Jan Karon's Mitford Years
Page 11
Finding themselves on a roll, she suggested they draw broomstraws to see who’d entertain the other with a retelling of Uncle Billy’s wedding joke.
The rector was not pleased to draw the short straw. After all, who but Uncle Billy could tell an Uncle Billy joke? He returned the straw. “Sorry,” he said, “but this joke can’t be done without a cane.”
She got up and went to the fireplace, whipped the broom off the hearth, and handed it over.
“Is there no balm . . . ?” he sighed.
“None!” she said.
Using the hearth for a stage and the broom for a cane, he hunkered down and clasped his right lower back, where he thought he might actually feel an arthritic twinge.
“Wellsir, two fellers was workin’ together, don’t you know. First’n, he was bright ’n cheerful, th’ other’n, he didn’t have nothin’ to say, seem like he was mad as whiz. First’n said, ‘Did you wake up grouchy this mornin’?’ Other’n said, ‘Nossir, I let ’er wake ’er own self up.’ ”
Hoots, cheers, general merriment.
“That’s just m’ warm-up, don’t you know, hit ain’t m’ main joke.”
The audience settled down and gazed at him raptly.
“Wellsir, Ol’ Adam, he was mopin’ ’round th’ Garden of Eden feelin’ lonesome, don’t you know. So, the Lord asked ’im, said, ‘Adam, what’s ailin’ you?’ Adam said he didn’t have nobody t’ talk to. Wellsir, th’ Lord tol’ ’im He’d make somebody t’ keep ’im comp’ny, said hit’d be a woman, said, ‘This woman’ll rustle up y’r grub an’ cook it f’r you, an’ when you go t’ wearin’ clothes, she’ll wash ’em f’r you, an’ when you make a decision on somethin’, she’ll agree to it.’ Said, ‘She’ll not nag n’r torment you a single time, an’ when you have a fuss, she’ll give you a big hug an’ say you was right all along.’
“Ol’ Adam, he was jist a-marvelin’ at this.
“The Lord went on, said, ‘She’ll never complain of a headache, an’ ’ll give you love an’ passion whenever you call for it, an’ when you have young’uns, she’ll not ask y’ to git up in th’ middle of th’ night.’ Adam’s eyes got real big, don’t you know, said ‘What’ll a woman like’at cost a feller?’ Th’ Lord said, ‘A arm an’ a leg!’
“Adam pondered a good bit, said, ‘What d’you reckon I could git f’r a rib?”’
Generous applause, ending with the whistle his wife learned as a ten-year-old marble player.
Crawling out the way they’d come in, they left the cabin before dusk and trekked to the lodge on an overgrown path.
During these jaunts, he faithfully looked for bear and stayed alert to protect his wife, though he saw nothing more suspicious than a raccoon seeking to purloin Wednesday’s chicken bones.
Today, Cynthia had hauled out sketch pads and pencils and abandoned any notion of leaving the porch. She vowed she’d seen a moose swimming in the lake and was not keen to miss further sightings. He, meanwhile, lay in a decrepit hammock and read G. K. Chesterton.
Peace covered them like a shawl; he couldn’t remember such a time of prolonged ease. There were, however, moments when Guilt snatched him by the scruff of the neck, determined to persuade him this was a gift he had no right to unwrap and enjoy, and he’d better watch his step or else....
“Listen to this,” he said. “ ‘An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.’ ”
She laughed. “I didn’t know G.K. had been to Cullen camp.”
“And this: ‘The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult, and left untried.’ Does that nail it on the head?” He fairly whooped.
“I love seeing you like this,” she said.
“Like what?”
“Happy . . . resting . . . at ease. No evening news, no phones, no one pulling you this way and that.”
“Stuart knew what he was doing, after all.”
“I have a whole new respect for your bishop,” she declared.
A loon called, a dragonfly zoomed by the porch rail.
“I heard something in our room last night,” she said. “Something skittering across the floor. What do you think it was?”
“Oh, I don’t know—maybe a chipmunk?” Right there was proof positive that his brain was still working.
“I love chipmunks!”
He put the Chesterton on the floor beside the hammock and lay dazed and dreaming, complete. “ ‘Blessed be the Lord . . . ,’ ” he murmured.
“ ‘. . . who daily loadeth us with benefits!’ ” she exclaimed, finishing the verse from Psalm Sixty-eight.
A wife who could read his mind and finish his Scripture verses. Amazing....
When he awoke, he heard only the faint whisper of her pencils on paper.
“Dearest, could you please zip to the store for us?”
“That car will not zip anywhere,” he said.
“Yes, but we can’t go on like two chicks in the nest, with poor Henry our mother hen. We must have supplies .”
