In This Mountain Read online

  Well, then, why not sooner?

  He’d take five minutes while Cynthia dressed for the church supper, and carry forth the dictum laid down by Nike.

  Thumping into his desk chair, he opened the laptop and accessed his e-mail. Nothing new. He was pierced by an odd disappointment.

  Now. He knew how to retrieve his e-mail, but could he send one without Emma standing over him? All he had to do was follow the handwritten directions she’d scrawled on a yellow pad. What could happen, after all, if he did it unsupervised? Could he somehow break the thing that had cost an arm and a leg and thrust him into the twenty-first century?

  If so, so be it….

  Dear Emma, just a note to say How much your pesky insistence is appreciated, not to mention your patient Tutorials. I like this sTuff, and yes, You Told Me So. (Lest you gloat overmuch in seeing my bald admission in black and white, tear this up, I pray you, or run it through a shredder.) The Mouse is driving me Ccrazy/

  Guess Who

  He hit send, holding his breath.

  Out of here.

  Emma Newland would count this her greatest triumph. To tell the truth, he felt pretty good about it himself.

  At six-thirty, Hope Winchester filled her teakettle with bottled water and placed it on the gas burner. She was wondering whether she’d ever known anyone other than George who was willing to make personal sacrifices for God.

  She thought of her mother, who had made desperate sacrifices for her two daughters, but not for God. Her mother didn’t appear to believe in God, though Hope remembered the time when her sister, Louise, was running a perilous fever, and her mother had sat at the foot of the bed and wept and rocked herself. “Oh, God, oh, God, oh,

  God,” she had whispered over and over. It had frozen Hope’s heart to witness her grief. When she was older, Hope remembered wondering if it had been God who made Louise well.

  It was mystifying to her that George would choose to go back to prison, back into despair and hopelessness and even possible danger, when he could have chosen an easy life in Mitford. And yet, she sensed it wasn’t in him to choose an easy life.

  She walked to the front window of her two rooms above the Chelsea Tea Shop, and looked out to Main Street. The days had grown shorter; already the street lamps were shining against the gathering dusk. Three people passed on the street below, two of them carrying something covered by a tea towel.

  A choir member had invited her to the Lord’s Chapel supper, and she’d wrestled all day with the invitation. Never in her life had she cooked or baked anything for a covered-dish supper, and the thought of doing it and failing was humiliating.

  Worse still, what if she took something and no one ate any of it and she had to carry the dish away, untouched, while everyone else went home with empty platters?

  It occurred to her in the afternoon that she might buy a dozen corn muffins before the tea shop closed, and in this notion found a moment of glad reprieve. Bought muffins, however, might be a mark against her in some way she could only sense and not fully understand.

  She wished fervently that she’d never been asked, and found that she was wringing her hands again. The bright spirit she’d recently felt had vanished, and she was her old self, the worried, fretful self she’d been before the fall.

  She went to her boiling teakettle and looked at the clock on the stove. Six forty-five. As the supper was at seven o’clock, it was too late to worry about it anymore. The whole affair could at last be forgotten.

  She instantly felt both an enormous relief and an unexplainable sadness, something like the feeling she had when she realized she wasn’t in love with George Gaynor, after all, but counted him a friend.

  “And in this mountain the Lord of hosts will make for all people a feast of choice pieces, a feast of wines on the lees, of fat things full of marrow….”

  In his blessing of the meal, Father Talbot quoted from the prophet Isaiah, then invited all to break bread together.

  “Did you bring your brownies?” Amy Larkin asked Harley, who was ahead of her in the queue to the food table.

  “Yes, ma’am,” he told the eleven-year-old. “Right over yonder.”

  “I brought pimiento cheese sandwiches.” Her eyes shone. “No crusts.”

  “Where’re they at?”

  “Right next to the potato salad in the red bowl,” she said. “On the left.”

  He nodded, respectful. “I’ll make sure to have one.”

