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Authors: Jan Karon

BOOK: A Common Life
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He tried to scramble to his feet and run upstairs, where he would take a shower and brush his teeth and get dressed and do this the right way, but his strength failed and he found he couldn’t move; he might have been glued to the linoleum, one knee up and one knee down, frozen as a herring.
“Hurry, Timothy!” she said, whispering.
“Will you marry me?”
“Yes! A thousand times yes!”
She was helping him to his feet, and then he was kissing her and she was kissing him back. She drew away and looked at him with a kind of awe; he found her radiance dumbfounding. “I thought you’d never ask,” she said.
It was done. He had jumped over the barbed wire.
He buried his face in her hair and held her close and bawled like a baby.
He was a muddle of happiness and confusion, as if his brain had been stirred like so much porridge. He was unable to think straight or put one thought logically after another; he felt the magnitude of the thing he’d done, and knew he should do something to carry through, though he wasn’t sure what.
They had sat on his sofa, talking until three in the morning, but not once had they mentioned what they would do today; they had talked only about how they felt and how mindlessly happy and grateful they were that this astonishing benediction should come to them, as a wild bird might come to their outstretched palms.
“To have and to hold,” she had murmured.
“’Til death do us part,” he had said, nuzzling her hair.
“And no organizing of church suppers or ironing of fair linens, and positively
nothing
to do with the annual Bane and Blessing.”
“Right,” he said.
“Ever!”
she said.
He hadn’t a single rule or regulation to foist upon her; he was chopped liver, he was cooked macaroni; he was dragged into the undertow of the great tsunami of love he’d so long held back.
They had prayed together, at last, and fallen asleep on the sofa, her head on his shoulder, his head against hers, bookends, then waked at five and scrambled to the back door, where Cynthia kissed him and darted through the hedge, devoutly hoping not to be seen.
He’d bounded up the stairs to his room with a vigor that amazed him, murmuring aloud a quote from Wordsworth:
“‘Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive, But to be young was very heaven!’”
Bliss, yes, as if he’d suddenly become lighter than air, as if the stone were at last rolled away from the tomb. He thought he might spring upward like a jack-in-the-box. Was any of this familiar to him, had he ever felt it before? Never! Nothing in his supposed love for Peggy Cramer, all those years ago, had prepared him for this.
In a misting summer rain, he headed for the church office at nine o’clock with Barnabas on the red leash.
He should tell Emma, he supposed, who had served him faithfully for nearly thirteen years. And Puny, the best house help a man could ever have, Puny would want to know.
He could see them both, Emma wincing and frowning, then socking him on the arm with approval, and Puny—she would jump up and down and hoot and shout, and great tears would stream down her freckled cheeks. Then she’d go at once and bake a cake of cornbread from which he, due to his blasted diabetes, might have one unbuttered, albeit large, slice.
Aha! And there was Miss Sadie, of course! Wouldn’t her eyes sparkle and gleam, and wouldn’t she hug his neck for a fare-thee-well?
And wouldn’t Louella break out a coconut cake or a chess pie and wouldn’t they have a party right there in the kitchen at Fernbank?
On the other hand, wasn’t Cynthia supposed to be along when he broke the news to everybody?
He sighed. He was in the very business of life’s milestones, including the occasional overseeing of engagements, yet he seemed to have forgotten everything he ever knew—if, indeed, he ever knew anything.
Besides, he wasn’t sure he was up for hooting and hollering and being punched in the arm or any of the other stuff that usually came with such tidings.
Then there was J.C. And Mule. And Percy.
Good Lord, he dreaded that encounter like a toothache. All that backslapping and winking and cackling, and the word spreading through the Grill like so much wildfire, and spilling out the door and up Main Street and around the monument to Lew Boyd’s Exxon. . . .
He felt his stomach do a kind of dive, as it always did when he took off or landed in a plane.
If Barnabas hadn’t suddenly jerked the leash, he would have walked straight into a telephone pole outside the Oxford Antique Shop.
Bottom line, he decided, Dooley Barlowe should be the first to know. And it was clearly right that they tell Dooley together. He was frankly relieved that Dooley had spent the night at Tommy’s and hadn’t been there to see him skid through the back door and drop to his knee. Not a pretty sight, he was sure of it.
