These High, Green Hills

by Jan Karon

  Miss Sadie thumped the floor with her cane. In all his years of knowing her, he’d never seen her do such a thing. “Shush!” she commanded. “I said I had to think about it. I didn’t say how long I had to think about it. Coming down the hall, I thought about it.”

  Nobody said a word.

  “And I have every intention of doing it!”

  “Save us from troubled, restless sleep,” he sang softly in the darkened room, “from all ill dreams Your children keep ...”

  “How lovely,” she murmured, lying beside him. “What are you singing?”

  “A verse from Louella’s hymn, ‘To You before the close of day ...’”

  He sang again, “... so calm our minds that fears may cease, and rested bodies wake in peace.”

  “Amen,” she whispered, taking his hand.

  The crowd at St. Andrews in Canton had hammered out a description of what every parish was looking for, and sent him a copy.

  The perfect pastor preaches exactly ten minutes. He condemns sin, but never hurts anybody’s feelings. He works from eight in the morning until midnight and is also the church janitor. He is twenty-nine years old and has forty years experience. He makes fif teen house calls a day and is always in the office.

  Right up there with what’s currently expected of Cynthia Kavanagh, he thought.

  “They asked me to be president of the ECW,” she said, looking pale.

  “What did you say?”

  “I said I have full-time work and that it wouldn’t be fair to be president of anything, for I would surely have to shirk my duty.”

  “Well put.”

  “And so they invited me to head up the Altar Guild.”

  They had discussed this very thing, long before he proposed to her on the night of his birthday last June.

  “Of course I said no, thank you. That’s when they asked me to chair that awful Bane and Blessing sale, which has put at least two women flat on their backs in bed.”

  “True.”

  “When they got to a nomination for program chairman, every eye turned to me. I excused myself and went to the ladies’ room. It was awful.”

  She sighed. “Well, dearest, I turned down six things in a row—they were all positively glaring at me. It took enormous courage.”

  “I’m certain of that.” Where the Episcopal Church Women were concerned, he personally wouldn’t have the guts to turn down six things—in a row or otherwise.

  She took a deep breath. “That’s when I announced that I’m reserving my energies to give a parish-wide tea in the spring.”

  Aha! He knew the fondness of his parish for a roaring good tea.

  “I was off the hook in a flash. You should have seen the look of forgiveness in their eyes! Now, guess what.”

  “What?”

  “Now I have to do it!” she wailed.

  The Hope House Board of Directors was searching for an administrator.

  According to Hoppy, all was going well. As a graduate of Harvard Medical School, and the personal friend of a distinguished heart man at Mass General, his contacts had already turned up the names of several promising candidates.

  It would take something like fifty people to run the two-story, forty-bed nursing home, and Miss Sadie had insisted on a full-time chaplain into the bargain. Finding the right candidate, the rector learned, was his job.

  There would be RNs, LPNs, nurses’ aides, business staff ... the list went on and on, and most would have to be hired from outside the area. All of which would give a boost to merchants up and down Main Street and beyond.

  No doubt about it, Hope House would be a shot in the arm for Mitford’s economy.

  “Who needs a canning factory?” asked a jubilant Mayor Cunningham at a town meeting.

  Puny had been looking a bit peaked, in his opinion. Somehow, she wasn’t the same girl he had escorted down the aisle in June and given in marriage to the mayor’s grandson.

  “Do you have to scrub the floor like this?” he asked his house help on Monday. Seeing Puny on her hands and knees on his kitchen floor always distressed him. “You know I’ll buy you a mop.”

  “You always say that. When I scrub on my hands and knees, I wisht you’d look th‘ other way. I don’t know why it makes you s’ mournful, it’s the same as my granmaw did it, and my mama, too, and it’s th’ way I’m goin‘ to do it.”

  She seemed to scrub the worn kitchen tiles even harder. “Some gloves, then!” he said. “Rubber gloves!” He had taken to worrying about the freckle-faced, red-haired Puny Guthrie as if she were his own blood.

  “Ooooh, I jis’ hate it when you preach!” she said.

