At first, I was simply aware of being aware. No sound or sight or feeling. It seemed to me that a long time ago something important had happened, but I couldn't remember what it might have been. Gradually, I noticed that I was warm. I realized that there was a very small circle of light some distance away from me. For a time, that was all I was aware of; I was warm, instead of cold, and there was this small circle of light.
It's like being at the bottom of a well, looking up, I thought.
I sensed, almost like one picks out a faint aroma on the breeze, that there was a great deal of activity somewhere far away from me. I wasn't aware of pain, or of having a body at all. But then I remembered: Harmon shot me.
“Emma, where am I?” I asked, or thought, or thought aloud.
I wasn't really expecting an answer, but I got one.
“Emma's done all she can for you,” came a deep, old, voice that I had heard only once, but was sure I recognized. It wasn't so much that I heard it now. I felt it, felt the voice within me.
“Mr. Nash?”
“Thomas.” .
There was a long silence.
“Where are we?”
“That depends on you, young man.”
He was angry with me. There was no tenderness in his voice, none of the affection I heard so often in Emma's voice.
“I'm sorry. I'm really sorry.”
“That's as may be. What are you going to do now?” Another silence.
“Harmon shot me.”
“That he did. What do you think about that?”
“He didn't mean to. He should have been more careful. I should have been more careful.”
“Hmmm.”
“I shouldn't have been there at all.”
“Emma is of the opinion that you needed to be there.”
“Is she all right?”
“It depends. Everything changes. You might bear that in mind, young man. Everything changes.”
“Yes sir. I am sorry.”
All this time there was just this warm darkness, and this small circle of light. It wasn't so much that we were speaking. I couldn't see Mr. Nash; I couldn't see any part of myself for that matter, or hear the sound of my voice. In a strange, unsettling way it was how I might have imagined talking to God would be, although I had never thought of God as being so cross, or having such a deep country accent.
“Mr. Nash, am I dead?”
“Dead,” he repeated, as if considering the word. “No son, you're not dead. Let me ask you again, what are you going to do now?”
“I ... I don't know that I can do anything. I want to see Emma, to see if she's all right. I want to tell Harmon that I'm okay. I want to see my dad. I don't know. I want to see you.”
I felt a bolt of pain shoot through me, more fierce than anything I had ever felt in my life, and that tiny sphere of light exploded in a silent fireball that completely engulfed me in an instant. I lurched forward, and then fell back, and realized for the first time that I was lying on a bed, or a stretcher. The white sphere of light was gone. Everything was a faint, faint white, a dark white, if such a thing is possible. I was lying back, the pain ebbing, ebbing, unable to move. And there was Mr. Nash.
“I know it hurts, son,” he said, a gentleness appearing in his voice for the first time. “It's going to hurt for a while.”
He laid his hand on my arm. He was old, in his nineties I would have guessed, but his hand was strong.
His face was long and deeply wrinkled; he was nearly bald; he had very big ears. I liked the look of him. The pain bucked through me again, and faded more quickly. We were alone in what seemed to be a little alcove, a strange, dark-white space suspended all by itself somewhere.
Mr. Nash stood beside me, and gently pressed his hand on my stomach and up across my chest.
“I don't like the feel of your back,” he said. “You'll need to work with that.”
“Yes, sir,” I answered, my eyes closed against the pain, my breath coming in sharp little pieces. I could feel his hands working through me; everywhere he worked there was so much pain.
“You can stand a little pain; that's good,” Mr. Nash said, to himself as much as to me it seemed, then more loudly. “The bullet about destroyed one of your vertebra. Emma reshaped it and I've done what I can but there's some damage there. You're going to carry that pain with you.”
“It's all right,” I said.
“It'll have to be,” he said.
His hands worked slowly, deftly. I felt like a lump of dough, a loaf of bread he was gently kneading into just the perfect shape. I watched him, mesmerized, knowing he was doing just what Emma had taught me about. My breathing came easier and fuller.
“How are you doing, there, son?” Mr. Nash asked.
“I'm fine, I'm fine,” I said quickly, not wanting him to stop.
