by Jan Karon
“Henry’s calling his doctor now, to work out an appointment for me. I need to leave Holly Springs day after tomorrow; I’ll head up to Memphis and try to see him on the way home.”
“Did Henry tell you what his doctor said today?”
“He didn’t mention it.”
“He says we have to hurry, Timothy, we have to hurry.”
He took her hand and held it. “Please understand that I can’t promise anything, Peggy.”
“Yes. I know.”
“You can trust me to do as God asks. Right now I’m too muddled even to hear his voice. Do you understand?”
“I do, I surely do.”
“Remember when I used to ask you to take your head rag off?”
Her sudden smile was balm to him. “You was th’ aggravatin’est little weasel,” she said.
“I’m going to aggravate you some more. Would you let me see what’s under there? Must be a pot of gold. Maybe the Holy Grail we’ve all been scrambling around to find.”
She reached up at once and slid the scarf off and bowed her head to him.
Two long, ropy scars intersected at the top of her head to form a perfect cross.
“Dear God,” he said, stunned.
“This longest one”—she ran her forefinger over it—“is where th’ woods rider got me for bringin’ Daddy a cup of water. An’ this one’s where th’ Devil himself got me th’ time you saved my life.
“But it’s all in th’ past,” she said, consoling him. “All in th’ past. It’s been a reminder all these years of th’ one who suffered for me.”
He stood and leaned over and kissed the cross on top of her head. Then he placed his hand upon it and prayed for her, wordless.
When he sat again, she slipped the red scarf into place and adjusted the knot in the back. Her eyes were radiant. “All th’ hurt an’ all th’ sorrow—even losin’ Jack an’ Sam—it’s all covered by th’ blood of Jesus.”
EIGHTEEN
Butter.
He was halfway to Whitefield when he remembered.
He pulled off the road, turned around, and drove back to town, realizing he couldn’t go to Whitefield, not yet.
At the convenience store, he bought bottled water and a pound of butter, and asked for a bag of ice. He dumped the butter into the bag and secured it with a twist tie. Then he drove west as if running late for an appointment.
Twelve miles out, he turned off the highway to the state road and followed it for two miles. Then he turned down a narrow road, now graveled, to the entrance of Indian Camp.
The cattle gate was closed. Only twenty minutes from the square, he had gone back in time fifty years. He got out of the car and walked along a rutted track to the gate and looked in.
The house was still there.
The top portion of the brick chimney lay scattered in the weeds, and the roof had caved in. Windowpanes were broken or missing. Porch timbers had sagged toward the middle and collapsed.
As wired as if he’d downed a blast of espresso, he unwound the rusted chain, swung one gate open, then shut it behind him and rewound the chain.
People were shot for less than this.
His eyes searched the ground for fresh manure. Unbelievable how some things never change. Right over there. And there and there. Just like when he was a kid.
Where there were cows, there was very likely a bull. He’d had a mild confrontation a few years back when he and Cynthia hied to the country for a picnic. While lolling about on a quilt, he’d spied a bull and urged her to run for cover, which she did. Looking the bull in the eye and with no cape to unfurl, he had stood his ground until she climbed over the fence. The bull had turned and lumbered off down the hill, which he had found both a vast relief and an insult.
He looked across to the trees, where the Chickasaw princess had convened her annual summer camp. He thought for a moment he heard the drums, but it was the beating of his heart.
“Grandpa,” he whispered. “I’m back.”
He gazed toward the big meadow, where he’d run after Grandpa told him the story of the cattle auction, and realized that, in his mind, he was running, now, flat out across the broad avenue of fescue cropped short by cattle. Yes.
He turned and sprinted back to the gate and opened it and went to the car and unlocked the trunk and raised the lid and peeled off his clothes. He laid his pants on the trunk floor as carefully as he could, and followed with his jacket and shirt; he would need this outfit for Memphis. Then he foraged for the running clothes he always kept in the car, and put on the pants and drew the string, and pulled the top over his head and, standing on one foot and then the other, shucked off his loafers, put on the socks, and stuck his feet in the frayed running shoes. He tossed the loafers in the trunk and shut the lid.
