Out to Canaan

by Jan Karon

  Harley grinned. “Somethin’ with Mickey on it, Rev’rend! I’d be much obliged.”

  Hot. He didn’t remember being so hot in years, not since his parish by the sea.

  And the colors in this part of the world—so vivid, so bright, so . . . different. In the mountains, in his high, green hills, he felt embraced, protected—consoled, somehow.

  Here, it was all openness and blue sky and flat land and palm trees. He never ceased to be astonished by the palm tree, which was a staple of the biblical landscape. How did the same One who designed the mighty oak and the gentle mimosa come up with the totally fantastic concept of a palm tree? Extraordinary!

  He chuckled.

  “Why are you laughing, dearest?”

  “I’m laughing at palm trees.”

  There went that puckered brow and concerned look again. Soon, he really would have to go on a retreat with his wife and act relaxed, so she’d stop looking at him like this.

  “You’re flying,” announced Cynthia, craning her neck to see the speedometer.

  Good Lord! Ninety! They’d be arriving in Lakeland in half the anticipated time.

  He could feel the toll of the 670-mile one-way trip already grinding on him as they zoomed past Daytona and looped onto the Orlando exit.

  The engine might be working in spades, and the wax job glittering like something off the showroom floor, but the air-conditioning performed only slightly better than a church fan at a tent meeting. He hadn’t noticed it at home where the elevation was a lofty five thousand feet, but here, where the sun blazed unhindered, they were all feeling the dismally weak effort of the a/c.

  He peered into the rearview mirror, checking on Pauline. She had ridden for hours looking out the window.

  He would let Cynthia drive when they got to the rest station in Providence, and once in Lakeland, they’d take a motel and rest before looking for Rhody Davis on Palm Court Way. In order to get Pauline back in time to keep Lida Willis satisfied, they would have only a few short hours to look for Jessie before they hauled back to Mitford on another ten-hour drive.

  Maybe he’d been a fool to risk so much on this one grueling trip.

  But if not now, when?

  He parked the car under a tree by the sidewalk, where the early morning shade still held what fleeting cooler temperature had come in the night.

  “That’s Rhody’s car in the driveway,” said Pauline.

  “Sit here,” he said, “while I check this out. I’ll leave the engine running, so you can stay cool.”

  “Cool!” said his wife. “Ha and double ha. Can’t I come with you, Timothy?”

  “No,” he said.

  He had worn his collar, but only after thinking it through. He always wore his collar, he reasoned—why should he not?

  His eyes made a quick reconnaissance.

  The small yard was nearly barren of grass. Plastic grocery bags were snared in the yucca plants bordering the unsheltered porch. The car was probably twenty years old, a huge thing, the hood almost completely bleached of its original color. A weather-beaten plastic tricycle lay by the steps. No curtains at the windows.

  He rang the doorbell, but failed to hear a resulting blast inside, and knocked loudly on the frame of the screen door.

  Hearing nothing, he knocked again, louder than before.

  Already the perspiration was beginning a slow trickle under his shirt. He might have been a piece of flounder beneath a broiler, and it wasn’t even nine a.m.

  Had they come so far to find no one home?

  He glanced at the bare windows again and saw her face pressed against the glass.

  His heart pounded; he might have leaped for joy.

  She looked at him soberly, and he looked at her, seeing the reddish blond hair damp against her cheeks, as if she’d been swimming. There was no doubt that this was five-year-old Jessie Barlowe; the resemblance to her brothers was startling.

  Not knowing what else to do, he waved.

  She lifted a small hand and waved back, eyeing him intently.

  He gestured toward the door. “May I come in?” he said, mouthing the words.

  She disappeared from the window, and he heard her running across a bare floor.

  He knocked again.

  This time, she appeared at the window on the left side of the door. She pressed her nose against the glass and stared at him. Perhaps she was in there alone, he thought with some alarm.

  She vanished from the window.

