Deep River Burning

by Donelle Dreese

  Prayer didn’t come easy to her. It used to, before the fire, before the fighting, before the murders when no one was caught and justice wasn’t served. She never told Father Allen this, but for a brief time when she was younger, she thought very seriously about becoming a nun. She even went to a Catholic church in Adena and spoke to a priest about it. He had discouraged her, but she couldn’t remember anymore what he said or why he steered her away from it. Still, she wondered, what would make becoming a nun seem like a good idea to a teenage girl who had more energy than she could ever contain. Maybe it seemed like an escape from a world that was beginning to show her its propensity for cruelty and violence. At some age, it becomes apparent that many things in the world are not right, and although Denver couldn’t quite articulate those feelings when she was younger, her short-lived focus on convent life may have marked the beginning of her desire to find answers.

  She went outside and stood in the parking lot of the hospital under the lights. Moths and bats were flying back and forth around the light poles. She smelled the salty air, but she felt dead inside. Maybe she was just tired. A warm breeze blew through a small opening in her blouse that felt cool and the moon was rising over a line of trees in the distance.

  She watched a young couple run around the parking lot, chasing one another, laughing, touching one another gently in the most delightful form of foreplay, and then they settled up against the side of a car and held onto each other as if there was nothing else that mattered in the world. It seemed odd to her to see people so happy in a hospital parking lot. Perhaps they were waiting for a friend to have a baby in the maternity ward. They turned the car radio on and danced to the slow beat. They weren’t drunk, but they laughed at the silliest of things. They kissed one another as a breeze caught the young woman’s lavender perfume and carried it over to Denver who had sat down on a curb at the edge of the parking lot.

  Denver closed her eyes and imagined a man standing over her as she was lying on a bed of buttery soft sand, a man she didn’t know personally, a man she hoped she would know someday. She would see his face and she would know his name and she would whisper it and it would remind her of morning surf or the swishing trees and lapping water of the Susquehanna. But when the music on the car radio changed to a song she once knew, one she had heard Josh singing all summer the year the fire split the highway going through Adena, a rush of electricity moved down the entire length of her body. It chilled all traces of the warmth her body was beginning to feel as she thought about this man who she didn’t know, but who loved her, and wouldn’t leave her.

  At times, she wondered if her heart was made of hard clay or some dry, crumbly earth where nothing would sprout. No matter how much time she spent with someone, or how much they had in common, no one’s presence ever wrapped itself around her heart or made a permanent impression on her. And that’s the way it needed to be. She needed to have her hair stand on end before she would ever love someone enough to get involved. She needed her consciousness shifted, her wiring remapped. She wanted love to build a new pier into her heart, one that reached farther out into the ocean than she’d ever been before.

  When she walked back into the waiting room, the others were still telling stories about how Father Allen helped them in some way in the past, or how he taught them to be better human beings, or they recalled a particular mass that impacted them in some powerful way. They talked about his passion for wildlife and ecology, and how he wasn’t perfect but he always seemed to be aligned with something larger than himself even during the most mundane moments of the day. They talked about how handsome he was and how some women in the church were secretly in love with him, although they tried to hide their feelings while sitting in the pews listening to him without taking their eyes off of him. They only went to the church to be near him, and Denver believed it, although she never attended his church, and she felt guilty about that now.

  Chapter 22

  A Stranger’s Hands

  A warm morning light was unfolding through the blinds of the hospital room when one of the doctors who had been watching over Father Allen came into the room and held her right hand up to a brilliant orange sun that was gingerly rising on the east side of the building. Father Allen was not awake. He had been sleeping most of the time since he was admitted to the hospital. The doctor, who was wearing a face mask that covered her mouth and nose, walked over to the window and turned the blinds slightly up so that more light would wash into the room. She walked over to Father Allen’s bedside and put her hand on his arm. He flickered his eyes a little and became aware of her presence, but talking or moving took too much effort. He felt the warmth of her calm hand resting on his forearm and fell back asleep.

  He instantly began dreaming about a day when an older woman from the parish entered the church and asked him for his help. She requested this assistance not for herself but for her daughter who had been married to a man who had abused her for years.

  “How can I help?” Father Allen asked.

  “Just talk to her,” the old woman said. So the old woman invited Father Allen to her house for dinner and invited her daughter as well for the same evening. The old woman lived at the end of a long, shady street with dense, spreading trees only slightly trimmed to accommodate the power lines. The house was a small cottage framed by a love of gardening. Flowers and colorful bushes were in mid-summer bloom and the dark green leaves of plants and grass were an expression of a warm season teeming with rain and sun. When he arrived at the house, the woman’s daughter was already there helping her mother put the finishing touches on dinner.

  The daughter was in her early forties and older than Father Allen. She politely greeted the priest when he came into the house without looking at him. She ran her fingers through her hair as if to comb it. She filled the glasses on the dining room table with water and spilled some of the water on an oversized sweatshirt that hid her figure. At the start of dinner, she sat at the table with her eyes fixated on a small candle in the center of the table. She only occasionally looked up at her mother and the young priest. Her mother raised her Catholic, but by the time she was a teenager there was nothing her mother could do to get her to continue going to church.

