Orchard of Hope (21 page)

This was a different kind of itch. The kind he had before he landed in Hollyhill, where he’d stuff his extra shirt and pants and his road atlas in his knapsack, get on his motorcycle, and move on down the road. But he wasn’t sure he was itching to leave Hollyhill. He was just itching to be out of the middle of Grand Central Station in Brookeville. A man needed some time to be alone. A man needed some time to think.

Then again it could be all the time he’d had to think in the middle of the night that was causing the itch. That and the Bible reading. He’d been doing a lot of Bible reading since the tornado had blown through his life. Sometimes he felt like a tornado was blowing through his soul when he picked up the Bible and started reading wherever the pages fell open. At first he’d read the Bible at the hospital because that was the only book there. Some Gideon had put it there, according to the front cover.

It wasn’t that he hadn’t ever read the Bible before. He’d been faithful in Sunday school as a little tyke, and Rosa had set great store by church while they’d been married. At one time Rosa thought their boy might even end up a preacher. For all Wes knew, the boy could have done it. He might be leading revivals all over.

Fate or the Lord or Mr. Jupiter, whoever it was who pushed the buttons that made things happen, had a funny sense of humor anyway. Here Wes was sleeping in the living room of a preacher whose daughter was wanting to call him Granddaddy. Jo was the reason that no matter how strong the itch got he wouldn’t leave Hollyhill. If he left Jo behind, he might as well just ride his motorcycle off a cliff somewhere and face whatever eternal reward was waiting for him.

He hadn’t spent a lot of time thinking about eternal rewards until the last few weeks. A man could sort of ignore the inevitable even when he knew how fast the inevitable could happen, the way it had with Rosa and Lydia. One afternoon they’d been on the beach in the full of the sunshine of life, and the next day, gone. Wes had done a lot of going since then, running away from even the memory of love until he’d gotten to Hollyhill and Jo had needed him. Or maybe it was him who had needed her.

Wes lay still and held his breath to see if he could hear any movement out on the porch where Jo was sleeping. Another reason he needed to move on out of here. It would be too cold for her to sleep out there once winter came. She’d need his spot in the living room. The Brooke house was running over at the top with people. And who knew? What with the way the man had been humming when he got up in the mornings lately, David might be thinking about moving in another female. Wes was pretty sure David’s song of choice hadn’t been out of a hymnal the morning before. It had sounded suspiciously like an Elvis number, “Love Me Tender.”

Wes didn’t hear a thing from out on the porch. Jo didn’t have the excitement of school to pull her out of bed early. She’d done all right at high school just the way he’d known she would even without the curly hair. She’d been typical Jo and jumped right in the middle of everything. The first day of school she had come home and sat on the porch with Wes, talking nonstop until Lovella made her help put supper on the table.

Jo was going to be okay. She was almost fourteen and she knew how to find answers to her questions. She’d be okay even if he wasn’t. Some days he thought he might hobble on through the valley he was in and come out okay on the other side. Other days the black of the valley closed in around him until he lost even the glimmer of hope of finding his way out.

He wished the sun would hurry up and get close enough to the eastern horizon to put some light in the day. He wanted to find that chapter in Philippians that he’d read the day before. He couldn’t remember all of it, but one verse stuck in his head.
I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth
me
. But that was Paul writing. And Paul was a man who knew what the Lord wanted from him. And why wouldn’t he? The Lord had literally knocked him down and told him what that was. Wes wasn’t hardly ready to put himself anywhere close to being in the same category as Paul. Even if there was another spot in the Bible someplace where Paul had said he was the chief of sinners. If old Paul was the chief, Wes wasn’t sure where that might leave him.

Still it had seemed like a sign when the Bible had fallen open to that “strengthening” verse twice in a row. Especially since Wes had been giving a lot of consideration to whether he had the strength to make it up the stairs back to his apartment. He was hoping he wouldn’t feel quite so old and helpless if he was living on his own again.

And there was another reason. He wanted to see if this drawing he was feeling toward the Bible was just rubbing off on him from David and Lovella and Jo. Maybe he’d forget all about Bible reading and go back to reading his science fiction or mysteries again. Maybe back in his old apartment he’d be able to lean on his own strength again.

