Deathgrip

by Brian Hodge

  Other men may have been out and about the city, traveling anywhere a restored leg might take them. For that, there would be ample time later. The next day, and the next. For now? His heart had always been closest to the pursuit of learning and the preservation of knowledge. Such a man he would be until he died.

  Upon his wall, a small tablet of clay, worked with the reed, then pressed there while still wet. The dry heat had leached its moisture over time, until now it was a part of the wall. Across its face was written a proverb that had always given him inspiration: A scribe whose hand moves as fast as the mouth, that’s a scribe for you.

  But what of a scribe whose hand moves as fast as the human spirit? What of him? What sort of mark may he leave on future generations?

  He thought of the four brave young men who had faced the night alone. And the lesser gods they had no choice but to serve. Oh, what a man of tiny mind he was, thinking the night had been their ordeal. When the ordeal was just beginning.

  Annemardu touched stylus to clay, and began to write.

  Their legacy would be heard in time — in the voice of the scorching windstorm, in the rustle of breezes through the reed marshes when wind stirred soft as memories…

  Alas, Babylon.

  II

  MARTYRS, SINNERS, SAINTS

  But what greater temptation than to appear a missionary, a prophet, an ambassador from heaven? Who would not encounter many dangers and difficulties, in order to attain so sublime a character? … Who ever scruples to make use of pious frauds, in support of so holy and meritorious a cause?

  — David Hume

  Chapter 8

  Amanda was back home, where she belonged, and this was easily the most nervous Donny had been about her mere presence since their wedding night. Sixteen years ago, and she’d been a great deal more lively then than now.

  Returning under cover of darkness, near midnight on the final Thursday of June, in an ambulance from a private firm hired for the occasion. The job had been doled out through nepotism; the driver was a nephew of Doctor Irv Preston. Keep things in the family, they tend to stay quieter. Not that a couple of well-placed tips didn’t smooth matters along, hush hush.

  The ambulance had come quietly down South Squire Road out of central Oklahoma City, turning into the parking lot by the chapel. A brief pause at the far end of the lot for electronic clearance at a gate, then they were allowed onto the private drive leading to the house. A tunnellike gauntlet of trees, then a looped cul-de-sac, and they stopped before the Dawson home’s doors. Preston and his nephew unloaded Amanda, strapped her into a gurney, and brought her up the walk. Donny took over for Preston then — the least he could do — and they eased her up to the third floor. The midnight-to-eight nurse was waiting, ready to help get Amanda settled into what had once been a guest room.

  Such a contrast in decor. The Queen Anne dressing table and flowing drapes over the multipane windows, these ties to the everyday remained. The four-poster canopy bed was gone in favor of a hospital model. Like a child’s puzzle, which of these does not belong? The clinical additions abounded: The stand for Mandy’s IVs. Boxes of Ensure and Sustical, bags of complete balanced nutrition in an ultrapuréed blend. The IV bags of potassium chloride solution to replace the electrolytes she was losing. A floor receptacle for her urinary output. And all manner of other odds and ends to make her life, such as it was, easier.

  The daily routine was as settled as it was boring. Feeding would be handled through her clear plastic nasogastric tube, kept around eighteen hundred calories per day, with each so-called meal followed by water. She would undergo the usual range-of-motion exercises to combat muscle atrophy. The nurses would turn her side to side every four hours to discourage bedsores, and should one dare show the beginning of its ulcerous face, inflatable O-rings were at the ready to slap over it. She urinated through a Foley catheter, unaware, and her bowel movements were cleaned up like a baby’s. No cares, no worries, no responsibilities.

  While the midnight nurse quietly went about making the final connections Amanda needed to sustain life, Preston placed a fatherly arm around Donny’s shoulders. Stout old guy, with half-gone hair and a walrus moustache and bifocals. He sometimes resembled a doc from some western frontier town, forever inspiring confidence, trust, loyalty. Unless you were with the IRS.

  Preston steered Donny into the hallway, back the same way they had come. The nephew remained a few paces behind.

