These High, Green Hills (61 page)

“When it boots,” Emma told him, “I have the configuration file install all the device drivers I’ll need all day.”

“Great!” he said, oiling the roller on his Royal manual.

“Can you believe the object linking and embedding capabilities allow me to make all my applications interactive?”

“I’ll be darned,” he said.

“Not only that, I can append to th‘ database, paste from th’ clipboard, or drag and drop anywhere ...”

“No kidding!”

“ ... within seconds,” she said, looking triumphant.

On what Emma called their now bimonthly “Tech Day,” she hauled in everything from roast beef and green beans to macaroni and cheese, which she fed Dave in huge quantities. Over lunch at the rector’s desk, which resembled a neighborhood cafeteria, they blithely spoke a language as foreign to him as Croatian.

On Tech Day, one thing was for certain:

He was out of there.

Whenever he met Bill Sprouse, who always wanted to know how it was going, he answered from an assortment of enthusiastic responses, including “Terrific!” “Couldn’t be better!” and his increasing favorite, “No problem!” With Emma Newland having taken to advanced technology like a duck to water, wasn’t every word of that the everlasting truth?

Never say you can’t teach an old dog new tricks, he thought, hoofing it to the Grill before Dave roared in at eleven-thirty.

He had dropped the Fernbank key in his pocket when he dressed to go running, and was standing in the middle of Miss Sadie’s attic, trying to find the right thing. In a way, it was like shopping, without the blasted aggravation of a mall.

Hat boxes, trunks, rocking chairs, a rolltop desk. Old newspapers, neatly piled and the stacks numbered. Dozens of umbrellas, both Chinese paper and crumbling silk, lamp bases, a magnificent chair with wheels, piles of folded draperies covered with sheets, a child’s rocker, a child’s table and chairs, headboards, footboards, rusting bedsprings.

It was overwhelming, and only a little light fell in through the window.

There. A large trunk with the initials JB. Josiah Baxter.

A cracked leather chair, a floor lamp with a hand-painted parchment shade. Books, books, and more books. A series of boxes stacked on a Jacobean table.

He looked at the boxes, one by one, until he came to the traveling case fitted with a comb and brushes, a shoehorn, talcum powder, and empty, cut-crystal bottles for cologne.

He picked it up and brushed away the dust with his handkerchief.
JB
, read the dim monogram on the leather.

“Something of Papa’s,” Miss Sadie had said.

It was a little fancy for a man like Buck Leeper, but it would certainly do.

“Retreat time!” she announced as he came in the back door, ready to do another few hours’ work at home.

“Didn’t we just have one?” he asked, scratching his head.

“Timothy, that was July! This is October.”

“Oh,” he said.

“I’m just packing up this hamper and we’ll be off. The sunset should be glorious tonight; there was a red sky this morning!”

“Doesn’t red sky in morning mean sailor take warning?”

“Whatever,” she said happily, stuffing in a wedge of cheese.

Barnabas trudged with them up the hill, where, panting furiously, they all arrived at the stone wall.

“Don’t really look at the view just yet, dearest. Let’s save it until we finish setting up our picnic, shall we?”

He spread the old fringed cloth, which had belonged to a bishop’s wife in the late forties, over the wall, and Cynthia began unpacking what she’d just packed.

Why was he up here on the hill, lolling about like some gigolo, when he had a nursing home to officially open one week hence, and a thousand details to be ironed out, only two of which had kept him up until one o‘clock in the morning? But no, let his wife finish a book and she went instantly into the lolling mode. Perhaps it was this very lolling mode of the last two months that had given her countenance the beatific look he’d lately noticed.

“The domestic retreat,” she said, setting out a plate of crackers, “is an idea which could literally save the institution of marriage. Do you know that studies say husbands and wives speak to each other a total of only seventeen minutes a week?”

“We’re so far over that quota, we’ve landed in another study.”

“I’ll say. Roasted garlic. Ripe pears. Toasted pecans. Saga bleu.”

She pulled out napkins and two glasses and poured a round of raspberry tea.

“There!” she said. “Now we can look!”

The Land of Counterpane stretched beneath their feet, a wide panorama of rich Flemish colors under a perfectly blue and cloudless sky.

Church steeples poked up from groves of trees.

Plowed farmland appeared like velveteen scraps on a quilt, feather-stitched with hedgerows.

There, puffs of chimney smoke billowed heavenward, and over there, light gleamed on a pond that regularly supplied fresh trout to Avis Packard’s Local.

“Look, dearest! Look at our high, green hills.”

He gazed across the little valley and up, up to the green hills, where groves of blazing hardwoods topped the ridges, and fences laced the broad, uneven meadows.

“Aren’t they beautiful in this light?”

“They are!” he said, meaning it.

“Where’s the train?”