  “Religion is for old people who are afraid of death,” her daughter said one day.

  “Some day, you’ll be old,” her mother replied. “Some day, you’ll be afraid.”

  The old woman, who seemed to adore Father Allen, asked the priest to bless the food. The daughter rolled her eyes up to the ceiling and then turned her face toward her lap and studied her jeans while Father Allen spoke. “Bless us, oh Lord, and these thy gifts, which we are about to receive from thy bounty, through Christ our Lord. Amen.”

  The daughter ate her food slowly. Dinner consisted of asparagus, roasted potatoes, and chicken breasts. Father Allen noticed that she chewed her food carefully and gingerly, almost as if she was learning to use her jaw for the first time. Her mother left the table, and a moment later she returned with warm rolls and a dish of butter while a grandfather clock in the corner of the room chimed seven times.

  “When is the church festival this year, Father?” asked the old woman.

  “September 19th through the 21st,” he replied.

  “I always look forward to the festival each year.”

  “Will you be able to volunteer again this year?” he asked.

  “Oh, you can count on me, Father. This year I plan to bring strawberry rhubarb pie and corn bread.”

  “I’ll be the first in line for a piece of your pie.”

  “How about you, dear? Will you go to the festival this year?” the mother asked her daughter.

  “I never go to the festival, Mom.”

  “Yes, but I thought things might be different this year?”

  “Why?” the daughter asked defensively.

  They looked at each other while a
n awkward silence fell across the table. The silence was broken by two nearly identical cats chasing one another at full speed through the kitchen, through the dining room, and then into the living room until one of the cats slipped on the hardwood flooring and slid into a piano bench. Father Allen laughed while the mother smiled and said, “They usually don’t start their antics for several hours. They must be showing off for you, Father.”

  When the meal was over, Father Allen, the mother, and the daughter remained at the table. Each had a cup of coffee, and in the middle of the table sat a plate of homemade vanilla cream puffs sprinkled with powdered sugar. The daughter hadn’t talked very much during dinner and Father Allen didn’t see what he could do to help her. She ate two cream puffs and then sat silently swirling her spoon around in her coffee.

  “How was your day at the bank today, dear,” her mother asked.

  “Same as every day.”

  “Where do you work?” Father Allen asked.

  “City National, down on High Street. I’m a bank teller.”

  “You must meet a lot of interesting people,” Father Allen responded.

  “I meet a lot of people who have a lot more money than I do.”

  “I thought you liked working at the bank, dear?”

  “No, I don’t like working at the bank. I have to wear a mask every day and pretend that I’m happy to handle other people’s money.”

  “You should thank the Lord that you have a job in today’s economy,” her mother said.

  “What else should I thank the Lord for, Mom? Should I thank the Lord for my last husband? Should I thank the Lord that I locked my keys in the car today while it was still running in front of the Quick-Mart? Who is responsible when something bad happens to me, and please don’t say the devil.” The daughter popped another cream puff into her mouth. “Why do terrible things happen to people who try so hard to do their best in this life? Maybe this is a question for Father Allen,” she said as she smirked at the priest.

  Father Allen blinked his eyes a few times and cleared his throat before he spoke. “It is the spiritual work of each individual person to come to understand why he or she is faced with certain challenges in life. Through prayer and contemplation, the answer will be given. Even if two people are struggling with the same difficulty, the reason for it may not be the same for both people.”

  “But don’t you think, Father,” the daughter asked, “that sometimes bad things just happen? I mean, is God really involved in everything? Aren’t there times when life kicks you in the stomach and you don’t necessarily learn anything from it, and you don’t grow from it, and no matter how much you go over and over it in your mind, you will never make sense of it? Aren’t there times when the situation is just bad and there’s nothing you can do about it?”

  “Some of the most profound moments of spiritual awakening can occur during times of extreme, personal trial,” Father Allen said.

  “But why is that? Why do we have to go through hell to have this spiritual awakening?”

  “Because it is the only way for you to realize who you really are.”

  “Who I really am.” The daughter scoffed.

  “Yes.” Father Allen said without hesitation.

  “Who am I?”

  “You are spirit. Your life here in the physical world is a temporal experience. Who you are is far greater than your identity as a human being, but sometimes we need to be reminded of that. Would you pay any attention to God if your life was perfect?”

  “But don’t people sometimes turn away from God and become atheists when terrible things happen?” The daughter looked exasperated.

  Father Allen got up from the table and walked behind the daughter’s seat. Ever so gently, he placed his hands on her shoulders. Her face went blank and her body shuddered in fear. Father Allen felt her take deep breaths and stiffen beneath his hands. She didn’t move. Her mother, who watched the horror on her daughter’s face, also didn’t move. Father Allen stood with his hands on her shoulders and didn’t say anything.

