The Language of Paradise: A Novel (17 page)

Dr. Craddock reached into his bag and brought out a vial and a small bottle of rust-colored liquid.

“What is that you’re giving him?” Mrs. Hedge asked, instantly vigilant.

“Only a little something to dull his senses.” Craddock tapped a few drops into the vial and raised the Reverend’s head. “Here, open up now, this will make you more comfortable,” he crooned.

Hedge had come awake. His eyes burned into the doctor’s. He turned his head aside with such vehemence that a drop of the offered medicine spilled on his jaw. “I will not be deprived of my chastisement!”

“There’ll be enough of that left over, no need to worry.” Craddock, speaking in the same light, lulling monotone, dabbed at Hedge’s face with his little finger. “Never a shortage of that particular quantity. Not in my experience.” When the rigid jaw relaxed, he seized Hedge’s hair, forced his head back, and poured the contents of the vial down his throat. The parson, unmanned by the doctor’s sleight-of-hand, swallowed. Although the maneuver had taken a mere fraction of a second, its effect was to render the whole company, even Mrs. Hedge, as docile as the patient, who was resting again on his pillow, grimacing at the bitter taste. Shaman indeed, Gideon thought. He had seen in the Reverend’s eyes a foreign body that had never lodged there before: the unmistakable glint of fear.

The shoulder was to be dealt with first, because, Craddock said, it was quickly done. “Stability is all,” he instructed them. Gideon understood that he and James were to be anchors. Craddock positioned James behind his father and showed him how to lay the flat of one hand on the forehead and grasp the good shoulder with the other. Gideon was to immobilize the legs, holding them firmly above the knee. He tried to fix his eyes on his own chapped knuckles, the familiar shape of his thumb, and avoid the sight of the white bone poking through Hedge’s flesh a few inches below.

The doctor began to work the injured joint with a kneading motion, rolling his hands as if molding dough or clay. “Come now,” he coaxed. “Come along, you rapscallion, that’s the way, that’s the way,” singing to the bone under his breath, wooing it. Gideon was so mesmerized by the performance that he almost forgot his own unease. When the click came—hollow and dull, a chillingly mechanical sound—his grip loosened and his muscles jumped along with the patient’s. Craddock did not seem to notice his weakness. He was already fashioning a sling from the strips of sheet that Sophy had brought in.

But the doctor had seen enough to ask his helpers to change places. James would assist with the crucial positioning of the leg, and Gideon had the lesser task of securing the upper body. He looked down upon the Reverend’s face, which was covered with a film of sweat. Hedge breathed shallowly though lips that were dry and cracked. His eyes sought Gideon’s with a roving intensity, as if something he’d lost might be found there.

“Talk to him,” Craddock said. “Give him a Psalm or a bit of Scripture. It will distract him, and might do you some good, too.”

From early childhood, Gideon had been called upon to recite—like a parrot, he’d complained to his mother—but at times his mind rebelled, presenting only a white sheet instead of the text he’d mastered to perfection. This had happened, on rare occasions, in Hedge’s presence. It was happening now. The entire Bible fled from him, leaving not one line he could grab hold of and use as a lure to draw others. Everyone seemed to be waiting on him: James with his hands in position, tensed as if for a starting shot; Mrs. Hedge, her lamp at half-mast; even the doctor, who was rummaging in his bag, puncturing the silence with the utilitarian clink of his instruments. Sophy and Micah had come in and were hovering by the door. Gideon took a deep breath, and opened his mouth in the hope of dredging up some embedded singsong from his infancy:
Our Father
.
Now I lay me down to sleep
. He breathed out Hebrew.

A fountain of it. Effortless, gushing from some well he didn’t know was there. At seminary he had been required to learn a few of the Psalms as they were written, but he couldn’t stop the flow to identify them now. The words were tactile, spelling out their shapes on his palate as they passed out of him and into Hedge. Gideon remembered what the Reverend had said about the solidity of the language he loved, how it filled the mouth and left a sweetness on the tongue. He was only a conduit—yet he was conscious of an exhilarating force in him whose depths he had only skimmed. This, surely, was a small taste of what he’d stumbled on in his first bungling efforts at translation, what he had sought, laboriously and to so little effect, in his research. Whatever the source, he wasn’t meant to hoard its bounty but to dip into the well and offer a healing draught to his teacher. The parson’s lips had begun to move along with his. No sound emerged at first, but soon Gideon heard a thin vibrato, a wavering line under his own voice. Hedge was chanting along with him, as best he could.

In what might have been another country, Craddock and James huddled over the fractured leg. Gideon’s view of the procedure was obscured, but he could see in the light of the lamp that the doctor’s brow shone with sweat. To an outsider’s eye, the setting appeared to be an athletic feat—a contest even—arduous enough to tax the strength of two strong men.

