At Home in Mitford

by Jan Karon

  “Where was she when you looked?”

  “When last spotted, she was somewhere over your bedroom.”

  “Do you think it would help to try coaxing her down? I just opened a can of her favorite dinner.”

  “We could try that.”

  She dashed into the kitchen and brought out a malodorous brown lump in a dish. Even so, something caught at his heart, for it was suppertime for Barnabas, as well.

  “Ugh, it’s liver,” she said, waving it above her head and calling, “Kitty, kitty, kitty.”

  “I don’t believe you have to hold it up,” said the rector, taking the dish from her, “I believe the odor will, ah, rise of itself.”

  “Oh, dear,” said Cynthia, straightening her dress and consulting her watch. “Violet, you wretch,” she called toward the roof, “come down at once!”

  He could say something like, Cynthia, I was thinking you might pop over to dinner tomorrow evening. Of course, it would have to be an early evening, because of services on Sunday. . . .

  “Six-thirty!” said Cynthia with exasperation, looking again at her watch. “Oh, dear. I’ve been invited to the country club tonight.”

  “Well, then, let me take care of this, and you go ahead.”

  “That would be perfect, just perfect! How kind of you, how very good. I’ll do something for you, I promise.”

  “But you already have. In fact, I was wondering if you might come to—”

  “There’s the bell. Would you like to say hello to Andrew Gregory?”

  Andrew Gregory!

  “Ah, no,” he said, hoarsely, “I’ll just carry on with the rescue.”

  “You’re so lovely, Father. Just toss her in the back door, I never lock it. Well, then, bye,” she said, blowing a kiss his way, and going quickly down the hall to her front door.

  He went as quickly to the basement and found the heavy ladder. There was no need to spend precious time calling a vagrant cat.

  He carried the ladder to the porch, climbed to the roof, and at once saw Violet curled happily next to the chimney.

  He heard the Mercedes engine start and the car pull slowly away from the curb. From where he was standing, he saw Cynthia looking up anxiously, but she didn’t see him.

  His heart beat dully.

  “Violet, you wretch,” he said.

  There were many things he did not like to feel. But feeling foolish was at the very top of the list. No question.

  It had all happened too suddenly. There had been Emma’s unexpected comment and the surprising realization that he missed seeing Cynthia. Then he’d impulsively raced to The Local, for no sensible reason whatsoever, and had ended up doing the whole thing backward. Clearly, he should have invited first, and planned second. In any case, that was hardly the point. The point was Andrew Gregory. Tall, suave, handsome Andrew Gregory.

  After tossing Violet in the back door, as suggested, he went home to a house that felt hollow as a tomb. No maverick dog to leap up with joy at his arrival. No boy with a cowlick that needed wetting down, or hot chocolate to fix, or homework to check.

  He would never admit it to Avis, but he put the duck in the freezer. Freezing a fresh, local, corn-fed duckling would verge on being a type of moral crime, he supposed.

  He paced the living room and looked blankly out the door, then wandered through the dining room and stared at the table, which looked forlorn, somehow, for all the old lace and rose damask.

  The cold wind that blew in with flurries of snow on Maundy Thursday made the bare, stripped altar seem even more appalling to the spirit. The congregation left the evening service in silence, not speaking until they passed through the lych-gates facing Old Church Lane.

  Father Tim found this service the most dismal in church liturgy, but he also found it to be one of the most crucial. The business of soaking up the joys of Easter without any consideration of the pain of the cross was spiritually risky business, at best.

  On Sunday, the wind still blew, but the sun shone brightly. And many of the parishioners at Lord’s Chapel felt they had come, at last, through a dark tunnel into new life.

  That George Gaynor could kneel at the communion rail on Easter morning added greatly to the rector’s personal joy. Rodney and Joe Joe stood behind the prisoner with official solemnity as he took the wafer and cup, then escorted him back to his seat on the gospel side.

  FBI agents were to arrive in Mitford on Wednesday, but hardly anyone wanted to see the man from the attic go. The entire village had taken an odd liking to this highly uncommon thief, and the schoolchildren had caught the sense of it as well. Letters and cards poured into the jail, with crayon and watercolor drawings that the prisoner taped to the walls of his cell.

