He was in for it.
“Sittin’ in a booth draped with th’ flag won’t cut it this election. Times are changin.’ I want you to go home and pray about it and come up with somethin’.”
“But the town festival is only four days away.”
“Somethin’,” she said, “that’ll blow Mack Stroupe and his barbecue deal clear to Holding.”
“You want me to do that?”
“And be quick about it,” she said, scratching a splotch.
Hadn’t his wife arranged countless retreats to help him relax, and cooked dinner on evenings when he wasn’t up to the task?
Hadn’t she prayed for him faithfully, and overhauled the rectory, and given him a complete set of Charles Dickens, not to mention a lighted world globe?
And wasn’t she working on a book nearly eight hours a day?
He would do what the Russians do. Though it was his very own birthday, he would be the host, he would give the dinner.
It would be just the two of them, and afterward, they would dance. He’d put on the CD of the rhumba—or was it the tango she liked?—and positively whirl her around the study. His blood was getting up for it.
And champagne! That was the ticket. Something expensive, of course, that wouldn’t give you a blinding headache even as it went down your gullet. Avis would know which label, and didn’t Avis mention that a shipment of fresh lamb was expected any day?
Furthermore, weren’t his antique French roses blooming like he’d never seen, drenching the air with their intoxicating scent?
By jing!
He examined the back of his head in the mirror again. He’d been fairly butchered in the privacy of his own home.
Best to nip out and get the matter settled, once and for all.
A decent haircut, the new blue sport coat Cynthia had found on sale, dancing with his wife on his birthday—what else could a man want or imagine?
Suddenly he didn’t feel a hundred years old in the shade, he was feeling more like—why not say it?—seventeen.
As he looked up Fancy’s number, he had to admit he missed Joe Ivey. So what if Joe had never gone to hair conventions to learn the latest thing? Joe was eminently companionable, and never talked your ear off while he barbered your head.
Another thing—Joe hadn’t been shy about slapping on the Sea Breeze, an all-time favorite treat for the way it made the scalp tingle. Fancy Skinner, on the other hand, considered the use of Sea Breeze beneath her station.
Ah, well. He sighed, dialing 555-HAIR. Fancy Skinner was the only game in town, and he hoped she could work him in.
“Th’ shop’s closed today, I’m here givin’ Mama a rinse. Mama, she lives in Spruce Pine, but I’m from Newland. If you get over here quick, I’ll trim you up because it’s you. You might be th’ only one I’d do this for, I’m not sure I’d do it for my own preacher, did you see what his wife did to him, it looked like she put a soup bowl on his head and hacked around it with a steak knife. How he had th’ nerve to preach a revival lookin’ like that is beyond me.
“Oh, Lord, I just remembered, would you mind stoppin’ by Th’ Local and gettin’ me some sugarless gum, I’ll pay you th’ minute you get here or take it off your bill, either one, I like to have gum in th’ shop, I do my best work if I have somethin’ in my mouth, at least it’s not a cigarette, law, I used to suck down two packs a day, unfiltered, can you believe it?
“Well, if you’re comin’, come on, tomorrow’ll be a zoo, everybody’s gettin’ ready for the town festival, why anybody would want highlights to eat barbecue in a parkin’ lot is beyond me, and if you could pick up a sack of peppermint while you’re at it, that’d be great, I like to have it for people with onion breath, doin’ hair is close work.”
As Fancy draped him with the pink shawl, he sighed resignedly and closed his eyes.
“Prayin’, are you? You ought to know by now I won’t cut your ear off or poke a hole in your head. Law, I’ve had too much coffee this mornin’, you know I can’t drink but two cups or I’m over the moon, how about you, can you still drink caffeine, or are you too old? Course, your wife is young, she probably can do it, I used to drink five or six cups a day . . . and smoke, oh, law, I smoked like a stack! But not anymore, did you know it makes you wrinkle faster? I hate those little lines around my mouth worse than anything, but that wadn’t coffee, that was sun, honey, I used to lay out and bake like a chicken.
