by Jan Karon
“Consider it done,” he said. “May His angels attend you every step of the way.”
“Timothy…”
“Yes?”
Happy sigh. “You’re the love of my life.”
“Same back!” he exclaimed. “By the way, have you heard the one about the three old sisters who…”
“Timothy? I apologize for the lateness of the hour—”
Edith Mallory.
Instinctively, he flung the handset across the room and heard it crash against the wall and clatter to the floor.
Long before Puny arrived, he was up and about, having a single cup of coffee, then, on his doctor’s advice, switching over to herb tea. Herb tea! He never thought he’d live to see the day.
“Right,” Hoppy had said, “and if you don’t shape up, you won’t live to see the day.”
“Very funny.”
“Laughter doeth good like a medicine, pal.”
He shook his head as he poured boiling water over the tea bag. Using a white jacket and stethoscope as free license, Hoppy Harper was getting away with murder.
He was setting the kettle on the stove when the phone rang. Hoping it was Cynthia, he answered at once.
“Timothy, if you hang up, you’ll completely miss the wonderful idea I’ve had, something that should be very close to your heart.”
He tried to speak, but couldn’t.
“Please don’t stress yourself so when I ring, I’m only trying to do something worthwhile for the community. Wasn’t it you who once pestered me about that very thing? Hmmm?”
“Don’t call here again,” he said, trying to keep his voice even.
“Not ever, ever again?”
He heard the sharp intake of breath as she inhaled smoke from her brown cigarette. “Precisely!” he said, slamming the phone onto the hook.
He stood at the kitchen island and took a deep breath. Then another. In only moments, he was feeling calm again, even confident; he had at last taken control.
Yet he noted that his hand trembled as he lifted the mug.
“Please!” he told Puny, who was washing yellow squash at the sink.
“Take the day off! I’m fine, you don’t have to be my nursemaid.”
“I’m not takin’ th’ day off.”
“Puny, why do you have such trouble obeying orders from your employer?”
“When it comes to lookin’ after you, I take orders from Cynthia. She said I was to come ever’ day and look after you, an’ that’s what I’m doin’.”
“You could spend the day with your children.”
“I am spendin’ th’ day with my children. They’ve gone to the drugstore an’ they’ll be right back.”
“The house is clean, the wash is done, my shirts are ironed…”
“But your lunch idn’t cooked yet, or your supper.”
“I could have lunch at the Grill.”
“Father…”
“Yes, Puny?”
She turned from the sink, exasperated. “I’m goin’ to say to you what Joe Joe says to me when I ask ’im to git up in th’ middle of th’ night and bring me a bowl of ice cream with sweet pickles.”
“So what does he say?”
“‘Git over it!’”
“Fine,” he said. He took his sermon notebook from the island and turned to walk down the hall. He stopped at the door.
“Wait a minute. Ice cream and pickles?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You mean…?”
He’d never seen her freckled face more beautiful, more radiant.
“Yessir. You’re goin’ to be a granpaw ag’in.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
In This Mountain
George Gaynor gazed east from the Lord’s Chapel bell tower to the green hills bordering Mitford.
“X marks the spot,” he said. “My soul was saved as I stood in this very place.”
Father Tim crossed himself, moved by the memory of George Gaynor coming down from the church attic one Sunday morning more than eight years ago. Standing barefoot in front of a stunned congregation, he confessed his theft of the jewels, the long months of hiding in the church attic, and his newfound faith in Jesus Christ.
“Sometimes I think it was the singing,” said George. Tears coursed down his cheeks; he wiped his eyes with his shirtsleeve. “Still bawling, Father, when I think of it.”
“It’s the Holy Spirit keeping your heart soft.”
“But of course it was more than the singing. I remember stealing your Bible….”
Father Tim chuckled. “I turned the place upside down looking for it.”
“It took several days to make the decision to open it. I was convinced that if I opened it, something powerful would happen, something…out of my control.”
“Yes!”
“Finally, I began reading in the Gospel of John, which was the best of all places to begin. As I moved through the chapters, I was intrigued, also, by what you’d written in the margins. What had Christ done for you? What difference had He made in your life, in the part of your life that no one sees, that maybe doesn’t show from the pulpit?
“I tried to find your heart in what you’d written privately, perhaps to see whether you would slip, somehow, and expose it all as a sham.”
“Did you hope to find it all a sham?”
George sat on the deep stone sill of the bell tower window. “Yes, sir, I did. It would have saved me the trouble of surrendering anything to God. Wretch that I was, I was clinging to my wretchedness.”
“Don’t we all, at some time or other?” He’d felt the sordidness of clinging to his own wretchedness these past weeks, seemingly unable to surrender anything.
“I read all the Gospels, but kept going back to John, where I studied what Jesus had to say with deep concentration. I began memorizing verses, thinking this was nothing more than a way to pass the time. Then a verse in the fifteenth chapter began to…” George hesitated.
“Began to…?”
