Miriam's Well (23 page)

Some time in the middle of the night, when I thanked God for using me to bring Mrs. Hobart to Jesus, it occurred to me that I no longer thought of myself as the instrument of Adam's salvation, and I wasn't sure whether that meant he was lost, or found.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Told by Adam

Brent made himself a baloney and sweet pickle sandwich, with a few other specimens from the animal and vegetable kingdoms. The sandwich was piled dangerously high. If it had been summer, and the ceiling fan had been on, meat and tomatoes would have been flying all over the kitchen. He pressed the tower down so he could wrap his mouth around it, and after his first bite, it popped back up, like a foam pillow. “Want some?”

“You make it look disgusting. I wouldn't eat that stuff.”

Brent shrugged, wiping mustard off his mouth with the shoulder of his T-shirt. “It's my dinner.”

“You're having dinner at four in the afternoon?”

“Hey, it's Christmas Eve. We don't officially eat on Christmas. We just eat all day and all night. So, go on. You're tearing down this dirt road, and there's nothing around you but frozen cows.”

“Okay, I'm going way too fast. My mother would have a seizure if she knew I was hitting fifty on an icy road. My windshield wipers and defroster are cranking like crazy, but I'm keeping the Chevy station wagon in sight all the way out there. Suddenly I check out the gas meter, and it's twitching just above empty. There's not a gas station in sight. I'm gonna run out of gas. I'm gonna have to walk eight miles to the nearest pay phone; then I won't be able to call because my fingers will be frostbitten, and they'll snap off in the holes of the dial, and besides, I don't have a quarter.”

“Is this girl worth it?” Brent asked, curling an extra slice of baloney and sliding it whole into his mouth. “Isn't she gonna croak anyway?”

How could I answer that? I wanted to sock him in the gut for saying something so insensitive and so true, but a part of me knew that as little as a month before, I would have said the same thing.

“Okay, so what happened? Did you follow the station wagon all the way?”

“Probably ten minutes have passed since I've seen an actual building that isn't just a silo or barn. Then, out of nowhere, I spot chimney smoke blackening the sky. That has to be where they're going. Finally the Chevy stops, a girl gets out—not Miriam, some lady from the church. Anyway, she gets out, opens the iron gate by the mailbox, closes it after the car's pulled through, then jumps back in. The car's gone, disappears up a winding road before I even reach the gate.

“I get out to open the gate. I'm telling you, it's
cold
out there. No trees for windbreakers. I'm reaching for the gate, when I hear my mother's voice, as clear as sonar: ‘That's private property, Adam Bergen. Open that gate, and you'll pull back a bloody stump.' I just can't make myself open it. I'm trying to convince myself it's electrified, even though that girl just opened it without frying. I just can't do it. I can't go up that driveway.”

“Pluck-pluck-pluck,” Brent said. “Chick-
en
.”

“Anyway, what would I have done when I got to the house? Storm it with machine guns?”

“You jerk, you went about nine hundred miles down a dirt road, in a snowstorm, and now you're telling me you just turned around and came home, with your tail between your legs like a little puppy dog?”

“Well, I've always been famous for wasted potential,” I muttered. “Anyway, I'm going back there tomorrow morning. Between now and then, I'm coming up with a plan. You want to go with me?”

“Oh, wow, that's really tempting. But, it's Christmas, and I gotta do family crap.” His cheeks stuffed with a cold, greasy potato pancake, he said, “I think I'm getting a car stereo for Christmas. What are you getting?” While all this was going on, we were both standing there in front of the refrigerator like we were worshipping at the Holy Ark. Brent dove in for a handful of black olives. “I mean, what are you getting for your own kind of Jewish Christmas, whatever you call it.”

“Chanukah, got that? CHA, as in gargling with salt water; NOO, as in nude; and KUH, as in duh, as in dumb. CHA-NOO-KUH. And it's not the Jewish Christmas. It's about freedom, not about a messiah, or
the
messiah. And it was over on December 19 this year. So I'm not getting anything for Christmas.” I slammed the refrigerator shut, making those bottles on the door stand up and pay attention. They must have been shaking and rattling on their shelves, wondering what act of terrorism I'd perform next.

