In the Company of Others Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-one

  Twenty-two

  Twenty-three

  Twenty-four

  Twenty-five

  Twenty-six

  Twenty-seven

  Twenty-eight

  Twenty-nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-one

  Thirty-two

  Thirty-three

  Thirty-four

  Thirty-five

  Thirty-six

  Thirty-seven

  Thirty-eight

  Thirty-nine

  Forty

  Forty-one

  Forty-two

  Forty-three

  Thanking:

  Remembering:

  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

  Shepherds Abiding

  Light from Heaven

  The Mitford Bedside Companion

  Jan Karon's Mitford Cookbook & Kitchen Reader

  Patches of Godlight

  A Continual Feast

  The Mitford Snowmen

  Esther's Gift

  THE FATHER TIM NOVELS

  Home to Holly Springs

  CHILDREN'S BOOKS

  Miss Fannie's Hat

  Jeremy: The Tale of an Honest Bunny

  ALL AGES

  The Trellis and the Seed

  JAN KARON PRESENTS

  Violet Comes to Stay

  Story by Melanie Cecka ; Pictures by Emily Arnold McCully

  Violet Goes to the Country

  Story by Melanie Cecka ; Pictures by Emily Arnold McCully

  VIKING

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street,

  New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto,

  Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published in 2010 by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  Copyright (c) Jan Karon, 2010

  All rights reserved

  Excerpt from "My Butterfly" from The Poetry of Robert Frost, edited by Edward Connery Lathem. Copyright 1934, 1969 by Henry Holt and Company. Copyright 1962 by Robert Frost.

  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.

  In the company of others : a Father Tim novel / Jan Karon.

  p. cm.--(The Father Tim series)

  eISBN : 978-1-101-46598-1

  1. Clergy--Fiction. 2. Americans--Ireland--Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3561.A678I44 2010

  813'.54--dc22

  2010024268

  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.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrightable materials. Your support of the author's rights is appreciated.

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  To readers of this work,

  I dedicate these words

  from the Kavanagh family crest:

  SIOCHAIN AGUS FARISINGE

  Peace and plenty

  One

  The beams of their hired car scarcely penetrated a summer twilight grown dark as pitch in the downpour.

  His wife's fear of being hemmed in was only slightly greater than his own. As the road narrowed to a lane the width of a sheep track, he took Cynthia's hand and peered out to sullen hedges pressing on either side. He was peevish at being crammed into a rain-hammered Volvo with a testy driver and a box of books, which for some bizarre reason they had thought they couldn't live without.

  He closed his eyes, then thought it best to keep them open. He was a lousy traveler. Indeed, the aggravation of getting from Atlanta to Dublin had exceeded his worst expectations. Following a delay of seven hours due to storms in the Atlanta area, the trip across the Pond had been an unnerving piece of business which shortened his temper and swelled his feet to ridiculous proportions. Then, onto a commuter flight to Sligo Airport at Strandhill, where--and this was the final straw, or so he hoped--they met the antiquated vehicle that would take them to the lodge on Lough Arrow. When he located an online Sligo car service a month back and figured how to dial the country code, hadn't he plainly said this trip would celebrate his wife's birthday as well as her first time in Ireland? Hadn't he specified a nice car?

  In any case, they'd be getting no consolation from the driver, a small, wiry fellow so hunkered over the wheel that little more was visible than his headgear--a mashed and hapless affair of uncertain purpose, possibly a hat.

  He had visited County Sligo as a bachelor ten years ago, with his attorney cousin, Walter, and Walter's wife, Katherine; they had driven to and from the fishing lodge on this same road. In any weather, it was no place to meet oncoming vehicles.

  He unbuckled the seat belt and leaned forward.

  'Aengus, I think we should pull off.'

  'What's that?'

  'I think we should pull off,' he shouted above the din of rain and wipers.

  'No place to pull off.'

  'Ask him how he can possibly see anything,' said Cynthia.

  'How can you possibly . . . ?'

  'I see th' wall on m' right an' keep to it.'

  'Doesn't appear to be any cars coming, why don't we stop and wait it out?' Torrential. Second only to the hurricane he'd driven through in Whitecap.

  'I'll get round th' bend there an' see what's ahead.' Aengus muttered, shook his head. 'Bleedin' rain, an'
fog t' bleedin' boot.'

  'It's what keeps you green,' shouted his wife, opting for the upbeat.

  'That's what they all say. M'self, I'm after goin' on holiday to Ibiza.'

  He sat back and tried to stuff his right foot into the shoe he'd removed on entering the car.

  'Timothy,' said his wife, 'if there's no place to pull off, what happens when people meet another vehicle?'

