These High, Green Hills

by Jan Karon

“Dooley’s the one who was wonderful. The whole choral presentation was outstanding. You would have been proud. He missed you.”

  She took his hand. “I miss him every day. Is he going to make it?”

  “He’s going to make it,” he said.

  “I knew he would.”

  “Well ... we both have lots to tell.”

  She leaned up and kissed him. “I want to hear everything. There’s supper in the oven.”

  “Thanks, maybe later.”

  “Then take your shower, why don’t you? I’ll be here waiting, and we can have our prayers.”

  She was there waiting, all right, but dead asleep doing it.

  He snuggled up to her back, conforming to her soft contours. “Spoons” is what this marital position was called in their part of the South.

  He lay there, comforted by his bed and his room and his house and his wife, and thanked God silently.

  He didn’t realize it until after he prayed, but blast if he hadn’t had a good time today in that little yellow tail dragger.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Serious about Fun

  J.C. HAD BEEN to the dentist and was sucking tea through a straw. “That crazy Omer Cunningham was flyin‘ so low yesterday, he could have picked my pocket.”

  “No kidding?” said the rector.

  Mule whistled. “I wouldn’t go up in that plane for a million bucks before taxes. What is it but a bed sheet wrapped around a bale of chicken wire?”

  J.C. sucked his tea to the bottom of the glass. “I’ve personally never met the fool who’d fly with Omer Cunningham.”

  “What’re you grinnin‘ about?” Mule asked the rector.

  “Grinning?” he said. “I didn’t know I was grinning.”

  He was in Wesley buying a new shaving kit, when he happened to glance out the shop window into the mall. He saw J.C. walking with a police officer. When they stopped for a moment, the rector threw up his hand and waved, but J.C. didn’t see him. It appeared that J.C. glanced around to see if anybody was looking, then he hugged the police officer and the officer hugged him back.

  He fogged his glasses and wiped them with his handkerchief and looked again. The two parted and went in opposite directions.

  Aha. That was no police officer J.C. had hugged. It was a woman.

  He pressed his nose to the shop window.

  Actually, it was a woman police officer.

  After Omer Cunningham told Lew Boyd at the Esso on North Main, word spread to the end of South Main with the speed of a brush fire.

  The rector noticed that people dropped what they were doing and nodded respectfully when he walked by. The postmaster pitched in a nickel when he ran out of change for a stamp. Uncle Billy gave him a strawberry-flavored sucker as a token of admiration. The following Sunday, his congregation proffered their rapt and undivided attention throughout the sermon.

  Four hours in an airplane had given him more credibility than thirty-six years in the pulpit.

  He wasn’t seeing much of his wife.

  What with working on her book, visiting schools, turning the rectory into a villa, and giving a tea for a hundred and twenty women, which, at the last minute, had numbered a hundred and thirty-one, she hardly had time to roll her hair, much less sit and talk at the breakfast table.

  At the office, he uncovered his Royal manual, bent on giving a hundred percent to his sermon, which was largely inspired by a saintly challenge. “Preach the Gospel at all times,” St. Francis had said. “If necessary, use words.”

  “Guess what?” asked his secretary.

  “What?” he snapped.

  “Oooh. Touchy.”

  “Try again.”

  “It’s something we just got. Three guesses.”

  Defend us, deliver us ...

  “Come on!” Emma said. “Be a sport, for Pete’s sake.”

  “Would it be asking too much for you to give me a clue?”

  “It’s brown.”

  “Ah. That’s helpful. A new suit for Harold.”

  “You know he hates to wear a suit.”

  “Runoff from the Clark River.”

  “Please.”

  “I give up.”

  “You always give up. OK, it’s a dog.”

  He had never seen Emma Newland beam. Smile, maybe. Laugh, certainly. But not beam.

  “You? Harold? A dog?”

  “A brown poodle named Snickers.”

  “A poodle! What does Harold think of that?”

  “He thinks all dogs should live outside. He was raised in the country, you know, and that’s how country people think.”

