“I can’t get it right,” he managed to say, as if repeating some unwritten liturgy.
Unwritten liturgy. All these years, he had spoken the written liturgy, while underneath…
“Almighty God, to You all hearts are open, all desires known, and from You no secrets are hid….”
I can’t get it right.
“Holy and gracious Father, in Your infinite love You made us for Yourself….”
I can’t get it right.
“It’s all my fault,” she said. “I was the one who insisted we come in here. I led us on a merry chase and brought that no-good flashlight…. You mustn’t blame yourself.”
He didn’t want to weep like this, but there was nothing he could do about it; he felt as if he’d broken open like a geode.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “Please forgive me.”
“He couldn’t tolerate anything that wasn’t perfect.”
“Who, dearest? What…?”
“That’s why he was enraged when something broke. It had to be fixed at once—or thrown away. There was a terrible pressure to keep things from breaking, to keep them like new. Mr. Burton’s tractor broke down along the road from our house…. Mr. Burton pushed it off the road and left it in the field for days. My father never passed that tractor without lambasting the owner’s incompetence.”
“Ah,” she said, quietly.
“I can’t retire,” he told her. Why had he said that?…like a geode.
“Tell me why.”
“The way things are, they’re running smoothly, most of the bases are covered. I’m trying to get it right, Cynthia. I can’t stop now.”
“But you have got it right, Timothy.”
He didn’t want to be placated and mollycoddled. He drew away from her, and she sat in silence.
He was hurting her, he could feel it, but here in this total, mind-numbing darkness, he could not summon what it might take to care. Out there in the light, out there where his ministry was, he could always summon what it took to care.
“Listen to me, dearest, and listen well.” He had heard knives in her voice once before, when he’d drawn away from her prior to their marriage. It was knives he heard again, but they were sheathed, and he leaned his head against the cold wall and closed his eyes.
“I lived with Elliott for seventeen years, always trying to get it right. When I tried to kill myself and it didn’t work, I remember thinking, I can’t even get this right. Elliott was never there for me, not once—he was out making babies with other women, trying in his own confused way to get it right. During those long months when I was recovering in a friend’s house in the country, God spoke to my heart in a way He hadn’t spoken before. No. Erase that. He made me able to listen in a way I couldn’t listen before.
“He let me know that trying to get it right is a dangerous thing, Timothy, and He does not like it.”
His head pounded where the blood had congealed. “What do you mean?”
“I mean that getting it absolutely right is God’s job.”
The cold was seeping into him. He was beginning to feel it in his very marrow. He also felt the loss of her living warmth, though she was right beside him. He drew her to him and took her hands and put them inside his shirt and held her. She was shaking.
“Must I remind you that your future belongs to God, and not to you? Please unlock your gate, Timothy. Leave it swinging on the hinges, if you will. This thing about our future must go totally out of our hands. We cannot hold on to it for another moment.”
He smiled in the darkness. “Don’t preach me a sermon, Mrs. Kavanagh.” The weeping had stopped, but the geode lay open. He felt a raw place in himself that seemed infantile, newly hatched.
These High, Green Hills, Ch. 10
SHE HAD FALLEN ASLEEP in his arms, and he sat with his eyes open, staring ahead, not wanting to miss the light when it came.
The feeling of panic had wondrously left him, and in its place had come an odd and surprising peace. Somehow, he wasn’t afraid of this place anymore. He could wait.
A line from Roethke surfaced in his mind: In a dark time, the eye begins to see.
It was as if he were drifting through space, and every care he had was reduced to nothing. What were his cares, anyway? They were few. So few. Who cared where they put the linen closets in Hope House? He had cared very much out there in the light, just as he had cared about Sadie Baxter hanging up her car keys, and Buck Leeper coming to terms with his Creator, and Dooley Barlowe growing up and having a life that no one could take from him, no matter what.