“Yes, well, fine as you'll get right now,” he said, and stepped back from me.
“We've about got you ready to go back to your family,” he said.
“Thank you sir,” I answered, hesitant.
“What is it, then?”
“I want to keep learning the things Emma taught me,” I said. “I want...” I came up short; Mr. Nash was eyeing me with such critical appraisal.
“I want to do what you do,” I said weakly.
“It's best to forget all that,” he said.
“Forget?”
“You're young,” he said. “You have things to do. Go to school, meet girls, find some work for yourself. Maybe someday, down the road, we'll talk again.”
“I know the work I want to do,” I said, and with the greatest of effort I held his gaze, my eyes locked on his. Everything Emma had taught me, everything that I wanted someday to be, welled up inside me and forced me to withstand the fierce, relentless power of Mr. Nash's gaze. To the surprise of us both, perhaps, my determination held. Finally, finally, he smiled, looked down at my chest, and began tapping there—hard, slowly, with his sharp forefinger.
“I'll leave that up to Emma, then,” he said. Tap. Tap. Tap. “Work from your heart, Thomas, if you're going to work. Always from your heart.” Tap. Tap. Tap. “Empty yourself of opinions. Empty yourself of pride.” Tap. Tap. Tap. “And, Thomas, the next time someone asks you—”
“Say ‘I . . .’”
TAP
‘“Bring . . .’”
TAP
“‘Strength!’”
And with that he slapped the living hell out of me.
I shot bolt upright in bed and slammed my forehead into the forehead of the unfortunate young emergency room doctor who was leaning over me, listening to my chest through a stethoscope. I fell back on the bed and grabbed my head, the great wooden “thonk!” of our collision still echoing in both our ears, I'm sure. The pain was such that it made me laugh. I looked up and saw so many concerned, surprised, anxious faces that I almost laughed again. And just behind the cluster of doctors and nurses and technicians I saw a balding old man in an old weathered coat, his finger to the side of his nose—our little secret, the gesture said—wink at me and leave the trauma room.
“Wow,” I said to the doctor, rubbing my forehead, smiling. “Sorry about that.”
He smiled back at me, a look of frank astonishment in his eyes. “I'm okay,” he said. “How do you feel?”
“I'm fine,” I said, looking at all the faces peering at me. I tried to move a little in the small stretcher. Mr. Nash wasn't kidding about my back.
“My back hurts,” I said.
“Heh,” the doctor suppressed a laugh, which was more than some of the others did. They seemed a pretty happy bunch, the nurses and all. There were so many people in such a small space, all staring at me. I found myself suddenly wanting to be left alone.
“You're a very lucky fellow,” the doctor told me. “We thought for a minute there . . . well, it doesn't matter what we thought. You're a very lucky fellow,” he said again.
“I want to see Emma,” I said.
“Emma?” the doctor looked around. “Is that the woman who ...”
At that moment my father burst through the door and plowed through the people around me, my mother close in his wake. He took me in his arms, holding me. I kept telling him that I was okay, but he wouldn't let go. He was crying, my mother was crying. It scared me almost, and, I'm sad to say, I was embarrassed that they were crying over me in front of all those strangers.
It seems awful, or hard-hearted, to recall now, but I felt a bit exasperated by the whole thing. I assured everyone that I was all right, and somehow I expected that to be enough, that we could just leave the hospital and go home. But of course to the doctors and nurses I had more or less miraculously come back from the brink of death. I soon learned that a thirty-caliber bullet had passed through me, clean through, with a big entry wound and a great gaping exit wound in my chest. By all accounts, I should have died on the spot. But they assumed that clearly the bullet had missed hitting any major organs; and, by some process that no one could understand, no one but me, I had only two raw, red, fleshy scars, front and back, rather than the two open wounds logic required I should have. It was like there was a certain audacity to what I had done, surviving in this way; the people at the hospital were delighted with me and baffled by me at the same time. And they simply would not leave me alone.
I wanted to see Emma.
