These High, Green Hills (48 page)

Authors: Jan Karon

BOOK: These High, Green Hills

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“I know.”

“It was one thing to want her out of there, but this is quite another. How can I be the one to sign the paper, to make a decision that will take her away from her mother? And yet, how can I not?”

“They’ll give her mother the choice of staying or leaving.”

“Yes, but they say she probably won’t leave. I asked what might happen, and apparently people often choose the horror over help.”

“We haven’t seen Lace since her father came home. I wish we knew what’s going on. I’d like to think that having work will help his drinking problem, but...” “

“But you don’t think so.”

“No, I don’t think so. What did you tell them?”

“I said I’d let them know by Wednesday. If we do this thing and she’s taken away, where will they send her?”

“They’ll try to place her with a relative. Failing that, she’ll be placed in foster care.”

“What if ... that is ... should we consider being her foster care?”

“I have no idea how that works.”

She was silent for a time before she spoke again. “I wish I could go to the Creek and see things for myself.”

“What possible good would that do? What would that solve?”

“I don’t know,” she said vaguely. “I don’t know.”

If there was anything a church had, it was lists, and in no time flat, according to Dave, they would have their lists formatted, bulleted, and numbered, not to mention sorted. Before Dave arrived, he hoisted the manual and read the following:

To change text appearing next to a number in the list, enter text in the Text Before box or the Text After box. To alter a number format or the bullet, select a number or bullet format under Number Format, Bullet Character, or Number or Bullet.

To change the indentation between sections of the list, enter a measurement in the Distance From Indent To Text box.

He noted that, to include hanging indents, he was to select the Hanging Indent box. He would not know a hanging indent if he met it in the street.

He looked with longing at his Royal manual, which sat mutely under its ancient black cover.

“There’s only one problem with doin‘ lists today,” Emma announced.

“More than one, to my mind.”

“I can’t find the folder with the lists in it. The ones we’re supposed to key in this morning.”

“It was right there on your desk two weeks ago, as I recall.”

“Not anymore. I’ve searched high and low. Did you move it?”

“I never touch your desk.” It might have been ringed with barbed wire for all the touching he ever did of her desk. “Which lists did it contain?”

“All the lists. Current membership, Sunday School roll with names, addresses, and phone numbers, lists of pledgers and nonpledgers, lists of people who’ve made special contributions and memorial gifts ... lists of people who worked on the roof since who-shot-Lizzie ... and oh, a list of all the costs to date on Hope House, and the projected expenses for next year’s budget.”

“Certainly those lists weren’t the originals?” He didn’t want to know the answer.

“Well, of course they were the
originals;
they were what I typed directly from all those messy notes you’ve been giving me since kingdom come. Plus, how was I going to make copies when the copier at the post office stays broken down half the time, and the one at the library’s so little you can hardly get a postcard on it? Besides, we’ve been out of carbon paper practically since I went back to bein‘ a Baptist.”

“We’ve got to find those lists.”

“Fine,” she said. “You look.”

“Who else has been in here?”

“In the last two weeks? How am I supposed to remember? That chaplain you hired....” She looked at him as if Scott Murphy were the culprit, there was the answer right there.

“Emma ...”

“I know you’re mad as a wet hen. But when things get so bad you can’t leave a file folder on your own desk without somebody helping themselves, what do you expect?”

“For God has not given us the spirit of fear, but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind,” he read aloud from Paul’s second letter to Timothy.

He remembered Katherine’s passionate counsel on the phone last year before he proposed to Cynthia. He had been sorely afraid of letting go, and Katherine had reminded him in no uncertain terms where fear comes from. If, she reasoned, it doesn’t come from God, there’s only one other source to consider. “Teds,” she said, “fear is of the Enemy.” And she was right.

As a young seminarian, he had wanted to believe the letters were, in some supernatural way, written directly to him. There were oddly personal links throughout the letters, not the least of which was Paul’s reference to Timothy’s mother and grandmother as women of “unfeigned faith.” No better description could have been rendered of his own mother and grandmother.

