Jan Karon's Mitford Years

by Jan Karon

  He was right.

  So maybe that meant Martin Houck was right. He sat back in the booth, weary of knowing too much and understanding too little.

  Jim set his coffee mug on the table. “I’d like to say it one more time. I’m sorry.”

  “Thank you. I forgive your father.”

  They shook hands, holding each other’s gaze for a moment. He and Jim had come back seeking the same thing—connections. They had a shared past, and whether or not they ever saw each other again, they were bound together in some fraternal way that was more mysterious, if not deeper, than blood.

  He was even further, now, from knowing the meaning of his father’s last words. Nor could he really care anymore what Martin Houck had done to the Kavanagh family. It was history. It was all history.

  On the way to Rosie’s house, he sniffed vagrant smoke rising off grilling barbecue; passed cars and trucks flying the Stars and Stripes.

  He knocked on the door, which set Zippy off, big time.

  “Get in here,” said Rosie, “we been lookin’ fo’ you. Where’s that big dog?”

  “In the car.”

  “Bring ’im on in.”

  Something was cooking in Sylvie’s kitchen; the aroma made his knees weak. He fetched his dog, doing what Peggy had called a “skip dance” in his imagination.

  “Butter beans,” said Sylvie, “an’ wilted lettuce an’ onion with a little side meat fried out crisp an’ crumbled on top.”

  “Don’t forget th’ cornbread you brownin’ in th’ oven.” Rosie was smiling like Louis, proud and easy like Louis.

  He sat with them at their kitchen table by a window that looked out to a bank of summer phlox. “Here’s what must have happened,” he said. “Coming from town, I was hit by a truck an’ died and went to heaven.” He was starving for butter beans and wilted lettuce and cornbread, starving for something deep and lost and rarely found.

  Sylvie smiled a little. “Won’t know ’til you taste it whether it’s heaven or th’ other place.”

  “I promise I didn’t show up at lunchtime on purpose. I’m leaving tomorrow and on the run, and…” What could he say?

  Rosie laughed. “You gon’ have t’ eat two helpin’s to make up fo’ comin’ in on us.”

  It was three o’clock when Rosie and Sylvie walked with him to the car.

  “We’re still brothers?”

  “Still brothers,” said Rosie. “Always gon’ be.”

  “I’ll call you. I’ll keep in touch. That’s a promise.”

  “I’m gon’ put Daddy an’ Ol’ Damn Mule on th’ wall next to th’ shotgun.”

  “Perfect,” he said. “That reminds me.” He took the yo-yo from the glove compartment and handed it to Rosie. “Remember this?”

  “Looky here.” Rosie was awed, reverent.

  “Whip a new string on there and you’re back in business.”

  “Been lost…”—Rosie calculated—“goin’ on sixty years.”

  “Bet you can still make it sleep.”

  “Bet I’m gon’ try. You comin’ back to ol’ Holly Springs?”

  “I’m comin’ back.”

  Rosie was suddenly crying. “You ain’t got another forty years to stay gone.” He embraced Rosie—and Louis and Sally and all the brothers, and all the good of all the past.

  “You’re always welcome,” said Sylvie. “Welcome as th’ flowers in May.”

  His grandmother used to say that.

  There was no way he was ripping open the packet of tissues. He drove away, wiping his eyes on the back of his hand.

  At the grocery store, he located the meat case and punched the bell.

  “Three steaks,” he said to the butcher. “Your best.”

  “That’d be Angus. Filet, T-bone, ribeye, or porterhouse?”

  “That’s a hard one.”

  “Grillin’ or broilin’?”

  “Grilling.”

  “Porterhouse. How thick?”

  “Two inches.”

  It was payback time at Whitefield.

  TWENTY-TWO

  “You’re hired,” said Ray.

  T flicked his cigarette into the wheelbarrow. “All you got t’ do is cook four nights a week an’ put in a rose bed for m’ brother’s ol’ lady. Th’ pay ain’t much, but you can keep your room.”

  “Sorry, boys, but I’m under long-term contract.”

  “Jus’ as well,” Ray told T. “He said he don’t even play gin rummy.”

