by Brett Lott
"Well, there it is," I said. I had not thought to question it. "Look and be amazed, for I am doing things in your own lifetime that you must see to believe." That's from Habakkuk 1:5, the Living Bible translation, one of several verses I kept scribbled in my notebook.
Greg put his hands on his hips, then crossed them back over his chest. "Whatever. Call it a miracle, then."
I did. I trusted Greg completely when it came to matters of math and physics, and if this little car had defied the laws of physics, then a miracle was the only explanation. Not every miracle turns water into wine or fills the sea with frogs. I half-expected the dirt to be brushed away and the doors to be opened and for the people inside to simply step out, blink in the sharp sunlight, fill their lungs with sea-blown air, and wave to the crowd. I prayed I would have the courage to shout out "Praise Jesus!"
Of course, it didn't happen quite like that. When the slide buried the car, it crushed the hood and windshield and the front of the roof, and when the jaws of life at last managed to tear away the door and side paneling, and the crews were able to shovel out the earth, the man and the woman inside were both dead. No one told us; the highway patrolman never turned and announced it, but everyone could tell. The Caltrans crews removed their hardhats. People groaned and I could feel the air exit every mouth around me. Beside me a mother shielded her daughter's face, then closed her eyes and kissed the top of the girl's head. The woman in the passenger seat was extracted first and laid on the gurney and covered with a white sheet.
But then something happened that has kept me talking about the landslide ever since. The jaws of life wenched away the passenger seat and fender, and a crewman put his hardhat into the backseat; he yelled something, I couldn't hear what it was, and then he backed out of the car carrying a car seat, the bucket kind, the baby inside it still alive. The roll bar in the roof of the Volkswagen had survived intact; it provided enough space, and with the parents dead, enough air for the baby to fill its tiny lungs until help arrived. It came out of the car filthy, a long scratch on its forehead, and within a second the paramedics were upon it, papoose board, intubation tube, needles—but it was alive. The crowds on both sides of the slide went crazy. Some people cheered, but others sobbed and covered their mouths in fear, which is the right attitude when a miracle is witnessed, for the power of the Lord's intervening hand, His puncturing of the fabric of time and space, is filled with terror, with lightning and thunder, and death to those without the reverence to fall to their knees and touch their lips to the dirt.
Which I did not do. I stayed on my feet and did my best to memorize every last detail I could see, the waffled tractor treads in the dirt, the broken taillights on the Rabbit, the yellow tape flapping in the breeze, even the ropy outseam of the woman's jeans that I saw when the wind flapped the sheet up an inch. I turned and looked at Greg. His jaw was clenched and his eyes were narrowed into slits, his eyebrows knit together at the top of his nose, and he held his scabbed hands together in an odd way, the flattened fingers of his left hand pressed between the flattened fingers and thumb of his right. He had a strange look on his face. I slapped his shoulder, pumped my hand around the knob of the bone, and said, "I praise you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and the learned, and revealed them to little children."
Without turning to look at me, he said, "Sure. Right." He gritted his teeth. I heard them grind back and forth.
I didn't know it then, but this was the last day of our friendship. Although we talked some on the way home, most of it was spent in silence, looking long out the windows at the setting sun and the lights of Los Angeles when we came down into the valley. When we parked in front of the dorm, I went straight to the Basilica to rewrite my sermon, this time telling the story of what I had witnessed, working in Isaiah 25 and Ephesians 2 and the story of Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead. I preached with fire, God's voice on my lips, and after the service Pastor Dale shook my hand and said, "I didn't know you had it in you." Kenna's father invited me to lunch where I retold the story of the landslide with Kenna's fingers interlaced with mine beneath the table, and afterward, Kenna hugged me for the first time and whispered that she thought I had a gift. The smell of her shampoo and the bacon from her BLT, the warmth of her cheek and her breasts pressed against my chest stayed with me all through finals week and made it hard to concentrate on my papers and exams. Greg sequestered himself in the Basilica for the entire week, his bed undisturbed for five straight nights, his neck bent over his graph paper and books as though he didn't want to look up and find the week had ended. By the time we were face-to-face, we were donning caps and gowns, and Greg was rubbing Neosporin and Vaseline on his hands. We moved out of the dorms that afternoon, I just down the hill to an apartment with another Fisher's intern, he to his aunt and uncle's house in Pasadena.
I saw him one last time at my wedding. Before the ceremony I helped him with his cufflinks and saw that his hands were worse than ever, scabbed with crisscrossing lines and dark spots where ink and pencil graphite had imbedded beneath his skin. The marks disappeared up both sleeves, on both sides of his arms, like prison tattoos. He'd told me he was working at an engineering firm, but I didn't know which one and I didn't press him to tell me. The chairs beyond the door were full of my relatives, I was on the verge of kissing Kenna for the first time and the entire boundless frontier of marriage, and I didn't want to think of anything unpleasant.
