These High, Green Hills (63 page)

“You might have waited for Puny to give us a hand,” he said.

“I can’t ask a new mother to be hauling heavy furniture.”

“Heavy? Did I hear you say heavy? You’ve insisted for a year that this thing is light as a feather!”

“Oh, poop,” she said darkly, “you know what I mean.”

He downed his lemonade and stood up to take his medicine like a man. “Ready?”

‘“Ready,” she said, eyeing him. “And don’t scratch the hall floors. They’ve just been waxed.”

Waxed, was it? He could see them taking one wrong step, skating up the hall, bursting through the front door, and landing in the street with the blooming thing on top of them. Bachelors didn’t rearrange the decor, no, indeed. In fifteen years, he had scarcely moved a side chair from one place to another.

He sighed deeply.

“You’re sighing,” she said.

“A penetrating observation.”

“One, two, three, lift!”

Away they went, lumbering down the hall. He tried to grip the slick floor with his toes, but they were imprisoned in his loafers.

“There!” she said happily, stepping back from the guest room wall to take a look. “What do you think, darling?”

“It’s wonderful!” he said, meaning it. “It belongs there. You were right all along, Kavanagh.”

“We’ll have so much more room for towels and linens ...”

“Exactly!” he said, mopping his face. “Absolutely.” What was that zapping pain that raced up his right leg? Or was it coming from his lower back?

“... and wonderful storage for sheets and pillowcases!”

“Well done,” he said, ready to crash on the study sofa, next to the electric fan.

“However ... ” She stood still farther from the wall and peered over her glasses. She folded her arms across her chest and frowned.

“However, what?”

“When you consider the way the windows are situated in this room, it looks out of proportion to the wall. Rats! Do you see what I mean?”

He recognized the faraway look she often got when thinking up a book. “Not at all,” he said. “I don’t see that at all, it’s wonderful right where it is, we should have done this ages ago.” He regretted sounding desperate.

“In fact, Timothy, do you know where it would really look grand? In our bedroom! On the wall to the right as you go in the door, just where your family chest is. We could move the chest in here—it would look terrific. All
that
old, dark wood with all
this
old, dark wood. I think that’s the answer.”

He backed from the room, looking pale.

“But not today, dearest!” she said, coming after him and planting a kiss on his cheek. “More like ... in the spring.”

“Of course!” he said, feeling brighter. “In the spring!”

They walked across the hall and into their bedroom. “Right there!” she said, pointing at the wall behind the family chest. “Perfect!”

He took a deep breath.

“In the spring,” he said, smiling at his determined wife. “Perfect!”

Visit America’s favorite small town—
one book at a time
Welcome to the next book,

THE INDOOR PLANTS were among the first to venture outside and breathe the fresh, cold air of Mitford’s early spring.

Eager for a dapple of sunlight, starved for the revival of mountain breezes, dozens of begonias and ferns, snake plants, Easter lilies, and wandering Jew were set out, pot-bound and listless, on porches throughout the village.

As the temperature soared into the low fifties, Winnie Ivey thumped three begonias, a sullen gloxinia, and a Boston fern onto the back steps of the house on Lilac Road, where she was now living. Remembering the shamrock, which was covered with aphids, she went back and fetched it out and set it on the railing.

“There!” she said, collecting a lungful of the sharp, pure air. “That ought to fix th‘ lot of you.”

When she opened the back door the following morning, she was stricken at the sight. The carefully wintered plants had been turned to mush by a stark raving freeze and minor snow that also wrenched any notion of early bloom from the lilac bushes.

It was that blasted puzzle she’d worked until one o‘clock in the morning, which caused her to forget last night’s weather news. There she’d sat like a moron, her feet turning to ice as the temperature plummeted, trying to figure out five letters across for a grove of trees.

Racked with guilt, she consoled herself with the fact that it had, at least, been a chemical-free way to get rid of aphids.

At the hardware, Dora Pugh shook her head and sighed. Betrayed by yesterday’s dazzling sunshine, she had done display windows with live baby chicks, wire garden fencing, seeds, and watering cans. Now, she might as well haul the snow shovels back and do a final clearance on salt for driveways.

Coot Hendrick collected his bet of five dollars and an RC cola from Lew Boyd. “Ain’t th‘ first time and won’t be th’ last you’ll see snow in May,” he said, grinning. Lew Boyd hated it when Coot grinned, showing his stubs for teeth. He mostly hated it that, concerning weather in Mitford, the skeptics, cynics, and pessimists were usually right.

“Rats!” said Cynthia Kavanagh, who had left a wet scatter rug hanging over the rectory porch rail. Lifting it off the rail, she found it frozen as a Popsicle and able to stand perfectly upright.

Father Timothy Kavanagh, the local rector, had never heard such moaning and groaning about spring’s tedious delay, and encountered it even in Happy Endings bookstore, where, on yet another cold, overcast morning, he picked up a volume entitled
Hummingbirds in the Garden.

“Hummingbirds?” wailed young Hope Winchester, ringing the sale.
“What
hummingbirds? I suppose you think a hummingbird would dare stick its beak into this arctic tundra, this endless twilight, this ... this
villatic barbican
?”

