Land of the Brave and the Free

by Michael Phillips

  Regrettably the words I had spoken about the speedy return of Miss Hollister’s memory were not to be fulfilled. After another week, it became clear that the problem was more severe than I had anticipated.

  By then she was up and about the place and regaining her health and color and vigor admirably. Notwithstanding, the wound in her shoulder and apparent concussion on her head continued to exercise their toll, and she remained in bed at least half of each day. But I made sure she walked about and got some fresh air and ate as much as she could, and gradually I could see strength returning to her frame.

  It did not, however, seem to be bringing back her memory, and as the days progressed I became increasingly more deeply concerned. That she was indeed Corrie Hollister I was all but certain, though I still had not shown her why I believed the name of the envelope to be hers. Somehow I had not felt the time to be right, though I sensed it would be soon.

  I did not know much about amnesia, other than that it could be total or partial, and that it could last but a matter of a few hours or days or could be indefinite. I knew sometimes memory came back slowly by degrees, and sometimes all at once, usually triggered by some thought or event having to do with how it originally was lost in the first place. The more time that passed, the more my concern grew, but also I hoped that in time the restored health of her body would lead to restoration of her mental faculties as well.

  Her convalescence did offer the opportunity for us to talk a great deal, and it was curious to discover those places wherein her mind was still active, and those mental rooms which had temporarily been cut off from her use. Of herself and her family and her personal background and recent past, she could recall nothing. Even as I began calling her by name, she seemed to resign herself to the appellation as a fact, but it did not appear to strike a chord of familiarity or recognition within her.

  And yet when it came to matters of the spirit, there seemed to be no lack in her individuality and expressiveness whatever. I was delighted, in fact, to find what kind of spiritual and moral fiber she was made of, though I had reason enough to expect it and was hardly surprised. Her sensitivity to the things of nature around her was perhaps heightened by the loss of something so close that we all take for granted. And along with this I knew from the very first that she was a young woman of God’s design and making, a true daughter of her Father in heaven. Her awareness of God’s life within her was neither stilted nor shy, and it expressed itself in the most refreshingly simple and childlike, loving and trusting ways. But there was nothing childish about the childlikeness of her faith. She was a deep and profound thinker about the things of God, and I found her a wonderfully adept sharpening instrument for my own ideas and questions, even doubts. Here was someone who really thought about things, like I did myself! Thought without being afraid of asking questions and looking at hard things that seem fearsome to most people.

  Even though she had no idea who she was, I knew who she was—this young woman was one of God’s own! In all my years as a Christian and among Christians, never had I met one so in harmony with my own desire to search for and discover ever more depth in the ideas of both the spirit and the reality of the application and practice of those ideas.

  From the first day with her, I recognized the combination immediately—this was a hungry soul—hungry to grow and learn, not in the least self-satisfied, desirous to press ever deeper into the character and heart and being of God . . . to know him!

  Not a sophisticated soul, I could tell that too . . . no airs, no pretensions, no guile. Hungry . . . eyes wide open for all life could teach, for all life might mean.

  How does one encounter such an appetite for life in a human breast and not be drawn to it, and not want to share in its pilgrimage to the high places of God? I had been around staleness and stagnation of the spirit so long, how could I not relish in the mere anticipation of knowing this lady’s heart?

  Six days after her awakening, I packed her up comfortably in the wagon, and with a lunch prepared by Mrs. Timms we headed into the countryside. It was her first excursion away from the house itself, and I judged that she was strong enough for an afternoon away from the bed.

  “Where are we going?” she asked softly from where she lay padded in the back of the wagon amid as many blankets and pillows as I could get together from the house.

  “Out . . . out away . . . to the country, to the hills, wherever our gallant steed should take us!” I replied, turning around and speaking to her with an enthusiasm that matched the joy in my heart.

  “Sounds like an adventure,” she replied. “Are you sure I am up to it?”

  “You, Miss Hollister, I have deduced from my observations, are one I doubt would be daunted by anything!”

  “I’ve never been wounded before.”

  “How do you know that?”

  She was silent. “Hmm . . . you’re right. I reckon I don’t know that, do I?”

  “Unless you are remembering more than you think,” I suggested. “In any case, yes, I do think you are up to it.”

  “I still feel so weak, not nearly myself.”

  “Ah, there you are again, making comments that hint in the direction of your past. It seems as if, though your mind is not recalling its facts, your emotions are sensing things you used to feel.”

  “Is that a good sign?”

  “I think a very good one.”

  “You still haven’t told me where we are going.”

  “I don’t know. I just wanted to get you out of the house, under the blue and white of God’s sky, let you feel the wind in your face and feel the autumn chill and smell its smells. I know how you love God’s creation, and it will refresh your spirit.”

  We rode on quietly for a while. I kept the reins tight so that our pace would be slow and the bouncing at a minimum. I took us probably not more than three-quarters of a mile from the house, then stopped and jumped down.

  “You stay just where you are until I have a place ready for you,” I said.

  I tied the horse to a tree, then got several of the blankets and spread them out on the dried grass of the meadow. She started to rise.

