Baptists warbled with Anglicans, Presbyterians harmonized with Methodists, and the Lutherans who had trickled in from Wesley gave a hand with the high notes.
The adults soldiered on through two more hymns, followed by the Youth Choir, who fairly blew out the windows with three numbers in rapid succession. The grand finale was a solo from Dooley Barlowe, whose voice carried all the way to the back of the room and moved several of the women to tears.
“He ain’t got th’ big head no more’n you or me,” said Dora Pugh.
It was some time before anyone could move to help clear the tables.
“Let’s just lay down right here,” said Mule Skinner, pointing to the floor.
“You ’uns cain’t be alayin’ down,” said Uncle Billy. “You’ve got baskets to take around, don’t you know.”
Somebody groaned. “Tell us a joke, Uncle Billy!”
“Well, sir, this feller had a aunt who’d jis’ passed on, an’ his buddy said, ‘Why are you acryin’? You never did like that ol’ woman.’ And th’ feller said, ‘That’s right, but hit was me as kept her in th’ insane asylum. Now she’s left me all ’er money an’ I have t’ prove she was in ’er right mind.’”
Groans and laughter all around. “Hit us again, Uncle Billy!”
“Well, sir, this feller was sent off to Alaska to do ’is work, and he was gone f’r a long time, don’t you know, and he got this letter from his wife, and he looked real worried an’ all. His buddy said, ‘What’s th’ matter, you got trouble at home?’ An’ he said, ‘Oh, law, looks like we got a freak in th’ family. My wife says I won’t recognize little Billy when I git home, he’s growed another foot.’”
Miss Rose Watson sat silent as a stone, concerned that the Ziploc bags of turkey and dressing would shift under her coat.
Good-byes 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 seashells 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 hotfoot 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 Jenna 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.
These High, Green Hills, Ch. 3
Father Tim and Cynthia Lost in a Cave
“UH-OH,” SAID CYNTHIA, staring at the nearly hidden opening in the side of the hill.
“What do you mean?”
“That hole! I can’t go through that hole like some rabbit into a burrow.”
“But you love rabbits.”
“Rabbits, yes, but not burrows.”
He had once seen her crawl on her hands and knees into Miss Rose Watson’s minuscule play hole in the attic of the old Porter place, entirely without a qualm.
“So let’s head back,” he said. “I’m famished.”
“Well…but I’ve never seen a cave. Let’s at least have a look.”
She climbed the short ascent to the hole, swept aside the weeds and brush, and peered in. “It drops straight down and then flattens out. I can’t really see anything.”
Personally, he didn’t want to see anything. He had no interest in disappearing into a hole in the ground that was hardly bigger around than he was.
His stomach growled. “Remember what happened to Alice in Wonderland….”
“Ummm,” she said, sticking her head in the opening. “Ummm.”
Which was it, anyway? Did stalactites go up or down? Tite. Tight. Tight to the ceiling! That’s what his seventh-grade teacher, Mrs. Jarvis, had said when they studied Mississippi caves, and then actually took a bus trip to a nearby cave. Stalactites hang down, mites stick up! Anita Jarvis. Now, there was a force to reckon with….
“The tites hang down!” he said aloud, looking up as Cynthia’s head disappeared into the hole.
He scrambled after her. “Cynthia!”
“Slide in feet first, Timothy. That’s the way to do it!”
He did it.
He might have been dropping into a tomb, for all he knew. What if there should be a landslide, a mudslide, any sort of shift in the terrain? The hole would be blocked until kingdom come. He felt his heart pound and his breath constrict.
He slid along the muddy entrance shaft on his backside and landed on his feet behind his wife. Enough light streamed into the mouth of the cave to illumine part of the large chamber in which they stood. It resembled a subway tunnel, long and rather narrow, and he was able to breathe easily again, sensing the space that opened up around them.
Odd, how the air was different. He could tell it at once. He felt the moisture in it, and smelled the earth. Like his grandmother’s basement, except better.
“Are you OK?” he asked, noting the absence of an expected echo.
“Wonderful! This is too good for words! A glorious opportunity! I’ve got a flashlight in here somewhere.” She fished in her day pack. “There!”
The beam from the flashlight snaked up the wall. “Good heavens! Look, dearest! It’s a whole rank of organ pipes!”
“Limestone. Limestone does this.” The vast wall might have been formed of poured marble, richly tinted with rose and blue, and glistening with an omnipresent sheen of moisture. He had never before observed what God was up to in the unseen places. A fine chill ran along his right leg.