  “Preach? If you think that’s preaching, wait ‘til you hear the real thing, young lady.”

  She looked at him and smiled, and pushed her hair from her eyes. “I kind of like it when you boss me.”

  “I’m not bossing you, and you know it. But you look a little ... pale, somehow. Are you feeling your usual self?”

  “Well,” she said, sitting back on her heels, “if you’re goin‘ to hound it out of me, th’ truth is, I ain’t. I’m give out, sort of. I don’t know what it is.”

  “You want a few days off? We can push along.”

  “Nossir, I don’t want a few days off! Me an‘ Joe Joe are addin’ a bathroom on our house an‘ puttin’ on a new roof. I sure don’t need to be takin‘ days off, with roofin’ at twenty dollars a square.”

  Since she walked in and took over his house two years ago, Puny had been like a candle against the darkness—he wouldn’t take the world for her cheerfulness, her vigor, her adamant faith, and the life she had brought to his household. Joe Joe Guthrie had won himself a pearl beyond price.

  “OK, I’ll hush.”

  “Good!” she said, grinning up at him.

  He woke in the middle of the night, searching for the glass of water on the nightstand. He took a swallow and lay there listening to her breathe. He was confounded over and over again that she was lying beside him. He hadn’t known what to expect, after all, when it came to sleeping with someone.

  Would he feel hemmed in? Invaded?

  But he had never felt hemmed in or invaded, not once. He felt, instead, a kind of awe that made him lie very still, scarcely breathing. How this could have happened, he couldn’t imagine. During the day, he could imagine it, and muse over the slow and gradual process that had brought them to this place. But at night, it seemed a miracle, defying reason.

  Oddly, he could feel himself becoming something more, as one might discover new rooms in a house he had lived in all his life. Doors had opened, shutters had been cranked back to let in new light. When he lay there and simply let the wonder of it sink in, he was suffused with a kind of joy he’d never known before.

  This joy was different from what he felt when the Holy Spirit broke down his defenses and circumcised his heart. But both these joys produced in him a tenderness that was nearly unbearable.

  “Thank you, Lord,” he whispered.

  “Hmmm?” Cynthia said, sleepily. “What did you say, dearest?”

  “I said ... thank you,” he croaked.

  “You’re welcome,” she sighed, falling back to sleep.

  He walked to the Grill with Barnabas on his red leash, feeling the keen, pure cold of the day. Overhead, he heard the drone of a small airplane and looked up. Omer Cunningham, he supposed, who had nothing better to do than dip and soar in the wild blue yonder, while the rest of them had to fetch and carry like so many ants on a hill.

  He reflected on Dooley’s call last night—not once had he said “ain’t,” a piece of grammatical mayhem that Cynthia particularly disliked. That boy was a quick learner, he could say that for him. But there was something held-back in him, also—something cautious and wary like the old Dooley, yet more severe.

  “How’s Tommy?” Dooley had asked.

  “Missing you, I think. Doing fairly well on his crutch. Dr. Harper is hopeful there won’t be a limp.” The friend who had fallen from a co
llapsing pile of lumber had survived a terrible wound to the head and a leg slashed to the bone.

  “Can he talk right?”

  “Nearly as well as the rest of us, I’d say.”

  Silence.

  “How are you? How’s your science class?”

  “All right.”

  “And math? You’re killing them, I take it.”

  “It’s OK.”

  “The chorus is coming along—you’re singing?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  If only he could see his face. “We’re wanting to see your face, pal. In just ten days, you’ll be home.”

  “Yeah.”

  Was the “yes, sir” he’d once managed to gouge out of Dooley now gone with the wind? He felt an inexpressible love for the boy who had changed his life, who had turned it upside down and backward, and had come to be like his own son. They had toughed it out, they had made it through.

  Or had they? “Are you OK?”

  “Yeah.”

  Blast it, he was not OK, but there was nothing he could do about it on the phone. In no time at all, he and Cynthia would fetch him home from school, and everything would be fine. All Dooley Barlowe needed, after all, was a good dose of family and friends and somebody to catch up his laundry.

