Cornered! (3 page)

Reverend John Andrews was driving
in the direction of Arrow Junction from the opposite end of the S formed by Route 7. He was not thinking of Billy Quirter any more than Sam Dickens was, because, not having a radio in his ageing Ford, he had not yet heard of Billy Quirter at all. But he was thinking, in a vaguely general way, about Ann Burley, Dr. Hugh Stewart, Ted Burley and Bob Saywell, because all of them were actively or inactively a part of his congregation.

Specifically Reverend Andrews was thinking desperately about what he was going to say to his flock that next Sunday morning. The trouble was that although Reverend Andrews felt his faith so strongly that the intensity of it often gave him actual physical pain, he could seldom communicate that faith to his flock.

In the three years that Reverend Andrews had been the minister for the Lutheran community of Arrow Junction, there had been numerous times when his wife Lottie had gotten up in the middle of the night and found the good reverend on his knees making an impassioned appeal to the heavens to give him more adequacy of communication.

But that did not mean he wished to be exactly like Reverend Maynard Styles. Now as he and Lottie were driving home from the Babcock Ministers’ Conference, Reverend Andrews was even more certain that he did not want to be exactly like Maynard Styles.

“It was a nice conference, wasn’t it?” Lottie asked. When Lottie and Reverend Andrews had been married, Lottie’s daddy, Horace Tellwinder, had described his daughter as, “Just a big little girl.” That was twenty-three years ago. Lottie was an even bigger little girl now. But she had retained that tiny voice, and nobody, including Reverend Andrews, thought of her as anything but a little girl. She adored her husband. Though the Reverend was smaller-boned, an inch shorter and a good deal leaner, nobody ever thought of large Lottie as anything but Reverend Andrews’s little girl.

“Yes,” Reverend Andrews said, “it was a nice conference, Lottie.”

“The food was so good.”

“Yes, it was.”

“Dear, you seem so blue.”

“No, I’m not. I’m feeling very thankful that the Good Lord allowed us to make this journey with so much enjoyment.”

“I know that, dear. But even if you’re grateful to the Good Lord, that doesn’t mean you can’t be blue, does it? I wish you’d tell me. You always keep things to yourself.”

Reverend Andrews shook his head. “I don’t know, Lottie. We should always think well of our brothers, particularly our brothers who have rallied to the call of the Lord and taken up the yoke of duty. But—”

“You’re thinking about Maynard Styles, aren’t you? I know what usually makes you upset. You think Maynard is—well—”

“Don’t say it, Lottie. Let’s leave judgments up to the Good Lord.”

“Well, I can’t help but feel that Maynard isn’t always thinking about the Good Lord.”

“Now, Lottie.”

“It’s true. He didn’t seem to be thinking so much about the Good Lord when he kept going on about how much the church in Babcock was paying him. And then about that extension to his house.”

“Jealousy is the Devil beckoning, Lottie.”

“I do wish we could have a little more money. But I’m not jealous, John. It’s just that Maynard seems to be more concerned with worldly things than a good minister ought to be.”

“He’s doing very fine work, Lottie. You know that.”

“I know that. And he talks an awful lot about it too. Just because we all grew up in Arrow Junction, I sometimes think he tries to make us jealous. Talking on and on about his programs over KWTC. I don’t think that’s the way the Good Lord likes things to be done.”

“Now, Lottie,” Reverend Andrews repeated, but Lottie had opened the tap that allowed the whole disturbment of being around Maynard Styles wash through his mind. Even as he prayed for an unembittered attitude, the Devil kept beckoning.

Maynard Styles was a tall broad-shouldered man with a handsome and strong profile. There was the strength of Samson in his looks. Reverend Andrews, when he examined his own insignificant features in the morning mirror, often wondered at the Good Lord’s oversight in this unequal distribution.

Moreover Maynard Styles owned the voice of thunder, a voice that caused Reverend Andrews something very close to shame when he compared it to his own slightly rasping sound that always seemed to fog in the middle of particularly emotional utterances.

