These High, Green Hills (41 page)

He was sitting at his desk when the door opened and a tall, slender young man walked into the office.

“Father Kavanagh? Scott Murphy.”

He looked into the pleasant face of someone he might have known for years, but had never seen before in his life.

“Come in, Scott! Have a seat.”

Scott Murphy adjusted his glasses. “I hear you’re looking for a chaplain, sir, for Hope House. I’m here to say ... I believe I’m your man.”

The rector stood and shook his hand, laughing. Scott Murphy had made that statement as if he believed it utterly.

“I like that,” he said, sitting again. “Tell me why you think so.” This was certainly not going to be the morning he’d expected.

“Well, Father, I’m willing to work hard, that’s the first thing. I would give myself freely—not to the job, but to the patients. I’ve got the background, but more than that, I like being with the elderly. I care about them very much.” The young man stopped and smiled.

“Anything else?”

Scott Murphy sat on the visitor’s bench. “No, sir. That’s it.”

Disarmed. Caught off guard. It had a certain charm, after all. “Well, Scott, if that’s true, I want to hear more. Who sent you?”

“I had a dream. It may be hard to believe, Father. All I can say is, you’ll have to go with me on this.”

“I’ll go with you,” he said, intrigued. “Will you have a cup of coffee?”

“No, sir. Coffee makes me jump.”

“A sight I’d like to see sometime.”

They laughed together easily.

“Father, when I was nine years old, a terrible thing happened to us, to our family.” Scott took a deep breath and leaned against the wall behind the bench.

“My father’s and mother’s parents were good friends. They lived in the same little town, Redwing, Kansas, not far from where we lived. My two sets of grandparents shared their garden produce and took a lot of their meals together, and went to the same church.

“Every summer, I could hardly wait for school to let out. I’d get on a bus to Redwing, and there I’d stay for three months, going back and forth from Granma and Granpa Murphy’s house to Granma and Granpa Lewis’s farm.

“Being with them was a wonderful experience. There was love coming at me from all four directions, and all at the same time. It was as concentrated and direct as a laser beam.”

Scott Murphy adjusted his glasses and grinned.

“They took me to the zoo, they gave me a pony, they built me a tree house, they let me work my own garden—they did everything anybody could ever do to make a kid feel great about life in general.

“But it wasn’t stuff like the pony or the tree house that made the difference, sir. What made the difference was their love. It had a force to it, and it stayed with me all the time. Looking back, I’d say it made me feel ... invincible.”

The rector nodded.

“One night, it was in the winter, all four of my grandparents piled into Granpa Murphy’s new Chevrolet Caprice and drove to the next town to see a Disney movie. Granma Murphy loved Walt Disney. On the way home ...”

Scott lowered his eyes for a moment, then looked at Father Tim.

“On the way home, they were hit head-on by a truck.”

The bookshelf clock ticked against the brief silence.

“Granma and Granpa Lewis were killed instantly, and so was Granpa Murphy. Granma Murphy was still alive when the ambulance reached the hospital, but she was in a deep coma.”

Over the years, how many tales that went beyond bearing, even beyond repeating outside these walls, had been poured out in this one small room?

“I can’t remember anything from then until I was about twelve or thirteen. There’s a blank there, like I was hit on the head and didn’t come to for a long time.

“You might say that accident left no survivors. Mom and Dad ... we couldn’t seem to get over it, to go on.” Scott shook his head. “You’d think that all the love I felt from my grandparents would stay with me like some kind of armor plating. Instead, I felt it had been stripped away. Whatever they’d given me, I lost it.”

“I understand.”

“Can you understand that whatever faith I had in God was lost, too?”

“Yes. It can happen like that.”

“We pretty much stayed away from the nursing home where Granma Murphy lived—if you could call it living. One reason we didn’t go was because she never knew who we were.

“Something about that bothered me, the staying away because she didn’t recognize us. But I was in school, and ever since the accident, school had been hard for me. There was a while when I didn’t think I’d make it to my senior year. I had plenty on my mind, so not going to see her didn’t trouble me too much. But something kept gnawing at me.

“One day, I was out on my bike, and I stopped by a picnic area and I looked at those tables sitting there with no one around, and I thought of all the picnics my grandparents had taken me on, and I was overwhelmed with ... with grief, with something I had never allowed myself to feel. I thought I would die from the pain.”

He let out a deep breath. “That was the best thing that could have happened to me, that I stopped and felt the pain.

“I knew right then that I had to go see Granma Murphy, really go see her, look at her, touch her, tell her I loved her. I can’t tell you the urgency I felt.

“We had put her in a nursing home about twenty miles away. I hardly remember that bike ride—twenty miles and I hardly remember it, something else was pumping those pedals. It was like I was divinely guided, given wings.”

Scott Murphy’s face was beaming. “I slammed my bike down outside the door and ran down the hall and found Granma....”

Tears streamed down the young man’s face, and he took off his glasses and wiped his eyes, but he was still smiling. “And I kissed her face and her hands and told her I loved her, and that I would always love her.

“I also told her I’d be back.

“I could see she didn’t know me. And Father ... it was OK that she didn’t know me. A lot of people stop going to see someone they love because that person doesn’t recognize them. Right then, I thought, who cares if she doesn’t recognize me? One out of two people in this room knows their identity, and those odds are good enough for me.”

“Yes!”

“I went back twice a week, it was like the old days, like the beginning of summer—I couldn’t wait to go see Granma. I just believed that somewhere in there, behind the eyes that didn’t appear to see, and the ears that didn’t seem to hear, was a heart still full of love, a heart that still wanted to give and still wanted to receive.

