Authors: Jan Karon
He sat at the kitchen island, pulling together a list of winter gardening chores for Harley.
Should the leaves remain on the lawn, or be raked and worked into the compost heap? There were clearly two schools of thought on the subject; he had a history of swinging back and forth between them. But why worry about it in June when Harley didn’t need to know ’til the end of October?
Cynthia trotted in and climbed onto the stool beside his.
“Lace Harper called. She’ll be here at four o’clock!”
“Aha! Good news.”
“I’ve made lemonade and pimiento cheese sandwiches. We’ll have afternoon tea.”
“
Scratch
pimiento cheese?”
“Timothy! Is the pope a Catholic?”
Chuckling, he kissed his wife and looked at his watch. Maybe he could catch Dooley. He bounded to the phone by the sofa in the study.
“Jessie!” he said when Dooley’s ten-year-old sister answered the phone.
“Hey, Father Tim.”
“How are you?”
“I’m OK. Dooley gave me a whole box of candy from the drugstore, it has nuts. Do you like nuts?”
“I am nuts,” he said, grinning.
“Why?”
“Because I’m going somewhere I…don’t really want to go.” He couldn’t believe he’d said that.
“I have to do things I don’t want to do.”
“Like what, may I ask?”
“Washing dishes and homework.”
“Both very popular in the category of what people don’t like doing. Is Dooley around?”
“Yeah.”
He heard Dooley in the background. “Say yes,
sir
!”
“Yes, sir, do you want to speak to him?”
“I do, thank you. And Jessie…”
“Yeah? I mean, yes, sir?”
“I’ve been meaning to tell you this for ages. You’re a lovely girl. We’re all proud of you.”
She caught her breath, considered his remark, then giggled. “Thanks.”
“You’re welcome. See you when we get back.”
“Hey,” said Dooley.
“Hey, yourself! Lace Harper’s dropping over at four o’clock. Cynthia made lemonade and pimiento cheese sandwiches. Want to come?”
Silence. Maybe he should throw in a plate of brownies. He could run to Sweet Stuff….
“Dooley?”
“I don’t know, I don’t think so.”
“It’ll take thirty minutes, maybe an hour, it won’t be a long visit.”
“I don’t think so.”
He observed his own silence. “Well, then. I’ll drive out to Meadowgate with you on Thursday morning, OK?”
“OK.”
“We love you, buddy.”
“Love you back.”
Click.
“He’s not coming,” said Father Tim, feeling oddly bereft.
His barefoot wife thumped onto the sofa beside him. “Want to bet?”
Perhaps he’d write an essay on the mystery of a woman’s ability to know and sense things beyond a man’s ken. At five ’til four, the front door opened and Dooley blew down the hall.
“Hey.”
He and Cynthia offered their family greeting in unison. “Hey, yourself!”
“I forgot something.”
“What?” asked Cynthia.
“My, umm, tennis shoes.”
“You’re wearing them.”
Dooley blushed. “Oh, right. I mean, no, not these. My old ones.”
“You outgrew them.”
Father Tim put his arm around his wife’s shoulder, hoping to distract her. She was a regular CIA agent, a storm trooper. “Cynthia…”
“I want them for…for Poo!” said Dooley.
“For Poo! What a great idea. Of
course
!”
“Of course!” said Father Tim. Quick thinking! Chalk one up for Dooley.
Dooley grinned, displaying sixteen hundred dollars’ worth of recent dental work, underwritten by Miss Sadie’s trust.
Handsome! thought Father Tim. Smart as a whip! The light of our lives!
His doctor was right. Lace Harper was…what had Hoppy said, exactly? Gorgeous. Slightly bucktoothed when he’d first encountered her stealing Miss Sadie’s ferns, Lace had obviously undergone dental work of her own. However, it was her eyes that engaged him. He’d remembered them as brown, but they were, in fact, amber, a startling, clear amber that gave this young woman great presence.
Dooley tried to sprawl on the study sofa, but, finding it impossible to appear nonchalant, returned to posing as ice sculpture.
“What will you be doing this summer?” his wife asked their guest.
“My friend Alicia invited me to visit her aunt in Martha’s Vineyard, but we’re going to take a family trip out West.”
He noted that Lace pronounced
aunt
like the Virginians, and not like Mitfordians, who comfortably used what sounded like
ant
and even
aint.
