In This Mountain

by Jan Karon

  “Get over here quick!” she squawked. “Bill Watson’s passed!”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  A Day in Thy Courts

  But Bill Watson had not passed.

  After calling 911 and rushing to the Porter place to meet the ambulance, Father Tim found Uncle Billy semiconscious and Miss Rose hysterical.

  “Dead as a doornail!” squawked the old woman.

  “His heart is still beating!” he shouted.

  “Still eating? Of course he was still eating, I suppose you think I starved him to death!”

  “Oh, for Pete’s sake!” he thundered.

  “A piece of cake? You want a piece of cake at a time like this?” Her voice rose by several decibels. “You’ll not get a piece of cake out of me!”

  Thank heaven for that, he thought, hearing sirens race north along Main Street.

  He rode in the ambulance with Uncle Billy, holding his hand and praying all the way, unmindful of how he’d get home from the hospital.

  Nurse Kennedy, who was working the night shift, volunteered to drive him as soon as her break time came around.

  It was four in the morning when he walked in the back door, arousing his dog, who had been waiting. He slumped into a chair in the study, too weary to navigate the stairs, then realized he’d failed to have Kennedy drive him to his car.

  At four-thirty, he stumped upstairs, furious with himself and everybody else.

  When the phone rang at six o’clock, he rolled over in bed and grabbed the blasted thing from the hook.

  “Who’s there?” He surprised himself by answering with his father’s phone salutation.

  “Good morning, Father Tim, it’s Beverly Hobgood.”

  “Beverly Hobgood, Beverly Hobgood…” He had no idea.

  “Bishop’s secretary!”

  “Oh, yes! Of course!”

  “I knew you were an early riser….”

  “Absolutely.” His head was pounding.

  “I’m calling to ask you to pray for Bishop, I know he would covet your prayers.”

  “What is it?”

  “Chest pains, very severe. He’ll go for testing today.”

  No need to spend all that money to find out the cause, he wanted to say—it’s stress, pure and simple. “Yes, I will pray. Certainly! Faithfully! And I’ll ask others to pray.”

  “He depends on you!” she said, her voice breaking.

  “And I depend on him.”

  When he hung up, he began to count the casualties. Joe Ivey, Uncle Billy, his bishop….

  He lay back against the pillows and stared at the ceiling.

  Why in heaven’s name didn’t Stuart retire? Now that he’d gotten the ball rolling, let someone else build the cathedral!

  But what good would it do his bishop to retire? Get a load of the fix yours truly was in—stress here, stress there, stress everywhere. If things kept going like this, he’d be looking for a way to retire from being retired.

  Tomorrow was a big day, a huge day, what with two morning services, the lakeside service, and a four-hour round trip that, but for the large donation to the Children’s Hospital, he would never in this lifetime have agreed to do.

  As usual through the years, he couldn’t rest until the sermon was finished and he felt a certain peace about it. Yet, no matter what he did, it wouldn’t come together in the way he’d thought it might; the premise was strong, even powerful, but he couldn’t make the pieces add up.

  Strung out! he thought. That vernacular seemed to describe with considerable eloquence the way he was feeling.

  After the morning office, he knelt to pray but found his mind wandering like an untethered goat. He wanted to call his wife and ask her to intercede for him, but that would alarm her. Besides, what was he thinking? She was praying for him; she did so faithfully.

  “Dear God,” he said aloud.

  He remained on his knees in a kind of fog, finding he couldn’t get beyond that pitiful supplication.

  He was priest-in-charge, he thought as he had breakfast at the kitchen island, but without any help to lean on. The deacon had been called away to a family funeral, and the church’s current senior warden was not, in his opinion, the one to visit Uncle Billy and pray with him.

  Surely he himself could squeeze out a simple visit up the hill—one final effort and then home to seclude himself, take the phone off the hook, and delve the meaning of this thing he needed to communicate.

