Out to Canaan

by Jan Karon

  “We’ve done it again,” proclaimed his wife, shaking her head.

  They gazed at each other, spent and pale.

  “Next year,” she said, relieved, “it will be different.”

  Next year, he would not be running around like a chicken with its head cut off, because next year, he would not have a parish.

  Suddenly his eyes misted, just thinking about it.

  Less than twelve months hence, his parishioners would be standing around him in the parish hall, singing “For he’s a jolly good fellow,” and giving him money, and a plaque of some sort, and tins of mixed nuts.

  After the wedding, Winnie and Thomas planned to move into her cottage by the creek, while Scott Murphy would move his wok and precious few other possessions into Winnie’s present quarters, once the home of Olivia Harper’s socialite mother.

  “Musical chairs!” said Cynthia.

  It was the season of good news and glad tidings, in every way. Joe Ivey was moving back to Mitford.

  “Hallelujah!” Father Tim said.

  Winnie looked pleased as punch. “He said people kept askin’ if Elvis was really dead, and he just couldn’t take it anymore. He’ll barber in that little room behind th’ Sweet Stuff kitchen.”

  “Baking and barbering!” said the jubilant rector. “I like it!” A little off the sides and a fruit tart to go.

  “Look!” said Jessie. “A baby in a box.”

  She stood on tiptoes, holding her doll, and gazed into the crèche that had belonged to his grandmother.

  He realized she didn’t know about the Babe, and wondered how his life could be so sheltered that he should be surprised.

  He glanced at his watch and picked her up and stood looking down upon the crèche with her. Standing there in the lamplit study, he told her about the Babe and why He came, as she sucked her thumb and patted his shoulder and listened intently.

  Four days before Christmas, and he was running ragged like the rest of crazed humanity. He resisted glancing at his watch again, and set her down gently as the front doorbell gave a blast.

  If that wasn’t a fruitcake from the ECW, he’d eat his hat. Or, more likely, it was the annual oranges from Walter.

  “I came to say . . . so long.” Buck Leeper stood in the stinging cold, bareheaded.

  He had dreaded this moment. “Come in, Buck!”

  “I can’t, I’m on my way to Mississippi, I just—”

  “Buck!” Jessie came trotting down the hall and grabbed the superintendent around the legs, as Barnabas raced in from the kitchen, barking.

  “Please,” said the rector, standing back for Buck to come in. “We’re keeping Jessie while Pauline shops for pots and pans. Come on back, we’ll scare up something hot for the road.”

  “Well,” Buck said, awkward, then stooped and picked Jessie up in his arms.

  They walked down the hall and into the study, where a fire simmered on the hearth. Buck stood in the doorway as if in a trance, taking in the tree ablaze with tiny lights and the train running around its base.

  Suddenly the rector saw the room with new eyes, also—the freshly pungent garlands over the mantel and the candles burning on his desk, reflected in the window. He had been passing in and out of this room for days, scarcely noticing, enjoying it with his head instead of his heart.

  Buck abruptly set Jessie down and squatted beside her on one knee. “Look, you have a good Christmas,” he said, speaking with some difficulty.

  Her eyes filled with tears. “Buck, please don’t go off nowhere!”

  “I’ve got to,” he said.

  She threw her arms around his neck, sobbing. “Me an’ Poo wanted you to live with us!”

  Buck held her close and covered his eyes with his hand.

  “Don’t cry,” said Jessie, clinging to him and patting his shoulder. “Please don’t cry, Buck.”

  He stood and wiped his eyes on the sleeve of his jacket. “Thanks for . . . everything. Your job is in good hands. I’ll let myself out.”

  Buck stalked out of the study and up the hall, closing the front door behind him. The rector had been oddly frozen in place, unable to move; Jessie stood at the study door, crying, holding her doll.

  The clock ticked, the train whistled and clacked, the fire hissed.

  He walked over to her with a heavy heart and touched her shoulder.

  She looked up at him, stricken. “Buck shouldn’t of done that,” she said.

