At Home in Mitford Read online

  “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.

  “Lie down!” he commanded. Barnabas stood and wagged his tail.

  “Stay!” he said, as Barnabas ambled to the door and sniffed it.

  “Then, sit!” Barnabas went to his water dish and took a long drink.

  “Whatever,” he muttered, unable to look at Emma.

  He sat down and turned to the Gospel reading for Sunday. As he prepared to practice reading it aloud, which was his custom, he cleared his throat.

  Barnabas appeared to take that as a signal to stand by his master’s chair and place his front paws on his shoulder, giving a generous lick to the Bible for good measure.

  He had just read that ignoring negative behavior and praising the positive could be a fruitful strategy. “Whatever you do,” the article had implored, “do not look your dog in the eye if you want to discourage his attentions.”

  " ’And as Jesus passed by,’ ” intoned the rector, avoiding the doleful stare, “ ‘he saw a man which was blind from his birth. And his disciples asked him, saying, “Master, who did sin, this man, or his parents, that he was born blind?” ’ ”

  Barnabas sighed and lay down.

  He continued, without glancing into the corner: “ ‘Jesus answered, “Neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents: but that the works of his God should be made manifest in him.” ’ ”

  He read aloud through verse five. Then, he stopped and studied Barnabas with some concentration.

  “Well, now,” he said at last, “this is extraordinary.”

  “What’s that?” asked Emma.

  “This dog appears to be . . . ,” he cleared his throat, “. . . ah, controlled by Scripture.”

  “No way!” she said with disgust. “That dog is not controlled by anything!”

  Just then, the door opened, and Miss Sadie Baxter helped prove the odd suspicion.

  Before she could speak, Barnabas had bounded across the room to extend his finest greeting, whereupon the rector shouted what came immediately to mind, and what Peter had told the multitude:

  “ ‘Repent and be baptized, every one of you!’ ”

  Barnabas sprawled on the floor and sighed with contentment.

  “I was baptized, thank you,” said Miss Sadie, removing her rain hat.

  CHAPTER TWO

  A Dubious Gift

  Miss Sadie Baxter was the last surviving member of one of Mitford’s oldest families.

  At the age of eighty-six, she occupied the largest house in the village, with the most sweeping view. And she owned the most land, much of it given over to an aged but productive apple orchard. In fact, the village cooks said that the best pies weren’t made of Granny Smiths, but of the firm, slightly tart Sadie Baxters, as they’d come to be called.

  As far as anyone knew, Miss Sadie had never given away any of the money her father had earned in his lumber operation in the valley. But she dearly loved to give away apples—by the sack, by the peck, by the bushel. Clearly, the only serious maintenance she’d done around Fernbank in recent years was in the orchards, for as anyone could see from the road, the roof that showed itself above the trees was in urgent need of repair. Some said she sat in her living room, surrounded by a regiment of buckets when it rained, and that the sound of it drumming into the pails was so loud you couldn’t hear yourself think.

  It was, in fact, pouring when she stopped to visit her rector on Tuesday morning. “Mercy!” she said, shaking out her rain hat. “What a day for ducks!”

  Father Tim hurried to help with her raincoat and kiss her damp cheek. “What in heaven’s name are you doing out in this deluge?”

  “You know weather never keeps me in!” she said in a voice as fresh as a girl’s.

  It was true. Everyone knew that Sadie Baxter would come down the hill in her 1958 Plymouth in a heartbeat—no matter what the weather. Ice, however, was a different story. “You can’t predict it,” she’d say, “and I dearly love the predictable.” So, on icy days, she read, played the piano, sorted through the family picture albums, or called Louella, her former maid and companion, who now lived with her grandson in Marietta, Georgia.

  Father Tim could see that Miss Sadie had driven up on the sidewalk, as usual, and parked her car so close to the steps that if he opened the office door all the way, he’d take the paint off her fender.

  “Sit down,” Emma said, “and have some coffee.”

  “You know how I like it,” she said, settling in for a visit. “Well! Guess what?”