Then life got between us. Fisher's hired me on full-time and by Christmas Kenna was pregnant. Pastor Dale asked me to preach one Sunday a month, and then every other, and when he retired, he tapped me as his successor. I saturated my life with God's Word as chocolate syrup saturates a glass of milk, and weekly encouraged my congregation to see the world the same way, to open your eyes and look at the fields, as Jesus tells the disciples in John. I was a good storyteller, as any effective speaker must be, and became known as the preacher who could see God in a ladybug crawling across a leaf, or in a dog at the end of a leash. Eventually my notebooks of parables and file drawer of sermons would get typed up and published in a book, God Is Everywhere, my half-factual autobiography told through a rosy lens, the climax of which was, of course, the landslide. "You too can emerge from disaster," I write, "you, too, can come out of your own grave and live again. Believe and God shall raise you up." It is a story I can tell when I am nervous or ill-prepared or needing to dazzle. I can thread it to any Bible verse, adapt it to every situation. For a long time, I believed God had shown it to me to do His will and to make disciples of all nations.
The only problem is that Greg is not in it. I tried at first to include him and the larger parts of that day, the cypress trees leaning sideways from the cliffs, his closed eyes at the turn of the golf course, his lessons about flight and lift. But space was limited—"Don't make people read too much at one time," my editor told me—and all that I knew of what had become of him I knew by hearsay, rumors filtered to me by an old SPEW acquaintance whose mother went to church with his aunt, or a friend of a friend in Salinas, where he grew up. I heard he was married, but isn't any longer, that he'd had a daughter who moved out of state with her mother, that he'd bounced around between jobs, his talents never quite matched with his employers' needs. I didn't know how to make any of that fit. I thought of his stacks of graph paper, and what Ethan Prufer said about them, and I imagined him in a sparsely furnished room in a shabby hotel rented by the week, unbuttoning his shirt at the end of his bed, his biceps and shoulders and chest and stomach inked black with a language no one else could read, and I deleted half of what I had written.
I could have tracked him down, found his parents, or his aunt, gotten hold of a number. I didn't have the courage. Instead, Greg found me. He called me deep in the early morning. This alone didn't surprise me; many people have my number and I am used to the phone summoning me from sleep. In a church the size of Fisher's, people leave and come into the world at every hour of the day. It wasn't
until after I had said "hello" and "hold on a sec" and moved from my bed to my study and sat down behind my desk—that week's sermon drafted on four sheets of legal paper—that I realized who I was speaking to. His voice was far-off and graveled, a faint whistle through the line, wind blowing in the background. "Hello from Miami," he said. "I saw you on TV. You look good."
"Miami," I said. "How'd you get all the way out there?"
"I just did."
"Greg," I said. I hadn't said his name in years. "What's going on?"
"I'm in trouble."
"Trouble?" I said. "With the police?"
"No, nothing like that." I could hear a tapping on his end. "Things just aren't right." I wrote not right on the legal pad, out of habit. I circled it twice. "I can't make heads or tails," Greg said.
At first I thought he was just in a tough spot, confused and defeated, but then I thought about his hands again. I had seen enough sadness to know the difference. I said, "You need to get some help. Go to the Emergency Room if you have to. Write this number down." I scrolled through my file for the number of a pastor I knew in Miami. Then I took his number down, and his address, and I said I'd call someone on his behalf. I said, "Let's pray" and I rattled off Jeremiah 29:11-14, and prayed for God to grant him peace in times of calamity. I did everything a pastor should have done. I called the prayer chain, I mobilized resources, I set my elbows on the desk and my knees on the floor and prayed for him. But I didn't put on my pants and brush my teeth and get on a plane. I didn't go to him. Instead I went back to bed and told Kenna nothing was wrong as I stroked the plain of her back, and fell asleep. The next morning I dialed the number he gave me more than a dozen times, and each time I listened to a woman's voice, half-Southern, half-computer, tell me it was disconnected.
Ethan Prufer explained it this way, shaking his head: "He never was good at the basics. Plain speech, conversation, paperwork, the little ins and outs. I'm surprised he figured out how to dial in the first place. I wouldn't make too much of it." My phone calls to Miami had yielded nothing; the pastor I knew there had tried to visit, but couldn't find him. Ethan and I see each other every few months to barbecue—it surprises me sometimes that of all my friends from SPEW, I have remained closest to him. We talked about Greg while we stood beside the grill, turning over the burgers and waving away the smoke. "A merry heart is a good medicine," he said. "His problem is he never had a merry heart." I nodded because it is a good phrase, even though I knew that wasn't it. That's not the way I remember him.