  Seven-thirty a.m., and he’d already gone through yesterday’s mail, typed two letters, and been to see Louella.

  Surely he could take ten minutes . . .

  He walked to the end of the corridor and opened the door without knocking, just as he’d always done.

  “Oh, rats, I might have known that was you,” said Esther Cunningham, using both hands to hide something on her desk.

  “What’s the deal? What’re you hiding? Aha! A sausage biscuit!”

  “It’s no such thing, it’s a ham biscuit!”

  “Sausage, ham, what’s the difference?”

  “I specifically spoke to th’ Lord about sausage,” she said, her eyes snapping, “so lay off.”

  “Esther, Esther.”

  He sat down and put his feet up on the Danish modern coffee table, grinning.

  She grinned in return, gave him a thumbs-up, then threw back her head and roared with laughter.

  Ah, but it was good to hear the mayor laughing again.

  As a bachelor, he had wondered every year what to do on Christmas eve. With both a five o’clock and a midnight service, he struggled to figure out when or what to eat, whether to open a few presents after he returned home at nearly one a.m. on Christmas morning, or wait and do the whole thing on Christmas afternoon while he was still exhausted from the night before.

  Now it was all put into perspective and, like his bishop who loved being told what to do for a change, he listened eagerly to his wife.

  “We’re having a sit-down dinner at two o’clock on Christmas Eve, and we’ll open one present each before we go to the midnight service. We will open our presents from Dooley on Christmas morning, because he can’t wait around ’til us old people get the stiffness out of our joints, and after brunch at precisely one o’clock, we’ll open the whole shebang.”

  She put her hands on her hips and continued to dish out the battle plan.

  “For brunch, of course, we’ll invite Harley upstairs. The menu will include roasted chicken and oyster pie, which I’ll do while you squeeze the juice and bake the asparagus puffs.”

  All she needed was a few military epaulets.

  “After that, Dooley will go to Pauline’s and spend the night, and our Christmas dinner will be served in front of the fire, and we shall both wear our robes and slippers!”

  She took a deep breath and smiled like a schoolgirl. “How’s that?”

  How was that? It was better than good, it was wonderful, it was fabulous. He gave her a grunting bear hug and made her laugh, which was a sound he courted from his overworked wife these days.

  He reached up to the closet shelf for the camera and touched the box of his mother’s things—the handkerchiefs, her wedding ring, an evening purse, buttons . . .

  He stood there, not seeing the box with his eyes, but in his memory. It was covered with wallpaper from their dining room in Holly Springs a half century, an eon, ago. Cream colored roses with pale green leaves . . .

  He would not take it down, but it had somehow released memories of his mother’s Christmases, and the scent of chickory coffee and steaming puddings and cookies baking on great sheets; his friends from seminary gathering ’round her table; and the guest room with its swirl of gifts and carefully selected surprises, tied with the signature white satin ribbon.

  He stood there, still touching the box, recalling what C.S. Lewis had said. It was something which, long ago, had expressed his own feelings so clearly.

  “With my mother’s death,” Lewis wrote, “all settled happiness, all that was tranqui
l and reliable, disappeared from my life. There was to be much fun, many pleasures, many stabs of Joy; but no more of the old security. It was sea and islands now; the great continent had sunk like Atlantis . . . .”

  “Mother . . .” he whispered into the darkened warmth of the closet. “I remember . . . .”

  He wasn’t surprised that he hadn’t seen Mack Stroupe again at Lord’s Chapel. It appeared that even his hotdog stand was closed—perhaps for the holidays, he thought.

  He didn’t want to consider whether he’d ever see Edith Mallory again.

  “I do this every year!” said Cynthia, looking alarmed.

  “Do what?”

  “Forget the cream for tomorrow’s oyster pie. And of course no one will be open tomorrow.”

