Jan Karon's Mitford Years

by Jan Karon

  “Come in out of the fretful stir!” she once said as he popped through the door at Happy Endings.

  He had looked up and smiled. “Wordsworth!” he exclaimed, obviously pleased.

  How many people would recognize two little words among a poet’s thousands? She had felt positively thrilled.

  Opening her purse, she examined the contents for the Kleenex she’d stuffed in at the last minute. Though she thought it fatuous to cry at weddings, she deemed it wise to be prepared.

  In the fourth row of the epistle side, Gene Bolick wondered what on earth was going on. His watch said five-fifteen. He knew Richard well enough to know he was looking pale after hammering down on the organ all this time with nothing happening.

  He glanced again at the bishop’s wife, whose head was bowed. Was she praying that the father hadn’t chickened out at the last minute? Wouldn’t that be a corker if their priest was on a plane bound for the Azores? He didn’t know where the Azores were located, but figured it was a distance.

  Realizing his fists were clenched and his palms sweaty, he forced his attention to the three-layer orange marmalade sitting in the parish hall refrigerator, looking like a million bucks. He hoped to the Lord the temperature was set right and hadn’t accidentally been switched to extra cool, which had once frozen two hundred pimento cheese sandwiches as hard as hockey pucks. He nudged Esther, who appeared to be sleeping under the brim of the hat she wore only to weddings and funerals.

  Esther was not sleeping, she was thinking, and ignored the nudge. Didn’t she deserve to sit and catch her breath until these people got their act together and got on with it? She was thinking that maybe she’d put in too much sugar, she knew Father Tim didn’t like too much sugar, but why, after all these years and hundreds of cakes later, did she still worry and fret over her work as if she’d never baked a cake in her life? The Expert is what some called her, but who could feel like an expert at something as willful and fickle as a cake, cakes having, as she’d always feared, a mind of their own? Use the same ingredients in the same amounts, time after time after time, and were her cakes ever the same? Not as far as she could see.

  She’d always depended on Gene to be the judge and he hadn’t failed her yet. Gene would take a taste of the batter and his eyes would wander around the room, as if that little taste had transported him on some round of roving thoughts and idle speculation. After a while, he’d come back to himself. “Best yet!” he might say, or, “Couldn’t be better!”

  Whatever he said, he would have reasoned it out, thought it through, and she could depend on the answer—which was more than most wives could say of their husbands. Now, you take Father Tim, his wife would be able to depend on him—the only question was, was she deserving of such a prize? She thought she was, she hoped she was; she was crazy about Cynthia, but hadn’t her senator husband, or was he a congressman, run around with other women? What did that mean? Cynthia didn’t look like a cold fish—the opposite, more like it.

  Anyway, didn’t their rector have enough sense to come in out of the rain and choose who he wanted to spend the rest of his life with? And in the last few months, hadn’t she and everybody else in the parish heard him laugh and joke like never before?

  Lord help, it must be virgin’s bower that was making her eyes burn and her sinuses drain. Virgin’s bower mixed with lilies, the bane of her existence, and nobody with the simple courtesy to remove the pollen from the anthers, which means it would be flying around in here like so much snuff, and her with no Sinu-Tabs in her pocketbook and too late to do anything about it.

  Pete Jamison made his way into the nave of Lord’s chapel, where a robed and expectant choir overflowed from the narthex. Embarrassed at being late, he dodged through the throng to the rear wall and stood, reverent and shaken, feeling at once a stranger here and also oddly at home. He realized his breath was coming in shallow gasps, probably because he’d run more than a block from the Collar Button where he’d parked—or was it from the excitement he felt in being here for the first time since his life had been changed forever?

  Two rows from the front, on the gospel side, Miss Sadie sat holding hands with Louella, oblivious of the time and enjoying the music. She felt certain that the emotions stirring in her breast were those of any proud mother.

