Jan Karon's Mitford Years

by Jan Karon

  People knew who she was, they knew whose wedding this was; if she’d stopped to ask permission, they’d have said help yourself, take all you want! So why stop and ask, that was her philosophy! People should be proud for her to rogue their flowers, seeing they made so many people happy. I declare, she once imagined someone saying, Hessie Mayhew stripped every peony bush in my yard today, and I’m just tickled about it!

  For her money, the hydrangeas were a week shy of the best color, but did people who set wedding dates ever stop and think of such things? Of course not, they just went blindly on. If she lived to marry again, which she sometimes hoped she would, she’d do it in May, when lily of the valley was at it peak.

  On her screened porch, a decrepit porcelain bathtub boasted a veritable sea of virgin’s bower and hydrangeas.

  In her double kitchen sink, Blue Mist spirea, autumn anemone, Queen Anne’s lace, artemisia, and knotweed drank thirstily. Inside the back door, buckets of purple coneflowers, autumn clematis, cosmos, and wild aster sat waiting. On the counter above the dishwasher, a soup pot of pink Duet and white Garden Party roses mingled with foxtail grass, Jerusalem artichoke, dog hobble, and panicles of the richly colored pokeberry. A small butterfly that had ridden in, drugged, on a coneflower, came to itself and visited the artemisia.

  At seven-thirty, Hessie Mayhew turned on her side, moaning a little due to the pain in her lower back, and though a team of helpers was due to arrive at eight, she slept on.

  In her home a half mile from town, Puny Guthrie crumbled two dozen strips of crisp, center-cut bacon into the potato salad and gave it one last, heaving stir. Everybody would be plenty hungry by six or six-thirty, and she’d made enough to feed a corn shuckin’, as her granpaw used to say. She had decided to leave out the onions, since it was a wedding reception and very dressy. She’d never thought dressing up and eating onions were compatible; onions were for picnics and eating at home in the privacy of your own family.

  Because Cynthia and the father didn’t want people to turn out for the reception and go home hungry, finger foods were banned. They wanted to give everybody a decent supper, even if they would have to eat it sitting on folding chairs from Sunday School. What with the father’s ham, Miss Louella’s yeast rolls, Miss Olivia’s raw vegetables and dip, her potato salad, and Esther Bolick’s three-layer orange marmalade, she didn’t think they’d have any complaints. Plus, there would be ten gallons of tea, not to mention decaf, and sherry if anybody wanted any, but she couldn’t imagine why anybody would. She’d once taken a sip from the father’s decanter, and thought it tasted exactly like aluminum foil, though she’d never personally tasted aluminum foil except when it got stuck to a baked potato.

  She thought of her own wedding and how she had walked down the aisle on Father Tim’s arm. She had felt like a queen, like she was ten feet tall, looking at everything and everybody with completely new eyes. Halfway down the aisle, she nearly burst into tears, then suddenly she soared above tears to something higher, something that took her breath away, and she knew she would never experience anything like it again. Later, when she called Father Tim “Father,” she was struck to find she said it as if he really were her father, it wasn’t just some religious name that went with a collar. Ever since that moment, she’d felt she was his daughter, in a way that no one except herself could understand. And hadn’t he been the one to pray that parade prayer that brought Joe Joe to the back door and into her life forever? She had been cleaning the downstairs rectory toilet when Joe Joe came to the back, because she hadn’t heard him knocking at the front. When she saw him, her heart did a somersault, because he was the cutest, most handsome person she’d ever seen outside of a TV show or magazine.

  “Father Tim said he might have a candy wrapper in the pocket of his brown pants, if you could send it, please.”

  She knew immediately that this policeman had been raised right, saying “please.” Not too many people said please anymore, much less thank you, she thought it was a shame.

  She had invited him in and given him a glass of tea and he perched on the stool where Father Tim sat and read his mail, and she went upstairs and looked in the father’s brown pants pockets and there it was, wadded up. Why anybody would want to carry around a wadded-up candy wrapper . . .

  “’Scuse my apron,” she remembered saying. She would never forget the look in his eyes.

