Jan Karon's Mitford Years

by Jan Karon

  Lon Burtie wiped his eyes on his bare arm.

  Buck drew a bandanna from his jeans pocket.

  Father Tim turned and looked away, his heart nearly bursting with joy and sorrow intermingled.

  “Sammy wants to show us his garden, may I take the car?”

  “How far is it?”

  “A couple of miles.”

  “What about…?” He didn’t want to say your father.

  “He’s not there, he won’t be there all day.”

  “Good.” Father Tim reached into his pocket and handed the key to Dooley. He had never before seen the boy’s face so radiant. The power of love was transforming; God had known that all along.

  “I learned to drink this stuff in Nam,” Lon said as he poured tea into three mugs.

  “They wouldn’t take me.” Buck looked at the floor, then up again.

  “What branch?”

  “Army. I was a machine gunner’s mate, E-4. We flew Hueys in and out of th’ war zone, a big ’copter that transported men and artillery.”

  In a moment of uncomfortable silence, the only sound came from two fans moving the close, humid air.

  “I thought I might never get over bein’ there, but I had to, it was eatin’ me alive. The stuff goin’ down in Nam was hard enough to deal with…then we came home and had to deal with what was goin’ down in here.” He made a fist and hit his head with a quick, ironic gesture.

  “I’m sorry,” Father Tim said.

  “Yeah, well, I can talk about it a little now. Only thing is, there’s not many to talk to ’cept Sammy.” Lon grinned. “He’s a good boy, I’m glad you found ’im. But you don’t want to cross ’im, he’s got ’is daddy’s temper.”

  Buck blew on his steaming tea. “We don’t know how to go about this, exactly, we’re tryin’ not to step in anything. I don’t know if he might like to, you know, come live with us.”

  Lon shrugged. “Sammy feels responsible for ’is daddy, he does everything but wipe ’is rear end. Buys ’is liquor, puts food on th’ table, hoofs to town when I can’t take ’im, washes th’ bedsheets his old man pukes on. Clyde Barlowe is one sorry sonofagun. For a fact, about as sorry as they come.”

  “We assume it’s true about Barlowe bein’ gone today. I wouldn’t want th’ kids to get in any trouble.”

  “It’s all right, he hightailed it up to Virginia with Cate Turner, one of his drinkin’ buddies.”

  Cate Turner. Lace Harper’s father. Father Tim was glad there’d never be any reason to mention this to her. “When will he get back, do you know?” Maybe they could take Sammy up the mountain for a day….

  “He’ll get back tonight, they go across th’ state line to buy lottery tickets. He’ll come home blasted out of his gourd and stay that way for four or five days.”

  “He needs help,” said Buck. “I was bad to drink myself.”

  “Us ol’ liquor heads, you line us up, we’d go around th’ world more’n a few times.”

  “What can we do?” asked Buck. “For now? For th’ short haul?”

  Lon shook his head. “I don’t know what to tell you. I offered Sammy a place over here, but he wouldn’t leave Clyde.”

  “We don’t want to force anything,” said Buck. “But…”

  “If you ran this deal through a social service agency, you could get Sammy out. The question is, would he be willin’ to go?”

  “What’s this Jaybird Johnson business?” asked Father Tim.

  “I think Clyde prob’ly stole somebody’s ID, I don’t have all th’ details on that.”

  “How much schooling has Sammy had, do you have any idea?”

  “I’ve known him since he was around seven, eight years old. Not much schoolin’, I can tell you for sure. He don’t like sittin’ in a classroom, they’ve held ’im back two grades. But he’s got a keen mind, very keen. You saw his garden, he took to doin’ that like a pig takes to slop, it’s natural to him. On th’ other hand, he can shoot the hair off any pool player you want to name. That’s natural, too; it’s an odd combination. I believe he could do ’most anything he set his mind to, but stayin’ around here, he’ll never amount to nothin’.” Lon shrugged. “I don’t much care to stay around here myself, but…”

  “But what?” asked Father Tim.

  Lon gave a short, cackling laugh. “But I ain’t plannin’ to amount to nothin’, so why bother to leave?”

