Deep River Burning (15 page)

Chapter 21

The Waiting Room

Father Allen’s eyes, only half open, moved horizontally across the room. He was surrounded by white. The curtains were white. The sheets and pillowcases were white. The walls were white. The floor was white. Towels sitting on a cart in the corner of the room were white. It seemed better to keep the eyes closed.

He felt himself sinking into the hospital bed. He could no longer tell where his body ended and where the bed began. This isn’t where he thought he would be at this time in his life, but he accepted it and took a deep breath as he felt his body continue to sink more deeply into a state of stillness. The nurse came to check on him, but he didn’t respond. He was too tired. He opened his eyes a little and then closed them again. He recited the Lord’s Prayer silently to himself . . . “Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name . . .” Then, he recited the 21st Psalm . . . “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures . . .” And finally, he recited the Prayer of St. Francis of Assisi . . . “Lord, make me an instrument of thy peace. Where there is hatred, let me sow love . . .”

He recited each prayer in its entirety over and over again in his mind until the words began to run together and collide with images, many of which were familiar from long ago, of a young boy sitting in an old truck watching a fire burn in someone’s front yard while his mom stood outside the truck by the driver’s side door. The young boy watched the men in long white robes and pointed hoods stand in solidarity around the fire while his mom slowly shook her head up and down in approval. “Yes,” she seemed to be saying to herself, “Yes.” She looked over at him as he sat in the truck and she smiled at him. He looked down at his hands while his mom leaned in through the open window and reassured him. She reached over and held his left hand. “It’s all right, honey. Daddy’s doing God’s work. It’s all right.”

The little boy heard screams coming from the house and the tall men in white stood so large they formed a wall he could barely see beyond. The light from the bellowing, malevolent blaze pointed toward the sky as sparks flew on to the grass. Tongues of fire reflected in the front windows of the house, and the little boy could see the mirrored images of the men in white who stood silent for a short while, and then they turned around and left the yard, leaving only the wooden cross engulfed in a crackling inferno to stand on its own. As the boy’s father walked back toward the truck, his mom hopped in on the passenger side. The father didn’t take off his hood until he was getting into the truck and then he drove away. All of the men drove away quickly and at the same time. God’s work was done.

Denver and Jimmie arrived at the church while Father Allen was sleeping. They made themselves comfortable on a sofa in the waiting room. Other people from the Isabel Beach Coastal Wildlife Sanctuary and the parish came to the hospital.

“I didn’t even know people could get TB these days,” said Twyla who had rushed to the hospital from the sanctuary as soon as she heard the news.

“According to the nurse,” Denver said, “people do still contract the disease, but she said that it is rare. Some people are carriers and they don’t know it, so they can pass it on with just a sneeze or a cough.”

“But Father Allen had always been so healthy.”

“Yeah,” Jimmie said, “but with all of the work he does at the sanctuary and then at the church, part of me isn’t surprised this happened. It was only a matter of time before something would slow him down.”

“I just wish it wasn’t something life-threatening,” Denver added.

Father Allen woke up disoriented as he felt his bed move. He looked around with his feverish eyes and pale skin as he was pushed down a long hallway, through large, wooden doors, and then through a heavy, locked door. He was being pushed into the quiet, serious world of infectious disease. This was the part of the hospital where not only was the patient afraid of what was happening in his own body, but so are the doctors and nurses. It’s a place where people were afraid of what they couldn’t see. They were afraid of what’s in the air, and maybe, they were even in awe of the destructive power of tiny organisms that are only programmed by nature to multiply.

“Do you have family who we can call for you?” the doctor asked. Father Allen shook his head no.

After about an hour, the doctor came into the waiting room and said that Father Allen had been quarantined and that it was critical for him to get rest. “What are the chances that he will pull through?” Denver asked.

“It depends on how well he responds to the medication,” the doctor said. “There is a strain of tuberculosis that is drug-resistant, and in those cases, it can be very difficult for the patient to overcome the illness, but most of the time, the antibiotic treatment works well and the patient will fully recover. The treatment involves a combination of drugs over a period of six months to a year in order to completely eradicate the infection so that there is less of a chance that it will recur. Let me ask you a question,” the doctor paused. “Do you have any idea where Father Allen may have come into contact with someone else who is infected? Due to the fact that some people are just carriers, it can be very difficult to determine how the disease was contracted, but it is important that we ask just in case we can trace it back to a person who may be unknowingly spreading it.”