“Look at this trim! Who did this? I thought Joe Ivey was workin’ at Graceland. Mama, come and look at this, this is what I have to put up with. Father, this is Mama, Mama, he’s a friend of Mule’s, he got married a while back for the first time.
“He preaches at that rock church down the street where they use incense, I declare, Mule and I passed by your church one Sunday, you could smell it comin’ out of th’ chimney! Lord, my allergies flare up somethin’ awful when I smell that stuff, I thought incense was Catholic, anyway, do y’all talk Latin? I had a girlfriend one time, I went to church with her, I couldn’t understand a word they said.
“Your hair’s growin’ like a weed. I hear if you eat a lot of grease, it’ll make your hair grow, you shouldn’t eat grease, anyway, you’ve got diabetes.
“Mama! Did you know th’ Father has diabetes? My daddy had diabetes. Is that what killed him, Mama, or was it smokin’? Maybe both.
“Look at that! Whoever trimmed your hair, you tell ’em to leave your hair alone. You can call me anytime, I’ll work you in. I’m sorry I couldn’t take you—when was it?—I think your pope was here, I guess he don’t always stay at the Vatican, have you ever been to the Vatican? Law, I haven’t even been to Israel, everybody’s been to Israel, our preacher is takin’ a whole group next year, but I’d rather go on a cruise, do you think that’s sacrilegious?
“You ought to let me give you a mask with Fancy’s Face Food while we’re at it, especially with your wife havin’ a birthday, or is it you that’s havin’ one? Either way, my mask is about as good as a facelift, not to mention four thousand dollars cheaper. No, I mean it, I’ll do it for you, it won’t take but an hour. Just name a better birthday present than lookin’ fifteen years younger, which is more in your wife’s age group, if I’m not mistaken. OK, lay back, you’re stiff as a board, I’m not goin’ to claw your eyes out, men are babies, aren’t they, Mama? She can’t hear for beans, bein’ under th’ dryer an’ all.
“Now, don’t try to talk while I’m puttin’ this on your face, OK? It’ll get hard and you have to lay like this for thirty minutes without sayin’ a word or th’ whole thing’ll crack off and fall on th’ floor and that’s forty bucks down the tubes. You ought to see this nice green color, it’s got mint in it, and cucumber, and I don’t know what all, I think there’s spinach in here, too, and burdock—my granmaw used to dig burdock for whoopin’ cough medicine!
“Don’t that feel good, don’t you just feel your skin releasin’ all those toxins? And those wrinkles on your forehead, I bet you pucker your forehead when you think, you seem like th’ type that thinks, well, you can kiss your wrinkles goodbye, honey, ’cause I’m talkin’ sayonara, adios, outta here . . . .”
Lying in Fancy’s chair had given him a headache, not to mention a crick in his neck that seemed to extend to his upper shoulders and into most of his spinal column. Oh, well. A small price to pay for looking forty-eight on his sixty-third birthday.
Fancy had urged him not to look in the mirror at Hair House. “Why look in the mirror,” she asked in what he considered a marvelous burst of philosophy, “when you can see th’ real difference by lookin’ in her eyes?” She winked at him hugely and blew a bubble, which wasn’t easy to do with sugarless spearmint gum.
Not wanting to seem ungrateful, he tipped her five dollars, noting that she hadn’t offered a discount for clergy on this particular deal.
He couldn’t help himself. The minute he came in the back door, he turned and looked in the mirror.
Good Lord!
His face was . . . green.
Unbelievable! Surely not. Was it the dim natural light in the kitchen? He switched on the overhead fixture, fogged his glasses, and looked again.
It wasn’t the light.
He dialed 555-HAIR from the kitchen phone, his heart beating dully. No answer.
He raced up the stairs to the bedroom and looked in the mirror he was accustomed to using.
Green.
His watch said five p.m. He’d invited Cynthia to come over at seven.
The birthday dinner, the champagne, the roses . . . the whole deal dashed. Blown on the wind.
