In This Mountain (A Mitford Novel, Band 7) - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Jan Karon is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of fourteen novels in the Mitford series, featuring Episcopal priest Father Tim Kavanagh. She has authored twelve other books, including Jan Karon's Mitford Cookbook and Kitchen Reader, and several titles for children. Jan lives in Virginia near the World Heritage site of Jefferson's Monticello.

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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.

    "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, damping 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...