At Home in Mitford (12 page)

He saw Andrew Gregory from the Oxford Antique Shop across the lane, Mayor Esther Cunningham, and more than a dozen others. Who in the dickens was running the town?

“Look up!” said Emma, pointing above his head at the front of the stone office building. He did as he was told and saw a large banner strung above the door.
Happy Birthday, Father Tim, the Big Six-O
was printed in bold, red letters.

“What you thought was a squirrel on the roof this morning was Avis Packard on a ladder, hangin’ that thing!”

“Way to go, Avis!” The crowd gave a round of applause.

“See why I told you to wear that dern sport coat?” Emma said as Miss Sadie pinned a rosebud on his jacket. “It’s got a lapel!”

J.C. Hogan was already on his second roll of TX 400, declaring that this was better than the turnout for the American Legion barbecue.

Then, Hoppy stepped forward with a handshake and a hug for the honoree. He’d come straight from the hospital and was wearing his white coat, which Emma thought looked romantic. “A young Walter Pidgeon!” she whispered to the mayor.

“According to Avis, who takes note of such things,” Hoppy declared, “it’s been seven years since you gave up your car for Lent.”

“Exactly!” he said, able at last to say anything at all.

“Well, we feel that a man of your distinction should have himself some wheels. But unfortunately, this bunch could afford only two.”

He heard a loud, explosive sound behind the hemlock hedge in the lot next door.

“Let ’er rip!” shouted Percy, and from behind the hedge roared what someone later called “a sight for sore eyes.”

It was Mule Skinner in a double-knit, chartreuse, yard-sale outfit, weaving wildly back and forth across the lane on a red Vespa motor scooter.

Barnabas led the group in scattering to the sidewalk.

“How do you stop this thing?” Mule yelled.

Hal leaped in front of his pregnant wife. “Turn off the key!”

Mule made a wobbly U-turn, turned off the key, dragged his foot to brake the scooter, and glided smoothly to a stop in front of Father Tim, visibly shaken.

To a loud chorus of “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow,” led by Esther Cunningham, the astonished rector got on the scooter, a bit pale beneath his tan, and drove with a mixture of excitement and foreboding to the first rose arbor on the lane, then back again.

By the time he parked it on the sidewalk and put the kickstand down, he noticed that he couldn’t stop grinning.

“You don’t have to make a speech, since you already make one twice every Sunday,” said Mule, slapping him vigorously on the back.

“We know it’s not new,” said Hoppy, “but it’s in great shape. We got it off a little old lady who drove it only on Sundays.”

“Nineteen eighty-two, 125 cc, good as new,” said Percy, kicking a tire.

“Looky here,” Percy said, “you got your horn . . .” He opened up on the horn and everybody clapped.

“You got your high beam and your low beam.” He demonstrated, which seemed to be another crowd-pleaser.

“And get a load of these turn signals. Ain’t that a sight? I rode this thing all the way from Wesley, purred like a kitten.”

“Wide open,” said Mule, “I followed ’im in th’ truck.”

Emma cupped her hands to her mouth and made an announcement. “You’re all invited in for cake and iced tea. But you’ll have to do it in shifts, so step right in and don’t tarry. We can take four at th’ time.”

She had produced a cake from her bottomless bottom drawer, and two gallon jugs of tea with Styrofoam cups.

Hal and Marge filled the cups with ice, and Father Tim cut the cake, as J.C. Hogan shot another roll of black and white, and Esther Cunningham played the kazoo.

The following Monday, the
Mitford Muse
ran two front-page stories on the local Episcopal church community.

A picture of Father Tim on the motor scooter was mistakenly given this bold headline: “Lord’s Chapel Rector Receives Gift Worth Five Million Dollars.” The story and picture of Miss Sadie giving the rector a cashier’s check had no headline at all and referred to the donor as “Sudie bixter.”

Mule Skinner looked at the front page and sighed.

“Law, law,” he said, "J.C.’s done it again.”

Hay lay in the fields in fat, round bales.

Blackberries were greening on bushes along the roadside.

Lacy elder flowers bloomed in the meadows.

In his opinion, all was right with the world. Except, of course, for the bitter disappointment of his daylilies. While they had been sold to him as rare and peach colored, they bloomed a fatal orange, just like the commoners in the hedge. In fact, he found them a good deal less attractive, for their color was insipidly pale, compared to the bold hue of their country cousins.

He complained to Emma.

“If
daylilies
were all I had to complain about in this world, I’d be a happy woman.”

“What
do
you have to complain about, then?” he asked cheerfully.

She gave him a hard stare, and he noticed that her lower lip trembled. He wisely turned in his swivel chair to face the bookcase, searching, presumably, for a reference work.

That swivel chair was a blessing out of heaven, he mused for the hundredth time. When there was nowhere to go in that infernally small space, one could always swivel in the other direction.

He saw that he was facing a volume on stress in the workplace. He took it off the shelf and opened it at once, daring to hope for a telling insight.

“Well,” said Emma, after a considerable silence, “don’t you care?” He did not turn around. He was consulting the index.

“Care about what?”

“What I have to complain about.”

“I asked you what you have to complain about.”

“Yes, but you didn’t care.”

The rector cleared his throat. He was not accustomed to this sort of thing in his own relationships, although he had seen it in the relationships of countless others.

Slowly, he turned to face his friend and part-time secretary.

“Actually, I am very interested,” he said, as kindly as he could.

Tears filled Emma’s eyes and splashed down her cheeks.

“Well, then, if you must know,” she said, “I’m complaining because I think I’m . . . because I’m falling in love with Harold Newland!”