“I love the West!” Cynthia said. “Where?”
“Hoppy’s great-grandfather had a ranch in Montana, so we’re going there, then we’re going to explore the Oregon Trail.” Lace smiled suddenly.
Father Tim thought her smile a miracle of healing; in the early years, her countenance had reflected only anger and the weight of a terrible sadness. Further, he thought her poise was nothing to be taken lightly. Though a year younger than Dooley, she seemed wiser, more mature, more settled into her skin.
“Sounds like good medicine for my doctor,” said Father Tim. In all the years he’d known the earnest practitioner, Hoppy had taken only two vacations, one of them his honeymoon.
“Olivia bought him cowboy boots.”
“Aha!”
“But don’t tell,” said Lace. “It’s a secret.”
“Never!”
Though the conversation flowed smoothly enough, the tension in the room was palpable; he felt it somewhere around the region of his jaws, as if he’d clenched his teeth since their visitor arrived. There was no mistaking Lace’s cool indifference toward Dooley, and Dooley’s wall of defense against her.
Father Tim remembered the day Dooley had stolen Lace’s old hat and she’d responded by punching him so hard in the ribs that Dooley thought a few of them broken. Now,
that
was communicating!
Cynthia passed the small sandwiches a second time. Father Tim took one, Lace declined. Dooley took two, one in each hand, then, realizing his social blunder, tried to return one to the plate, but Cynthia had passed it out of reach. He popped an entire sandwich into his mouth and sat red-faced and chewing, holding the other as if it were a hot potato.
Something must be
done
! thought Father Tim. He shot from his chair and addressed the assembly.
“Why don’t we all go for a ride in my car? Dooley, you can drive!” There! That ought to do it. Dooley at the wheel of the red Mustang, the top down, the four of them without a care….
“A
ride
?” queried his wife, refilling their glasses. “Whatever
for
?”
He sat as quickly as he’d stood.
“Didn’t go too well, did it?” Cynthia asked.
They lay in bed, holding hands.
“Depends on what we were expecting.”
“We were expecting them to be friends, of course, just as they used to be.”
“He told me she snubbed a phone call he made to her at school.”
“Yes,” she said, “but it’s more than that. Because of their backgrounds, they’re both terrified of feeling their feelings. Dooley can take Jenny to a movie and it doesn’t mean a great deal to him, but there’s something so…intense, so volatile in his feelings toward Lace that he simply tries to shut his feelings down.”
“Deep stuff.”
“Some of the stuff you dealt with when courting me.”
“Really?”
“Absolutely!”
“What happened?” he asked, smiling in the dark. “How did we end up in the same bed?”
She patted his hand. “Water wears away stone.”
He yawned hugely. “Whatever that means,” he said.
He sat in a straight-back chair in a small, empty room with a dirt floor. It was the same cool, hard-packed floor of his grandmother’s potato cellar, but there were windows through which light streamed, casting patterns at his feet.
He heard a door opening behind him; children filed into the room on either side of his chair. They came in silently, almost reverently, and settled themselves at his feet as if waiting for him to speak, to tell them a story or solve some great riddle; there were dozens of children, many more than a small room could possibly hold, but their silence made them seem fewer. The light from the open doorway fell upon their hair and illumined their faces as they looked at him, searching for something he had no ability to name or to deliver. He tried to speak, but couldn’t open his mouth; he tried but could not speak—
“What is it, dearest?”
Her hand on his shoulder was the most reassuring touch he’d ever known, save that of his mother. “I keep falling asleep and waking again. Did I disturb you?”
“You were dreaming,” she said. “I’ve been awake, too. It’s the change that’s coming.”
It’s already with us, he thought. We have disrupted something precious, something fragile. Yet they were doing what they believed God wanted….
“Come,” he said, taking her into his arms. They lay without talking as he stroked her cheek.
“I’m going with you to New York,” he said at last.
“You don’t have to, it’s all right.”
“No, we’re going together.” To arrive in Tennessee in early June and leave the middle of July didn’t seem the best thing, but he was going with his wife, period. As for his lifelong fear of flying, he’d put his head down and do it, he’d reckon with it.
She kissed him tenderly. “I’ll be proud to show off my husband.”