The beam of light inched up the wall, shining palely on formations that appeared to be folds of draperies with fringed cornices, overhanging an outcropping of limestone as smooth as alabaster.
“Heavens!” gasped Cynthia. He slipped his forefinger into the band of her jeans as they inched along the chamber wall, looking up.
“Look!” she said. “There’s just enough light to see how the ceiling of this thing soars—
it’s like a cathedral.
“Can you believe we’re under the crust of the earth, possibly where no one has ever been before, except Indians? And who knows how old this cave is? It could be millions of years old, maybe billions….”
“Hold the light close to your face for a minute,” he said.
“You’re interested in seeing another ancient formation, I presume?”
“Your breath is vaporizing on the air.”
She turned around and shone the light toward him. “And so is yours! But it doesn’t feel cold in here.”
“Not cold. But different.”
“What are you doing?”
“We’re turning around and going back the way we came.”
She sighed. “You’re right, of course.” They turned and began walking. “I was going to sketch something while you held the light, but I suppose there’s not time.”
“Darn right. How’s the battery in that thing? It looks weak.”
“It’s just that this place is so huge and so dark, it absorbs the light.”
“Let’s hope so.”
“I guess I’m ready to get out of here, too. I’m starved, not to mention freezing. Are you freezing? Suddenly, it’s…like a grave in here.”
“Kindly rephrase that.”
They walked in silence, shining the light along the walls on either side. He had no memory of the little cave in Mississippi looking anything like this; in fact, he remembered being pretty bored with that field trip. The most vivid memory of it was the picture someone took of him with Anita Jarvis, who was nearly as wide as the bus. He had tried to flee the camera, but she grabbed him by the ear and yanked him back, while everyone laughed their heads off. He had wanted to tear the resulting snapshot in a hundred pieces, but was so entranced with having a picture of himself, even with Anita Jarvis, that he couldn’t do it.
“I’ve got an idea,” she said. “Why don’t we stop and turn the light off? I’d love to see how dark it really is in here.”
“Cynthia, Cynthia…”
“It will only take a minute. Then we’ll go, I promise.”
“Well…”
Bright, unidentifiable images swam before his eyes, then gradually faded, leaving a velvet and permeating darkness.
He thought he heard her teeth chattering. “Maybe I should turn the light back on.”
“Wait,” he said, touching her arm. “Our eyes are just starting to get adjusted.” They stood together in silence. “I think this place is totally devoid of light,” he said at last. “We’re in complete and utter darkness. Amazing.”
“Scary.”
“Don’t be scared. I’ve got you.” He put his arm around her shoulders, noting that the musical sounds of water-on-water seemed louder than before.
“I’m glad you’re here,” she whispered.
“I’ll always be here.”
“You will? Do you mean that?”
“Of course I mean that. I took a vow on it, for one thing.”
Some fragment of a poem came swimming to him, something, he thought, by Wendell Berry: “and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings.” What was it about this darkness, the particular, nearly tangible density of it, and the odd sense that he was somehow blending into it?
“Why can’t we see light from the mouth of the cave?” Cynthia asked.
“I don’t know. We were standing in the light only a minute ago.”
“We can’t have walked completely away from the light that was coming through the hole.” She switched on the flashlight, which glimmered on columns of roseate limestone.
“This isn’t the way we came,” she said. “We haven’t seen these before.”
“We must have missed a turn.” He puzzled for a moment, rubbing his forehead and feeling disoriented. “You were hauling along there pretty good.”
“You get in front and haul, then,” she said testily.
“OK, let’s retrace our steps and watch where we’re going.” But they had just retraced their steps….
In less time than it might have taken to recite the Comfortable Words, they’d been thrown off-kilter. He felt for a moment as if his mind had walked out on him.
They had begun to move in the opposite direction when the light faded, glimmered weakly, and failed.
“No,” she said, as the darkness overtook them. “Please, no.”
These High, Green Hills, Ch. 9
“PRAY, TIMOTHY!”
“I am praying. Keep moving. We’re bound to come back to the light from the entrance.”
“Are you sure?”
“Positive.”
“It’s so terribly dark. Don’t you have some matches in your shirt pocket? I thought campers always took matches.”
“No matches.”
“Don’t lose me, Timothy.”
“I won’t lose you. Hang on to my belt; we’re doing fine. The wall is leading us.”
