In This Mountain by Jan Karon Read Free Book Online Page B

Good gracious….”
    “It’s the most money anyone ever let me spend on an order,” she called after him. “I used everything but the kitchen sink!”
    He trotted down the hall, peering carefully around a thicket of maidenhair fern so he wouldn’t crash into a wall, and delivered the basket to the study.
    “There!” He set it on the hearth, nearly poking his eye on one of the several lengths of grapevine stuck capriciously into the moss. “I don’t know what it is; possibly a complete shire from the west of England!”
    “How wonderful !” His wife bounded from the sofa, streaked to the thing, and buried her face in it, wreathed in smiles. “Heaven! Oh, my! What joy!”
    He observed that she was now down on all fours, crawling around the basket, which was fully the size of Johnson County and loaded with everything from yellow tulips and lavender foxglove to pink roses and purple verbena.
    “Umm! Oh, goodness! Look, dearest, could it be heliotrope? And there! See the tiny mushrooms growing in the moss?”
    “Who’s it from?” he asked, squatting down to where the action was.
    She removed the card from the French wire ribbon. “Let’s see…. Well! Have you ever?”
    No, he had never. “Who?” he asked.
    “Dear James!”
    “Dear James?”
    “You know, darling, my editor.”
    “Aha.”
    “‘My dear Cynthia,’” she read aloud from the card. “‘Please accept this smallest of tokens for the joy you have brought so many. Congratulations!’”
    “ Dear James, dear Cynthia?” This inquiry, spoken with uncharacteristic sarcasm, was out of his mouth before he knew it. His face flamed.
    Just as it took very, very little to make his wife happy, it took very little, indeed, to wound her deeply. She looked as if she’d been dashed with ice water.
    “I’m sorry,” he said, dumbfounded by his feelings. Where had that sudden, bitter jealousy come from?
    He reached toward her, but she drew back. “I’ve never heard you…speak that way before,” she whispered.
    Tears sprang to his eyes. “I don’t know, I’m sorry, please forgive me.” He felt oddly lost, bereft, as if a great chasm had opened between them.
    She leaned her head to one side and looked at him for a long moment. Then she smiled. “It’s all right, dearest,” she said, taking his hand.



CHAPTER THREE
The Future Hour
    He settled into his chair in the study, swiveled around to the desk, and tore off several calendar pages.
    May 21st, vanished!
    May 22nd, defunct!
    May 23rd, out of here!
    Where had time gone? He hadn’t penned a word in nearly a month. But there’d be no guilt; he’d sworn to enjoy the process and not kick himself for failing to churn out a predetermined volume of work. The book would happen when it happened.
    He put his mind to the thing before him.
    “‘Enough, if something from our hands have power,’” he recited aloud, “‘to live and act and serve the future hour….’”
    This new essay would address the couplet from Wordsworth; it put forth an issue he’d been searching in his heart, whether indeed he’d done anything in nearly forty years as a priest that would truly serve the future hour. He needed to know the answer, the honest answer. Writing to search the soul had often helped; more than once this had enabled him to arrive at a better understanding of a personal issue. He thought, too, that the whole subject might be of interest to others—didn’t everyone fervently desire to leave a mark, to make a difference? In truth, mortality had been one of mankind’s most devouring disappointments—having only a brief time to make a difference, one forever felt the pressure to get cracking.
    He picked up the black pen and relished its solid heft; for years, he’d wished for a fine pen, something more than the annual Christmas ballpoint from The Local, or the sundry poor excuses in his pen cup that multiplied like wire hangers in a closet. And now, in honor of this book of essays, his good wife had