He was sort of hoping he could, because he didn’t know what he was going to do if he kept feeling the Lord hanging out around his heart. He hadn’t been in a church building since Rosa and Lydia died. Swore he’d never go in one again after their funeral. He’d held them dying in the wreck against the Lord, as if the Lord had been driving instead of Wes. But living here, with David being so good to him and Lovella talking Bible verses with him and Tabitha letting him share in the wonder of her baby and Jo loving him so pure and simple, Wes could feel his heart softening. Twice already he’d thought about asking David to say that special prayer he sometimes talked about praying with people. The one where a man asked the Lord to save him. The one that David said the Lord always answered. The one that would change a man’s life forevermore.

But could Wes change? And if he did, what would people, what would the Lord, expect him to do next? Would he have to walk down a church aisle and look a bunch of church people in the eye and confess to his need for the Lord?

Maybe it would be better to just hole up in his apartment and never admit he felt a thing. Sometimes it was as if there was a war going on inside his heart. One he had no control over. One he had no idea who was going to win.

22

When David came down the stairs as the sun was beginning to push fingers of light over the horizon, Wes was in his chair, already dressed and sipping coffee with a couple of books in his lap, but he wasn’t reading. “Don’t you ever sleep?” David asked. “And where did the coffee come from? Is Jocie up already?”

“Ain’t heard a peep out of her. Don’t think she’s even put the dog out yet. As for the coffee”—Wes lifted up his cup toward David—“I ain’t totally helpless. There’s a whole pot if you want to get a cup and join me. That is, if you ain’t on the way to walk with the girl.”

David looked toward the door. He hadn’t walked with Leigh for days. He’d wanted to, but he had to take Jocie to school. It was part of their father-daughter routine. He always dropped her off at school before he went to the newspaper office. He couldn’t just suddenly tell her she’d have to start riding the school bus. She might think he was deserting her. She might think it had something to do with what had happened in July. She was already carrying around enough worry about that with feeling so to blame for Wes getting hurt. David didn’t want to add any more worry and certainly not even the shadow of doubt about how much he loved her.

But today was Saturday. David could go. It was still early. The sun was just peeking over the horizon. Maybe he could even work up the nerve to ask Leigh out to dinner. She’d told him the day before when he went by the courthouse that she was going to visit her parents that afternoon, so maybe he could meet her somewhere in Grundy. Someplace where they had candles on the tables. Then he tried to remember how much money he had in his pocket. Probably not enough for a restaurant that keeps candles on the tables.

David looked back at Wes. The shadows under the man’s eyes were getting darker. The skin was just hanging off his bones. The man was fading away in front of David’s eyes. His friend was hurting and not just because of his broken leg. This went deeper. Some kind of soul sickness. The doctor in Lexington called it depression when David had called to see if there was anything he could do for Wes. Dr. Curtis had offered medication but said Wes had turned the pills down while he was still in the hospital.

“I’ll see if he’s changed his mind,” David had told the doctor. “But I doubt it. We can’t even get him to take an aspirin when the pain starts thumping in his leg.”

“He did seem set against taking any kind of pills,” the doctor agreed. “Failing medication, you can try to get him to talk it out. Is he eating all right? Sleeping okay?”

“Not eating much or sleeping well.”

“Classic symptoms,” Dr. Curtis said. “He isn’t suicidal, is he?”

“Suicidal?” David hadn’t even thought about that, although he knew what depression could do. He’d preached funerals of people who had put a gun to their head rather than face another day. But Wes wouldn’t do something like that. Not as long as Jocie was around. “No, I don’t think so.”

“Then patience might be your best avenue. Most people weather these storms, and when Mr. Green is once again able to do some of the things he could do before he was hurt, he’ll most likely move away from his depression. Still, it might be best if you kept a close eye on him. Not every person who thinks about suicide talks about it.”

So now David smiled at Wes and said, “Sure, coffee sounds great.”

“It’s extra strong,” Wes said.

“Of course it is, if you made it. You need a refill?”

Wes held out his cup. “I could use it. I couldn’t carry it but half full.”

