The Cure

by Athol Dickson

  He remembered digging the pit in the clearing beside the bodies, Hope using their one and only shovel, him on hands and knees with a metal dinner plate, violently refusing help from everyone else in the search party, both of them beyond all words, beyond humanity itself, and then a glimpse of something moving at the edge of the clearing, a flitting sense of color, and dropping the plate to run toward it, hearing it just beyond that tree, just around those bushes, following for five, ten, fifteen minutes until at last he saw her, the sole survivor of her people, a little girl, bleeding wrists still wrapped up like a gift in yellow rope, Waytee’s grandchild, the last living daughter of those savage murderers—or so he had thought them then—the only innocent, who would become his perfect Bree, standing in a fresh mown field, amidst a halcyon swarm of gnats, or angels.

  The frowning judge had turned to look at him. Riley forced himself to listen as the off camera lawyer spoke again. “Mr. Lee Hanks said they would kill the girl? You heard this personally?”

  “Yes.”

  “What did you do then?”

  Riley heard the woman speak of rifles at her back, and white men speared like rodents, and Waytee, giving her the cross that Riley himself had carved for Hope on the occasion of her birthday, the cross Hope gave to Waytee on the day the old man told her he saw Jesus very very much, the cross someone had thrust into his hand in the darkness at Henry’s store, given to him as a payment for the cure. Riley thought of that cross somehow stolen from the old woman by a savage from another tribe in a different jungle, the cross trimmed with golden foil from a box containing chocolates that Hope had given to the murdered children of The People, that cross protecting the old woman, so she said, as every member of his little flock was slaughtered in the clearing, and Riley remembered the flavor of sobriety in the alley by the garbage bin, the surprising chocolate flavor, and he thought about the cross that had traveled this full circle and returned into his hand, the cross that had put him in a cell for murder, just as he had been imprisoned by his conscience all those years for that very crime, a crime of which it now seemed he was innocent, and Riley Keep began to wonder if there might be weights that you must lift and lift and lift again until they crushed you, or until you understood that they were never really there at all.

  “Mr. Keep, are you all right?”

  He nodded at the judge, saying, “Yes, sir,” forcing himself to stare at the woman on the screen, who said, “For the first few years I moved every three months or so, changing my name and appearance every time. I lived in South America, then Mexico, then Arizona, Texas, Utah, and Nebraska. I spent all my spare time and money on synthesizing the chemicals in the plants. It was really hard under those conditions, but after almost five years, I learned how to do it. I figured out how to make the cure.

  “Then I took a chance. I went to see my brother. I knew Mr. Hanks probably had someone watching, but I had to give the cure to my brother. It worked, of course. Everybody knows it works, now. But after a few weeks my brother started drinking again. He didn’t have the urge anymore, but he started drinking anyway. And when he took that first drink the urge returned, just as Waytee said it would. I couldn’t stop it. My brother died six months later.

  “That’s when I knew I had to find the last piece of the puzzle, the way to make it really last. So I tracked down the reverend, or at least I got as far as finding his wife and their adopted child. I—”

  “Excuse me, but are you talking about Reverend Keep?”

  “Oh, sorry. Yes, Reverend Keep.”

  “Why him?”

  “Waytee told me he had the secret of making the cure last.”

  “Are you saying Reverend Keep had part of the formula and you had the other? Because if that’s the case, then we need to rethink this lawsuit.”

  “No, I’m not saying that at all. I’ll get to it. I just want to tell this next part first, okay?”

  “Of course.”

  “Okay, so I moved to the Keeps’ hometown of Dublin, Maine, and changed my name and appearance again, and I waited. See, the reverend had disappeared. Nobody could tell me where he was. I was afraid to show too much interest, because then someone might wonder why I cared. I was afraid of way too many things back then. I was always afraid, always thinking Mr. Hanks would find me. I was even afraid Mr. Hanks had killed the reverend, but Mrs. Keep seemed to think her husband was still alive, so I waited.

