At Home in Mitford

  “What’s that?”

  “He could be down for months. The best way to recover from this is to get plenty of bed rest. That means he won’t be able to care for the boy. In fact, he’s going to need some care himself.”

  “Well,” said Father Tim, at a loss for words.

  Dooley stood by the bed, looking anxiously at his grandfather. The old man was weak and spoke with his eyes closed.

  “Dooley, are you behavin’ yourself?”

  “Nope.”

  “Don’t shame me, boy. You hear?”

  “All right, Granpaw, I won’t.”

  Before he left, Dooley took his grandfather’s hand. “Granpaw,” he said, “don’t die!”

  Russell Jacks opened his eyes and looked at his grandson with a faint smile. “All right, boy, I won’t.”

  According to parishioners, the Christmas Eve masses at Lord’s Chapel were more beautiful, more powerful, more stirring than ever before.

  Candles burned on the windowsills, among fragrant boughs of spruce and pine. Fresh garlands wrapped the high cedar beams over the nave. A glorious tree from Meadowgate Farm stood near the pulpit, and a lush garden of cream-colored poinsettias sprang up around its feet.

  In the midnight service especially, there was an expectant hush that went beyond the usual reverent silence before the service, and someone said that, for the first time in her life, she had felt the sweet savor of the Christ child in her heart.

  “Once in royal David’s city stood a lowly cattle shed, where a mother laid her baby in a manger for his bed . . .”

  Someone who was out walking in the balmy air heard a great wealth of music pouring from the little stone church, music with a poignant clarity and purpose.

  “. . . This child, this little helpless boy, shall be our confidence and joy . . .”

  “Hark! the herald angels sing, glory to the newborn King!”

  Miss Rose came on the arm of Uncle Billy, wearing her new black suit and fuchsia coat, and a pair of red and navy argyles with unlaced saddle oxfords.

  “We’re gittin’ there,” Uncle Billy said to Father Tim after the service. “You might say we got a pretty good ways past the head, but we ain’t made it to th’ toe.”

  As he headed home with Dooley at nearly one-thirty in the morning, he felt deeply grateful, but uncommonly fatigued.

  He had never been able to decide when to open his gifts. He could hardly do it on Christmas Eve, when he arrived home past 1:00 a.m. after preaching two services. And on Christmas morning, conducting two masses kept him at Lord’s Chapel until well past noon.

  “I play it by ear,” he once told Emma, who couldn’t imagine not opening presents anytime she felt like it, starting on or before December 15.

  At nearly two o’clock in the morning, they sat on the floor with hot chocolate and Winnie’s doughnuts, and he gave Dooley his presents from Miss Sadie, Puny, Emma, and one from himself: a wool scarf from the Collar Button.

  Miss Sadie had sent two pocket handkerchiefs, a pair of shoe laces, and a five-dollar bill wrapped in aluminum foil and tied with a red ribbon. Puny had given him a yellow windbreaker, and there were two dozen Reese’s Cups from Emma.

  Dooley sat mournfully in the midst of his gifts. “I wanted ’at ol’ bicycle.”

  “The way your earnings are piling up, you’ll have it before long. Now, I’d like to open your present to me.”

  “Wait ’til mornin’. You ain’t goin’ t’ like it, anyway.”

  “I’d appreciate making that decision myself.”

  “Wait ’til morning. I’m give out,” Dooley said, irritably.

  It was two-thirty when the pair trudged upstairs, well behind Barnabas, who was already sprawled at the foot of the bed and snoring.

  On the landing, he put his hand on Dooley’s shoulder. “I’ll be awake before daylight, preparing for two services, and you may definitely expect to hear some creeping on the stairs. But if I catch you coming after me with a shoe . . .”

  “I’ll be dead meat.”

  “Precisely!”

  At six-thirty, he and Barnabas woke Dooley.

  “I don’t want t’ git up!” he wailed. “You done wore me out goin’ t’ church. I ain’t never been t’ s’ much church in my life. I didn’t know they was that much church in th’ whole dern world.”

