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The highway of holiness is a toll road.
No one had ever warned him. Never would he have guessed that the barren desert of silence and separation would serve as balm for his soul. Or more importantly, that it would take his old bones to the last place he expected: the far-off promised land—the proverbial land flowing with milk and honey. The land of reconciliation and restoration.
Never.
Healing had always receded on the horizon, dropping farther and farther back, like a wavering mirage, teasing with its promise of life-giving water. He thinks, We are all thirsting wanderers, desperate for a drop of soothing water to cool our tongues as we aimlessly traverse this earthly hell.
There is no alternate route. None.
A glint of light catches on the metal’s edge as he turns the lightweight blade in his hand. He squints, pauses. His sense of hearing is unusually heightened. The room pulses and takes on a life of its own; a ticking clock becomes a rhythmic heartbeat, causing surges of perspiration to trickle down the sides of his neck, soaking the cotton shirt as he stands, hesitates, holds the object up to study its smooth surface, finely polished, noticeably sharp.
He’d never before considered how small and innocuous this thing felt in the palm of his hand. Yet so capable of slicing through flesh with precision, severing blood vessels, separating muscle from bone, tissue from tendons, all with the slight pressure one might use in peeling an apple.
Hardly innocuous. For even a surgeon’s scalpel must tear open flesh and draw blood before it can do a healing work.
Pain precedes healing. This truth has taken him a lifetime to learn.
But there is a wash of relief that follows ablution, and the soul thus rid of a lifetime’s burden of contamination becomes keenly aware of a glorious sense of freedom.
He can taste it; he is that close.
A glance at the clock tells him it is almost time. Soon will come the culmination of his story, the point to which all the divergent paths of his life have unknowingly led him. All the hurtful, agonizing moments he thought were intended for harm God actually intended for good, for the saving of life. But how could he have known? When immersed in pain, there is only pain. He feels as if he has roamed the wilderness his entire life, clueless, directionless, exhausted. Depleted not just in body but in spirit, yearning for a word that might lift him above his circumstances and whisk him away from his life.
He hears the sound of car doors slamming, voices overlapping. The air is charged as if an electrical summer storm has just blown in. The hairs on his neck stand alert.
His sons.
He sets down the tool he is gripping; he forgot he still had it in hand. He lays it tenderly alongside his finished sculpture, the sculpture he had begun carving for Rachel, all those years ago. The eagle’s eyes are now void of judgment; they stare out vacantly, almost as if listening too.
Finished—after all this time. He cannot fathom the import of his accomplishment. Not yet.
A line from one of Leah’s poems drifts into his head. He had memorized them all long ago, to where they fastened like barnacles onto his limbs and sinews, grown crusty and impermeable with age.
I am a foreigner in this wet desert of twisted coral and pulsating sponge
Where Creole wrasses swarm in neon blue,
Each movement of my hand makes them dart in dance.
I conduct a ballet on the edge of the precipice.
He feels a smile inch up his face. That is how he sees her still, dancing on the edge of a knife—a knife so much like the one he just now set down.
The kind that cuts both ways.
Exuberant voices—like a choir of angels singing—rise in volume. His sons are coming around the house toward the garage. His knees buckle as he tries to stand. He collapses back onto his stool. He listens intently, sifting through the sounds, his attention riveted in anticipation of the one voice that will both break and mend his heart.
Joseph.
His son, always a blur, a skew of light that struck the eyes and caused you to squint. The kind of glare that cast a long shadow on everything in proximity. It was only by his light that Jake saw everything else clearly.
Why hadn’t the tremor in Joey’s voice that day set off an alarm? At the time, he didn’t think anything of it. Maybe Joey had picked up tension from listening to those hushed conversations, Jake’s worry over Rachel’s health. Joey listened, noticed everything.
He chided himself. It was too late, far too late for recriminations, for what ifs and if onlys. But still . . . He wishes he had stopped, laid a hand on Joey’s shoulder, and asked, “What do you mean? Who has to die?”
A tear splashes onto his cheek, containing that one tiny wish. He wipes it away with the back of his hand.
He lifts his tired head in the direction of her abandoned garden and remembers the prodigious greenery, the potency of life bursting from the earth, escaping over fences. How everything Rachel’s hands touched became infused with vitality. Oh, how he misses her.
He turns and studies his sculpture on the shelf before him. For years, as that piece of wood sat unfinished, those unformed eyes watched him stumble through his life, silently laughed in judgment from a dusty cobwebbed shelf. He did not touch metal to that wood for nearly thirty years, not until life had dug a deep enough groove into his heart and punctured the wellspring, freeing his captive spirit. Not until now.
It is time.
His sojourn through the wilderness is over. He turns his head toward the door. Tears fill the pools of his eyes, but through the distortion of his watery lenses he can make out the distinctive shape approaching him, carried on a bier of jubilant voices. A mirage materializing in the heat waves of time.
He fears his heart will break.
Joseph, my Joseph . . .