Villatic barbican
was a phrase she had learned just yesterday from a book, and wanted to use it before she forgot it. She knew the rector from Lord’s Chapel was somebody she could use such words with—he hadn’t flinched when she said “empiric” only last week, and seemed to know exactly what she was talking about.

While everyone else offered lamentations exceeding those of the prophet Jeremiah, the rector felt smugly indifferent to complaints that spring would never come. Turning up his collar, he leaned into a driving wind and headed toward the office.

Hadn’t winter dumped ice, snow, sleet, hail, and rain storms on the village since late October? Hadn’t they been blanketed by fog so thick you could cut it with a dull knife, time and time again? With all that moisture seeping into the ground for so many long months, didn’t it foretell the most glorious springtime in years? And wouldn’t that be, after all, worth the endless assault?

“Absolutely!” he proclaimed aloud, trucking past the Irish Woolen Shop. “No doubt about it!”

“See there?” said Hessie Mayhew, peering out the store window. “It’s got Father Tim talking to himself, it’s that bad.” She sighed. “They say if sunlight doesn’t get to your pineal glands for months on end, your sex drive quits.”

Minnie Lomax, who was writing sale tags for boiled wool sweaters, looked up and blinked. “What do you know about pineal glands?” She was afraid to ask what Hessie might know about sex drive.

“What does anybody know about pineal glands?” asked Hessie, looking gloomy.

Uncle Billy Watson opened his back door and, without leaving the threshold, lifted the hanging basket off the nail and hauled it inside.

“Look what you’ve gone and done to that geranium!” snapped his wife of nearly fifty years. “I’ve petted that thing the winter long, and now it’s dead as a doornail.”

The old man looked guilt stricken. “B‘fore I hung it out there, hit was already gone south!”

“Shut my mouth? Did you say shut my mouth?” Miss Rose, who refused to wear hearing aids, glared at him.

“I said
gone south!
Dead! Yeller leaves!”

He went to the kitchen radiator and thumped the hanging basket on top. “There,” he said, disgusted with trying to have a garden in a climate like this, “that’ll fire it up again.”

The rector noted the spears of hosta that had congregated in beds outside the office door. Now, there, as far as spring was concerned, was something you could count on. Hosta was as sturdy a plant as you could put in the ground. Like the postman, neither sleet nor snow could drive it back. Once it emerged from the dirt, up it came, fiercely denant—only, of course, to have its broad leaves shredded like so much Swiss cheese by Mitford’s summer hail.

“It’s a jungle out there,” he sighed, unlocking his office door.

After the snow flurry and freeze came a day of rain, followed by a sudden storm of sleet that pecked against the windows like a flock of house sparrows.

His wife, he noted, looked pale. She was sitting at the study window, staring at the infernal weather and chewing her bottom lip. She was also biting the cuticle of her thumb, wrapping a strand of hair around one finger, tapping her foot, and generally amusing herself. He, meanwhile, was reading his new book, and doing something productive.

A low fire crackled on the hearth.

“Amazing!” he said. “You’d never guess one of the things that attracts butterflies.”

“I don’t have a clue,” said Cynthia, appearing not to want one, either. The sleet gusted against the window panes.

“Birdbaths!” he exclaimed. No response. “Thinking about the Primrose Tea, are you?”

The second edition of his wife’s famous parish-wide tea was coming in less than two weeks. Last year at this time, she was living on a stepladder, frantically repainting the kitchen and dining room, removing his octogenarian drapes, and knocking holes in the plaster to affect an “old Italian villa look.” Now here she was, staring out the window without any visible concern for the countless lemon squares, miniature quiches, vegetable sandwiches, and other items she’d need to feed a hundred and twenty-five women, nearly all of whom would look upon the tea as lunch.

His dog, Barnabas, ambled in and crashed by the hearth, as if drugged.

Cynthia tapped her foot and drummed her fingers on the chair arm. “Hmmm,” she said.

“Hmmm what?”

She looked at him. “T. D. A.”

“T. D. A.?”

“The Dreaded Armoire, dearest.”

His heart pounded. Please, no. Not the armoire. “What about it?” he asked, fearing the answer.

“It’s time to move it into our bedroom from the guest room. Remember? We said we were going to do it in the spring!” She smiled at him suddenly, as she was wont to do, and her sapphire-colored eyes gleamed. After a year and a half of marriage, how was it that a certain look from her still made him weak in the knees?

“Aha.”

“So!” she said, lifting her hands and looking earnest.

“So? So, it’s not spring!” He got up from the sofa and pointed toward the window. “See that? You call that spring? This, Kavanagh, is as far from spring as ... as ...”

“As Trieste is from Wesley,” she said, helping out, “or the Red Sea from Mitford Creek.” He could never get over the way her mind worked. “But do not look at the weather, Timothy, look at the calendar! May third!”

Last fall, they had hauled the enormous armoire down her stairs, down her back steps, through the hedge, up his back steps, along the hall, and finally, up the staircase to the guest room, where he had wanted nothing more than to fall prostrate on the rug.

Had she liked it in the guest room, after all that? No, indeed. She had despised the very sight of it sitting there, and instantly came up with a further plan, to be executed in the spring; all of which meant more unloading of drawers and shelves, more lashing the doors closed with a rope, and more hauling—this time across the landing to their bedroom, where, he was convinced, it would tower over them in the night like a five-story parking garage.