Jan Karon's Mitford Years

by Jan Karon

“Can’t say that I do.”

  She took a deep breath. “I should probably give up bacon while I’m at it, an’ I’ll get a pill from Hoppy, to knock me out over th’ Atlantic.”

  “There you go,” he said. “There’s more than one way to skin a cat.”

  “But I’m not gettin’ my hopes up,” she said. “Andrew will probably go, or he’s already got somebody in mind.”

  “Could be.”

  “And lookit, they’re sendin’ a couple. I wonder if that means we should send a couple, to keep things even. I can’t imagine who it would be, can you? Not th’ Bolicks, he has that tumor. Not th’ Harpers, they’ve just been on vacation….”

  He studied the top of the computer screen, pondering the mysteries to be unlocked within File, Edit, View, Insert, Format, Tools…

  “Besides, who would fix Harold’s breakfast?”

  “Percy Mosely?” he asked, hoping to be helpful.

  “Late February is what th’ doctor said. But I hope it’s March! If it can wait ’til March th’ third, it’ll be born on my mama’s birthday.”

  He sat at the kitchen table, counting his pocket change. “Do you know whether it’s a boy or a girl?” A dollar forty, a dollar fifty…

  “No, sir, I don’t know an’ don’t want t’ know. What did people do before you could look in somebody’s stomach with a camera? They waited ’til it was born, that’s what!”

  “Will you, ah, be bringing the baby to work?”

  “I’m sure not goin’ to farm it out! Besides, how do you think it would get to know its granpaw if I didn’t bring it to work?”

  He thought Puny looked positively radiant.

  “A dollar seventy-five, seventy-six, seventy-seven. You’ve got a point there,” he said.

  Emma Newland’s possible mission to England, and his new grandchild on the way….

  Just let somebody try to tell him that miracles didn’t happen every day.

  Dear Father,

  I have seen little Timothy and he’s cute as a button. He looks just like Junior, though he has his mother’s eyes. We hope you and Cynthia can come and visit soon, and see your namesake for yourself.

  I feel like a regular gossip column, but must tell you that Ernie and Mona are going on a cruise and will renew their vows in Honolulu! The wall they built on the yellow line is being used as a community bulletin board, tho’ you have to stoop down to read the postings. It’s where I found a wonderful old Hoover vac as good as new. I always liked an upright.

  Don’t forget us!

  Best love from Marion and Sam

  Timothy! Hail to thee from Tennessee!

  Just wait til our package arrives on your doorstep, in thanks for the outstanding gift you made to Backyard. Abner has worked on this marvelous creation for several months and as he is not gifted at drawing or painting, decided to send the forthcoming, instead. Am busting to tell you what it is, but can only say you are a fortunate man! God be with you, let us hear soonest. Send mammon, as ever. In His service, Fr Roland

  Teds! Its us, walt&kat@icm.com! We were blown away (to use the vernacular) to receive your e-mail. We can’t figure whether your entry into cyberspace is the beginning of an era or the end of one!

  The year at Meadowgate sounds like loads of fun, and yes, we’d love to come for a week, will probably drive down and stop along the way. Let’s talk soon.

  C’s trip sounds exhausting but fun, I’m reading her Violet books to my dearlings at the retirement home, as I passionately believe great children’s literature is for all ages. So glad yr health improved. Lots of love and kisses to you and your talented C, and hugs to Dooley

  “It’s me…Betty.”

  “Betty!”

  “I’ll do it.”

  “Great! Wonderful!”

  “But no cleaning.” He heard the tremor in her voice. It wasn’t easy for Betty Craig to lay down the law.

  “Absolutely none!”

  “And just two meals a day.”

  “Not a scrap more,” he said.

  “When do I start?”

  “He’ll be home tomorrow. Your timing is perfect.”

  “So I start tomorrow evenin’?”

  “Yes, ma’am. Around four-thirty, if you could.”

  “Will you be there to get me started?”

  “I will.”

  “And Father?”

