The Healing

by Linda Byler

  They had been dating long enough to no longer need the nervous chatter that accompanied them on their first dates.

  Lena was happy with Samuel. He was everything she had always imagined a boyfriend to be. Handsome, eager to please, kind, attentive, she was often afraid she would become spoiled, unappreciative of everything he did for her. He was always willing to go her way, never demanding anything of her that required her to go against her own will.

  And, he never touched her. They discussed this at the beginning of their courtship. Lena had strong opinions about any form of bodily contact before marriage, with the courage to tell Samuel her convictions. He had listened, nodded, his face like a stone, which caused her to feel as if she required too much and he’d drop her for someone else who didn’t cling to the old ways. But he had respected her in every way.

  So Lena was happy, blessed.

  Tonight, however, she tried to keep John out of her thoughts. She had been shocked when Samuel aired that awful opinion, making light of John’s suffering. There was no doubt in Lena’s mind that he had suffered, was going through more pain than anyone had any idea. Lena knew suffering when she saw it.

  She mentally shrugged her shoulders, tried to pass off the unkindness as banter among brothers, teasing. Perhaps that kind of talk was normal in the Stoltzfus household with all those boys.

  But through the evening spent on the living room couch, Lena was preoccupied, until Samuel asked her what was wrong.

  “You seem to be thinking of something else.”

  “I am, Samuel. I’m sorry. But . . . well, it’s just that John is on my mind. He has suffered, is still suffering. Don’t you believe Lyme disease is real?”

  “No. I don’t.”

  “But . . . It is a medical . . . I mean, blood tests show the bacteria.”

  “I know. That part I believe, but not the ongoing thing. After a few weeks of antibiotics, he should be OK. All this lying around pitying himself is for the dogs. He’s always been coddled. He’s the baby.”

  Lena nodded, hoped to be agreeable.

  “I mean, he sleeps in the living room with Dat on the couch. Mam trotted off to Walmart for an air mattress. I mean, come on.”

  “But surely there’s a reason.”

  “He’s spoiled. He’s a baby. If he were my own son, he’d be kicked up the stairs and told to go to bed.”

  There was nothing to say to this. Lena inhaled deeply. She knew when to be quiet and when to change the subject, always tactful and kind, always avoiding confrontation.

  John was in the kitchen, making a sandwich, his mother gone for the day, some quilting or other, his father at a horse sale in Ohio.

  He toasted bread in the broiler of the gas stove, fried bacon on a burner that was turned too high, splattered grease all over the stovetop. He cut a tomato in thick slices, tore a hunk from a head of iceberg lettuce and proceeded to build a spectacular BLT.

  He was in a good frame of mind, having slept well, or at least better than most nights. His mind was refreshed. He felt more alert than he had in months. He was hungry, too.

  The smell of frying bacon whetted his appetite, and he swallowed the drool that rose in his mouth, anticipating that first bite.

  When had he last looked forward to a sandwich?

  Hope rose like a mist, obscuring the days of pain and anguish. Perhaps now the whole load of pills would be proving their worth, finally.

  He poured himself a glass of milk, added Hershey’s syrup, upending the container and giving it a long squeeze, then stirred. He glanced at the small saucer of pills his mother had set out for him. A pink sticky note was attached to the countertop.

  “John, be sure and take these. Love, Mam.”

  She would never know the difference if he didn’t. He could flush them down the commode. Would it be any different today, if he did?

  He often wondered if he simply refused, what would happen?

  After a few bites of his sandwich, his stomach clenched and the toast became hard to swallow, his throat gone dry. The chocolate milk seemed to curdle, leaving his mouth with a sour taste that turned his stomach even more.

  Quickly, he moved to the counter to swallow the required handful of pills, then lay on the recliner, tilting it to the position that was closest to lying down, his gut roiling, his head thick with nausea.

  His heart pounded. The thought that these were his final moments on earth pushed its way into his head. Dying. He was dying.

  So this is how it felt.