  “I give up,” said the rector.

  “I weigh exactly the same as my age!”

  “No!” exclaimed Emma.

  “Yes, indeed. I went to see Hoppy for a checkup, and I tip the scales at exactly eighty-six pounds. Have you ever?”

  “Never!” said Father Tim.

  “And you know what else?” she inquired, sitting on the edge of the visitor’s bench like a schoolgirl.

  “What’s that?” he asked.

  “Louella is coming to see me for Easter. Her grandson is driving her up here all the way from Marietta! I certainly wouldn’t ask her to do the cooking—she’s a guest! So I thought we’d just have frozen chicken pies. Don’t you think that would be all right, Emma?”

  “Why, sure it would. And maybe some fruit cocktail with Jell-O.”

  “Good idea! And some tea. I can still make tea. Louella likes it real sweet. And let’s see, what else?”

  Emma thought, tapping her pen on the typewriter. “Ummm . . .”

  “Tell you what,” said Father Tim, “I’ll bake you a ham.”

  “You would? Oh, Father, that would be so . . . why, bless your heart.”

  “Don’t even mention it!” he said, feeling his heart blessed already.

  “Now that’s settled, you’ll never guess what else, so I’m going to tell you. Yesterday, I didn’t go out of the house at all. Why, I hate to say this, but I never even got dressed, isn’t that awful? Just went around in my wrapper all the livelong day, my mama would faint. And first thing you know, I was poking around in the attic, looking for an old baby doll I was thinking about, a baby doll that must be eighty years old if she’s a day. But we never threw anything away, so I just knew I’d find it. Oh, the dust! Why, I kicked up a regular dust storm!

  “And hats! Oh, mercy, the hats I found, why there was a slew of my mama’s beautiful hats. I’m going to bring the whole lot to Sunday school one morning and let the children try them on. Would that be too sacrilegious?”

  He laughed. “Certainly not!”

  “So, then I got to looking for an old picture of Papa, the one with his handlebar mustache, and I was crawling around in there, back in that place where we always kept pictures standing up in little racks, and I was pulling this one out and that one, and the first thing you know, well . . .” Miss Sadie paused and looked at them intently.

  “Well, what?” Emma said, leaning forward.

  “Well, there was this old painting of the Blessed Virgin and the baby Jesus that Papa brought back from overseas.”

  “Aha!” said Father Tim.

  “And I want you to have it for the church, Father,” she said, “to hang on the wall.”

  This could be perilous. He remembered two or three other gifts to the church that had caused the widest consternation. One was a mounted moose head, said by the donor to be one of God’s creatures, after all, and therefore fit for the parish house wall, if not the
nave.

  “Maybe I could come up to Fernbank and look at it one day, and we could just, ah, take it from there.”

  “Oh, no. No need to do that, Father, I’ve brought it with me. If you’d just step out to the car . . .”

  “It’s raining cats and dogs, Miss Sadie.”

  “Oh, I know, so I wrapped it up in a sheet, and then I wrapped that up in some plastic, and I tied it all with a string!”

  He found that he was able to open his office door exactly halfway without scraping it on the green Plymouth. Then he maneuvered an umbrella ahead of him, released it outside the door, moved sideways out of the room, drew the umbrella over his head to the drumming sound of a pouring rain, opened her rear car door, and leaned across the seat to pick the heavy painting up with his right hand while holding the umbrella with his left.

  He managed to grasp the painting under his arm, shove the car door closed with the heel of his drenched shoe, push open the office door with the toe of the same shoe, then slip the painting through the door ahead of him, lower the umbrella, squeeze through the narrow opening, and stand dripping on the carpet.

  “There!” said Miss Sadie with delight, as if she had just fetched the parcel herself.

  He leaned the heavy bundle against the wall, quite spent.

  “If you have a scissors, Emma, I’ll do the honors.” Miss Sadie pushed up the sleeves of her cardigan and addressed herself to cutting through several layers of string, cloth, and plastic.

