These High, Green Hills (26 page)

IF SPRING had blown in like a zephyr, its mood soon changed.

Gentle rains became wind-lashed torrents, washing seeds from furrows and carving deep gullies in driveways and lawns. Power blinked off and surged on again, those with computers kept them unplugged, and TVs went down before the lightning like so many ducks in a shooting gallery.

Sudden, startling downpours of hail unleashed themselves on the village, leaving holes the size of dimes in the burgeoning hosta, and flattening whole groves of trillium and Solomon’s seal. Seedlings keeled over in the mud, and Winnie Ivey’s hens and chicks scattered for high ground.

Mitford was driven indoors for three days running, to watch the mildew make its annual invasion of basements, bathrooms, and closets.

It was Tuesday morning before the village awoke to a dazzling sunrise, clear skies, and balmy temperatures. The foul weather, however, lingered on in his secretary.

“If I ever read another word about Hessie Mayhew’s Lady Spring, I’ll
puke
,” Emma said.

“Did Harold get his potatoes in?”

“Got ‘em in, watched ’em slide off the side of the mountain. Along with his peas, beans, squash, and onions.”

“A regular blue plate special.”

“I haven’t heard you talk about a garden this year. Too busy, I suppose.” Emma gave him one of her unmistakable looks-with-a-message.

“Not at all. We’re filling out a couple of beds with purple foxglove, lupine, cosmos ... let’s see, delphinium, Canterbury bells, a dozen astilbe ...”

“Humph. Astilbe. Too feathery for me. I’ll take a good, hardy marigold any day.”

“To each his own,” he said mildly.

“That was some shindig at your place.”

He had wondered when she would at last bring up the social event that was still the talk of the town. “So I hear.”

“Cynthia did a good job.”

“Thank you. I hear that, too.”

“A little too much sugar in the lemon squares.”

“I see it failed to sweeten your disposition.”

“Ha ha. What do you think about your kitchen walls being banged up with a hammer?”

“The best thing to happen to the rectory since Father Hanes installed a fireplace in the study.”

“I didn’t think you’d go much for that deal.”

“I hope you know the ruined look is the very thing to give mundane surfaces a mellow, weathered appeal. Take your old villas in Italy, for example, where the plaster is put on thickly, without superficial concern for perfection, where the surfaces ripple and change like ... like life itself ...”

She peered at him over her glasses.

“... where buildings shift and settle with the passage of years, where a century is but a fleeting moment in time ...”

“I get it!” she said, wanting him to stop at once.

“... where decades of smoking olive oil and burning wood wash the walls with a palette of color as subtle as the nuances of old stone or ancient marble—where, indeed, the very movement of light and shadow are captured in the golden glow of the walls, grown as redolent with history as trade routes worn by ancient Romans....” He had no idea what he was saying, but he was enjoying it immensely.

She stared at him with her mouth slightly agape.

That ought to fix her.

When Cynthia wasn’t bending over the drawing board with her elaborate wooden box of watercolors, she was laying a flagstone walkway through the hedge. This time, he couldn’t claim ineptitude. It was down in the dirt with his wife, or else.

She was wearing one of Dooley’s baseball caps, a T-shirt, blue jeans, and out-at-the-seams tennis shoes. Given how youthful she was looking and what he was thinking, he could be jailed for a violation of the Mann Act.

“I’m packing for your camping trip,” she said, huffing a heavy flagstone into the hollow he’d just dug with a shovel and edger. He would have huffed it in himself, but she preferred her way of placing the stones.

“So it’s my camping trip, is it?”

“Well, yes, I would never in a hundred years do this on my own.”

“What are you packing?”

“Colored pencils, Snickers bars, and a change of socks and underwear.”

“That ought to do it,” he said, trying not to laugh.

“What are you packing?”

“They’re bringing the food, so we’re traveling light. Tent, flashlight, emergency candles, matches, bottled water, a Swiss army knife, an iron skillet, a coffeepot, coffee, fire starter ... ah, let’s see ... inflatable pillows, ground cover, lantern, sleeping bags, bandages, toilet paper, dried fruit and nuts ... what else? A canteen, fishing poles, bait, talcum powder, mosquito repellent, Band-Aids, sunscreen, and, oh, yes ... a bucket to put the fish in. Ah, I just remembered—an egg turner to flip the fish in the skillet. And cornmeal, of course. Can’t fry fish without cornmeal.”

“We’ll need a U-Haul,” she said, muscling the stone around until it pleased her.

“We’re going to pack it in to the campsite.”

“You do have someone meeting us there with
a team of mules
?”

“You’re looking at the team,” he said, pleased with himself.

“Do we really need all that for one night?”

“They’ve asked us to stay two nights.”

“Timothy!”

He rolled his eyes and shrugged.

