At Home in Mitford (17 page)

“It might do you some good in the matter that’s presently concerning you,” said the rector.

In his study that evening, he wrote to Father Roland, in his large New Orleans parish.

“just wanted you to know,” he typed with his forefingers, “that the sleepy life you insist i’m living is entirely a product of your 18th cent. romanticism. in two short days, i have run eight miles, washed an exceedingly filthy and enormous dog, counseled a woman in love with our postman, washed two grocery sacks full of collard greens, begun next Sunday’s sermon outline, prayed with the sick at our little hospital, read the entire lot of Wordsworth’s evening voluntaries (which I heartily recommend to you, my friend), attended a vestry meeting about the building site of our new nursing home, personally registered a boy in school, and worked a bucket of bat droppings into my floribunda beds.

“now,” he concluded, “do let me know how you’re coming on.”

“Lord have mercy!” said Puny on Wednesday. “There’s always somethin’ to cook around here. Some places you go, all you have to do is clean— it’s like a vacation. Come over here, and there’s a bushel of this, a sack of that, a peck of somethin’ or other.”

“I thought you liked to cook.” He was sitting at the kitchen counter, having a meatloaf sandwich and a glass of tea.

“I like to cook,” she said, crossing her arms over her chest like armor plate, “but not for the entire Russian army.”

“Aha.”

“Besides, these collards ’ve smelled up the place till it’s more’n I can hardly stand.”

“Next time, I’ll cook the collards and you wash Barnabas. How’s that?”

“That dog of yours looks like somethin’ the cat drug in. Why you take th’ trouble to wash ’im is beyond me, when he just goes out and gets covered with mud again.”

“It’s the same principle as making the bed. Why do it if you’re just going to get in it again? Or, for that matter, why wash the lunch dishes when you’re going to use them for supper?”

“That’s not the same thing,” she said tartly, getting down on her hands and knees with the scrub brush. “Anyway, how did Dooley do on ’is first day?”

“Black eye,” he said.

“Oh, law! It’s that red hair. I was always pestered for bein’ redheaded. Did he whop ’im back?”

“A left to the solar plexus and a right to the nose.”

“Hot dog!” she said with evident satisfaction.

“Puny, I know it’s none of my business how you conduct your chores here, but I do wish you wouldn’t clean the floor on your hands and knees.”

“It’s the only way to do it right. My mama did it this way, her mama did it this way.” She brushed a loose strand of hair out of her eyes. “An’ I’m goin’ to do it this way.”

Little Emma! he thought, finishing his tea.

She looked at him, flushed and beaming. “Did he really get ’im good?”

“I did not press him for the sordid details.” She cocked her head to one side. “Now, Father . . .”

“Oh, well, then, Puny, all right!” He went to the sink and rinsed out his tea glass, so she couldn’t see him grinning like an idiot. “Yes! The answer is yes, he got him good.”

“I’ll bake ’im a cake!” said Puny, scrubbing the worn tiles with renewed vigor.

At the drugstore, he ran into Hoppy Harper, who was buying a bag of jelly beans.

“I overdose on these about twice a week,” the doctor said. “I eat the green first.”

The rector sighed in mock despair. “You sure cut into my fun. I haven’t had a Little Debbie since Easter.”

“The trouble with you,” said Hoppy, “is that Little Debbies were the only fun you were having.”

Hoppy paid for his jelly beans and opened the bag at once, searching for a green. “So when are you going on vacation?”

If Hoppy Harper had asked him that once, he had asked him that a hundred times, he thought. He wasn’t proud of the fact that he’d never been good at arranging his own recreation. The trip to Cambridge had been the best of examples.

While the English weather abandoned its usual caprice and offered glorious balm and sunshine, he’d found himself hopelessly plunged into research that confined him for days to the musty, fan-vaulted library.

“There are racehorses,” a bishop once told him, “and there are plow horses, and the pulpit can make fit use of both kinds.”

He didn’t try to deceive himself. In his own opinion, he was a plow horse. He set his course at one end of the field, then plowed to the other and back again.

In any case, he felt himself becoming an increasingly dry old crust, and his doctor was profoundly right about his lack of anything even remotely resembling fun.

