Authors: Jan Karon

These High, Green Hills (8 page)

BOOK: These High, Green Hills

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“And think about the heating system,” he added, “and the insulation, and those good, tight windows, all brand-new. Warm as toast!”

“Think ‘bout where it is!” crowed Louella. “One block from th’ grocery! Aroun‘ the corner from th’ post office!”

“You all don’t have to preach me a sermon!”

After a respectful silence, he plunged in again. “Twenty-nine steps and nobody to sit and sing a hymn with. I wouldn’t want to do it.”

Miss Sadie looked at him coolly.

“I’ll be sleepin‘ in th’ kitchen, listenin‘ to th’ roof leakin‘ in th’ buckets,” moaned Louella.

“Is the roof leaking again?” he asked. “I thought it was fixed.”

“I thought it was fixed, Miss Sadie thought it was fixed. But it ain’t fixed.”

“It’s fixed everywhere except the entrance hall!” said Miss Sadie, looking stern.

“Yas ‘um,” Louella muttered. “An’ when it rains, it take a soup pot, a Dutch oven, an‘ a turkey roaster t’ catch it!”

Miss Sadie thumped the floor with her cane. In all his years of knowing her, he’d never seen her do such a thing. “Shush!” she commanded. “I said I had to
think
about it. I didn’t say how
long
I had to think about it. Coming down the hall, I thought about it.”

Nobody said a word.

“And I have every intention of doing it!”

“Save us from troubled, restless sleep,” he sang softly in the darkened room, “from all ill dreams Your children keep ...”

“How lovely,” she murmured, lying beside him. “What are you singing?”

“A verse from Louella’s hymn, ‘To You before the close of day ...’”

He sang again, “... so calm our minds that fears may cease, and rested bodies wake in peace.”

“Amen,” she whispered, taking his hand.

The crowd at St. Andrews in Canton had hammered out a description of what every parish was looking for, and sent him a copy.

The perfect pastor preaches exactly ten minutes. He condemns sin, but never hurts anybody’s feelings. He works from eight in the morning until midnight and is also the church janitor. He is twenty-nine years old and has forty years experience. He makes fif teen house calls a day and is always in the office.

Right up there with what’s currently expected of Cynthia Kavanagh, he thought.

“They asked me to be president of the ECW,” she said, looking pale.

“What did you say?”

“I said I have full-time work and that it wouldn’t be fair to be president of anything, for I would surely have to shirk my duty.”

“Well put.”

“And so they invited me to head up the Altar Guild.”

They had discussed this very thing, long before he proposed to her on the night of his birthday last June.

“Of course I said no, thank you. That’s when they asked me to chair that awful Bane and Blessing sale, which has put at least two women flat on their backs in bed.”

“True.”

“When they got to a nomination for program chairman, every eye turned to me. I excused myself and went to the ladies’ room. It was awful.”

She sighed. “Well, dearest, I turned down six things in a row—they were all positively glaring at me. It took enormous courage.”

“I’m certain of that.” Where the Episcopal Church Women were concerned, he personally wouldn’t have the guts to turn down six things—in a row or otherwise.

She took a deep breath. “That’s when I announced that I’m reserving my energies to give a parish-wide tea in the spring.”

Aha! He knew the fondness of his parish for a roaring good tea.

“I was off the hook in a flash. You should have seen the look of forgiveness in their eyes! Now, guess what.”

“What?”

“Now I have to do it!” she wailed.

The Hope House Board of Directors was searching for an administrator.

According to Hoppy, all was going well. As a graduate of Harvard Medical School, and the personal friend of a distinguished heart man at Mass General, his contacts had already turned up the names of several promising candidates.

It would take something like fifty people to run the two-story, forty-bed nursing home, and Miss Sadie had insisted on a full-time chaplain into the bargain. Finding the right candidate, the rector learned, was his job.

There would be RNs, LPNs, nurses’ aides, business staff ... the list went on and on, and most would have to be hired from outside the area. All of which would give a boost to merchants up and down Main Street and beyond.

No doubt about it, Hope House would be a shot in the arm for Mitford’s economy.

“Who needs a canning factory?” asked a jubilant Mayor Cunningham at a town meeting.

Puny had been looking a bit peaked, in his opinion. Somehow, she wasn’t the same girl he had escorted down the aisle in June and given in marriage to the mayor’s grandson.

“Do you have to scrub the floor like this?” he asked his house help on Monday. Seeing Puny on her hands and knees on his kitchen floor always distressed him. “You know I’ll buy you a mop.”

“You always say that. When I scrub on my hands and knees, I wisht you’d look th‘ other way. I don’t know why it makes you s’ mournful, it’s the same as my granmaw did it, and my mama, too, and it’s th’ way I’m goin‘ to do it.”

She seemed to scrub the worn kitchen tiles even harder. “Some gloves, then!” he said. “Rubber gloves!” He had taken to worrying about the freckle-faced, red-haired Puny Guthrie as if she were his own blood.

“Ooooh, I jis’ hate it when you preach!” she said.

“Preach? If you think that’s preaching, wait ‘til you hear the real thing, young lady.”

She looked at him and smiled, and pushed her hair from her eyes. “I kind of like it when you boss me.”

“I’m not bossing you, and you know it. But you look a little ... pale, somehow. Are you feeling your usual self?”

“Well,” she said, sitting back on her heels, “if you’re goin‘ to hound it out of me, th’ truth is, I ain’t. I’m give out, sort of. I don’t know what it is.”

“You want a few days off? We can push along.”

“Nossir, I don’t want a few days off! Me an‘ Joe Joe are addin’ a bathroom on our house an‘ puttin’ on a new roof. I sure don’t need to be takin‘ days off, with roofin’ at twenty dollars a square.”

Since she walked in and took over his house two years ago, Puny had been like a candle against the darkness—he wouldn’t take the world for her cheerfulness, her vigor, her adamant faith, and the life she had brought to his household. Joe Joe Guthrie had won himself a pearl beyond price.

“OK, I’ll hush.”

“Good!” she said, grinning up at him.

He woke in the middle of the night, searching for the glass of water on the nightstand. He took a swallow and lay there listening to her breathe. He was confounded over and over again that she was lying beside him. He hadn’t known what to expect, after all, when it came to sleeping with someone.

Would he feel hemmed in? Invaded?

But he had never felt hemmed in or invaded, not once. He felt, instead, a kind of awe that made him lie very still, scarcely breathing. How this could have happened, he couldn’t imagine. During the day, he could imagine it, and muse over the slow and gradual process that had brought them to this place. But at night, it seemed a miracle, defying reason.

Oddly, he could feel himself becoming something more, as one might discover new rooms in a house he had lived in all his life. Doors had opened, shutters had been cranked back to let in new light. When he lay there and simply let the wonder of it sink in, he was suffused with a kind of joy he’d never known before.

This joy was different from what he felt when the Holy Spirit broke down his defenses and circumcised his heart. But both these joys produced in him a tenderness that was nearly unbearable.

“Thank you, Lord,” he whispered.

“Hmmm?” Cynthia said, sleepily. “What did you say, dearest?”

“I said ... thank you,” he croaked.

“You’re welcome,” she sighed, falling back to sleep.