Jan Karon's Mitford Years

by Jan Karon

  “I…I don’t know,” he said, ashamed that he didn’t know. Now that he had his father’s attention, he remembered that he hadn’t chosen a subject. “Maybe about how we could…communicate better.”

  “Communicate.”

  His father repeated the word, looking as he often looked—inordinately bored.

  “Why do you hate me?” There it was, he’d said it. His breath failed.

  “Hate you.”

  He gulped air. “Yes. I think you do. I don’t know why.” He was stricken by what he was doing, but more than that, he urgently wanted to know.

  His father was stalling for time, making him suffer.

  “Talk to me, Father. Tell me why.”

  The color had drained from his father’s face. “You are impertinent, Timothy.”

  “No, Father, I am your son and I must know the answer.” Rage flamed in him, but he resisted it. He was a man now, he had finished high school with honors, he had been accepted into a respectable and discriminating college—he would wait for the answer without asking again, and without begging or whining. He felt the heavy pounding of his heart.

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about, Timothy. I seldom do, in fact.”

  His father rose from the table and walked stiffly from the kitchen. He shut the door, which usually remained open, behind him.

  He sat frozen, lest the slightest movement cause something in him to shatter.

  Then there was the whisper of his mother’s dress, the gray faille that sounded like dry husks of corn blown together in a breeze.

  She sat in his father’s chair and reached for his hand across the table. “Love your father, Timothy,” she said quietly. “Pray for him.”

  “I can’t. I’ve tried, but it doesn’t work.” He wanted it to work, if only to please her.

  “It’s time I told you something.”

  Her eyes were brown and dark. He felt he could see a kind of eternity in them.

  “Your father bears many wounds.”

  “But it isn’t right to inflict them on others; especially not on you.”

  “No. It isn’t right. Yet, in many ways, it’s no surprise. His father treated him brutally. You know the verse from Deuteronomy.”

  “Lots of people have been treated brutally. Saint Paul—”

  “But Saint Paul had encountered Christ, and your father shields himself against even the remotest possibility that Christ would approach him.”

  Through the window, he saw his father driving away.

  “Timothy, your grandfather once horsewhipped your father—in front of a great number of people. It was a vicious attack that left Matthew terribly damaged in many ways. After that incident, which wasn’t the first of its kind, Matthew sealed himself up like a tomb. That’s how he made certain that his father could never reach him again.”

  He watched the black Packard make a right turn by the hedge of myrtles and disappear from view. The loss he felt was sudden and immeasurable, different from any loss he’d ever felt before.

  “I’m sorry,” he said at last. “But it’s too easy. When he shut out his father, he shut out everyone else, too. He uses a terrible personal experience as an excuse to wound others.”

  “Forgive him, Timothy.”

  “How can I do that? I don’t know how to do that.”

  “I’ll pray for you to be able to do that,” she said simply.

  “Do you love him?” he asked. It was a deeply personal question. His family did not ask deeply personal questions, and today he had asked an intimate confession of both his parents.

  She gazed out the window as she answered. “I thought I could soften his heart, could give him joy. I believed that love would conquer all.”

  “Do you still believe that?”

  “Yes,” she said, turning to look at him. “I still believe that. Please believe that with me.”

  He’d attended college for two years, then gone on to seminary, perceiving his call to the priesthood as God’s way of using Timothy Kavanagh to bring his father into relationship with Jesus Christ. But his father died with a hardness of heart no mortal son could remove.

  He had tried hard to believe with his mother that love would conquer all. And love had not conquered.

  He felt a cool breeze on his face and heard the laughter of children.

  The children appeared to be sitting on a limb of the tree above his head, for he saw feet dangling among the leaves. One small pair of feet was shod in white socks and patent leather shoes and the other feet were brown and bare.

  “Father, is that you?”

  “Miss Sadie! Is that you?”

  “It’s us!” More laughter. The limb moved; leaves trembled.

  “What are you doing up there?”

