by Jan Karon
What if she were to shut herself away from him, once and for all? He stood up and paced beside the low stone wall, forgetting the scene in the valley.
He'd never understood much about his feelings toward Cynthia, but he knew and understood this:
He didn't want to keep teetering on the edge, afraid to step forward, terrified to turn back.
He felt the weight on his chest, the same weight he'd felt so often since she came into his life and he'd been unable to love her completely.
Perhaps he would always have such a weight; perhaps there was no true liberation in love. And certainly he could not ask her to accept him as he was—flawed and frightened, not knowing.
He turned and looked up and drew in his breath.
A glorious sunset was beginning to spread over the valley, and across the dome of heaven, stars were coming out. He had stood on this hill, wrapped in his selfish fears, while this wondrous thing was shaking the very air around him.
He felt tears on his face and realized the weight had flown off his heart. Every cloud over the valley was infused with a rosecolored light, and great streaks of lavender shot across the upland meadows.
Dear God! he thought, if only Cynthia were here.
But Cynthia was there—in the little house just down the hill and through the park. She was there, not in New York or some far-flung corner, but there, sitting on her love seat, or feeding Violet, or putting her hair in those blasted curlers.
The recognition of her closeness to the very spot on which he stood was somehow breathtaking. He remembered the long, cold months of the dark house next door and the strained phone calls and the longing, and then she had come home at last.
The very sight of her had sent him reeling—yet once again, he had closed down his deepest feelings and managed to keep his distance from the only woman, the only human being he had ever known, who would eat the drumstick.
He was amazed to find that he was running; there was nothing but his beating heart and pounding feet. He felt only a great, burning haste to find her and see her face and let her know what he was only beginning to know and could no longer contain.
"There comes a time when there is no turning back," Walter had said.
He pounded on, feeling the motion of his legs and the breeze on his skin, and the hammering in his temples, feeling as if he might somehow implode, all of it combusting into a sharp, inner flame, a durable fire, a thousand hosannas.
Streaming with sweat, he ran past the cool arbors of Old Church Lane and across Baxter Park, desperate to see some sign of life in the little yellow house, to know she was there, waiting, and not gone away from him in her heart.
Her house was dark, but his own was aglow with light in every window, as if some wonderful thing might be happening.
He bounded through the hedge and into his yard and saw her stand ing at his door. She opened the door for him and held it wide as he came up the steps, and for one fleeting moment suspended in time, he sensed he had come at last to a destination he'd been running toward all his life.
Before the eleven o'clock service began, many of the Lord's Chapel congregation opened their pew bulletins and read the announcements.
There would be a regional Youth Choir performance in the church gardens on August 1. The Men's Prayer Breakfast would begin meeting at seven instead of seven-thirty on Thursdays, and would those who brought dishes to the bishop's brunch please collect their pans and platters from the kitchen.
Directly beneath the names of those who were bequeathing today's memorial flowers, they read the following:
I publish the banns of marriage between Cynthia Clary Coppersmith of the parish of the Chapel of Our Lord and Savior and Father Timothy Andrew Kavanagh, rector of this parish. If any of you know just cause why they may not be joined together in Holy Matrimony, you are bidden to declare it.
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These High, Green Hills
CHAPTER ONE
THROUGH THE HEDGE
HE STOOD at the kitchen window and watched her coming through the hedge.
What was she lugging this time? It appeared to be a bowl and pitcher. Or was it a stack of books topped by a vase?
The rector took off his glasses, fogged them, and wiped them with his handkerchief. It was a bowl and pitcher, all right. How the little yellow house next door had contained all the stuff they'd recently muscled into the rectory was beyond him.
"For your dresser," she said, as he held the door open.
"Aha!"
The last thing he wanted was a bowl and pitcher on his dresser. The top of his dresser was his touchstone, his home base, his rock in a sea of change. That was where his car keys resided, his loose coins, his several crosses, his cuff links, his wallet, his checkbook, his school ring, and a small jar of buttons with a needle and thread.
It was also where he kept the mirror in which he occasionally examined the top of his head. Was his hair still thinning, or, by some mysterious and hoped for reversal, growing in again?
"Cynthia," he said, going upstairs in the wake of his blond and shapely wife, "about that bowl and pitcher ..."
"The color is wonderful. Look at the blues. It will relieve all your burgundy and brown!"
He did not want his burgundy and brown relieved.
He saw it coming.
Ever since their marriage on September seventh, she had plotted to lug that blasted armoire over for the rectory guest room.
The lugging over was one thing; it was the lugging back that he dreaded. They had, for example, lugged over an oriental rug that was stored in her basement. "Ten by twelve!" she announced, declaring it perfect for the bare floor of the rectory dining room.
After wrestling the table and chairs into the hall, they had unrolled the rug and unrolled the rug—to kingdom come. It might have gone up the walls on all four sides and met at the chandelier over the table.