  “Talk to her a lot,” he was saying. “I doubt she’ll show any signs of hearing you, but do it anyway. She’ll hear you, and something may very well get through, and mean something to her. Okay?”

  Donny nodded, yes, yes, anything.

  Preston smiled. “A few years back, I treated this five-year-old kid who’d gotten banged up in a car wreck. He was in a coma for two weeks. His mom and big sister would talk to him, and I’ll be damned if they didn’t actually get responses out of him. He’d squeeze their fingers to answer when they told him to. Sometimes he’d nod his head to questions. They’d ask him if he wanted an ice pop, and he’d nod, and they’d ask if he wanted orange, cause that was his favorite flavor, and yeah, he’d nod again. And he’d suck on those things like a baby with a bottle. They’d read him stories and fairy tales and comic books. The kid had no memory of it when he came out, but nobody can ever convince me that that mother and that sister didn’t help bring the little guy out of it.”

  “Do you think I might get any response like that out of Mandy?” Anything would be better than her stone wall of silence, and he’d only been around her, what, fifteen minutes since her fall? Day in, day out, it would be maddening.

  “There’s always a chance. If you do, terrific.” Treading from third floor to second now. “But if you don’t, don’t be discouraged. It’s not the rule, it’s the exception. And bear in mind that she’ll probably rise and fall, so to speak, during the duration. She’ll be in there at different levels.”

  They had come to the final length of the staircase. The big one, the guilty one, here where it all began…

  “She might remember something she hears while she’s under, though. Not necessarily right away. It would seem like a dream. You know how you’ll dream and not recall it right away, but later on in the day, a word, a thought, something, will trigger the memory? It’s the same principle.”

  They reached the bottom of the stairs, Preston leading his own way to the door. “Let me know of anything you might get out of her. I’ll be by once or twice a week, more if something changes. Now, if you have any problems with the nurses, you let me know. I wouldn’t expect any, not from these ladies, but I realize how, well — delicate this situation is.”

  There it was, wasn’t it? Understated, but undeniably there, the conflict in ethics. A man of medicine not only condoning, but aiding and abetting a fraudulent healer. A man of God who saw to it that thou shall not steal was overlooked, at least in the case of charitable contributions the man of medicine showed in his ledgers. One hand washing the other, I won’t tell if you won’t.

  God understood, surely. These days, big government and big business just made getting along so much more complicated than they had to be. It was their own fault. And God understood.

  Once they had reached the door, Gabe stepped from the parlor, where he had been keeping a patient vigil. Donny leaned in to give Preston a hug, lingering a moment while the doctor slapped him good-naturedly on the back.

  “If you need anything at all, just call,” Preston said. “Anytime.”

  “Thanks for everything, Irv. God bless.”

  “You too. And especially Mandy.”

  Donny locked the door behind Preston and his nephew, leaned his head against the translucent glass. Heard the ambulance roll away, and oh, didn’t the days of trial lay ahead now?

  “You need anything?” Gabe asked. Still in his workday suit. Might as well leave it on and sleep over and begin fresh at nine the next morning. What commitment, this man had no life of his own. No friends apa
rt from the ministry, no woman in his life, no family anymore. Just career and God. It couldn’t be healthy for him, but Donny wasn’t about to say anything, not now, not when Gabe was needed more than ever. Have to remember to talk to him about that someday, get a life.

  “Just pray with me, Gabe,” and they knelt at the foot of the stairs. Taking turns going to the Lord in a petition for mercy and healing and bestowment of strength in these needful hours. Fifteen minutes of tag-team prayer, after which Donny arose, and if he wasn’t on fire, at least hopes were rekindled. He decided to sit up with Mandy for a while and sent Gabe back to the parlor, to the waiting book he had tabled, spine up.

  The long climb up the stairs, this time alone. Into Mandy’s room. The night nurse was Alice Ward, and having met her patient’s every need for the moment, she could only watch and wait for something else to come up. A homely woman in her mid-fifties, she kept to a chair beside the bed, clock steadily ticking on a table to let her know when Mandy would require turning again, like a steak on a grill, and she thumbed through an antiques magazine.