“I suppose it would be a good thing to keep the battery charged.”
“A quart of two-percent milk,” she said, without looking up from her sketch pad, “whole wheat English muffins, brown eggs, an onion—we can’t make another meal without an onion—and three lemons—”
“Wait!” He hauled himself over the side of the creaking hammock and trotted into the house for a pen and paper.
She held up the sketch and squinted at it. “Oh, and some grapes!” she called after him. “And bacon! Wouldn’t it be lovely to smell bacon frying in the morning? I do love raisin bran, Timothy, but really. . . .”
Though the late afternoon temperature felt unseasonably warm when he left the car, it was refreshingly cool as he entered the darkened store.
A man in a green apron was dumping potatoes from a sack into a bin; he looked up and nodded.
The rector nodded back, wondering at his odd sense of liberty in being untethered, yet wondering still more about his desire to hurry back to his wife. This was, after all, the first time they’d been apart since the wedding; he felt . . . barren, somehow, bereft. Perhaps it was the sixtysomething years for which, without knowing it, his soul had waited for this inexpressible joy, and he didn’t want to miss a single moment of it. Then again, his joy might owe nothing to having waited, and everything to love, and love alone.
He didn’t understand these things, perhaps he never would; all he knew or understood was that he wanted to inhale her, to wear her under his very skin—God’s concept of “one flesh” had sprung to life for him in an extraordinary way, it was food, it was nectar; their love seemed the hope of the world, somehow. . . .
He chose a package of thick-sliced market bacon. This was living on the edge, and no two ways about it.
But perhaps he was happiest, in reflection, about the other waiting, the times when the temptation to have it all had been nearly unbearable, but they had drawn back, obeying God’s wisdom for their lives. The drawing back had shaken him, yes, and shaken her, for their love had exposed their desire in a way they’d never known before. Yet, His grace had made them able to wait, to concentrate on the approaching feast instead of the present hunger.
He set his basket on the counter.
“You over on the lake?” the man asked.
“We are.”
“Looks like you’ll have a fine sunset this evenin’.”
He peered through the store windows toward the tree line. Holy smoke! If he hurried, he could make it back to the lodge in time. . . .
“Anything else I can round up for you?”
“This will do it.”
“You sure, now?”
As he took out his wallet, he realized he couldn’t stop smiling.
“Thank you, this is all,” he said. “I have absolutely everything.”
Viking
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Copyright © Jan Karon, 2002
Illustrations copyright © Penguin Putnam Inc., 2002
All rights reserved
Illustrations by Donna Kae Nelson
PUBLISHER’S NOTE
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are 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.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA
Karon, Jan, date.
In this mountain / Jan Karon. p. cm.—(The Mitford Years)
ISBN: 978-1-1012-2151-8
Mitford (N.C.: Imaginary place)—Fiction. 2. City and town life—fiction. 3. North Carolina—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3561.A678 I5 2002
813'054—dc21 2002016877
Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
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Soli deo gloria
To God alone be the glory
And in this mountain
The Lord of hosts will make for all people
A feast of choice pieces,
A feast of wines on the lees,
Of fat things full of marrow,
Of well-refined wines on the lees.
Isaiah 25:6, New King James version
Acknowledgments
Warm thanks to:
Bishop Andrew Fairfield; The Reverend Frank Clark; The Reverend John Yates; The Anglican Digest, a great resource and a consistently good read; Langford at Farmers Hardware; Murray Whisnant; Dr. Peter Haibach; Barbara Conrad Pinnix; Kenny Isaacs; Betty Newman; Jeff Harris; Bishop Keith Ackerman; The Reverend Edward Pippin; Rick Carter, Esq.; Ted Carter; Don Mertz; Dr. Chuck Colson; Kent Watson; Ron Humphrey; Wayne Erbsen; Graham Children’s Health Center, Asheville, NC; Janet Miller; Ivy Nursery; The Reverend Gale Cooper; Cheryl Lewis; The Reverend Christopher Henderson; Dr. Karen DiGeorgis; Dr. Chris Grover; Alice Boggs Lentz; Richard A. Propst; Dharma Benincasa; The Reverend Harry N. Hill; The Reverend Jeffrey Palmer Fishwick; Joni Roseman; Nancy Briggs; Dr. David Ludwig; Janet Cherchuck; Stephen Shifflett; Jeffrey Garrison; Sharon Vandyke; R. David Craig; and Jerry Burns, man about town.
Special thanks to:
Dr. Paul Thomas Klas; The Reverend James Harris; Dr. Sue Frye; Nancy Lou Beard, Joke Queen; Michael Thacker, my right hand; and to my valued readers and booksellers for your boundless enthusiasm and encouragement.
