From the Corner of His Eye (47 page)

Shortly past nine o’clock, an hour after Edom and Jacob had gone, Barty came downstairs, book in hand. “The twisties are back.”

For each of them, Agnes put one scoop of vanilla ice cream in a tall glass of root beer, and after changing quickly into their pajamas, they sat together in Barty’s bed, enjoying their treats, while she read aloud the last sixty pages of
Starman Jones.

No weekend had ever passed so quickly, and no midnight had ever brought with it such dread.

Barty slept in his mother’s bed that night.

Shortly after Agnes turned out the light, she said, “Kiddo, it’s been one whole week since you walked where the rain wasn’t, and I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about that.”

“It’s not scary,” he assured her again.

“Well, it still is to me. But what I’ve been wondering…when you talk about all the ways things are…is there someplace where you don’t have this problem with your eyes?”

“Sure. That’s how it works with everything. Everything that can happen
does
happen, and each different way of happening makes a whole new place.”

“I didn’t follow that at all.”

He sighed. “I know.”

“Do you see these other places?”

“Just feel ’em.”

“Even when you walk in them?”

“I don’t really walk in them. I sort of just walk…in the idea of them.”

“I don’t suppose you could make that any clearer for your old mom, huh?”

“Maybe someday. Not now.”

“So…how far away are these places?”

“All here together now.”

“Other Bartys and other Agneses in other houses like this—all here together now.”

“Yeah.”

“And in some of them, your dad’s alive.”

“Yeah.”

“And in some of them, maybe I died the night you were born, and you live alone with your dad.”

“Some places, it has to be like that.”

“And some places it has to be that your eyes are okay?”

“There’s lots of places where I don’t have bad eyes at all. And then lots of places where I have it worse or don’t have it as bad, but still have it some.”

Agnes remained mystified by this talk, but a week before, in the rain-swept cemetery, she had learned there was substance to it.

She said, “Honey, what I’m wondering is…could you walk where you don’t have bad eyes, like you walked where the rain wasn’t…and leave the tumors in that other place? Could you walk where you have good eyes and come back with them?”

“It doesn’t work that way.”

“Why not?”

He considered the issue for a while. “I don’t know.”

“Will you think about it for me?”

“Sure. It’s a good question.”

She smiled. “Thanks. I love you, sweetie.”

“I love you, too.”

“Have you said your silent prayers?”

“I’ll say them now.”

Agnes said hers, too.

She lay beside her boy in the darkness, gazing at the covered window, where the faint glow of the moon pressed through the blind, suggesting another world thriving with strange life just beyond a thin membrane of light.

Murmuring on the edge of sleep, Barty spoke to his father in all the places where Joey still lived: “Good-night, Daddy.”

Agnes’s faith told her that the world was infinitely complex and full of mystery, and in a peculiar way, Barty’s talk of infinite possibilities supported her belief and gave her the comfort to sleep.

Monday morning, New Year’s Day, Agnes carried two suitcases out of the back door, set them on the porch, and blinked in surprise at the sight of Edom’s yellow-and-white Ford Country Squire parked in the driveway, in front of the garage. He and Jacob were loading their suitcases into the car.

They came to her, picked up the luggage that she had put down, and Edom said, “I’ll drive.”

“I’ll sit up front with Edom,” Jacob said. “You can ride in back with Barty.”

In all their years, neither twin had ever set foot beyond the limits of Bright Beach. They both appeared nervous but determined.

Barty came out of the house with the library copy of
Podkayne of Mars,
which his mother had promised to read to him later, in the hospital. “Are we all going?” he asked.

“Looks that way,” said Agnes.

“Wow.”

“Exactly.”

In spite of major earthquakes pending, explosions of dynamite-hauling trucks on the highway, tornadoes somewhere churning, the grim likelihood of a great dam bursting along the route, freak ice storms stored up in the unpredictable heavens, crashing planes and runaway trains converging on the coastal highway, and the possibility of a sudden violent shift in the earth’s axis that would wipe out human civilization, they risked crossing the boundaries of Bright Beach and traveled north into the great unknown of territories strange and perilous.

As they rolled along the coast, Agnes began to read to Barty from
Podkayne of Mars
: “‘All my life I’ve wanted to go to Earth. Not to live, of course—just to see it. As everybody knows, Terra is a wonderful place to visit but not to live. Not truly suited to human habitation.’”

In the front seat, Edom and Jacob murmured agreement with the narrator’s sentiments.