  'Someone has to back up. I never quite understood how that gets decided. Anyway, there'll be a pull-off along here somewhere; they seem to appear at very providential places.'

  'When he said he keeps to the wall, I realized those aren't hedges. There's stone under all those vines.'

  He thought she looked mildly accusing, as if he'd neglected to pass along this wisdom.

  'Walls!' reiterated Aengus. 'Landlord walls.'

  He had promised her this trip for years, and for one reason or another, it had been often deferred, twice rescheduled, and even now there was a glitch. Last week, Walter and Katherine had been forced to postpone tomorrow's planned arrival in Sligo until four days hence. Walter's apologies were profuse; after months of red tape and head scratching, he said, the date for meeting with a big client had come out of the blue. His cousin hated the inconvenience it would cause; after all, Katherine was the only one among them with guts to drive the Irish roadways. She was a regular Stirling Moss--fearless, focused, fast. Too fast, the cousins had long agreed, but what could they do? They were both cowards, unfit for the job.

  Until Walter and Katherine arrived at the lodge with wheels, he and Cynthia would be stuck like moss on a log. 'How will you manage? ' Walter had asked.

  'Very well, indeed,' he said. In truth, Walter and Katherine's delay was the best of news. He and Cynthia were badly in need of four uneventful days, having been thrashed by the affairs of recent months.

  Soon after she fractured her ankle and lapsed, unwilling, into what she called her Long and Unlovely Confinement, he learned he had a half-brother in Mississippi. There had been a few shocks in his seventy years, most of them occurring during forty-plus years as a priest, but never anything like this.

  As a kid, he'd once pulled that nearly impossible stunt of St. Paul's and prayed without ceasing--for a brother. It didn't work. Then, sixty years later, there was Henry Winchester. Henry, with acute myelogenous leukemia, needing stem cells from a close relative.

  He had quartered in Memphis with Cynthia for weeks, giving over his stem cells through apheresis, standing watch at Henry's bedside and feeling in an odd and confusing way that he was fighting for his own life. His long road trip in a vintage Mustang hadn't helped, of course. Then, playing out the proverb of 'when it rains it pours,' came the sudden flare-up of his diabetes only days ago.

  'There's no way we're not going,' he told his wife, whose recent sixty-fourth birthday had gone largely uncelebrated.

  'There's no way we're not going,' he told his doctor, who had seen him through two diabetic comas and was as hidebound as they come. Hoppy Harper had preached him the lipids sermon followed by the exercise sermon, pulled a stern face to ram the points home, then caved. 'So, go,' he said, popping a jelly bean.

  Four days. To walk the shores of Lough Arrow. To row to an island in the middle of the lake and picnic with Cynthia. To sit and stare--gaping, if need be--at nothing or everything.

  It would be roughly in the spirit of their honeymoon by the lake in Maine, where their grandest amenity was a kerosene lamp. It had rained then, too. He remembered the sound of it on the tin roof of the camp, and the first sight of her in the white nightgown, her hair damp from the shower, and her eyes lit by an inner fire that was at once deeply familiar and strangely new. He hadn't really known until then why he'd never before loved profoundly.

  Cynthia nudged him with her elbow. 'We're around the bend.'

  He leaned forward and shouted, 'We're around the bend. You were going to stop.'

  'There's nothin' so bad it couldn't be worse--another bend comin' up.'

  He sank back in the seat. 'That's the way of bends. They keep coming up.'

  'What am I t' call you?' shouted Aengus. 'Are ye th' father or th' rev'rend?'

  'Reverend,' he said. 'I'm the Father back home, but in your country only Catholic priests are addressed as Father.'

  'Here for th' fishin', you an' th' missus?'

  'No fishing.'

  ''t is th' fishin' capital of th' west, you should have a go at it.'

  'We could reach out and touch those walls,' she said. 'It looks like we're going to rip the side mirrors off their hinges.'

  He made another feckless go at shoeing his right foot. 'Always looks that way.' His earlier foray here had earned him rights to play the old head. 'Never happens.'

  Aengus gave him a shout. 'I've been thinkin', Rev'rend.'

  'What's that?'

  'There's seven or eight them Kav'na families in Easkey.'

  'Good. Wonderful.'

  She foraged in her handbag, which did double duty as mobile library and snack hamper. 'Here,' she said. 'Eat this. It's been four hours.'

  Raisins. He ate a handful with a kind of simple shame, recalling chocolate with macadamias.

  She leaned close, her breath warm in his ear. 'Do you think he does this for a living? He isn't wearing a uniform or anything.'

