These High, Green Hills

by Jan Karon

  “Father ... I want so much ... to start over. Do you think God ... will let me start over?”

  “That,” he said, meaning it, “is what God is all about.”

  Nurse Gilbert’s uniform rustled cripsly as she walked in with a needle. “This will help,” she said, going to Pauline.

  If only it could, he thought.

  “Lord help! Look at this! Are you practicin‘ to be John the Baptist in a church play? Remember what happened to him, honey, his hair was so bad-lookin’, they cut his head off.

  “How’s your wife, I saw her the other day, she was at the food bank givin‘ a ton of stuff, all I took was sweet potatoes and cream of mushroom soup, do you think that’s OK? Do you know what all you can do with cream of mushroom soup? It’s more versatile than Cheez Whiz, you can pour it over chicken and bake it covered, and Lord, it is the best thing you ever put in your mouth, Mule loves it, do you ever use it? Well, you should, you can also pour it over a roast, but you have to wrap that thing like a mummy for it to work, at least two sheets of foil, and let it go on three fifty for two hours.

  “Speakin‘ of foil, I’m learning to highlight with foil, I used to use a cap, but that is outdated, nobody does that anymore who’s up to the minute. Do you know what it costs to be up to the minute in this business? I went to a convention in Charlotte, you wouldn’t believe the hotel rooms down there, they cost an arm and a leg and you open your curtains and all you see is a brick wall.

  “Speakin‘ of walls, I hear Cynthia knocked holes in your kitchen, I said, ’Mule, what is that about?‘ Is that the latest thing, to knock holes in your wall? He said, ’Fancy, if you knock holes in our walls, I will personally knock your head off,‘ ha, ha. I’m sure she had a reason, she’s so smart, we all like her, I think you did really great to get her.

  “Oops, there I go, pokin‘ you with these nails, they’re acrylic, mine won’t grow because I never drank milk as a kid, don’t you think it’s awful the things you do when you’re young and have to pay for down the road? Like layin’ in th‘ sun. Look at these wrinkles around my mouth, see that? Sun! Too much sun. But I say, why quit now, if it’s goin’ to kill me, I’ve already had enough to keel me over two or three times.

  “Speakin‘ of keelin’ over, I hated to hear about ol‘ Miss Baxter, was she a friend of yours, I hope she left you some of that money she’s been hoardin’ back all these years. Whoa, baby, wouldn’t it be a deal for a preacher to have big bucks? What would you do, probably go to the Caribbean on a cruise, I have always wanted to go on a cruise, Mule says next year. Have you ever been on a cruise? Do you think you would throw up? I might throw up. I hear that is the worst sick anybody can get, but the food, they say you eat twelve or fourteen times a day, which is enough right there to make you throw up.

  “Sit still! I declare, men squirm like babies in this chair, I don’t understand it. Did you know Buck Leeper had th‘ guts to come back and set down where you’re settin’ and was nice as anything you’d ever want to see? Remember I nearly scratched his eyes out th‘ last time because he sassed me so bad?

  “Do you know who else comes in here? Adele Lynwood. Have you heard she goes out with J. C. Hogan? Can you believe it? Who would go out with J. C. Hogan? She’s really nice. You ought to talk to her sometime, she has a son who’s a cop in Deerfield—is that Connecticut or Massachusetts? And two of the cutest little granbabies you’ll ever lay eyes on. Seriously, what do you think she sees in him? It is beyond me.

  “Lord! Look at this stuff, I need a hay baler and a combine to clean up after you.

  “But let me tell you, honey, it is lookin‘ good, your wife will eat you with a spoon! And I am talkin’ a spoon!

  “See there? What do you think? That’ll be six dollars, you’re clergy.”

  “Any infection?” he asked Hoppy.

  “Nothing. No setback, no pneumonia, no infection.”

  “An answer to prayer?”

  “I don’t know. There’s no way to know. But I have my opinion, and it’s yes.”

  “So is this a miracle?”

