by Jan Karon
“You’re sighing, Timothy.”
“Wondering when Stuart will get off the pot.”
“He’s retiring in June and consecrating the cathedral—altogether, a great deal to say grace over. You’ll hear soon, dearest.”
She handed him a mug of black coffee, which he took with gratitude.
So here he sat, retired from nearly four decades of active ministry as a priest, toasting himself by an open fire with his good-humored and companionable wife of seven years, and situated in what he believed to be the most breathtakingly beautiful countryside in America.
Why bother, after all, about some “challenge” that may or may not be coming. Hadn’t he had challenges enough to last him a lifetime?
His wife, on the other hand, was ever drumming up a challenge. During their year at the farm, conveniently located twenty minutes from Mitford, she’d decided to accomplish three lifetime goals: learn needlepoint, make perfect oven fries, and read War and Peace.
“So how’s it coming with War and Peace?”
“I despise telling you this, but I haven’t opened it once. I’m reading a charming old book called Mrs. Miniver.”
“And the fries?”
“Since Dooley comes tomorrow, I’ll be conducting my next experiment—to see whether soaking the potatoes in ice water will make them crispier. And I’m definitely using peanut oil this time.”
“I’ll peel and cut,” he said. He hadn’t seen any activity around the needlepoint plan, so he declined to mention it.
“Pathetic,” she said, reading his mind. “I’m all thumbs. Learning from a book is not the way to do it. I’ve decided to let Olivia tutor me, if she has a free day now and then. Besides, having lunch with someone who also wears eye shadow might be fun.”
“I’m definitely a dud in the eye shadow department.”
She thumped into the wing chair opposite him and took a sip from her coffee mug. “And what about you, dearest? Have you accomplished all your lifetime goals?”
Oddly, the question stung him. “I suppose I haven’t thought about it.” Maybe he hadn’t wanted to think about having any further goals.
He closed his eyes and leaned his head against the back of the wing chair. “I believe if I were charged with having a goal, it would be to live without fretting—to live more fully in the moment, not always huffing about as I’ve done in recent years . . . to live humbly—and appreciatively—with whatever God furnishes.”
He reflected for a moment and raised his head and looked at her. “Yes.That would be my goal.”
“But aren’t you doing that?”
“No. I feel obligated to get out there, to open myself to some new and worthwhile service. I’ve been a bump on a log these last weeks.”
“It’s OK to be a bump on a log once in a while. ‘Be still,’ He tells us, ‘and know that I am God.’ We must learn to wait on Him, Timothy. All those years of preaching and celebrating, and doing the interim at Whitecap—what a lovely legacy God allowed you to have there; and ministering to Louella and Miss Sadie and Hélène Pringle and Morris Love and George Gaynor and Edith Mallory and the Leepers . . .” She took a deep breath. “On and on, an entire community, for heaven’s sake, not to mention volunteering at the Children’s Hospital and rounding up Dooley’s little sister and brothers ...”
“One brother still missing,” he said, “and what have I done about it?”
“There may be nothing you can do about it. There’s absolutely nothing to go on, no leads of any kind. Maybe God alone can do something about it. Perhaps Kenny is God’s job.”
The fire crackled on the hearth; the dogs snored.
His wife had just preached him a sermon, and it was one he needed to hear. He had a mate who knew precisely what was what, especially when he didn’t.
“‘Let us then be up and doing,’” he quoted from Longfellow, “‘with a heart for any fate!’ Where’s the grocery list?”
“In my head at present, but let’s get it out.” She opened the small drawer in the lamp table and removed her notebook and pen.
“Steak!” She scribbled. “Same old cut?”
“Same old, same old. New York strip.” This would be no Lenten fast, but a Lenten feast for a starving college boy who was seldom home.
“Russet potatoes,” she said, continuing the litany.
“Always best for fries.” His blood would soon get up for this cookathon, even if he couldn’t eat much on the menu.While some theologians construed St. Paul’s thorn to be any one of a variety of alarming dysfunctions, he’d been convinced for years that it was the same blasted affliction he’d ended up with—diabetes.