  Suddenly the door opened a few inches and she peered at him through the screen.

  “Who is it?” she asked, frowning. She was barefoot and wearing a pair of filthy shorts. Her toenails were painted bright pink.

  “It’s Timothy Kavanagh.”

  “Rhody can’t come!” she said, closing the door with force.

  He was baking, he was frying, he was grilling.

  He mopped his face with a handkerchief and looked toward the street, seeing only the rear end of his Buick sitting in the vanishing point of shade.

  “Jessie!” he yelled, pounding again. “Jessie!”

  He heard her running across the floor.

  She opened the door again, this time wider. “Rhody can’t come!” she said, looking stern.

  He tried the screen door. It wasn’t locked.

  He opened it quickly and stepped across the threshold, feeling like a criminal, driven by his need.

  The intense and suffocating heat of the small house hit him like a wall. And the smell. Good Lord! His stomach rolled.

  He saw a nearly bare living room opening onto a dining area that was randomly filled with half-opened boxes and clothing scattered across the floor

  “You ain’t ’posed to come in,” she said, backing away. “I ain’t ’posed to talk to strangers.”

  “Where is Rhody?”

  “Her foot’s hurt, she done stepped on a nail.” She wiped the sweat from her face with a dirty hand, and put her thumb in her mouth.

  “Is she here?”

  Jessie glanced down the hall.

  “I’d like to talk with her, if I may.”

  “Rhody talks crazy.”

  “Can you take me to her?”

  She looked at him with that sober expression, and turned and walked into the hall. “Come on!” she said.

  The smell. What was it? It intensified as he followed her down the long, dark hallway to the bed where Rhody Davis lay in a nearly empty room. A baby crib stood by the window, containing a bare mattress and a rumpled sheet; a sea of garbage was strewn around the floor.

  The woman was close to his own age, naked to the waist, a bulk of a woman with wispy hair and desperate eyes, and he saw instantly what created the odor. Her right foot, which was nearly black, had swollen grotesquely, and streaks of red advanced upward along her bloated leg. The abscesses in the foot were draining freely on the bedclothes.

  Her head rolled toward him on the pillow.

  “Daddy? Daddy, is that you?” Sweat glistened on her body and poured onto the soaked sheets.

  “Rhody—”

  “You ain’t got no business comin’ here lookin’ for Thelma.”

  “What—”

  “Thelma’s long gone, Daddy, long gone.” She moaned and cursed and tossed her head and looked at him again, pleading. “Why’d you bring that dog in here? Git that dog out of here, it’ll bite th’ baby . . . .” She tried to raise herself, but fell back against the sodden pillow.

  “Do you have a phone?” he asked Jessie. He was faint from the heat and the stench and the suffering.

  Jessie sucked her thumb and pointed.

  It was sitting on the floor by an empty saltine cracker box and a glass of spoiled milk. He tried to open the windows in the room, but found them nailed shut.

  Then he dialed the number everyone was taught to dial and went through the agonizing process of giving the name, phone number, street address, and the particular brand of catastrophe.

  “Gangrene,” he said, knowing.

&
nbsp; At the hospital, he got the payoff for wearing his collar. The emergency room doctor not only took time to examine Rhody Davis within an hour of their arrival, but was willing to talk about what he found.

  “There was definitely a puncture to the sole of the foot. Blood poisoning resulted in a massive infection, and that led to gangrene.”

  “Bottom line?” asked the rector.

  “There could be a need to amputate—we don’t know yet. In the meantime, we’re putting her on massive doses of antibiotics.”

  “What follows?”

  “Based on what you’ve told me, our department of social services will plug her into the system.”

  “She’ll be taken care of?” asked Cynthia.

  The amiable doctor chuckled. “Our social services department loves to get their teeth into a tough case. This one looks like it fills that bill, hands down.”

  “I’ll check on her,” said Cynthia. “I’m his deacon.”

