by Jan Karon
Flowers poured in. Roses, tulips, even a few sprigs of ivy pulled from the yard of a former parishioner and stuck into a Mason jar. Let this root, said the note.
Sissy sent the heel of a potato, sprouting in a paper cup. Sassy sent an avocado seed, suspended in a jelly glass by three toothpicks, whose stupendous crop of leaves had seen better days.
Hessie Mayhew had clearly outdone herself with the offering she sent in a basket that occupied an entire corner of the room. He wanted to pore over every stem and stamen, examine the colors, muse on the fragrances, but he could not. When he occasionally glanced at it, he felt guilty that he didn’t care about it in the least, and so stopped looking in that corner.
He gave it to Kennedy, who was clearly skeptical. “I’ve had yards smaller than this,” she said, lugging it from the room.
He discovered that he was content with the laughter of other patients’ visitors along the hall. It was a kind of assurance that people’s lives were going on, though his own had come to a bitter halt.
He walked down the hall once, without permission, stiff as a board, shuffling like an old person. He was old, of course, he was nearly seventy. When he was young, seventy had been old, hadn’t it? One of his grandfathers had died at the age of seventy, and surely no one had said, Poor Yancey, he was so young.
He noticed that several people stared at him as he scuffed along in his slippers, as if toilet tissue might be trailing from one of the soles. At least two people, whom he’d met casually, lowered their eyes and appeared not to recognize him. He knew some of the patients, certainly, and most of the nurses—as rector of Lord’s Chapel, he’d come here nearly every weekday morning for sixteen years—yet today nothing seemed familiar. He might have been a stranger in the place he’d once spent hours praying with patients and staff and reading the Word by countless bedsides.
He barely made it to the rubber plant at the elevators when Kennedy found him and hauled him back to his room as if he were a convict who’d gone over the wall.
“No wonder people die in hospitals,” he muttered to the longtime head nurse. “They never let you have any fun.”
I have come home.
He wrote these words on a blank page in the back of his journal, intending to say more, but discovered there was nothing else to say. It was all he had wanted and then some, just to come home.
Thinking he should date the entry, he picked up the pen and held it for moment, then put it down and looked out the window to the postage-stamp view of Baxter Park.
They should tear down the old garage and open up the view. He had no idea why they’d never thought of it before. Even the straggly hedge behind it, which belonged to the town, could be cleaned up to some extent, and deadwood pulled out. In only a couple of days, he and Harley could get the job done, no problem. They would use the chain saw, as needed, he’d stack brush and put it out for the town chipper, and voilà! a view of Baxter Park.
“What do you think, old boy?” Barnabas jumped from the slipcovered chair by the sofa, came to him, and looked soulfully into his eyes.
He started to rise from the chair, but found he hadn’t the strength or will to actually do it. The thought of pulling down the garage and cleaning up the hedge had nearly finished him.
“No more e-mails, and especially from Father Roland,” he heard Cynthia tell Emma at the front door. “He needs rest.”
Emma’s words were muffled, but his wife’s were sharp and clear, even though she lowered her voice. “No more anything for a while.”
Emma’s muffled voice, obviously cranky.
“I’m sure he wants to see you, too, but doctor’s orders are doctor’s orders. Call me on Monday, I’ll give you a report….”
The front door closed and his wife came down the hallway, his dog behind her at a trot.
Why couldn’t he see Emma? Besides, he was starting to like e-mail. He didn’t want to personally be online, for heaven’s sake, but he liked the little sheaf of papers Emma brought every week, found them a wonder, truth be told. What about Father what’s-his-name in England? What was he up to? And Father Harry—had he received the check or had last Thursday’s flood kept the mail truck out of the Cove? Since no one seemed to write regular letters anymore, how would he ever know anything? And of course there was Marion Fieldwalker…though just getting started at the business of e-mail, she promised to be a positive encyclopedia of news from Whitecap, a place he’d found himself missing more than once.
“Guess who’s coming today, dearest.” Cynthia stood behind his chair and kissed the top of his head.
“Umm.” He wanted to say something bright and clever, but couldn’t come up with anything.
“Dooley!” Barnabas barked at her announcement. “He’ll be here at three o’clock. He was terribly worried about you, he wanted to visit the hospital, but Hoppy—”
“Blast Hoppy,” he muttered.
“Hoppy is dropping in after lunch, by the way.”
“Why?”
“To talk.”
“Seems to me he had plenty to say at the hospital.”
“He’s leaving for his trip out West, and wanted to…go over some things with you.”
“Where’s Puny?”
“I’ve given her a few days off.”
Something was up with his wife, he didn’t know what. She seemed tense, distracted, worn. Perhaps it was all she’d been through; then again, perhaps it was something more.
“Uh-oh,” she said, looking at the clock on his desk. “I’m off to The Local. Dooley’s coming, you know what that means.”
She kissed his cheek and dashed from the room, grabbing her car keys off the kitchen island. “I’ll bring you a surprise!” she called over her shoulder.
No surprises, please, he thought. Anything but another surprise.
