These High, Green Hills (49 page)

“I’m going to get her at nine o‘clock and bring her to see you.”

“Oh, Father,” she said slowly, “you don’t have time to be ferrying people around.”

“It’s my job to ferry people around, if it has anything to do with you.”

She turned her gaze to him. “I wasn’t going to tell you this, Father, for it might give you the big head ... ”

“Tell me!” he said, urgent. “Whatever it is, I promise I won’t get the big head.”

“We’ve had seven priests in my eighty years at Lord’s Chapel, and you ... you are the one who has loved us best.”

He swallowed hard. Whatever he did, he must seize the moment. “And the thanks I get from you is no more stories?”

She closed her eyes and smiled. “When you come again,” she said. “But I hope you won’t expect too much, Father. I think I’ve spoiled you with stories of angels and painted ceilings, and broken hearts that never mended.”

“Miss Sadie, you can tell me anything. You can read me the phone book, for all I care! Just keep ... ”

She looked at him.

“Just keep being Miss Sadie.”

She closed her eyes again and he bent down and kissed her forehead. “Would you like me to bring you a bag of donut holes?” Please say yes, he thought.

“Oh, no. No.”

He tried to sing “Love Divine, All Loves Excelling” as he drove down the hill, but he could not.

“Happy birthday!” crowed his wife, kissing his face.

“What in the world?”

“Wake up, sleepyhead, it’s your birthday! You’re now a full seven years older than me, and I’m thrilled!”

“Being seven years older than you will last less than a month, so enjoy it while you can.”

“Oh, I will, I will! Now sit up, I’ve brought your coffee.”

“I’ve never had coffee in bed in my life, except for a cup Dooley brewed when I had the flu. What time is it, anyway? Good Lord, Kavanagh, it’s not even daylight.”

“I had to do it now because if I didn’t, you’d be careening down Main Street in that funny jogging suit, or in your study doing the Morning Office.”

“What is this?” he asked suspiciously, taking the tray on his lap and looking at something discreetly covered with a napkin.

“First, drink your coffee. Then I have a little present for you.”

“A present? At five‘clock in the morning? This is earlier than I ever got up for Santa Claus when I was a kid.”

“Isn’t it fun?” she asked, sitting cross-legged on the bed.

“For you, maybe. I have my hospital visits, two meetings before noon, Winnie Ivey to fetch back to the bakery, and a sermon to finish so I can squire you out to dinner Saturday evening. Not to mention another round with the computer technician.”

“Oh, dear. Dave?”

“Dave.”

“Ummm. Drink your coffee, dearest.”

“By the way,” he said, “happy anniversary of ... well, you know.”

“Say it, you big lug.”

“Of the night I hauled myself down on one knee and recklessly abandoned my freedom, my liberty—”

“Your boring existence as a dry old crust...”

“Exactly.”

He had taken his first sip of coffee from his favorite mug when the phone rang. No, he thought. Please, not that....

It was Nurse Kennedy. Someone had been critically burned. Would he come and pray at the hospital, or did he want to do it at home?

“Pray,” he told Cynthia as he hurriedly dressed. “A burn victim.”

All he could think as he drove up the hill was, Why, God?

“They don’t know who it is, Father. It’s somebody from the Creek, that’s all I can tell you. Dr. Harper’s having a trauma surgeon fly in who knows more about what to do. He and Dr. Wilson are both working in there. He says to pray like you’ve never prayed before.”

“It’s bad?”

“It’s very bad.”

Bill Sprouse had talked about families who got burned out at the Creek, but that was in winter, when kerosene stoves and open fireplaces posed a threat.

He didn’t dare think....

He ran after the retreating nurse, his heart pounding. “Kennedy! Is it a girl?”

“I don’t think so, Father. Is it important to know?”

“Yes!” he said. “Very!”

“I’ll find out as soon as I can.” She walked away quickly, the soles of her shoes making loud squishing noises along the empty hallway.

Kennedy knocked lightly and opened Hoppy’s office door. “One of the nurses says it’s not a girl. It’s an adult female.”

“Do you know who it is, then?”

“No, sir. Nurse Gilbert says the patient can’t talk, and whoever brought the patient didn’t stay.”

“No idea who she is?”

“They said she’s wearing a bracelet with the initials LM. I think Dr. Harper wants you with her when she goes to isolation, that’s what I heard—but he hasn’t come and said anything to me.”

“Whatever,” he said, meaning it.

There were two choices, Hoppy once told him. A doctor could believe the patient was going to live, or that the patient was going to die. He had referred to something a patient told him about her former physician. She said he hadn’t believed she was going to live. In fact, she went on to say she felt like the doctor’s attitude was killing her.

Nurse Kennedy rapped on the door and peered in.

“Father, Dr. Harper wants you in isolation in ten minutes. He asked me to give you a run-down.

“It’s a forty percent burn, primarily on the left side of the body and mostly third-degree. No eye injury, but a lot of grafting will be necessary. They’ve put the patient on a respirator, to keep the airway open. It was a flash burn with kerosene, there was some inhalation injury, and swelling was occluding the airway. She can’t talk, even without the endotracheal tube, and probably won’t be able to for several days.”

“grafting...” he said, remembering a seminary friend who was in a car accident.

“Yes, sir. They’ve just washed off the debris and given her another shot of morphine for the pain, but there’s a lot of pain that can’t be controlled. The trauma surgeon said to talk to her, it will calm her. We hope you don’t mind doing it. You’re so good at it.”

“Of course I don’t mind. Anything else I should know?”

“Dr. Harper will tell you anything else. They’ve admitted her as LM, for the time being. Want some coffee?”

If he had passed out when Sassy Guthrie came into the world, what might he do in the face of this hellish thing?

Isolation.

As he opened the door to the gray room, he felt he was stepping into a place removed, out of time. And the smell. There was always the alien smell of fluids that didn’t belong to the human frame, but could, nonetheless, sustain it.

The suffering beneath the mound of wet dressing was palpable. He felt the impact of it like a blow.

He walked to the bed and looked hard at what he could see of the patient. Only a small portion of the right side of her face was visible, distorted by the large tube that entered her mouth. The smell of saline, which permeated the dressings, came to him like a sour wind from the sea. Dear God. Could he speak?

The patient opened her eye and gazed into his, and he suddenly felt the power to do this thing surge through him.

“You’re not alone. I’m with you.”

Tears coursed from her eye onto the pillow, and he took a tissue from the box by the bed. He started to wipe her tears, but instinctively drew back, afraid of inflicting pain with his touch.

“I’ve asked the Holy Spirit to be with us, also.”

He had seen eyes that beseeched him from the very soul, but he hadn’t seen anything like this in his life as a priest.

He had no idea where the thought came from—it seemed to come from a place in him as deep as the patient’s desperation. “I’m asking God to give me some of your pain,” he said, hoarse with feeling. “I’ll share this thing with you.”

She looked at him again and closed her eye.

He brought the chair from the corner of the gray room and placed it next to her bed, and sat down.