The Healing

by Linda Byler

  A cat peered around a corner of the horse stall, a sick emaciated old barn cat that should have been put down a long time ago. Patches of hair alternated with bare, wrinkled skin, the head was too large for the rail-thin body, and the long twitching tail had no hair on the end.

  John sat on a hay bale, his elbows resting on his upturned knees. Poor cat. He’d be better off dead. He was sick, too old to keep around the barn, unable to hunt mice and chipmunks.

  There was no point in letting the sick old cat survive.

  “Here, kitty. Come here, old man.”

  John reached out a hand, was rewarded by the old cat coming to him, the trust glimmering from his tired old eyes. He rubbed up against John’s trouser leg, his arched back bony, pitiful.

  Quite suddenly, John entertained the thought that the cat was fortunate, old enough to creep behind a bale of straw and pass peacefully away, the way nature intended. He wished he was elderly.

  Soon his time to die would come. If the doxycycline wasn’t working, and all the vitamins passed through him without a bit of good, what else was left? Lyme disease was a cruel thing.

  Crushed by thoughts of defeat, he rubbed his hand across the shockingly apparent ribs on the cat’s side. He thought of his .22 shotgun. A small bullet to the head, that was all it would take.

  Poor cat.

  Dat found him, asleep, between two bales of hay, the cat in his arms. Alarmed, he stood gaping at his teenaged son.

  “John?”

  There was no answer.

  “John?” Louder now.

  Startled, John’s eyes flew open. He scrambled to his feet, blinking furiously. The cat stayed where he was, lifting his head for a short time before resting it on his paws, like a dog.

  “John, is it that bad?” Dat asked kindly.

  Disoriented, ashamed, John felt the color creep up into his face.

  He shook his head.

  “Guess I’m just lazy. You know, not used to rumschpringa.”

  “The truth, John.”

  His father folded his length onto a bale of hay, patted the one beside him.

  “Sit.”

  John obeyed, unwilling to meet his father’s gaze. It was too piercing, too penetrating, far too honest.

  “Are we expecting too much of you? Is your Lyme disease actually making you so tired that you can’t summon enough energy to stay awake this early in the morning? I do wish you’d talk about your disease more often. Is the doxycycline not working?”

  John heard his father’s words. He felt the questions like arrows, penetrating his skin, painful, irritating.

  “How am I supposed to know?” His voice was curt, with a ragged edge.

  “John, listen. This is not only hard for you, but it’s hard for all of us. Your mother is slowly turning into a nervous wreck. She doesn’t know how to handle this if you won’t talk. Communication is everything, especially at a time like this. If you aren’t able to do your work, then tell me. I’ll hire a knecht to help out. If you need to rest this thing out, then tell us. We’ll work with you. Do whatever it takes.”

  Before he could give his father a proper answer, the voices of his six brothers echoed around in his head, taunting, challenging, teasing.

  What an unbelievable baby.

  Nothing wrong with him, only milking it for all it was worth.

  He’s lazy, that’s all.

  Kick him out of bed. He needs to man up.

  He’s all right on the weekend.

  “John, I’m talking to you, and I expect the courtesy of an answer.”

  “Yeah. All right. Well, I don’t know what to say. Just tired I guess.”

  “Did Dr. Stevenson give you any instructions? Rest, exercise? How are you expected to carry on if you have no strength?”

  “I don’t know.”

  John’s voice was barely above a whisper, wobbling from his mouth in a little boy’s quavering tones.

  He lowered his head to his knees. His shoulders shook with the force of his weeping. Wisely, Dat stood by, without comment, allowing the storm to build momentum, before weakening.

  “I’m just so tired, Dat. Everything hurts. I sweat at night, and can’t sleep.”

  “Can you sleep if you sleep downstairs?” He didn’t add, “with me.”

  John nodded, miserable with this childish revelation.

  “Then, if that’s how it is, that’s where you’ll sleep. We’ll get Mam to buy you a larger air mattress next time she goes to Walmart. OK?”

  Choking back tears, Dat lay a hand on John’s shoulder.

  John stood up, but wouldn’t meet his father’s eyes. He was too ashamed.