  Hoppy ran his fingers through his unruly hair. “Definitely untypical. Definitely a minor miracle.”

  The rector grinned. “So why split hairs?” he asked.

  He called Olivia. “How’s it going?”

  She laughed.

  “Thank God you’re laughing.”

  “One must, Father, don’t you think?”

  “Yes, and I need desperately to remember that. Tell me everything. How is she?”

  “Very solemn. Did you know her mother has agreed to come out? They’ll be putting her in a women’s shelter in Wesley on Tuesday.”

  “Excellent! I’m relieved to hear that.”

  “I only hope this removes the impulse for Lace to run away. She’s quite a character, I must say, but more than that, she has character.”

  “Yes. I think so, as well.”

  “She likes Hoppy enormously! Oh, and I’ve cleaned her up and she looks wonderful in a dress, but I don’t think she likes it. Actually, I know she doesn’t like it, so we’ve washed and ironed all her old clothes and will keep them in her closet.”

  “Sounds like you’ve got a handle on it.”

  “I don’t know, Father, I think we mustn’t try and remove all her identity at once. The way she dresses seems rude and unworthy to us, perhaps, but it’s who she is, and we must let her grow up into a new creature without much forcing.”

  “I like your style.”

  “That hat, though...”

  He laughed. “A test, Olivia, a test.”

  “Mercy...”

  “I’ll be up to look in on you. Does she think I had anything to do with what happened?”

  “She’s generally distrustful of us all. I’m only hoping she doesn’t run away. But I don’t think there’s anywhere to run, now that her mother is leaving the Creek.”

  “I hope you’re right. Has she mentioned Poobaw?”

  “She said he was living under the house with her. They slept on a pile of blankets under the house, right under her mother’s bed. She said she could remove the floorboards and go in and out of the house without being seen. She knew they were looking for her, and thought they’d be looking for the boy, too. She was protecting him. She said it was the only child Pauline had left.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “She left him under the house when she went out to get food, and that’s when she was picked up.”

  Please, God, give us a break here.

  He wanted to move to Nova Scotia, one of the few places left that had home milk delivery, and be a milkman. It was not a high ambition, but the thought had always consoled him in times like these.

  “I like your hair,” said Puny, who was peeling potatoes at the sink.

  “I like yours.”

  She laughed.

  “Where are Luke and Lizzie today?”

  “Who?” She turned around and stared at him, blankly.

  “Uh-oh.” Luke and Lizzie, Sissy and Sassy, Jessie and Kenny ... how he’d ever keep them all sorted out was a blasted mystery.

  He went to the phone to call Miss Sadie and tell her that Dooley’s mother was improving. He had his hand on the receiver when he stopped and shook his head, realizing all over again that Miss Sadie was not there.

  “Father,” said Nurse Kennedy, “someone was here to see you about Miss Barlowe, but he didn’t stay.”

  “Who was it?”

  “Mr. Leeper—he’s the supervisor at Hope House. He said he heard Dooley’s mother was in here and he was sorry.”

  He was dumbfounded. Buck Leeper?

  “He left this for Miss Barlowe.”

  Nurse Kennedy handed him a rose in a vase.

  The man who had smashed furniture against his walls had left a rose in a vase?

  He shook his head with a kind of wonder.

  “There’s something I’ve been wanting to ask you, Father,” said Nurse Kennedy, walking with him along the hall.
/>   “Shoot.”

  “Why is it God so often breaks our hearts?”

  “Well. Sometimes He does it to increase our faith. That’s the way He stretches us. But there’s another reason, I think, why our hearts get broken.”

  She looked at him.

  “Usually,” he said, “what breaks is what’s brittle.”

  She nodded thoughtfully. “So we have to be careful of getting hard-hearted?”

  “Bingo,” he said, putting his arm around her shoulders as they walked to the end of the hall.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Send Me

  “IT’S OUR RETREAT for the month,” Cynthia announced, “and you have to come.”

  “No problem,” he said, happy to mind his wife.

  At twilight, they trooped through the backyard and out to Baxter Park, carrying a blanket.

