Part 3

Light from Heaven
by Jan Karon

(Page 3 of 6)

Getting around was a piece of cake. The heavens had given them only a couple of inches, and in a farm truck built like a tank, he felt safe and thoroughly above it all.

Patently envious. Patently envious. What could a bigwig bishop, albeit his oldest friend, envy in a country parson? There it was again, the tape running in a loop and promising to work his mind into a lather.

"I roll this whole mystery over to You, Lord," he said aloud, "and thank You for this day!"

In truth, the whole day belonged to him. He would stop by the hospital to see Puny and her new brood; he would run over to Hope House and visit Louella; he would make a noon stop at Lew Boyd's Exxon where the Turkey Club was lately convening; he would have a chin-wag with Avis at The Local... .

As for getting a haircut, he had no intention of trusting his balding head to Fancy Skinner ever again, period; Joe Ivy had retired from cutting hair and wanted nothing more to do with such a trade; trooping to the barber shop in Wesley would take too much time. So, no, indeed, absolutely not, there would be no haircut on this trip into civilization. The sun broke through leaden clouds and flooded the countryside with a welcome light.

"Yee hah!" he shouted against the considerable din of the truck engine. Why had he felt so bereft and grumpy only a half hour before, when he was now beginning to feel like a new man?

He switched on the radio to the blast of a country music station; it was golden oldies time.

"I bought th' shoes that just walked out on me... ." someone sang. He sang along, hardly caring that he didn't know the words.

"Country come to town!" he whooped as he drove into Mitford.

Roaring past the Exxon station, he blew the horn twice, just to let the general public know he'd arrived.

He bent and kissed her forehead.

"Well done," he said, a lump in his throat. Two sets of twins! May God have mercy... . "They're whoppers," she said, smiling up at him.

His so-called house help of ten years, and the one whom he loved like a daughter, lay worn but beaming in the hospital bed.

He took her hand, feeling the rough palm that had come from years of scrubbing, polishing, cooking, washing, ironing, and generally making his life and Cynthia's far simpler, not to mention indisputably brighter. "Thank you for naming one of your fine boys after this old parson."

"We won't call 'im by th' fancy name. It'll jis' be Timmy."

"Timmy. I always liked it when Mother called me Timmy."

"Timmy an' Tommy," she said, proudly.

"Timmy and Tommy and Sissy and Sassy."

"You'll be the boys' granpaw, too," she said, in case he hadn't considered this.

"It'll be an honor to be their granpaw."

"Father?"

Since he'd officiated at her wedding several years ago, she had taken to calling him by his priestly title in a way that subtly claimed him as her true father. He never failed to note this. Blast, if he wasn't about to bawl like baby. "Yes, my dear?"

"I sure do love you and Cynthy."

There they came, rolling down his cheeks like a veritable gulley washer... .

"And we sure do love you back," he croaked.

"So, how's the food at Hope House these days?"

He sat on the footstool by Louella's rocking chair, feeling roughly eight or ten years old, as he always had in the presence of Miss Sadie and Louella.

"Oh, honey, some time it's good, some time it ain't fit for slop." He noted that Louella said ain't now that Miss Sadie, who forbade its use, had passed on. "You take th' soup - th' menu has th' same ol' soup on it every day, day after day, long as I been here." She looked thoroughly disgusted.

"What soup is that?"

"Soup du jour! If they cain't come up with more'n one soup in this high-dollar outfit, I ain't messin' with it."

"Aha," he said.

"My granmaw, Big Mama, said soup was for sick people, anyway, an' I ain't sick an' ain't plannin' to be."

"That's the spirit."

Louella rocked on. The warm room, the lowering clouds beyond the window, and the faint drone of the shopping network made him drowsy; his eyelids drooped... .

Louella suddenly stopped rocking. "I been meanin' to ask - what you doin' 'bout Miss Sadie's money?"

He snapped to attention. "What money is that?"

"Don't you remember? I tol' you 'bout th' money she hid in that ol' car."

"Old car," he said, clueless.

"In that ol' Plymouth automobile she had." Louella appeared positively vexed with him. "Louella, I don't have any idea what you mean."

"Your mem'ry must be goin', honey."

"Why don't you tell me everything, from the beginning."

"Seem like I called you up an' tol' you, but maybe I dreamed it. Do you ever dream somethin' so real you think it happened?"

"I do."

"A while before she passed, Miss Sadie got mad 'bout th' market fallin' off. You know she made good money in that market."

"Yes, ma'am, she did." Hadn't she left Dooley Barlowe a cool million plus at her passing? This extraordinary fact, however, was not yet known to Dooley.

"She say, 'Look here, Louella, I'm goin' to put this little dab where those jack legs at th' market can't lose it.' I say, 'Miss Sadie, where you goin' to put it, under yo' mattress?' She say, 'Don't be foolish, I'm goin' to put it in my car an' lock it up.' She'd quit drivin' an' her car was up on blocks in th' garage. She say, 'Now don't you let me forget it's in there.'"

"And?" he asked.

"An' I went an' let 'er forget it was in there!"

The 1958 Plymouth had been sitting for several years in the garage behind Fernbank, Miss Sadie's old home on the hill above Mitford. Fernbank was now owned by Andrew Gregory, Mitford's mayor, his Italian wife, Anna, and his brother-in-law, Tony.

"Well, it probably wasn't much," he said, reassuring.

"Wadn't much? It mos' certainly was much. It was nine thousand dollars!"

"Nine thousand dollars?" He was floored.

"Don't holler," she instructed. "You don't know who might be listenin'." "You're sure of that amount, Louella?"

"Sure, I'm sure! Miss Sadie an' me, we count it out in hun'erd dollar bills. How many hun'erd dollar bills would that be? I forget."

"Umm, that would be ninety bills."

"Yessir, honey, it was ninety, it took us 'til way up in th' day to count them hun'erds out, 'cause ever' time we counted 'em out, Miss Sadie made us start all over an' count 'em out ag'in!"

"Good idea," he said, not knowing what else to say.

© 2006 Penguin, a division of Penguin Putnam, used by permission.

About the Author

Jan Karon, born Janice Meredith Wilson in the foothills of North Carolina, was named after the title of a popular novel, Janice Meredith. Jan wrote her first novel at the age of ten. "The manuscript was written on Blue Horse notebook paper, and was, for good reason, kept hidden from my sister. When she found it, she discovered the one curse word I had, with pounding heart, included in someone's speech. For Pete's sake, hadn't Rhett Butler used that very same word and gotten away with it? After my grandmother's exceedingly focused reproof, I've written books without cussin' ever since."