In This Mountain

by Jan Karon

  “That don’t always work.”

  “What don’t, ah, doesn’t?”

  “That repentance business.”

  “It worked for you. How long have you been dry?”

  “Four years goin’ on five.”

  “See there?”

  Father Tim was dead sure he heard Fancy Skinner’s high-heel shoes pecking on the floor above their heads, but he wouldn’t introduce that sore subject for all the tea in China.

  Joe picked up his scissors and comb.

  “Just take a little off the sides,” said Father Tim.

  “It’s fannin’ out over your collar, I’m gettin’ rid of this mess on your neck first.”

  “Cynthia said don’t scalp me.”

  “If I had a’ Indian-head nickel for every time a woman sent me that message, I’d be rich as cream an’ livin’ in Los Angelees.”

  “Why on earth would you want to live there?”

  “I wouldn’t, it’s just th’ first big town that popped to mind.”

  “Aha.” Father Tim saw a veritable bale of hair falling to the floor.

  “Where’s he goin’ to work at?”

  “I don’t know. We have a couple of possibilities.”

  “You wouldn’t want him to be out of work.”

  “Of course not.”

  “That’d be too big a temptation.”

  “You’re going to like this man. Remember, he made a public confession and turned himself in; he was willing to admit his mistake and spend eight years paying for it. Give him a chance.”

  “I don’t know…”

  “Ours is the God of the second chance, Joe.”

  Joe stood back and squinted at his handiwork, then handed Father Tim a mirror. “Well, there they are.”

  “There what are?”

  “Your ears. How long has it been since you seen ’em?”

  He left the barbershop and walked toward the corner of Main Street, head down. He wouldn’t confide it to anyone, not even to Cynthia, but something Hope expressed had already been nagging him. Indeed, what if things didn’t work out with George? Yours truly would be the one to blame. Worse, he wouldn’t even be here, he’d be in Tennessee, with no way to sense the flow of things at home. Somehow, he couldn’t grasp the reality of their move to Tennessee; it wouldn’t stick. The boxes were packed, their clothes were ready to zip into hanging bags, but…

  He admitted his relief that they’d failed to locate Clyde Barlowe. Indeed, it was possible that Dooley’s worst fears could come true; if they found the man, the family could be at risk, it was playing with fire. Why was he messing in other people’s lives, anyway, giving George Gaynor easy entry to Mitford, and actively searching for someone who’d never been anything but trouble?

  When he reached the hospital four blocks away, he figured he may as well check into a room and get it over with. His feet and legs had the weight of cinder blocks; he’d literally dragged himself up the hill. He recalled that Uncle Billy had asked him to stop by this afternoon, but maybe tomorrow….

  “So how do you like boot camp?”

  “Boot camp?”

  “Your hair. What’s left of it.” His ever-harried doc grinned, running his fingers through his own wiry, disheveled hair, which grew in plenty. “Your glucometer reading is through the roof. Two-fifty.”

  His heart sank.

  “You know it should be well under two hundred, around one-forty is where I’d like to see it hang.”

  He said nothing; he loathed this disease, he was sick of it….

  “I’ll have Kennedy draw blood for the lab. What happened to your exercise program?”

  “Let’s see…” His mind felt positively fogged.

  “Gone with the wind, is my guess.” Hoppy popped a green jelly bean.

  The very nerve, thought Father Tim.

  “I’m ready to scuttle your trip.”

  “What?”

  “Either that or I let you go on good faith, with your absolute commitment to take care of yourself.”

  “Meaning…?”

  “Meaning you’ve got to get back to a strict exercise regime and watch your diet. Plus, I’m going to double your insulin.”

  Father Tim stared at his shoes.

  “You know the higher we make your insulin the hungrier you’ll get, and if you don’t exercise you’ll gain weight, you’ll feel rotten…it’s a vicious cycle. So it’s imperative you stick with it, Father. I’m prescribing ten more units…every day. Every morning, every evening, no cutbacks, no slipups, and no excuses.”

  He nodded, numb.

  “I’m worried about you, pal. There’s no quick fix to diabetes.”

