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"I got to do somethin' to rake in business."
Percy slid into the booth, looking...Father Tim pondered what Percy was looking...Percy was looking old, that's what; about like the rest of the crowd in the rear booth. He sucked up his double chin.
"Maybe I ought t' mess around with th' menu," said Percy, "an' come up with a special I could run th' same day ever' week."
"Gizzards!" said Mule.
"What about gizzards?"
"I've told you for years that gizzards is th' answer to linin' your pockets."
"Don't talk to me about gizzards, dadgummit! They're in th' same category as what goes over th' fence last. You'll never see me sellin' gizzards."
"To make it in th' restaurant business," said Mule, "you got to set your personal preferences aside. Gizzards are a big draw."
"He's right," said J.C. "You can sell gizzards in this town. This is a gizzard kind of town."
Mule swigged his coffee. "All you got to do is put out a sign and see what happens."
Percy looked skeptical. "What kind of sign?"
"Just a plain, ordinary sign. Write it up yourself an' put it in th' window, no big deal."
"When me an' Velma retire at th' end of th' year, I want to go out in th' black, maybe send 'er to Washington to see th' cherry blossoms, she's never seen th' cherry blossoms."
"That's what gizzards are about," said Mule.
"What d'you mean?"
"Gizzards'll get some cash flow in this place."
"Seem like chicken livers would draw a better crowd," said Percy.
"Livers tie up too much capital." J.C. was hammering down on country ham, eggs over easy, and a side of yogurt. "Too much cost involved with livers. You want to go where the investment's low and the profit'shigh."
Mule looked at J.C. with some admiration. "You been readin' th' Wall Street Journal again."
"What would I put on th' sign?" asked Percy.
"Here's what I'd put," said Mule. "Gizzards Today."
"That's it? Gizzards Today?"
"That says it all right there. Like you say, run your gizzard special once a week, maybe on..." Mule drummed his fingers on the table, thinking. "Let's see..."
"Tuesday!" said J.C. "Tuesday would be good for gizzards. You wouldn't want to start out on Monday with gizzards, that'd be too early in th' week. And Wednesday you'd want something..."
"More upbeat," said Mule.
Father Tim buttered the last of his toast. "Right!"
"Wednesday could be your lasagna day," said J.C. "I'd pay good money for some lasagna in this town."
There was a long, pondering silence, broken only by a belch. Everyone looked at Mule. "'Scuse me," he said.
"Do y'all eat gizzards?" Percy inquired of the table.
"Not in this lifetime," said J.C.
"No way," said Mule.
"I pass," said Father Tim. "I ate a gizzard in first grade, that was enough for me."
Percy frowned. "I don't get it. You're some of my best reg'lars-why should I go to sellin' somethin' y'all won't eat?"
"We're a different demographic," said J.C.
"Oh," said Percy. "So how many gizzards would go in a servin,' do you think?"
"How many chicken tenders d'you put in a serving?"
"Six," said Percy. "Which is one too many for th' price."
"So, OK, as gizzards are way less meat than tenders, I'd offer fifteen, sixteen gizzards, minimum."
J.C. sopped his egg yolk with a microwave biscuit. "Be sure you batter 'em good, fry 'em crisp, an' serve with a side of dippin' sauce."
Percy looked sober for a moment, then suddenly brightened. "Fifteen gizzards, two bucks. What d'you think?"
"I think Velma's going to D.C.," said Father Tim.
A brief silence was filled with the sound of the dishwasher running full throttle behind the rear booth. Accustomed to its gyrations, the occupants of the booth no longer noticed that the wash cycle occasioned a rhythmic tremor in the floorboards.
"So how do you think your jewel thief will go over?" asked J.C.
"He's not my jewel thief," snapped Father Tim.
"It was your church attic he hid out in," said Percy.
"I think he'll go over just fine. He's paid his debt to society in full, but better than that, he's a redeemed man with a strong faith."
Silence.
Chewing.
Slurping.
"I hope," said Father Tim, "that you'll extend the hand of fellowship to him." There. That's all he had to say about it.
Mule nodded. "No problem. It's th' right thing to do."
More chewing.
"So how come you're not goin' to Rwanda or someplace like that?" asked Percy.
"Hoppy wouldn't allow it." Hoppy would never have considered such a thing. Father Tim knew his limitations and they were nu- merous.
"What about th' kids in your own backyard? You ever thought of doin' somethin' for them?"
The fact that he'd supported the Children's Hospital in Wesley for twenty years was his own business; he never talked about it. "Tennessee is our own backyard." How he ever ended up with this bunch of turkeys was more than he could fathom.
"We'll miss you," said Mule, clapping him on the shoulder. "I won't hardly know what to order around here."
Father Tim laughed, suddenly forgiving. He thought he might miss them, too, though the possibility seemed a tad on the remote side.
"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.
--from In This Mountain by Jan Karon, Copyright © June 2002, Viking Press, a member of Penguin Putnam, Inc., used by permission.
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In This Mountain
By Jan Karon
Viking
Copyright © 2002 Jan Karon.
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 0670031046
Chapter One
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 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.
"A price war?" asked Father Tim.
"Head to head, you might say. Fancy had this big sign painted and put in her window upstairs, said, Haircuts Twelve Dollars, All Welcome. First thing you know, Joe puts a sign downstairs, says, Haircuts Eleven Dollars."
Joe Ivey's one-chair barbershop was located in a former storage room behind the kitchen of his sister's Sweet Stuff Bakery. The only other game in town was Fancy Skinner's unisex hair salon, A Cut Above, which rented the upstairs area over the bakery. "Poetic irony," is what one Grill customer called the arrangement.
