At Home in Mitford

by Jan Karon

  Emma’s wedding. Miss Sadie’s love story. Cynthia’s alarming proposal. And now a pretty visitor for Dooley. Was there some sort of epidemic?

  He felt a sudden, burning thirst and drank a glass of water. Then he felt too fatigued to stand. He sat on the study sofa for some time. He simply didn’t know what to do about Dooley’s behavior. He would pray about it, leave it entirely to God, and trust him to control the outcome.

  It was dusk when he climbed the stairs and knocked on Dooley’s door.

  “Yeah,” said Dooley. He went in.

  “We’ve got a lot of talking to do to smooth things out. But before that happens, there’s something I’d like to say.”

  The boy looked up. His face was freshly bruised, but it was the old bruise in his spirit that the rector saw and felt.

  “Dooley,” he said simply, “I’d like to thank you for standing up for me today.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  A Love Story

  “Come in, honey, we glad to see a young face aroun’ this ol’ folks home.”

  He hugged Louella with one arm, holding on to the gloxinia he’d picked up at Mitford Blossoms.

  “What I got t’ do wit’ that?” asked Louella, who had just lost a finicky Boston fern.

  “Set it in Miss Sadie’s window and water it once a week.”

  “I could jes’ set it right here and let it get its own water. See yonder?”

  He looked up to peeling paint and a dark stain on the ceiling. “That doesn’t look good.”

  “That leak done filled two dishpans and a Dutch oven. Miss Sadie say let it pour, she don’ care, long as we catch it in a bucket. Don’ you think if she was plannin’ to live awhile she’d be gettin’ her a new roof?”

  “Well . . .”

  “An’ if she was plannin’ to keep livin’, would she be in any hurry to tell you her love story?” Louella shook her head. “This whole thing got me worried.”

  Miss Sadie was sitting up in bed, against flowered cushions from her divan, looking bright and expectant in a satin bed jacket.

  “Father! You’ve brought your famous gloxinia. Louella, if Father ever brings you a gloxinia, you are officially sick.”

  “Miss Sadie, you ain’t officially sick.”

  “Oh, well, whatever. Sit down right here, Father.” She patted the arm of a chair that had been pulled up to the bed. He put the flowerpot on her sunny windowsill and happily did as he was told.

  “Well, now, tell me,” he said, unbuttoning his jacket, “are you sick?”

  “Not one bit. I’m just tired. Some people get sick confused with tired. But I know tired when I see it, and that’s what I am.”

  “All those years of eatin’ froze’ pies and white bread will make you tired,” said Louella, putting her hands on her hips. “I’m goin’ down and get lunch ready, and it’s goin’ to be greens cooked with a nice piece of side meat. Greens is full of iron, even if they do smell up the place, and they’ll be good for what ails you, ain’t that right, Father?”

  She winked at the rector and left the room, closing the door behind her.

  “She’s the most encouragement in the world to me,” said Miss Sadie, with satisfaction. “I’d been rattling around in this old house like a seed in a gourd. Now when I sneeze, there’s always someone to say ‘Bless you’!”

  Someone to say bless you, thought the rector. There’s a sermon title!

  “I’m going to get out of this bed in a day or two and be good as new. But tell me about you. Are you missing your dog?”

  “Terribly,” he said. “I would never have dreamed. . . .” He cleared his throat, and they were silent for a moment. “I would never have dreamed that an animal could come to mean so much. Perhaps this sounds foolish, but Barnabas really did have a reflective soul. He was companionable in every way.”

  She looked at him intently. “You say he was companionable, and he did have a reflective soul. That is past tense.” She held her hand out to him. “Life is so short, let’s think in the present tense, shall we? I believe with all my heart you’ll get your Barnabas back.”

  She smiled and pressed his hand, which he found immeasurably comforting.

  “Thank you, Miss Sadie. You know I’ve come to hear your love story, if you’re in the mood to tell it. All I have to do today is see Evie Adams, so we’ve plenty of time.”

  “Evie? What’s Miss Pattie done now?”

  “Gave the angel birdbath away.”