  “So, where’s Snickers going to live?” he inquired.

  “Inside!” she said, looking determined.

  He walked up to Fernbank after he left the office, to check on Miss Sadie’s house. He could sense the worry when he talked with her on the phone. Had that dead tree crashed onto the porch during a recent storm? And what about the old washhouse—could rain have come in where the handmade bricks had fallen out of the chimney, and ruined the pine table that belonged to her mother?

  “I’ll go,” he said.

  “Oh, Father, I promise I wasn’t asking you to run up there. I was just thinking out loud.”

  “Glad to do it,” he said, meaning it.

  He veered off Church Hill Road along a path through the ferns on the steeply pitched bank. The path, which led from the road to the orchard, had been worn by locals over the past few years, owing to Miss Sadie’s invitation to the town. “Come and get them!” she said annually, unable to have the apples picked.

  He was halfway up the bank and had stopped to rest by a huge oak when he saw movement ahead, among the ferns. It looked like a young boy, who was facing away from him and digging.

  He watched intently. The boy was digging ferns with their root balls, and putting them into a sack, looking constantly to the left and right, but not behind. Clearly, he thought he was well-protected from behind by the tree.

  Certain people, he recalled, often dug ferns and rhododendron on someone else’s property and sold them to nurseries who looked the other way. He knew, too, about the flourishing traffic in galax leaves, and local moss, which was peeled off the ground or pulled from logs in large, unbroken sheets and sold to florists.

  The ways and means of making a living in these mountains had never been easy, he knew that, but let an incident like this go by, and Fernbank could be stripped of the very resource that inspired its name.

  As he started to move away from the tree, he saw the boy take off his hat. Long hair spilled down and fell over his shoulders. Actually, it appeared to be a girl, a girl wearing boy’s clothes, or even a man’s clothes, given the way they hung on her. She had sashed the oversized shirt with vines.

  “Hello,” he called.

  She whirled around, letting the mattock drop. He saw the fear in her eyes, then the anger.

  “I ain’t done nothin‘,” she said harshly, standing her ground as he walked toward her. He saw that she noted his clerical collar.

  The point was to speak kindly, he thought. She might have been a wild rabbit for the look in her eyes and the fierce way she glared at him. He knew a thing or two about rabbits, having raised them as a boy. They didn’t like sudden moves.

  “These ferns are pretty special.”

  “I don’t care nothin‘ about ’em.”

  She backed away from him and put her foot on the mattock handle.

  He stopped about a yard from her and glanced toward the sack.

  “I’ll knock you in th‘ head if you lay hands on my sack. I don’t care if you are a preacher.”

  “Miss Sadie Baxter’s ferns are a town treasure.” He spoke as if he had all the time in the world. If he had a stick, he would have whittled it with his pocket knife. “These banks have been covered with the wild cinnamon fern for many years—there’s not another stand like it anywhere, I hear.”

  “Don’t mean nothin‘ t’ me,” she said, edging toward the sack.<
br />
  “Ferns grow in families, like most other kinds of plants. Actually, there are four different fern families ... and look at this. See how the leaves curl at the tip of the stem and curve around? That’s called a fiddlehead.”

  She was going to grab the mattock and sack and run for it, he could tell by the language of her movements.

  “I’d personally appreciate if it you’d replant everything you just dug,” he said kindly. “In fact, I’ll help you do it. And I won’t say anything to anybody about it, unless I see you here again.”

  She reached down and grabbed the mattock and dived toward the sack. Quick as lightning, she threw it over her shoulder and was away, racing down the bank like a hare.

  He saw that she was barefoot and that she’d left her hat lying at his feet.

  Had he done or said the right thing? He didn’t know. He had never liked the pressure to do and say the right thing because he was a preacher. He was also a human being, blast it, and he stumbled along like the rest of humankind.

  He squinted his eyes and watched her disappear over the curve of the green bank.

  She had not looked back.