  “An old preacher in Mississippi once said, ‘God don’t make junk.’ I’m sure you amount to more than you let on.” Father Tim smiled.

  “You have a trade?”

  “I paint houses. I got a truck, a couple of ladders, I keep busy. Th’ whole deal is to show up on time, do your work, stay sober, an’ clean up after yourself.”

  “Good plan.”

  “You might say my sideline keeps me goin’.”

  “What’s that?” asked Buck.

  “While th’ kids are over at Clyde’s, I’d like to show you—I don’t get much of a chance to, you know, show it to anybody.”

  “Please!” said Father Tim. “Lead on.”

  Lon took them across the large, sparsely furnished room to a door.

  “This was th’ head.”

  “That’s OK,” said Buck, “I don’t need to go. How ’bout you, Father?”

  “Was th’ head,” said Lon. Father Tim thought their graying, fiftyish host was a surprisingly handsome man when he smiled. Lon opened the door and stood back.

  Father Tim drew in his breath. “Good heavens!”

  Buck removed his ball cap. “Man!”

  “This is my garden. Walk in.”

  The room was fairly sizable. Where toilet stalls had been, the walls on three sides were lined with shelves containing potted orchids of varying colors and petal shapes. Orchids also sat in pots on shelves above a washbasin, and clung to a wire screen, their roots trailing into the air. A rattan blind was raised over a small window admitting light from the south.

  “Some of these plants are pretty old, I bought ’em after I came back from Da Nang. This’n right here, it’s Paphiopedilum delenatii, I brought it out of Nam in a duffel bag, wrapped bare root in my underwear. For a long time people thought it was extinct, it would’ve been worth ten, fifteen thousand bucks back then.”

  Buck whistled softly.

  “It’d probably bring about as much today, but I wouldn’t part with it, no way.”

  “Are they all out of Nam?”

  “They come from all over. These here originated in th’ Philippines, this one in India, over there, th’ dark pink, that’s a South American variety.”

  “Marvelous!” said Father Tim.

  “It’s good an’ humid down here by th’ river, they like that.”

  “How’d you get started doin’ this?” Buck wanted to know.

  “Th’ whole thing started with a man named…”—Lon cleared his throat, suddenly moved—“Tran van Hoi. We met in the mountains, where he lived with his family in a little hut. He was the enemy, accordin’ to th’ U.S., but he was…the best friend I ever had.”

  Lon wiped his eyes with the heel of his hand, unashamed. “I took most of my R and R time in th’ jungle, just lookin’ at th’ beauty. I was never afraid of th’ jungle, I grew up in th’ woods around here before it was timbered off and strip-malled. Tran taught me about orchids, they say there’s twenty-five hundred different kinds just in Nam.”

  “Words fail,” said Father Tim.

  “Yeah, well, I wish everybody who pulled time over there could have somethin’ like this. It’s what’s kept me from losin’ it completely. See these halogen deals I installed? Th’ light fakes ’em out, they don’t have a clue they’re growin’ in a Amoco station outside of Holding, North Ca’lina.”

  Lon grinned. “You might say electricity’s my only vice since I laid off weed an’ alcohol.”

  “This is great,” said Buck. “Just great!”

  “A day of miracles!” said Father Tim.

  Four miracles down, and one
—at least—to go.

  Hope Winchester sat on the stool at the cash register, a book closed in her lap, and tried to understand what had happened when she fell.

  She had gone down in a state of perplexity and anguish, and had been lifted up in a state of…it was important to find just the right word…in a state of happiness. She had always been leery of that word, and avoided using it. But happiness seemed to be what she had experienced—happiness and liberty.

  Liberty!

  She had never felt free in her life, until after the fall. To put it another way, she had gone down bearing a heavy weight and come up light and diaphanous, like the wings of a moth.

  Even her mother had noticed something different when they talked on the phone the other day. Her mother, who was in constant pain, seemed to forget the pain for a change and concentrate on her daughter, a hundred miles to the north. “You sound good,” her mother said. “You sound different.” And then, at the end, she said, “You must be happy. I hope you’ll get on the bus and come let your sister and me see you looking happy.”

