At Home in Mitford (18 page)

She put her hands on her hips and looked at him steadily. “I’ll scrub your floors and wash your drawers and put up your tomatoes and feed your dog, but I’ll not scrape your shoes after you been stompin’ around a farm.”

“You have my word. I am not going out there to jump in a manure pile. I am going out there to walk through the woods, read my new book, and help cook dinner tonight. Now, what’s so bad about that?”

“An’ I’m not goin’ to wash Dooley Barlowe if he comes back with farm mess on ’im.”

Little Emma! he thought. “It’s a deal,” he said.

As they approached the farm gate, the resident dogs ran out to meet the red truck.

“Here they come!” yelled Hal over the din. “Open the door!”

Father Tim threw open the door and Barnabas leaped out to greet Buckwheat, Bowser, Baudelaire, Bodacious, and Bonemeal.

“Don’t throw me out there!” yelled Dooley, holding his hands over his ears.

“Throw ’im out there!” Hal shouted, taking Dooley by the shoulder.

“No, no, them ol’ dogs’ll eat me! Don’t throw me out there!”

“Oh, all right, then,” Father Tim said, laughing. “We won’t throw you out till we get to the barn!”

As the pickup drove through the stable shed, Dooley saw a bay mare looking soulfully over her stall door.

“Throw me out now!” he cried, enthralled at his first sight of Goosedown Owen.

On his list of favorite things to do, “sit in the kitchen at Meadowgate” was clearly among the top five. This afternoon, however, he might have placed it at the very, very top.

A low fire burned on the hearth, warming the autumn air that, by morning, would cause a heavy mist to rise upon the fields.

The dumpling pot was simmering on the black cook stove, and vases brimming with wildflowers stood on the pine table and along the windowsills.

However, there was to be no sitting in the Meadowgate kitchen today. Dooley dragged him out to the stable, saying every step of the way, “I want t’ ride ’at horse, I got t’ git a ride on ’at horse.”

“Dooley, have you ever ridden a horse?”

“Nope, but I know how.”

“How?”

“You take it over t’ th’ house, you stand on th’ top step of th’ porch, and you jis’ jump on it an’ go.”

“What about a saddle?”

“Don’t need no saddle.”

“Is that a fact?”

“I’ve thought about it a million times. It’ll work.” He thought Dooley’s hair seemed redder, his eyes bluer, and his freckles thicker under the bill of his new baseball cap.

Hal came around the side of the stable from his office, carrying his black O.B. bag

“Finally got this bag in order,” he said. “Let me set it in the truck and I’ll join you boys.”

“I’d like t’ git a ride on ’at horse,” said Dooley, following at the vet’s heels.

“I think that might be arranged. Ever been on a horse?”

“Nope, but I done it in my mind over and over ’til I know how.”

“To tell the truth, that’s how I learned to ride a horse. Goosedown has spirit, but I don’t think she’ll throw you.” Hal put the bag through the open truck window and set it on the front seat. “Course, there’s no guarantee, either.”

“I can handle it,” said Dooley, putting his thumbs in the straps of his overalls.

The first time Hal walked Dooley and Goosedown Owen around the stable yard, Dooley’s face went as white as library paste.

“Stick up there!” said Hal.

The second time around, his color had improved.

“Lookin’ good!” said Hal.

The third time, Hal ran, still holding the bridle, and Dooley bounced up and down with glee. “Let ’er go!” he hollered.

Hal let her go.

Goosedown Owen cantered to the hog pen, stopped suddenly at the gate, and threw her rider into a trough of fresh slop.

That it was only apple peelings, sour oatmeal, orange rinds, cabbage leaves, sprouted potatoes, and stale soup was no consolation.

“Slop!” sputtered Dooley, rolling out of the trough and into the mud. “I’d like to half kill ’at horse!”

Goosedown Owen had trotted back to the stable and was eyeing the whole scene from the comfort of her stall. Dooley stood up and shook his fist toward the stable. “I’m ridin’ you agin, you mule-headed ol’ poop!”

Father Tim strolled over to Dooley, who was climbing through the hog pen gate.

“Do you, ah, know what would happen if Puny Bradshaw could see you now?”

He wiped his hair from his eyes with an arm that was smeared to the elbow. “Yep. I’d be dead meat.”