  “Jigsaw puzzles are about all the excitement I can stand—but thanks for the offer.”

  Barnabas snored at his feet; Tater and Tot nosed about the yard.

  “Back at th’ mansion,” said Ray, “they used t’ have entertainment after supper.”

  “We could do our joke,” said T.

  Ray grinned. “Ain’t got but one joke we can tell a preacher.” Ray cleared his throat. “An invisible man married an invisible woman.”

  “Yeah,” said T, “an’ their kids wadn’t much to look at, either.”

  “T dug that up with th’ leg bone of a dinosaur.”

  “Not bad,” he said. Uncle Billy Watson would be turning over in his grave.

  “That’s our complete entertainment package,” said T. “All she wrote. Good supper; we thank you.”

  “You nailed th’ fries, that’s f’ sho.”

  “My wife worked on the recipe for months ’til she finally had a breakthrough. What did the trick was soaking the cut fries in cold water, and using a heavy bake sheet.”

  “Speakin’ of breakthrough,” said T, “I’m back on my hair cream. I had a killer idea last night. I’m gon’ hit it again over th’ weekend; it’s gon’ work.”

  “Glad to hear it. I’ll start thinking about a name, maybe give it some thought on our way up the road.”

  “Better get over to Graceland while you’re in Memphis,” said T. “Th’ Trophy Room’ll bring tears to a glass eye an’ I ain’t kiddin’ you. Awards from all over th’ world, anywhere you can think of. Everybody loved Elvis.”

  “Three things you got to see fo’ you pass,” said Ray. “Th’ Grand Canyon. Niagara Falls. An’ Graceland.”

  “There’s a lineup for you,” he said.

  Ray grinned. “Top three.”

  He couldn’t get used to Ray with teeth.

  “It sold out a while back,” said T. “Fifty-five million smackers. You never know what changes might go down.”

  He’d never paid much attention to Elvis, but he wouldn’t want to say so—not here, anyway.

  Ray removed a denture and stared at it. “Seem like he give me somebody else’s uppers—this plate crowdin’ m’ mouth.”

  “Set ’em up there on th’ rail awhile,” said T. “Takes you a day or two to get used to havin’ teeth again. He dropped his uppers off a twelve-foot ladder onto a concrete slab. Buckshot did somethin’ to ’is lowers.”

  “Eatin’ squirrel,” said Ray. “I’m layin’ off wild game an’ stickin’ to fish. Fish is good fo’ th’ brain.”

  “Don’t get too smart on me, you’ll be shuckin’ this job an’ goin’ to live in th’ islands.”

  Three men laughing on a porch in Mississippi. He could do worse. There was a lot to be said for sitting out here with the cicadas, talking about dentures, watching fireflies “stagg’ring down the dark.” Shootin’ the breeze, was what they used to call it.

  “I’m flyin’ up to roost,” said Ray. “My back’s botherin’ me t’night.”

  “You gon’ miss th’ fireworks,” said T.

  “I’ll catch ’em from my front window. Somebody jump in this rockin’ chair, this is a good chair.”

  “Take your teeth. You don’t want ’em settin’ out here all night.”

  He would miss these guys. “Thanks for everything, Ray. See you in the morning at checkout time.”

  In the yard, Ray turned and threw up his hand. “Don’t let th’ bedbugs bite.”

  They watched as he vanished along the path, Tater and Tot at his heel
s.

  T lit a cigarette. “Been good havin’ you.”

  “Thanks. It was good being here. Very good.”

  “You comin’ back?”

  “I’m coming back.”

  “If my cream works out, I prob’ly won’t be here when you get back. If it don’t work out, my brother asked me to stay an’ caretake th’ place. But I don’ know about that.”

  “Could be a good deal either way,” he said.

  T smoked. The rocker creaked.

  He realized he wanted to talk about the extraordinary thing that had blindsided him. “The little house that fell in—”

  A muffled boom, as of cannon, sounded across four flat miles. The western sky was a flame of orange.

  “Yeah?”

  “I told you about the woman who lived there—she’s the mother of my half brother.”

