These High, Green Hills

by Jan Karon

  She stared at him with her mouth slightly agape.

  That ought to fix her.

  When Cynthia wasn’t bending over the drawing board with her elaborate wooden box of watercolors, she was laying a flagstone walkway through the hedge. This time, he couldn’t claim ineptitude. It was down in the dirt with his wife, or else.

  She was wearing one of Dooley’s baseball caps, a T-shirt, blue jeans, and out-at-the-seams tennis shoes. Given how youthful she was looking and what he was thinking, he could be jailed for a violation of the Mann Act.

  “I’m packing for your camping trip,” she said, huffing a heavy flagstone into the hollow he’d just dug with a shovel and edger. He would have huffed it in himself, but she preferred her way of placing the stones.

  “So it’s my camping trip, is it?”

  “Well, yes, I would never in a hundred years do this on my own.”

  “What are you packing?”

  “Colored pencils, Snickers bars, and a change of socks and underwear.”

  “That ought to do it,” he said, trying not to laugh.

  “What are you packing?”

  “They’re bringing the food, so we’re traveling light. Tent, flashlight, emergency candles, matches, bottled water, a Swiss army knife, an iron skillet, a coffeepot, coffee, fire starter ... ah, let’s see ... inflatable pillows, ground cover, lantern, sleeping bags, bandages, toilet paper, dried fruit and nuts ... what else? A canteen, fishing poles, bait, talcum powder, mosquito repellent, Band-Aids, sunscreen, and, oh, yes ... a bucket to put the fish in. Ah, I just remembered—an egg turner to flip the fish in the skillet. And cornmeal, of course. Can’t fry fish without cornmeal.”

  “We’ll need a U-Haul,” she said, muscling the stone around until it pleased her.

  “We’re going to pack it in to the campsite.”

  “You do have someone meeting us there with a team of mules?”

  “You’re looking at the team,” he said, pleased with himself.

  “Do we really need all that for one night?”

  “They’ve asked us to stay two nights.”

  “Timothy!”

  He rolled his eyes and shrugged.

  “Oh, well,” she said, wiping her forehead with the back of her garden glove. “Dig this one a little bigger. See that stone? It needs to go in next, I think. What do you think?” She sat back on her heels.

  “Perfect.”

  “It will be lovely not to get mud on our shoes when we pop through the hedge.”

  “I’ll say.”

  “Timothy, dearest, do you like being married?”

  “Married to you, or married in general?”

  “In general,” she said, watching intently as he dug the hollow.

  “I do. Very ...” he searched for the right word, “consoling.”

  “Lovely! Now, do you like being married to me?” He looked down upon her sapphire gaze under the bill of the baseball cap and squatted beside her.

  “Words fail,” he said, meaning it. The scent of wisteria floated out from her like scent from a bush in an old garden.

  “I want to be your best friend,” she said.

  “You are my best friend.”

  “You can speak your heart to your best friend,” she said.

  “What is it you want me to say?”

  “I want us to talk about our future. It really doesn’t matter if you don’t know what you want to do, or when. It would be lovely just to talk, to have it out in the open. I can’t bear that closed place in you. It’s like coming up to a gate that’s been locked, and the key thrown away.”

  “Perhaps we all contain gates that have been locked.”

  “Perhaps,” she said.

  He wanted to stand up again and turn away from her and go on with their work. Wasn’t that what they’d come out here to do? But he sat down in the grass and looked at her across the half-finished walkway. He was grateful for the shade because he felt warm, and suddenly peevish.

  Katherine had taken it upon herself to counsel him before he got married, whether he needed it or not. “First and foremost,” she had said in her salty way, “communicate! If Cynthia wants to talk, Teds, you’d better hop to it. Communicating is everything, painful as it may be. Trust me on this.”

  So far, so good. But he wanted to draw the line somewhere. He wanted to draw it right here and right now—but he sat and faced her, making the effort.

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” he said, finally.

  “I know.” She sat, too, and took off her work gloves.