“Oh, well,” she said, wiping her forehead with the back of her garden glove. “Dig this one a little bigger. See that stone? It needs to go in next, I think. What do you think?” She sat back on her heels.

“Perfect.”

“It will be lovely not to get mud on our shoes when we pop through the hedge.”

“I’ll say.”

“Timothy, dearest, do you like being married?”

“Married to you, or married in general?”

“In general,” she said, watching intently as he dug the hollow.

“I do. Very ...” he searched for the right word, “consoling.”

“Lovely! Now, do you like being married to me?” He looked down upon her sapphire gaze under the bill of the baseball cap and squatted beside her.

“Words fail,” he said, meaning it. The scent of wisteria floated out from her like scent from a bush in an old garden.

“I want to be your best friend,” she said.

“You are my best friend.”

“You can speak your heart to your best friend,” she said.

“What is it you want me to say?”

“I want us to talk about our future. It really doesn’t matter if you don’t know what you want to do, or when. It would be lovely just to talk, to have it out in the open. I can’t bear that closed place in you. It’s like coming up to a gate that’s been locked, and the key thrown away.”

“Perhaps we all contain gates that have been locked.”

“Perhaps,” she said.

He wanted to stand up again and turn away from her and go on with their work. Wasn’t that what they’d come out here to do? But he sat down in the grass and looked at her across the half-finished walkway. He was grateful for the shade because he felt warm, and suddenly peevish.

Katherine had taken it upon herself to counsel him before he got married, whether he needed it or not. “First and foremost,” she had said in her salty way, “communicate! If Cynthia wants to talk, Teds, you’d better hop to it. Communicating is everything, painful as it may be. Trust me on this.”

So far, so good. But he wanted to draw the line somewhere. He wanted to draw it right here and right now—but he sat and faced her, making the effort.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” he said, finally.

“I know.” She sat, too, and took off her work gloves.

There was a long silence, filled with the chatter and song of birds. A junco dipped through the air and vanished into the hedge. They heard a neighbor’s phone ring.

A nap, he thought. A nap would be the very thing. Why this Puritan work ethic pumping through them like so much adrenaline? Hadn’t they come and gone through the hedge with perfect ease for the last two years? So what if they got their shoes muddy once in a blasted blue moon?

“You’re angry,” she said.

Yes, he was. And he didn’t like it. “What good can it do, talking of something I don’t know anything about? We came out here to work, why not work?”

“Lord,” she prayed aloud, “will You please help us through this?”

His heart was hard toward her, something he hadn’t experienced since they married, and wanted never to experience. It felt like the time she had mentioned marriage—only mentioned it. His heart had turned to stone, and remained stone for weeks on end.

“There’s your gate,” she said. “I’m right up against it, and it’s still locked.”

More birdsong. A car passing on Wisteria Lane.

“You’ll have to do the talking,” he said, “because I don’t know what to say. I don’t have a clue.”

She looked at her hands, a little furrow between her brows. He thought she was weighing whether it was worth it to try and figure out their future.

“All that really matters about our future,” she said, “is that we’re together. I mean that with all my heart. I feel so puzzled about why you shut down like this—why does this wave of coldness seep out from you when there’s any mention of your retirement? Oh, rats, Timothy, why does it have to be complicated? All I want to know is...

“... are you going to preach ‘til you keel over? Will we someday have our own home? Have you thought where we might live?”

“I mean,” she said, waving her arm toward the new flower bed, “should we be planting all these
perennials
? ”

He stared at the row of astilbe. “I don’t know. Why do I have to know?”

“Ummm,” she said, looking at him. “This is going nowhere.”

“So let’s get back to work.” He got to his feet and picked up the shovel.

What had happened? They had been working together as one flesh and one spirit, laying one flagstone walkway to link two houses. And then it had all come apart.

They were silent as they placed the remaining stones.

He felt oddly embarrassed at his hardheaded behavior, behavior that even he didn’t truly understand.

They were an hour out of Mitford, headed north to the campsite, when a drumming rain began. It transformed the overloaded van into an odorous cocoon on wheels. A radio report guaranteed the downpour would last through the morning and well into the afternoon.

Turning around and going back was loudly argued among eight teenagers.

Bo Derbin, who had a surging, but nonetheless repressed, attraction to Lila Shuford, would have none of turning back. He imagined himself swinging on a vine across a broad creek or tributary, to rescue her from a human savage raised by wolves.

Avoiding eye contact with his wife, the rector voted to press on. Larry declared he had no intention of doing otherwise.

They pressed on.

Eight teenagers with lower lips they might have tripped over was not a pretty sight.

“Oh, pipe down!” yelled Larry, clipping along at the front of the line as they hiked into the woods in a persistent drizzle. Though known for not taking any flack from the youth group, he was nonetheless their hands-down favorite leader, not to mention an Eagle Scout, an Orvis fly-casting school graduate, and onetime wrestler of a grizzly bear.