Yes, Maynard Styles certainly owned all the physical assets that a good minister would want to own. But for a good number of young years Maynard Styles had been quite deaf to the clarion trumpet of the Lord. Reverend Andrews well remembered one evening in 1932 when Maynard Styles had been discovered drunkenly passed out in the middle of the main street of Arrow Junction.

But of course Maynard did change his ways after he’d gone off to agricultural school at the University.

He’d come back loudly proclaiming his new dedication to becoming a worker for the Lord. Reverend Andrews had never heard a more enthusiastic vocal pledge to reform than Maynard Styles had made.

And the truth was that Reverend Andrews had never been sure that the switch from farming to preaching had been done entirely for spiritual reasons.

Reverend Andrews’s career had produced one long siege of austere existence as he and Lottie moved from one tiny community to another, finally winding up back in Arrow Junction. But a minister’s life could produce something else, as Maynard Styles had proved.

Maynard Styles had been able to settle comfortably, if not grandly, in Babcock. He had his three-times-a-week broadcast over KWTC, which brought his voice to so many that it would be no time at all before he went on to Omaha or even Chicago. He had his large house with its fine study and fireplace. He had his good gabardine suits, his Stetson hats, and that new De Soto. Reverend Andrews was not at all sure that Maynard Styles could have done so well materially at farming as he had done at ministering. Certainly there would not have been so much ego satisfaction in plowing the land.

Reverend Andrews tried to shake free from that kind of thinking. Judgments, as he’d told Lottie, should be left up to the Lord. And if sometimes distributions seemed unequal, well, the Lord often saw to balances in His own way.

“Storm seems to be getting worse,” Lottie said. “It’s a good thing they’ve been through here with the snow plow. I wonder if they’ve been through between Graintown and Arrow Junction?”

“Let’s hope so.”

“Are you hungry, dear?”

“I am a little, yes.”

Lottie lifted from the back seat one of several cardboard boxes left over from the conference. It was filled with cold fried chicken.

“I think maybe I’ll just keep driving through tonight, dear.”

Reverend Andrews settled himself more firmly behind the wheel. In truth he had to keep driving because he didn’t have enough money to stop at a motel for the night. But Reverend Andrews nonetheless sent up his prayers of gratitude. The windshield wipers were working fine. The heater was giving out good heat. The time spent driving might very well solve his problem of what to say on Sunday. Reverend Andrews was suddenly more content.

They had plenty to eat, after all. There was a gigantic quantity of fried chicken in the back seat. Despite the fact that Reverend and Lottie Andrews had consumed enough fried chicken over the past twenty-three years never to want to hear a chicken cackle, you couldn’t deny that it was always good chicken. The Good Lord was just, Reverend Andrews reminded himself.

“Here, dear,” said Lottie. “You can have the wishbone this time.”

Earlier that day, Dr. Hugh Stewart
had watched Ann Burley open her eyes in Bob Saywell’s store and known the feeling about her he’d been trying so hard to avoid could no longer be avoided.

That had been at late morning. He’d driven her home. He’d taken her into her house. He’d been with her alone.

Now, as the wind increased and darkness moved in late that afternoon, Hugh Stewart paced his small office on the second floor of a building facing the main street of Arrow Junction.

A quiet man, Arrow Junction had labeled Hugh Stewart. They had even developed a form of distrust for it, neatly prodded along by Bob Saywell. But the quiet was but an outward control for Hugh Stewart to cover the inner fires.

Hugh Stewart walked across the office and stared at the turbulence outside. This storm—it was like the storm that had begun in him early and continued to reappear, seasonally, with the same inclemency that storms built and raged over these Midwest fields.

Hugh Stewart stood silently, a tall man who did not look tall because of the slim well-proportioned body. The slimness, like the quiet, was deceptive. He was a little over six feet. But he weighed one hundred and eighty-one pounds. Nobody in Arrow Junction would have guessed that. There were a lot of things about Hugh Stewart that nobody in Arrow Junction would have guessed.

