Somewhere Safe With Somebody Good (23 page)

‘It would be a pain, all that banging and hammering.’

‘But the final result would give you pleasure.’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It would. Let me finish this book and we’ll talk about it.’

‘When will you finish?’

‘May, I think. Or maybe June, July.’

He needed to remember that he went through something like this with every new book, worrying about her eyes, her right arm, her neck, her shoulders, her lower back. Who said art isn’t manual labor, right up there with digging ditches?

‘How about a long weekend in Whitecap?’

‘Not now, sweetheart. Let me finish the book.’ She plopped the other foot in his lap. ‘And maybe one day . . .’

‘One day what?’

‘. . . we can go across the country in an RV.’

He laughed. ‘Where did that come from?’

‘I think about it a lot. All that lovely freedom—parking in churchyards overnight, stopping at flea markets, sketching in meadows. I’ll let my hair go gray and knit while you drive.’

What a wild notion. He never knew what to expect from his wife.

‘Speaking of hair,’ she said, ‘when are you going to get a cut?’

The bloody nuisance of it.

•   •   •

H
E
LAY
AWAKE
, listening for Dooley to come home. Barnabas would bark a couple of times, out of courtesy to the household.

Eleven-thirty.

Ten ’til twelve.

Midnight.

Dooley was twenty-two years old. Kenny was nineteen, soon to be
twenty. Yes, but Sammy was seventeen, and there was the memory of the college president’s son and his surly minions.

Twelve-twenty.

There went the barking. A light glowing on the stair. Dooley coming up and going to his room across the hall and the stair light switching off and the door closing.

Thanks be to God.

•   •   •

T
HE
PHONE
RINGING
 . . .
ONE
O
’
CLOCK
.

Addled, he remembered that Dooley was across the hall, so this wasn’t the call every parent feared.

‘It’s Mary Talbot, forgive me, Father. It’s Henry . . .’

‘Henry.’

‘He left the house at six this evening. In his running clothes.’ Mary Talbot was breathless, as if she had been running. ‘He hasn’t come home. I should have called sooner, but I hated to involve . . . You’re the only one . . .’

‘His car?’

‘It’s here. His billfold, his watch, everything is here. What shall I do, Father? I mustn’t call the police, it would attract attention . . .’

‘Let me think. No, let me dress. Don’t worry, I’ll be in touch.’ He hung up, grabbed his khakis from the back of the chair.

Cynthia stirring.

‘I’m going out for a time. Henry Talbot.’ He pulled on a shirt, a sweater, cords, socks, a jacket; it was cold out there. His wife turned over, sighed, slept on.

He needed a flashlight, he needed Dooley.

‘Wake up, buddy. Wake up.’

‘What?’

‘I need you to come with me. Sorry. Get up.’

Dooley got up, sat on the side of the bed, stared at him. ‘What?’

‘It’s important. Please get dressed.’ He handed over the clothes Dooley had just taken off.

•   •   •

D
OOLEY
DROVE
THE
PICKUP
to the hospital and around to the rear of the building and parked near the entrance of the trail into the woods. In the beam of their headlights, cans, bottles, fast-food bags, detritus.

‘What do you think?’ said Dooley.

‘I’m not thinking, just going on instinct. This is where he runs, I don’t know, it could be a dead end.’

They got out of the truck; he switched on the flashlight.

‘Spooky,’ said Dooley.

‘Why anyone would run back here is beyond me.’

They entered the trail, which he had checked out years ago as a possibility for his own route—a round-trip three-mile stretch of rough ground, tailor-made for spraining an ankle or sprawling over the gnarly roots of old trees.

If Talbot left his house at six, he would have had less than thirty minutes of diminishing daylight. An odd time to go running over this terrain.

‘Man,’ said Dooley.

‘Thanks for coming with me.’ He didn’t like the feel of this. ‘How did it go at Bud’s?’

‘Some guy from Winston merked Sammy, they were shootin’ straight pool.’

‘That’s good.’

‘What’s good?’

‘Losing once in a while will help keep his feet on the ground.’

‘Yeah, well, I don’t like losing.’

‘Who does?’

What had Talbot lost, that he would run only where he could hide?

They concentrated on negotiating the path and ignoring the trash. He was so wired, his teeth chattered. Maybe they were wasting precious time in here, and yet the hunch was too strong to ignore. The night was damp, claustrophobic; a nearly full moon had vanished behind sullen clouds.

Midway into the path, they heard a movement to their right. An animal scurrying through leaf mold. And the smell . . .

‘Puke,’ said Dooley.

They stopped, panned the trees with the beam of the flashlight. Maybe someone had come in here with a bottle of whisky, but the smell was different—he knew the stink of alcohol-related vomitus.

