staring over the head of the miserable and hapless wretch opposite her.
Dooley Barlowe had stepped in it, big-time.
While Cynthia trotted off with Dooley to bring the car around, Father Tim went in search of Andrew, seeking the whereabouts of their check.
Andrew Gregory still looked as fresh and unwrinkled as if he’d sauntered through the park, not opened a restaurant and catered to the whims of more than fifty people. He was the only man Father Tim knew who didn’t wrinkle linen.
His mind couldn’t avoid a momentary flashback to Andrew’s earnest courtship of Cynthia. He’d watched their comings and goings from his bedroom window at the rectory, feeling miserable, to say the least. He remembered once thinking of the tall, slender Andrew as a cedar of Lebanon, and of himself, a lowly country parson, as mere scrub pine.
But who had won fair maid?
“I’ve had quite a visit with your new tenant,” Andrew said. “She stayed in Wesley the last few days, waiting for the movers, and came several times to the shop. Very inquisitive about Fernbank, it seems. Wanted to know what was sold out of the house, and so on. Said she had a great interest in old homes.”
“Yes, she mentioned that to me.”
“She asked me to name the pieces I bought from you, and was eager to learn whether anything was left in the attic. I told her no, it had all been cleaned out and given away. She asked whether relatives had taken anything, and I said I didn’t really know.”
“Curious.”
“I thought so,” said Andrew. “And by the way, your money doesn’t spend here.”
Andrew’s wife joined them from the kitchen, looking flushed and happy.
“Put away, put back,” said Anna, indicating his wallet. He thought Andrew’s Italian bride of two years, who had come from the village of Lucera, bore a breathtaking resemblance to Sophia Loren.
“But . . .”
“It’s our gift to you, our farewell present,” Andrew insisted.
“Well, then. Thank you. Thank you so much! You’ve made a great contribution to Mitford, Miss Sadie would be proud to see Fernbank filled with light and laughter. Anna, Andrew—’til we meet again.”
“Ciao!” cried Anna, throwing her arms around him and kissing both his cheeks. He loved Italians. “Go with God!”
“Father!” It was Tony, Anna’s younger brother and Lucera’s chef, running from the kitchen in his white hat and splattered apron. “Grazie al cielo! I thought I’d missed you!”
Tony embraced him vigorously, kissed both cheeks, then stood back and gripped his shoulders. Father Tim didn’t know when he’d seen a handsomer fellow in Mitford. “Ciao!” said Tony, his dark eyes bright with feeling. “God be with you!”
“And also with you, my friend.”
“Ciao!” they shouted from the car to Andrew and Anna, who came out to the porch as they drove away from Fernbank, away from the grand old house with the grand new life.
He was driving on the Parkway with the top down, when he looked in the rearview mirror and saw his Buick pulling up behind him.
Who was the driver? It was Dooley, with Barnabas sitting in the seat beside him, looking straight ahead.
Dooley was grinning from ear to ear; he could see him distinctly. Yet, when he looked again, the car was gone, vanished.
He woke up, peering into the darkness.
Two a.m., according to the clock by their bed. He sighed.
“Are you awake?” asked Cynthia.
“I had a dream.”
“About what?”
“Dooley. He was driving my Buick.”
“Oh. I can’t sleep, I can never sleep before a long trip.” She sighed, and he reached over and patted her shoulder.
“Maybe I could give Dooley the Buick next year. He could pay something for it, two or three thousand. . . .”
“Umm,” she said.
Suddenly he had a brilliant idea. Not everybody could wake in the middle of the night and think so cleverly.
“Tell you what. Why don’t I give you the Buick, and you let Dooley pay you a few thousand for the Mazda. I think he’d like your car better. It’s newer, has more . . . youthful styling.”
“Not on your life,” she said. “I may be a preacher’s wife, but I did not take a vow of poverty.”
“Cynthia, the Buick drives like a dream.”
“Dream on,” she said. His wife was stubborn as a mule.
“It never needs any work.”
“It is fourteen years old, the paint is faded, and there’s rust on the right fender. The upholstery on the driver’s side is smithereens, a church fan works better than the air conditioner, and it reeks of mildew.”
He sighed. “Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play?”
She giggled.
He rolled over to her and they assumed their easy spoon position, which someone had called “the staple consolation of the marriage bed.” She felt warm and easy in his arms.
“Listen,” he said.
“To what?”
“I heard something just then. Music, I think.”
They lay very still. The lightest notes from a piano floated through the window.
“A piano,” he said.
“Chopin,” she murmured.
Moments later, he heard her whiffling snore, found it calming, and fell asleep.
Hammer and tong.
That’s how they were going at it in the yellow house.
The plan was to get on the road by eight o’clock, which was when Dooley reported to The Local.
Excited about the idea that had come to him in the dream, Father Tim asked Dooley to help tote the last of the cargo to the curb, where Violet was already in her cage on the rear floor of the Mustang.
The top was down, the day was bright and promising, and Barnabas had been walked around the monument at a trot.
“Ah!” Father Tim inhaled the summer morning air, then turned to Dooley, grinning.
