These High, Green Hills

by Jan Karon

  It was another of those columns, perhaps, something like a great elephant trunk. He turned slowly to the right, reading the wall with his hands. More columns.

  The columned wall, he found, continued around inaUcurve.

  It was a moment before he told her what neither wanted to know.

  They had reached a complete dead end.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Darkness into Light

  HE FELT as if the circuits had gone down in his brain.

  No logic, no reason, no common sense had worked to lead them to the opening. Every turn had been a wrong turn. Every decision had been fruitless. It was maddening.

  Dear God! Now what?

  The darkness seemed to fall like a heavy curtain over his mind.

  “If we go back the way we came,” he said, forcing himself to think rationally, “we’ll come to where we were sitting. We know that turning right isn’t the way; that’s where I fell off the ledge. So, let’s retrace our steps and turn left.”

  She was trembling as he put his arm around her shoulders.

  “We can’t be far from the opening,” he said. “We’re going to find it, I promise. Besides, Larry won’t let this go on much longer. Hang on.”

  She tucked her hands into his belt and they began the return trek.

  He was blasted sick and tired of this everlasting fumbling around in the dark. Where in God’s name was Larry, anyway? Putting a fly in the water and showing off the cast he learned from his Orvis seminar?

  His thirst was becoming hard to ignore, and he realized how seductive the dripping water sounded. He saw them down on their hands and knees, lapping at a puddle like Barnabas and Violet. But what might the water contain, what could limestone do to the human system, what algae or larvae might be lurking in it?

  “I’m so thirsty,” she said, as if reading his mind. “Are we almost there?”

  “The wall is beginning to curve a little, I think.” Would they recognize the curve, the place where they’d been sitting, or go careening around to the right until he fell off the ledge again? Good Lord, why hadn’t they marked the place they’d sat, left something there as a touchstone?

  “Here. I think we’re here.” That was the thin slime of mud they’d been sitting on, wasn’t it? Something was squishing under his shoes. It might have been a light in a window, for the moment of warm familiarity it kindled in him.

  “How are your feet?”

  “Frozen,” she said.

  “We’re turning left. Hang on.”

  “You’re sure? You’re positive this is the way?”

  “Positive.” He wasn’t positive.

  Except for the time they had sat by the wall ... when? How long ago? Twenty minutes ago? Except for that time, they had been constantly on the move, battling their fear, struggling to make sense of this mind-altering confusion. His knees felt weak—or was it the numbing cold and dampness that was seeping into their very bones and slowing them down?

  Now. They were back to a passage he could touch on either side, thanks be to God!

  “Soon,” he said, hearing the despair in his voice, “we’ll be at the opening. We just took a couple of wrong turns.”

  “Right.”

  He heard the echoing despair in her own voice.

  He didn’t try to imagine how much time had passed.

  He leaned against the day pack, using it as insulation between his back and the damp cold of the wall, and held her tightly between his legs.

  They had groped along an endless passage strewn with boulders and low shelves of limestone, which banged up their knees and twice sent him sprawling. At a pool of water, they stopped and made the decision to go no farther.

  “I think we should wait it out,” he said, edging back from the pool. “We need to stop moving, and let them find us.” How much deeper had they gone in, struggling to find their way out?

  She didn’t speak.

  Exhausted, they sat away from the water, under a ledge, and prayed silently.

  He felt as if they had become part of the cave. The damp cold had made such a thorough invasion of their bodies that their nervous systems had slowed to a crawl. It wasn’t cold enough to freeze them to death, he reasoned, but it was blasted cold and dark and still enough to numb every limb, not to mention the mind.

  Leaning with her back against his chest, she rubbed his legs and ankles, and he rubbed her arms and shoulders for warmth.

  His throat was as parched as if they’d wandered the desert. Couldn’t he scoop up the water in one hand, and with the other examine it for living things? He did not want to gulp down an eel or a worm or whatever else might live in these waters, and though his wife had remained substantially calm until now, straining a wriggling organism through her teeth would not improve matters.

