In This Mountain

by Jan Karon

  Abba, Father…

  He struggled to pray, but was disconcerted by a loud beeping noise somewhere above his head. He opened his eyes and found he could see.

  He was in a dark place.

  It smelled of aluminum foil, or possibly mouthwash.

  A narrow column of light shone through a door that stood ajar.

  Where in God’s name was he? Their door wasn’t on that side of the bedroom.

  Cynthia!

  He found he couldn’t move his left hand, it hadn’t yet filled up, so he examined the bed with his right. The bed was narrow, and he was alone.

  He tried to roll onto his side, but found he was tethered.

  “Cynthia? Cynthia!”

  The beeping grew louder and the slice of light grew wider as the door opened.

  “Father Kavanagh!”

  “Who is it?”

  Someone walked soundlessly into the room without turning on the light.

  “Nurse Kennedy.” She took his wrist and placed her fingers on his pulse. “Thank God,” she said softly.

  “Where am I?” he asked.

  She did something that stopped the beeping. “You’re in Mitford Hospital. Welcome home.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Grace Sufficient

  “Dearest…”

  He opened his eyes and saw Cynthia standing by the hospital bed. Though tears streamed down her cheeks, her smile was radiant.

  He found he could not lift his hand to touch her, though the sight before him was the most wondrous he’d ever beheld.

  He touched her with his gaze, then mutely examined her face with his eyes. Home. He was home. Whatever he had done, he would never do it again. He felt like a man who had been to a hideous war and returned at last to kiss his very doorstep.

  “Timothy…,” she whispered, leaning down to brush her cheek against his.

  “Come,” he said.

  She lay down in the narrow space beside him, and held him, and wept.

  “Dear God, what bloody foolishness! How many times are you planning to pull this stunt?”

  “What stunt?” Father Tim asked. The effort of speaking seemed monumental.

  “Making yourself comatose. You did it so well the first time, you thought you’d do it all over again?” Hoppy raised his voice as if his patient had gone clinically deaf.

  “Comatose?”

  “For nearly forty-eight hours. I suspect it all started with delirium from severely elevated blood sugar, complicated by a concussion from whacking your head. All of which resulted in grieving your wife and upsetting half the county….” Hoppy stooped and squinted at Father Tim. “What the devil did you do to yourself, anyhow?”

  Get out of my face, he wanted to say; he felt nailed to the pillow by his doctor’s blazing stare. “I don’t remember.” He had some vague recollection of going to the country with Dooley, but not much more. “How high was my sugar?”

  “You don’t want to know,” snapped his doctor.

  “How did I get a concussion?”

  “You weren’t wearing your seat belt.”

  “When can I go home?”

  Hoppy walked to the window, scowling, his hands jammed into his coat pockets. “We’ll take you out of ICU tomorrow, then three, four days on the floor. You’ll be home Sunday, looking at a full month of recovery. To tell the truth, you’ll feel rotten for six weeks.”

  Hoppy had the grayish pallor Father Tim had often seen in him over the years. He knew it well—it was exhaustion, plain and simple; he supposed he was the cause….

  “You’re pretty fired up.”

  “Yes!” Hoppy turned from the window. “Because you don’t listen. I talk, I preach, I warn, but you turn me off like I’m some know-nothing parent.”

  He decided to ignore this accusation. “What happened?”

  “You blacked out while you were driving and hit…”

  “Hit what?”

  Hoppy raked his hand through his thatch of gray hair. “A stop sign at Little Mitford Creek. So what was it, Father? More of that infernal cake you ate last time? Or did you cut back on your insulin and try living by your own rules?”

  He had cut back on his insulin, yes, but only a little. As for cake, he hadn’t had any cake. Coke, maybe. Or was it cake? No, it was Coke, some glimmer of memory assured him. “Coke,” he said. “I had a Coke at the country store, coming home from Meadowgate.” There. His mind was back. “I thought I punched the Diet Coke button, but I guess I got the real thing…. I skipped lunch and then I was thirstyand—”

  “I don’t know,” said Hoppy, shaking his head. “I just don’t know.” He thumped into the green vinyl chair by the bed and checked his watch. “You’re a pain in the butt.”

