Twenty-four

Jimmy lay in the corner of his six-by-eight-foot cell. The pain of his mutilated body was nothing compared to the pain in his heart.

One glimpse of the raw agony on Imogene’s face had been enough. To look at her again would have been unbearable. He loved her so much. He’d had such hopes, such plans. He’d dreamed such dreams for them, once the horror of this war was over. The children they would have had, the life they would have shared.

Now there would be only dreams. Ephemeral. Gone like wisps of fog in a murky dawn.

He sighed. For him the horror would soon be over, but what of those he loved. Imogene. His mother and father. How would they take his death?

His father would feel shame, a loss of face.

His mother’s heart would be broken, but mended by God’s love. His mother would survive. Her foundation ran deep.

Was Imogene’s faith deep enough? He raised his eyes heavenward and prayed it was. “Please, God, make it so.”

He remembered how his mother had made him copy a verse from Proverbs whenever he’d misbehaved as a boy. She’d always managed to find one to fit the crime. By the time he was ten and had gone away to boarding school, he had accumulated enough for a small book.

“My son, hear the instruction of thy father, and forsake not the law of thy mother.” Her personal favorite. He smiled.

If he’d had a son, he’d have taken a page from that book.

If he’d had a son.

“Trust in the Lord with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding. In all thy ways acknowledge Him, and He shall direct thy paths.”

He’d sincerely believed he was on God’s path when he took that medicine, knowing the lives it would save.

Was he so misguided? Had he arrogantly gone his own way, telling himself it was God’s way? No, he couldn’t believe that.

But what had his life amounted to? What did he have to show for it? He was lost to the woman he loved; he had shamed his family, was despised by his country.

Even God seemed to have abandoned him.

He lowered his head, and with a wrenching understanding, he remembered Jesus’ words from the cross: “My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?”