Closing the gate behind him, he broke into an easy lope—not thinking, just moving. He didn’t want to stop and stretch, he would let his gait be the warm-up. Though he had jogged and run for years since the diabetes diagnosis, he hadn’t moved his limbs in weeks; he was stiff as a cadaver.
He took it easy through the wide, rough yard and past the old cornfield. Then he picked up speed as the ground leveled out to the meadow and he was onto the plain of stubble and weeds and cow pads and bugs simmering in the July inferno of northern Mississippi.
The sweat was already pouring.
He’d been a distance runner at Holly High, practicing five days a week after school, and driving the eight-mile round-trip in his 1948 Chevy pickup. He’d been pretty fast in high school, but the real thing broke through at Sewanee. Given a great coach and a great team, his one-, two-, and three-mile runs all improved, but the two-mile had been his best. He’d concentrated on it—literally eating, sleeping, and dreaming it—and usually brought it off well under ten minutes.
College was when he began running for his father. One afternoon on the track, the idea slid into his consciousness like the moon appearing from behind a cloud: He would run as Matthew Kavanagh might have run if he weren’t handicapped—and he would win.
The faster he ran, the more he’d been able to love his father without the stain of pity, anger, or remorse. There were times when his heart nearly burst with a fierce love that compelled him, drove him, to be first at the finish line. On these runs which left him exhausted physically, but high as a kite emotionally, he called his father ‘Dad.’ Dad, Dad, Dad, Dad, Dad, he thought, in rhythm with the pounding of his feet on the track. Allowing himself to think this common appellation made him uneasy at first. As it grew more familiar, it also became another way of loving the man who demanded to be called ‘Father.’ Indeed, it became a term of endearment and even intimacy. By the end of his sophomore year, he was winning big time for his dad.
It was rough going across the fields of Indian Camp; he was drenched. He reached in his pocket and pulled out his sweatband and put it on as he spied the cow track to the spring.
His heart hammered as he switched to the smooth-worn track and picked up speed down the slope toward the spring.
There was a sense in which he was glad his father may have had a heart and soul, that his life had been more than bitterness and personal defeat. But it was also inconvenient to have his opinions altered—Emerson had remarked on that. Now he was charged to see his father as more than one-dimensional, perhaps even the man of feeling he’d proved to be the night they walked around the barn together. It was Christmas Eve…
He was scared to do it alone. Tommy thought he was nuts; no way was he slipping out of his house on Christmas Eve, he said, and stumbling around in the dark wearing a sheet.
But it was important to do this; he wanted to know how it felt to journey through the night, across the fields toward that bright star, to be one of the very first in the whole world to honor the Babe. When Matthew Kavanagh found his son sitting on the porch, tremulous and shivering in his shepherd getup, he hadn’t offered to make the journey with him, but had looked at him curiously and gone in the house.
Someh
ow, he summoned the courage to do it alone, even knowing that cows were supposed to talk on Christmas Eve. The big drawback to this scheme was, if he heard their two old cows talking in the barn, he would die.
He reached the barn and touched its silvery, unpainted wood. More stars had come out, and he chose an especially big one to follow. Then he heard footsteps.
He whirled around, his heart racing, and in the twilight saw the figure of his father.
His father walked with him, then, neither of them speaking. When he stumbled over a castaway bucket and instinctively flung out his hand, his father caught it in his own and held it tight, and in the cold and velveteen darkness they continued around the silent barn, toward the house in which every window gleamed with light…
The track was hammered smooth as iron, though muddy in places from the late rain. He leaped the puddles and kept moving, his breath short but regular.
The peace was beginning to flow in, if only a little.
Thank you, Lord, for this inkling of what I hoped you’d give me. It’s a mere drop, but as you showed Blake, there’s an ocean in the drop, and I take it as your assurance.
