In This Mountain (6 page)

“Here comes Hamp Floyd,” said J.C. “Hide your wallet.”

“What for?”

“Th’ town needs a new fire truck.”

“Seems like a good cause,” said Father Tim. He took out his billfold and removed a ten.

“Th’ town’s got th’ money for a standard truck, but Hamp wants a few bells an’ whistles.”

“Aha.”

“Plus, he won’t have anything to do with a red truck,” said J.C.

“Seems like a fire chief would like red. Besides, what other color is there?”

“Yellow. He’s holdin’ out for yellow.”

A
yellow
fire truck? Father Tim put the ten back in his billfold and pulled out a five.

The usually talkative Puny moved around the kitchen without once acknowledging his presence. He might have been a bump on a log as he sat at the kitchen island drinking tea.

He peered over his newspaper.

He knew that pinched brow of hers and the soulful cast of her eyes; Puny Guthrie wore her heart on her sleeve, she couldn’t hide anything from him. He should ask her straight out what was going on, but then again…maybe he didn’t want to know.

He dropped his gaze to the story about the grave sites of Union soldiers presumed to exist on Edith Mallory’s sprawling ridge property above Mitford. Coot Hendrick, their unofficial mayor pro-tem and great-grandson of Mitford’s founder, wanted the graves identified and available to public view, as did several preservationists in the area. Edith Mallory, secure behind a combination of electric fences and electronic gates, continued to deny access to anybody, much less what she called in a letter to the editor, “the morbid and profane.”

Though the controversy between the town and Edith Mallory had dragged on for two or three years, most people didn’t give a hoot either way. Who wanted to see graves? And especially Yankee graves? The legend that the soldiers were shot in cold blood by the town’s founder might have gone over big a hundred years ago, but in today’s world, said another letter to the editor, it was murder, plain and simple, and “nothing to be proud of.”

As usual, the
Muse
printed a sidebar containing all the verses of a song said to have been composed by Mitford’s founder, Hezekiah Hendrick, and believed by Coot Hendrick and his elderly mother to be proof positive that the graves could be located on the Mallory property.

“Brouhaha!” exclaimed Father Tim.

This comment elicited no response from his longtime house help, who remained silent as a tomb as she peeled apples for a pie.

“Puny, what’s on your mind?”

She turned from the sink and looked at him oddly, then burst into tears.

See there? He should have kept his big mouth shut.

Puny pulled up her apron and hid her face. “I had th’ awfulest dream!”

“Tell me everything,” he said. “Come and sit here.” He patted the stool beside him.

“I cain’t talk if I sit,” she said, wiping her eyes. “Th’ dream was so lifelike, I thought it was real. It’s worried me to death all day.”

“What did you dream?”

“It was about you. I didn’t know if I should tell you. I mean, I
want
to tell you, but I don’t know if I should, because it’s like if I tell you, it might really happen.” She drew her apron over her face again. “You were so
sick
.”

“Puny, Puny, it was just a dream, don’t cry, everything’s fine! I’m healthy as a horse!” He got off the stool and went to her and put his arm around her solid shoulders.

“I jis’ couldn’t stand it if anything happened to you, you’re th’ only granpaw th’ girls’ll ever have….” She blew her nose on the handkerchief he handed her.

“What was the dream about?”

“In th’ dream I begged you to go to the doctor and Cynthia did, too, and you wouldn’t go and you got real bad off an’…”

“And what?”

“An’ maybe
died
, I cain’t remember th’ end, but it seemed like you died, Joe Joe woke me up because I was cryin’.”

“Let it go from your mind, it was only a dream. You were probably sleeping on your back. I have bad dreams if I sleep on my back.”

“I was sleepin’ on my side, I always sleep on my side,” she assured him.

“So you probably ate too late, that’ll do it every time.”

“No!” she said, shaking her head. “All I had was fruit salad, you cain’t have bad dreams on fruit salad.”

He sighed.

“I feel like this dream meant somethin’. I think you’re supposed to go to Dr. Hopper and see if you’re OK.”

“Well…,” he said, not wanting to make a big production over a dream.