  Except for clergy, no visitors were allowed, and Cleo had been stationed at the door to discourage the villagers’ good intentions.

  “Dadgum, I hate to say it,” the police chief said, “but I’ll be glad to see this brother go. If the feds weren’t comin’ Wednesday, I’d have to hire on more help.”

  “How long do you think he’ll . . . get?”

  “I don’t know about these big, fancy jewel jobs,” said Rodney, hitching up his holster belt. “My guess is twenty years, more’n likely.”

  Twenty years, thought the rector. Twenty years out of his new friend’s life. On the other hand, he had gained eternity.

  The rector said good-bye in the cell, where the two men embraced with some feeling. When George stood back, his face was streaming with tears.

  “How long,” he asked, laughing, “can I expect this to last?”

  The rector could barely speak. “This what, my friend?”

  “This . . . bawling.”

  “May it last always,” replied the rector, who knew the worse consequences of a hard heart.

  He walked quickly away from the jail, thinking to go home and do some spading around his rosebushes for an hour. But Percy and his crowd of ten o’clock regulars were standing on the sidewalk, waiting for the FBI car to pass on its way out of town.

  “I’ve said my good-byes,” he told Percy.

  “Aw, come on and stand with us, it’ll swell th’ crowd,” urged Mule Skinner.

  He noticed that people had come out of the shops and were lining the sidewalks on either side of the street.

  They saw the car moving toward them, just as Cynthia Coppersmith dashed across from The Local with a string shopping bag. She stood breathlessly beside the rector.

  Up and down the street, the onlookers waved silently as the car moved past, its contents kept secret behind dark windows.

  Cynthia took the rector’s hand, pressed it, then hurried away, as the gray car with the official tag drove slowly around the monument and disappeared from view.

  The total collected reward money was $2,400 until Winnie and Joe Ivey came forward with a hundred. At that, the reward committee, composed of Rodney Underwood and Percy Mosely, undertook to have posters printed at the highway Quik Copy, which were soon seen all over town.

  “Twenty-five hundred smackeroos,” said Mule Skinner. “If that don’t flush out those dirty, low-life scumheads, nothin’ will.”

  Rumor had it that Miss Rose Watson was looking for Barnabas herself, as were many other villagers, including Coot Hendrick, who stuck two packs of peanuts in his overalls and headed toward Farmer with his pickup window rolled down, whistling and calling.

  “Mayor,” said the rector in an early morning phone call, “a thought occurs to me.

  “You said the town might keep Uncle Billy in the Porter place if Miss Rose dies. What if Miss Rose deeded the place to the town now and held a life estate in, say, two rooms and a bath? Would the council consider taking care of them both?”

  Two comfortable, well-heated rooms, maintained by the town. Cool in summer, warm in winter, with a good roof and a solid floor, and a commode that flushed every time. In addition, a renovated Porter place, shining on its green lawn across from the monument, and second only in splendor to Fernbank. If s
omeone didn’t get to it soon, it would be too late. The whole thing seemed to him the best idea he’d recently generated.

  “I’ll look into it,” said Esther Cunningham, “and get back to you. Have you thought about your speech yet?”

  “What speech?”

  “Your Festival of Roses speech, of course.”

  “How’s this: ‘Roses: I like ’em. Plant some today. Amen.’ ”

  “You can be foolish,” she said in her rasping laugh.

  “I hope so.”

  “Joe Joe’s been tellin’ me all th’ excitement about th’ man in the attic. I suppose that was a trick you pulled to increase attendance?”

  “You’re right, as usual. You ought to see the Baptists we raked in the following Sunday.”

  “Ha, well, you’d do mighty good to get us Baptists singin’ those depressin’ hymns over at your place.”

  “Mayor, those hymns are not depressing, they are ancient. There’s a difference.”

  She snorted. “Well, you take Ray, he’s ancient and depressin’. You know how long we’ve been married at four o’clock tomorrow?”

