by Jan Karon
“But why all this?”
“Because you were so brave when we were lost in that horrible cave.”
The payoff was definitely improving. He brushed her hair back and kissed her forehead. “It wasn’t so horrible.”
“Timothy…”
“OK,” he said, “I was scared out of my wits.”
She laughed. “I knew that!”
“You did not.”
“Did so.”
“Did not.”
“Are y’uns havin’ a fuss?” Uncle Billy peered through the screen door.
“Not yet,” said the rector. “Come in and sit!”
These High, Green Hills, Ch. 11
MARGE OWEN’S FRENCH grandmother’s chicken pie recipe was a study in contrasts. Its forthright and honest filling, which combined large chunks of white and dark meat, coarsely cut carrots, green peas, celery, and whole shallots, was laced with a dollop of sauterne and crowned by a pastry so light and flaky, it might have won the favor of Louis XIV.
“Bravo!” exclaimed the rector.
“Man!” said Dooley.
“I unashamedly beg you for this recipe,” crowed Cynthia.
The new assistant, Blake Eddistoe, scraped his plate with his spoon. “Wonderful, ma’am!”
Hardly anyone ever cooked for diabetes, thought the rector as they trooped out to eat cake in the shade of the pin oak. Apparently it was a disease so innocuous, so bland, and so boring to anyone other than its unwilling victims that it was blithely dismissed by the cooks of the land.
He eyed the chocolate mocha cake that Marge was slicing at the table under the tree. Wasn’t that her well-known raspberry filling? From here, it certainly looked like it….
Ah, well. The whole awful business of saying no, which he roundly despised, was left to him. Maybe just a thin slice, however…something you could see through….
“He can’t have any,” said Cynthia.
“I can’t believe I forgot!” said Marge, looking stricken. “I’m sorry, Tim! Of course, we have homemade gingersnaps, I know you like those. Rebecca Jane, please fetch the gingersnaps for Father Tim, they’re on the bottom shelf.”
The four-year-old toddled off, happy with her mission.
Chocolate mocha cake with raspberry filling versus gingersnaps from the bottom shelf…
Clearly, the much-discussed and controversial affliction from which Saint Paul had prayed thrice to be delivered had been diabetes.
Out to Canaan, Ch. 4
WHEN HE WALKED into Esther’s hospital room on Thursday morning, her bed was surrounded by Bane volunteers. One of them held a notepad at the ready, and he felt a definite tension in the air.
They didn’t even look up as he came in.
Hessie leaned over Esther, speaking as if the patient’s hearing had been severely impaired by the fall.
“Esther!” she shouted. “You’ve got to cooperate! The doctor said he’d give us twenty minutes and not a second more!”
“Ummaummhhhh,” said Esther, desperately trying to speak through clamped jaws.
“Why couldn’t she write something?” asked Vanita Bentley. “I see two fingers sticking out of her cast.”
“Uhnuhhh,” said Esther.
“You can’t write with two fingers. Have you ever tried writing with two fingers?”
“Oh, Lord,” said Vanita. “Then you think of something! We’ve got to hurry!”
“We need an alphabet board!” Hessie declared.
“Who has time to go lookin’ for an alphabet board? Where would we find one, anyway?”
“Make one!” instructed the co-chair. “Write down the alphabet on your notepad and let her point ’til she spells it out.”
“Ummuhuhnuh,” said Esther.
“She can’t move her arm to point!”
“So? We can move the notepad!”
Esther raised the forefinger of her right hand.
“One finger. One! Right, Esther? If it’s yes, blink once, if it’s no, blink twice.”
“She blinked once, so it’s yes. One! One what, Esther? Cup? Teaspoon? Vanita, are you writin’ this down?”
“Two blinks,” said Marge Crowder. “So, it’s not a cup and it’s not a teaspoon.”
“Butter!” said somebody. “Is it one stick of butter?”
“She blinked twice, that’s no. Try again. One teaspoon? Oh, thank God! Vanita, one teaspoon.”
“Right. But one teaspoon of what? Salt?”
