Jan Karon's Mitford Years

by Jan Karon

  It was the same unbearably tiresome nonsense he’d wrestled with for years. He didn’t know how to do anything on the side of fun, didn’t have a clue how to instigate it. It was Cynthia who dragged him into fun like a sack of potatoes; hadn’t she come up with those famous clergy retreats, small treasuries of time to laugh, to unwind, to refresh themselves? Had he ever come up with a retreat for her benefit? Not that he could recall. One might question if he had a brain in his head.

  But wait. She was as much a part of this trek to Tennessee as he. They had both prayed for a ministry with children, something they could do as a couple, and Cynthia had been eager and willing. It was he, however, who’d gotten the adrenaline pumping about Father Roland’s deal, which, he now learned, came with a moose head in their living room, no bridges over their creeks, a rug chewed by dogs, and an infestation of mosquitoes.

  Down the road, maybe Hal’s idea was, indeed, something to think about. Meadowgate had always held a place in Cynthia’s heart, and certainly in his. It would give them something to look forward to while in Tennessee. He mused for a moment on picnics in the Owens’ meadows and long walks in the woods; on the background music of lowing cattle and crowing roosters. Best of all, they’d be with Dooley through the summer, they wouldn’t have to make this wrenching disconnect….

  The thirst was profound, dredging up some odd anxiety he couldn’t name. But right up the road was the little store he and Dooley had stopped at the other day. He wheeled into the parking area and heaved himself from the car and went inside.

  “Water,” he said.

  “Thirty-two, thirty-three…Around back.” Absorbed in counting money, the man at the cash register jerked his thumb toward the rear of the building.

  “Around back?”

  “Spigot out back. Forty, forty-five…Th’ drink box is over there.”

  Drink box. He walked to it as if through high water, his legs heavy.

  Coke. Pepsi. Sprite. Dr Pepper.

  He couldn’t drink this stuff.

  But he didn’t feel like going around back, either.

  He dropped the change in the slot, punched in his selection, and pulled the handle. The can thumped into the dispenser. His hand trembled as he popped the top and drank, feeling the icy liquid flow down his gullet like a river of life, a benediction.

  He sat on a stack of drink crates and checked his watch.

  He was within two miles of Lottie Greer, Absalom Greer’s elderly sister, who was still living in back of the country store built by her parents more than eighty-five years ago. He should go by and visit. It had been a long time.

  The fork in the road was coming up. He had thirty seconds to make a decision.

  He saw the marker, Mitford Seven Miles, Farmer Two Miles, and noticed how, in the well-mown V of the fork, the weeds had been left to grow up around the marker post. His father never liked to see weeds left growing around a post….

  He veered left; he wouldn’t go to Lottie Greer’s. Everything at home was now on a schedule that, if interrupted, could throw them off the mark for their early morning departure. God willing, he would visit Lottie when he came back in September. He made a vow to do it; Absalom would have wanted it.

  He missed the old preacher, who had loved Miss Sadie ’til death did them part, the preacher who’d hung on to what some called “old-time religion.” Indeed, there was nothing “old-time” about the truth of the gospel, it was instead a truth for all time—yesterday, today, tomorrow. Absalom Greer had never preached the fashion of the day, nor done whatever popular thing it took to fill his pews; he had preached the Word and let the chips fall where they may. He would visit Absalom’s sister for this reason alone.

  Speaking of visiting…blast! he hadn’t gotten by to see Louella at Hope House. That wouldn’t do, that wouldn’t do at all. He stepped on the accelerator, hoping the sheriff’s boys weren’t lurking in a bush somewhere.

  Louella sat by her window, gazing out to the rooftops of Mitford.

  “Knock, knock!” he said, standing at the open door of Room Number One.

  “Uh-oh! Look at my shameful self! I’m still in this ol’ housecoat!”

  “It’s all right, Louella, you look beautiful in that color.”