"So Fancy cranks her price down to ten bucks and has her sign repainted. Then Joe drops his price, changes his sign, and gives me an ad that says, ‘Haircuts nine-fifty. Free chocolate chip cookie to every customer.’"
"Cutthroat," said Percy.
"I don't know where this'll end," said J.C., "but if you need a haircut, now's the time."
"Happy birthday. Father Tim thought they should get to the point.
"Right. Happy birthday!" said Percy. "You can be one of th' first to order offa my new menu."
J.C. scowled. "I was used to the old menu."
"This is my an' Velma's last year in this hole-in-th'-wall, I wanted to go out with a bang." Percy stepped to the counter and proudly removed three menus on which the ink was scarcely dry and handed them around. He thought the Wesley printer had come up with a great idea for this new batch—the cover showed the Grill motto set in green letters that were sort of swirling up, like steam, from a coffee mug: Eat here once and you'll be a regular.
"Where's Mule at?" asked Percy.
"Beats me," said Father Tim. "Probably getting a haircut."
"So how old are you?" Percy wanted to know.
J.C. grinned. "Fourteen goin' on fifteen is what Adele says."
"Gag me with a forklift," said Mule, skidding into the booth. "He's fifty-six big ones, I know because I saw his driver's license when he wrote a check at Shoe Barn."
"OK, give me your order and hop to it, Velma's havin' a perm down at Fancy's and I'm shorthanded. Free coffee in this booth, today only."
"I don't want coffee," said Mule. "I was thinkin' more like sweet ice tea."
"Coffee's free, tea's another deal."
J.C. opened his menu, looking grim. "You spelled potato wrong!" he announced.
"Where at?" asked Percy.
"Right here where it says ‘tuna croissant with potatoe chips.’ There's no e in potato."
"Since when?"
"Since ever."
Look who's talking, thought Father Tim.
"I'll be darned," said Mule. "Taco salad! Can you sell taco salad in this town?"
"Taco salad," muttered Percy, writing on his order pad.
"Wait a minute, I didn't say I wanted taco salad, I was just discussin' it."
"I don't have time for discussin'," said Percy. "I got a lunch crowd comin' in."
Father Tim noticed Percy's face was turning beet-red. Blood pressure, the stress of a new menu ...
"So what is a taco salad, anyway?" asked Mule.
The Muse editor looked up in amazement. "Have you been livin' under a rock? Taco salad is salad in a taco, for Pete's sake."
"No, it ain't," said Percy. "It's salad in a bowl with taco chips scattered on top."
Mule sank back in the booth, looking depressed. "I'll have what I been havin' before th' new menu, a grilled pimiento cheese on white bread, hold th' mayo."
"Do you see anything on this menu sayin' pimiento cheese? On this menu, we don't have pimiento cheese, we ain't goin' to get pimiento cheese, and that's th' end of it." The proprietor stomped away, looking disgusted.
"You made him mad," said J.C., wiping his face with his handkerchief.
"How can a man make a livin' without pimiento cheese on his menu?" Mule asked.
"'Less you want to run down to th' tea shop and sit with th' women, there's nowhere else to eat lunch in this town ..."—J.C. poked the menu—"so you better pick something offa here. How about a fish burger? Lookit, ‘four ounces breaded and deep-fried haddock filet served on a grilled bun with lettuce, tomato, and tartar sauce.’"
"I don't like tartar sauce."
Father Tim thought he might slide to the floor and lie prostrate. "I'm having the chef's salad!" he announced, hoping to set an example.
Mule looked relieved. "Fine, that's what I'll have." He drummed his fingers on the table. "On the other hand, you never know what's in a chef's salad when you deal with this chef."
"I'm havin' th' tuna melt," said J.C., "plus th' fish burger and potato skins!"
"Help yourself," said Mule. "Have whatever you want, it's on us." He peered intently at the menu. "‘Chili crowned with tortilla chips and cheese,’ that might be good."
"Here he comes, make up your mind," snapped J.C.
"I'll have th' chili deal," said Mule, declining eye contact with Percy. "But only if it comes without beans."
Percy gave him a stony look. "How can you have chili without beans? That's like a cheeseburger without cheese."
"Right," said J.C. "Or a BLT without bacon."
Father Tim closed his eyes as if in prayer, feeling his blood sugar plummet into his loafers.
So what are you doing these days?
It was a casual and altogether harmless question, the sort of thing anyone might inquire of the retired. But he hated it. And now, on the heels of the very same question asked only yesterday by a former parishioner ...
"So what'n th' dickens do you do all day?"
Mule had left to show a house, J.C. had trudged upstairs to work on Monday's layout, and Percy stood beside the rear booth, squinting at him as if he were a beetle on a pin.
After nearly four years of retirement, why hadn't he been able to formulate a pat answer? He usually reported that he supplied various churches here and there, which was true, of course, but it sounded lame. Indeed, he once said, without thinking, "Oh, nothing much." Upon hearing such foolishness out of his mouth, he felt covered with shame.
In his opinion, God hadn't put anyone on earth to do "nothing much." Thus, in the first year following his interim at Whitecap, he'd given endless hours to the Wesley Children's Hospital, second only to the church as his favorite charitable institution. He had even agreed to do something he roundly despised: raise funds. To his amazement, he had actually raised some.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from In This Mountain by Jan Karon. Copyright © 2002 by Jan Karon. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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