Jan Karon's Mitford Years

by Jan Karon

  Surviving…the…Blade, he wrote.

  Had he turned a corner, somehow, and survived the blade of these last ghastly months? Was it over? Had God brought him out into the light, or was there darkness yet to come?

  But he mustn’t try to second-guess God. He had no idea at all what was yet to come—no one ever knew, of course. St. Francis de Sales had spoken ably to that: “Do not look forward to what may happen tomorrow; the same everlasting Father who cares for you today will take care of you tomorrow and every day. Either He will shield you from suffering, or He will give you unfailing strength to bear it.”

  He bent over the tablet, writing furiously, his tea going cold in the cup….

  A cramp in his right hand brought him awake to the sight of the maple tree in the park; to the sound of his dog snoring; to the realization that Violet was wrapping herself around his leg, leaving a pelt of white fur in her wake.

  Thanks be to God.

  He was alive, he was writing, he was working! He had vanished into another realm for…how long?

  He checked his watch. Two hours. Two hours in which his feeble frame had sat without aching or remorse, two hours in which he’d taken a kind of winged flight and unburdened his heart, able to say what he had to say without looking back. It was the mountaintop after a long trek through a parched valley.

  He got up and went to the back stoop and inhaled the afternoon air, seeing the hedge in some crisp, clear way he hadn’t seen it in a very long time. He put his head back and closed his eyes, giving thanks. For two blessed hours, he had been a river without a dam, a colt without a fence.

  He would relish the moment, and not expect the worst to befall him for relishing it.

  “‘And now in age I bud again!’” he recited aloud from George Herbert. “‘After so many deaths I live and write, I once more smell the dew and rain,/And relish versing: O my only Light,/It cannot be That I am he /On whom Thy tempests fell all night!’”

  Suddenly self-conscious, he turned and hurried inside to the phone, where he kept the list of places he might reach Cynthia.

  He wanted her to know that he’d written the first draft of an essay he actually liked, that he had found in himself a coal yet burning. Even if his new freedom couldn’t be counted on to last, he wanted to savor this pinprick of joy and share it.

  Hélène Pringle was placing an African violet on the radiator shelf by the dining room window when she looked up and saw her neighbor.

  Father Kavanagh was standing on his back stoop in what appeared to be drawstring pajamas, speaking aloud and lifting his hands in what could be described as a priestly gesture. She saw on his face an odd look—something like bliss, she thought.

  A shiver of happiness seized her, as if she’d just witnessed a kind of omen she’d been looking for without realizing it.

  He sat in the wing chair in their bedroom, missing his wife—her countenance, her whiffling snore on the neighboring pillow, her softness of spirit, her unaffected eagerness, her warm flesh.

  He missed the way she took over when he needed her to take over and the way she stepped back when he needed to make decisions, or even mistakes, on his own. He’d done the right thing by insisting she go; he despised the mewling infant he’d been for weeks on end, and was learning he could do without her if push came to shove.

  He stood up and stretched and placed his glasses on the night table. In a sense, her going away had allowed him to really come home.

  He patted the foot of the bed; Barnabas leaped to his place at once. Then he knelt and prayed for his wife, traveling to places he would never see, flying in planes he would never board—in her was a vast store of courage and adventuring that he would never possess.

  He crawled into bed, thinking that one day he would make up to her the long weeks she’d pampered and protected him. He would do something wonderful for her, something that required a true sacrifice on his part, not just any old thing that was easily tossed off.

  Perhaps he would take her somewhere…somewhere she had always wanted to go.

  The idea that suddenly occurred to him was electric, bringing him fully awake and sentient. He would take her to his ancestral homeland, that great, green, mysterious land out of whose loins his paternal line had found its way to America—to Pennsylvania and Kentucky and Mississippi and Mitford.

  The excitement he felt over this idea was startling. It surpassed even the joy he felt about the meeting at Lon Burtie’s house two days hence, the meeting in which Dooley, Jessie, and Poo would visit their brother, as God continued to restore to the Barlowes the days the locusts had eaten.

