While Sid, Greg, and Luke worked tirelessly in the church basement to set up crates and ensure that the dogs were clean and comfortable, Gabriel and Eliot became the de facto guardians of the church sanctuary. This was where they had placed the nine dogs from the shelter isolation room. These dogs, recovering but still weak from their battle with illness, lay silently in their crates under the tortured stained glass eye of Isaac and the wooden image of Christ on his cross.
Greg had earlier moved their IV lines from one front paw to the other to keep the lines from occluding, but he hadn’t had time for the usual niceties of cleaning and wrapping the old IV port sites. Gabriel had offered to do that for the dogs and this was what occupied him now.
He took a bottle of sterile saline solution, a box of cotton swabs, and a roll of paper towels from the supply box they had brought over from the shelter, and sat cross-legged before the first crate.
Nick lay curled up on his side, completely exhausted, but he thumped his tail when he saw the priest. Gabriel unlatched the crate and Nick immediately stretched out his long frame and yawned. Gabriel rested his hand lightly on Nick’s head and he thumped his tail even harder.
“Now, let’s see that paw.” Gabriel reached for Nick’s foreleg and gently pulled it forward.
Working as carefully as he could, Gabriel cleaned the affected area with saline and a cotton swab. Nick was forgiving but Gabriel could see by the way the dog winced that the site of the old port was sore. “I have an idea,” he said. “It works for my knees.”
Gabriel rose and grabbed the nearest substitute washbasin he could find—the large ciborium on the altar. He filled it with warm water from the bathroom behind the dais and brought the bowl to Nick. Gabriel delicately placed the dog’s wounded paw into the warm water. Nick dropped his head in Gabriel’s lap, closed his eyes, and sighed.
As Gabriel stroked Nick’s head, a deep sense of peace came over the priest. It had been so long absent that at first Gabriel couldn’t identify the feeling. Then he noticed the worn wooden image of the crucified Jesus looking down on them and understood. He desperately wanted to say something to that figure—that sometimes, maybe only twice in a lifetime, it is all laid out before you; discrete pieces of a life that have no business even being in the same area code meet and join to create something so much more powerful than their parts; worlds open and the divine spirit becomes not only real, but tangible and measurable; that in this moment Gabriel loved his God at least as much as he had ever loved another human being; that without the love he now felt there could be nothing else. And he knew—with a degree of moral certainty that came only from years of hopeless searching in all the wrong places—that he was loved as deeply right back.
Gabriel wiped his eyes and moved on to the spent dog in the next crate.
He was cleaning the paw of the last dog in the sanctuary when Sid found him. Gabriel sensed Sid’s presence but addressed him without turning around. “I have a very aggressive form of Alzheimer’s,” the priest said. “Within six months on the outside, I will lose most of my ability to speak. I will not be able to recognize you or anyone else. I will shit and pee myself and need to be cleaned by someone else. I will not be able to read the word of God or the Sunday comics. I will again become a baby, except in the body of a man. Then I will become only an empty vessel in human form. After that I will lose the ability to swallow. I signed the paperwork to decline a feeding tube.”
Sid placed his hand on Gabriel’s shoulder. “How long have you known?”
Gabriel rose. “A month. This may sound ironic, but I don’t believe in miracles. Or, even if they do exist, that I’m worthy of one. I’ve prayed every day since I found out that God would take me into His house before another sunrise. But I guess sometimes God’s greatest gift to us is an unanswered prayer. Everything follows something that came before, doesn’t it? If He had taken me, these creatures would not have found sanctuary, even if it is perhaps just for a day. Eliot would have been dead on some cold metal table, and you, my friend”—Gabriel turned to face Sid—“would have been denied the opportunity to pull my head out of my ass.”
“Is there nothing I can do for you?”
“Oh, on the contrary. I intend to extract a promise from you.”
“Of course.”
“But you don’t even know what it is. You’re supposed to make this hard. I had it all planned out.”
“You are a good man. You would not impose an unreasonable burden.”
“I want you to take Eliot and Molly when the time comes.”
“It would be my honor.”
Gabriel sighed as the weight lifted from his chest. “There is one other thing.” Gabriel struggled for words, but they would not come. The request was too large, the language required to frame it too alien to a Roman Catholic priest.
Sid appeared to think for a moment and then nodded. “Make sure she is happy, Gabe.”
Sid’s blessing made Gabriel’s knees weak. He desperately wanted to switch subjects before he became a blubbering mess. “So,” he said, “did you hear the one about the priest, the locksmith, and the sick dogs all locked in a church?”
“What sick dogs?” Sid asked, pointing.
Gabriel followed the direction of Sid’s finger.
Each dog that Gabriel had cleansed and bathed—each of the nine that had been sick and in isolation at the shelter—now stood alert and renewed, waiting for freedom.