These High, Green Hills (10 page)

Miss Rose Watson sat silent as a stone, concerned that the Ziploc bags of turkey and dressing would shift under her coat.

Goodbyes were said, hugs were given out, and everyone shook the hand of the rector and his new wife, thanking them for a fine Feast. Several inspected Dooley’s school blazer and commented that he’d shot up like a weed.

The contingent organized to deliver baskets waited impatiently as the packers worked to fulfill a list of sixteen recipients. These included Miss Sadie and Louella, Homeless Hobbes, and Winnie Ivey, who had shingles.

“You doin‘ a basket run?” Mule asked the rector.

He nodded. “Over to Miss Sadie’s new digs on Lilac Road, then back here to help clean up. What about you?”

“Headed to Coot Hendrick’s place. His mama’s weak as pond water since th‘ flu.”

“I thought J.C. was coming to the Feast this year.”

“He probably boiled off a can of mushroom soup and ate what he didn’t scorch.”

“It’s a miracle he’s alive.”

“Ain’t that th‘ truth?” Mule agreed.

“There’s nothin‘ wrong with J.C. that a good woman couldn’t cure,” said Fancy, who was dressed for today’s occasion in fuchsia hot pants, spike heels, V-neck sweater, and a belt made of sea shells sprayed with gold paint.

“Don’t hold your breath on that deal,” said Mule.

Sophia came over and hugged the rector around the neck, as Liza clasped his waist and clung for a moment. “We love you, Father,” said Sophia. He leaned down and kissed Liza on the forehead.

“Lord have mercy,” said Mule, as Liza and Sophia left. “I don’t know what these people will do when you retire. I hate t‘ think about it.”

“Then don’t,” snapped the rector.

He saw the surprised look on his friend’s face. He hadn’t meant to use that tone of voice.

“Line up and collect your baskets,” hollered Esther Cunningham, “and hot foot it out of here! This is not a cold-cut dinner you’re deliverin‘.”

The delivery squad obediently queued up at the kitchen door.

“If you could knock th‘ Baptists out of this deal,” said Charlie Tucker, “we’d have somethin’ left to go
in
these baskets. Baptists eat like they’re bein‘ raptured before dark.”

“It wasn’t the
Baptists
who gobbled up the turkey,” said Esther Bolick, appearing to know.

“Well, it sure wasn’t the Methodists,” retorted Jena Ivey, taking it personally. “We like fried chicken!”

“It was the dadgum Lutherans!” announced Mule, picking up the basket for Coot Hendrick’s mother. “Outlanders from Wesley!”

Everyone howled with laughter, including the Lutherans, who had personally observed the Episcopalians eating enough turkey to sink an oil freighter.

Abner Hickman came in the back door of the parish hall, returned from taking his kids home.

“Y‘all want to see a
sunset?”

A little murmur of excitement ran through the cleanup crew. Mitford was a place where showy sunsets were valued.

“Better get up to th‘ wall,” declared Abner, “and step on it.”

Esther Bolick parked her carpet sweeper in a corner. “Drop everything and let’s go! Life is short.”

They piled into vans and cars and screeched out of the parking lot, gunning their engines all the way to the steep crest of Old Church Lane, where they tumbled out and raced to the stone wall that overlooked the Land of Counterpane.

“Good heavens!”

“That’s a big ‘un, all right.”

Little by little, the sharp intakes of breath and the murmurs and whooping subsided, and they stood there, lined up along the wall, gazing at the wonder of a sunset that blazed across the heavens. Where the sun was sinking, the skies ran with molten crimson that spread above the mountains like watercolor, changing to orange and pink, lavender and gold. A cool fire of platinum rimmed the profile of Gabriel Mountain and the dark, swelling ridges on either side.

He put one arm around Dooley’s shoulders and the other around Cynthia’s waist. The fullness of his heart was inexpressible.

He knew it could not always be this way. No, nothing ever remained the same. If he had learned anything in life, he had learned that such moments were fragile beyond knowing.

CHAPTER FOUR

THE LIGHT from the street lamp in front of the rectory shone through the hall window, reflected into the mirror at the top of his dresser, and bounced softly onto the bedroom ceiling.

Because a mimosa tree had grown up beside the old street lamp, the light gleamed through its leaves, casting shadows overhead. He could tell when a breeze was up, as the shadow of the leaves danced above him.

“Timothy?”

“Hmmm?”

Cynthia turned over and lay facing him. “I can feel you lying there stiff as a board. Something’s on your mind, I just know it. Can’t you tell me?”

He didn’t want to say it to himself, much less to anyone else. “It’s Dooley.”

“Yes.”

“What’s happened to him?”

“I’ve been wondering that, too.”

“He’s different. Was I so wrong to send him away to school?”

“I don’t know.” She sighed. “At least he isn’t saying ‘ain’t.’ But that’s no consolation.”