  “All right, now,” she said, “you look the other way, and I’ll say when.”

  The rector turned and looked out the window behind his desk, and mopped his rain-soaked face and hands with a handkerchief. Emma stoically faced the door to the bathroom, which displayed a bulletin board of parish notices.

  Get a move on, thought Emma, who had to coordinate memorials for Easter flowers.

  “Now!” Miss Sadie cried.

  He turned around and beheld a sight that stunned him.

  The painting, in a wide, gilded frame with elaborate carving, was a rosy-hued depiction of mother and child that fairly glowed, even under years of dirt and grime. A faint halo appeared around the infant’s head, and the mother looked upon the child in her arms with a wistful tenderness. In the background, moving away from the blue and gold of her gown, was a landscape with a bright stream flowing through open countryside, and above this, a sky that blushed with the platinum, rose, and lavender of an early morning sun.

  “Well, now,” he said, feeling a sudden desire to cross himself. “This is quite . . . quite beautiful. I wasn’t expecting . . .”

  “Then you like it?” Miss Sadie’s eyes were dancing.

  “Like it? I like it enormously! It’s a lovely thing to see.”

  “I cleaned it up,” Miss Sadie told him. “Lemon Pledge.”

  He squatted down for a closer look. “Any name anywhere? Do we know who did it?”

  “No sign of a name. I got out my magnifying glass and went all over it, front and back.”

  The office door swung open suddenly, bringing in a gust of rain and Harry Nelson in a dripping slicker.

  “Occupancy by more than three persons is unlawful,” Emma said with ill humor. She could hardly bear the sight of the senior warden, and especially not in a wet slicker that was already soaking the thin carpet.

  “If we ever get some real money in this place, we’ll knock these walls out and add you a thousand square feet,” he said with satisfaction.

  Over my dead body, thought the rector, who loved the diminutive stone building that the parish had erected in 1879.

  Harry Nelson deposited his slicker in the corner, helped himself to a cup of coffee, and joined Miss Sadie on the visitor’s bench.

  “Okay, Father, here’s the scoop. We’ve looked into it, and it’s goin’ to make a bloody mess of the sanctuary to tear that cabinet out of there.”

  As Father Tim and Harry Nelson talked church matters, Emma and Miss Sadie talked Easter dinner. Emma was actually going to bake cloverleaf yeast rolls from scratch, which she hadn’t done since Charlie died ten years ago. And Miss Sadie decided she would serve Louella and her grandson on the sunporch, if the weather turned off nice.

  “Well, well, well, what’s this?” Harry wanted to know, peering at the painting.

  “Miss Sadie is making a gift to Lord’s Chapel,” Father Tim said proudly.

  Harry bent over to look closer. As Emma was seated directly behind him, it afforded her such an intriguing idea that she was nearly breathless.

  Harry whistled with appreciation. “This looks mighty like a Vermeer to me,” he informed the group.

  “Why, Harry Nelson, I didn’t know you were familiar with Vermeer,” said Miss Sadie.

  “Familiar! Why, I reckon I am! Shirley and I’ve had all kinds of classes in art appreciation. Did you know there’s only thirty-five Vermeers in the world, except for some Dutchman in the last century who forged a whole bunch of ’em? Baked ’em in the oven to make ’em look like the real thing.”

  He took his glasses off and squinted at the painting. “Is there a signature on here anywhere?”

  “Not that we’ve been able to find,” the rector said.

  “If this isn’t the real thing, I’ll eat my hat. Shoot, I hear that even the fakes bring a bundle. Tell you what, I have a friend who appraises this stuff, I’ll just ask him to drive up from Charlotte and take a look. He says some of the biggest art finds in history have come out of somebody’s attic.”

  “That’s where it came from, all right,” Miss Sadie confessed.

  “Well, let me get on the road. I’ve got to go over the mountain to see some customers. Boys howdy, this coffee’ll curl your hair.”

  “Ah, Harry, about that appraiser, I don’t know that this is what we need to do just now. I think we should wait on that.”