  “Lord knows, I get dressed ever’ day that rolls around; today I say, Louella, ain’t nobody comin’ that you got to impress!”

  “And you were right! You don’t have to impress me, I’m already impressed.”

  “I don’ know by what!”

  He leaned down and kissed her cheek. “By your stamina, your positive attitude, your fine singing voice. Want to hit a couple of verses?” He sat on the footstool near her chair. He instantly felt eight, maybe ten years old. Miss Sadie and Louella had always done that for him, made the years roll away.

  “I cain’t praise th’ Lord in this ol’ housecoat, it’s nothin’ but rags and patches, Miss Sadie give it to me.”

  “We’ll just gab, then,” he said.

  Nurse Carter stuck her head into the room, grinning. “Y’all going to sing today?”

  “No,” he said. “We can’t. Louella’s in her housecoat.”

  “Oh,” said Nurse Carter.

  “Cynthia and I are leaving town tomorrow,” he said. “We’ll be home for a week in September.” For some reason, he found it difficult to put those two sentences together.

  He stood in the parking lot, trying to remember where he was and where he was going. He looked up to the roof of the front entrance and saw the angel weather vane. Of course! He was at Hope House and he was going home.

  He located the red Mustang on the other side of a Bronco and got in it and drove down the long driveway to Lilac Road, turned left on Church Hill, and passed Little Mitford Creek on his right. As he approached the stop sign, he noticed that weeds were growing up around the post, and there…

  …there was his father. His heart beat with a profound joy.

  As the image of Matthew Kavanagh appeared to him, an odd and severe explosion erupted in his head, and he felt his body violently jolted into a kind of limbo, a sudden darkness.

  CHAPTER SIX

  The Vale

  “Father?”

  Dressed in dark trousers and a familiar plaid shirt, the man up ahead stood next to a road sign at the edge of a cliff. The man’s right arm was lifted, as if shielding his eyes from a bright sun, though no sun shone.

  His heart pounded in his breast—to think it may be his father, dead all these years and now alive and real and wearing a shirt he remembered giving him at Christmas. The brown in the plaid was extraordinarily beautiful; he’d never known that brown might have this rich and glowing life.

  The man squinted in his direction, as if affronted by the interruption of an important thought.

  Yes! He could see clearly now: It was his father, his young and handsome father, the very image of the picture that had sat always on his mother’s dressing table in a silver frame. Tears stung his eyes. How extraordinary that he wasn’t dead, that there would be another chance for them. He stood rooted to the spot, weeping unashamed.

  “Who is it?” demanded his father.

  “It’s…” Who was he? He looked at his arms, his legs, his feet. He was wearing loafers he’d put on this morning, and pants he’d picked up from the cleaner’s in Wesley. He felt his head, and the hair lying about his skull in a fringe. It was this that inarguably identified himself to himself.

  “It’s Timothy!”

  His father knit his brow and frowned. “I don’t know you!” he said, then turned and walked off the cliff’s edge as though out for an evening stroll.

  A voice murmured at his right ear; he felt a warm breath that cosseted his hearing and made it acute.

  “O God, Light of lights, Keep us from inward darkness. Grant us so to sleep in peace, that we may arise to work according to Your will.”

  The voice ceased, and he waited to hear it again, desperately wished to hear it again. Is that all? There came a kind of whirring in
his head, as if of planets turning, and then the voice warmed his ear again. “Goodnight, dearest. I love you more than life….”

  He could not open his mouth, it was as if he had no mouth, only ears to catch this lovely sound, this breath as warm as the tropical isles he would never visit. Nor had he eyes to see; he discovered this when he tried to open them. No mouth to speak, no eyes to see; all he could locate was his right and waiting ear.

  He tried to remember what the voice had just said to him, but could not. Speak to me again! he cried from his heart. Please! But he heard nothing more.

  The water poured in through the top of his head, as loud as a waterfall, and rushed into his neck and arms and hands and belly and legs and streamed into his feet. Immediately the wave came in again at the top of his head and flowed through him once more.