  'Ask him,' he said. He was sick of yelling.

  She unbuckled her seat belt and leaned forward to the hat. 'Mr. Malone, do you do this for a living?'

  'What's that?'

  'Drive tourists. Is it what you do . . . all the time?'

  ''t is the only time. 't is m' brother's oul' clunker. I mow verges for th' Council at Sligo.'

  She sat back and rebuckled. 'He mows verges,' she said, looking straight ahead. 'It's the only time he's done this.'

  There was no point in pursuing that line of thought. 'The sides of the road where weeds grow,' he said, in case she didn't know from verges.

  Rain drummed the roof. The fan in the dash spewed air smelling of aftershave. They moved at a crawl.

  'Mother of God!' shouted Aengus.

  The sudden slam of brakes jolted them forward. A blinding light . . . on top of them. His heart pounded into his throat.

  Aengus flashed the Volvo's high beams, scraped the gears in reverse, and squinted into the rearview mirror.

  'Bloody lorry,' he snapped. 'We'll be backin' up.'

  Two

  The walls ended; the rain slackened; parting clouds liberated scraps of pale light. The hedges now were merely tumbled stones and August bloom twined with ivy, foxglove, scarlet creeper.

  Aengus Malone had learned a certain dexterity on his mower; his skill at locating and backing into the previously overlooked pull-off had been brilliant. The lorry driver had given three blasts of his horn as a thumbs-up.

  'That was some scrape you bailed us out of,' he said to Aengus. 'Well done.'

  'It's m' lucky hat that done it.' Aengus reached up and patted the thing. 'Me oul' mum give it to me.'

  'If it weren't so dark,' said Cynthia, 'we might see a rainbow.'

  'There's some as see rainbows at night, but those would be fairies.'

  'You believe in fairies?'

  'Ah, no, not a bit. But they're there noneth'less.'

  'You've never seen one, then?'

  'If it's fairies ye're after, they're said to be very numerous in Mayo.'

  On a slope in a grove of ancient beeches, the dusky, formless shape of the lodge appeared, its windows luminous against a starless night.

  His wife drew in her breath.

  Broughadoon.

  'That would be candles burnin',' said Aengus. The Volvo rattled over a cattle grate. 'Looks like th' rain's shut down your power.'

  'Stop,' said Cynthia. 'Please.'

  Aengus braked; the motor idled.

  'It's the most beautiful sight I've ever seen.'

  She sat for a moment, bound in one of her spells, then opened the door. A pure and solemn air spilled in; his right foot sl
ipped into his loafer.

  She got out of the car and stood looking along the slope to the fishing lodge, at fog drifting among the cloistered beeches. 'Listen,' she said.

  They listened.

  'Nothin' much t' hear,' said Aengus.

  Rain dripped from the shadowed trees, pattered on the roof of the car; a breeze stirred.

  He watched as she got back in the car and closed the door and looked at him and smiled. Then she leaned to him and kissed him. Her faint scent of wisteria mingled with the Sligo air. He had never been so happy in his life.

  As they drew up to the lodge, figures appeared on the stoop, silhouetted against the light from the open front door. Three barking dogs bounded onto the gravel and squared off with the Volvo.

  There was a considerable shaking of hands with innkeepers Liam and Anna Conor, as the dogs ganged a-glee about their feet--two Labradors, and a Jack Russell dancing on its hind legs.

  Anna, the striking-looking woman he'd known a decade earlier, gave him a hand-wringing that jimmied his teeth. He admired all over again her tousle of copper-colored hair and, without meaning to, blurted the sentiment aloud.

  They were joined by a white-haired old man wearing a tie and cardigan and brandishing a walking stick. In the gabble of greetings, he decried their weather as 'foul and infernal.'

  Somewhere, thanks be to God, something was cooking. 'Lamb,' he said to his wife. He could devour a table leg.

  He recognized the feeling he experienced on his wedding day nearly eight years ago--as if he'd lost the proper sense of things and stepped outside his body. He was a cannonball fired directly from the quiet desperation of a hired car into a domestic muddle of energy and good cheer.

  They were herded through an entrance hall, its walls fairly crammed with fish mounted in glass cases, and into a sitting room lit by candles and an open fire. A half-finished jigsaw puzzle was spread on a table among a loose aggregation of sofas and wing chairs.

  He felt at once the keen pleasure of the room: its book-lined walls and good pictures, the impression of ease.

  In a corner, three men murmured over a card game by the light of a candle. A distinguished-looking fellow sat reading a newspaper by the firelight and stroking his white mustache; upon seeing them, he stood at once and buttoned his jacket.