“Oh, please, you wouldn’t use a teaspoon of salt in a cake!”
“Excuse me for living,” said Vanita.
“Maybe cinnamon? Look! One blink. One teaspoon of cinnamon!”
“Hallelujah!” they chorused.
Esther wagged her finger.
“One, two, three, four, five…” someone counted.
“Five what?” asked Vanita. “Cups? No. Teaspoons? No. Tablespoons?”
“One blink, it’s tablespoons! Five tablespoons!”
“Oh, mercy, I’m glad I took my heart pill this morning,” said Hessie. “Is it of butter? I just have a feelin’ it’s butter. Look! One blink!”
“Five tablespoons of butter!” shouted the crowd, in unison.
“OK, in cakes, you’d have to have baking powder. How much baking powder, Esther?”
Esther held up one finger.
“One teaspoon?”
“Uhnuhhh,” said Esther, looking desperate.
“One tablespoon?” asked Vanita.
“You wouldn’t use a tablespoon of baking powder in a cake!” sniffed Marge Crowder.
“Look,” said Vanita, “I’m helpin’ y’all just to be nice. My husband personally thinks I am a great cook, but I don’t do cakes, OK, so if you’d like somebody else to take these notes, just step right up and help yourself, thank you!”
“You’re doin’ great, honey, keep goin’,” said Hessie.
“Look at that!” exclaimed Vanita. “She’s got one finger out straight and the other one bent back! Is that one and a half? It is, she blinked once! I declare, that is the cleverest thing I ever saw. OK, one and a half teaspoons of bakin’ powder!”
Everyone applauded.
“This is a killer,” said Vanita, fanning herself with the notebook. “Don’t you think we could sell two-layer triple chocolates just as easy?”
“Ummunnuhhh,” said Esther, her eyes burning with disapproval.
Hessie snorted. “This could take ’til kingdom come. How much time have we got left?”
“Ten minutes, maybe eleven!”
“Eleven minutes? Are you kidding me? We’ll never finish this in eleven minutes.”
“I think she told me she uses buttermilk in this recipe,” said Marge Crowder. “Esther,” she shouted, “how much buttermilk?”
Esther made the finger-and-a-half gesture.
“One and a half cups, right? Great! Now we’re cookin’!”
More applause.
“OK,” commanded the co-chair, “what have we got so far?”
Vanita, being excessively nearsighted, held the notepad up for close inspection. “One teaspoon of cinnamon, five tablespoons of butter, one and a half teaspoons of baking powder, and one and a half cups of buttermilk.”
“I’ve got to sit down,” said the head of the Food Committee, pressing her temples.
“It looks like Esther’s droppin’ off to sleep, oh, Lord, Esther, honey, don’t go to sleep, you can sleep tonight!”
“Could somebody ask th’ nurse for a stress tab?” wondered Vanita. “Do you think they’d mind, I’ve written checks to th’ hospital fund for nine years, goin’ on ten!”
“By the way,” asked Marge Crowder, “is this recipe for one layer or two?”
He decided to step into the hall for a breath of fresh air.
Out to Canaan, Ch. 18
THEY HAD GONE to Mona’s and eaten fried perch, hard-shelled crabs, broiled shrimp, yellowfin tuna fresh off the boat, hush puppies, french fries, and buckets of coleslaw. They had slathe
red on tartar sauce and downed quarts of tea as sweet as syrup, then staggered home in the heat with Jonathan drugged and half asleep on Father Tim’s back.
As they walked, Cynthia did her part to deliver after-dinner entertainment, loudly reciting a poem by someone named Rachel Field.
If once you have slept on an island
You’ll never be quite the same;
You may look as you looked the day before
And go by the same old name.
You may bustle about the street or shop;
You may sit at home and sew,
But you’ll see blue water and wheeling gulls
Wherever your feet may go.
“I declare!” said Earlene. “You’re clever as anything to remember all that. I wonder if it’s the truth.”
“What?”
“That part about never being quite the same.”
“I don’t know,” said Cynthia. “We’ll have to wait and see.”