He could just see the face of his thirteen-year-old charge when he heard the news. The boy would flush with embarrassment or relief, or both, then laugh like a hyena. He would very likely exclaim,
Cool!
then race upstairs with a joy that he dare not freely display.
Still, telling anyone at all seemed hotheaded and premature. This was between Cynthia and himself; it was their secret. It was somehow marvelous that it was yet unknown to anyone else in the world.
At the corner, he stopped at a hemlock to let Barnabas lift his leg, and suddenly knew he couldn’t contain the secret any longer, he was full to bursting with it.
“Make it snappy,” he said to his dog. “I have something to tell you.”
Barnabas did as he was told, and when they crossed the street, the rector of the Chapel of our Lord and Savior paused in front of the church office and said under his breath, “I’ve just decided . . . that is, Cynthia and I are going to get . . .”
His throat tickled. He coughed. A car passed, and he tried again to tell his dog the good news.
But he couldn’t say it.
He couldn’t say the
m
word, no matter how hard he tried.
As he opened the office door, he realized with complete clarity where he should begin.
His bishop. Of course. How could he have forgotten he had a bishop, and that such a thing as this thing he was going to do would be of utmost importance to Stuart Cullen?
But, of course, he couldn’t call Stuart this morning, because Emma Newland would be sitting at her desk cheek-by-jowl with his own.
He greeted his longtime, part-time secretary as Barnabas collapsed with a sigh onto his rug in the corner.
Desperate to avoid eye contact, he sat down at once and began to scribble something, he knew not what, into his sermon notebook.
Emma stared at him over her half-glasses.
He put his left elbow on the desk and held his head in his hand, as if deeply thoughtful, feeling her hot stare covering him like a cloak.
Blast, he couldn’t bear that look. She might have been examining his tonsils or readying him for colon surgery.
“For heaven’s sake,” he said, swiveling around in his squeaking chair to face the bookcases.
“I’d leave heaven out of this if I were you,” she said, sniffing.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I mean, I can’t imagine heaven wantin’ anything to do with you this morning.”
Church secretaries had been fired for less, much less, he thought, grinding his teeth. The office was suddenly doing that bizarre thing it sometimes did—it was growing rapidly and infinitely smaller; it was, in fact, becoming the size of a shoe box.
He bolted to his feet and half stood behind his desk, trying to get a deep breath.
“Your collar’s too tight,” she said.
“How do you know?”
“Your face is red as a beet.”
“It’s possible that I’m having a heart attack,” he snapped.
“I’m telling you it’s your collar. Are you wearin’ one of those Velcro deals?”
“Yes.”
“Let it out a little.”
Dadgummit, she was right. He realized he was nearly choking to death. He adjusted the Velcro, disgusted with himself and everybody else.
What had happened to the soft, circumcised heart God had given him only last night? Where had the lighter-than-air spirit of this morning fled? Why was he grumping and grouching when he ought to be leaping and shouting?
Barnabas yawned and rolled on his side.
“I’m getting married!” he blurted uncontrollably. Then he sat down, hard, in his chair.
He would never be able to explain the mysteries surrounding love, only one of which surfaced when he confessed his news to Emma.
By the involuntary utterance of those three amazing words, his frozen Arctic tundra had been transformed into a warm tropical lake. Something in him had actually melted.
In the space of a few moments, he had become jelly. Or possibly custard. Then a foolish smile spread across his face, which seemed destined to remain there for the rest of his life.
When Emma left for the post office, vowing not to say a word to anyone, he prayed at his desk, went to the toilet and did a glucometer check, then positively swaggered to the phone to call his bishop.
Stuart’s secretary said he was either in the loo or in a meeting, she wasn’t sure which, but she would find out and have him call back.
He slumped in the chair, disappointed.
But wait.
Walter!
Of course, he must call Walter and Katherine at once.
The names of those with special interest in his good fortune were being revealed to him, one by one, in the way some are given inspiration for their Christmas card list.
Since Cynthia had never met Walter, his first cousin and only known living relative, he supposed he was on his own for spilling the beans to New Jersey.
“Walter!”
“Cousin! We haven’t heard from you in the proverbial coon’s age.”
“Which phone are you on?” asked the rector.
“The kitchen. Why?”

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