These High, Green Hills

by Jan Karon

  “Huge!” announced Bo. “And scary, too. Clarence was too chicken to go in, but I did, and you won’t believe it!”

  “You can believe Larry Johnson will strip your hide for leaving camp like this.”

  “Let’s go see it,” said Cynthia.

  “No way,” said the rector, herding the boys toward the clearing.

  “Oh, please, Timothy! Where is it, Bo? Is it far?”

  “It’s just right in there. I was coming out when I heard you whistle. Clarence can’t whistle—it was me who whistled back.”

  “I can too whistle!” said Clarence.

  “It’s right through there,” said Bo, “behind that big rock. Just go in behind that rock and you’ll see this hole in the side of the hill, kind of covered up with bushes and stuff.”

  “Did you see any bats?” asked Cynthia.

  “Nope. Just heard water dripping, and saw all those weird things sticking up.”

  “Stalactites,” said the rector. “Or is it stalagmites?”

  “Timothy, dearest, just five minutes? The boys can go back and we’ll follow right behind. I’ve never seen a cave. Five minutes, I promise!” She looked imploring.

  “Well ...” he said.

  “Wonderful!”

  “Straight across the clearing, hit the trail to the left, and be quick about it,” the rector told the boys.

  Clarence looked disconsolate. “Larry’s prob‘ly goin’ to whip our head.”

  “C‘est la vie. Get moving.”

  “We’re right behind you!” called Cynthia as the boys sprinted away.

  Father Tim cupped his hands to his mouth. “And stay together!” he shouted.

  It was a word of caution he’d soon have to reckon with himself.

  “Uh-oh,” said Cynthia, staring at the nearly hidden opening in the side of the hill.

  “What do you mean?”

  “That hole! I can’t go through that hole like some rabbit into a burrow.”

  “But you love rabbits.”

  “Rabbits, yes, but not burrows.”

  He had once seen her crawl on her hands and knees into Miss Rose Watson’s minuscule play hole in the attic of the old Porter place, entirely without a qualm.

  “So let’s head back,” he said. “I’m famished.”

  “Well ... but I’ve never seen a cave. Let’s at least have a look.”

  She climbed the short ascent to the hole, swept aside the weeds and brush, and peered in. “It drops straight down and then flattens out. I can’t really see anything.”

  Personally, he didn’t want to see anything. He had no interest in disappearing into a hole in the ground that was hardly bigger around than he was.

  His stomach growled. “Remember what happened to Alice in Wonderland....”

  “Ummm,” she said, sticking her head in the opening. “Ummm.”

  Which was it, anyway? Did stalactites go up or down? Tite. Tight. Tight to the ceiling! That’s what his seventh-grade teacher, Mrs. Jarvis, had said when they studied Mississippi caves, and then actually took a bus trip to a local cave. Stalactites hang down, mites stick up! Anita Jarvis. Now, there was a force to reckon with....

  “The tites hang down!” he said aloud, looking up as Cynthia’s head disappeared into the hole.

  He scrambled after her. “Cynthia!”

  “Slide in feet first, Timothy. That’s the way to do it!”

  He did it.

  He might have been dropping into a tomb, for all he knew. What if there should be a landslide, a mudslide, any sort of shift in the terrain? The hole would be blocked until kingdom come. He felt his heart pound and his breath constrict.

  He slid along the muddy entrance shaft on his backside and landed on his feet behind his wife. Enough light streamed into the mouth of the cave to illumine part of the large chamber in which they stood. It resembled a subway tunnel, long and rather narrow, and he was able to breathe easily again, sensing the space that opened up around them.

  Odd, how the air was different. He could tell it at once. He felt the moisture in it, and smelled the earth. Like his grandmother’s basement, except better.

  “Are you OK?” he asked, noting the absence of an expected echo.

  “Wonderful! This is too good for words! A glorious opportunity! I’ve got a flashlight in here somewhere.” She fished in her day pack. “There!”

