Out to Canaan

  He eased around the monument and headed west on Lilac Road.

  Did anyone really count their blessings, anymore? There was, according to the world’s dictum, no time to smell the roses, no time to count blessings. But how much time did it take to recognize that he was, in a sense, driving one around? Hadn’t Harley Welch just saved them a hundred bucks, right in his own backyard?

  Besides, if there were no time in Mitford, where would there ever be time?

  “Ah, Barnabas,” he said, reaching over to scratch his dog’s ear. Barnabas stared straight ahead, a behavior he’d always considered appropriate to riding in a car.

  He turned on the radio and heard Mozart straining to come across the mountains from the tower in Asheville, and fiddled with the dial until he got a weather report. Sunshine all weekend. Hallelujah!

  He realized he was grinning from ear to ear.

  How often did he feel as if he didn’t have a care in the world? Not often. He’d been equipped, after all, with a nature that could run to the melancholy if he didn’t watch it.

  “Serious-minded!” a neighbor had said of him as a child, putting on his glasses to get a better look at the tyke who stood before him with a large book under his skinny arm.

  He thought of last night, of his vibrant and unstoppable wife sitting up in bed, reading to him, knowing how he loved this simple sacrifice of time and effort. He had put his head in her lap and reached down and held the warm calf of her leg, knowing with all that was in him how extraordinarily rich he was.

  He had heard Dooley come in, racing up the stairs on the dot of his curfew, and afterward, the sound of his dog snoring in the hall . . . .

  He thought of the old needlepoint sampler his grandmother had done, framed and hanging in the rectory kitchen. He had passed it so often over the years, he had quit seeing it. The patient stitching, embellished with faded cabbage roses, quoted a verse from the Sixty-eighth Psalm.

  “Blessed be the Lord,” it read, “who daily loadeth us with benefits.”

  “Loadeth!” he exclaimed aloud. “Daily!”

  The car was running like a top, thanks to his live-in mechanic, but he didn’t want to turn around and go home; he had a sudden taste for a view of the late-June countryside, maybe a little run out to Farmer, four miles away, then back to help Cynthia bake for the church booth tomorrow.

  And while he did the run to Farmer, he would do a seemingly childish thing—he would count his blessings as far as he could.

  Quite possibly the list could go on until Wednesday, for he knew a thing or two about blessings and how they were, even in the worst of times, inexhaustible.

  It came to him that Patrick Henry Reardon had indirectly spoken of something like this. He had copied it into his sermon notebook only days ago.

  “Suppose for a moment,” Reardon had said, “that God began taking from us the many things for which we have failed to give thanks. Which of our limbs and faculties would be left? Would I still have my hands and my mind? And what about loved ones? If God were to take from me all those persons and things for which I have not given thanks, who or what would be left of me?”

  What would be left of me, indeed? he wondered. The very thought struck him with a force he hadn’t recognized when he copied it into his notebook.

  He put his hand on his dog’s head and hoarsely whispered the beginning of his list:

  “Barnabas . . .”

  He saw her standing at the corner of Main Street and Wisteria, looking toward the rectory. He had never seen her before in his life, but he knew exactly, precisely, who she was.

  He felt himself loving her at once, as she held out her arms and smiled and started running toward him. He tried to run, also, to meet her, but found he moved as if through sand or deep water, and was dumbstruck, unable to call her name.

  His wife was shaking him. “Wake up, dearest!”

  “What . . . what . . . ?”

  “You were dreaming.”

  He sat up with a pounding heart.

  “We have to find Jessie,” he said.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Political Barbecue

  There was plenty of talk on the street. As early as seven-thirty on the morning of the festival, he couldn’t walk from the south end to the north without picking up new funds of information.

  Dora Pugh, who was setting flats of borage, chives, and rosemary outside the hardware door, asked if he’d seen the billboards on the highway. They must have been put up in the middle of the night, she said, because when she drove home yesterday, she certainly hadn’t noticed Mack Stroupe’s ugly mug plastered on three new boards, all the way from Hattie Cloer’s market to the Shoe Barn.

