Fiction

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The doorbell rang at the least opportune moment. Maddie had just placed a very fussy Constance down for a nap and the Westminster Bells doorbell had begun chiming as she was cautiously pulling the nursery door shut. She tensed and listened for a few seconds, hoping that the infant had not been roused by the sound of the bells. When she saw no movement above the crib bumpers, she tripped the latch and dashed to the front door in an effort to answer it before the visitor felt in necessary to ring a second time.

“Yes, hello,” she said softly as she threw the front door open.

“Afternoon, ma’am,” the large man in bib overalls said with a smile. “Is there a Kyle Valendar lives here?”

She studied him for a few seconds before answering. She pegged his Appalachian accent at somewhere in eastern Kentucky and realized this could only be one person from Kyle’s past.

“Yes he does, but he’s not home from school yet. You must be Oakie. Am I right?”

“Yes I am and yes you are. Seems the pastor’s been talkin’ about me. I hope he’s been kind. Well I’ll just wait in my car ‘til he gets home,” Oakie said after quickly checking his watch and realizing Kyle should be home within the hour if he ended up teaching high school as he had indicated the direction of his education was headed ten years earlier.

“No, no, no, no. You just referred to my husband as ‘pastor’. You should come on in and have some lemonade. We need to talk. Or at the very least, you need to talk and I need to listen. I’m Maddie.”

She had known about Kyle’s love of the Appalachian Trail since they were in high school. Kyle’s grandfather had planted a seed in his head when he was perhaps ten years old. His grandfather had lived between Gettysburg and Mont Alto State Forest in Pennsylvania, and they had often walked the several miles of the Appalachian Trail that passed through Mont Alto. During one of those walks, they had climbed Snowy Mountain, and the old man had suggested walking the entire trail someday. He had made a big deal of what an adventure such an undertaking would be. Over the next ten years, Kyle had, in bits and pieces, lived out a large percentage of that adventure. Sometimes it was on vacation with his family, others with friends from school whom he had managed to talk into the spirit of the adventure, but the last leg of the journey he had completed, the one that ran from where the trail crossed U.S. 64 in North Carolina to Amicalola State Park in Georgia, had been a solo effort.

On the bus ride home, a case of mistaken identity and arriving from a quick run to the local drugstore too late to catch the outbound Greyhound had landed Kyle in the company of Oakie Putvergen, a jack-of-all-trades from Siloam, Kentucky who had come to the bus station to pick up an intern from Royce Bible College. The intern in question, prompted by a letter from home indicating a sudden decline in his father with Alzheimer’s condition, had abandoned the three-week internship without informing the pastor of the church.

Because he had three weeks until the fall quarter of his junior year in college began, he gave in to the absurdity of the situation and volunteered to accompany Oakie for two of them. He had thought that perhaps he would find the makings of a term paper somewhere in the experience. The internship had amounted to little more than taking care of oddball chores for the older parishioners of the three churches that shared the sanctuary, but he learned a lot about mountain religion in the process, making it an invaluable two weeks. And because Oakie never explained that Kyle was not the expected intern, everyone from the church referred to him as ‘pastor’, a title he did not wear with ease.

As Oakie described some of the jobs Kyle performed in his role of ersatz intern, the front door opened. And before Kyle could ask whose car was in the drive, Oakie had shaken his hand and squeezed the breath out of him with a bear hug. After the shock of the encounter wore off, Kyle managed to ask the question the situation required.

“Oakie, what are you doing here?”

“Do you remember Kayla Wetherholt?”

“She was roughly eight years old, blonde, pigtails, looking for Grandma’s grave with her mother Peggy.”

“Yes. She’s eighteen now and I was giving her a ride to college. The folks in town told me not to bother coming back if I didn’t stop in to see how you were getting along, so here I am.”

“So, Kayla’s in college. Doesn’t seem like it was that long ago,” Kyle remarked with a touch of disbelief.