  Boom. Saffron washed the sky.

  “She’s still alive. We had a long visit.”

  “How was it?” asked T.

  “Good. His name is Henry Winchester.” He was quiet for a time. “I always wanted a brother.”

  “My brother can be a pain in th’ ass, but he’s sure saved mine a few times.”

  “Henry needs a stem cell transplant. From a sibling.”

  “You bein’ th’ siblin’?”

  “He has a sister, but her health isn’t good.”

  “What about your di’betes?”

  “My wife and son drove into Memphis around six this evening. We’ll see the doctor tomorrow, try to get a grip on where this thing is going, how the diabetes figures in. Then we’ll head home. Depending on the circumstances, I may come back to Memphis for…whatever needs to be done.”

  Cigarette ash burned against the milky twilight. “How you feelin’ about th’ whole deal?”

  “Like I’ve been hit upside th’ head.”

  “Pissed?”

  “Maybe that’ll come later. But I don’t think so.”

  “How does knowin’ God help you out in a case like this?”

  “I believe he has a purpose for everything. I believe he’ll bring good out of this, maybe even in a way I won’t like very much. It’s his call, not mine.”

  “Seems like any God a’tall would want you down here bustin’ a gut, not leavin’ it all up to him.”

  “Seems like. But it doesn’t work that way. We’ve got to let him do the heavy lifting. We’ve got to grunt, that’s for sure, but we’ve got to let him lift. The challenge is to trust him. Right now, I’m trusting him. Running a little scared, but trusting him.”

  “How do you take havin’ a brother that’s half black?”

  “He’s a good man. I like him. As for introducing him around back home, I’m not there yet.”

  “Ol’ Ray an’ me are kind of like brothers. Brothers without th’ baggage, you might say.”

  “He’ll die without a transplant.” Sapphire and crimson bloomed in the sky above the distant courthouse. “On the other hand, he could die with a transplant.”

  They didn’t talk for what seemed a long time.

  He leaned his head against the back of the chair and closed his eyes. He would let this day, and those before it, go for now—he felt as if one shock and stupefaction after another had been wound onto a spool in the region of his heart; he wanted nothing more than to let it all wind off.

  He surrendered himself to the loud, symphonic night, to the insistent cry of tree frogs, cicadas, and insects as exotic and unidentifiable as those of a rain forest—the sounds seemed to soak into his pores. How different this Mississippi night was from a mountain night. In the mountains, which he loved, the sounds of evening seemed to arrive from a great distance, razor-sharp and clean. Here, the night sounds were close, complex, many-layered, seductive.

  A rivulet of sweat trickled along his spine; the stairs to his room seemed far away and steep, very steep.

  “Nothin’ to lose?” asked T.

  He was startled by the question, then he remembered.

  “Nothing,” he said.

  TWENTY-THREE

  A single truth possessed many facets.

  He realized that having a brother meant Cynthia had a brother-in-law. It meant Dooley had an uncle. And if he chose to give the name of his closest living relative when asked, it would not be Walter, but Henry. The domino factor would have a good run.

  After a quick egg biscuit at Frank’s, he knocked on Booker’s stockroom door.

  “Here you go,” said Red, handing off a cooler.

  Without lifting the lid, he knew. He was headed to Memphis with a groundhog.

  “Cheer up,” said Red. “You gon’ like it. Have a good trip an’ come on back, I’ll put you t’ work.”

  Was he going to keep the cooler cool or put the top down like he’d planned?

  He put the top down and drove north, taking a shortcut through the country to the highway. He felt like a teenager headed for a heavy date.

  “You’re everything to me,” he said when they talked last night. “Wife, sister, mother, sweetheart, friend.” If there was anything more, she was that, too.

  He had once called her brave, which puzzled her. “Brave in the face of life,” he explained. And plenty brave, into the bargain, to marry Tim Kavanagh.

  God had reserved for him a woman marked by suffering—as a child emotionally abandoned by her parents, and later as a woman cast aside by a philandering husband.