“Torment me, in a way. ‘If ye abide in me, and my words abide in you, ye shall ask what ye will and it shall be done unto you.’ I realized that I had no idea what to ask God for. I especially had no belief that God, if He were real, would be interested in entertaining whatever request I might cobble together.”
A light breeze traveled through the tower.
“It was a kind of intellectual nightmare, a wrestling match between logic and longing, if you will. I wanted to ask Him for something, but couldn’t believe He was really open to being asked.
“Then one day Pete Jamison walked in downstairs and I heard someone yell, ‘Are you up there?’”
George looked at Father Tim, grinning. The two men burst into laughter as if sharing a family joke.
“It scared me out of my wits,” said George. “I thought, who is this idiot asking if I’m up here—does he think I’m going to yell down and say, Sure, come on up and enjoy the view ? I thought it might be the feds, but couldn’t figure out why they were being so polite.”
They laughed together again, relishing the comfort of their bond, the familiarity of a story that had passed into Mitford legend.
“And then I heard you speak to Pete, and I listened to what you said as if my life depended on it. Of course, my life did depend on it.
“You said the question isn’t whether He’s up there, but whether He’s down here. I realized then that I’d begun to experience His presence down here, and that His words were somehow beginning to abide in me.
“When you asked Pete to recite the prayer with you, I had no idea what you were going to say, but I knew it would contain all that I ever wanted to ask Him for.
“That’s why, when Pete prayed the prayer of salvation, I prayed it with him.”
“Two for one.”
“That prayer, that moment, changed everything.”
“Alleluia!” Father Tim said softly.
They gazed from the windows, silent for a time. Someone was riding a blue bicycle along the opposit
e sidewalk. A car driving on Church Hill wheeled into the driveway leading to Fernbank.
“Please forgive me if I overstep,” said George, turning to Father Tim. “I sense you may be…wrestling with something yourself.”
He hated to think that others could sense it. His cheeks burned. “Perhaps as much in recent weeks as ever before in my life.” He knew, however, that he was safe with George. He didn’t have to pretend to be perfect because he was a priest. “I try to wait for Him to make the darkness light, then grow afraid and try to create the light on my own.”
“Something you’d written in a margin,” said George, “I can’t remember where…‘The significant, life-forming times are the dull, in-between times.’ A pretty simple statement, but profound if we think it through. I used to believe the life-forming times were the times on the mountain, the great hurrahs…”
“The glad hosannas…”
“Your buddy, Oswald Chambers—you know I read him avidly in prison—said something like, ‘The height of the mountaintop is measured by the drab drudgery of the valley.’ He went on to say it’s in the sphere of humiliation that we find our true worth to God, that there’s where our faithfulness is revealed.”
“I’m ashamed to confess it, but I thought I knew my true worth to God, I thought my faithfulness had long ago been revealed to Him. I didn’t think He’d…require anything more.” There. He’d said it.
“Perhaps you should be glad He’s requiring more. It seems to me He doesn’t ask more of just everybody.”
Father Tim took his handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his eyes and blew his nose. “Bless you,” he said. “Thanks.”
“Thanks for asking me to come along today. I made something a few weeks ago. This is the perfect time….”
George withdrew a small paper bag from his jacket pocket and removed a wooden cross.
“You made this?”
“Yes, sir. Harley had a few sticks of cherry wood lying around. Cherry is hard as granite, but I managed to whittle it into shape and then rubbed it with wax.”
Morning light streamed onto the polished cross. A piece of twine was looped through a hole at the top.
“See this nail, Father?” George pointed to a rusted nail between two of the tower windows.
“Ah!” He’d never seen it before, but then he hadn’t often dawdled around up here….
“I used to study that nail as if it were a great philosophical conundrum. Why was it there? What purpose could it possibly serve? Who had put it there, taking the trouble to fix it so neatly in the mortar between the stones? I never forgot this nail.”
George looped the twine around the nail, tied the cross to it, then stood back. “In this mountain,” he said, “the hand of the Lord rested on me….”
The wooden cross hung against the stone wall between the windows. On either side, the view of the high, green hills rolled away to summer clouds in a dome of blue sky.
George turned and placed his hands on the shoulders of his friend. “In this mountain, may the hand of the Lord rest always upon you, my brother. You remember the last thing you said to me when I left here eight years ago?”
“I do.”
“‘They that sow in tears shall reap in joy; He that goeth forth and weepeth, bearing precious seed, shall doubtless come again with rejoicing, bringing his sheaves with him.’”
Father Tim smiled. “You did come again with rejoicing.”
“And so will you, Father, so will you.”
Before leaving, they noted with pleasure that the cross appeared to have hung there a very long time.
Father Tim picked up a rough draft of Sunday’s pew bulletin from the Lord’s Chapel office and asked for a correction of two typos. Then, mission accomplished, the two men stepped out into the warm August afternoon.
At the end of the short walkway to the street, George hesitated. “There’s something I need to tell you.”
“Tell away!” He felt lighter; his flesh seemed less dense and burdened.