“Pie crusts,” she said, scribbling on. “Oh, rats. For the life of me, I can’t remember all the ingredients for his chocolate pie, and of course, I didn’t bring my recipe box.”
“I never liked the recipe we use,” he said, suddenly confessional.
“You’re not supposed to even touch chocolate pie, Timothy, so what difference does it make? Dooley loves it; it isn’t half bad, really.”
“It needs something.”
“Like what?”
“Something more . . . you know.”
“Whipped cream!”
His wife loved whipped cream; with the slenderest of excuses, she would slather it on anything.
“Not whipped cream. Something more like . . .” He threw up his hands; his culinary imagination had lately flown south.
“Meringue, then.”
“Meringue!” he said, slapping his leg. “That’s it!”
She bolted from her chair and trotted to the kitchen counter. “Marge’s recipe box . . . I was thumbing through it the other day and I vaguely remember ... Let’s see ... Onions in Cream Sauce, Penne Pasta with Lump Crab-meat, that sounds good. . . .”
“Keep going.”
“Pie!”
“Bingo.”
“Buttermilk Pie . . . Vinegar Pie . . . Fresh Coconut ...”
“Mark that one!”
“Egg Custard . . . Fresh Peach . . . Deep-Dish Apple ...”
“Enough,” he said. “I’m only human.”
“Here it is. Chocolate Pie with Meringue.”
“Finish that list, Kavanagh, and I’m out of here.”
Ha! He’d denied himself as sternly as one of the Desert Fathers these last weeks; he would have the tiniest sliver of that pie, or else . . .
“I know what you’re thinking,” she said.
He pulled on his jacket and foraged in the pockets for his knit cap, and kissed her warm mouth.
“You always know what I’m thinking,” he said.
His hand was on the doorknob when the phone rang.
“Do try to find a haircut while you’re in town,” she said, picking up the receiver. “You’ve got that John-the-Baptist look again. Hello! Meadowgate Farm.”
He watched her pause, listening, then grin from ear to ear.
“Thanks for calling, Joe Joe. That’s wonderful! Congratulations! Give Puny our love. I’ll be over on Thursday. Timothy’s headed into Mitford now, I’m sure he’ll stop by.”
“So?” he asked, excited as a kid.
“Boys! Weighing in at fifteen pounds total! Thomas and . . .” She paused, and looked all-knowing.
“And?”
“Thomas and Timothy!”
“No!”
“Yes! One named for Puny’s grandfather and one named for you. Now there are two little boys in this world who’re named for you, and I hope you realize that people don’t go around naming little boys for a bump on a log.”
Boys! And because Puny’s father was long deceased, he would be their granpaw, just as he was granpaw to Puny and Joe Joe’s twin girls.
His entire chest felt suffused with a warm and radiating light.
He turned onto the state road, which had already been scraped for the school buses, and headed south past the Baptist church and its snow-covered brush arbor. He glanced at the wayside pulpit, which was changed weekly.
<
br /> IF LOVING GOD WERE A CRIME, WOULD YOU BE IN JAIL?
Getting around was a piece of cake. The heavens had given them only a couple of inches, and in a farm truck built like a tank, he felt safe and thoroughly above it all.
Patently envious. Patently envious. What could a bigwig bishop, albeit his oldest friend, envy in a country parson? There it was again, the tape running in a loop and promising to work his mind into a lather.
“I roll this whole mystery over to You, Lord,” he said aloud, “and thank You for this day!”
In truth, the whole day belonged to him. He would stop by the hospital to see Puny and her new brood; he would run over to Hope House and visit Louella; he would make a noon stop at Lew Boyd’s Exxon where the Turkey Club was lately convening; he would have a chin-wag with Avis at The Local....
As for getting a haircut, he had no intention of trusting his balding head to Fancy Skinner ever again, period; Joe Ivy had retired from cutting hair and wanted nothing more to do with such a trade; trooping to the barber shop in Wesley would take too much time. So, no, indeed, absolutely not, there would be no haircut on this trip into civilization.
The sun broke through leaden clouds and flooded the countryside with a welcome light.
“Yee hah!” he shouted against the considerable din of the truck engine.
Why had he felt so bereft and grumpy only a half hour before, when he was now beginning to feel like a new man?