  “Yes?”

  “Every time Miss Rose is mean to me, I’m goin’ to put a dime in a little bank I made from a Sprite can.”

  He laughed. “You could quickly become a very rich woman.”

  “Yes, sir, an’ when this job is over, I’ll use th’ money for a vacation—’cause I’ll sure be needin’ one.”

  Father Talbot rang up in the evening. Would the Kavanaghs come to a spur-of-the-moment community-wide covered dish supper on Friday? Bill Sprouse would be there, and Millie Tipton; there would be special music, and they’d do a bit of ecumenical praying-for-rain into the bargain.

  Cynthia was up for it.

  “Ray Cunningham’s cole slaw, Margaret Larkin’s fried chicken, and Hessie Mayhew’s yeast rolls. Fabulous!” said his wife.

  “How do you know they’ll even be there?”

  “It’s worth the gamble,” she said. He thought Cynthia Kavanagh had come home as starved as a barn cat.

  Father Tim called George and Harley to see if they could reschedule the barbecue for the Saturday before George was to leave. Not a problem. George said he would pass on going to Lord’s Chapel, however, and get together with Scott Murphy.

  Harley was keen for the church supper.

  “What sort of getup?” asked Harley.

  “Khakis, I’d say, and a sport shirt.”

  “You reckon I ought t’ bring a pan of brownies?”

  “Definitely!”

  “Nuts or plain?”

  “Nuts,” said Father Tim. “And when you take the Saran Wrap off, stand back.”

  Harley cackled. One of his proudest moments had been when two church ladies begged for his recipe. He’d written it down on the back of a pew bulletin, and now, every time they came by the station, they talked about the brownies that were making them famous all the way to Minnesota, or was it Montana?

  Didn’t he have to earn his wings sooner or later?

  Well, then, why not sooner?

  He’d take five minutes while Cynthia dressed for the church supper, and carry forth the dictum laid down by Nike.

  Thumping into his desk chair, he opened the laptop and accessed his e-mail. Nothing new. He was pierced by an odd disappointment.

  Now. He knew how to retrieve his e-mail, but could he send one without Emma standing over him? All he had to do was follow the handwritten directions she’d scrawled on a yellow pad. What could happen, after all, if he did it unsupervised? Could he somehow break the thing that had cost an arm and a leg and thrust him into the twenty-first century?

  If so, so be it….

  Dear Emma, just a note to say How much your pesky insistence is appreciated, not to mention your patient Tutorials. I like this sTuff, and yes, You Told Me So. (Lest you gloat overmuch in seeing my bald admission in black and white, tear this up, I pray you, or run it through a shredder.) The Mouse is driving me Ccrazy/

  Guess Who

  He hit send, holding his breath.

  Out of here.

  Emma Newland would count this her greatest triumph. To tell the truth, he felt pretty good about it himself.

  At six-thirty, Hope Winchester filled her teakettle with bottled water and placed it on the gas burner. She was wondering whether she’d ever known anyone other than George who was willing to make personal sacrifices for God.

  She thought of her mother, who had made desperate sacrifices for her two daughters, but not for God. Her mother didn’t appear to believe in God, though Hope remembered the time when her sister, Louise, was running a perilous fever, and her mother had sat at the foot of the bed and wept and rocked herself. “Oh, God, oh, God, oh,


  God,” she had whispered over and over. It had frozen Hope’s heart to witness her grief. When she was older, Hope remembered wondering if it had been God who made Louise well.

  It was mystifying to her that George would choose to go back to prison, back into despair and hopelessness and even possible danger, when he could have chosen an easy life in Mitford. And yet, she sensed it wasn’t in him to choose an easy life.

  She walked to the front window of her two rooms above the Chelsea Tea Shop, and looked out to Main Street. The days had grown shorter; already the street lamps were shining against the gathering dusk. Three people passed on the street below, two of them carrying something covered by a tea towel.

