Shepherds Abiding

by Jan Karon

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Shepherds Abiding

  A Viking Book / published by arrangement with the author

  All rights reserved.

  Copyright © 2003 by Jan Karon

  This book may not be reproduced in whole or part, by mimeograph or any other means, without permission. Making or distributing electronic copies of this book constitutes copyright infringement and could subject the infringer to criminal and civil liability.

  For information address:

  The Berkley Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Putnam Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  The Penguin Putnam Inc. World Wide Web site address is

  http://www.penguinputnam.com

  ISBN: 978-1-1012-0040-7

  A VIKING BOOK®

  Viking Books first published by The Viking Publishing Group, a member of Penguin Putnam Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  VIKING and the “V” design are trademarks belonging to Penguin Putnam Inc.

  Electronic edition: December, 2003

  Other Mitford Books by Jan Karon

  AT HOME IN MITFORD

  A LIGHT IN THE WINDOW

  THESE HIGH, GREEN HILLS

  OUT TO CANAAN

  A NEW SONG

  A COMMON LIFE:

  The Wedding Story

  IN THIS MOUNTAIN

  PATCHES OF GODLIGHT

  THE MITFORD SNOWMEN

  ESTHER’S GIFT

  Children’s Books

  MISS FANNIE’S HAT

  JEREMY: THE TALE OF

  AN HONEST BUNNY

  All Ages

  THE TRELLIS AND THE SEED

  To the honor and glory of the Child, Emmanuel,

  God with Us

  Acknowledgments

  Warm thanks to:

  Family Heirlooms of Blowing Rock, where I found the Nativity figures written about in this story; my daughter, Candace Freeland, who got excited with me and contributed a great idea; Mrs. George (Bobby) Walton, who, without knowing my need, sent a helpful book of Nativity images; my publishers at Viking Penguin, who are ever gracious to Mitford; Fr. James Harris, who is always helpful and tender of spirit; Jefferson Otwell; The Right Reverend Keith L. Ackerman, SSC; Gary Purdy; Hoyt Doak; Lisa Knaack; Sherman Knaack; Mike Thacker; Bill Lapham, Asher Lapham, and Michael Summers.

  Special thanks to:

  Stefanie Newman, who restored the actual Nativity figures to their present charm and beauty.

  And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night.

  And lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them; and they were sore afraid.

  And the angel said unto them, Fear not: for behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people.

  For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord.

  And this shall be a sign unto you; Ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger.

  And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying,

  Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.

  And it came to pass, as the angels were gone away from them into heaven, the shepherds said one to another, Let us now go even unto Bethlehem, and see this thing which is come to pass, which the Lord hath made known unto us.

  And they came with haste, and found Mary, and Joseph, and the babe lying in a manger.

  And when they had seen it, they made known abroad the saying which was told them concerning this child.

  And all they that heard it wondered at those things which were told them by the shepherds.

  Luke 2:8—18, KJV

  The rain began punctually at five o’clock, though few were awake to hear it. It was a gentle rain, rather like a summer shower that had escaped the grip of time or season and wandered into Mitford several months late.

  By six o’clock, when much of the population of 1,074 was leaving for work in Wesley or Holding or across the Tennessee line, the drops had grown large and heavy, as if weighted with mercury, and those running to their cars or trucks without umbrellas could feel the distinct smack of each drop.

  Dashing to a truck outfitted with painter’s ladders, someone on Lilac Road shouted “Yeehaw!,” an act that precipitated a spree of barking among the neighborhood dogs.

  Here and there, as seemingly random as the appearance of stars at twilight, lamps came on in houses throughout the village, and radio and television voices prophesied that the front passing over the East Coast would be firmly lodged there for two days.

  More than a few were fortunate to lie in bed and listen to the rain drumming on the roof, relieved to have no reason to get up until they were plenty good and ready.

  Others thanked God for the time that remained to lie in a warm, safe place unmolested by worldly cares, while some began at once to fret about what the day might bring.

  Father Timothy Kavanagh, one of the earliest risers in Mitford, did not rise so early this morning. Instead, he lay in his bed in the yellow house on Wisteria Lane and listened to the aria of his wife’s whiffling snore, mingled with the sound of rain churning through the gutters.

  Had he exchanged wedding vows before the age of sixty-two, he might have taken the marriage bed for granted after these seven years. Instead, he seldom awakened next to the warm sentience of his wife without being mildly astonished by her presence, and boundlessly grateful. Cynthia was his best friend and boon companion, dropped from the very heavens into his life, which, forthwith, she had changed utterly.

  He would get up soon enough and go about his day, first hying with his good dog, Barnabas, into the pouring rain, and then, while the coffee brewed, reading the Morning Office, as he’d done for more than four decades as both a working and a now-retired priest.

  Feeling a light chill in the room, he scooted over to his sleeping wife and put his arm around her and held her close, comforted, as ever, by the faint and familiar scent of wisteria.

