These High, Green Hills (30 page)

“Why did you stop?” she said.

“The wall just ran out on the left. Maybe that’s another passage. Maybe that’s the way we came before I crashed. Hold on, we’re backing up.”

He took two steps backward and found the wall on the left, and examined it with his hand. Did it end abruptly or did it curve around?

It curved around. A fairly gentle curve. If they had come through this passage to where they were standing now, they might easily have continued around the curve to their right, which had pitched him off the ledge.

What if he left her here and explored the passage? Perhaps just around the turn, he would see light from the entrance. Or what if they both explored that passage? But they could be stumbling along passages until kingdom come. Who would have thought that an innocent-looking hole in the side of a hill might lead to such unutterable complexity?

Mush. His mind was mush.

“We need to stop again,” he said.

“Why stop again? You said we were going out of here.”

“We are. But we need to stop and think, right here where these two passages converge. We’ve got to think.”

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.

“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....”

“Holy and gracious Father, in Your infinite love You made us for Yourself....”

“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.

He stood up and helped her to her feet. He was stiff in every joint, but stronger.

“I think I should take this passage and check it out. I won’t go beyond the range of your voice, I promise. Maybe I can see light, maybe this is the way.”

“Don’t leave me, Timothy.”

“I promise I won’t go beyond the range ...”

“I’ll come with you.”

“I feel you need to stay here and be the compass. If I don’t turn anything up, I’ll pop right back. We’re not far from the opening. We can’t be. Besides, I know Larry, and he’s starting to get worried, maybe even ticked off, for Pete’s sake. One way or the other—”

“Timothy ...”

“Yes?”

“You have your fears, I have mine. Don’t leave me.” Her own geode had come apart; he heard her panic.

“But I don’t know what’s along that passage. Why should we both take the risk?”

“You could go pitching headfirst into God knows what, you might not...”

“Might not what?”

“Might not come back.”

“Of course I’ll come back. I’ll test every step I take.”

“The buddy system—they say to always use the buddy system. We’re stronger together, smarter. If we only had something to scatter as we go, like bread crumbs. But then, we couldn’t see them....”

Why hadn’t they left something at the entrance of the cave, some sign that they’d gone in, like the nearly empty water bottle or a candy wrapper? It might have said,
If you find this, we’re still in here. Start the search.

Stay calm was still the directive. They couldn’t go blasting down every passageway that presented itself. Light! If only he had the tiniest flame, the barest flicker of illumination, he would fall to his knees in thanksgiving.

He refused to fear this thick, palpable darkness. As far as he knew, God had not drawn the line on caves. He hadn’t said,
I’ll stick by you as long as you don’t do some fool thing like get lost in a cave, you poor sap. What He had said was, I well never leave you. Period.

“Trust God!” he blurted to his wife.

“Don’t preach me a sermon, Father Kavanagh. I am trusting Him, for Pete’s sake. It’s you I can’t get a bead on. Are we going or coming?”

“Definitely going. Let’s tuck along this passageway for a bit. I won’t take a step I haven’t tested first. I’ll keep my left hand on the wall and my right hand in front of me. Hang on. And no backseat driving, thank you.”

They moved carefully around the curving limestone wall with its thrusting formations.

“ ‘I cannot see what flowers are at my feet,’ ” she murmured, “ ‘nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs, but, in embalmed darkness, guess each sweet wherewith the seasonable month endows.’ Who said that?”

“Will Rogers!”

She laughed. “One more guess.”

“Joe DiMaggio?”

“Keats!”

“Aha.”

“How’s it going up there?”

“Ummm. Same old, same old. But no mud. Feels like we’re walking on dry clay. Does that ring any bells as to our previous sojourn?”

“I can’t remember,” she said. “Our sojourns all run together like so much goulash.”

He was feeling more closed in than he had before, when his hand suddenly struck something in front of him. It was a wall of sheer limestone with—he moved his cold hand over it as someone blind might examine a sculpture—with a swollen formation attached to its surface.

It was another of those columns, perhaps, something like a great elephant trunk. He turned slowly to the right, reading the wall with his hands. More columns.

The columned wall, he found, continued around inaUcurve.

It was a moment before he told her what neither wanted to know.

They had reached a complete dead end.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

HE FELT as if the circuits had gone down in his brain.

No logic, no reason, no common sense had worked to lead them to the opening. Every turn had been a wrong turn. Every decision had been fruitless. It was maddening.

Dear God
! Now what?

The darkness seemed to fall like a heavy curtain over his mind.

“If we go back the way we came,” he said, forcing himself to think rationally, “we’ll come to where we were sitting. We know that turning right isn’t the way; that’s where I fell off the ledge. So, let’s retrace our steps and turn left.”

She was trembling as he put his arm around her shoulders.

“We can’t be far from the opening,” he said. “We’re going to find it, I promise. Besides, Larry won’t let this go on much longer. Hang on.”

She tucked her hands into his belt and they began the return trek.

He was blasted sick and tired of this everlasting fumbling around in the dark. Where in God’s name was Larry, anyway? Putting a fly in the water and showing off the cast he learned from his Orvis seminar?

His thirst was becoming hard to ignore, and he realized how seductive the dripping water sounded. He saw them down on their hands and knees, lapping at a puddle like Barnabas and Violet. But what might the water contain, what could limestone do to the human system, what algae or larvae might be lurking in it?

“I’m so thirsty,” she said, as if reading his mind. “Are we almost there?”

“The wall is beginning to curve a little, I think.” Would they recognize the curve, the place where they’d been sitting, or go careening around to the right until he fell off the ledge again? Good Lord, why hadn’t they marked the place they’d sat, left something there as a touchstone?

“Here. I think we’re here.” That was the thin slime of mud they’d been sitting on, wasn’t it? Something was squishing under his shoes. It might have been a light in a window, for the moment of warm familiarity it kindled in him.

“How are your feet?”

“Frozen,” she said.

“We’re turning left. Hang on.”

“You’re sure? You’re positive this is the way?”

“Positive.” He wasn’t positive.