  A choir member had invited her to the Lord’s Chapel supper, and she’d wrestled all day with the invitation. Never in her life had she cooked or baked anything for a covered-dish supper, and the thought of doing it and failing was humiliating.

  Worse still, what if she took something and no one ate any of it and she had to carry the dish away, untouched, while everyone else went home with empty platters?

  It occurred to her in the afternoon that she might buy a dozen corn muffins before the tea shop closed, and in this notion found a moment of glad reprieve. Bought muffins, however, might be a mark against her in some way she could only sense and not fully understand.

  She wished fervently that she’d never been asked, and found that she was wringing her hands again. The bright spirit she’d recently felt had vanished, and she was her old self, the worried, fretful self she’d been before the fall.

  She went to her boiling teakettle and looked at the clock on the stove. Six forty-five. As the supper was at seven o’clock, it was too late to worry about it anymore. The whole affair could at last be forgotten.

  She instantly felt both an enormous relief and an unexplainable sadness, something like the feeling she had when she realized she wasn’t in love with George Gaynor, after all, but counted him a friend.

  “And in this mountain the Lord of hosts will make for all people a feast of choice pieces, a feast of wines on the lees, of fat things full of marrow….”

  In his blessing of the meal, Father Talbot quoted from the prophet Isaiah, then invited all to break bread together.

  “Did you bring your brownies?” Amy Larkin asked Harley, who was ahead of her in the queue to the food table.

  “Yes, ma’am,” he told the eleven-year-old. “Right over yonder.”

  “I brought pimiento cheese sandwiches.” Her eyes shone. “No crusts.”

  “Where’re they at?”

  “Right next to the potato salad in the red bowl,” she said. “On the left.”

  He nodded, respectful. “I’ll make sure to have one.”

  Amy Larkin reminded him of Lace when she was still a little squirt, running to his trailer with a book under her arm. He hated she had grown up and gone off to school, but he knew it was for the best.

  He fixed his gaze on Cynthia’s lemon squares on the dessert table. He had set his mouth for a lemon square, and hoped he could get to the familiar blue and white platter before it was too late.

  “O God, heavenly Father, who by Thy Son Jesus Christ has promised to all those who seek Thy kingdom and its righteousness all things necessary to sustain their life: Send us, we entreat thee, in this time of need, such moderate rain and showers, that we may receive the fruits of the earth, to our comfort and to Thy honor; through Jesus Christ our Lord.”

  “Amen!”

  “Abide with me:

  fast falls the eventide;

  the darkness deepens;

  Lord, with me abide:

  when other helpers

  fail and comforts flee,

  help of the helpless,

  O abide with me….”

  The words of the eighteenth-century hymnist carried through the open windows of the parish hall and lifted on the mild September air.

  A block away, Hope Winchester thought she could hear singing, but wasn’t sure. Maybe she heard something that sounded like abide with me… and something about eventide, but she couldn’t be certain.

  She stood at her open window for what seemed a long time, listening.

  Hélène Pringle heard the faint sound of the basement door closing, and knew that someone had come in.

  When she saw Harley this afternoon at the gas station, he said he was having supper at Lord’s Chapel. “Are you goin’?” he asked.

  “Oh, no,” she’d said. “I haven’t been invited.”

  “Ever’body’s invited,” he’d told her. “Hit’s community-wide, you ought t’ come!”

  But of course she hadn’t gone; she’d felt terribly vulnerable last Sunday when the father preached on being thankful and had the odd notion he was preaching directly to her. She tried to recall if she had thanked God for anything, or only asked Him to give her something, as a child might make requests of St. Nicholas.

  She had grown fond of those times of talking through the curtain, to the one she supposed to be God. She still had no certainty that He cared or was even listening, but she hoped He was. In truth, it was increasingly important to her that He should listen and care, and that their time together be more than the figment of a spinster’s overwrought imagination.

  She turned the kitchen light off and was going along the hall when the phone rang. It would be a student, of course, canceling or rescheduling .

  “Allo!” she said in the French way.