  After all, Father Tim wasn’t merely her priest, her brother in Christ, and one of the dearest friends of this life, he was also like a son. Who else would run up the hill after a hard rain and empty the soup kettle sitting brimful under the leak in her ceiling? And who else would sit for hours listening to her ramble, while appearing to be genuinely interested? God in His Providence had not seen fit to bless her with children, but He’d given her Olivia Harper and Timothy Kavanagh! And, since she’d helped raise Louella from a baby, she could almost count her pewmate as her child—Lord knows, she wasn’t but ten years old when she’d begun diapering and dressing that little dark baby as if it were her own!

  Miss Sadie wiped a tear with the handkerchief she had carefully chosen for the occasion, a lace-trimmed square of white Irish linen monogrammed with her mother’s initial, and turned and smiled proudly at Louella, who looked a perfect blossom in the lavender dress.

  Dooley Barlowe swallowed hard. It would have been fine if everything had started when it was supposed to, but here it was twenty minutes after five and who knew where Cynthia and Father Tim were, like maybe they both got scared and ran off, or had a fight and weren’t going through with it. He felt foolish sitting here in the front row, all of them tricked into waiting like a bunch of stupid goats, listening to organ music. He was about to die to go to the toilet, but if he tried now to make it to the parish hall, everybody would know where he was going.

  He crossed his legs and squeezed his eyes shut and jiggled his foot and went through the verses again.

  Reverend Absalom Greer had purposely followed Sadie Eleanor Baxter into the nave, though he tried to appear as if he had no idea she was anywhere around. He followed her so he could sit behind her and look at her again. Who knows when the Lord might call him Home and this would be his last chance on earth to see her face?

  The way it fell out was, he was the first to go into the pew behind her, which meant he had to sit all the way to the end, by the window of Jesus washing the disciples’ feet. He thought this location was a blessing from above, seeing as he could look at her in profile instead of at the little gray knot on the back of her head.

  Absalom felt such a stirring in his breast that he might have been fourteen years old, going up Hogback to see Annie Hawkins, carrying two shot quails and a mess of turnips in a poke. Annie’s mama was dead of pneumonia and her daddy not heard of since the flood, and as Annie was left to raise a passel of brothers and sisters, he never went up Hogback without victuals; once he’d killed a deer and helped her skin it and jerk the meat.

  It had taken him three years to get over big-boned, sassy-mouthed Annie Hawkins, but he’d never gotten over Sadie Baxter. Sadie had filled his dreams, his waking hours, his prayers for many a year; he’d earnestly hoped she would forget Willard Porter and marry him. Finally, the burning hope had fizzled into a kind of faint glow that laid on his heart like embers, making him smile occasionally and nod his head and whisper her name. He’d confessed this lingering and soulful love only to the Almighty and never told another, though sometimes his sister, Lottie, suspicioned how he was feeling and derided him with a cool stare.

  Reverend Greer settled stiffly into the creaking pew and nodded to those around him and bowed his head and prayed for his dear brother in the Lord, Tim Kavanagh, as fine a man as God ever gave breath to, amen. When he lifted his head and looked at Sadie’s profile and the tender smile on her face, the tears sprang instantly to his eyes and he fetched the handkerchief from his pocket, the handkerchief Lottie had starched and ironed’til it crackled like paper, and thanked the Lord Jesus that he still had eyes to see and tears to wipe, hallelujah.

  Pete Jamison, though six-foot-three, eased h
imself up on the balls of his feet so he could see down front to the gospel side. He found the pew where he sat the day he had wandered, alarmed and desperate, into the darkened church. It had been sometime around Thanksgiving and there was snow on the ground; he remembered noticing his incoming tracks as he left the church a different man, one to whom everything seemed fresh and new.

  He’d knelt that day and cried out to God, asking a simple question: Are you up there? He wasn’t trying to get anything from God, he wasn’t begging for money or success, though at the time he urgently needed both, he just wanted to know more desperately than he’d ever wanted to know anything in his life, if God was up there—no more ifs, ands, or buts, just yes or no. Now he knew the answer more completely than he could ever have hoped or imagined.