“You’re pretty happy,” said Dooley.
“I’m happy to tell you that next summer, with only a modest outlay of funds on your part, Cynthia and I would like to make you the proud owner of . . . the Buick.”
Dooley looked stunned.
“I ain’t drivin’ that thing!” he said, reverting to local vernacular and obviously highly insulted.
They were standing on the sidewalk as the Lord’s Chapel bells chimed eight.
Puny and the twins were first in line, and he was up to bat.
“Say bye-bye to Granpaw,” urged Puny.
“Bye-bye, Ba,” said Sissy. She reached out to him, nearly sprawling out of Puny’s arms.
He plucked her from her mother and held her, kissing her forehead. “God be with you, Sissy.”
Her green eyes brimmed with tears. “Come back, Ba.”
He set her down on chubby legs, wondering how he could go through with this. . . .
He hoisted the plump, sober Sassy, who was chewing a piece of toast, and kissed the damp tousle of red hair. “God’s blessings, Sassy.” Barnabas, who was sitting patiently on the sidewalk, licked Sissy’s face.
Puny was openly bawling. Blast. He took it like a man and gave her a hug, feeling her great steadfastness, smelling the starch in her blouse, loving her goodness to him over the years. “You’re always in our prayers,” he told her, hoarse with feeling.
Puny wiped her nose with the hem of her apron. “We’ll miss you.”
“We’ll be back before you know it.�
�
Puny and the children fled into the yellow house, as Cynthia stood on tiptoe and gave Dooley a hug. “Take care of yourself, you big lug.”
“I will.”
“And write. Or call. A lot!”
“I will.”
Father Tim clasped the boy to him, then stood back and gazed at him intently. “I’m counting on you to help Harley hold things together around here.”
“Yes, sir. I will.”
“We love you.”
“I love you back.” Dooley said it fair and square, looking them in the eye. Then he turned and ran to his red bicycle, leaped on it, and pedaled toward Main Street. Before he reached the corner, he stopped, looked back, and waved. “’Bye, Cynthia, ’bye, Dad!”
They waved as Dooley disappeared around the rhododendron bush.
Father Tim jingled the keys in his hand. “Harley, reckon you can sell the Buick for me?”
Harley looked skeptical, scratched his head, and gazed at the sidewalk.
“Would you . . . like to drive it while I’m gone?”
“Rev’rend, I ’preciate th’ offer, but I’ll stick to m’ truck.”
“Aha.” Clearly, he had a vehicle he couldn’t even give away, much less sell.
“Well, Harley . . .” He put his arm around the shoulders of the small, frail man who was now holding down the fort.
“Rev’rend, Cynthia . . . th’ Lord go with you.” Harley’s chin trembled, and he wiped his eyes with his sleeve.
“’Bye, Harley,” said Cynthia. “We love you.”
Father Tim opened the passenger door and put the seat forward. “Come on, fellow, get in.”
Barnabas leaped onto the leather seat, sniffed Violet’s cage, and lay down, looking doleful.
“Don’t even think about crying,” he told his wife as they climbed in the car.
“The wind in our hair . . . ,” she said, laughing through the tears.
He started the engine. “The cry of gulls wheeling above us . . .”
“The smell of salt air!”
He turned around in a driveway at the end of Wisteria Lane. Man alive, he liked the way this thing handled, and the seat . . . the seat felt like an easy chair.
They waved to Harley, who was rooted to the spot and waving back.
After hooking a right on Main Street, he drove slowly, as if they were a parade car. J. C. Hogan was just trotting into the Grill.
Father Tim hammered down on the horn and J.C. looked up, dumbstruck, as they waved.
Then he stepped on the gas and whipped around the monument, consciously avoiding a glance in the rearview mirror.
CHAPTER FOUR
The Smell of Salt Air
He was loving this.
“You’re loving this!”crowed his wife.
He couldn’t remember ever having such a sense of perfect freedom; he felt light as air, quick as mercury, transparent as glass.
And hot as blazes.
He looked into the rearview mirror. Barnabas, currently sitting up with his head riveted into the scorching wind, was attracting the attention of all westbound traffic.
“You must stop and get a hat!” his wife declared over the roar of an eighteen-wheeler. “Your head is turning pink!”
“Lunch and a hat, coming up,” he said, reluctant to delay their journey, even if it was into the unknown.
They were barreling toward Williamston, through open tobacco country.
“Flat,” said Cynthia, peering at the landscape.
“Hard to have an ocean where it isn’t flat.”
“Hot,” she said, reduced to telegraphic speech.
“Don’t say we weren’t warned. Want to put the top up?”
“Not yet, I’m trying to get the look of an island native.” His wife was wearing shorts and a tank top, sunglasses and a Mitford Reds ball cap. All exposed areas were slathered with oil, and she was frying.
“I think we need to get Barnabas under cover before long. We’ll put it up at Williamston.”
Whoosh. A tractor-trailer nearly sucked them out of the car. He reached up and clamped his new hat to his head.
“Did Miss Pringle say why she left Boston to live in Mitford?”
“No. Didn’t say.”
“And you didn’t ask?”
