These High, Green Hills (Mitford Years)

Book by Karon Jan

Contents

 

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Acknowledgments

Map

 

CHAPTER ONE - Through the Hedge

CHAPTER TWO - Bread of Angels

CHAPTER THREE - Gathered In

CHAPTER FOUR - Passing the Torch

CHAPTER FIVE - A Close Call

CHAPTER SIX - Love Came Down

CHAPTER SEVEN - Flying High

CHAPTER EIGHT - Serious about Fun

CHAPTER NINE - Locked Gates

CHAPTER TEN - The Cave

CHAPTER ELEVEN - Darkness into Light

CHAPTER TWELVE - Lace

CHAPTER THIRTEEN - Homecoming

CHAPTER FOURTEEN - The One for the Job

CHAPTER FIFTEEN - And Many More

CHAPTER SIXTEEN - Loving Back

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN - Sing On!

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN - Every Trembling Heart

CHAPTER NINETEEN - Starting Over

CHAPTER TWENTY - Send Me

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE - These High, Green Hills

 

Teaser Chapter: Out of Canaan

Sneak Peek: Somewhere Safe with Somebody Good

 

PENGUIN BOOKS

PENGUING BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.; Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.); Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England; Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd); Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd); Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, I 1 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi- 110 017, India; Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd); Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

 

Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

 

First published in the United States of America by Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Books USA Inc. 1996
Published in Penguin Books 1997

 

Copyright © Jan Karon, 1996

All rights reserved

 

Illustrations by Donna Kae Nelson

 

Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint an excerpt from Life Together by
Dietrich Bonhoeffer. English translation copyright © 1954 by Harper and Brothers. Copyright
renewed 1982 by Helen S. Doberstein.

 

PUBLISHER’S NOTE
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  

ISBN : 978-1-101-46377-2

1. City and town life—United States—Fiction. I. Title. II. Series: Karon, Jan, date Mitford years.
PS3561.A678T48 1996
813’.54—dc20 96-11933

 

The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

For my precious grandmother,
Fannie Belle Bush Cloer,
Mama, Redwing, The Storyteller.
1893-1993

With sincere thanks to:

Miss Read (Dora Saint); Rev. Rocky Ward; Marrion Ward; Dr. Greg Adams; Dr. “Bunky” Davant; Dr. Greg Hawthorne; Flyin’ George Ronan; Jim Atkinson; Dr. John C. Wolff, Jr.; Billy Wilson; Dr. Buck Henson; Dr. Cara Roten-Henson; David Watts; Tony di Santi; Dr. Ken McKinney; Fr. James Harris; Ruth Bell Graham; Earl and Nancy Trexler; Sonny Klutz; Richard J. Foster; Dr. William Standish Reed; Jim Barber; Diane Grymes; Steve Sudderth; Bear Green; Bob Moody; Fr. Chuck Blanck; Fr. Rick Lawler; Fr. Russell Johnson; Raney MacArthur-Ratchford; Maribelle Freeland; Julie Q. Hayes, R.N. BSN, Blowing Rock Hospital; Pam Collette, R.N. BSN, Clinical Nurse Mgr., Donna Joyner, Assistant Clinical Nurse Mgr., and Pamela Thomas, R.N. BSN, of the Burn Center, North Carolina Baptist Hospitals, Inc., Winston-Salem; Dana Watkins, R.N. BSN, Sanger Clinic, Charlotte; Rev. James Stuart; Fr. Kale King; Dr. Ross Rhoads; Doug Galke; Shirlee Gaines Edwards; Bertie Beam; Nancy Olson of Quail Ridge Books; Shirley Sprinkle of The Muses; my friends at Gideon Ridge Inn; Liz Darhansoff, my gifted and indefatigable agent, and Carolyn Carlson, my visionary Viking Penguin editor and friend; Jerry Burns, the small-town newspaperman with the big heart; and the vanishing breed of old-time Gospel preachers (especially the late Vance Havner and the still-present Arndt Greer), who brought conviction to their calling and color to the language.

Last but never least, thanks to the wonderful booksellers who have enthusiastically spread the word, and to the many readers who have cheered me on, given my books to family and friends, and come to feel comfortably at home in Mitford.

