Jan Karon - In the Company of Others

It was an unfamiliar odor, layered in the way perfumes were said to be composed. He sniffed the air of the closed room-definitely a top note of fried bacon, his Mississippi nose wouldn’t mistake that, then a middle note of something sharply caustic, maybe shellac, and bringing up the rear, the smell of coffee.

O’Donnell’s journal was definitely growing on him. He laid it on the table by the chair and eased to the armoire, creaking only one floorboard. Pud stuck his head from beneath the bed skirt.

‘Timothy? ’

‘Good morning, Sunshine.’ It was his mother’s and Peggy’s old greeting at the top of the day.

‘What are you doing?’

‘Dressing.’

‘What time is it?’

He picked up his watch, squinted in the gray morning light. ‘Gaining on six forty-five.’ He shucked his pajamas into Maureen’s basket.

‘I loved yesterday,’ she said.

‘And another grand, soft day predicted, according to William.’

‘I’m glad you got the reservations done.’

By the skin of his teeth. ‘Coffee’s on.’

‘Did you sleep?’

‘Well enough.’ He found the knit shirt folded in the drawer, shook it out, pulled it over his head.

‘I feel so guilty being able to sleep.’

‘As you should, Kav’na, as you should.’

‘What are we doing today?’

‘Maybe out to Easkey-stone houses abandoned during the famine, a broad expanse of gray sea, a view to Donegal on a clear day. Just the ticket for artists, it seems to me.

‘Or there’s a castle in Collooney. Gardens. Ancient trees. Only a few stairs in to lunch.’ He zipped his trousers, buckled his belt. ‘There’s Lissadell House, of course, they say Yeats enjoyed the place. However-too much walking, would be my guess.’

She yawned. ‘I’m trying to think.’

‘Anna said she forgot to mention roads up the side of Ben Bulben-very rough tracks with sheep galore and turf fields. A dash on the primitive side, but great views, and the Vauxhall could make it.’

‘I love the primitive side.’

He took the comb from his pocket and ran it through what was left of his hair-felt the stubble on his chin, regretted the incessant bother of shaving.

‘I like your pictures of Ben Bulben,’ he said, pulling on his watch. Worn from the long day, she had forgone sketches of William last night, rescheduling for this evening.

‘There’s something benign about it,’ she said, ‘the way it broods over the landscape, but I couldn’t catch it. Of course, I never can really catch what I’m after, just fragments, like when small clouds break away from big clouds and little shreds go floating off. I get the little shreds.’

‘Little shreds are good.’

He sat on the side of the bed; Pud shot from his quarters as if squeezed forth by the sag in the mattress. ‘You remind me of something Washington Irving said about traveling-in Spain, I think it was.’ He eased his bare feet into his loafers. ‘I copied it out for you years ago.’

‘Umm,’ she said, burrowing in for another round of sawing wood.

‘Let others repine at the lack of turnpike roads and sumptuous hotels and all the elaborate comforts of a country cultivated into tameness… but give me the rude mountain scramble, something, something, something, that gives such a true game flavour to-in this case-Ireland. There you have it, and thank heaven, no senility yet.’

She was drowsing into sleep. He leaned toward her side of the bed and touched her cheek. She had added true game flavour to his life, a fact which he didn’t take lightly.

Going down the stairs with Pud at his heels, he might have whistled, but didn’t want to wake anyone.

In the dining room, he identified the smell-the wall above the sideboard was freshly painted. A picture in oil, smaller than the Barret, hung between the sconces.

He filled his coffee mug-hair of the dog-and squinted at the figures of three men fishing in a broad, dark stream overhung by trees rendered in the taste of the nineteenth century. Above the trees, an illumination of silvered clouds-he was finicky about clouds, these were up there with Constable’s. He leaned forward, adjusted his glasses. There, nearly invisible on the shadowed bank, a spaniel and a wicker hamper. No signature.

A fresh start, then; life goes on. Good for Liam.

He took his coffee to the open French doors, now relieved of yellow tape, and wondered what he would write at the top of today’s entry if he were keeping a journal. A mild morning, mist rising. In the early light, he saw Anna at the flower bed farthest from the lodge. Stooped and intent, she reminded him of his mother and the gardens she wrought from Mississippi clay.

After Peggy disappeared, he had been the one cheering his mother on. He had fetched her tools, helped her dig the holes, joined her in the endless battle against leaf minors in the allée of century-old boxwood. All this under the strain of his father’s view of gardens as time-wasting indulgence-Matthew Kavanagh had been known to walk as if blind by a newly planted bed of astonishing possibility.

As the gardens expanded, the curious began showing up at the gate, total strangers sometimes, then came the busloads during Pilgrimage, to see what Madelaine Kavanagh had done. What she had done was to take nothing and turn it into something. That was the first time he witnessed that particular kind of miracle.

He was twelve, maybe thirteen, and reading Les Misérables when he found a line that would help him in the cheering-on:

The patch of land he had made into a garden was famous in the town for the beauty of the flowers which he grew there.

Proud, he had gone to his mother, carrying the open book. ‘Look, Mama. Just like you.’

In an unforgiving north light from the wash-house window, she read the words he pointed out with his finger and nodded a little and smiled. He saw something then, for the first time-the lines in her face, and the unbearable thinness of her eyelids, blue and transparent as a moth’s wing.

He looked out to the flowering beds of Broughadoon and gave thanks for her life, then crossed himself and prayed for this household, his cousins on the road in the Flying Fiat, Henry and Peggy in the house with the swept yard on the road from Holly Springs…

‘Reverend.’

He turned to see Liam at the kitchen door, and made a gesture toward the dining room wall. ‘Well done, Liam.’

‘Seamus and I washed out th’ rollers around one o’clock this mornin’. Then the other walls looked so bloody grim, we’re after paintin’ th’ whole business when time allows. I hope you passed a good night.’

‘Good enough, thanks.’

The clock in the library chiming the quarter hour.

‘The painting came from our family quarters down th’ hall, ’t was hangin’ above our couch these last years.’

‘Not a Barret,’ he said.

‘Not a Barret, no.’ Liam joined him. ‘But Father loved it, nonetheless. He was a man after a nice touch to clouds, said most artists weren’t up to the job of th’ human hand or th’ heavenly cloud.’

‘Agreed. No signature, I see.’

‘It wasn’t so unusual for the time, leavin’ off th’ signature.’

‘How do you feel about having it on public view… the possibility of…?’

‘This was always th’ wall for hangin’ his favorite paintings-he seldom hung them at th’ house ’til they had a good run here. I was after bringin’ the baskin’ whales from the library, but Anna said ’t would be too violent a scene for guests at their food.’

‘Very thoughtful.’

‘Blood on th’ water an’ all.’

‘Yes.’

‘But ’t wouldn’t seem right without something there, something he enjoyed. So.’ Liam shrugged. ‘I like to believe… I have to believe…’