At Home in Mitford

by Jan Karon

  For God is not the author of confusion, but of peace, he reminded himself more than once, as Paul had reminded Corinth. Confusion was ungodly, the hour was ungodly, and Barnabas had lately begun to snore in an alternate bass and baritone.

  He would drift off to sleep again, only to wake and look at the clock. Andrew Gregory, the very soul of graciousness, a lover of rare books—of Wordsworth, for heaven’s sake? No, not Andrew. Never.

  On Saturday, after Dooley went to Meadowgate for the weekend, he turned off the telephone and lay down on the study sofa where he slept for ten hours under the crocheted afghan Winnie had given him for Christmas. He was awakened by barking in the garage and was bewildered to see that it was nighttime.

  After taking Barnabas to the hedge and feeding him, he lay down again in the study, exhausted, and waited for the eleven o’clock news.

  He should have visited Russell Jacks today, gone to see Olivia, bathed Barnabas, cleaned up the garage, vacuumed his car, shined his shoes, bundled up the newspapers for recycling. How very odd, he thought, to have slept through an entire day, something he couldn’t remember ever doing before. He felt strangely disoriented and feebly guilty, and for a moment could not remember the crux of his sermon for tomorrow.

  At a quarter of eleven, the phone rang.

  "Father,” said Hoppy Harper, “Olivia is in trouble.”

  At Olivia’s home on Lilac Road, Hoppy opened the door. “You’re not going to like this,” he said.

  “What won’t I like?”

  “The way she looks. You’ll be . . .”

  “Shocked?”

  “Very likely.”

  “I’ve been shocked before, my friend.”

  Hoppy ran his fingers through his disheveled hair. “I’ve talked to Leo Baldwin. Last week, I took a risk and put her on the national waiting list. She doesn’t know I did that.”

  “Good! The nick of time,” he said, observing his friend’s anguished look. As they walked down the hall, he laid his hand on Hoppy’s shoulder. “Whatever we do, let’s remember who’s in control here.”

  Olivia’s housekeeper, Mrs. Kershaw, stood outside the bedroom door, wiping her red eyes with a handkerchief and lustily blowing her nose.

  As they went into Olivia’s bedroom, he saw only a large, high-ceilinged room with softly colored walls and a deep carpet. Silk draperies began at the ceiling and cascaded to the floor. Lamps glowed here and there in the room, creating pools of warm light. Even in view of the circumstances, he sensed that he’d stepped into a treasury of calm and peace.

  “Hello . . . Father,” a voice said, breathlessly. He turned and saw Olivia in a silk dressing gown, sitting in a chair. Tears sprang at once to his eyes, and he was glad for the dimness of the light. For all his priestly experience with sorrow and with shock, nothing had prepared him for this.

  “Father . . . ,” she said, lifting her hand slightly from her lap. She was so swollen that he wouldn’t have recognized her. And her alabaster skin, always such a stunning foil for her violet eyes, was an alarming shade of yellow. He called upon every professional strategy he knew to appear composed.

  “Olivia,” he said, simply, taking her hand. He didn’t recognize his own voice.

  “Shock . . . ing,” she said, gasping for the breath to say it.

  He looked at her feet, which were propped on a footstool. They were more than twice their normal size. He couldn’t help but notice that a pair of bedroom slippers beside the footstool looked foolishly small.

  “It’s the congestion,” Hoppy said. “It’s backing up from around her heart and enlarging the liver. I’m putting her in intensive care for a couple of weeks, using some IV drugs to move the fluid around. Mrs. Kershaw, have you packed her things?”

  Mrs. Kershaw was now weeping openly, without the formality of a handkerchief. She picked up the blue suitcase standing by the bedroom door and carried it into the foyer.

  Olivia’s desperate struggle for breath created the most agonizing sound the rector had heard since his mother’s harsh illness.

  He dropped to his knees by her feet and, taking her hands in his, began to pray.

  “Socks,” Hoppy said. “Is there a pair of socks she can wear?”