  “You look really good in an apron,” he said, turning beet red.

  She’d never been told such a thing and had no idea what to say. She handed him the candy wrapper and he put it in a little Ziploc bag without taking his eyes off her.

  She thought she was going to melt and run down in a puddle. Then he bolted off the stool and was out the door and gone and that was that. Until he came back the very next day when she was cooking lima beans.

  “Hey,” she said through the screen door as he bounded up the steps. By now, she knew that the whole police force was working on the big jewel theft at Lord’s Chapel.

  “You’re under arrest,” he said, blushing again.

  For a moment, she was terrified that this might be true, then she saw the big grin on his face.

  “What’re th’ charges?”

  “Umm, well . . .” He dropped his head and gazed at his shoes.

  She thought it must be awful to be a grown man who blushed like a girl.

  He jerked his head up and looked her in the eye. “You’re over the legal limit of bein’ pretty.”

  She giggled. “What’re you goin’ to do about it?” Boy howdy, that had flown right out of her mouth without even thinking.

  “Umm, goin’ to ask you to a movie in Wesley, how’s that?”

  “Is it R? I don’t see R.”

  “I don’t know,” he said, appearing bewildered.

  “You could look in the newspaper, or call,” she said. She could scarcely get her breath. She had never noticed before that a police uniform looked especially good, it was like he was home on leave from the armed forces.

  “Will you see, umm, PG-13?”

  “Depending.” Why on earth was she being so hard to get along with? Her mouth was acting like it had a mind of its own.

  “My grandmother’s th’ mayor!” he exclaimed.

  “That’s nice,” she said. This was going nowhere. She felt she was fluttering around in space and couldn’t get her toes on the ground. Suddenly realizing again that she was wearing her apron, she snatched it up and over her head and stood there, feeling dumb as a rock.

  “So, just trust me,” he said. “We’ll find a good movie if we have to go all th’way to . . .” He hesitated, thinking. “Johnson City!”

  “Thank you,” she said, “I’d enjoy goin’ to th’ movies with you.”

  After he left, she felt so addled and weak in the knees that she wanted to lie down, but would never do such a thing in the father’s house; she didn’t even sit down on the job, except once in a while to peel peaches or snap string beans.

  She walked around the kitchen several times, trying to hold something in, she didn’t know what it was. She ended up at the back door, where it suddenly came busting out.

  It was a shout.

  She put the plastic cover on the potato salad bowl and smiled, remembering that she’d stood at the screen door for a long time, with tears of happiness running down her cheeks.

  Having had their flight canceled on Saturday due to weather, Walter and Katherine Kavanagh arrived at the Charlotte airport at 11:35 a.m. Sunday morning, following a mechanical delay of an hour and a half at La Guardia. They stood at the baggage carousel, anxiously seeking her black bag, which contained not only her blue faille suite for the wedding, but the gift they’d taken great pains to schlep instead of ship.

  “Gone to Charlottesville, Virginia!” said the baggage claim authority, peering into his monitor. “How about that?”

  From her greater height of six feet, Katherine surveyed him with a look capable of icing the wings of a 747.

  “Sometim
es they go to Charleston!” he announced, refusing to wither under her scorn. He was used to scorn; working in an airline baggage claim department was all about scorn.

  Miss Sadie Baxter sat at her dressing table in her slip and robe, near the open window of the bedroom she’d occupied since she was nine years old. The rain clouds had rolled away, the sun was shining, and the birds were singing—what more could any human want or ask for?

  She carefully combed the gray hair from her brush, rolled it into a tidy ball, and let it fall soundlessly into the wastebasket that bore the faded decal of a camellia blossom.

  Where had the years gone? One day she’d sat here brushing hair the color of chestnuts, and the next time she looked up, she was old and gray. She remembered sitting on this same stool, looking into this same mirror, reading Willard Porter’s love letter and believing herself to be beautiful. . . .