He peered at his watch. “Ten minutes!” The little train would come winding through the valley, over the trestle that spanned the gorge, and just as it broke through the trees by the red barn and the silo, they would see it. If providence were with them, they would also hear the long, mournful blast of its horn.

Away to the east, he thought he saw a speck of some kind, a bird perhaps. But birds didn’t gleam. Aha! It was a little plane. It was a little yellow plane. By jing, it was Omer Cunningham. Dipping, rolling, gliding, soaring. Omer! He stood up on the wall and waved.

“What in the world ... ?” asked his wife.

“That’s Omer,” he said, gleeful.

“Who is Omer?”

He waved some more and thought he could see Omer waving back as the little plane dipped its right wing and roared into the blue.

“Omer. I declare.” He felt a silly grin stretching all the way across his face.

“You know absolutely everybody,” she said, impressed.

He sat back down and gazed around and gulped his tea. “Ah, well, we won’t be doing this forever,” he said.

“I know!” She raised her glass to his. “We’ll be living in some far-off land filled with adventure!”

“Right.”

She sighed.

“Why are you sighing?”

“Was I sighing? I didn’t know I was sighing.”

“Sighing often goes unnoticed by the sigher,” he said.

“Ummm. What did we agree we wanted in the place where we’ll retire?” she asked.

“Oh, as I recall, four distinct seasons ... ”

“Absolutely!” she said.

“A small house and a big yard.”

“Oh, yes. Now I remember. We plant, we mow.”

“You got it. And nothing flat, we said.”

“Flat is so ... ” She paused, looking for words.

“
Flat
,” he remarked.

“Right!” she agreed.

“Didn’t we say something about liking winters that freeze our glasses to our noses?”

“Definitely.”

“Listen!” He cupped his hands to his ears. “Here it comes!”

A freight train broke into view at the red barn, blowing its horn as it rushed past a field, disappeared into the trees, and appeared again along a row of tiny houses.

She applauded, and turned to him, laughing. No, indeed, it didn’t take much for his wife....

They tried the roasted garlic and spread the Saga bleu on crackers and munched the pecans and emptied the tea container and watched the sky blush with pink, then fuchsia.

“You’re sighing again,” he announced.

“I can’t think why.”

“You can’t fool me. If anybody can think why they do something, it’s you, Kavanagh.”

“OK. I think I’ll miss Mitford.”

“Aha. So will I.”

A bird called. Barnabas rolled over at his master’s feet and yawned, and the rector leaned down to scratch the pink belly that was offered.

“So ... ” she said, pausing thoughtfully.

“So?”

“It occurs to me that we’ve found a place that meets all our strict requirements.”

“Hmmm. Small house, big yard,” he mused.

“Winters that freeze our glasses to our noses ... ”

“Nothing flat, lots of hills...”

“No sand,” she said.

They turned to each other and smiled. Then they laughed.

Neither said anything more as they packed up the hamper and folded up the cloth and went down the hill with their dog at their heels.

Next year, they agreed, they’d be adding a large room to the back of the little yellow house. With lots of windows, said the rector. With gleaming hardwood floors, said his wife.

“ ‘There are two things to aim at in life,’ ” he quoted from Logan Pearsall Smith. “ ‘First, to get what you want, and after that, to enjoy it.’”

“There’s the rub!” she said.

Using a Magic Marker, she inscribed the wisdom on the wall above her drawing board, relishing the freedom to do it, loving the notion of making the little yellow house larger, and living there forever.

There was so much to do and so much to think about, they had trouble sleeping at night. He’d even talked the vestry into building the kennel and dog run, and two men from Farmer had been working around the clock to complete the job.

The ECW was out in force, canvassing every garden and meadow for autumn flowers, dried herbs, pumpkins, and gourds to decorate the public rooms at Hope House. Cynthia volunteered to round up vases, buckets, and mounds of oasis from the florist, not to mention bake six dozen lemon squares for the reception.

J. C. Hogan’s wedding was coming straight up, in the middle of the week after the grand opening, and the rector would not only officiate, but had offered to bake a ham.

Immediately following the police station wedding at which Mule Skinner would be best man, they would troop to the Skinner household, where Fancy was giving a reception on the premises of Hair House, owing to the fact that their living quarters were being repainted.

For this affair, Cynthia had been asked to contribute four dozen vegetable sandwiches, four dozen lemon squares, and as many barbecued chicken drumettes as she could manage.

“I will not make drumettes, barbecued or otherwise,” she told her husband. “There are two cardinal rules from which I will not depart—I will not cook with Cheez Whiz and I will not do drumettes. I will substitute meat balls in sauce.”

Scott Murphy was collecting animals, large and small, having them vetted by Hal Owen, and installing them in the brand-new Hope House kennels, which were complete except for fencing in the runs.