Jan Karon's Mitford Years

by Jan Karon

  “I’ll be darned.”

  “I’ve been meaning to tell you, by the way, that Holy Trinity hasn’t been completely forgotten by the world. Over the years, a sentimental priest or two has been found peering in the windows, and occasionally we get picnickers. Or, once in a rare while, someone visits the cemetery and leaves flowers.

  “Then there was the summer day an entire busload of tourists debarked below the creek. They were out to see historic churches, and climbed up the ridge to Holy Trinity. They had the best sort of time, and even took the lack of toilets with proper good cheer.

  “It just happened to be the day I was conducting our annual Evening Prayer. You know we must hold one liturgical service a year, to remain under church ownership and off the tax rolls. Imagine our joy to have every pew filled.” She looked at him, her face radiant.

  “I think I can imagine!”

  “It was one of the many ways God encouraged us over the years.”

  “Would today be a good time to pick up your story where you left off?”

  She smoothed her dress over her knees, silent.

  “Your venerable Buick had died, and you switched to a truck.” He tried to imagine Agnes Merton whipping around these narrow, winding roads in a pickup truck.

  Agnes didn’t speak for some time, but looked out the window into the woods. A male cardinal swooped across the lane, a flash of scarlet against the still-leafless trees.

  “I sometimes think,” she said at last, “that God didn’t fashion or fit me for the world. Perhaps I am a type of Desert Mother, transported to the oldest mountains in the world.”

  She grew quiet again, then turned and gave him one of her half smiles.

  “I never thought much about marrying; my mission work was rewarding and often very exhausting. Jessie and I toiled hard, and her faith greatly overshadowed my own. I was laboring for the people; Jessie was laboring for God. She often recited something from St. Francis, which I committed to memory, so that we might encourage one another.

  “‘Keep a clear eye toward life’s end. Do not forget your purpose and destiny as God’s Creature. What you are in His sight is what you are and nothing more. Remember that when you leave this earth, you can take nothing you have received ... but only what you have given; a full heart enriched by honest service, love, sacrifice and courage.’ ”

  He recalled that he’d once preached on those words of the troubador, in a sermon titled “A Clear Eye.”

  “If one breaks this passage down, line by line,” she said, “it is deeply instructive. For years, I believed in giving my life to honest service, love, sacrifice, and courage, without any need at all to trust my life to God. I had made a covenant with my head, but not with my heart.

  “Quint Severs had given his heart to God long years before Jessie and Little Bertie and I came to the ridge. Quint was a wonderful mechanic for our Buick; he was completely self-taught, and had a natural gift for engines, for the way things worked in general. He always rendered his service to us as unto the Lord. He was an angel if ever there was one.

  “But our truck was another matter. Oh, my, here we are at the sisters’; they’re on our list for the last stop, but we could visit now instead of on the way home ... if you’d like.”

  “Let’s do it now,” he said. “I can use more spontaneity in my life!”

  “Pull in here, then. You can park by the old shed.”

  He saw an unpainted house with a sagging porch beside a pile of discarded mattresses, a refrigerator, and a variety of other abandoned household goods. All had been arranged in an orderly manner, and left to season beneath a blue tarpaulin stretched over four sapling poles. An orange and white cat perched on the side of an old watering trough, drinking. Neat stacks of used tires lay about the yard, punctuated by the ancient chassis of a tractor and a mélange of rusted oil drums. Overall, he found the spectacle oddly ceremonial in effect.

  He parked by the shed, which leaned toward the truck as if it might come down upon the hood at any moment. “I’ve been thinking,” he said, as he opened her door. “We need a Porta John for Holy Trinity.”

  “They won’t bring a truck up these roads to pump it. It’s the piney woods, Father, and no help for it.”

  “Ah, well!”

  She gave him her amused half smile. “Don’t fret. When we get under way, I’ll open the schoolhouse to the congregation.”

  “But that’s your home.”

  “It’s His home,” she said, stepping onto the stool, “and I’m sure He would approve.”

  “Necessity is the mother of invention,” he said, grinning.