  “Right.”

  “Who’s going to be your medical counsel in Tennessee?”

  “I don’t know, I haven’t thought about it.”

  “Fortunately, you don’t have to. I have an old school chum in Nashville. Call him. It’s a must.”

  Hoppy scribbled a name on a notepad, tore off the page, and handed it to him. “I don’t think you’ve ever realized how serious this can be, even with the dive you took a few years back.”

  “Maybe not. I’ve tried to stay with the exercise, but lately I haven’t felt up to it.”

  “That’s when you need to push yourself to do it, of course.”

  “Of course.” Maybe he was tired because he was old. Age ought to count for something in this deal.

  “Wretched thing, exercise,” said his doctor. “Thank God diabetes is missing in my gene pool. Our crowd has other problems.”

  “Like what?”

  “Prostate cancer. My father, two uncles, a cousin.”

  Father Tim shook his head. “Sorry,” he said, meaning it. Who didn’t have a cross to bear? “Tell me about Lace. Is she home from school?”

  “Came in yesterday, went straight to visit Harley, said she’d try to see you and Cynthia before you go. You won’t believe how gorgeous she is, Timothy. Dumbfounding.”

  “I’m not surprised.”

  “Dean’s list, to boot. Olivia and I can never thank you enough for bringing us together as a family. It hasn’t been easy, but she’s the light of our lives.”

  Father Tim grinned. “I’m not the one, of course, who brought you together, but I’ll pass your sentiments along in my prayers tonight. What’s she up to next year?”

  “University of Virginia.”

  “Good. Terrific.”

  “How’s Dooley?”

  “Handsome. Smart as a whip. The light of our lives.”

  They laughed together comfortably, the two who had prayed for Olivia Davenport to find a heart transplant. In the process of finding a heart, his good doctor had a found a wife.

  In the evening, he pulled on his sweat suit, put his good dog on the leash, and ran.

  It wasn’t working. At the top of Church Hill, he wanted nothing more than to sit and stare down at the village. Just sit; not run, not travel to Tennessee, not even go home for dinner.

  In the evening, he took his glucometer out of the box to check the number of strips he had left. He fumbled the thing, somehow, and dropped it on the floor. While searching for it in the unlit bathroom, he heard it crunch under his heel.

  “Good riddance!” he said, switching on the light to do the cleanup.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  A Sudden Darkness

  He sat at the kitchen island, pulling together a list of winter gardening chores for Harley.

  Should the leaves remain on the lawn, or be raked and worked into the compost heap? There were clearly two schools of thought on the subject; he had a history of swinging back and forth between them. But why worry about it in June when Harley didn’t need to know ’til the end of October?

  Cynthia trotted in and climbed onto the stool beside his.

  “Lace Harper called. She’ll be here at four o’clock!”

  “Aha! Good news.”

  “I’ve made lemonade and pimiento cheese sandwiches. We’ll have afternoon tea.”

>   “Scratch pimiento cheese?”

  “Timothy! Is the pope a Catholic?”

  Chuckling, he kissed his wife and looked at his watch. Maybe he could catch Dooley. He bounded to the phone by the sofa in the study.

  “Jessie!” he said when Dooley’s ten-year-old sister answered the phone.

  “Hey, Father Tim.”

  “How are you?”

  “I’m OK. Dooley gave me a whole box of candy from the drugstore, it has nuts. Do you like nuts?”

  “I am nuts,” he said, grinning.

  “Why?”

  “Because I’m going somewhere I…don’t really want to go.” He couldn’t believe he’d said that.

  “I have to do things I don’t want to do.”

  “Like what, may I ask?”

  “Washing dishes and homework.”

  “Both very popular in the category of what people don’t like doing. Is Dooley around?”

  “Yeah.”

  He heard Dooley in the background. “Say yes, sir!”

  “Yes, sir, do you want to speak to him?”

  “I do, thank you. And Jessie…”

  “Yeah? I mean, yes, sir?”

  “I’ve been meaning to tell you this for ages. You’re a lovely girl. We’re all proud of you.”