  “The worst part of that stupid fear was having the secret to the cure and not being able to share it. I knew Mr. Hanks would come for me if I made it public, but I wanted to help as many alcoholics as I could, so I went to work at this little homeless shelter they had in Dublin. It was horrible, getting to know those guys but not being brave enough to give them the cure. I couldn’t stand it after a while, and started healing some of them. I didn’t give it to everyone. That would have attracted too much attention, and besides, I had already seen it was useless for people like my brother. But many of them really seemed to want to stop. I did my best to sort them out from the others and I slipped it into their meals at the shelter. That way they wouldn’t know it was me, or anything else about how it happened. They just realized all of a sudden that they didn’t feel the urge to drink anymore.

  “So, anyway, I did that for a year or so without any problems. Then the man who ran the shelter retired, and I took over on my own, and I guess I got impatient. I started curing too many of them. Word got out and more and more homeless alcoholics came. One of them was Reverend Keep.

  “Well, I was devastated. I mean, I had no idea he was an alcoholic. I sure didn’t know he was living on the streets. As soon as I saw what he was, it was obvious he didn’t have a clue about the cure, much less any way to make it permanent. So I gave up on that. I decided it was time to figure out a way to get the formula into the hands of the public just the way it was.

  The man off-camera said, “You say `get the formula into the hands of the public.’ Does that mean sell it to a pharmaceutical company? Make a lot of money for yourself?”

  “Oh, no! I just wanted everyone to have it. Everyone who needs it.”

  “Then why not just call a press conference? Make an announcement?”

  “I should have. But I was so afraid of Mr. Hanks. It was like a disease, my fear. It clouded my thinking. I thought I had to find a way to get the word out without attracting attention to myself. But everything seemed too risky. I kept thinking of scenarios and then shooting holes in them. I just knew Mr. Hanks would figure out I was behind the cure, no matter how I made it public. I was a witness to what he did, how he ordered his men to murder that whole village. I knew he’d kill me too. So most days I just wanted to keep the cure to myself. But there were other days when I knew I couldn’t keep it secret anymore. I went back and forth like that for a couple of weeks.

  “Then a man died in my shelter. He sat down on the floor and drank a bottle of rubbing alcohol and just died, and I knew it was my fault. I killed that man. If only I had enough courage to give the cure to the world back when I first discovered it, he would have lived. I felt sick. I mean I literally threw up, okay? I remember kneeling by the toilet thinking about how afraid I’d been for so long, and realizing my fears were going to kill me too, if I didn’t find some way out from under them. That’s when I knew I had to get the word out, right away.”

  The lawyer’s voice asked, “How did you finally do it?”

  “Well, I already had a plan, so I just went with it. The part-time pastor of one of the churches that supported the shelter was a pharmacist during the week, so that next Sunday I wrote down the formula for the cure and the instructions for its synthesis. I also wrote a brief explanation of the purpose of it, and Waytee’s warning that anyone who drinks after taking it will get the alcoholic urge again. I put all that in a little envelope and gave it to that pastor’s church anonymously, along with a small sample of the compound. I put it in an offering collection basket in the middle of the Sunday service. That way, I figured there was no way
anyone could tie it back to me, and since the minister is a good man and understands the pharmaceutical world, I thought he’d know how to get the cure out to the people.”

  The lawyer interrupted again. “Just to be clear, it was your intention to donate the formula for the cure to alcoholism to the First Congregational Church of Dublin, Maine, where the minister is Henry Reardon. Right?”

  “Right.”

  “Okay. What happened then?”

  “I’m not sure. Somehow, Riley Keep ended up with the formula and the sample. He apparently took some himself, and then gave the rest to a few of the men in my shelter.”

  “He healed them?”

  “The formula did, yes. But there was only enough for about a dozen doses. When Reverend Keep ran out, there was a riot. I thought they were going to kill him. I tried to stop them. They attacked me too, and then they carried him away. I knew the word would spread. I had to disappear or Mr. Hanks would find me. So I did what I always do—I ran away and hid.”

