Out to Canaan

by Jan Karon

  Pauline appeared at the door and let him in as the rector walked up to the porch.

  “Mama, there’s a job at Hope House! Something in the dining room! I heard it at the store, they need somebody right now.”

  “Oh.” Pauline grew pale and put her hand to the left side of her face. “I . . . don’t know.”

  “You’ve waited tables, Mama, you can do it! You can do it!”

  He saw the look on Dooley’s face, and tried to swallow down a knot in his throat. In only a few years, this boy on a bicycle would be worth over a million dollars, maybe two million if the market stayed strong. Dooley wouldn’t know this until he was twenty-one, but the rector could see that Sadie Baxter had known exactly what she was doing when she drew up her will.

  “Come on, Mama, get dressed and go up there, I’ve got to get back to The Local or Avis’ll kill me, I got five deliveries.”

  “I’ll take you,” the rector told Pauline. “I’ll go home and get the car, won’t be a minute.” Hang the meeting in the parish hall at two o’clock.

  Pauline looked at him through the screen door, keeping her hand over the left side of her face. “Oh, but . . . I don’t have anything to . . . I don’t know . . .”

  “Don’t be afraid,” he said.

  Tears suddenly filled Pauline’s eyes, but she managed to smile. “OK,” she said, turning to look at her son. “I can do it.”

  “Right!” said Dooley. He charged through the door and raced down the steps and was away on his red bicycle, but not before the rector saw the flush of unguarded hope on his face.

  “I’ll be back,” said Father Tim. “Wear that blue skirt and white blouse, why don’t you? I thought you looked very . . .”—he wasn’t terribly good at this; he searched for a word—“nice . . . in that.”

  She gazed at him for a long moment, almost smiling, and disappeared down the hall.

  An attractive woman, he thought, tall and slender and surprisingly poised, somehow. Her old life was written on her face, as all our lives are written, but something shone through that and transformed it.

  In his opinion, Hope House might have done a notch better on their personnel director, Lida Willis.

  “How long have you been sober?” asked the stern-looking woman, eyeing Pauline.

  “A year and a half.”

  “What happened to turn you around?”

  “I prayed a prayer,” said Pauline, looking fully into the director’s cool gaze.

  “You prayed a prayer?”

  Though he sat well across the room, feigning interest in a magazine, Father Tim felt the tension of this encounter. God was calling Pauline Barlowe to come up higher.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Are you in AA?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know. I . . . feel like God has healed me of drinkin’. I don’t crave it no more.”

  “Shoney’s fired you for drinking on the job?”

  “Yes. But they said that . . . when I was sober, I was the best they ever had.”

  “Miss Barlowe, what makes you think you might be right for this job?”

  “I understand being around food, I get along real well with people, and I’m not afraid of hard work.”

  The director sat back in her chair and looked at Pauline, but said nothing.

  “I need this job and would be really thankful to get it. I know if you call Sam Ward at Sam and Peg’s Ham House in Holding, he’ll tell you I do good work, I never missed a day at th’ Ham House, my station was fourteen tables.”

  “Were you drinking when you worked there?”

  Pauline looked down for a moment, then looked straight at Lida Willis. “Not as bad as . . . later.”

  “Has your personal injury handicapped you in any way?”

  “Sometimes I don’t hear as good out of my left ear, but that’s all. My arm works wonderful, it’s a miracle.”

  “I appreciate your honesty, Miss Barlowe.” She stood up. “Please don’t call us. We’ll be in touch.”

  Pauline stood, also. “Yes, ma’am.”

  Dear God, he wanted this job for Pauline. No, wrong. He wanted this job for Dooley.

  He saw Scott Murphy in the hall. “If there’s anything you can do,” he said under his breath as Pauline drank at the water fountain. “Your dining room manager’s job . . .” He never begged anyone for anything, but this was different and he didn’t care.

  Scott looked at him, knowing.

  “She can do it,” he told the chaplain.

  He was looking something up in his study when he heard a noise in the garage. It sounded like his car engine revving.

  Surely Harley wasn’t already working on . . .