In memoriam:
Sonya Massi, sister in Christ, 1934–2001; those lost in the Pentagon and World Trade Center catastrophes, and the Pennsylvania plane crash of September 11.
Contents
ONE:
Go and Tell
TWO:
Mixed Blessings
THREE:
The Future Hour
FOUR:
www.seek&find.com
FIVE:
A Sudden Darkness
SIX:
The Vale
SEVEN:
Grace Sufficient
EIGHT:
Tender Mercies
NINE:
Touching God
TEN:
Up and Doing
ELEVEN:
To Sing in the Dark
TWELVE:
Where the Heart Is
THIRTEEN:
Sammy
FOURTEEN:
Waiting for Wings
FIFTEEN:
In This Mountain
SIXTEEN:
Gizzards Today
SEVENTEEN:
A Coal Yet Burning
EIGHTEEN:
Looking Alike
NINETEEN:
A Day in Thy Courts
TWENTY:
In Everything
TWENTY-ONE:
Salmon Roulade
TWENTY-TWO:
Even to the Dust
TWENTY-THREE:
A Place of Springs
In This Mountain
CHAPTER ONE
Go and Tell
Moles again!
Father Tim Kavanagh stood on the front steps of the yellow house and looked with dismay at the mounds of raw earth disgorged upon his frozen March grass.
Holes pocked the lawn, causing it to resemble a lunar surface; berms of dirt crisscrossed the yard like stone walls viewed from an Irish hilltop.
He glanced across the driveway to the rectory, once his home and now his rental property, where the pesky Talpidae were entertaining themselves in precisely the same fashion. Indeed, they had nearly uprooted Hélène Pringle’s modest sign, Lessons for the Piano, Inquire Within; it slanted drunkenly to the right.
Year after year, he’d tried his hand at mole-removal remedies, but the varmints had one-upped him repeatedly; in truth, they appeared to relish coming back for more, and in greater numbers.
He walked into the yard and gave the nearest mound a swift kick. Blast moles to the other side of the moon, and leave it to him to have a wife who wanted them caught in traps and carted to the country where they might frolic in a meadow among buttercups and bluebells.
And who was to do the catching and carting? Yours truly.
He went inside to his study and called the Hard to Beat Hardware in Wesley, believing since childhood that hardware stores somehow had the answers to life’s more vexing problems.
“Voles!” exclaimed the hardware man. “What most people’ve got is voles, they just think they’re moles!”
“Aha.”
“What voles do is eat th’ roots of your plants, chow down on your bulbs an’ all. Have your bulbs bloomed th’ last few years?”
“Why, yes. Yes, they have.”
The hardware man sighed. “So maybe it is moles. Well, they’re in there for the grubs, you know, what you have to do is kill th’ grubs.”
“I was thinking more about ah, taking out the moles.”
“Cain’t do that n’more, state law.”
Even the government had jumped on the bandwagon for moles, demonstrating yet again what government had come to in this country. “So. How do you get rid of grubs?”
“Poison.”
“I see.”
“’Course, some say don’t use it if you got dogs and cats. You got dogs and cats?”
“We do.”
He called Dora Pugh at the hardware on Main Street.
“Whi
rligigs,” said Dora. “You know, those little wooden propellerlike things on a stick, Ol’ Man Mueller used to make ’em? They come painted an’ all, to look like ducks an’ geese an’ whatnot. When th’ wind blows, their wings fly around, that’s th’ propellers, and th’ commotion sends sound waves down their tunnels and chases ’em out. But you have to use a good many whirligigs.”
He didn’t think his wife would like their lawn studded with whirligigs.
“Plus, there’s somethin’ that works on batt’ries, that you stick in th’ ground. Only thing is, I’d have to order it special, which takes six weeks, an’ by then…”
“…they’d probably be gone, anyway.”
“Right,” said Dora, clamping the phone between her left ear and shoulder while bagging seed corn.
He queried Percy Mosely, longtime proprietor of the Main Street Grill. “What can you do to get rid of moles?”
Percy labeled this a dumb question. “Catch ’em by th’ tail an’ bite their heads off is what I do.”
On his way to the post office, he met Gene Bolick leaving the annual sale on boiled wool items at the Irish Woolen Shop. Gene’s brain tumor, inoperable because of its location near the brain stem, had caused him to teeter as he walked, a sight Father Tim did not relish seeing in his old friend and parishioner.
“Look here!” Gene held up a parcel. “Cardigan sweater with leather buttons, fifty percent off, and another twenty percent today only. Better get in there while th’ gettin’s good.”
“No, thanks, the Busy Fingers crowd in Whitecap knitted me a cardigan that will outlast the Sphinx. Tell me, buddy—do you know anything about getting rid of moles?”