  It was that lovely lull between the five o’clock and midnight services of Christmas Eve, and he was sitting by the fire in a state of contentment that he hadn’t felt in some time. Tonight, after the simplicity of the five o’clock, which was always held without the choir and the lush profusion of garlands and greenery, would come the swelling rush of voices and organ, and the breathtaking spectacle of the nave bedecked, as if by grace, with balsam, fir, and the flickering lights of candles.

  He roused himself as from a dream. “I’ll run out and find some. I think Hattie Cloer is open ’til eight.”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “Don’t be. You cook, I fetch. I get a much better deal.” He took her face in his hands and kissed her on the forehead, then went to the kitchen peg for his jacket.

  “Man! What’s that terrific smell?” He sniffed the air, homing in on the oven.

  “Esther’s orange marmalade cake! Vanita Bentley gave me a bootleg copy of her recipe. She ran off dozens on her husband’s Xerox.”

  “Where’s your conscience, Kavanagh?”

  “Don’t worry, this is legal. I called Esther and she gave me permission to use it. Have at it! she said.”

  “Oh, well,” he sighed, feeling diabetic and out of the loop.

  “You can have the tiniest sliver, dearest. I’m sure your food exchange will allow it.”

  If she only knew. “Harley!” he called down the basement stairs. “Want to run to the highway?”

  “Yessir, Rev’rend, I do, I’m about t’ gag on this book about that feller hoardin’ ’is gold.”

  He heard Dooley and Barnabas clambering down from above. “Where’re you going?” asked Dooley.

  “To the store. Want to come?”

  “Sure. Can I drive?”

  “Well . . .”

  “You said I could when I came home for Christmas.”

  “Right. Consider it done, then!” Perfect timing! It was just getting dark, and hardly a soul would be out on a cold Yuletide eve.

  Harley came up the stairs, wearing a fleece-lined jacket that he’d found, good as new, at the Bane. “I was hopin’ f’r a excuse t’ lay that book down. It ain’t even got a picture in it!”

  Barnabas stood in the fray, wagging his tail and hoping to be invited, as the doorbell gave a sharp blast.

  “I’ll get it!” said the rector, hurrying along the hall.

  It was Buck Leeper, standing in the pale glow of the porch light.

  “I got as far as Alabama and turned around,” he said. “I’m willing to do whatever it takes.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Lion and Lamb

  Buck was shaking as they went into the study. Though the rector knew it wasn’t from the cold, he asked him to sit by the fire.

  There was a long silence as Buck waited for the trembling to pass; he sat with his head down, looking at the floor. The rector remembered the times of his own trembling, when his very teeth chattered as from ague.

  “Does Pauline know you’re back in Mitford?”

  “No. I came for . . . I came for this.” He looked up. “I didn’t want to come back.”

  “I know.”

  “It was sucking the life out of me all the way. I was driving into Huntsville when I knew I couldn’t keep going . . . .”

  He was shaking again, and closed his eyes. Father Tim could see a muscle flexing in his jaw.

  “God a’mighty,” said Buck.

  Father Tim looked at him, praying. The man who had controlled some of the biggest construction jobs in the Southeast and some of the most powerful machinery in the business couldn’t, at this moment, control the shaking.

  “I pulled into an Arby’s parkin’ lot and sat in the car and tried to pray. The only thing that came was somethin’ I’d heard all those years in my grandaddy’s church.” Buck looked into the fire. “I said, Thy will be done.”

  “That’s the prayer that never fails.”

  The clock ticked.

  “He can be for your life what the foundation is for a building.”

  Buck met his gaze. “I want to do whatever it takes, Father.”

  “In the beginning, it takes only a simple prayer. Some think it’s too simple, but if you pray it with your heart, it can change everything. Will you pray it with me?”

  “I don’t know if I can live up to . . . whatever.”

  “You can’t, of course. No one can be completely good. The point is to surrender it all to him, all the garbage, all the possibilities. All.”

  “What will happen when . . . I pray this prayer?”

  “You mean what will happen now, tonight, in this room?”

  “Yes.”