  There was a long silence, filled with the chatter and song of birds. A junco dipped through the air and vanished into the hedge. They heard a neighbor’s phone ring.

  A nap, he thought. A nap would be the very thing. Why this Puritan work ethic pumping through them like so much adrenaline? Hadn’t they come and gone through the hedge with perfect ease for the last two years? So what if they got their shoes muddy once in a blasted blue moon?

  “You’re angry,” she said.

  Yes, he was. And he didn’t like it. “What good can it do, talking of something I don’t know anything about? We came out here to work, why not work?”

  “Lord,” she prayed aloud, “will You please help us through this?”

  His heart was hard toward her, something he hadn’t experienced since they married, and wanted never to experience. It felt like the time she had mentioned marriage—only mentioned it. His heart had turned to stone, and remained stone for weeks on end.

  “There’s your gate,” she said. “I’m right up against it, and it’s still locked.”

  More birdsong. A car passing on Wisteria Lane.

  “You’ll have to do the talking,” he said, “because I don’t know what to say. I don’t have a clue.”

  She looked at her hands, a little furrow between her brows. He thought she was weighing whether it was worth it to try and figure out their future.

  “All that really matters about our future,” she said, “is that we’re together. I mean that with all my heart. I feel so puzzled about why you shut down like this—why does this wave of coldness seep out from you when there’s any mention of your retirement? Oh, rats, Timothy, why does it have to be complicated? All I want to know is...

  “... are you going to preach ‘til you keel over? Will we someday have our own home? Have you thought where we might live?”

  “I mean,” she said, waving her arm toward the new flower bed, “should we be planting all these perennials? ”

  He stared at the row of astilbe. “I don’t know. Why do I have to know?”

  “Ummm,” she said, looking at him. “This is going nowhere.”

  “So let’s get back to work.” He got to his feet and picked up the shovel.

  What had happened? They had been working together as one flesh and one spirit, laying one flagstone walkway to link two houses. And then it had all come apart.

  They were silent as they placed the remaining stones.

  He felt oddly embarrassed at his hardheaded behavior, behavior that even he didn’t truly understand.

  They were an hour out of Mitford, headed north to the campsite, when a drumming rain began. It transformed the overloaded van into an odorous cocoon on wheels. A radio report guaranteed the downpour would last through the morning and well into the afternoon.

  Turning around and going back was loudly argued among eight teenagers.

  Bo Derbin, who had a surging, but nonetheless repressed, attraction to Lila Shuford, would have none of turning back. He imagined himself swinging on a vine across a broad creek or tributary, to rescue her from a human savage raised by wolves.

  Avoiding eye contact with his wife, the rector voted to press on. Larry declared he had no intention of doing otherwise.

  They pressed on.

  Eight teenagers with lower lips they might have tripped over was not a pretty sight.

  “Oh, pipe down!” yelled Larry, clipping along at the front of the line as they hiked i
nto the woods in a persistent drizzle. Though known for not taking any flack from the youth group, he was nonetheless their hands-down favorite leader, not to mention an Eagle Scout, an Orvis fly-casting school graduate, and onetime wrestler of a grizzly bear.

  “When we get there,” shouted Larry, “the sun will be shining, the fish will be biting—”

  “And the ground will be sopping!” he heard Cynthia mutter.

  Sopping was right. The ground at the campsite was like okra that had been boiled and mashed.

  He had never seen his wife look so pathetic, though she didn’t utter a word of complaint. The kids, on the other hand, howled and grumbled. They wanted Nintendos, they wanted TV, they wanted a bathroom with a lock on the door.

  But they hadn’t come two miles from civilization and forty miles from Mitford to coddle themselves.

  “Strip bark!” commanded Larry Johnson, who was humiliated to find he’d forgotten the Coleman stove.

  “Strip ... bark?” said Cynthia.

  In the rector’s opinion, that was where the whole thing began to slide downhill.

  He knelt by the sleeping bag, which, like a bicycle, was built for two.

