At Home in Mitford (3 page)

Take Time to Smell the Roses, Courtesy Oxford Antiques

A Reader’s Garden, Courtesy Happy Endings Bookstore

“Mitford,” observed a travel feature by a prominent newspaper, “is a village delightfully out of step with contemporary America. Here, where streets are named for flowers, and villagers can seek the shade of a dozen fragrant rose arbors, spring finds most of the citizenry, including merchants, making gardens.

“. . . and while Mitford’s turn-of-the-century charm and beauty attract visitors like bees to honeysuckle, the town makes a conscious effort to discourage serious tourism.

" ’We want people to come and visit,’ says Mayor Esther Cunningham, ‘but we’re not real interested in having them stick around. The college town of Wesley, just fifteen miles away, is perfect for that. They’ve got the inns and guest houses and all. Mitford would simply like to be the pause that refreshes.’ ”

Going south on Main Street to Wisteria Lane were the post office, the library, a bank, the bookstore, Winnie Ivey’s Sweet Stuff Bakery, and a new shop for men’s furnishings.

There was also a grocery store, so well-known for its fresh poultry and produce from local sources that most people simply called it The Local. For thirty-six years, The Local had provided chickens, rabbits, sausage, hams, butter, cakes, pies, free-range eggs, jams, and jellies from a farming community in the valley, along with vegetables and berries in season. In summer, produce bins on the sidewalk under the green awnings were filled each day with Silver Queen corn in the shuck. And in July, pails of fat blackberries were displayed in the cooler case.

To the left of Main Street, Wisteria Lane meandered past the Episcopal rectory, whose back door looked upon the green seclusion of Baxter Park, and then climbed the hill to the Presbyterians.

To the right of Main, Wisteria led only to Wesley Chapel, a tiny Methodist church that stood along the creek bank in a grove of pink laurel and was known for the sweetness of its pealing bells.

The second and only other business block of Main Street was lined with a hardware store, a tea shop, a florist, an Irish woolen shop, and an antique shop, with gardens in between.

Next, Main was crossed by Old Church Lane, rising steeply on the left to Church Hill Drive, where the ruined foundation of Mitford’s first Episcopal church stood in the tall grass of the upland meadow near Miss Sadie Baxter’s Fernbank.

At the opposite end of the lane was Lord’s Chapel, which stood between two vacant lots. After passing the church, which was noted for its fine Norman tower and showy gardens, the lane narrowed to a few comfortable houses on the bank of a rushing stream, where Indian Pipes were said to grow in profusion.

As the streets and lanes gave way to countryside and sloped toward the deeper valley, the rolling farmland began. Here, pastures were stocked with Herefords and Guernseys; lakes were filled with trout and brim; barnyards succored chattering guineas. And everywhere, in town or out, was the rich, black loam that made the earthworm’s toil one of unending satisfaction.

On rare occasions, and for no special reason he could think of, he imagined he was sitting by the fire in the study, in the company of a companionable wife.

He would be reading, and she would be sitting across from him in a wing chair.

In this idyll, he could not see her face, but he knew it had a girlish sweetness, and she was always knitting. Knitting, he thought, was a comfort to the soul. It was regular. It was repetitious. And, in the end, it amounted to something.

In this dream, there was always a delectable surprise on the table next to his chair, and nearly always it was a piece of pie. In his bachelor’s heart of hearts, he loved pie with an intensity that alarmed him. Yet, when he was offered seconds, he usually refused. “Wouldn’t you like another piece of this nice coconut pie, Father?” he might be asked. “No, I don’t believe I’d care for any more,” he’d say. An outright lie!

In this imaginary fireside setting, he would not talk much, he thought. But now and then, he might speak of church matters, read Blake or Wordsworth aloud, and try a sermon outline on his companion.

That would be a luxury far greater than any homemade sweet—to have someone listen to his outline and nod encouragement or, even, for heaven’s sake, disagree.