  The beam from the flashlight snaked up the wall. “Good heavens! Look, dearest! It’s a whole rank of organ pipes!”

  “Limestone. Limestone does this.” The vast wall might have been formed of poured marble, richly tinted with rose and blue, and glistening with an omnipresent sheen of moisture. He had never before observed what God was up to in the unseen places. A fine chill ran along his right leg.

  The beam of light inched up the wall, shining palely on formations that appeared to be folds of draperies with fringed cornices, overhanging an outcropping of limestone as smooth as alabaster.

  “Heavens!” gasped Cynthia. He slipped his forefinger into the band of her jeans as they inched along the chamber wall, looking up.

  “Look!” she said. “There’s just enough light to see how the ceiling of this thing soars—it’s like a cathedral.

  “Can you believe we’re under the crust of the earth, possibly where no one has ever been before, except Indians? And who knows how old this cave is? It could be millions of years old, maybe billions....”

  “Hold the light close to your face for a minute,” he said.

  “You’re interested in seeing another ancient formation, I presume?”

  “Your breath is vaporizing on the air.”

  She turned around and shone the light toward him. “And so is yours! But it doesn’t feel cold in here.”

  “Not cold. But different.”

  Cynthia strode forth again, at a gallop.

  “Hey! Are you going to a fire, Mrs. Kavanagh? Slow down.”

  “But we only have five minutes.... Yuck! Mud. These shoes will be history. I never have the right shoes for anything. When I was in New York last year in the blizzard, I only had pumps—”

  “What’s that?” They stopped, and he turned and listened. It sounded like water dripping. Here. There. At random. Everywhere. Water falling on water. Plink. Plink. Plinkplink.

  “Obviously, there’s water in here,” he said. “Watch your step. Maybe we shouldn’t be going in so far.”

  “Just two more minutes,” she said, shining the light on the wall that curved ahead of them. “There! See that? Doesn’t it look just like the rib cage of a dinosaur?”

  “Spoken like the woman who once spotted Andrew Jackson in a cumulus cloud.”

  She placed her hand on the limestone wall that rippled with smooth, undulating forms. “Feel it, Timothy. It’s so strange to the touch. Slick. Wet. But friendly, somehow, don’t you think?”

  “Ummm.” Larry Johnson would have that slab of potatoes browning to a fare-thee-well. A little green onion in the mix wouldn’t be bad, either, not to mention a sprinkle of the Romano cheese he’d carried along in a sandwich bag. It didn’t take Ecclesiastes to know there was a time to seek nourishment and a time to explore caves.

  “Time to go,” he said firmly.

  “There at the end of the passage, dearest. See? It looks like a huge urn, doesn’t it, sitting in that vault? How extraordinary, all these wonders that remind us of things on top of the earth—and yet, surely all this came long before cathedrals and urns.”

  “Listen, people are depending on us. We’ve run off exactly like Bo and Clarence did, and Larry will not like this one bit. You talk about getting our head whipped ...” He took her arm.

  “What are you doing?”

  “We’re turning around and going back the way we came.”

  She sighed. “You’re right, of course.” They turned and began walking. “I was going to sketch something while you held the light, but I suppose there’s not time.”

  “Darn right. How’s the battery in that thing? It l
ooks weak.”

  “It’s just that this place is so huge and so dark, it absorbs the light.”

  “Let’s hope so.”

  “I guess I’m ready to get out of here, too. I’m starved, not to mention freezing. Are you freezing? Suddenly, it’s ... like a grave in here.”

  “Kindly rephrase that.”

  They walked in silence, shining the light along the walls on either side. He had no memory of the little cave in Mississippi looking anything like this; in fact, he remembered being pretty bored with that field trip. The most vivid memory of it was the picture someone took of him with Anita Jarvis, who was nearly as wide as the bus. He had tried to flee the camera, but she grabbed him by the ear and yanked him back, while everyone laughed their heads off. He had wanted to tear the resulting snapshot in a hundred pieces, but was so entranced with having a picture of himself, even with Anita Jarvis, that he couldn’t do it.

