Jan Karon's Mitford Years

by Jan Karon

  Like the time he got shoes, he knowed they was shoes, the fact of them being shoes went straight to his heart and made it beat like a hammer striking, but he kept his mind plumb closed to the fact they was shoes ’til he got down to their little log house by the creek. That way, him and his mama and Maisie could all be surprised at the same time.

  “What’s that you’re a-totin’?” asked his mama.

  He’d set the shoes on the table and his mama give a little gasp, and then tears gushed out of her eyes. He didn’t say nothing and she didn’t say nothing, either. She just sat down and looked at the shoes like they was a bag of pure gold.

  “Well,” she finally said, smiling at him. “Let’s see do they fit.”

  But they didn’t fit. He shoved his bare, callused feet into the shoes like he’d seen his mama stuff ground pork into a casing. It was all he could do to get them in there and tie up the strings.

  “They might fit Maisie,” she said.

  “No ma’am, please, I want t’ wear these shoes, they was give to me.”

  “Go on, then,” she said.

  One time Uncle Joe had throwed out a little paper sack with a duck call in it. You blowed in one end and out the other end come a sound like a wild duck calling its mate. He studied whether to keep it or sell it, he could’ve sold it if he’d walked to Mortimer, but Uncle Joe might have got wind of it getting sold and got his feelings hurt so he kept it and carried it in his pocket for a long time, always blowing on it whenever the notion struck. It had been a treat better than candy; then he’d lost it jumping over a creek.

  He remembered one Christmas him and Maisie got presents in a stocking. It was one of his pap’s old stockings with holes ever’ whichaway, it was hanging on a nail over the fireplace.

  They had never had a Christmas stocking before, and he nearly wet hisself for pure happiness. But when it come right down to it, they wasn’t nothing in it to speak of.

  Not one thing could match what Uncle Joe had throwed out of the train. Nossir. In the stocking was two oranges that got eat right up, and four little hard candies, two apiece, that they sucked on awhile, then took out of their mouth and laid up on the mantel to last another day, and a little doll for Maisie made out of corn shucks.

  When he failed to carry on over the goods in the stocking, his pap said, “I’ll be et f’r a tater if you ain’t spiled rotten.”

  And he reckoned he was. Anybody who’d already got shoes and duck calls and all, they was bound to be spiled rotten.

  The train whistle sounded faintly from the north. It would be coming around by the old riverbed….

  With his left hand, he patted his britches pocket to make sure the tin box was still there, and it was. His right hand held tight to what he’d worked on last night.

  He had laid on the floor in front of the last of the little cook fire, to get the light, and with his mama helping him, managed to write a single line on a piece of paper his pap had brought him from the lumber company.

  Writing just one line had taken what seemed like hours; he had erased again and again and again.

  “Joe’s got a e on th’ end,” said his mama. “Looky, this is a e, you can make a e if I can!” She signed the e in the air, and he copied it on the paper.

  “Don’t wear your pencil down too far,” his mama said. “Hit’s your drawin’ pencil.”

  “That’s OK, I won’t need this ’un n’more, I’ll give this ’un to Maisie.”

  “That drawin’ you do, hit’s not mortal,” said his mama. “Hit’s from th’ good Lord.”

  “Looky here, is this e any good?”

  “Hit is!” She clapped her hands together, and then a worried look come on her face. “I reckon I ought t’ send you off t’ school one day, where they can learn you to read an’ write.”

  “No ma’am,” he said, “I ain’t a-goin’ t’ no school, I can learn m’self to read an’ write.”

  It was bitter out by the track, but he was glad for no wind a-blowing. His bare feet stung with the cold, and he pulled his pap’s old coat around him good and tight. Then all of a sudden he heard the whistle getting louder. Here it come!

  He hoped to the good Lord he could do this right. Everything in him wanted it to land smack-dab in Uncle Joe’s outstretched hands. What if it landed under the train and was grinded to bits? He prayed out loud for God in heaven to help him get the job done and not let old Scratch mess things up.