  He grinned at his doctor, whose bedside manner appeared to be in drastic ill repair. “Same back.”

  Hoppy tried to smile. “We’ll get through this,” he said.

  He fell asleep almost immediately after Hoppy’s visit, and woke with a start.

  Tennessee! What about Tennessee?

  He felt around on his pillow for the nurse’s bell, but the movement exhausted him and he lay panting from the effort. The phone. He could phone Cynthia and ask her; they hadn’t talked about it when she rushed to the hospital this morning at two o’clock. Now it was—what time was it? No watch. No clock. How was he supposed to know anything around here? He noticed for the first time that a TV hung over his bed at a drunken slant, as if it might plummet into his face at any moment. Maybe there was a remote; he could get the time from CNN. He craned his neck and peered at the nightstand, but saw only a box of tissues and a glass of water. He decided that shouting for a nurse was out of the question—it would take more energy than he had, and worse, disturb other patients.

  He would simply lie here, then, until someone came, enduring the pounding of his head and the sharp sting of the bruise where his temple had gotten banged up in that business with the sign.

  He heard rain strike the windowpane, and felt strangely bereft and alone. He should be glad for the sound, glad for what a spring shower would do for the grass and the garden, his roses. But he felt no gladness. In truth, he felt almost nothing.

  Was this how it would be during the long weeks ahead? And was it really his stubbornness and stupidity that had caused his wife such agony, his doctor to work overtime, and the ministry in Tennessee to go begging from the beginning?

  Emma’s packet arrived with his lunch, which consisted of a pint of milk, a bowl of yogurt, and something he couldn’t identify—was it congealed tomato soup or aspic or…worse? He tore into the saltines and read his e-mails.

  From: ourbackyard@aol.com

  That’s a fine kettle of fish, Timothy! I suppose it was the moose head that scared you off.

  When you’re up and about and ready to join us, I’ll take it off your living room wall and hang it in your woodshed.

  Forgot to mention you’ll be heating with a woodstove, like the rest of us in Bear Creek Cove.

  Thank God for Richard and Trudy, who arrived yesterday and have already done the work of two hale men. Youth! That’s the ticket!

  We discovered your roof needs a patch job, it has let a good bit of spring deluge into your sleeping quarters, which, looking on the bright side, drowned a good many of the mice.

  Richard will fetch new sheathing for the roof as soon as the mud dries on the road and we can get around without miring up to our fenders.

  We’re all assuming you and Cynthia have four-wheel drive.

  Well, old friend, hang in there and content yourself with the bald truth that God is working in Jessup, Tennessee!

  Yrs, Fr Harry

  P.S. A neighboring boy named Abner, as in the comic strip of yore, has come to my door looking for work, heaven knows we can use an extra hand. It makes the heart glad to see his patient industry. Around fourteen, maybe fifteen years old, can’t read a word or write his name.

  Pray for Abner. Keep me posted. Send money.

  The e
ternal effervescence of Harry Roland was more than a man could take on an empty stomach. He opened the other package of crackers and downed his low-fat milk, watching the door for a sign of his wife. Four-wheel drive. Blast. Why hadn’t they thought of that? Cynthia’s Mazda had front-wheel drive. Wouldn’t that do the trick? What could he have been thinking these last couple of months? What kind of fog had he been in, anyway?

  From: hisbp@aol.com

  My old friend,

  I write to you as St. Paul wrote to the Hebrews.

  “How can we thank God enough for you in return for all the joy that we feel before our God because of you?

