by Jan Karon
“Mama keeps it dark during the day. The heat.”
“Yes.”
“Please make yourself at home, Reverend. I’ll tell Mama you’re here.”
Bare floorboards, bleached with wear and scrubbing, gave light to the chiaroscuro of the enormous space. There seemed a holy calm over the commonplace things of the room—a dining table and chairs; a fireplace furnished with a vase of dried flowers; a bookcase heavy with books. An oscillating fan whirred and turned, soundless beneath the high ceiling.
On a table next to an upholstered chair, a lamp illumined a Bible and several framed photographs: a dark man with a mustache; Henry in a conductor’s uniform; Henry and a younger woman wearing a brooch on the lapel of her blue jacket; two young boys and a girl in school portraits.
Peggy—alive and well, and with a life other than any he’d ever imagined.
He tried to gather the explosion of feelings he’d experienced since leaving Mitford, tried to collect them into something focused and manageable, but he could not.
Lord. He found he couldn’t form words for prayer, but called on him all the same, as he’d always done when mute with grief or joy or wild speculation.
There was a whispering sound, and he turned and saw her, bent nearly double and aided by a cane, moving toward him in the dim light. It was her bare feet that whispered over the pine boards.
Her hand alighted in his, like the claw of a bird with bones so brittle they might shatter beneath his breath. There was a strong impulse to kneel, but he remained standing, awkward and tremulous, foraging for his handkerchief.
She looked up at him, into his eyes. The tall woman he’d known sixty years ago appeared as small as a child.
“I aks God to send you,” she said. Her voice was reedy, like the piping of a flute. “I knew he would.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Please come and sit,” she said.
She led him by the hand to the chair beside the table and the lighted lamp.
“May I help you?” He was a basket case.
“Oh, no. I’ve got my way of sittin’ down and gettin’ up.”
She lowered herself into the chair and stationed her cane against the arm. The osteoporosis had set her bones like the half portion of a paperclip. “You might take the footstool, most people do—pull it up close so I can get a good look at your face, the face I aks God to let me see again.”
He sat on the low stool and gazed at her, forgetting to breathe. Peggy.
A light kindled in her eyes. “I prayed for you all these years.”
“Yes, ma’am. Thank you.” He wouldn’t say that he’d stopped praying for her because, in his heart, she had died.
“I thank God for sending you, and I thank you for coming.” Tears coursed along her cheeks; she took a handkerchief from her dress pocket. “You’re han’some as can be.”
“Your eyes are playing tricks.”
“God have blessed me with second sight. You know what that is, second sight?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“I can see a chigger crawlin’ on a blackberry. But he didn’t leave a hair on this ol’ noggin, I’m bald as a hen egg.” She laid her hand for a moment on her red head scarf. “How is your health?”
“Good,” he said, skipping the canned response about diabetes. “Can’t complain.”
“You don’t look a bit like your Gran’pa Kavanagh. Some say you did as a boy, but now you look like your ownself.”
“Do you mean it?”
“I do mean it.” She made the slightest movement with her hand, as if to touch him, but did not. Even so, he felt the sensation of her fingertips on his cheek.
“You do got your mama’s pretty eyes.” She squinted at him. “An’ your Gran’pa Yancey’s mouth. Best thing is, you got your Gran’pa Yancey’s ways.”
It was a gift to believe her.
“I hope you’ll excuse my bare feet, an’ forgive me for treatin’ you like family. If Brother Grant knew I was entertainin’ a man of God barefooted, he’d be scandalized. I can’t bear th’ weight of shoes on my feet ’less I’m in church.”
“It’s good to be treated like family.”
“Reverend.” Henry’s quiet baritone sounded from across the room. “Will you have a glass of lemonade? Homemade this morning.”
“I’d like that. Many thanks.” He shouldn’t follow Frank’s blackberry pie with another blast of sugar, but he wouldn’t mention his diabetes if his life depended on it; he was sick of the very word.
“Be right up,” said Henry.
“Henry is a gentleman.”
