These High, Green Hills (17 page)

Placing the phone on the hook, he sank into a chair at the kitchen table as Cynthia walked in from next door.

“Timothy! What is it?”

“You won’t believe this.”

“Tell me!”

“Dooley isn’t coming home for Christmas.”

“But why? What’s wrong? Is he—”

“He’s going to Europe.”

“
Europe
?”

“To sing. In the school chorus. They’re leaving next week. They’ll be gone fourteen days.”

She sat down, too.

“A boy has pneumonia, and Dr. Fleming said the choirmaster pulled Dooley off the bench, as it were. All expenses paid. It’s part of a grant.”

“Why, I’m ... it’s ... I’m speechless. It’s too wonderful for words!”

“I was just going to bring the electric train down from the attic,” he said, looking dazed and forlorn.

She reached over and took his hand. “Don’t worry, dearest. We’ll get it down, anyway. I love electric trains.”

A hastily scrawled note from Dooley:

A world globe with a light in it! Merely the present he’d wanted all his life. Amazing that the boy recalled something he’d mentioned only once, a very long time ago.

He had found a few precious moments to make notes in his sermon notebook, while a fire blazed on the hearth, the Christmas tree lights glimmered, and Cynthia made dinner.

It was a type of grace, this small hour he’d been given during the haste and hurry of Advent. He gazed away from the notebook, giving thanks for small things.

“We look for visions of heaven,” Oswald Chambers had written, “and we never dream that all the time God is in the commonplace things and people around us.”

He went to his bookshelf and took down a volume. He was thankful merely for the time to go to his bookshelf and look with leisure for a reference.

He thumbed the pages. Dietrich Bonhoeffer had talked of the small things, too, saying in
Life Together:

Cynthia came in quietly and set a cup of tea before him. He kissed her hand, inexpressibly grateful, and she went back to the kitchen.

When we view the little things with thanksgiving, he thought, even they become big things.

Where his hair was concerned, it was fish or cut bait. Some of the youth group mentioned it, asking when he was getting an earring.

He’d been to Fancy Skinner only twice. On both occasions, his longtime barber, Joe Ivey, was either down with the flu or in Tennessee with relatives. Whatever Fancy had done, he’d liked it, noting both times that he looked suddenly thinner—a look he could currently use, if the tightness of his collar was any indication.

Joe Ivey, however, was in town and healthy as a horse, and he couldn’t figure out how to give his business to Joe’s competition without being found out.

“When are you gettin‘ your neck cleaned up?” asked Emma. She considered it her business to remind him about haircuts, shoe shines, and a variety of other personal services.

“Ah...”

“Christmas is on top of us and you look like a wise man who’s been travelin‘ from afar.” She peered at him over her glasses. “They traveled two years, you know.”

Whatever that was supposed to mean.

“I’m surprised Cynthia hasn’t made you get a haircut.”

In his secretary’s view, his wife was doing nothing for the church, much less ministering to the needs of her husband.

“Anyway,” she said, “if I were you, I’d try Fancy Skinner. Joe Ivey makes you look like a chipmunk.”

Permission! Is that what he’d been waiting for like a schoolboy? He was out the door in a flash.

“Lord!” said Fancy, who had worked him in between her eleven-thirty trim and twelve o‘clock perm. “Look at this mess, it’s cut in three different lengths. I hate to say it, but I hear Joe Ivey gets in th’ brandy, and if your hair’s any proof, his liver’s not long for this world.

“How’s your wife? I’m glad you married her, she’s cute as anything and really young. How much younger is she than you, anyway? Lord, I know I shouldn’t ask that, but ten years is my guess.

“So, what are you givin‘ Cynthia for Christmas? Mule’s givin’ me a fur coat, I have always wanted a fur coat, I said, ‘Honey, if you buy me a fur coat at a yard sale, do not come home, you can sleep at your office ’til kingdom come.‘ I know it’s not right to wear fur, think of the animals and how they feel about it, but it gets so dern
cold
up here in th’ winter. Of course, it’s not been cold
this
winter, they say th‘ fleas will be killer this summer.

