by Jan Karon
“Some of his blood cells have cancer,” said Peggy. “They’re takin’ over his healthy cells. Th’ outcome of that is, Henry will die…if we don’t do somethin’.”
Henry looked at his mother, seemingly agonized.
“Henry needs a stem cell transplant.” Peggy was calm, even cool. “They used to call it a bone marrow transplant, but now they got a new way of doin’ it.”
The fan moved the air, the clock ticked. He was in a kind of free fall.
“Best thing is to have a brother or sister donate th’ stem cells,” she said. Peggy Lambert Winchester was a locomotive hurtling along the track, not stopping at the stations. She looked at him, her eyes wide, her breath short. “Sister can’t do it, too much heart problems, an’ anemic since she was a child.”
“You’re sure about the diagnosis?” he asked Henry.
“They drilled into my pelvis and pulled out bone marrow with a syringe. They’re sure.”
“What happens if you don’t get the transplant?”
“They say I could live for some months. A lot of transfusions and antibiotics. Chemo would help, but not for long.”
“What happens if you do get the transplant?”
“Rejection and infection can be serious problems,” said Henry, “along with the possibility of liver or kidney failure. And yet, there’s also the possibility that God would grant me a few more years, that I could live a normal life. Any way you look at it, there’s no guarantee of success. But I would take that. I would take it gladly.”
“You want me to donate the stem cells.”
“Yes,” said Peggy. “We do.” Tears spilled along her cheeks.
“When Mama began praying about this, I was completely against getting in touch with you. I tried to put myself in your shoes, and knew it was too much to ask. But God and Mama are a force to be reckoned with.
“I guess I never really believed you’d come, and that would be all right. I’ve lived a full life—I’ve met a lot of good people, seen beautiful places, and I know where I’m going when I pass.
“Then we heard you were in Holly Springs, and I knew God had answered a selfish prayer. I admit that, for the first time, I began to hope.
“I don’t want to leave Mama at this late stage, though Sister would do all she could to help. But I want you to know that I’m not expecting anything, I have no right to expect anything. It’s enough to meet you, Tim, to see you face to face. I’ve heard about you all my life, it was a comfort to know you were out there somewhere. You’ve always been…”—Henry paused, moved—“a brother to me.”
He was overwhelmed to think he’d been counted a brother to someone all these years, that God had used such a fragile scrap for binding.
“Would you be willin’ to talk to Henry’s doctor?” asked Peggy.
“I have diabetes,” he said. “Type Two. And I have a wife and son.” With or without a medical problem, he had no idea what the consequences could be. He had never heard of a stem cell transplant, only bone marrow transplants.
Peggy leaned toward him. “Would you be willin’?”
“I don’t know.” All he knew for certain was that he didn’t have time for a crisis; he was headed home to Mitford day after tomorrow. “I need time.”
Peggy pressed her fingers to her forehead. “An’ I need to lie down a little bit. I’m sorry for all this; we’d give anything if it could be some other way. Help me up, please, Henry.”
Henry helped his mother from the chair; she seemed even smaller than she had looked when they arrived hours, days, years ago.
“Excuse us,” said Henry. “I’ll be right back.”
“Take your time.”
He heard the ticking of the clock, and stared, unseeing, at the pool of light cast by the lamp onto the empty chair.
“We could walk outside if that would be all right.” Henry came back to the room, appearing eager to leave it again. “There’s a bench.”
They walked across the yard to the shade of an immense oak, passing beneath the drip line of the branches into a zone of cool, sweet air, and sat on the bench. The wire fence behind them was massed with honeysuckle and humming with bees.
“I can take you to Frank’s anytime you need to go.”
“I’ll wait ’til she gets up,” he said. “I couldn’t leave now.”
“This has worn on her,” said Henry. “And on you, too. I’m sorry.”
“No need to apologize. No need. It’s going to take time; it’s a great deal to take in.”
“Yes,” said Henry. “I’ve been taking in the fact that I had a half brother over a period of years, so I don’t feel the brunt of it as you do. But having you here in the flesh, and not in a dream or a story, that’s a great deal to take in for me.
“If you hadn’t come, this would be just another day, but Mama would have tried and that would have helped her, somehow. Of course, I didn’t know you when we sent that letter, and I couldn’t realize…I never really carried it forward to think how it would be painful for you—and even for me, though I have no right to say so. No one is taking anything from me, or asking anything of me. But it’s hard to be the cause of another’s suffering.”
“Did she love him?”
“Yes. She did.”
“A lot of questions come to mind. Did it go on a long time?”
“A few months, she said. She knew it was wrong, and had the potential to hurt a lot of people. She loved him, I think, because he was wounded—as she was. Perhaps the principal thing is that he wasn’t afraid of her.”
“Was he afraid of my mother?” He felt a stab of anger, and deep humiliation that a stranger might know more about his father than he had known.
“I think he may have been afraid of most everybody.”
Afraid. That wasn’t one of the words he’d use to define Matthew Kavanagh, though it suddenly seemed right. “Did he love your mother?”