  He went through the kitchen, carrying J. W. Stevenson’s rare volume on his ministry in the Scottish highlands.

  Dooley was sitting in the Buick, gunning the motor. Barnabas sat on the passenger side, looking straight ahead.

  “What’s going on?” Father Tim asked through the open car window.

  “Nothin’.”

  “Nothing, is it? Looks like you’re gunning that motor pretty good.”

  “I’m checking it out for Harley.”

  “Really?”

  “He didn’t ask me to, but I thought it would help him to know how it sounds.”

  “Right. Well, you’re out of there, buddy. Come on.”

  Dooley gave him an aloof stare. “Jack’s dad lets him—”

  “Look. What Jack’s dad does is beside the point.” Was it, really? He didn’t have a clue. Why would people let fourteen-year-old kids drive a car, two years before they could get a license? Or was that the going thing and he was a stick-in-the mud? “Maybe one day we can drive out to Farmer . . . .”

  Dooley turned off the ignition: “Cool,” he said. “Your engine’s got a knock in it.”

  At six-thirty, Barnabas was finishing up last week’s meat loaf, Violet was sneering down from the refrigerator, Cynthia was running a garlic clove around the salad bowl, Dooley was taking one of his endless showers, and Lace was stuffing a snack down a reluctant Harley Welch.

  Father Tim still couldn’t get over the fact that only three or four years ago, the rectory had been quiet as a tomb. No dog, no boy, no wife in an apron, no red-haired babies, and hardly ever a soul in the guest room, with the agonizing exception, of course, of his phony Irish cousin and an occasional overnight visit by Stuart Cullen, his seminary friend and current bishop.

  “Can I talk t’ you som’ers?” Lace wanted to know.

  Harley was sitting on the side of the bed, fully dressed, but looking weak. He scraped the last bite from a cup of peach yogurt and wiped his mouth with his sleeve.

  “Rev’rend, Lace has got a notion I cain’t argue ’er out of. Don’t pay no attention to ’er if she talks foolish.”

  “I don’t believe I’ve ever heard Lace talk foolish,” he said. “You look a little peaked today, Harley. How’re you feeling?”

  “Wore out. We was up an’ down an’ aroun’ ever’ whichaway, th’ doc said I needed exercise. I been eatin’ like a boar hog an’ layin’ up in this bed ’til I was runnin’ t’ fat.”

  “We could go down t’ y’r basement,” said Lace, tugging at her hat brim.

  “My basement?”

  “I hate like th’ dickens I couldn’t talk ’er out of this,” said Harley. “She’s pigheaded as a mule, always has been since I knowed ’er as a baby.”

  “What’s the deal?” he asked as they trooped down the basement stairs.

  “You’ll see,” she said.

  The musty smell of earth came to him, and he remembered the cave he and Cynthia had been lost in only last year. They had wandered in circles for fourteen agonizing hours, until the local police, led by Barnabas, brought them out.

  He shuddered and flipped the switch that lit the dark hallway.

  There was the bathroom that hadn’t been used since he moved here fifteen years ago, and the two bedrooms and
the little kitchen—which had served, during the tenures of various rectors, as a mother-in-law apartment, a facility for runaways and later for elderly widows, a home office, an adult Sunday School, a church nursery, and storage space for the detritus of nearly a century of clergy families.

  Lace folded her arms across her chest. “This is what I think.”

  “Shoot.”

  “When me’n Harley was ramblin’ around today outside, we seen y’r basement door. F’r somethin’ t’ do, I tried t’ git th’ door open and had t’ nearly bust it in.”

  “Really?”

  “But it ain’t broke, it was just stuck.”

  “Good!”

  “So we seen how this is a place t’ live, with a toilet an’ kitchen an’ all. An’ I got to thinkin’ how if Harley goes back to th’ Creek, how he ain’t goin’ t’ take care of hisself, an’ besides, somethin’ bad could happen to ’im.”

  “Aha.”

  “So I thought if you was to like th’ idea, Harley could live down here and go t’ work f’r you an’ Cynthia.”

  He pulled at his chin.