  A fog so thick it felt like cotton moved into his brain, obliterating any rational thought of helping himself so he would not die. He tried desperately to push away the thick cotton that kept him from remembering the numbers to summon help, but the effort was too much.

  Alone, afraid, his heart pounding in his chest, a half-eaten sandwich and a glass of chocolate milk sitting in a square of weak November sun, the clock chimed the hour of ten o’clock.

  A deep moan of despair escaped John’s lips. His limbs turned to water, useless. He couldn’t lift his hand if he tried, couldn’t remember where he was, how he had gotten there, or how he would ever remove himself from this bed, or whatever it was he was lying in.

  When Allen and Daniel came home from work, they found their brother in the same position he had been at ten o’clock. They had been warned by their mother to be careful of John’s feelings, then received the same stern warning from their father.

  Lyme disease was real, it was not an imagined thing. John was doing the best he could. None of them, including himself, had any idea what he suffered at night, the anxiety very common for those who had chronic Lyme.

  Dat’s words were accepted as authority, pure and potent, at first. Until their own opinions on Lyme disease watered it all down, and they carried their suspicions separately, some having more respect than others.

  Daniel and Allen were young, more impressionable than Abner, Amos, Marcus, and Samuel. So when they found John on the recliner, they banged their lunchboxes and Coleman water thermoses on the counter and raised silent eyebrows at one another.

  He was pale as a ghost.

  Was he dead?

  But neither one dared to wake him. They tiptoed past, then tiptoed back. Where was Mam? Why wasn’t she along in the kitchen, making supper the way she always did? They were hungry, uneasy with John not waking up when they entered the kitchen. Something wasn’t right.

  A horse and buggy came clattering in the drive, spraying gravel. Ah, Mam. Now things would return to normal again.

  She entered through the washhouse door, untying her bonnet as she charged in, yanked the pin from her shawl, and folded the shawl with hard, jerky movements of her arms. Her wide, pleasant face was pink with cold, her dark eyes popping as she spoke.

  “Never in my life saw anyone like Davey sie Lissie. She could well have gotten that quilt out by herself. That would be no hardship to her. But no, my sister Emma says we’ll get it done. We’ll get it done.” She wagged her head in frustration. “There I was, agreeing to her nonsense. We quilted till my fingertips were like hamburger. Every stitch hurt so bad. Plus, I get so tired of Lydia’s endless stories about her children and grandchildren. Seriously, does she think the world contains only her and her children? You can only smile, or say that’s cute, or amazing, or how talented her girls are for so long, and then you get all washed out. Your mouth puckers when you smile and your cheeks actually hurt and you just want to come home and lay on the recliner with the Reader’s Digest.”

  As she spoke, she disappeared through the pantry door, her voice reeling out from behind it.

  “Well, it’s Campbell’s soup tonight. Now where’s this bean with bacon? Elmer doesn’t mind canned soup if it’s bean with bacon. Now, ach, where is it? Don’t tell me you boys ate it all. Well, looks like it. Cream of celery it will have to be. And hot dogs. Good thing I bought a few packages of John Martin’s cheese dogs. They’re the best. Oh, I don’t have hot dog rolls. Well, bread it’ll have to be. Wha
t’s wrong with John? John? John?”

  She went to the recliner, moving swiftly, bent to touch his shoulder. She shook it gently.

  “John?”

  John heard his name being called from a great distance. He felt as if he was swimming in oil, thick and greasy, so that his arms and legs had to use every ounce of strength to get through it. After he woke up enough to know he was on the recliner, and it was his mother calling him, slow tears slid down his cheeks, the exhaustion that had used up all his reserves so thick and heavy he could do nothing but cry.

  “Are you all right?”

  He nodded. His eyes remained closed. It took too much effort to open them. Mam had supper on her mind, so she left him, and for that, he was grateful. To be allowed to rest alone, sound and sight and touch and smell completely relinquished, was all he wanted, or needed.

  Winter arrived in the form of rain and ice, slow streams of cold rainwater that formed puddles, the ice surrounding them in thin layers by the morning.

  The coal stove in the basement heated the house with help from the heater in the living room, turning the atmosphere cozy and warm, a fortress of comfort against the elements.