  Lew Boyd, who liked to rise with the sun every morning, and who always wore his watch to bed, gazed at the luminous face of his Timex and saw that it was the first day of October.

  October! He had no idea at all where the time had gone. Yesterday was July, today was October. As a matter of fact, where had his life gone?

  He stared at the bedroom ceiling and pondered a question that he’d never been fond of messing with, though now seemed a good time to do it and get it over with.

  One day, he’d been a green kid without a care in the world. Then, before you could say Jack Robinson, he’d looked up and found he was an old codger with a new and secret wife living way off in Tennessee with her mama, and him lying here in this cold, lonesome bed just as he’d been doing all those years as a widower.

  He tried to recall what, exactly, had happened between his youth and old age, but without a cup of coffee at the very least, he was drawing a blank.

  Though he’d worked hard and saved his money and honored his dead wife’s memory by looking at her picture on Sunday and paying to have her grave weed-eated, he didn’t know whether he’d made a g
o of it with the Good Lord or not.

  For the few times he’d cheated somebody down at his Exxon station, he’d asked forgiveness, even though he’d cheated them only a few bucks. He’d also asked forgiveness for the times he’d bitten Juanita’s head off without good reason, and for a few other things he didn’t want to think about ever again.

  To top that off, he’d quit smoking twelve years ago, cut out the peach brandy he’d fooled with after Juanita passed, and increased what he put in the plate on the occasional Sundays he showed up at First Baptist.

  But the thing was, it seemed like all of it—good and bad, up and down, sweet and sour—had blown by him like Dale Earnhardt Jr. at Talladega.

  He sighed deeply, hauled himself out of bed, and slid his cold feet into the unlaced, brown and white spectators he wore around the house. If Juanita was alive, or if Earlene was here, he’d probably turn on the furnace out of common decency. But as long as he was boss of the thermostat, he’d operate on the fact that an oil furnace was money down the drain and wait ’til the first hard freeze to make himself toasty.

  Sitting on the side of the bed and covering his bare legs with the blanket, he scratched his head and yawned, then reached for the cordless and punched redial.

  When his wife, living with her dying mama in a frame house on the southern edge of Knoxville, answered the phone, he said, “Good mornin’, dumplin.’ ”

  “Good mornin’ yourself, baby. How’re you feelin’ this mornin’?”

  “Great!” he said. “Just great!”

  He thought for a split second he was telling a bald-faced lie, then realized he was telling the lawful truth. It was the sound of Earlene’s cheerful voice that had changed him from an old man waking up in a cold bed to a young buck who just remembered he was driving to Tennessee in his new Dodge truck, tonight.

  At six-thirty, Hope Winchester dashed along Main Street under a red umbrella. Rain gurgled from the downspouts of the buildings she fled past and flowed along the curb in a bold and lively stream.

  To the driver of a station wagon heading down the mountain, the figure hurrying past the Main Street Grill was but a splash of red on the canvas of a sullen, gray morning. Nonetheless, it was a splash that momentarily cheered the driver.

  Hope dodged a billow of water from the wheels of the station wagon and clutched even tighter the pocketbook containing three envelopes whose contents could change her life forever. She would line them up on her desk in the back room of the bookstore and prayerfully examine each of these wonders again and again. Then she would put them in her purse at the end of the day and take them home and line them up on her kitchen table so she might do the same thing once more.

  UPS had come hours late yesterday with the books to be used in this month’s promotion, which meant she’d lost precious time finishing the front window and must get at it this morning before the bookstore opened at ten. It was, after all, October first—time for a whole new window display, and the annual Big O sale.

  All titles beginning with the letter O would be twenty percent off, which would get Wesley’s students and faculty hopping! Indeed, September’s Big S sale had increased their bottom line by twelve percent over last year, and all because she, the usually reticent Hope Winchester, had urged the owner to give a percentage off that really “counted for something.” It was a Books-A-Million, B&N, Sam’s Club kind of world, Hope insisted, and a five-percent dribble here and there wouldn’t work anymore, not even in Mitford, which wasn’t as sleepy and innocuous as some people liked to think.

  She dashed under the awning, set her streaming umbrella down, and jiggled the key in the door of Willard Porter’s old pharmacy, now known as Happy Endings Books.

  The lock had the cunning possessed only by a lock manufactured in 1927. Helen, the owner, had refused to replace it, insisting that a burglar couldn’t possibly outwit its boundless vagaries. Jiggling diligently, Hope realized that her feet were cold and soaking wet. She supposed that’s what she deserved by wearing sandals past Labor Day, something her mother had often scolded her for doing.

  Once inside, and against the heartfelt wishes of Helen, who lived in Florida and preferred to delay heating the shop until the first snow, Hope squished to the thermostat and looked at the temperature: fifty degrees. Who would read a book, much less buy one, at fifty degrees?

  As Margaret Ann, the bookstore cat, wound around her ankles, Hope turned the dial to “on.”

  The worn hardwood floor trembled slightly, and she heard at once the great boiler in the basement give its thunderous annual greeting to autumn in Mitford.