  Though she was sitting in the way she usually sat on this odd and disagreeable stool—tight in the shoulders and along her spine, having nothing to lean her back upon—in her mind she was dancing, her face to the sun.

  “That’s a beautiful smile you’re wearing today,” said George, coming in from the mailroom.

  “Thank you,” she said. She noticed that she didn’t roll herself into a ball inside, nor was her heart racing. She’d said thank you in the most natural way in the world, which was part of the miracle of transformation she’d just been contemplating.

  “By the way, if you ever need help for any reason, you can call me at Miss Pringle’s. I know you had trouble with the plumbing the other evening.”

  “I appreciate it. I do.” The toilet had run over just as she was getting ready to lock up, and a plumber had to be summoned from Wesley.

  “Coffee this morning?”

  “Yes!” she said, still smiling. She didn’t try to pay him, for he would never take it. “I’d love coffee.”

  “The usual way,” he said. It was not a question.

  “Yes.” Her eyes met his, and she felt no fear, no fear at all. She didn’t shrink or recoil or wish to hide her head beneath the sales counter. “Thank you.”

  “Back in ten.” Now he was smiling, too. “Hold down the fort,” he said, closing the door behind him.

  She slid from the stool and walked to the center of the room to bask in the pale rectangle of light that shone through the glass-paneled door. She still felt stiff and sore from the fall, but stretched her arms and arched her back, in the manner of Margaret Ann, the bookshop cat, who was slumbering in the Gardening section. It was all she could do to restrain herself from dancing, though she knew nothing at all about dancing, had never danced, nor ever before wished to.

  She remembered the story of a man who’d suffered a blow to the head and, shortly afterward, sat down and played Chopin and Beethoven, though he’d never had a lesson, much less been exposed to a piano. Then there was the ten-year-old boy who, after a fall down the stairs, suddenly became a genius at math. Even though she hadn’t injured her head, had something like that happened to her?

  She should read about this phenomenon, of course, and turned toward the shelf where such a book might possibly be found. But…she stopped and considered: she didn’t want to read a book. Not at all. She didn’t even want to pore over the dictionary and learn the word, if there was one, for what seemed to have happened to her.

  What, then, did she want?

  A light flickered in her eyes. She wanted to feel her new feelings. One by one.

  He’d come back from his trip down the mountain elated and exhausted at once.

  But “old time it was a-flying,” and he had to get cracking with his sermon notes.

  Unfortunately, a ringing phone was always a temptation when he was working on a sermon….It blew the weight of responsibility away, if only for a fraction of…

  “Hello!”

  “Father Tim, Lew Boyd.”

  “Lew! I hadn’t heard back from you, did you change your mind?”

  “Oh, no. Wouldn’t do that. Thing is, we, ah…”

  “Yes?”

  “We run off to South Carolina and done it with th’ justice of th’ peace.”

  “Ah!”

  “See, me an’ Earlene ain’t exactly spring chickens.”

  “Right.”

  “So we already knew all th’ stuff you aimed to talk to us about.”

  “Aha.”

  “So we didn’t see no use to waste your time…”

  “No waste at all.”

  “…or ours, you know—we didn’t want to waste ours, neither.”

  “Don’t blame you a bit.”

  “You don’t?”

  “Certainly not! Congratulations!”

  “Remember, you can’t tell nobody.”

  “I remember.”

  “Not a soul.”

  “Got it.”

  “You come on by th’ station, I’ll give you a free wash and sweep you out.”

  “That’s mighty good of you, Lew, you don’t have to do that.”

  “I aim t’ do that! You come on by.”

  “Thank you kindly. I wanted to say I was sorry about the news regarding Harley. I knew it, of course, but…”

  “I ain’t goin’ to worry about it. I took a little heat when George pitched in to help on weekends, an’ I’ll take a little over this, but they’re two of th’ hardest-workin’ fellers you ever seen. Most of th’ help I’ve had th’ last few years has been so triflin’ it’s criminal…in a manner of speakin’.”

  “Well, then! When do we get to meet Earlene?”

