The Mitford Bedside Companion

by Jan Karon

  He was back from the dead, he was among the living, he was ready to do this thing.

  “How was it, darling?”

  “Terrific!” he said, kissing her. “Wonderful fellowship, great fellowship—fellows in a ship, get it?”

  “Got it. And the weather?”

  He shrugged. “A little rough, but not too bad.”

  “What’s for supper?” she asked, eyeing the cooler he was lugging.

  “Yellowfin tuna and dolphin! Let’s fire up the grill,” he said, trotting down the hall, “and I’ll tell you all about it!” By the time he hit the kitchen, he was whistling.

  She hurried after her husband, feeling pleased. He’d come home looking considerably thinner, definitely tanner, and clearly more relaxed. She’d known all along that buying him a chair with Captain Willie was a brilliant idea.

  A New Song, Ch. 13

  Tourist Season in Whitecap

  IN THE VILLAGE, merchants prepared for the wave of tourists that would wash over them only two or three weeks hence. They were eager to see an economy that had slowed to a trickle once again surge like the incoming tide: quite a few prices were discreetly raised and the annual flurry of stocking nearly empty shelves began.

  The dress shop reordered Whitecap T-shirts printed variously with images of the lighthouse, the historic one-room schoolhouse moved from the Toe to the village green, and the much-photographed St. John’s in the Grove; the grocery store manager decided to dramatically expand his usual volume of hush puppy mix, much favored by tourists renting units featuring a kitchen; and Whitecap Flix, the sixty-two-seat theater rehabbed from a bankrupt auto parts store and open from May 15 through October 1, voted to open with Babe, convinced it was old enough to bill as a classic. To demonstrate their confidence in the coming season, Flix scheduled a half-page ad to hit on May 15, and included a ten-percent-off coupon for people who could prove it was their birthday.

  Hearing of the advertising boom coursing through the business community, Mona elected to run a quarter-page menu once a month for three months, something she’d never done before in her entire career. Plus, she was changing her menu, which always thrilled a paltry few and made the rest hopping mad. She figured to put a damper on any complaints by offering a Friday night all-you-can-eat dinner special of fried catfish for $7.95, sure to pacify everybody. Due to space too small to cuss a cat, she had resisted all-you-can-eat deals ever since she opened in this location, since any all-you-can-eat, especially fried, was bad to back up a kitchen. All-you-can-eat was a two-edged sword, according to Ernie—who could not keep his trap shut about her business, no matter what—because while you could draw a crowd with it, in the end you were bound to lose money on it since people around here chowed down like mules. In the end, all-you-can-eat was what some outfits called a loss leader. Mona did not like the word loss, it was not in her vocabulary, but she would try the catfish and see how it worked, mainly to draw attention from the fact there was no liver and onions on her new menu, nor would there ever be again in her lifetime, not to mention skillet corn bread that crowded up the oven, cooked cabbage that smelled to high heaven, and pinto beans. Lord knows, she couldn’t do everything, this was not New York City, it was Whitecap, and though she’d been born and raised here, it was not where she cared to spend the rest of her life, she was investing money in a condo in Florida, even if Ernie had expressed the hope of retiring to Tennessee. Tennessee! The very thought gave her the shivers. All those log cabins, all those grizzlies stumbling around in the dark, plus moonshine out the kazoo…no way.

  Sometime in April, a sign appeared in the window of Ernie’s Books, Bait & Tackle:

  Buy Five Westerns

  Any Title, Get a

  Free Zane Grey or Louis L’Amour,

  Take Your Pick

  Hardly anyone going in and out of Mona’s had ever read Zane Grey, though several had heard of him, and a breakfast regular seemed to remember L’Amour as a prizefighter from Kansas City. Two days after the sign went up, a potato chip rep dropped a hundred and eighty-seven bucks on the special offer and posted Ernie’s phone number and address in a chat room devoted to the subject of Old West literature. In the space of eight working days, the book end of the business had blown the bait end in the ditch, and Ernie hired on a couple of high school kids to handle mail orders.

