Poor Cecilia, enjoying every frolicking moment of it and assuming that Steve was enjoying it too! He was in his element, after all. How could she know that the tenseness in his body was different today from every other day? How could she know that this was proving to be pure torture for him, not the thrill he usually experienced in overcoming challenging road conditions?
Steve made a firm decision to resign himself to the struggle. That helped. No point in fighting the pain. There was enough to fight on the road.
Just open your eyes wide and let it come, he lectured to himself. You’ve got mighty precious baggage here to be worrying about your eyes. Just get her there safely, he told himself over and over again. He had to remind himself constantly that his baggage was precious because even with her arms around his waist, she didn’t feel precious. His feelings were consumed by the massive ball of fire stabbing him in both eyes and sending explosive throbs into his head. By sheer force of reason he flung his feelings aside and focused on Cecilia and the challenges of the road.
At last, the struggle ground to a jerking halt. Steve turned up a little pathway leading to the place where they had come earlier in the fall and pulled up beside a great oak tree. Cecilia jumped off the cycle and danced around to the front, but Steve remained anchored to the seat gunning the engine, his eyes pressed tightly shut. He could hardly believe it was all over. Slowly he let the roar of the engine which had become synonymous with life die away.
Here they come, he shuddered to himself, anticipating the stabbing pains in his head which he had been holding at bay. She was standing in front of him grinning spritely. He looked up.
“That was quite something, wasn’t it,” he heard himself remark.
She nodded abruptly.
“Let’s go take a rest under that tree. A drive like that sort of takes it out of a fellow for a while.”
He fumbled his way over to the tree and sank into a bed of warm dry leaves trapped in a hollow between two big roots and bathed in the afternoon sun. The old oak clung to the hillside near the top of the windward flank of the bluff. The prevailing wind had sent most of the snow skittering over the top of the bluff to the leeward flank.
Steve shut his eyes, his head propped solidly between the two large roots.
“Cecilia,” he said absently. “I think I’m just going to take a little nap for a few minutes.”
“Sure,” she said. “You’ve earned it.”
In a moment he was unconscious.
Meanwhile Cecilia gathered some dry wood, cleaned out an open area in the leaves not far from Steve, and lit a crackling fire to help keep him warm. Then she poked around in his bag until she found his dry socks. Unlacing his left shoe, she eased it off without disturbing him and peeled off the wet sock. She touched his toes. They felt numb. So she massaged them and the rest of his foot briskly until his whole foot was pink again. She put on the dry stocking and, turning to the other foot, gave it the same treatment. The shoes she set closer to the fire to dry out. Then for an hour or so she sat below Steve, massaging his stocking feet and tending the fire.
Sitting there she gazed at the trees. A squirrel scampered back and forth between two nearby oaks, apparently just for the fun of it. A blue jay stirred up a racket high overhead.
They always sound like they’re scolding someone, but I think it’s just their way of laughing, she told herself.
For a long time she mused on these things. Then quietly, imperceptibly, an awesome sense of the vastness and providential goodness of Creation began to stir within her. It was the spotless fathomless blue of the sky and the endless whiteness of the earth. It was the time-warped gnarls of the ancient oaks in contrast to the fleeting nowness of the little woodland creatures scampering around in them. It was the fragrance-laden breezes and the cozy cushion of leaves. It was the sun’s benediction and the earth’s adoration. It was all of this and more, distilled in the all-embracing love of God and in Steve and Cecilia’s blossoming love for each other. Her heart was bursting with joy. God had been so good to them!
At that moment Steve stirred. She looked up at him from where she was sitting at his feet. His eyes blinked and opened and then pressed shut.
“O Steve,” she purred with quiet ardor. “Isn’t God wonderful? I’ve just been soaking in this tiny corner of His vast creation and thinking of how great He is, and of all He’s done for us.”
Steve blinked again and pinched his eyes back shut, reeling from the brightness as from the door of a blast furnace.
“Mmmmm,” he mumbled. “We are pretty lucky, aren’t we?”
She looked at him a little crestfallen.
“Lucky?” she asked softly. “Wouldn’t you rather say ‘blessed’? God has blessed us, don’t you think?”
“You sound just like my mother.”
“Like your mother?”
She was still rubbing his feet. He didn’t talk much about his parents.
“You must love her very much,” she suggested.
“There is only one person in the world that I love very much,” he muttered between his teeth. “Only one person I’d drive through a wall of fire with a splitting headache for, just because she wants to come out here.”
Cecilia fell back in alarm.
“O my love! Why didn’t you tell me you had a headache? We would never have come out here if I had only known! Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Because,” he replied slowly, opening his eyes a slit and wobbling his head drunkenly with each word, “because you’re the one person in the whole world I’d walk through burning coals to reach if you were on the other side. That’s why.”
His head fell back, his eyes pressed shut again.