  “She’s goin’ to stick with her job another year to, you know, get her retirement benefits an’ all, then she’ll be movin’ to Mitford.”

  “A long-distance marriage. I hear that’s the going thing these days.”

  “I’m puttin’ a new engine in my Dodge Ram, an’ replacin’ th’ carburetor.”

  “That’ll do it.”

  “Remember not to tell nobody.”

  “Right.”

  “We’re plannin’ to stay low-key ’til, you know, we get things straightened out.”

  “Aha.”

  “Well, you come on over in a day or two and get your wash job.”

  “I will, Lew, and thank you. We’d like to have you and Earlene over when things settle down.”

  “We ’preciate it, Father.”

  “May God bless your marriage to be a long and happy one!”

  “We ’preciate it.”

  He was grinning when he hung up. He had rather a fondness for late-blooming romances.

  They had found Sammy Barlowe; Bill Sprouse was preaching at First Baptist on Sunday; and as for himself, his weight was steady, his sugar hovering around normal, and he had his own preaching to do.

  He should have been shouting for joy. Instead, he felt the old darkness moving upon him.

  At four o’clock, he pulled on his running clothes and laced up his shoes. Exercise doesn’t take energy, he lectured himself, it gives energy, everybody knows that.

  Barnabas came and stood by his knee, looking soulfully into his eyes. His was a profound dog, always had been. He put his arm around the large head, its dark coat now shot through with silver, and whispered, “You, my friend, are the best of the best.” He held his dog’s head close to his beating heart. There had never been, nor ever would be, a more boon companion than this.

  “God be with you,” he said, hoarse.

  He wandered down to the kitchen and opened the refrigerator and saw that Puny had left his dinner covered with foil, ready to be reheated. He peered under the foil.

  Chicken-something, carrot-something, spinach-something. He was sure it would look more appetizing when hot, though he could have eaten the whole thing on the spot. He devoured a spoonful of peanut butter, instead, smiling to see that
Puny had placed the Anglican Digest by his plate on the kitchen island, to keep him company at supper.

  Instead of heading toward Farmer, he decided they’d run north on Main Street, hook a right, cross over Little Mitford Creek, hook another right, then take a left up to the hospital. Afterward, they’d run down Old Church Lane and across Baxter Park. This would give them better than a mile and a quarter, which was, after all, better than nothing. When Cynthia got home and things were back to normal, he’d make up for this week’s short time.

  Cynthia…

  He stood on his front steps, holding the red leash. He missed his wife. No wonder he was feeling blue. He had tried to keep himself from knowing this….

  He experienced a sudden wave of emotion, something like the “sinking feeling” his mother used to talk about, and shrugged it off. His sugar was fine, he’d just checked it, and he’d drunk plenty of water—it was time to get on with it.

  They trotted down the steps and along the walk and out to the street. Another beautiful August day in the mountains—but dry. Dry as tinder. The little rain they’d had was hardly enough to make a showing on the gauge. Harley had watered the roses with the soaking hose eight times, by Father Tim’s count, and the perennial beds were looking none too hale. In truth, the Mitford Muse had warned of a forthcoming Water Watch.

  “Okay, old fellow,” he said, as they broke into a light run.

  He huffed by the Woolen Shop and nearly steamrolled a woman coming out with a shopping bag.

  “Excuse me, I’m sorry, I should look where I’m going—”

  “No harm done in the least! Are you Father Tim?”

  “Yes ma’am!”

  She extended her hand, smiling. “Millie Tipton from Methodist Chapel.”

  By George, she was wearing a collar….

  “Reverend Tipton! Glad to meet you at last. Welcome to Mitford.” He’d have to bake her a pie, and be quick about it; she’d been in town several weeks.

  “I’m proud to be here. I was hoping we might have coffee sometime. Even though you’re retired, I understand you’re still quite a force in Mitford. Everyone loves you.”

  His face flushed. A former bishop had warned him never to completely trust a man loved by everyone. “Not everyone!” he insisted. “Perhaps you’ll join us one morning at the Grill, if you can bear the company of an aging clergyman, a grouchy newspaper editor, anda…a realtor.” He decided his buddy Mule defied description.