There was nothing Rags could do. The man would die within seconds, and Rags knew of no way to save him. The only thing he could do was stay with him until he died, talk to him, tell him that it would be all right, that soon he would be with Jesus forever. Then the door to the last car opened.
Jesse was in the doorway, dressed all in white, his face a mask of sorrow. Rags stared at him, eyes and mouth wide in amazement. Then Jesse began to move toward him slowly, and Rags backed away on his hands and knees toward the door of the forward car, where he stopped and watched as Jesse knelt beside the old man, leaned over him, and put his lips against the blue skin. The wheezing sound stopped, the body shuddered once, and lay still.
Then, for the first time, Jesse looked directly at Rags, and Rags felt a two-fold shock of recognition sear through him as he saw Enoch's eyes staring out of Jesse's face. The illusion lasted for only a moment, and then Rags saw Jesse, and only Jesse, just as if he were alive and human and not what Rags feared he had become.
There was recognition in Jesse's face as well, the sad ghost of a smile at seeing Rags, and he opened his mouth slightly as if to speak, but said nothing. Instead, a look of purpose came over his gaunt features, and he rose from the dead man's side and walked toward Rags, who still crouched on his hands and knees. Jesse knelt beside him and lifted a pale, bloodless hand toward his old friend. The fingers trembled, and Rags could see that Jesse was hesitant to touch him, almost as if he were afraid.
Then something in Jesse leaped into flame as a burst of emotion crossed his face. Rags saw desperate hope, fierce determination, the quenching of doubt, and, above them all, a surge of will that would have physically driven Rags back had not the fingers of Jesse's hand clamped like iron bands onto the cloths around his neck, holding Rags in a grip of fire, a white, cleansing, purifying fire that burned away all Rags's fear. . .
And consumed his tumor.
It did not shrink slowly, like a deflated balloon, nor did it wither and shift, melding with his body. It simply vanished as the knife wound had vanished, leaving his skin furrowed with age, but soft, flat, whole. The cancer had left him.
Now Jesse's hand was soothingly cool, even through the layers of cloth, and for the first time in many months Rags straightened his neck, and looked into Jesse's face, where he saw his own wonder mirrored. Jesse seemed filled with surprise, and even, Rags thought, a certain frail triumph. But there was not enough joy there to balance the sorrow that hung like a mist around his friend, borne of pain so strong that Rags could touch it with his mind.
Jesse took his hand away and stood up. In the instant before he turned and walked back into the last car, Rags saw a tear leave his eye and roll down his cheek, and then Rags was alone with the dead man on the floor.
Rags got up and walked back to the door, looked through it, and saw that the last car was empty. When the train stopped at the next station, he got off and crossed over to the eastbound track. He stood there alone, listening to the sounds of the tunnels, thinking that if it was so hard to be just a man, how much harder it must be to be a god.
"Hope, Jesse," he whispered. "Hope."
Then, slowly, he pulled out the ends of the cloths that swaddled him and unwound them from around his body, first from his neck, then his arms, chest, stomach, and legs, methodically working his way downward until the last piece of fabric came away from his ankles, and he stood wearing only a shabby white shirt and a pair of faded dungarees. He gathered up the rags in his arms and bore them, as gently as if he carried a child, to a refuse container, into which he dropped them a handful at a time.
Then he sat on a bench, bowed his head, and prayed for Jesse Gordon until the next train came, his last train, the train that would carry him up, into the light.
Lowland Rider Page 24