  He took notes as John Brewster gave him the scoop.

  …r. on Tamblin Rd at serv station 1 mi and r. on Springlake Dr—park in lot next to lake, Mary Fisher wl drive me to private chapel, Rite I arrive 5 p.m. MF @ 972/604-7832

  The roads to Kinloch were winding—it would be more than an hour and a half each direction.

  He rang Mary Fisher twice but got an answering machine with a digital voice recording that declined to take a message.

  He gazed into the mirror of his old walnut dresser, turning his head this way and that. He definitely needed a little shearing for the events of Sunday.

  He hoofed to Joe Ivey’s minuscule shop at the rear of Sweet Stuff. Closed, read the sign.

  He went around to Main Street and opened the door to the bakery—one of his favorite things to do. In truth, just opening the door was enough for him; he’d learned to relish the aroma without craving an entire tray of glazed donuts.

  He rang the bell on the bake case. “Winnie! Are you there?”

  “Yessir,” she said, coming through the curtains, wiping her hands on a paper towel. “But I just got here a minute ago, I’ve been at th’ hospital, I guess you heard about Joe.” She looked red-eyed and worn.

  “No! What?”

  “He’s got this.” She pulled a scrap of paper from her apron pocket and handed it to him.

  “Hemochromatosis,” he read aloud.

  “It’s inherited. It’s too much iron collectin’ in th’ blood, an’ it’s caused…it’s caused…Look on th’ back of that paper.”

  He turned the slip of paper over. “Cirrhosis. Ah.”

  “Dr. Harper said he’d always worried Joe would get cirrhosis from drinkin’ brandy, and here he got it from too much iron in ’is system!”

  Ironic in the true sense of the word, he thought. “What can I do?”

  “He’s been real weak an’ run-down lately, but we thought it was all th’ ruckus with that woman upstairs. Th’ hair business in this town has turned into another Desert Storm because of her. I could take a whippin’ for lettin’ Fancy Skinner sign a lease for two miserable years—and do her dirty work right over our heads!”

  He’d never seen Winnie so distraught, except for the time Edith Mallory’s henchmen tried to force Winnie to sell the bakery.

  “What can I do?” he asked again.

  “Pray!” she said, sounding urgent.

  He stood on the sidewalk at the foot of the stairs, looking up.

  There was no way he could deliver himself into the hands of Fancy Skinner, even if her haircuts were the only game in town. No way. He was not hauling up those stairs and into that pink room that looked like the interior of an ulcerated stomach. No, indeed! No, no, no, a thousand times no.

  He turned and trotted home, put the top down on the Mustang, and roared to Wesley, where, for twelve bucks, he got a decent haircut, albeit with a slightly spiked look, reminding himself all the while that beggars couldn’t be choosers.

  In the tiny rest room of Happy Endings Bookstore, Hope Winchester washed down an aspirin with a Coke Classic, something her mother had always done to settle her nerves.

  She was going to be calm today, she was not going to study George Gaynor’s profile when she thought he wasn’t looking, and she definitely wasn’t going to compare him with literary figures like Lord Byron or even the fictitious Heathcliff. She was going to be alo
of, poised, complete.

  Hessie Mayhew stood on her deck, drinking a second cup of coffee with hazelnut Coffee-mate and eyeing the lawn chair blown by a recent wind to the railing.

  It was the only chair in a collection of seven with its woven plastic seat still intact. She had been in a quandary about her aging lawn chairs for several years. At times she considered setting them on the street for the Annual Town RoundUp. At other times, she was determined to haul them down the mountain to get the seats rewoven. A note on her refrigerator read, DO NOW!!! Take chairs to Wesley. By loose calculation, the note was five years old.

  That’s the way life worked. It raced by. Write a note, look up, and five years had galloped past. While volunteering at the library, she’d studied the old poets in order to write her annual “Lady Spring” column. Old poets had a lot to say about the passage of time, not the least of which was Robert Herrick. “Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,” he wrote, “Old time it is a-flying.”