  “Wait,” I said. “I don’t want you reinjuring that shoulder trying to climb down.”

  “I’m fine. I can—”

  I jumped up onto the wagon wheel beside her, and before she had a chance to finish, I slid my hands under her knees and back where she lay and scooped her into my arms. A moment or two later she was on the ground adjusting the blankets around her.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, noting the crimson in her face. “I didn’t mean to embarrass you. But I have to admit I am very protective where that shoulder of yours is concerned.”

  “I must have lost a heap of weight,” she said, giving a nervous little laugh. “You picked me up like I was a feather.”

  Now it was my turn to laugh. “Believe me, Miss Hollister, compared with the lifting I have done in my life, you are scarcely more than a feather! I worked my way through seminary hoisting hundred-pound bags of wheat all day long at a granary.”

  She said nothing, and the thought turned me introspective for a moment. “Although in retrospect,” I added, “I suppose even that wasn’t the hardest work I ever did.”

  “What was?” she asked.

  I couldn’t help smiling ironically. “Trying to feed people starving for the truth,” I said. “People who had no idea how desperately hungry for it they ought to have been.”

  I paused. “Actually,” I went on pensively, “perhaps the hardest work of all was trying to figure where truth was myself . . . after all that happened.”

  We opened the basket and laid out the simple fare provided for us by my landlady.

  “Father,” I prayed, closing my eyes, “I thank you for this glorious and wonderful day you have given us to enjoy. Thank you for the clouds above that move about as if delighting in the antics of the wind, the breath from your mouth. Thank you for those gentle breezes down here, chilling our cheeks and carrying into
our nostrils those fragrant aromas from your thousand growing things, rousing us to life itself. Thank you, Father, that you do not allow us to rest, but always keep the winds of your spirit blowing through our inner houses to clean and purge and refresh. Thank you for your sun, the very picture of the fiery light of life which is the essence of your being. Thank you, God, for life itself! And I thank you for my sister, for protecting and preserving and restoring her life, for leading me to her. I ask you, Father, in the name of your Son Jesus, to invigorate and fully energize her body, to utterly heal her wound, and to restore the fullness of her memory in your perfect time. Thank you, Father, for your goodness to us—in all ways. Amen.”

  “Amen,” she repeated softly.

  We began to eat awhile in silence. Neither of us, however, seemed particularly intent upon the food.

  “Thank you for praying for me, Christopher,” she said at length.

  “Of course,” I replied.

  “Nobody’s ever prayed like that for me.” She caught herself, then glanced up and smiled. Such a beautiful and innocent smile of sheer delight in the moment. “At least, I don’t remember ever being prayed for like that!”

  “Sometimes I tend to get carried away when I pray,” I said. “God’s goodness is just so huge, it occasionally overwhelms me.”

  “I could feel that as you prayed,” she said. “You really know God, and talk to him just like he truly is your father.”

  “What else is he?”

  “But I don’t remember hearing anyone talk so . . . I don’t know—I reckon it sounded almost bold the way you were talking to him, like you knew he was not just listening, ’cause maybe we all do that, but like you knew without doubting it at all that he was gonna answer what you asked for.”

  “I suppose I do believe it,” I said.

  “Hearing you pray for me with such confidence, well, I reckon it makes me believe it too.”

  “I’m glad to hear it,” I said.

  “There is one thing I’m not glad about, though,” she added.

  I looked at her with concern. Then she smiled, and I saw that it was nothing I needed to worry about.

  “Even though neither of the names are ones I altogether feel comfortable with, I reckon being called Miss Somebody still sounds a mite stranger than just having one name to get used to. So if you’re still thinking I’m the person on that envelope I was carrying, especially if I’m calling you Christopher, don’t you think it’s high time you were calling me Corrie?”

  “If you like,” I laughed. “I will do so with pleasure.”

  “I do like.”

  “Then Corrie you shall be!

  Why are you doing all this for me?” Corrie asked after she had finished with as much lunch as she could eat.

  “You mean helping you get back on your feet? What else could I do? Are we not commanded to do whatever we are able for our fellows?”

  “But you have taken care of me night and day, for weeks. Surely you don’t do this for everyone you meet.”

  “I do not often meet young ladies near death from gunshot wounds.”

  “You know what I mean,” she said, not to be deterred from her interrogation. “There is something different about you. I know it. Even if I cannot remember who I am or where I have been, I can tell that you are unlike people I’ve known before, even if I can’t remember them. You must know it too.”

  I felt myself squirm with embarrassment. She had turned the spotlight of conversation straight into that region where I was least comfortable that it should be—pointing at me!

  “We can’t talk much about me,” Corrie added. “There’s nothing we know of to talk about! So now I want to know about you. If we don’t know why I’m here, I want to know why you’re here taking such good care of me, someone you don’t even know.”

  “But I do know you.”

  “There you go again trying to sidestep my question. I said it before, you know what I mean.”

  I laughed, thinking to myself that this was a determined and forceful young lady, a side to her I hadn’t yet seen. “I suppose I do,” I said.