  She brought a little sackful of things and began setting them out. There were small candles in holders, which she lit with a match, then placed in the grass like so many fireflies caught in jars.

  Two ripe peaches. A bottle of champagne. Crystal stemware. Two damask napkins.

  “There!” she said, pleased with herself.

  He fell back on the blanket, quietly intoxicated with an idea he couldn’t have come up with in a hundred years. Tree frogs called, crickets whirred, a night bird swooped from the hedge and rushed over them.

  “Ahhhh,” said his wife, letting out her breath.

  “What did you do today?” he asked, feeling a sudden tenderness for his wife’s good instincts.

  “The usual, of course. And I sat with Miss Pattie for an hour and a half.”

  He loved the familiarity of the question everyone asked of Evie Adams’s elderly mother. “What’s Miss Pattie done now?”

  “Nothing much, actually. We were sitting on the sofa playing Who’s Got the Button, that’s her favorite, when she went sound asleep. She just sort of fell over on my shoulder and snored for ages.”

  “And what did you do?”

  “I didn’t want to move and wake her up, of course, so I just sat there and prayed for Pauline and Evie and Miss Pattie, then I made out our grocery list in my head, and figured out how to mix two blues together with a dash of green, for some feathers I’m painting.”

  He smiled. “Good work, Deacon. How’s your book?”

  “Wonderful! Just two more pages to go. Do you know I absolutely love painting birds?”

  “What don’t you love?”

  “Three things. Stress, stress, and stress.”

  “We’ve certainly had all three lately. And all for good reason, of course, but ... ”

  “We shouldn’t even have to talk about stress, much less have it. After all, we live in Mitford!”

  “Right. A quaint little town where people value each other and nothing bad ever happens to anybody.”

  “Poop!” she said, with feeling.

  “Where are we going to live when we retire?” he asked, seeing a star appear. “And where are we going in August, which is only next month? To the coast?”

  “I can’t swim!” she said.

  “I can’t tolerate sun,” he confessed.

  “I hate sand!”

  “So that’s out,” he declared. “Let’s open the champagne.” They hadn’t had champagne since ...

  “We haven’t had champagne since our wedding,” she said, handing him the bottle. “And please be careful. My nephew, David, drew out the cork one evening and looked in to see why it hadn’t all come out.”

  “Uh-oh.”

  “That’s when it came out! He wore the eyepatch for two months.”

  He drew out the cork and they heard it pop across the grass and into the rhododendron.

  “Bingo!” exclaimed his wife.

  They raised their glasses. “How did I ever find you?” he asked.

  “You were poking around in the hedge, and there I was!”

  “In your curlers,” he said, grinning.

  “To curlers!” she crowed. “Let’s figure out August later, and dream of the other, now. We can paint retirement with a much bigger brush!”

  “How about if I supply in Canada?” he asked, lying back and holding the glass on his chest.

  “We could live in the wilds!”

  “Wherever I’m called.”

  “I could do that,” she said.

  “Or England. We could live in England. We know the language. Roughly speaking, of course.”

  “I could do almost anything, dearest. And just think—I can work anywhere, as long as I have paints and a brush. By the way, I hear there’s a little church at the coast with an apartment in the rear, and clergy from different denominations supply it every week or so. Of course we’d hate the sand, but we’d love the seafood. That might be fun.”

  “Maybe ... ” he said, smiling.

  The champagne was going straight to his head. He saw himself wearing shoes with treads that might have been spliced from tractor tires. He would be a veritable globe-trotter; he would go here, he would go there ...

  “Timothy, dear?” She nudged him in the side. “Are you dropping off?”

  He sat upright at once. “Who, me? Dropping off? Of course not!”

  Good Lord! Where would he get the energy to go farther than his own backyard?

  Dooley came from his mother’s hospital room, looking drawn and silent.

  They drove slowly down Old Church Lane in a downpour, the windshield wipers turned on high.

  “Your mother is going to be all right.”