  He had endured some discomfort with the salesperson when he bought the thing in Holding, but spreading it on the ground in front of God and everybody had been worse.

  The kids had snickered, Larry Johnson had cocked his eyebrow like some two-bit actor, and Cynthia had been bashful as a girl. The heck with it, he thought, unzipping his side at a little after ten o‘clock on Friday night.

  So what if he had forgotten the tent poles and they had no earthly cover from whatever the weather might bring? So what if they were lying out in the open like so much carrion for wolves, bears, or worse, wild boar?

  He glanced around the campsite, making certain no one watched as he slithered in beside his slumbering wife. Clearly, no one cared. Larry Johnson was playing a final tune on his guitar, which, thanks to the dense humidity that followed the rain, sounded precisely like rubber bands stretched over a cigar box.

  Cynthia had almost completely enveloped herself in the bag, leaving only her nose in view. The thought of sleeping on the ground with but a thin cover under them and nothing above them had stunned her—no two ways about it. It had put a positive curl in her lip that he didn’t believe he’d ever seen before.

  In the end, however, the fresh air worked wonders. After crawling into the bag a little before eight-thirty, she had gone out like a light.

  He drew her close, feeling how much she meant to him, and how like his own body her sleeping form seemed to be. One flesh! There were miracles in that phrase, in that unfathomable concept. He realized he sometimes felt attached to her like a Siamese twin, joined at the heart or the groin, the shoulder or the spleen.

  How had he lived so long without this vital connection in his life? Where had he been all these years? How had he gotten by before he was married?

  He couldn’t reckon how it had been before. It was as if he’d always lain with her in this sleeping bag built for two, spooning like a farm-hand, inhaling her warmth. What power it must have taken to draw him out of himself, he thought with wonder, out of his endless surmise, out of his inward-seeing self, into such a union as this.

  “How lucky you are!” people continually said to him. But, no. There was never any time he thought of it as luck. Luck! What was that, after all, but so much random good fortune? It was grace, and grace alone that brought Cynthia’s body close to his, made them this single mystical flesh that, once laced together like brandy in coffee, could not be riven apart—even by the world and its unending pressures.

  He closed his eyes and thanked God for the crucible of peace and laughter and love that lay beside him, snoring with the galvanized precision of a chain saw.

  “Lila Shuford!” yelled Larry Johnson, beating on a skillet with an egg turner. A pitiful fire crackled in a ring of rocks.

  “Here!”

  “Lee Lookabill!” More beating.

  “Here!”

  Murky sunshine. Birdsong.

  “Luke Burnett!”

  He sat up in the sleeping bag and looked at his watch. Five after six. He hadn’t slept this late since his honeymoon. Cynthia rolled over and peered at him as if he were a Canadian moose who had stumbled into camp.

  “Cynthia Kavanagh!”

  “Ugh!” muttered Cynthia, sitting up in a T-shirt from The Local, which was printed with a huge yellow squash. “Here, for Pete’s sake!”

  He reached for the camera in his duffel bag, but not before she slammed his wrist with a karate chop.

  “Do it and die,” she said, meaning it.

  “Rats. I was going to put it on the parish hall bulletin board. Enlarged.”

  She grinned, surprising him entirely. “Actually, that wasn’t so bad,” she said, stretching. “Except I feel bruised all over. Were we sleeping on a rock?”

  “You slept like a rock, I know that.”

  “I remember when you crawled in here with me, but I played like I was asleep. I was furious. But I’m over it.”

  “You knew nothing when I got in here with you. You were snoring with the might of a top-of-the-line fellerbuncher.”

  “What in heaven’s name is that?”

  “You don’t want to know,” he said, slithering out of the bag.

  “Clarence Austin!”

  Birdsong.

  “Clarence! Rise and shine!”

  “Clarence ain’t here,” said Lee Lookabill.

  “Where is he?”

  “I ain’t seen ‘im.”

  “Take Henry Morgan and find him,” said Larry. “Bo Derbin!”

