In This Mountain

by Jan Karon

  Hélène leaned her forehead against the windowpane. Indeed, if the father had pressed charges against her for…she could not bear to use the word stealing… for removing the bronze angel from his mantelpiece, she, also, might have been incarcerated

  She sighed deeply, then turned and went to the bathroom to brush her teeth. She occasionally recalled that this had been the father’s bed and bath for many years, a thought that always drew her closer to him in spirit.

  She had, some time ago, come to terms with the fact that she loved him, but not with passion. Non!

  She loved him very gratefully for all he had done for her, for the fact that he had brought her back to herself and saved her from destruction. He insisted it was the work of the Holy Spirit, and she sensed that this may be accurate, that there truly had been a greater force than the father himself who rescued her from the deep.

  She was pleased that she’d again formed the habit of praying, something she hadn’t done since her grandmother died. As she’d prayed during recent weeks, she tried to picture God as a large man with a flowing white beard, sitting on a throne and holding what, on closer inspection, appeared to be a pitchfork. She later recognized this to be a likeness of Neptune seen in a childhood book, and thus abandoned the image at once.

  She moved along, then, to a God striding through heavenly gardens, wearing shimmering robes that billowed as He walked; He was also wearing sandals, though she restrained herself from looking at his toes. This God, however, had seemed so deep in thought that He noticed her not at all, and thus she turned from the image in some despair.

  As it seemed unconscionable to pray to vapor, she sought to form another likeness, but failed utterly. She prayed on, nonetheless, keeping it short. And then one evening, quite to her own surprise, she stopped trying to figure out what God looked like.

  God was God, she concluded. It no longer mattered what He looked like.

  In truth, trying to assess what He looked like had been terribly distracting and in the end had kept her from the business of praying with ardor and absorption. Currently, she felt that if God wished to reveal Himself to her, He would do so in His own time, and in a way that she couldn’t begin to imagine.

  Meanwhile, she decided to approach Him as if He were sitting on the other side of a drapery, distinctly near but unseen.

  She removed her old blue robe and hung it over a chair, then knelt on the rug by her bed and crossed herself. Tonight she would pray in English. After all, if she was going to live as an American citizen, which she’d recently become, she felt it her bounden duty to make a greater effort to speak in the national tongue of her country.

  “Dear God, Thank you for the students you have given into my hand, and for my life in Mitford. Please bless the father to recover completely from his…malheurs, and to live a long life in which he will be helpful to many others as he has been to me. I should like to be a good neighbor, God, if you would kindly fashion me so. Rescue young Sammy Barlowe from his plight, so that he might live a good and useful life—I can’t think who said it, but I’ve been told You have a plan for each of us. Perhaps You would let me know, somehow, if this might be true for…Hélène Pringle?”

  She caught her breath and wondered whether this might be everything she had to say.

  “And do take care of all those at Hope House, especially Mother.

  “That’s all, I believe.” She waited a moment, then whispered, “Bon nuit.”

  She wondered if she should mention something about Jesus, God’s Son.

  However, she knew hardly anything about Jesus, except as He appeared in the arms of the Blessed Mother, first as a babe and again as a grown man taken bleeding from the cross.

  She got into bed and lay on her right side and closed her eyes, hearing only the sound of Barbizon’s light snoring from his rug by the door.

  Soon, like almost everyone else in Mitford, Hélène Pringle slept.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Gizzards Today

  His sugar was nearly normal, his weight good, his cholesterol low. But Hoppy wanted him back on the antidepressant.

  “I don’t want to take it,” said Father Tim. “I want to ride this thing out, it has to have an end. I’m…dealing with it.”

  Hoppy shrugged. “OK.”

  “What do you mean, ‘OK’?”

  “Don’t take it. Ride it out. And if it starts riding you, resume the medication.”

  There was nothing like a long vacation to relax an uncompromising doctor.