He had cared that Lord’s Chapel was running several thousand dollars behind budget, and that two of his favorite families had gone over to the Presbyterians for no reason he could understand. It was his job to care, but what he was beginning to understand, sitting here in this unspeakable darkness, was that God cared more.
Whether Tim Kavanagh cared wasn’t the point, after all, and whether Tim Kavanagh was in control didn’t matter in the least. God was fully in control—firmly and finally and awfully—and he knew it for the first time in his heart, instead of in his head.
He felt himself smiling, and wondered at the laughter welling up in him, like a spring seeping into a field where the plow had passed.
But he wouldn’t wake her, not for anything, and he pushed the laughter back, and felt its warmth spreading through him like the glowing of a coal.
“Father?” he whispered.
Come in and tell me why….
“I love you,” he heard himself saying. “I forgive you. It’s all right.”
Cynthia murmured in her sleep, and the surge of inexpressible tenderness that stirred in him was unlike anything he’d known before.
He sensed that everything was possible—yet he had no idea what that meant, nor what everything might be.
Maybe he, too, had fallen asleep and was dreaming.
But he wasn’t dreaming.
He heard it again—a kind of woofing or huffing. He sat, frozen, afraid he had imagined it.
Woof, woof!
“It’s Barnabas!” he shouted. It was the mighty voice of a Wurlitzer, it was the voice of angels on high, it was his dog!
He heard himself yelling in odd harmony with Cynthia’s ear-splitting scream, their voices raised in a single, joyful invective against the primordial dark.
The miner’s lamp attached to his collar wildly illuminated the walls as Barnabas licked every exposed part of their bodies, pausing only to bark for the rescue team.
The faces of Larry Johnson and Joe Joe Guthrie finally bobbed toward them under hats with miner’s lamps.
“Lord have mercy, are y’all OK?” yelled Joe Joe, tripping over the long rope leash they’d anchored to Barnabas.
“Fine! Wonderful!” shouted the rector.
“I ought to kick your butt,” said Larry Johnson, meaning it.
These High, Green Hills, Ch. 11
* * *
Sweet Dreams:
The Mitford Books as Sleep Therapy
People often say my books put them to sleep.
Would any author in his right mind covet such an accolade?
And yet I do value this lovely compliment, for it affirms that Mitford isn’t scary, isn’t stressful, isn’t intellectually manipulative, nor is it emotionally off-putting. A reader can open a Mitford novel and soon, I suspect, take a deep breath, as the heart rate slows, the mind stops racing, and…
Come to think of it, the book you now hold in your hands is, indeed, very aptly named.
* * *
Miss Sadie’s Death
SADIE ELEANOR BAXTER died peacefully in her sleep on June 30, in the early hours of the morning.
When the rector of Lord’s Chapel received the phone call, he went at once to the hospital room, where he took Miss Sadie’s cold hand and knelt and prayed by her bedside.
He then drove to the church, climbed the stairs to the attic, and tolled the death bell twenty times. The mournful notes pealed out
on the light summer air, waking the villagers to confusion, alarm, or a certain knowing.
“It’s old Sadie Baxter,” said Coot Hendrick’s mother, sitting up in bed in a stocking cap. Coot, who was feeding a boxful of biddies he had bought to raise for fryers, called from the kitchen, “Lay back down, Mama!”
Mule Skinner turned over and listened, but didn’t wake Fancy, who could have slept through the bombing of London. “There went Miss Baxter,” he whispered to the darkened room.
J. C. Hogan heard the bells in his sleep and worked them into a dream of someone hammering spikes on a railroad being laid to Tulsa, Oklahoma. Bong, bong, bong, John Henry was a steel-drivin’ man….
Cynthia Kavanagh got up and prayed for her husband, whose pain she felt as if it were her own, and went to the kitchen and made coffee, and sat at the table in her robe, waiting until a reasonable hour to call Meadowgate Farm and all the others who’d want to know.
