Jan Karon's Mitford Years

by Jan Karon

  “That one day they’ll form a truce?”

  “Well, yes.”

  “Hoppy and I think about that, too. We love Dooley, and I believe Lace cares for him. But the odds seem short for them, don’t you think? Lace can be critical and cold, and very suspicious of love.”

  “So can Dooley.”

  Olivia looked beyond the trees to the twilit mountain beyond.

  “Regarding any future…truce…there’s one thing we can be certain about.”

  “And what is that?”

  She turned and looked at him, smiling.

  “That time will tell,” she said.

  Olivia’s mortal envy of that BMW, he thought on the way home, would be nothing compared to Dooley Barlowe’s raging jealousy. Suddenly Dooley’s seven-year-old Jeep would be prehistoric, ready for the Smithsonian’s permanent collection.

  If Dooley had the million and a quarter Miss Sadie left him in her will, what he’d choose to drive would be different, indeed. Just how different was, of course, the point.

  He had memorized that entire portion of Miss Sadie’s letter, which was delivered to him only days after her death.

  As you know, I have given a lot of money to human institutions, and I would like to give something to a human individual for a change.

  I have prayed about this and so has Louella and God has given us the go ahead.

  I am leaving Mama’s money to Dooley.

  We think he has what it takes to be somebody. You know that Papa was never educated, and look what he became with no help at all. And Willard—look what he made of himself without any help from another soul.

  Father, having no help can be a good thing.

  Father, having no help can be a good thing.

  As he recalled the letter, word for word, he could hear Miss Sadie as if she were at his very elbow….

  But having help can be even better—if the character is strong. I believe you are helping Dooley develop the kind of character that will go far in this world, and so the money is his when he reaches the age of twenty one.

  (I am old fashioned and believe that eighteen is far too young to receive an inheritance.)

  I have put one and a quarter million dollars where it will grow, and have made provisions to complete his preparatory education. When he is eighteen, the income from the trust will help send him through college.

  I am depending on you never to mention this to him until he is old enough to bear it with dignity. I am also depending on you to stick with him, Father, through thick and thin, just as you’ve done all along.

  Cynthia loved the questions her young readers asked; though having a grand time, she was keenly missing her husband; life on the road had its downside; and how was Violet handling her prolonged absence?

  “Well enough,” said Father Tim. “She’s lying in my lap.”

  Violet seldom acknowledged his presence until her mistress left the house. At once, she glommed on to him, raveling his sweater sleeves, giving his pants a generous coating of white hair….

  “The little flirt! Have you put the top down since I left?”

  “Umm, no.”

  “Please put it down, dearest. Summer will be over before we know it, and our glasses freezing to our noses.”

  “I will, I promise.” Even in absentia, Cynthia was trying to help him have fun. “You’ll never guess what Lace brought me from Oregon.”

  “Cowboy boots!” she crowed.

  “How did you know?”

  “She called me from the trail, I’m the one who gave her your shoe size.”

  Wives knew everything. Except on the rarest occasion, it was almost impossible to surprise a wife.

  He pondered his own axe blade. Over the years, time and time again, he would forgive his father, then the bitterness would seep back into his soul like a toxin. Often, it lingered and did its damage for months before he came awake to the Enemy’s ruse, whereupon he forgave Matthew Kavanagh yet again.

  Without faith, his soul may not have survived the blade. But like the tree, God had enabled him to grow, and even flourish, around it.

  He got into his pajamas, weary beyond telling, and knelt beside the bed and thanked God for survival, for overcoming, for grace. He remembered Sammy and Kenny and Dooley and Jessie and Poo, and all those whom the blade had struck….

  Cynthia would be home in ten days, he mused as he climbed into bed, and Dooley would leave for school in twelve. He missed Dooley already.

  The summer break had come and nearly gone, with only the briefest interludes of hanging out, being together. And virtually all the interludes had contained some hard issue.

  He reminded himself that things would be different next summer.