Forgive my hard heart toward my dad. Forgive me for convicting him when he was innocent. And please help me love him not less, but all the more in everything I’ve learned this day.
I’ve got a lot to download on your mercy and grace. I’ve always rushed up to you and dumped whatever it was and hurried away, fascinated by my own busyness. I want to turn all this over to you slowly, carefully, examining every fragment as I pass it off, so there’ll never be any question about it again. Every time I’ve dumped and run, I’ve nearly always run back and snatched it out of your hands. Help me in this. And please, Lord, supply wisdom and grace to Henry and Peggy, and to Cynthia and me in any uncertainty that lies ahead.
Right now, I’m absolutely certain of only one thing—that you love us, and that’s where we all have to begin.
He saw Henry sitting exhausted behind the steering wheel as they said goodbye at Frank’s place. ‘You shouldn’t have driven me,’ he told Henry. ‘It’s all right,’ said Henry. ‘I wanted us to have time together.’
When he, Timothy, was sixty years old, no dog the size of a sofa had yet come into his life, no thrown-away boy with a galaxy of freckles, no good-looking next-door neighbor with legs that set the Main Street Grill on its head. He had been an old bachelor mired in his books, his armchair, and the fray of his parish. And look what had happened—his whole life had been changed forever.
There was no way in which he deserved to become the husband, indeed the soul mate, of a remarkable woman, and yet God Almighty had set her down in the yellow house across the hedge from the rectory, and there it was—a joy to be chosen or refused. He had almost refused.
And Dooley. When Dooley came to live with him, there had been no thought of refusing, though at the time he was completely clueless about the extraordinary rewards that lay ahead.
In like manner, Henry Winchester’s best years might lie before him—if he was given the chance to choose.
There were the cows at rest in the deep shade of trees near the water, looking at him, curious.
He stopped in his tracks and crossed himself.
There were twenty or thirty of them, and no bull as far as he could see. Sunlight filtered through the canopy of trees, casting patterns onto the dark sheen of their hides and the surface of the water. He dropped to his haunches and gazed at them. It was among the loveliest sights he’d ever witnessed.
He leadeth me beside the still waters, he restoreth my soul.
For some time he listened to his heavy breathing and the strong, healthy pounding of his heart, then got up and walked back to the old house, mopping his face with the tail of his sweatshirt.
Indian Camp had stayed in the family well over a hundred years. At his grandfather’s death, it had passed to his mother, Aunt Lily, and Uncle Clarence. At his mother’s death, her share of the sale had come to him—a considerable sum for a young clergyman. He had held on to it as if it were his family personified in assets, and done a little investing with the help of a bishop who had a keen sense of those things.
After moving to Mitford, he’d given most of it to the Children’s Hospital in Wesley, and used it freely as his priestly discretionary fund. He had bought the rectory with it, and done his bit to help remodel the yellow house. If anything should be left of it at his death, well, then, his wife didn’t need it and neither did Dooley, so he’d leave it to the Children’s Hospital, which would help toward adding a room or two, and updating the aging equipment.
He stood awhile, looking at the rotted stump of the tree where the snake once crawled from the attic to bask on a limb; at the porch where they’d sat talking, moon after moon…
‘Can you see ’em comin’, son?’
‘Yes, sir!’
‘Comin’ in that big Buick town car, black as coal an’ twice as shiny? Buy a black car, I always say, th’ choice of presidents an’ statesmen, an’ a heap easier to keep clean. That’s your daddy drivin’ an’ your mother, your beautiful mother, she’s holdin’ little Timmy on her lap. A year old, I’d say, right at a year, an’ drivin’ up Salem Avenue to Grandma and Grandpa Howard’s house where th’ little chap was born. Now they’re pullin’ in th’ driveway an’ your grandma and me, we’re standin’ on th’ porch wavin’ to beat th’ band.’
‘Granpa?’