  What they needed, he thought, was an adventure, some recreation. Hadn’t they agreed on that very thing not long after their honeymoon? He had boldly declared they’d do something interesting every weekend, even in the dead of winter. In fact, they’d shaken hands on it.

  But what were they doing? Why, working, of course. And falling into bed like two logs, with scarcely a fare-thee-well.

  Once again, he’d let the puzzling mystery of recreation hold him back. What was fun, after all? And how did one go about having it?

  He’d been so fired up the day they shook hands; the possibilities had seemed endless. Now, all he could think of was going out to dinner in Wesley. But they’d done that twice. Besides, anybody could go out to dinner. What was needed here was something fresh and new, something unexpected, to captivate the imagination of his highly imaginative wife.

  Then again, if she was so highly imaginative, why not ask her to think of something?

  He would not. It was his own bounden duty to come up with a solution.

  He walked around his rosebushes. He pulled a wild burdock out of the daylilies. He sat on the stone bench and stared at a tree. Maybe he should ask somebody for an idea. But who?

  Not Emma Newland, who thought fun was watching TV game shows and nagging Harold to eat his vegetables.

  Not Mule Skinner, who thought fun was clipping cents-off coupons and going to yard sales.

  Not Ron and Wilma Malcolm, who thought fun was packing their car to the roof and driving nonstop to Boca Raton, where the temperatures would roast a pork loin.

  Come to think of it, he didn’t know anybody who was good at having fun, except, of course, Omer Cunningham, who clearly knew how to have a good time—and all for the price of a few gallons of gas.

  Oh, well. He would think about it. He would make some notes. He might go to the library. In the meantime, he knew he couldn’t count on reading Wordsworth aloud forever. Somehow, that had been just dandy while they were going steady, but now it didn’t go over so well. Cynthia’s gaze wandered around the room, she fidgeted, she got up and made notes that had absolutely nothing to do with Wordsworth.

  Even Barnabas, once so attracted to the romantic poets, went to sleep before the end of an opening stanza.

  There was nothing for it but to come up with a whole new ball game in the area of recreation.

  He stopped by the rectory for his checkbook, in transit to the Children’s Hospital in Wesley.

  Puny Guthrie looked exceedingly plump, not to mention smug and self-satisfied. Everything about her had gained a certain largesse—her hair seemed redder and curlier, her freckles bigger, her eyes greener.

  “Guess what?” she said, turning from the sink where she was peeling potatoes.

  “I promise I can’t guess,” he said.

  “Remember you said you’d play with it, an‘ all, when I brought it to work with me?”

  “Now, Puny ...”

  “Well, th‘ only thing is—it’s not an it.”

  “It’s not?”

  “It’s twins!”

  “No!”

  “Yes!” she exclaimed, looking joyful.

  He thumped down into a chair at the kitchen table.

  She rubbed her stomach, giggling. “You’ll have two t‘ play with! Don’t that beat all?”

  “You can say that again,” he replied, loosening his collar.

  “Dearest,” she said, before popping through the hedge to her drawing board, “why don’t you come with me to Hastings School tomorrow? You never take a real day off, and besides, it would be fun!”

  Fun? “Sure!” he said without hesitation.

  Emma could cover for him. They also had an office answering machine, didn’t they? Besides, it was true—he hardly ever took a real day off.

  “I’ll be reading Violet Visits the Queen. Oh—I just thought of something!—you could read the part of the palace guard!”

  He looked dazed.

  “Just say yes!” she implored. “Remember the first time you took me to visit Miss Pattie, and let me see into your work? This way, you can see into mine. That will be the most fun of all!”

  To hear her tell it, this sojourn would be loaded with the very thing he’d been trying so hard to get a bead on.

  “I’ll tell you how the sun rose ...” she said, zooming down the road in her Mazda.

  “Tell me!” he said.

  “A ribbon at a time—

  The Steeples swam in Amethyst—

  The news, like Squirrels, ran—

  The Hills untied their Bonnets—

  The Bobolinks—begun—

  Then I said softly to myself—

  That must have been the Sun!“

  “Mark Twain!” he said recklessly, leaving all care behind.