  Roanoke Clark was painting one of the big summerhouses, and had hired on a helper who, he was surprised to learn, stayed sober as a judge and worked like a horse. He pondered making this a permanent deal, if only for his partner’s nearly new pair of telescoping ladders, not to mention late-model Ford truck, an arrangement that would prevent the necessity of renting Chess Doyle’s rattletrap Chevy with a homemade flatbed, for which Chess dunned him a flat forty bucks a week.

  In the Toe, Bragg’s was busy pumping diesel and dispatching tons of gravel and cement to construction sites as far away as Williamston, not to mention an industrial park in Tyrrell County.

  At the north end of the small island shaped like a Christmas stocking, St. John’s in the Grove was at last divested of its scaffolding. The heavy equipment had vanished, the piles of scrap lumber and roofing had been hauled away, and the errant flapping of loose tarps was heard no more.

  Behind this effort had come a parishwide cleanup. Brooms, rakes, hoes, mattocks, and shovels were toted in, along with fresh nursery stock to replace what had been damaged in the general upheaval.

  During the windy, day-long workfest, someone discovered that the coreopsis was beginning to bloom, and Father Tim was heard to say that their little church looked ready to withstand another century with dignity and grace.

  A New Song, Ch. 22

  Father Tim and Cynthia Exchange Wedding Vows

  IN THE NINTH row of the epistle side, next to the stained-glass window of Christ carrying the lost lamb, Hope Winchester blushed to recall her once-ardent crush on Father Tim. She’d taken every precaution to make certain he knew nothing of it, and now it seemed idiotic to have felt that way about someone twice her age.

  She remembered the fluttering of her heart when he came into the bookstore, and all her hard work to learn special words that would intrigue him. She would never admit such a thing to another soul, but she believed herself to be the only person in Mitford who could converse on his level. When she’d learned about Cynthia months ago, she had forced herself to stop thinking such nonsense altogether, and was now truly happy that he and his neighbor had found each other. They seemed perfect together.

  Still, on occasion, she missed her old habit of looking for him to pass the shop window and wave, or stop in; and she missed pondering what book she might order that would please and surprise him.

  It wasn’t that she’d ever wanted to marry him, for heaven’s sake, or even be in love with him; it was just that he was so very kind and gentle and made her feel special. Plus he was a lot like herself, deep and sensitive, not to mention a lover of the romantic poets she’d adored since junior high. Early on, she had made it a point to read Wordsworth again, weeping over the Lucy poems, so she could quote passages and dig out morsels to attract his imagination.

  “Come in out of the fretful stir!” she once said as he popped through the door at Happy Endings.

  He had looked up and smiled. “Wordsworth!” he exclaimed, obviously pleased.

  How many people would recognize two little words among a poet’s thousands? She had felt positively thrilled.

  Opening her purse, she examined the contents for the Kleenex she’d stuffed in at the last minute. Though she thought it fatuous to cry at weddings, she deemed it wise to be prepared.

  In the fourth row of the epistle side, Gene Bolick wondered what on earth was going on. His watch said five-fifteen. He knew Richard well enough to know he was looking pale after hammering down on the organ all this time with nothing happening.

  He glanced again at the bishop’s wife, whose head was bowed. Was she praying that the father hadn’t chickened out at the last minute? Wouldn�
��t that be a corker if their priest was on a plane bound for the Azores? He didn’t know where the Azores were located, but figured it was a distance.

  Realizing his fists were clenched and his palms sweaty, he forced his attention to the three-layer orange marmalade cake sitting in the parish hall refrigerator, looking like a million bucks. He hoped to the Lord the temperature was set right and hadn’t accidentally been switched to extra cool, which had once frozen two hundred pimiento cheese sandwiches as hard as hockey pucks. He nudged Esther, who appeared to be sleeping under the brim of the hat she wore only to weddings and funerals.