“You didn't get much this year, hunh? Okay, okay,” he said, backing off with a gallon of milk hanging from his thumb. The sandwich was history now, and the olives, too. He splashed the milk into a tall glass.

“The milk's expired,” I said. “It's December 23 milk.”

“Smells okay.” Brent took the next step of his feast to our pantry, for a Hostess apple pie. “Lighten up, Bergen. It's just a holiday. So now, the cops are out looking for the girl?”

“I guess so. I've got to call and tell them where she is.”

“You're holding out on the cops? Jesus, Adam.”

I knew I should have called an hour ago, but somewhere in the heroic pit of my stomach, I wanted to be the one to rescue Miriam. Dumb. I wasn't even sure she wanted to be rescued.

“What are you gonna do after you go out to Whitewater tomorrow, big shot?”

The conversation was turning as sour as old milk, and I wasn't sorry when Brent stuffed the last half of the Hostess pie into his mouth and mumbled, “Well, I gotta go. We're putting out our
luminarias
as soon as my dad gets home. Me and my brother have to fill up about a hundred lunch bags with sand. But it sure looks beautiful when the whole neighborhood's lit up at dusk. It just isn't Christmas without
luminarias
. How come you guys don't put them out? Every other house on the block does. It doesn't mean anything, just candle lights.”

“I'll take it under advisement,” I said. It was an expression I'd learned from Diana, in debate. For a second I missed Diana deep in my belly, the way you feel after your first dog croaks.

“Well, let me know how it turns out with the big rescue mission
mañana
,” he said. Suddenly, inspired by the
luminarias
, he was sliding into fourth-grade Spanish.

“Yeah, right.”

I pulled my arms up inside my T-shirt, fuming about what a crappy friend Brent had turned out to be. Or maybe I was having a severe case of the yellow-stripe-down-the-back Bah Humbugs. Or maybe I was missing Diana's TV room and being pressed up against her on that curvy couch. Anyway, I was completely miserable as I followed Brent to the front door.

A dribble of apple pie sat on his shirt collar. What a slob. How come I'd never noticed before? He put on his ski jacket and trudged through the snow, digging deep Nike trenches between my house and his. As sort of a last tribute to our friendship, he shouted from his porch, “
Feliz Navidad
,” and someone shoveling a driveway across the street yelled back, “Merry Christmas to you, too!”

I shut the front door. The air was hot inside. The furnace roared its way through probably its last winter. “Merry Christmas,” I muttered to myself. “Happy Chanukah. Happy Winter Solstice, Happy Holiday-of-Choice.”

I flashed on a picture: Diana in Acapulco, sunning on a beach. Bronze-chested beach boys would be bringing her frosty drinks with Christmas bows and a sprig of mistletoe tied to the straws. She'd be wearing a suit that was—what did she say?—revolutionary. I wasn't in the picture.

I sat in front of the window, watching my neighbors put out the sacks of sand, carry in packages, rearrange a string of lights on a pine tree on the front lawn. I turned on the radio. Perry Como's smarmy voice promised, “I'll be home for Christmas.…”

Lights were coming on all over the neighborhood, as darkness hit with December suddenness. “… If only in my dreams,” Perry promised. And that got me wondering, What did Diana dream about for Christmas that she didn't already have three of?

And wherever
she
was, what was Miriam's dream? That she'd be around for one more Christmas?

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Told by Miriam

What a glorious night! I had never, not even in church, felt such an outpouring of love as I felt on that Christmas at the farm. After we buried the blackbird, we went back to the kitchen. Brother Timothy sat a little apart from the rest of us, listening, thinking. Mr. and Mrs. Hobart swayed to and fro in their maple rockers on opposite sides of the fireplace, their outstretched toes nearly touching. Mrs. Hobart's face glowed like a bride's. Across the table from me, Mama looked like she'd come home at last, and Uncle Benjamin and Uncle Vernon seemed relaxed and jovial and full of Christmas spirit.