He switched on the radio to the blast of a country music station; it was golden oldies time.
“I bought th’ shoes that just walked out on me. . . .” someone sang. He sang along, hardly caring that he didn’t know the words.
“Country come to town!” he whooped as he drove into Mitford.
Roaring past the Exxon station, he blew the horn twice, just to let the general public know he’d arrived.
He bent and kissed her forehead.
“Well done,” he said, a lump in his throat. Two sets of twins! May God have mercy....
“They’re whoppers,” she said, smiling up at him.
His so-called house help of ten years, and the one whom he loved like a daughter, lay worn but beaming in the hospital bed.
He took her hand, feeling the rough palm that had come from years of scrubbing, polishing, cooking, washing, ironing, and generally making his life and Cynthia’s far simpler, not to mention indisputably brighter.
“Thank you for naming one of your fine boys after this old parson.”
“We won’t call ’im by th’ fancy name. It’ll jis’ be Timmy.”
“Timmy. I always liked it when Mother called me Timmy.”
“Timmy an’ Tommy,” she said, proudly.
“Timmy and Tommy and Sissy and Sassy.”
“You’ll be the boys’ granpaw, too,” she said, in case he hadn’t considered this.
“It’ll be an honor to be their granpaw.”
“Father?”
Since he’d officiated at her wedding several years ago, she had taken to calling him by his priestly title in a way that subtly claimed him as her true father. He never failed to note this. Blast, if he wasn’t about to bawl like baby. “Yes, my dear?”
“I sure do love you and Cynthy.”
There they came, rolling down his cheeks like a veritable gulley washer....
“And we sure do love you back,” he croaked.
“So, how’s the food at Hope House these days?”
He sat on the footstool by Louella’s rocking chair, feeling roughly eight or ten years old, as he always had in the presence of Miss Sadie and Louella.
“Oh, honey, some time it’s good, some time it ain’t fit for slop.” He noted that Louella said ain’t now that Miss Sadie, who forbade its use, had passed on. “You take th’ soup—th’ menu has th’ same ol’soup on it every day, day after day, long as I been here.” She looked thoroughly disgusted.
“What soup is that?”
“Soup du jour! If they cain’t come up with more’n one soup in this high-dollar outfit, I ain’t messin’ with it.”
“Aha,” he said.
“My granmaw, Big Mama, said soup was for sick people, anyway, an’ I ain’t sick an’ ain’t plannin’ to be.”
“That’s the spirit.”
Louella rocked on. The warm room, the lowering clouds beyond the window, and the faint drone of the shopping network made him drowsy; his eyelids drooped....
Louella suddenly stopped rocking. “I been meanin’ to ask—what you doin’ ’bout Miss Sadie’s money?”
He snapped to attention. “What money is that?”
“Don’t you remember? I tol’ you ‘bout th’ money she hid in that ol’ car.”
“Old car,” he said, clueless.
“In that ol’ Plymouth automobile she had.” Louella appeared positively vexed with him.
“Louella, I don’t have any idea what you mean.”
“Your mem‘ry must be goin’, honey.”
“Why don’t you tell me everything, from the beginning.”
“Seem like I called you up an’ tol’ you, but maybe I dreamed it. Do you ever dream somethin’ so real you think it happened?”
“I do.”
“A while before she passed, Miss Sadie got mad ’bout th’ market fallin’ off. You know she made good money in that market.”
“Yes, ma’am, she did.” Hadn’t she left Dooley Barlowe a cool million plus at her passing? This extraordinary fact, however, was not yet known to Dooley.
“She say, ‘Look here, Louella, I’m goin’ to put this little dab where those jack legs at th’ market can’t lose it.’ I say, ‘Miss Sadie, where you goin’ to put it, under yo’ mattress?’ She say, ‘Don’t be foolish, I’m goin’ to put it in my car an’ lock it up.’ She’d quit drivin’ an’ her car was up on blocks in th’ garage. She say, ‘Now don’t you let me forget it’s in there.’”
“And?” he asked.
“An’ I went an’ let ’er forget it was in there!”