  “I know you just came on duty,” Donny said, “but why don’t you take a break. I’d like to be alone with my wife awhile. You understand.”

  As he wished. The magazine went with her to the door. “Would it be all right if I go to the kitchen to fix some coffee? First night and all, I’m not used to these hours yet.”

  Donny told her to help herself, coffee in the pantry, machine on the counter, can’t miss them, make it strong. She left with no noise, seemingly no breeze of departure. Where did they learn to walk like that? You couldn’t teach that in class, could you? Maybe it was innate, a sign of their calling.

  He had met the three nurses earlier in the week, handpicked by Preston and submitted for Donny’s approval. Although why he would object when Irv wouldn’t, he didn’t know. Courtesy, Donny supposed, and this he appreciated. All had been given the nod.

  Each was a single woman, to avoid the need to account for the particulars of her shift to a curious husband. There was Alice Ward, a widow, and despite her bulldog countenance she was the most mannered and cultured of the three. Probably the most dependable, which was why she had been offered the graveyard shift.

  Alice was relieved by Edie Carson in the mornings, who stayed until four in the afternoon. Never married, no boyfriend, according to Irv. Just a quiet little mousey thing who would never raise a second glance, getting through life with as few bumps and obstructions as possible. Noble and sad.

  The last was Sally Pruett, tall leggy blond, rounding out the schedule from four to midnight. No intentions to marry, said Irv. Lots of relationships but none very close. Keep this Jezebel at a distance; there would be no reenactments of Jim Bakker’s PTL scandal, real or alleged, originating under this roof.

  Three nurses, all skilled, more than capable enough for the present situation. For Amanda didn’t look to present much of a challenge. She lay beneath a single sheet, slightly curled onto her right side, facing him. The once-lustrous perky hair now hung limply from her skull. Hands and face looked pale, the skin nearly transparent and waxen, and she was dotted with sweat. Dark circles ringed her eyes.

  He scooted the nurse’s chair so he could get as close to Mandy as possible, without actually climbing into the same bed. It wasn’t enough. He could climb into her head and even that wouldn’t do the job, for he feared he would find himself utterly alone in there. Frantic cries to rouse her going unanswered, echoing through her inner darkness like lonely drops of water plinking in some subterranean cavern.

  They hadn’t had children yet. Often discussed, but something he had always felt would be better postponed, the time never right. For whatever reasons, multitudes, the ministry never quite able to spare the attentions a child would require. He had never been any gladder of it than now. To be subjecting children to the sudden absence of Mom would have added a whole new dimension of hell to this entire ordeal.

  Donny took her hand, leaned over, kissed those lips so very gently. Warm, but unresponsive. A prone statue, sculpted from flesh instead of stone, and if he could have breathed more life into it, he would have slaved over her for as long as it took.

  “I miss you, Mandy,” a whisper into her ear, half covered with limp hair. He uncovered it the rest of the way, silly attempt to allow the words better access. “God alone knows how much I miss you. A man couldn’t have asked for any better a partner than you.”

  I’m tired of living out lies, and damn that memory anyway.

  “Hon, can you hear me? If you can hear me, squeeze my hand.”

  Waiting. Waiting. In case it took the words abnormally long to register, for the synapses to fire and make sense of them. A minute, two, three. He could have waited all night, but she wasn’t going to squeeze. Here he was, knocking at the house of someone who could not make it to the door. That didn’t mean he still couldn’t stand at the threshold and call in. Hoping.

  “I tried, Mandy. I really tried so hard to help you. But it just wouldn’t come.” Donny wrapped his other hand around hers, swallowing it between his palms, trying not to choke on his own words, a performance first. “It just. Wouldn’t. Come.”