  “My friend, you will pleased to know that Santa Claus visited this humble rectory last night and left something in the study for one Dooley Barlowe.”

  “They ain’t no Santy. I don’t believe ’at old poop.”

  “Well, then, lie there and believe what you like. I’m going downstairs and have my famous Christmas morning casserole.”

  Barnabas leaped on Dooley’s bed and began licking his ear.

  " ’is ol’ dog is th’ hatefulest thing I ever seen!” Dooley moaned, turning his face to the wall.

  “Come, Barnabas. Leave him be.”

  Barnabas lay resolutely on Dooley’s bed and stared at his master.

  Barnabas, at least, was determined to execute Puny’s good idea.

  He set two places at the counter and took the bubbling sausage casserole from the oven. There would be no diet this day. Then, he turned on the record player and heard the familiar, if scratchy, strains of the Messiah.

  Dooley appeared at the kitchen door, dressed in the burgundy robe. “Sounds like a’ army’s moved in down here.”

  “My friend, you have hit the nail on the head.

  It is an army of the most glorious voices in recent history, singing one of the most majestic musical works ever written!”

  Dooley rolled his eyes.

  “I believe you’ve been asked to sit with Jena Ivey and your Sunday school friends this morning, is that correct?”

  “Yeah.” "Yes, sir.”

  No response.

  Directly after Christmas, he would deal with this pigheaded behavior to the fullest.

  “I ain’t feelin’ too good.”

  “Is that right? What’s the trouble?”

  “I puked up somethin’ green.”

  “Really?”

  “It had a lot of brown in it, too.”

  “The walk to church will revive you. You’ve been going pretty strong, keeping to a rector’s schedule. Why don’t you look in the study and find out what Barnabas is up to?”

  He followed the boy into the study, to see what he’d been imagining for weeks:

  The look of joyful astonishment on Dooley Barlowe’s face.

  Dooley really hadn’t seemed well, he concluded, as he walked home from church. He’d promised to stay right there on the study sofa, looking at his new bicycle and drinking 7Up.

  Though he’d received three invitations to Christmas dinner with parishioners, he wanted nothing more than to go home and crash. Later, if Dooley felt up to it, they’d take the new bike to the school-yard and over to the Presbyterian parking lot.

  There was only one problem with that plan.

  Dooley could not be found in the study, nor anywhere else in the house. And neither could the new red bicycle.

  The down jacket was missing from the peg, and the gloves weren’t in the bin. And while he easily located the handkerchiefs and shoe strings from Miss Sadie, the windbreaker, the five-dollar bill, and the Reese’s Cups had vanished.

  Nurse Herman said she hadn’t seen Dooley, and, no, she wouldn’t mention this call to Russell.

  He drove the motor scooter through the school playground and then to the Presbyterian parking lot.

  He rode up and down Main Street twice, circled the war monument, and checked the lot behind the post office. There was hardly a soul to be seen on the streets, though Christmas lights in the shop windows winked cheerfully. He slowed at the corner of Old Church Lane, then turned left at his office and headed up the hill to Fernbank. Perhaps the boy had taken the bike to show Miss Sadie, he thought, but there was no sign of a visitor at the silent white mansion, nor even Miss Sadie’s car.

  Coasting down the hill in t
he increasingly chill wind, he came to a single, desperate conclusion: Dooley Barlowe had run away.

  Rodney Underwood answered the phone over the uproarious giggles of his three small daughters. “Aw, he’s just gone out for a little spin,” said the police chief. “Maybe he went out to Farmer on all them dirt roads.”

  The rector was convinced that Dooley Barlowe would not take his new red bike on a dirt road. The boy was gone. He could feel it in his bones, and he knew he could trust the feeling.

  Rodney said he’d personally file a missing persons report and send an officer out in a cruise car. “Don’t you worry, Father. You can’t lose a redheaded boy on a red bicycle. We’ll find ’im.”

  After he talked to Rodney, he went to the hospital, where Russell Jacks was sitting up and, with some effort, eating a bowl of soup.

  “Dooley wanted to come, Russell, but early this morning, he . . . ah, threw up.”

