At Home in Mitford

  Perhaps one of the highest points, for him, had been looking out into the eleven o’clock congregation and seeing Miss Sadie sitting with Louella and her grandson. The countenances of all three were radiant, which created a special pool of light on the gospel side.

  After church, Louella grabbed him and gave him a bosomy hug.

  “That’s some good ham you baked,” she said. “We got into it las’ night, with the Jell-O. An’ Miss Sadie goin’ to run it by us again today.”

  Hal and Marge were there, their good news shining in their eyes.

  Emma wore a hat with a Bird of Paradise on one side and was proudly showing off her daughter from Atlanta. And Miss Rose and Uncle Billy, usually partial to the Presbyterians, attended their first service at Lord’s Chapel.

  He saw faces he’d never seen before, and would never see again, and faces that had become as familiar as his own. It had been a good twelve years in Mitford.

  During the days following Easter Sunday, he noticed a certain lassitude of spirit in himself. He would go to his back door and gaze at the azaleas, which he’d left sitting along the bank in their potting cans.

  There was still a flat of pansies to be planted, and a dozen rare, pink daylilies.

  But the joy he’d felt in gardening, only days before, seemed to have vanished. A letdown was to be expected after the intense activities of high holy days.

  He went to the library at noon and sat, idly reading, wanting a nap, forgetting to have lunch. At last, he forced himself to check out the latest Dick Francis, a book on dog breeds, a volume of Voltaire, and Maeterlinck’s Intelligence of the Flowers. He felt so exhausted from selecting the books that he did something entirely out of the ordinary: he phoned Emma to say he was going home.

  “I’m calling Hoppy this minute,” she said, alarmed.

  “There’s nothing to worry about in the least. I’m just a little tired, that’s all. I expect to be there bright and early in the morning.”

  “Well, it’s my day off, you know, but I’ll come in at ten to check on you. I’ve found us a new kind of Little Debbies, and I’ll bring you a box.”

  He couldn’t summon the energy to argue with her. He also noted, vaguely, that her offer of one of his favorite sweets had no appeal.

  By the time he reached the new men’s store a block away, he regretted having checked out the books he was carrying, especially the Voltaire, which suddenly felt like the complete works.

  Miss Rose and Uncle Billy lived on Mitford’s Main Street, in one room of a house that was variously called “a disgrace,” “an eyesore,” and “a crying shame.”

  The house had been built in the late 1920s by Miss Rose’s brother, Willard Porter, who invented and sold pharmaceuticals.

  His biggest seller, a chest rub, had added the second story, the wooden shutters with cutouts of a dove, a wraparound porch, and a widow’s walk. There was an ornate gazebo, large enough for dances, that had commemorated the success of a flavored lip balm. And four sculptured stone garden benches with carved angels’ heads, sitting in what once was a majestic rose garden, had marked the debut of a cough syrup containing mountain herbs.

  The house had historically been the pride of the village, sitting as it did on the edge of the old town green, across from the war monument, and displaying the finest architecture of its time.

  In recent years, however, all that had changed. The stone benches with carved angels’ heads were crumbling to dust. Many of the shutters lay in the grass where they had fallen. And Uncle Billy had nailed a No Trespassing sign on the widow’s walk.

  A decorator from Raleigh had often tried to buy the Porter place for a second home, thinking how spectacular it would be for parties. When all efforts to buy it through Mule Skinner had failed, she took it upon herself personally to visit Miss Rose and Uncle Billy, who were sitting in the backyard in two chrome dinette chairs, at a wooden spool previously used to roll up electric wiring. They were eating bologna sandwiches and drinking iced tea from jelly glasses.

  Miss Rose wiped her mouth on a threadbare T-shirt that said I surfed Laguna Beach.

  “I’m Susan Parnell Phillips,” the intruder informed them, with more eagerness than was necessary.

  “This is Rose,” said Uncle Billy, “and I’m the thorn.”

  At that, Uncle Billy grinned broadly, showing all three of his teeth, one of which was “covered with enough gold to reroof the house,” as a neighbor once said.