  “Listen, it’s nothing to be ashamed of. You have a disease. I’ll have to talk to your brothers.”

  “What about Mam? Can you ask her to stop asking questions? I don’t always have an answer.”

  Trusting Dat felt like a huge step. He felt a weight roll off his shoulders. His breathing eased, relaxed.

  “All right, then. You go on in the house, and wherever you’re most comfortable, I want you to stay. If you’d rather be away from the rest of us, then do that. Wherever you can find rest.”

  John wanted to thank his father, but the words caught on a sob he was unwilling to reveal, so he turned away and walked through the gloom into the house.

  Luckily, Mam was at her washing machine, the air-­powered device loud enough to hide his footsteps. He laid his shoes behind the recliner and went upstairs, his feet as if they were encased in cement blocks.

  That was the morning Aunt Emma and Aunt Sarah came for coffee. They’d heard their sister was under the weather, dealing with her son’s Lyme disease. They clattered into the kitchen bearing coffee cake and cinnamon rolls, talkative and caring, bearing their own ideas and hearsays about Lyme.

  “All over. It’s just all over. Did you hear about the girl in Lancaster County? I think she’s a cousin, or second cousin to your Susie’s husband, Elam? She has it on her brain. She’s so sick and depressed, they’re afraid of suicide. Doctor wants to put her on an antidepressant and she, the mother, won’t do it. Natural. Completely natural. She won’t allow antibiotics, nothing.”

  Emma bit into a large cinnamon roll, leaning forward so the brown-sugar-encrusted walnuts would not fall on the clean floor.

  Emma was older than Sarah by three years, and Mary was the youngest, but each one was well endowed with strong opinions and the courage to fire them into the air at opportune times. Or inopportune times, none of the sisters being very good at gauging which was which.

  This subject of Lyme disease had been hashed and rehashed until it was nothing but pulp, mixed with myth, untruths, ill-advised tales that escalated into pure horror stories, Mary thought, tight-lipped.

  She allowed her sisters to rattle off mind-numbing statistics, names of herbs and nutritious powders or oils or tinctures that completely cured her husband’s cousin.

  She drank cup after cup of scalding coffee laced with milk and three teaspoons of sugar, ate two cinnamon rolls out of the middle of the pan to avoid the hard edges. That, and Emma was plenty stingy when it came to making and spreading caramel icing. She’d leave the rolls with syrup and nuts for Sarah—she wanted the ones with icing.

  The coffee cake was nothing special, and she told Sarah this, without an ounce of tact.

  “Oh, I know. It was in the oven a tad too long. My neighbor came over, with a fall arrangement in a blue mason jar. I never saw anything so ugly in all my life. You know how goldenrod goes to seed? Well, she had that brown stuff mixed with corn leaves. Corn leaves, mind you. Brown as mud, and stiff. I think she had a few mums, purple asters, and what looked like dead weeds. But you know how it goes. I told her it was pretty. She’s going for knee surgery. I pity her with that husband of hers. He’s so ignorant about a woman having knee surgery. Says it would be cheaper to have her put down. Imagine if someone spoke like that to us.”

  “Oh, he’s nice. He just says that to tease her. I like him a lot. He�
��s the first one to offer help if you need it.”

  “You don’t know my neighbors,” Sarah said, prickly now.

  “Aren’t you talking about the Gutschalls?”

  “Well, yes.”

  “Well, then.”

  Sarah pursed her lips self-righteously. Emma puckered her own, slurped her coffee with an indecent rattle.

  “John doing better?”

  “Oh yes. He was at the supper last evening. His Sunday pants have grass stains on them, which tells me he was playing volleyball. He’s so tall, I imagine he’s good at it. He’s in the barn this morning.”

  “Really? That good! Good for him.”

  “Yes, it’s been quite a siege. I do believe the doxycycline is taking hold, and he feels better again. I mean, if he was playing volleyball last evening, got up and did chores, is working with his father, well, what does that tell you? He’s improving, that’s what.” She spoke triumphantly, with an air of having accomplished what she set out to do.

  Emma cut a slice of coffee cake, watched her sister’s face with plenty of caution coupled with pessimism. She wondered if John was really out of the woods the way she thought, but said nothing.