  “Oh, dear, that landmark birdbath! The last I heard, Miss Pattie had climbed out on the roof and was singing ‘Amazing Grace’ in her wrapper. I hope I never get old!”

  “I believe you passed up the chance some time ago.”

  “The nursing home will make a difference, won’t it, Father?”

  “More than we can know.”

  “It’s wonderful what comes to mind when you really stop and think. Lying here these last few days has helped me settle things. One is, I don’t want to call it a nursing home. I know it will be a home, and the people in it will have to be nursed. But the whole thing has such a sad ring to it, we’re going to call ours something else. Would you help me think of a name?”

  “I will.”

  A breeze stirred through the open windows of the bedroom, with its high ceilings and cool, hardwood floors. On Miss Sadie’s dressing table, Father Tim saw again the old photos in the silver frames. There was the face of the woman so eerily identical to Olivia Davenport. And the brooding, intense gaze of the young man named Willard Porter, whose grand house had been brought to ruin in full view of the whole village.

  Miss Sadie took a deep breath.

  “Father,” she said, “what I’m about to tell you has never been spoken to another soul. I trust you will carry it to your grave.”

  “Consider it done,” he said, solemnly, sitting back in the slip-covered chair and finding it exceedingly comfortable.

  “I’ve thought many times about where to begin,” she said, folding her small hands and looking toward the open windows. “And while it doesn’t have much to do with the rest of the story, my mind keeps going back to when I was a little girl playing in these apple orchards.

  “You’ll never know how I loved the orchards then, and the way the apples would fall on the grass and burst open in the sun. Then the bees would come, and butterflies by the hundreds, and the fragrance that rose from the orchard floor was one of the sweetest thrills of my life.”

  She lay back against the pillows and closed her eyes, smiling. “Do you mind if I ramble a bit?”

  “I’d be disappointed if you didn’t.”

  “I used to carry my dolls out under the trees. If you walk down the back steps and go straight past the gate and the old washhouse and then turn right—that was my favorite place. Louella’s mother, China Mae, loved to go with me! Why, she played with dolls as if she were a little girl herself. She was the most fun, so full of life. I was nine when we moved here from Wesley, into the new house Papa built, and China Mae was twenty. She was my very best friend on earth.

  “She was so black, Father! I liked to turn her head in my hands to see the light play on her face, to see the blue in the black!

  “She used to call me Little Toad. I have no idea why, I’d love to know. But I’ll just have to find that out when I see her in heaven.”

  “I hope you’re not planning to find that out anytime soon.”

  “Of course not! I’m going to live for ages and ages. I have things to do, you know.”

  The clock ticked on the dresser.

  “Back then, there was a big house in Mitford, right where the Baptist church stands today. It’s long gone, now, but it was named Boxwood, and oh, it was a pretty place. Miss Lureen Thompson owned that house, she was like me, an only child; her parents both died in a fall from a rock when they were out on a picnic. Their chauffeur was waiting in the car for them to come back, and they didn’t come and didn’t come, and when he went to look . . .” Miss Sadie shivered. “It was an awful
thing, they say, Miss Lureen was so stricken. You know how she tried to get over it?”

  He didn’t know.

  “Parties! There was always something fine and big going on at Miss Lureen’s. And China Mae and I were always invited to come by and sample the sweets before a party. Her cook was as big as the stove, and her cream puffs were the best you ever tasted, not to mention her ambrosia. I have dreamed about that ambrosia several times. She used to make enough to fill a dishpan, because people took such a fit over it.

  “Miss Lureen liked to say, ‘The firefly only shines when on the wing. So it is with us—when we stop, we darken.’ I never forgot that.

  “Oh, we all loved Boxwood! It had so many servants hurrying about, and they all seemed so happy in their work. Miss Lureen was good to her people. Why, when her Packard wore out, do you know who she gave it to? Her chauffeur! He fixed it up good as new and drove it back to Charleston when she died.