The small movement again; the sour reek. The hair stood on the back of his neck.

‘Careful, Dad.’

He lowered the beam, illumined the form sprawled in the leaves by a tree. ‘Who’s there?’ he said.

A voice—hoarse, unintelligible. Somebody drunk or in another kind of trouble.

He was aware of a slippery feel beneath the soles of his shoes as he walked toward the tree; he stumbled, righted himself, the fumbled beam of light picking out a couple of empty water bottles, a discarded jacket, Henry Talbot’s agonized face.

Dear God.

He fell to his knees. Henry lay on his back, eyes open, pupils dilated. Henry’s hairpiece was missing. The sight of him without it was jarring.

‘“Living darkly,”’ Henry whispered, ‘“with no ray of light . . .”’

He handed the flashlight to Dooley, pressed his fingers to the carotid artery, felt the faint, rapid pulse.

‘Henry! It’s Tim and Dooley Kavanagh.’

The suffocating smell.

‘Can you get up? Can we help you up?’

‘I was coaching back then . . .’

‘Let’s get him into a sitting position,’ he said. ‘Go easy, we don’t know . . .’

Henry Talbot might have been a rag doll, his limbs and torso dead weight, his upper body and running shirt slick with vomit. He could not be set upright or brought to his feet; they laid him again on the ground, on his back. Apparently nothing was broken, or pain would be evident. They needed a plan.

Talbot was easily six-two, one-eighty or one-ninety. No way to get an ambulance or Dooley’s truck into these woods.

‘We’ll have to carry him out, what do you think?’

‘We can do it.’ He heard the alarm in Dooley’s voice, and the resolve.

But he’d been too quick. Wilson lived roughly a block from the hospital, and had a golf cart—Wilson’s wife was often seen wheeling her husband’s lunch to the side entrance.

‘Better plan. Go to Wilson’s house and ask for the golf cart. Tell him we’ll see him in ER, and bring a medic with you if one’s available.’

Dooley hesitated briefly, then set off running.

The light bobbed along the trail and vanished—he was alone in the night with a man who could be dying.

‘Jesus,’ he whispered into the darkness.

This was a dream, nothing about it smacked of reality. He shivered in the damp air and felt about for the jacket to put around Henry, but it was saturated with a cold slime, and useless.

He had spent a few nights camping with youth groups, but was hardly an outdoorsman. The silence unsettled him; he needed the sound of the human voice, he needed something to put under the head of a broken man lying in the woods, surrendered to fear and
remorse. There was nothing to do but wait. He hunkered on the ground by Henry’s side.

‘“Living darkly, with no ray of light . . .”’ He repeated Henry’s quote, drawn from the half-delirious poem by John of the Cross.

‘“And darker still, for I deserved no ray.”’ Henry’s voice might have emanated from an octave never before heard.

‘God loves you, Henry.’

‘“Love can perform a wondrous labor . . . and all the good or bad in me takes on a penetrating savor . . .”’

His hand gripped Henry’s shoulder, to give some mite of warmth.

‘It is very hard to die. Or if I have died, I confess I expected more.’ A deep tremor in Henry’s body, his whole frame agitated, the breath ragged. ‘Perhaps this is purgatory, or I have passed directly to Sheol. But the people . . . the people . . .’

‘Tell me.’

‘They had grown fat on honey and I gave them bitter root. Tell them I learned to love them. Lying here, it came to me that I love them and deeply repent of my cold disfavor toward them and our Lord. I was unable, I was coaching then. Ask them to forgive my manifold sins against God and this parish. It was winter, you see, and I was but ten years old; my sled had come apart against a tree . . .’

He placed his hand on Henry’s head and prayed aloud. ‘Nothing can separate us from your love, O Lord. Thank you for releasing us from the bondage of believing we are worthless and rejected . . .’

‘Up there . . .’ Henry’s voice coarse from the heaving.

The moon had escaped cloud cover and silvered the canopy of branches. ‘Up there, the heavenly realm, and here, O Lord, am I, a worm awaiting your claim. Will you have me?’

‘He will have you, Henry.’

‘“Living darkly, with no ray . . .”’

Their voices mingled on the night air.

‘For you, Lord,’ he prayed, ‘have not given us the spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind . . .’

‘“. . . and quickly killing every trace of light,”’ Henry whispered, ‘“I burn myself away.”’

•   •   •

‘H
ARD
TO
ASSESS
,’ said Wilson. ‘No way to know how much or when he took it, he’s too confused to tell us anything.’

‘What was it?’ said Dooley.

