Jan Karon's Mitford Years

by Jan Karon

  He drummed his fingers on the desktop.

  He didn’t want to work on his sermon. He didn’t want to take a shower and crawl into bed with a wellloved book from his well-stocked shelves, and he most certainly did not want to turn on the TV and have the clamor pour into this quiet place like some foul Niagara. He was unable to think of anything he wanted to do; there was no seduction in any of the usual pursuits.

  Aha. His fingers grew still upon the desktop.

  There it was, plain as day:

  He wanted to record, somehow, the joy of this breathless thing that had swept him up and overpowered and mesmerized him. Perhaps for most people, people who had been in love again and again, it would not be such a beauteous experience, but it was new to him and dazzling. Yet even in its newness, he felt it slipping away, becoming part of a personal history in which the nuances, the shading, would be lost forever; buried within the consciousness, yes, but paled by time, and then, he feared, vanished altogether.

  He opened the desk drawer and took out a writing pad and one of the commercial pens he’d grown to prefer. Though the ink had a noxious odor, he liked the way it flowed onto the page—black, bold, and able.

  He knew now what his soul was driving him to. He knew, and he liked the idea immensely.

  He would write a poem.

  In it, he would tell her everything, he would confess the all of his love, which, by its great and monumental force, had heretofore rendered him dumb as a mackerel.

  With her, he experienced a galaxy . . . no, an entire universe of feelings, yet they continually displayed themselves as the western portion of the state of Rhode Island:

  YouarebeautifultomeIshallloveyoueternallywillyou marrymeandmakemethehappiestmanwhoeverdrewbreath, period, end of declaration.

  He was amazed at how far he’d gotten with this extraordinary woman by the utterance of the most rudimentary expressions of love, all of them sincere beyond measure, and yet, they were words too simple and words too few; not once had they been equal to the character, the beauty, or the spirit of the one to whom they were addressed.

  He knew, now, why people wanted to shout from rooftops, yet he couldn’t imagine it to have great effect, in the end. One would clamber onto the roof and, teetering on some gable or chimney pot, bellow until one was hoarse as a bullfrog, “I love! I love!”

  And what would people on the street do? They would look up, they would shrug, they would roll their eyes, they would say:

  So?

  He bounded happily from the chair and went to the kitchen to put the kettle on. Clearly, shouting from the rooftops had been a fleeting thing in the history of the lovestruck, not long enjoyed as a certified expression of ardor. Indeed, what had done the trick each and every time? Poetry! And history had proved it!

  “ ‘I love thee,’ ” he recited as he filled the kettle, “ ‘. . . to the level of every day’s Most quiet need, by sun and candlelight . . . I love thee freely, as men strive for Right . . .’ ”

  There! That was getting down to it. The only problem was that E. B. Browning had already written it.

  He stood musing by the stove in a kind of fog that made him forget momentarily where he was and what he was up to, until the kettle whistled and he awoke and found himself oddly joyful to be dropping the bags into the teapot and pouring the steaming water therein.

  He clamped the lid on the pot and, leaving it to the business of steeping, returned to the study and visited his bookshelves. He couldn’t readily put his hand on a volume of love poetry, but surely he’d find something here to spark a thought, to get his blood up. He chose a small blue volume that he’d used a time or two in marital counseling, and opened it at random.

  “ ‘I feel sad when I don’t see you,’ ” he read aloud from a letter by a nineteenth-century American suitor. “‘Be married, why won’t you? And come to live with me. I will make you as happy as I can. You shall not be obliged to work hard, and when you are tired, you may lie in my lap and I will sing you to rest . . .’ ”

  There’s a good fellow! he thought.

  “ ‘. . . because I love you so well, I will not make you bring in wood and water, or feed the pig, or milk the cow, or go to the neighbors to borrow milk. Will you be married? ’ ”

  He shoved the book upon the shelf, took down another, and thumbed through the section on all things marital.

  “ ‘I love you no longer; on the contrary, I detest you . . .’ ” Napoleon Bonaparte to Josephine, wrong section.