“
Well
ain’t good enough,” she said flatly. “You need to do this for Cynthia. An’ for Sissy an’ Sassy!”

“OK,” he said. “I’ll go.”

“You could pick up th’ phone and make an appointment this minute.”

Emma Newland made over, except with freckles. “As a matter of fact, I have an appointment coming up in…let’s see, three days! How’s that?”

She looked at him intently, red-eyed. “Father…”

“Yes?”

“I think th’ Lord wants you to do this.”

“Well, then, that settles it,” he said earnestly.

“Dearest, you need a haircut.”

Get a haircut. See a doctor. Was there no end to it? “It can wait awhile.”

“You look like a Los Angeles film director.”

“What do you know about Los Angeles film directors?”

“Television, darling. Remember television? Film directors appear on things like Oscar night, which you and I recently watched for a full nine minutes before we fell asleep with our clothes on.”

“Ah.”

“So when can you do it?”

“I don’t know.”

“Yes, but you know the alternative. If you don’t get it done professionally, that means I must do it, or Dooley.” His wife raised one eyebrow and grinned.

The very thought made him weak in the knees. Both had positively butchered him once or twice before, and Puny wouldn’t touch his hair with a ten-foot pole. But the last thing he wanted was to get caught in the fray between Joe Ivey and Fancy Skinner. No way would he slink in the back door of the Sweet Stuff Bakery and risk a run-in with Fancy Skinner; Fancy would curl his hair right then and there. In truth, rumor had it that she often looked down from her upstairs aerie to see who came and went to Joe Ivey, and was taking names. Emma said Fancy had seen Marcie Guthrie, to name only one, go turncoat. For a measly two bucks less, Marcie had popped in to Joe and was said to have exited the place looking like J. C. Hogan. “Let ’em
go
downstairs!” Fancy snapped, nearly burning Emma’s ear off with the curling iron. “Anybody can save two dollars and spend two months wishin’ they hadn’t!”

“I’ll run over to Wesley one of these days,” he said, trying to mean it.

He was sitting on the sofa in the study when he heard Puny and his wife discussing their neighbor.

“I don’t think she’s the marrying kind,” said Cynthia, rinsing mixed greens for a salad.

“Yes, but she’s a nice-lookin’ woman, seems it’d be good for her to have a husband.”

“Maybe. But who on earth would it be? I mean, this is
Mitford
!”

“Watch it!” he called into the kitchen. “Mitford, after all, is where you found yours truly.”

Puny giggled. “I think she’s kind of soft on th’ father.”

“Yes, well,” said his wife, “she can get over it!”

There! He was thrilled to hear this. Feeling expansive, he kicked off his loafers.

“What about the Collar Button man?” asked Puny, setting dinner plates on the island.

“I don’t think
he’s
the marrying kind.”

“Mr. Omer,” said Puny. “He has a nice, big smile.”

“Omer Cunningham is a teddy bear, but not her sort. Darling, who are the bachelors in Mitford?”

“Ummm. Let’s see. Avis Packard!”

“Too strange!” said his wife, rolling her eyes.

“Scott Murphy!” he called from the study.

“Timothy! Scott and Miss Pringle wouldn’t be suited in the
least.
What are you
thinking
?”

“I’m not trying to make matches here, you asked me who the bachelors are. I’d like to see Scott find someone, though, if you have any ideas on the distaff side.”

“Then, of course,” said Cynthia, dismissing his agenda for Scott Murphy, “there’s Andrew Gregory’s brother-in-law, Tony, a handsome fellow, and Catholic like Miss Pringle, but quite clearly—”

“Too
young
!” declared Puny.

“This is hard.” He scratched his head. “Old Man Mueller?”

“Timothy, for heaven’s
sake
!”

“Remember, I’m not proposing anything, I’m only naming bachelors, as I was asked to do. Lew Boyd!” Lew had been a widower for a number of years.

His wife didn’t acknowledge this contribution.

He threw up his hands, naming the only other bachelor he could possibly think of. “Coot Hendrick!”