Monday night, Edom and Jacob booked adjoining units in a motel near the hospital. They called Barty’s room to give Agnes the phone number and to report that they had inspected eighteen establishments before finding one that seemed comparatively safe.

In regard for Barty’s tender age, Dr. Franklin Chan had arranged for Agnes to spend the night in her son’s room, in the second bed, which currently wasn’t needed for a patient.

For the first time in many months, Barty didn’t want to sleep in the dark. They left the door of the room open, admitting some of the fluorescent glow from the hallway.

The night seemed to be longer than a Martian month. Agnes dozed fitfully, waking more than once, sweaty and shaking, from a dream in which her son was taken from her in pieces: first his eyes, then his hands, then his ears, his legs….

The hospital was eerily quiet, except for the occasional squeak of rubber-soled shoes on the vinyl floor of the corridor.

At first light, a nurse arrived to perform preliminary surgical prep on Barty. She pulled the boy’s hair back and captured it under a tight-fitting cap. With cream and a safety razor, she shaved off his eyebrows.

When the nurse was gone, alone with his mother as they waited for the orderly to bring a gurney, Barty said, “Come close.”

She was already standing beside his bed. She leaned down to him.

“Closer,” he said.

She lowered her face to his.

He raised his head and rubbed noses with her. “Eskimo.”

“Eskimo,” she repeated.

Barty whispered: “The North Pole Society of Not Evil Adventurers is now in session.”

“All members present,” she agreed.

“I have a secret.”

“No member of the society ever violates a secret confidence,” Agnes assured him.

“I’m scared.”

Throughout Agnes’s thirty-three years, strength had often been demanded of her, but never such strength as was required now to rein in her emotions and to be a rock for Barty. “Don’t be scared, honey. I’m here.” She took one of his small hands in both of hers. “I’ll be waiting. You’ll never be without me.”

“Aren’t you afraid?”

If he had been any other three-year-old, she would have told a compassionate lie. He was her miracle child, however, her prodigy, and he would know a lie for what it was.

“Yes,” she admitted, her face still close to his, “I’m afraid. But Dr. Chan is a fine surgeon, and this is a very fine hospital.”

“How long will it take?”

“Not long.”

“Will I feel anything?”

“You’ll be asleep, sweetie.”

“Is God watching?”

“Yes. Always.”

“It seems like He isn’t watching.”

“He’s here as sure as I am, Barty. He’s very busy, with a whole universe to run, so many people to look after, not just here but on other planets, like you’ve been reading about.”

“I didn’t think of other planets.”

“Well, with so much on His shoulders, He can’t always watch us directly, you know, with His fullest attention every minute, but He’s always at least watching from the corner of His eye. You’ll be all right. I know you will.”

The gurney, one wheel rattling. The young orderly behind it, dressed all in white. And the nurse again.

“Eskimo,” whispered Barty.

“Eskimo,” she replied.

“This meeting of the North Pole Society of Not Evil Adventurers is officially closed.”

She held his face in both hands and kissed each of his beautiful jewel eyes. “You ready?”

A fragile smile. “No.”

“Neither am I,” she admitted.

“So let’s go.”

The orderly lifted Barty onto the gurney.

The nurse draped a sheet over him and slipped a thin pillow under his head.

Having survived the night, Edom and Jacob were waiting in the hall. Each kissed his nephew, but neither could speak.

The nurse led the way, while the orderly pushed the gurney from behind Barty’s head.

Agnes walked at her son’s side, tightly holding his right hand.

Edom and Jacob flanked the gurney, each gripping one of Barty’s feet through the sheet that covered them, escorting him with the same stony determination that you saw on the faces of the Secret Service agents who bracketed the President of the United States.

At the elevators, the orderly suggested that Edom and Jacob take a second cab and meet them on the surgical floor.

Edom bit his lower lip, shook his head, and stubbornly clung to Barty’s left foot.

Holding fast to the boy’s right foot, Jacob observed that one elevator might descend safely but that if they took two, one or the other was certain to crash to the bottom of the shaft, considering the unreliability of all machinery made by man.

The nurse noted that the maximum weight capacity of the elevator allowed all of them to take the same cab, if they didn’t mind being squeezed a little.

They didn’t mind, and down they went in a controlled descent that was nevertheless too quick for Agnes.

The doors slid open, and they rolled Barty corridor to corridor, past the scrub sinks, to a waiting surgical nurse in green cap, mask, and gown. She alone effected his transfer into the positive pressure of the surgery.

As he was wheeled headfirst into the operating room, Barty raised off the gurney pillow. He fixed his gaze on his mother until the door swung shut between them.