The 1958 Plymouth had been sitting for several years in the garage behind Fernbank, Miss Sadie’s old home on the hill above Mitford. Fernbank was now owned by Andrew Gregory, Mitford’s mayor, his Italian wife, Anna, and his brother-in-law, Tony.
“Well, it probably wasn’t much,” he said, reassuring.
“Wadn’t much? It mos’ certainly was much. It was nine thousand dollars!”
“Nine thousand dollars?” He was floored.
“Don’t holler,” she instructed. “You don’t know who might be listenin’.”
“You’re sure of that amount, Louella?”
“Sure, I’m sure! Miss Sadie an’ me, we count it out in hun‘erd dollar bills. How many hun’erd dollar bills would that be? I forget.”
“Umm, that would be ninety bills.”
“Yessir, honey, it was ninety, it took us ‘til way up in th’ day to count them hun’erds out, ’cause ever’ time we counted ’em out, Miss Sadie made us start all over an’ count ’em out ag’in!”
“Good idea,” he said, not knowing what else to say.
“We got a rubber band and put it aroun’ all them bills, an’ took out a big envelope and whopped ’em in there, an’ I licked th’ flap and sealed it up tight as Dick’s hat band, so nothin’ would fall out.
“She say t’ me, ‘Louella, you th’ best frien’ I ever had, but you cain’t go down there with me, this is between me an’ th’ Lord.’
“Then she struck out to th’ garage, an’ when she come back, she was proud as a pup wit’ two tails.
“I say, ‘Miss Sadie, where you put that money in case you pass?’ She say, ‘I ain’t goin’ t’ pass any time soon, don’t worry about it. Sometime later she mention that money; we was livin’ at Miss Olivia’s ol’ house. She say she ought to go get it out of where she put it, but th’ market was still real bad.
“Then, we both plumb forgot.
“Th‘other day I was settin’ in this rockin’ chair watchin’ th’ soaps an’ it come t
o me like a lightnin’ strike. I said, oh, law! Somethin’ bad goin’ to happen to Miss Sadie’s money, an’ Miss Sadie, she’ll be hoppin’ mad.”
He was dumbfounded by this strange turn of events. As far as what might be done about it, his mind felt oddly pickled.
Louella’s immense bosom heaved with a sense of the urgent mission to be carried forth; she leaned toward him and lowered her voice.
“So,” she said, “what you goin’ t’ do ’bout Miss Sadie’s money?”
On the way to Main Street, he zoomed by their yellow house on Wisteria Lane and found it looking spic, not to mention downright span. Harley’s general supervision of its welfare made it possible to spend this carefree year at Meadowgate.
He threw up his hand and waved.
“We’ll be back!” he shouted.
He wheeled into Lew Boyd’s Exxon, still occasionally referred to as the Esso station, and saw the Turkey Club sprawled in plastic deck chairs inside the front window. The lineup included J. C. Hogan, longtime Mitford Muse editor; Mule Skinner, semiretired realtor; and Percy Mosely, former proprietor of the now-defunct Main Street Grill.
He’d been hanging out with this bunch for eighteen or twenty years, and it had been a rude awakening when Percy and Velma packed it in last Christmas Eve, vacating a building that quickly became a discount shoe store. Currently occupying the spot where the club’s rear booth had stood was a rack of women’s pumps, sizes eight to ten.
“Hooboy!” Mule stood and saluted. “Here comes our Los Angelees movie producer.”
“Who, me?”
“Pretty soon, you’ll be whippin’ that back in a ponytail an’ wearin’ a earring.”
Father Tim suddenly felt his hair flowing over his shoulders like a medieval mantle.
“Come on, leave ‘im alone,” said Percy. “He’s livin’ out in th’ boonies, he don’t have to slick up like we do.”
“If you call that slicked up, I’m a monkey’s uncle.”
“How long’re you stuck out there in th’ sticks?” asked Percy.
“Hal and Marge will be living in France for a year, so ... roughly nine more months. But we don’t feel stuck, we like it.”
“I lived in th’ country when I was comin’ up,” said Percy, “an’ it like to killed me. They ain’t nothin’ but work on a farm. Haul this, fix that, hoe this, feed that. If it ain’t chickens, it’s feathers.”