Out to Canaan

by Jan Karon

  “We’re going to like you coming home, even better. In just six or seven weeks, you’ll be here . . . .”

  Silence. Was Dooley dreading to tell him he wanted to spend the summer at Meadowgate Farm? The boy’s decision to do that last year had nearly broken his heart, not to mention Cynthia’s. They had, of course, gotten over it, as they watched the boy doing what he loved best—learning more about veterinary medicine at the country practice of Hal Owen.

  “Of course,” said the rector, pushing on, “we want you to go out to Meadowgate, if that’s what you’d like to do.” He swallowed. This year, he was stronger, he could let go.

  “OK,” said Dooley, “that’s what I’d like to do.”

  “Fine. No problem. I’ll call you tomorrow for our usual phone visit. We love you.”

  “I love you back.”

  “Here’s Cynthia.”

  “Hey,” she said.

  “Hey, yourself.” It was their family greeting.

  “So, you big galoot, we sent a box for you and one to share with your friends.”

  “What’s in it?”

  “Lemon squares.”

  “I like lemon squares.”

  “Plus raspberry tarts, pecan truffles, and brownies made by the preacher.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Are you OK?”

  “Yes.”

  “No kidding?”

  “Yep.”

  “Good!” said Cynthia. “Lace Turner asked about you the other day.”

  “That dumb girl that dresses like a guy?”

  “She doesn’t dress like a guy anymore. Oh, and your friend Jenny was asking about you, too.”

  “How’s Tommy?”

  “Missing you. Just as we do. So hurry home, even if you are going to spend the summer at Meadowgate, you big creep.”

  Dooley cackled.

  “We love you.”

  “I love you back.”

  Cynthia placed the receiver on the hook, smiling happily.

  “Now, you poor rube,” she said, “where were we?”

  He sat on the study sofa and took the rubber band off the Mitford Muse.

  Good grief! There he was on the front page, standing bewildered in front of the UPS truck with his nose looking, as usual, like a turnip or a tulip bulb. Why did J. C. Hogan run this odious picture, when he might have photographed his hardworking, good-looking, and thoroughly deserving wife?

  Primrose Tee Draws

  Stand-Out Crowd

  Clearly, Hessie had not written this story, which on first glance appeared to be about golf, but had given her notes to J.C., who forged ahead without checking his spelling.

  Good time had by all . . . same time next year . . . a hundred and thirty guests . . . nine gallons of tea, ten dozen lemon squares, eight dozen raspberry tarts . . . traffic jam . . .

  The phone gave a sharp blast.

  “Hello?”

  “Timothy . . .”

  “Hal! I’ve just been thinking of you and Marge.”

  “Good. And we of you. I’ve got some . . . hard news, and wanted you to know.”

  Hal and Marge Owen were two of his closest, most valued friends. He was afraid to know.

  “I’ve just hired a full-time assistant.”

  “That’s the bad news? It sounds good to me, you work like a Trojan.”

  “Yes, but . . . we won’t be able to have Dooley this summer. My assistant is a young fellow, just starting out, and I’ll have to give him a lot of time and attention. Also, we’re putting him up in Dooley’s room until he gets established.” Hal sighed.

  “But that’s terrific. We know Dooley looked forward to being at Meadowgate—however, circumstances alter cases, as my Mississippi kin used to say.”

  “There’s a large riding stable coming in about a mile down the road, they’ve asked me to vet the horses. That could be a full-time job right there.”

  “I understand. Of course. Your practice is growing.”

  “We’ll miss the boy, Tim, you know how we feel about him, how Rebecca Jane loves him. But look, we’ll have him out to stay the first two weeks he’s home from school—if that works for you.”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Oh, and Tim . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “Will you tell him?”

  “I will. I’ll talk to him about it, get him thinking of what to do this summer. Be good for him.”

  “So why don’t you and Cynthia plan to spend the day when you bring him out? Bring Barnabas, too. Marge will make your favorite.”