  “Harley can work, you ain’t never seen ’im work, you just seen ’im laid up sick. Harley can rake, he can saw, he can hammer, he can paint.”

  “I’ll be darned.”

  “An’ he wouldn’t charge you a cent to keep you an’ Cynthia’s cars worked on.”

  She looked at him steadily under the dim glow of the bulb.

  “Well, I don’t know. I’d have to think about it, talk to Cynthia about it.”

  “He wouldn’t be no trouble. They wouldn’t be no cookin’ or nothin’ to do for ’im, he could take care of hisself. He could paint this place for you, fix it up, I’d help ’im.”

  She paused, then said: “You ought t’ do it, it’d be good for ever’body.”

  Lace Turner had made her case, and rested it.

  “Can he draw cats?” asked Cynthia. “He could do my next book.”

  Uh-oh. “Your next book?”

  “I’ve been meaning to tell you, dearest. I’m starting a new book. You know how I said I’d never do another Violet book?”

  “You definitely said that. Several times.”

  “I lied.”

  “Aha.”

  “You won’t believe the advance they’ll give me to do another Violet book.”

  It was true. When she told him, he didn’t believe it. “Come on. That’s four times what they gave you for the bluebird book.”

  “Well, you see, I refused so fiercely to do another Violet book, they had to make me an offer I couldn’t resist.”

  “You’re tough, Kavanagh.”

  “So kiss me!” she said, laughing.

  He kissed her, inhaling the elusive scent of wisteria. “Congratulations! We can build a boat and retire to the Caribbean and spend our lives cruising and fishing.”

  “Where did you get an idea like that?”

  “From Mike Jones at Incarnation in Highlands. He said that’s what he wants to do when he retires—the only problem is, he’s never mentioned it to his wife.”

  “The only problem is,” she said, “we’ll need gobs of money to enlarge my little yellow house to contain a man, an ocean of books, and a dog the size of Esther Bolick’s Westinghouse freezer.”

  “Well, then. What do you think?”

  “I think we should let him have the basement and fix it up. I love Harley. He’s funny and good-hearted and earnest. And it would be wonderful to have some more help around here. For openers, your garage could use a cleanup and my Mazda needs a new alternator.”

  “What do you know about alternators?”

  “Absolutely nothing. Which means it would be nice to have Harley living in the basement. We’ll buy the paint and I’ll make his kitchen curtains.”

  “Done!” he said.

  A new book? He knew what that meant. It meant his wife would be working eight hours a day or more, complaining of a chronically stiff neck, staring out the window without speaking, getting headaches from eye strain, and crashing into bed at night as lifeless as a swamp log.

  Oh, well. He sighed, trudging up the stairs with his dog to tell Harley the news.

  “Goodnight, buddy.”

  He had left Harley’s room and stepped down the hall to sit on the side of Dooley’s bed.

  “ ‘Night.”

  “We’re praying that your mother gets the job.”

  “Me, too.”

  “How about your job? You like it all right?”

  “It’s neat. But I’m about give out.”

  When Dooley was tired or angry, Father Tim noted, he often lapsed into the vernacular. He grinned. That prep school varnish hadn’t covered the boy’s grain entirely. “Are you going to run a booth at the town festival?”

  “Yep. Avis wants Tommy and me to do it. Avis’ll be the bigwig and take the money.”

  “Sounds good. What will you do?”

  “We’ll sell corn and stuff from the valley. Avis has buckets of blackberries and strawberries comin’ in from Florida, and peaches from Georgia and syrup from Vermont and all. He’s calling it ‘A Taste of America.’ ”

  “Great idea! That Avis . . .”

  “I’m about half killed.”

  “Well . . . see you at breakfast.”

  “What were you doing up at Mama’s today? Taking livermush to Granpaw?”

  “Just dropped by to say hello, that’s all, and check on Poobaw.”

  “He likes to be called Poo now.”

  “I’ll remember that. I’m glad you heard about the job at Hope House and didn’t waste any time.”

  “Me, too. ’Night.”

  “Goodnight.”