  “We were cradle Episcopalians,” Martha McKinney told him, “and very heartbroken to see our old church closed as if it was nothin’ more than a gas station!”

  They had assembled in the kitchen of the McKinney sisters, in the house their father had built “in nineteen-aught-two.” Though the kitchen contained an electric range, the air was redolent with cooking smells from the pot on a wood cook stove.

  If he’d thought Jubal’s squirrel made his mouth water...

  ... and what was going on in the McKinney oven? Something was definitely going on in that oven; he suddenly had the appetite of a stevedore.

  Martha removed her thick-lensed glasses. “In the end, there was nothin’ to do but what we did,” she said with finality.

  She turned toward the window and held her glasses to the light. “Lard!” She gave the lenses a vigorous polish with the hem of her apron.

  “And what was it you did?” He hoped he wasn’t being overly nosey.

  “We became Methodists!” confessed Martha.

  “We became Methodists!” crowed her sister, Mary, who sat by the stove with her bare feet tucked onto the stretcher of the chair.

  “Aha!”

  “But we didn’t really want to!” said Mary.

  Martha gave her sister a stern look. “We certainly couldn’t fall away to the Baptists! Needless to say, Father, I miss the liturgy!”

  “She misses the liturgy!” said Mary.

  Martha popped her glasses on again and looked him in the eye. “We need to get this show on the road. You like white meat or dark?”

  Had their unexpected visit forced their hosts to share their meal? Would accepting be the thing to do or should they run along? What was the social code in this matter? The cold spring wind keened around the corners of the house; he looked at Agnes for guidance.

  “Miss Martha,” said Agnes, “we like anything that doesn’t go over the fence last.”

  Chicken and dumplings in a mountain kitchen warmed by a zealous woodstove; the fragrance of strong coffee percolating on the back burner; Eastertide drawing nigh; and every grand possibility stretching ahead.

  He was relishing the many wonders of his new parish, not the least of which were the sisters, one as round as the moon and shy, the other as tall as a corn shock and bold. Indeed, Martha McKinney appeared able to roof a house single-handedly, or possibly plow up forty acres with a mule.

  “Mr. Adderholt,” said Agnes, “was making squirrel stew when we stopped by.”

  Martha laughed. “Jubal Adderholt has helped himself to every squirrel in the county. They’ll be a lost species if that old so-and-so keeps livin’. Five years ago Christmas, he promised to shoot me a squirrel, but I haven’t seen hide nor hair of it!”

  “I’ll remind him,” said Father Tim.

  “Tell him to send two while he’s at it, they’re scant meat.You’ll not see me wastin’ a shell on a squirrel.”

  “You have a gun?” he asked.

  “Of course I have a gun!”

  “She has a gun,” said Mary, wide-eyed.

  “Oh, pshaw! Everybody on this ridge has a gun.”

  “Johnny had a gun,” said Mary.

  Having refused all offers of assistance, Martha was clearing dishes from the table as the orange and white cat devoured giblets from a saucer behind the stove.

  “Miss Mary’s Johnny once brought us te
nderloin of bear,” said Agnes. “Johnny was a lovely man who plowed our garden before Clarence was old enough to do it.”

  The younger sister smiled broadly, revealing a set of new dentures. “Of a day, me an’ Johnny stayed out of one another’s way,” she confided to the vicar, “but of a e‘enin’, we come home an’ jis’ courted.” She put her hand over her mouth and giggled.

  “A good plan,” he said, meaning it.

  “We was married forty-two years.”

  “See there? A very good plan!”

  Martha threw up her hands. “Don’t mind her, she talks about Johnny all th’ time!”

  “I talk about Johnny all th’ time,” said Mary. “Johnny was part Cherokee, his great-granddaddy was a medicine man. Did you know a Cherokee medicine man cain’t doctor his own self? It was a rule. I’m a Chiltosky, but ever’body calls us th’ McKinney sisters.”

  “Where in th’ nation did I put my pot scrub?” asked Martha. “Sister, have you seen my pot scrub?”

  “When he passed ten years ago, I left my place down th’ road an’ moved up with Sister.”