  But no. He couldn’t do it. The very thought of trotting down Main Street to his car and driving up the hill to the hospital…and Miss Rose would, of course, need a ride to visit her husband…maybe Hessie Mayhew, maybe Esther Bolick, though they’d never forgive him for asking…

  He finished his poached eggs, took two aspirin, and went to his desk, glad that Puny wouldn’t be in today.

  “I preached as never sure to preach again, and as a dying man to dying men,” Richard Baxter had written in the seventeenth century. That’s how he wanted to preach. Every time may be the last time! Just as important, however, he wanted to preach with energy and enthusiasm as if for the first time. Well, he knew what he meant by all that….

  Scott Murphy. The idea came out of the blue.

  “Of course, Father,” said the Hope House chaplain. “I’ll be glad to go pray with him. Anything else while I’m there?”

  “Joe Ivey. Room Two-fourteen. If you could…”

  “No problem at all.”

  “I owe you,” he said, relieved.

  “Consider yourself indebted to the Lord, if you will, but not to me. The truth is, I’m forever in your debt.”

  “How’s that?”

  “For bringing me to Mitford. Remember how you hired me before I interviewed with Miss Sadie?”

  He grinned. “Yes, that was a great presumption on my part, but completely instigated by the Holy Spirit. So consider yourself indebted to Him, if you will, but not to me.”

  “Stalemate!” said Scott, laughing.

  He spent the day in a kind of daze, walking his dog to the monument, opening and closing the refrigerator door, reading Emily Dickinson, Spurgeon, Whitefield. He read with absorption, grasping their meaning for long moments, then losing it and beginning again.

  He kept his sermon notebook at his side, waiting….

  At two o’clock in the morning, he realized he’d fallen asleep in his chair in the study, and found his notebook on the floor. He regretted waking. There seemed a film over the lamplit room, as if he were wearing sunglasses. It had nothing to do with his eyes and everything to do with his spirit. He felt at the end of himself.

  Perhaps he should have gone forward with the medication for depression. The film, the darkness seemed always hovering nearby; if it disappeared for a time, it came back. He felt again a moment of panic—what if he were succumbing, as his father did, to the thing that brought down his marriage, brought down his business, ruined his health?

  But he mustn’t dwell on that. He must dwell on the message, for the message still hadn’t come right.

  He’d be forced to drum up something from days of yore, some antiquity that might be dredged from sermon notes stored in the study cabinet.

  But he didn’t have what it might take even to dredge.

  “Lord,” he said, “speak to me, please. I can’t go on like this. Speak to me in a way I can understand clearly. I’ve read Your word, I’ve sought Your counsel, I’ve whined, I’ve groveled, I’ve despaired, I’ve pled—and I’ve waited. And through it all, Lord, You’ve been so strangely silent.”

  He sat for a time, in a kind of misery he couldn’t define; wordless, trying to listen, his mind drifting. Then at last he drew a deep breath and sat up straighter, determined.

  “I will not let You go until You bless me!” he said, startled by his voice in the silent room.

  He took his Bible from beside his chair and opened it at random.

  Stop seeking what you want to hear, Timothy, and listen to what I have to tell you.

  He f
elt no supernatural jolt; it happened simply. God had just spoken to his heart with great tenderness, as He’d done only a few times in his life before; it produced in him an utter calm.

  “Yes,” he said. “Thank you. Thank you.”

  Where the book had fallen open in his lap, he began to read with expectation and certainty.

  He found the passage only moments later. Instantly, he knew: He’d discovered at last what God had held in reserve—expressly for him, expressly for now, and expressly for tomorrow morning.

  The peace flowed in like a river.

  Though he’d known for decades that the exhortation was there in First Thessalonians, and had even preached on it a time or two, it came to him now as if it were new, not ancient, wisdom. It came to him with the utterly effulgent certainty that this Scripture was his, and he might seize upon it as upon a bright sword that would help him pierce…

  …pierce what?

  The darkness.

  The time to begin was now.

