Little Faith, page 14
“So, we prayed over her. Now, I never claimed to be a healer. I didn’t claim I had supernatural powers, and in no way did I promise her it would change things, but a group of parishioners and I prayed over her, and guess what? The next Sunday she comes to church and says it worked. She held up her hands and they were still bent like broken tree branches, still totally gnarly, but she felt better. So what was I supposed to say? That the prayer hadn’t helped? That she still had two grotesque claws for hands? She felt better. It worked.”
“Huh,” Lyle grunted.
“Lyle, let’s just say, heaven forbid, that it was you who had cancer. Do you know how the doctors—every doctor in the world—how they’d advise you to beat it?”
“Chemo, diet, exercise, I don’t know . . .”
“They’d tell you that you have to believe you can beat it. You have to believe you can win. Now, you tell me how that’s different from prayer. You tell me how that’s different from what you were trying to do tonight for Hoot.”
“It’s false hope though,” Lyle said. “It’s not the prayer or belief that kills the cancer. It’s the chemo. You can’t believe that you can jump off a cliff and somehow survive. You can’t believe that you can shoot yourself and live.”
“It isn’t false hope,” Charlie said. “The cliff bottom isn’t your body, and neither is the bullet. The cancer is your body. Pain is your body. Grief and sadness and depression—those afflictions are in your body.” Charlie reached over to Lyle and poked him in the bicep with a forefinger. “Don’t you think your friend would rather see you there, believing in him, than out by the broom closet, moping around, having an existential crisis? I mean, come on, Lyle.”
“You’re not exactly making me feel better, Charlie.”
“I’m your friend, Lyle. Making you feel better isn’t part of my job description. I’m here to give it to you straight.”
“Yeah, well, I’m gonna get some more wood for this fire,” Lyle grunted.
“Fine,” Charlie said. “I’ll be right here, listening to Saint John Coltrane.”
Outside, the wind lashed Lyle’s face as he gathered an armload of dry oak from under the protected cave of the parsonage’s porch. The coyotes were close now, yip-yip-yipping, barking, and howling. The hair on the back of Lyle’s neck stood on end, and he was happy to step back through the door. He fed the fire two more logs and set the remainder of the pile beside the hearth on Charlie’s old wood floors.
When Lyle returned to his chair, his friend’s head was pitched backward, eyes closed, and mouth open, offering up the deep snuffling rattle of sleep. Lyle flipped the record and resettled the needle at the outer rim of the vinyl.
“No wonder you live alone,” Lyle said. “You snore like a buffalo.”
Roused from his brief slumber, Charlie took another sip of Scotch. The two men were quiet for a long time, just listening to the jazz and the gently crackling sizzle of the fire.
“This one day, back in Alaska, about, oh . . . twenty years ago now,” Charlie said, “I was working this crab boat. The owner was getting on in years and he, I guess, liked me, because when the weather was rough and he didn’t feel up to it, he trusted me with his boat, which is no small deal. The boat was his livelihood, you know. And not just that, it was his retirement, too.
“It was calm when we went out that morning, just me and these two other guys. One was an ex-con on the lam from some banks he robbed down in Oregon, and the other was this real soft kid from Cleveland who was working for a year or two to pay for his studies in the seminary. We teased him relentlessly and the ex-con was always trying to show him porno mags and tell him the dirtiest jokes. At times, I felt a little bad for the kid.
“Anyway, I guess I was a little cocky—hell, I know I was a little cocky—because I allowed us to get pushed way off course. The currents are really powerful up there and I was still learning their patterns, and the next thing I knew, we were totally lost, nowhere near our crab pots out in the Bering Sea. We might’ve been a thousand yards off the coast, or halfway to Japan—I really couldn’t tell you. I didn’t trust any of our gauges or charts and I just panicked. I didn’t want to radio back home either, because I was embarrassed, so I just pretended everything was fine and pointed us in a direction I felt pretty sure was home.