  “You’ve had every lecture in my arsenal,” said Hoppy. “Every plea, every warning.” Hoppy popped a couple of green jelly beans. “See me in three weeks.”

  They laughed. They shook hands. They compared boots.

  Then, feeling like a prisoner with a reprieve, he was out of there.

  He awoke Sunday morning and waited for the fatigue to hit. He was wearied of bounding out of bed ahead of it, only to have it snare him by the time he reached the kitchen. He would wait for it, settle into it, and get up slowly; this was a big day.

  The processional at the eleven o’clock was thrilling. He hadn’t remembered Lord’s Chapel being so strikingly beautiful, nor the choir so gifted and accomplished.

  From the altar, he looked eagerly into faces he’d never seen before, and was heartily encouraged by the familiar—Hoppy, Olivia, and Lace, three rows back on the gospel side; Buck, Pauline, and the Barlowe clan across from them on the epistle side, with Dooley in his school tie and blazer. Just there, Harley and George, his cheerleaders at both the early and late services…Emma and Harold Newland, the Bolicks, Hal and Marge Owen….

  For the second time that morning, he acclaimed the opening words with true joy.

  “Blessed be God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit!”

  “And blessed be His kingdom,” responded the congregation, “now and forever. Amen!”

  He had expected his heart to hammer with a certain anxiety as he stood before the majority of his old flock; instead, there was an empowering peace.

  In the churchyard, he visited with Dooley and the Owen family.

  “Did you see Doc Harper’s new Beemer?” asked Dooley. “Man!”

  “That’s not Doc Harper’s new Beemer,” said Father Tim.

  “He was showing it to somebody just a few minutes ago.”

  “That’s Lace Harper’s Beemer.”

  He saw in Dooley’s face a fleeting moment of shock, outrage, and then…something like humiliation.

  In the afternoon, they stood under a tent at the town graveyard as the coffin was lowered into the pit. Russell hadn’t wished to be cremated, though it meant giving up the privilege of lying at rest in the Lord’s Chapel Prayer Garden he’d created with his own hands.

  Jessie sobbed quietly as Poo sought to comfort her; Dooley was stoic. Father Tim believed he knew Pauline’s heart in this—busy rebuilding her life as a working mother and wife, she had largely neglected her father and left the nurturing to Betty Craig. But guilt would not prove useful….

  He put his arm around Pauline and held her as she wept against his shoulder.

  “We’ve made a decision about Sammy,” Buck told him.

  “Yes, sir,” said Dooley. “I want to go see him with you and Buck.”

  “Wonderful.”

  “We’re standing together now as a family,” Buck declared. “Nobody ever has to stand alone again.”

  “If something bad happens…” said Pauline.

  “…we’ll handle it,” said Buck.

  As the Lord’s Chapel bells tolled nine o’clock on Monday morning, Emma Newland arrived at his front door, her laptop in one hand and a bulging file folder in the other.

  “I practically had to ring the bell with my chin,” she said, glowering at him over her glasses.

  He opened the screen door and threw his arms wide to give her a hug. Suddenly remembering that hardly anyone ever hugged Emma Newland, he brought his hands together in enthusiastic applause.

  “Glad to se
e you!” he exclaimed.

  “You could’ve seen me a whole lot sooner,” she said, stomping into the hall, “if it wasn’t for people protectin’ you like th’ Dalai Lama.”

  Remember, he told himself—I asked for this.

  She thumped into his chair in the study. “Here’s your e-mail from that money-grubbin’ Father Roland! All he ever says is send money for this, send money for that! Does he think it grows on trees down here? He’s worse than a Baptist.

  “If I were you, I’d let ’im tough it out up there in th’ boondocks, he asked for it, it was his big idea! You’d better thank God on bended knee that you missed th’ flood that swept your quonset hut into a creek and sent it bobbin’ downstream like a cork. That’d be a fine thing to wake up to in th’ middle of th’ night.