  “Thank You,” he whispered, “for this time of darkness.”

  “You up, brother?”

  “Bill! Good morning! You’re preaching today, and I’m praying for you!”

  “I don’t mind tellin’ you I’ve got butterflies. How about you?”

  “Running on fumes, not enough sleep. But God is faithful; this morning He gave me something I’ve needed for a long time.”

  “You might say He’s done th’ same for me, that’s why I’m callin’. He laid it on my heart last night that I was to thank you.”

  “Thank me?”

  “You know that stop sign…”

  “I do.”

  “He’s been showin’ me that I was to take that stop sign as a sign to stop. Before I got stopped by th’ stop sign, you might say, I was runnin’ around in circles like a chicken with its head cut off. I’d been so busy workin’ for Him that I’d fallen out of relationship with Him! These weeks have been long, but they’ve been good. I’ve had wonderful times of fellowship with th’ Holy Spirit, an’ time with Rachel that we haven’t had in years. An’ to cap it all off, He’s brought me Buddy.”

  “Coals to Newcastle.”

  “To tell th’ truth, I feel brand-new. And I just wanted to thank you, Tim, for lettin’ th’ Lord use you, as bad as it all seemed to be for both of us.”

  In the space of a few hours, he had twice been succored.

  “Thank you,” he said, hard-pressed to speak. “Thank you.”

  Esther Bolick settled into the worn oak pew with a certain satisfaction.

  This was where she and Gene always sat, unless some thoughtless parishioner nabbed their spot before they could get to it. You’d think people would respect the place you’d chosen and been faithful to for twenty-three years, but no, some people didn’t care where you sat, much less where they sat. One Sunday they’d plop down next to the choir stall in the rear and another Sunday they’d turn up in the first row, gospel side.

  She’d occupied this same spot since way before Father Tim came. It was like home. The minute she sat down, she was as rooted as a turnip, which, in times like these, she considered a blessing.

  She opened her pew bulletin and squinted at the order of service. Oh, law, there was that communion hymn she could never get right to save her life! Minnie Lomax from the Collar Button used to sit beside her and Gene every Sunday morning ’til the fateful day when, singing her brains out, she, Esther Big Mouth Bolick, had squawked for all to hear, “When I fall on my face with my knees to the rising sun,/Oh, Lord have mercy on me….”

  The next Sunday, Minnie had gone across the aisle, where she remained to this day. Esther decided to keep her trap shut during hymn 325.

  She was pleased that she and Gene were fifteen minutes early. Being early gave her time to collect her wits, which had been blown on the wind all week like bedsheets on a clothesline.

  Thank the Lord, Father Tim was back again. Two Sundays in a row! She tried to keep her opinion to herself about why she was so glad to have him back, but the truth was, she’d never warmed up to Father Talbot, though she’d been impressed to start with.

  You take Father Tim—he was a big hugger and hand-shaker, even a kisser. He’d whopped her one on the cheek when she and Gene had their first grandbaby, and given her a hug into the bargain.

  But you take Father Talbot. If you started to hug him, he jumped back a foot, probably because you might mess up his hair. Or was it a wig? Nobody knew for certain, but his hair always looked perfect, like it was never slept in.

  And another thing. It seemed like Father Talbot had this relationship with God that he didn’t want to share. Somehow, it was just him and God, with nothing dribbling out on his parishioners. On the other hand, he was smart as a whip, using words she’d never heard before in her life. Plus, his sermons were like the front page of the newspaper. Unfortunately, she had already read the newspaper by the time she got to church and so occasionally took a nap while he preached.

  Somebody said he’d gone to Harvard. Or was it University of Michigan? She could never remember which. The story was, he’d come out of college as a stockbroker. According to Hessie Mayhew, who knew all about the Episcopalians even though she belonged to the Presbyterians, he did stockbroking ’til he was forty, then got called and went to seminary. Maybe his late start was the problem. She wondered how his wife liked him jumping from one job to another.

