In This Mountain Read online

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  IN THIS MOUNTAIN

  Jan Karon writes “to give readers an extended family, and to applaud the extraordinary beauty of ordinary lives.” She is the author of eight Mitford novels, At Home in Mitford; A Light in the Window; These High, Green Hills; Out to Canaan; A New Song: A Common Life; In This Mountain; and Shepherds Abiding, all available from Penguin. She is also the author of Patches of Godlight: Father Tim’s Favorite Quotes; The Mitford Snowmen: A Christmas Story; Esther’s Gift; and The Trellis and the Seed. Her children’s books include Miss Fannie’s Hat and Jeremy: The Tale of an Honest Bunny. Coming from Viking in fall 2004 is Jan Karon’s Mitford Cookbook and Kitchen Reader.

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  The Mitford Years

  In This Mountain

  JAN KARON

  Viking

  Viking

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Putnam Inc., 375 Hudson Street,

  New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Books Australia Ltd, 250 Camberwell Road,

  Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia

  Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue,

  Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2

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  Penguin Books (N.Z.) Ltd, Cnr Rosedale and Airborne Roads, Albany,

  Auckland, New Zealand

  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue,

  Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices:

  Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England

  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.

  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 righ
t.

  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.

  “Whirligigs,” 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?”

  “Moles? My daddy always hollered in their holes and they took off every whichaway.”

  “What did he say when he hollered?”

  Gene cleared his throat, tilted toward Father Tim’s right ear, and repeated the short, but fervent, litany.

  “My goodness!” said the earnest gardener, blushing to the very roots of what hair he had left.

  He heard the receiver being crushed against the capacious bosom of his bishop’s secretary, and a muffled conversation. He thought it appealingly quaint not to be put on hold and have his ear blasted with music he didn’t want to hear in the first place.

  “Timothy! A blessed Easter to you!”

  “And to you, Stuart!”

  “I was thinking of you only this morning.”

  “Whatever for? Some interim pulpit assignment in outer Mongolia?”

  “No, just thinking that we haven’t had a really decent chinwag in, good heavens, since before you went down to Whitecap.”

  “An eon, to be precise.” Well, a couple of years, anyway.

  “Come and have lunch with me,” suggested his bishop, sounding…sounding what? Pensive? Wistful?

  “I’ll do it!” he said, decidedly spontaneous after last Sunday’s Easter celebration. “I’ve been meaning to come for a visit, there’s something I’d like us to talk over. I may have a crate of moles that must be taken to the country. I can release them on my way to you.”

  “A crate of…moles.”

  “Yes.” He didn’t want to discuss it further.

  But he couldn’t catch the blasted things. He prodded their tunnels with sticks, a burlap sack at the ready; he shouted into their burrows, repeating what Gene had recommended, though in a low voice; he blew his honorary Mitford Reds coach’s whistle; he stomped on the ground like thunder.

  “I give up,” he told his wife, teeth chattering from the cold.

  He noted the streak of blue watercolor on her chin, a sure sign she was working on her current children’s book starring Violet, the real-life white cat who usually resided atop their refrigerator.

  “But you just started!”

  “Started? I’ve been working at it a full half hour.”

  “Ten minutes max,” Cynthia said. “I watched you, and I must say I never heard of getting rid of moles by shouting down their tunnels.”

  He pulled his gloves off his frozen hands and sat on a kitchen stool, disgusted. His dog sprawled at his feet and yawned.

  “I mean, what were you saying when you shouted?”

  He had no intention of telling her. “If you still want them caught and crated up, you do the catching and crating, and I’ll haul them to the country. A fair division of labor.” He was sick of the whole business.

  Cynthia glared at him as if she were his fifth-grade teacher and he a dunce on the stool. “Why don’t you just stop fretting over it, Timothy? Let them have their day!”

  Have their day! That was the artistic temperament for you. “But they’re ruining the lawn I’ve slaved over for years, the lawn you dreamed of, longed for, indeed craved, so that you might walk on it barefoot—and I quote—‘as upon a bolt of unfurled velvet.’”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake, did I say such a silly thing?”

  He rolled his eyes.

  “Timothy, you know that if you simply turn your head for a while, the humps will go down, the holes will fill in, and by May or June, the lawn will be just fine.”

  She was right, of course, but that wasn’t the point.

  “I love you bunches,” she said cheerily, trotting down the hall to her studio.

  He pulled on his running clothes with the eagerness of a kid yanked from bed on the day of a test he hadn’t studied for.

  Exercise was good medicine for diabetes, but he didn’t have to like it. In truth, he wondered why he didn’t enjoy running anymore. He’d once enjoyed it immensely.

  “Peaks and valleys,” he muttered. His biannual checkup was just around the bend, and he was going to walk into Hoppy Harper’s office looking good.

  As the Lord’s Chapel bells tolled noon, he was hightailing it to the Main Street Grill, where a birthday lunch for J. C. Hogan would be held in the rear booth.

  Flying out the door of Happy Endings Bookstore, he hooked a left and crashed into someone, full force.

  Edith Mallory staggered backward, regained her balance, and gave him a look that made his blood run cold.

  “Edith! I’m terribly sorry.”

  “Why don’t you watch where you’re going?” She jerked the broad collar of a dark mink coat more securely around her face. “Clergy,” she
said with evident distaste. “They’re always preoccupied with lofty thoughts, aren’t they?”

  Not waiting for an answer, she swept past him into Happy Endings, where the bell jingled wildly on the door.

  “’Er High Muckety Muck traipsed by a minute ago,” said Percy Mosely, wiping off the table of the rear booth.

  Father Tim noted that the slur of her perfume had been left on his clothes. “I just ran into her.”

  “I’d like t’ run into ’er…,” said the Grill owner, “with a eighteen-wheeler.”

  If there was anyone in town who disliked Edith Mallory more than himself, it was Percy Mosely, who, a few years ago, had nearly lost his business to Edith’s underhanded landlord tactics. It was clergy, namely yours truly, who had brought her nefarious ambitions to utter ruin. Thus, if there was anyone in town whom Edith Mallory could be presumed to despise more than Tim Kavanagh, he didn’t have a clue who it might be.

  “Ever’ time I think I’ve seen th’ last of that witch on a broom, back she comes like a dog to ’is vomit.”

  “Cool it, Percy, your blood pressure…”

  “An’ Ed Coffey still drivin’ ’er around in that Lincoln like th’ Queen of England, he ought t’ be ashamed of his sorry self, he’s brought disgrace on th’ whole Coffey line.”

  J. C. Hogan, Muse editor and Grill regular, slammed his overstuffed briefcase into the booth and slid in. “You’ll never guess what’s hit Main Street.”

  Percy looked fierce. “Don’t even mention ’er name in my place.”

  “Joe Ivey and Fancy Skinner are locked in a price war.” J.C. pulled a large handkerchief from his hip pocket and wiped his face.