  Mam stood at the kitchen counter, gazing through the windows with eyes glassy with fatigue. Deep lines furrowed her brow, her mouth puckered with anxiety, vertical creases around her mouth like parentheses. Here it was the first week in December, and she hadn’t thought much about Christmas preparations, or anything pertaining to the usual rejoicing of Christ’s birth.

  She was simply at the end of her rope, as the old saying went. Her strength was ebbing, the mere courage it took to get through the day not always available. She cried slow tears into the swirling water of her wringer washer. She prayed when she stood at the gas range preparing breakfast for her seven boys. She begged God to look down on them with mercy when she packed all those lunchboxes.

  Had God forgotten them?

  The specter of John haunted her days, kept her wide-eyed at night. She fell asleep in the evening, jerked into wakefulness by the constant sounds from the air mattress in the living room. He wasn’t sleeping, yet again.

  Fear clenched her insides, roiled her stomach, as pain spread through her chest.

  John blew his nose, a rumpled men’s handkerchief left beside the air mattress, a testimony to his despair at night.

  And still he would not talk to his parents. He fiercely guarded his own anguish, refused a visit to the Lyme specialist in Philadelphia. He seemed to think that if he kept everything away from his family, things would appear normal.

  But it was obvious that things were far from normal.

  The easy camaraderie they knew so well, the times they lingered at the supper table, the easy banter and unobstructed flow of conversation, the river of her boys’ life, the current easy and calming and joyous—all of that had dwindled and nearly disappeared. More and more, time together was spent in uneasiness, covert glances, awkward conversation. Elmer seemed to be aging quickly, his usual sunny demeanor faded, as if a graying mist had successfully overtaken his good humor.

  Mary and Elmer were trying their best, but just as waters will toss river stones over and over, back and forth, smoothing and rounding them, so John’s health deteriorated the family structure. Unity was blown apart, each of the brothers harboring their own impatience, their lack of empathy. Their faces were encased in stiff, cheery masks of obedience. They could be outwardly nice, the way Dat ordered, without feeling it on the inside.

  More and more often, arguments broke out. Mam knew why they fought. It was the underlying frustration, everyone carrying the burden of a crumbling family structure, unable to devise a plan to regain the easy love and closeness they had before John’s illness. Borrowed shirts, missing socks, lost wallets—any and all were cause for major eruptions.

  Dat and Mam sat wearily, cups of warm cocoa on the table between them. Sleep aids, although neither would admit it.

  “Why don’t you try and persuade him to go to a chiropractor? The one in town who prescribes natural remedies. You know, Mary. I can’t think of his name.”

  “Elmer, you know as well as I do that it’s not going to work. If either one of us is going to take him to a doctor, he’ll have to be gagged and bound.”

  “Are we sure it is Lyme disease?” he asked desperately. “Perhaps he’s mentally ill. Do you suppose a psychiatrist would be helpful? A counselor, someone he could talk to about his feelings?” Dat sighed, dropped his face into upturned hands. “It’s just simply gone on long enough. Is there no one to help us?”

  Watching Elmer start to crumble threw Mam into a panic. That night she didn’t sleep at all.

  A few days later she gathered the reserves of her usual pluck, marched upstairs, her footfalls sounding hollow on the polished stairway, yanked John’s door open, and plopped herself on his bed.

  Breathing hard, she lay a hand on his arm where the blue T-shirt stopped and the limp, white arm began.

  “John, you have to talk to us. This has gone on long enough. Dat and I simply cannot take another week of this. We want you to see Dr. Stevenson again, do some tests. Or would you rather go to the chiropractor who deals in homeopathic medicine?”

  John’s answer was rolling away, cocooning himself in the quilt, covering his head, shutting her out.

  Mam tried to still her accelerating emotions, the hysteria that rose in her throat. Taking a deep breath, she counted to ten, left the bed, picked up a pair of rumpled trousers, rearranged the cologne and hair products on the wooden tray on his dresser. She looked at herself in the mirror, the mound of impertinence on the bed that contained her son.