Sometimes he shared an outline or argument with his close friend Hal Owen, the country vet. But in the main, he found that a man must hammer out his theology alone.

He was musing on this one evening, shortly after he’d been to the garage to give the black dog its supper, when he was surprised by a loud, groaning yawn from the vicinity of his own stockinged feet.

He was astounded to see the maverick dog lying next to his chair, gazing up at him.

“Blast!” he exclaimed. “I must have left the garage door open.”

The usually gregarious dog not only appeared thoughtfully serene, but looked at him with an air of earnest understanding. How odd that the brown eyes of his companion were not unlike those of an old church warden he’d known as a young priest.

Feeling encouraged, he picked up a volume of Wordsworth from the table by his elbow.

" ’It is a beauteous evening, calm and free,’ ” he read aloud.

The dog appeared to listen with deep interest. And when the rector finished reading the poem Wordsworth wrote for his young daughter, he moved happily along to an essay.

" ’Life and the world,’ ” it began without pretension, " ’are astonishing things.’ ”

“No doubt about it,” he muttered, as the dog moved closer to his feet.

Barnabas!
he thought. That had been the old warden’s name. “Barnabas,” he said aloud in the still, lamp-lit room.

His companion raised his head, alert and expectant.

“Barnabas?” The dog seemed to blink in agreement, as the rector reached down and patted his head.

“Barnabas, then!” he said, with all the authority of the pulpit. The matter was settled, once and for all.

As he rose to put out the lights in the study, Barnabas got up also, revealing a sight which caused the rector to groan. There, on the worn Aubusson carpet, lay his favorite leather slippers of twenty years, chewed through to the sole.

“A puppy,” pronounced Hal Owen, lighting his pipe. “Not fully grown.”

“How much bigger, do you think? This much?” Father Tim extended his hands and indicated a small distance between them.

Hal Owen grinned and shook his head.

“This much?” He held his hands even farther apart.

“Umhmm. About that much,” said Hal.

Barnabas had settled in the corner by the rector’s desk and was happily banging his tail against the floor.

Hal studied him with sober concentration as he puffed on his pipe. “A trace of sheepdog, looks like. A wide streak of Irish wolfhound. But mostly Bouvier, I’d say.”

The rector sighed heavily.

“He’ll be good for you, Tim. A man needs someone to talk to, someone to entertain his complaints and approve his foolishness. As far as background goes, I like what E. B. White said: ‘A really companionable and indispensable dog is an accident of nature. You can’t get it by breeding for it and you can’t buy it with money. It just happens along.’ ”

“Well, he does like eighteenth-century poetry.”

“See there?” Hal put on his tweed cap. “You bring Barnabas out to Meadowgate, and we’ll give him a good run through the fields. Oh, and Marge will bake you a chicken pie. How would that suit you?”

It suited him more than he could express. “I’m out of here. Have to check the teeth on Tommy McGee’s horses and look up the rear of Harold Newland’s heifer.”

“I wouldn’t want to trade callings with you, my friend.”

“Nor I with you,” said the vet, amiably.

“Ah . . . what exactly shall I feed him?”

“Money,” said Hal, without any hesitation. “Just toss it in there twice a day, and he’ll burn it like a stove.”

“That’s what I was afraid of.”

“Tell you what. I’ll let you have his food in bulk, good stuff. It’ll hardly cost you a thing. About like keeping a house cat.”

“May the Lord bless you.”

“Thank you, Tim, I can use it.”

“May he cause his face to shine upon you!” he added with fervor.

“That would be appreciated,” said Hal, pulling on his gloves. “I’ll even see to his shots in a day or two.”

Just then, they heard the sound of Emma Garrett’s sensible shoes approaching the office door. And so did Barnabas.

With astonishing agility, he leaped over the rector’s desk chair, skidded to the door on the Persian prayer rug, and stood on his hind legs, preparing to greet Emma.