  “Socks?” asked Mrs. Kershaw with dignity. “Miss Olivia does not wear socks!”

  Mrs. Kershaw tenderly wrapped her mistress’s feet in scarves and took a dark mink coat from the closet, as insulation against the night air.

  Hoppy bent over and put one arm behind Olivia’s shoulders and another under her knees. Carefully, he picked her up from the chair. “She can’t lie down in the ambulance because of her breathing, and there’s nothing they can do for her. We’ll take her in my car.”

  It was precisely midnight when the doors swung open to the emergency hall and Hoppy carried his patient inside.

  The doctor came swiftly along the corridor, carrying a woman wrapped in scarves and fur, whose dark, unbound hair swept over his arm like a mantilla.

  “Get the drips started,” he said to a nurse, who was wheeling a stretcher toward them. “Oxygen. EKG. The works.”

  As he laid her on the stretcher with pillows under her head, Olivia looked at the rector. She was fighting for air like a fish stranded on the beach. “Philipp . . . ians four . . . thirteen, for . . . Pete’s sake,” she said, and smiled.

  “Hook her up,” said the doctor.

  “How did she get so . . . stricken?” the rector asked, as they stood outside Olivia’s room in the intensive care unit. “I knew she wasn’t feeling her best, but she assured me it was nothing. I saw her only days ago.”

  “It flares up without warning, and she couldn’t face that it was happening. She’s been well-compensated for several months, and she let herself believe . . . the unbelievable. When the relapse came, she let it go too long. Mrs. Kershaw was under strict orders not to call me.”

  “What next?”

  “God knows. She could arrest at any time.”

  “What does that mean exactly?”

  “She could die.” Hoppy snapped his fingers. “Just like that.”

  “I see.”

  “Pray for me when I tell her I’ve put her on the list.”

  “That prayer may already be answered. She’s been considering that but didn’t want you to know until she came to a firm decision. Where do we go from here?”

  “I’ll keep her a couple of weeks, at least, then we can let her go home . . . if all goes well.”

  “It will go well,” Father Tim said, with unusual conviction.

  Hoppy took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “You need to know that a third of the patients on the waiting list will die while waiting.”

  “That means,” the rector replied, evenly, “that two-thirds of them will not die while waiting.”

  Hoppy looked at him for a long moment. “You’re a good guy,” he said.

  When he arrived home at two o’clock, after looking in on Russell Jacks, he hurried to Dooley’s room to see if he was sleeping soundly, then remembered the boy was at Meadowgate.

  He sat on the side of his bed in a daze until nearly two-thirty, when he finally undressed and lay down, taking care to set the alarm for five.

  He was surprised and dismayed that he did something he hadn’t done since childhood:

  He wept until he fell asleep.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  The Finest Sermon

  On Sunday morning, he made entries in the loose-leaf book provided for prayers of the people. Under prayers for the sick, he wrote the names of Olivia Davenport and Russell Jacks, Miss Sadie who had a sore throat, Rebecca Jane who had colic, Harold Newland who had cut his hand on a saw blade, the Baptist kindergarten who was having a measles epidemic, and Dooley Barlowe who had come home from Meadowgate this morning with a fever.

  Lord, he had prayed on the way to the church at seven o’clock, keep that boy in bed and out of mischief.

  While he ordinarily trained his eyes on Miss Sadie’s painting at the rear
of the nave, he allowed himself a quick search of the congregation. Hal, with his pipe sticking out of his jacket pocket. Emma in a leopard-skin hat. Louella with Esther Bolick. And yes, there was his neighbor, sitting on the gospel side, looking happy and expectant.

  As he offered the prayer before the sermon, he heard a harsh, grating noise somewhere behind him in the sanctuary. When the prayer ended, he saw the entire congregation sitting with open mouths and astonished faces, gazing toward the ceiling.

  It was, perhaps, his dysfunctional sleep pattern that caused such an odd storm of feeling. He turned around with a pounding heart, to see that the attic stairs had been let down and that someone in bare feet was descending.