“Yes, ma’am.” He was reminded that he’d never before said ma’am to Peggy; in his day, white children didn’t do that, it was the code.
“He’s educated, and he’s mingled with educated people.” She turned to the table and picked up the photograph of the dark man with the mustache.
“This was my husband, Dr. Packard Winchester. He was principal of a school for colored up in Memphis. He read all those books there, and more, to boot. He helped me learn things I’d always hungered to know. Packard Winchester was a wonderful husband, a devoted educator, and a fine father. We lost him way too soon.”
He took the framed photograph and gazed at it a moment. Kind. Benevolent. “He was good to you,” he said.
“Oh, yes. He was my angel from heaven, I miss him every day. And that’s our daughter, Sister, there with Henry. Sister has a beauty shop right down th’ road, and does real well; she raised three lovely children out of th’ beauty shop business, and has four grans. Sister helps Henry look after me.”
“Doesn’t look like you need much looking after.”
She chuckled. “Sister claims I run ’em ragged.” She touched her forehead. “I’m a little dizzy today, I didn’t sleep good last night.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Old age. And talkin’ to th’ Lord about this visit.”
“I didn’t know what to make of the note you sent me. But something powerful drew me here.”
“I prayed night an’ day on what to do, and th’ Lord finally directed me to write and aks you to come. He told me clear as a bell what to say and Henry wrote it down. Henry said, ‘Mama, seem like you ought to say more.’ But when we tried to say more, it was too much. So we wrote what the Lord said write.”
“How did you know where I was?”
“Henry found your name and address in a library book. It had a red cover and listed clergy.”
“How did you know I was clergy?”
“I guess I knew it in my heart. First we tried to find you in th’ Baptists, then we looked in th’ Episcopalians. I expected you’d gone one way or th’ other.”
“Why did you want me to come?”
“I’m gon’ tell you everything. Night might pass and I won’t be finished tellin’ you everything. Are you in a hurry?”
“I’m not in a hurry.”
“That’s good. People nowadays are always in a hurry.”
“Yes, ma’am. Would you tell me why you didn’t sign the note or say how to reach you?”
“I didn’t treat you and your fam’ly right. I thought if you knew who wanted you to come, you wouldn’t come. I hope you won’t be sorry for comin’.”
“Why would I be sorry?”
“I aks th’ Lord whether to tell the truth, or let things go on like they been going on.”
“He gave truth the go-ahead.”
“Yes. The go-ahead.”
Her eyes had no dim cloud of age; he recognized Peggy Lambert in her eyes.
“I want to ask your forgiveness for how I left you without sayin’ goodbye. You meant the world to me. I guess you couldn’t know it from how I acted, but you were like my own. An’ look how you saved my life that bad day. I thank you again.”
“It was the grace of God,” he said. “I didn’t know what I was doing.”
“You was the smartest little somebody I ever saw. I remember how you read your schoolbooks to me, hard as yo
u could go, like learning was a nail you could drive in my hard head.
“Your mother helped me in more ways than I could ever say, but it was you who gave me the notion to get an actual education. What I got wasn’t all I needed, but I can read nearly every word in the King James, an’ spell Deuteronomy slick as grease.”
Thank God for laughter; some pressure went off his chest.
“But the thing that cut the deepest,” she said, “is that I left your mother without a word. There was nothing else I could do. I want you to know how sorry I was and still am, about leaving her.”
“I wanted to find you,” he said, “as much for her as for myself. I looked for you everywhere, and worried for years about what had happened. And of course you’re forgiven. Absolutely. Please know that.”
“I thank you.” She was silent for a time, then said, “Did she suffer at the end?”
“She passed very peacefully. I was with her.”
“Have you been back to the old place?”
“Yes, ma’am. I stayed there last night. In my old room.”
“You don’t mean it.”
“I do.”
“All her pretty gardens? They gone?”
“All gone.”
Peggy rested her head in her hands. She wore a slender gold band on her left hand.
“I visited Rosie yesterday,” he said. “We remembered you.”