  Ah, well, here was one for the books, something Evelyn Waugh had trotted out in a letter of proposal. “ ‘I can’t advise you in my favour because I think it would be beastly for you, but think how nice it would be for me!’ ”

  Would it be beastly for Cynthia? Living with him, an old stick in the mud? He shook the thought away and licked his right forefinger and turned to another page.

  “ ‘You have set a crown of roses on my youth and fortified me against the disaster of our days. Your courageous gaiety has inspired me with joy. Your tender faithfulness has been a rock of security and comfort. I have felt for you all kinds of love at once. I have asked much of you and you have never failed me. You have intensified all colours, heightened all beauty, deepened all delight. . . .’” Duff Cooper, writing to his future wife in the war-dark year of 1918, had known how to get down to brass tacks, all right. Maybe he could do something with the idea of courageous gaiety; he had always thought Cynthia courageous.

  He sighed deeply. In truth, this was going nowhere. It was a waste of precious time to try and glean from another man’s brain. There’d be no more lollygagging.

  He dashed again to the kitchen and poured a mug of tea, then added a little milk and stirred it well, and returned to his desk and sat, gazing at the mug, the pad, and the pen, and the nightfall dark against his window.

  He considered that he had written hymns to God, several in his time, but he’d never done anything like this, never! He knew that God was familiar with his very innards and that He perceived the passion of his heart full well; thus he had not sweated greatly over lines that were awkward here or a tad sophomoric there, but this . . .

  “Write!” he bellowed aloud.

  Barnabas bolted from the rug by the sofa and trotted to his master and stood by the desk. The rector turned his head slowly, and for a moment each looked soulfully into the other’s eyes.

  Dearest love . . . , he wrote at last, tender one . . . my heart’s joy . . .

  He drew a line through the feeble words and began again:

  Loveliest angel of light and life . . .

  What about something from the Song of Solomon? On second thought, scratch that. The Song still made him blush. Whoever drummed up the notion that it was about Christ and the church . . .

  He nibbled his right forefinger and mused upon lines from Shakespeare; he chewed his lower lip and called to mind Keats; he sank his head onto his arms on the desktop and contemplated Robert Browning’s fervent avowal, “All my soul follows you, love . . . and I live in being yours.”

  Blast and double blast. The good stuff had already been written.

  He talked to himself with some animation as he trotted up Main Street from Lord’s Chapel. What if Shakespeare had never put pen to paper because the good stuff had already been written? In truth, what if he refused one morning to preach because all the good sermons had already been preached?

  Ha!

  On the other side of the Irish Shop’s display window, Minnie Lomax examined the bent head and hunched shoulders of the village priest as he blew past, his mouth moving in what she supposed was prayer.

  He didn’t look at all like a man besotted with love, not in her view.

  Why was he staring at the sidewalk when he might be looking into the heavens, or whistling, or waving to her through the window as he usually did? He was scared of what he’d let himself in for, that’s what! Sixty-something and getting married for the first time? The very thought gave her the shivers.

  She
had never married, and never wanted to. Well, not never, exactly. She had wanted to once, and look what happened. She sniffed and smoothed her cardigan over her thin hips and took a Kleenex from her pocket and blew her nose, then turned around to the empty store, wondering what she might do to lure traffic through the door today. Boiled wool had a terrible go of it during the summer; next year she would advise the owner to put in more cotton and linen, for heaven’s sake, and get shed of the entire lot of those hideous crocheted caps.

  He would choose each word as carefully as his mother had chosen peaches off Lot Stringman’s truck. “Let me pick them out for you, Miz Kavanagh.” “No, thank you, Mr. Stringman,” she would say, “I like the doing of it myself.”

  Finally despairing that writing a poem was beyond his endowment, he had decided to be content with writing a letter.