  “She ain’t got but one ear.”

  It was the old Dooley talking, the boy who still lived under the emblem on his prep school blazer.

  “Do you want to stay with us awhile, and go see her every day?”

  Dooley was quiet. Then he said, “I want t‘ go back to th’ farm. I’ve got stuff t‘ do.”

  Two steps forward, one step back.

  On Main Street, they passed Olivia Harper in the blue Volvo, who blew the horn and waved. He saw Lace sitting beside her, unsmiling, the old hat jammed on her head.

  One for you and one for me, he thought, waving back.

  The Hope House project was booming along, even with the heavy rains. Buck Leeper was driving his crew to finish on time, and unbelievable as it seemed in today’s world, he was still committed to bringing it in on budget.

  “He’ll kill himself one day,” said Ron Malcolm. “He’ll just fall over in an excavation and they’ll throw the dirt over him. Or, he’s going to blow like a volcano.” Ron shook his head. “It’s not worth it.”

  “Amen.”

  “How’s the computer? And don’t bite my head off for asking.”

  “My friend, I am a happy man. By some miracle I’ll never understand, Emma likes the blasted thing, and has taken to it like a bee to clover. Go figure!”

  Ron laughed. “Hope House is going to be a dazzler.”

  “Indeed. Have you found an administrator? I missed the last meeting.”

  “It looks like Hoppy has one,” said Ron. “We’ll be in the interview process in the next week or two. I hear she’s tough.”

  “You’d have to be tough to run a forty-bed nursing home and make it go like clockwork.”

  “What do you know about tough?” Ron asked fondly.

  “What do I know about tough? Plenty. More than I’d like to know.”

  “You’ve been looking all in, if you ask me. Are you taking care of your Big D?”

  “Pretty well. I’m off my running schedule, but Scott Murphy will be here in September, we’re going to try and run together. That’ll get me going again.”

  Ron looked concerned. “I wouldn’t wait for Scott Murphy to get you going.”

  “So?” said Mule, as a rain-soaked J.C. slammed into the booth.

  “So what?” snapped J.C.

  “Oh, no. Don’t tell me ...”

  “I don’t have any intention of telling you. It’s none of your dadgum business.”

  “After all we
did to help you, it’s none of our business?” asked the rector.

  “You didn’t send the flowers,” said Mule, looking depressed.

  “I sent the bloomin‘ flowers.”

  “You forgot the reservation at the restaurant and they wouldn’t seat you and you had to go to Hardee’s,” surmised the rector.

  “I not only remembered the reservation, I shelled out sixty bucks for something on a lettuce leaf the size of snail droppings.”

  “Oh, law!” said Mule. “We told you not to go to that French place.”

  “Maybe it was snail droppings,” said the rector, trying not to laugh.

  “So, did you propose?”

  “Propose? We never talked about me proposing.”

  “We didn’t think we had to talk about it, we thought you got the drift. Did you at least tell her you love her?” asked Mule.

  “Sort of.”

  The rector looked at the editor over his glasses. “What do you mean, sort of?”

  “I said ... well, you know.”

  “No, we don’t know. And if we don’t know, chances are she doesn’t know, either. Have you ever thought of that? Read my lips,” said the rector. “You have to say it outright, I l-o-v-e y-o-u. Get it?”

  “I said something kind of like that.”

  “What was it?” asked Mule.

  “I told her I really like the way she keeps her squad car clean.”

  Mule slapped himself on the forehead. “No way, no way, no way! You’re hopeless.” He turned to the rector. “We’re wasting our time.”

  “Go back and try again,” said Father Tim. “Send the flowers. Take her to dinner. Tell her you love her.”

  “Then give her a ring,” said Mule. “Don’t you know anything about th‘ birds and bees?”

  “I might tell her I love her, but I’m not doin‘ flowers and snail stuff again.”

  The rector peered at J.C. “There’s that one-time deal rearing its ugly head. Flowers one time, a fancy dinner one time. You’re getting off the train before you get to the station, buddyroe.”