  He went downstairs with a heart nearly full to bursting. To borrow a phrase from Dooley’s granpaw, blast if he didn’t love that boy better than snuff.

  In less than a week, the bishop would arrive at Lord’s Chapel on his annual confirmation pilgrimage. This year, however, he also had a dirty job to do. It had fallen on him to break the news of Timothy Kavanagh’s retirement, just eighteen months away.

  Stuart Cullen did not look forward to this bitter task. The parish wouldn’t like the news, not even a little. In fact, he was prepared to duck after divulging this woe. Unless he and Martha got out of there immediately after the service, he was in for a virtual cantata of moaning and groaning, not to mention wailing and gnashing.

  All that, he knew, would be followed by a series of outraged letters and phone calls to diocesan headquarters, and possibly a small, self-appointed group who would show up on his doorstep, begging him to force Father Tim to remain at Lord’s Chapel until he was on a walker or, worse yet, senile and unable to commandeer the pulpit.

  The rector, in the meantime, was trying to get himself in shape for an occasion that seemed variously akin to a wedding and then a funeral. His feelings rose and plummeted sharply. Bottom line, he couldn’t dismiss the fact that once the words left Stuart’s mouth, the deed was done, it was writ on a tablet, he was out of there.

  His wife had certainly done everything in her power to help, though nothing seemed to calm his nerves. Certainly not the new suit she ordered from New York and which, he was aghast to find, was double-breasted. Would he look like some Mafia don at the parish brunch, as he struggled to give his stunned parish a look of innocent piety?

  And so what if he’d managed to lose a full four pounds six ounces and appear positively trim? The downside was, his stomach stayed so infernally upset, he couldn’t eat.

  For years, he had feared this whole retirement issue. Even Stuart confessed to dreading it, and had once called retirement “a kind of death.”

  For himself, however, he had made peace with his fear last year in the cave. He had been able, finally, to forgive his father, to find healing and go on.

  In some way he would never fully understand, he’d thought that by preaching into infinity, he could make up for having been unable to save his father’s soul. Not that he could have saved it, perso
nally—that was God’s job. But he had somehow failed to soften his father’s heart or give him ears to hear, and had believed he could never make up for that failing, except to preach until he fell.

  Now he knew otherwise, and felt a tremulous excitement about stepping out on faith and finding his Canaan, wherever it may be. Indeed, the fear he now wrestled with was the fear of the unfamiliar. Hadn’t he been wrapped in a cocoon for the last sixteen years, the very roof over his head provided?

  “By faith, Abraham went out,” he often quoted to himself from Hebrews, “not knowing where . . . .”

  He knew one thing—he didn’t want to leave the priesthood. He was willing to supply other pulpits here, there, anywhere, as an interim. Wouldn’t that be an adventure, after all? Cynthia Kavanagh certainly thought so. He suspected she had already packed a bag and stashed it in the closet.

  There were only a couple of things left to be done prior to Sunday. One, attend the closed vestry meeting on Friday night and tell them the news before it hit the pulpit. He dreaded it like a toothache. As far as he knew, they didn’t have a clue what was coming, and they’d be shocked, stunned. He could stay and take it like a man, or duck out the back door while Buddy Benfield gave the closing prayer.

  The list was all downhill from there. Two, book Stuart and Martha’s lodging in Wesley, and three, get a haircut.

  But hadn’t he just had a haircut?

  His hair was growing fast, Cynthia said, because of the olive oil in his diet.

  Emma said he looked shaggy because Joe Ivey had gotten slack toward the end and hadn’t given him his money’s worth.

  Somebody else declared it was the time of year when hair had a growth spurt like everything else, from ragweed to burdock.

  He called Fancy Skinner for an appointment. Today, if possible, and get it over with.

  “Oh, law, I don’t have an openin’ ’til kingdom come! Ever’ since Joe Ivey went to Tennessee, I’ve gone like a house afire! The haircuts he’s let loose around here gives me th’ shivers, you can spot a Joe Ivey cut a mile away, it’s always these little pooches of hair over th’ ears, it’ll take me a year to get rid of that chipmunk look in this town.