Agnes held a smile as best she could, determined that her son’s final glimpse of her face would not leave him with a memory of her despair.

With her brothers, she adjourned to the waiting room, where the three of them sat drinking vending-machine coffee, black, from paper cups.

It occurred to her that the knave had come, as foretold by the cards on that night long ago. She had expected the knave to be a man with sharp eyes and a wicked heart, but the curse was cancer and not a man at all.

Since her conversation with Joshua Nunn the previous Thursday, she’d had more than four days to armor herself for the worst. She prepared for it as well as any mother could while still holding on to her sanity.

Yet in her heart, she wouldn’t relinquish hope for a miracle. This was an amazing boy, a prodigy, a boy who could walk where the rain wasn’t, already himself a miracle, and it seemed that anything might happen, that Dr. Chan might suddenly rush into the waiting room, surgical mask dangling from his neck, face aglow, with news of a spontaneous rejection of the cancer.

And in time, the surgeon did appear, bearing the good news that neither of the malignancies had spread to the orbit and optic nerve, but he had no greater miracle to report.

On January 2, 1968, four days before his birthday, Bartholomew Lampion gave up his eyes that he might live, and accepted a life of blindness with no hope of bathing in light again until, in his good time, he left this world for a better one.

Chapter 62

PAUL DAMASCUS WAS
walking the northern coast of California: Point Reyes Station to Tomales, to Bodega Bay, on to Stewarts Point, Gualala, and Mendocino. Some days he put in as little as ten miles, and other days he traveled more than thirty.

On January 3, 1968, Paul was fewer than 250 miles from Spruce Hills, Oregon. He wasn’t aware of that town’s proximity, however, and he didn’t, at the time, have it as his destination.

With the determination of any pulp-magazine adventurer, Paul walked in sunshine and in rain. He walked in heat and cold. Wind did not deter him, nor lightning.

In the three years since Perri’s death, he had walked thousands of miles. He hadn’t kept a record of the cumulative distance, because he wasn’t trying to get into
Guinness
or to prove anything.

During the first months, the journeys were eight or ten miles: along the shoreline north and south of Bright Beach, and inland to the desert beyond the hills. He left home and returned the same day.

His first overnight journey, in June of ’65, was to La Jolla, north of San Diego. He carried too large a backpack and wore khaki pants when he should have worn shorts in the summer heat.

That was the first—and until now the last—long walk he made with a purpose in mind. He went to see a hero.

In a magazine article about the hero, passing mention was made of a restaurant where occasionally the great man ate breakfast.

Setting out after dark, Paul had walked south, following the coastal highway. He was accompanied by the windy rush of passing traffic, but later only by the occasional cry of a blue heron, the whisper of a salty breeze in the shore grass, and the murmur of the surf. Without pushing himself too hard, he reached La Jolla by dawn.

The restaurant wasn’t fancy. A coffee shop. Aromatic bacon sizzling, eggs frying. The warm cinnamony smell of fresh pastries, the bracing scent of strong coffee. Clean, bright surroundings.

Luck favored Paul: The hero was here, having breakfast. He and two other men were deep in conversation at a corner table.

Paul sat by himself, at the far end of the restaurant from them. He ordered orange juice and waffles.

The short walk across the room, to the hero’s table, looked more daunting to Paul than the trek he’d just completed. He was nobody, a small-town pharmacist who missed more work each month, who relied increasingly on his worried employees to cover for him, and who would lose his business if he didn’t get a grip on himself. He had never done a great deed, never saved a life. He had no right to impose upon this man, and now he knew he hadn’t the nerve to do so, either.

Yet, with no recollection of rising from his chair, he found that he had shouldered his backpack and crossed the room. The three men looked up expectantly.

With every step through the long night walk, Paul had considered what he would say,
must
say, if this encounter ever took place. Now all his practiced words deserted him.

He opened his mouth but stood mute. Raised his right hand from his side. Worked his fingers in the air, as though the needed words could be strummed from the ether. He felt stupid, foolish.

Evidently, the hero was accustomed to encounters of this nature. He rose, pulled out the unused fourth chair. “Please sit with us.”

This graciousness didn’t free Paul to speak. Instead, he felt his throat thicken, trapping his voice more tightly still.

He wanted to say,
The vain, power-mad politicians who milk cheers from ignorant crowds, the sports stars and preening actors who hear themselves called heroes and never object, they should all wither with shame at the mention of your name. Your vision, your struggle, the years of grueling work, your enduring faith when others doubted, the risks you took with career and reputation—it’s one of the great stories of science, and I’d be honored if I could shake your hand.