  “Puked, did he?” the old man asked, with evident pride.

  The heat in the small room was stifling. Father Tim removed his jacket and sat down by the bed. “You know, Russell, I’ve been wondering about his mother. Has she had any help?”

  “Gits food stamps an’ all, and I’ve tried to help.”

  “I understand. But help with her drinking . . .”

  “Went off to Broughton one time t’ dry out. Come back, started up again.” His hand shook, so that soup spilled down the front of his hospital gown. Father Tim felt miserably guilty about asking such questions on a day when the sick needed special cheering.

  “What is your daughter’s name, by the way, and where does she live?”

  " ’er name’s Pauline, married a fella Barlowe worked on the new highways they put through there. Give ’er five little young ’uns in a row, got them highways built, then jumped on one and went. Didn’t come back.”

  He had never ceased to be astonished by the weight of sorrow in the world. “A vale of tears,” the poet had called it, and rightly so.

  “And she’s still down in Holding?”

  “I hope t’ God she is.”

  “Has a warm place to live, I expect.”

  “Ol’ trailer over behind Shoney’s. She worked there awhile ’til they run ’er off for drinkin’ on th’ job.”

  There. That was enough to go on. He’d call Rodney from the phone in the waiting room.

  “Russell,” said the rector, brightening his tone and changing the subject, “if you could have just one Christmas wish, what might it be?”

  Russell pushed the soup bowl away and wiped his mouth with a trembling hand. He lay back on the pillow and closed his eyes, so that Father Tim thought for a moment he hadn’t heard the question.

  Then he said, “I wish Ida was still livin’; she’d be a blessin’ to th’ boy . . . an’ I wish th’ rhododendrons would set their buds real good so we git a nice show of bloom, come spring.”

  He liked it to be where he could reach for it and find it immediately. Yet he could not find his small, worn, leather-bound Bible with his name stamped on the cover.

  He turned on the lights above the pulpit and, once again, searched the empty shelf.

  He walked angrily back to the office. That Bible contained marginal notes and special references that were irreplaceable. Who would have been so thoughtless to move it, and where did they move it, and why?

  “Missin’ Bibles, missin’ cakes, missin’ boys,” Emma said, as if she were filing a report.

  “Has Rodney called?”

  “Not since he talked to you at ten o’clock.”

  On Christmas afternoon, Rodney had notified the Holding police, giving them Pauline Barlowe’s name and the location of the trailer. Holding had called back to say the trailer had been moved, and they were continuing to investigate.

  We’re going into the third day, he thought anxiously.

  Emma fielded the phone calls. “No, we don’t know a thing, yet. Thank you for calling, we appreciate it, we have no idea. Yes, we’ll let you know.”

  He noticed she’d begun dabbing at her eyes with that wad of toilet tissue she always carried.

  “Are you all right?” he asked.

  That was when she finally said it:

  “That poor little orphan, gettin’ somethin’ he wasn’t responsible enough to own! I hate to say I told you so!”

  He turned and blurted angrily, “Then for God’s sake, don’t say it!”

  When he went home for lunch, Puny was back from her holiday with a sister. He told her about Dooley.

  Her face went white. “I could’ve told you so,” she said.

  Ah, the everlasting smugness of people! He might have sighed but thought of the thanks box that now contained eleven dollars’ worth of his infernal sighing.

  “Dadgummit,” said Puny, as he left for the office, “I’m worried sick about that little poop-head!” She burst into tears and ran down the hall to the kitchen.

  According to Puny, who later saw Emma at The Local, he had “picked at his lunch like a bird and looked kind of gray-colored.”

  “Humph,” snorted Emma, who was still nettled from her brush with the rector. “If you ask me, he’s actin’ exactly like he did before he got diabetes.”

  “Well he cain’t be gittin’ it again if he’s already got it.”

  “So maybe he’s gettin’ somethin’ else,” Emma said, airily.

  “Nothing is more wearying,” Agatha Christie had said, “than going over things you have written and trying to arrange them in proper sequence or turn them the other way round.”