  “Too long?”

  “You got it! Forty-eight years.”

  “The only thing I’ve ever done for forty-eight years straight is draw a breath.”

  “We’re havin’ a cookout on Saturday, and we’d like it if you’d come. All the kids and grans will be there, and th’ greatgrans, you name it.”

  “Why, that’s half the town. There won’t be a soul left on the street!”

  “Well, just come on and don’t talk about it,” she said.

  “I’ll give it some thought. Dooley might like that.”

  “I need you one more minute. I suppose you know about Joe Joe and your Puny.”

  Aha! No, he didn’t. But now he did. “Well, yes,” he said, smiling with delight.

  “I wouldn’t mind knowin’ just what you think of her, her bein’ an orphan an’ all.”

  “Here’s exactly what I think of Puny Bradshaw. She is the finest, hardest-working, most forthright and decent girl on the face of the earth.”

  “Well!” said the mayor, approvingly. “You know, of course, that Joe Joe was my first gran, and I wouldn’t want anybody who isn’t . . .”

  “Now, Mayor, this sort of thing works both ways. What about Joe Joe’s credentials?”

  “Joe Joe,” she said with fervor, “is a Cunningham!”

  In the mayor’s view, that explained everything. It had never ceased to amaze him, and others as well, that, of the five beautiful Cunningham daughters and more than twenty grandchildren, there was not a black sheep in the lot. Except for Omer.

  “We all remember what Omer did,” she said crisply, “but he’s over it.”

  “Let’s just say that my stake in this goes nearly as deep as yours,” suggested the rector. “I happen to like Joe Joe exceedingly, as a matter of fact. And if this were to take shape, he would be the luckiest man alive. Next to Ray, of course.”

  “Father,” said the mayor, “flattery has never ceased to ring my bell.”

  “You know what they call me out at th’ farm?”

  “What’s that?”

  “Uncle Dools.”

  The rector, who was on his knees in a perennial bed, looked up and laughed. “Uncle Dools, is it?”

  Dooley was standing with his arms crossed and his cowlick shooting up like a geyser. A few days of sun had increased his freckles, and his eyes seemed bluer than ever.

  “Yeah, an’ ol’ Goosedown, she tried that bone-head trick agin of th’owin’ me in th’ slop, but I stuck on ’er good’n tight and I like to rode th’ hair off ’at horse.”

  “Well, I’ll say.”

  There was a long pause. A bird sang. The rector’s heart felt at peace.

  “I held ’at baby three times.”

  “Did you, now?”

  “She was grinnin’ at me an’ all.”

  He flung the dandelions into a pile as he worked.

  “Then she called m’ name.”

  The rector stopped weeding and stood up, feeling the stiffness in his knees. He had a sudden sense that Dooley was sharing a deep confidence. “You don’t mean it!”

  “Yeah, she did, said, ‘Doo-oo-ools,’ jis’ like ’at. I like t’ fell out. She ain’t hardly six month old, ain’t even got teeth.”

  “Good gracious,” said the rector.

  “Nobody heard it but me,” the boy told him, wondering if he was free to trust his own ears.

  “I believe you, son.”

  Dooley nodded soberly. Something important had just transpired between them. Father Tim could feel it.

  “Spring,” said the local gardening column in the Muse, “is slowly climbing the mountain to Mitford, wearing a frock of morning mist and carrying an armful of forsythia. She is shod with ivy and dandelion, and her hair is entwined with sprigs of wolf bane. Unfortunately, she is easily distracted and often interrupts her journey to tarry upon a bed of moss, where she sleeps for days on end.”

  Laughing, Father Tim put the newspaper down and walked to his open bedroom window. Hessie Mayhew had been reading Coleridge again!

  He saw the gray Mercedes parked at the curb in front of his neighbor’s house. Good Lord, didn’t the man have a home of his own?

  He tied the sash of his robe and leaned his elbows on the sill. The air was balmy, inviting, and the sound of the rain as gentle as the whisper of moth wings.