‘Acetaminophen and diphenhydramine. The empty bottles were in the pocket of the jacket you brought in. It’s a common mix for the suicide demographic who prefer ingestion.’

‘He left the house at six,’ he said. ‘There were empty water bottles with him on the trail. Let’s say he got the stuff down right away. We found him at one-thirty, one-forty . . .’

‘It’s three forty-five now,’ said Dooley, ‘so around ten hours.’

‘The tests show thickened blood,’ said Wilson, ‘some liver damage, and the kidney function is off. We hung a couple liters of saline on him, gave him an antidote, and the chopper will have him to Winston in forty-five minutes—before five, say, or about eleven hours from the overdose. Twelve hours out and he’s in big trouble. So by a hair, by a hair.’

The doctor he’d recently thought a cub looked pretty old right now.

‘What about ID?’ asked Dooley.

‘On his wrist. A band.’

‘Dad notified his wife.’

‘She’ll have to get here fast.’

‘She won’t be coming,’ he said.

‘Not even the children know what’s happening,’ she’d told him on the phone. ‘I’ve lived the last thirty-four years putting a good face on things for Henry. It’s useless for me to come, for there’s no longer a good face to be put. I love Henry more than life, Father, but I will
go through with the divorce. I declare the agony ended forever on this terrible night. I’m sorry—for everything. Thank you for all you’ve done.’

‘I hope we can keep this quiet,’ he told Wilson.

‘Nobody will hear it from me, but I can’t make promises for anyone else. You know the Mitford grapevine.’

They waited in the hall for Talbot’s gurney. ‘My son’s going to be a doctor,’ he said, proud.

Wilson eyed Dooley with approval. ‘You’ll make a good one, I’m sure. Your speciality?’

‘Animals,’ said Dooley. ‘Not people.’

The doctor volunteered a grin. ‘Animals are people, too.’

•   •   •

T
HE
CHOPPER
USED
TO
LAND
in Baxter Park; now there was a helipad on the roof of the hospital. He read again the bronze plaque at the door of the elevator to the pad:
A GIFT OF THE IRENE AND CHESTER MCGRAW FAMILY
. He remembered that Chester had been flown to Charlotte from the pad he funded, and died en route.

Cutcutcutcutcutcut . . .

At 4:10, the machine lifted off the roof of Mitford Hospital and, in the starless night, burned itself
away.

H
e had called the bishop at seven-thirty to brief him on the harrowing circumstances of last night.

‘This changes everything,’ Jack Martin had said. ‘I’ll meet you in the vestry a little earlier, say ten-fifteen, we’ll celebrate together. The Lord be with you.’

According to Bill Swanson, Bishop Martin was not only never late, but known to arrive early. Now he was late by more than forty minutes. In alb and stole, he paced the confines of the minuscule room where the choir changed, the priest vested, offerings were counted, and, occasionally, an anxious bridegroom waited.

Bill Swanson’s face was beet-red as he rushed into the vestry and closed the door. ‘Bishop Martin can’t make it, Father. He just got cell phone service. A rockslide on the mountain, quite a few people badly injured. Very serious. No cars getting through, he says.’

He stared as if the senior warden had spoken in another tongue. On every side, wreckage. Debris hurtling into the air and then falling, falling . . .

Bill Swanson’s left eyelid twitched. ‘Bishop says tell you to carry on. What can I do?’

‘Pray.’

‘Say as little as you can, would be my thinking, Father, and let the vestry handle the rest at the parish meeting. All hell will break loose when they get the details. No need for it to break loose in the eleven o’clock.’

The congregation wouldn’t know what to make of seeing Tim Kavanagh in the pulpit; they would be heartily up for the flamboyance of the bishop’s mitre and crozier, and for learning what Talbot had in mind for the bishop’s unexplained visit. They would have the momentary shock of the old priest to work through, which would, perhaps, condition them for the blow to follow.

He could go head down into the wind and make the announcement before the opening hymn. But no, the opening hymn would give them all a chance to settle in and connect with whatever familiar words had been selected. It was a packed house, with people sitting on chairs in the aisle and standing at the rear, the usual case with a visit by the bishop. Something was up, everybody knew that much.

‘I’m ready,’ he said to Bill. Exhausted, strung out, wired, and ready.

Bill Swanson was reeling from this, but thumping him on the back with good cheer. ‘When th’ bishop can’t make it, Father, God himself shows up.’

He embraced Bill and walked from the vestry into the nave and bowed to the cross and ascended the steps to the altar and the organ played and he turned to the people and lifted his hands for them to stand. They rose with a great
swoosh
, as a single body, and he opened his mouth and the words learned as a child came forth with sweet accord.

When morning gilds the skies

My heart awaking cries

May Jesus Christ be praised!