Winnie Ivey, awake since four-thirty, stopped in the middle of the kitchen on Lilac Road, where a dim light burned in the hood of the stove, and prayed, thanking God for the life of one who had cared about people and stood for something, and who, as far as she was concerned, would never be forgotten.
Louella Baxter Marshall had not been asleep when she heard the bell toll; she had been praying on and off throughout the night, and weeping and talking aloud to Miss Sadie and the Lord. When the tolling came, she sat up, and, without meaning to, exactly, exclaimed, “Thank you, Jesus! Thank you for takin’ her home!”
Lew Boyd heard the bells and woke up and looked at his watch, which he never took off except in the shower, and saw the long line of automobiles snaking up to his gas pumps and buying his candy and cigarettes and canned drinks. Sadie Baxter’s funeral would draw a crowd, he could count on it. He sighed and went back to sleep until his watch beeped.
Jenna Ivey, who was up and entering figures in her ledger for Mitford Blossoms, shivered. She would have to hire on help to do the wreaths and sprays for this one. This would be bigger than old Parrish Guthrie’s had ever hoped to be, the old so-and-so, and so what if Miss Sadie had never bought so much as a gloxinia from Mitford Blossoms, Sadie Baxter had been a lady and she had loved this town and done more for it than anybody else ever would, God rest her soul in peace.
Esther Bolick punched Gene and woke him up.
“Sadie Baxter’s gone,” she said.
“How d’you know?”
“The bell’s tolling.”
“Maybe it’s th’ president or somebody like that,” said Gene, who remembered the hoopla over Roosevelt’s passing.
“I don’t think so,” said his wife. “I saw the president on TV yesterday and he looked fit as a fiddle.”
Percy Mosely was leaving his house at the edge of town when he heard the first tolling. He removed his hat and placed it over his heart and was surprised to feel a tear coursing down his cheek for someone he’d hardly ever exchanged five words with in his life, but whose presence above the town, at the crest of the steep fern bank, had been a consolation for as long as he could remember.
After tolling the bell, the rector went to Lilac Road and sat with Louella and prayed the ancient prayer of commendation: “Acknowledge, we humbly beseech You, a sheep of Your own fold, a lamb of Your own flock…. Receive her into the arms of Your mercy, into the blessed rest of everlasting peace, and into the glorious company of the saints….”
Then he did what others after him would do with Sadie Baxter’s lifelong friend. He sat and wept with her, sobbing like a child.
These High, Green Hills, Ch. 18
A Posthumous Letter from Miss Sadie
Dear Father,
We have just come home from your lovely wedding ceremony, and I don’t know when our hearts have felt so refreshed. The joy of it makes my pen fairly fly over the page.
To see you taking a bride, even after so many years, seemed like the most natural thing in the world. Certainly no one can ever say that you married in haste to repent at leisure!
Long years ago when I loved Willard so dearly and hoped against hope that we might marry, I wrote down something Martin Luther said. He said, there is no more lovely, friendly, and charming relationship, communion, or company than a good marriage.
May God bless you and Cynthia to enjoy a good marriage, and a long and happy life together.
As you know, I have given a lot of money to human institutions, and I would like to give something to a human individual for a change.
I have prayed about this and so has Louella and God has given us the go-ahead.
I am leaving Mama’s money to Dooley.
We think he has what it takes to be somebody. You know that Papa was never educated, and look what he became with no help at all. And Willard—look what he made of himself without any help from another soul.
Father, having no help can be a good thing. But having help can be even better—if the character is strong. I believe you are helping Dooley develop the kind of character that will go far in this world, and so the money is his when he reaches the age of twenty-one.
(I am old-fashioned and believe that eighteen is far too young to receive an inheritance.)
I have put one and a quarter million dollars where it will grow, and have made provisions to complete his preparatory education. When he is eighteen, the income from the trust will help send him through college.
I am depending on you never to mention this to him until he is old enough to bear it with dignity. I am also depending on you to stick with him, Father, through thick and thin, just as you’ve done all along.