He turned, looking at the simple neatness of his office. It was clean, normal, economically equipped. He was now a small-town doctor. And he was not even successful at that. Hugh Stewart lifted his hands and looked at them.

They were large hands with long, strong fingers. He had not used those hands with the true skill they owned since he’d gotten here. He smiled bitterly. He wondered what Dr. Emil Ludgaard would think about that. Perhaps, he thought, Emil Ludgaard would understand. Perhaps Emil Ludgaard had understood a lot about him.

Hugh Stewart had never talked anything but medicine and surgery with Emil Ludgaard. In those terse working days the walls of that New York clinic formed a barrier against anything else.

“You could be a great surgeon, Hugh,” Emil Ludgaard had said in his softly clipped, European-accented words.

Emil Ludgaard was a great surgeon himself. He did not make mistakes in judgment. He never lied. It was an occasion when he offered the faintest compliment.

“You could be a great surgeon, Hugh…”

Yes, Hugh Stewart breathed to himself, a great surgeon…

His mind raced back through the tunnel of time; those childhood parentless years. He’d been just seven months old in 1926 when that Atlantic boat had sunk and killed both parents. But he’d been saved, handed ashore to an aunt who was too busy, too pretty, to want an orphaned infant seven months old.

Later he’d learned something about his parents through this sister of his mother’s. He’d learned about their gaiety, their money, their whirlwind life of excitement. But he’d really understood nothing. Not even later when the Crash had disintegrated the family money and sent the aunt to sudden poverty and too much alcohol, when she’d finally drawn a razor across her wrists.

He’d been found in that small apartment with her. Hungry. Dirty. Screaming his lungs out. He had not understood then. But later he did, through the lean and lonely years of being shunted from family to family. The same fire blazed inside himself, he’d discovered, that must have blazed inside his parents and his aunt. But the elements around him were different. He learned to case the fire in armor.

But he had not been entirely unlucky. There had finally been Uncle Ben, clear on the opposite coast in California.

Uncle Ben had given him understanding and love. It was a quietly good time with Uncle Ben, who was not really his uncle but the uncle of his father. There was a neat picket-fenced cottage. There was a room of his own. If he’d felt any insecurity before, he lost it with Uncle Ben.

Uncle Ben had worked with him and been proud of the results. It was high school by that time. It was study and athletics. He’d accomplished both. Honor student. Star halfback.

He’d achieved his accomplishments quietly, trying to hide the fire. But the fire exploded now and then. Twice with girls which only gave him a reputation that was not uninviting to other girls. They were a little afraid of him. The bolder and better-looking of them searched him out. When, almost invariably, he continued with his quiet and his armor, they went away puzzled.

The fire exploded in other directions too. He found a sudden switch of interest and discovered medicine. As a result the athletic drive lessened. The summer after high school he worked with an ice company, loading cakes of ice. But every night he’d gone home and pored over books. The hunger for medicine became full-blown.

Uncle Ben had been steadily behind him. Grayer now. More bent. Working at his factory job with uncomplaining good humor.

“You want to be a doctor, Hugh. I’ll help all I can…”

But Hugh had refused help then. He would not be a burden to Uncle Ben. He’d gotten a football scholarship. He played adequate but uninspired football for three years, getting all the pre-med he could, and working as a janitor to pay for the small room he rented.

Then the Army. When he returned home, the hunger was greater.

Uncle Ben said, “Now let me help you, Hugh. You can’t waste more time. Medical school will take all your time…”

He worked, earning what he could when he could at whatever he could find. He went to school the year around. Uncle Ben helped him. It wasn’t nearly enough. But somehow it worked out. He made it. Uncle Ben, white-haired now and thin, cried the day he graduated.

Then came internship and residency. He knew, of course, what kind of doctor he wanted to be by then: the best kind of surgeon. The power of the desire was so great that it frightened him.