  “His name was Soot Tobin. Black as soot, they said. He was a big, strapping man with a stutter so bad he scarcely ever spoke, but when he did, people listened, colored and white, for his voice was as deep as the bass on a church organ. He made China Mae fairly giddy. ’Most everything he’d say, she’d just giggle and go on, to beat the band. You know, China Mae was not all . . . well, she never grew up, exactly, which is one reason I loved her so. She was just like me!

  “One day I came home from school and I could not believe my eyes what had happened.

  “China Mae would never have to play with my baby dolls again, for she had one of her own, just her color. It was lying asleep in the bed with her and had on a little white gown. My mama was standing by the bed looking at that baby, with tears just streaming down her face.

  " ’Sadie,’ she said to me, ’This is Louella. God has sent her to live with us.’ ”

  Miss Sadie shook her head and smiled at the rector. “Isn’t that a surprise? To come home from school one day, and there’s your second best friend of life, sent down from heaven?”

  He laughed happily. If there was anything more amazing and wonderful than almost anyone’s life story, he couldn’t think what it was.

  “Well, I took after that baby somethin’ awful. I rocked her, I bathed her, I pulled her around in a little wagon, I sewed dresses for her, I was as happy as anything to have her to play with and love, and Mama was, too.

  “When she got weaned, I started taking her to town. I’d dress her up myself, and they’d say, ‘Here comes Sadie Baxter with that little nigger.’

  “I never did like to hear that, even as a child. I wanted Louella to be my sister, I played like she was my sister, and then when I’d go to town, they’d say that. So, I stopped going.

  “We stayed home and played and I never did miss going to town. Mama hired a tutor for me, anyway. Mr. Kingsley. I declare, he had the worst bad breath in the world, but he taught the prettiest cursive you ever saw and was real good at history. Mama ordered off for all my clothes and shoes, and China Mae cut my hair, and we went to the doctor and dentist at Papa’s lumberyard down in the valley. Or, sometimes, the doctors would drive up the mountain to give us our checkups, and Mama would put on a big spread like the president was coming.

  “We called it ‘Doctor Day,’ and I didn’t take to it one bit. I would grab Louella and we would run off and hide in the orchard.”

  Miss Sadie laughed to herself, with her eyes closed. Father Tim could see that she was watching a movie in which she was both the star and the director. He closed his eyes, too, and quietly slipped his feet out of his loafers.

  “When Louella was about three, Mama said she was tired of going off and leaving her and China Mae at home when we marched off to Lord’s Chapel. There were only a dozen or so colored people in Mitford, not enough for a church, I suppose. So, Mama said that from now on, we were all going together, that was what God gave us churches for.

  “Papa didn’t like this one bit, but Mama would not let up on him. She got down the Bible and the prayer book and without a shadow of a doubt, she showed him what was what.

  “So, China Mae and Louella and Papa and Mama and me would walk down the road to the old Lord’s Chapel that stood on the hill. And we would all sit in the same pew.

  “If anybody ever once said ‘nigger,’ I don’t know who it was, for they were scared of Papa. I mean, they respected him, not to mention that he gave a lot of money.

  “In a little while, it seemed like nobody noticed anymore, it was just the most natural thing on earth. What they said outside the lych-gates, I don’t know, but if China Mae missed a Sunday from being sick, lots of ladies would ask about her.

  “Life was better in those days, Father, it really was. When China Mae did the wash in the washhouse, and we put the fire under that big iron pot, why, it was an exciting event. China Mae had joy over making the clothes come clean, while people today would think it was drudgery. We kind of celebrated on wash day. Mama would make a pineapple upside-down cake, and Louella and I would make stickies out of biscuit dough and cinnamon and sugar, and after that big load of work was done, we all sat down and had a tea party.”

  A bird called outside the open windows, and a breeze filled the fragile marquisette curtains. Father Tim caught himself nodding off and sat upright at once.

  “You know how the Bible is always talking about the poor? Twice every week, Mama went to see the poor. She would pack a big basket of the best things in the world and put her blue shawl on her head and go off walking to see the poor.