I told them, leaving out rather a lot, who Emma was, and the staff said they would set about trying to reach her family. At first I couldn't get them to tell me what was happening with her, but finally they admitted that she was not doing well. She was upstairs, on the floor above me, in the Intensive Care Unit. I badgered the nurses relentlessly to let me go see her. My father spoke with the doctor. They came together to my bedside.
“I guess I can't think of a reason why you shouldn't visit your friend,” the doctor said, frowning slightly with evident concern.
“I'll be fine,” I said bluntly.
“It's okay, Tom,” my father said. He went and got a wheelchair, and helped me into it. He wheeled me to an elevator, and we went up to the next floor in silence.
When we got to the door of her room I craned my neck around, wincing from the pain in my back, to look up at my father.
“I need to see her alone,” I said.
“Okay,” he said quietly. He didn't release his grip on the wheelchair.
“Tell her ...” he began, but then he shook his head. After a moment he gave me a faint smile, and touched my face with his hand. Then he walked slowly down the hall to the elevator.
I opened the door to her room and slowly, awkwardly wheeled myself in. She was so old. That was the first thing I saw. She seemed to have aged twenty years that afternoon. Her face was pale and oddly puffy. I fought back tears. The door slipped shut behind me, and for a long while I just sat there and looked at her. I was too sad, too ashamed to take her hand, or to speak. I sat hunched in the wheelchair, wishing to heaven that the whole thing had not happened, that I had never gone hunting that day, that Emma was well and strong.
“Thomas?”
Her voice was faint; it startled me to attention. Her face was toward me, a slight smile on her lips.
“Emma? Are you okay?”
“I've been better,” she said slowly.
I think my face, already downcast, fell even further.
“I'm fine, child,” she said. “I'll always be fine. Don't worry.”
“I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry for what happened.”
I was crying. She lifted her hand, and let it fall. I put my hand on top of hers.
“Everything will be well,” she said. “Leave me for a while, but don't worry. Think healing thoughts.”
I managed to wheel myself out of the room, banging into a side table, the wall, tears flowing down my face.
Downstairs, there was concern and repeated questions over my crying. Everyone seemed intensely aware of everything I did or said, of every expression on my face, as if I might suddenly decide to die after all. They were moving me to a room on the same floor as Emma, to keep me for a day or two of “observation.” I found it intolerable that they wouldn't simply leave me alone.
It took some time to get me into my room. My parents stayed quite a while, not talking much, but clearly not wanting to leave. I wanted to be alone. I told them I was tired, and they left, reluctantly, so that I could sleep. Once they were gone I began, with almost feverish intensity, to try and generate a circle of healing that would encompass and support Emma, cursing myself all the while for not practicing the week before as she had so particularly asked me to do. But I was exhausted, and in spite of my intention to maintain this vigil through the night, I quickly fell into a deep, deep sleep.
I opened my eyes, suddenly and completely awake, sometime far into the middle of the night. I knew, without a sense of anxiety, that Emma needed to see me, right then. The hospital was quiet. I could hear a distant “beep—beep—beep,” a muffled cough. Without a thought as to explaining myself to any doctor or nurse I might see, I stole out of bed and walked directly, silently down the hall, to the adjacent wing and Emma's room. No one saw me. Emma was awake, waiting for me.
“Hello, my dear,” she said.
“How are you feeling?” I asked. She looked a little better, I guess, but if anything she looked older still, and she was eerily pale.
“I think I'm going to move on,” she said simply, and even though I knew what she meant, it took a moment for the words to register.
“Emma, no,” I said.
“It's not the end; don't worry. Do you remember, Thomas, I told you once that all the animals I help go on to die someday?”
“I remember.”
“Well, it's the same with me, and with you. We have to die. But the work we do goes on. We go on . . . with the work. Once you start, you never finish. I'm sure of that.”
“Will I be able to see you?”
“No, dear. Not any time soon.”
“But I saw Mr. Nash,” I protested. “I talked to him.”
“I know. He told me. But he's much further along the path than I am. I don't know what to tell you. There are so many things I don't understand.”
I shook my head, “No.”
“Don't worry, dear,” she said, and then she added, “although I admit, I'm a little afraid.”