  “Willard!” she whispered, recalling the letter she had committed to memory, the letter he wrote on her twenty-first birthday: You may know that I am building a house in the village, on the green where Amos Medford grazed his cows. Each stone that was laid in the foundation was laid with the hope that I might yet express the loving regard I have for you, Sadie.

  I am going to give this house a name, trusting that things may eventually be different between us. I will have it engraved on a cedar beam at the highest point in the attic, with the intention that its message may one day give you some joy or pleasure.

  Perhaps, God willing, your father will soon see that I have something to offer, and relent. Until then, dear Sadie, I can offer only my fervent love and heartfelt devotion.

  Soon afterward, Willard had been killed and buried in France, and many years went by before she learned the name he had engraved on the beam.

  “‘For lo, the winter is past . . . ,’” she murmured, gazing from her window into the orchard. Learning the name, Winterpast, had indeed given her much joy and pleasure.

  “‘. . . the rain is over and gone. The flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come. . . .’”

  The time of the singing of birds had come for the father and Cynthia.

  Miss Sadie looked into the mirror and smiled. Yes, it was their time, now.

  At four-fifteen, Cynthia urged Katherine to give her a few minutes alone. So much had gone on in the last days and weeks, she said, that she was quite breathless.

  “What if you should fall down the stairs?” Katherine inquired. “And your hair, it’s still in curlers!”

  Cynthia had known Katherine for just under two hours, but already reckoned her to be a woman who minced no words.

  “I’m not going to fall down the stairs,” she said. “And the curlers come out in a flash. I must say you look smashing in Olivia’s suit, really you do, the color is wonderful on you.”

  “I’ve never worn anything this short in my life!” fumed Katherine, peering into the full-length mirror and tugging at her skirt. “I look exactly like Big Bird, I had no idea I was so knock-kneed. I’ll scandalize the church, your friends will think we’re riffraff.”

  “They’ll think no such thing, they’ve all been dying to meet you.” Cynthia urged Katherine toward the door of her bedroom, the bedroom that would, tonight, belong to Walter and Katherine, who currently had no room of their own at all, poor souls.

  “I’ll take your bouquet out of the parish hall refrigerator,” said Katherine, “and see you in the narthex.” What could she do with a bride who wanted to be alone? As for herself, she had sprained her ankle twenty minutes before her own wedding and if friends hadn’t surrounded her, she might still be lying by the fish pond at that dreadful hotel in the Poconos.

  At five ’til five, Father Tim shot his French cuffs and exchanged meaningful glances with Walter and the bishop.

  They were cooped into the six-by-eight-foot sacristy like three roosters, he thought, and not a breath of air stirring.

  He walked to the door and pushed it open. Avis Packard’s cigarette smoke blew in.

  “’Scuse me,” said Avis, peering into the sacristy at what he considered a sight for sore eyes. There was their pope, dolled up in a long white robe and the oddest-looking headgear he ever laid eyes on, not to mention that long stick with a curve at the end, which was probably for snatching people up by the neck when they dozed off in the pew. Avis took a deep drag off his filtered Pall Mall and threw it in the bushes.

  At precisely five o’clock, Father Tim heard the organ. What was going on? Why hadn’t anyone come to the outer sacristy door to tell them the bride had arrived?

  “Don’t go out there!” he nearly shouted, as the bishop’s hand went for the door that led to the sanctuary. “Walter, please find Katherine, find out what’s going on.” Somebody had missed a signal, somehow. He felt oddly uneasy.

  At five after five, Walter reappeared, looking mystified. “Katherine can’t find Cynthia. She was supposed to meet her in the narthex at five ’til.”

  Ten minutes late! Cynthia Coppersmith was the very soul of punctuality.

  He had a gut feeling, and it wasn’t good. “I’ll be back,” he said, sprinting through the open door.

  “I’ll come with you!” said Walter.

  “No! Stay here!”

  He dashed up Old Church Lane, cut through Baxter Park, and hit her back steps running.

  “Cynthia!” He was trembling as he opened the unlocked door and ran into the hall. He stood for a moment, panting and bewildered, as Violet rubbed against his pant leg. He wished he could find cats more agreeable.

