by Jan Karon
Hélène’s face looked considerably pinched, not to mention white as a sheet, as his mother would have said.
“Are you…all right?”
“It is a very uncomfortable thing to talk about, Father….”
“You can talk about it to me.”
He watched her struggle with some deep truth. “I would hope to be delicate, but you see…”
They hauled around another curve, and were now barreling down a steep grade on a gravel road, enveloped in a flume of dust kicked up by the truck.
“…I desperately need to…to…find a powder room!”
He thought she might burst into tears of humiliation.
“And I need to find water!” he said, equally urgent.
It didn’t look hopeful. No, indeed, they were in the piney woods with no habitation in sight. In truth, he hoped they didn’t meet another vehicle, as the road was fit for the passage of one car only. What had he gotten them into? He felt a sudden responsibility for Hélène Pringle, an innocent bystander. They passed a deserted house trailer.
“There’s something else I should tell you,” she said. “Something far worse.”
“What’s that?”
“Our petrol gauge reads half full, but the gauge doesn’t work properly. There’s really less than a quarter of a tank.”
“Aha.”
“We left in such haste that I forgot to look until now, but I’m sure we have enough to get back to town….” her voice trailed away thinly.
Lord, have mercy…. “I’m sure,” he said, coughing from the dust seeping into the car.
“J’en suis désolée, mon père! Pardonnez-moi. J’espère que je ne nous ai pas attiré des ennuis.”
He had no idea what she was saying, but her distress was evident.
“We can turn around and go back!” he exclaimed, thinking to console her.
“Non, non! We must not do that! This is very crucial to your happiness, to dear Dooley’s happiness! We must press on and take our chances.” She turned to look at him, beseeching. “You pray, Father, and I’ll drive!”
The road was a washboard; he thought his insides might be rearranged in some unrecognizable way, his liver where a kidney had been, his heart in his throat….
They followed the blue truck, making a hard left turn onto an unmarked dirt road scarred with potholes; he heard the exhaust pipe scrape over one rock, then another. This was hardly better than a dry creek bed.
He realized, suddenly, that the truck had disappeared.
“Where did they get to?”
“I don’t know,” she said, bewildered. “But we’ll catch them!”
He clapped a hand over his eyes and held on for dear life.
He didn’t want to admit it, even to himself, but minutes later he was greatly relieved to find that the truck had, indeed, disappeared.
Hélène slowed down and stopped for a moment, shaken. He had the odd feeling they’d gotten off light with a thirty-eight-dollar joyride.
The fatigue was like nothing he’d ever experienced; it was all the exhaustion and despair of the last weeks rolled into a single agony. He supposed he’d have to turn himself in to an institution of some sort; he could not be trusted to care for himself. Perhaps there was a kind of death wish in him that he’d never routed out, that he’d held back from God and never let Him touch.
On their way home, they had stopped to go to the rest room, get gas, and take nourishment. He sat in the car at the service station like an invalid, while Hélène pumped gas, bought drinks and two bags of Fritos, and ministered to his pathetic needs. It was desperately humiliating, but he could do nothing about it. As they sped up the mountain, he guzzled bottled water and feebly consumed the Fritos.
He came into his kitchen, out of breath and dazed, and reached for the countertop of the island. As the wave of fatigue rolled over him, he felt like a sinking swimmer whose foot had just touched an undertow. He inhaled deeply and shook his head, panicked; then it passed and he was safe again, holding on to the countertop and looking into the eyes of his dog.
He let Barnabas into the yard without a leash, something he rarely did, and thanked God that his faithful companion obeyed his master’s every command.
Now he could administer his evening shot and drag himself to bed—that’s all he wanted, nothing more: nothing.
He was sleeping when the phone rang; he fumbled it to his ear.
“Hello?”
“Ah, Timothy, so glad you’re there, it’s Edith.”
Edith! Was this a dream?