“The boat was old, and it wasn’t unusual that we’d have to troubleshoot a half dozen problems while we were out fishing. We never figured out what happened, whether we struck some shoal or hit an ice floe, but we began sinking, and fast. Sometimes I wonder if the old captain had sent us out there on a suicide mission. You know, sabotaged his own boat for the insurance money . . . Anyway, we got a lifeboat ready and all three of us hopped aboard just in time to watch her go down.”
“You’ve never told me this one before,” Lyle said.
“It’s not a story I’m very proud to tell,” Charlie continued. “And I wouldn’t be telling it, except that the seas were so calm. If it had been rough—and usually it’s as rough as it gets on the planet—we would have been dead. We didn’t have the gear to be out there like that in an open boat.
“But we just drifted through this fog so thick you could almost pack it in your hands like a snowball. And we listened. Listened for buoys. Listened for motors. Listened for anything. For hours we took turns blowing on our life-jacket whistles or screaming out.
“And then, out of nowhere, there was this pod of humpback whales and they swam all around us, breaching. They were so close that I reached out through the fog and touched one. I saw its eye. We looked at each other, man. For several seconds. That whale was closer to me than you are now. It was right there. And the ex-con and the kid touched the whales, too. They swam beside us for several minutes and then were gone. Beautiful phantoms.
“We’d all been working crab boats for several seasons and, I mean, none of us had ever experienced anything like that. Porpoises, sure. And it wasn’t uncommon to see a whale breach or blow. But this was different. It was . . . I don’t know . . . intimate, you know? Powerful.
“We were out there almost a whole day before the fog finally lifted and we were discovered by another crab boat. They took us aboard and gave us hot coffee, wrapped us in blankets. We’d drifted seventy-five miles from our home port. Another four hours later a serious storm kicked up and we would have been killed, I don’t doubt that for a second.
“When we got back to town, the two other guys and I went to a bar downtown for a cheeseburger and some beers. We all had the sense that we’d be going our separate ways. And I remember just sitting around, being real quiet, drinking my beer, and the kid saying to me, ‘That was providence that saved us. That was God’s work. The odds of us being found . . . The odds of the weather being so calm . . . The only reason we’re alive is because He’s got a plan for us. And I hope you two recognize that, recognize that we just experienced a miracle.’
“That night in the bar was the last time I ever saw that ex-con. But I remember, I’ll always remember, he finished his beer, he took that kid by the shoulder, and he said, ‘I never believed in God until we were out there on that water in that little boat. I think I do now. You know what changed me, bub?’
“The kid just blinked up at him and said, ‘Getting rescued?’
“And the ex-con looked at us both in the eyes and said, ‘The whales.’
“And we never saw him again. He rapped his knuckles on the table, dropped a twenty-dollar bill on his plate, and walked out of the bar. After that, no one would hire me on any crab boat. I was bad luck. The guy who’d sunk a million-dollar boat in still water. So I bummed around. Worked in salmon canneries, stayed with a girl for a while in a commune outside Ketchikan, dropped a lot of acid. And just before I got it in my head to come back here, I decided to buy a kayak and try to paddle that area where we’d seen the whales.
“I camped out in this beautiful cove. Huge Sitka spruce and cedar lining the coast and that cold, clear water. Crystal clear, thirty feet down. I just paddled around every day, fished for my food. Read a lot of Gary Snyder and Jim Harrison. Took photographs. Something was awakening in me and it had to do with those whales and that little boat. One day, I’m sitting beside my campfire on that cove, watching the water, and this huge humpback breaches completely out of the water, then crashes down. Just an epic splash. Like he knew I was there, like he was putting on a show. So I grabbed my camera, and I thought to myself, What are the odds that the whale will do that again?
“And it did. Not two minutes later. Breached completely out of the water right in front of me, maybe thirty feet offshore. I stayed at that campsite for another four days and never saw another whale. Then I came back here.”
“Isn’t that something,” Lyle said, clicking his tongue in appreciation. “You still have that photograph?”
“Lyle,” Charlie sighed, “I don’t need the photograph. I’ve got the story. I’ve got the memory, the wonder. Do you understand?”
“No,” Lyle admitted, “I guess I don’t.”