  Her John. Beloved as he had always been, now turned into this obstinate log. Clamped up like a person she didn’t know. A brain gone awry.

  She turned.

  “Listen, John. Your father and I have to get help for you. This goes on and on, the resting, the refusal to cooperate. We need to do more for this Lyme disease than we have been doing. You need help.”

  Nothing. Not even a twitch, to show he had heard.

  “John? Talk to me, John. We need your obedience to carry out our plan.”

  When there was no response, Mam realized she stood on the outer edge of a crumbling cliff. She could hear the pebbles loosening from the fragile shelf that contained her sanity, the yawning abyss stretching before her, horrifying in its proximity.

  Dear God, she breathed. Help me.

  She turned, fled down the stairs, away from the unnatural silence that was her son. Shaking and crying, she began to gather a clean rag, a bucket of soapy water, the smell of Mr. Clean and Windex a balm to her unstable mind. Here was normalcy—scouring and cleaning, attacking soap scum in the bathtub, wiping mirrors and windows, sloshing the toilet brush in the bowl as if the very ferocity of her movements would banish the Lyme bacteria from her son’s body.

  She knelt by the bathtub with hands uplifted, moaning and crying in supplication, prostrating herself for the thousandth time before the throne of grace.

  Christmas was a strange, subdued affair.

  John looked worse than ever. The sisters from Kentucky were alarmed. Mary and Elmer were a shadow of themselves.

  Lydia sat on the couch with Andrew, eighteen months old, the joy of her existence, and tried to imagine what her mother must be enduring. The suffering and exhaustion was oppressive—she sensed it as soon as she came through the door.

  It was time for a family conference, and she would initiate it. Everyone needed help whether they admitted to it or not.

  But here was Ruthie and now Samuel’s friend, Lena.

  Lydia hardly knew what to make of that. This Lena. She was a rare flower, a tropical orchid. As sweet and kind as she was beautiful.

  Life wasn’t fair. Appearance dominated. Of all these brothers, Samuel was the handsome, arrogant one.

  Lydia sensed that something was amiss, between the two. He was too sure of himself, and she was like a trailing vine. Compliant. Kind. And she kep
t her eyes on John much of the time.

  The family conference did not go well. They waited for Abner and Samuel’s return from taking their girls to their respective homes, which made it close to midnight before everyone was assembled, in various stages of exhaustion and overeating. Coffee flowed, but mostly, the men just wanted to get to bed. John excused himself, refused to participate.

  Susie and Sara Ann thought Lydia was being manipulative. Who did she think she was, being the youngest and all?

  She forged ahead.

  “Something needs to be done with John.”

  Silence.

  “None of you seem to realize how bad he’s gotten . . . and how it’s weighing you all down. This thing has gone on long enough. He looks awful. Why isn’t he getting help?”

  Mam began weeping, sniffling into a wad of Kleenex. Dat cast a sympathetic glance in his wife’s direction, cleared his throat, steeled himself against his own breakdown of emotions. He was the head of the house—he should be able to remedy his son’s suffering.

  “He won’t go. He refuses to see a doctor. Hides everything away from us. Fiercely protects his own thoughts and feelings.” Dat said quietly.

  “I already know that. I talk to him on the phone.”

  Mam nodded. “I’m glad. He needs to talk to someone.”

  “He is obviously a victim of chronic Lyme. He is the type who experiences intense and debilitating anxiety. He told me about a month ago that he’s convinced he’s dying, slowly.”

  A snort from Samuel.

  Lydia glared at her brother. “I thank you for keeping your ridicule to yourself.”

  “Hey, get real, everybody. You’ll never get to the end of this till you all figure out he’s a spoiled brat, and can’t have what he wants, so he’s sucking up everybody’s pity. It’s disgusting. He needs a kick in the butt and to be sent to work. There’s nothing wrong with him.”

  “Yeah. Sam’s right. You should see him on the weekend. Normal. As happy as a lark. Laughing, watching the girls. He likes Marty and she doesn’t like him, so go figure.”