“Afraid?” I asked, alarmed. She always seemed so calm and confident. “Afraid of what?”
“Dying,” she said simply. “Mr. Nash says not to be, and really he should know, but I can't help it. He says that life, and death, is a little different for everyone: no two creatures are just the same, he says. So I don't know how it will be for me. I asked Mr. Nash and he said ‘How should I know? Everything changes.’”
“He said that to me, too,” I said.
“He says that a lot. I guess I'm about to understand a little better what he means.”
“Emma, I can't stand it if you go. I feel like it's all my fault.”
She patted the side of her bed. “Sit here,” she said. I settled gently on the edge of the bed, not wanting to jostle her. She took my hand in hers.
“I know I'm going to forget half the things I wanted to tell you,” she said.
She started talking very quietly, sometimes with her eyes closed, sometimes looking up at the ceiling, sometimes looking directly, piercingly, at me. She was very still, her breathing shallow. I leaned close to her, not wanting to miss anything. She talked a while about her childhood, about growing up outside of Harrow Point, about the family store. She told me again about her husband, her children.
“I had a normal life, I guess. A full, normal life. It was hard back then, harder in some ways than now because you had to work such long hours, always, just to get by. But, Thomas, it was a normal life I had, and I'm afraid that you'll lose that, by my teaching you things so early.”
“It's okay,” I said.
“It's not though. Forgive me, dear, but you don't know enough yet to say so. Balance is so important.”
“Balance?” I thought she meant something like “not tipping over.”
“A balanced life. There's so much suffering in the world, Thomas. We can only touch the surface of it, emptying the ocean a thimble at a time. It's all we can do, but it's what we do. That's what I've been teaching you to do—giving you, well,” she smiled, “a better thimble. But there is so much joy, too, and beauty, and simple, commonplace, everyday wonder and delight that should be yours too. And the sorrows, the little human idiocies—Thomas, you have to understand, what happened today ...”
“I'm so sorry,” I said, suddenly in tears. “I never should have been there.”
“Yes, you should have,” she said forcefully. “I was the one who shouldn't have been there. Or ... I pushed you into a place you weren't ready to be. You were out with your father, with your friends, trying to learn whether you were a hunter or not. But I had thrown everything out of balance for you.”
“But if I hadn't ...”
She cut me off. “You saved Reggie. You intercepted that bullet. You did. I'm proud of you for that. And you learned, for yourself, that you're not a hunter. You had to learn for yourself.”
I cried then. I still felt guilty, but what she said helped. She talked on. She told me more about the techniques of healing. It's surprisingly simple, really: a natural human gift. She talked at greater length about the state of mind, the state of heart, for the healing to be healthy and effective. She kept coming back to humility, and gentleness, and the willingness to put my feelings and opinions to one side for the sake of whoever it was that was in front of me. She was repeating herself, at the end, so anxious was she that I should understand. Finally she relaxed, and we were quiet for a while.
“Here then,” she said, after a time. “Lean closer.”
When I did, she grasped the back of my neck, tightly, and pulled me towards her. Her grip was so tight it hurt. There are times, in truth, when the place she gripped me hurts me still. She held me there, so tightly, and then she pulled me even closer, until our foreheads touched. Her candle to mine, I think now. Her candle to mine. She told me one last thing, which I will not share, and then she said she loved me.
“I love you, too.”
“Thomas, I'm scared,” she said. She was trembling.
“Emma!”
Then her grip on my neck, so iron tight, loosened, and her breathing eased to almost nothing. She relaxed. Everything about her relaxed, like a great sinking, a fading.
“He's here,” she whispered. With a faint chuckle, she died.
They let me go home the next day. There wasn't any reason to keep me; my wounds were two big fresh pink scars, front and back. The wounds were healed, but my chest ached from sorrow. Nothing in the world could help my sadness at losing Emma.
It seemed so clear to me that we had been building toward something, Emma and I. She was leading me to a place that I couldn't now get to, on my own. I kept going through everything she had told me in the weeks that I knew her, trying to remember every word. She had been the embodiment of wisdom and magic to me, and for the brief time we were together it had seemed that a little of her magic had rubbed off on me. Now I was just an ordinary boy in a little country town, lucky to be alive.