  “I’ve got an idea,” she said. “Why don’t we stop and turn the light off? I’d love to see how dark it really is in here.”

  “Cynthia, Cynthia ...”

  “It will only take a minute. Then we’ll go, I promise.”

  “Well ...”

  Bright, unidentifiable images swam before his eyes, then gradually faded, leaving a velvet and permeating darkness.

  He thought he heard her teeth chattering. “Maybe I should turn the light back on.”

  “Wait,” he said, touching her arm. “Our eyes are just starting to get adjusted.” They stood together in silence. “I think this place is totally devoid of light,” he said at last. “We’re in complete and utter darkness. Amazing.”

  “Scary.”

  “Don’t be scared. I’ve got you.” He put his arm around her shoulders, noting that the musical sounds of water-on-water seemed louder than before.

  “I’m glad you’re here,” she whispered.

  “I’ll always be here.”

  “You will? Do you mean that?”

  “Of course I mean that. I took a vow on it, for one thing.”

  Some fragment of a poem came swimming to him, something, he thought, by Wendell Berry: “... and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings.” What was it about this darkness, the particular, nearly tangible density of it, and the odd sense that he was somehow blending into it?

  “Why can’t we see light from the mouth of the cave?” Cynthia asked.

  “I don’t know. We were standing in the light only a minute ago.”

  “We can’t have walked completely away from the light that was coming through the hole.” She switched on the flashlight, which glimmered on columns of roseate limestone.

  “This isn’t the way we came,” she said. “We haven’t seen these before.”

  “We must have missed a turn.” He puzzled for a moment, rubbing his forehead and feeling disoriented. “You were hauling along there pretty good.”

  “You get in front and haul, then,” she said testily.

  “OK, let’s retrace our steps and watch where we’re going.” But they had just retraced their steps....

  In less time than it might have taken to recite the Comfortable Words, they’d been thrown off kilter. He felt for a moment as if his mind had walked out on him.

  They had begun to move in the opposite direction when the light faded, glimmered weakly, and failed.

  “No,” she said, as the darkness overtook them. “Please, no.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  The Cave

  “PRAY, Timothy!”

  “I am praying. Keep moving. We’re bound to come back to the light from the entrance.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Positive.”

  “It’s so terribly dark. Don’t you have some matches in your shirt pocket? I thought campers always took matches.”

  “No matches.”

  “Don’t lose me, Timothy.”

  “I won’t lose you. Hang on to my belt; we’re doing fine. The wall is leading us.”

  “The flashlight battery ... I haven’t used that flashlight since I moved next door and the electricity went off. I’m a terrible partner.”

  “Careful. Slippery here. Feels like ...”

  “Water,” she said. “We’re stepping in water. It’s soaking through my tennis shoes.”

  He stopped. They hadn’t come through water before. His heart pumped like an oil derrick. It wasn’t the darkness, exactly, that was disconcerting. It wasn’t the sense of being hemmed in by walls of limestone on either side. No, the worst of it was the sudden sense of being turned around, of having no idea at all which way was north, east, south, or west. It was as if the beaters of a mixing machine had been lowered into his brain and turned on high.

  “I’m terrified,” she said, clinging to his back. Whatever he did, he must not let her sense his own fear.

  Something like light flickered at the periphery of his vision.

  “Light!” he said. “I saw light.”

  “Where? Thank God!”

  He blinked. Then blinked again. But it wasn’t light at all. He realized his nervous system was generating neural impulses that resulted in the strange, luminous flickers.

  “Wrong,” he said. “Something’s going on with our vision. It’s still adjusting.”

  “Poop!” she said with feeling.

  The sound of dripping water was random, but constant, and now he realized it was dripping nearby.

  Were they standing in a puddle they had stepped through before without noticing, or something they had walked around and missed entirely? “Wait here,” he said. “I’m going to see if this stuff gets deeper.”