“God’s truth, as much as I fought him on it, I miss hearing him say it.”

Cynthia turned and lay on her back. “The wind is up,” she said, looking at the ceiling.

“I sense something hard in him, something harder than before.”

“He hates that school.”

“I can’t help but wonder if I should bail him out. Or trust the old adage that time heals all wounds. Maybe it’s just a matter of time until he puts down roots where he is. He put roots down here—his very first—then I hauled him off to Virginia. Transplanting is always risky business.”

“Look what happened,” she said, “when I moved my white lilac in the middle of summer. How did I know it should be moved in early spring?”

“Yes. Maybe it was timing, maybe we should have waited a year to send him away.”

“Have you talked to him?”

“He won’t talk. He’s hard as stone—face, heart, spirit.”

“He needs to spend time with Tommy,” she said. “He’s avoiding his best friend.”

He despised losing sleep over any issue. Broad daylight was the time for fretting and wrestling—if it had to be done at all. “Don’t worry about anything,” Paul had written to the church at Philippi, “but in everything, by prayer and supplication, make your requests known unto God. And the peace that passes all understanding will fill your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus.” In the last hour, he had twice given his concerns to God and then snatched them back, only to lie here staring at the ceiling, worried.

“What were you like when you were thirteen? What was going on in your life? Maybe that will help us.”

“My best friend was named Tommy, also. We did everything together. My father despised him.”

“Your father. What was it, Timothy, that made him so cold? Did you ever do anything that pleased him?”

He thought about it. No. He really couldn’t remember doing anything that pleased his father. His grades had been very good, but never good enough. There was the incident with the bicycle, but he didn’t want to remember that. He didn’t want to talk about his father. It was the middle of the night and he suddenly felt the weight lying on his chest.

“Let me rub your neck,” he said, turning to her. “I know you had a long day over the drawing board.”

“But, dearest—”

“There. How’s that?”

“Lovely,” she murmured.

The softness of her skin, the warmth of the down comforter, the leaves moving softly above them ...

He was asleep in two minutes.

He drove to the country to see the ninety-year-old preacher he’d hooked up with Homeless Hobbes and the residents of Little Mitford Creek.

Every Wednesday night, in clement weather, Homeless cooked a vast pot of soup and fed any who would come to his one-room shack on the creek bank. Homeless’s broader concern for their spiritual feeding had moved the rector to ask Absalom Greer to preach a summer meeting, his last call before retiring from his “little handfuls” at three mountain churches.

The old parson had willingly gone into the desperately impoverished area, where alcohol, drugs, and violence had eaten into the Creek like cancer.

“I quit!” said Absalom Greer, opening a cold bottle of Orange Crush and passing it to the rector.

“I hate to hear it,” said Father Tim.

“Every time I try to get loose of preachin‘, there’s somebody who hates to hear it, and so I fall to doing it again, goin’ like a circle saw. But this is it, my brother, as far as churches and camp meets go. The Lord paid me off, showed me the gate, and told me to trot.”

The two men sat by the ancient soft-drink box in Absalom Greer’s country store, twelve miles from Mitford. Among the comforts of this life, the rector once said, was sitting in Greer’s Store in the late afternoon, with the winter sun slanting across heart-of-pine floors laid nearly a century ago.

“I’ll do my preaching from the drink box, from here on out. There’s many a lost soul comes down that road looking to quench their thirst, thinkin‘ they can do it with a Pepsi.”

The rector nodded.

“Used to, I could give ‘em a soft drink and a sermon for a nickle. Now the drink companies gouge a man for the best part of a dollar.” The preacher’s pale blue eyes twinkled. “Some days, it’s hard to come up with a dollar’s worth of preaching.”

“Amen!”

The rector gazed with affection on the man who, more than sixty years ago, tried to win the hand of Sadie Baxter, and lost—the self-educated man who, to the horror and delight of his parishioners, had supplied the pulpit at Lord’s Chapel while Father Tim hustled off to Ireland last year. What was more extraordinary was that Absalom Greer had packed them in—after the initial shock wore off.

“Tell me about your stint on the Creek. Homeless said wonderful things happened.”

“My brother, they were a rough bunch—a handful and a half! I was preaching on sin, and they didn’t like it a bit—same as the fancy churches, where the very mention of sin empties the pews.

“But a man has to start somewhere, and that’s where the Lord told me to start—with sin and repentance.

“Folks like to think sin is what everybody else is doing, but the mighty book of Romans lays it out plain and simple—‘For all have sinned and come short of the glory of God.’

“I didn’t go on about drinking and fornicating, or backbiting and stealing. Nossir, I jumped right to the heart of the matter and preached the taproot of sin, which is found in the middle of the word, itself—
I
! I want this, I want that, and I want it right now. I want to run things, I want to call the shots, I want be in charge....