  The water’s journey was warm and consoling, familiar; it was as if he’d waited for this moment all his life, and now that it had come, he was at peace.

  Then he was floating somewhere, weightless, emptied of all doubt or fear, but not emptied of longing. More than anything, he longed for the sound of the voice at his ear, and the warm zephyr that came with it.

  The birdsong was sharp and clear, the sky cloudless. He was walking along a woodland trail, carrying something on his back. He supposed it might be a pack, but he didn’t check to see. In trying to balance the thing between the blades of his aching shoulders, he felt the weight shift wildly so that he lost his balance. He stumbled; the edge of the woodland path crumbled under his right foot and he fell to his knees, hard, and woke shouting.

  Lord! Where are you?

  He knew he had shouted, yet he hadn’t heard his voice.

  The room—was it a room?—was black, not even a street lamp shone, and the dream—was it a dream?—had been so powerful, so convincing, that he dared not let it go. Where are You? he repeated, whispering, urgent.

  Here I am, Timothy.

  He lifted his hand and reached out to Jesus, whom he couldn’t see but now strongly sensed to be near him, all around him.

  The tears were hot on his face. He had found the Lord from whom he’d thought himself lost, and lay back, gasping, as if he’d walked a long section of the Appalachian Trail.

  Thank you! he said into the silence. Had he spoken?

  “‘And yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death…’”

  There was the voice at his ear, and the soft, warm breath. Stay! Don’t go, don’t leave me.

  “‘I will fear no evil, for Thou art with me, Thy rod and Thy staff, they comfort me….’”

  He listened, but couldn’t contain the words; he forgot them the moment they were spoken.

  “I love you, my darling, my dearest, my Timothy.”

  A fragrance suffused the air around his pillow, and he entered into it as if into a garden. It possessed a living and deeply familiar presence, and was something like…

  …Home. But what was Home? He couldn’t remember. His heart repeated the word, Home, Home, but his head couldn’t fathom the meaning.

  “I…came…shift…yes…it’s…soon.”

  Voices. Voices interrupted by static, sounding like the radio that sat in the corner of the living room in Holly Springs, with broadcasts that left out entire words of critical war news and replaced them with air.

  “Did you…Kennedy?”

  “…right…then some.”

  “…twice…seventh leading cause…death.”

  “I…doctor…must, too.”

  “…wring neck.”

  He grew weary of trying to piece together a puzzle that was clearly missing its most interesting pieces.

  He discovered he was longing for something so finely woven into the fiber of his being that it couldn’t be identified, one might as well strive to put form and feature on vapor. Longing, longing, his spirit torn with it…

  Then he began to know. It was a gradual understanding, unfolding in him like petals opening after rain.

  He held his breath, waiting for the revelation he was certain would come. When at last he could name the longing, he felt his heart lift up with a sudden, stunning joy.

  He was longing for…his wife.

  But he couldn’t make sense of the word; his heart appeared to know its meaning full well, but his brain refused to step up to the plate. What was “wife”? Think, Timothy! Think! His head felt as if a network of connections had shut down entirely and an odd rewiring were taking place.

  Wife. His heart told him it meant something like comfort or solace. Yes! Wife was solace. Chocolate was candy. Candy was chocolate. Solace was wife.

  Wife was also…He waited for the meaning to grow in his breast, then felt himself reading his heart as one might read a book to gather understanding. Wife was also wonder, his heart seemed to tell him. Yes! Wonder and pleasure and…delight!

  He liked this game, he had always liked games, really, was quite good at Scrabble and practically unbeatable at something starting with…what did it start with? With an M? But he was veering off into mist again. Now that he knew he could read his heart, he wouldn’t feel so alone. What else, then?

  Wife was……

  laughter! He remembered laughter, though distantly. Laughter doeth good like a medicine! he tried to say.