  He took the stairs two at a time and hung a left into her bedroom. “Cynthia!”

  “Timothy!”

  She was beating on her bathroom door from the inside. “Timothy! I can’t get out!”

  He spied the blasted doorknob lying on the floor. He picked it up and stuck the stem back in the hole and cranked the knob to the right and the door opened and he saw his bride in her chenile robe and pink curlers, looking agonized.

  “Oh, Timothy . . .”

  “Don’t talk,” he said. “Don’t even tell me. How can I help you, what can I do?”

  She raced to the closet and took out her suit. “I already have my panty hose on, so I’m not starting from scratch. Stand outside and I’ll do my best. Pray for me, darling! Oh, I’m so sorry, I should have borrowed something blue for good luck, what a dreadful mess. . . .”

  He stood in the hall and checked his watch. Five-seventeen.

  Violet rubbed against his ankle. He felt his jaws beginning to lock.

  “OK, you can come in now, I have my suit on, where are my shoes, oh, good grief, how did they get there, I can’t believe this, Timothy, I couldn’t help it, the knob just fell off, I yelled out the window and nobody heard, it was awful—”

  “Don’t talk!” he said, coming into the room. Why was he commanding her not to talk? Let the poor woman talk if she wanted to! Helpless—that’s what he felt.

  She thumped onto the bench at her dressing table and powdered her face and outlined her lips with a pencil and put on lipstick.

  Five-twenty.

  Then she did something to her eyebrows and eyelids.

  Five-twenty-two.

  She sprayed the wisteria scent on her wrists and rubbed them together and touched her wrists to her ears.

  He could see Stuart pacing the sacristy, Katherine wringing her hands, Walter going beserk, the entire congregation getting up and walking out, the ham, covered by Saran Wrap, abandoned in the refrigerator....

  “Cynthia . . . ”

  “Oh, dreadful, oh, horrid!” she cried, finishing her mascara with a shaking hand. “And I just remembered, you’re not supposed to see the bride before the ceremony!”

  “Too late!” he said, eyeing his watch. “Five twenty-four.”

  “I’m coming, I’m coming!”

  She got up and dashed toward him.

  “Curlers,” he said, his jaws cranking still further into the lock position.

  “Rat
s!”

  She plucked curlers from her head like so many feathers from a chicken, and tossed them into the air. They literally rained around the room; he’d never seen anything like it.

  “No time to brush!” She looked into the mirror and ran her fingers through her hair. “There! Best I can do. God help me!”

  She turned to him now, and he felt a great jolt from heart to spleen. She was so astonishingly beautiful, so radiant, so fresh, it captured his very breath. Thanks be to God, his custard was back....

  She grabbed her handbag from the chair. “We can take my car!”

  “No place to park!”

  “So,” she cried, as they headed for the stairs, “race you!”

  CHAPTER NINE

  The Wedding

  In the ninth row of the epistle side, next to the stained-glass window of Christ carrying the lost lamb, Hope Winchester blushed to recall her once-ardent crush on Father Tim. She’d taken every precaution to make certain he knew nothing of it, and now it seemed idiotic to have felt that way about someone twice her age.

  She remembered the fluttering of her heart when he came into the bookstore, and all her hard work to learn special words that would intrigue him. She would never admit such a thing to another soul, but she believed herself to be the only person in Mitford who could converse on his level. When she’d learned about Cynthia months ago, she had forced herself to stop thinking such nonsense altogether, and was now truly happy that he and his neighbor had found each other. They seemed perfect together.

  Still, on occasion, she missed her old habit of looking for him to pass the shop window and wave, or stop in; and she missed pondering what book she might order that would please and surprise him.

  It wasn’t that she’d ever wanted to marry him, for heaven’s sake, or even be in love with him; it was just that he was so very kind and gentle and made her feel special. Plus he was a lot like herself, deep and sensitive, not to mention a lover of the romantic poets she’d adored since junior high. Early on, she had made it a point to read Wordsworth again, weeping over the Lucy poems, so she could quote passages and dig out morsels to attract his imagination.