  Miss Rose glowered at the visitor. “I’m not selling.”

  “Selling? But how did you—I mean, what makes you think I’m buying?”

  “I can always tell,” Miss Rose snapped.

  Recently, the new men’s store had tried to buy the place. And so had a dozen others over the years. But Miss Rose stood her ground.

  “Home is where the heart is,” she said to one prospective buyer who knocked on their door in January and found her in a chenille robe, a World War II trench coat, a pair of rubber garden boots, a man’s felt hat, and what appeared to be Uncle Billy’s flannel pajama bottoms.

  As far as the frozen caller could tell, there was no heat in the house. Being a caring soul, he inquired around and was told that the Presbyterian church had filled up Miss Rose’s oil tank in November, and, on last inspection, it was still full.

  Most people knew, too, that the old couple walked to Winnie Ivey’s bake shop every afternoon, always hand in hand, to pick up what was left over. Winnie, however, was not one to give away the store. She carefully portioned out what she thought they would eat that night and the next morning, and no more. She didn’t like the idea of Miss Rose feeding her perfectly good day-old Danish to the birds.

  After their visit to the bake shop, Miss Rose and Uncle Billy, walking very slowly due to arthritis and a half dozen other ailments, dropped by to see what Velma had left at the Main Street Grill.

  Usually, it was a few slices of bacon and liver mush from breakfast, or a container of soup and a couple of hamburger rolls from lunch. Occasionally, she might add a little chicken salad that Percy had made, himself, that very morning.

  On balance, it was said, Miss Rose and Uncle Billy fared pretty well in Mitford. And many were pleased to see that they provided for their spiritual nourishment, as well, by going to church on Sunday.

  Recently, that very thing had been a matter for conversation around the village, since they’d been over to The Chapel of Our Lord and Savior, as it was properly called, four Sundays in a row, including Easter.

  “Are you going to visit Miss Rose and Uncle Billy?” Emma asked one morning as Father Tim came in with Barnabas.

  He hung his hat on a peg. “Do I need to?”

  “Well, you usually do go visit after somebody’s been to church a few times.”

  “Yes, I’ll do that. Soon. Remind me to do that.”

  “Don’t eat anything while you’re there,” she warned. “They say Miss Rose cooks, sometimes.”

  He was going through the mail that Harold Newland, the postman, had just handed him, since the mailbox was too small to hold this morning’s bundle. He spied a letter from Walter.

  “Are you pale today?” Emma demanded.

  “Pale? Do I look pale?”

  “As a ghost.”

  He slowly opened the letter, stared at what appeared to be a blur, then sat down heavily on the corner of his desk.

  “Something . . .” he said vaguely. “Something is . . . not right.”

  Emma rose to steady him. “Don’t move,” she said, afraid he might crash to the floor. “I’m bringing the car to the door and we’re going to the hospital.”

  “This,” said Dr. Walter Harper, who was known to the village as Hoppy, “is where the rubber hits the road.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning the party’s over, pal. You’ve got to make some changes, big-time.”

  He sighed. Change! If there was anything he didn’t like, that was it, right there in a nutshell.

  Emma, who had left her
glasses at the office, was squinting at cartoons in an old New Yorker, when Hoppy and Father Tim came out to the waiting room.

  Hoppy Harper was tall, slim, and even handsome with his piercing green eyes, intense gaze, and determined jaw.

  Only last September, his wife of sixteen years had died of cancer, and the grief had aged him noticeably. Those who cared about him enough to look closely, and these were quite a few, saw that grief had also done something else. It had deepened him.

  “Emma,” he said, “let’s have a talk.”

  Oh, God! Emma thought, using the proper meaning of the phrase, Let everything be all right.

  “I’ve already been over this with Tim. But I think someone close to him should also know the score.”

  “This is a dark day, Emma,” said the rector, managing a weak smile.

