by Jan Karon
Even with these last weeks of working outdoors, her husband looked oddly pale when he arrived home from Mitford at eleven o’clock. Blanched would be the word.
He set the bags from the Local on the kitchen table and headed upstairs to their room.
She gave him a few minutes and went up. He was sitting at the foot of the bed in a kind of daze. ‘A call from Henry,’ he said. ‘I picked up our phone messages at the house. He’s coming our way.’
‘Henry!’ she said, astonished.
‘There’s a convention in Charlotte for some of the people he worked with on the trains. He was concerned that he hadn’t heard from us. Living at Meadowgate has been like entering another world, I somehow lost connection.’ He and Henry had written often; talked on the phone every week or so until he moved out to Meadowgate.
‘This is great news!’ she said. She had sat beside Henry’s hospital bed in Memphis, when no one knew whether he’d live or die.
‘He’ll drive over to Birmingham to see an old friend, then board the Crescent up to Charlotte. He just got word from his doctor that he’s good to go.’ In the voice mail, Henry sounded plenty excited. This would be his first train trip since the transplant.
‘He wants to see us. He wondered if we could come down to Charlotte, his treat at a nice hotel, he said. Or he can drive up to Mitford if that would be easier for us.’
He and Cynthia had talked through the possibility of a visit from Henry more than a few times. He had long ago known that he would introduce Henry not as his half brother, but as his brother. Period. After hosing his blood platelets into Henry’s seven years ago, how could they be anything but brothers?
Could he feel at ease introducing his brother to Mitford? Just as important, how would Henry feel? And so what if neither of them felt completely comfortable with the social aspect of things? Was life ever perfect?
‘I told him earlier that Dooley would be getting married,’ he said. ‘But I didn’t mention a date, so he has no idea what’s going on.’
‘When would he be able to see us?’
‘The thirteenth and fourteenth.’
She thought it was the perfect example of what southerners call a rock and a hard place. She sat beside him; they didn’t talk for a time.
‘When will you call him back?’
‘Soon. Right away.’
‘What are you thinking?’ she said.
‘He said it will be his last trip east.’
She was zooming along on his gift now, that’s the way it worked—good days and bad days, just like people always said of a particular illness or travail.
And then there was the knock on the door and no one downstairs to answer it.
Down the steps, all twenty-two, and through the living room to the door and there was the FedEx person named Harry and four dogs barking.
PERISHABLE
She went to the kitchen and opened the package, a nearly impossible task just shy of breaking into a vault at Fort Knox, and there were two enormous beef tenderloins. Huge!
Love eternal,
Beth and Mary Ellen
Their first potluck had arrived.
‘What are you worried about?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I can tell,’ said Dooley.
‘Well . . .’
‘Just . . . well?’
‘I don’t know,’ he said.
‘You sound like me.’
‘Henry.’ He removed his glasses, rubbed his eyes, breathed out. ‘Henry is coming this way for a convention in Charlotte and wants to know if . . .’
Lord help him. He despised his fear, so deeply, viscerally rooted that he could not gouge it out.
‘. . . if he can come for an overnight with Cynthia and me. The thirteenth and fourteenth. He didn’t know the wedding date, didn’t know we’re living out here.’ He wanted to fall down dead. Dead would be good.
But Dooley was ahead of him. ‘We’ll send Harley to bring him up.’ Dooley was smiling, beaming, really—what a God-given sight. ‘Henry can have Miss Sadie’s place at the table. She would like that and we would, too.’
Dooley put his arm around the man who had believed in him, suffered his rebellious crap, given him love he didn’t know existed.
‘I can’t say any more right now, Dad. But let me just tell you. We may all be in for a surprise at this wedding.’
His wife was winding down a tutorial before their nighttime prayers. Not to be missed in this life was a tutorial of any sort by Cynthia Coppersmith Kavanagh.
‘And you simply say, This is Henry Winchester, my brother.’
‘This is . . .’ He was relieved and happy, though the tears were coming and he couldn’t help it.
‘. . . Henry Winchester . . . my brother.’
To say it was a perfect late-spring day could suggest that others gone before were not. Indeed, they had all been perfect for a long stretch, with just the right amount of rain.
The barn doors were closed to keep roosting fowl from targeting the aisle. The stalls were mucked, and the loft filled with fescue from the recent mowing.
Though often offended by the nonchalance of dogs, the zinnias had prospered; the impatiens gave the barn a certain panache; and new grass was flourishing.
On Sunday afternoon, Hal and Marge came over for a tour around the premises, for Dooley’s deep-dish pizza, and Father Tim’s Evensong. Afterward they all hung out on the porch just to watch the grass grow.
For additional amusement, there were the chickens, recently released from their run and pecking about with something like glee. And the swallows darting and diving through the lambent air, devouring insects and furbishing elaborate mud nests under the eaves.
It was a joy, they conceded, to look upon such vernal satisfactions.