  “He said somebody named Abner jumped in an’ managed to save a moose head, he didn’t say what a moose was doin’ in Tennessee, I thought they mainly came from Alaska.

  “An’ here’s th’ deal from Mitford, England—we’re gettin’ close to bein’ Sister Cities or whatever, I guess you’ll have to call it Sister Villages, bein’ as their Mitford only has five hundred people and us a thousand an’ thirty-three at last count. I hope you don’t have to fly over there for any ceremony, you’re green around th’ gills an’ skinny as a rail! I’m glad your wife can’t see you right now, she’d be on the next plane.”

  She sniffed the air. “Is Puny cookin’ anything for you to eat around here? I should’ve brought th’ rest of last night’s pork roast, I did it with raspberry preserves instead of mushroom soup. Harold ate ’til he fell!” She adjusted her glasses and peered at him. “What you need is some good red meat!”

  Emma Newland, he thought, made Fancy Skinner look mute as a doorknob. In the moment of blessed silence that prevailed as Emma booted her computer, he heard Puny switch on the vacuum cleaner in the upstairs hallway.

  “You did a good job at church yesterday, Esther Bolick said it was just like you’d never left, except you look older. I told her it wasn’t fair to compare you to Father Talbot, who bleaches his teeth and maybe even wears…I shouldn’t say it.”

  “Shouldn’t say what?”

  “A hairpiece. Some people say his hair is, you know…”

  He sighed, rubbing his forehead. He felt a headache coming on, or was it only Emma?

  “I guess you saw that Hoppy’s back from wanderin’ all over creation while people suffered an’ died back home, an’ have you heard what he bought Lace? A car that costs as much as some people’s houses. When I was her age, I didn’t have a car, I was lucky to have money to ride th’ bus, I hope they don’t let th’ poor girl get above her raisin’.”

  “Lace Harper didn’t have any raising to get above.”

  “Oh, well, you know what I mean. You take Dooley…”

  “And the car is a used car.”

  “Anyway, you take Dooley—there he is ridin’ around in that old Jeep with rust on th’ fenders, which, if you ask me, is more like it. I didn’t see you trottin’ out to buy him a car that cost th’ national debt.”

  He read while this blather went in one ear and out the other. Emma’s enforced separation from him had made her mad as a hornet, to say the least. As he’d learned from long years of experience, the only thing to do was let her talk ’til she was thoroughly cleansed and could go to work and get something done, for heaven’s sake. On the rug by the hearth, his dog heaved a huge sigh. His own sentiments, exactly.

  “An’ I guess you heard what people are sayin’ about Harley and th’ Man in th’ Attic—”

  He looked up from his e-mail. “He’s not the Man in the Attic.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “His name is George, and I trust him completely, as I do Harley. And no, I’m not collecting criminals who’ll loose themselves on the town to wreak havoc. Who’s saying such things anyway?” If she knew so much, maybe she knew the source of this wild rumor-mongering.

  She shrugged. “Don’t ask me.”

  “I am asking you. Who’s saying this? Where did you hear it?”

  “At The Local.”

  “Who said it?”

  “Somebody…,” she said, throwing up her hands and looking pained.

  “Next time you see Somebody, tell them these men paid their debt to society and are now making every effort to contribute to it.”

  “Oh, all right,” she said. “It was Ed Coffey. I didn’t want to say his name, since I know how you feel about that witch he works for.”

  Edith Mallory. Alive and well and spewing her venom.

  He’d just written and delivered a sermon and now it was time to write another. A priest whose name he couldn’t remember had nailed it: “It’s like having a baby on Sunday and waking up pregnant on Monday.”

  He ran along the road toward Farmer, with Barnabas loping behind.

  He wanted Sunday’s message to count for something. Otherwise, why bother?

  “Your words for Your people,” he huffed aloud.

  “Hey, buddy.”

  “Hey, yourself.”

  “Is this a good time?”

  “I’m just gettin’ ready to feed the horses.”