“Never thought to.”
“Why on earth would she pick Mitford? And for only six months! Can you imagine hauling a piano from Boston for only six months? Does she have friends or relatives in Mitford?”
“I don’t think so, but I’m not sure.”
“Darling, how can you ever know things about people if you don’t ask?”
As a priest, he usually managed to find out more than he wanted to know, though hardly ever through asking.
She sat thinking, with Violet asleep at her feet on the floorboard.
“Remember that chicken salad we had for lunch?” she inquired.
“Only vaguely.”
“It’s becoming a distant memory to me, too. I’m starved. Actually, during the entire lunch, I was dreaming of something finer.”
“Oh?”
“Esther’s cake.”
“Aha.”
“In the cooler. . . .”
“Umm.”
“I’ve been thinking how moist it is, how cold and sweet, how velveteen its texture. . . .”
“That’s Esther’s cake, all right.”
“And those discreet little morsels of bittersweet rind that burst in your mouth like . . . like sunshine!”
“You’re a regular Cowper of cake.”
“Don’t you think we should have some?” she asked.
“Now you’re talking.”
“Did you bring your pocketknife?”
“Always,” he said, producing it from his pocket.
She got on her knees in her seat and foraged around on the floorboard in back, cranking off the cooler top and fetching out the foil-wrapped mound.
“Oh, lovely. Nice and cold on my legs. Well, now. How shall we do this?” she asked, peeling back layers of foil. “This is the cake that nearly sent you to heaven in your prime. You probably shouldn’t have a whole slice.”
“If you recall,” he said, “it was two slices that nearly sent me packing. I’ll have one slice, and would appreciate not being able to see through it.”
She carefully carved a small piece and put it on a napkin from the glove compartment. “Don’t keel over on me,” she said, meaning it.
Driving to the beach in a red convertible, eating Esther’s cake—how many men wouldn’t crave to be in his shoes? The sweetness and delicacy of the vanishing morsel in his hands were literally intoxicating. Priest Found Drunk on Layer Cake . . .
“Darling, you talked in your sleep last night.”
“Uh-oh.”
“You said ‘slick’ several times; you were very restless.”
“Slick?”
“Yes, and once I think you said ‘Tommy.’ ”
“Aha!” The dream flooded back to him instantly. His boyhood friend, Tommy Noles, and that miserable experience that earned him his nickname, a nickname he’d never mentioned to his wife. . . .
“Who is Tommy?” she queried.
“Tommy Noles, my old friend from Holly Springs.”
“The one who always knew the make and model of cars.”
“Right.”
“What were you dreaming?”
As usual, his inquisitive wife wanted to know everything. Should he tell her?
“Well, let’s see. I was dreaming about . . . well, about the time when . . .”
“When what?”
Weren’t couples supposed to tell each other their fondest wishes, their deepest secrets, their blackest fears? He’d never thought much of that scheme, but so far, it had worked. In fact, he’d found that for every one of his deepest secrets, Cynthia Kavanagh would pour forth two or three of her own; it was like winning at slots.
“. . . when I got my nickname.”
“Are you blushing or
is that the sun?”
“The sun,” he said.
“What about when you got your nickname? I never knew you had one.”
Tommy Noles had lived right up the road, next to his attorney father’s gentleman’s farm. Mr. Noles was a history teacher and a packrat. He hauled every imaginable oddity to his seven acres, and parked it around the property as if it were outdoor sculpture. A rusting haymow, an antique tractor, a gas tank from a service station, a prairie schooner, a large advertising sign for tobacco . . .
Mr. Noles mowed around these objects regularly and with great respect, but neglected to trim the grass that grew directly against them, so that each was sheathed in a colorful nest of sedge and wildflowers, which, as a boy, the young Tim had found enhancing.
His father found none of it enhancing, his father who idolized perfection above all else, and no son of his would be allowed to play with Tommy Noles.
But he had, in fact, played with Tommy Noles, wading in the creek, building a fort in the woods, constructing a tree house, fishing for crappie, searching for arrowheads in the fields.
Tommy Noles had wanted to be a fighter pilot in a terrible war, and he, Timothy Kavanagh, wanted to be a boxer or an animal trainer or, oddly enough, a bookbinder, for hadn’t he been outrageously smitten with the smell and the look of his grandfather’s books?
He remembered training Tommy’s dog, Jeff, to catch sticks in midair, and to roll over and play dead. It had been deeply satisfying to finagle another living creature into doing anything at all, and he longed for a dog of his own, but his father wouldn’t allow it. Dogs had fleas, dogs scratched, dogs defecated.
He grew uneasy thinking about how it had happened.
Tommy Noles, urged by the others and unbeknownst to him, had put dog poop just inside the double doors of the schoolhouse, two piles of it.
Bust in through those doors, runnin’, Tommy said to him, and we’ll give you a nickel.
Why? he asked. The teachers were in a meeting in the gym, and he smelled trouble brewing.
Just because, just for nothin’, just run up th’ steps, bust through th’ doors, and run down th’ hall all th’ way to th’ water fountain, and we’ll give you a In’ian head nickel.