“Father…”
Hoppy sat in their study, looking anxious and exhausted. Any improvement Father Tim had seen in his doctor two days ago had clearly vanished. There was no small talk, no mention of the weather, which was currently sullen with rain, nor any reference to the new study, which Hoppy had never seen until today.
“You’ve been through a dangerous patch. It will take a while to recover your stamina.”
“Yes,” he said. He had the sure sense that an axe was about to fall. His wife sat with him on the sofa and held his hand. He thought she looked unwell. This whole thing had been too much….
“But you’re in a familiar place now, with the best nurse in the county, outside Kennedy. And I believe you’re strong enough to hear what we have to tell you.”
But he didn’t want to hear anything more….
“When you blacked out at the wheel of your car, you did hit the stop sign at Little Mitford Creek.”
“If there’s any damage, Rodney knows I’ll take care of it.”
“You also hit Bill Sprouse.”
He looked at his wife, disbelieving, and saw that all color had drained from her face. Her hand tightened on his.
“And his dog, Sparky,” she whispered.
Something like ice formed in his veins.
“Bill is at the hospital with several fractures and a mild concussion. His room was right down the hall from yours. I’m sorry, Father.”
Everyone knew and loved First Baptist’s jovial pastor, who was devoted to his dog and regularly seen walking Sparky around Mitford.
“What else?” The pounding of his heart was nearly unbearable.
“Sparky was found under the rear wheel of your car; we think he died instantly.”
Lord have mercy, Christ have mercy. He put his head in his hands. “Why didn’t you tell me this before?”
“We wanted to wait ’til you were stronger. Not everybody would have handled it this way, but it seemed the best thing to do.”
Father Tim had a fleeting thought that this was only a terrible dream…
“Here’s the good news. Bill is going to be all right, though he’ll need several weeks to rest and heal. They’
re looking for someone to supply his pulpit.”
…but no, it was a waking nightmare.
Dooley sat with him on the sofa, unspeaking. Barnabas left the slipcovered chair, came to his master, and lay down at his feet.
The clock ticked. The hand moved from 3:10 to 3:11.
“I’m sorry,” Dooley said at last.
“I know,” he replied.
“I would do something if I could.”
“I know,” he said again.
“I’ve been praying for you.”
“Don’t stop.”
“No, sir. I won’t.”
“Bill will be all right. But his dog…”
“Yes, sir.”
The hand passed from 3:13 to 3:14. A June breeze poured through the open windows, bearing a scent of rain and leaf mold.
“I’d better go,” said Dooley.
“I know.”
The boy stood; Father Tim looked at him, stricken.
“I love you,” Dooley said with courage. His voice shook.
I love you back, he thought, but could not speak.
He sat in the study as Cynthia, looking disconsolate, went up to bed. He knew he should do something to reassure her, she who had reassured him again and again. But he could not.
He took his Bible off his desk and opened it to Second Corinthians, and closed his eyes and prayed for Bill Sprouse and his wife. Afterward, he sat with the Bible in his lap for a long time, praying again.
Then he lifted the book into the warm circle of light from the lamp. Though he knew the passage by heart, he wanted to see it in print.
“‘My grace is sufficient for thee,’” he read, barely whispering the words, “‘for my strength is made perfect in weakness….’”
CHAPTER EIGHT
Tender Mercies
Unlike the arrival of spring, which in Mitford always seemed dilatory, summer came this year precisely on time.
On the day of solstice, the weather changed as if driven by a calendar date, and temperatures rocketed into the high eighties from the previous day’s low seventies.
Hessie Mayhew’s deck, which was known to enjoy cool breezes from the west, became by noon a veritable broiler and Hessie an unwilling capon as she arranged flowers for a wedding at the Methodist chapel. Rescuing buckets of roses, wild larkspur, yellow heliopsis, and Madonna lilies from the perilous heat, she dumped the whole shebang in her kitchen, regretful that her screened porch was currently a storage bin with no room to skin a cat.
She absolutely despised working a wedding in a kitchen the size of a cocktail napkin, but more than that, she hated what rode in on her plant materials—caterpillars, spiders, beetles, mosquitoes, gnats, aphids, bees, inchworms, ladybugs, creatures too weird and disgusting to identify, and, depending on the season, chiggers and fleas.
Feeling rivulets of sweat streaming down her spine, she opened the refrigerator door to cool her backside and declared aloud to the Ken-more stove that this was it, this was her last year to be every Tom, Dick, and Harry’s step-and-fetch-it flower arranger—she was getting out of the business once and for all and, come hell or high water, was prepared to let Social Security show her what it was made of.
And another thing. That ridiculous “Lady Spring” column, which she’d slaved over every year for ten years, was history. She’d done the first on a lark, after forcing herself to read Wordsworth and Cowper and all those other old poets who liked to hang around in the country searching for violets and stuffing their pockets with nuts. When she saw what a kick Father Tim got out of it, she did it another year, then another and another, until she was practically senseless, and all for a measly fifteen dollars a clip, which J. C. Hogan appeared to regard as a cool million before taxes.
