These High, Green Hills

by Jan Karon

  “Right,” he said. “We can’t be more than a few yards from the entrance. If it were a snake, it would bite us.”

  “Did we turn right or left at that vault thing?”

  “Right. We went around the corner, and there were the dinosaur ribs....”

  “The dinosaur ribs came before the vault.”

  He made a conscious effort not to sigh, and put his arm around her shoulders. “Let’s chill to the next episode, dude.”

  “What kind of talk is that?”

  “That’s Dooley’s new foreign language, in addition to French. Let’s take a couple of deep breaths and go from there.”

  “I feel as if every crawling thing ever created is lurking in here.”

  “Anything lurking in here is blind—if that’s any comfort.”

  “Blind?”

  “All creatures who live in caves are blind.”

  “That makes sense, I suppose. I mean, what good would it do them to see?”

  “I learned that in the seventh grade when we went on a bus trip to a local cave. I wanted to hold Justine Ivory’s hand while we were standing by the blind trout pool, but I didn’t have the guts.”

  “In the seventh grade, you wanted to hold hands?”

  “Didn’t you?”

  “Absolutely not. I fell in love with Russell Lowell in the fifth grade, got my heart broken, and didn’t even think of boys again until high school.”

  “Different strokes ...”

  He visualized Larry running this way right now, with the entire pack at his heels. Hadn’t Bo said the cave was scary? And big? And the opening half-covered by brush? That wouldn’t sound good to Larry Johnson, who was pretty savvy about things of the woods.

  On the other hand, what if the boys couldn’t find their way back to the cave?

  “Oh, Lord, Timothy! Gross! Vile! Get it off me!”

  “What?” he said, his heart thundering.

  “Something fell on my head, oh, please, oh, no, it’s running down my neck, oh, get it off ... !”

  “Water,” he said stoically, feeling a large drop crash onto his own head and roll down his back.

  “Are you sure? Run your hand down my back.”

  It had hit with such force, it must have come from a great distance. “Water,” he said again, smoothing her damp shirt.

  “Timothy, we’ve got to get out of here. We can’t just stand around talking about the seventh grade!”

  “Did you say you have candy bars in your day pack?”

  “Snickers. Two.” She turned her back to him and he reached into the pack and felt around among the colored pencils and the sketchbook and the dead flashlight and socks, and found them rolled up in her underwear.

  He didn’t know why it swam to the surface at just that moment, but he remembered Miss Sadie’s story of falling in the well, of the darkness and her terrible fear, and the long night when no one seemed destined to find her because of the rain. The rain had destroyed the scent for the bloodhounds. What if it were raining out there again, erasing their scent?

  But he was making mountains out of molehills. Good Lord, they’d been fumbling around in here for only ten or fifteen minutes, and already he was calling in the bloodhounds.

  His adrenaline had stopped pumping, and he felt exhausted, as if he wanted nothing more than to lie down and sleep. He ate two bites of the candy, wondering at its astonishing sweetness, its texture and form, the intricate crackle of the paper, and the way the smell of chocolate intensified in the darkness.

  “Please don’t eat the whole thing.” She had seen him in a diabetic coma once, which had been once too often.

  He put the rest of the bar in her day pack, realizing he felt completely befuddled. He didn’t want to press on until the sugar hit his bloodstream.

  “I’m going to start walking,” she said impatiently.

  “Which way?”

  “To my right. That’s the way we were going when we stopped to reflect on our early love interests.”

  “We were going to your left. I was ahead of you, remember?”

  “I thought I was ahead of you. No, wait. That was before.”

  “Trust me. We go this way. Grab my belt and hold on.”

  “I think it’s time to scream. In fact, I think we should scream now and walk ten paces and scream again, and so on until someone comes or we see the light.”

  “Have at it,” he said tersely.

  She swallowed the last bite of her Snickers, then bellowed out a sound that would have shattered the crystal in their own cabinets, forty miles distant.

  “How was that?” she wanted to know.

  “You definitely get the job of screaming, if further screaming is required.”

  “Every ten paces,” she said, feeling encouraged. “You pray and I’ll scream.

  “A fair division of labor.” He was feeling the numbing cold, now, and the dampness of his clothes. Didn’t the French keep wine in caves because of a mean temperature in the fifties? This felt like thirty degrees and dropping.

  “Five, six, seven ...” said Cynthia.

  His foot met thin air. He pitched wildly to the left, banging his head on a sharp object, and fell sprawling.

  Was it blood, or mud, or the moisture that covered everything in this blasted place?

  Blood. Definitely. He felt the sharp sting as he rubbed his fingers over the gash.

  “Are you all right?” He heard the fear in her voice.

  “I’m OK. Just a knock on the head.” He was struggling to find the breath that had failed him.

  “Let me help.”

  “Don’t move!”

  Her voice seemed to come from somewhere above him. He reached up, feeling nothing but air, then touched a flat rock. He inched his hand along the edge, and found the tip of her shoe. “You’re standing on some kind of ledge. Back up a little, and take it easy.”

  “Timothy ...”

  “Don’t panic. I’m fine. I’m telling you, we’ve got to be right at the entrance. We’ll be out of here in no time. Stay calm.”