“You see?” Cynthia said to Puny. “There’s absolutely nobody in Mitford for a nice French lady who teaches piano.”

He and Cynthia were hammering down on the front and side yards of the yellow house. Mayor Gregory had poured on the coal for their annual Rose Day, advertising the event in newspapers as far away as Charlotte, Asheville, Winston-Salem, and Raleigh. Now everybody was breaking their necks to get cleaned up for the tourists just days hence. While former Mayor Esther Cunningham had despised the very word
tourist
, Andrew Gregory thought otherwise, arguing that controlled tourism was an economy that produced no factory emissions or water pollution. The merchants, while fond enough of the Cunningham reign, clearly favored the Gregory renaissance.

Though five projects had been marked off Father Tim’s list, the following remained:

Add lkspr to front bds, cut wisteria off garage, grub honeyskle/ivy at steps, cultivate/mulch/spray roses, whlbarrow from H. Pringle, new hose/ nzzl.

Could he finish in time? Had his list been too ambitious? And then there was Cynthia’s list, which was considerably longer than the one in his shirt pocket. He leaned on the garden spade and wiped his perspiring forehead with a worn handkerchief. “No rest for the wicked,” he said.

“And th’ righteous don’t need none!” crowed his wife, completing a proverb favored by Uncle Billy Watson. She was squatting with a weeder, going full throttle at an infestation of wire grass in the perennial bed facing Wisteria Lane.

He heard a car brake suddenly in the street, squawking to the curb. “There she is!” a voice called.

He looked up as the driver and passenger leaped from a Buick, the motor still running, and dashed across the sidewalk to the perennial bed. Both callers wore muumuus, though of different colors, and both appeared flushed and overwrought.

“You’re Cynthia Coppersmith!” exclaimed the one with a camera strapped around her neck.

“The nice man at the drugstore told us where you live,” said the other, “but don’t tell him we told you he told us!”

“We’re your biggest fans in the whole world, we drove all the way from Albany, Georgia, just to see where you do your little cat books!”

“We hoped we’d run into you, but we never
dreamed
we’d find you out in your
yard
!”

“Oh, gosh, I’m often in my yard,” said Cynthia.

“Get over there behind her, Sue Lynn, and let me take a picture!”

He noted that Sue Lynn jumped behind his wife with astonishing agility.

Click.
“Sue Lynn, honey, you blinked, let me take it again.”
Click.
“Oh, umm, could you move out of the picture, your arm was in that one.” He moved out of the picture.
Click.

“Now, would you take a picture of Sue Lynn and me behind Cynthia?” A camera was thrust into his hands.

“Sue Lynn, honey, take your sunglasses off, we can’t see your face!”

“Oh, mercy,” said his wife, clearly distressed. “I’m filthy, we really shouldn’t be doing this.”

He was struck by her look of dumbfounded desperation. “Ladies!” he proclaimed in his pulpit voice, “perhaps we could—”

“Just look through that little place in the middle and push down the button on the right,” said the camera owner. She hunkered over Cynthia, who appeared frozen in a squat position. “We just love your little books better than anything, this is so exciting I can hardly stand it, we’ll send you a copy of the pictures, we always order four-by-six glossy. Sue Lynn, honey,
move over
! It’s that little button on the right! On th’
right
! There you go!”

He noted that Dooley was forking down his lasagna, itching to pick up Tommy and haul him to Wesley for a movie. The plan to eat at least one meal a day together wasn’t easy to stick to, especially with a teenager, but they were all hanging in there until Dooley’s move to his mother’s house tomorrow night. After that, he’d be out to Meadowgate for the summer, helping Hal Owen with his veterinary practice, and they’d be heading for Tennessee.

“‘Fame…,’” he muttered, dribbling olive oil on a slice of bread.

“What about it?” Cynthia inquired.

“‘…can never be a bedfellow to tranquillity,’” he said, loosely quoting Montaigne.

“And all because of little books about a cat. Who knew?” His wife looked oddly pleased.

The award business in New York and the invitation to travel around the country had been one thing, but today had been another. He’d felt strangely unnerved by the women in muumuus.