  “Playing!”

  “Is Louella with you?”

  “We eatin’ cornbread an’ milk!” Louella shouted.

  “I declare,” he said, shaking his head.

  “Come up!” crowed Miss Sadie. “I need to talk with you about something.”

  “No way am I coming up there.”

  “Father, if you want my advice, clergy needs to climb a tree once in a while.”

  “Else you goes stuffy!”

  “You’ll have to talk to me where I stand,” he said, being firm. What nonsense!

  “Well, then, Father, I want you to look out for Dooley and Lace Turner.”

  “What do you mean, look out for them?”

  “Don’t let them drift apart.”

  “What can I do about such things?” He was starting to feel positively huffy. “That’s God’s business!”

  “I thought God’s business was your job!” replied Miss Sadie.

  “It is not my job to meddle in the romantic lives of people who’re barely college age!”

  “Oh, pshaw! What do you think I should tell him, Louella?”

  “Tell ’im do the best he can.”

  “Do the best you can, Father. That will be enough.”

  “Blast!” he muttered, stomping away. He didn’t like people thrashing around in trees above his head. How ridiculous.

  He was a balloon shaped like a man; his right arm, his chest, his groin, his legs were being filled with a familiar substance, though he couldn’t have said what it was….

  There was a terrible fatigue in him, as if he had toiled up mountains, mountains he had not in the least wished to climb.

  Abba, Father…

  He struggled to pray, but was disconcerted by a loud beeping noise somewhere above his head. He opened his eyes and found he could see.

  He was in a dark place.

  It smelled of aluminum foil, or possibly mouthwash.

  A narrow column of light shone through a door that stood ajar.

  Where in God’s name was he? Their door wasn’t on that side of the bedroom.

  Cynthia!

  He found he couldn’t move his left hand, it hadn’t yet filled up, so he examined the bed with his right. The bed was narrow, and he was alone.

  He tried to roll onto his side, but found he was tethered.

  “Cynthia? Cynthia!”

  The beeping grew louder and the slice of light grew wider as the door opened.

  “Father Kavanagh!”

  “Who is it?”

  Someone walked soundlessly into the room without turning on the light.

  “Nurse Kennedy.” She took his wrist and placed her fingers on his pulse. “Thank God,” she said softly.

  “Where am I?” he asked.

  She did something that stopped the beeping. “You’re in Mitford Hospital. Welcome home.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Grace Sufficient

  “Dearest…”

  He opened his eyes and saw Cynthia standing by the hospital bed. Though tears streamed down her cheeks, her smile was radiant.

  He found he could not lift his hand to touch her, though the sight before him was the most wondrous he’d ever beheld.

  He touched her with his gaze,
then mutely examined her face with his eyes. Home. He was home. Whatever he had done, he would never do it again. He felt like a man who had been to a hideous war and returned at last to kiss his very doorstep.

  “Timothy…,” she whispered, leaning down to brush her cheek against his.

  “Come,” he said.

  She lay down in the narrow space beside him, and held him, and wept.

  “Dear God, what bloody foolishness! How many times are you planning to pull this stunt?”

  “What stunt?” Father Tim asked. The effort of speaking seemed monumental.

  “Making yourself comatose. You did it so well the first time, you thought you’d do it all over again?” Hoppy raised his voice as if his patient had gone clinically deaf.

  “Comatose?”

  “For nearly forty-eight hours. I suspect it all started with delirium from severely elevated blood sugar, complicated by a concussion from whacking your head. All of which resulted in grieving your wife and upsetting half the county….” Hoppy stooped and squinted at Father Tim. “What the devil did you do to yourself, anyhow?”

  Get out of my face, he wanted to say; he felt nailed to the pillow by his doctor’s blazing stare. “I don’t remember.” He had some vague recollection of going to the country with Dooley, but not much more. “How high was my sugar?”

  “You don’t want to know,” snapped his doctor.

  “How did I get a concussion?”