  Deep-dish chicken pie, with a crust like French pastry. “We’ll be there!” he said, meaning it.

  “Will you tell him?” he asked Cynthia.

  “No way,” she said.

  Nobody wanted to tell Dooley Barlowe that he couldn’t spend the summer doing what he loved more than anything on earth.

  She opened her eyes and rolled over to find him sitting up in bed.

  “Oh, my dear! Oh, my goodness! What happened?”

  He loved the look on his wife’s face; he wanted to savor it. “It’s already turned a few colors,” he said, removing his hand from his right temple.

  She peered at him as if he were a butterfly on a pin. “Yes! Black . . . and blue and . . . the tiniest bit of yellow.”

  “My old school colors,” he said.

  “But what happened?” He never heard such tsking and gasping.

  “T.D.A.,” he replied.

  “The Dreaded Armoire? What do you mean?”

  “I mean that I got up in the middle of the night, in the dark, and went out to the landing and opened the windows to give Barnabas a cool breeze. As I careened through the bedroom on my way to the bathroom, I slammed into the blasted thing.”

  “Oh, no! Oh, heavens. What can I do? And tomorrow’s Sunday!”

  “Spousal abuse,” he muttered. “In today’s TV news climate, my congregation will pick up on it immediately.”

  “Timothy, dearest, I’m so sorry. I’ll get something for you, I don’t know what, but something. Just stay right there and don’t move.”

  She put on her slippers and robe and flew downstairs, Barnabas barking at her heels.

  T.D.A. might stand for “The Dreaded Armoire” as far as his wife was concerned. As far as he was concerned, it stood for something else entirely.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Step by Step

  He was missing her.

  How many times had he gone to the phone to call, only to realize she wasn’t there to answer?

  When Sadie Baxter died last year at the age of ninety, he felt the very rug yanked from under him. She’d been family to him, and a companionable friend; his sister in Christ, and favorite parishioner. In addition, she was Dooley’s benefactor and, for more than half a century, the most generous donor in the parish. Not only had she given Hope House, the new five-million-dollar nursing home at the top of Old Church Lane, she had faithfully kept a roof on Lord’s Chapel while her own roof went begging.

  Sadie Baxter was warbling with the angels, he thought, chuckling at the image. But not because of the money she’d given, no, indeed. Good works, the Scriptures plainly stated, were no passport to heaven. “For by grace are you saved through faith,” Paul wrote in his letter to the Ephesians, “and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God—not of works, lest any man should boast.”

  The issue of works versus grace was about as popular as the issue of sin. Nonetheless, he was set to preach on Paul’s remarks, and soon. The whole works ideology was as insidious as so many termites going after the stairs to the altar.

  Emma blew in, literally. As she opened the office door, a gust of cold spring wind snatched it from her hand and sent it crashing against the wall.

  “Lord have mercy!” she shouted, trying to snatch it back against a gale that sent his papers flying. She slammed the door and stood panting in front of it, her glasses crooked on her nose.

  “Have you ever?” she demanded.

  “Ever wh
at?”

  “Seen a winter that lasted nine months goin’ on ten? I said, Harold, why don’t we move to Florida? I never thought I’d live to hear such words come out of my mouth.”

  “And what did Harold say?” he asked, trying to reassemble his papers.

  “You know Baptists,” she replied, hanging up her coat. “They don’t move to Florida; they don’t want to be warm! They want to freeze to death on th’ way to prayer meetin’ and shoot right up to th’ pearly gates and get it over with.”

  The Genghis Khan of church secretaries wagged her finger at him. “It’s enough to make me go back to bein’ Episcopalian.”

  “What’s Harold done now?”

  “Made Snickers sleep in the garage. Can you believe it? Country people don’t like dogs in the house, you know.”

  “I thought Snickers was sleeping in the house.”

  “He was, ’til he ate a steak off Harold’s plate.”

  “Aha.”

  “Down th’ hatch, neat as a pin. But then, guess what?”

  “I can’t guess.”

  “He threw it all up in the closet, on Harold’s shoes.”