Not a word of that would come to Paul, but his frustrating speechlessness might have been for the best. From everything he knew about this hero, such effusive praise would embarrass him.

Instead, as he settled into the offered chair, he withdrew a picture of Perri from his wallet. It was an old black-and-white school photograph, slightly yellow with age, taken in 1933, the year he’d begun to fall in love with her, when they were both thirteen.

As if he’d been presented with many previous photos under these circumstances, Jonas Salk accepted the picture. “Your daughter?”

Paul shook his head. He presented a second picture of Perri, this one taken on Christmas Day, 1964, less than a month before she died. She lay in her bed in the living room, her body shrunken, but her face so beautiful and alive.

When finally he found his voice, it was rough-sawn with a blade of grief: “My wife. Perri. Perris Jean.”

“She’s lovely.”

“Married…twenty-three years.”

“When was she stricken?” Salk asked.

“She was almost fifteen…1935.”

“A terrible year for the virus.”

Perri had been crippled seventeen years before Jonas Salk’s vaccine had spared future generations from the curse of polio.

Paul said, “I wanted you…I don’t know…I just wanted you to see her. I wanted to say…to say…”

Words eluded him again, and he surveyed the coffee shop, as if someone might step forward to speak for him. He realized people were staring, and embarrassment drew a tighter knot in his tongue.

“Why don’t we take a walk together?” the doctor asked.

“I’m sorry. I interrupted. Made a scene.”

“You didn’t at all,” Dr. Salk assured him. “I need to talk to you. If you would give me a little of your time…”

The word
need,
instead of
want,
moved Paul to follow the doctor across the coffee shop.

Outside, he realized he hadn’t paid for his juice and waffles. When he turned back to the coffee shop, he saw, through one of the windows, an associate of Salk’s picking up the check from his table.

Putting an arm around Paul’s shoulders, Dr. Salk walked with him along a street lined with eucalyptuses and Torrey pines, to a nearby pocket park. They sat on a bench in the sunshine and watched ducks waddle on the shore of a man-made pond.

Salk still held the two photographs. “Tell me about Perri.”

“She…she died.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“Five months ago.”

“I really would like to know about her.”

Whereas Paul had been confounded in his desire to express his admiration for Salk, he was able to speak about Perri at length and with ease. Her wit, her heart, her wisdom, her kindness, her beauty, her goodness, her courage were the threads in a narrative tapestry that Paul could have continued weaving for all the rest of his days. Since her death, he hadn’t been able to talk about her with anyone he knew, because his friends tended to focus on him, on his suffering, when he wanted them only to understand Perri better, to realize what an exceptional person she had been. He wanted her to be remembered, after he was gone, wanted her grace and her fortitude to be recalled and respected. She was too fine a woman to leave without a ripple in her wake, and the thought that her memory might pass away with Paul himself was anguishing.

“I can talk to you,” he said to Salk. “You’ll understand. She was a hero, the only one I ever knew till I met you. I’ve read about them all my life, in pulp magazines and paperbacks. But Perri…she was the real thing. She didn’t save tens of thousands—hundreds of thousands—of children like you’ve done, didn’t change the world as you’ve changed it, but she faced every day without complaint, and she lived for others. Not
through
them. For them. People called her to share their problems, and she listened and cared, and they called her with their good news because she took such joy in it. They asked for her advice, and though she was inexperienced, really, so short of experience in so many ways, she always knew what to say, Dr. Salk. Always the right thing. She had great heart and natural wisdom, and she cared so much.”

Studying the photos, Jonas Salk said, “I wish I’d known her.”

“She was a hero, just like you. I wanted you…I wanted you to see her and to know her name. Perri Damascus. That was her name.”

“I’ll never forget it,” Dr. Salk promised. With his attention still on Perri’s pictures, he said, “But I’m afraid you give me far too much credit. I’m no superman. I didn’t do the work alone. So many dedicated people were involved.”

“I know. But everyone says you’re—”

“And you give yourself far too little credit,” Salk continued gently. “There’s no doubt in my mind that Perri was a hero. But she was married to a hero, as well.”

Paul shook his head. “Oh, no. People look at our marriage, and they think I gave up so much, but I got back a lot more than I gave.”

Dr. Salk returned the photos, put a hand on Paul’s shoulder, and smiled. “But that’s always the way, you see? Heroes always get back more than they give. The act of giving assures the getting back.”

The doctor rose, and Paul rose with him.