They sat on the porch and watched the gathering sunset through the trellis, where the Marion Climber had put forth several new blooms.
A New Song, Ch. 10
UNCLE BILLY WATSON slogged to the Grill with his pant legs stuffed into his galoshes and his wife’s felt hat jammed onto his head. He also wore gloves with both thumbs missing; under an ancient coat of his own, Rose’s deceased brother’s military jacket displayed a variety of tarnished war medals.
“I was hopin’ you’d have a loaf of bread a feller could take home,” the old man told Percy. Uncle Billy’s arthritic fingers clutched three dimes, a nickel, and two pennies, which he thought was a fair price. “I’ll pay cash money, don’t you know.”
“Go on in an’ take it offa th’ shelf,” said Percy. To tell the truth, he was tired of Bill Watson gouging a loaf of bread out of him every week for the last hundred years, but he wouldn’t fret over it now, being the time of year it was.
“What y’uns doin’?” asked Uncle Billy.
Father Tim scooped another shovelful of snow. “There’s a snowman contest on Main Street, and Percy wants to nab the prize for the Grill.” He was huffing like a steam engine and had lost feeling in most of his fingers and toes.
Uncle Billy surveyed the creation in front of him. “Only thing is, hit’s naked as a jaybird.”
“Right,” said Father Tim. “Needs two eyes, a nose—you know, the basics.”
“Needs a hat is more like it,” said Uncle Billy. “What’s th’ prize?”
“Doughnuts. Maybe a snow shovel, but definitely doughnuts.”
“Doughnuts!” said Uncle Billy. “Would that be plain or glazed?”
The Mitford Snowmen
SWADDLED IN A pink chenille robe and wearing a mesh hairnet, Esther Bolick lay sprawled in her recliner, staring at the ceiling.
The view of the brass chandelier from Home Depot vanished; in her mind’s eye she saw an imaginary row of two-layer orange marmalade cakes standing proud on her countertop.
By tomorrow afternoon, the whole caboodle would be baked, filled, frosted, and ready to roll out of her kitchen as gifts coveted from one end of Mitford to the other. She and Gene would trot to the five o’clock Christmas Eve service at Lord’s Chapel, then strike out in their van to make deliveries.
Though she’d never been much on frills, she had for years longed to use paper doilies to set off her marmalades, and for a fleeting moment imagined a circular, scalloped doily with machine-made cut-work under each of her creations. However, a package of such doilies was four dollars, and that was four dollars she wasn’t willing to part with. No, ma’am, she would never be using doilies, so why even think about it?
In her imagination, the doilies disappeared and the cakes sat directly on cardboard rounds, which she’d cut from packing boxes found at The Local.
While she was minding costs, she wondered what it was costing her to bake an orange marmalade these days. Though she’d formed a vague notion over the years, she was inspired to ask Gene to compute the actual figure. It seemed to her that a two-layer had once come to around four or five dollars. She didn’t mind giving away a cake that cost five dollars, not at all, she’d been doing it for years, especially at Christmas, when the flat broke and lonesome seemed to have a particularly rough go of things.
“Forty-three dollars a pop!” said Gene. The color drained from his face as he made this announcement.
“What?” She clutched her heart with one hand and held on to the countertop with the other. “Am I hearin’ you right?
“Well, then.” Esther caught her breath. “I’ll have to go to my short list.”
Eager to forget the particulars of the cake deal, Gene picked up the remote and aimed it at the TV; on came a full choir of children, singing their hearts out beneath a large star of Bethlehem. Esther cranked back in her recliner and sighed deeply. She would wait awhile before she started baking those two cakes for Hessie and Louella…or maybe she would leave Hessie out and just give one cake this year….
How silently, how silently
The wondrous gift is given!
So God imparts to human hearts
The blessings of his heaven.
At four-thirty, Gene came in from his rounds about town, stomping snow onto the kitchen mat. “One, two, three, four, five, six, seven?” He grinned from ear to ear. “That don’t look like a short list.”
She put her hands on her hips. “Do like me an’ don’t think about th’ cost.”