“The flashlight battery…I haven’t used that flashlight since I moved next door and the electricity went off. I’m a terrible partner.”
“Careful. Slippery here. Feels like…”
“Water,” she said. “We’re stepping in water. It’s soaking through my tennis shoes.”
He stopped. They hadn’t come through water before. His heart pumped like an oil derrick. It wasn’t the darkness, exactly, that was disconcerting. It wasn’t the sense of being hemmed in by walls of limestone on either side. No, the worst of it was the sudden sense of being turned around, of having no idea at all which way was north, east, south, or west. It was as if the beaters of a mixing machine had been lowered into his brain and turned on high.
“I’m terrified,” she said, clinging to his back. Whatever he did, he must not let her sense his own fear.
Something like light flickered at the periphery of his vision.
“Light!” he said. “I saw light.”
“Where? Thank God!”
He blinked. Then blinked again. But it wasn’t light at all. He realized his nervous system was generating neural impulses that resulted in the strange, luminous flickers.
“Wrong,” he said. “Something’s going on with our vision. It’s still adjusting.”
“I’m thirsty,” she said. “Stop and let me take the day pack off. I think I’ve got a bottle of water.”
They stood with their backs to the damp wall, and she found the bottle and shook it. “There’s not much left. The flashlight…the water. I can’t do anything right.”
“So, what did I come off with? Nothing. You get extra points.”
She unscrewed the cap and reached for his hand and gave him the bottle.
“No,” he said. “You first.”
“I think you should be first. You’re the leader.”
“Drink,” he said. She took the bottle and drank, and passed it back to him. There wasn’t much left, but he drained the bottle and felt revived.
“Why don’t I scream for help?”
“Not yet. We can find our way out.” Who would hear them if they yelled their heads off?
“I forgot you’re one of those men who won’t stop at a service station and ask directions.”
“There are no service stations anymore,” he said unreasonably. “Just places to buy hot dogs and T-shirts and pump your own.”
“We should be screaming our heads off. Someone will be looking for us, Timothy. They’ll hear us.”
He stuffed the empty bottle into her pack. “Save your breath. We’ve only been in here ten minutes.” Had it been ten minutes? Twenty? An hour? He couldn’t see his watch. He had never bought a watch with an illuminated dial, thinking it an unnecessary expense. After all, who needed to know what time it was in the dark, except when one was in bed? For that, there was the illuminated face of the clock on his nightstand.
“I hate this,” she said, whispering. “It’s horrid. We’re sopping wet all over.”
His unspoken prayers had been scrambled, frantic. He needed to stop, take a deep breath, and state it plainly. He
put his arms around her and she instantly recognized the meaning of his touch and bowed her head against his.
“Father, Your children have stumbled into a bit of trouble here, and we’re confused. You know the way out. Please show it to us. In Jesus’ name.”
“Amen!” she said, squeezing his arm.
They sat with their backs to the wall, and he put his arm around her to warm her, and pulled her to him. He felt the cool slime of mud under them, but he didn’t care.
In his life, he had never confronted anything like this. He had never been to war, he had never been in peril, he had never even gone to the woods and lived on berries like Father Roland once boasted of doing. No, he had lived a sheltered life, a life of the soul, of the mind, and what had it gained him in the real circumstances of day-to-day living?
He had spent nearly forty years telling other people how to live in the light, and here he was, lost in a complex maze in the bowels of the earth, in total, devastating darkness.
For no reason he could have explained, he thought of his father calling him into the house that summer night, the night the chain had broken and he had walked his bicycle home from Tommy’s house.
“Timothy.” The kitchen light was behind his father, throwing him into silhouette at the screen door. He had looked up and been frightened instantly. The silhouette of his father was somehow larger than life, immense.
“Yes, sir?”
“Come in and tell me why.”
Come in and tell me why. He would never forget that remark. What did it mean? He knew it had something to do with why he could never do anything right. He had stood there, unable to go in, frozen.
His father had opened the screen door and held it, and he walked inside.
He saw the look on his mother’s face. “Don’t hurt him, Matthew.”
“You’re crying,” Cynthia whispered, wiping the tears from his cheek. He hadn’t known he was weeping until she touched his face. It was as if he stood nearby, watching two people sitting on the floor of the cave, holding each other.
“Dearest…” Cynthia whispered, stroking his arm.
The self who stood was humiliated that the priest had broken down and broken apart. The priest who would do this under pressure was a priest who could not get it right.