Autumn drew on in Mitford, and one after another, the golden days were illumined with changing light.

New wildflowers appeared in the hedges and fields. Whole acres were massed with goldenrod and fleabane. Wild phlox, long escaped from neat gardens, perfumed every roadside. And here and there, milkweed put forth its fat pods, laden with a filament as fine as silk.

There were those who were ecstatic with the crisp new days of autumn and the occasional scent of woodsmoke on the air. And there were those who were loathe to let summer go, saying it had been “the sweetest summer out of heaven,” or “the best in many years.”

But no one could hold on to summer once the stately row of Lilac Road maples began to turn scarlet and gold. The row began its march across the front of the old Porter place, skipped over Main Street and the war monument to the town hall, paraded in front of First Baptist, lined up along the rear of Winnie Ivey’s small cottage, and ended in a vibrant blaze of color at Little Mitford Creek.

When this show began, even the summer diehards, who were by then few enough in number to be counted on the fingers of one hand, gave up and welcomed the great spectacle of a mountain autumn.

“It is quite a treasure trove,” Andrew Gregory told the rector. “Primitive, yes, but with great insight, great depth. There’s a winsome quality about them, yet they have surprising polish, too. I’d like to show you how they’re looking in the frames.”

“I’ll drop by around noon.”

“If arthritis hadn’t caught up with him, who knows what he might have done?”

“And who knows what was lost when Miss Rose set fire to his ink sketches, because he ate her portion of the pickle relish?”

Both men shook their heads with regret.

“I’m afraid our parish hall won’t hold a great many people. Maybe we should have the showing in the town hall.”

“The mildew will keep the crowd away,” Andrew wisely reminded him.

“You’re right, of course. Well, then, what about the Oxford Antique Shop?”

“Possibly,” Andrew said, thoughtfully. “Possibly. With a little mulled wine, sometime in October?”

“Excellent!”

“Of course, we could sell the whole lot without the trouble of hanging them. Miss Sadie loves art, she’d be good for at least one. And Esther Cunningham would very likely take two for the town hall.”

“Hoppy Harper, probably two.”

“And your veterinarian friend and his wife?”

“One or two, certainly.”

“I’ll have a half dozen myself, out of that series he did of the valley.”

“How many drawings are there? I keep forgetting the number.”

“Forty-three, done over a period of maybe fifteen or twenty years. It’s fairly easy to put them in sequential order, his early woodcocks look like mourning doves. And I mistook one of his first bird dogs for a deer.”

They laughed agreeably. It gave them much satisfaction that Uncle Billy was not merely an affable, rheumatic village indigent, but a gifted artist.

“I’ll have one for my study, of course, and one for Walter and Katherine for Christmas.”

Andrew’s face lighted up with his well-known smile. “We’ve sat right here and sold a couple of dozen!” He took a small, black book from the breast pocket of his jacket and consulted it. “Well, then! How about Saturday, October twentieth, around four o’clock in the afternoon? At the Oxford! I’ll have a new shipment from England and a container of books from a Northamptonshire manor house. I’m told Beatrix Potter visited there as a child and scribbled throughout two volumes on moles.”

The rector laughed. “I’m astounded that two volumes on moles even exist! Though of course, when they tunnel under my back lawn, I have volumes to say on the subject myself.”

As Andrew stood up to go, the rector couldn’t help but admire his friend’s impeccable tailoring. It was safe to say that Andrew Gregory owned more cashmere jackets than anyone who ever lived in Mitford, all of which were cut so cleanly to his form that a weight gain of barely two pounds would have forced him into another wardrobe. Discipline! That’s the ticket! thought the rector, chagrined that he’d slacked up on his jogging.

He stood at the door with his neighbor from across the lane. “I hope business is thriving at the Oxford.”

“Better than ever! And a curious thing happened. Over the weekend, I sold half the English pieces to an Englishman! Chap’s taking the whole lot back to Ipswich! And your business?” Andrew inquired with a twinkle in his blue eyes.

“Oh, up and down,” replied the rector, smiling.

He was sitting at the desk in his study when the phone rang.

“Tim, dear!” said a cheerful voice. “We agree that Barnabas is a wonderful dog and boon companion, but how is it that he so easily replaces two old friends?”