  Esther was not sleeping, she was thinking, and ignored the nudge. Didn’t she deserve to sit and catch her breath until these people got their act together and got on with it? She was thinking that maybe she’d put in too much sugar, she knew Father Tim didn’t like too much sugar, but why, after all these years and hundreds of cakes later, did she still worry and fret over her work as if she’d never baked a cake in her life? The Expert is what some called her, but who could feel like an expert at something as willful and fickle as a cake, cakes having, as she’d always feared, a mind of their own? Use the same ingredients in the same amounts, time after time after time, and were her cakes ever the same? Not as far as she could see.

  She’d always depended on Gene to be the judge and he hadn’t failed her yet. Gene would take a taste of the batter and his eyes would wander around the room, as if that little taste had transported him on some round of roving thoughts and idle speculation. After a while, he’d come back to himself. “Best yet!” he might say, or, “Couldn’t be better!”

  Whatever he said, he would have reasoned it out, thought it through, and she could depend on the answer—which was more than most wives could say of their husbands. Now, you take Father Tim, his wife would be able to depend on him—the only question was, was she deserving of such a prize? She thought she was, she hoped she was; she was crazy about Cynthia, but hadn’t her senator husband, or was he a congressman, run around with other women? What did that mean? Cynthia didn’t look like a cold fish—the opposite, more like it.

  Anyway, didn’t their rector have enough sense to come in out of the rain and choose who he wanted to spend the rest of his life with? And in the last few months, hadn’t she and everybody else in the parish heard him laugh and joke like never before?

  Lord help, it must be virgin’s bower that was making her eyes burn and her sinuses drain. Virgin’s bower mixed with lilies, the bane of her existence, and nobody with the simple courtesy to remove the pollen from the anthers, which means it would be flying around in here like so much snuff, and her with no Sinu-Tabs in her pocketbook and too late to do anything about it.

  Pete Jamison made his way into the nave of Lord’s Chapel, where a robed and expectant choir overflowed from the narthex. Embarrassed at being late, he dodged through the throng to the rear wall and stood, reverent and shaken, feeling at once a stranger here and also oddly at home. He realized his breath was coming in shallow gasps, probably because he’d run more than a block from the Collar Button where he’d parked—or was it from the excitement he felt in being here for the first time since his life had been changed forever?

  Two rows from the front, on the gospel side, Miss Sadie sat holding hands with Louella, oblivious of the time and enjoying the music. She felt certain that the emotions stirring in her breast were those of any proud mother.

  After all, Father Tim wasn’t merely her priest, her brother in Christ, and one of the dearest friends of this life, he was also like a son. Who else would run up the hill after a hard rain and empty the soup kettle sitting brimful under the leak in her ceiling? And who else would sit for hours listening to her ramble, while appearing to be genuinely interested? God in His Providence had not seen fit to bless her with children, but He’d given her Olivia Harper and Timothy Kavanagh! And, since she’d helped raise Louella from a baby, she could almost count her pewmate as her child—Lord knows, she wasn’t but ten years old when she’d begun diapering and dressing that little dark baby as if it were her own!

  Miss Sadie wiped a tear with the handkerchief she had carefully chosen for the occasion, a lace-trimmed square of white Irish linen monogrammed with her mother’s initial, and turned and smiled proudly at Louella, who looked a perfect blossom in the lavender dress.

  Dooley Barlowe swallowed hard. It would have been fine if everything had started when it was supposed to, but here it was twenty minutes after five and who knew where Cynthia and Father Tim were, like maybe they both got scared and ran off, or had a fight and weren’t going through with it. He felt foolish sitting here in the front row, all of them tricked into waiting like a bunch of stupid goats, listening to organ music. He was about to die to go to the toilet, but if he tried now to make it to the parish hall, everybody would know where he was going.

  He crossed his legs and squeezed his eyes shut and jiggled his foot and went through the verses again.

  Reverend Absalom Greer had purposely followed Sadie Eleanor Baxter into the nave, though he tried to appear as if he had no idea she was anywhere around. He followed her so he could sit behind her and look at her again. Who knows when the Lord might call him Home and this would be his last chance on earth to see her face?

  The way it fell out was, he was the first to go into the pew behind her, which meant he had to sit all the way to the end, by the window of Jesus washing the disciples’ feet. He thought this location was a blessing from above, seeing as he could look at her in profile instead of at the little gray knot on the back of her head.