  He fell into a kind of sleep in which his body floated as if on waves of music. He thought it might be Beethoven’s Pastorale, in which the crashing of the thunderstorm over the meadows would soon be heard, but the storm did not come. When he awoke, he found he’d learned yet another definition:

  Wife was peace.

  He felt someone caressing his hand, but couldn’t open his eyes to see or his mouth to inquire who it might be. The touch was inexpressibly tender; he wanted to clasp the caress, to hold it to himself as insurance against what might come.

  Wife, he said, trying to move his mouth. Wife, he had discovered in his sleep, was a place one went when one was afraid, or alone, or even senselessly happy. It was a place one wanted to be, a place one cherished…it was something very like Home.

  “Home,” he said, and heard himself speak.

  “But it’s what he wants. It’s the only word he’s uttered in days.”

  “He can’t go home, it’s too soon, he could be here for weeks, we don’t know where this thing is going—”

  “We could have help come in, surely you could find someone for us, perhaps Nurse Kennedy on her hours off.” He thought the woman sounded close to tears and wanted to rise up and protect her from the other voice.

  He was urinating where he lay and could do absolutely nothing to prevent it. He felt it streaming out of him and afterward was greatly relieved. He wondered why it hadn’t soaked the bed beneath him. But of course he wasn’t lying in a bed, he was in a hammock swung by his mother and he was wearing knickers and was barefoot and laughing, and she was singing.

  Baby Bye, here’s a fly,

  Let us watch him you and I,

  As he crawls, up the walls,

  Yet he never falls.

  I believe with six such legs

  You and I could walk on eggs!

  Spots of red dot his head

  Rainbows on his back are spread.

  “I’m not a baby!” he shouted, in case she had forgotten.

  She laughed. “Oh, really? Is that so? I did forget for a moment, I admit, but only a very tiny moment!”

  He thought his mother the most beautiful woman in the world. More beautiful than the ladies in Ladies’ Home Journal, and nine hundred thousand times more beautiful than the other ladies at church.

  “I’m five!” he shouted again, flying through the air.

  “You have a whole day left before you’re five! I want this day to go on and on and on and on and—”

  “For always?” he yelled.

  “For always!” whooped his mother.

  He felt secretly pleased that she wished him always to be four instead of five, though he would have hated being four forever.

&nbs
p; O Lord, you are my portion and my cup; it is you who upholds my lot. My boundaries enclose a pleasant land; indeed, I have a goodly heritage. I will bless the Lord who gives me counsel; my heart teaches me, night after night…

  He stood before his Sunday School class in his mother’s Baptist church and recited the whole of the Sixteenth Psalm, for which he would be given a coveted gold star to wear on his lapel.

  I have set the Lord always before me; because he is at my right hand I shall not fall. My heart, therefore, is glad, and my spirit rejoices; my body also shall rest in hope….

  You will show me the path of life; in your presence there is fullness of joy, and in your right hand are pleasures for evermore.

  For evermore… the phrase moved him deeply and set him wondering about eternity and the souls of others. Miss Wright was smiling and nodding her head. While one part of him was twelve years old and sitting down after the recitation, another part of him, a vague and hazy part, stood filled with relief and joy that Miss Wright, whom he and everyone else loved, had not been killed in a car accident with her husband on Christmas Eve.

  Well done, Timothy.

  Thank you, ma’am.

  His heart pounded like a jackhammer, his face blazed. He suddenly knew that tonight, possibly even before, he would pray, Lord, show me the path of my life…

  Why can’t we talk? he wanted to say to his father, who sat across from him at the kitchen table. But this question supposed that they had tried to talk and failed. They had never really tried to talk. He would attempt something else, then, something more straightforward and to the point. After all, what if his father died before they seized the chance?

  He cleared his throat and felt the terrible fear of a man who, though poised on a diving board, cannot swim. “Let’s talk…sir,” he said.

  “About what?”

  His father was much older than the handsome man in the silver frame that always sat on his mother’s dressing table.