by Jan Karon
“Most people know the shop closes at six. It wouldn’t look right for me to be taking my ease at four-thirty.”
She thought his eyes as blue as the sea. “Why not?”
“I don’t want to cause any unnecessary talk or suspicion, because it all falls back on good people like you and Father Tim. If, God forbid, anything went wrong in town, a lot of eyes would turn to me—or to Harley. It’s just the way things are.”
“Things shouldn’t be that way.”
“Yes, but it’s the way things are.”
She saw the resolve in him. “Yes,” she said. “Well.”
She’d had few friends in her life, and had never once been friends with a man. But the feeling with George was different now; ever since the fall, it had been different. It was a nice, comfortable feeling.
“How’s your mother?” he asked.
“A little better. But not much. I think I should go see her in September.”
“You seem to be doing fine since your fall.”
“I feel wonderful, really. It’s hard to express, I’ve been trying to understand it. But something happened when I fell. Something…lovely.”
“I’m glad. I’ve been praying for you.”
She supposed that was what Christians did—they prayed for people. But she didn’t want them praying for her; it seemed an invasion of her privacy.
“You really needn’t bother to pray for me, I don’t believe in it.” Something of the old, cold reserve returned and chilled her heart.
“You don’t need to believe in it for me to pray for you. And it’s no bother, it’s a blessing.”
“Oh,” she said, looking at him. She supposed he was still handsome, but she didn’t see that now. What she was seeing, more and more, was his kindness.
“Since the fall,” he said, smiling, “you seem to be living up to your name.”
“Yes.” She mused on this with wonder. “I think that’s true. I never really believed in my name. Hope seemed very…alien. I thought I should have been a Janet or a Peggy.”
“I think Hope is right for you.”
“Thank you.” A lovely warmth flooded her heart; tears sprang to her eyes. It was as if she’d been given her name for the first time, in a kind of baptism. “I remember when you looked down at me in the window—you said, ‘Hope! ’ as if it were a command. I didn’t associate the word with my name; instead, it was something you were urging me to do.”
“Hope is a verb,” he said, “as well as a noun.”
They were sitting on the floor now instead of squatting, the open boxes between them.
“Where are your parents?” she asked. “Do they know you’re in Mitford?”
“My parents were killed in a plane crash fifteen years ago. I was in the plane, also.”
“Oh.” She couldn’t imagine such horror. “I’m sorry.”
“I was pinned in the cockpit for three days, in freezing temperatures. Broken legs, fractured skull.”
She shook her head, wordless.
“I made a deal with God then, but I didn’t keep my end of the bargain.”
“Are you…keeping your end of the bargain now?”
He smiled. “I’m trying.”
“Do you like it in Mitford?”
“Very much.”
“I don’t think I ever quite understood how you came here, why you picked Mitford.”
“I didn’t pick Mitford, God did. I thought I was driving without purpose or direction. Mitford seemed no more than a random choice for a place to hide from the feds. Now I know that God led me here and put me in the attic of Lord’s Chapel, specifically, so that when Father Tim prayed the prayer of salvation in the nave, I would be there—at that precise moment in time—to pray it, too.”
“Couldn’t it have happened anywhere?”
“Possibly. But I don’t think so. I think this was my place, and that was my time.”
“What sort of prayer is the prayer of salvation?” She had once read it in the letters-to-the-editor column of the Muse, but had no recollection of the words.
“It’s simple. Very simple.”
“But you don’t seem a simple person. What made you think it true or profound?”
“The Holy Spirit spoke to my heart, and I knew it to be true.”
She felt a slight shiver along her spine. The Holy Spirit. Speaking! “And it changed your life,” she said. It wasn’t a question; everyone in Mitford knew that some sort of prayer had changed the life of a man who turned himself in to face eight years of punishment.
“Yes.”
She didn’t relish the thought of asking him to recite the prayer, if, indeed, he could; it would seem awkward. But she wished to know its content; it was natural that she wished to know, she was a curious person.
She was debating this when the bell jangled on the door and three Mitford School teachers breezed in, chattering happily. Hope knew they’d stopped by the bakery before coming to the bookstore; their clothes brought in a carefree scent of cinnamon and chocolate.
He spoke with Cynthia at eight-thirty; she was missing him, too.
“You miss me, I miss you. Bookends!” she said, calling the two of them by an affectionate name she’d contrived during their courtship.
“But I’m glad I encouraged you to go.”
“You didn’t encourage me at all, you insisted! But thanks for making me do it, Timothy, it’s been a wonderful experience—exhausting, but wonderful.”
“It was good for me to send you away.”
“Why, dearest?”
“Because I’d grown afraid of losing you. Somehow, by sending you away, I lost the fear of losing you.”
“Why were you afraid?”
“Your success…. I wondered if it would overshadow what we had.”
“Nothing can do that, Timothy. And you can never, ever lose me, I refuse to be lost.”
“I love you, Kavanagh.” He was in the mood to be mushy with his wife. Life was short! “Madly.”