  She hadn’t gathered many rosebuds lately. All she’d done was work, work, work. The summer had worn her out, and here was fall staring her in the face with three weddings in Wesley, an ECW fund-raiser at Lord’s Chapel, a missionary dinner at the Methodists’…

  Lord knows, missionary dinners didn’t pay anything, they would expect her to practically give them fourteen arrangements. Well, then she’d use leaves—fall color should be great this year because the nights had been cold for weeks, she’d worn a sweater to bed more than once. And of course there were nuts and berries. There were always nuts and berries.

  She took a sip of coffee and eyed the chair. Why didn’t she sit down in the blooming thing? Why didn’t she ever sit down? Her grandmother had never sat down, her mother had never sat down, and the gene had clearly passed to her. Refusing to give herself time to think about it further, she thumped into the chair, sighing deeply.

  Heaven help her for being raised Baptist. The Baptists hardly ever sat down, unlike the Presbyterians, of which she was now one, who occasionally sat down. Episcopalians were another matter; they appeared to sit down whenever they wanted to.

  The trouble with sitting down, of course, is that it made you feel guilty. She pondered this. Maybe what she needed to do was get up and go inside and grab her yellow tablet and bring it out here and, while sitting down, make a list of things to do.

  But if she got up and went inside, she would never come back.

  She stayed put, deciding to follow an instruction she’d seen on bumper stickers out the kazoo: Take time to smell the roses! Ha! It didn’t take an old poet to come up with that notion.

  Hessie scooted the chair back and put her feet up on the railing.

  Then she took them down.

  She wasn’t the sort to put her feet up on a railing.

  Well, then, maybe just one foot.

  She put her right foot up, let it rest there a moment, then took it down. One foot on the railing made her back feel like it was going out.

  In order to make use of the time, maybe she should meditate. She’d heard of meditating, but didn’t know what you were supposed to think while you did it. Maybe you didn’t think anything, maybe you just sat there.

  What a horrible thought!

  She was about to jump out of her skin when suddenly she had an idea.

  Last Sunday, her preacher asked everyone to go over in their minds who they needed to forgive. He was always giving them something to do: List how many times you pray this week! Make a list of all the times God answers your prayers! Give someone a smile! Think of who you need to forgive—and then forgive them! She never paid attention to these injunctions; it was too much like homework, which she’d never cared for, either.

  But maybe she’d do just this one thing.

  She took a deep breath and closed her eyes. Polly Morris!

  Hessie didn’t see how in the world she could forgive Polly Morris.

  She considered the whole incident from start to finish. How could anybody have taken apart every single centerpiece that she, Hessie Mayhew, had made for the Mitford Country Club Azalea Ball at a discount—at a discount !—and put them back together again in a totally different way that was ugly as mud ? It was a slap in the face! Polly Morris, as everyone knew, didn’t have a life, which gave her all the time in the world to mess with other people’s lives from here to kingdom come!

  Hessie felt her blood pressure pounding in her temples. Starting from the chair, she splashed coffee in her lap. “Dadgummit!” she shouted. A bird flew out of a bush by the railing.

  Enough of this sitting-down nonsense! Let other people sit down and waste time!

  Hessie trotted to the kitchen, mopped the front of her khaki pants with a dish towel, and poured another cup of coffee. Then she snatched her tablet off the breakfast table and scrawled the words, Throw out deck chairs TODAY!!!

  “The Enemy will not let you rest!” her preacher had said. “He doesn’t want you to forgive anybody, he wants you to hold all that bitterness and anger inside ’til it turns to sickness and ill health!”

  Clutching the mug, she threw open the sliding doors and raced back to the chair; sitting down was working her to death.

  She would try one more time, and if that didn’t get results, she was out of here. She had the back porch to clean off, the chairs to dump in the basement ’til the next RoundUp, groceries to buy, a tire to be retreaded. Unlike some people she could think of, she had a life that couldn’t be lived on her rear end.

  She closed her eyes and listened to the rasping call of a bird in the maple tree. A squirrel clucked near the creek.

