Jan Karon - In the Company of Others

He took his watch from the night table and squinted at the illuminated face. Ten-thirty. It was five-thirty in the afternoon in Mitford. He ran the figures in his head-an hour to the Hickory airport in Puny’s station wagon, with their luggage and her double set of twins; an hour’s wait with a two-day-old copy of The Charlotte Observer; roughly a two-hour flight to Atlanta in a plane the size of his carry-on; in Atlanta, a two-hour wait and a seven-hour delay; then seven and a half hours to Dublin with a two-hour wait before boarding an hour’s hop to Sligo, followed by a half-hour in baggage claim and the dicey trek with Aengus Malone.

Roughly twenty-five hours in motion, and no sleep to speak of. He was wrecked, but not ruined-with a few good hours tonight, he could easily get in sync with the time difference.

He was not a man to part easily from home, from his dog, from his now legally adopted son, Dooley, who was twenty-one going on forty-five. Such things need watchful tending, like a cook fire. One mustn’t go long away from connections lest something fragile die out. One could not fetch that particular fire from neighbors.

He’d noticed that she was carrying a couple of sketchbooks in the red handbag as big as a Buick. Why was he surprised? She was an artist, he should expect her to carry sketchbooks. While rummaging for a granola bar in the depths of that mess kit, she had set the watercolor box on the seat beside her, innocent of his stares.

So. Sketchbooks and watercolors. Just in case, of course.

Last week, she showed him the e-mail from her editor, James, in which she was exhorted to ‘get a book out of Ireland.’

She hit reply. ‘James-the only thing I intend to get out of Ireland is pleasure. Your devoted author.’ She handed over the printed declaration. ‘There, darling,’ she said, ‘remove that worried look from your face.’

Such intentions were all well and good, but books had a tendency to pop out of her like a jack from a box. He had never liked jacks-in-the-box.

Out of the blue, the mania would take hold, and for months following she would be cut in twain: half for him, half for the book. She gave it all the tenderness and passion of a mother toward a child, and at times all the brooding of a woman toward a lover. She would be there and not there, all at once-the way he had been, perhaps, during so many seasons of his priesthood. There and not there, all at once.

‘Fire and ice,’ someone had said of him in the days when he was searching for God and trying to make up the emptiness. And even when, into his forties, he had at last been found of God, it was the very same, except then he was absorbed utterly in the telling of the truth and sparing nothing, least of all himself.

He didn’t want her committing her soul to another book, not now. He didn’t want to be on this trip alone, though at her side daily. After more than sixty years of bachelorhood, he had discovered a terrible truth:

Without her, he was beached.

He scooped her closer to his chest and belly and into the curve of his bent knees.

Silver apples of the moon, golden apples of the sun.

Together with the sound of her light snore, the rain dripping from the leaves was his cradle song.

He opened his eyes at five o’clock sharp, just as he did at home, just as he’d done for more than forty years as a priest. No international time clock could trump four decades of habit.

Still no power. He took the first of two daily insulin shots and read the Morning Office by the uncertain beam of a flashlight. Then he prayed for Dooley and Henry and Peggy and all the rest who made up his world, deciding at the end to include the smaller realm of this sleeping household.

He removed a sweater, a shirt, and pants from the massive armoire, and shucked out of his pajamas. Roughly an hour until the coffeepot would appear on the sideboard. He couldn’t say he felt exhausted or even mildly disoriented; he had slept well and felt fine, which wasn’t bad for the seventy years he celebrated only weeks ago-or was it seventy-one? He kept forgetting. He zipped his pants, buckled his belt. It was tomorrow when he’d be a rambling wreck.

There was a stinging chill in the air, like early October might feel at home in Mitford. He looked out to a shroud of fog over the slope to the lake, the three fishermen trooping down the shadowed path in their Wellingtons. As a limestone lake, Lough Arrow had no silt to be stirred by last night’s heavy rains-the fishing today would likely be good.

He went to the bed and pulled the covers around Cynthia’s shoulders, and stood looking at her, bemused. Six decades of living alone couldn’t trump eight years of marriage-he marveled still at the sight of her sleeping in his bed. Or was it he who slept in hers?

He fastened his tab collar, put the notebook under his arm. In the hall, he was pleasured by the primal incense of burning turf.

For all the sound made by his passage down the stone stairs, he might have been weightless, a sylph. On the landing, he stopped and buttoned the brown cardigan and turned to look beyond the windows. In the gray murk of early light, a fenced garden. A spade thrust upright into black loam. A blue wheelbarrow; the fire of ripe tomatoes on the vine. He was starting down when he saw a dim figure moving along the path by the garden wall. He adjusted his bifocals. The girl who had brought around the hot towels, riding a bicycle with a large parcel in the basket.

Firelight shimmered over the dusky walls of the sitting room; chunks of hand-cut turf blazed on the grate. Unlike the resinous logs back home, there was no snap and crackle from decayed masses of plant material; turf burned with nary a murmur. He gazed into the color and heat of the fire, stretching his hands toward the flame in gratitude.

It was good to be away, after all. Even with the long haul to get here, he felt an ease in his shoulders as if he’d let go some large wen. He turned his back to the blaze, looking about the room at walls glazed with years of turf smoke, and shelf after shelf of books which he might search for hours without guilt over time taken from the lawn mower or the weed patrol or his almost-daily visit to Mitford Hospital. And there, hanging on either side of the door to the dining hall, a display of early sepia photographs he hadn’t noticed last night. Groups of men in rough coats and trousers, formal in the act of holding aloft silvered fish; knock-kneed boys displaying their own prize catches-a way of life he’d never known, given a father who believed fishing promoted sloth. Sloth-right now, he’d like a double shot of it, straight up.

The clock ticked, the fire simmered; he was rooted to the spot in an agreeable coma.

An odd sound, then, something like a sneeze.

He peered around. In a corner, the Jack Russell sat motionless in a wing chair.

‘Bless you,’ he said, keeping his voice low.

The dog cocked its head to one side and looked at him. It was a steady look, conversational in feeling. He’d read somewhere that dogs don’t make eye contact. Baloney.

He sat facing the fire and marking the lingering scent of last evening’s pipe smoke. His grandfather, firing his pipe and flicking the match into the smoldering Mississippi night…

He put his feet on the footstool, if only to see how it felt to lean back, let go, breathe. The aroma of brewed coffee drifted up the hall. Yes.

The dog hadn’t moved.

‘Bolted any rabbits lately?’

One ear cocked.

‘I have a dog-a Bouvier mix named Barnabas. A hundred and ten pounds. The Old Gentleman, we call him; likes nineteenth-century poetry.’

Two ears cocked.

‘You, on the other hand, have the look of a nonfiction man. The history of the American West, I’d say. Cowboys, Indians, that sort of thing.’