  Peach by perfect peach, that is how he would choose his words....Sunday afternoon, four o’clock, a breeze stirring through the open windows

  My Own,

  Consider how these two small words have the power to move and shake me, and take my breath away! I am raised to a height I have never before known, somewhere above the clouds that hide the mountain-rimmed valleys and present a view of floating peaks. I have been comfortable for years, haplessly rooted in myself like a turnip, and now am not comfortable at all, but stripped of everything that is easeful and familiar, and filled with everything that is tremulous and alive; I am a spring lamb upon new legs. Every nerve is exposed to you, my dearest love, and my thankfulness for this gift from God knows no bounds, no bounds! Indeed, He has saved the best for last, and that He should have saved it at all, set it aside for me, is a miracle. A miracle! Let no one ever say or even think that God does not work miracles, still; every common day, every common life is filled with them, as you know better than anyone I have ever met. You, who see His light and life in the dullest blade of grass, have taught my own eye to look for and find His magnitude abounding everywhere.

  Though you are merely steps away, beyond the hedge, I long for you as if you were in Persia, and yet, your presence is with me, your very fragrance clings to the shirt I wear.

  I have given my heart completely only once, and that was to Him. Now He has, Himself, set aside in my heart a room for you. It is large and open and suffused with light, with no walls or boundaries to stifle us, and He has graciously fashioned it to give us warmth and shelter and joyous freedom until the end of our days.

  May this be only the first of many times I thank you for all you are to me, and for the precious and inimitable gift of your love.

  Please know that I shall set a watch upon myself—to make every effort to bring you the happiness you so richly deserve, and, by His grace, to place your needs before my own.

  May God bless you with His greatest tenderness now and always, my sweetheart, my soon-to-be wife.

  Timothy

  He sat as if drained; there was nothing left of him, nothing at all, he was parchment through which light might be seen.

  “Barnabas,” he murmured.

  His good dog stirred at his feet.

  “I have a mission for you, old friend.” He folded the letter, regretting that he’d written it on paper from a mere notepad. Ah, well, what was done was done. He placed the letter in an envelope and thought carefully how he might address it.

  In a letter hidden inside an envelope, one might say whatever one wished, but the outside of the envelope was quite another thing, being completely exposed, as it were, to . . . to what? The hedge? The sky?

  My love, my blessing, my neighbor, he scrawled with some abandon.

  He licked the flap and pressed it down and sat for a moment with it under his hand, then took it to the kitchen and found a length of twine, which he looped around the neck of his patient dog. Lacking a hole punch, he stuck the tip of a steak knife through the corner of the envelope and ran the twine through the hole and tied it in a knot.

  “There!” he said aloud.

  He walked with Barnabas down the back steps and across the yard to the hedge. “OK, boy, take it to Cynthia!”

  Barnabas lifted his leg against a rhododendron.

  “Take it to Cynthia!” he said, wagging his finger in the direction of the little yellow house. “Over there! Go see Cynthia!”

  Barnabas turned and looked at him with grave indifference.

  “Cat!” he hissed. “Cynthia’s house! Cat, cat, cat!” That ought to do it.

  Barnabas sniffed a few twigs that lay in the grass, then sat down and scratched vigorously.

  Rats, what a dumb idea. In the old days, a fellow would have sent his valet or his coachman or some such, and here he was trying to send a dog—he deserved what he was getting.

  “Go, dadgummit! Go to Cynthia’s back door, that’s where you love to go when you’re not supposed to!”

  Barnabas gazed at him for a moment, then turned and bounded through the hedge and across her yard and up the steps to her stoop, where he sat and pressed his nose against the screen door, peering in.

  He suddenly felt ten years old. Why couldn’t he think straight for five minutes in a row? His dog might sit at that door ’til kingdom come, with Cynthia having no clue Barnabas was out there. Should he run to the door and knock to alert her, then run away again?

  This was suddenly the most ridiculous mess he’d gotten himself into in . . . ever. His face flamed.

  “Timothy?” It was Cynthia, calling to him through her studio window. He’d utterly forgotten about her studio window.

  “Umm, yes?”

  “Why are you hiding behind the hedge?”