“What did you mean by ‘looking for’ grandma’s grave?” Maddie asked. “Surely her mom knew where the grave was located.”

“Surprisingly, no. Eunice Wetherholt had died six weeks earlier and this was Peggy’s first time in town in how long, Oakie?”

“She left town maybe three years before Kayla was born, so somewhere around ten years. Peggy had been looking for any excuse to leave town when she was in her teens and found one shortly after she graduated high school. That excuse rode a motorcycle and could quote Jack Kerouac like a preacher quotes John 3:16. Everyone in town knew this kid was bad news, but there was no telling Peggy.”

“Pardon me if this is off topic, but what were you doing in a cemetery, Kyle?” Maddie wondered.

“One of my chores was to landscape recently occupied graves. Once the weather had helped with the initial compaction of the earth in a new grave, the ground could be leveled out and grass seed planted. I had tidied up Eunice’s grave earlier that morning and was able to direct them right to it. During the walk to the grave, Peggy insisted that I explain my accent. When she realized that I was not a member of the community, she began telling me much more than I had any right to know. One of the pitfalls of my not having close ties to the town, I suppose. Some things are just easier to tell a stranger.”

Maddie drew her eyebrows together, cocked her head slightly and looked very directly at Oakie. He interpreted this look as a request for confirmation of Kyle’s account, so he shrugged and said, “I ain’t heard this story before. Do tell, Kyle.”



Kyle had maintained a discrete distance as Peggy and Kayla spoke quietly by Eunice’s grave. Peggy described in detail the experience of eating a piece of Eunice’s apple pie, how hard she had worked to support her family after Peggy’s dad had died in a mining accident, and the many sacrifices she made for the sake of Peggy, her brother and her sister. Toward the end of these recollections, Kayla’s attention drifted over to another part of the cemetery.

“Mama, did grandma like those flowers in that tree?” she asked and pointed to a magnolia tree in full bloom.

“Yes she did,” Peggy said and gave the youngster the go ahead to harvest a few.

As Kayla ran to the tree and began inspecting the flowers, Peggy turned and brushed a hand hard across her eyelids.

“First visit since the funeral?” Kyle asked cautiously.

“No, first visit since before Kayla was born. I was what you might call a willful child, a moody girl given to flashes of temper. I always thought of my mother’s efforts to tone down this obstinacy as attempts to keep me under her thumb, to control me. It’s a shame we have to become parents to understand our own parents.”

“I haven’t had that experience yet. What may I expect to learn?”

“You’ll learn that you should have said ‘thank you’ more often. As I give up small things that I might not have thought twice about purchasing or doing before I had the responsibility of another human being, I remember all the sacrifices my mom made for me. And then I remember all the times I’d do something foolish and how she would hurt over my actions. I now see that she was looking at those events through the lens of her sacrifices and was wondering whether or not they had all been made in vain.”

“I see. Then you are here to let her know that they were not in vain.”

“It took a lot of mistakes on my part, but I finally made it to where she knew I always should have been.”

“Not that I need to know any of the details, but what do you mean by that?”

“As I said, I took the limits she set for me as attempts to control me. After high school, I went out of my way to be uncontrollable. I took up with a man who never cared to meet his daughter, did many things I’d rather not admit to, and avoided God in the process because I viewed Him as the most controlling one of all.”

“But the limits God set for us are simply for our own good.”

Peggy laughed loud enough to cause Kayla to look up from the bouquet she was arranging. It had been a long time since she heard her mother laugh. “Where were you years ago when I could have used that sage advice? Not that I would have listened, mind you. Every evangelist who ever urged me to allow Jesus to have control of my life just put me off something awful, so you’d have done no better. But there was something to be learned by resisting control.”

“I’d be interested to know what defiance can do for you,” Kyle said.

“You might be surprised. Mostly I discovered what a train wreck life could become by insisting on being the person in charge. And when I gave that control over to Christ, I finally learned why he wants to be the one in control.”

“Really? And why is that?”