She was not a child anymore. Those coming to the wedding would be their guests, they would be kind enough to bring food; she had to prepare for them and make them comfortable. Forget rain—what if it was a really hot day and they were all broiling in the sun while the vows were being exchanged and think of Father Tim in his heavy brocaded special vestments. Or if they used the porch for the ceremony, then all the chairs would have to be taken off the porch to make room for dancing and the musicians, which would be a scramble.
‘We’re having a tent,’ she told Dooley. ‘For the ceremony.’
He would be disappointed that she was not the hard-nosed pioneer woman in a sunbonnet ready to skin a squirrel and boil up a stew.
‘Great!’ he said. ‘I’m for that.’
‘We’re having a tent!’ she told the household, who had obviously wanted a tent all along. Of course everybody wants a tent! What is a summer wedding in the country without a tent?
She felt ten feet tall.
They would put the tent up on Saturday and take it away on Monday.
‘You may want to order extra chairs,’ said Cynthia. ‘For the ceremony as well as for the barn supper. You never know. I mean, look at the marvelous surprise of Henry.’
‘I’m not sure,’ she said. Here they were splurging on a tent plus adding chairs.
‘These things happen, they say—extra people show up.’
Okay, extra chairs. ‘Six? Eight? How many? Does that mean an extra table? I mean, we’re already sticking out on either end of the shed.’
‘People will love sticking out on either end of your shed. You might order another table while you’re at it, and oh, say, fourteen chairs. Seven is my favorite number, so I would say seven for the barn and the same for the ceremony, or you could pick your favorite number. Just in case.’
Duh, she didn’t have a favorite number. So okay, fourteen.
She texted Beth.
What about overalls with a white t-shirt?
U do not want to do that.
She upended t
he buckets on plywood laid across sawhorses. She would spray-paint them a soft cream color instead; blue would detract from the sweet stardom of the Sisters.
‘Make sure no bulbs are burned out,’ she said. ‘Then we’ll go ahead and string the lights in the trees and bushes.’ While painting buckets she was also commandeering lighting for the trees and boxwood. She was a fan of multitasking.
‘Who’s gon’ climb up in th’ trees?’ said Willie.
Willie had arthritis and Harley was nursing a recent knee injury.
‘I will,’ she said. ‘Bring the extension ladder from the barn.’
‘Dooley ain’t gon’ like you climbin’ up in th’ trees,’ said Willie.
‘We need t’ git some young people in here,’ said Harley.
‘I am young people,’ she said.
He wheeled into the driveway from the barber up the road. Meadowgate had never looked so good. It had the shimmering perfection that usually comes only after rain, everything sharp, clear, clean. The grass, the sign, fresh gravel on the drive, green rockers on the front porch, the flag flying from the porch column, new paint on the clinic door . . .
How long it might take for him to see it as theirs, he didn’t know. In a way, it would always belong to Hal and Marge, who had been like parents to him. From no parents at all to three great sets of parents—it was beyond understanding.
His dad had put his heart and soul into the work done here in recent weeks. He had poured a lot of love into the place. Who knows how long love could last on a place? Maybe forever.
He wanted to be all that he needed to be—for Lace, for his patients, for his sibs, and certainly for—but he didn’t want to think about that now, the situation was still uncertain. Maybe he and Lace had relied too heavily on everything working out.
All the commotion, the busy household, was a good thing, but he hadn’t been prepared for it, he hadn’t trained for it. It had come suddenly and sometimes he felt overwhelmed, caught inside a wave. He’d been amped for a long time; actually, everybody he knew was amped. He would like to spend the rest of his life de-amping.
He took the keys out of the ignition and came awake to the sudden longing for the peace of her, the long future of sleeping together, skin to skin. They would wade in the creek and fish in the pond, telling each other the truth about themselves, and maybe in a couple of years, there would be llamas with their confiding eyes. He would be with her forever; not even death would separate them. He thought that bit in the ceremony about ‘until death do us part’ should be rethought.
He pulled down the visor and looked in the mirror. The barber had sheared sheep for a living for twenty-four years; now he had a bad back and was shearing people for ten bucks a head. Lace was not going to like this.
‘I can’t believe it,’ said Lace.
‘Skint,’ said Harley.
‘It’ll grow out,’ said Dooley.
As for their resident priest, Cynthia had eased up on him about haircuts. What was left of his hair in back was now growing over his collar and she liked it that way. Indeed, a curl or two had presented itself, possibly for the first time since childhood. The day before graduation when everybody got shorn on the porch, Cynthia had actually stood by Lily to make sure she didn’t cut off his curls.
Wonders never ceasing.
A new list going up by the back door . . .
He would take Cleaning Out the Hen Boxes, as the contents would be good for the grass, and opt for Weed-eating the Pet Cemetery on the twelfth, all the while working with Lace on their homemade wedding program.
He had thought things would slow to a simmer, but no. Six days before the day, and the pot was still boiling.
‘I’m running to town,’ he told Cynthia on Monday.
‘What for?’
He couldn’t find a reason in his rattled brain. ‘To, you know, just get out of here.’
‘I’ll ride with you,’ she said.
They were all coming down with the highly contagious Bride Hysteria.