  “Night and day we pray most earnestly that we may see you face to face and restore whatever is lacking in your faith.” (If anything be lacking, dear brother)

  “Now may our God and Father himself and our Lord Jesus direct our way to you and may the Lord make you increase and abound in love…just as (Martha and I) abound in love for you.”

  I plan to come through Mitford on 28th, en route to mtg in

  Charlotte. Will see you then unless advised to contrary. Be encouraged.

  Stuart

  There was an appalling soreness in every limb, every joint; his eyes were as painful as if they’d been punched like a voting ballot. And his head—pounding like horses at a gallop. He found his left temple bandaged and supposed this had come about from crashing into the stop sign….

  He dropped the mail onto his blanket, exhausted.

  Perhaps the yogurt would provide some strength, but he couldn’t get interested in lifting the spoon to his mouth. He rang for the nurse to take his tray so there would be room for Cynthia to sit on the bed beside him. Some flame licked up at the thought of her and warmed him, and he lay back against the pillows and closed his eyes and tried to forget what he had done and where he was, and why.

  His wife lay on her side next to him, her hand in his. They had been silent for some time, content merely to lie together, touching.

  “We’re a pair,” he murmured at last. “What are you thinking?”

  “I’m thanking God for you.”

  “What’s left of me,” he said, surprised at the irony in his voice.

  “I’m thinking about Tennessee, how they’ll have to dig deep ’til we get there. It won’t help matters to start off short-handed.”

  “We’ll think about that later.”

  “What about the car? Did I…?”

  “Let’s talk about it later, dearest. We’ll talk about…everything, later.”

  Hoppy blew in with a burst of energy that scattered the e-mails to the floor.

  “Now I have two patients?”

  “Multiplying like coat hangers in a closet!” crowed Cynthia, sitting up and tidying herself.

  Hoppy put his hand on Cynthia’s shoulder. “Have you slept?”

  “Finally,” she said. “But still a bit droopy.”

  Father Tim raised his head from the pillow. “We were just talking about Tennessee, and when we might be able to—”

  “You’ll have to forget Tennessee,” said his doctor, folding his arms across his chest. “With your out-of-control diabetes, the last thing you need is a year in the backwoods.”

  “Yes, but you—”

  “What if this had happened in Jessup, Father? Fourteen miles from the nearest hospital?”

  Having no answer, he was silent.

  “There’s your answer,” said Hoppy.

  Hoppy had decreed that no one but Cynthia could visit him when he moved to the floor. That suited him fine. He had nothing much to say and less energy to say it with. The staff was conniving to stuff food into him at every turn. He felt like a goose in which someone sought to cultivate pâté. When the phone rang, he didn’t answer it. Once, a nurse answered and announced that J. C. Hogan was on the line. He waved the proffered receiver away, spent.

  Flowers poured in. Roses, tulips, even a few sprigs of ivy pulled from the yard of a former parishioner and stuck into a Mason jar. Let this root, said the note.

  Sissy sent the heel of a potato, sprouting in a paper cup. Sassy sent an avocado seed, suspended in a jelly glass by three toothpicks, whose stupendous crop of leaves had seen better days.

  Hessie Mayhew had clearly outdone herself with the offering she sent in a basket that occupied an entire corner of the room. He wanted to pore over every stem and stamen, examine the colors, muse on the fragrances, but he could not. When he occasionally glanced at it, he felt guilty that he didn’t care about it in the least, and so stopped looking in that corner.

  He gave it to Kennedy, who was clearly skeptical. “I’ve had yards smaller than this,” she said, lugging it from the room.

  He discovered that he was content with the laughter of other patients’ visitors along the hall. It was a kind of assurance that people’s lives were going on, though his own had come to a bitter halt.

  He walked down the hall once, without permission, stiff as a board, shuffling like an old person. He was old, of course, he was nearly seventy. When he was young, seventy had been old, hadn’t it? One of his grandfathers had died at the age of seventy, and surely no one had said, Poor Yancey, he was so young.