  They heard footsteps overhead. Water was running in the bathroom.

  Sarah pointed a finger to the ceiling.

  “One of the boys home sick?”

  Bewildered, Mary said, “No.”

  “Well, someone’s up there.”

  Mary got to her feet, moved rapidly up the stairs. The sisters in the kitchen held very still, straining to hear. When she returned, her face was ashen, her eyes dark pools of motherly concern. She flopped into a chair, her appetite gone, close to tears.

  “I guess I was wrong.”

  She shook her head from side to side, her mouth a slash of iron control.

  “The hardest part for me is the fact that he keeps everything inside. He tells me nothing. Nothing at all. He won’t answer my questions. I keep telling him all the time how hopeless it is to help him if he won’t supply us with answers. It’s as if he lives in a cocoon, where he shuts us all out, even his brothers. What is anyone supposed to think? Sometimes I think I just can’t face another day of his withdrawal from all of us.”

  For once, the sisters didn’t have an answer. The kitchen became very quiet, the propane gas lamp hissing softly as the dark clouds thickened and churned. Splatters of rain fell against the east kitchen window. The wind picked up, moaning against the edge of the roof, where a piece of loose drip edge began to whir. The clock on the wall chimed ten o’clock, then began its quiet tune of “Amazing Grace.”

  “It sure is turning into an ugly day,” Sarah remarked, the weather seemingly the only subject that was safe ground.

  As if this feeble attempt had never been offered, Mary plowed on.

  “I often wonder if we should take him to a Lyme specialist. There are doctors in Philadelphia, there’s one in Baltimore, Maryland. I heard of a Joe Wenger Mennonite family who had such good results with their daughter. What would you do? I mean, there are so many nutrition programs and natural remedies all over the place, that I’m never quite sure if we’re doing enough. Or if we’re doing the right thing. I mean, what if we’re not doing everything we should be doing?”

  “Mary. Mary. Listen. You are not in control. Your son is very sick, perhaps, but that still doesn’t eliminate God from your life. You need to look on Him, depend on Him, to show you the way. Your spiritual life is very important at a time like this. Don’t you think it’s about time to let go and let God? The way the old saying goes.”

  Mary began to weep softly.

  “You just don’t know. Our family is being torn apart.”

  CHAPTER 11

  THERE WAS A BIG EVENT PLANNED FOR THANKSGIVING AT THE AMOS Beiler place. Amos Beiler was a man of prestige in the community, a builder of gazebos and garden sheds, chicken coops and storage sheds, all manufactured beneath a huge building with tremendous ceiling space. So when they invited all the youth of Jefferson County, plus cousins and friends from Lancaster, the boys all looked forward to the day of food and indoor volleyball.

  Mam grumbled about an event for the youth on Thanksgiving. She didn’t like anything going on for any members of her family on that date, simply wanting her own tradition of seeing all her children around her table, the way it should be. The way it had always been.

  She didn’t like weddings on that date, either. Whoever heard of ruining so many people’s holiday, for a wedding?

  She had decided that morning to accept the fact that she was no longer considered young, the color of her hair gone mostly from dark brown to grayish brown. Mostly gray, really. She drew the fine-tooth comb through her fading tresses, twisted it into a long rope, and wound it into a tight coil on the back of her head. She pinned a clean white covering on top, turning her head slightly to catch her still youthful profile.

  She noticed that her neck looked slack. Well, if she seemed to have an abundance of gray hair it was simply no wonder. She had a lot on her shoulders, with John. And now Samuel was having problems with Lena. He looked extremely crestfallen, nervous sometimes, as if he dreaded a matter that was far above his own understanding. Poor boy. She hoped if Lena wasn’t happy with Samuel, she’d end the relationship sooner than later, save him the thought of marriage, at least. Heartbreak. She dreaded the sound of it, but the way Samuel was acting, it was probably inevitable.

  And the girls in Kentucky, settled in, seemingly liking it down there. They called to leave messages, or on occasion, planned a certain hour to have a real conversation about life, which consisted of listening about babies, birth, farming, and husbands, good or bad. Not that Mam allowed her girls to vent their displeasure on the poor erring husbands. “You married him,” she would say. “Don’t come whining to me. Are you being nice to him? Cook him a good meal.”