  He felt tears smart his eyes, and his heart expand. The music was beginning to enter him; he was beginning to hear it over the pounding of his heart, and was glad to feel the joy of this time and place as if it might, in some small way, belong also to him.

  Standing outside the church door in the warm September afternoon, Katherine Kavanagh saw the bride and groom literally galloping down the street, and suppressed a shout of relief. She tugged on her skirt for the umpteenth time and tried to relax her tense shoulders so the jacket would fall below her waistline. In the desperate half hour she’d waited for Cynthia to show up, she had decided what to do. The minute she returned home, she was suing the airline, who had gotten away with their criminal behavior long enough.

  Though wanting very much to dash across the churchyard and meet Cynthia, she realized this impetuous behavior would cause her skirt to ride up. She stood, therefore, frozen as a mullet as she watched the bride sprinting into the home stretch.

  Next to the aisle on the epistle side, Emma Newland nearly jumped out of her seat as the organ cranked up to a mighty roar. The thirty-seven-voice ecumenical choir was at last processing in, sending a blast of energy through the congregation as if someone had fired a cannon.

  The congregation shot to its feet, joining the choir in singing hymn number 410 with great abandon and unmitigated relief:Praise my Soul the King of Heaven;

  To His feet thy tribute bring;

  Ransomed, healed, restored, forgiven,

  Evermore His praises sing;

  Alleluia, alleluia!

  Praise the everlasting King!

  Dooley Barlowe felt something happen to the top of his head. He had opened his mouth with the rest of the congregation and heard words flow out in a strong and steady voice he scarcely recognized as his own.

  Praise Him for His grace and favor;

  To His people in distress;

  Praise Him still the same as ever,

  Slow to chide and swift to bless.

  Alleluia, alleluia,

  Glorious in His faithfulness.

  Dooley thought Father’s Tim’s voice carried loud and clear from where he stood with the bishop and Walter at the rail. The bishop was decked out in a really weird hat, but looked cool as anything otherwise. As for Father Tim, he’d never seen him in a tuxedo before and thought he looked . . . different, maybe sort of handsome.

  The tremor in his stomach subsided; he felt suddenly tall and victorious and forgot about having to go to the toilet.

  Hessie Mayhew gazed at Stuart Cullen, whom she found exceedingly good-looking, and thought it was a darned good thing that Episcopal clergy were allowed to marry, otherwise it could cause a rumpus. She’d never chased after clergy like some women she knew, but she couldn’t dismiss their powerful attraction, either. Anyway, who’d want to tie the knot with a preacher and end up with a whole churchful of people pulling you to pieces day and night? Head this, chair that! No, indeed, no clergy for her, thank you very much.

  She fluffed her scarf over the odd rash that had appeared on her neck, dismissing it as one of the several hazards of her calling, and hoped the bishop was noticing the flowers and that someone would tell him about Hessie Mayhew, who, even if she was Presbyterian, knew a thing or two about the right and proper way to beautify a church.

  Angels, help us to adore Him;

  Ye behold Him face to face;

  Sun and moon, bow down before Him,

  Dwellers in all time and space.

  Alleluia, alleluia!

  Praise with us the God of grace.

  Jena Ivey could not carry a tune in a bucket and preferred to look at the stained-glass window for the duration of the processional hymn. The window was of Christ being baptized while John the Baptist stood onshore in his animal skin outfit. It seemed to her that St. John could have presented himself better, seeing it was the Lord Jesus who was getting baptized; like it wasn’t as if St. John didn’t know He was coming, for Pete’s sake. Look at the three wise men, who always appeared nicely groomed, though they’d been riding camels for two years.

  She was startled by the sound of the trumpet only a few feet away, causing, simultaneously, an outbreak of goose bumps and a wild pounding of her heart.

  Then, suddenly, there was the matron of honor charging down the aisle; Jena didn’t have a clue who this woman might be, she was tall as a giraffe. That’s the way it was with weddings, they turned out people you’d never seen before in your life and would never see again.