  “Yet another good plan, if you ask me. Miss Martha, your chicken and dumplings are the finest I’ve enjoyed in many years. Are you sure you aren’t from Holly Springs, Mississippi?”

  Martha scraped the remains of the pot into a bowl. “Born and raised on this ridge, and never left it except to go to college at Connelly Springs. Then I moved back to the home place and taught fifth grade for forty years in the valley.

  “I had to go off this ridge every day of th’ school week, in every kind of weather you’d want to name. Walked a mile to th’ creek, then trotted across on a log, or pulled my shoes off and waded through—whatever it took. I did everything but swing over on a vine!”

  Martha had a good laugh over this, as did the rest of the assembly.

  “I’d meet Portman Henshaw who was a bank clerk in Holding, and ride as far as Granite Springs, where he dropped me at the school door. Every single year, I had to get permission from his wife, Miss Hettie, to ride with him. I had to ask her in a formal note the first of January, and the answer always came back in a note toted to me by her poor, hen-pecked husband.

  “‘Dear Mrs. Henshaw,’ was my petition, ‘I would be beholden to you if I could ride to school and back with Mr. Henshaw this year. Thank you in advance.Yours sincerely.’ I would always send two quarts of string beans with that note and a jar of strawberry jam.

  “In a flash, here’d come her little jot, added to the bottom of mine, and not a word in long-hand! She printed like a second grader! ‘Dear Miss McKinney, You may ride to school with Mr. Henshaw if you do not keep him waiting at the creek. Please don’t track mud on the floorboards. Yours sincerely.’ At the end of the year, I always sent a bushel of potatoes with four jars of butter beans and five one-dollar bills, which I thought was a gracious plenty since he was goin’ that way anyhow.”

  Mary nodded in agreement. “He was goin’ that way anyhow.”

  “Portman drove a Ford in the beginning; I always liked a Ford, but over the years, we went through five or six different buggies, one being a Pontiac.”

  Martha shook her head, disapproving. “I don’t know what possessed Portman Henshaw to buy that Pontiac. Agnes, do you remember that Pontiac?”

  “I do. Dark green, with slipcovers sewn by Miss Hettie.”

  “I missed thirty-three days of school over that bloomin’ Pontiac. It was a lemon if I ever saw one, and I still had to send over a basket of rations and five hard-earned dollars.”

  Martha poured Agnes a cup of coffee from the battered pot on the stove.

  “Anyhow, I rode with Portman ‘til he retired, then I tried hitchin’ a ride with every Tom, Dick, and Harry who had a wheel, but it never worked, so I up an’ retired, too. It was either that or buy my own buggy, and I didn’t want to fool with it!”

  “How do you ladies shop for food and get to church?” asked the vicar.

  “Portman’s oldest boy, Thomas, took over where his daddy left off; he hauls us food shop-pin’ once a week. I’m goin’ to leave him that tractor in th’ yard when I pass, it’s an antique. He’ll get good money for that tractor.

  “Then there’s Agnes’s boy, Clarence, he takes us around every chance he gets; I’m leavin’ him that waterin’ trough to soak his grapevine in. Course, I put in a big garden every year; it keeps us goin’ pretty strong if we miss a week or two down at Winn Dixie, and Sister and I still go blackberryin’ ...”

  Martha opened the oven door, and a furnace of heat blasted the small kitchen. Father Tim realized he was on the edge of his chair with anticipation.

  Wearing a pair of long-used oven mitts, Martha removed a cobbler, still bubbling in its crockery dish and, with evident pride, thumped it onto an overturned skillet on the table. “Picked the first week of August an’ all th’ chiggers removed free of charge.”

  He had the impulse to cross himself.

  “As for church ...” Martha dug into the steaming blackberry cobbler with a wooden spoon, “we walk if we have to. For goodness’ sakes, it’s only two miles.” Out of respect for clergy, Martha passed the first serving to Father Tim, who handed it off to Agnes.

  “Two miles?” Hadn’t Agnes said that Miss Martha was Jubal’s senior by a decade?

  “Keeps us hale!” declared Martha. “Besides, somebody always brings us home.”

  Mary nodded. “Somebody always brings us home!”