  He heard a single intake of breath from the congregation, a communal gasp. As the man reached the floor and stood beside the altar, he turned and gazed out at them.

  He was tall and very thin, with a reddish beard and shoulder-length hair. His clothing fit loosely, as if it had been bought for someone else.

  Yet, the single most remarkable thing about the incident, the rector would later say, wasn’t the circumstances of the man’s sudden appearance, but the unmistakable radiance of his face.

  Hal Owen stood frozen by his pew on the epistle side.

  “I have a confession to make to you,” the man said to the congregation in a voice so clear, it seemed to lift weightlessly toward the rafters. He looked at the rector, “If you’d give me the privilege, Father.”

  As Hal Owen looked to the pulpit, Father Tim raised his hand. Let him speak, the signal said.

  The man walked out in front of the communion rail and stood on the steps. “My name,” he said, “is George Gaynor. For the last several months, your church has been my home—and my prison. You see, I’ve been living behind the death bell in your attic.”

  There was a perfect silence in the nave.

  “Until recently, this was profoundly symbolic of my life, for it was, in fact . . . a life of death.

  “When I was a kid, I went to a church like this. An Episcopal church in Vermont where my uncle was the rector. I even thought about becoming a priest, but I learned the money was terrible. And, you see, I liked money. My father and mother liked money.

  “We gave a lot of it to the church. We added a wing, we put on a shake roof, we gave the rector a Cadillac.

  “It took a while to figure out what my uncle and my father were doing. My father would give thousands to the church and write it off, my uncle would keep a percentage and put the remainder in my father’s Swiss bank account. Six hundred thousand dollars flowed through the alms basin into my uncle’s cassock.

  “When I was twelve, I began carrying on the family tradition.

  “The first thing I stole was a skateboard. Later, I stole a car, and I had no regrets. My father knew everybody from the police chief to the governor. I was covered, right down the line.

  “I went to the university and did pretty well. For me, getting knowledge was like getting money, getting things. It made me strong, it made me powerful. I got a Ph.D. in economics, and when I was thirty-three, I had tenure at one of the best colleges in the country.

  “Then, I was in a plane crash. It was a small plane that belonged to a friend. I lay in the wreckage with the pilot who was killed instantly, and my mother and father, who would die . . . hours later. I was pinned in the cockpit in freezing temperatures for three days, unable to move.”

  George Gaynor paused and cleared his throat. He waited for a long moment before he continued.

  “Both legs were broken, my skull was fractured, the radio was demolished. Maybe you can guess what I did—I made a deal with God.

  “Get me out of here, I said, and I’ll clean up my act, I’ll make up for what my father, my uncle, all of us, had done.

  “Last summer, a friend of mine, an antique dealer, had too much to drink. He took me to his warehouse and pulled an eighteenth-century table out of the corner, and unscrewed one of its legs.”

  Father Tim’s heart pounded dully. He could feel it beating in his temples.

  “What he pulled out of that table leg was roughly two and a half million dollars’ worth of rare gems, which were stolen from a museum in England, in the Berkshires.

  “I’d just gotten a divorce after two years of marriage, and I’d forgotten any deal I’d made with God in the cockpit of that Cessna.

  “The bottom line was that nothing mattered to me anymore.”

  George Gaynor sat down on the top step leading to the communion rail. He might have been talking to a few intimate friends in his home.

  “I discovered that thinking about the jewels mattered a great deal. I was consumed with the thought of having them, and more like them.

  “The British authorities had gotten wind of the stuff going out of England in shipments of antiques, and my friend couldn’t fence the jewels because of the FBI.

  “One night, I emptied a ninety-dollar bottle of cognac into him. He told me he had hidden the jewels in one of his antique cars. I stole his keys and went to his warehouse with a hex-head wrench. I lay down under a 1937 Packard and removed the oil pan and took the jewels home in a bag.

  “I packed a few things, then I walked out on the street and stole a car. I changed the tag and started driving. I headed south.”