  Lydia frequently spoke to John, wrote long letters, sent him cards of encouragement, religious poems and verses. John never related any of their conversation to Mam, so she figured she’d give Lydia and John the benefit of the doubt. He needed someone to confide in, so if it was Lydia, then that was all right.

  The Coleman queen-sized air mattress had been bought, the pump used to fill it with air, sheets stretched across it, pillows and quilts folded beside it. This was where John spent his nights, the comfort of his father on the couch beside him, knowing it was all right. John never slept well, often staying awake till two or three in the morning, tossing from his aching back to his roiling stomach, and back again. Mam knew how poorly he slept, merely by the sounds from the air mattress, the shuffling rustle, the whomp of plastic, over and over.

  He moved constantly, which left Mam sleepless on many nights, too. Dat had a talk with the boys, each one told without preamble, that John suffered more than they knew, anxiety and awful fear kept him from sleeping, and if he ever found out any of them made fun of him, he’d . . . well, he didn’t like to make empty threats, but they’d have it coming.

  In spite of his best efforts, though, he caught Marcus and Samuel snickering at times, or raising eyebrows.

  The usual carefree banter at the supper table was mostly gone, replaced with careful, muted conversation, as stiff and awkward as a pair of stilts. Mam could tell that Marcus and Samuel still thought John was a baby, a spoiled, coddled youngest son who was plain lazy and preyed on his parents’ sympathy.

  Mam was saddened to hear all this, to see the blatant display of disbelief in John’s symptoms. Yeah, sure, there was Lyme disease. That was one thing. But to lie in your room all day? No wonder he didn’t have any energy. All those youthful muscles softening like Jell-O.

  One night Marcus became emphatic, spoke roughly to Mam. “You should see him play volleyball. In the thick of it with that Marty. Thinks he’s so cool.”

  A note of jealousy?

  Mam wiped the Princess House two-burner griddle, flicked her covering strings across her shoulders, then went back to the sewing machine to find a tiny g
old safety pin to secure the ends behind her back. They always got in the way.

  When she came back, Marcus told her she was trying to avoid what he had to say.

  Irritation flickered behind her glasses, like faraway lightning before a thunderstorm. She tied and retied her apron, another sure sign of agitation.

  Marcus forged on.

  “You didn’t say anything, ’cause you don’t know what to say. He’s lazy. If his Lyme disease was as bad as he says it is, how could he play volleyball? He doesn’t look sick. Healthy as a horse on the weekends. Seriously.”

  Mam drew herself up, glared at her handsome son. If he was still six years old, she’d make him sit until he quit this back talk.

  But he wasn’t a small boy. He was a grown youth, forming opinions and life views on his own. Here’s where it got tricky.

  “Marcus, do you honestly believe John chooses to stay in bed? No healthy boy with normal energy levels would choose to ache all over. The volleyball isn’t good for him, probably, but Dat and I feel he needs to socialize, keep up appearances of being normal, for his own sake.”

  She shook a finger at him.

  “What is it to you, Marcus? You know nothing about Lyme, so why sit there accusing your father and me?”

  “You’re babying him.”

  A few mornings later, the whole thing started over again. Marcus leaned back in his chair, stretched his arms above his head, and yawned. He lifted his shirt and scratched his stomach, then tucked the shirttail back below the belt of his trousers.

  “Mam, I need new shirts. Long-sleeved ones for Sunday.”

  “You mean for Thanksgiving. Big to-do, that day. Why would anyone plan such a thing on a holiday?”

  Marcus shrugged. “Nicest shop in Jefferson County.”

  Mam didn’t answer, thinking of John playing volleyball. What if she did have a devious son who was as lazy as he was clever? He would turn out to be a regular thief, or a crooked business dealer. Or worse.

  Marcus talked on, waiting for his pancakes and eggs. He was leaving for work earlier, something about finishing a job. Hillside Construction was known as a top-notch builder of houses, the rough framework, so when the pressure was on, it was nothing out of the ordinary to leave at five o’clock in the morning.