  “I can see Harold’s point.”

  “You would,” she said stiffly, sitting at her desk.

  “I would?”

  “Yes. You’re a man,” she announced, glaring at him. “By the way . . .”

  “By the way what?”

  “That bump on your head is the worst-lookin’ mess I ever saw. Can’t you get Cynthia to do somethin’ about it?”

  Then again, maybe works could have an influence. Exercising the patience of a saint while putting up with Emma Newland for fifteen years should be enough to blast him heavenward like a rocket, with no stops along the way.

  Emma booted her computer and peered at the screen.

  “I nearly ran over Mack Stroupe comin’ in this morning, he crossed th’ street without lookin’. I didn’t know whether to hit th’ brakes or the accelerator. You know that hotdog stand of his? He’s turnin’ it into his campaign headquarters! Campaign headquarters, can you believe it? Who does he think he is, Ross Perot?”

  The rector sighed.

  “You know that mud slick in front that he called a parkin’ lot?” She clicked her mouse. “Well, he’s having it paved, the asphalt trucks are all over it like flies. Asphalt!” she muttered. “I hate asphalt. Give me cement, any day.”

  Yes, indeed. Straight up, right into a personal and highly favorable audience with St. Peter.

  “Something has to be done,” he said.

  “Yes, but what?”

  “Blast if I know. If we don’t get a new roof on it soon, who can guess what the interior damage might be?”

  Father Tim and Cynthia sat at the kitchen table, discussing his second most worrisome problem—what to do with the rambling, three-story Victorian mansion known as Fernbank, and its endless, overgrown grounds.

  When Miss Sadie died last year, she left Fernbank to the church, “to cover any future needs of Hope House,” and there it sat—buffeted by hilltop winds and scoured by driving hailstorms, with no one even to sweep dead bees from the windowsills.

  In Miss Sadie’s mind, Fernbank had been a gift; to him, it was an albatross. After all, she had clearly made him responsible for doing the best thing by her aging homeplace.

  There had been talk of leasing it to a private school or institution, a notion that lay snarled somewhere in diocesan red tape. On the other hand, should they sell it and invest the money? If so, should they sell it as is, or bite the bullet and repair it at horrendous cost to a parish almost certainly unwilling to gamble in real estate?

  “We just got an estimate on the roof,” he said.

  “How much?”

  “Thirty, maybe thirty-five thousand.”

  “Good heavens!”

  They sat in silence, reflecting.

  “Poor Fernbank,” she said. “Who would buy it, anyway? Certainly no one in Mitford can afford it.”

  He refilled his coffee cup. Even if they were onto a sour subject, he was happy to be hanging out with his wife. Besides, Cynthia Kavanagh was known for stumbling onto serendipitous solutions for all sorts of woes and tribulations.

  “Worse than that,” she said, “who could afford to fix it up, assuming they could buy it in the first place?”

  “There’s the rub.”

  After staring at the tablecloth for a moment, she looked up. “Then again, why worry about it at all? Miss Sadie didn’t give it to you . . .”

  So why had he worn the thing around his neck for more than ten months?

  “ . . . she gave it to the church. Which, in case you’ve momentarily forgotten, belongs to God. So, let Him handle it, for Pete’s sake.”

  He could feel the grin spreading across his face. Right! Of course! He felt a weight fly off, if only temporarily. “Who’s the preacher around here, anyway?”

  “Sometimes you go on sabbatical, dearest.”

  He stood and cranked open the kitchen window. “When are we going up there and pick out the token or two that Miss Sadie offered us in the letter?”

  She sighed. “We don’t have a nook, much less a cranny that isn’t already stuffed with things. My house next door is full, the rectory is brimming, and we’re retiring.”

  She was right. It was a time to be subtracting, not adding.

  “What have the others taken?” she wondered.

  “Louella took the brooch Miss Sadie’s mother painted, and Olivia only wanted a walnut chest and the photographs of Miss Sadie’s mother and Willard Porter. The place is virtually untouched.”