“You can imagine that I’ve told this story a few times in my work, and once in a while, people ask how some teenage kid knew to think like that.

“I’ve got to tell you, I didn’t know how to think like that. I was just a tall, gangly, mixed-up kid like a lot of other kids that age. Something else was at work in me.

“My parents started going, too. And somehow, we just began pouring love into my Granma, and talking to her as if she understood everything we said. My dad would tell her jokes, she always loved jokes, and we believed she could hear and was laughing somewhere inside. We just stopped doubting that she knew us and could hear us.”

Scott paused and grinned.

“Go on!” said the rector.

“Today, my Granma is one of the activity leaders in her nursing home.”

“Hallelujah!” he nearly shouted.

Scott looked at his watch. “Two-thirty. She’s in crafts class right now. They’re painting canister sets for their children and grandchildren.”

The rector burst into laughter. Painting canister sets! How ordinary and insignificant that would seem to the world. He wanted to clap and shout.

“Some people,” said Scott, “ask if I prayed while she was in that coma. Once in a while, I’d say something like, ‘God, I’m really mad at You, but I still believe You’re God and You can do anything You want to, and I want You to heal Granma. Period.’ ”

“What do you think happened?”

“I think He healed Granma, just like I asked Him to. I think He did it with love, and He used us to help. He could have used anybody—a nurse, an old friend, maybe—but it was us, and I’m grateful.

“I came away from that time in my life with a special sense of a couple of verses in second Corinthians:

“ ‘For our light affliction, which is but for a moment, works for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory; while we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen: for the things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal.’

“In my ministry as a chaplain, I try to look for the things which aren’t seen.”

“Well done.”

Scott stood up and stretched. “Excuse me, sir, but I haven’t been running in a while, and I can feel it.”

“I’ve slacked off, too, in the last few days. How long are you going to be around?”

“I don’t know. Maybe I should tell you the rest of the story....”

“Please.”

Scott Murphy sat back down and leaned against the wall behind the bench.

“I think I got my calling to be a chaplain during the time we were visiting Granma. And so, when college came around, it just seemed the natural thing to do to go to Fuller, where a couple of uncles had gone. I got my M. Div. there, and did a C.P.E. year in a hospital working with geriatric patients.

“Then I was hired as chaplain at a large eldercare center in Boston. It’s all in my résumé, sir, and I have several letters of recommendation.”

“I look forward to seeing them.”

“I’ve been at the center for three years, and I’ve worked hard and I’ve learned a lot, but somehow, it’s time to move on. All I can say is, I’ve been feeling restless, and I haven’t really known why.

“I’ve done a lot of praying about where I’m supposed to be, and two or three months ago, I had a dream. In the Old Testament, God does some pretty incredible stuff with dreams.”

“You can say that again.”

“In the dream, this black curtain came down in my mind, with a word on it. The letters were white, and they were big and they were printed. ‘Mitford’ was the word.

“Somehow, I felt this was the answer, but it sure didn’t come with any instruction manual. I didn’t have a clue what to do about dealing with this answer. So I went to the little neighborhood library down the street and cross-referenced that word ‘til it was chopped liver. Geriatric centers, military schools, you name it. Nothing. Then, I was looking through an atlas, because I like maps a lot, and it hit me—maybe Mitford was a place.”

“Good shot!”

“I found a lot of Milfords. They’re everywhere. But there’s only one Mitford in the whole country.

“I did some research on the Web, and learned you’re building a five-million-dollar nursing home here.”

Scott looked at the computer sitting on Emma’s desk. “Are you on the Web?”

“You don’t want to know,” said the rector, grimacing.

Scott Murphy laughed. “So, I waited for a four-day break, and I got in my car and I drove down here.

“I won’t ask if that sounds crazy, sir, because I know it does. I spent last night in Wesley, and I’ve been walking around your town all morning, and I’ve just been up to see Hope House. It’s an outstanding facility, sir, the best I’ve ever seen. The space is filled with light ... everything about it lives up to its name.

“I like your town a lot. People have been very friendly to us all morning, especially to Luke and Lizzie.”

“Luke and Lizzie?”

“My Jack Russells, sir. They’re two years old. You might say they work with me.”

“Aha.”

“The elderly love dogs, and Luke and Lizzie love them. So, we’re a team, sir.” Scott smiled. “Hope House, your town, the people ... it all seems right to me, Father. It all seems very right. I just lay it out to you like it is, with no window dressing.”

Scott Murphy stood up from the visitor’s bench and put his hands behind his back like a schoolboy about to deliver a review of
War and Peace.

“There’s only one more thing I want to say, Father. And that is, I’d like very much to have this job.”

The rector got up and walked over to Scott Murphy. He looked into the young man’s urgent brown eyes and shook his hand.

“You’re hired,” he said.

Good Lord! He had hired a man who should have been reviewed by the vestry, not to mention Hoppy Harper, and—last, but definitely, absolutely not least—Sadie Baxter.

If Sadie Baxter, who was footing the bill, didn’t approve of Scott Murphy, Timothy Kavanagh was dead meat.

“Scott, I want you to visit Miss Sadie Baxter for a half hour or so, and please don’t mention that I just hired you.”

Scott laid his résumé folder on the rector’s desk. “Yes, sir.”

He dialed the number on Lilac Road.

“Miss Sadie, if it’s convenient, I’m sending over a candidate for chaplain. I hope you’ll give him a few minutes of your time.”