  “Miss Pringle, it’s Hope Winchester. How are you this evening?”

  “Very well, Hope, and you?”

  “Good, thank you. Is…George Gaynor there? I hope this is no trouble.”

  “No trouble in the least! One moment, please, and I’ll call down.”

  She laid the phone on the hall table and walked to the basement door and opened it. “Mr. Gaynor! Are you there?” Though she called Harley by his first name, she had never felt comfortable calling Mr. Gaynor by his.

  “Yes, Miss Pringle?” George Gaynor appeared in a pool of light at the foot of the basement stairs.

  “You have a telephone call. Will you come up?”

  “Yes. Thank you.”

  “The receiver is on the hall table, just switch on the lamp.”

  Mr. Gaynor was an arresting figure, she thought, as he appeared at the top of the stairs—quite handsome and dignified, not at all like someone who had spent time behind bars. “Please don’t hurry,” she said. “I’ll be upstairs.”

  “Thank you again.”

  It was étrange, she mused as she went up, that her next-door neighbor had somehow collected the three of them under one roof—what an odd assortment! She smiled at the thought.

  Ça alors! what a day this had been—Barbizon was in the foulest of tempers, and all three of her students had done poorly at their lessons. She would take a hot bath and put on sa chemise de nuit préférée and talk to the other side of the curtain.

  She paused at the top of the stair, attracted by laughter in the hallway. It was such an unusual sound, a man laughing in her house….

  “I said you could call anytime. Yes, it’s all right, I assure you.”

  There was a long silence. Hélène thought she should go to her room, but didn’t move from the banister railing.

  “Of course. I remember the day when the teachers came in, I was going to tell you about the prayer, but…”

  Her grandmother’s tall case clock ticked on the landing.

  “It’s a very simple prayer. Sometimes, people think they want something more sophisticated, or even complicated. But if you have a willing heart, it’s all you need, nothing more….

  “What will happen? That’s a good question.”

  Hélène heard him chuckle; it seemed a glad sound.

  “It would take years to tell you all that happens when you surrender your life to God. Perhaps forgiveness—I think His forgiveness may be the most important thing that happens….

  “Yes. Even for the worst stuff….”


  Hélène looked at the clock. In less than a minute, it would chime the hour. Her heart beat in her temples.

  “Surrendering your soul to Him changes everything. That sounds scary, but I found it downright terrifying when I presumed to be in control…

  “I understand. I had every reason, also. My uncle was a priest who stole six hundred thousand dollars from the church coffers—with the help of my father. I’ve found that if we keep our eyes on Christians, we can be disappointed in a major way. The important thing is to keep our eyes on Christ….

  “I can’t honestly say that I know what happy means. Let’s say that I’m certain…

  “About who He is, what life is for, where I’m going, what it means to be given a second chance….

  “Yes, you can pray it with me…whatever seems right to you.”

  Hélène heard the movement in the French clock begin to whir.

  “Thank you, God, for loving me…and for sending Your Son to die for my sins….”

  The first hour struck…

  “I sincerely repent of my sins…and receive Jesus Christ as my personal savior.”

  The second hour…

  “Now, as your child, I turn my entire life over to you. Amen.”

  The clock on the landing of the old rectory struck again, seven times.

  Hélène stood by the railing, breathless and unmoving, lest she betray to George Gaynor that she was standing there at all.

  When at last she went down the stairs to turn off the light, the hall was empty and the basement door was closed.

  When Volunteer Fire Chief Hamp Floyd got the call from a neighbor, he ran to his back door and flung it open. Naked as a jaybird and still clutching the cordless, he looked east.

  Rooted to the spot, he dialed the fire chief in Wesley.

  “It’s Hamp,” he said, his voice shaking. “Bring both trucks, I’ll have a lead car waitin’ at the corner of Lilac an’ Main.”

  He dressed in two-point-three minutes and, without kissing his wife, ran from the house to do the impossible.

  Father Tim heard the truck leave the fire station at two in the morning.