Read Online A Morning Like This by Deborah Bedford - Free Book Online

The Needle. David returned
     his attention to the rocky terrain at their feet. For several hundred feet he climbed in silence again, to where a granite
     face rose to the east.
    “Abby put my turntable in a garage sale and I had to grab it out of someone’s hands. All those people wandering the front
     yard, and I put it back inside the house. Imagine. I wouldn’t have any way to play my old albums from college.”
    “Do you play your old albums from college?”
    “No. But that doesn’t matter. It matters that I wouldn’t have any
way
to.”
    A narrow vertical crack split the tower of rock, suitable for climbing, but Nelson continued plodding uphill. He didn’t stop
     until they’d traversed a high ledge onto one large, conspicuous boulder. “Nelson, every other preacher I know goes to The
     Pines to relax with a round of golf. You’re the only one I know who has to climb.”
    “Sarah sold my clubs at a garage sale.”
    Below them the valley sprawled like a gathered skirt, the Snake River rickracking a border beside the straight seam of highway.
     To the northeast glistened Jackson Lake, sunk into sage flats and gleaming like a mirror. To the southeast lay the Lockhart
     hayfields, already green from a first cutting. David grasped his pack and sprinted on ahead of Nelson. He knelt on all fours
     and crawled through a narrow tunnel formed by the angle of one huge boulder.
    Nelson scrabbled through behind him. “The Eye Of The Needle,” he said.
    “Appropriate name.”
    After that, they climbed for a while without talking. David’s thigh muscles began to burn. He welcomed the pounding of his
     pulse, the rich aching in his obliques.
    If everything goes the right way
…
    As each step became harder, he embraced the fierce physical exercise.
    …
Abby won’t find out what I’ve done
.
    He leaned into the slope, climbed higher, earning both his progress and his pain.
    If everything goes the right way
…
    With each step, he did penance, made restitution to himself and to the mountain.
    …
I can hide this
.
    “Hey,” Nelson said between breaths when they finally stopped to rest. “Got…a question…to ask you.”
    “What’s that?”
    “You like that Husquvarna chainsaw you bought?”
    “It’s a good one. Six-point-one horsepower engine. Best chainsaw I’ve ever had.”
    “Next time you go out to cut firewood for the church with your chainsaw, can I go with you? I’d love to get my hands on that
     piece of equipment.”
    “Sure.”
    “One of the occupational hazards of being a pastor. Having men serve the church so well that I never get out to do the fun
     stuff myself.”
    “You’re too important,” David said. “Think what it would do to the congregation if a tree fell on you.”
    They started up again. The landscape opened into tundra, continuing north, following a faint track in the loose scree and
     crossing hard-frozen patches of snow. Long ago they’d discovered that from here they could see all the way to Gannett Peak
     on a clear day. David shaded his eyes and searched for it now, some sixty miles away against the southeast horizon, the crowning
     height along the purple line of the Wind Rivers.
    “Probably the same thing it would do to them if I fell off a mountain,” Nelson said.
    The air was growing thin, making it harder for them to breathe as they climbed.
    “It’s hazy, isn’t it?” David said between gasps. “I don’t know what happened to the sun.” For a long time, he stood on the
     edge of a precipice, looking out, staring off into the distance. Nelson stood on the outcropping beside him, eyes raised to
     the sky and to the heavenly Father beyond the sky. If anyone had been watching them with binoculars from the valley below,
     they would have seen two human figures jutting beyond the silhouette of the mountain, their statures confident, their feet
     braced wide, as if by gaining height there, they’d gained perspective on the world.
    A deep bass-note of thunder