“I love you madly back!”
“I’ll have a surprise or two for you.” Salmon roulade was all he’d come up with so far, but surely he could think of something else.
“I love surprises,” she said, happy. “Now hurry to bed, sweetheart. You sound bushed.”
He read the evening office and was hurrying to bed, minding his wife.
Somehow, the day had seemed a hundred years long. It might have been another age and time when he’d driven with Buck and the children down the mountain and witnessed their joy. Even Dooley, who usually chose his words carefully, had talked nonstop going home—what they’d all do when they got together with Sammy again, how they might talk him into coming to Mitford for his first visit, how he would buy Sammy a really great pair of tennis shoes, plus he’d give him a lot of stuff he no longer wore….
Jessie was determined to give Sammy her savings, which amounted to more than forty dollars; Poo would probably hang on to his new bat, but would give his brother his catcher’s mitt and teach him to play softball; he was incredulous that Sammy didn’t know how to play softball….
He couldn’t let the day end without talking to his boy.
“Hey,” he said, when Dooley came to the phone.
“Hey, yourself!”
He heard the happiness in Dooley’s voice.
“Just wanted to call and say how glad I am for today.”
“Yes, sir. Me, too. I hate to go back Monday.”
“I know. When you come home for Thanksgiving, maybe we can get Sammy to come, too.” He felt an unexpected knot in his throat.
“He’s got bad teeth.”
“Yes.”
“Maybe somehow we could get his teeth fixed, like Miss Sadie left money to fix mine.”
“We can probably work that out.” What a great idea. “Can you spare the time to swing by on Monday, on your way to Georgia? I should have Cynthia home a few minutes after twelve. You can have lunch with us, fill up on Puny’s macaroni and cheese.”
“OK. Great.”
“Terrific.”
“You know when you were asking me what Reba Sanders is like?”
“Yes.”
“I forgot to tell you something.”
“Ah.”
“She’s beautiful. Really beautiful.”
“I’d like to meet her sometime. Which reminds me—I saw someone beautiful today.”
“Who?”
“Lace Harper.”
Silence.
“Don’t hold her car against her, son. She’s worth more than that. Far more. Remember the day Barnabas got hit? God enabled you to save his life. But you couldn’t have done it without Lace.
“Remember how she pitched in?” He was filled with emotion at the memory of his stricken dog, lying helpless in the street and bleeding from a wound in the chest cavity as his master stood by, more helpless still. Dooley had known exactly what to do, while Lace, leaning only on courage and raw instinct, assisted him as if trained.
“I feel the greatest gratitude and pride toward you both.”
“Yes, sir.”
Dooley had heard him; he felt the arrow hit its mark.
So, maybe he was meddling, but he felt good about it. One thing he would not do is tell Dooley about Guber. He remembered Dooley once saying how much he wanted a brown Lab. Dooley might hear about the puppy from someone else, but no, indeed, he would not hear it from yours truly.
Uncle Billy Watson lay in his bed at the rear of the Mitford town museum, next to his wife of more than a half century.
He heard her snoring, and could plainly see the glow of the street lamp through the window, yet in some way he couldn’t figure, he wasn’t lying in his bed at all.
He was standing barefooted by the train track in a bright cove of Turncoat Mountain, listening for the whistle and watching the hawks soar and dip on unseen waves of thermal.
Yesterday he’d stood by the track in the very same place, and waited for the log train to come roaring through, blasting cinders and noise, power and heat on its way to Mortimer, fourteen miles south.
The train wouldn’t even slow down here, nossir, this wasn’t even a wide place in the road, but something wonderful could happen anyhow, something nearly about as good as the train grinding to a stop and the conductor leaning out the window and hollering, “Want a ride, Little Billy?”
His uncle, who helped the conductor, had several times in the past throwed him a packet from the train—though nothing in the past had ever matched the plain wonder of the little tin box that landed in his hands yesterday.
He remembered the first time his uncle throwed something out the train window. It was a note weighted with a small stone and tied with twine. According to what his mama read off to him, the note said:
Little Billy, I see you standin by the trak ever day wavin & think of your mama and how I haint seen my baby sister in two year. one day ill get off in mortimer & walk back to visit yall. be a good boy help your mama. yrs truly uncle joe.
One time it was hard candy wrapped in a handkerchief that was none too clean.
Another time it was a pair of work shoes—but they was way yonder too little. He’d worn them anyhow, they’d near about crippled both feet, then passed them on to Maisie. His little sister had wore the shoes all day and slept in them at night, even though they was about two years this side of a good fit.
It was always a happy time standing there by the track, even if his uncle wasn’t on the train, or if he maybe waved and didn’t throw nothing down; it didn’t matter. It made him swimmy-headed just to stand there and let that blast of heat run by him, scorching his bones and rattling his teeth ’til he sometimes hollered for pure joy.
Whatever was throwed out, he never messed with it right there by the track. He as good as shut his eyes and run all the way home about three mile, before he’d let it enter his mind what he was toting.
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 whist
le 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?”