Cecilia turned her pleading eyes away and peered into the fire. All at once she felt like crying. She swallowed hard. Then she looked back at him. Her throat was tight. Her tongue felt swollen. She got up and sat down next to his head. Gently she rested her hand on his forehead.
“But … can you love me and not love everyone else too?” Tears were blurring her eyes now. She blinked and one big tear fell onto his cheek.
Steve was simply going to answer, “Of course I can.” But something in her voice checked him before he spoke.
“Actually,” he said very softly instead, “when I’m feeling more like myself and when my heart is full of you, I guess you could say that my love for you spills over to everyone else, too, in some sense. Yes, you could say that.”
She leaned over and kissed him on the forehead.
Now she was lightly caressing his eyeballs through his eyelids. It felt good.
In the silence that followed, Steve mulled over what he had just said, moving from confusion to greater clarity.
Could a headache subvert his love for her? No, not really. But it could sure subvert his love for others beyond her. His love for her, based on a clear rational decision of his in response to everything that had led up to it, was an openly acknowledged factor in his life. It was his life! It was lodged just as firmly in his mind as it was in his heart. If pain drove her out of the feelings of his heart, she was still very much in his mind. His feelings for her could be, and almost always were, quite overwhelming, but his love for her was sustained by more than his feelings. It was sustained by his decision to love her and to believe in her love for him.
But what of his love for others beyond her? Had he ever openly acknowledged its existence or defined it as an important factor in his life? Let’s face it: it was a by-product of his love for her, and entirely on the feeling level. He didn’t even know he was doing it when he was doing it! No wonder it simply disappeared when something like a headache destroyed the feeling side of love. Now he had his finger on it….
Listen, old boy, he warned himself severely. That’s the way it’s got to stay. If you experience this “love for others” as a spontaneous offshoot of your love for Cecilia, well and good. When it springs from your heart all by itself, no problem. But why would you ever let it get entrenched in your min
d? It could make a real sucker of you if you thought you had to love others no matter how you felt about it. Loving Cecilia is so rewarding. It’s worth any personal sacrifice on your part because of the returns it brings. If loving her flows over into loving even people you have every good reason to despise, then at least recognize the fact that you are under no obligation to love them when you don’t feel like it, when it doesn’t come naturally. What did you learn last summer? Two things at least: the joy of authentic companionship and the stupidity of clinging to an ideal, like wilderness living, when you have stopped desiring it. So, you can love others as long as loving Cecilia makes you want to. But careful about taking it further than that.
At this moment he knew he was living on his decision to love her. His heart could feel almost nothing. It was as though reading the wedding notice of a couple of strangers in the newspaper, he could neither doubt their happiness nor share in it. Sheer reason would have to carry him through today. Here she was, loving him with all her heart and tearfully stroking his brow, while all he could do through his blinding headache was to calculate that he loved her.
Such pretty bits of insight, arranged so neatly and encased in my poor aching head. Why can you think love when your head aches, but you can’t feel it? You have to think yourself through the motions of love. Here is an angel sitting by my head, running her fingers across my brow, caressing my throbbing eyeballs, and letting her tears fall on my face. And here I lie, almost as unmoved as a stone. All on account of the fact that I am suffering from the worst headache of my life, which is all on account of one Blaise Pascal, which is all on account of my curiosity getting the better of me, which is all on account of my feeling so good last night, which is all on account of how high I was riding after being with her, which is all on account of how much I love her! How crazy is life! You can start out in heaven and wind up in hell! Well, thank God that with her I will be out of this hell and back up to heaven again tomorrow. So stick it out, man, and don’t do anything stupid.
He opened his eyes. She was looking down at him, questions written all over her face. He reached for her hand and pulled her down to his side. The effort itself pumped poison into his head, but he bore it without wincing. Taking her into his arms, he said, “All I know is that I love you more than life itself. Please believe me. I can’t love anybody without loving you.”
She rested her head on his chest. His heart was thumping beneath his shirt. What a strange thing to say, she thought. Not that loving me makes him love everyone, but that he can’t love anyone without loving me…. My poor Steve must be bearing a terrible wound in his heart.
Lying there with her head on his chest, she felt his breathing become more regular, as though he were dozing off. She put her right arm around his rib cage and very gently drew him in more tightly against her.
“O Jesus!” she prayed softly under her breath. “How can I help You heal that terrible wound in his heart! I’ll do anything You ask of me for him, dear Savior. Anything! Whatever it takes. I love him so much.”
They lay there for some time without stirring. At length Steve took a deep breath and shifted his position.
“Cecilia, would you please get me the first-aid kit under the seat of the cycle? It’s just a tiny box. There are two aspirins in it. I’m going to take them now.”
She fetched it for him.
“Now a handful of clean snow.”
She brought it. He placed the two aspirins in his mouth and swallowed them without water. Then he took some of the snow, melted it in his mouth, and swallowed it, too.