He turned his head on the pillow and looked out the window to the leaves of the maple tree gleaming in the moonlight.
“Whitecap didn’t seem so hard.”
“We were lighthearted about going to Whitecap,” she murmured.
“The freedom of an island…”
“The wind in our hair…”
“Gulls wheeling above us…”
“The smell of salt air!” He completed their old liturgy. Whitecap had seemed inviting and open; what lay ahead now seemed closed, though he didn’t know why.
“This will be our last foray,” he said.
“Thank you, Timothy. We’re no spring chickens.”
Ah, yes. He would be sixty-nine in less than a month, looking square into the maw of The Big Seven-oh. But age had nothing, less than nothing to do with serving God. There were countless older saints who, faithful to the end, had perished on the mission field. And there were mission fields at home, right in his own backyard—hadn’t he always been a proponent of the local mission field? After Tennessee, he would get down to it once and for all. He would find his niche and make his mark for God at home, in Mitford. What with two days at the Children’s Hospital in Wesley, a couple of days with Scott Murphy at Hope House, Wednesdays with Homeless Hobbes’s soup kitchen, and a pulpit here and there, he’d have more than a full plate.
“Let me pray for us,” he said, smoothing her hair from her forehead. The faintest scent of wisteria rose from her flesh, evanescent but consoling. He’d be able to locate his wife anywhere, even blindfolded in a crowded air terminal; her smell had become the smell of home to him, of peace and certainty.
“Lord,” he said, “to You all hearts are open, all desires known, and from You no secrets are hid. We can hide nothing from You, yet something is hidden from us. Speak to us again, Father, help us discern Your direction for our lives. Are we on the path you’ve set for us? Have we missed the mark?”
They lay still then, hearing the ticking of the clock, and Barnabas snoring on the hall landing.
Buck Leeper dropped by the following morning on his way to the construction site in Holding. He stood at the front door holding a to-go cup of coffee, looking exhausted and apologetic.
“I figured you’d be up.”
“Since five-thirty,” said Father Tim. “What is it, my friend?”
“Could we sit out here and talk?”
They thumped onto the top step of the front porch.
“I had a big runaround yesterday, I thought I’d found Kenny.
“Somebody on my job said they’d seen a bunch of paintings on velvet up around Elizabethtown, said they were propped against a van in an empty lot, an’ signed Kenny Barlowe.”
Though the mission had clearly failed, a bolt of adrenaline surged through Father Tim.
Buck swigged the coffee. “I started to call you, but there was no time, I just jumped in th’ truck an’ went for it. I drove up there an’ found th’ van—my heart was pumpin’ like a jackhammer, and then this kid came out, probably around Sammy’s age. It was all I could do to keep from bustin’ out cryin’.”
“But?”
“But th’ boy’s name was Wayne, his daddy’s name was Kenny Barlow, no
e.
I met his daddy, a pretty decent guy down on his luck. I bought a painting of a deer head, it’s rolled up behind th’ seat in th’ truck.”
“Well done.”
“I don’t know about you, but I’m ready to quit on this.”
Father Tim took a deep breath. Quit. That’s what he was about to do, as well. But it would do no good to quit, no good at all.
“Let’s don’t quit,” he said. “Let’s don’t quit.”
Buck set the cup on the step between his feet.
“A few days ago I asked Pauline to tell me everything she could remember about the boys, like if they had any birthmarks, an’ th’ color of their eyes.”
“Good thinking.”
“She couldn’t remember th’ color of their eyes.”
There was a long silence between them.
“When she realized she couldn’t remember the color…” Buck hunched over, his head in his hands. “It was the alcohol, of course. All those years…”
“Those years are behind you.”
“Yeah, they are, thank God.” Buck looked at him. “But you pay the consequences.”
“True. But now God is in the consequences with you. Otherwise, you’re in them alone, desperately alone.”
Buck stood up. “Forgive me for makin’ a rough start to your day, Father. Findin’ a needle in a haystack ain’t ever been my long suit.”
The men walked to the truck together.
“I saw something on TV last night,” said Father Tim. “It happened right after the Second World War when nobody had any money. A sewing machine company held a contest…whoever found the needle hidden in a haystack would win a brand-new sewing machine. There were people swarming all over that haystack, hay was flying everywhere. And guess what?”