  He paused and looked down. He looked down for a long time. A child whimpered in the back row.

  He stood again, his hands in the pockets of the loose, brown trousers. “I hadn’t spoken to God in years. To tell the truth, I’d never really spoken to God but once in my life. Yet, I remembered some of the language from the prayer book.

  “ ‘Bless the Lord who forgiveth all our sins. His mercy endureth forever.’ That’s what came to me as I drove. I pulled off the road at a rest stop and put my head down on the steering wheel and prayed for mercy and forgiveness.

  “I’d like to tell you that a great peace came over me, but I can’t tell you that. I just started the car and drove on.

  “There was no peace, but there was direction. I began to have a sense of where I was going, like I was attached to a fishing line and somebody at the other end was reeling me in.

  “I stopped and bought a box of canned goods and crackers . . . candy bars, Gatorade, beef jerky, so I wouldn’t have to stop so often to eat and risk being seen.

  “One morning about two, I hit the Blue Ridge Parkway and stayed on it until I saw an exit sign that said Mitford. I took the exit and drove straight up Main Street, and saw this church.”

  His voice broke.

  “I felt I’d . . . come home. I had never felt that before in my life. I couldn’t have resisted the pull God put on me, even if I’d tried. I broke the side door lock, Father.”

  The rector nodded.

  George wiped his eyes with the sleeve of his shirt.

  “I brought my things in . . . a change of clothes, a flashlight, a blanket, and my box from 7-Eleven. Then I parked the car several blocks away and removed the tag. No one was on the street. I walked back here and started looking for . . . a place to rest, to hide for a few days.”

  George Gaynor moved to the lectern and gestured toward the attic stairs. “I’ve got to tell you, that’s a strange place to put stairs.”

  Welcoming the relief, the congregation laughed. The placement of the stairs had been a parish joke for years.

  “That’s how I came to live behind the death bell, on the platform where it’s mounted. I didn’t have any idea why I was in this particular place, as if I’d been ordered to come. But just before Thanksgiving, I found out.

  “I kept my things behind the bell, where they couldn’t be seen. But I put the jewels in an urn in your hall closet. The closet looked unused, I figured nobody went in there, and I didn’t want them on me, in case I was discovered.

  “During the day, I lived in the loft over the parish hall. I exercised, sat in the sun by the windows— I even learned a few hymns, to keep my mind occupied. On Sunday, I could hear every word and every note very cle
arly, as if we were all sitting in the same room.

  “At night, I roamed downstairs, used the toilet, looked in the refrigerator, found the food supplies in the basement. And I always wore gloves. Just in case.

  “One day in December, my shoes fell off the platform and landed at the bottom of the bell tower.” Grinning, he looked at his feet, then at the congregation. “Every time a box came in for the rummage sale, I was downstairs with my flashlight. But I’ve yet to find a pair of size elevens.”

  A murmur of laughter ran through the congregation. Hal Owen continued to stand by his pew, watching, cautious.

  “One afternoon, I was sitting in the loft, desperate beyond anything I’d ever known. It made no sense to be here when I could have been in France or South America. But I couldn’t leave this place. I was powerless to leave.

  “I heard the front door open, and in a few minutes, a man yelled, ‘Are you up there?’

  “I was paralyzed with fear. This is it, I thought. Then, the call came again. But this time, I knew the question wasn’t directed to me. It was directed to God.

  “There was something in the voice that I recognized—the same desperation of my own soul. I told you the sound from down here carries up there, and I heard you, Father, speak to that man.

  “You said the question isn’t whether He’s up there, but whether He’s down here.”

  Father Tim nodded.

  “He told you that he couldn’t believe, that he felt nothing. You said it isn’t a matter of feeling, it’s a matter of faith. Finally, you prayed a simple prayer together.”

  Remembering, the rector crossed himself. A stir ran through the congregation, a certain hum of excitement, of wonder.

  “That was a real two-for-one deal, Father, because I prayed that prayer with you. You threw out the line for one, and God reeled in two.”