Dinner at Meadowgate Farm was always an event, and tonight was no exception. Marge had baked a savory hen stuffed with sausage, bread crumbs, orange peel, and farm onions, which she served with brandied fruit and a pot of dumplings so splendid that the rector recommended entering the recipe in the county fair.

As the men cleared away the dishes, a three-quarter moon rose and shone through the windows that looked toward the meadow.

Dooley sat on the floor with a jumble of dogs. Bodacious and Bonemeal chewed rawhide strips the size of ceiling molding. Barnabas slept on the hearth by the low, simmering fire. Baudelaire curled up on the chintz sofa and looked doleful. Buckwheat chased his tail and barked, and Bowser sat contentedly in Dooley’s lap and licked his face.

Marge eased herself into her father’s rocking chair. “Dogs!” she said, with mock disgust. “The baby’s first words will be ‘woof, woof.’ ”

“Do you think you’ll be game for an art showing on the twentieth?” the rector wanted to know. “Andrew Gregory is framing more than forty of Uncle Billy’s drawings.”

Marge rubbed her sizable stomach. “I’m not game for much of anything, Tim dear.”

“If she can handle it, we’ll be there,” said Hal. “Like the rest of us, she has her good days and her bad days.”

“I know all about that,” said the rector, as the phone rang.

Hal reached into a wooden bread bowl filled with winter squash and plucked out a cordless phone. “Hello! Meadowgate here.”

He listened ruefully, holding the receiver away from his ear. Even over the din of the dogs, a voice could be heard shouting.

“. . . an’ you better come quick, for I don’t know how long she’s been at it, bellerin’ her head off, and me down with the pneumonia and cain’t leave the house.” There followed a series of long, racking coughs, explosive hawking, and general bronchial pyrotechnics that made every dog in the room grow silent and stare at the phone Hal now held above his head.

“Is she in the stall?” Hal shouted.

“In the stall tied to ’er feedbox, and it sounds bad t’ me. She’s kickin’ th’ wall to beat the band, and if I lose this ’n on top of losin’ Mister Cooley, you’ll not see no more of me, it’ll put me down like a doornail.”

“Hold on, Miss Reba, I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”

“Tell her to have a cup of hot tea with honey, for goodness’ sake!”

“My wife says have a cup of hot tea with honey!”

This advice was greeted with a coughing demonstration of such force and magnitude that the audience was mesmerized. Finally, Hal came to himself and simply hung up the phone.

“Reba Cooley,” he announced, as if that explained everything.

“Rats!” said Marge, as Hal hurried out of the kitchen and took a jacket off the peg in the hallway.

“I like ’is ol’ dog,” said Dooley, oblivious to anything but Bowser’s devoted attention.

Father Tim dried his hands. “I’d like to come with you.”

“You’re on, pal. Grab a jacket, it’s getting cold tonight.”

Hal kissed his wife, tousled Dooley’s hair, and was gone, the rector beside him in the moonlight that lay like a platinum sheen over the lawn of Meadowgate Farm.

Hal drove a few miles on the moonlit highway, then turned onto a series of narrow roads that wound steeply along the side of a mountain.

“You should drive along these roads when there’s no moon,” he said. “It’s enough to make a man want a chew of tobacco.”

They noticed that the higher they went, the lower the temperature dropped.

“I don’t mind telling you that this nursing-home business frightens me,” the rector said, pulling on a fleece-lined jacket that smelled strongly of horse linament. “Five million dollars! Sometimes, the enormity of it is overwhelming. It’s going to be a huge project to sieve through a little parish.

“It’s like that Vermeer fiasco. I was praying it wasn’t a valuable painting, as you know, because it would have torn us asunder. I’m not saying we couldn’t pull ourselves back together, but I dreaded the . . . well, the violence of the disruption. A small parish is a fragile ecology.”

“It is.”

“We’re close to naming a building committee. And you wouldn’t believe the horror stories I’ve heard about building committees.”

Hal tightened his left-hand grip on the wheel. He knew exactly what his rector was working around to. He felt in his pocket for his pipe, which lived in this particular jacket, packed and ready to go during any emergency.

“I’ll sit on the committee, of course,” Father Tim said, “and I expect Ron Malcolm to be asked . . .”

“A retired contractor,” Hal said. “A good man.”