When evening shadows fall

This rings my curfew call

May Jesus Christ be praised . . .

‘Blessed be God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit,’ he said.

‘And blessed be his kingdom,’ the people said, ‘now and forever.

‘
Amen
.’

‘Almighty God, unto whom all hearts are open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid: cleanse the thoughts of our hearts by the inspiration of thy Holy Spirit, that we may perfectly love thee, and worthily magnify thy holy Name; through Christ our Lord.’

‘
Amen
.’

He felt his heart pierced through; the terrible constriction in his throat. His wife knew something had gone wrong. From the second row, gospel side, she gave the sign that she was praying—a slight raising of the forefinger of her right hand held against her cheek. And there was his dazed and sleep-deprived son sitting next to her, and thank God for his support.

‘Bishop Martin is unable to join us this morning. He sends his profound regret from a scene of unthinkable tragedy on the mountain—a rockslide gravely injuring many people. The bishop is unhurt, but traffic will be delayed for some time.

‘We must remember Bishop Martin in our prayers and those who, though unknown to us, are yet brother and sister in this mortal flesh. We ask God for his great mercy upon all whose lives were changed this morning on the mountain . . . and for each of us gathered here today.’

The word mercy struck a chord among the congregants. Why would they need God’s mercy in the same measure as those poor souls in the rockslide?

‘I am grieved to say there is more to tell you this morning. But
before it is spoken, I bid you listen carefully to what our Lord Jesus Christ saith:

‘Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it: Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself . . .

‘Our neighbor and your priest, Father Henry Talbot . . .’ He looked to Cynthia.
Help me
.

‘. . . is in urgent need of your love, your forgiveness, and your prayers. Bishop Martin asks me to tell you that Father Talbot’s duties as priest of this parish are officially ended.’

No gasping or seeming mortifications. Only stunned silence.

‘Father Talbot has charged me to tell you that he is deeply repentant for not serving you as God appointed him to do, and as you hoped and needed him to do.

‘He wished very much to bring you this message himself, but he could not. He bids you goodbye with a love he confesses he never felt toward you . . . until this day. He asks—and I quote him—that you might find it in your hearts to forgive him his manifold sins against God and this parish.’

He felt the tears on his face before he knew he was weeping, and realized instinctively that he would have no control over the display. He could not effectively carry on, nor even turn his face away or flee the pulpit. He was in the grip of a wild grief that paralyzed everything but itself.

He wept face forward, then, into the gale of those aghast at what was happening, wept for the wounds of any clergy gone out into a darkness of self-loathing and beguilement; for the loss and sorrow of those who could not believe, or who had once believed but lost all sense of shield and buckler and any notion of God’s radical tenderness, for the ceaseless besettings of the flesh, for the worthless idols of his own and of others; for those sidetracked, stumped, frozen, flung
away, for those both false and true, the just and the unjust, the quick and the dead.

He wept for himself, for the pain of the long years and the exquisite satisfactions of the faith, for the holiness of the mundane, for the thrashing exhaustions and the endless dyings and resurrectings that malign the soul incarnate.

It had come to this, a thing he had subtly feared for more than forty years—that he would weep before the many—and he saw that his wife would not try to talk him down from this precipice, she would trust him to come down himself without falling or leaping.

And people wept with him, most of them. Some turned away, and a few got up and left in a hurry, fearful of the swift and astounding movement of the Holy Spirit among them, and he, too, was afraid—of crying aloud in a kind of ancient howl and humiliating himself still further. But the cry burned out somewhere inside and he swallowed down what remained and the organ began to play, softly, piously. He wished it to be loud and gregarious, at the top of its lungs—Bach or Beethoven, and not the saccharine pipe that summoned the vagabond sins of thought, word, and deed to the altar, though come to think of it, the rail was the very place to be right now, at once, as he, they, all were desperate for the salve of the cup, the Bread of Heaven.

And then it was over. He reached into the pocket of his alb and wondered again how so many manage to make it in this world without carrying a handkerchief. And he drew it out and wiped his eyes and blew his nose as he might at home, and said, ‘Amen.’

And the people said, ‘
Amen
.’

•   •   •

A
T
THE
CHURCH
DOOR
, Buck Leeper gave him a crushing embrace.

A fellow who introduced himself as a visitor nodded and said, ‘Right on.’

The soldier in Army uniform with his family from Wesley waited
until others had gone through the line. He embraced the boy—so sober, so young, younger than Dooley.

‘Where are you serving?’ he asked.

‘Armageddon,’ said the boy.

Eileen Douglas threw up her hands and shook her head with wonder and said nothing.

Which, God knows, was saying a lot.