“I don’t need proof that God exists, Lyle. I know that there’s something more. I’ve felt it. It was in those whales and it’s in the coyotes outside this house. It’s in that fire and this old single malt.” He stood up from his chair and pointed his finger like a knife into Lyle’s breastbone. “It’s in you, buddy. It’s in me. You just need to figure out what your . . . I don’t know, where your whales are at. What they are. Because I know you see God in the world; I know you feel Him.”
Charlie stood up from his chair, sighed deeply, and stretched his back. “But now I’m tired and I’m going to bed. Good night, Lyle.”
“Hey, wait a minute, Charlie. You can’t just go to bed like that.”
“I ain’t a missionary, Lyle. I didn’t bang on your door tonight, trying to convert you. You came to me, remember? Don’t you think that’s telling? Here you are, in the middle of the night, as lost as I was out on that ocean, and you’re searching for something, but every time someone throws you a rope, you wander off in another direction.” Charlie threw his hands up in the air.
“Well, help me out then.”
“No, you gotta help yourself, buddy. I’m old, I’m tired, and I’m going to sleep. The damn furnace at church is about on its last legs and I gotta figure out how the hell we’re gonna pay for a new one. Or find some generous soul to volunteer his time to come resurrect the thing. I’m exhausted. Lock the door on your way out, will you?”
Lyle drank the remainder of the Scotch in a single gulp, patted the armrests of the old leather chair, turned the record player off, and walked back out into the cold, windy night.
(22)
THE APPLE TRUCK WAS OLD, DAMN NEAR AS OLD AS OTIS. ITS rusted bed was made a room by slats of ancient wood that rose up from above the wheel wells, so that standing there, among the loaded boxes of apples, pale early morning light fell in parallel yellow and white lines across the red fruit. Lyle moved about the bed of the truck, adjusting the heavy crates, stacking them up toward the cab before steadily moving his way backward to the tailgate. The morning sun was periodically obscured by low clouds banking in from Minnesota. Lyle felt the shadows chill his back and hands. His breath billowed.
It was shortly after dawn. He was not a man prone to complaint, but this morning was cold. He had stood in his kitchen for a while, holding his mug of coffee and letting the heat of the black liquid transfer through the ceramic into the cells of his callused skin. But not for too long. After last night’s spat with Peg, he wanted to leave the house early. He knew that he had violated one of the hackneyed folk rules of marriage, Don’t go to bed angry. Also, his head was fragile from Charlie’s Scotch.
Lyle didn’t drive the apple truck very often. No one did. Ordinarily, it sat in the lee of the apple house, collecting leaves in its bed, its tires bulging near the earth, cracked and low on air, as if the truck were too heavy for itself. But that morning, Lyle had been asked to bring a shipment of apples to a grocery store south of Redford, down the Mississippi, toward the Iowa border.
He had packed lunch in a brown paper bag. A salami sandwich with thickly cut cheddar cheese, a leaf of romaine lettuce, and Dijon mustard. A plastic bag of carrot sticks. A chocolate bar. And another plastic bag of pistachios for later, if necessary. He’d chuckled to himself there at the kitchen counter, thinking, No need to worry about buying an apple.
Before leaving the orchard, he laid a map on the bench seat of the truck and studied the crinkled paper in the gray light, tracing a finger over the day’s route. He knew those serpentine back roads buttressed over by the canopies of ancient trees; he’d taken joyrides all over them as a younger man. In places, the roads followed sandstone gullies and canyons where sparrows nested in the soft rock, forming honeycomb matrices of nests. The roads followed streams and lesser rivers toward the Mississippi, where the sky opened and, along the banks of that wide brown thoroughfare, escarpments and coulees stood against the sky—the tallest things around.
Lyle slid the truck into drive and slowly began to merge onto the road. He did not see the deer until it was almost too late.
The creature stood on the road, big-eyed and blinking, as it went on chewing a mouthful of wet ditch grass, its muscles twitching under the tall crown of antlers framing its head. Lyle slammed his foot on the brake, and the old truck jerked to a violent stop; from the bed came the sound of several crates crashing over, and then a cavalcade of apples plopping down. The deer bounded off across the road and in seconds was long gone. Lyle raised a hand as if in apology. Then he exhaled and, reversing the truck off the road again, sat inside the idling cab and trembled.