  He should have been exhausted, with one long trip behind him and another one ahead. But he wasn’t exhausted, he was energized. They all were.

  Cynthia chattered, fanning herself with one of the coloring books she’d been optimistic enough to bring. Pauline talked more freely, telling them Miss Pattie stories from Hope House, and holding Jessie on her lap.

  Jessie alternately ate cookies, broke in a new box of crayons, and asked questions. What was that white thing around his neck? What was their dog’s name? Where were they going? What was wrong with Rhody? Could they get some more french fries? Did they put her monkey in the trunk with her tricycle? Why didn’t Cynthia paint her toenails? Why did the skin on Pauline’s arm look funny? Could they stop so she could pee again?

  Sitting behind the wheel on the first leg of the journey, he glanced often into the rearview mirror.

  He saw Jessie touching her mother’s face, though the concept of having a mother was not clear to her. “You’re pretty,” said the child.

  “Thank you.”

  “You don’t got no ear.”

  “It was . . . burned off.”

  “How’d you burn it off? Did you cry?”

  “I’ll tell you about it one day. That’s why my arm looks funny. It was burned, too.”

  “Are we goin’ back to get Rhody? Are you Rhody’s friend?”

  “I’m your mother.”

  Stick in there, he thought, feeling the pain as if part of it belonged to him. He looked at his wife. He knew when she was praying, because she often moved her lips, silently, like a child absorbed in the reading of a book.

  As soon as they got around Daytona, they all played cow poker with enthusiasm, using truck-stop diners in place of the nearly nonexistent cows.

  He felt as if he’d been hit by a truck, but thanks be to God, he hadn’t.

  They rolled into Mitford at midnight, dropped Pauline and Jessie at Betty Craig’s, and went home and found Dooley’s note that said he was spending the night at Tommy’s. Crawling into bed on the stroke of one, he looked forward to sleeping in, until Cynthia told him she’d asked Pauline to leave Jessie with them on her way to work. Betty Craig was spending a rare day away from home with a sister, and did it make sense to leave Jessie with her elderly grandfather, who was a total stranger?

  He slept until seven, when he heard Jessie come in, shrieking with either delight or fear upon encountering Barnabas. He woke again at eight, when he heard Puny, Sissy, Sassy, and the overloaded red wagon bound over the threshold and clatter down the hall like so much field artillery.

  He burrowed under the covers, feeling the guilt of lying abed while the whole household erupted below him.

  Someone was bounding up the stairs, and it definitely wasn’t his wife.

  “Wake up, Mr. Tim!”

  Jessie Barlowe, freshly scrubbed, with her hair in a pony tail, trotted into the room. As he opened his eyes, she scrambled onto the bed and peered down at him.

  “Time to put your collar on and get my tricycle out of your car!”

  Actually, it was more like he’d gone a few rounds with Mike Tyson.

  Standing helplessly by the coffeepot, he’d fallen prey to Puny’s plea that he “watch” the twins while she did the floors upstairs. Cynthia and Jessie had gone next door, out of the fray, and here he was, drinking strong coffee in the study behind closed doors, as Sassy bolted back and forth from the bookcase to the desk, laughing hysterically, and Sissy lurched around the sofa with a string of quacking ducks, occasionally falling over and bawling. Barnabas crawled beneath the leather wing chair, trying desperately to hide.

  “Ba!” said Sissy, abandoning the ducks and taking a fancy to him. “Ba!”

  “Ba, yourself!” he said.

  With the vacuum cleaner roaring above his head on bare hardwood, and Sissy banging his left knee with a rattle, he read Oswald Chambers.

  “All your circumstances are in the hand of God,” Chambers wrote, “so never think it strange concerning the circumstances you’re in.”

  The fact that this piece of wisdom was the absolute gospel truth did not stop him from laughing out loud.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Amazing Grace

  Pauline and Jessie were sitting at the kitchen table as he cooked dinner.

