by Jan Karon
“Father?”
Dressed in dark trousers and a familiar plaid shirt, the man up ahead stood next to a road sign at the edge of a cliff. The man’s right arm was lifted, as if shielding his eyes from a bright sun, though no sun shone.
His heart pounded in his breast—to think it may be his father, dead all these years and now alive and real and wearing a shirt he remembered giving him at Christmas. The brown in the plaid was extraordinarily beautiful; he’d never known that brown might have this rich and glowing life.
The man squinted in his direction, as if affronted by the interruption of an important thought.
Yes! He could see clearly now: It was his father, his young and handsome father, the very image of the picture that had sat always on his mother’s dressing table in a silver frame. Tears stung his eyes. How extraordinary that he wasn’t dead, that there would be another chance for them. He stood rooted to the spot, weeping unashamed.
“Who is it?” demanded his father.
“It’s…” Who was he? He looked at his arms, his legs, his feet. He was wearing loafers he’d put on this morning, and pants he’d picked up from the cleaner’s in Wesley. He felt his head, and the hair lying about his skull in a fringe. It was this that inarguably identified himself to himself.
“It’s Timothy!”
His father knit his brow and frowned. “I don’t know you!” he said, then turned and walked off the cliff’s edge as though out for an evening stroll.
A voice murmured at his right ear; he felt a warm breath that cosseted his hearing and made it acute.
“O God, Light of lights, Keep us from inward darkness. Grant us so to sleep in peace, that we may arise to work according to Your will.”
The voice ceased, and he waited to hear it again, desperately wished to hear it again. Is that all? There came a kind of whirring in his head, as if of planets turning, and then the voice warmed his ear again. “Goodnight, dearest. I love you more than life….”
He could not open his mouth, it was as if he had no mouth, only ears to catch this lovely sound, this breath as warm as the tropical isles he would never visit. Nor had he eyes to see; he discovered this when he tried to open them. No mouth to speak, no eyes to see; all he could locate was his right and waiting ear.
He tried to remember what the voice had just said to him, but could not. Speak to me again! he cried from his heart. Please! But he heard nothing more.
The water poured in through the top of his head, as loud as a waterfall, and rushed into his neck and arms and hands and belly and legs and streamed into his feet. Immediately the wave came in again at the top of his head and flowed through him once more.
The water’s journey was warm and consoling, familiar; it was as if he’d waited for this moment all his life, and now that it had come, he was at peace.
Then he was floating somewhere, weightless, emptied of all doubt or fear, but not emptied of longing. More than anything, he longed for the sound of the voice at his ear, and the warm zephyr that came with it.
The birdsong was sharp and clear, the sky cloudless. He was walking along a woodland trail, carrying something on his back. He supposed it might be a pack, but he didn’t check to see. In trying to balance the thing between the blades of his aching shoulders, he felt the weight shift wildly so that he lost his balance. He stumbled; the edge of the woodland path crumbled under his right foot and he fell to his knees, hard, and woke shouting.
Lord! Where are you?
He knew he had shouted, yet he hadn’t heard his voice.
The room—was it a room?—was black, not even a street lamp shone, and the dream—was it a dream?—had been so powerful, so convincing, that he dared not let it go. Where are You? he repeated, whispering, urgent.
Here I am, Timothy.
He lifted his hand and reached out to Jesus, whom he couldn’t see but now strongly sensed to be near him, all around him.
The tears were hot on his face. He had found the Lord from whom he’d thought himself lost, and lay back, gasping, as if he’d walked a long section of the Appalachian Trail.
Thank you! he said into the silence. Had he spoken?
“‘And yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death…’”
There was the voice at his ear, and the soft, warm breath. Stay! Don’t go, don’t leave me.
“‘I will fear no evil, for Thou art with me, Thy rod and Thy staff, they comfort me….’”
He listened, but couldn’t contain the words; he forgot them the moment they were spoken.
“I love you, my darling, my dearest, my Timothy.”
A fragrance suffused the air around his pillow, and he entered into it as if into a garden. It possessed a living and deeply familiar presence, and was something like…
…Home. But what was Home? He couldn’t remember. His heart repeated the word, Home, Home, but his head couldn’t fathom the meaning.
“I…came…shift…yes…it’s…soon.”
Voices. Voices interrupted by static, sounding like the radio that sat in the corner of the living room in Holly Springs, with broadcasts that left out entire words of critical war news and replaced them with air.
“Did you…Kennedy?”
“…right…then some.”
“…twice…seventh leading cause…death.”
“I…doctor…must, too.”
“…wring neck.”
He grew weary of trying to piece together a puzzle that was clearly missing its most interesting pieces.
He discovered he was longing for something so finely woven into the fiber of his being that it couldn’t be identified, one might as well strive to put form and feature on vapor. Longing, longing, his spirit torn with it…
Then he began to know. It was a gradual understanding, unfolding in him like petals opening after rain.
He held his breath, waiting for the revelation he was certain would come. When at last he could name the longing, he felt his heart lift up with a sudden, stunning joy.