"This is a rug for a school gym!" he said, wiping the pouring sweat from his brow.
She seemed dumbfounded that it didn't fit, and there they had gone, like pack mules, carting it through the hedge again.
The decision to keep and use both houses had been brilliant, of course. The light in the rectory would never equal that of her studio next door, where she was already set up with books and paints and drawing board. This meant his study could remain unchanged—his books could occupy the same shelves, and his vast store of sermon notebooks in the built-in cabinets could hold their place.
Marrying for the first time at the age of sixty-something was change enough. It was a blessed luxury to live with so few rearrangements in the scheme of things, and life flowing on as usual. The only real change was the welcome sharing of bed and board.
Over breakfast one morning, he dared to discuss his interest in getting the furniture settled.
"Why can't we keep things as they were ... in their existing state? It seemed to work. ..."
"Yes, well, I like that our houses are separate, but I also want them to be the same—sort of an organic whole."
"No organic whole will come of dragging that armoire back and forth through the hedge. It looks like a herd of elephants has passed through there already."
"Oh, Timothy! Stop being stuffy! Your place needs fluffing up, and mine needs a bit more reserve. For example, your Chippendale chairs would give a certain sobriety to my dining table."
"Your dining table is the size of something in our nursery school. My chairs would look gigantic."
She said exactly what he thought she would say. "We could try it and see."
"Cynthia, trust me on this. My chairs will not look right with your table, and neither will that handpainted magazine rack do anything for my armchair."
"Well, what was the use of getting married, then?"
"I beg your pardon?"
"I mean, if no one is going to change on either side, if we're both just going to be our regular, lifetim
e selves, what's the use?"
"I think I see what you're getting at. Will nothing do, then, but to cart those chairs to your house? And what about my own table? It will be bereft of chairs. I hardly see the point." He felt like jumping through the window and going at a dead run toward the state line.
"One thing at a time," she said happily. "It's all going to work out perfectly."
dear stuart,
thanx for your note re: diocesan mtg, and thank martha for the invitation to put my feet under yr table afterward, however, I must leave for home at once, following the mtg—hope you'll understand.
while i'm at it, let me ask you:
why are women always moving things around? at Sunday School, jena iivey just had the youth group move the kindergarten bookcases to a facing wall.
on the homefront, my househelp has moved a ladderback chair from my bedroom into the hall, never once considering that i hung my trousers over it for 14 years, and put my shoes on the seat so they could be found in an emergency.
last but certainly not least, if C could lift me in my armchair and put it by the window while i'm dozing, she would do it.
without a doubt, you have weightier things to consider, but tell me, how does one deal with this?
i hasten to add that i've never been happier in my life, to tell the truth, i am confounded that such happiness—in such measure—even exists.
He signed the note, typed on his 'Royal manual, thankful that Stuart Cullen was not merely his bishop, but his closest personal friend since the halcyon days of seminary.
Fr Timothy Kavanaugh,
The Chapel of Our Lord and Savior
Old Church Lane, Mitford, N.C.
Dear Timothy:
In truth, it is disconcerting when one's househelp, SS supervisor, and wife do this sort of thing all at once. My advice is: do not fight it. It will wear off.
In His peace,
Stuart P.S.
P.S. Martha would add a note, but she is busy moving my chest of drawers to the far side of our bedroom. As I am dealing with an urgent matter with the House of Bishops, I could not be browbeaten to help, and so she has maneuvered it, at last, onto an old bedspread, and I can hear her hauling the whole thing across the floor above me. This particular behavior had lain dormant in her for nearly seven years, and has suddenly broken forth again.
Perhaps it is something in the water.
He could see, early on, that beds were a problem that needed working out.
They had spent their wedding night in his bed at the rectory, where they had rolled down their respective sides and crashed together in the middle.
"What is this trough doing in your bed?" she asked.
"It's where I sleep," he said, feeling sheepish.
They had been squeezed together like sardines the livelong night, which he had profoundly enjoyed, but she had not. "Do you think this is what's meant by 'the two shall be one flesh'?" she murmured, her cheek smashed against his.
The following night, he trooped through the hedge with his pajamas and toothpaste in a grocery bag from The Local.
Her bed was a superkingsize, and the largest piece of furniture in her minuscule house.
He found it similar in breadth to the state of Texas, or possibly the province of Saskatchewan. Was that a herd of buffalo racing toward him in the distance, or a team of sled dogs? "Cynthia!" he shouted across the vast expanse, and waited for the echo.
They had ordered a new mattress for the rectory immediately after returning from their honeymoon in Stuart Cullen's summer house. There, on the rocky coast of Maine, they had spent time listening to the cry of the loons, holding hands, walking along the shore, and talking until the small hours of the morning. The sun turned her fair skin a pale toast color that he found fascinating and remarkable; and he watched three freckles emerge on the bridge of her nose, like stars coming out. Whatever simple thing they did together, they knew they were happier than ever before in their lives.