  The lawyer off-screen said, “I think we’re almost done, Dr. Williams. There’s just a couple of other things.”

  “Okay.”

  “Uh, a few minutes ago you said you went to Reverend Keep’s hometown to find a missing ingredient for the cure, a way to make it permanent?”

  “That’s right.”

  “You still haven’t mentioned what made you think Reverend Keep knew how to do that?”

  “Oh, yeah. Okay, well, when I was in the jungle with that Indian, Waytee, before we got back to the village, I asked if there was a way to make the cure last, even if I took another drink, and Waytee said there was. He mentioned Reverend Keep and he used some words I didn’t understand. When he saw I didn’t know what he was talking about, he left me for a minute and went into the jungle. He came back with a short branch from some kind of bush. The branch was covered with thorns. I asked if I was supposed to eat it, but he just frowned and kept pointing to it, saying `Riley.’ I remember he pricked himself with one of the thorns and held his finger up so I could see the blood. I still didn’t understand, but I figured I could get it straightened out back in camp. I started to put the branch in my backpack, but Waytee took it away from me and threw it into the jungle. He seemed really frustrated. I was a little scared, I guess, so I never went to look for it. I sure wish I had. I wish . . .”

  Riley was not listening anymore. He was in the jungle with his knife in his hand, working on his translation of the Bible into The People’s language. He had found a prickly vine and cut a section free to carry to the clearing in the village. He had found old Waytee sitting naked on a log, charring wooden spear points in a fire to harden them.

  Riley spoke in their language, dangling the vine before him. “Waytee, say how this?”

  At first the old man gave him the word for vine, but Riley cleared up the confusion and Waytee told him what he needed to know, about the thorns. Then the old Indian said, “Why sound want you?”

  “Is in God’s carvings.”

  “True? How in?”

  “I say story?”

  Riley remembered the old man setting his spear aside and composing himself to listen. Riley remembered speaking of a thorn in the flesh, a messenger of Satan, sent to torment. He remembered finishing with the words, “when I am weak, then I am strong,” and Waytee taking his spear into his hands again and slowly rotating the tip in the fire’s embers. Riley Keep had said nothing more. He had learned to wait on Waytee, to expect some form of wisdom when the old man shut him out to think like this. It took perhaps ten minutes, and when it came, the Indian spoke it without pausing in his work.

  He said, “Is same when I not ghost.”

  Riley had often wondered what the old man meant by that. Waytee never did explain. Now, hearing what the Indian said to Willa in the jungle all those years ago, he thought of healing a very small man, Timothy Frank, and that same man dead drunk again, passed out on the concrete. It ain’t the drinkin’ that’s the problem. It’s the not drinkin’. He thought of Willa—he would always think of her as Willa—and her brother who had been healed, but drank again and died of liquor anyway. He thought of carrying Brice to Dublin, of making millions, giving cars, paying mortgages. He thought of hanging in the background, waiting tables, healing strangers, setting Dylan up to care for Hope and Bree, being very, very strong although his heart was breaking. He thought of Waytee’s finger, bleeding from a thorn, and missionaries murdering and savages who healed. Everything Riley thought he knew was upside down and backward and he himself was inside out. He thought about the weight that never lifted no matter what he did. Sober, drunk, broke or flush, in love or alone, it did not matter. And suddenly he realized what it was he had forgotten in a clearing choked with carnage seven years ago, the reason for his incapacitating weakness. When I am weak, then I am strong.

  The man’s voice off camera said, “You’re not hiding anymore. Why is that?”