  And there she lay, silent testimonial to his own inadequacies. He could probably live with just about anything fate or God or Satan threw at him, except for the loss of her respect. Too much. And so, he could never let her forget…

  “But Mandy, honey, you can’t deny that it happened that once, that I really did it, that I brought that boy back from the brink of death.” A hesitant smile through tears threatening to break free and cascade upon her bed. Anointed tears. “Do you remember those days? Those fine days? Sometimes I think those were the best days we ever knew. You remember, don’t you? Sure you do. Squeeze my hand if you remember…”

  Fine days indeed. Exhilarating, in their own rudimentary way, the fulfillment coming from putting themselves wholly in the hands of God and letting Him guide where He wished. For the time being, He’d seen fit to leave them as poor as churchmice.

  August 1980. An election year, the Carter presidency on its last leg as it headed toward the first Tuesday in November. If you believed the polls, the outlook was bleak. But in the south, as Donny and Amanda thumped the evangelical trail, hope sprang eternal. With a washed-up actor running for president on the Republican ticket, the south would rise again. Count on it.

  Donny Dawson, traveling preacher, self-ordained. He was twenty-seven that August, Amanda his junior by four years. They took meals with hospitable congregations and, in between, took brief day jobs to keep them solvent. Haircut money was saved by adopting extremes. Hers she wore bound, nearly to the waist. His was in a crew cut, because that took longest of all to grow out. They didn’t even have enough cash to get swindled, and it was just about the holiest, most romantic life they could conceive of. This was simple perfection.

  Their chariot was a 1966 Ford Falcon, once white but now a rolling shrine of dust and great splats of mud. It carried them through small towns in Georgia and Alabama and Louisiana and Mississippi, these towns the same everywhere, except for different names across peeling-paint water towers standing against trackless skies. These towns with the same people working the fields, or strolling to the market with half a dozen of the same kids in tow, or sitting half-hidden at twilight behind screened porches, guarding secrets the world had no right to share. These towns of burning sidewalks, buckled and cracked from the passage of too many seasons, and overhung with the lazily bobbing branches of weeping willows. The highways and byways between them all were encroached upon by kudzu vines, here forever, creeping up with no less a goal than total conquest of land and town.

  As Donny was discovering while he and his bride pushed from revival to revival, these same proud people had the same thirst for the Word of God. Same needs of assurance of an eternity far better than the lot they had drawn here on Earth.

  In the Mississippi Delta, they would roll across the rural landscape, Amanda staring out the window
s at ramshackle hovels, black children, white children, the same haunting stares from each while parents broke their backs in the fields. Amanda would gaze at them with tears barely held in check, sadly shaking her head, completely forgetting that in most cases, the people she saw probably had more in worldly goods than did she and Donny.

  It was the compassion, above all else, that had bound him to her. She kept him mindful of others, their needs. Rich or poor, they were all needy in a way.

  Northwestern Alabama, the sawdust trail having led them to a pair of rural hamlets called Courtland and Valdosta. A paper mill kicked a lot of paychecks into the area, but life remained much the same as it had always been: one step forward, two steps back.

  A chuckholed succession of back country roads led them to a dingy clapboard building with a sign that read SALVATION CHURCH OF THE PENTECOST. An oft-patched, open-sided tent had been erected on the lawn before the church, in a clearing surrounded by trees. The tent was crammed with rows of rickety folding chairs, full of some of the singingest, shoutingest people he’d ever seen. Some decked out in rural Sunday finest, clothes old and ill-fitting but clean, and others wearing work clothes that had seen hard mileage all the way. Faces ran with sweat, and the occasional breeze only dropped things down from stifling to merely sultry.

  Amanda took over on the piano, hauled outside earlier, and pounded away with reeling abandon. Seasons of humidity had detuned its strings into a honky-tonk warble. Hymns and songs of celebration churned out rapid-fire, a clarion call for the believers. Foot-stomping and arm-waving, beholders of visions and speakers in tongues, they waited for the words of Donny Dawson.

  Magic was in the air, all right.

  And another sound, as well, the rumbling blat of an ancient tractor from up the hard-packed dirt road. Donny heard it well before it came into view, shambling mechanical dinosaur held together with baling wire and prayers. The driver, little more than a silhouette against the fields and woodland beyond, was waving from afar.