  I paused. “I have always had a great longing to help people,” I went on at length.

  “Why? Where did it come from.”

  “It’s a long story.”

  “I’d like to hear it.”

  “If I tell you where it came from originally, I’ll never get around to answering the question you just asked about why I’m here now with you.”

  “You’ll tell me about the first part of it someday?”

  “If you like.”

  “I insist you do. As much as you long to help people, I want to know about people.”

  “Why?”

  She became very thoughtful. “Hmm . . . I don’t know. It’s something I just feel inside, like every person has a story to tell that I’m supposed to find out about.”

  “Another clue to your past?” I said.

  “I reckon so. Which is all the more reason why I want you to promise that you will tell me your story someday, where the thing came from inside you that wants to help folks.”

  “All right . . . I promise.”

  Corrie smiled, satisfied. She’d won the exchange and knew it . . . and I knew it too! This young lady could match wits and hold her own with anybody!

  “Now tell me why you’re here now, and why I was lucky enough to have whatever happened to me happen where you’d find me.”

  I took in a deep breath and thought for a minute. “I told you I’ve wanted to help people. That’s the story I’ve promised to tell you another time. For now I’ll just say that it always meant more than merely doing things for them.”

  Again I paused. I suddenly found myself in new territory with this Corrie Hollister. Until now she had been, as it were, my patient. All at once, the insides of my being were being opened up, and she was holding the surgeon’s scalpel with the penetrating gaze of her eyes and her probing questions. I was not accustomed to anyone being interested in these deep places within me, and it was an altogether new kind of exchange for me.

  “Because of what had happened in my own life some time earlier, I found growing within me an enormous hunger to help people really be complete. To help them become full people, to help them know their heavenly Father intimately and wonderfully. If that meant doing something for them, like nursing you back to health, then I was happy for such an opportunity. But there was also the side to it, which was even stronger, of wanting to help people see and know God and be his sons and daughters—wanting them to know his truth, and to know themselves, and to know how great was his love for them, and to know that he was not a faraway God almighty and omnipotent somewhere in the distant heavens, but that he was a close and present and tender and compassionate and loving Father to them! And it was this hunger in me that led me toward the ministry.”

  “How old were you?”

  “I was in my teen years when God began to get deeply into me. I was twenty-one when I entered seminary.”

  “The bags of grain?”

  “Right! Wheat by day, Bible and preaching and church history by night!”

  “Sounds like a lot of work.”

  “It was. But I desperately wanted to serve God’s people, and the ministry was the only way I knew to go about it. I could envision no other place where such a hunger as mine could live itself out and express itself and exercise an impact in people’s lives. So I worked hard and studied equally hard, preparing myself for a life in the church. That was the call I thought was on me, and I gave myself to it enthusiastically.”

  “And then?”

  “I made it through the four years, obtained my degree of Divinity—”

  “You are an actual certified minister!”

  “In the flesh, a Doctor of Divinity.”

  “I’m impressed.”

  “Don’t be. A few letters after my name means less to me now than I can possibly tell you.”

  “Still, it is something.”

  “No,
it really isn’t.”

  “No matter. Please . . . go on. I’m sorry for interrupting you.”

  “Well, I was twenty-five, a newly ordained minister of the gospel of Jesus Christ, excited at last to be sent out into the harvest fields, so to speak, and to begin doing what I had prepared for and longed for. When I say ‘harvest fields,’ I do not mean the lost and unsaved, or the pagans in the jungle. I had long felt within my own heart such a desire and hunger to be part of the growth and nurturing process within the body of God’s people—helping Christians know their Father better more than trying to bring unbelieving people into the church with salvation messages and hellfire sermons.”

  “Did you become pastor of a church?”

  “Not immediately. But all the seminary graduates send out letters making themselves available. And there are notices of churches in need of pastors. It’s the typical search of a new minister, fueled both by a great hope as well as a great dread.”

  “What dread?”

  “The dread of no church wanting you, after you’ve prepared so long and so hard.”

  “That must have happened to you,” said Corrie. “You’re obviously not a pastor now, and it couldn’t have been too long ago. I’m sorry.”

  “Why do you say it couldn’t have been long ago?”

  “Because you’re so young. You don’t look any older than I am.”

  “I’m thirty. By the way, Corrie, how old are you?”

  She thought for a moment, trying hard to rummage through the parts of her brain still working to see if she could locate the answer.

  “I don’t know,” she said finally with a sigh. “But I don’t think I’m that old. I have the feeling I’m twenty-five or twenty-six . . . or maybe even twenty-seven. But I’m sure I’m not thirty.”

  “Well, I am. I graduated five years ago, in 1859—and I was full of optimism for the future. It did not take long for me to find a church that did indeed want me to be their pastor, and they issued me a formal call.”

  “You must have been thrilled.”

  “Of course. It was a decent-sized congregation too, in a section of the city where a young man just out of school would not expect to start. It was a prestigious way to make a beginning in what could well be a prominent career in the religious world.”