“When we spoke last evening, I said I ought to thank you, and then, silly me, I forgot to actually do it! So, thank you, Timothy, thank you. God uses everything for good, don’t you think? But I mustn’t keep you. Blessings to you and Cynthia and that dear boy you took in. Toodles!”
He was dumbfounded all over again, but more than that, he felt molested, plain and simple. Why would Edith Mallory never leave him alone? Why did she endlessly insinuate herself into his life? He hated this business of phoning him up like some old school chum, and fervently hoped it would never happen again. Perhaps it wouldn’t; she had thanked him, after all, for whatever aberrant reason she might have had, and that should be enough.
He hoped to God it would be enough.
The talk with Cynthia hadn’t gone well; she’d heard his fatigue and wanted to know everything, but he’d been afraid to tell her everything.
He knew that hiding the raw details from his wife, or any wife, did not bode well for future outcomes. But he couldn’t explain it all; it was too exhausting, too complicated, too…he thought the whole afternoon vaguely dreamlike, as if it had never happened. He’d been to another world with the intent of accomplishing a grand mission, and had come home humbled and defeated. Why even speak of it?
At the foot of the bed, Barnabas scratched furiously, causing the mattress to throb like a great, arhythmic heartbeat.
Still awake at three in the morning, Father Tim lay in the dark room and looked out the window to darkness. The heavens were over-cast, obscuring a nearly full moon, and the street lamp had been knocked winding two weeks ago by a careless driver.
Who was to say that Cynthia wouldn’t give up on him? In truth, he was wearing down while she was gearing up. How long could a bright, successful, beautiful woman be patient with a man who had no passion in him anywhere? His wife was all about passion, passion for whatever she was doing, for whatever lay ahead. At the beginning, she’d declared him charming and romantic—perhaps now she was changing her mind. But he couldn’t bear such thoughts, it was blasphemy to think these vile things.
“Are you there, Lord? Sometimes I can’t sense Your Presence, I have to go on faith alone. You want us to walk by faith, You tell us so…don’t we go on faith that the sun will set, the moon will rise, our breath will come in and go out again, our hearts will beat? Give me faith, Lord, to know Your Presence as surely as I know the beating of my own heart. I’ve felt so far from You….”
He remembered Miss Sadie’s story of falling into the abandoned well, of her terror as she cried out, unheard, in the dark summer night, unable to move—she said she’d known for the first time the deep meaning of the prayers she had learned by rote. “It was the darkness,” Miss Sadie had told him, “that was the worst.”
The tears were hot on his face. His own life seemed overwhelmed by darkness these last weeks; there had been the bright and shining possibility, then had come the crushing darkness. Something flickered in his memory. “Song birds,” he whispered. “Song birds, yes…are taught to sing in the dark.”
That was a line from Oswald Chambers, from the book he’d kept by his bedside for many years. But he couldn’t bear switching on the lamp to read it; his eyes had been feeling weak and even painful. He turned on his side and opened the drawer of the nightstand and took out the flashlight. Then he pulled Cynthia’s pillow atop his own and shone the flashlight on the open book.
He thumbed through the worn and familiar
pages. There! Page forty-five, the reading for February fourteenth….
At times God puts us through the discipline of darkness to teach us to heed Him. Song birds are taught to sing in the dark, and we are put into the shadow of God’s hand until we learn to hear Him…. Watch where God puts you into darkness, and when you are there keep your mouth shut. Are you in the dark just now in your circumstances, or in your life with God? Then remain quiet…. When you are in the dark, listen, and God will give you a very precious message for someone else when you get into the light.
The flashlight slid onto the bed beside him as he fell asleep, but his hand resolutely gripped the book until dawn.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Where the Heart Is
Uncle Billy Watson decided he was fed up with trying to learn jokes from a book. A man had to study out a little bitty part in print as fine as frog hair, then close his eyes and say it out loud ’til he got it right, then study out the next dadblame part, and so on and so on, ’til the whole works was so mixed up in his head he didn’t hardly know hisself if it was funny. He hadn’t laughed one time over that parrot joke, so why did he think he could get the preacher to laugh?