  Muted laughter from the three girls who had slept under a quilt tied to four poles.

  “Bo! Snap to!”

  “Bo’s not here,” said Lila Shuford.

  “Where is he?”

  “He slipped off, we saw him. He went with Clarence. They’ve been gone a really long time.”

  “Prob‘ly takin’ a leak,” said Lee Lookabill, trying to be helpful.

  “Move it,” Larry told the search party, “and while you’re at it, strip more bark. We’ve got grub to cook.” The rector thought Larry looked like he’d just wrestled with yet another grizzly.

  “Gross to the max,” muttered Cynthia, remembering last night’s chicken à la king, which had come packaged in industrial-strength brown plastic.

  “You’re losing your vocabulary out here in the woods. Didn’t you like your peach bar?”

  “I hated it. I was too hungry to wait while it soaked in water, so I ate it dry. It’s still reconstituting in my stomach.”

  “And the peanut butter. I thought you loved peanut butter.”

  “Can you imagine having to knead your peanut butter in the package before opening it? And what was that they gave you to spread it on, a flagstone for the path through our hedge? I’m so starved, I could eat a helping of moss. What’s in that package you had left?”

  He picked it up and squinted at it. “Sugar, salt, chewing gum, matches, and toilet tissue.”

  “Yum,” she said, slithering out into the chill morning air. “Let’s save that for afternoon tea.”

  Lee Lookabill lost his glasses while stripping bark, and Henry Morgan returned with a report.

  “We cain’t find Bo ’n Clarence, and Lee’s done lost ‘is glasses and cain’t hardly see to walk back. I thought I stepped on ’em, somethin‘ crunched, but it was a stick.”

  “Fine!” snapped Larry. “Luke, go back with Henry and help Lee find his glasses. Tim, Cynthia, look for Bo and Clarence. They can’t be far. Tell ‘em I said they’re in deep manure. And remember—step on a log, not over it.”

  Larry squatted over the smoking fire with a skillet, trying to dignify a cement-colored block of hash browns, as the rector and his wife vanished into a thicket.

  Cynthia pulled on blue jeans and a denim shirt. He got into jeans, also, and hiking boots, leaving on the turtleneck he’d slept in, and addin
g a corduroy shirt. The air was damp and cool from yesterday’s rain, and the skies again appeared overcast.

  “I’ll take my day pack. We might see something worth drawing.” She pulled her blond hair back and whipped a rubber band around it.

  “I don’t think this is a drawing trip.”

  “You never know,” she said brightly. “Besides, I think it has two candy bars in it.”

  “Ummm. No substitute for Percy’s poached eggs with a side of grits.”

  “Dearest,” she said, looking at him sternly, “we didn’t come on this trip to coddle ourselves.”

  Give his wife a little time and a good night’s rest, and she could bounce back with the best of them, he thought with pride.

  “Bo!” he called as they stepped into a clearing in the woods. “Clarence! Give us a shout!”

  “You want me to whistle?” asked Cynthia.

  “Whistle?”

  “Like this,” she said, piercing the air with a note so high and shrill, it might have dropped the Chicago Bulls in their tracks.

  “Good Lord!” he said, holding his ears. “Where did you learn to do that?”

  “When I was eleven. I was in a girls’ club and we all learned to do something boys did. Phyllis Pringle learned to shoot marbles, Alice Jacobs took up the slingshot, and I learned to whistle.”

  “Aha.”

  “Want me to do it again?”

  “Well ...”

  She did it again.

  “You’re strong stuff, Kavanagh,” he said with admiration.

  They heard the answering whistle reverberate in the woods.

  “Listen!” she exclaimed.

  “Sounds like it came from over there.”

  They sprinted into the clearing and were nearly across when they saw Bo and Clarence emerge from the woods.

  “Man!” shouted Bo. “You won’t believe this!”

  “It better be good,” said the rector, meaning it.

  Clarence pointed toward the trees. “There’s a big cave in there!”