  Yes, God willing, things would be different next summer.

  With this thought, which delivered a certain peace, he drifted to sleep, breathing the faint scent of wisteria from the pillow he held in his arms.

  Next door, Hélène Pringle stood at her bedroom window and watched the Kavanaghs’ second floor go dark.

  She had wanted to take a loaf of her homemade bread to her neighbors, but heard in The Local that Cynthia was on a worldwide tour, or was it a whirlwind tour? Whatever sort of tour it might be, she was away, and it would not be appropriate to carry food to the father in his wife’s absence.

  She was relieved, really. It seemed to her that giving food bore the marks of sympathy, and surely he had grown tired of sympathy for what happened months ago, and which was, she hoped, forgiven and forgotten by all.

  Of course, he continued to look épuisé. She based this opinion on his pale face and slow step as he walked by the rectory with those little red-haired girls whom he claimed as grandchildren.

  She heard the wind chime caroling on the porch below, and was pleased with the sound. Harley and Mr. Gaynor had been very kind to give her a hand with hanging it—in fact, they’d helped her with a great many things around the house and yard. She’d been terribly surprised to learn, just yesterday, that Harley had also been incarcerated. It did seem odd, of course, to have two former prisoners living downstairs, but if the father approved and thought it all right, so did she. Perhaps one of the father’s ministries was to help such people get a new lease on life, just as he’d helped her to do.

  Hélène leaned her forehead against the windowpane. Indeed, if the father had pressed charges against her for…she could not bear to use the word stealing… for removing the bronze angel from his mantelpiece, she, also, might have been incarcerated

  She sighed deeply, then turned and went to the bathroom to brush her teeth. She occasionally recalled that this had been the father’s bed and bath for many years, a thought that always drew her closer to him in spirit.

  She had, some time ago, come to terms with the fact that she loved him, but not with passion. Non!

  She loved him very gratefully for all he had done for her, for the fact that he had brought her back to herself and saved her from destruction. He insisted it was the work of the Holy Spirit, and she sensed that this may be accurate, that there truly had been a greater force than the father himself who rescued her from the deep.

  She was pleased that she’d again formed the habit of praying, something she hadn’t done since her grandmother died. As she’d prayed during recent weeks, she tried to picture God as a large man with a flowing white beard, sitting on a throne and holding what, on closer inspection, appeared to be a pitchfork. She later recognized this to be a likeness of Neptune seen in a childhood book, and thus abandoned the image at once.

  She moved along, then, to a God striding through heavenly gardens, wearing shimmering robes that billowed as He walked; He was also wearing sandals, though she restrained herself from looking at his toes. This God, however, had seemed so deep in thought that He noticed her not at all, and thus she turned from the image in some despair.

  As it seemed unconscionable to pray to vapor, she sought to form another likeness, but failed utterly. She prayed on, nonetheless, keeping it s
hort. And then one evening, quite to her own surprise, she stopped trying to figure out what God looked like.

  God was God, she concluded. It no longer mattered what He looked like.

  In truth, trying to assess what He looked like had been terribly distracting and in the end had kept her from the business of praying with ardor and absorption. Currently, she felt that if God wished to reveal Himself to her, He would do so in His own time, and in a way that she couldn’t begin to imagine.

  Meanwhile, she decided to approach Him as if He were sitting on the other side of a drapery, distinctly near but unseen.

  She removed her old blue robe and hung it over a chair, then knelt on the rug by her bed and crossed herself. Tonight she would pray in English. After all, if she was going to live as an American citizen, which she’d recently become, she felt it her bounden duty to make a greater effort to speak in the national tongue of her country.

  “Dear God, Thank you for the students you have given into my hand, and for my life in Mitford. Please bless the father to recover completely from his…malheurs, and to live a long life in which he will be helpful to many others as he has been to me. I should like to be a good neighbor, God, if you would kindly fashion me so. Rescue young Sammy Barlowe from his plight, so that he might live a good and useful life—I can’t think who said it, but I’ve been told You have a plan for each of us. Perhaps You would let me know, somehow, if this might be true for…Hélène Pringle?”

