8

Pace spent five weeks in the hospital before returning to Bay St. Clement. A private caregiver, Addie Mae Longbow, a septuagenarian, half-Cherokee woman who had worked with Lady O for a number of years before retiring from full-time nursing, attended Pace for almost a month, after which time he was able to take care of himself. Though still not at full strength, Pace got around well enough, he could drive and prepare his own meals. He resumed writing but resolved to do something for the good of others, to devote a portion of what energy he had to charity work. This desire did not stem from any righteous or empty feeling; it was just that Pace felt a considerable amount of disgust at what he deemed selfish, wasteful and narcissistic behavior, including his own. Fear, he concluded, was what drove people to behave as they did, and fear took many forms. Pace could not claim to be free of fear, but for whatever reason he felt less afraid than he ever had before.

Addie Mae Longbow was a member of an organization based in a warehouse in North Nazareth called Jesus Sees Us, which fed, clothed and provided free medical care to anyone in need. Pace donated three afternoons and evenings a week to Jesus Sees Us, serving lunch and dinner. It was while dishing up mashed potatoes and gravy on a Thursday evening three months after he had begun helping out there that Pace recognized the man wearing glasses and an orange hat with earflaps who had shot him.

Pace said nothing to the man as he passed in the serving line and then carried his food tray to a table, where he sat down and began to eat. Pace had had only a momentary glimpse of the delinquent hunter, but was certain this was he. As Pace continued to dole out potatoes, he kept an eye on the person who had plugged him and fled, trying to decide what to do. When the man in the orange hat finished eating and got up to go, Pace noticed that both of the lenses in his eyeglasses had cracks in them and that his green army field jacket was torn and dirty. As Pace watched him walk out of the dining area, the tension that had overcome him upon spotting the man gradually drained from his body. Pace felt not unlike he imagined Lazarus must have once he understood that he was truly again among the living.

“Mister, ain’t you gonna spoon me some of them smashed ’taters?”

Pace looked at the stooped old woman in the line standing across from him, waiting to be served. Her deeply creased face and grizzled gray hair were filthy but there remained a distinct beam of brightness in her chestnut eyes.

“I surely am, ma’am,” Pace said, scooping potatoes onto her plate. “Do you want gravy?”