  For the first time, the old woman looked directly at the camera. Sitting at the conference table, surrounded by lawyers and guards and the judge, Riley felt as if it had become just him and the old woman. He felt as if she somehow knew he would be watching this. He felt as if she spoke directly to him, as if she was a prophetess, a mentor, an oracle sent for him. She said, “Reverend Keep sold the formula to Mr. Hanks. I should have known he’d do it. In a way, I guess that’s my fault. They know each other from the reverend’s missionary days, and the story Mr. Hanks circulated about the massacre in Brazil made the whole thing out to be the Indians’ fault. Mr. Hanks told the world the Indians got drunk and attacked the team without provocation. I never came forward with the truth, so the reverend has no reason to think Mr. Hanks is anything but a good man who owns a huge drug company. Now Mr. Hanks has the cure and he’s doing what he said he would—he’s pricing it out of reach for those who need it most. And my brother’s dead. And that poor man in the shelter is dead. And I can’t hide anymore.

  “I should have done the right thing seven years ago, but it seemed too hard. I was too afraid. I thought it was unfair. Why should I be the one to take the risk? But the thing about being afraid is you have to embrace it, you know? You have to just let it come, whatever makes you frightened, because it’s not the thing you’re worried about that will kill you so much as it is the worrying. Now I know I have to do this, just because it has fallen to me, and no one else. Seven years have gone by. Who knows how many people alcohol has killed in those seven years? A million? Two? All those deaths are on my hands because I was afraid, and Mr. Hanks is about to see to it that they keep on dying, just so he can make another billion off of those who can afford to pay. It has to stop.

  “So I’m gonna file this lawsuit, and you say I have to use my real name. That means Mr. Hanks will know it’s me, and he’ll probably find me. If he does—if I’m killed—I want you to make sure the cure gets into the hands of all the people who need it, not just the rich ones. And I want the world to know what kind of man Mr. Hanks is. He murdered The People, and if I’m killed, I want everyone to know he murdered me. He’ll make it look different, he’ll lie about it, but no matter how it looks, he’s the one who killed me.” Still staring straight at the camera, the old woman said, “You’ll make sure he doesn’t get away with it, won’t you?”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  THE DECISION HAD APPARENTLY BEEN MADE before they called him to the courthouse, the prosecuting attorney and the judge showing him the video just so he would understand why they were dropping the murder charge. It also seemed the young lawyer from Kansas had engaged in a telephone conversation with Willa—Dr. Williams—just a few hours before the coroner’s estimated time of death, and she was already in her Bangor hotel room while half a dozen witnesses had seen Riley at the hospital down in Dublin, watching over Hope. The prosecution’s theory had been that Riley slipped away from the hospital and went to some location where he had kept Willa Newdale confined after her disappearance, and then he killed her and hid her body in the Mercede
s, which was out in the parking lot. Obviously if Dr. Williams had been alive and well and working with a lawyer during that time, Riley Keep was innocent of her kidnapping. And if Dr. Williams had been in a hotel bed in Bangor while the witnesses placed Riley at the hospital, he had not had time to slip away and bring her back to Dublin. Since all the evidence against Riley had been circumstantial, and this new information seemed to cast reasonable doubt on the situation, he became a so-called free man that Saturday afternoon.

  Dylan offered Riley a ride to the hospital, assuming he would want to see Hope, but Riley was not ready. He did not think he could face her from a proper distance. It was time to face the facts instead. He might be reconciled with his daughter, but his wife had offered no such possibility, and he still felt the heartbreak that had driven him to flee when she awoke from her coma and asked for Dylan.

  Riley knew how it would be. He had been through a difficult time, and she was a fine Christian woman. She would politely say she was glad he was out of jail again, and ask about his future plans, with Dylan there beside her. So Riley thanked Hope’s good friend or whatever Dylan really was to her, and he walked out of the judge’s office into the midsummer sunshine, alone.

  He had a lot of thinking to get done. He strolled the streets of Dublin for hours, through the sunset and deep into the night. He reached the edge of town, the road out to Teal Pond, and turned around and walked back down the hill, slapping at mosquitoes. He passed the church at least three times—the scene of the crime, where he had chugged Communion wine in his misery, desiring gallons and gallons of it above all things, and where he had later closed his eyes to let fate choose between a thimbleful of that same wine or perhaps only grape juice.