  She caught her breath, considered his remark, then giggled. “Thanks.”

  “You’re welcome. See you when we get back.”

  “Hey,” said Dooley.

  “Hey, yourself! Lace Harper’s dropping over at four o’clock. Cynthia made lemonade and pimiento cheese sandwiches. Want to come?”

  Silence. Maybe he should throw in a plate of brownies. He could run to Sweet Stuff….

  “Dooley?”

  “I don’t know, I don’t think so.”

  “It’ll take thirty minutes, maybe an hour, it won’t be a long visit.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  He observed his own silence. “Well, then. I’ll drive out to Meadowgate with you on Thursday morning, OK?”

  “OK.”

  “We love you, buddy.”

  “Love you back.”

  Click.

  “He’s not coming,” said Father Tim, feeling oddly bereft.

  His barefoot wife thumped onto the sofa beside him. “Want to bet?”

  Perhaps he’d write an essay on the mystery of a woman’s ability to know and sense things beyond a man’s ken. At five ’til four, the front door opened and Dooley blew down the hall.

  “Hey.”

  He and Cynthia offered their family greeting in unison. “Hey, yourself!”

  “I forgot something.”

  “What?” asked Cynthia.

  “My, umm, tennis shoes.”

  “You’re wearing them.”

  Dooley blushed. “Oh, right. I mean, no, not these. My old ones.”

  “You outgrew them.”

  Father Tim put his arm around his wife’s shoulder, hoping to distract her. She was a regular CIA agent, a storm trooper. “Cynthia…”

  “I want them for…for Poo!” said Dooley.

  “For Poo! What a great idea. Of course!”

  “Of course!” said Father Tim. Quick thinking! Chalk one up for Dooley.

  Dooley grinned, displaying sixteen hundred dollars’ worth of recent dental work, underwritten by Miss Sadie’s trust.

  Handsome! thought Father Tim. Smart as a whip! The light of our lives!

  His doctor was right. Lace Harper was…what had Hoppy said, exactly? Gorgeous. Slightly bucktoothed when he’d first encountered her stealing Miss Sadie’s ferns, Lace had obviously undergone dental work of her own. However, it was her eyes that engaged him. He’d remembered them as brown, but they were, in fact, amber, a startling, clear amber that gave this young woman great presence.

  Dooley tried to sprawl on the study sofa, but, finding it impossible to appear nonchalant, returned to posing as ice sculpture.

  “What will you be doing this summer?” his wife asked their guest.

  “My friend Alicia invited me to visit her aunt in Martha’s Vineyard, but we’re going to take a family trip out West.”

  He noted that Lace pronounced aunt like the Virginians, and not like Mitfordians, who comfortably used what sounded like ant and even aint.

  “I love the West!” Cynthia said. “Where?”

  “Hoppy’s great-grandfather had a ranch in Montana, so we’re going there, then we’re going to explore the Oregon Trail.” Lace smiled suddenly.

  Father Tim thought her smile a miracle of healing; in the early years, her countenance had reflected only anger and the weight of a terrible sadness. Further, he thought her poise was nothing to be taken lightly. Though a year younger than Dooley, she seemed wiser, more mature, more settled into her skin.

  “Sounds like good medicine for my doctor,” said Father Tim. In all the years he’d known the earnest practitioner, Hoppy had taken only two vacations, one of them his honeymoon.

  “Olivia bought him cowboy boots.”

  “Aha!”

  “But don’t tell,” said Lace. “It’s a secret.”

  “Never!”

  Though the conversation flowed smoothly enough, the tension in the room was palpable; he felt it somewhere around the region of his jaws, as if he’d clenched his teeth since their visitor arrived. There was no mistaking Lace’s cool indifference toward Dooley, and Dooley’s wall of defense against her.

  Father Tim remembered the day Dooley had stolen Lace’s old hat and she’d responded by punching him so hard in the ribs that Dooley thought a few of them broken. Now, that was communicating!

  Cynthia passed the small sandwiches a second time. Father Tim took one, Lace declined. Dooley took two, one in each hand, then, realizing his social blunder, tried to return one to the plate, but Cynthia had passed it out of reach. He popped an entire sandwich into his mouth and sat red-faced and chewing, holding the other as if it were a hot potato.