  “You weren’t wearing your seat belt.”

  “When can I go home?”

  Hoppy walked to the window, scowling, his hands jammed into his coat pockets. “We’ll take you out of ICU tomorrow, then three, four days on the floor. You’ll be home Sunday, looking at a full month of recovery. To tell the truth, you’ll feel rotten for six weeks.”

  Hoppy had the grayish pallor Father Tim had often seen in him over the years. He knew it well—it was exhaustion, plain and simple; he supposed he was the cause….

  “You’re pretty fired up.”

  “Yes!” Hoppy turned from the window. “Because you don’t listen. I talk, I preach, I warn, but you turn me off like I’m some know-nothing parent.”

  He decided to ignore this accusation. “What happened?”

  “You blacked out while you were driving and hit…”

  “Hit what?”

  Hoppy raked his hand through his thatch of gray hair. “A stop sign at Little Mitford Creek. So what was it, Father? More of that infernal cake you ate last time? Or did you cut back on your insulin and try living by your own rules?”

  He had cut back on his insulin, yes, but only a little. As for cake, he hadn’t had any cake. Coke, maybe. Or was it cake? No, it was Coke, some glimmer of memory assured him. “Coke,” he said. “I had a Coke at the country store, coming home from Meadowgate.” There. His mind was back. “I thought I punched the Diet Coke button, but I guess I got the real thing…. I skipped lunch and then I was thirstyand—”

  “I don’t know,” said Hoppy, shaking his head. “I just don’t know.” He thumped into the green vinyl chair by the bed and checked his watch. “You’re a pain in the butt.”

  He grinned at his doctor, whose bedside manner appeared to be in drastic ill repair. “Same back.”

  Hoppy tried to smile. “We’ll get through this,” he said.

  He fell asleep almost immediately after Hoppy’s visit, and woke with a start.

  Tennessee! What about Tennessee?

  He felt around on his pillow for the nurse’s bell, but the movement exhausted him and he lay panting from the effort. The phone. He could phone Cynthia and ask her; they hadn’t talked about it when she rushed to the hospital this morning at two o’clock. Now it was—what time was it? No watch. No clock. How was he supposed to know anything around here? He noticed for the first time that a TV hung over his bed at a drunken slant, as if it might plummet into his face at any moment. Maybe there was a remote; he could get the time from CNN. He craned his neck and peered at the nightstand, but saw only a box of tissues and a glass of water. He decided that shouting for a nurse was out of the question—it would take more energy than he had, and worse, disturb other patients.

  He would simply lie here, then, until someone came, enduring the pounding of his head and the sharp sting of the bruise where his temple had gotten banged up in that business with the sign.

  He heard rain strike the windowpane, and felt strangely bereft and alone. He should be glad for the sound, glad for what a spring shower would do for the grass and the garden, his roses. But he felt no gladness. In truth, he felt almost nothing.

  Was this how it would be during the long weeks ahead? And was it really his stubbornness and stupidity that had caused his wife such agony, his doctor to work overtime, and the ministry in Tennessee to go begging from the beginning?

  Emma’s packet arrived with his lunch, which consisted of a pint of milk, a bowl of yogurt, and something he couldn’t identify—was it congealed tomato soup or aspic or…worse? He tore into the saltines and read his e-mails.

  From: ourbackyard@aol.com

  That’s a fine kettle of fish, Timothy! I suppose it was the moose head that scared you off.

  When you’re up and about and ready to join us, I’ll take it off your living room wall and hang it in your woodshed.

  Forgot to mention you’ll be heating with a woodstove, like the rest of us in Bear Creek Cove.

  Thank God for Richard and Trudy, who arrived yesterday and have already done the work of two hale men. Youth! That’s the ticket!

  We discovered your roof needs a patch job, it has let a good bit of spring deluge into your sleeping quarters, which, looking on the bright side, drowned a good many of the mice.