CHAPTER ONE

Through the Hedge

HE STOOD at the kitchen window and watched her coming through the hedge.

What was she lugging this time? It appeared to be a bowl and pitcher. Or was it a stack of books topped by a vase?

The rector took off his glasses, fogged them, and wiped them with his handkerchief. It was a bowl and pitcher, all right. How the little yellow house next door had contained all the stuff they’d recently muscled into the rectory was beyond him.

“For your dresser,” she said, as he held the door open.

“Aha!”

The last thing he wanted was a bowl and pitcher on his dresser. The top of his dresser was his touchstone, his home base, his rock in a sea of change. That was where his car keys resided, his loose coins, his several crosses, his cuff links, his wallet, his checkbook, his school ring, and a small jar of buttons with a needle and thread.

It was also where he kept the mirror in which he occasionally examined the top of his head. Was his hair still thinning, or, by some mysterious and hoped-for reversal, growing in again?

“Cynthia,” he said, going upstairs in the wake of his blond and shapely wife, “about that bowl and pitcher . . .”

“The color is wonderful. Look at the blues. It will relieve all your burgundy and brown!”

He did not want his burgundy and brown relieved.

He saw it coming.

Ever since their marriage on September seventh, she had plotted to lug that blasted armoire over for the rectory guest room.

The lugging over was one thing; it was the lugging back that he dreaded. They had, for example, lugged over an oriental rug that was stored in her basement. “Ten by twelve!” she announced, declaring it perfect for the bare floor of the rectory dining room.

After wrestling the table and chairs into the hall, they had unrolled the rug and unrolled the rug—to kingdom come. It might have gone up the walls on all four sides and met at the chandelier over the table.

“This is a rug for a school gym!” he said, wiping the pouring sweat from his brow.

She seemed dumbfounded that it didn’t fit, and there they had gone, like pack mules, carting it through the hedge again.

The decision to keep and use both houses had been brilliant, of course. The light in the rectory would never equal that of her studio next door, where she was already set up with books and paints and drawing board. This meant his study could remain unchanged—his books could occupy the same shelves, and his vast store of sermon notebooks in the built-in cabinets could hold their place.

Marrying for the first time at the age of sixtysomething was change enough. It was a blessed luxury to live with so few rearrangements in the scheme of things, and life flowing on as usual. The only real change was the welcome sharing of bed and board.

Over breakfast one morning, he dared to discuss his interest in getting the furniture settled.

“Why can’t we keep things as they were . . . in their existing state? It seemed to work. . . .”

“Yes, well, I like that our houses are separate, but I also want them to be the same—sort of an organic whole.”

“No organic whole will come of dragging that armoire back and forth through the hedge. It looks like a herd of elephants has passed through there already.”

“Oh, Timothy! Stop being stuffy! Your place needs fluffing up, and mine needs a bit more reserve. For example, your Chippendale chairs would give a certain sobriety to my dining table.”

“Your dining table is the size of something in our nursery school. My chairs would look gigantic.”

She said exactly what he thought she would say. “We could try it and see.”

“Cynthia, trust me on this. My chairs will not look right with your table, and neither will that hand-painted magazine rack do anything for my armchair.”

“Well, what was the use of getting married, then?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“I mean, if no one is going to change on either side, if we’re both just going to be our regular, lifetime selves, what’s the use?”

“I think I see what you’re getting at. Will nothing do, then, but to cart those chairs to your house? And what about my own table? It will be bereft of chairs. I hardly see the point.” He felt like jumping through the window and going at a dead run toward the state line.

“One thing at a time,” she said happily. “It’s all going to work out perfectly.”

deAr stuart,

 

thanx for your note re: diocesan mtg, and thank martha for the invitation to put my feet under yr table afterward. however, I must leave for home at once, following the mtg—hope you’ll understand.

while i’m at it, let me ask you:

why are women always moving things around? at Sunday School, jena iivey just had the youth group move the kindergarten bookcAses to a facing wall.

on the homefront, my househelp has moved a ladderback chair from my bedroom into the hall, never once considering that i hung my trousers over it for 14 years, and put my shoes on the seat so they could be found in an emergency.

last but certainly not least, if C could lift me in my armchair and put it by the window while i’m dozing, she would do it.

without a doubt, you have weightier things to consider, but tell me, how does one deal with this?

i hasten to add that ii’ve never been happier in my life. to tell the truth, i am confounded that such happiness—In such measure—even exists.

