The Mitford Bedside Companion Page 7

  “No TV, no pizza, no talking on the phone.”

  “Ogre!” said Marge.

  “What did the big guy do, anyway?” Hoppy wondered, leaning over to scratch Barnabas behind the ears.

  “I’m afraid it’s unspeakable, actually.”

  “Oh, good!” exclaimed Miss Sadie. “Then tell us everything.”

  Miss Sadie enjoyed the bath story so much, she brought out a lace handkerchief to wipe her eyes.

  Miss Rose, however, was not amused. “I leave dogs alone.”

  “Nope, dogs leave you alone,” said her husband.

  “Whatever,” said Miss Rose, with a wave of her hand.

  Hoppy set his dessert plate on the hearth, then leaned back and stretched his long legs. He looked fondly at his elderly patient of nearly a decade. “Uncle Billy, I’d sure like to hear a joke, if you’ve got one.”

  Uncle Billy grinned. “Did you hear the one about the skydivin’ lessons?”

  “I hope you didn’t get this from Harry Nelson,” said Emma, who didn’t like Harry Nelson jokes, not even secondhand.

  “Nossir. I got this joke off a feller at the Grill. He was drivin’ through from Texas.”

  Everyone settled back happily, and Miss Rose gave Uncle Billy the go-ahead by jabbing him in the side with her elbow.

  “Well, this feller he wanted to learn to skydive, don’t you know. And so he goes to this school and he takes all kind of trainin’ and all, and one day comes the time he has to jump out of this airplane, and out he goes, like a ton of bricks, and he gets on down there a little ways and commences to pull th’ cord and they don’t nothin’ happen, don’t you know, and so he keeps on droppin’ and he switches over and starts pullin’ on his emergency cord, and they still don’t nothin’ happen, an’ th’ first thing you know, here comes this other feller, a shootin’ up from the ground, and the feller goin’ down says, ‘Hey, buddy, do you know anything about parachutes?’ And the one a comin’ up says, ‘Nope, do you know anything about gas stoves?’”

  Uncle Billy looked around proudly. He would have considered it an understatement to say that everyone roared with laughter.

  “I’ve heard that bloomin’ tale forty times,” Miss Rose said, removing a slice of cheese from her pocket and having it with her coffee.

  At Home in Mitford, Ch. 4

  WHEN HE ARRIVED home that afternoon at five-thirty, he found a steaming, but spotless, kitchen and a red-cheeked Puny.

  “That bushel of tomatoes like to killed me!” she declared. “After I froze that big load of squash, I found some jars in your garage, sterilized ’em in your soup pot, and canned ever’ one in th’ bushel. Looky here,” she said, proudly, pointing to fourteen mason jars containing vermilion tomatoes.

  “Puny,” he exclaimed with joyful amazement, “this is a sight for sore eyes.”

  “Not only that, but I scrubbed your bathroom ’til it shines, and I want to tell you right now, Father, if I’m goin’ to stay here—and I dearly need th’ work—you’re goin’ to have to put your toilet seat up when you relieve yourself.”

  He felt his face burn. A little Emma, her employer thought, darkly. Now I’ve got one at the office and one at home, a matched set.

  He could not, however, dismiss the joy of seeing fourteen jars of tomatoes lined up on his kitchen counter.

  On Friday afternoon, he arrived at the rectory to find the house filled with ravishing aromas.

  Baked chicken. Squash casserole. Steamed broccoli. Corn on the cob. And frozen yogurt topped with cooked Baxter apples. Oh, ye of little faith, why didst thou doubt? he quoted to himself.

  “I know about that old diabetes stuff, my granpaw had it worse’n you,” Puny told him with satisfaction. “An’ not only can I cook for diabetes, I can cook for high blood pressure, heart trouble, nervous stomach, and constipation.”

  During the past twelve years, he had sometimes asked in a fit of frustration, “Lord, what have I done to deserve Emma Garrett?” Now, he found himself asking with a full heart, “Lord, what have I done to deserve Puny Bradshaw?”

  At Home in Mitford, Ch. 7

  “I WISH I could make you some corn bread,” Puny said, wistfully. “I just crave to do that.”

