Jan Karon's Mitford Years

by Jan Karon

  He was leaving the circle through the opening in the hedge when a car approached. It was Edith Mallory’s black Lincoln Town Car, a new model that gleamed and glittered under the light of the street lamps. Driving slowly, it cruised by the monument and turned right onto Lilac Road.

  Barnabas growled, low in his throat. When Father Tim reached down to pat his head, he felt the hair bristling on the back of his dog’s neck.

  At nine o’clock, he sat in his darkened bedroom, listening to Barnabas snore.

  He wondered whether he should have taken the job at the Children’s Hospital. Several years after retirement, he was still trying to figure out what God wanted of him. How much more could he, much less God Almighty, stand of his boundless and incessant navel-gazing? Was this a blasted midlife crisis, delayed by thirty years?

  Drifting toward some other purpose, Cynthia had said. What other purpose? He seemed to have no purpose at all, much less an other purpose. With the Children’s Hospital, he’d be able to work his own hours, contact the existing donors, nearly all of whom he liked immensely, and build a list of new contacts—there were a number of people he’d never contacted in the western diocese….

  The last time he’d spoken with John Brewster, the position hadn’t been filled. What harm could it do to call John and inquire about the lay of the land?

  But did he really, in the deepest part of his spirit, want the job? Or was he trying to fill time with his own agenda for good works, unwilling to wait on the Lord’s agenda?

  He remembered a story, heard from the Wesley pulpit. A young boy found a cocoon, and seeing how hard the insect struggled inside, split the cocoon with his camp knife, thinking to let it escape. Instead, the nascent butterfly died. A butterfly collector told him that it’s the struggle within the cocoon that gives strength to the butterfly and enables its wings to grow and develop. Only then can it emerge and go free.

  Was he trapped in this confused and unspeakable state, waiting for his wings?

  “Lord,” he prayed aloud, “I’d like to have this position if it be Your will.”

  He would brush his teeth and call John.

  But the position was filled.

  “And in the nick of time!” said the hospital administrator.

  What could he say? His prayer had been answered.

  “We just discovered that the foundation of the entire building needs to be underpinned. When this old place was built in 1901, they just started laying brick on grade. What with the runoff from the mountain behind us, the brick is deteriorating and the foundation’s bowed, which explains the cracks in the interior plaster.”

  “Not good.”

  “When I saw the estimate, I nearly ran down the hall and jumped in a bed.”

  “What are we talking about here?” asked Father Tim.

  “Close to three-quarters of a million.”

  “You’ve got a good man coming in?”

  “A good woman. I was going to call and tell you the news in a day or two. She’s perfect for the job, Tim, absolutely perfect, she’s the one we’ve been praying for.”

  When he hung up, he felt glad for John, and for the hospital he’d supported for more than twenty years. Yet he couldn’t help but remember that John had once called him the absolutely perfect person for the job….

  He sat in the wing chair, sensing again that God had something for him, some wisdom that would flash upon his heart like lightning and illumine the dark. He read in the Psalms, then felt inclined toward the Gospel of John. Every truth was there, what more could a man possibly wish for or want? But he wasn’t finding the yet-unknown truth meant profoundly for him, the truth he’d recognize instantly when at last it was revealed.

  He placed the book on the table and closed his eyes and prayed the prayer that never failed. Whether or not he found the longed-for wisdom, whether or not he redeemed his joy, this prayer would cover him in sickness and in health, in sorrow and in celebration, in success and, yes, even in utter failure.

  His wife was in Boston; tomorrow, the contingent would debark for Chicago, then head for points west, including Los Angeles. The other authors had arrived safely, they’d just finished dinner, and Miniver Tarleton was everything Cynthia had hoped the legendary, eighty-something author/illustrator/role model might be. His wife was clearly exuberant, and he wouldn’t begrudge her a moment of this sojourn.

  He couldn’t, however, resist tossing in a nagging fear, if only to hear her denounce it. “I hope,” he said, “you won’t fall too hard for all this big-city glamour.”

  “Timothy! I could never live in a city, big or small! You know that, darling.”

  “I know that,” he said, soothed.

  “In fact, I think we should take Hal and Marge up on their farm-sitting offer next year.”

  “Would you really like that?”

  “I’d love it!”

  “Speaking of next year, Dooley says he wants to spend the summer with us.”

  “Perfect!” she said. “At Meadowgate, we could all be together in a place he loves.”

  “You could write a book about Violet going to the country.”

  “I already wrote that book, dearest. Ages ago! Besides, I’m not going to write any book at all next year!”

  Whenever his wife said she wasn’t going to write a book, that was when a book started pouring forth.

  “I’ll be a farm wife, instead. Go barefoot, pick meadow flowers, gather eggs, churn butter…” She paused, thinking. “Drive a tractor!”

  “Cynthia, Cynthia…”

  “Life is short, Timothy!”

  “Driving a tractor could make it shorter still,” he said, being the family worrywart.

  “What does Dooley want to do about Sammy?”

  “He’s thinking about it.”

  “He’ll make the right decision.”

  “Yes,” he said. “Pauline doesn’t want to make a move ’til Dooley settles it in his own heart. Poo and Jessie don’t know yet.”