“That’s what I get for being an amateur scientist,” he said, laughing weakly. “Pills don’t do much good without something to dissolve them in. Now we’ll give them a few minutes to go to work. Then I have something to tell you that I’ve wanted to tell you for a long time.”
She sat down next to him.
“No, here,” he motioned, patting his chest with one hand and stretching out the other towards her. So she lay down again, her head beneath his chin and her slender body extended alongside his and enfolded in his arm.
They lay like that for several minutes, with their eyes closed. Then Steve opened his eyes. The headache had subsided to a mere annoyance. He inhaled deeply and felt her head rise with his chest. He gazed down at her golden hair. She went out of focus and in his mind’s eye he beheld the indistinct form of his Spectre Maiden in all its tantalizing beauty. Love surged into his heart, warm and real.
“Cecilia, I want to tell you about the Maiden from Heaven that I fell in love with this summer,” he breathed.
Her heart almost stopped.
“Mmmmmm,” she purred. Was this his great wound?
Several times he opened his mouth, but nothing came out. “I don’t know where to begin,” he admitted.
“I want to hear it all, my love. So why not go back to where it starts?”
“To where it starts,” he echoed. “That takes you all the way back to a big empty farmhouse in North Dakota and to a mother that was constantly nagging her husband and a father that paid no attention to his wife or his son. For each of them, life had become a self-inflicted drudgery, but for different reasons. It wasn’t until their kid got away to school that he discovered that you didn’t have to hate life every blessed moment of the day because there were some things you could do just for the fun of it.
“So what did the poor kid do? He got out of the house every chance he could. He raced horses, dreamed up ridiculous pranks, stormed the countryside in the Model T Ford his dad bought for him probably to make up for his neglect, wandered around outside all by himself, not joyfully like you used to do but restlessly, and spent his time figuring things out in his head that most people ignore, and generally raising Cain when he could.
“Everything he enjoyed, decent people looked down on. Everything he couldn’t stand, decent people spent their life pursuing. He knew lots of people who hated what they said they liked and liked what they said they hated, so he took any advice from them with a grain of salt. First thing you know, his mother was pushing him off to college and his father was trying to palm off the farm on him.
“So off he goes to college, hating every blessed minute of it except when he can get away on weekends with the fellows. But pretty soon this goes sour on him too. He gets a bellyful of that kind of stuff and about goes crazy trying to figure out what there is in the world that’s worth doing. Something inside him won’t give him any rest. Everyone is trying to get him to amount to something, as they define it. His professors, his mother, his father all have a clear idea of what he should be doing. He just wants to break free and fly away while he still can. Where? Who cares! Just so it’s away.
“Something about the wilderness attracts him, away from everybody and everything that could ensnare him and close to the creatures in nature who live by instinct and do only what they feel like doing. So he turns his back on all the rubbish people have dreamed up to turn their lives into pure drudgery in the name of duty, and takes off on his motorcycle for parts unknown, preferably in a forest somewhere.
“All right, fine and dandy. After nearly a month of disappointment and dead ends, he literally stumbles into a paradise in Upper Michigan…. A paradise, I tell you, Cecilia, a real paradise….”
His voice trailed off and his throat tightened up. Cecilia had been hanging onto each word. Her heart was bleeding for him.
“It was beautiful, my love, so beautiful. And perfect for my purposes. A lush basin in the silent hills just south of Lake Superior. Pines and cedars and great hardwoods. Dotted with sun-splattered glades. Bisected by a tumbling stream of pure cold water. Birds and animals. Everything I loved. Nothing I hated.”
“O Steve,” she interrupted. “Will you take me there sometime? I’d love to be in a place like that with you!… I’m sorry. Continue.”
“Well, at first I was overjoyed. I tinkered around building a camp. It was great fun. Before long I had finished the campsite, finished scouting the are
a, finished all my preparations for the good life there. So I settled back and waited for happiness. Well, Cecilia,… you’ll never believe it, but I had already had all the happiness I was going to get in that place. I’d already had it….
“Then one day as I was tramping around, I ran into a big silver dog that I named King. Or rather, he found me and decided I was his friend. He was very handsome, a husky, silver and white except for a patch of black under his neck. When he looked at you, you figured he understood you. His eyes were a little Oriental, made him look very wise. Well, he stayed with me all summer. And, Cecilia, that creature never got his fill of trying to please me, even when I was all wrapped up in myself and ignoring him. I tell you before God that he was the first living creature I knew who really loved me just as I was, and I guess I learned to love him in return.
“Early one morning I was awakened by his howling. It turned out that our camp was right in the path of a couple of huge warring ant colonies. A tree full of wood ants had fallen over a big mound of earth ants, and did they ever fight! All day long we watched them whittle each other down from two huge warring hoards to almost nothing, all over a misunderstanding. The only survivor I could see at the end of the battle was the queen of the wood ants, and she was maimed.
A Grain of Wheat Page 17