  “There’s no way to know whether Sammy will be home, but we could take a shot at it tomorrow morning. That’s a good time for Buck and me. What about you?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Can you meet me at the Grill at eight o’clock? We’ll have breakfast and connect with Buck on the way down the mountain.”

  A long pause. “I’ll be there.”

  He heard the apprehension in the boy’s voice, and went to his chair in the study and prayed again about tomorrow’s mission. “And while I’m at it, Father, please…show me how to put an end to this darkness, or if You choose to let it go on, give me a brighter spirit to endure it.” He was whining. He hated whining.

  “Father! John Brewster here.”

  “John, how’s it coming? I’ll be over next week to see the children. I’ve missed my visits.”

  “We’ll be glad to have you, as always. I’ve got great news!”

  “Shoot.”

  “We’ve had a call from an anonymous donor. They want to give us a check for twenty-five thousand dollars.”

  “Great! You can use it.”

  “There are a couple of strings attached.”

  “The usual,” he said.

  “They want you to conduct services at a private chapel over in Kinloch, somewhere on the lake.”

  “Me? Why me?”

  “I don’t have all the details, the check will be delivered with the info as soon as they know whether you’ll do it.”

  “What’s the timeline for the service?”

  “Next Sunday evening at six o’clock. You know how much twenty-five thousand would mean to us right now, Tim.”

  “Yes, I do know. But why not Stuart Cullen?” The sum of twenty-five thousand bucks didn’t equate to a country priest, it equated to a big-city bishop.

  “You’re the one they requested, said they’d heard you preach a couple of times.”

  “Do you know the identity of this anonymous donor?”

  “I don’t. That was the other string. Maybe you’ve heard that Kinloch is currently without a priest. Looks like this is something the donor wants to do for the parish, but doesn’t want to be recognized for it.”

  “What sort of service? What’s the occasion?”

  “I’ll tell you more when I know more, probably by tomorrow morning. You’ll do it, then?”

  He hesitated.

  Did he have the stamina to perform two services at Lord’s Chapel, make the nearly four-hour round-trip drive to celebrate and preach in Kinloch, then meet Cynthia’s plane the following morning? But that wasn’t the point. The point was twenty-five thousand dollars for a cause with an urgent need, a cause he’d passionately believed in and supported for more than two decades….

  “Consider it done,” he said.

  He was relieved to he
ar from John Brewster as he was going out the door to meet Dooley for breakfast.

  “Got the check!” said the hardworking administrator. This was a big day in John’s book; currently, thirteen seriously ill or handicapped children were counting on his skills. “Of course, I can’t cash it ’til you do the service. By the way, there’s no special occasion, they just want a good, all-around worship service.”

  “Who signed the check? Where did it come from?”

  “Signed by…let’s see, Jonathan Ferguson, out of a Schwab account in Miami.”

  His heart literally skipped a beat.

  Edith Mallory, of course, had a home in Miami. But then, so did a couple million other people.

  “It arrived by courier service about ten minutes ago, they knew I’d be in early this morning. I never realized we had a courier service in these hills.” John laughed, heady with the updraft of unexpected financial support. “Thanks, Father, this is great, thanks a million.”

  Besides, thought Father Tim, Edith would never let twenty-five thousand dollars go so easily, and for so little in kind. She craved honor, glory, fame, and praise, which the low-profile Children’s Hospital rarely bestowed, save in an inexpensive annual printout of donor names. No, this had nothing of her stamp on it.

  He released his breath in a long sigh.

  He was in the booth at ten ’til eight.

  Though ready for the trip to the trailer, and believing in the best, he was trying to prepare himself for the worst.

  “How’re the gizzards doing?” he asked Percy.

  “Big,” said Percy. “Really big.”

  “It’s th’ sauce,” said Velma.

  “I like your sign.” Father Tim nodded toward the hand-lettered broadside taped to the back of the cash register.

  Gizzards Today.

  Now with Velma’s