She looked up. “Rosie Ponder? His people were good people. Has th’ Lord given you a wife?”
“Yes, ma’am. He kept me an old bachelor ’til I was sixty-two, and then…” He dug out his wallet and flipped it open. “Here’s what happened.”
He held the wallet out to her; she studied the image closely. “Great day! That is a beautiful woman.”
“Her name is Cynthia. She writes books for children.”
“Books! Packard would have loved to meet her.”
“In heaven,” he said.
“Yes! That’s right.”
“And this is my son.”
“A han’some boy. Han’some. But I don’t see any of your people in his looks.”
“Adopted. Just a few months ago. I raised him from the age of eleven.”
“Eleven.”
That’s how old I was when you left, he nearly said.
“I’m glad you have family—someone to love you, an’ even mo’ better, someone to love. You always had the most love in you.”
“When you went away, I thought something terrible might have happened with Cole Jenkins.”
“Cole Jenkins! Law help, I hadn’t thought about that ol’ darky in years. No, nothin’ like that.”
“Reverend.”
Henry had come into the room without a sound, and stood by the footstool. Two tall glasses of lemonade on a silver tray. Two white, starched napkins.
“Thank you,” he said. He took a perspiring glass and a napkin and passed them to Peggy, then took the other glass for his own. “I’d appreciate it if you’d call me Tim.”
Henry looked doubtful. “I don’t believe I ever called a clergyman by his first name.”
“If you practice,” he said, “it gets easier.”
A dark half-moon of perspiration stained the underarms of Henry’s jacket.
“I hope that means you’ll drop th’ Mr. Winchester.”
“Starting now. Henry.”
“Y’all gettin’ sociable,” said Peggy. “Makes th’ lemonade mo’ sweeter.”
Cold. And so heavy with sugar it made his molars ache. The ice clinked in the glass; it was the lemonade of his postwar boyhood. “Boy howdy. Who made this?”
“Henry made it. He can do most anything. Henry was a member of th’ Brotherhood of Sleepin’ Car Porters, he knows how to treat people. He was Employee of the Year two times runnin’.”
“Mama likes to remember me as a porter,” Henry said with obvious affection, “though the brotherhood merged with a larger union soon after I became a member. I went on to serve as a conductor for thirty-two years.”
“Henry, Reverend Kavanagh says he’s not in a hurry. Why don’t you get a glass of lemonade and sit with us a little bit?”
“No, ma’am, I don’t care for lemonade just now. I’ll just stand a minute.”
He could see the anxiety in Henry’s face, as if he’d aged, somehow, since Frank’s parking lot. Even in the dim light, he noticed the bruises again.
“Henry worked on th’ City of New Orleans. Mr. Arlo Guthrie put out a song about that train, it runs from Chicago all the way to the city it’s named after. There’s a northbound and a southbound, Henry worked northbound.”
Henry nodded. “A nine-hundred-and-twenty-six-mile run.”
“It’s a beautiful train. Henry and Sister took me on it for my eightieth. We ate Dover sole from china plates on a white tablecloth, an’ the dinin’ car people sang ‘Happy Birthday.’ They had movies on that train.”
“Mr. Elvis Presley rode with us now and again,” said Henry. “We once served him a barbecue sandwich for breakfast, he took it chopped. He ate it mighty fast and ordered two more; we gave him the fourth one on the house. Said it was the best barbecue he ever tasted, but said, don’t quote that around Memphis, they’d run him out on a rail.”
“Left Henry a hundred-dollar bill.”
Henry looked uneasy. “I’d best be getting back to…I’m just baking a pie for…later. When…that is, if you’ll have a piece.” He hurried from the room.
“Henry writes poetry,” said Peggy.
“Poetry!”
“He can do most anything, Reverend.”
“I believe it. Will you stop calling me Reverend?”
“It might be hard callin’ you Tim, it doesn’t seem right.”
“Timothy, then! That’s what God calls me. You can’t do better than that.”
Her laughter was reedy, girlish.