  Amy Larkin reminded him of Lace when she was still a little squirt, running to his trailer with a book under her arm. He hated she had grown up and gone off to school, but he knew it was for the best.

  He fixed his gaze on Cynthia’s lemon squares on the dessert table. He had set his mouth for a lemon square, and hoped he could get to the familiar blue and white platter before it was too late.

  “O God, heavenly Father, who by Thy Son Jesus Christ has promised to all those who seek Thy kingdom and its righteousness all things necessary to sustain their life: Send us, we entreat thee, in this time of need, such moderate rain and showers, that we may receive the fruits of the earth, to our comfort and to Thy honor; through Jesus Christ our Lord.”

  “Amen!”

  “Abide with me:

  fast falls the eventide;

  the darkness deepens;

  Lord, with me abide:

  when other helpers

  fail and comforts flee,

  help of the helpless,

  O abide with me….”

  The words of the eighteenth-century hymnist carried through the open windows of the parish hall and lifted on the mild September air.

  A block away, Hope Winchester thought she could hear singing, but wasn’t sure. Maybe she heard something that sounded like abide with me… and something about eventide, but she couldn’t be certain.

  She stood at her open window for what seemed a long time, listening.

  Hélène Pringle heard the faint sound of the basement door closing, and knew that someone had come in.

  When she saw Harley this afternoon at the gas station, he said he was having supper at Lord’s Chapel. “Are you goin’?” he asked.

  “Oh, no,” she’d said. “I haven’t been invited.”

  “Ever’body’s invited,” he’d told her. “Hit’s community-wide, you ought t’ come!”

  But of course she hadn’t gone; she’d felt terribly vulnerable last Sunday when the father preached on being thankful and had the odd notion he was preaching directly to her. She tried to recall if she had thanked God for anything, or only asked Him to give her something, as a child might make requests of St. Nicholas.

  She had grown fond of those times of talking through the curtain, to the one she supposed to be God. She still had no certainty that He cared or was even listening, but she hoped He was. In truth, it was increasingly important to her that He should listen and care, and that their time together be more than the figment of a spinster’s overwrought imagination.

  She turned the kitchen light off and was going along the hall when the phone rang. It would be a student, of course, canceling or rescheduling .

  “Allo!” she said in the French way.

  “Miss Pringle, it’s Hope Winchester. How are you this evening?”

  “Very well, Hope, and you?”

  “Good, thank you. Is…George Gaynor there? I hope this is no trouble.”

  “No trouble in the least! One moment, please, and I’ll call down.”

  She laid the phone on the hall table and walked to the basement door and opened it. “Mr. Gaynor! Are you there?” Though she called Harley by his first name, she had never felt comfortable calling Mr. Gaynor by his.

  “Yes, Miss Pringle?” George Gaynor appeared in a pool of light at the foot of the basement stairs.

  “You have a telephone call. Will you come up?”

  “Yes. Thank you.”

  “The receiver is on the hall table, just switch on the lamp.”

  Mr. Gaynor was an arresting fig
ure, she thought, as he appeared at the top of the stairs—quite handsome and dignified, not at all like someone who had spent time behind bars. “Please don’t hurry,” she said. “I’ll be upstairs.”

  “Thank you again.”

  It was étrange, she mused as she went up, that her next-door neighbor had somehow collected the three of them under one roof—what an odd assortment! She smiled at the thought.

  Ça alors! what a day this had been—Barbizon was in the foulest of tempers, and all three of her students had done poorly at their lessons. She would take a hot bath and put on sa chemise de nuit préférée and talk to the other side of the curtain.

  She paused at the top of the stair, attracted by laughter in the hallway. It was such an unusual sound, a man laughing in her house….

  “I said you could call anytime. Yes, it’s all right, I assure you.”

  There was a long silence. Hélène thought she should go to her room, but didn’t move from the banister railing.

  “Of course. I remember the day when the teachers came in, I was going to tell you about the prayer, but…”

  Her grandmother’s tall case clock ticked on the landing.