  Hoppy Harper had called the church office earlier, saying merely, “I need to bust out of here, and I need to talk. What about lunch?”

  His friend was already in the front booth, looking, as Emma once remarked, “like a young Walter Pidgeon.”

  “Track me on this,” said Hoppy. After years of exhausting himself as the only doctor in town, he had learned the economy of never mincing words.

  “Hippocrates said that in the body, there’s no beginning—in a described circle, no beginning can be found. He believed that if the smallest part of the body suffers, it imparts suffering to the whole frame.”

  The rector nodded. If the smallest part of the spirit suffers, it imparts suffering to the whole being. He’d seen this principle at work too often. “Keep going.”

  Velma appeared with her order pad.“What’re you havin‘?”

  “What’s the Father having?” asked the doctor. “Give me the same.”

  “Chicken salad on whole wheat, no mayonnaise,” said the rector, “with a cup of vegetable soup.” Why did people always want to order what he ordered? Did they think he had some special sign from Providence about what to order for lunch?

  Hoppy leaned toward him, his brow furrowed. “So, nothing happens to any part of the envelope that affects us in an isolated area. And part of the envelope is the spirit—right in there with the lymphatic and enzymatic and neurological and circulatory factors.

  “Even Socrates jumped on this. He said the cure of a lot of diseases was unknown, because physicians were ignorant of the whole. His bottom line was, the part can never be well unless the whole is well.”

  “I’m with you,” said the rector.

  “For the first few months, the staff and I prayed silently before operating, and that was good. It got us up for the job ahead in a whole new way. Now we usually ask the patient if we can pray aloud before we begin the surgical procedure.

  “It works for me, it works for the staff. That alone has to be of some benefit. But it’s working for the patients, too. I think it helps them go under the anesthetic as a complete entity, not merely a diseased bladder or a ruptured appendix.”

  “Makes complete sense.”

  “Besides, wouldn’t God care as much about our bodies as our souls? Isn’t redemption total? Doesn’t it involve body, soul, mind—all?”

  “Absolutely all.”

  “By the way, Olivia read that in certain primitive cultures, the doctor and the priest are one and the same person.”

  “Quite a packaging concept.”

  He had never before seen his friend so passionate about anything—except, perhaps, securing the miraculous heart transplant that saved the life of the woman he married last June.

  Hoppy ran his hand through his disheveled hair. “As I said, there’s nothing in this you can print out, nothing you can prove. Yet I know it’s real, it’s right, it works—even though we see through a glass darkly.”

  They didn’t notice that Velma had set their orders on the table, until Percy dropped by to refill their cups.

  “Your soup’s gettin‘ cold,” he snapped. “And your san’wiches are dryin‘ out.”

  Percy Mosely did not like his customers to be indifferent to his fare. No, indeed.

  The annual All-Church Feast, convening this Thanksgiving Day at Lord’s Chapel, was drawing its largest crowd in years. Villagers trooped across the churchyard hooting and laughing, as if to a long-awaited family reunion.

  It was one of his favorite times of the year, hands down.

  People he saw only at the post office or The Local were, on this day, eager to give him the details of their gallbladder operation, inquire how he liked married life, boast of their grandchildren, and debate the virtues of pan dressing over stuffing.

  This year, the Presbyterians were kicking in the turkeys, which were, by one account, “three whoppers.”

  Esther Bolick had made two towering orange marmalade cakes, to the vast relief of all who had heard she’d given up baking and was crocheting afghans.

  “Afghans?” said Esther with disgust. “I don’t know who started such a tale as that. I crocheted some pot holders for Christmas, but that’s a far cry from afghans.”

  Miss Rose Watson marched into the parish hall and marked her place at a table by plunking her pocketbook in a chair. She then placed a half dozen large Ziploc plastic containers on the table, which announced her intent to do doggie bags again this year.

  Ray Cunningham came in with a ham that he had personally smoked with hickory chips, and the mayor, who had renounced cooking years ago, contributed a sack of Winesaps.