“How were you going to know when I showed up in Holly Springs?”
“I speculated you’d go directly to Booker’s. Somebody named Willie was Henry’s lookout at Booker’s, but before Henry heard from Willie that you’d come, Henry heard it at Frank’s. Henry came home yesterday and we talked, and he wrote the note and took it to Frank.”
“Only God could put that plan together.”
“It was all prayed about, every jot and every tittle. I wish everybody could understand what a powerful thing prayer is.” She was thoughtful for a moment. “There’s some that believe in him but don’t believe in prayer, did you know that?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Peggy sat forward in the chair and put her head in her hands.
The fan whirred to the left, then to the right, and back again. A deep tremor coursed through his body, and was spent as quickly as it had come. Something heavy had entered the room; he had no idea where this journey was headed.
She raised her head and looked at him.
“We’re goin’ to talk now,” she said.
FIFTEEN
“Back in the ol’ days, there was a question you always aks me—where was Peggy born, where did Peggy come from? You remember that?”
“I remember.”
“I was born in a turpentine camp close by Middleton, Georgia. Do you know what that is, a turpentine camp?”
“I don’t.”
“They gone with th’ wind now, thank th’ Lord in his mercy.” Something passed over her features like the shadow of a bird flying across water. “It was a camp way back in th’ piney woods. We called ’em th’ turpentine woods, where thirty or forty or maybe sixty people lived in rows of little jackleg shacks all spring an’ summer, an’ sometimes right through th’ year.
“I was my young mama’s first child, with four to come—Sam, Lona, Minnie, an’ sweet baby Jack. When I was seven years old, they put me to mindin’ babies. Cookin’, cleanin’, washin’, I did all that like a grown-up, so my mama could go weed boxes.
“When I was eight or so, they put me out in th’ trees rakin’ pine. I mostly worked with my little brother S
am. He was what they call retarded, but he kep’ up, bless his soul, he kep’ up. What I did, Sam did in behind me ’til he got it straight in his head.
“I learned to use a boxin’ axe to cut a box on th’ tree, down near the ground. Th’ sap would run in the box, up to a quart or more, an’ that was what we called dip turpentine; it was put in barrels and hauled to market. All durin’ the spring and summer when the sap was runnin’, some of it would catch on the face of a boxed tree where we’d scraped it. That caught sap would harden up and flake, so scrapers would go in durin’ the cold months, the off season, and gather it up in boxes and pack it in barrels and off it would go. They didn’ waste a thing, they even worked gum out of dead wood lyin’ on th’ ground.”
Peggy rested her elbows on her knees and bowed her head into her hands.
“There was a lot to workin’ th’ trees. Some camps had stills set up to cook gum, an’ kilns to make tar, my daddy ran a tar kiln. He also dipped when he could, he could dip up to two barrels a day, better than any man in camp. But whatever we did, it was hard labor six days a week, sunup to sundown, an’ all for such a mite of pay you could barely feed yourself.”
“What happened if you got sick?”
“If we got sick, we doctored ourselves. Sometimes with turpentine, but you had to be careful how you used it. Mama drank it now an’ again to kill parasites in her intestines—I was a grown woman before I learned that drinkin’ it can kill you.
“Course, it was real good for cuts, we all used it for cuts an’ scrapes. I remember a man named Toby, he was gamblin’ for a pack of Camel cigarettes—a fight broke out an’ somebody cut him eighteen times with a razor, they were bad cuts. He was a good worker, so they were goin’ to take him to a doctor over in th’ county, but he was scared of doctors, so he said, ‘Bring th’ turpentine an’ pour it on me.’ He was back in th’ trees in no time, that’s th’ gospel truth.
“Another thing you could do—if you had a sore throat or somethin’ bad goin’ on in your lungs, you could fry off some fatback an’ mix th’ grease with turpentine an’ rub it on your chest. Or you could rub it on plain to get rid of lice. Th’ camps were a bad place for lice and bedbugs—an’ a whole lot of other things there’s no use to talk about. But I’m goin’ on too long.”