  “It’s a very simple prayer. Sometimes, people think they want something more sophisticated, or even complicated. But if you have a willing heart, it’s all you need, nothing more….

  “What will happen? That’s a good question.”

  Hélène heard him chuckle; it seemed a glad sound.

  “It would take years to tell you all that happens when you surrender your life to God. Perhaps forgiveness—I think His forgiveness may be the most important thing that happens….

  “Yes. Even for the worst stuff….”

  Hélène looked at the clock. In less than a minute, it would chime the hour. Her heart beat in her temples.

  “Surrendering your soul to Him changes everything. That sounds scary, but I found it downright terrifying when I presumed to be in control…

  “I understand. I had every reason, also. My uncle was a priest who stole six hundred thousand dollars from the church coffers—with the help of my father. I’ve found that if we keep our eyes on Christians, we can be disappointed in a major way. The important thing is to keep our eyes on Christ….

  “I can’t honestly say that I know what happy means. Let’s say that I’m certain…

  “About who He is, what life is for, where I’m going, what it means to be given a second chance….

  “Yes, you can pray it with me…whatever seems right to you.”

  Hélène heard the movement in the French clock begin to whir.

  “Thank you, God, for loving me…and for sending Your Son to die for my sins….”

  The first hour struck…

  “I sincerely repent of my sins…and receive Jesus Christ as my personal savior.”

  The second hour…

  “Now, as your child, I turn my entire life over to you. Amen.”

  The clock on the landing of the old rectory struck again, seven times.

  Hélène stood by the railing, breathless and unmoving, lest she betray to George Gaynor that she was standing there at all.

  When at last she went down the stairs to turn off the light, the hall was empty and the basement door was closed.

  When Volunteer Fire Chief Hamp Floyd got the call from a neighbor, he ran to his back door and flung it open. Naked as a jaybird and still clutching the cordless, he looked east.

  Rooted to the spot, he dialed the fire chief in Wesley.

  “It’s Hamp,” he said, his voice shaking. “Bring both trucks, I’ll have a lead car waitin’ at the corner of Lilac an’ Main.”

  He dressed in two-point-three minutes and, without kissing his wife, ran from the house to do the impossible.

  Father Tim heard the truck leave the fire station at two in the morning.

  He got up quickly and went to the window facing Wisteria, but saw nothing out of the ordinary.

  “What is it, Timothy?”

  “I don’t know. I’m going to throw something on and go down to the porch. Sounds like they’re headed north.”

  “I’ll pray,” she said.

  He pulled on his pants, shoved his feet into his loafers, and buttoned his shirt as he went down the stairs.

  “Stay,” he said to his dog, who was hard on his heels at the front door.

  From the porch, he saw a neighbor running toward Main Street.

  “What is it?” he called.

  “Fire on the ridge!”

  He ran to the sidewalk, hooked a left, and jogged toward Main.

  Several neighbors were standing in the street; a group had gathered on Edie Adams’s front lawn.

  Bill Adkins, dressed in pajamas and a windbreaker, nodded as Father Tim reached the sidewalk at Edie’s. “It’s a bad one,” said Bill.

  Father Tim turned and looked northeast, up to the long ridge where fire was turning the dark sky orange, where the clouds appeared lit by an eerie inner glow.

  “Clear Day,” he whispered.

  “Yessir. Looks like the truck went out mighty late.”

  “I should go.” He was suddenly chilled, shaking.

  “Nossir, I wouldn’t do that if I was you.”

  “That’s a huge fire.”

  “Yessir, there’s no way our truck can handle it, they’ll have to get help from Wesley. Lord knows I hope th’ woods hadn’t caught fire, dry as it’s been.”

  Ninety acres of parched timber bordering eight thousand square feet of heart pine, oak beams, and cedar shakes.

  “That yella truck’ll have t’ do th’ work of three or four red ’uns,” said an onlooker.

  “What if she’s up there?” he asked Bill Adkins.

  “In Florida would be my guess.”

  But something told him otherwise.