  Richard will fetch new sheathing for the roof as soon as the mud dries on the road and we can get around without miring up to our fenders.

  We’re all assuming you and Cynthia have four-wheel drive.

  Well, old friend, hang in there and content yourself with the bald truth that God is working in Jessup, Tennessee!

  Yrs, Fr Harry

  P.S. A neighboring boy named Abner, as in the comic strip of yore, has come to my door looking for work, heaven knows we can use an extra hand. It makes the heart glad to see his patient industry. Around fourteen, maybe fifteen years old, can’t read a word or write his name.

  Pray for Abner. Keep me posted. Send money.

  The eternal effervescence of Harry Roland was more than a man could take on an empty stomach. He opened the other package of crackers and downed his low-fat milk, watching the door for a sign of his wife. Four-wheel drive. Blast. Why hadn’t they thought of that? Cynthia’s Mazda had front-wheel drive. Wouldn’t that do the trick? What could he have been thinking these last couple of months? What kind of fog had he been in, anyway?

  From: hisbp@aol.com

  My old friend,

  I write to you as St. Paul wrote to the Hebrews.

  “How can we thank God enough for you in return for all the joy that we feel before our God because of you?

  “Night and day we pray most earnestly that we may see you face to face and restore whatever is lacking in your faith.” (If anything be lacking, dear brother)

  “Now may our God and Father himself and our Lord Jesus direct our way to you and may the Lord make you increase and abound in love…just as (Martha and I) abound in love for you.”

  I plan to come through Mitford on 28th, en route to mtg in

  Charlotte. Will see you then unless advised to contrary. Be encouraged.

  Stuart

  There was an appalling soreness in every limb, every joint; his eyes were as painful as if they’d been punched like a voting ballot. And his head—pounding like horses at a gallop. He found his left temple bandaged and supposed this had come about from crashing into the stop sign….

  He dropped the mail onto his blanket, exhausted.

  Perhaps the yogurt would provide some strength, but he couldn’t get interested in lifting the spoon to his mouth. H
e rang for the nurse to take his tray so there would be room for Cynthia to sit on the bed beside him. Some flame licked up at the thought of her and warmed him, and he lay back against the pillows and closed his eyes and tried to forget what he had done and where he was, and why.

  His wife lay on her side next to him, her hand in his. They had been silent for some time, content merely to lie together, touching.

  “We’re a pair,” he murmured at last. “What are you thinking?”

  “I’m thanking God for you.”

  “What’s left of me,” he said, surprised at the irony in his voice.

  “I’m thinking about Tennessee, how they’ll have to dig deep ’til we get there. It won’t help matters to start off short-handed.”

  “We’ll think about that later.”

  “What about the car? Did I…?”

  “Let’s talk about it later, dearest. We’ll talk about…everything, later.”

  Hoppy blew in with a burst of energy that scattered the e-mails to the floor.

  “Now I have two patients?”

  “Multiplying like coat hangers in a closet!” crowed Cynthia, sitting up and tidying herself.

  Hoppy put his hand on Cynthia’s shoulder. “Have you slept?”

  “Finally,” she said. “But still a bit droopy.”

  Father Tim raised his head from the pillow. “We were just talking about Tennessee, and when we might be able to—”

  “You’ll have to forget Tennessee,” said his doctor, folding his arms across his chest. “With your out-of-control diabetes, the last thing you need is a year in the backwoods.”

  “Yes, but you—”

  “What if this had happened in Jessup, Father? Fourteen miles from the nearest hospital?”

  Having no answer, he was silent.

  “There’s your answer,” said Hoppy.

  Hoppy had decreed that no one but Cynthia could visit him when he moved to the floor. That suited him fine. He had nothing much to say and less energy to say it with. The staff was conniving to stuff food into him at every turn. He felt like a goose in which someone sought to cultivate pâté. When the phone rang, he didn’t answer it. Once, a nurse answered and announced that J. C. Hogan was on the line. He waved the proffered receiver away, spent.