  “That,” she snorted, “is three times more of that cracker than I ever wanted to see.” Dora once lived in Georgia, where “cracker” had nothing to do with party snacks.

  At the Sweet Stuff, Winnie Ivey hailed him in.

  “I’m experimenting,” she said, tucking a strand of graying hair under her bandanna. “My license says people can sit down, so I thought I should try fixin’ things to where people don’t have to stand at th’ shelf.”

  The shelf along the wall had come down, replaced by posters of mountain scenery, and in the long-empty space in front of her display cases stood three tables and a dozen chairs.

  “I’m tryin’ to do all I can to bring in business. If I’m goin’ to sell out, I want my ledgers lookin’ good,” she said.

  “I’m proud of you, Winnie! And to think you’ve done all this by yourself!”

  “I have to do whatever it takes, Father! Of course, it’s just coffee and sweets, as usual, except now you get a chair to sit in—but I might add sandwiches next week. And soup in the winter. What do you think?”

  “I think you should!”

  She brightened. “It helps to have advice.”

  “Don’t I know it!” Weren’t his parishioners full of it?

  “My husband, Johnny, used to know what to do about things, but he died so many years ago, I can hardly remember his face. Do you think that’s bad?”

  He could seldom recall his father’s face. “No,” he said, “it can happen like that . . . .”

  “You know, sometimes I . . .” Winnie blushed.

  “Sometimes you . . . ?”

  “You wouldn’t tell this?”

  “You have my word.”

  “Sometimes I think of a man standin’ beside me in th’ kitchen back there, I don’t know who it is because I can’t exactly see his face, but it seems like he’s tall and dark-headed, and I can tell he has a big heart.” She paused, looking shy. “He bakes all th’ cakes, and he’s always laughin’ and sayin’ nice things, like how good my cream horns are, and how pretty I glazed the fruit tarts.”

  He nodded.

  “He always has flour on his apron.”

  “He would.”

  “It would be nice . . . .” she said, looking at him.

  “I know,” he said, looking back.

  “It might not be right to pray for such as that . . . .”

  “I think it would be wrong if we didn’t,” he said.

  Apparently, all of merchantdom was up and at it, a full two hours before the festival opened.

  The Collar Button man was sweeping the sidewalk, with a sprinkler turned on the handkerchief-sized garden next to his store.

  “Good morning, Father! How’re you liking the jacket your wife selected for your birthday?”

  “Immensely! It brings out the blue of her eyes. How’s business?”

  “Couldn’t be better!” said the Collar Button man, going full tilt with his broom.

  When he reached the Grill, he stopped and sniffed the balmy air. The smell of roasting pork drifted on the breeze from Mack Stroupe’s campaign headquarters near the monument.

  Then he squinted up at the sky.

  Blue. Here and there, a few billowing clouds.

  Perfect.

  He slid into the booth with a mug of coffee

 
“Where’s J.C?”

  “Went upstairs to get film out of his refrigerator,” said Mule.

  “Film was all he had in his refrigerator ’til he married Adele. What’s going on with you?”

  “Feelin’ like somethin’ the cat covered up. I can’t half sleep ’til Fancy gets to bed, and she was going like a circle saw ’til two o’clock this morning.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Doin’ hair.”

  “Who in the dickens would get their hair done at two o’clock in the morning?”

  “You’d be surprised.”

  “That’s true, I would.”

  “How’s your new boarder?” asked the realtor.

  “Working on my Buick. I pay for the parts, he insists on doing the labor. He was under the hood at seven o’clock this morning.”

  J.C. slung his briefcase into the corner and slid in.

  “I looked out th’ upstairs window and dadgum if th’ street ain’t jumpin’.” The editor rubbed his hands together briskly. This was front-page stuff, everything from llamas and political barbecue to a clogging contest and tourists out the kazoo.