  “I’m praying, dearest, and I believe all will be well and very well. Now off to bed with both of us. Check your sugar, watch your diet, get some rest, mind Puny, and don’t forget your eye doctor’s appointment.”

  “Consider it done,” he said. “May His angels attend you every step of the way.”

  “Timothy…”

  “Yes?”

  Happy sigh. “You’re the love of my life.”

  “Same back!” he exclaimed. “By the way, have you heard the one about the three old sisters who…”

  “Timothy? I apologize for the lateness of the hour—”

  Edith Mallory.

  Instinctively, he flung the handset across the room and heard it crash against the wall and clatter to the floor.

  Long before Puny arrived, he was up and about, having a single cup of coffee, then, on his doctor’s advice, switching over to herb tea. Herb tea! He never thought he’d live to see the day.

  “Right,” Hoppy had said, “and if you don’t shape up, you won’t live to see the day.”

  “Very funny.”

  “Laughter doeth good like a medicine, pal.”

  He shook his head as he poured boiling water over the tea bag. Using a white jacket and stethoscope as free license, Hoppy Harper was getting away with murder.

  He was setting the kettle on the stove when the phone rang. Hoping it was Cynthia, he answered at once.

  “Timothy, if you hang up, you’ll completely miss the wonderful idea I’ve had, something that should be very close to your heart.”

  He tried to speak, but couldn’t.

  “Please don’t stress yourself so when I ring, I’m only trying to do something worthwhile for the community. Wasn’t it you who once pestered me about that very thing? Hmmm?”

  “Don’t call here again,” he said, trying to keep his voice even.

  “Not ever, ever again?”

  He heard the sharp intake of breath as she inhaled smoke from her brown cigarette. “Precisely!” he said, slamming the p
hone onto the hook.

  He stood at the kitchen island and took a deep breath. Then another. In only moments, he was feeling calm again, even confident; he had at last taken control.

  Yet he noted that his hand trembled as he lifted the mug.

  “Please!” he told Puny, who was washing yellow squash at the sink.

  “Take the day off! I’m fine, you don’t have to be my nursemaid.”

  “I’m not takin’ th’ day off.”

  “Puny, why do you have such trouble obeying orders from your employer?”

  “When it comes to lookin’ after you, I take orders from Cynthia. She said I was to come ever’ day and look after you, an’ that’s what I’m doin’.”

  “You could spend the day with your children.”

  “I am spendin’ th’ day with my children. They’ve gone to the drugstore an’ they’ll be right back.”

  “The house is clean, the wash is done, my shirts are ironed…”

  “But your lunch idn’t cooked yet, or your supper.”

  “I could have lunch at the Grill.”

  “Father…”

  “Yes, Puny?”

  She turned from the sink, exasperated. “I’m goin’ to say to you what Joe Joe says to me when I ask ’im to git up in th’ middle of th’ night and bring me a bowl of ice cream with sweet pickles.”

  “So what does he say?”

  “‘Git over it!’”

  “Fine,” he said. He took his sermon notebook from the island and turned to walk down the hall. He stopped at the door.

  “Wait a minute. Ice cream and pickles?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You mean…?”

  He’d never seen her freckled face more beautiful, more radiant.

  “Yessir. You’re goin’ to be a granpaw ag’in.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  In This Mountain

  George Gaynor gazed east from the Lord’s Chapel bell tower to the green hills bordering Mitford.

  “X marks the spot,” he said. “My soul was saved as I stood in this very place.”

  Father Tim crossed himself, moved by the memory of George Gaynor coming down from the church attic one Sunday morning more than eight years ago. Standing barefoot in front of a stunned congregation, he confessed his theft of the jewels, the long months of hiding in the church attic, and his newfound faith in Jesus Christ.

  “Sometimes I think it was the singing,” said George. Tears coursed down his cheeks; he wiped his eyes with his shirtsleeve. “Still bawling, Father, when I think of it.”

  “It’s the Holy Spirit keeping your heart soft.”

  “But of course it was more than the singing. I remember stealing your Bible….”

  Father Tim chuckled. “I turned the place upside down looking for it.”

  “It took several days to make the decision to open it. I was convinced that if I opened it, something powerful would happen, something…out of my control.”

  “Yes!”

  “Finally, I began reading in the Gospel of John, which was the best of all places to begin. As I moved through the chapters, I was intrigued, also, by what you’d written in the margins. What had Christ done for you? What difference had He made in your life, in the part of your life that no one sees, that maybe doesn’t show from the pulpit?

  “I tried to find your heart in what you’d written privately, perhaps to see whether you would slip, somehow, and expose it all as a sham.”

  “Did you hope to find it all a sham?”

  George sat on the deep stone sill of the bell tower window. “Yes, sir, I did. It would have saved me the trouble of surrendering anything to God. Wretch that I was, I was clinging to my wretchedness.”

  “Don’t we all, at some time or other?” He’d felt the sordidness of clinging to his own wretchedness these past weeks, seemingly unable to surrender anything.