  Uncle Billy Watson lay with his eyes squeezed shut and listened to the rain pounding the roof of the Mitford town museum, the rear portion of which he and Rose called home.

  He was glad it was raining, for two reasons.

  One, he figured it would make the ground nice and soft to plant th’ three daffodil bulbs Dora Pugh had trotted to ’is door. Th’ bulbs, if they was like her seeds, wouldn’t be fit to plant, but he’d give ’er one more chance to do th’ honorable thing an’ stand by what she sold.

  When he was feelin’ stronger an’ the doc would let him poke around outside, he knowed right where he’d plant to make the finest show—at the bottom of th’ back steps, over to th’ left where the mailman wouldn’t tear up jack when he made ’is deliveries.

  Feeling the gooseflesh rise along his arms and legs, he pulled the covers to his chin.

  Th’ other good thing about the rain, if hit lasted, was when Betty Craig come to nurse ’im t’day, she’d be cookin’ all manner of rations to make a man’s jaws water. If they was anything better’n hearin’ rain on th’ roof an’ smellin’ good cookin’ at the same time, he didn’t know what hit’d be.

  He lay perfectly still, listening now to the beating of his heart.

  His heart wasn’t floppin’ around thisaway and that-away n’ more, he reckoned the pills was workin’.

  In a little bit, he rolled over and covered his ears to shut out the sound of his wife’s snoring in the next bed.

  He might’ve lost a good deal of eyesight an’ some control of ’is bladder, don’t you know, but by jing, ’is hearin’ could still pick up a cricket in th’ grass, thank th’ Lord an’ hallelujah.

  “Check this out,” said J. C. Hogan, editor of the Mitford Muse and longtime regular of the Main Street Grill. He thrust a copy of the Muse, hot from his pressroom above their heads, under Father Tim’s nose.

  “Photo staff?” asked Father Tim.

  * * *

  EXPECT A SPECTACLE

  As Mitford’s mayor, Andrew Gregory, doesn’t return until after press time from a buying trip to England, the Muse called on former mayor Esther Cunningham to make the Muse’s official annual prediction about our fall leaf display.

  “Color out the kazoo!” stated Ms. Cunningham.

  Meterologists across western North Carolina agree. They say that color this fall will be “the best in years,” due to a hot, dry mountain summer followed by heavy rains, which began September 7 and have continued with some frequency.

  So load your cameras and wait for Mitford’s famed sugar maples, planted from First Baptist all the way to Little Mitford Creek, to strut their stuff. Color should be at its height October 10–15.

  Use ASA 100 film and don’t shoot into the sun. Best morning photo op: from the steps of First Baptist, pointing south. Best afternoon op: from the sidewalk in front of the church, pointing east. This advice courtesy the Muse photo staff.

  * * *

  “You’re lookin’ at it,” said J.C.

  “I thought you had spellcheck.”

  “I do have spellcheck.”

  “It’s not working.”

  “Where? What?” J.C. grabbed the newspaper.

  “Meteorologist is misspelled.” The former rector of the local Episcopal church had kept his mouth shut for years about the Muse editor’s rotten spelling, but since the newspaper had invested in spellcheck, he figured he could
criticize without getting personal.

  J.C. muttered a word not often used in the rear booth.

  “You ought to have a photo contest,” said Father Tim, blowing on a mug of steaming coffee. “Autumn color, grand prize, second prize . . . like that.”

  “Unless th’ rain lets up, there’ll be nothing worth enterin’ in a contest. Besides, I’d have to shell out a couple hundred bucks to make that deal work.”

  “Where’s Mule?” asked Father Tim. The erstwhile town realtor had been meeting them in the rear booth for two decades, seldom missing their eight a.m. breakfast tryst.

  “Down with th’ Mitford Crud. Prob’ly comes from that hot, dry spell changin’ into a cold, wet spell.”

  Velma Mosely skidded up in a pair of silver Nikes. “Looks like th’ Turkey Club’s missin’ a gobbler this mornin’. What’re y’all havin’?”

  This was Percy and Velma Mosely’s final year as proprietors of the Grill. After forty years, they were hanging it up at the end of December, and not renewing the lease.

  In the spring, they would take a bus to Washington and see the cherry blossoms. Then they planned to settle into retirement in Mitford, where Percy would put in a vegetable garden for the first time in years and Velma would adopt a shorthaired cat from the shelter.

  Father Tim nodded to J.C. “You order first.”

  “Three eggs scrambled, with grits, bacon, and a couple of biscuits! And give me plenty of butter with that!”

  The Muse editor looked at Velma, expectant.

  “Your wife said don’t let you have grits and bacon, much less biscuits an’ plenty of butter.” J.C.’s wife, Adele, was Mitford’s first and, so far, only policewoman.

  “My wife?”

  “That’s right. Adele dropped in on her way to the station this mornin’. She said Doc Harper told you all that stuff is totally off-limits, startin’ today.”