He was longing for…his wife.
But he couldn’t make sense of the word; his heart appeared to know its meaning full well, but his brain refused to step up to the plate. What was “wife”? Think, Timothy! Think! His head felt as if a network of connections had shut down entirely and an odd rewiring were taking place.
Wife. His heart told him it meant something like comfort or solace. Yes! Wife was solace. Chocolate was candy. Candy was chocolate. Solace was wife.
Wife was also…He waited for the meaning to grow in his breast, then felt himself reading his heart as one might read a book to gather understanding. Wife was also wonder, his heart seemed to tell him. Yes! Wonder and pleasure and…delight!
He liked this game, he had always liked games, really, was quite good at Scrabble and practically unbeatable at something starting with…what did it start with? With an M? But he was veering off into mist again. Now that he knew he could read his heart, he wouldn’t feel so alone. What else, then?
Wife was……
laughter! He remembered laughter, though distantly. Laughter doeth good like a medicine! he tried to say.
He fell into a kind of sleep in which his body floated as if on waves of music. He thought it might be Beethoven’s Pastorale, in which the crashing of the thunderstorm over the meadows would soon be heard, but the storm did not come. When he awoke, he found he’d learned yet another definition:
Wife was peace.
He felt someone caressing his hand, but couldn’t open his eyes to see or his mouth to inquire who it might be. The touch was inexpressibly tender; he wanted to clasp the caress, to hold it to himself as insurance against what might come.
Wife, he said, trying to move his mouth. Wife, he had discovered in his sleep, was a place one went when one was afraid, or alone, or even senselessly happy. It was a place one wanted to be, a place one cherished…it was something very like Home.
“Home,” he said, and heard himself speak.
“But it’s what he wants. It’s
the only word he’s uttered in days.”
“He can’t go home, it’s too soon, he could be here for weeks, we don’t know where this thing is going—”
“We could have help come in, surely you could find someone for us, perhaps Nurse Kennedy on her hours off.” He thought the woman sounded close to tears and wanted to rise up and protect her from the other voice.
He was urinating where he lay and could do absolutely nothing to prevent it. He felt it streaming out of him and afterward was greatly relieved. He wondered why it hadn’t soaked the bed beneath him. But of course he wasn’t lying in a bed, he was in a hammock swung by his mother and he was wearing knickers and was barefoot and laughing, and she was singing.
Baby Bye, here’s a fly,
Let us watch him you and I,
As he crawls, up the walls,
Yet he never falls.
I believe with six such legs
You and I could walk on eggs!
Spots of red dot his head
Rainbows on his back are spread.
“I’m not a baby!” he shouted, in case she had forgotten.
She laughed. “Oh, really? Is that so? I did forget for a moment, I admit, but only a very tiny moment!”
He thought his mother the most beautiful woman in the world. More beautiful than the ladies in Ladies’ Home Journal, and nine hundred thousand times more beautiful than the other ladies at church.
“I’m five!” he shouted again, flying through the air.
“You have a whole day left before you’re five! I want this day to go on and on and on and on and—”
“For always?” he yelled.
“For always!” whooped his mother.
He felt secretly pleased that she wished him always to be four instead of five, though he would have hated being four forever.
O Lord, you are my portion and my cup; it is you who upholds my lot. My boundaries enclose a pleasant land; indeed, I have a goodly heritage. I will bless the Lord who gives me counsel; my heart teaches me, night after night…
He stood before his Sunday School class in his mother’s Baptist church and recited the whole of the Sixteenth Psalm, for which he would be given a coveted gold star to wear on his lapel.
I have set the Lord always before me; because he is at my right hand I shall not fall. My heart, therefore, is glad, and my spirit rejoices; my body also shall rest in hope….
You will show me the path of life; in your presence there is fullness of joy, and in your right hand are pleasures for evermore.
For evermore… the phrase moved him deeply and set him wondering about eternity and the souls of others. Miss Wright was smiling and nodding her head. While one part of him was twelve years old and sitting down after the recitation, another part of him, a vague and hazy part, stood filled with relief and joy that Miss Wright, whom he and everyone else loved, had not been killed in a car accident with her husband on Christmas Eve.
Well done, Timothy.
Thank you, ma’am.
His heart pounded like a jackhammer, his face blazed. He suddenly knew that tonight, possibly even before, he would pray, Lord, show me the path of my life…
Why can’t we talk? he wanted to say to his father, who sat across from him at the kitchen table. But this question supposed that they had tried to talk and failed. They had never really tried to talk. He would attempt something else, then, something more straightforward and to the point. After all, what if his father died before they seized the chance?
He cleared his throat and felt the terrible fear of a man who, though poised on a diving board, cannot swim. “Let’s talk…sir,” he said.
“About what?”
His father was much older than the handsome man in the silver frame that always sat on his mother’s dressing table.
“I…I don’t know,” he said, ashamed that he didn’t know. Now that he had his father’s attention, he remembered that he hadn’t chosen a subject. “Maybe about how we could…communicate better.”