Brother James held one little girl on each knee, and Marylou sat on the floor, leaning against his legs ever so lightly.

The image of the small bird in its soft, patchwork nest came to me: Dear God, help me to remember that hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul. In that moment I almost believed that the words had come from Scripture.

Then Brother James led us all in prayer, and we asked for peace on earth, goodwill toward all men, as He would have wanted. “Silent night, holy night,” we sang, with only candles and the fireplace aglow. Brother James spoke barely above a whisper, and we all reached for every word. I thought he looked so blissful, with Marylou at his feet and the little girls' heads resting on his shoulders. I envied how they fell asleep to the humming of his body as he spoke.

One by one, people went off to bed. The unmarried men were to sleep in the front parlor, and Uncle Vernon and Uncle Benjamin went off to lay out their bedrolls. Brother James carried the little girls upstairs to the bed I would share with them later. I knew he meant for me to stay downstairs after the others had gone, and so I waited.

When he came back, there were only small fingers of fire left. Brother James stirred the embers and threw on another log, and I knew it was to be a long talk. He motioned for me to take the rocking chair opposite him.

“This is a Christmas I will always treasure, Miriam.

“Me, too, Brother James.”

“Might have been more appropriate for Easter, though, because I see that you have been renewed, just like the buds that burst forth on the trees of spring.”

“I feel stronger than ever,” I told him.

“I don't doubt it.” We rocked quietly, as I wondered what would come next.

“About the boy,” Brother James began.

My heart sped up. “Yes?”

“It won't work, child. You're fish, and he's fowl.”

I blurted out what was on my mind: “Do we have to hate people who aren't like us, Brother James?”

“No, child. We don't hate them, any more than we hate the snow that made that poor bird hit our window. Remember, God said, ‘This I command you, that you love one another.' But we surely worry about them.”

I did not think Adam and his father needed our worrying. But then I thought, Not in this life, maybe, but what will become of them in the next life?

“You see, we love them so much that we want to bring them along with us, but it troubles us that they haven't found Jesus yet. Miriam, you know the church teaches that we have a God-given obligation to save them. ‘Go into all the world and preach the gospel to the whole of creation.' You've been tied up in your own problems so long, maybe you've forgotten what God expects of you.”

I wasn't entirely sure what he meant, but I felt myself tensing up as I waited for the next words.

“I want you to make this Adam Bergen boy your personal mission, Miriam. Saving a thousand strangers isn't as precious as saving one troubled soul you know only too well.”

“I've meant to, Brother James. I've promised Jesus, and I've thought and prayed about it. I can't get any kind of a foothold. Adam's not very religious, but anyway he seems pretty comfortable with his own faith.”

“Comfort? What's comfort got to do with God's word? We're talking souls here, child.”

I'd thought comfort had everything to do with God, but perhaps Brother James meant something else.

“If you like the boy, bring him around to our door. Look at the joy in the face of Brother Timothy's mother. Don't you want the same for Adam?”

I wanted to tell him that I'd brought Mrs. Hobart to Jesus, just by causing all these people to be together on Christmas, and wasn't that enough? But of course I could not boast that way, and I didn't want him to think I was trading Mrs. Hobart's salvation for Adam's.

Brother James said, “I want the boy's soul for Jesus. As it says in the
Book in Gold Leaf
, ‘Be a fisher of men.' Reel him in to us, child, and that's how you can thank the Lord for the miracle He's performed for you. And let me remind you about First Corinthians, ‘For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive.' Is he worth it to you?”

I was reminded of Adam's father asking, “How much is it worth to you to be pain-free?”

I couldn't answer right away; I don't think Brother James expected me to. His words hung in the air, gradually trailing off like the scent of vanilla in Mama's kitchen.

“I'll think about it,” I promised, and he reached across and patted my hand which was clutching the arm of the rocker.

“That's all I ask, Miriam. Just give it some thought. Now,
I've
given some thought to Marylou Wadkins and me getting married.” There was a thick pause. I wasn't sure how I was supposed to respond. It was inconceivable that he was asking my advice. I rather thought he was measuring my reaction.