“D‘you want some gum, have some gum, it’s sugarless.

“Speakin‘ of sugar, I hear you’re diabetic, how does that affect you? I hear it makes some people’s legs swell or is it their feet? Lord, your scalp is tight as a drum, as usual—you ought to be more relaxed now that you’re married, but of course, some people get more uptight when they tie th’ knot. I bet married people come bawlin‘ to you all th’ time, I don’t know how you have a minute to yourself, bein‘ clergy.

“My great uncle is clergy, they handle snakes at his church. Mule says for God’s sake, Fancy, don’t tell that your uncle handles snakes, so don’t say I mentioned it. Have you ever seen anybody handle snakes, it’s in th‘ Bible about handlin’ snakes, but if you have to do that to prove you love th‘ Lord, I’m goin’ to hell in a hand basket.

“Oops, I like to poked a hole in you with that fingernail, it’s acrylic.

“How’s Dooley, I hope he don’t get th‘ big head in that fancy school. I’ve never been to Virginia, I hear seven presidents were born in that state, I think we had one president from our state, maybe two, but I can’t remember who it was, maybe Hoover, do you think he had anything to do with th’ vacuum cleaner, I’ve always wondered that. Speakin‘ of school, they asked me to come to Mitford School and talk about bein’ a hairdresser for Occupation Day, I think I’ll do a make-over, wouldn’t that be somethin‘? I’d like to make over th’ principal, that is the meanest school principal in the world! I’d dye her hair blue in a heartbeat, then swing her around in this chair and say, ‘Look at that, Miss Hayes, honey, don’t you just love it, it’s
you
!’

“See there? Aren’t you some kind of handsome with all that glop cut from over your ears? You looked like you were wearing earmuffs. Oooh, yes! Cute! I’ll just swivel you around so you can look at the back, your wife’ll eat you with a spoon....”

He paid Fancy and reeled out of her shop, his ears ringing. By dodging the Skinners’ driveway and taking the footpath, he was able to avoid the next customer, who merely glimpsed his back as he fled the premises.

Not only was he at a loss about what to give Cynthia, he couldn’t figure out what to buy Tommy with Dooley’s ten bucks.

It came to him while he was walking home from Fancy’s. Just go by the bank and exchange it for ten silver dollars. A great idea! His new haircut clearly helped him think better. He felt as if he’d just hatched out of an egg for the lightness of spirit that overcame him.

And what the heck would he get Dooley? He’d better knuckle down and come up with something pronto. Maybe a parka. But he already had one, and besides, Dooley Barlowe did not consider clothing items to be gifts.

Tommy’s mother welcomed him with a hug.

“We’re so glad to see you, Father. Tommy is doing better each day. He’ll be back in school after Christmas, Dr. Harper said.”

“Wonderful news!”

“Come down the hall and see him. He’s reading a new book. It’s been awful hard to keep up with his schooling. I can’t help him a bit with his math, and his daddy says he never even heard of diagramming a sentence.”

“What a grand tree!” he said, stopping to look at the bedecked Fraser fir that stood in the corner. A veritable sea of gifts lay under its branches.

“See those three big packages by the sofa? They’re from Mr. Leeper! He’s been wonderful, Father. Thank you for asking him to look in on Tommy.”

“Oh, but I didn’t have a thing to do with it. It was all Mr. Leeper’s idea.”

“I’ve heard he’s not a very nice person, but I disagree, don’t you?”

He looked at the gifts, given by a man who was also heating—not from a terrible accident, but from other, far deeper, wounds. He would go and see Buck Leeper over Christmas and sit with him in the room where the drunken Hope House supervisor had hurled and smashed a bottle and a chair around his head, venting a black rage that lasted for hours. He would never forget that night, and his inability to get up and walk out on the pain that was forged by a brutal father, years of alcoholism, and Buck’s part in the death of his younger brother.