  “Did anyone go sneezing through the attic?”

  “Not a soul.”

  “I absolutely love sneezing through attics! Attics are full of mystery and intrigue. So, yes, let’s do it! Let’s go up! Besides, we don’t have to shop, we can browse!”

  Her eyes suddenly looked bluer, as they always did when she was excited.

  “I love it when you talk like this,” he said, relieved.

  At least one of the obligations surrounding Fernbank would be settled.

  Fernbank was only his second most nagging worry.

  What to do about Dooley’s scattered siblings had moved to the head of the line.

  Over the last few years, Dooley’s mother, Pauline Barlowe, had let her children go like so many kittens scattered from a box.

  How could he hope to collect what had been blown upon the wind during Pauline’s devastating bouts with alcohol? The last that Pauline had heard, her son Kenny was somewhere in Oregon, little Jessie’s whereabouts were unknown, and Sammy . . . he didn’t want to think about it.

  Last year, the rector had gone with Lace Turner into the drug-infested Creek community and brought Dooley’s nine-year-old brother out. Poobaw was now living in Betty Craig’s cottage with his recovering mother and disabled grandfather, and doing well in Mitford School.

  A miracle. But in this case, miracles, like peanuts, were addictive.

  One would definitely not be enough.

  “This news just hit the street,” said Mule, sliding into the booth with a cup of coffee. “I got it before J.C.”

  “Aha,” said the rector, trying to decide whether to butter his roll or eat it dry.

  “Joe Ivey’s hangin’ it up.”

  “No!”

  “Goin’ to Tennessee to live with his kin, and Winnie Ivey cryin’ her eyes out, he’s all the family she’s got in Mitford.”

  “Why is he hanging it up?”

  “Kidneys.”

  Velma appeared with her order pad. “We don’t have kidneys n’more. We tried kidneys last year and nobody ordered ’em.”

  “Meat loaf sandwich, then,” said Mule. “Wait a minute. What’s the Father having?”

  “Chicken salad.”

  “I pass. Make it a BLT on whole wheat.”

  “Kidneys?” asked the rector as Velma left.

  “I don’t have to tell you Joe likes a little shooter now and agai
n.”

  “Umm.”

  “Lately, he’s been drinkin’ peach brandy, made fresh weekly in Knox County. The other thing is, varicose veins. Forty-five years of standing on his feet barbering, his legs look like a Georgia road map.” Mule blew on his coffee. “He showed ’em to me.”

  Except for a couple of visits to Fancy Skinner’s Hair House, Joe Ivey had been his barber since he came to Mitford. “I hate to hear this.”

  “We all hate to hear it.”

  There was a long silence. The rector buttered his roll.

  “I despise change,” said Mule, looking grim.

  “You and me both.”

  “That’s why Mack won’t call it change, he calls it improvement. But you and I know exactly what it is . . . .”

  “Change,” said Father Tim.

  “Right. And if Mack has anything to do with it, it won’t be change for the better.”

  What the heck, he opened the container of blackberry jam left from the breakfast crowd and spread that on, too. With diabetes, life may not be long, he thought, but the diet they put you on sure makes it seem that way.

  “Have you thought of the bright side of Joe getting out of the business?” asked Father Tim.

  “The bright side?”

  “All Joe’s customers will be running to your wife.”

  Mule’s face lit up. “I’ll be dadgum. That’s right.”

  “That ought to amount to, oh, forty people, easy. With haircuts at ten bucks a head these days, you and Fancy can go on that cruise you’ve been talking about, no problem.”

  Mule looked grim again. “Yeah, but then Fancy’ll be gettin’ varicose veins.”

  “Every calling has an occupational hazard,” said the rector. “Look at yours—a real estate market that’s traditionally volatile, you never know how much bread you can put on the table, or when.”

  J.C. threw his bulging briefcase onto the bench and slid into the booth.

  “Did you hear what Adele did last night?”

  “What?” the realtor and the rector asked in unison.