“The Altar Guild is helpin’ plant pansies on the town medium today,” said Emma, as he came in with Barnabas on a new red leash.

“Median, Emma, median.”

“Medium,” she said, brightly, “and they wondered if you could come out there after a while and direct the colors.” It certainly wasn’t that the Altar Guild couldn’t direct the colors themselves, she thought. But he had gone so far as to win some prizes for his gardening skills and had been written up in a magazine put out by the electric co-op.

He noticed Emma was clearly pretending that Barnabas did not exist, which was hard to do in an office with room for only two desks, two chairs, a visitor’s bench, four coat pegs, and a communal wastebasket.

“What do you mean, direct the colors?” he asked, sorting through his phone messages.

“Well, you know. Do the yellow ones go in the middle or around the edges or what? And where do you put the blue? Not next to the purple!” she said with conviction.

“I’ll take care of it.”

She peered at him over her glasses. “You look handsome with that tan, I must say.”

“And thank you for saying it. Compared to a golfer’s tan, a gardener’s tan is not quite so distinguished, but it has its merits. For example, you do not have to wear chartreuse golf pants in order to get it.”

Emma howled with laughter. If there was anything she liked, it was a laugh. And frankly, while he was good for a great many things, her rector was not always good for a laugh.

“You don’t look as fagged out as you looked there for a while. I thought we’d have to scrape you off the floor a time or two.”

“Spring, Emma. It medicates the bones and revives the spirit.”

“Well, let’s just hope it lasts,” she said, eyeing him as if he were a boiled potato.

She went back to posting Sunday’s checks. “It rags me good that Petrey Bostic never catches up his pledge,” she grumbled.

“You know I don’t want to hear that. I don’t want to look out in the congregation and see dollar signs instead of souls.”

“You know what I think?”

He didn’t know.

“I think you live in an ivory tower. It seems to me you’d want to know the nitty gritty of what goes on. You take the Baptists; they keep up with everything.”

Emma liked to talk about the Baptists, having previously been one. “Is that so?” he said mildly.

“What comes in, what goes out, who shot Lizzie. You name it, they like to know it.”

“Aha,” he said. Ever since she got red hair, she had been living up to it.

He turned to his old Royal manual and typed with his forefingers:

As he looked up from the cryptic message to his first cousin and boyhood friend, he saw it had started to rain. All morning, the fog had hung about the village as thick as soup in a bowl, causing him once again to consider buying one of those orange slickers so he could be seen walking in the fog.

“You don’t drive a car?” his former bishop once asked, incredulous. Well, and why should he, after all? The rectory was two minutes from the office and less than three from the church. The hospital was only a few blocks away, and one of the finest grocery stores in existence was right across the street.

The old gospel preacher Vance Havner had written about that very thing: “This is the day of the motorist, and anyone who walks is viewed with suspicion. You see a man coming down the road now, just meditating, and you figure he’s either out of his head or out of gas. It’s such a rarity that dogs bark as though they’d seen a ghost.”

Making his rounds on foot kept him fit and positive, if not altogether trim. And, if push came to shove, he could always get the battery charged on his Buick Riviera, back it out of the garage, and go.

Actually, he’d been thinking seriously of getting a bicycle. Only now, there was Barnabas. And a rector in a clerical collar on a bicycle, leading a great, black dog on a red leash? Well, there was no way to bring it off that he could see.

“Peedaddle!” said Emma, as she made an error in her bookkeeping.

Barnabas leaped up and bounded to her desk, where he put his paws on the ledger, leaned over, and fogged her glasses.

“My God!” she exclaimed.

Why was she always saying “My God!” in a way that had nothing whatever to do with her God? He caught Barnabas by the collar and dragged him into the corner next to his chair.

“I’m tellin’ you the truth,” Emma said, squinting as she wiped her glasses, “it’s goin’ to be either him or me.” She grabbed her sandwich bag and put it in her desk, slamming the drawer shut.