  He was mortified. I have no idea, he wanted to say. “There’s a delivery”—he fairly thundered the word—“at your back door.”

  “Oh,” she said.

  He waited, covering his face with his hands.

  “My goodness!” he heard her exclaim as she opened the screen door. “A letter on a string!”

  Surely he would regret this.

  “‘My love, my blessing, my neighbor’!” she crowed.

  Did she have to inform the whole neighborhood?

  “Go tell your master that I’ve received his most welcome missive . . . which I can barely get off the string. Ugh! . . . Oh, rats, wait ’til I get the scissors.”

  His dog waited.

  “And further,” she said, coming back and snipping the letter off, “do tell him I shall endeavor to respond promptly. However, my dear Barnabas, do not harbor, even for a moment, the exceedingly foolish hope that it will be delivered by Violet.”

  The screen door slapped behind her.

  The deed done, his dog arose, shook himself, and came regally down the steps, across the yard, and through the hedge, where, wearing the remains of the twine around his neck, he sat and gazed at his master with a decided air of disdain, if not utter disgust.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The Prayer

  She pressed the letter to her heart, wishing the power of its message to enter her very soul and cause her to believe with the writer what an extraordinary benediction had come to them.

  Yes, she loved him; in truth, more than life itself. And yet, the fear was beginning to creep in, the fear she had at last grown wise enough to recognize—that she could not please him and give him the joy that he above all others, deserved; the fear that Timothy, like Elliott, would not find her valuable enough for any true purpose; the fear that her priest, her neighbor, and now her betrothed, might discover in her some “terrible lack,” as Elliott had called her inability to bear children.

  Only weeks earlier, she had wept in despair that Timothy Kavanagh would ever be able to abandon his own raw fear and surrender his heart.

  Now she bowed her head and wept because, at last, he had.

  She stood at the kitchen sink, spooning an odorous lump of congealed cat food into Violet’s dish.

  Drawing her breath sharply, she stared at the cat bowl that she had just filled without knowing it.

  She felt strick
en. What had she done when she accepted his proposal with such unbearable eagerness and joy? Had she rashly agreed to something in which she might prove a bitter disappointment to both Timothy and herself?

  And another thing—could she, who had often felt thrown away, be a friend and guide to a thrown-away boy? She thought she could, she knew she wanted to—for Dooley’s sake and her own.

  She put the bowl on the floor and walked down the hall to her studio and stood at the window, gazing across the hedge to the rectory. There was his stone chimney, his slate roof, his bedroom window beneath the gable....

  How often she had found solace in merely looking upon his house, the place where he would be working in his study, snoring by his fire, brushing his dog, commandeering his wayward boy, living his life.

  She’d begun by having the most terrific crush on him, like a pathetic schoolgirl; it had been the sort of thing that made her blush at the sight of him, and caused her skin to tingle when she heard his voice. Worse, there had been long lapses in concentration that afflicted her for months on end.

  She had plotted ways to meet him on the street, and once thumped onto the bench in front of the Main Street Grill, affecting a turned ankle that delayed her jaunt to The Local. He had, indeed, come by, just as she’d hoped, and sat with her and smiled at her in a way that made her nearly speechless until, finally, she fled the bench, forgetting to limp, and avoided him altogether for several weeks.

  She remembered, too, the day she had prayed and marched boldly to his back door. Her heart thundered under her jumper as she asked to borrow a cup of sugar to make a cake. Having no intention of making a cake, she worried whether, in some priestly way, he might see through such guile and find her out. But he had invited her in and fed her from the remains of his own supper and she had seen something in his eyes, some kindness that had nearly broken her heart with its plainness and simplicity. And then his dog, attached to the handle of the silver drawer by a leash, had yanked the drawer out, sending forks, knives, and spoons clattering about the kitchen and skidding into the hallway. They had dropped to their knees as one, hooting with laughter as they collected the errant flatware. Even then, she knew that something had been sealed between them, and that it was laughter that had sealed it