  The train drew closer, clacketyclackclacketyclack.

  If he ever got on that train, he knowed he’d never come back even if he did love his mama better than anything on earth and Maisie, too, and sometimes his pap.

  Here it come, now, it had rounded the bend, and he seen Uncle Joe a-leaning out the window and waving. He waved back.

  He’d never give Uncle Joe a dadjing thing before. Until yesterday, it had never entered his mind to do anything but wave.

  His heart hammered. The train was nearly on him.

  He drawed his arm back and throwed the best he could. The folded note, weighted with a stone and tied with a frayed apron sash, sailed up and up, over and over….

  Deer uncle joe…

  The passage of the note, with the apron string fluttering on the air, seemed to take a long time…it is th best thing i ever got…

  …before it started falling down to where it was going, and then it landed—smack-dab in Uncle Joe’s hands….

  Yrs truly billy

  He didn’t have time to stand there patting hisself on the back, nossir.

  He whipped that little tin box out of his britches pocket and the folded piece of paper out of his other britches pocket and set down on the rail, which was warm from the grinding of the great iron wheels, and balanced the box on his knee and opened it and took out one of the brand-new pencils he’d sharped with his mama’s butcher knife and began to draw the caboose of the train, in quick, sure, flying strokes, until the image on the paper became real to him, as real as the train that had just hurtled by, taking his breath away.

  When the phone rang at two o’clock in the morning, Father Tim sat up in bed, anxious.

  “Hello?”

  “Is this th’ preacher?”

  Rose Watson—he would know her voice anywhere. “Yes! What is it?”

  “Get over here quick!” she squawked. “Bill Watson’s passed!”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  A Day in Thy Courts

  But Bill Watson had not passed.

  After calling 911 and rushing to the Porter place to meet the ambulance, Father Tim found Uncle Billy semiconscious and Miss Rose hysterical.

  “Dead as a doornail!” squawked the old woman.

  “His heart is still beating!” he shouted.

  “Still eating? Of course he was still eating, I suppose you think I starved him to death!”

  “Oh, for Pete’s sake!” he thundered.

  “A piece of cake? You want a piece of cake at a time like this?” Her voice rose by several decibels. “You’ll not get a piece of cake out of me!”

  Thank heaven for that, he thought, hearing sirens race north along Main Street.

  He rode in the ambulance with Uncle Billy, holding his hand and praying all the way, unmindful of how he’d get home from the hospital.

  Nurse Kennedy, who was working the night shift, volunteered to drive him as soon as her break time came around.

  It was four in the morning when he walked in the back door, arousing his dog, who had been waiting. He slumped into a chair in the study, too weary to navigate the stairs, then realized he’d failed to have Kennedy drive him to his car.

  At four-thirty, he stumped upstairs, furious with himself and everybody else.

  When the phone rang at six o’clock, he rolled over in bed and grabbed the blasted thing from the hook.

  “Who’s there?” He surprised himself by answering with his father’s phone salutation.

  “Good morning, Father Tim, it’s Beverly Hobgood.”

  “Beverly Hobgood,
Beverly Hobgood…” He had no idea.

  “Bishop’s secretary!”

  “Oh, yes! Of course!”

  “I knew you were an early riser….”

  “Absolutely.” His head was pounding.

  “I’m calling to ask you to pray for Bishop, I know he would covet your prayers.”

  “What is it?”

  “Chest pains, very severe. He’ll go for testing today.”

  No need to spend all that money to find out the cause, he wanted to say—it’s stress, pure and simple. “Yes, I will pray. Certainly! Faithfully! And I’ll ask others to pray.”

  “He depends on you!” she said, her voice breaking.

  “And I depend on him.”

  When he hung up, he began to count the casualties. Joe Ivey, Uncle Billy, his bishop….

  He lay back against the pillows and stared at the ceiling.

  Why in heaven’s name didn’t Stuart retire? Now that he’d gotten the ball rolling, let someone else build the cathedral!