One evening, soon after the new mattress and springs were installed at the rectory, he found her sitting up in bed as he came out of the shower.
"I've had a wonderful idea, Timothy! A fireplace! Right over there where the dresser is."
"What would I do with my dresser?"
She looked at him as if he had toddled in from the church nursery. "Put it in the alcove, of course."
"Then I couldn't see out the window."
"But how much time do you spend staring out the alcove window?"
"When you were parading about with Andrew Gregory, a great deal of time." His face burned to admit it, but yes, he'd been jealous of the handsome antique dealer who had squired her around for several months.
She smiled, leaning her head to one side in that way he could barely resist. "A fireplace would be so romantic."
"Ummm."
"Why must I be the romantic in the family while you hold up the conservative, let'sdon'tmakeanychanges end?"
He sat down beside her. "How quickly you forget. When we were going steady, you said I was wildly romantic."
She laughed and kissed him on the cheek. "And I was right, of course. I'm sorry, old dearest."
He regretted being anyone's old dearest.
"Old dearest, yourself," he said grumpily. "I am, after all, only six years your senior."
"By the calendar," she said imperiously, referring, he supposed, to something decrepit in his overall attitude about life.
In any case, the fireplace issue did not come up again.
In truth, he had no words for his happiness. It grew deeper every day, like the digging of a well, and astounded him by its warmth and power. He seemed to lose control of his very face, which, according to the regulars at the Main Street Grill, displayed a foolish and perpetual grin.
"I love you . . . terribly," he said, struggling to express it.
"I love you terribly, also. It's scary. What if it should end?"
"Cynthia, good grief..."
"I know I shouldn't talk of endings when this is a blessed beginning."
"Don't then," he said, meaning it.
That Barnabas had so willingly given up the foot of his master's bed to sleep on a rug in the hall was a gesture he would never forget. Not only did his dog enjoy eighteenth-century poets and submit to his weekly bath without rancor, his dog was a gentleman.
The decisions were made, and both parties were in amicable accord.
They would sleep at the rectory primarily, and on occasion at the little yellow house. Though she would work there, as always, they would treat it much as a second home, using it for refreshment and private retreat.
He promised to have his sermon well under control each Saturday afternoon, with time to relax with her on Saturday evening, and he would continue to make breakfast on Sunday morning.
He showed her where his will was, and promised to have it rewritten. She confessed she didn't have a will, and promised to have one drawn up.
If they should ever, God forbid, have a misunderstanding, neither would dash off to the other house to sulk.
He would continue to have the cheerful and enterprising Puny Guthrie, nee Bradshaw, clean the rectory three days a week, and Cynthia would use her services on a fourth day, next door.
They would go on with their separate checking accounts, make some mutual investments, counsel with the other about gift offerings, and never spend more than a certain fixed sum without the other's prior agreement.
He suggested fifty dollars as the fixed sum.
"One hundred!" she countered.
He was glad he had opened the bidding low. "One hundred, then, and I keep that old jacket you earmarked for the Bane and Blessing sale."
"Done!"
They laughed.
They shook hands.
They felt relieved.
Getting a marriage off on the right foot was no small matter.
"I reckon you're gone with th' wind," said Percy Mosely, who rang up his lunch tab at the Main Street Grill.
> "How's that?" asked the rector.
"Married an' all, you'll not be comin' in regular, I take it." The proprietor of the Grill felt hurt and betrayed, he could tell.
"You've got that wrong, my friend."
"I do?" said Percy, brightening.
"I'll be coming in as regular as any man could. My wife has a working life of her own, being a wellknown children's book writer and illustrator. She will not be trotting out hot vittles for my lunch every day—not by a long shot."
Percy looked suspicious. "What about breakfast?"
"That," said the rector, pocketing the change, "is another matter entirely."
Percy frowned. He liked his regulars to be married to his place of business.
He looked up from his chair in the study. Curlers, again.
"I have to wear curlers," she said, as if reading his mind. "I'm going to Lowell tomorrow."
"Lowell? Whatever for?"
"A school thing. They want me to read Violet Goes to France to their French class, and then do a program in the auditorium."
"Must you?"
"Must I what? Read Violet Goes to France? That's what they asked me to read."
"No, must you go to Lowell?"
"Well, yes."
He didn't want to say anything so idiotic, but he would miss her, as if she were being dropped off the end of the earth.
A long silence ensued as she curled up on the sofa and opened a magazine. He tried to read, but couldn't concentrate.
He hadn't once thought of her traveling with her work. Uneasy, he tried to let the news sink in. Lowell. Somebody there had been shot on the street in broad daylight.
And another thing—Lowell was a full hundred miles away. Did she have good brakes? Plenty of gas? When had she changed her oil?
"How's your oil?" he asked soberly.
She laughed as if he'd said something hilariously funny. Then she left the sofa and came to him and kissed him on the forehead. He was instantly zapped by the scent of wisteria, and went weak in the knees.