  What was going on out there in the world, anyway, where people were free to move around and look at trees and hear the call of other human voices? The kids couldn’t find the cave, he was convinced of it. Furthermore, it was almost certainly raining, and no trace of their scent remained on the ground.

  Drops of moisture hit the pools, plinkplinkplink. He felt a sudden shortness of breath and a racking, intense thirst.

  He sat up and pulled the bag to his side and reached in and found the bottle. He also found the two soft bundles she had tucked next to her pencil case. Socks!

  “Put these on,” he said, handing her a pair.

  It was difficult to draw his feet from his shoes, as most of the feeling had gone. The good news was, his socks were still dry, thanks to the investment he’d made in the boots. Her socks, however, were sopping. “Put on both pairs,” he said.

  “No, dearest. You—”

  “Please mind your priest.”

  She pulled his feet into her lap and massaged them briskly, and put his socks on again. Then she rubbed her own feet and pulled on the dry socks. “Heaven,” she murmured.

  “I’m going to get water,” he said.

  “But—”

  “How bad can it be?”

  She thought a moment. “Maybe we could scoop some into our hand and feel if there’s anything in it.”

  “Whatever.”

  “Don’t leave me!”

  “It’s just over there, for Pete’s sake.”

  “Just over there? Where is just over there? We thought the opening was just over there.”

  “Cynthia ...”

  “I’m coming with you.”

  “Hitch on, then.”

  They crawled the short distance to the pool, feeling their way, the smell of damp earth in their nostrils.

  “It smells clean,” he said. “That’s one thing I can say for this place. And the air ... no sneezing, no sinus drainage.”

  “No exhaust fumes, no pollen!” she said, catching the spirit.

  He splashed his hand into the edge of the pool. Then, pushing up his muddy sleeve, he slid his hand into the water and tested the depth. It dropped off steeply. Thank God they hadn’t bungled their way into it.

  “Do you feel anything moving?”

  He didn’t. He scooped water into his cupped hands and recklessly drank it. Good Lord! Sweet. Sweet as sugar! It went down his throat in a great, healing stream. He scooped some more and drank.

  “It’s OK, you can drink it! Move up to the edge, but be careful. This pool could be pretty deep.”

  He splashed water into his mouth with the palm of his hand. Then he bent his head to the pool and drank freely, feeling the mentholated coolness of the water against his face, and the drops from above splatter on his back.

  “Oh,” she said, simply, weeping with relief as she drank.

  It was as if God had touched them, instilling a new, raw hope.

  They crawled back to the dry pack, and he fetched the bottle to the pool and filled it and put the cap on, and returned to where she sat under the ledge.

  “Why don’t I start screaming?”

  “Give you a little refreshment and you’re off again,” he said.
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  “I mean it, Timothy. It would be such a help to whoever is looking for us.”

  “Well...”

  He held his ears, and she screamed.

  “Well done!”

  “I’m going back to the screaming program. I don’t care what you say.”

  “So be it,” he said. “Let’s get warm.”

  She crawled into the embrace of his legs and arms, and pulled her own legs under her chin.

  “Thank God Sophia and Liza are looking in on Barnabas,” he mused. “He’s probably dragging them around the town monument as we speak.”

  “And Liza’s loving it!”

  “I like the way you smell,” he said, burying his face in her hair. Even in this dark, damp place that reeked only of earth, he inhaled the faintest scent of wisteria.

  “Tell me something.”

  “What?” she asked.

  “Why are you especially afraid of being left?”

  There was a long silence. He listened to the musical drip, dripping of the water, calling upon every discipline to avoid the sheer panic that lay beneath the surface of his outward calm. They should be finding their way out of here, executing some rationale that he couldn’t seem to get a fix on. But no, stumbling around hadn’t worked, he had to fight the fear with everything in him and stay exactly where they were until help came.