“Marge! I think of you daily, and you and Hal are always in my prayers. But you’d never know it, would you? Please forgive me.”

“Forgive you, indeed! Your penalty is a Baxter apple pie, which I hear you’ve frozen in commercial quantities.”

He laughed with the first friend he ever made in Mitford.

“Hal will be in on Friday afternoon to do errands,” said Marge. “Why don’t you come out with Barnabas and spend the night and most of Saturday?”

“Well, I . . .”

“May he fetch you around four?”

“Well . . . ,” said Father Tim, thinking of the rosebushes that needed transplanting, and the English ivy that needed digging up and potting, and the carpet stains he’d sworn to Puny he’d try to remove, and the bath that Barnabas must have at once, and the accumulation of papers and magazines on his desk, and the new helmet he had to order, and the perennial beds that needed attention, and the letters that wanted answering.

His gaze fell upon the open Bible at his elbow. “Thine own friend, and thy father’s friend, forsake not,” began a verse in Proverbs.

“I’ll be ready and waiting,” he said.

The next morning, he walked across the plush, green churchyard and rounded the east corner of Lord’s Chapel, in search of Russell Jacks. He found the old sexton oiling his push mower.

“Russell, how’s the world treating you this morning?”

Russell stood up slowly and removed his battered hat. “Well, sir, there’s no rest for the wicked, and the righteous don’t need none.”

"I’ll say!”

“Them leaves ’re goin’ to be comin’ down by the wagonload,” he said soberly, looking up at the lacy ceiling of oak and maple branches.

“Let me ask you a favor,” said Father Tim. “If you wouldn’t mind parting with him, I’d like to borrow your grandboy on Friday afternoon and return him Saturday before dark.”

“I’d be much obliged!”

“I’m going out to a farm that has a whole raft of cows and horses and dogs, and good trees to climb, and I thought Dooley might enjoy it.”

“I’d consider it a blessin’, to tell the truth. He’s about wore me out. Let’s just say he’s old enough to want t’ drive, but not tall enough to reach the pedals, if you get my meanin’.”

“You sure don’t look any worse for wear,” said the rector, noting a new sparkle in the old man’s eyes.

He inspected the mulch Russell was putting on the rhododendrons underneath the windows. Where the mulch hadn’t yet been spread, he noticed something unusual.

“Russell, this looks like ashes. Are you putting ashes under the mulch?”

“Nope, I ain’t.”

He was not of the let’s-throw-ashes-around-all-the-shrubs-in-the-garden school. He took a spade out of the green wicker tool basket and scraped the pile of ashes away from the roots. “Looks like somebody dumped ashes out of an outdoor grill.”

“No tellin’ what people’ll do these days.”

“If you see any more of it around, let me know. We haven’t used the fireplace in a couple of years; I don’t know where that could have come from.”

He stood up and wiped his hands on a handkerchief Puny had just ironed. “Well, Russell, keep up the good work. You’re the one who’s made our grounds a regular showplace, and I want you to know we all appreciate it.”

Russell put his hat over his heart. “You reported that broke lock yet?”

“The truth will out—no, I haven’t.” He could tell Russell believed that negligence in reporting this incident to the police would encourage someone to kick the doors in next time. “You rest up, now, while Dooley’s off to the farm.”

“I’m goin’ to cook me a mess of greens and fry out some side meat, is what I’m goin’ to do!” he said eagerly. “I’m about half sick of peanut butter and jelly.”

When he went home for lunch on Friday, Puny was ironing the shirt and overalls Dooley had left behind when he dressed for Miss Sadie’s interview.

“Great farm clothes!” he said with satisfaction. “I wish you were coming with us, Puny.”

“I do not like a farm,” she said with unusual emphasis. “You have to watch where you step ever’ minute.”

“I can safely say you’d like Meadowgate.”

“Work, that’s what farms are! And no letup! Cain’t go off to Asheville or down to Lake Lure nor anywhere else, with all them animals hangin’ on your dress tail. Women I’ve seen livin’ on farms looks like their granmaw by the time they git my age. No wonder they all run off t’ work in the cannin’ plant, even if they do come home smellin’ like kraut.”

“You don’t have to preach me a sermon.”