  Father Tim. Now, there was somebody she needed to forgive. When she delivered that garden basket to the hospital, the poor man had been in a coma, for heaven’s sake. Or just out of one, or in any case, sick. Very sick. He couldn’t have written a thank-you note if his life depended on it. But Cynthia could have. Yes, indeed, what kind of preacher’s wife couldn’t write a simple thank-you note or make a phone call?

  But maybe Cynthia had been so distraught over her husband that she couldn’t think of writing thank-you notes. Hessie understood that. Of course! It had been an oversight.

  Then Hessie remembered the basket itself and how much it had cost, even wholesale. She thought of the miniature roses and all the other wonderful items she’d tucked into it, not to mention acres of moss from her own special, private place in her own backyard.

  “Lord,” she said aloud, “You’re goin’ to have to help me do this!”

  She set her coffee mug on the rail and gripped the arms of the lawn chair.

  “I forgive Cynthia!”

  There.

  She took a deep breath. “And Father Tim, in case he had anything to do with it!”

  She felt better at once.

  “You’ll never guess who’s in the slammer,” said J.C.

  Father Tim stirred his tea. “Old Man Mueller ran the red light one time too many?”

  “Ed Coffey found Coot Hendrick stumblin’ around in th’ yard up at Edith Mallory’s, lookin’ for that Yankee grave.”

  “Oh, boy.”

  “And Coot with an honorary appointment to th’ town council,” said Mule. “I hate it when politicians break th’ law.”

  Percy refilled the coffee cups. “Beats me why anybody’d want to go lookin’ for a grave full of Yankees in th’ first place.”

  “Idn’t that th’ truth!” Velma stood at the counter, wrapping fork and knife combos with paper napkins. “Nobody’ll pay cash money to look at th’ bloomin’ thing if he finds it.”

  “He wants to find th’ grave because ’is great-granddaddy shot th’ Yankees, and it’s town history,” said Mule.

  Percy snorted. “Let sleepin’ dogs lie is what I say.”

  “Look,” said Father Tim, “if his ancestor shot and killed the enemy, he wouldn’t have given them the honor of a marked grave. Marking a grave is a type of tribute, so this grave wouldn’t be marked. Therefore, how could Coot hope to find it?”

&
nbsp; “Right!” J.C. forked an entire sausage link into his mouth.

  “He told me he’ll just know,” said Mule. “But how come he didn’t go lookin’ before th’ Witch set up housekeepin’ on th’ ridge?”

  “Because,” said Percy, “when she bought that parcel twenty years ago, Coot didn’t give a katy about town history.” Percy counted himself among the few who knew what was what in the early days of Mitford; the turkeys in this booth had all come from someplace else. “He was more into chasin’ women.”

  “I don’t even want to think about what women Coot Hendrick was chasin’.” J.C. pulled out his handkerchief and mopped his forehead.

  “As I recall,” said Percy, “he was chasin’ Emeline Poovey from over at Blackberry.”

  “I thought all Pooveys live in Poovey’s Grove,” said Mule.

  “Th’ crowd over at Blackberry splintered off from th’ Poovey’s Grove Pooveys.”

  “So if he was chasin’ her, did he catch her?”

  “Emeline married that big bootlegger that robbed Th’ Local when Avis’s daddy first had it. Sauce Harris was ’is name, he burrowed hisself into a dumpload of roastin’ ears, somebody backed th’ truck up to th’ storeroom in th’ rear an’ dumped th’ corn, then locked th’ storeroom doors and drove off. Sauce got into th’ grocery, eat a smoked ham, guzzled three quarts of chocolate milk, an’ cleaned out th’ safe behind th’ butcher case. Busted through a window and run off with two thousand smackers.”

  Father Tim gave his whole wheat toast a light buttering. “That was a lot of money back then.”

  “That’s a lot of money today, buddyroe.”

  “Right. How did they catch him?”

  “Emeline turned him in. Th’ county was about half dry for four years.”

  “So how long do you think Coot’s in for?”

  “He’ll be out on bail late today,” said J.C. “That reminds me, I’ve got an interview set up in”—J.C. checked his watch—“thirty minutes.”