He looked at his hands, so thick and dumb. They quaked. He could not remember when they had last looked young or nimble. Lyle was glad it was still so early in the morning; he’d seen no sign of Otis or Mabel, no lights in their windows, no blue glow from the television, the newspaper still peeking out of their mailbox. He would not have wanted them to see him like this, trembling and unnerved. Or their possibly damaged fruit.
Glancing in the driver’s-side mirror, he noticed several apples in the gravel behind the truck. He placed the truck in park and stepped out. He commenced picking them up, gathering them in the concave fold of his canvas barn jacket. The apples were dusty. He examined them for bruises. Some he kicked into the tall grasses at the margin of the driveway. Once, in angrily trying to boot an apple, he actually slipped and fell onto the gravel, his back landing hard and flat on the little stones. He lay on the ground some time, the wind knocked out of him; it is always a shock, to lose control of one’s body so completely, so unexpectedly, to feel so fragile—and especially so as an adult. It’s commonplace enough to watch a toddler teeter over. Comical, even. But a sixty-, seventy-, or eighty-year-old? There is a good chance they might not stand back up, at least not without assistance. He looked at the palms of his hands where the gravel had left indentations, as if bitten by an animal with a mouth full of strange, erratic, and dull teeth. He bent his knees and sat up. All the apples he had collected were on the ground again. Where they want to be, he thought.
The diesel exhaust of the old truck hot at his neck and nauseating to breathe, he got to his feet and began collecting the apples again, placing them inside the last crate at the back of the load, and double-checked his cargo for wobbling cairns of fruit or spillage. The day was not brightening, but rather growing more gray. For the first time that year, he felt winter in the wind and examined the heavens for a sign of snow. Then he climbed back into the truck, placing the transmission in drive, and inched forward, and this time he scanned the road four times before moving out onto the lane in a slow and deliberate manner.
“Here we go,” he said aloud. “An old man in an old tank.” He rubbed the dashboard in affection. The dials before him were huge and simple. He liked them very much.
Through sleepy towns and unincorporated villages he drove, always ten miles per hour below the posted limit. In the cold, muddy fields cows drowsed, their haunches covered in filth, steam rising off their backs. Down in the ditches, grasses and old flowering weeds heavy with frost lay down until spring, their lines defined in silver and platinum. Only the oaks were too stingy to drop their leaves yet, and there they hung, crisp and umber red.
The truck lumbered on, incapable of great speeds, but taking the corners and meanders of the road with a kind of stable grace that made Lyle almost light-headed, as if he were steering some small, stout ship. He held the wheel in his hands that way, as if he were captain, loosely, attentively, happily. The heater kicked out a dry steady breath of air that warmed his shins and kneecaps.
Lyle studied the geology of the road cuts he passed through, and thought suddenly of a young woman he’d recently met at Coulee Lands Covenant, a woman who’d proselytized to Lyle and Peg about the dangers of teaching evolution in public schools, clearly unaware that Peg had spent her entire career teaching in the area’s public schools.
“How old are you?” Lyle had asked, even as Peg lightly swatted at his back with a paper church bulletin.
“Twenty-nine,” she answered, already a bit defensive.
“And how old do you think this planet we’re on is?” he asked, kindly.
“Seven thousand years,” she said firmly. “Give or take.” Her eyes were hard, dark.
He nodded and smiled. Then he said, “I’m no expert in evolutionary biology, geology, or anthropology; it’s been a long, long time since I’ve sat in a classroom. But I’m over sixty now. Getting close to seventy. That seems like a good chunk of what you’re calling our available history. And I have to tell you something. I hope I keep on evolving right up to the end. But I don’t know how it could be that I represent such a vast percentage of history. Wouldn’t that mean that my life, about sixty-five years so far, stood for, like, I’m guessing now . . . several dozen feet of bedrock? I don’t know the technical terms for these things.” He was sincerely interested in her opinion.