  He noticed that several people stared at him as he scuffed along in his slippers, as if toilet tissue might be trailing from one of the soles. At least two people, whom he’d met casually, lowered their eyes and appeared not to recognize him. He knew some of the patients, certainly, and most of the nurses—as rector of Lord’s Chapel, he’d come here nearly every weekday morning for sixteen years—yet today nothing seemed familiar. He might have been a stranger in the place he’d once spent hours praying with patients and staff and reading the Word by countless bedsides.

  He barely made it to the rubber plant at the elevators when Kennedy found him and hauled him back to his room as if he were a convict who’d gone over the wall.

  “No wonder people die in hospitals,” he muttered to the longtime head nurse. “They never let you have any fun.”

  I have come home.

  He wrote these words on a blank page in the back of his journal, intending to say more, but discovered there was nothing else to say. It was all he had wanted and then some, just to come home.

  Thinking he should date the entry, he picked up the pen and held it for moment, then put it down and looked out the window to the postage-stamp view of Baxter Park.

  They should tear down the old garage and open up the view. He had no idea why they’d never thought of it before. Even the straggly hedge behind it, which belonged to the town, could be cleaned up to some extent, and deadwood pulled out. In only a couple of days, he and Harley could get the job done, no problem. They would use the chain saw, as needed, he’d stack brush and put it out for the town chipper, and voilà! a view of Baxter Park.

  “What do you think, old boy?” Barnabas jumped from the slipcovered chair by the sofa, came to him, and looked soulfully into his eyes.

  He started to rise from the chair, but found he hadn’t the strength or will to actually do it. The thought of pulling down the garage and cleaning up the hedge had nearly finished him.

  “No more e-mails, and especially from Father Roland,” he heard Cynthia tell Emma at the front door. “He needs rest.”

  Emma’s words were muffled, but his wife’s were sharp and clear, even though she lowered her voice. “No more anything for a while.”

  Emma’s muffled voice, obviously cranky.

  “I’m sure he wants to see you, too, but doctor’s orders are doctor’s orders. Call me on Monday, I’ll give you a report….”

  The front door closed and his wife came down the hallway, his dog behind her at a trot.

  Why couldn’t he see Emma? Besides, he was starting to like e-mail. He didn’t want to personally be online, for heaven’s sake, but he liked the little sheaf of papers Emma brought every week, found them a wonder, truth be told. What about Father what’s-his-name in England? What was he up to? And Father Harry—had he received the check or h
ad last Thursday’s flood kept the mail truck out of the Cove? Since no one seemed to write regular letters anymore, how would he ever know anything? And of course there was Marion Fieldwalker…though just getting started at the business of e-mail, she promised to be a positive encyclopedia of news from Whitecap, a place he’d found himself missing more than once.

  “Guess who’s coming today, dearest.” Cynthia stood behind his chair and kissed the top of his head.

  “Umm.” He wanted to say something bright and clever, but couldn’t come up with anything.

  “Dooley!” Barnabas barked at her announcement. “He’ll be here at three o’clock. He was terribly worried about you, he wanted to visit the hospital, but Hoppy—”

  “Blast Hoppy,” he muttered.

  “Hoppy is dropping in after lunch, by the way.”

  “Why?”

  “To talk.”

  “Seems to me he had plenty to say at the hospital.”

  “He’s leaving for his trip out West, and wanted to…go over some things with you.”

  “Where’s Puny?”

  “I’ve given her a few days off.”

  Something was up with his wife, he didn’t know what. She seemed tense, distracted, worn. Perhaps it was all she’d been through; then again, perhaps it was something more.

  “Uh-oh,” she said, looking at the clock on his desk. “I’m off to The Local. Dooley’s coming, you know what that means.”

  She kissed his cheek and dashed from the room, grabbing her car keys off the kitchen island. “I’ll bring you a surprise!” she called over her shoulder.

  No surprises, please, he thought. Anything but another surprise.

  “Father…”