  He breathed deeply. Much to do tomorrow. Visit Winnie Ivey who was recovering from a gallbladder operation. Take a copy of the New Testament and Psalms to Homeless. Carry a pound of Jenkins’s livermush to Russell, out of the freezer. That brand could only be found in Wesley, and who could ask Betty Craig to make such a trek when she had more important things to do for her cantankerous patient?

  Finally, write a demanding letter about the bells. The bells! Now, there was an act of the Almighty.

  Had the bells arrived while George Gaynor was living in the attic, he would surely have been discovered and arrested, and God’s plan would not have been carried out. Perhaps he should write the English restoration firm and praise them for their endless delay! “Gentlemen, Thanks to your inexcusable delinquency, someone has found new life behind our death bell!”

  At noon, go to school and have lunch with Dooley in the cafeteria, as tomorrow was the day parents were invited to share this nostalgic ritual.

  Get his medication refilled. Or had he already done that? He couldn’t recall. He looked at his watch. Ten o’clock. Time, and then some, for evening prayers.

  He realized he had gone over this interminable list to keep his mind off something far more important. What was happening over there, anyway?

  He heard his neighbor’s front door open and Cynthia’s mole laughter, recognized first at Uncle Billy’s art show. He felt frozen to the spot.

  “Well, do think about it,” Andrew Gregory said.

  “Oh, but I already have thought about it,” Cynthia responded.

  Their voices carried to his room as clearly as if they’d been standing in it. With what seemed enormous effort, he pulled the window down.

  I have no claim on her, none at all, nor any reason to be interested in her activities. What’s going on here? It was a question that not only had to be asked, it was a question that had to be answered.

  “Just tell me one thing,” said his neighbor, standing on the other side of his screen door. “Why are you mad at me?”

  He was stunned by her sudden appearance, her extraordinary question, and, even more, by the astonishing gleam of her eyes. Since he had seen her eyes many times, why was he always so forcibly struck by the intensity of their color?

  “Well?” she said, with an openness that disarmed him completely.

  “I don’t . . .”

  “You can tell me,” she said, looking at him quizzically.

  “But what makes you . . . ?”

  “I can just feel it,” she said.

  “Why don’t
you come in?”

  “Why don’t you come out? We could sit on your garden bench. I’ve been longing to sit on your old bench.” She tilted her head and gazed at him with a half smile.

  “Well . . .” His heart hammered, which was a feeling he did not like at all, not in the least. Years of not having such a feeling, perfectly content not to have such a feeling, and now this. He felt his throat constrict, so that he croaked when he tried to talk. There was only one thing to do, he decided, until this desperate condition passed, and that was to keep quiet.

  In his opinion, it was far too cool to sit on a moss-covered stone bench, but he followed her around to the side of the rectory.

  Very likely, he concluded, this was not happening at all. Possibly, he had dozed off on the study sofa, and this was what his subconscious had concocted.

  “Just beautiful,” murmured Cynthia, sitting down. He was certain that the damp moss would stain her skirt, but that was not for him to say.

  “I’d like to draw this little hidden-away spot,” she confided. “I can see it from my bedroom window, and even in winter, it has magic.”

  He nodded, dumbly.

  “Please sit,” she said, looking up at him and patting the bench.

  He sat.

  “Aren’t we fortunate to have hours like these, when everyone else is working away under some fluorescent ceiling, with no windows to gaze out, and no Carolina junco to come swooping by?”

  The little gray bird landed on a branch of rhododendron and preened itself.

  “Ummm,” he said, still not trusting his voice.

  She turned her head and looked at him. “You see, it’s nothing you’ve said or done, really. It’s just that I feel things are not . . . the same between us. Perhaps I really shouldn’t mention it, but I . . . well, you see, it’s important to me.” She stared at him frankly. “I’d love to put it right.”

  He felt he might be able to leap over the hedge and hit the ground, running, in Baxter Park.

  “There isn’t anything . . .” he began, and was aghast to find he was still croaking.

  She gazed at him steadily, trying not to laugh. He felt his face redden.

  “You’re so funny,” she said. “You’re like a boy, really.”