  “And you don’t know how I appreciate it, and thank you for the thought,” he said, eating a tuna sandwich made with whole wheat, and no mayonnaise. “But I can’t eat corn bread because of this aggravating diabetes.”

  “I could leave out th’ bacon drippin’s, and use vegetable oil. But it wouldn’t be no good.”

  “That’s right!”

  “If my granpaw didn’t git corn bread once a day, he said he couldn’t live. I’d bake him a cake at night, he’d eat half of it hot. Then he’d git up in the night and eat what was left, crumbled up in milk.”

  “Really?”

  “Stayed a string bean all his life, too. He said preachin’ the word of God kept the fat wore off.”

  “It has never served me in that particular way, I regret to say.”

  Puny filled the scrub bucket and went to work with her brush.

  At Home in Mitford, Ch. 10

  HE SET TWO places at the counter and took the bubbling sausage casserole from the oven. There would be no diet this day. Then, he turned on the record player and heard the familiar, if scratchy, strains of the Messiah.

  Dooley appeared at the kitchen door, dressed in the burgundy robe. “Sounds like a’ army’s moved in down here.”

  “My friend, you have hit the nail on the head. It is an army of the most glorious voices in recent history, singing one of the most majestic musical works ever written!”

  Dooley rolled his eyes.

  At Home in Mitford, Ch. 12

  IN THE FADING afternoon light, Absalom Greer’s slim frame might have been that of a twenty-year-old as he hurried down the steps of the old general store.

  “Welcome to God’s country!” he said, opening the door of the Buick. “Get out and come in, Father!”

  The rector was astonished to see that the face of his eighty-six-year-old host was remarkably unlined, and, what was more astounding, he had a full head of hair.

  “I was looking for an elderly gentleman to greet me. Pastor Greer must have sent his son!”

  The old man laughed heartily. “I can still hear an ant crawling in the grass,” he said with satisfaction, “but there’s not a tooth in my head I can call my own.”

  The country preacher led the village rector up the steps and into the dim interior of the oldest store in several counties.

  Father Tim felt as if he’d walked into a Rembrandt painting, for the last of the sunlight had turned the color of churned butter, casting a golden glow upon the chestnut walls and heart-of-pine floors.

  “My daddy built this store when I was six years old. It’s got the first nails I ever drove. It sold out of the family in 1974, but I bought it back and intend to keep it, though it don’t do much toward keeping me.

  “Let me give you a little country cocktail,” said his host, who was dressed in a neat gray suit and starched shirt. He selected a cold drink from an icebox behind the cash register, opened it, and handed it to the rector.

  “You’re looking at where I do my best preaching,” he said, slapping the worn wood of the old counter. “Right here is where the rubber hits the road.

  “Like the Greeks said to Philip, ‘Sir, we would see Christ.’ If they don’t see him behind this counter six days a week, we might as well throw my Sunday preaching out the window. Where is your weekday pulpit, my friend?”

  “Main Street.”

  “That’s a good place. Some soldiers set around and smell the coffee and watch the bacon frying, but the battle is waged on your feet.”

  “Absalom,” said a quiet voice from the back of the store, “supper’s ready. You can come anytime.”

  A door closed softly.

  “My sister, Lottie,” the old man said with evident pride. “She lives with me and does the cooking and housekeeping. I can assu
re you that I never did anything to deserve her ministry to me. She is an angel of the Lord!”

  His host turned the sign on the front door to read Closed, and they walked the length of the narrow store on creaking floorboards, passing bins of seeds and nails, rows of canned goods, sacks of feed, thread, buttons, iron skillets, and aluminum washtubs.

  Absalom Greer pushed open a door and the rector stood on the threshold in happy amazement. Before him was a room with ancient, leaded windows gleaming with the last rays of sunlight. In the center of the room stood a large table laid with a white cloth and a variety of steaming dishes, and on it burned an oil lamp.

  In the corner of the room, a fire crackled in the grate, and books lined the walls behind a pair of comfortable reading chairs. A worn black Bible lay on the table next to one of the chairs, and an orange cat curled peacefully on the deep windowsill.