“Where are you headed?” demanded his wife.
“Out t’ m’ dadjing garden!” he said, stomping to the door.
“This soup’s cooked and ready to eat!”
“Hit’s too hot f’r soup!” he said, mad as a hornet about things in general. “A man oughtn’t t’ have t’ eat soup when th’ weather’s ninety degrees in th’ shade!”
“A man ought to eat what’s offered and be glad to get it!”
He thought Rose Watson was the meanest-looking woman he ever laid eyes on, the way she crossed her arms and glared down on him like he was two feet tall. He sometimes figured they wadn’t nothing at all wrong with his wife. She was smart as a whip and twice as tough; her sickness was just something she used to get attention and worry a man to death.
“No rest f’r th’ wicked an’ th’ righteous don’t need none,” he said under his breath. He let the screen door slam behind him, even if slamming doors wasn’t allowed in his house, and went down the back steps with his cane.
For all he cared, she could holler at him ’til she was blue in the face, he was going out to his little patch and set in a chair and watch his sprouts grow. He’d make up his own joke, by johnny—a man who’d lived eighty-some years ought to have enough dadblame sense to make up his own joke.
They lay facing each other in bed; the moon had risen, bright and full, illuminating the room.
“It was good for you to get away,” he said, tracing the outline of her ear with his fingertips.
“Yes. It was. But it’s better for me to be home.”
“Do you really mean it?”
“I really mean it.”
He kissed her, lingering.
“I think you’re glad I’m home.”
“Amen!”
She smiled. “Home is where the heart is.”
She put her palm against his cheek and kissed him back; he felt the slow, steady tide rising in him.
He wasn’t as old and feeble as he’d thought. No, indeed, he wasn’t old and feeble at all.
Hope Winchester sat on the stool behind the cash register at Happy Endings, not daring to lift her eyes from the book she was reading. She couldn’t make heads nor tails of the words; they seemed to mush together in a kind of typographical quagmire. What a snare she’d gotten herself into; she was exerting every effort to appear absorbed in Jim the Boy, which the New York Times had raved over, but her mind was riveted on the mailroom.
It was nearly unbearable that the door to the mailroom, just a few feet from the register, was partially open; occasionally she saw him walk to the stacks and take a book from the shelf. She thought his hands mesmerizing—long, tapered fingers that seemed to hold things with sensitivity and purpose.
She tried to forget that he’d used those same fingers to unscrew the oil pan from a car and steal a friend’s jewels, which, as it turned out, had been stolen from a British museum. But that was over, that was past; he had suffered his punishment, and was nice as anything and very serious and kind and loved books as much as she did.
She thought she might have borne his nearness with more equanimity if he had not loved books, or if he were not so very handsome. She had never been around handsome men, and the fact that one was working in the next room and speaking her name and occasionally bringing her coffee in the mornings was…she tried to find words for what it was. It was something like painful, even excruciating to have him so near and to feel such an avalanche of emotion and be completely unable to laugh and talk and go about one’s life normally, instead of sitting on a stool, frozen with longing and fear and pretense, trying to read words that would not penetrate her brain.
“Miss Winchester?”
George Gaynor stood at the open door, only feet away, smiling. He was wearing a denim shirt the color of his eyes; she could barely speak.
“Yes?”
“I wonder if you would show me how to enter this order—it’s different from all the others.”
She wanted to die on the spot and get it over with, and not suffer so cruelly.
“Of course,” she said, slipping off the stool. The book crashed to the floor and she stooped to pick it up. She looked at him as she laid it on the counter and saw that he was smiling.
“You know how things have gone the last couple of years,” he told Buck on the phone. “We’ve had a lot of disappointments. Maybe we shouldn’t say anything yet to Pauline and the kids…or to Dooley…but Sammy is in Holding.”