Hessie yanked up her dress and tucked the hem into the legs of her underpants, so that she assumed, overall, the look of a mushroom turned upside down on its stem.
All these years of scrambling for her livelihood, running around like a chicken with its head cut off, and still no air conditioner, not even a window unit! And here it was, getting hotter and hotter in the mountains every blessed summer—gone were the days when people sometimes wore a sweater in August!
Hessie jabbed the rubber stopper into the drain of her kitchen sink and turned on the tap. Some people said all this weather mess was the greenhouse effect. Pretty soon the icebergs would be melting in the north and the terrible floods hurtling in this direction, which meant that, once again, the South would be taking the brunt of things.
Rankled by the doomed and unfair outcome of fuel emissions, she plunged the stems of forty-seven lilies into the tepid water. “Drink up!” she commanded.
At that moment, she realized she’d never heard a single, civilized word from Father Kavanagh about the garden basket she sent to his hospital room nearly three weeks past. She’d certainly heard straight back from Rachel Sprouse about the lovely vase of yellow roses.
She grabbed a coffee mug and smashed a worm on the countertop. What was the matter with people these days? Had common courtesy gone completely out the window? People nattered on about their sex lives ’til they were blue in the face, but there was scarcely a soul left standing who’d bother to say a simple please or thank you.
On the other hand…
She was stunned at the thought—had she really taken the father a basket, or had she dreamed it? Had she planned it so carefully, in every detail, that she only imagined she’d done it? To tell the truth, she couldn’t remember delivering it. And no wonder—since the middle of May, she’d made so many garden baskets, slogged to the hospital so many times, and done flowers for so many weddings, that it all seemed a blur….
A dull heaviness settled on her heart. Poor Father Kavanagh, with everything that had happened to him, and not a civilized word from Hessie Mayhew.
She felt like the worm she’d just sent to its reward.
A few blocks south, Uncle Billy Watson carried a packet of seeds and a rusted hoe to the backyard of the town museum.
He liked the way the seeds rustled in their colorful packet. The sound encouraged him in what he was about to do. The dadjing things had cost a dollar at Dora Pugh’s hardware, and he’d made such a fuss about the price, she gave him an old pack from last year’s inventory, warning him they may not germinate but don’t come crying to her about it.
What he was out to accomplish was a beautification plan for the town museum, since the town was too trifling to do the beautifying themselves. He would show them what a man with a little get-up-and-go could do, which ought to put the whole lot of the town crew to shame. Before long, people would be driving by and taking notice, like they did down at Preacher Kavanagh’s place every summer—those pink roses blooming up the side of his wife’s yellow house…now, that was a sight for sore eyes.
He laid the packet on the seat of a rusted metal dinette chair that had sat under the tree for several years, and considered the roots of the tree, which were exceedingly prominent. He’d better not go to digging around tree roots, Lord knows what trouble that might stir up; if he was to mess with that tree, it could end up falling on the house, and this was the side his and Rose’s bedroom was on.
He moved away from the tree and into the yard, where the tall grass awaited the town crew and their mowing machines two days hence. How he would get a patch of this tall grass dug up was more than he could figure, but he was going to do it, and that was that.
He raised the hoe and gave the ground a good lick, but the hoe bounced out of his hand and landed two feet away. Uncle Billy said a word he hadn’t said in a good while, then shuffled over and bent down stiffly to pick it up. “Lord have mercy,” he said, wiping the sweat from his eyes.
Without returning to the original spot, he gave the ground another good lick and this time made a dent. The hoe blade turned up a smidgen of earth as red as a brick and nearly as hard. Seeing dirt gave him a feeling of confidence; he struck the ground again, but missed the opening he had just created and scored a sec
ond dent several inches from the first.
“Dadgummit!”
He was having a hard time drawing a breath, and his heart was flipping this way and that, like a fish on a creek bank.
Not to mention he was hot as a depot stove, and no wonder—he was wearing Rose’s brother’s old wool britches, which were not only burning him up, but itching him half to death. It was enough to make a man run around buck-naked.
He considered going to the house and changing clothes, but it was too much trouble. Besides, if he went in, Rose would start harping about this or that, and first thing you know, he’d be hauling out garbage or peeling potatoes or sharpening a knife blade that wouldn’t cut butter. She might even send him to the basement for that jar of pickles Lew Boyd had brought a while back, and the thought of all those jumping spiders was enough to make his scalp prickle.
Nossir, he was going to knock this thing in the head, and by October—or was it September?—they would have a bait of yellow chrysanthemums that a man could see all the way from the town monument. It would be a help if Preacher Kavanagh would walk by with his dog, the preacher would definitely know the best way to do this job of work, but he hadn’t seen the preacher in a good while, owing, he supposed, to the bad thing that had happened. He would go down the street in a day or two and tell him the two new jokes he’d learned from one of his almanacs. He would do the same for Preacher Sprouse, but there was no way in creation he could make it up that long hill to what most people called Sprouse House.
He took the hoe handle firmly between his arthritic hands, raised it as high as he was able, and whacked the ground with all his might.