He took long and hard walks at night, wondering at the flames inside him. Once, in the blackness of a cold winter night, he felt the flames might explode and disintegrate him, leaving nothing but a flashing brilliance in the night, then only blackness. That was the first time he got really drunk, waking up in the cheap room of a girl with whom he could not remember being. He was spent and dry and shaking…

Uncle Ben was behind him always. “It’s right for you, Hugh. Being a good surgeon. I’ve talked to doctors who work with you. They believe in you.”

And Hugh had replied, “It’s more study and more money, Uncle Ben. It’s for somebody else. I’ve got to pay you back now—”

But Uncle Ben had insisted. And the hunger was great.

New York then. The finest specialists in the profession. The final, truest training, the honing of a talent to razor’s edge.

He’d worked harder than ever before, the fire steadying to a red-coal glow. He’d worked with a dedication that allowed for nothing but work, using the money from Uncle Ben without questioning.

Then that final specialized training was almost over. He’d reached a zenith; they would use him for one of the most important operations any young colleague of these professional masters had ever performed in the clinic, proof of his achievement. Uncle Ben would, at last, realize the fruits of his belief and help.

But the red-coal glow was again fanned into flames the night before the operation. Uncle Ben died. He died almost penniless, having given Hugh all he could and more. He died without knowing the final victory.

Once again Hugh Stewart gave in to the flames. He woke up in a jail cell this time, five hours after Dr. Emil Ludgaard himself had successfully performed the operation Hugh Stewart was to have performed. He woke up black-minded and exhausted, empty and grim.

“It’s all right, Hugh,” Dr. Ludgaard had said, his tired blue eyes avoiding Hugh’s. “You broke up that tavern terribly. They’ll raise hell at the clinic. But I’ll smooth things.” Dr. Ludgaard, like Uncle Ben, would not let him down. “These things happen, Hugh. You thought a great deal of your uncle.”

“No,” Hugh said. “It was more than that. It was—”

He had not been able to explain. He didn’t know. It was simply that finally he no longer trusted himself. The flames would steady to coals, but they did not cool and die. They were always waiting. The kind of talent he now owned was not a talent to be offered unreliably.

He’d decided. He would settle for being a general practitioner. A country doctor. Not a specialized surgeon. This would demand all his energy. The work would come at him in a steady stream. But it would not be likely to build to excruciating delicacy. A country doctor’s duties required of a man all his general medical ability, but it was not often channeled to that final thin blade. In emergency that could be left to others.

But now here he was. Out of touch with all he’d learned in the clinic. Out of touch with Emil Ludgaard. Lost in the center of a corn-belt flatland. The escape from delicate life-or-death responsibility he’d wanted had been more complete than he’d bargained for. There was
no
responsibility so far. Nothing.

Yet the flames had flickered again, threatened to blaze once more.

Hugh Stewart sat down at his desk tiredly, rubbing hands through his hair. Ann Burley. He hadn’t counted on that at all.

Yet he could think of nothing else. Her face was etched in his brain. It was the way she’d looked when, after he’d kissed her, she’d turned her face away from him, trembling…

There had been no forewarning. Nothing of substance said between them. They had stood apart in that farmhouse. In Ted Burley’s farmhouse…

But the unsaid, unadmitted communication was as real as though it could be seen, like spitting sparks along a high-tension line. They’d come together roughly. She’d met his fire-driven passion equally. Then they had stopped.

He’d left swiftly and returned to his office. Now here he was as the darkness crept into an unlit room. The emptiness, the grimness, had returned.

He was startled when the knock sounded on his door. He stood up, frowning. There were so few knocks at his door. He opened it, blinking in surprise.

Ann Burley stood there, blond hair rumpled, wide-spaced brown eyes staring at him as through long distances and a hundred hurts. There was a bruise darkening her left cheek. Blood showed at the corner of her mouth.

“May I come in?” she asked as though dazed.

He helped her in quickly.