He went to the bathroom and lathered his hands with soap and warm water and scrubbed his face.
Who would want to dance the tango with someone whose face was green? And how could he possibly confess that he’d had a facial, something which no other man in the village of Mitford would ever do in a hundred—no, a million—years?
He splashed his face and dried it and looked in the medicine cabinet mirror, which was topped by a 150-watt bulb that never lied.
Green. No two ways about it.
He stood gazing into the mirror, stunned. That’s what he got for being a weak-minded sap, unable to say no to a woman in a pair of Capri pants so tight they looked as if they’d been robbed from a toddler.
He wanted to dig a hole and crawl in it.
They had dined, they had danced, they had remarked upon the extraordinary fragrance of the roses. She had raved about his cooking, she had sung a rousing “Happy Birthday,” and she’d given him a book about himself and the parish of Mitford, which she had written and illustrated.
He was visibly moved and completely delighted. To have a book in which he saw himself walking down Main Street and standing on the church lawn in his vestments . . . Now he knew how Violet must feel.
He thought it immensely good of her not to comment on anything unusual in his appearance, though he was certain that he saw her staring a time or two, once with her mouth open.
He poured a final glass of champagne.
“This is like . . . like a date!” she said, flushed and happy.
“Which we never had, except for that movie where you ate all my Milk Duds.”
“I detest dating!” she said. “I think it should be reserved for marriage.”
“Amen!”
He served the poached pears he’d served the first time she came for dinner, drizzling hers with chocolate sauce.
“Dearest,” she said, as they lolled on the study sofa, “there’s something I’ve been wanting to say . . . .”
Here it comes, he thought, his heart sinking.
“You aren’t looking well at all. You seem . . . a little green around the gills. I’m worried about you, Timothy.”
“Aha.” He had paid good money to look fifteen years younger, and wound up looking sick and infirm. He would never step foot in Fancy Skinner’s place again, not as long as he lived, so what if the round-trip to Memphis would take eighteen hours’ hard driving?
“All that business about your retirement and the worry over Fernbank, and whatever this new, urgent project is for the mayor . . . I think it’s time for a retreat.”
His wife specialized, actually, in the domestic retreat. It was, to a worn-out clergyman, what retreads were to a tire. Once they’d had a picnic in Baxter Park, once a picnic overlooking the Land of Counterpane, and once she’d carried him off to the little yellow house where they had reclined on her king-size bed like two dissolute Romans, drinking lemonade and listening to the rain.
“Right,” he said. “A retreat.”
She peered at him again, her brow furrowed.
“Definitely!” she said, looking concerned.
While they partied in the study, Barnabas had stood up to the kitchen counter like a man and polished off what was left of the lamb. He also helped himself to two dinner rolls, half a stick of butter, a bowl of wild rice, and all the mint jelly he could lick off a spoon in the dishwasher.
At two in the morning, the rector felt a large paw on his shoulder. This was major, and no doubt about it.
He hastily pulled on his pants and a shirt, slipped his feet into his loafers, and thumped downstairs behind his desperate dog.
He barely got the leash on before Barnabas was out the back door and across to the hedge.
Barnabas sniffed his turf. Possums, raccoons, hedgehogs, squirrels, and cats had passed this way, not to mention the rector’s least favorite of all creatures great and small, the mole. The place was a veritable smorgasbord of smells, apparently causing his dog to forget entirely why he had barreled outside in the middle of the night, dragging his master behind like a ball on a chain.
“Sometime in this century, pal?”
More sniffing.
Suddenly Barnabas had the urge to go around the house . . . then across the yard . . . then out to the sidewalk . . . then up the street.
“Not the monument!” he groaned.
Barnabas strained forward with the muscle and determination of a team of yoked oxen. They were going to the monument.
He trotted behind his dog, noting the peace of their village when no cars were on the street. There seemed an uncommon dignity in the glow of the streetlights tonight and the baskets brimming with flowers that hung from every lamppost.