  He thought he’d never entered a home so peaceable in spirit.

  A tall, slender woman moved into the room from the kitchen, wearing an apron. Her blue dress became her graying hair, which was pulled back simply and tied with a ribbon. She smiled shyly and extended her hand. “Father Tim,” said Absalom Greer, “Lottie Miller! My joy and my crown, my earthly shield and buckler, and my widowed sister.”

  “It’s my great pleasure,” said the rector, feeling as if he had gone to another country to visit.

  “My sister is shy as a deer, Father. We don’t get much company here, as I do all my pastoring at church or in the store. Why don’t you set where you can see the little fire on the hearth, it’s always a consolation.”

  After washing up in a tidy bathroom, Father Tim sat down at the table, finding that even the hard-back chair seemed comforting.

  “I left school when I was twelve,” said Absalom Greer over dinner, “to help my daddy in the store, and I got along pretty good teaching myself at night. One evenin’, along about the age of fourteen—I was back here in this very room, studyin’ a book—the wind got to howling and blowing as bad as you ever heard.

  “Lottie was a baby in my mother’s arms. I can see them now, my mother sitting by the fire, rocking Lottie, and humming a tune, and I was settin’ right there on a little bed.

  “My eyes were as wide open as they are now, when suddenly I saw a great band of angels. This room was filled with the brightness of angels!

  “They were pure white, with color only in their wings, color like a prism casts when the sun shines through it. I never saw anything so beautiful in my life, before or since. I couldn’t speak a word, and my mother went on rocking and humming, with her eyes closed, and there were angels standing over her, and all around us was this shining, heavenly host.

  “Then, it seemed as if a golden stair let down there by the door, and the angels turned and swarmed up that staircase, and were gone. I remember I went to sobbing, but my mother didn’t hear it. And I reached up to wipe my tears, but there weren’t any there.

  “I’ve thought about it many a time over the years, and I think it was my spirit that was weeping with joy.”

  Lottie Miller had not spoken, but had passed each dish and platter, it seemed to the rector, at just the right time. He had a second helping of potatoes that had been sliced and fried with rock salt and chives, and another helping of roasted lamb, which was as fine as any lamb he’d tasted in a very long time.

  “It’s a mystery how I could have done it, but I completely forgot that heavenly vision,” said the preacher, who was buttering a biscuit.

  “Along about sixteen, I got to feeling I had no soul at all. They’d take me to hear a preaching, and I couldn’t hear. They’d take me to see a healing and I couldn’t see. My daddy said it was the name they’d put on me—Absalom! A wicked, rebellious, ungodly character if there ever was one, but my mother was young when I was born, and heedless, and she liked the sound of it, and I was stuck with it. Later on, when I got to reading the Word, I got to understanding Absalom and his daddy, and that pitiful relationship, and the name got to be a blessing to me instead of a curse, and, praise God, some of my best preaching has come out of my name.

  “Well, along about twenty, I kissed my mother and daddy goodbye, and my baby sister, and I walked to Wesley and took the train and I went out west carrying a cardboard box tied with twine.

  “Times were so hard, I couldn’t get a job. I ended up putting the cardboard from that box in the bottoms of my shoes. A fella told me the bottom of one foot said Cream of Wheat, and the other said This Side Up.

  “I walked on that box for three months ’til I got work in a silver mine. Way down in that mine, in that deep, dark pit, I heard the Lord call me. ‘Absalom, my son,’ He said as clear as day, ‘go home. Go home and preach my Word to your people.’

  “Well sir, I didn’t know his Word to preach it. But I up and started home, took the train back across this great land, got off at Wesley, walked twelve miles to Farmer in the middle of the night with a full moon shining, and I got to my mother’s and daddy’s door right out there, and I laid down with the dogs and went to sleep on a flour sack.

  “I remember I told myself I’d never heard the Lord call me in that mine, that I’d just been lonesome and was looking for an excuse to come home.

  “I went on like that for a year or two, went to church to look at the girls, helped my daddy in the store. But that wasn’t enough, something was sorely missing. One day, I commenced to read everything theological I could get my hands on.