There was such a lot of fuss and trouble over the shooting. I was this marvel at school: it seemed like half the kids were afraid to talk to me, and the other half wouldn't stop asking me questions about what had happened. My father, for his part, was adamant about pressing charges against Harmon for the reckless discharge of a firearm. Of course, the shooting had just been a foolish accident; I felt that it was at least as much my fault as Harmon's for running in front of him that way. But my father would not budge, which was a misery for me at the time. The whole community was in an uproar over the notion that a hunting accident could lead to legal charges. Some people thought it made perfect sense, and some thought the idea was practically sacrilegious. A state senator actually called the house one evening to try and talk my father out of pressing charges. I begged him to let the matter drop. Finally, to appease me, and being glad, I know, to have his son home and safe, my father relented.
All the attention and controversy was difficult for me. The only hint of peace I could find came from walking in the woods; but it was there that I most deeply missed Emma. After school I headed out through the fields at the edge of town, straight to the base of that same little bramble-covered hill where I first met her. I combed the woods, searching for some trace that she had ever been there. I have no idea what I thought I might find. Each night I came home sad, tired, with an aching back that I knew would never quite heal—came home to parents who couldn't help but beam at their son, restored to them from the dead.
On the first Saturday after the shooting I left the house early and just started walking. I wasn't conscious of where I wanted to go until I had been in the woods nearly an hour. I didn't go up as far as Reggie's meadow, but veered, instead, over toward Harrow Point, and Emma's motor court.
When I got there, the place seemed deserted. I walked past the row of cabins, to the last one, where Emma had lived. I pressed my face to the window to look inside. It was nearly empty, just a broom leaning against the living room wall and a couple of cardboard boxes stacked unevenly in the middle of the floor.
“They already been and took her things,” a thin, reedy voice said.
I turned quickly, startled, to find a thin old woman in a stained, old winter parka, her arms crossed against her chest, an unlit cigarette in the fingers of one hand. Abigail was walking up behind her, a little ways off still, moving slowly, limping.
“Her family took her stuff,” the woman said again.
“What's in the boxes?” I asked.
“Kitchen things, cleaning things. Her family took her stuff.”
“Okay,” I said. “Hey, Abigail.” The old dog had finally reached us. I bent down and patted her. I pulled my hand back sharply. Abigail slumped against my leg.
“Leave the boy alone, Abby,” the woman said. “Stupid old dog.”
“No, she's okay,” I said. Gently, so gently, I reached down and stroked her again.
“Well, her family took her stuff,” the old woman said a final time, and shuffled away.
I knelt down beside Abigail, nervous.
“You're a bit overdue for a treatment, aren't you, old girl?” I said, trying to sound confident, but it was all I could do to breathe. In that first touch I had felt the searing pain in her hip that she endured so patiently. The image of that pain was vivid to me, and the image of the tiny distance we might take it, where it wouldn't hurt so much. I could feel my hands warming, warming. Of course, nothing like this had happened to me since Emma died, but I remembered, or knew somehow instinctively, what I should do.
“It's okay, Abby,” I said, my hands moving over her back, her hips. At once she leaned heavily against me.
It didn't take me long to ease the pain in her hip. She had a lot of experience with this sort of healing, after all, and I had worked with her that one time before. It was a good, odd feeling to push her away from me, gently, and pat her rump. I looked around. The first time I had helped Abigail I was completely exhausted when I finished, but now I felt ready for more. Of course, there was no more.
I walked home, feeling flat, strange. Was this what my friendship with Emma was for? So I could take care of an old arthritic dog? Humility, Emma taught me. Put your opinions and wishes to one side. Well, if this was all I was meant to do, help Abigail with her hip, then so be it.
Of course that was not all. I had learned, learned in my heart's core, that I could never be a hunter. My father understood without my having to tell him. When I came home from the hospital, my new shotgun was gone. He told me that he had decided to give up hunting as well. I told him there was no need for him to quit hunting, but he could not be moved on this one. The sight of me lying in the dirt, he said, had cured him for all time of the desire to hunt. The truth is, his decision made me glad.