  Stricken, he prayed aloud the prayer that never fails: “Dear God, Your will be done!”

  “Amen,” replied a voice in the crowd.

  Neighbors in slippers, a few with their hair in curlers, continued to convene along the west side of Main Street, as if gathering for a parade. There were long periods of astonished silence as they looked east to the furnace on the ridge. Then murmurs of disbelief again rippled through the crowd, swelling into agitated talk and laughter.

  To Father Tim it seemed an eternity before they heard the twin sirens of Wesley’s trucks hauling south toward the Mitford monument. As the trucks came into view and swung left on Lilac Road, cheers went up.

  He walked toward home, praying.

  “That woman’s gettin’ back what she’s been dishin’ out.”

  “A little taste of what’s to come, you know what I mean?”

  Laughter.

  He walked on.

  “Hey, Father.”

  “Hey, Sam. Will you pray?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Cynthia would sleep through this; she could sleep through an air raid. He wouldn’t disturb her. But he needed her; he needed her to tell him what to do.

  “It’s bad, isn’t it?”

  She was sitting up in bed, waiting, her eyes wide.

  “It’s Clear Day.”

  “Dear God…”

  “I think any effort I could make would be useless. Three trucks, and maybe more coming, I don’t know.”

  “If you went, all you could do is pray; we can do that here. Come, sweetheart.”

  She held out her hands to him.

  He went to her and sat by her side and couldn’t stop trembling.

  He awoke at first light and lay quiet and uneasy, listening to the snores of his dog in the hallway.

  He thought for a while, trying to bring something forth from his befuddled mind, then got up and padded to the wing chair and turned on the floor lamp and picked up his Bible and turned to Isaiah.

  Toward the end of the twenty-fifth chapter was the prophet’s warning to those who would not trust, the reverse side of the bright verse that Father Talbot had used in his prayer only last night, thou
gh it seemed days ago.

  “For in this mountain,” he read, “shall the hand of the Lord rest…and the fortress of the high fort of thy walls shall he bring down, lay low, and bring to the ground, even to the dust.”

  Without waking Cynthia, he dressed and went downstairs, and made a call from the kitchen.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  A Place of Springs

  “They wadn’t no fire alarm that went off, is what they say.”

  Coot Hendrick was occupying the lead stool at Percy’s counter, and looking as ragged out as the rest of the early crowd.

  Father Tim took a mug of coffee from Percy and sat on the stool beside Coot. “I called Wesley Hospital this morning, on the chance they’d know something. It turns out Ed Coffey drove her over there, and she was picked up by a trauma unit. They flew her to Charlotte.”

  “Was she burned bad?” asked Percy.

  “Wasn’t burned at all. A ceiling beam and some of the plaster gave way in her bedroom—it’s serious, I think.” Clergy shared a few privileges with the press; they were sometimes given information that others couldn’t access.

  Percy rubbed his eyes. His house afforded one of the best views of the Clear Day property, and sleep had been scarce. “Tim Jenkins was th’ first one in this mornin,’ takin’ coffee to th’ ridge, said ’er house was about burned t’ th’ ground when they got there.”

  “They’ll be on th’ ridge a while yet,” said Coot. “Smoke’s comin’ off of it, big time.”

  “Took ’em a good half hour to get to th’ house from th’ road, Tim said they had t’ break down that electric gate she’s got, they busted th’ bloomin’ thing half t’ pieces t’ get in, then what d’you think?”

  “What?” asked Coot.

  “Turns out there’s a hedge of rhodos on either side of th’ road, runnin’ from th’ gate to ’er house—”

  J.C. wheeled in with his briefcase, blackened from head to toe and reeking of smoke. He took a mug of coffee from Percy.

  “We were just talkin’ about th’ rhodo hedge,” said Percy.

  “Man, what a mess. Th’ guys in the trucks didn’t know there was a back way to th’ house, so they tried gettin’ th’ trucks in through th’ front. Th’ rhododendrons have grown together, sides and top, ’til they’re tight as a steel culvert.