  Anyway, it was a blessing to have Father Tim again, she didn’t know why they couldn’t let him attend his old church—what an aggravation it must be to tool over to Wesley every Sunday! The problem, of course, was that ridiculous church law saying the old priest couldn’t hang around because everybody would run to him and leave the new priest out on a limb.

  There went the bells chiming! Since childhood, that had been one of her favorite things about church. Then the organ cranked up the prelude. Though she had no idea what music it was, she knew it was something Father Tim liked, Richard often played it in the old days….

  It was easy to think, if only for a moment, that nothing had changed—except, of course, that Father Talbot had talked the vestry into having the carpet yanked up so the choir would have better acoustics. Unbelievable! Walk down the aisle on a snowy Sunday morning with your boots melting snow on that slick wood floor, and blam! down you could go, ending up in the hospital with a broken hip and a blood clot racing to your heart. Or was it your brain?

  She would never in a hundred years understand church politics.

  Hélène Pringle stepped from the bright, warm sunlight into the cool, sweet shadow of the narthex.

  Before she quite recovered from the small shock to her senses, someone thrust a copy of the pew bulletin into her hand and gave her a surprised, albeit warm, greeting, which, to her regret, she returned in French.

  She was trembling slightly, with both fear of the unknown and a deep, childlike excitement.

  The service would be different from the services her grandmother had forced her, for a brief period, to attend in that great, cold church built of stone. She’d hardly ever understood anything the priest had said, for the echo made his voice sound tremulous and metallic, as if it were coming from the walls and not from a man. The acoustics, however, had done wondrous things for the voices of the choir; she remembered the goose bumps she felt as a nine-year-old; they prickled along her spine and made her hair feel as if it were standing.

  She was afraid she wouldn’t know what to say or do in this morning’s service, though someone had declared that Episcopal and Catholic liturgies weren’t so vastly different, in the end. Of course, the whole Episcopal thing had come about in the first place because of Henry the Eighth, who’d been a vain and vulgar man, to say the least. She wondered that anyone would admit to being part of something he’d established. But she sensed the moment she awoke this morning that she had to be here, and so she had arisen and dressed, asking the unseen Being on the other side of the drapery to help her select attire that wouldn’t stand out or
offend.

  She suspected there would be a lot of kneeling and jostling about, which led her to choose the very back row, on the side by the stained-glass window of the Sermon on the Mount, where she tried to shrink herself as small as she possibly could, so no one would notice she was there.

  “How lovely is thy dwelling place,

  O Lord of hosts, to me!

  My thirsty soul desires and longs

  Within thy courts to be;

  My very heart and flesh cry out,

  O living God, for thee.

  Beside thine altars, gracious Lord,

  The swallows find a nest;

  How happy they who dwell with thee

  And praise thee without rest,

  And happy they whose hearts are set

  Upon the pilgrim’s quest.

  They who go through the desert vale

  Will find it filled with springs,

  And they shall climb from height to height

  Till Zion’s temple rings

  With praise to thee, in glory throned

  Lord God, great King of kings.

  One day within thy courts excels

  A thousand spent away;

  How happy they who keep thy laws

  Nor from thy precepts stray,

  For thou shalt surely bless all those

  Who live the words they pray.”

  Hope Winchester entered the church as the pipe organ began the prelude, and looked around anxiously for a place to sit. There was only one person in the rear pew on the left.

  Thinking the rear pew a good choice, she slid in quickly, noting that Hélène Pringle occupied the other end. She nodded to Miss Pringle, who had bought note cards at Happy Endings just last week.

  She consulted her pew bulletin, turned in the prayer book to page 355, and hugged the open book to her chest. She’d been inside Lord’s Chapel only twice before, and was feeling utterly naked, as if she were raw and exposed altogether. She hoped she wouldn’t make a fool of herself, and especially hoped that George wasn’t sitting where he could see her in case she did. She only knew that it was important to be here this morning, though she wasn’t sure why.