  “She never let me go with her, not once, but she taught me some verses from Proverbs, the thirty-first chapter, ‘She stretcheth out her hand to the poor; yea, she reacheth forth her hands to the needy. . . .She looketh well to the ways of her household, and eateth not the bread of idleness.’ That was her favorite in the whole Bible; she said it was her model.

  “Those golden days passed so quickly. I wanted to stay a child forever, but before I felt like I was awake real good, I was sixteen, and it was time to go abroad. Abroad! What a hateful word. I came to despise it. So many girls would have given anything to ‘go abroad.’

  “When I heard that Uncle Haywood had talked Papa into sending me, I was shocked, I felt betrayed. How could he send me away to another country? Mama was horrified, too, but she said it was for the best. I know I’d complained about Mr. Kingsley’s bad breath a hundred times, but I didn’t see that as a reason to change my schooling to the other side of the world!”

  Miss Sadie opened her eyes. She was silent for a moment, gazing at the faded yellow roses on the wallpaper.

  “I can just see Papa now. Right before we were ready to go down to Charleston to take the boat, he came in the front door. I remember all the luggage, the big trunks and the hatboxes, was stacked in the hall, and Papa came storming in and threw his hat on the table. He was burning mad, I had never seen him so mad. The veins stood out on his neck, and the top of his head was red as fire where the hair had thinned.

  “ ‘Cur!’ is what he said over and over. He was shouting. I thought a dog had bitten him! But oh, it was so much worse than that.

  “Mama tried to make him sit down and drink a lemonade, it was so hot his shirt was sticking to him, it was August. But he wouldn’t, and he started up again, saying things like ‘scoundrel’ and ‘scum of the earth.’

  “It turns out he’d been driving up from the lumberyard in the valley, and somebody had come speeding by him so fast that Papa had run his Buick town car into a ditch, causing considerable damage to the beautiful grillwork and the fenders.”

  Miss Sadie looked at the rector. “My papa was a good man, but he was not the kind of man you want to run off the road, and especially not into a ditch. You know, Father, times were different, then, and it was considered almost honorable for a man to hold a grudge against an injustice.”

  She sighed. “I don’t suppose I have to tell you who it was that ran him off the road.”

  No. No, she did not. Father Tim glanced across the room at the photo of
the handsome young Willard Porter, whose dark gaze seemed to pierce the room so forcibly that he might have been present, listening.

  “Papa had to borrow a car to drive to Charleston, and in those days, people did not care to loan their cars, so that upset Papa even more. On the way, he talked about what had happened on Lumber Road. He just couldn’t seem to get over it. He didn’t know who had done it, he hadn’t recognized the car, it was a new car, and fancy. And the more he talked about it, the less he acted like himself. Of course, he tried not to talk about me going away, because every time he did, he would cry a little.

  “He’d never spent a night away from Mama since they were married, and it was a big sacrifice to give us both up at one time, for she was going with me—to stay ’til I got settled.

  “You could have floated that big ol’ boat on our tears!” Miss Sadie said, laughing. “And to think— buying all those fancy clothes and hats and steamer trunks, and going to Charleston in August, of all things, and taking that long trip across the ocean in that big storm that broke a freighter in two, and all those tear-stained, homesick letters—just to turn around and come home again, lickety split, in two months!”

  “But look what it’s given you to remember all these years.”

  With the only irony he had ever heard in her voice, she said, “Yes. But look what it did to my heart.”

  Suddenly, an alarm sounded so loudly that it caused his own heart to thunder. “Good Lord!” he exclaimed, thrusting his feet into his shoes and standing up at once.

  “That’s just Louella,” she said, brightly. “Lunch must be ready. Father, dear, would you kindly turn your head and look toward the door?”

  He did so, his ears ringing, as she got out of bed and put on her slippers and robe.

  “Now you can look!” she said, going to the wall opposite her bed and grasping what appeared to be a drawer pull under a painting. A little door opened in the wall and Miss Sadie stuck her head inside. “Yes, Louella?”

  “Miss Sadie!” he heard Louella’s mezzo voice boom up the shaft, “Do th’ Father want vinegar on his greens?”