“First off, it’s not because he’s on a power trip or has some neurotic obsession regarding his creation. He wants to be in control of our lives because he knows that he is the only person in the universe who can control us without destroying us.”

“You know, that’s a keen observation and probably quite true.”

“Yes, but no one should have to pay as much as I did to gain such insight. If only I had listened when I was younger.”

“To your mom? What did she say?”

“I don’t know, I didn’t listen,” she said with a smile. “But seriously, I was referring to listening to God. You said you were only going to be here for another week. When you go home, will there be anyone other than your parents who will be glad to see you?”

“You mean like a girlfriend?”

“Yes, someone the sound of whose voice will cause you to get all twitterpated, ‘specially after a long separation.”

“Twitterpated?”

“Your pate is your head. Think of Elisha and some disrespectful teenagers who harassed him for being a baldpate. To have your head in a twitter means to be confused. When the terms are combined in a romantic sense, to be twitterpated is to be love struck.”

Kyle smiled with understanding and reached for his wallet. He had purchased the bi-fold just before he began this leg of his walk on the Appalachian Trail. From beneath the safety of a leather flap that ran the length of the wallet, he removed a strip of photos that had been taken in a booth located in one of the concourses of a local mall. He smiled as he recalled the circumstances of each of the poses. The first was serious and the poses got progressively silly from there. After a few seconds, he handed the strip to Peggy.

“ ‘Maddie and me, 6/12/96’,” Peggy read off the back of the strip. “She’s a pretty girl. Maddie short for Madeline?”

“Yes, Madeline Trumbauer. We’ve been friends since grade school and best friends since high. And sometime between now and when we graduate from college in two years time, we expect to be husband and wife.”

“Good for you. Have you kept in contact during your walk?”

“Yes, several times a week, in fact.”

“And when you talk, what is it about the discussion that brings the most pleasure?”

“Just hearing her voice. Listening to what she has to say. Telling her about how my days have gone seems like a chore. When I call her, I mainly want to hear how she’s been doing.”

“And that is exactly as it should be. The focus of the lover is the one loved. And I’m sure it’s the same thing for her. She wants to hear your voice and nothing else. Move this over to the spiritual end of life. If God is the supreme Lover of the universe, he wants to hear from us. Likewise, we should want to hear from him. Now that happens in a very real sense when we read his written word, the Bible. But if we listen as we pray and don’t just rattle off a list of needs and desires, we will sense something much deeper. The unexpected thought that speaks to the moment or the sense of peace regarding an area of pressing concern in our life. If I had cultivated the listening side of prayer when I was younger, I might have avoided several situations in life that taught me through difficult circumstances the same lessons I might have learned more easily by paying attention to a still, small voice.”



“I can’t believe you never told me that story,” Oakie said with a hint of disappointment.

“It seemed like a story that only Peggy should tell. I didn’t think it was my place to tell her tale. Besides, I don’t recall having a lot of time on my hands. If I wasn’t planing down a door or patching a leaky roof, I was being force-fed ten different varieties of cherry cobbler.”

“And he says that like it was a hardship,” Oakie said and shook his head sadly.

“That explains something that’s been bugging me for years,” Maddie said.

“What’s that?”

“How you managed to gain weight walking the Appalachian Trail.”



That Christmas, as Constance was pounding on a Fisher-Price xylophone, Maddie presented Kyle with a gift in a box the size of a two-drawer filing cabinet. Inside Kyle found a Tyco Baby Carrier. It was the Cadillac of hiking equipment designed to allow a hiker to bring an infant weighing up to forty-four pounds along for the walk.

“This is very nice…but entirely unexpected. Is there something you want to explain?”

“As you told me after our visit from Oakie this past year, the section of the Appalachian Trail you had yet to walk runs from Mont Alto north to Bear Mountain State Park across the Hudson River from Peekskill, New York. After this school year ends, you have seventy-five days before the next year begins. I think it’s time you finish what you started.”

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