The next couple of Saturdays I walked up to Harrow Point to tend to Abigail. Finally, I asked the old woman I had talked to there, the manager of the little set of cottages, if I could have Abigail. She certainly didn't mind, and my parents came around easily enough. We lived out in the country, after all. One dog more or less didn't make much difference.
Abigail and Toby got along well, and as Abby settled into the house, her hip seemed to improve a bit, and her coat got thicker and shinier. She was a happy old dog. I still walked in the woods almost every afternoon, and most weekends, but nothing in particular happened out there. Sometimes Abigail would come with me, and we would make our way along very slowly, in deference to her age, and I would think of Emma, and try once again to think through the things that she taught me.
When spring came, it was time for baseball season. I was supposed to move up from Little League to Junior League that year, which was a big deal in our town. I have to say, the summer before I had positively lived for baseball. But playing baseball would mean giving up some of my time walking in the woods, which I was reluctant to do. I kept thinking that I would come upon an injured animal one day and be able to help it the way I could help Abigail.
I thought hard about the things Emma and Mr. Nash told me about balance, about having a normal life. I spent hours debating with myself over whether I should play Junior League baseball or not. I decided that Emma would want me to play, so I signed up.
The first day of practice was a gorgeous spring day, the sun shining brightly, the air deliciously warm, the outfield grass a rich, deep green. I loved the sounds and smells of baseball. Near the end of the practice, the coach let us play a short scrimmage game, which was what all the kids most wanted to do. I was playing right field, focusing completely on the action before me, as happy as I had been in many months.
The field was part of a park at the south edge of town. The road comes out in a big, wide turn at the bottom of the hill, to where the park sits down by the river. Cars would go by now and then, but I was wrapped up in the play and never gave the traffic any particular notice. But then, from the corner of my eye, I saw a little hound dog trotting intently along the side of the road. I smiled and turned back toward the infield, when the hair moved on the back of my neck. I dropped my glove, turned, and started loping out toward the roadway.
I was too late. Everything was happening at once. I turned and began running as a car came down the hill and around the turn much too fast, hitting the shoulder of the road, throwing gravel in its wake as the driver tried to pull the car back onto the road. The little dog never broke stride. The sound of the impact was sickening. The dog was thrown twenty feet or more.
I knelt by the small broken body, trying to catch my breath, feeling an almost frantic sense of fear and pain. It took me a moment to realize that I was intercepting the terror of the dog, who clearly couldn't know what had happened to him.
“It's okay,” I said, and tried to think. My hands were shaking. I felt sick to my stomach. I was so afraid.
“It's all right, Thomas,” Emma said. “Now, see if you have anything to work with.”
“Emma!” I spun around, looking. I had heard her voice as plain as day, but there was no one else nearby, just some of the boys running out toward me from the baseball diamond.
“Yes dear, I'm with you,” Emma said, her voice warm and clear from somewhere inside my chest. “But let's mind the dog.”
I nodded, trying to focus, trying not to cry. I ran my hands over the dog's coat. He shuddered, his wet brown eyes open, blood seeping onto the gravel underneath him.
“I think it's okay,” I said. “I think I can do it.”
The dog's spirit was pure fear and pain, almost overwhelming me in its intensity. I tried to soothe him, stroking him lightly, saying “shhh,” sensing more clearly the internal damage and how things could be set right.
“Gently, Thomas.”
“Yes, thank you. I remember.”
Some of the other boys had come up behind me by then. “That's so gross,” I heard one of them say. The coach arrived next.
“Singer, the dog's dead. Leave it be.”
“No, he's just stunned,” I said. I was hunched over the little body, trying to shield him.
“Easy, boy,” I said quietly. “Easy, now.” I could feel his spirit waver a moment, frightened, but not resisting me so much. I leaned closer, cradling the small dog against my chest, steadying myself, emptying myself.
“I bring strength,” I whispered, and set carefully, gently to work.