  Every table in the Lord’s Chapel storage closets had been set up, and the Presbyterians had trucked in four dozen extra chairs. The only way to walk through the room, everyone discovered, was sideways.

  Cynthia Kavanagh appeared with two pumpkin chiffon pies in a carrier, Dooley Barlowe followed with a tray of yeast rolls still hot from the oven, and the rector brought up the rear with a pan of sausage dressing and a bowl of cranberry relish.

  Sophia and Liza arrived with a dish of cinnamon stickies that Liza had baked on her own. Handing them off to her mother, she ran to catch Rebecca Jane Owen, who had grown three new teeth and was toddling headlong toward the back door, which was propped open with a broom handle.

  Evie Adams helped her mother, Miss Pattie, up the parish hall steps, while lugging a gallon jar of green beans in the other arm.

  Mule and Fancy Skinner, part of the Baptist contingent, came in with a sheet cake from the Sweet Stuff Bakery.

  And Dora Pugh, of Pugh’s Hardware, brought a pot of stewed apples, picked in August from her own tree. “Get a blast of that,” she said, lifting the lid. The aroma of cinnamon and allspice permeated the air like so much incense from a thurible.

  In the commotion, George Hollifield’s grandchildren raced from table to table, plunking nuts and apples in the center of each, as Wanda Hollifield came behind with orange candles in glass holders.

  In his long memory of Mitford’s All-Church Feasts, the rector thought he’d never seen such bounty. He thought he’d never seen so many beaming faces, either—or was that merely the flush from the village ovens that had been cranked on 350 since daybreak?

  The face he was keeping his eye on, however, was Dooley Barlowe’s.

  Following the regimental trooping to the dessert table, someone rattled a spoon against a water glass. No one paid the slightest attention.

  Somebody shouted “Quiet, please!” but the plea was lost in the din of voices.

  Esther Bolick stepped to the parish hall piano, sat down, and played the opening bars of a ragtime favorite at an intense volume.

  A hush settled over the assembly, except for the kit
chen crew, who was lamenting a spinach casserole somebody forgot to set out.

  “Hymn two-ninety!” announced the rector, as the youth group finished passing out song sheets. “And let me hear those calories burn!”

  Esther gave a mighty intro, and everyone stood and sang lustily.

  Come, ye thankful people, come

  Raise the song of harvest home

  All is safely gathered in

  Ere the winter storms begin

  God, our Maker, doth provide

  For our wants to be supplied

  Come to God’s own temple, come

  Raise the song of harvest home.

  Baptists warbled with Anglicans, Presbyterians harmonized with Methodists, and the Lutherans who had trickled in from Wesley gave a hand with the high notes.

  The adults soldiered on through two more hymns, followed by the Youth Choir, who fairly blew out the windows with three numbers in rapid succession. The grand finale was a solo from Dooley Barlowe, whose voice carried all the way to the back of the room and moved several of the women to tears.

  “He ain’t got th‘ big head no more’n you or me,” said Dora Pugh.

  It was some time before anyone could move to help clear the tables.

  “Let’s just lay down right here,” said Mule Skinner, pointing to the floor.

  “You ‘uns cain’t be alayin’ down,” said Uncle Billy. “You’ve got baskets to take around, don’t you know.”

  Somebody groaned. “Tell us a joke, Uncle Billy!”

  “Well, sir, this feller had a aunt who’d jis’ passed on, an‘ his buddy said, ’Why are you acryin‘? You never did like that ol’ woman.‘ And th’ feller said, ‘That’s right, but hit was me as kept her in th’ insane asylum. Now she’s left me all ‘er money an’ I have t‘ prove she was in ’er right mind.‘ ”

  Groans and laughter all around. “Hit us again, Uncle Billy!”

  “Well, sir, this feller was sent off to Alaska to do ‘is work, and he was gone f’r a long time, don’t you know, and he got this letter from his wife, and he looked real worried an‘ all. His buddy said, ’What’s th‘ matter, you got trouble at home?’ An‘ he said, ’Oh, law, looks like we got a freak in th‘ family. My wife says I won’t recognize little Billy when I git home, he’s growed another foot.’ ”