  “Diabetes,” Hoppy said. “That’s the bad news. The good news is, it’s non-insulin dependent. Which means he won’t require regular insulin shots. What he will require is a change of diet. Little Debbies, pies, cakes, candy—outta here.

  “We stuck his finger for blood sugar, and it’s over 350. Not good. And he’s got four-plus sugar in the urine. So, here’s the scoop.”

  There was something in the doctor’s green eyes that made Emma concentrate on every word.

  “Exercise. Jogging is what I recommend. Three times a week, and no less. Morning, noon, night, whenever. But he’s got to do it.”

  The rector looked anguished.

  “Less fat in his diet, juice, a lot of fresh fruit. And no skipping meals.”

  Hoppy grinned and looked at his patient. “Now, the most important thing of all. And that’s changing your schedule. You haven’t had a real vacation in twelve years, and you usually work seven days a week. I can’t tell you how to change that, but it’s got to change. Think about it, pal.” Hoppy ran his fingers through his unruly hair. Emma thought he looked tired, and wondered who was taking care of him.

  He had a hurried lunch of Percy’s soup of the day, with a salad, and went home to say a word to Barnabas. This took him past the new men’s store, which he had failed to stop and inspect since it opened with some fanfare before Easter. The Collar Button, it was called.

  It had been a long time, indeed, since he’d gone into a clothing store. In the first place, he didn’t like to shop. In the second place, the prices for clothes these days were absolutely—yes, he thought he could honestly say it—sinful. And in the third place, what was the going fashion for a rector who didn’t wish to appear conspicuously well-dressed?

  He slipped his hand into his jacket pocket and felt his mended gloves, which he still needed from time to time on cold mornings. He must not get carried away in this place, he thought. He would say he was just looking.

  The Collar Button was new, but it seemed old. The walls were dark, burnished panels of mahogany, a low fire burned in a grate, and a large golden retriever, lying by the hearth, opened one eye as he came in.

  “Good heavens!” he said with earnest appreciation. This was like walking into a study in some far reach of Cambridge, where he had once gone to research a paper on the life and works of C. S. Lewis.

  “Father Tim, I believe!” boomed a deep voice, and from behind a wall of brocade curtains stepped the new proprietor, extending his hand to the rector.

  “That’s right. How did you know?”

  “Oh, I’ve seen you pass now and again, and I thought to myself, there goes a proper candidate for the Collar Button style!”

  “And what, ah, style is that, exactly?”

  “English gentleman, country squire, village rector, the man of thoughtful reflection and quiet taste.”

  “Aha.”

  “What can I show you? Oh, and would you care for a dash of sherry?”

  His head was fairly swimming with the unexpected dazzle of the modern shopping experience.

  When he left the Collar Button, he was carrying a large bag with two jogging suits and a box with a new spring sport coat.

  For the life of him, he couldn’t figure out how it had all come about.

  He had mentioned jogging and then, before he knew what was happening, he was standing before a mirror in a turquoise jogging outfit, trying to hold his stomach in.

  He had to admit he would need something to run in. He certainly could not do it in a jacket, trousers, and shirt with a clerical collar. As he hurried toward home, clutching his packages, he muttered all the excuses he could possibly think of for having spent such a large sum of money on himself.

  On Saturday morning, he put on the forest green running suit and a pair of old Nikes that he’d worn for several years in the garden.

  Running shoes was a category he dreaded investigating. Someone had recently told him that shoes these days had parts that you literally pumped up. It was an esoteric realm, and so for now, he concluded, it would have to be his old garden shoes or nothing.

  He was smitten at once with the comfort of the new outfit he was wearing. In fact, he praised it aloud.

  “Why, this feels just like pajamas,” he said into the full-length mirror behind the guest room door.

  Barnabas barked and leaped backward when he saw the rector come into the hall.

  “You’ll have to get used to it, old fellow. If I do what the doctor ordered, I’ll be looking like this three times a week. So, pipe down.”

  Barnabas, however, couldn’t contain his excitement over something new in the air. He leaped up and put his forepaws on his master’s chest and cocked his head to one side.