  “Let me give you a hand.”

  “Back up and stay put.”

  He grabbed the ledge and hauled himself up. He had fallen only a couple of feet, thanks be to God.

  Lord, You know I’m completely in the dark, in more ways than one. I don’t have a clue where we are or what to do. I know You’re there, I know You’ll answer, give me some supernatural understanding here....

  He stood up and leaned against the wall, and reached for her, and found her sleeve and took her hand. He had lost all sense of time. A thousand years in Thy sight are but as yesterday when it is past, and as a watch in the night.... Was he being introduced to something like God’s own sense of time?

  “I’m going to scream again.”

  “Don’t,” he said, meaning it.

  “Why not, Timothy? People will be looking for us. We’ll never get out of here.”

  “Turn around.”

  “Turn around? Again? We’re so turned around now we can’t think straight. We’ve turned around and turned around, ‘til we’re fairly churned to butter!”

  “Clearly, this is not the way. It vanishes into thin air.”

  He stepped around Cynthia, and she tucked her hands into his belt.

  The sugar was beginning to work. He felt suddenly victorious as he moved along the wall, his wife attached to his belt like a boxcar to an engine.

  He walked more quickly now, his hands never leaving the wet surfaces on either side. There. That felt better. His adrenaline was definitely up and pumping.

  “We’re out of here!” he whooped. He reached up and brushed away the blood that was running into his left eye. A handkerchief. In his pocket. He took it out, still walking, and patted it to his forehead.

  When he put it in his pocket and reached for the wall on his left, he groped air.

  “Why did you stop?” she said.

  “The wall just ran out on the left. Maybe that’s another passage. Maybe that�
��s the way we came before I crashed. Hold on, we’re backing up.”

  He took two steps backward and found the wall on the left, and examined it with his hand. Did it end abruptly or did it curve around?

  It curved around. A fairly gentle curve. If they had come through this passage to where they were standing now, they might easily have continued around the curve to their right, which had pitched him off the ledge.

  What if he left her here and explored the passage? Perhaps just around the turn, he would see light from the entrance. Or what if they both explored that passage? But they could be stumbling along passages until kingdom come. Who would have thought that an innocent-looking hole in the side of a hill might lead to such unutterable complexity?

  Mush. His mind was mush.

  “We need to stop again,” he said.

  “Why stop again? You said we were going out of here.”

  “We are. But we need to stop and think, right here where these two passages converge. We’ve got to think.”

  They sat with their backs to the wall, and he put his arm around her to warm her, and pulled her to him. He felt the cool slime of mud under them, but he didn’t care.

  In his life, he had never confronted anything like this. He had never been to war, he had never been in peril, he had never even gone to the woods and lived on berries like Father Roland once boasted of doing. No, he had lived a sheltered life, a life of the soul, of the mind, and what had it gained him in the real circumstances of day-to-day living?

  He had spent nearly forty years telling other people how to live in the light, and here he was, lost in a complex maze in the bowels of the earth, in total, devastating darkness.

  For no reason he could have explained, he thought of his father calling him into the house that summer night, the night the chain had broken and he had walked his bicycle home from Tommy’s house.

  “Timothy.” The kitchen light was behind his father, throwing him into silhouette at the screen door. He had looked up and been frightened instantly. The silhouette of his father was somehow larger than life, immense.

  “Yes, sir?”

  “Come in and tell me why.”

  Come in and tell me why. He would never forget that remark. What did it mean? He knew it had something to do with why he could never do anything right. He had stood there, unable to go in, frozen.

  His father had opened the screen door and held it, and he walked inside.

  He saw the look on his mother’s face. “Don’t hurt him, Matthew.”

  “You’re crying,” Cynthia whispered, wiping the tears from his cheek. He hadn’t known he was weeping until she touched his face. It was as if he stood nearby, watching two people sitting on the floor of the cave, holding each other.

  “Dearest ...” Cynthia whispered, stroking his arm.

  The self who stood was humiliated that the priest had broken down and broken apart. The priest who would do this under pressure was a priest who could not get it right.

  “I can’t get it right,” he managed to say, as if repeating some unwritten liturgy.

  Unwritten liturgy. All these years, he had spoken the written liturgy, while underneath ...

  “Almighty God, to You all hearts are open, all desires known, and from You no secrets are hid....”

  I can’t get it right.

  “Holy and gracious Father, in Your infinite love You made us for Yourself....”

  I can’t get it right.

  “It’s all my fault,” she said. “I was the one who insisted we come in here. I led us on a merry chase and brought that no-good flashlight.... You mustn’t blame yourself.”

  He didn’t want to weep like this, but there was nothing he could do about it; he felt as if he’d broken open like a geode.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “Please forgive me.”

  “He couldn’t tolerate anything that wasn’t perfect.”

  “Who, dearest? What ... ?”

  “That’s why he was enraged when something broke. It had to be fixed at once—or thrown away. There was a terrible pressure to keep things from breaking, to keep them like new. Mr. Burton’s tractor broke down along the road from our house.... Mr. Burton pushed it off the road and left it in the field for days. My father never passed that tractor without lambasting the owner’s incompetence.”