“A customer was pumping gas the other day at Lew’s and recognized Harley as someone he’d done time with.”
“Ah.” Not good.
“He was from West Virginia, so he had nothing to lose around here by saying he’d been in prison, he broadcast it all over the station. Harley was devastated.
“Now Lew has two ex-cons on his hands and people are talking. Since we’re living in your house, you may want to know what they’re saying.”
“What are they saying?” The lightness of spirit he felt only moments ago had fled, and something like dread came rushing in.
After jogging for two miles along the flat road to Farmer—uphill to Church Hill was out of the question—he went home and called Hoppy. His doctor was with a patient, but the receptionist took his number.
He changed clothes and went to the kitchen and opened the refrigerator door. Starving. But he’d eaten already. He took two carrot sticks from the crisper. Blast this disease to the ends of the earth, he wanted a burger, lightly charred on an outdoor grill, with mayo and sweet pickle relish, a slab of Vidalia onion, and a thick slice of a valley-grown Big Boy with plenty of salt and pepper, all on a homemade sourdough bun with a side of coleslaw. He went to his study and kicked the footstool in front of his leather chair.
There was no more putting it off, no more pacing the floor, and no more holding on to even the faintest hope that Sunday’s sermon would drop from the sky into his lap.
Could he do it? Could he preach in his old church and bring something worthwhile to the service? He couldn’t kid himself or God, either—he felt jittery about it, unnerved. He needed someone to preach him a sermon.
“‘I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me!’” he shouted aloud from Philippians 4:13.
“Is that merely a few things, Timothy, or is it actually all things?” he demanded of himself as he walked to and fro in the light-filled study. He was ravenous.
“All things!” he thundered in his pulpit voice.
There. That should do it.
He thumped into his desk chair and stared at the Royal manual he’d foraged from the corner of the room where it had sat for an age under its dust cover, then opened the drawer, took out a sheet of paper, and rolled it into the typewriter.
So far, so good.
He took up his Bible, already turned to the passages in Hebrews that he’d studied again last night. Thank God for this chapter, one of the grandest in the whole of Scripture. Its powerful reminder had saved his neck and that of legions of others more than once.
In truth, the eleventh chapter of Hebrews was a sermon in itself, requiring no feeble exegesis from him, a tired and re-tired country parson—but it was exegesis folks wanted and exegesis they would have….
He answered the insistent phone, forgetting he’d planned to turn the ringer down and switch on the answering machine.
“Father? It’s Betty Craig.”
“Betty!” The wonderful nurse who cared for Dooley’s grandfather in her cottage up the way. “Did we forget Russell’s livermush delivery this week?”
“No, sir, it’s not that.”
He knew at once.
“Mr. Jacks passed this morning at eight-thirty.”
“I’m sorry, Betty.” This was a blow. It would be a greater blow, however, to Dooley, to Pauline, and the children—and even to Betty Craig, who had learned to love the former Lord’s Chapel sexton who made the church grounds a showplace for many years.
“He always said he wanted you to do his funeral.”
“Yes.”
“He sat on the side of th’ bed this mornin’ an’ just stared at the wall, I saw him when I went down th’ hall. ‘Betty,’ he said, ‘can you come here a minute?’ an’ I went in an’…”
He prayed silently as she wept.
“An’ he said, ‘Betty, you’ve been a daughter to me.’” She sobbed into the phone. “I can’t talk now, Father, can you come?”
“I’m on my way.”
“See there, that’s m’ keeper!” the old man once said of Betty. “God rest ’er soul!”
Now Russell’s soul was at rest. And he must be the one to break the news.
He drove to Meadowgate, where Dooley was disinfecting the kennels. They sought the shade of a maple tree behind the barn.
“I feel really bad I didn’t go see him more.” Dooley rubbed his eyes, then with evident shame and sorrow said, “I could’ve.”
Father Tim went looking for Pauline at Hope House, and found her in the dining room setting tables for the evening meal.
Pauline dropped her head; tears escaped along her cheeks. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “So sorry I didn’t visit Daddy more’n I did.”
Regret. As his own heart could attest, the world seemed filled with it.
“Law help!” said Puny. “I’d th’ow that phone out th’ winder if I was you!”
He was helping Pauline with the funeral arrangements; a young couple had called for counseling; he was wanted down at the church to advise the sexton where to plant four white azalea bushes that had to be moved for a water line repair….
“It’s jis’ like it used t’ be!” said his house help.
Yes, he thought. It is! And to tell the truth, he rather liked it. In fact, he liked it immensely.
Harley came to the door at four-thirty on his way home from Lew Boyd’s.
Father Tim had seldom seen Harley without his toothless grin.
“I cain’t even tell you how sorry I am,” Harley said, hanging his head. “I hate f’r Dooley t’ know it worser’n anybody. Lace, she knowed, but hit didn’t matter t’ her.”
“Harley,” he said, “it doesn’t matter to me, either.”
Harley looked at him, wordless.