  Absalom felt such a stirring in his breast that he might have been fourteen years old, going up Hogback to see Annie Hawkins, carrying two shot quails and a mess of turnips in a poke. Annie’s mama was dead of pneumonia and her daddy not heard of since the Flood, and as Annie was left to raise a passel of brothers and sisters, he never went up Hogback without victuals; once he’d killed a deer and helped her skin it and jerk the meat.

  It had taken him three years to get over big-boned, sassy-mouthed Annie Hawkins, but he’d never gotten over Sadie Baxter. Sadie had filled his dreams, his waking hours, his prayers for many a year; he’d earnestly hoped she would forget Willard Porter and marry him. Finally, the burning hope had fizzled into a kind of faint glow that lay on his heart like embers, making him smile occasionally and nod his head and whisper her name. He’d confessed this lingering and soulful love only to the Almighty and never told another, though sometimes his sister, Lottie, suspicioned how he was feeling and derided him with a cool stare.

  Reverend Greer settled stiffly into the creaking pew and nodded to those around him and bowed his head and prayed for his dear brother in the Lord, Tim Kavanagh, as fine a man as God ever gave breath to, amen. When he lifted his head and looked at Sadie’s profile and the tender smile on her face, the tears sprang instantly to his eyes and he fetched the handkerchief from his pocket, the handkerchief Lottie had starched and ironed ’til it crackled like paper, and thanked the Lord Jesus that he still had eyes to see and tears to wipe, hallelujah.

  Pete Jamison, though six feet three, eased himself up on the balls of his feet so he could see down front to the gospel side. He found the pew where he sat the day he had wandered, alarmed and desperate, into the darkened church. It had been sometime around Thanksgiving and there was snow on the ground; he remembered noticing his incoming tracks as he left the church a different man, one to whom everything seemed fresh and new.

  He’d knelt that day and cried out to God, asking a simple question: Are you up there? He wasn’t trying to get anything from God, he wasn’t begging for money or success, though at the time he urgently needed both, he just wanted to know more desperately than he’d ever wanted to know anything in his life, if God was up there—no more ifs, ands, or buts, just yes or no. Now he knew the answer more completely than he could ever have hoped or imagined.

  He felt tears smart his eyes, and his heart expand. The music was beginning to enter him;
he was beginning to hear it over the pounding of his heart, and was glad to feel the joy of this time and place as if it might, in some small way, belong also to him.

  Standing outside the church door in the warm September afternoon, Katherine Kavanagh saw the bride and groom literally galloping down the street, and suppressed a shout of relief. She tugged on her skirt for the umpteenth time and tried to relax her tense shoulders so the jacket would fall below her waistline. In the desperate half hour she’d waited for Cynthia to show up, she had decided what to do. The minute she returned home, she was suing the airline, who had gotten away with their criminal behavior long enough.

  Though wanting very much to dash across the churchyard and meet Cynthia, she realized this impetuous behavior would cause her skirt to ride up. She stood, therefore, frozen as a mullet as she watched the bride sprinting into the home stretch.

  Next to the aisle on the epistle side, Emma Newland nearly jumped out of her seat as the organ cranked up to a mighty roar. The thirty-seven-voice ecumenical choir was at last processing in, sending a blast of energy through the congregation as if someone had fired a cannon.

  The congregation shot to its feet, joining the choir in singing hymn number 410 with great abandon and unmitigated relief:

  Praise my Soul the King of Heaven;

  To His feet thy tribute bring;

  Ransomed, healed, restored, forgiven,

  Evermore His praises sing;

  Alleluia, alleluia!

  Praise the everlasting King!

  Dooley Barlowe felt something happen to the top of his head. He had opened his mouth with the rest of the congregation and heard words flow out in a strong and steady voice he scarcely recognized as his own.

  Praise Him for His grace and favor;

  To His people in distress;

  Praise Him still the same as ever,

  Slow to chide and swift to bless.

  Alleluia, alleluia,