  But what good would it do his bishop to retire? Get a load of the fix yours truly was in—stress here, stress there, stress everywhere. If things kept going like this, he’d be looking for a way to retire from being retired.

  Tomorrow was a big day, a huge day, what with two morning services, the lakeside service, and a four-hour round trip that, but for the large donation to the Children’s Hospital, he would never in this lifetime have agreed to do.

  As usual through the years, he couldn’t rest until the sermon was finished and he felt a certain peace about it. Yet, no matter what he did, it wouldn’t come together in the way he’d thought it might; the premise was strong, even powerful, but he couldn’t make the pieces add up.

  Strung out! he thought. That vernacular seemed to describe with considerable eloquence the way he was feeling.

  After the morning office, he knelt to pray but found his mind wandering like an untethered goat. He wanted to call his wife and ask her to intercede for him, but that would alarm her. Besides, what was he thinking? She was praying for him; she did so faithfully.

  “Dear God,” he said aloud.

  He remained on his knees in a kind of fog, finding he couldn’t get beyond that pitiful supplication.

  He was priest-in-charge, he thought as he had breakfast at the kitchen island, but without any help to lean on. The deacon had been called away to a family funeral, and the church’s current senior warden was not, in his opinion, the one to visit Uncle Billy and pray with him.

  Surely he himself could squeeze out a simple visit up the hill—one final effort and then home to seclude himself, take the phone off the hook, and delve the meaning of this thing he needed to communicate.

  But no. He couldn’t do it. The very thought of trotting down Main Street to his car and driving up the hill to the hospital…and Miss Rose would, of course, need a ride to visit her husband…maybe Hessie Mayhew, maybe Esther Bolick, though they’d never forgive him for asking…

  He finished his poached eggs, took two aspirin, and went to his desk, glad that Puny wouldn’t be in today.

  “I preached as never sure to preach again, and as a dying man to dying men,” Richard Baxter had written in the seventeenth century. That’s how he wanted to preach. Every time may be the last time! Just as important, however, he wanted to preach with energy and enthusiasm as if for the first time. Well, he knew what he meant by all that….

  Scott Murphy. The idea came out of the blue.

  “Of course, Father,” said the Hope House chaplain. “I’ll be glad to go pray with him. Anything else while I’m there?”

  “Joe Ivey. Room Two-fourteen. If you could…”

  “No problem at all.”

  “I owe you,” he said, relieved.

  “Consider yourself indebted to the Lord, if you will, but not to me. The truth is, I’m forever in your debt.”

  “How’s that?”

  “For bringing me to Mitford. Remember how you hired me before I interviewed with Miss Sadie?”

  He grinned. “Yes, that was a great presumption on my part, but completely instigated by the Holy Spirit. So consider yourself indebted to Him, if you will, but not to me.”

  “Stalemate!” said Scott, laughing.

  He spent the day in a kind of daze, walking his dog to the monument, opening and closing the refrigerator door, reading Emily Dickinson, Spurgeon, Whitefield. He read with absorption, grasping their meaning for long moments, then losing it and beginning again.

  He kept his sermon notebook at his side, waiting….

  At two o’clock in the morning, he realized he’d fallen asleep in his chair in the study, and found his notebook on the floor. He regretted waking. There seemed a film over the lamplit room, as if he were wearing sunglasses. It had nothing to do with his eyes and everything to do with his spirit. He felt at the end of himself.

  Perhaps he should have gone forward with the medication for depression. The film, the darkness seemed always hovering nearby; if it disappeared for a time, it came back. He felt again a moment of panic—what if he were succumbing, as his father did, to the thing that brought down his marriage, brought down his business, ruined his health?

  But he mustn’t dwell on that. He must dwell on the message, for the message still hadn’t come right.

  He’d be forced to drum up something from days of yore, some antiquity that might be dredged from sermon notes stored in the study cabinet.

  But he didn’t have what it might take even to dredge.