David looked at the cup, then at the crutches lying by the chair. “How did you carry it at all?”

Wes clamped his teeth on the handle of the cup and held his head sideways as he demonstrated. He took the cup out of his mouth and said, “I had to move pretty slow to keep from sloshing it out.”

“Did you ever consider you might be too addicted to coffee?” David said with a laugh as he took the cup and went out to the kitchen.

When he came back and handed Wes his filled cup, Wes said, “Better coffee addictions than some others.”

“That’s for sure. But speaking of that, I talked to Dr. Curtis the other day.”

Wes took a sip of his coffee before he asked, “How come?”

“I could say it was to do with you going back to get the rods out of your cast, but that wouldn’t be entirely true.” David looked straight at Wes. “We need to do that next week, but that wasn’t why I called.”

“I told you I wasn’t going back over to that hospital. Dr. Markum can take the cast off here.”

“If you haven’t already trimmed it off yourself, right?” David looked down at the floor and was relieved when he didn’t see any plaster dust there.

“I haven’t been whittling on it since I told you I’d wait a spell.”

“Dr. Markum can’t do the rods. You’ll have to go back to Lexington for that, Wes. After that, he said he could handle it from here. It’ll just be one more time to the hospital.”

“One more time until the next time. Them city doctors like to bleed a man dry.” Wes took another drink of coffee. “So why did you call him, David?”

“I was worried about you, Wes.” He kept his eyes on Wes’s face. “I am worried about you.”

Wes just looked at him for a moment before he said, “I appreciate all you’ve done for me, David. I really do, but I ain’t a child. I’m a grown man, and you don’t have to take me on as a new responsibility. You’ve got enough of those as it is.”

“You’re not a responsibility. You’re my friend, and I can’t just sit here and watch you sinking so low without trying to help.”

“No, I guess not. So what did the good doctor say? Slip pills in my coffee?”

“I wouldn’t do that,” David said. “Although he did say he could prescribe some pills if you wanted them.”

“Nerve pills. He said something about them before, but he couldn’t give me no guarantee that they wouldn’t just make me crazier.”

“You’re not crazy. You’re just feeling down because of being hurt.”

“I do feel down,” Wes admitted. “Sometimes down for the count.”

“And you’re not eating or sleeping.”

“I eat some and sleep some.”

“But not much. Not enough.” David searched for the right words to say. Words that would help Wes walk out of the dark valley he was in. He wasn’t sure the words that came to his mind were the right ones, but he said them anyway. “I’ve been praying for you.”

“I know you have, David. You and Jo and Lovella. I feel hedged in with prayers here,” Wes said, but he didn’t look upset.

“The Lord sometimes hedges us in with blessings.”

Wes stared down at his coffee cup. “He took the blessing hedge away from Job.”

“He did,” David admitted.

“If he’d do that to a good man like Job, what might he do to a man like me?” Wes looked up at David. “So maybe it’s better to stay outside the hedge in the first place.”

“I don’t think so,” David said. “I always want to be inside the hedge of the Lord’s love and mercy, and I’ll try to be like Job and trust him in the face of whatever happens.”

“But I ain’t sure I’ve got that much trust, David.”

“Maybe you need to start with just enough trust to trust what you’re feeling and stop fighting against it.”

“You could be right, but I want to be sure it’s me doing the trusting and not just me leaning on the trust that echoes in this house. Doesn’t it have to be my own doing and not just what somebody else wants?”

“It does. I can pray for you, but somewhere, sometime, you’ll have to take that prayer over and make it yours.”

“That’s what I thought.” Wes looked back down at his coffee again.

David waited a minute hoping Wes would say more, but when he didn’t, David asked, “Do you want to take the prayer over?”

Wes mashed his mouth together and then after a moment, sighed. “Not yet, David. I think I need to get out of here, out of the hedge of your caring for me, so that I can make sure it’s me doing the praying for me and not me only pretending to pray to please you and Jo. You see what I’m saying?”

“I think so, Wes, but there’s one thing you have to realize. You can never get out of the hedge of our love for you. Whatever you do, whatever happens, you’re part of our family now. You always will be. If you decide to join the family of God, we’d celebrate your decision with you.”