  He couldn’t agree more, he thought, as he struggled with his sermon. Directly after the meeting with the stranger in the nave, his sermons had seen a definite upturn; he was nearly jubilant afterward. Then, suddenly, he felt that he was right back where he started.

  “The trouble with you,” Walter had said in a recent phone conversation, “is that you’re too prepared. You don’t give the Holy Spirit room to do wondrous things. You need to take risks now and then—that’s what makes life snap, crackle, and pop.”

  Snap, crackle, and pop? Not only did people love saying they told you so, they were infernally full of advice.

  He looked at the calendar clock on his desk. If the boy didn’t turn up in the next few hours, he and Miss Sadie had agreed to drive to Holding, where they’d go over the town with a fine-tooth comb.

  “I’ve got new tennis shoes,” she told him. “I’ll go up one side of the street and you go up the other!”

  “Listen to this,” the rector said to Barnabas, who was sprawled at his feet. As he read the first draft of his sermon, Barnabas listened with sincere interest.

  Actually, he found his dog more attentive than many of his congregation. On the other hand, none of the congregation ever openly engaged in vigorous scratching. So it was a wash.

  He got up and walked to the tall spruce with its twinkling lights and looked at the array of gifts still lying beneath it. He had lost the heart to finish opening them, somehow, though he’d torn right into his cousin’s gift and discovered that it was, indeed, an electric train. As soon as Dooley comes back, he thought, we’ll set it up. Surely, Dooley would be coming back.

  Suddenly, he remembered the present Dooley had made for him and found it lying near Winnie’s bulky gift.

  He opened it eagerly.

  A glasses case, made at school. Two pieces of leather, glued together on three sides, and monogrammed with the aid of a stencil. FT was printed on one side, DB on the other. “I put my initials on it,” Dooley had scrawled on a piece of notebook paper, “so you won’t firgit me.”

  Forget Dooley Barlowe? Never!

  Many boys who’d been raised like Dooley, he reasoned, would be good for nothing. Dooley, he was convinced, was extraordinarily good for something. It only remained to be seen what it was.

  He wished he had someone in the house to talk to about this disturbing turn of events. Like Walter, with whom he’d shared nearly every confidence since he was a boy.

>   He put the glasses case in his shirt pocket and walked back to his desk. “Talk to Hoppy. Tell Rodney. Thank Cynthia” were scrawled across the top of his desk calendar.

  He decided to work his list backward.

  Cynthia, he thought, did not have much trouble making herself at home. When he’d called to thank her for the mole watercolor, she’d suggested tea, and he said he had just put the kettle on. In barely two minutes, she had “popped through the hedge,” as she liked to say, and curled up on his study sofa, helping herself to a piece of shortbread. He was intrigued to see that another of her pink curlers, obviously overlooked, adorned the back of her head.

  “I’m so sorry,” she said, when told about Dooley. “I always thought runaway boys come straight home when they got hungry.”

  “Yes, well, that is complicated by the fact that this is not his home.”

  “Has anyone seen him?”

  “Rodney says he was seen by three different people on his way down the mountain. They remembered the red bicycle.”

  “Did they say anything else?”

  “They said he was . . . ah, flying.”

  “Flying! Oh, dear.”

  There was a thoughtful silence.

  “I’ve never raised a boy,” said Cynthia.

  “That makes two of us.”

  “But I do try to understand their feelings. I always pretend I’m a child when I write Violet books, and then I write exactly what I want to hear.”

  Is that the way he should write his sermons? Saying exactly what he would like to hear?

  “A publisher who looked at the first manuscript said, ‘Oh, we can’t print this, it’s far too silly.’ But the next publisher understood, and there have been eight since then. All silly!”

  “And all successful, I believe.”

  “Well, yes, and then the Davant Medal was announced, and we went into second and third printings of everything. But my point was, let’s try and put ourselves in his shoes, even if it seems silly. It might work! Let’s see . . . if I were a boy with a new bicycle, where would I go?” She stared intently at the fire, wrinkling her forehead.

  “We think he’s gone to his mother, but we can’t trace her.”

  “Where does she live?”