“Communicate.”
His father repeated the word, looking as he often looked—inordinately bored.
“Why do you hate me?” There it was, he’d said it. His breath failed.
“Hate you.”
He gulped air. “Yes. I think you do. I don’t know why.” He was stricken by what he was doing, but more than that, he urgently wanted to know.
His father was stalling for time, making him suffer.
“Talk to me, Father. Tell me why.”
The color had drained from his father’s face. “You are impertinent, Timothy.”
“No, Father, I am your son and I must know the answer.” Rage flamed in him, but he resisted it. He was a man now, he had finished high school with honors, he had been accepted into a respectable and discriminating college—he would wait for the answer without asking again, and without begging or whining. He felt the heavy pounding of his heart.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about, Timothy. I seldom do, in fact.”
His father rose from the table and walked stiffly from the kitchen. He shut the door, which usually remained open, behind him.
He sat frozen, lest the slightest movement cause something in him to shatter.
Then there was the whisper of his mother’s dress, the gray faille that sounded like dry husks of corn blown together in a breeze.
She sat in his father’s chair and reached for his hand across the table. “Love your father, Timothy,” she said quietly. “Pray for him.”
“I can’t. I’ve tried, but it doesn’t work.” He wanted it to work, if only to please her.
“It’s time I told you something.”
Her eyes were brown and dark. He felt he could see a kind of eternity in them.
“Your father bears many wounds.”
“But it isn’t right to inflict them on others; especially not on you.”
“No. It isn’t right. Yet, in many ways, it’s no surprise. His father treated him brutally. You know the verse from Deuteronomy.”
“Lots of people have been treated brutally. Saint Paul—”
“But Saint Paul had encountered Christ, and your father shields himself against even the remotest possibility that Christ would approach him.”
Through the window, he saw his father driving away.
“Timothy, your grandfather once horsewhipped your father—in front of a great number of people. It was a vicious attack that left Matthew terribly damaged in many ways. After that incident, which wasn’t the first of its kind, Matthew sealed himself up like a tomb. That’s how he made certain that his father could never reach him again.”
He watched the black Packard make a right turn by the hedge of myrtles and disappear from view. The loss he felt was sudden and immeasurable, different from any loss he’d ever felt before.
“I’m sorry,” he said at last. “But it’s too easy. When he shut out his father, he shut out everyone else, too. He uses a terrible personal experience as an excuse to wound others.”
“Forgive him, Timothy.”
“How can I do that? I don’t know how to do that.”
“I’ll pray for you to be able to do that,” she said simply.
“Do you love him?” he asked. It was a deeply personal question. His family did not ask deeply personal questions, and today he had asked an intimate confession of both his parents.
She gazed out the window as she answered. “I thought I could soften his heart, could give him joy. I believed that love would conquer all.”
“Do you still believe that?”
“Yes,” she said, turning to look at him. “I still believe that. Please believe that with me.”
He’d attended college for two years, then gone on to seminary, perceiving his call to the priesthood as God’s way of using Timothy Kavanagh to bring his father into relationship with Jesus Christ. But his father died with a hardness of heart no mortal son could remove.
He had tried hard to believe with his mother that love w
ould conquer all. And love had not conquered.
He felt a cool breeze on his face and heard the laughter of children.
The children appeared to be sitting on a limb of the tree above his head, for he saw feet dangling among the leaves. One small pair of feet was shod in white socks and patent leather shoes and the other feet were brown and bare.
“Father, is that you?”
“Miss Sadie! Is that you?”
“It’s us!” More laughter. The limb moved; leaves trembled.
“What are you doing up there?”
“Playing!”
“Is Louella with you?”
“We eatin’ cornbread an’ milk!” Louella shouted.
“I declare,” he said, shaking his head.
“Come up!” crowed Miss Sadie. “I need to talk with you about something.”
“No way am I coming up there.”
“Father, if you want my advice, clergy needs to climb a tree once in a while.”
“Else you goes stuffy!”
“You’ll have to talk to me where I stand,” he said, being firm. What nonsense!
“Well, then, Father, I want you to look out for Dooley and Lace Turner.”
“What do you mean, look out for them?”
“Don’t let them drift apart.”
“What can I do about such things?” He was starting to feel positively huffy. “That’s God’s business!”
“I thought God’s business was your job!” replied Miss Sadie.
“It is not my job to meddle in the romantic lives of people who’re barely college age!”
“Oh, pshaw! What do you think I should tell him, Louella?”
“Tell ’im do the best he can.”
“Do the best you can, Father. That will be enough.”
“Blast!” he muttered, stomping away. He didn’t like people thrashing around in trees above his head. How ridiculous.
He was a balloon shaped like a man; his right arm, his chest, his groin, his legs were being filled with a familiar substance, though he couldn’t have said what it was….
There was a terrible fatigue in him, as if he had toiled up mountains, mountains he had not in the least wished to climb.