  Her suffering had led her to a life in Christ, and in that fusion was created everything he’d ever hoped for in a mate—compassion, tenderness, honesty, depth, and nearly always, high good humor. She was the only woman he could have loved, though he never dreamed he might enjoy for his own such a composition of characteristics and a spirit marked by so many influences, including worldly success.

  Indeed, he’d had no idea how to manage a woman like Cynthia Coppersmith, and so he stepped back from management, as did she, and somehow they had merged their lives.

  He remembered the fight to hold on to his pitiable bachelorhood. Where would he turn, now, if not to her?

  Chesterton had been wise to that sort of thing: ‘There are no words to express the abyss between isolation and having one ally. It may be conceded to the mathematician that four is twice two. But two is not twice one; two is two thousand times one.’

  At the side of the road, he saw a busted-open watermelon sitting on a stump in front of a hand-lettered sign:

  FRESH PRODUCE

  STOP IN

  He slowed down, eyeing the cool flesh of the melon, flesh the color of crepe myrtle blooms. It was calling him, sure enough. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d dived into a watermelon.

  He passed the sign, drove a few hundred yards up the road, then hung a right into a driveway, turned around, and headed back.

  As he pulled onto the gravel in front of the produce stand, a man appeared at the door of a house a few yards away. The screen door slapped behind him.

  “Mornin’ to you.”

  “Good morning. My mouth’s waterin’ for watermelon. That’s a tempting promotion on your stump.”

  “Fresh-picked an’ homegrown. We don’t sell nothin’ ain’t grown local.”

  Cantaloupe. He chose one and sniffed the end born from the vine. It was redolent with the ripe scent of its seeded, peach-colored flesh. He was salivating.

  “I’d like a cantaloupe to have tomorrow, and a ripe watermelon to get into tonight.” He supposed they’d be driving straight from the meeting with the doctor, since Barnabas would have no place to lay his head in Memphis.

  “This ’un right here’s yo’ watermelon.” The man thumped a small, green-striped globe. “Listen at that.”

  No left thumb.

  His mouth was hanging open. He closed it and took a deep breath.

  “Would you mind if I guessed how you lost that thumb?”

  “You guess how I lost this thumb, that melon don’t cost you a red cent. Give you one guess.”

  “One guess,” he said.r />
  “Yessir, one guess.” The man looked downright entertained by the prospect. “You get it right, you got you a sweet, ripe melon picked this mornin’.”

  “Deal.” He was trembling a little. “You lost that thumb whacking the head off a chicken.”

  The man looked astonished. “Thass right. Sho did.”

  He also looked disappointed that the game was ending so abruptly.

  “A cat got your thumb and ran off to the barn with it.”

  “You got it right ag’in. How you know that?”

  “Let’s see.” He scratched his head. “When you were ten years old, you lived on Gholson Avenue in Holly Springs.”

  “Sho as you born, I did. How you do that?”

  “There was a piano in Miss Lula’s parlor.”

  “This some kind of magic trick?”

  “I busted the vase an’ you took th’ whippin’ for it.”

  “La-a-a-w have mercy. You th’ little white boy I minded that time.”

  “It’s me.” They both guffawed. He pounded Willie on the back, Willie pounded him on the back.

  “How many years?” asked Willie.

  “A hundred,” he said.

  “This beat all.”

  “I’ve prayed ever since for the chance to thank you for what you did for me. It must have been a terrible whipping they gave you.”

  Willie grinned. “No whippin’ a’tall. None a’tall. Miz Lula, she didn’ let nobody whip me. If they was any whippin’ t’ do, she done it her ownself. My mama, she could put you in th’ bed from a whippin’, so one time Miz Lula said, From now on, I gon’ be th’ boss of whippin’ this chile.

  “Nossir, all I done was tell Miz Lula you didn’t go t’ do it. I said you was a good boy, an’ yo’ daddy was gon’ tear yo’ head off, I could see it in ’is face. So th’ Lord give me th’ notion t’ say I done it.”

  “Thank you, Willie. Thank you.” He was jubilant. “Thank you more than I can say. I’ve never forgotten that time; I was miserable about it. I went back to Miz Lula’s after she died, trying to find out what happened to you.”