  Something must be done! thought Father Tim. He shot from his chair and addressed the assembly.

  “Why don’t we all go for a ride in my car? Dooley, you can drive!” There! That ought to do it. Dooley at the wheel of the red Mustang, the top down, the four of them without a care….

  “A ride?” queried his wife, refilling their glasses. “Whatever for?”

  He sat as quickly as he’d stood.

  “Didn’t go too well, did it?” Cynthia asked.

  They lay in bed, holding hands.

  “Depends on what we were expecting.”

  “We were expecting them to be friends, of course, just as they used to be.”

  “He told me she snubbed a phone call he made to her at school.”

  “Yes,” she said, “but it’s more than that. Because of their backgrounds, they’re both terrified of feeling their feelings. Dooley can take Jenny to a movie and it doesn’t mean a great deal to him, but there’s something so…intense, so volatile in his feelings toward Lace that he simply tries to shut his feelings down.”

  “Deep stuff.”

  “Some of the stuff you dealt with when courting me.”

  “Really?”

  “Absolutely!”

  “What happened?” he asked, smiling in the dark. “How did we end up in the same bed?”

  She patted his hand. “Water wears away stone.”

  He yawned hugely. “Whatever that means,” he said.

  He sat in a straight-back chair in a small, empty room with a dirt floor. It was the same cool, hard-packed floor of his grandmother’s potato cellar, but there were windows through which light streamed, casting patterns at his feet.

  He heard a door opening behind him; children filed into the room on either side of his chair. They came in silently, almost reverently, and settled themselves at his feet as if waiting for him to speak, to tell them a story or solve some great riddle; there were dozens of children, many more than a small room could possibly hold, but their silence made them seem fewer. The light from the open doorway fell upon
their hair and illumined their faces as they looked at him, searching for something he had no ability to name or to deliver. He tried to speak, but couldn’t open his mouth; he tried but could not speak—

  “What is it, dearest?”

  Her hand on his shoulder was the most reassuring touch he’d ever known, save that of his mother. “I keep falling asleep and waking again. Did I disturb you?”

  “You were dreaming,” she said. “I’ve been awake, too. It’s the change that’s coming.”

  It’s already with us, he thought. We have disrupted something precious, something fragile. Yet they were doing what they believed God wanted….

  “Come,” he said, taking her into his arms. They lay without talking as he stroked her cheek.

  “I’m going with you to New York,” he said at last.

  “You don’t have to, it’s all right.”

  “No, we’re going together.” To arrive in Tennessee in early June and leave the middle of July didn’t seem the best thing, but he was going with his wife, period. As for his lifelong fear of flying, he’d put his head down and do it, he’d reckon with it.

  She kissed him tenderly. “I’ll be proud to show off my husband.”

  He turned his head on the pillow and looked out the window to the leaves of the maple tree gleaming in the moonlight.

  “Whitecap didn’t seem so hard.”

  “We were lighthearted about going to Whitecap,” she murmured.

  “The freedom of an island…”

  “The wind in our hair…”

  “Gulls wheeling above us…”

  “The smell of salt air!” He completed their old liturgy. Whitecap had seemed inviting and open; what lay ahead now seemed closed, though he didn’t know why.

  “This will be our last foray,” he said.

  “Thank you, Timothy. We’re no spring chickens.”

  Ah, yes. He would be sixty-nine in less than a month, looking square into the maw of The Big Seven-oh. But age had nothing, less than nothing to do with serving God. There were countless older saints who, faithful to the end, had perished on the mission field. And there were mission fields at home, right in his own backyard—hadn’t he always been a proponent of the local mission field? After Tennessee, he would get down to it once and for all. He would find his niche and make his mark for God at home, in Mitford. What with two days at the Children’s Hospital in Wesley, a couple of days with Scott Murphy at Hope House, Wednesdays with Homeless Hobbes’s soup kitchen, and a pulpit here and there, he’d have more than a full plate.