‘I could have done it,’ said Dooley, looking at hundreds of tiny lights strung in their two old maples and the boxwood. ‘You should have let me do it.’
‘I loved being up there.’ She had peered into the window of the bedroom that would soon be theirs, and along the road to the Hershells’ place, and seen Truman trotting across the yard as if on a very important mission.
‘Great job,’ he said. ‘You’re amazing.’
‘Tonight after dinner, let’s turn them on, okay? A rehearsal. Just us.’
‘Deal,’ he said.
Sweep, sweep, sweep.
Her hands had developed calluses over the last weeks. Since she was going to be a farmwife, which she wanted with all her heart to be, she would need calluses.
She loved to sweep, it was an act of redemption. All the dead bugs, grass clippings, dog hair, you name it, off the porch and into the forgiving grass
Dooley’s palms, once ‘book soft,’ as he termed it, were also wearing in to rough work. When they held hands, she liked sharing this simple talisman.
Cynthia saw Lace moving toward the fence carrying a bucket, with Truman at her heels like a pup.
The window above their Mitford kitchen sink looked out to the hedge and the old rectory, which was never a bad view. Here she was served the shifting combination of sunlight and shadow over meadows animated by grazing cows. She had always liked the cow’s noble acceptance of circumstance. A cow seemed to be saying, That’s cool, I’m fine with that, whatever.
Lace appeared to be calling to someone. She moved to the right of the sink to see who it could be.
Choo-Choo.
At a gallop.
Good Lord, he looked ferocious chasing across the field at high speed. She knew a bull probably couldn’t hurdle a fence, yet she was tempted to raise the window and yell, ‘Stand back!’
And there he was; he’d covered the distance and reached the fence and Lace was stroking his enormous leathery nose.
Then Lace dipped her hand into the bucket and came forth with what must be the irresistible sweet feed, because a fourteen-hundred-pound Red Angus bull was eating out of her hand.
She was working with Father Tim on the wedding program, trying to make all the pieces come together and fit all the people into the right spots. As for Dooley’s wedding gift, she was taking anything she could get: Fifteen minutes. Ten minutes. The occasional hour. She could not stop and fix every minor disappointment; she had to keep moving and stay open to what she was getting right now, at this moment.
Thank you, thank you, thank you.
He would love it, she was loving it. It would be the best wedding gift she could possibly give him. Not cuff links, not new work boots, not an oiled jacket from Orvis or even seat covers for his truck. Just this. Just this one true river flowing directly from her heart . . .
Harley was silent for a time. Whatever was stuck in his throat, it was like swallerin’ down a golf ball.
‘It’s just two little lines on a piece of paper,’ she said. ‘Think of Sacagawea and what an amazing thing she did, and how you loved learning about Lewis and Clark and were so great with conquering arithmetic. Remember how happy it made you to jump over a wall of fear to learn new things.’
He wanted to bawl like a baby, but drew himself up like a man. He had never stood up in front of people and read anything out loud. If he didn’t love this young’un . . .
‘I’ll do it,’ he said.
She gave him a kiss on the forehead and a big smile and handed him a piece of paper with two lines typed on it.
He waited till she was out of the room before looking at it.
‘Make their life together a sign . . .’
‘Ten, nine, eight, seven . . .’
They counted down together as Harley waited to flip the switch at the light pole in the yard.
‘. . . four, three, two . . . lights!’
‘Wow,’ said Dooley. The skin prickled on the back of his neck. ‘Wow.’
‘Good night, Harley,’ she said.
‘Same t’ you ’uns.’
They sat on the top step of the front porch. A small breeze stirred, the lights glimmered. There was nothing to say for a while. She prayed, silent.
‘Would you like to do our secret vows tonight? Like now?’
‘Sure,’ he said. ‘Yes.’
They held hands, each silvered in light from the shining trees and half-moon.
‘I will never leave you,’ she said. She had been left by both parents, not physically—but mentally, emotionally, they had vanished before her eyes.
He was thoughtful about what she said, and grateful for the vow she had chosen. He took a deep breath and waited before giving his, though he’d thought it over carefully for days.
‘I will never harm you.’
A chorus of crickets, the sound of a nightjar . . .
‘I’ll love you even when I don’t like you.’ She knew there would be such times; they had survived more than a few.
‘And I’ll love you even when I don’t like you,’ he said, for it was worth repeating.
‘One more,’ she said, looking at him in the light of the trees. ‘I will love you always.’
If there was anything they hadn’t confessed over the years, anything that troubled them about the other, they couldn’t name it. He had a couple of buddies who hardly knew the women they were marrying. There was a time when he envied this—when he felt that he and Lace knew each other too well, where was the mystery? But he had passed through that phase and found that time made his love less tenuous, more certain. He had lived the last years of school in the cocoon of that kind of love. No longer did a brisk wind instill fear of a gale.
He figured that thirteen years of knowing each other could be divided into three categories. Three years of juvenile antagonism, followed by four years of fire and ice—a roller coaster that had flipped them both out. Then the last few years of falling into a new way of loving, a new way of doing things—yoked together, generally plowing the same furrow in the same field for the same reasons.