A car waited at the curb in front of the park. Dr. Salk’s two associates stood beside it and seemed to have been there awhile.

“Can we give you a ride anywhere?” the hero asked.

Paul shook his head. “I’m walking.”

“I’m grateful that you approached me.”

Paul could think of nothing more to say.

“Consider what I told you,” Dr. Salk urged. “Your Perri would want you to think about it.”

Then the hero got in the sedan with his friends, and they drove away into the sun-splashed morning.

Too late, Paul thought of the one more thing he had wanted to say. Too late, he said it anyway, “God bless you.”

He stood watching until the car cruised out of sight, and even after it dwindled to a speck and vanished in the distance, he stared at the point in the street where it had last been, stared while a breeze turned playful, tossing eucalyptus leaves around his feet, stared until at last he turned and began the long walk home.

He had been walking ever since, two and a half years, with brief respites in Bright Beach.

Admitting to the likelihood that he would never again devote himself seriously to his business, Paul sold it to Jim Kessel, long his good right hand and fellow pharmacist.

He kept the house, for it was a shrine to his life with Perri. He returned to it from time to time, to refresh his spirit.

During the rest of that first year, he walked to Palm Springs and back, a round trip of more than two hundred miles, and north to Santa Barbara.

In the spring and summer of ’66, he flew to Memphis, Tennessee, stayed a few days, and walked 288 miles to St. Louis. From St. Louis he hiked west 253 miles to Kansas City, Missouri, and then southwest to Wichita. From Wichita to Oklahoma City. From Oklahoma City east to Fort Smith, Arkansas, from whence he rode home to Bright Beach on a series of Greyhound buses.

He slept outdoors rarely and otherwise stayed in inexpensive motels, boardinghouses, and YMCAs.

In his light backpack, he carried one change of clothes, spare socks, candy bars, bottled water. He planned his journeys to be in a town every nightfall, where he washed one set of clothes and donned the other.

He traveled prairies and mountains and valleys, passed fields rich in every imaginable crop, crossed great forests and wide rivers. He walked in fierce storms when thunder crushed the sky and lightning tore it, walked in wind that skinned the bare earth and sheared green tresses from trees, and walked also in sun-scrubbed days as blue and clean as ever there had been in Eden.

The muscles of his legs grew as hard as any of the landscapes that he trod. Granite thighs; calves like marble, roped with veins.

In spite of the thousands of hours that Paul was afoot, he seldom thought about
why
he walked. He met people along the way who asked, and he had answers for them, but he never knew if any answer might be the truth.

Sometimes he thought he walked for Perri, using the steps she had stored up and never taken, giving expression to her unfulfilled yearning to travel. At other times, he thought he walked for the solitude that allowed him to remember their life in fine detail—or to forget. To find peace—or seek adventure. To gain understanding through contemplation—or to scrub all thought from his mind. To see the world—or to be rid of it. Perhaps he hoped that coyotes would stalk him through a bleak twilight or a mountain lion set upon him on a hungry dawn, or a drunk driver run him down.

In the end, the reason for the walking was the walking itself. Walking gave him something to do, a needed purpose. Motion equaled meaning. Movement became a medicine for melancholy, a preventive for madness.

Through fog-shrouded hills forested with oaks, maples, madrones, and pepperwoods, through magnificent stands of redwoods that towered three hundred feet, he arrived in Weott on the evening of January 3, 1968, where he stayed the night. If Paul had any northernmost goal for this trip, it was the city of Eureka, almost fifty miles farther—and for no reason, other than to eat Humboldt Bay crabs at their origin, because that was one of his and Perri’s favorite foods.

From his motel room, he telephoned Hanna Rey in Bright Beach. She still looked after his house on a part-time basis, paid the bills from a special account while he traveled, and kept him informed about events in his hometown. From Hanna, he learned that Barty Lampion’s eyes had been lost to cancer.

Paul recalled the letter he had written to Reverend Harrison White a couple weeks after the death of Joey Lampion. He’d carried it home from the pharmacy on the day that Perri died, to ask for her opinion of it. The letter had never been mailed.

The opening paragraph still lingered in his memory, because he had crafted it with great care:
Greetings on this momentous day. I’m writing to you about an exceptional woman, Agnes Lampion, whose life you have touched without knowing, and whose story may interest you.

His thought had been that Reverend White might find in Agnes, Bright Beach’s beloved Pie Lady, a subject who would inspire a sequel to the sermon that had so deeply affected Paul—who was neither a Baptist nor a regular churchgoer—when he had heard it on the radio more than three years ago.