  “Timothy, you’re not trying! Guess again.”

  Women wanted you to guess something every time you turned around. “Christina Rossetti?”

  “No, but you’re close. One more guess. Listen—steeples, amethyst, bobolinks. Who writes like that?”

  “Hessie Mayhew!”

  She laughed uproariously. It didn’t take much for his agreeable wife. Give her an inch of amusement and she’d convert it to a mile’s worth.

  “Emily Dickinson, for Pete’s sake. Now it’s your turn.”

  “Can’t we play cow poker?” he wondered, gazing out the window for a pasture.

  “I can’t be mooning into ditches counting cows while I’m driving. No, you have to do a poem or something. And not Wordsworth.”

  “Blast! A man can’t take a day off ...”

  She whipped around a truck. “Something from the eighteenth century would be nice.”

  After yowling from Mitford to Holding, Violet had finally curled up and gone to sleep in her carrier. Now, at least, he could think straight.

  “Ye fearful saints, fresh courage take

  The clouds ye so much dread

  Are big with mercy, and shall break

  In blessings on your head.

  His purposes will ripen fast

  Unfolding every hour

  The bud may have a bitter taste

  But sweet will be the flower.“

  “Are you sure that’s not Wordsworth?” she asked, slowing down for an intersection.

  “Positive,” he said. “One of his friends, however.”

  “Cowper, then.”

  “Yes, from the hymn that opens with ‘God moves in a mysterious way, His wonders to perform.’ Most people think that line is from Scripture.”

  “ ‘The bud may have a bitter taste, but sweet will be the flower.’ ” She laughed, looking happy. “That’s our courtship and marriage he was writing about!”

  It was grand to be on the road with a comfortable companion.

  “And this is Miss Coppersmith’s husband, Mr. Coppersmith.”

  The stu
dents applauded.

  “And they’re both going to read about one of your favorite friends.”

  “Violet!” shouted the class in unison.

  “Let’s sit on the floor with the children,” Cynthia whispered.

  He looked at the half-circle of bright faces, hoping his knees didn’t creak like a garden gate when he sat down. Could he get up? He would cross that bridge when he came to it.

  “Miss Coppersmith is very, very famous. She has won a medal for one of her books. I know Mr. Coppersmith must be very proud.”

  “Actually,” said Cynthia, “my husband’s name is not Coppersmith. It’s Kavanagh.”

  “Oh,” said the teacher. “How modern!”

  “Actually, we both have the same name. Coppersmith is my writing name. OK, everybody! This is Father Kavanagh. And this is Violet!” They sat down in front of the children, with Violet’s carrier. The kids scrambled close and peered inside.

  “I never seen a cat that’s in books,” somebody said.

  “Does she live in there?”

  “What does she do all day?”

  “Where are her kittens?”

  Violet blinked imperiously from her carrier.

  “I have a cat!” announced a girl. “Its name is Perry Winkle!”

  “I have two dogs!” said a boy, raising his hand and flapping it. “One throws up if he eats spaghetti.”

  “My mom knows somebody who has a pig!” offered another. “They let it live in the house. Yuck! A pig in the house! I wonder where it goes to the bathroom.”

  The pupils guffawed.

  “Children!” said the teacher.

  “A pig in the house is no big deal,” said Cynthia. “When I was your age, I had an alligator that lived in my bathtub.”

  “wot!”

  “Neat!”

  “How did you take a bath?” More hysterical laughter.

  “I didn’t,” said Cynthia. “I didn’t take a bath for a whole month. Maybe two whole months!”

  “Cool,” someone murmured in heartfelt awe.

  “Neat-o!”

  “I took showers at my friend’s house!” said Cynthia.

  Groans, moans.

  “How can your husband be married to you if he’s your father?” inquired the boy whose dog couldn’t tolerate spaghetti.