“She thinks he felt safe with her. She said he used to come to her house at Whitefield and sit and cry like a baby. He never said why, he just sat there and wept. Then he’d get up and wash his face and hands and go home.
“He always told her he couldn’t stay long, because her house smelled like a nigger cabin and the smell would get in his clothes. She didn’t like that, as you can imagine, and made him explain himself. He said the smell he was talking about was of cold biscuits and stale ashes and ham grease and wood smoke. She said to me not long ago, How can you change the smell of wood smoke if you cook with wood? How can you change the smell of biscuits if that’s what you bake, and ham if that’s what you fry? That incident has stood out in her memory all these years.
“In the end, she believes he felt safe with her because she believed him when no one else seemed to.”
He meant the Houck trial. The truth was like a knife.
“Maybe he never let anyone see again the compassionate side that spared Sam his punishment,” said Henry. “Mama also loved him for what he did for Sam.”
He didn’t have to sit here asking these naked questions. He put one hand over his face and sat speechless and unmoving amid the humming of the bees.
“I’m thanking God for you, Tim, and asking him to give you strength and wisdom.”
He could not move his hand from his face—the touch, even of his own hand on his brow, was a kind of comfort. “I’m angry,” he said at last, “and sad, yes—that my father may have shown love and even tenderness to someone else.” His mother had longed for it, needed it, deserved it.
“He loved your mother.”
“How can you say that?” he snapped.
“I only know what Mama told me.” Henry’s voice was calm. “He loved your mother very much. He was proud of her, too, but he was afraid of her strong faith. He could never understand it; he could only see that it made her more whole than he felt he could ever be.”
“She also had the money in the family,” he told Henry. “God help us.” He saw his mother and father standing among the hostas, and the
open, surrendered look on his father’s face. For a time, if only when the shutter exposed them in that fleeting and vulnerable moment, they had been happy.
He looked beyond the shade of the tree to the sun-bleached garden. “Did you ever see him?”
“I never did. When Mama left your family, she went down to Batesville to stay with people she’d known in camp. She met Packard Winchester there. Thank God for him; he was a wonderful father to me, the best of the best. We called him Papa. Mama probably told you he was principal of an academy for black children. After teaching and administrating all day, he made house calls to parents, helping them learn to read and write. Then he’d come home to Mama and Sister and me, and help us with our homework—we all had homework from Papa.
“He taught me a good bit of Latin. Of course, I’ve forgotten a good bit more.”
“They probably don’t use much Latin on the choo-choo,” he said.
Henry chuckled. “Not much, that’s right. Papa was careful to have me read the poets, too, including the black poets, though their work wasn’t easy to come by then. But no matter how hard Sister and I labored at our studies, he called Mama his favorite pupil.
“All this time, Mama was out working, doing whatever she could find, and saving to put me through college. Sister never wanted to go to college; she said they’d have to catch her first.
“When Papa died twenty years ago, we moved here; it was an old property of the Winchester family that needed a lot of work. Sister’s husband had left a long time back, so she came with us and made a new life down the road there.”
“When did you know about your biological father?”
“I was pretty young, maybe ten or twelve. Papa thought I should know the truth. He believed in the truth.”
“Did you ever want to find him?”
“Not really,” said Henry. “It would have embarrassed him and hurt me, so I never could see the use of it. May I ask how it was with the two of you?”
“His pain was agony to me. More than anything, I wanted him to know the love of Christ, to know it deeply and truly. It would have transformed him. But as far as I’m aware, he died without that assurance.
“I spent a long time at his bedside at the hospital, desperately hoping to persuade him of God’s love. I left to drive back to seminary, and he died only an hour or two later. I won’t know until heaven what the Holy Spirit did with any of that.
“Even knowing what an ungodly act it is to carry guilt, I’ve nonetheless carried a lot of it over the years. A good deal of it was because I tried to persuade my father before I was persuaded myself.
“It was years later before I surrendered my life to Christ. In the meantime, I had the words right, the outward behavior right, but my soul was lost. That simple.”
Henry nodded.
“Down deep, I think I loved him very much. But I spent a lot of time hating him, too. I’d like to be able to say that in a different way, maybe just say that I feared him, which I did. But in the end, the truth is that I often hated him. When I was young, I found something written by a seventeenth-century clergyman. ‘To be proud and inaccessible is to be timid and weak.’ It was the first description, outside my own, that I had of my father. It was a confirmation of sorts; I clung to that for a number of years as a pointed insight to his character.
“I never knew where to step with him. It seemed he despised me, and I could never understand the reason. I don’t think I’ll ever understand it.”
“Not everything can be understood or resolved,” said Henry. “But it all has to be faced, I think.”
“Maybe because my grandmother died when he was born, he never learned to love, never had a model for it. And my Grandfather Kavanagh was certainly not one to teach love or charity. As a believer, I still castigate myself for being unable to love my father unconditionally, with no looking back. It’s the looking back that causes me to stumble.
“Coming out to Holly Springs has done what talking about Sam does for your mother—it makes it all fresh again.”