  “I drenched myself in Spurgeon, and plowed through Calvin, I soaked up Whitefield and gorged on Matthew Henry, as hard as I could go. But I was fightin’ my calling, and my heart was like a stone.

  “One day I was settin’ in the orchard I planted as a boy, and the Lord spoke again. ‘Absalom, my son,’ He said, clear as day, ‘spread my Word to your people.’

  “It made the hair stand up on my head. But in five minutes, I had laid down in the sunshine and gone to sleep like a lizard.

  “I went on that way for about three years, not listening to God, ’til one night He woke me up, I thought I’d been hit a blow on the head with a two-by-four.

  “It was like a bolt of lightning knocked me out of bed and threw me to the floor. Blam! ‘Absalom, my son,’ said the Lord, ‘go preach my Word to your people, and be quick about it.’

  “I got up off that floor, I ran in here where it was cold enough to preserve a corpse, I wrapped up in a blanket and lit an oil lamp, and I got to reading the Good Book and for two years I did not stop.

  “Everybody who knew me thought I’d gone soft.

  “‘Absalom Greer has got religion,’ they said, but they were only partly right. It was religion that had got me, it was God Himself who had me at last, and it was the most thrilling time of my life.

  “The words would jump off the page, I would understand things I had never understood before. I could take a verse my tongue had glibbed over in church, and see in it wondrous and thrilling meanings that kept the hair standing up on my head.

  “I would go out to work at the lumber company and take it with me. I would set on the toilet and read it. I would walk to town reading, and I’d be so transported I would fall in the ditch and get up and go again, turning the page.

  “I felt God spoke to me continuously for two transcendent years. Glory, glory, glory!” said the old preacher, with shining eyes.

  “One Sunday morning, I was settin’ in that little church about three miles down the road there and Joshua Hoover was pastoring then. I remember I was settin’ there in that sweet little church, and Pastor Hoover come down the aisle and he was white as a ghost.

  “He said, ‘Absalom, God has asked me to let you preach the service this morning.’

  “I like to dropped down dead at his feet.

  “He said, ‘I don’t know about this, it makes me uneasy, but it’s what the Lord told me to do.’

  “When I stood up, my legs gave out under me, I like to fainted like a girl.”

  Lottie laughed softly.

&n
bsp; “I recalled something Billy Sunday said. He said if you want milk and honey on your bread, you have to go into the land of giants. So, I went into that pulpit and I prayed, and the congregation, they prayed, and the first thing you know, the Holy Ghost got to moving in that place, and I got to preaching the Word of God, and pretty soon, it was just like a mill wheel got to turning, and we all went to grinding corn!”

  “Bliss!” said the rector, filled with understanding.

  “Bliss, my friend, indeed! There is nothing like it on earth when the spirit of God comes pouring through, and He has poured through me in fair weather and foul, for sixty-four years.”

  “Have there been dry spells?”

  The preacher pushed his plate away and Lottie rose to clear the table. Father Tim smelled the kind of coffee he remembered from Mississippi—strong and black and brewed on the stove.

  “My brother, dry is not the word. There was a time I went down like a stone in a pond and sank clear to the bottom. I lay on the bottom of that pond for two miserable years, and I thought I’d never see the light of day in my soul again.”

  “I can’t say my current tribulation is anything like that. But in an odd way, it’s something almost worse.”

  “What’s that?” Absalom Greer asked kindly.

  “When it comes to feeding his sheep, I’m afraid my sermons are about as nourishing as cardboard.”

  “Are you resting?”

  “Resting?”

  “Resting. Sometimes we get so worn out with being useful that we get useless. I’ll ask you what another preacher once asked: Are you too exhausted to run and too scared to rest?”

  Too scared to rest! He’d never thought of it that way. “When in God’s name are you going to take a vacation?” Hoppy had asked again, only the other day. He hadn’t known the truth then, but he felt he knew it now—yes, he was too scared to rest.

  The old preacher’s eyes were as clear as gemstones. “My brother, I would urge you to search the heart of God on this matter, for it was this very thing that sank me to the bottom of the pond.”