Denver and Jimmie both looked at each other and shook their heads.

“Was he around anyone who had even a little cold?”

“The only time I can think of,” Denver said, “was last September when the church was used as a storm shelter for Hurricane Bernita, but that was almost eight months ago. He also comes into contact with people every week at the church.”

“Tuberculosis can remain dormant for many months before it becomes active, and it often appears at a time when the immune system is weakened for one reason or another. Is there any way that you could get me the names of all of the people that stayed in the shelter during the storm? And could you get me a list of the people who are members of his church? Of course, we will need to test the two of you as well as the other volunteers at the sanctuary.”

“Yes, of course. We can get a list of the parishioners, and I’m sure they have a record somewhere at the church of who stayed at the shelter during the hurricane,” Jimmie said.

It was hard for Denver to accept that she was not going to be able to see Father Allen. He was quarantined, cut off from the world except for the few doctors who were not afraid. He was sick and alone, and those who cared about him were going to have to wait. She wondered about his parents in Pennsylvania, if they had been notified, if they cared. Father Allen told her once that he was estranged from his parents because they didn’t agree with his decision to become a priest. But it didn’t matter. He had family, a big family, and some friends slowly left the waiting room when they were told they wouldn’t see him while others decided to stay at the hospital so they didn’t have to be alone with their worry and sadness. Denver and Jimmie were in the latter group.

Jimmie went to get some food and brought it back for those who didn’t want to leave. The doctor said that it might be as long as two weeks before they would know for sure if the drugs would be effective against the disease, but if at all possible, Denver wanted to be there to hear the news when the doctor found out, one way or another. According to the doctor, tuberculosis is slow to grow but it is also slow to die, so even if Father Allen responded well to the drugs, he would have to be treated with medication and periodic tests for at least the next six months, and he would remain quarantined until tests indicated that he was no longer contagious.

While Jimmie was gone, Denver talked to a few of Father Allen’s parishioners and then went for a walk around the hospital. She wondered how people got well at all, in such cold, colorless rooms. Health is more than just a physical experience, it is spiritual as well, she thought, but at some point, someone got the idea to put sick people in drab and dingy rooms thinking it was a good thing for healing.

She did not need to remind herself that she was in the same place again, not the hospital, but in a place where she felt like she was losing herself again. She had lost the people who had meant the most to her, and now she may lose again, someone so utterly dear to her that she might dissolve one moment, or become entirely numb, as if the nerve traveling to the part of her that registers grief had been severed. Maybe it had been cut, maybe she was in denial, or maybe she knew that Allen’s faith would see him through the suffering. “I am not my body,” he once said to her. “It’s just a shell.”

When Jimmie returned, he had six hot subs in a bag for everybody in the waiting room who was there for Father Allen. There were three vegetable and provolone sandwiches and three turkey and swiss. The waiting room reminded Denver of a hotel with the same cheap, generic furniture and scenic country pictures hanging on the wall. It was a large waiting room with linoleum and walls painted basic eggshell. There were dusty windows on one side of the room that provided a view of a parking lot and a street. The waiting room also had three round tables with four chairs around each one, and several end tables placed throughout the room piled with magazines and health information pamphlets. Other groups of people were there talking amongst themselves and showing varying degrees of worry for someone in the hospital.

When Jimmie finished his sandwich, he sipped from a bottle of water he got from a hospital vending machine and told a story about a young woman who died from tuberculosis because it was against her religion to accept medical treatment. “She believed that her illness was between herself and God and that doctors should not be involved in the outcome. Not that doctors are bad people, she just believed that the only reality is God and everything else is just an illusion, so doctors are not important when it comes to curing disease,” Jimmie explained.

“Was she treated for the disease any way?” Denver asked.

“If you consider prayer as a form of treatment. She didn’t believe in death, so she wasn’t afraid of it. She believed that her illness was a result of an error in thinking and the tuberculosis was in her because there was some kind of mental issue that she needed to work out with God.”

“Do you know what this ‘error in thinking’ was all about?” Denver asked.