  They heard Dooley coming down the hall.

  “It’s Dooley,” said Pauline, gently pushing Jessie toward her brother as he walked into the kitchen.

  Dooley was suddenly pale under his summer tan.

  “Jess?”

  It had been three years, the rector thought, and for a five-year-old, three years is a long time.

  “Jess?” Dooley said again, sinking to his knees on the kitchen floor.

  Jessie looked at him soberly. Then, standing only a couple of feet away, she slowly lifted her hand and waved at her brother.

  “Hey, Jess.”

  “Hey,” she murmured, beginning to smile.

  It came to him during the night.

  At seven o’clock on Sunday morning he called Hope House, knowing she would be sitting by the window, dressed for church and reading her Bible.

  “Will you do it?” he asked

  “Law, mercy . . .” she said, pondering.

  “For Miss Sadie? For all of us?”

  Louella took a deep breath. “I’ll do it for Jesus!” she said.

  Harley Welch was dressed in a dark blue jacket and pants, a dress shirt that Cynthia had plucked out of Bane contributions and washed and ironed, and a tie of his own. It was, in fact, his only tie, worn to his wife’s funeral thirteen years ago, and never worn since.

  “You look terrific!” exclaimed Cynthia.

  “Yeah!” agreed Dooley.

  “Here!” said the rector.

  Harley took the box and opened what had been hastily purchased at a truck stop in South Carolina.

  “Th’ law, if it ain’t a Mickey watch! I’ve always wanted a Mickey watch! Rev’rend, if you ain’t th’ beat!”

  There went Harley’s grin . . . .

  Driving his crew to Lord’s Chapel, he thought how it was Harley who was the beat. Harley Welch all rigged up for church and wearing a Mickey Mouse watch was still another amazing grace from an endlessly flowing fountain.

  He stood in the pulpit and spoke the simple but profound words with which he always opened the sermon.

  “In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, amen.”

  Then, he walked over and sat in the chair next to the chalice bearer, leaving the congregation wondering. This morning, someone else would preach the top part of the sermon—an English clergyman, long dead, and one of his own parishioners, very much alive.

  In the middle of the nave, on the gospel side, Louella Baxter Marshall rose from her pew and, uttering a silent prayer of supplication, raised the palms of her hands heavenward and began to sing, alone and unaccompanied.

  Amazing grace! how sweet the sound

  that saved a wretch like me!

  I once was lost but now am found


  was blind, but now I see.

  The power of her bronze voice lifted the hymn of the Reverend John Newton, a converted slave trader, to the rafters.

  ’Twas grace that taught my heart to fear,

  and grace my fears relieved;

  how precious did that grace appear

  the hour I first believed!

  The Lord has promised good to me,

  his word my hope secures;

  he will my shield and portion be

  as long as life endures.

  The words filled and somehow enlarged the nave, like yeast rising in a warm place. In more than one pew, hearts swelled with a message they had long known, but had somehow forgotten.

  For those who had never known it at all, there was a yearning to know it, an urgent, beating desire to claim a shield and portion for their own lives, to be delivered out of loss into gain.

  The rector’s eyes roamed his congregation. This is for you, Dooley. And for you, Poo and Jessie, and for you, Pauline, whom the hound of heaven pursued and won. This is for you, Harley, and you, Lace Turner, and even for you, Cynthia, who was given to me so late, yet right on time . . . .

  Through many dangers, toils, and snares,

  I have already come;

  ’tis grace that brought me safe thus far,

  and grace will lead me home . . . .

  Today was the day. He was ready.

  Ron Malcolm, who had priced Fernbank at three hundred and fifty thousand, suggested they accept an offer of no less than two ninety-five. Fernbank was not only an architecturally valuable structure, even with its flaws, but the acreage was sizable, chiefly flat, and eminently suited for development. At two hundred and ninety-five thousand, give or take a few dollars, it would be a smart buy as well as a smart sell.