  “Because I was always being left by someone. My mother and father ... and then Elliott.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “Well, you see ...” She hesitated, then went on. “I remember when I was in fourth grade and Mother and Daddy were to pick me up from school. Except ... they never came.”

  “Never?”

  “I waited out front until all the buses had left, and Miss Phillips stayed with me. Then everyone left, and we went back inside and stood by the windows in my classroom and watched for them to drive up.”

  She trembled slightly.

  “They ... never did come. Miss Phillips called our house over and over, but there was no answer, so she took me home with her.”

  He kissed her hair.

  “Miss Phillips kept calling, but there was no answer, and I remember she made grilled cheese sandwiches and hot cocoa, and finally I did my homework and we went to bed. I slept on her sofa and her cat curled up beside me—his name was Alexander, as in Alexander the Great. We got up the next morning and I put my clothes back on and we went to school, and I was afraid people would know that I hadn’t been home, that Mother and Daddy ... At recess, Miss Phillips said Mother called to say they’d been ...”

  He waited.

  “... detained.”

  The water dripped all around them, and he was glad for the ledge that kept them dry.

  “I don’t know why I remember that particular thing.”

  “I’ll never leave you,” he said, holding her.

  “Not even to explore a passage?”

  “Not even for that,” he said.

  She had fallen asleep in his arms, and he sat with his eyes open, staring ahead, not wanting to miss the light when it came.

  The feeling of panic had wondrously left him, and in its place had come an odd and surprising peace. Somehow, he wasn’t afraid of this place anymore. He could wait.

  A line from Roethke surfaced in his mind: In a dark time, the eye begins to see.

  It was as if he were drifting through space, and every care he had was reduced to nothing. What were his cares, anyway? They were few. So few. Who cared where they put the linen closets in Hope House? He had cared very much out there in the light, just as he had cared about Sadie Baxter hanging up her car keys, and Buck Leeper coming to terms with his Creator, and Dooley Barlowe growing up and having a life that no one could take from him, no matter what.

  He had cared that Lord’s Chapel was running several thousand dollars behind budget, and that two of his favorite families had gone over to the Presbyterians for no reason he could understand. It was his job to care, but what he was beginning to understand, sitting here in this unspeakable darkness, was that God cared more.

  Whether Tim Kavanagh cared wasn’t the point, after all, and whether Tim Kavanagh was in control didn’t matter in the least. God was fully in control—firmly and finally and awfully—and he knew it for the first time in his heart, instead of in his head.

  He felt himself smiling, and wondered at the laughter welling up in him, like a spring seeping into a field where the plow had passed.

  But he wouldn’t wake her, not for anything, and he pushed the laughter back, and felt its warmth spreading through him like the glowing of a coal.

  “Father?” he whispered.

  Come in and tell me why....

  “I love you,” he heard himself saying. “I forgive you. It’s all right.”

  Cynthia murmured in her sleep, and the surge of inexpressible tenderness that stirred in him was unlike anything he’d known before.

  He sensed that everything was possible—yet he had no idea what that meant, nor what everything might be.

  Maybe he, too, had fallen asleep and was dreaming.

  But he wasn’t dreaming.

  He heard it again—a kind of woofing or huffing. He sat, frozen, afraid he had imagined it.

  Woof, woof!

  “It’s Barnabas!” he shouted. It was the mighty voice of a Wurlitzer, it was the voice of angels on high, it was his dog!

  He heard himself yelling in odd harmony with Cynthia’s ear-splitting scream, their voices raised in a single, joyful invective against the primordial dark.

  The miner’s lamp attached to his collar wildly illuminated the walls as Barnabas licked every exposed part of their bodies, pausing only to bark for the rescue team.

  The faces of Larry Johnson and Joe Joe Guthrie finally bobbed toward them under hats with miner’s lamps.