  “Lord,” he said, “speak to me, please. I can’t go on like this. Speak to me in a way I can understand clearly. I’ve read Your word, I’ve sought Your counsel, I’ve whined, I’ve groveled, I’ve despaired, I’ve pled—and I’ve waited. And through it all, Lord, You’ve been so strangely silent.”

  He sat for a time, in a kind of misery he couldn’t define; wordless, trying to listen, his mind drifting. Then at last he drew a deep breath and sat up straighter, determined.

  “I will not let You go until You bless me!” he said, startled by his voice in the silent room.

  He took his Bible from beside his chair and opened it at random.

  Stop seeking what you want to hear, Timothy, and listen to what I have to tell you.

  He felt no supernatural jolt; it happened simply. God had just spoken to his heart with great tenderness, as He’d done only a few times in his life before; it produced in him an utter calm.

  “Yes,” he said. “Thank you. Thank you.”

  Where the book had fallen open in his lap, he began to read with expectation and certainty.

  He found the passage only moments later. Instantly, he knew: He’d discovered at last what God had held in reserve—expressly for him, expressly for now, and expressly for tomorrow morning.

  The peace flowed in like a river.

  Though he’d known for decades that the exhortation was there in First Thessalonians, and had even preached on it a time or two, it came to him now as if it were new, not ancient, wisdom. It came to him with the utterly effulgent certainty that this Scripture was his, and he might seize upon it as upon a bright sword that would help him pierce…

  …pierce what?

  The darkness.

  The time to begin was now.

  “Thank You,” he whispered, “for this time of darkness.”

  “You up, brother?”

  “Bill! Good morning! You’re preaching today, and I’m praying for you!”

  “I don’t mind tellin’ you I’ve got butterflies. How about you?”

  “Running on fumes, not enough sleep. But God is faithful; this morning He gave me something I’ve needed for a long time.”

  “You might say He’s done th’ same for me, that’s why I’m callin’. He laid it on my heart last night that I was to thank you.”

  “Thank me?”

  “You know that stop sign…”

  “I do.”

  “He’s been showin’ me that I was to take that stop sign as a sign to stop.
Before I got stopped by th’ stop sign, you might say, I was runnin’ around in circles like a chicken with its head cut off. I’d been so busy workin’ for Him that I’d fallen out of relationship with Him! These weeks have been long, but they’ve been good. I’ve had wonderful times of fellowship with th’ Holy Spirit, an’ time with Rachel that we haven’t had in years. An’ to cap it all off, He’s brought me Buddy.”

  “Coals to Newcastle.”

  “To tell th’ truth, I feel brand-new. And I just wanted to thank you, Tim, for lettin’ th’ Lord use you, as bad as it all seemed to be for both of us.”

  In the space of a few hours, he had twice been succored.

  “Thank you,” he said, hard-pressed to speak. “Thank you.”

  Esther Bolick settled into the worn oak pew with a certain satisfaction.

  This was where she and Gene always sat, unless some thoughtless parishioner nabbed their spot before they could get to it. You’d think people would respect the place you’d chosen and been faithful to for twenty-three years, but no, some people didn’t care where you sat, much less where they sat. One Sunday they’d plop down next to the choir stall in the rear and another Sunday they’d turn up in the first row, gospel side.

  She’d occupied this same spot since way before Father Tim came. It was like home. The minute she sat down, she was as rooted as a turnip, which, in times like these, she considered a blessing.

  She opened her pew bulletin and squinted at the order of service. Oh, law, there was that communion hymn she could never get right to save her life! Minnie Lomax from the Collar Button used to sit beside her and Gene every Sunday morning ’til the fateful day when, singing her brains out, she, Esther Big Mouth Bolick, had squawked for all to hear, “When I fall on my face with my knees to the rising sun,/Oh, Lord have mercy on me….”

  The next Sunday, Minnie had gone across the aisle, where she remained to this day. Esther decided to keep her trap shut during hymn 325.

  She was pleased that she and Gene were fifteen minutes early. Being early gave her time to collect her wits, which had been blown on the wind all week like bedsheets on a clothesline.