  “Wait? Wait was what broke the camel’s back!” Harry grabbed his slicker off the peg, threw it over his head, squeezed out the door, and called behind him, “Miss Sadie, you should have just drove this Plymouth on in the door.”

  For some reason he couldn’t explain, the rector found Harry’s plan to involve an appraiser oddly unwelcome. Yet, something even less welcome occurred at noon.

  While he waited with eager anticipation for his usual rainy-day share of cream-filled Little Debbies from Emma’s paper bag lunch, she said nonchalantly, “Little Debbies? I’ve given ’em up for Lent.”

  He had just walked in the door and taken off the tweed cap Hal Owen gave him, when Percy Mosely turned around from the grill and winked. Then, he went back to frying his sausage.

  That was odd, thought Father Tim, sitting down at his favorite booth and opening his newspaper. “Percy,” he said, “I believe I’ll have two over easy this morning.”

  Velma came to the booth and stood there, grinning. “Gonna celebrate, are you? I’d have two eggs myself, if it wasn’t for my cholesterol.”

  Cholesterol, cholesterol, thought Father Tim. He’d heard more than enough about cholesterol. It was as bad as the Hula Hoop craze.

  Velma poured his coffee. He had traveled to many conferences, retreats, seminars, and workshops, and right here was the best cup of coffee he’d ever had. “What do you mean, celebrate?”

  “Well, celebrate over all that money you’ll be gettin’ down at th’ chapel.”

  “What money is that?” asked Father Tim, dumbfounded.

  “That art money. Why, I heard you had a painting over there worth two hundred thousand dollars.”

  He had just taken a mouthful of coffee and deeply regretted spitting it down the front of his shirt.

  “Now, look at you!” said Velma, helping him clean up.

  “Velma, whatever you’ve heard is absolutely untrue. Someone donated a painting to the church and we haven’t even had it appraised. It’s just a nice painting, that’s all.”

  “We heard it was a Veneer,” said Percy, yelling from the grill.

  “Yep, that’s what we heard,” agreed Mu
le Skinner, who sold real estate around town.

  Blast! he thought, completely losing his appetite.

  Miss Sadie had delivered the painting on Tuesday. By the end of the day on Thursday, he had received an unprecedented number of calls. Even Emma, who had the day off, called.

  In the Grill at eight o’clock, the figure had been two hundred thousand. By three in the afternoon, he had a call from an architect who wanted to submit plans for an addition to the church, and congratulated him on the million dollars Lord’s Chapel would be getting from the sale of the old master. At three-thirty, the village newspaper called for a statement.

  By four, his stomach felt painful and empty. Bleeding ulcer! he reasoned darkly.

  He put the answering machine on, and left.

  At five after four, Walter got this message: “Persevere in prayer, with mind awake and thankful heart. This is the office of The Lord’s Chapel. Please leave a message at the sound of the tone.”

  That evening, Father Tim took the phone off the hook, gave Barnabas what was almost certainly his first bath, made a dinner of broiled chicken and packaged spinach souffle, had a glass of sherry, and went to bed.

  What if the painting really were a Vermeer? He didn’t know much about art, but he did know the work had a certain power, a vitality he hadn’t found in just every depiction of the Blessed Virgin and child.

  He also knew the turmoil that would ensue if they were actually in possession of such a priceless work. Hadn’t he had enough headaches over the seventeenth-century tapestry hanging in the nave? Just getting it insured had been a process that took months, endless costly phone calls, and sleepless nights. In the end, they’d been forced to keep the church doors locked, a thing he roundly despised.

  The bottom line, however, was pretty simple. God would, indeed, be faithful to instruct and guide. As the evening progressed, he grew confident that he’d be led to act in the interest of all concerned.

  On the way to the church office the next morning, there was a quickness in his step. Of course, he must never tell a soul. But last night, for the first time in his life, he had allowed a dog to sleep on the foot of his bed. And he’d found it an incomparably satisfactory experience.