  “I read all the Gospels, but kept going back to John, where I studied what Jesus had to say with deep concentration. I began memorizing verses, thinking this was nothing more than a way to pass the time. Then a verse in the fifteenth chapter began to…” George hesitated.

  “Began to…?”

  “Torment me, in a way. ‘If ye abide in me, and my words abide in you, ye shall ask what ye will and it shall be done unto you.’ I realized that I had no idea what to ask God for. I especially had no belief that God, if He were real, would be interested in entertaining whatever request I might cobble together.”

  A light breeze traveled through the tower.

  “It was a kind of intellectual nightmare, a wrestling match between logic and longing, if you will. I wanted to ask Him for something, but couldn’t believe He was really open to being asked.

  “Then one day Pete Jamison walked in downstairs and I heard someone yell, ‘Are you up there?’”

  George looked at Father Tim, grinning. The two men burst into laughter as if sharing a family joke.

  “It scared me out of my wits,” said George. “I thought, who is this idiot asking if I’m up here—does he think I’m going to yell down and say, Sure, come on up and enjoy the view ? I thought it might be the feds, but couldn’t figure out why they were being so polite.”

  They laughed together again, relishing the comfort of their bond, the familiarity of a story that had passed into Mitford legend.

  “And then I heard you speak to Pete, and I listened to what you said as if my life depended on it. Of course, my life did depend on it.

  “You said the question isn’t whether He’s up there, but whether He’s down here. I realized then that I’d begun to experience His presence down here, and that His words were somehow beginning to abide in me.

  “When you asked Pete to recite the prayer with you, I had no idea what you were going to say, but I knew it would contain all that I ever wanted to ask Him for.

  “That’s why, when Pete prayed the prayer of salvation, I prayed it with him.”

  “Two for one.”

  “That prayer, that moment, changed everything.”

  “Alleluia!” Father Tim said softly.

  They gazed from the windows, silent for a time. Someone was riding a blue bicycle along the opposite sidewalk. A car driving on Church Hill wheeled into the driveway leading to Fernbank.

  “Please forgive me if I overstep,” said George, turning to Father Tim. “I sense you may be…wrestling with something yourself.”

  He hated to think that others could sense it. His cheeks burned. “Perhaps as much in recent weeks as ever before in my life.” He knew, however, that he was safe with George. He didn’t have to pretend to be perfect because he was a priest. “I try to wait for Him to make the darkness light, then grow afraid and try to create the light on my own.”

  “Something you’d written in a margin,” said George, “I can’t remember where…‘The significant, life-forming times are the dull, in-between times.’ A pretty simple statement, but profound if we think it through. I used to believe the life-forming times were the times on the mountain, the great hurrahs…”

  “The glad hosannas…”

  “Your buddy, Oswald Chambers—you know I read him avidly in prison—said something like, ‘The height of the mountaintop is measured by the drab drudgery of the valley.’ He went on to say it’s in the sphere of humiliation that we find our true worth to God, that there’s where our faithfulness is revealed.”

  “I’m ashamed to confess it, but I thought I knew my true worth to God, I thought my faithfulness had long ago been revealed to Him. I didn’t think He’d…require anything more.” There. He’d said it.

  “Perhaps you should be glad He’s requiring more. It seems to me He doesn’t ask more of just everybody.”

  Father Tim took his handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his eyes and blew his nose. “Bless you,” he said. “Thanks.”

  “Thanks for asking me to come along today. I made something a few weeks ago. This is the perfect time….”

  George withdrew a small paper bag
from his jacket pocket and removed a wooden cross.

  “You made this?”

  “Yes, sir. Harley had a few sticks of cherry wood lying around. Cherry is hard as granite, but I managed to whittle it into shape and then rubbed it with wax.”

  Morning light streamed onto the polished cross. A piece of twine was looped through a hole at the top.

  “See this nail, Father?” George pointed to a rusted nail between two of the tower windows.

  “Ah!” He’d never seen it before, but then he hadn’t often dawdled around up here….

  “I used to study that nail as if it were a great philosophical conundrum. Why was it there? What purpose could it possibly serve? Who had put it there, taking the trouble to fix it so neatly in the mortar between the stones? I never forgot this nail.”

  George looped the twine around the nail, tied the cross to it, then stood back. “In this mountain,” he said, “the hand of the Lord rested on me….”

  The wooden cross hung against the stone wall between the windows. On either side, the view of the high, green hills rolled away to summer clouds in a dome of blue sky.

  George turned and placed his hands on the shoulders of his friend. “In this mountain, may the hand of the Lord rest always upon you, my brother. You remember the last thing you said to me when I left here eight years ago?”

  “I do.”

  “‘They that sow in tears shall reap in joy; He that goeth forth and weepeth, bearing precious seed, shall doubtless come again with rejoicing, bringing his sheaves with him.’”

  Father Tim smiled. “You did come again with rejoicing.”

  “And so will you, Father, so will you.”

  Before leaving, they noted with pleasure that the cross appeared to have hung there a very long time.

  Father Tim picked up a rough draft of Sunday’s pew bulletin from the Lord’s Chapel office and asked for a correction of two typos. Then, mission accomplished, the two men stepped out into the warm August afternoon.