One by one, she set a cake on the scalloped paper doily she’d proudly placed in the bottom of each box, and closed the lid. What difference did a piddling four dollars make in the scheme of things? After all, it was Christmas.
Esther’s Gift
“FATHER!”
Hélène Pringle darted from the side of the house and hastened up the steps to his front stoop—apparently she’d popped through the hedge—wearing blue striped oven mitts and bearing a dish covered by a tea towel.
“For you!” She thrust her offering at him with seeming joy, but how could he take it from her if oven mitts were required to handle it?
He stepped back.
Miss Pringle stepped in.
“Roast poulet!” she exclaimed. “With olive oil and garlic, and stuffed with currants. I so hope you—you and Cynthia—like it.”
“Hélène!” His wife sailed down the hall. “What have you done? What smells so heavenly?”
“Roast poulet!” Miss Pringle exclaimed again, as if announcing royalty.
“Oh, my!” said Cynthia. “Let me just get a towel.” She trotted to the bathroom at the end of the hall and was back in a flash. “Thank you very much, Hélène, I’ll take it. Lovely! Won’t you come in?”
“Oh, no, no indeed, I don’t wish to interfere. I hope…that is, I heard about…” She paused, turning quite red. “Merci, Father, Cynthia, bon appétit, au revoir!”
She was gone down the walk, quick as a hare.
“I like her mitts,” said Cynthia.
“Delicious!” He spooned the thick currant sauce over a slice of tender breast meat and nudged aside the carrots Cynthia had cooked.
“Outstanding!” He ate heartily, as if starved.
He glanced up to see his wife looking at him.
“What?” he asked.
“I haven’t seen you eat like this in…quite a while.”
“Excellent flavor! I suppose it’s the currants.”
“I suppose,” she said.
In This Mountain, Ch. 9
“FRESH SALMON!” HE told Avis Packard. “That’s what I was hoping. But of course your seafood comes in on Thursday, and if I buy it on Thursday, I’d have to freeze it ’til Monday.”
“For ten bucks I can have a couple pounds flown in fresh on Monday, right off th’ boat. Should get here late afternoon.”
No one in the whole of Mitford would pay hard-earned money to have salmon shipped in. But his wife loved fresh salmon, and this was no time to compromise. Not for ten bucks, anyway.
“Book it!�
� he said, grinning.
“You understand th’ ten bucks is just for shippin’. Salmon’s extra.”
“Right.”
“OK!” Avis rubbed his hands together with undisguised enthusiasm. “I’ve got just the recipe!”
Some were born to preach, others born to shop, and not a few, it seemed, born to meddle. Avis was born to advocate the culinary arts. Father Tim took a notepad and pen from his jacket pocket. “Shoot!”
“Salmon roulade!” announced Avis. “Tasty, low-fat, and good for diabetes.”
“Just what the doctor ordered!” said Father Tim, feeling good about life in general.
In This Mountain, Ch. 17
HIS TRAVEL-WORN WIFE was devouring the salmon roulade as if she hadn’t eaten in weeks.
“Heavenly!” she murmured. “Divine!”
“Thank you.” His cheeks grew warm with pleasure. “I got the recipe from Avis.”
“Perfection!”
He’d nearly forgotten her boundless enthusiasm, it was wondrous to have it again, he’d been barren without her….
She peered at him over the vase of late-blooming roses. “It’s no wonder women chase after you, Timothy.”
“Now, Kavanagh…”
“It’s true. You’re handsome, charming, thoughtful, sensitive—and you can cook! The very combination every woman dreams of. However…” She patted her mouth with her starched napkin and went after another forkful of wild rice. “Do remember this….”
“Yes?”
“You’re mine.”
He laughed.
“All mine.”
“Amen,” he said.
“Totally, completely, absolutely mine, just like it says in the marriage service.”
“I vowed so once, I vow so again.”
“So watch it, buster.”
“Consider it done,” he said, grinning like an idiot. He loved it when she talked like that.
In This Mountain, Ch. 21
“I LOVE YOU MADLY,” she said.
“I love you madlier.”
“Do not!”