“Miss Sadie, of course. Jeb Reynolds.” He paused, then plunged ahead. “You know I need you on this committee, even though Marge is only a month away from an event that will change both your lives.”

Just then, the truck swung around a bend, and the lights picked out a small farmhouse and barn, an odd assortment of sheds and chicken coops, great rolls of baling wire, a fleet of rusting tractors and hand plows, and three baying coon dogs standing abreast at the side door of the house.

The porch light came on with such fierce wattage that the rector covered his eyes, then the door banged open as if a gale-force wind had caught it. Reba Cooley peered out.

“We’re here,” called Hal, “and driving on down to the barn. I’ll need a bucket of warm water. I’ll send the father back for it.”

The rector leaned forward and threw up his hand. To say that Reba Cooley presented a striking appearance would have been an understatement of ridiculous proportions. He thought she looked like a vast boulder, dressed in a chenille robe, that someone had rolled to the door. Her hair was cut short, like a man’s, so that he said later he would have sworn it was Mr. Cooley, had he not learned the poor fellow now rested in a plot behind the chicken house.

The cow stall was damp and cold, and he was grateful for the jacket. He couldn’t remember when he had last heard the bawling of a cow, but suddenly, the smells and sounds brought back memories of his Mississippi boyhood.

His father had been an attorney in their little town of Holly Springs, with a farm that lay just two miles distant from his office. They’d never kept large animals, as the other 4-H families did. But there were rabbits by the dozens, and flocks of chestnut-colored bantams.

He remembered asking, with immeasurable disappointment, why everything on their farm had to be small.

“This is not a working farm,” his father had said with finality, and no amount of pleading by his mother had been able to change his mind.

He remembered Harold Johnson, a strapping boy who was held back in seventh grade for three years running, whom he envied for his knowledge of farm life. “Ol’ cow calved last night,” Harold might say, smugly. “Dropped a big ’un.”

Then there was Raymond Lereaux who showed horses and won blue ribbons that he brought to school for show-and-tell.

It had taken a while to get interested in something as small as rabbits, but when he did get interested, he was fairly consumed, and it was hardly any wonder that he chose to breed Flemish Giants.

Dark-haired Jessica Raney, who dressed in embroidered pinafores and lived on a dairy farm, was wide-eyed with admiration when he started winning ribbons for his sleek show rabbits. And during the year when disease wiped out his entire herd, she sent a card saying she was sorry. Just that, nothing more. And he’d put it in his sock drawer, where it stayed for a very long time.

The death of the herd, and the shock of seeing them sprawled stiffly in the hutches, had not set well with his father.

“No more,” he had snapped, walking briskly from the hutches toward the car. He had run after his father with the taste of iron in his mouth, his heart heavy as a stone. “Wait!” he had cried out to his father, who got in the car and roared down the driveway, not looking back.

He would never forget the agony he felt, as if something of himself had perished with the herd. What he hated most was the way their legs had stood stiffly in the air, a humiliating loss of dignity in creatures whom he’d found to be poised and wise.

Hal Owen inspected his patient carefully, then removed most of the contents of his O.B. bag. Anesthetic, syringe, lubricant, gloves, leg chains, hooks, towels. Father Tim warily laid the cow puller, which he’d carried in from the truck, on a shelf. The cow bawled hideously.

“Tim, might as well go to the house for water now, and I’ll see what’s up. We may be close to the countdown. Make it warm, it’s getting cold as blazes. And bring the bucket full.”

He zipped his jacket and headed toward the house, where he was greeted by the trio of baying hounds. They leaped against his chest and legs, barking hysterically, and he was not surprised to find that quoting Scripture did nothing to control the onslaught.

He pounded on the storm door, and waited.

When Reba Cooley threw open the door, he couldn’t help but notice that she was wearing overalls under her robe.

“Preacher,” she said, “I got a job for you.”

In the kitchen, she handed him a flashlight and a bucket of warm water.

“Not one real preacher could I lay hold of t’ say a word over Mister Cooley.” At this, she coughed so hard that the water splashed on his shoes.

“All I could git was a lay preacher, not hardly more’n twenty year old.” She reached into a pocket of her overalls. “Here, this is your’n to go over there and do it right. You know I’d go with you, but I’m a sick woman.” He laid the money on the table as they walked out to the stoop. The silvery moon that lighted their path at Meadowgate Farm was not shining at the Cooleys’.