  “Let me guess,” said Velma, arriving at the rear booth in an unusually cheerful frame of mind. “Poached for th’ preacher, scrambled for th’ realtor—”

  “Fried for th’ editor,” said J.C. “And don’t be bringin’ me any yogurt or all-bran.”

  Velma looked him over as if he were a boiled ham. “You’re pickin’ up weight again.”

  “I’ve picked up worse,” said J.C.

  Mule stirred his coffee. “Just dry toast with mine.”

  “No grits?” she asked, personally offended.

  “Not today.”

  “What’s the matter with Percy’s grits?”

  “Oh, well, all right. But no butter.”

  “Grits without butter?” What was wrong with these people?

  “Lord, help,” sighed Mule. “Just bring me whatever.”

  “I’ll have mine all the way,” said J.C., who had lately thrown caution to the wind. “Biscuits, grits, sausage, bacon, and give me a little mustard on the side.”

  “I’ll have the usual,” said Father Tim.

  Mule looked approving. “That’s what I need to do—figure out one thing and stick with it. Same thing every morning, and you don’t have to mess with it again.”

  “Right,” said the rector.

  “Have you seen Mack’s new boards?” asked J.C.

  They hadn’t.

  “They rhyme like those Burma-Shave signs. First one says, ‘If Mitford’s economy is going to move’ . . . th’ second one says, ‘we’ve got to improve.’ Last one says, ‘Mack for Mitford, Mack for Mayor.’”

  “Gag me with a forklift,” said Mule.

  “Esther Cunningham better get off her rear end, because like it or not, Mack Stroupe’s eatin’ her lunch. She’s been lollin’ around like this election was some kind of tea party. You’re so all-fired thick with the mayor,” J.C. said to the rector, “you ought to tell her the facts of life, and the fact is, she’s lookin’ dead in the water.”

  “Aha. I thought we agreed not to talk politics.”

  “Right,” said Mule, whose escalating blood pressure had suddenly turned his face beet red.

  J.C. looked bored. “So what else is new? Let’s see, I was over at the town museum ’til midnight watchin’ those turkeys get ready for the festival. Omer Cunningham was draping th’ flag on Esther’s booth and fell off the ladder and busted his foot.”

  “Busted his foot?” the rector blurted. “Good Lord! Can he fly?”

  “Can he fly? I don’t know as he could, with a busted foot.”

  Mule cackled. “He sure couldn’t fly any crazier than when his foot’s not busted.”

  “Toast!” said Velma, sliding two orders onto the table.

  The rector felt his stomach wrench.

  “Biscuits!” said Velma, handing off a plate to J.C.

  “May I use your phone?” asked Father Tim.

  “You can, if you stay out of Percy’s way, you know where it’s at.”

  He went to the red wall phone and dialed, knowing the number by heart. Hadn’t he called it two dozen times in the last few days?

  No answer.

  He hung up and stood by the grill, dazed, his mouth as dry as cotton.

  “I just busted th’ yolk in one of y’r eggs,” said Percy, who despised poaching.

  So? Busted feet, busted yolks, busted plans.

  He might possibly be looking at the worst day of his life.

  His palms were damp, something he’d never appreciated in clergy. Also, his collar felt tight, even though he’d snapped the Velcro at the loosest point.

  When he and Cynthia arrived on the lawn of the town museum at 9:35, they had to elbow their way to the Lord’s Chapel booth, which was situated, this year, directly across from the llamas and the petting zoo.

  “Excellent location!” said his wife, who was known to rely on animals as a drawing card.

  They thumped down their cardboard box filled with the results of last night’s bake-a-thon in the rectory kitchen. Three Lord’s Chapel volunteers, dressed in aprons that said, Have you hugged an Episcopalian today? briskly set about unpacking the contents and displaying them in a case cooled by a generator humming at the rear of the tent.

  Though the festival didn’t officially open until ten o’clock, the yard of the Porter mansion-cum-town museum was jammed with villagers, tourists, and the contents of three buses from neighboring communities. The rear end of a church van from Tennessee displayed a sign, Mitford or Bust.