He signed the note, typed on his Royal manual, thankful that Stuart Cullen was not merely his bishop, but his closest personal friend since the halcyon days of seminary.

Fr Timothy Kavanaugh,
The Chapel of Our Lord and Savior
Old Church Lane, Mitford, N.C.

 

Dear Timothy:

 

In truth, it is disconcerting when one’s househelp, SS supervisor, and wife do this sort of thing all at once.

My advice is: do not fight it. It will wear off.

In His peace,
Stuart

P.S. Martha would add a note, but she is busy moving my chest of drawers to the far side of our bedroom. As I am dealing with an urgent matter with the House of Bishops, I could not be browbeaten to help, and so she has maneuvered it, at last, onto an old bedspread, and I can hear her hauling the whole thing across the floor above me. This particular behavior had lain dormant in her for nearly seven years, and has suddenly broken forth again.

Perhaps it is something in the water.

He could see, early on, that beds were a problem that needed working out.

They had spent their wedding night in his bed at the rectory, where they had rolled down their respective sides and crashed together in the middle.

“What is this trough doing in your bed?” she asked.

“It’s where I sleep,” he said, feeling sheepish.

They had been squeezed together like sardines the livelong night, which he had profoundly enjoyed, but she had not. “Do you think this is what’s meant by ‘the two shall be one flesh’?” she murmured, her cheek smashed against his.

The following night, he trooped through the hedge with his pajamas and toothpaste in a grocery bag from The Local.

Her bed was a super-king-size, and the largest piece of furniture in her minuscule house.

He found it similar in breadth to the state of Texas, or possibly the province of Saskatchewan. Was that a herd of buffalo racing toward him in the distance, or a team of sled dogs? “Cynthia!” he shouted across the vast expanse, and waited for the echo.

They had ordered a new mattress for the rectory immediately after returning from their honeymoon in Stuart Cullen’s summer house. There, on the rocky coast of Maine, they had spent time listening to the cry of the loons, holding hands, walking along the shore, and talking until the small hours of the morning. The sun turned her fair skin a pale toast color that he found fascinating and remarkable; and he watched three freckles emerge on the bridge of her nose, like stars coming out. Whatever simple thing they did together, they knew they were happier than ever before in their lives.

One evening, soon after the new mattress and springs were installed at the rectory, he found her sitting up in bed as he came out of the shower.

“I’ve had a wonderful idea, Timothy! A fireplace! Right over there where the dresser is.”

“What would I do with my dresser?”

She looked at him as if he had toddled in from the church nursery. “Put it in the alcove, of course.”

“Then I couldn’t see out the window.”

“But how much time do you spend staring out the alcove window?”

“When you were parading about with Andrew Gregory, a great deal of time.” His face burned to admit it, but yes, he’d been jealous of the handsome antique dealer who had squired her around for several months.

She smiled, leaning her head to one side in that way he could barely resist. “A fireplace would be so romantic.”

“Ummm.”

“Why must I be the romantic in the family while you hold up the conservative, let’s-don‘t-make-any-changes end?”

He sat down beside her. “How quickly you forget. When we were going steady, you said I was wildly romantic.”

She laughed and kissed him on the cheek. “And I was right, of course. I’m sorry, old dearest.”

He regretted being anyone’s old dearest.

“Old dearest, yourself,” he said grumpily. “I am, after all, only six years your senior.”

“By the calendar,” she said imperiously, referring, he supposed, to something decrepit in his overall attitude about life.

In any case, the fireplace issue did not come up again.

In truth, he had no words for his happiness. It grew deeper every day, like the digging of a well, and astounded him by its warmth and power. He seemed to lose control of his very face, which, according to the regulars at the Main Street Grill, displayed a foolish and perpetual grin.

“I love you . . . terribly,” he...