  She caught her breath and wondered whether this might be everything she had to say.

  “And do take care of all those at Hope House, especially Mother.

  “That’s all, I believe.” She waited a moment, then whispered, “Bon nuit.”

  She wondered if she should mention something about Jesus, God’s Son.

  However, she knew hardly anything about Jesus, except as He appeared in the arms of the Blessed Mother, first as a babe and again as a grown man taken bleeding from the cross.

  She got into bed and lay on her right side and closed her eyes, hearing only the sound of Barbizon’s light snoring from his rug by the door.

  Soon, like almost everyone else in Mitford, Hélène Pringle slept.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Gizzards Today

  His sugar was nearly normal, his weight good, his cholesterol low. But Hoppy wanted him back on the antidepressant.

  “I don’t want to take it,” said Father Tim. “I want to ride this thing out, it has to have an end. I’m…dealing with it.”

  Hoppy shrugged. “OK.”

  “What do you mean, ‘OK’?”

  “Don’t take it. Ride it out. And if it starts riding you, resume the medication.”

  There was nothing like a long vacation to relax an uncompromising doctor.

  “You’ve had every lecture in my arsenal,” said Hoppy. “Every plea, every warning.” Hoppy popped a couple of green jelly beans. “See me in three weeks.”

  They laughed. They shook hands. They compared boots.

  Then, feeling like a prisoner with a reprieve, he was out of there.

  He awoke Sunday morning and waited for the fatigue to hit. He was wearied of bounding out of bed ahead of it, only to have it snare him by the time he reached the kitchen. He would wait for it, settle into it, and get up slowly; this was a big day.

  The processional at the eleven o’clock was thrilling. He hadn’t remembered Lord’s Chapel being so strikingly beautiful, nor the choir so gifted and accomplished.

  From the altar, he looked eagerly into faces he’d never seen before, and was heartily encouraged by the familiar—Hoppy, Olivia, and Lace, three rows back on the gospel side; Buck, Pauline, and the Barlowe clan across from them on the epistle side, with Dooley in his school tie and blazer. Just there, Harley and George, his cheerleaders at both the early and late services…Emma and Harold Newland, the Bolicks, Hal and Marge Owen….

  For the second time that morning, he acclaimed the opening words with true joy.

  “Blessed be God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit!”

  “And blessed be His kingdom,” responded the congregation, “now and forever. Amen!”

  He had expected his heart to hammer with a certain anxiety as he stood before the majority of his old flock; instead, there was an empowering peace.

  In the churchyard, he visited with Dooley and the Owen family.

  “Did you see Doc Harper’s new Beemer?” asked Dooley. “Man!”

  “That’s not Doc Harper’s new Beemer,” said Father Tim.

  “He was showing it to somebody just a few minutes ago.”

  “That’s Lace Harper’s Beemer.”

  He saw in Dooley’s face a fleeting moment of shock, outrage, and then…something like humiliation.

  In the afternoon, they stood under a tent at the town graveyard as the coffin was lowered into the pit. Russell hadn’t wished to be cremated, though it meant giving up the privilege of lying at rest in the Lord’s Chapel Prayer Garden he’d created with his own hands.

  Jessie sobbed quietly as Poo sought to comfort her; Dooley was stoic. Father Tim believed he knew Pauline’s heart in this—busy rebuilding her life as a working mother and wife, she had largely neglected her father and left the nurturing to Betty Craig. But guilt would not prove useful….

  He put his arm around Pauline and held her as she wept against his shoulder.

  “We’ve made a decision about Sammy,” Buck told him.

  “Yes, sir,” said Dooley. “I want to go see him with you and Buck.”

  “Wonderful.”

  “We’re standing together now as a family,” Buck declared. “Nobody ever has to stand alone again.”