It was a long-standing tradition to read the letters on or near his birthday. Of course, there had been several years when he didn’t have a clue that his birthday had come and gone, but this year was different. Now, there was more to celebrate about June 28, only days away, than his nativity in Holly Springs, Mississippi. Now it was also the date on which he’d proposed to his next-door neighbor.

He adjusted his glasses and read toward a favorite passage, a passage that, every year, seemed to stand apart for him.

“Continue in the things which you’ve learned and have been assured of, knowing of whom you learned them, and that from a child you’ve known the holy scriptures, which are able to make you wise unto salvation through faith in Christ Jesus.”

He read on, toward the end of the second letter, where the chief apostle made a request. “The cloak that I left at Troas ... , when you come, bring it with you....” Because Paul was then almost certainly ill and dying, those few lines never failed to move him.

“Do thy diligence to come before winter,” the letter said in closing. In other words, Hurry! Don’t let me down. Soon, it will be bitterly cold.

In the end, would he be able to say with Paul,
I have fought
a
good fight! I have finished the course! I have kept the faith!

Time, which tells everything, would tell that, also.

He was running late and no help for it.

Opening the office door, he was about to say good morning to his secretary when something brown dashed from nowhere and attached itself to his right ankle, growling.

“What in the dickens?”

Emma lunged from her desk. “Snickers! Come here this minute!”

“Good heavens,” he said, trying to shake his ankle free. The teeth weren’t actually puncturing the skin, but if he made a wrong move ...

“Don’t mind him,” said Emma.

Don’t
mind
him? This dog was determined to attach itself to his leg permanently.

“Don’t pay any attention and he’ll stop doing it.”

“Oh.” He walked to his desk, dragging the dog with him, as if it didn’t exist.

“That’s Snickers,” said Emma. “Since you’ve pretty much quit bringing Barnabas to work, I thought I’d bring Snickers once in a while.”

Was there
any
balm in Gilead?

“I suppose I could just leave my ankle in his mouth until he falls asleep,” said the rector, taking the cover off his Royal manual.

Emma peered at him over her glasses. “You don’t like my dog?”

“Well...”

“He certainly likes you,” she said, offended.

He had wired Roberto in Florence, asking if his grandfather might write a letter to Miss Sadie.

It would be good medicine to have word from her childhood friend, Leonardo. As a young boy, Leonardo had lived at Fernbank with his artist father for three years, transforming the ballroom ceiling into a heavenly dome alive with a host of angels.

When the letter arrived at the church office, carefully translated into English, he took it to the hospital at once.

“May I read it to you?” he asked, sitting by her bed.

She nodded, and he noticed how transparent her skin seemed. He had never noticed that before.

My dearest Sadie,

Time continues to be money, my cherished friend, but I no longer care about such things.

What do I care about, then, and what moves me, still? Hearing Roberto sing your praises, and tell of the journey he made last June into the bosom of your family and friends, and of the grand occasion held in your ballroom, that same lovely room in which my father and I labored so happily.

I delight to listen again and again to Roberto’s description of the ceiling, which had grown faded in memory, but which he has made vividly fresh and beautiful to me once more.

I care, Sadie, that I have lived my life doing what I loved most passionately—painting.That is all I ever wanted to do, I never once thought of being a banker, or pondered the lure of exporting, I was able to do what I loved! I consider this a most extraordinary miracle in a world which conspires to rob us of our dreams, and even of our passion.

Your priest tells us that you have fallen, but that your spirits are strong and you are singing in your bed! That is the Sadie Baxter who met us at the door so many years ago and said, Tempo e denaro! Time is money! Did you know that my father often pressed me to quicken my brushstrokes, in remembrance of what you said to us in greeting? He thought your father had asked you to say it, being too much a gentleman to press us himself.

I, also, lie in bed these days, and am not often up. My old enemy, arthritis, afflicts me savagely. Yet I, too, sing in my bed, Sadie, the old music from La Traviata. I have no voice left, it is my spirit which sings.

My dear friend, across half the world, I challenge you:

Sing on! Sing on!

You live forever in my soul.

Yours faithfully,

Leonardo Francesca

Miss Sadie nodded, which told him she had heard and was pleased.

“Where is Louella?” she asked, looking out the window.