‘Yes, sir?’
‘Are we happy?’
‘Oh, yes. Yes, we are. We’re all happy…’
As he approached the gate, he realized what had really happened since he’d come home to Holly Springs:
His own bear had lumbered up to the wagon.
He closed the gate and secured the chain without looking back at Indian Camp.
“Lord,” he said, as he walked to the car, “you got to do this thing, amen.”
NINETEEN
“Hate to tell you this,” said Ray. “Ol’ Barnabas rolled in somethin’.”
“Where is he?”
“Took hisself off to th’ basement like a gentleman. There’s a drain in th’ floor down there an’ I hooked you up a hose. Smells like skunk to me.” Ray grinned. “Other’n that, he had a real good time.”
After an arduous bout of canine grooming, he took off the running clothes, which had their own wicked odor, and hosed himself down, as well.
When had he been so exhausted? No wonder people waited forty years to go home again.
He fed Barnabas, and fell across the bed in his clean shirt and jeans and slept like the dead until someone knocked on the door.
T looked quizzical. “You okay?”
He hesitated, trying to find the answer, but couldn’t.
“Supper’s right around th’ corner,” said T. “Let your belt out, Ray’s puttin’ on th’ dog.”
He had no idea how he could make it through supper. Everything he was feeling was on his face, hanging out there in plain view, not to mention that he still smelled of skunk.
In the hall bathroom, he scrubbed his hands again and went downstairs. “How’d it go today?” Jovial, upbeat, that was the ticket. He could get through this.
“Basement steps done,” said T, “gutterin’ around back went up, an’ fixed th’ porch screen where I busted it out with a ladder.”
“Had a good day,” said Ray. “Caught enough to freeze some. You hungry?”
“Could gnaw a table leg.”
He sensed their questions hanging in the air: How did your day go? Did you talk to Henry Winchester? What was that all about?
“I’m really sorry about the skunk odor,” he said. “Thanks for your patience with us ol’ North Carolina boys. I have a half brother.” Belly flop, but he was in the water.
“Oh, yeah?” said T. “You hadn’ said anything about a half brother.”
“Didn’t know about him ’til today.” For the first time, he connected the dots. He could have a half brother from his father or his mother. �
�My dad,” he said.
There was a thoughtful silence.
“You ought to have a beer,” said T.
“If it was me, I’d have two,” said Ray.
Supper passed in the kind of blur some people ascribe to their wedding ceremony. He said nothing more about what he’d learned, and they didn’t ask—he concentrated on the meal, which was outstanding. How could he ever repay these good men who’d been sent by the Almighty as surely as manna had been sent for the tribes? Grace can’t be repaid, his wife was known to remind him.
He cleaned up the kitchen as Ray left for a trip to the dentist and T walked over to his garage lab with Tater and Tot. Then, mildly sheepish about what he was doing, he went upstairs and collapsed on the bed and slept ’til nine o’clock, waking to the sound of a light rain.
What would they say in Mitford? He saw J. C. Hogan staring at him, mouth open—not a pretty sight. Mule would try to say the right thing, whatever that might be, and end up botching the job. Percy Mosely would think his new hearing aid had gone haywire, and, to put a fine point on it, the news would spread through town like a rogue fire.
Then again, why would anyone need to know?
He woke Barnabas from his sleep of contrition and, in the downstairs hall, snapped on the red leash.
But he’d never had a consuming secret, except for the brief time he’d stayed mum about his engagement to Cynthia. How did one contain so large and important a secret as the existence of a brother, black or white, half or otherwise?
One contained a consuming secret by denying its existence, of course—though as a priest, hadn’t he seen enough acts of denial to last him a lifetime?
But all anyone wanted were his stem cells. Nobody had mentioned phoning on Sundays or getting together at family reunions. If he gave Henry what Henry needed, well, then, they were done, it was over—why even imagine what might be thought or said in Mitford, where none of this would ever be known unless he himself made it known?