“I also fought to love him,” said Henry. “Just in a different way and for different reasons.
“After I learned the truth, I used to crawl up under the house to think about him, it was a very private, very fragile thing. I thought that if I hid somewhere, I had a better chance of finding him. I’d write his name on my school tablet, and try to draw his face from the descriptions Mama gave me. I’d take the drawings in the house and ask her, Is this him?
“Mama would say make th’ nose a little longer or th’ forehead a little higher, something like that, and I’d go at it again. It was mighty hard to try and spin the face of my father out of thin air.
“I remember sounding out his name, Mister Matthew Kav-a-nagh, and sometimes, with great fear and trembling, I would whisper, Daddy. It was strange, and even scary, to think that a little black boy in the red dirt under an old house in Mississippi could call a prominent white man Daddy.
“The truth is always hard, but I’m glad Papa told me. Someone said, Out of every fresh cut springs new growth. It’s helped me in a lot of ways to know the truth.”
“I’d like you to know,” he told Henry, “that I’ve forgiven him. Again and again. Once done, of course, back comes the Enemy to persecute and prosecute, and I must ante up to God and forgive yet again.”
“There may be circumstances in this life,” said Henry, “that God uses to keep bringing us back to him, looking for his grace.”
“Yes.” They were quiet for a while; bees browsed in the hot perfume of honeysuckle. “You never married?”
“I planned to. I was forty, an old bachelor. I met Eva on the train. She was wearing a black hat with a red rose. I thought she was the prettiest lady I’d ever seen. As I said coming out in the car, lives can be changed on a train.”
“What happened?”
“Cancer. I wanted to marry her before she died, but she wouldn’t allow it. She wanted me to go on, and find someone else. She was a wonderful woman. There won’t be anyone else.”
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“And you?”
“Married when I was sixty-two. Adopted our son, Dooley, just a few months ago. If it weren’t for Dooley, maybe I couldn’t understand how your mother is going about this, and how urgently she wants your life to be spared. I would do the same for Dooley, of course. That’s just the way it is. I have no idea where this will lead, but I admire Peggy for her courage and faith.”
“Thank you for saying it.”
He glanced at Henry, then turned on the bench and gazed full into his face. “I’m looking for my father,” he explained.
“Yes.” Henry looked back at him. “Me, too.”
“You’re tall like he was. And there’s something about your eyes.”
“Mama says he was a handsome man.”
“Very. Your mother says you write poetry.”
“I do. Packard taught us a lot through poetry. He liked Paul Laurence Dunbar, said to be America’s first premier black poet, who wrote: ‘Like sentinels, the pines stand in the park; And hither hastening, like rakes that roam, With lamps to light their wayward footsteps home, The fireflies come stagg’ring down the dark.’”
“‘Stagg’ring down the dark,’” he said. “I like it.”
“I got a nickel for learning that; it was the first money I ever earned. Mama said you liked poetry as a boy.”
“All my life, really. I’d like to read something you’ve written, take something with me, if that would be, I don’t know, appropriate. I’ve never had a half brother before, so I hardly know what to do or say.”
Henry’s laughter was gentle, easy. “We’re in that boat together, all right. There’s a poem I’ll send with you, but let me confess I’m not much of a poet in the long run, I just take down what comes.”
“That will work,” he said.
“I wrote it while Mama was praying, asking God what he wanted her to do about contacting you. I’d never written about my mother bef
ore. I’d always written about trains and how it feels to move through the night past towns and people and lives we can never know.
“Mama was sitting with her back to the window that looks out to the garden. She had her Bible open on her lap, but she was reciting the words from memory, as she often does. I happened to look up from my book and saw something so remarkable that the breath went out of me like a shot.
“I saw my mother’s soul.
“I can’t explain it. I thought that writing the poem would capture it, but nothing came of the struggle to say what really happened or what it did to the air in the room.
“As I said, I’m not much of a poet. What went on in that moment escaped me, though I tried hard to catch it.”
“Poem or sermon,” he said, “all one can ever really do is try and catch it.”
They stood up from the bench. “She should be rested a little by now,” said Henry. “Then I’ll drive you back whenever you say.”
Peggy’s question burned in him as they went across the side yard and up the steps.
“Did you ever see the top of Mama’s head?” Henry asked.
“Never. She would never take that blasted head rag off. I always wanted to see what was under there.”
“I’ll ask her to show you before you leave. As a man of God, or even as someone who cared about my mother all those years ago, you should see it.”
They talked for a few minutes on the stoop. When they stepped inside, Henry went to his room and he found Peggy sitting in her chair.
“I could have slept ’til Judgment Day,” she said. “But I aks Jesus to wake me up in fifteen minutes, an’ he hit it right on th’ dot. He’s my alarm clock.”
“I’ve used that alarm clock myself, more than once,” he said, sitting on the footstool. “Peggy, I’m willing to talk to Henry’s doctor.”
She gazed at him for a moment as if in disbelief, then put her hand over her heart. “Thank you, Jesus,” she whispered. “Thank you, Timothy.” Tears pooled in her eyes.