  “Don’t leave me!”

  “I’ll be only inches away. Let me check it out.”

  “I’ll come with you.” She dug both hands under his belt and hung on.

  The water definitely got deeper as they stepped forward. Then the wall on either side ended, and his hands were suddenly groping thin air. He sensed they might be entering a large chamber at the end of the passage.

  “We’re turning back,” he said evenly.

  “We keep turning back—and turning around! I’m so confused.”

  “Hang on.” Dear God, what was a complete turn when you could see nothing? Had he been misjudging their turns? Had he been making half turns that sent them off along some other route? Why hadn’t they crashed into something?

  They turned slowly, as one, and began walking. He kept his hands out, feeling for the wall that had been within reach only moments ago.

  There! He felt the sweat pour from his body, followed by a stinging chill as it met the cool air of the cave.

  “Keep your left hand in my belt and put your right hand on the wall, and don’t take it off, even for a moment. We’ll come back to the light, I promise. There’s no way we can’t.” His voice was about to gear down into the croaking mode, and he mustn’t let her hear that. In him, croaking was a sure sign of depression, anger, or fear, and she knew it.

  They hadn’t been in here long enough for Larry Johnson to be worried. Knowing Larry, he probably thought the newlyweds were off doing a little hand holding, and he’d give them plenty of time to enjoy it.

  “I’m thirsty,” she said. “Stop and let me take the day pack off. I think I’ve got a bottle of water.”

  They stood with their backs to the damp wall, and she found the bottle and shook it. “There’s not much left. The flashlight ... the water. I can’t do anything right.”

  “So, what did I come off with? Nothing. You get extra points.”

  She unscrewed the cap and reached for his hand and gave him the bottle.

  “No,” he said. “You first.”

  “I think you should be first. You’re the leader.”

  “Drink,” he said. She took the bottle and drank, and passed it back to him. There wasn’t much left, but he drained the bottle and felt revived.

  “Why don’t I scream for help?”

  “Not yet. We can find our way out.” Who would hear them if they yel
led their heads off?

  “I forgot you’re one of those men who won’t stop at a service station and ask directions.”

  “There are no service stations anymore,” he said unreasonably. “Just places to buy hot dogs and T-shirts and pump your own.”

  “We should be screaming our heads off. Someone will be looking for us, Timothy. They’ll hear us.”

  He stuffed the empty bottle into her pack. “Save your breath. We’ve only been in here ten minutes.” Had it been ten minutes? Twenty? An hour? He couldn’t see his watch. He had never bought a watch with an illuminated dial, thinking it an unnecessary expense. After all, who needed to know what time it was in the dark, except when one was in bed? For that, there was the illuminated face of the clock on his nightstand.

  “I hate this,” she said, whispering. “It’s horrid. We’re sopping wet all over.”

  His unspoken prayers had been scrambled, frantic. He needed to stop, take a deep breath, and state it plainly. He put his arms around her and she instantly recognized the meaning of his touch and bowed her head against his.

  “Father, Your children have stumbled into a bit of trouble here, and we’re confused. You know the way out. Please show it to us. In Jesus’ name.

  “Amen!” she said, squeezing his arm.

  “That’s the ticket.”

  He wanted to stand there for a moment, collect his thoughts, get a real sense of the place. Maybe that would help, maybe that would give them some idea of what to do next. They had raced into this place, after all, like two heedless children, then panicked and gotten wildly confused.

  Stop. Slow down. That was definitely the answer.

  He drew a deep breath. “Actually, this is the way a lot of people live their lives.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Never knowing, in the dark, constantly guessing. It’s the guessing that’s the worst.”

  “Always working, dearest.”

  “Sermons are everywhere,” he said.

  “Speaking of guessing—you’ve been guessing, haven’t you, about the way to get back to the entrance?”

  Why lie? “Yes.”

  She was silent for a time. “We can’t possibly be far. It seemed so simple when we came in, just a long room with that vault thing and the urn.”