  “ ‘Jesus said to the disciples, “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.” ’ ” The rector looked Barnabas squarely in the eye.

  Barnabas sighed heavily and lay down at his master’s feet.

  “And don’t let it happen again,” he said, brushing off his new jogging suit.

  He knew he didn’t want to be seen doing this. First, he wanted to try it out, in a place where there was no traffic. And while he’d seen countless others running heedlessly along Main Street, he felt, somehow, that jogging was an intimate activity, accompanied by snorts, sweating, hawking and spitting, and an inordinate amount of huffing and puffing. Why in the world anyone would want to do that up and down the center of town was beyond him.

  He went to the study window at the back of the rectory and peered across his greening yard into Baxter Park. As far as he could see, the coast was clear.

  He began in a kind of lope, along the flagstones by his perennial beds, through the space in the hedge and out to Baxter Park, where he turned left and ran close to the hemlock border.

  By the time he reached the middle of the park, he was winded. “Take it easy,” Hoppy had told him. “Don’t try to do Boston the first time out.”

  He had already broken a light sweat.

  A squirrel chattered by one of the ancient park benches. A chipmunk dashed across the grass. And the old fountain, now green with moss and algae, made a sweet, pattering sound.

  A bronze plaque on the fountain read: Given in loving memory of Rachel Livingstone Baxter, 1889 - 1942. Miss Sadie’s mother, he thought, thankful for such an oasis of peace. He wondered why he hadn’t been in this wonderful old park in several years, even though it bordered his yard and he looked into it nearly every day.

  Starting again, he jogged over to Old Church Lane. Then, he ran with surprising ease up the hill toward the meadow where the remains of the ruined Lord’s Chapel stood.

  Panting and soaked with sweat, his heart pounding furiously, he sat on a crumbling stone wall that bordered the old churchyard and saw what lay before him as if for the first time.

  It was, he thought, the Land of Counterpane.

  The view swept down to a small valley with church spires, orderly farms, and freshly planted fields. Then, the far walls of the valley rose steeply and rolled away to ridge upon ridge, wave upon wave of densely blue, mist-cloaked mountains.

  He sat as if stunned for a long moment. Then, he tried
to recall when he’d been up here last.

  It had been seven or eight years, he figured, since he’d climbed the steep lane with Walter and Katherine and a picnic basket. He wondered who he might share it with now, but could think of no one. Except, of course, Barnabas.

  His heart had ceased its thundering, and a light breeze coming up from the valley seemed sweet with the fragrance of earth and manure, leaf mold and blossoming trees.

  He got up from the wall, idly wondering how long he had sat there, and began his jog down Old Church Lane.

  He was no longer trying to hide himself along the hedges. In fact, he discovered that he was suddenly feeling absolutely “top notch,” as Walter might say.

  As he ran, he became aware that he was thinking the oddest thoughts. Thoughts of how he might look in his new spring sport coat; about the little girl’s pony that had got caught in the barbed wire fence; whether Emma had dyed her hair at home or had it done by Fancy Skinner. Also, he hoped the pink daylilies would not disappoint him and bloom out orange.

  He turned out of the bright sun into the cool morning shade of Baxter Park and paused again to rest at the fountain.

  Maybe this jogging business wouldn’t be so bad, after all.

  New possibilities lay before him, it seemed, though he couldn’t yet tell what they were. Perhaps it was time to make some other changes, as well, to do something fresh, something different and unexpected.

  The idea came upon him quite suddenly.

  He would give a dinner party.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Company Stew

  In the little village of less than a thousand, everyone’s dinner—party or otherwise—began at The Local, unless they wanted to make the fifteen-mile drive to Food Value. Of course, they could go out on the highway to Cloer’s Market, but Hattie Cloer was so well-known for telling customers her aches and pains that hardly anyone ever did that.

  “See this right here?” she might say, pointing to her shoulder. “Last night somethin’ come up there big as a grapefruit. I said, ‘Clyde, put your hand right here and feel that. What do you think it is?’