  “Ah,” she said, quietly.

  “I can’t retire,” he told her. Why had he said that? ... like a geode.

  “Tell me why.”

  “The way things are, they’re running smoothly, most of the bases are covered. I’m trying to get it right, Cynthia. I can’t stop now.”

  “But you have got it right, Timothy.”

  He didn’t want to be placated and mollycoddled. He drew away from her, and she sat in silence.

  He was hurting her, he could feel it, but here in this total, mind-numbing darkness, he could not summon what it might take to care. Out there in the light, out there where his ministry was, he could always summon what it took to care.

  “Listen to me, dearest, and listen well.” He had heard knives in her voice once before, when he’d drawn away from her prior to their marriage. It was knives he heard again, but they were sheathed, and he leaned his head against the cold wall and closed his eyes.

  “I lived with Elliott for seventeen years, always trying to get it right. When I tried to kill myself and it didn’t work, I remember thinking, I can’t even get this right. Elliott was never there for me, not once—he was out making babies with other women, trying in his own confused way to get it right. During those long months when I was recovering in a friend’s house in the country, God spoke to my heart in a way He hadn’t spoken before. No. Erase that. He made me able to listen in a way I couldn’t listen before.

  “He let me know that trying to get it right is a dangerous thing, Timothy, and He does not like it.”

  His head pounded where the blood had congealed. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean that getting it absolutely right is God’s job.”

  The cold was seeping into him. He was beginning to feel it in his very marrow. He also felt the loss of her living warmth, though she was right beside him. He drew her to him and took her hands and put them inside his shirt and held her. She was shaking.

  “Must I remind you that your future belongs to God, and not to you? Please unlock your gate, Timothy. Leave it swinging on the hinges, if you will. This thing about our future must go totally out of our hands. We cannot hold on to it for another moment.”

  He smiled in the darkness. “Don’t preach me a sermon, Mrs. Kavanagh.” The weeping had stopped, but the geode lay open. He felt a raw place in himself that seemed infantile, newly hatched.

  He stood up and helped her to her feet. He was stiff in every joint, but stronger.

  “I think I should take this passage and check it out. I won’t go beyond the range of your voice, I promise. Maybe I can see light, maybe this is the way.”

  “Don’t leave me, Timothy.”

  “I promise I won’t go beyond the range ...”

  “I’ll come with you.”

  “I feel you need to stay here and be the compass. If I don’t turn anything up, I’ll pop right back. We’re not far from the opening. We can’t be. Besides, I know Larry, and he’s starting to get worried, maybe even ticked off, for Pete’s sake. One way or the other—”

  “Timothy ...”

  “Yes?”

  “You have your fears, I have mine. Don’t leave me.” Her own geode had come apart; he heard her panic.

  “But I don’t know what’s along that passage. Why should we both take the risk?”

  “You could go pitching headfirst into God knows what, you might not...”

  “Might not what?”

  “Might not come back.”

  “Of course I’ll come back. I’ll test every step I take.”

  “The buddy system—they say to always use the buddy system. We’re stronger together, smarter. If we only had something to sc
atter as we go, like bread crumbs. But then, we couldn’t see them....”

  Why hadn’t they left something at the entrance of the cave, some sign that they’d gone in, like the nearly empty water bottle or a candy wrapper? It might have said, If you find this, we’re still in here. Start the search.

  Stay calm was still the directive. They couldn’t go blasting down every passageway that presented itself. Light! If only he had the tiniest flame, the barest flicker of illumination, he would fall to his knees in thanksgiving.

  In Him was life; and the life was the light of men. And the light shineth in the darkness; and the darkness overcame it not....

  He refused to fear this thick, palpable darkness. As far as he knew, God had not drawn the line on caves. He hadn’t said, I’ll stick by you as long as you don’t do some fool thing like get lost in a cave, you poor sap. What He had said was, I well never leave you. Period.

  “Trust God!” he blurted to his wife.

  “Don’t preach me a sermon, Father Kavanagh. I am trusting Him, for Pete’s sake. It’s you I can’t get a bead on. Are we going or coming?”

  “Definitely going. Let’s tuck along this passageway for a bit. I won’t take a step I haven’t tested first. I’ll keep my left hand on the wall and my right hand in front of me. Hang on. And no backseat driving, thank you.”

  They moved carefully around the curving limestone wall with its thrusting formations.

  “ ‘I cannot see what flowers are at my feet,’ ” she murmured, “ ‘nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs, but, in embalmed darkness, guess each sweet wherewith the seasonable month endows.’ Who said that?”

  “Will Rogers!”

  She laughed. “One more guess.”

  “Joe DiMaggio?”

  “Keats!”

  “Aha.”

  “How’s it going up there?”

  “Ummm. Same old, same old. But no mud. Feels like we’re walking on dry clay. Does that ring any bells as to our previous sojourn?”

  “I can’t remember,” she said. “Our sojourns all run together like so much goulash.”

  He was feeling more closed in than he had before, when his hand suddenly struck something in front of him. It was a wall of sheer limestone with—he moved his cold hand over it as someone blind might examine a sculpture—with a swollen formation attached to its surface.