  “Lord have mercy, are y‘all OK?” yelled Joe Joe, tripping over the long rope leash they’d anchored to Barnabas.

  “Fine! Wonderful!” shouted the rector.

  “I ought to kick your butt,” said Larry Johnson, meaning it.

  They stumbled out of the opening into the light, which issued from a ring of lanterns and the flash of J. C. Hogan’s Nikon.

  J.C. walked backward as they advanced from the cave, shooting at close range, and crashed into the underbrush.

  Cynthia, who was covered with mud from head to toe, embraced various members of the exultant youth group and shouted, “Hallelujah!”

  “What time is it?” asked the rector.

  “Ten o‘clock!” announced Bo Derbin, proud to be asked. “We thought Indians were living in that cave and had scalped you or made you their slaves.”

  Mule Skinner appeared, carrying a lantern. “Lord help, look at that gash on your head! I hope you’re up to walkin‘ th’ two miles out of here. We got to get you to th‘ hospital.”

  “We’re fine,” he said. “No harm done!”

  “We was goin‘ to radio for a helicopter in case you was in real bad shape,” said a police officer, who appeared disappointed.

  Father Tim felt positively humiliated by all this ruckus. Not only had he and Cynthia spoiled the camping trip, they’d brought out the police and the press, who, worse yet, had to hump it on foot across two miles of rough terrain.

  “Cave!” said Larry Johnson. “That’s all I had to hear. I gave you an hour and we started looking. We called and hollered, then went a little ways in and poked around, but couldn’t see for squat, even with a lantern and flashlight. I walked out to the van, drove to the nearest phone, and called Rodney.”

  “I was down at th‘ station chewin’ th‘ fat when Larry called,” said Mule. “I told ’em how my daddy was lost in a cave in Kentucky, and they like to never found ‘im ’til they sent in his Blue Tick hound. So Rodney collected th‘ boys and went to your house and got Barnabas.”

  “A stroke of genius.”

  Larry leaned close to the rector’s ear. “I hate to tell you that Rodney took a wrong turn outside Farmer and
every one of ‘em were lost as the tribes of Israel for two hours.”

  “We followed Barnabas as hard as we could go,” said Joe Joe. “The way he tracked you, y‘all must’ve been runnin’ around in there like chickens with their heads cut off.”

  “Tell me about it,” said the rector.

  “Actually,” Cynthia informed J.C., “it was a very interesting experience. So sorry we alarmed everybody.”

  “Want my last package of peanut butter?” Lee Lookabill asked Cynthia.

  “If you’ll knead it first, I’ll eat it,” she said. “I never thought it would come to this.”

  Rodney Underwood looked at the rector sternly and hitched up his holster belt. “I don’t know when I’ve had to fool with a man who was lost in a cave. I just radio’d th‘ county sheriff. He says this cave is totally unexplored.”

  “Not anymore it ain’t,” said Mule, grinning proudly.

  Emma Newland was making her pronouncement.

  “Anybody who’d step foot in a cave deserves to get lost!”

  “It was a very interesting experience,” he said, quoting his wife.

  “Interesting? With bats swarmin‘ around your head, and steppin’ in water out th‘ kazoo?”

  “We never saw a bat, actually.”

  “Never saw a bat? That’s where bats live—in caves!”

  “So sue me,” he said.

  Merely walking out the door of the rectory was invigorating. It was as if he’d come back from the grave, given the dazzling, living energy of every green thing he saw.

  He had escaped the tomb, and felt his spirit quicken in response. In a way, it was his own Eastertide.

  “Lost in a cave?” said Bill Sprouse, who passed him on the way to the Grill. “That’ll preach, Brother, that’ll preach!”

  “For you,” said Percy, “a dollar off th‘ special.”

  “Why a dollar off?” He was leery of Percy’s specials.

  “You been lost in a cave! You’re a big gun!”

  He grinned. “Big gun, is it? Well, then, bring on the special.”