  “Something extraordinary could happen. Or it could be so subtle, so gradual, you’ll never know the exact moment He comes in.”

  “Right,” said Buck, whispering.

  The rector held out his hand to a man he’d come to love, and they stood before the fire and bowed their heads.

  “Thank You, God, for loving me . . .”

  “Thank You, God . . .” Buck hesitated and went on, “for loving me.”

  “ . . . and for sending Your Son to die for my sins. I sincerely repent of my sins, and receive Christ as my personal savior.”

  The superintendent repeated the words slowly, carefully.

  “Now, as Your child, I turn my entire life over to You.”

  “ . . . as Your child,” said Buck, weeping quietly, “I turn my entire life over to You.”

  “Amen.”

  “Amen.”

  He didn’t know how long they stood before the fire, embracing as brothers—two men from Mississippi; two men who had never known the kindness of earthly fathers; two men who had determined to put their lives into the hands of yet another Father, one believing—and one hoping—that He was kindness, Itself.

  In the kitchen, Cynthia said, “You won’t believe this! Look!”

  She pointed under the kitchen table, where Barnabas and Violet were sleeping together. The white cat was curled against the black mass of the dog’s fur, against his chest, against the healing wound.

  Father Tim sank to his knees, astounded, peering under the table with unbelieving eyes.

  “It’s a miracle,” Cynthia told Buck. “They’ve been mortal enemies for years. You can’t imagine how he’s chased her, and how she’s despised him.”

  Barnabas opened one eye and peered at the rector, then closed it.

  “The lion shall lie down with the lamb!” crowed Cynthia.

  “Merry Christmas, one and all!” whooped the rector.

  “Merry Christmas!” exclaimed his wife.

  “Right,” said Buck. “You, too.”

  “I thought you’d never get finished.” Dooley came up the basement steps with Harley. “Hey, Buck, I thought you’d left for Mississippi. How’s it goin’?”

  “Real good, what are you up to?”

  Dooley pulled a pair of gloves out of his jacket pocket. “I’m drivin’ to the store! Let’s bust out of here, I’m ready.”

  “Settin’ on high idle, is what he is,” said Harley.

  They trooped to the garage and pushed the button that opened the automatic door. It rose slowly, like a stage curtain, on a scene that stopped
them in their tracks.

  “Snow!” Dooley shouted.

  It was swirling down in large, thick flakes and already lay like a frosting of sugar on the silent lawn.

  “Maybe you’d better let me drive,” said the rector.

  “I can drive in snow! Besides, I won’t go fast, I’ll go really slow.”

  “I don’t reckon they’s any cows out plunderin’ around in this, Rev’rend.”

  Buck and Harley climbed into the backseat, and he slid in beside Dooley. “This isn’t Harley’s truck, buddy, so there’s no clutch. Remember to keep your left foot—”

  “I know how,” said Dooley.

  As they turned right on Main Street, there they were, on every lamppost—angels formed of sparkling lights, keeping watch over the snow-covered streets.

  “By jing,” said Harley, “hit’s another world!”

  “Glorious!” said the rector. The Buick seemed to be floating through a wonderland, lighter than air. He turned the radio to his favorite music station. Hark the herald angels . . .

  “Buck, where are you staying?”

  “I’ll bunk in with one of my crew for a couple days, then head back. Emil’s got me on a big job in Texas startin’ January.”

  “Why don’t you bunk in with us? Harley, would you let Buck use your sofa bed? Cynthia’s using the guest room as a gift-wrapping station.”

  “Hit’d be a treat. I sleep s’ far down th’ hall, I don’t reckon I’d keep you awake with m’ snorin’.”

  “And you’ll have brunch with us tomorrow, if that suits.”

  “I’d like that,” said Buck. “Thank you.”

  Dooley braked at the corner. “Let’s ride by Mama’s, want to?”

  “I’ll go anywhere you ’uns say,” declared Harley.

  “We’ll just ride by and honk th’ horn,” said Dooley, “then let’s ride by some more places before we go to the store, OK?”