  Emma thought the matron of honor blew past like she was going to a fire, canceling any opportunity to study the skimpy cut of Katherine Kavanagh’s suit, or to check out the kind of shoes she had on. She did, however, get a whiff of something that wasn’t flowers, it was definitely perfume, possibly from Macy’s or some such.

  Then came Rebecca Jane Owen and Amy Larkin, wearing velvet hair bows the color of green Baxter apples. As far as Emma could tell, they were fairly smothered with flowers; you’d think Hessie Mayhew would scale down for children, but oh, no, Hessie scaled up, these two infants were fairly tottering under the weight of what looked like full bushes of hydrangeas.

  Jabbing Harold to do the same, Emma swiveled her head to see the bride trotting behind the small entourage.

  Cynthia Coppersmith was flushed as a girl—her eyes shining, her face expectant, her hair curled damply around her face as if she’d just won a game of tag. Emma thought she looked sixteen years old if she was a day, and her suit was exactly the color of a crayon Emma had favored in first grade, aquamarine. She appeared to be moving fast, but that was all right—hadn’t she herself run lickety-split to marry Harold Newland, starved to death for affection after ten years of widowhood and thrilled at the prospect of someone to hug her neck every night?

  Emma leaned over the arm of the pew so she could see Father Tim as his bride approached the altar. The look on his face made her want to shut her eyes, as if she’d intruded upon something terribly precious and private.

  “Dearly beloved, we have come together in the presence of God to witness and bless the joining together of this man and this woman in Holy Matrimony. The bond and covenant of marriage was established by God in creation, and our Lord Jesus Christ adorned this manner of life by His presence and first miracle at a wedding in Cana of Galilee. It signifies to us the mystery of the union between Christ and His Church, and Holy Scripture commends it to be honored among all people.

  “The union of husband and wife in heart, body, and mind is intended by God for their mutual joy; for the help and comfort given one another in prosperity and adversity; and, when it is God’s will, for the procreation of children and their nurture in the knowledge and love of the Lord. Therefore marriage is not to be entered into unadvisedly or lightly, but reverently, deliberately, and in accordance with the purposes for which it was instituted by God.

  “Into this holy union, Cynthia Clary Coppersmith and Timothy Andrew Kavanagh now come to be joined. . . .”

  Uncle Billy Watson hoped and prayed his wife would not fall asleep and snore; it was all he could do to keep his own eyes open. Sitting with so many people in a close church on a close afternoon was nearabout more than a man could handle. He kept alert by asking himself a s
imple question: When it came time, would he have mustard on his ham, or eat it plain?

  “Cynthia, will you have this man to be your husband; to live together in the covenant of marriage? Will you love him, comfort him, honor and keep him, in sickness and in health; and, forsaking all others, be faithful to him as long as you both shall live?”

  Winnie Ivey clasped her hand over her heart and felt tears burn her cheeks. To think that God would give this joy to people as old as herself and no spring chickens . . .

  The bride’s vow was heard clearly throughout the nave. “I will!”

  “Timothy, will you have this woman to be your wife; to live together in the covenant of marriage? Will you love her, comfort her, honor and keep her, in sickness and in health; and, forsaking all others, be faithful to her as long as you both shall live?”

  “I will!”

  “Will all of you witnessing these promises do all in your power to uphold these two persons in their marriage?”

  “We will!”

  At the congregational response, Dooley Barlowe quickly left the front pew by the sacristy door and took his place in front of the altar rail. As he faced the cross and bowed, one knee trembled slightly, but he locked it in place and drew a deep breath.

  Don’t let me mess up, he prayed, then opened his mouth and began to sing.

  Oh, perfect Love, all human thought transcending,

  Lowly we kneel in prayer before Thy throne,

  That theirs may be the love which knows no ending,

  Whom Thou forevermore dost join in one.

  It all sounded lovey-dovey, thought Emma, but she knew one thing—it would never work if Cynthia sat around drawing cats while her husband wanted his dinner! Oh, Lord, she was doing it again, and this time without intending to; she was running down a person who didn’t have a mean bone in her body. She closed her eyes and asked forgiveness.