I remember the paramedics disappearing over the landslide and the ambulance-bay doors closing, and the rig driving away, lights and sirens spinning, and the crowd dispersing back to their cars and the long wait that lay ahead. The highway patrolman shouted that traffic would be diverted to a service road that would take us back toward San Luis Obispo and the 101. When I told Greg I was heading back to the car, he gripped my wrist and said, "Let's go back to the golf course." His hand was shaking and hot against my skin. "We'll play one more round, spend the night in a motel, eat steaks tonight. I'll buy. I don't want to be on the road anymore."
But no way was I going to miss my shot at preaching. "Relax," I said. "Be not afraid." He pressed his lips together and looked down. The backhoe roared up behind us, spewing out a black puff of exhaust before digging its shovel into the earth. I slapped Greg's arm and told him the backhoe had the faith of a mustard seed—it could move the mountain from here to there. I couldn't fathom that anyone would see it otherwise.
DAVID McGLYNN is Managing Editor of Western Humanities Review at the University of Utah, where he received his Ph.D. in Literature and Creative Writing. His stories and essays have appeared in Image, Black Warrior Review, Northwest Review, Shenandoah, Ninth Letter, and elsewhere.
THE VIRGIN'S
HEART
A.H. WALD
"THE VIRGIN'S HEART" IS A SKILLFUL PORTRAYAL OF A woman's life lived in service to others, with the attendant triumphs and sorrows any life lived this way will have no choice but to encounter. Especially striking in this genuinely heartfelt character study is the manner in which Ms. Wald renders the tough landscape, allowing it to reflect the difficult life of Sharon Farley, a life, as with the countryside against which she lives, that is not without its own startling beauty and hidden joy.
—BRET LOTT
Sharon Farley had long since given up hoping for a child of her own. Visitors would notice her ringless fingers and with a draft of pity that made her stiffen, ask when she had come out to Tidderzane. That's how everyone in the mission spoke of it. Fifteen, nineteen, twenty-four years ago, she answered, trying to keep a boast out of her voice. She had determined that she would stay until she died.
In her twenty-sixth summer at the orphanage, she was hanging up the infirmary sheets and a tub of laundry for a family who had just taken in twins when she saw a man and girl trudging along the dirt lane below the property. It was late morning, and an oppressive cloud of heat had swelled over the dusty compound, pushing most of the children and all of the staff inside, except for Sharon and one energetic cluster of boys squealing over by the tire swings. From a distance, she saw nothing distinctive about the pair. The man wore a simple knit cap over his bushy black hair and an old jacket that hung below his wrists; the girl wore a faded print dress with a large tear hanging down in the back.
Sharon leaned past the sheets to get a better look, plucking her T-shirt with her fingers like clothespins to let in a spot of coolness. She knew most all of the locals and a good number of the mountain families who came down to the small village for supplies, but she didn't recognize either of them. When they came to a bored shepherd looking after his flock in the dry scrub, the man asked him something, and Sharon assumed they must be traveling through. It was not unusual to have strangers come by; the country was in the middle of a bad drought, and people migrating north to the cities often passed through Tidderzane. The shepherd pointed in the direction of the village around the other side of the rise, and when the pair disappeared behind a stand of anemic pines, Sharon's curiosity dwindled and she bent down for another sheet.
Around the orphanage, bald singular mountains puffed up out of the plains, and in the flat brown land in between, stones were the best crop. They bubbled up the size of baseballs and basketballs every spring after the freeze-thaw of winter and then were cleared by the local men into little stacks of three or four, like petrified prairie dogs. In the lower foothills where sparse groves of trees had managed to take hold, the ground was just as barren, with only a dull sage green scrub sowed with pebbles and rocks.
Everything changed in the years when the rains came and soaked the arid earth, softening the pods of minute seeds that lay buried in the soil like grainy ash. The sterile land suddenly turned green, and not just one shade of green but a lush palette of jeweled hues, emerald and celadon and malachite and jade. On the hillsides, the green would give way to tracts of wildflowers, their color spilling down the slopes like fresh paint: yellow tickseed, white daisies, purple lavender, orange hawkweed, flaming red poppies all spread out in an embarrassing extravagance. The children splashed in the water-filled ruts on the lane, and the new orphanage staff always stared dumbfounded at the miracle of what the landscape had kept concealed in its tight fist.
Even the old-timers would turn giddy at the sight of the brilliantly colored drops gesturing in the breeze, and the entire staff would make a holiday out of it with an afternoon picnic among the flowers. Someone was always sent to search out Sharon in the infirmary and urge her to join the others. "Who knows when the next chance will be?" But she could never be pulled away. She had promised to look after someone's baby, or the cook was sick and she said she'd help with supper, or the mattresses needed to be aired and she couldn't waste the sunshine. The envoy would hesitate for a moment in the doorway, but Sharon would shoo the person along. "Don't worry, I don't mind," she'd say, and the person would shake his or her head, admiring how Sharon could work so hard without taking tim
e for herself. She pretended not to notice, but secretly she was pleased; it was one of the few indulgences she allowed herself.