  The Presbyterian brass band was already in full throttle on the museum porch, and the sixth grade of Mitford School was marching around the statue of Willard Porter, builder of the impressive Victorian home, with tambourines, drums, and maracas painted in their school colors.

  Why was he surprised to see posters on every pole and tree, promoting Mack Stroupe’s free barbecue at his campaign headquarters up the street?

  His eyes searched the crowd for the mayor, who said she’d be under the elm tree this year, the one that had miraculously escaped the blight.

  “I’ll be back,” he told Cynthia, who was giving him that concerned look. The way things were going, he’d need more than a domestic retreat, he’d need a set of pallbearers.

  He saw Uncle Billy next to the lilac bushes, sitting in a hardback chair with a bottomless chair in front of him and a bucket of water at his feet.

  “Stop in, Preacher! I’ll be a-canin’ chairs, don’t you know, hit’s a demonstration of th’ old ways, and I’ve set out a few of m’ birdhouses f’r sale.”

  “How’s your arthur?” asked the rector, concerned.

  “Well, sir, last night, I slapped it and said, ‘Git on out of there, I ain’t havin’ nothin’ t’ do with you!’ And m’ hands are feelin’ some better this mornin’, don’t you know.” He wiggled a couple of fingers to prove his point.

  “Where’s Miss Rose?”

  “She ain’t a-comin’ out this year, says she don’t like s’ many people ramblin’ around on ’er property.”

  “Hold that green birdhouse for me, I’ll be back!”

  He spotted Esther and her husband, Ray, shaking hands by a booth draped with an American flag and a banner hand-lettered with the mayor’s longtime political slogan.

  “Mayor! Where’s Omer?”

  “Where’s Omer? I thought you’d know where Omer is.”

  “What about his foot?”

  “Broken in two places.”

  “Right, but what about . . . can he fly?”

  She glared at him in a way that made Emma Newland look like a vestal virgin. “That’s your business,” she said, and turned back to the people she’d been shaking hands with.

  He headed to the Lord’s Chapel booth, his heart hammering. He was afraid to let his wife see his face, since she could obviously read it like a book—but where else could he go?

  Dooley! Of course!
A Taste of America!

  He hung a hard left in the direction of Avis Packard’s tent, cutting through the queue to the cotton candy truck, and ran slam into Omer Cunningham on a crutch.

  “Good heavens! Omer!” He threw his arms around Esther Cunningham’s strapping brother-in-law and could easily have kissed his ring, or even his plaster cast.

  Heads turned. People stared. He wished he weren’t wearing his collar.

  Omer’s big grin displayed teeth the size of keys on a spinet piano. “We’re smokin’,” he said, giving a thumbs-up to the rector, who, overcome with joyful relief, thumped down on a folding chair at the Baptists’ display of tea towels, aprons, and oven mitts.

  “Father!”

  It was Andrew Gregory, the tall, handsome proprietor of Oxford Antiques, calling from his booth next to the statue of Willard Porter.

  The rector could honestly say he felt a warm affection for the man who once courted Cynthia, escorting her hither and yon in his gray Mercedes, while Father Tim moped at the upstairs window of the rectory. Andrew might be six-four with a closetful of cashmere jackets, but hadn’t the five-nine, less stylish country parson won Cynthia?

  By jing!

  He felt positively lighthearted as he stepped up to the booth and shook hands with the antique dealer, who looked elegant in a linen shirt and trousers.

  “Great to see you, my friend!”

  “How is it,” asked Andrew, “that we seldom meet, though our doors are directly across the street from one another?”

  “We’ve mused on that before,” said the rector, “and always to no avail. I’ve missed you. How are you?”

  “Off next week to Italy, to my mother’s birthplace, a little town called Lucera.”

  “I’ve often visited Italy . . . .”

  “You have?”

  “In my imagination,” confessed the rector.

  Andrew smiled. “I’m afraid I’ve cultivated my paternal English side to the vast neglect of my Italian side. I’ll do like you did a couple of years ago—go searching for my roots, sample the local wines, visit cousins.”