When you receive this letter, there are two things you will need to know at once. First, the urn for my ashes is in the attic at Fernbank. When you go up the stairs, turn to the right and go all the way to the back. I have left it there on a little table, it is from czarist Russia, which Papa once visited. Don’t scatter me among any rosebushes, Father, I know how you think. Just stick the urn in the ground as far away from Parrish Guthrie as you can, cover it with enough dirt to support a tuft of moss, and add my little marker.
The other thing you need to know at once is that my marker is with Mr. Charles Hartley of Hartley’s Monument Company in Holding. It is paid for. You might say it is on hold in Holding, ha ha. I think it is foolish nonsense to choose one’s own epitaph, it makes one either overly modest or overly boastful. I leave this task to you, and trust you not to have anything fancy or high-toned engraved thereon, for I am now and always will be just plain Sadie.
I am going to lay down my pen and rest, but will take it up again this evening. It is so good to write this letter, which has been composing in my head for years! It was your wedding today which made me understand that one must get on with one’s life, and that always includes the solemn consideration of one’s death.
He looked up to see his wife rubbing a chicken with olive oil, and humming quietly to herself. An extraordinary sight, somehow, in view of this even more extraordinary letter.
He noted the renewed strength of Miss Sadie’s handwriting as the letter resumed.
We are going to watch TV this evening and pop some corn, so I will make it snappy.
As for Fernbank, I ask you to go through the attic with Olivia and Cynthia and take whatever you like. Take anything that suits you from the house, also. I can’t imagine what it might be, but I would like you to select something for Mr. Buck Leeper, who is doing such a lovely job with Hope House. Perhaps something of Papa’s would be in order.
Whatever is left, please give it to the needy, or to your Children’s Hospital. Do not offer anything for view at a yard sale or let people pick over the remains. I know you will understand.
I leave Fernbank to supply any future requirements of Hope House. Do with my homeplace what you will, but please treat it kindly. If I should pass before Louella, she has a home for life at Hope House, and provision to cover any special needs. I know you will do all in your power to look after her, she is my sister and beloved friend.
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It would be grand if I could live to be a hundred, and go Home with a smile on my face. I believe I will! But if not, I have put all the buttons on my affairs, and feel a light spirit for whatever God has in store for me.
May our Lord continue to bless you, Father, you mean the world to yours truly,
Sadie Eleanor Baxter
He looked up and met Cynthia’s concerned gaze.
“What is it, dearest?”
“You mustn’t speak this to another soul,” he said.
“I won’t. I promise.”
“Sit down,” he said. She sat.
“Dooley Barlowe,” he told her, “is a millionaire.”
Louella would sing a hymn in her throaty mezzo-soprano, which was as consoling as raisins in warm bread. No, she wouldn’t break down, she was wanting to do it! Hadn’t she sung with Miss Sadie since they were both little children?
The choir director, who was known for inventiveness, suggested Dooley sing with Louella, but no one thought he would. The rector called the boy, anyway.
“What’re we singing?” Dooley asked, already persuaded.
“‘Love Divine, All Loves Excelling.’”
“No problem. What instruments?”
“Organ and trumpets.”
“I can’t sing over trumpets,” said Dooley.
“You don’t have to sing when the trumpets are playing.”
“When is rehearsal?”
“Tomorrow at three o’clock. I’ll see you at Meadowgate around two.”
“I’m sorry she died,” he said. “It seemed like she’d live a long time.”
That, he thought, is the way it always seems with someone we love.
These High, Green Hills, Ch. 18
Miss Sadie’s Memorial Service
“THE PEOPLE HAVE gathered, the trumpets have sounded!” he exclaimed. “Sadie Eleanor Baxter is at home and at peace, and I charge us all to be filled with the joy of this simple, yet wondrous fact.”
How often had people heard that, for a Christian, death is but the ultimate triumph, a thing to celebrate? The hope was that it cease being a fact merely believed with the head, and become a fact to know with the heart, as he now knew it.