  Had he checked his sugar this morning? He couldn’t recall. Lord...

  Agnes inhaled the fragrant steam rising from her coffee cup. “Miss Martha, won’t you take your apron off and sit down with us?”

  “Oh, law, no, I never take my apron off!” said Martha.

  “She never takes her apron off!” said Mary.

  Father Tim noted that the woodstove had lent a rosy flush to every cheek.

  “Miss Martha, Miss Mary, it’s time we told you why we came. We feel we have some very good news.”

  “Well, now!” exclaimed Martha. “I like good news!”

  “She likes good news!” said Mary, showing her dentures to good effect.

  Thumb up, forefinger out, the remaining three fingers tucked into the palm.

  “This,” said Agnes, “is L. And that—is Donny Luster’s trailer. You’ll notice I don’t tell you much about your new parishioners beforehand; it seems best to let you form your own impressions. I’ll just say that Donny is a most remarkable young man.”

  “Spotless,” he said, peering around as he parked beside a pickup truck. “Someone is proud to live here.”

  Agnes looked for a moment at her hands, lying palms up in her lap. “Father, I must say what I have to say ... now. It can’t wait any longer.”

  She lifted her head and looked at him; he saw the firm resolve in her eyes.

  “The longer I hesitate, the more I dread my confession.”

  “You needn’t confess anything to me.”

  “It’s important that it be done. Then I shall be free to tell you in peace the rest of my story, which is also Holy Trinity’s story”

  Behind the trailer, early afternoon light sparkled on upland pasture where a small herd of cows grazed.

  Agnes crossed herself as she told him what must be spoken.

  “I never married,” she said.

  “I’m five.”

  Sissie Gleason held up as many fingers.

  “Five!” exclaimed the vicar. “I remember being five!”

  It was merely a flash of memory, like a sliver of celluloid carved from a lengthy documentary. His mother was pushing him on the tree swing behind their house in Holly Springs. It was the day before his fifth birthday, and she was singing the song he would never forget as long as he lived.

  Baby Bye, here’s a fly,

  Let us watch him you and I...

  “I’m not a baby!” he shouted.

  “Is that so? I did forget for a moment, but only a very tiny moment!”

  He thought his
mother the most beautiful woman in the world ...

  “I’m five!” he shouted again, flying toward a perfectly blue sky. The soles of his bare feet pushed against silken summer air.

  “You have a whole day left before you’re five! I want this day to go on and on and...”

  “It’s good to be five,” he said, stooping down to look into the solemn eyes of the child with tangled hair. In the corner of the room, a TV hawked the wares of a shopping network.

  “I was this many b’fore.” She held up four fingers. “How many are you?”

  He raised both hands and extended his fingers seven times.

  She observed this lengthy communication. “That’s too many.”

  “Darn right,” he said, creaking upward on resistant legs.

  “What’s ’at roun’ your neck?”

  “My tab collar.”

  “What’s it f’r?”

  “It marks me as a preacher, a priest. It lets people know I’m someone they can come to, confide in, pray with.”

  “And this,” Agnes told him, “is Dovey Gleason, Sissie’s mother and Donny’s sister.”

  He bent over the bed where Dovey lay, and looked into another pair of brown and solemn eyes. “Dovey.” He took her hand and instinctively held it in both of his.

  “Dovey,” he said again; the name seemed an odd comfort to him. “May I pray for you?” He knew nothing about her except what he saw in her eyes.

  “Yes,” she whispered.

  He sat in the chair beside her. “Dear God and loving Father, Creator of all that is, seen and unseen, we thank You for Your presence in this home, at this bedside, and in the heart of Your child, Dovey. Give us eyes to see Your goodness in her suffering, give us faith to thank You for her healing, give us love to strengthen us as we wait. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.”

  “Amen,” said Agnes.

  “Amen,” whispered Dovey.

  When he looked up, he saw Donny Luster standing at the foot of the bed. “Amen,” said Donny. “Miss Agnes, how you?”

  “Very well, Donny, thank you. Please meet Father Timothy Kavanagh.” The thin, blond young man leaned toward him and they shook hands.