They had a good life in Mitford, no doubt about it. Visitors were often amazed at its seeming charm and simplicity, wanting it for themselves, seeing in it, perhaps, the life they’d once had, or had missed entirely.
Yet there were Mitfords everywhere. He’d lived in them, preached in them, they were still out there, away from the fray, still containing something of innocence and dreaming, something of the past that other towns had freely let go, or allowed to be taken from them.
How much longer could the Esther Cunninghams of the world hold on? How much longer could common, decent, kind regard hold out against utter disregard?
Like the rest of us, he thought, the mayor may have her blind spots, but I’ll take my chances with Esther any day.
He’d almost forgotten what he’d come out here for; he’d been walking as in a dream. Then, thanks be to God, his dog found a spot behind the hedge surrounding the monument.
He stood there as Barnabas did his business, and looked at the summer sky. Cassiopeia . . . the Three Sisters . . . the Bear . . .
He nearly missed seeing the car as it went around the monument and headed down Lilac Road.
Lincoln. New. Black. Quiet.
He felt alarmed, but couldn’t figure why. The car seemed to remind him of something or someone . . . .
He had the strange thought that it didn’t seem right for a car to be so quiet—it was oddly chilling.
“What’s the scoop?” he asked Scott Murphy.
“Interesting. I can’t figure it out exactly. When they come to see Homeless on Wednesday night, they don’t have much to say, but they seem to sense something special about being there, as if they’re . . . waiting for something.”
They are, he thought, suddenly moved. They are.
“I hate to tell you this,” he said, glancing at his wife as they weeded the perennial bed next to her garage. The town festival was tomorrow, and all of Mitford was scurrying to look tidy and presentable. Certainly he was looking more presentable. The greenish cast to his skin had disappeared altogether.
A long silence ensued as he pulled knotgrass from among the foxgloves.
“Well? Spit it out, Timothy!”
“I did some simple arithmetic . . .”
“So?”
“ . . . and I was sixty-four yesterday.”
“No!”
“Yes.”
“I thought you were sixty-three! This means I’ll be fifty-eight, not fifty-seven. Oh, please!”
Her moan might have ricocheted off the roof of the town museum two blocks away.
“The neighbors . . .” he said.
“We don’t have any, remember? Since I moved to the rectory, we don’t have any neighbors, which means I c
an wail as loud as I want to.”
“Good thinking, Kavanagh.”
Sixty-four! He felt like letting go with a lamentation of his own.
“Th’ volts was down t’ ten,” said Harley, wiping his hands on a rag. “Hit was runnin’ off the battery. Why don’t you take it out and spin it around, I tuned it up some while I was at it.”
“We thank you, Harley. This is terrific.”
“Hit ought t’ go like a scalded dog.”
The rector opened the door and Barnabas jumped into the passenger seat, then he got in and backed his wife’s Mazda out of the garage.
What a day! he thought as he drove up Main Street, glad to see the bustle of commerce. In a day of shopping malls on bypasses, not every town could boast of a lively business center.
He saw Dooley pedal out of The Local alleyway on his bicycle, wearing his helmet and hauling a full delivery basket. He honked the horn. Dooley grinned and waved.
There was Winnie, putting a tray of something sinful in the window of the Sweet Stuff, and he honked again but was gone before Winnie looked up.
As he approached the monument, he saw Uncle Billy and Miss Rose, stationed in their chrome dinette chairs on the lawn of the town museum, where everybody and his brother had gathered to put up tents, booths, flags, tables, umbrellas, hand-lettered signs, and the much-needed port-a-john, which this year, he observed, appeared to lean to the right instead of the left.
He honked and waved as Uncle Billy waved back and Miss Rose looked scornful.
How in the dickens he could have lived in this town for over fifteen years and still get a kick out of driving up Main Street was beyond him. He’d liked living in his little parish by the sea, too, but the main street hadn’t been much to look at, and often, during the hurricane season, their few storefronts had stayed boarded up.
Count your blessings, his grandmother had told him. Count your blessings, his mother had often said.