“Aha,” he said, thinking helplessly of Harold Newland’s legs in his summer shorts uniform.

“I suppose you’re shocked,” she said, barely able to speak.

“Not a bit, not one bit. Tell me about it.”

She blew her nose on some toilet tissue she’d put in her purse this morning, and composed herself. “Well, whenever I’d get to the office early, he started bringing the mail inside because he saw my car out front.

“Pretty soon, we were talking about this and that, and one evening we went to Wesley to a movie, and then we went to Holding for barbecue, and, well . . . the first thing you know, I was . . . I was cooking for him.”

Emma inspected her rector’s face and pressed on. “I hate to tell you this, but that big birthday dinner I brought you was leftovers from Harold’s supper the night before.”

“Two birds with one stone,” he said agreeably.

She wiped her eyes. “You know how long Charlie’s been gone.”

"Ten years.”

“Ten
long
years,” she said, weeping again.

He waited.

“Harold is such good company. He can fix nearly anything. He even glued three pieces of my good china back together; you can hardly see where. I’d given up ever getting that done! And you know how hard it is to break new ground.”

“Oh, I do.”

“But he made a little garden out back with nothing but a hoe, and put in a dozen Big Boys.”

“That will come in mighty handy around the end of next month.”

Emma had warmed to her subject. “And you know those attic stairs that I could never get down? They come down easy as grease, now! Not to mention that he installed new ceiling insulation while he was at it.”

“Terrific!” exclaimed her interested listener.

“Plus, he fixed the leak in the basement that mildewed all the clothes I’d saved back for the rummage.” Emma wondered if he was getting the point. “You know how things can go down in ten years.”

“Around my place, in ten days!”

There was a comfortable silence.

“Does Harold have a church in Mitford?”

“Well, not
right
in. More out. Harold has a farm, you know, eleven acres. He goes to a Baptist church in the country. He said he gave his heart to the Lord when he was a boy.”

He had to confess he didn’t know much about Harold Newland, since he’d been on their route only a year. Occasionally, if their paths crossed, they’d stop and talk at the mailbox out front.

“Well, then. He goes to church, and knows what for. He owns a farm, he has a job, he’s handy around the house, and he likes your cooking. What could you possibly have to complain about?”

Her chin began to quiver. “It’s so embarrassing!” she said, wiping fresh tears with the small wad of tissue. “That’s why the tomato patch is in the backyard instead of at the side that gets the most sun.”

“Whatever can that mean?”

“Well, nobody can see you in the backyard like they can at the side of the house, and I didn’t want anybody to see Harold setting out my tomato plants, because . . . well, because . . .”

“Because why, for heaven’s sake?”

“Because he’s only forty-five!” Emma wailed.

He was quiet for a moment. “Pardon my asking so directly, but how old are
you?
” He thought he remembered that she was two years his junior.

“Fifty-four!”

“Scout’s honor.”

“Fifty-eight,” she said, exhausted by the ordeal of confession.

“I’ve got an appointment in less than twenty minutes, and I’d like to ask you to think about something.”

He looked at her with a gentle franknesss. “As Paul wrote to Timothy, ‘God has not given us the spirit of fear, but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind.’ ”

She blew her nose. “Could you write that down?”

“Who’s the secretary around here?” he asked, grinning.

One morning in early August, as he was running on Church Hill Drive, Barnabas came to a sudden halt, which caused him to crash headlong into a ditch filled with the last of the summer sweet peas.

When he limped toward the office later than usual, he was inclined to tell Emma a lie about the whole affair.

“What in God’s name have you done to yourself?” she snapped.

He couldn’t tell a lie. “We were running. Barnabas stopped, I fell over him. Landed in a ditch.”

“Barnabas!” she said, with venom. “From the day you let that creature fool you into taking him home, look what’s happened! You got diabetes, your daylilies bloomed out orange, and now here you are black-and-blue, not to mention half-crippled!”

“It goes without saying that it was not a premeditated act.” He eased himself into his swivel chair and felt a sharp pain stab his left knee.

“That does it!”

“Does what?” he asked, not really wanting to know.

“That’s it, that’s absolutely it!”

If she had a gift, he thought, it was for parable and double-talk. And, while showing off Harold Newland in public had recently sweetened her temperament, he could see a real backsliding under way.

“Do you remember how many times we’ve all tried to make you get house help?”

“Oh, I remember, all right.”

“And how many times you have flatly refused?”

“Over and over again, as I recall.”

“Well, that dog has just been the cause of you gettin’ it, whether you want it or not!”

“What in the dickens does that mean?”

“That means the vestry had a meeting behind your back, to do something you won’t do for yourself! You’re on medication, you do your own cooking, you’ve got a big house and a yard and a busy parish and two services on Sunday, and you won’t take a vacation, and now this!

“They said just say when, and we’ll hire ’im some help. We’ll send ’em on over to the rectory every Wednesday and Friday morning at eight o’clock sharp, but we want you to tell him, because we’re scared to do it!”

House help! He felt as if he’d just been delivered a blow to the solar plexus.

He could give himself time to think this over, he reasoned, by swiveling around to face the bookshelves. On the other hand, he could call Harry Nelson at once and attempt to overturn the vestry’s decision.

Instead, he did at last what Emma Garrett had so often, in recent weeks, made him feel like doing.

He got up from his desk, walked to the door, and left the office without speaking a word.

He walked briskly to the corner and turned right. At the Oxford Antique Shop, Andrew Gregory invited him in for coffee, but he didn’t even slacken his pace. When your vestry goes behind your back and your secretary hates your dog, he thought, there’s no place like the Grill to drown your sorrows.