“No. I read about her story a while ago in a magazine, but I distinctly remember the article mentioned that she believed there was no such thing as a heaven or hell, per se, but that hell is a state of consciousness when you don’t realize who you truly are, which is all spirit. When you realize your true self as a spiritual being, then your state of being, or consciousness, is pure bliss, or heaven.”

“So, what’s wrong with seeking medical treatment?” Twyla asked.

“Nothing. I just think she viewed medicine as inconsequential.”

“What religion is this?” Twyla asked.

“Hmmm . . . I think her beliefs were in the Christian Science Church.”

“Thank goodness Catholicism isn’t that way,” Twyla added.

“I don’t know how ya’ll can relax at a time like this,” said an older, southern woman from the church who had known Father Allen for many years. “Father Allen changed my life. I used to be a person who could cut people from my life as easy as it is to snap a twig from a tree, and I was proud of it. Sometimes people deserved it, sometimes they didn’t, but it didn’t matter, I was always in control. I could hold a grudge for years. If someone said or did one thing to me that I didn’t like, I wouldn’t let them near me ever again. I thought I was such a big deal back then, but really, I was full of fear. It was Father Allen who changed me and made me realize that carrying a grudge only makes you heavier. And I mean that literally since I probably gained eighty pounds carrying all my grudges. I thought it was a way of getting back at the other person, but it doesn’t work that way. You only hurt yourself. I learned that from him.” The woman wiped large tears from her eyes and her cheeks burned a bright red.

“We all have to believe that Father Allen is going to beat this disease,” Denver said. “As long as he doesn’t have a drug-resistant strain of TB, he should be okay. The doctor said that, right?” The others nodded their heads in agreement, but their worrying eyes fell to the floor. No one was going to feel better until they heard from the doctor that Father Allen was responding well to the medication.

Denver walked away from the conversation and left the waiting room for a while. She thought about the sanctuary. She didn’t think she could keep working there if something happened to Father Allen. His presence was palpable, fluid in every room, doing every task, and his patient wisdom was recorded everywhere on the beach. He was the one who found her on the beach when she was alone, without a home, without a friend, without a clue what the next moment would bring. In many ways, she felt as if he had saved her life, and now she could do nothing to save his.

Prayer didn’t come easy to her. It used to, before the fire, before the fighting, before the murders when no one was caught and justice wasn’t served. She never told Father Allen this, but for a brief time when she was younger, she thought very seriously about becoming a nun. She even went to a Catholic church in Adena and spoke to a priest about it. He had discouraged her, but she couldn’t remember anymore what he said or why he steered her away from it. Still, she wondered, what would make becoming a nun seem like a good idea to a teenage girl who had more energy than she could ever contain. Maybe it seemed like an escape from a world that was beginning to show her its propensity for cruelty and violence. At some age, it becomes apparent that many things in the world are not right, and although Denver couldn’t quite articulate those feelings when she was younger, her short-lived focus on convent life may have marked the beginning of her desire to find answers.

She went outside and stood in the parking lot of the hospital under the lights. Moths and bats were flying back and forth around the light poles. She smelled the salty air, but she felt dead inside. Maybe she was just tired. A warm breeze blew through a small opening in her blouse that felt cool and the moon was rising over a line of trees in the distance.

She watched a young couple run around the parking lot, chasing one another, laughing, touching one another gently in the most delightful form of foreplay, and then they settled up against the side of a car and held onto each other as if there was nothing else that mattered in the world. It seemed odd to her to see people so happy in a hospital parking lot. Perhaps they were waiting for a friend to have a baby in the maternity ward. They turned the car radio on and danced to the slow beat. They weren’t drunk, but they laughed at the silliest of things. They kissed one another as a breeze caught the young woman’s lavender perfume and carried it over to Denver who had sat down on a curb at the edge of the parking lot.

Denver closed her eyes and imagined a man standing over her as she was lying on a bed of buttery soft sand, a man she didn’t know personally, a man she hoped she would know someday. She would see his face and she would know his name and she would whisper it and it would remind her of morning surf or the swishing trees and lapping water of the Susquehanna. But when the music on the car radio changed to a song she once knew, one she had heard Josh singing all summer the year the fire split the highway going through Adena, a rush of electricity moved down the entire length of her body. It chilled all traces of the warmth her body was beginning to feel as she thought about this man who she didn’t know, but who loved her, and wouldn’t leave her.