He heard the sharp intake of breath.
“What’re the circumstances?”
“He’s living with his father, I don’t know where. I had someone drive me down the mountain and we were led on a wild goose chase.”
“I’ll stop by tomorrow night on my way home, if that’s all right. I’ve got to take Poo and Jessie to a ball game tonight, I promised.”
“I have a big event planned tomorrow night. How about in the morning—maybe the Grill—could you be there at, say, eight-thirty?”
“I’ll be there,” said Buck.
For a man who had once scared the living daylights out of him, not to mention made him plenty mad, Buck Leeper now offered a kind of consolation. If there was anybody he’d want in his corner when facing down Clyde Barlowe, it was Buck Leeper.
He should tell his wife the news about Sammy. But it took too much energy to start at the beginning and explain everything. He would wait. He was feeling stronger today than in a very long time, but every activity cost him dearly in strength—bringing in the paper, talking to Harley, walking his dog to the corner, the slightest thing. He would tell her after he and Buck had talked, when they had put together a plan. After all, she was good with plans. He could run it by her and get her input, that had always proved to be a good thing.
“Tim, it’s your brother in th’ Lord!”
“Bill!”
“You’ll never guess what’s happened!”
“No, sir, I couldn’t. What is it?”
“Th’ Lord has sent me a dog.”
“You don’t mean it….”
“He was mighty quick about it, I wasn’t lookin’ for one so soon, but this is it, this is th’ one. I want you to see ’im, Tim, he’s a laugh a minute! Are you gettin’ out yet?”
“I got out for a haircut and a little…drive. I want to come up for a visit. When would be a good time?”
“Anytime is a good time. Just come on.”
“Have you named him?”
“Buddy.”
“Buddy. Good name. I’m sure he’ll live up to it.”
“He walks sideways.”
“That takes some doing. What age, do you think?”
“Five, maybe six years old. One of th’ congregation found ’im in a ditch, no tags, bones stickin’ out. I talked to Sparky about it last night, Sparky says it’s OK, said to let
’im have…”—Bill’s voice broke, but only for a moment—“to let ’im have his bed over in th’ corner of our bedroom.”
“I’m thrilled for you, Bill.”
“Are you doin’ all right?”
“God is faithful, I’m coming along,” said Father Tim. “How about you, my friend?”
“Can’t complain!”
“Well, if you can’t complain, nobody can. Why don’t I bring you and Rachel some fruit tarts?”
“Nossir, Hoppy’s got me off sugar.”
“He’s got everybody off sugar. These deals are sugar-free.”
“Bring ’em on, then, brother,” said Bill Sprouse, laughing.
Father Tim felt the weight lifting from his shoulders, moving off his chest. Bill Sprouse had a dog! Bill Sprouse was laughing! God was faithful, indeed.
When he took the tarts up the hill tomorrow, he’d throw in a box of dog treats.
He didn’t think he’d ever driven to the Grill before; he’d always walked, no matter what the weather.
Feeling like one of the modern-day common horde, he backed the Mustang out of the garage in order to drive two blocks. He was saving the energy it would take to walk, saving it for her.
“I ain’t believin’ my eyes.” Percy wiped his hands on the towel he kept tucked in his belt and trotted to the rear booth. “I thought you’d dropped offa th’ face of th’ earth.”
“Back again and better than ever. It’s great to see you, buddyroe. Where’s Velma?”
“In th’ rest room, takin’ curlers out of ’er hair.”
“Aha.”
“I ain’t poached a egg since th’ last time you was in here.”
“We’ll see if you’ve lost your touch! I’ll have two poached on whole wheat, the usual.” He slid his coffee cup to Percy, who filled it.
“You’re trouble,” said Percy, feigning aggravation, but clearly pleased. “Want you a little bacon on th’ side? A dish of grits?”