  “If something bad happens…” said Pauline.

  “…we’ll handle it,” said Buck.

  As the Lord’s Chapel bells tolled nine o’clock on Monday morning, Emma Newland arrived at his front door, her laptop in one hand and a bulging file folder in the other.

  “I practically had to ring the bell with my chin,” she said, glowering at him over her glasses.

  He opened the screen door and threw his arms wide to give her a hug. Suddenly remembering that hardly anyone ever hugged Emma Newland, he brought his hands together in enthusiastic applause.

  “Glad to see you!” he exclaimed.

  “You could’ve seen me a whole lot sooner,” she said, stomping into the hall, “if it wasn’t for people protectin’ you like th’ Dalai Lama.”

  Remember, he told himself—I asked for this.

  She thumped into his chair in the study. “Here’s your e-mail from that money-grubbin’ Father Roland! All he ever says is send money for this, send money for that! Does he think it grows on trees down here? He’s worse than a Baptist.

  “If I were you, I’d let ’im tough it out up there in th’ boondocks, he asked for it, it was his big idea! You’d better thank God on bended knee that you missed th’ flood that swept your quonset hut into a creek and sent it bobbin’ downstream like a cork. That’d be a fine thing to wake up to in th’ middle of th’ night.

  “He said somebody named Abner jumped in an’ managed to save a moose head, he didn’t say what a moose was doin’ in Tennessee, I thought they mainly came from Alaska.

  “An’ here’s th’ deal from Mitford, England—we’re gettin’ close to bein’ Sister Cities or whatever, I guess you’ll have to call it Sister Villages, bein’ as their Mitford only has five hundred people and us a thousand an’ thirty-three at last count. I hope you don’t have to fly over there for any ceremony, you’re green around th’ gills an’ skinny as a rail! I’m glad your wife can’t see you right now, she’d be on the next plane.”

  She sniffed the air. “Is Puny cookin’ anything for you to eat around here? I should’ve brought th’ rest of last night’s pork roast, I did it with raspberry preserves instead of mushroom soup. Harold ate ’til he fell!” She adjusted her glasses and peered at him. “What you need is some good red meat!”

  Emma Newland, he thought, made
Fancy Skinner look mute as a doorknob. In the moment of blessed silence that prevailed as Emma booted her computer, he heard Puny switch on the vacuum cleaner in the upstairs hallway.

  “You did a good job at church yesterday, Esther Bolick said it was just like you’d never left, except you look older. I told her it wasn’t fair to compare you to Father Talbot, who bleaches his teeth and maybe even wears…I shouldn’t say it.”

  “Shouldn’t say what?”

  “A hairpiece. Some people say his hair is, you know…”

  He sighed, rubbing his forehead. He felt a headache coming on, or was it only Emma?

  “I guess you saw that Hoppy’s back from wanderin’ all over creation while people suffered an’ died back home, an’ have you heard what he bought Lace? A car that costs as much as some people’s houses. When I was her age, I didn’t have a car, I was lucky to have money to ride th’ bus, I hope they don’t let th’ poor girl get above her raisin’.”

  “Lace Harper didn’t have any raising to get above.”

  “Oh, well, you know what I mean. You take Dooley…”

  “And the car is a used car.”

  “Anyway, you take Dooley—there he is ridin’ around in that old Jeep with rust on th’ fenders, which, if you ask me, is more like it. I didn’t see you trottin’ out to buy him a car that cost th’ national debt.”

  He read while this blather went in one ear and out the other. Emma’s enforced separation from him had made her mad as a hornet, to say the least. As he’d learned from long years of experience, the only thing to do was let her talk ’til she was thoroughly cleansed and could go to work and get something done, for heaven’s sake. On the rug by the hearth, his dog heaved a huge sigh. His own sentiments, exactly.

  “An’ I guess you heard what people are sayin’ about Harley and th’ Man in th’ Attic—”