  But Father Allen didn’t hurt her. In fact, he didn’t move. He didn’t talk. He held his hands on her shoulders and waited. He waited for her to relax. He waited for her to see that she was safe. The daughter began to cry. It started as a quiet cry with just a few tears and it slowly grew into a sob that bubbled up from the deepest part of her being. Her mother also began to cry. The daughter had vowed that she would never let another man lay a hand on her and here she was being touched again. But for some reason, a reason she wasn’t quite sure of yet, she didn’t move. It was fear, yes, but there was something else. She could have gotten up from the table. She could have pushed his hands away. She could have told him to take his hands off of her, but she didn’t do any of those things. She just sat there and cried with her face in her hands while the clock hands continued to move forward.

  During that time, every bruise she ever had seemed to hurt again. She could see them all again, sometimes one on top of each other. And over the last several years, she had been hit many places on her body more than once. She heard the yelling and felt the sweat come out of her pores all over again until the hair began to stick to the back of her neck. She smelled the alcohol and began to feel sick to her stomach. She saw the holes in the wall and the dents in the cabinets. She had that feeling again of being utterly trapped and powerless, but all of these sensations moved through her quickly. She watched them with her hands over her eyes, feeling the heat from her hands on her face, feeling the bare ring finger with her thumb, wishing she could tan the white circle where the ring had been.

  After a while, she stopped crying and she uncovered her face and pulled her head up and looked at her mother who was still sitting across the table. Her mother’s face was red and quivering, full of sorrow and tears as her hands clutched a bunch of tissues. The pain on her face was the kind of sadness that only a parent could understand. It is a pain that wraps around every cell in the body and squeezes. Much to the mother’s surprise, a small smile began to cut through the tears on the daughter’s face, a little smile that grew into a giggle and then into a full laugh. Her mother had a look of confusion on her face, but she laughed with her daughter, and Father Allen began to laugh.

  The doctor in the hospital room looked over at Father Allen when she heard him making some kind of noise. “Maybe he is finally responding to the medication,” she muttered to herself. When she went to his bedside, she saw him smiling slightly. She wasn’t sure if he was laughing or beginning to cough. She placed her hand on his arm, and Father Allen felt the hand, but he wasn’t sure if it was the doctor’s hand or the daughter’s hand when she got up from her seat at the table to give him a hug. It didn’t matter whose hand it was. It was a good hand. He smiled and laughed with the daughter and the mother as he felt his eyes open, and the fluorescent lights seemed too bright but the sun shining into the room was pleasant to him. It was the light from a high noon sun.

  “Good morning!” the doctor said with her hand still on his arm.

  “Good morning,” he said, somewhat startled at the sound of his own voice.

  “I have some good news for you,” she said. Father Allen felt confused, but the reality of his situation came back to him with each moment that passed by.

  “You are responding to the medication, which means the strain of tuberculosis that you have is not the drug-resistant strain. So you’re going to be fine. It will take a while for you to fully recover, but you are going to be okay. We will talk about all of this in a little while when you are more fully awake.”

  Father Allen felt a tear roll back into his ear, but he wasn’t crying because he still felt sick, and he wasn’t crying because he was happy that he was going to regain his health. No. He was ready to leave his physical body if that’s what God wanted. He cried for all the men in the world who are so lost in their own despa
ir that the only relief they get is through acts of violence. He cried for the women who are afraid of human touch, who walk through life as if it is an icy parking lot, who have lost all faith in human goodness and the possibility of joy. He cried for the woman in the oversized sweatshirt who was able to let go of at least some of her pain one evening a long time ago at a kitchen table, and he cried for the mother who so desperately wanted to help her.

  When Denver heard that Father Allen was recovering and no longer contagious, at first, she couldn’t believe it. She was anticipating grief, almost looking forward to it, as if it was easier to be sad and give in to the heartbreak than to spend one more day trying to push against it, but the good news spread quickly and people from the church and sanctuary began to filter into the hospital waiting room hoping to see Father Allen. He was moved out of the infectious disease wing of the hospital, but he still wasn’t feeling well and he did not have much strength, so the doctor advised that he only have a few visitors. Jimmie and Twyla were in the waiting room talking and laughing with other friends of Father Allen. They all looked like they had just won the lottery.

  When Denver walked into the room to see him, she felt a rush of emotion that she didn’t show. For a short moment, she thought she saw the same feeling come through Father Allen’s expression, as if they were two young children who were separated at birth, meeting one another later in life on a crowded street and suddenly recognizing each another without fully understanding why.

  He said that he had had a dream about her. She was swimming in the ocean and swimming was so easy for her that it seemed as if she was weightless, and at times she would pop up from the water like a dolphin and dive back down with the water bubbling over her face. The other fish looked at her as if she had fins and belonged there with them. Her green eyes matched the color of the water. She could ride the backs of loggerhead turtles and then swim for miles and miles without stopping. In his dream she was a fish who knew the greatest depths of the sea and deftly navigated the shallow coral reefs where the sun penetrated through the water and made shadows on the sandy sea floor through the waving seaweed. She listened to Father Allen’s dream with a smile on her face and then urged him to get more rest.