“Damn if his muscles don’t resist me all on their own,” the doctor muttered, “laudanum or no.” His orders to James were terse. The broken bones must be pulled apart in order to be made straight.

Each time they shifted the leg, Hedge moaned, a throttled noise wrung from him against his will. For a few seconds Gideon sang alone, but always Hedge’s voice rejoined his. His pain seemed woven into the prayer. Gideon had long considered the Psalms a relic of a more credulous age—for who in modern times would expend such urgent emotion on the Ineffable?—but never again would he find it difficult to imagine David beating his chest or grinding his forehead in the dust, pleading with his God for victory, forgiveness, salvation, revenge.

Craddock mopped his face with one sleeve. “Steady now,” he said, and he and James leaned into each other. Hedge let out a cry so piercing that Gideon’s Hebrew froze in his throat, cut off in midstream. The lamp shook and slanted downward, casting them all into momentary darkness as Fanny bent to her husband. Gideon had hardly given her a thought since the procedure began. Her face was a mirror of Hedge’s pain, alive with it, filled with feeling that had been absent for weeks. “Almost done, my lamb,” she said, stroking his cheek. “I am here to bear it with you.” But the Reverend was gazing into the eyes of his pupil, and all through the stitching and splinting and binding, he never looked away.

CHAPTER 14

____

KNIT

M
ICAH MADE THE CRUTCHES HIMSELF. FORAGING IN THE
workshop, he chose some pieces from a pile of white oak set aside for seasoning, and lavished on them all the care he would have devoted to a chest or chair, with a measure of his father’s ingenuity mixed in. The usual crude T-shape, an unforgiving bar atop a tapered stick, would have been quick work, but the Reverend’s condition gave him time. He constructed models out of chips and scraps, lining them up along the windows—a new species of fauna for his menagerie—and walking them with his fingers up and down the sill until he arrived at an elegantly simple split-stick design that pleased him. Once the sticks were cut and turned, he drove a wedge between them to bend the wood to the S-curves he wanted. His effort was well spent: the cross-pieces fit inside the splits with just the right tension, like Samson braced between the temple pillars. Then he polished them to bring out the pattern of the oak, oiled them until they shone, and covered the arm-cradles with sheepskin.

The crutches had been propped against the bedroom wall for a month, stirring the admiration of all the Reverend’s visitors. Dr. Craddock called them “the handsome twins”; he praised their flexibility and said he’d never seen a prettier pair. As days turned to weeks, Gideon began to think of them as sculpture, for Hedge was still in bed and showed no sign of leaving, his leg, trussed now in proper splints, stretched out and elevated on a pillow. The wound from the protruding bone continued red and angry, oozing pus through the stitches. Twice a week Fanny undid the bindings herself to apply a special poultice. Craddock marveled that no fever had developed but refused to credit her potions, attributing the phenomenon to the parson’s strong character and innate resistance to corruption. Craddock’s optimism had lately been tempered with caution. “I haven’t lost hope that he will knit,” he told them at the door one afternoon, hat in hand. “But, you understand, I can’t guarantee he will knit
straight
.” He smiled at Micah. “It’s good sense to keep those fine crutches in plain sight. That way he’ll get used to ’em before he ever has to lean on ’em.”

THE SNOW THAT HAD
been slow to come fell in abundance all through February, as if a stopper had been removed in the heavens. Even well-traveled roads were impassable; no sooner was one layer trodden down than a new one smoothed it over, filling in wagon ruts and effacing the prints of intrepid horses and walkers. For nearly a month, Gideon had been unable to trek to Ormsby for his Sunday visits. He missed Sophy, poignantly at times, but was glad to put aside the complications of affection and be a hermit in his room, a simple student once again, devoting all his energy to his last semester in seminary. The Hedges had consumed him for the better part of a year. When he wasn’t with them physically, he thought about them. For all practical purposes, it occurred to him one evening over his thesis, he had been living
there
rather than
here
. A strange emotion stole over him, a compound of resentment and regret seasoned with nostalgia. They had ensnared him, these wily Hedges—diverted him from his path! A few short months ago his only allegiance had been to his own brilliant future, a destination to be approached systematically. Now he was attached, and there was nothing to be done, no escape from the fetters that bound him.

The subject of his thesis was the quest for the language of Paradise. He was careful to keep a scholar’s skeptical distance, confining his research to a honed selection of those who had plowed the field before him. He jumped nimbly from the Egyptians and Greeks to Philo, from the pre-Socratics to Rousseau and Herder (how familiar their theories of nature seemed, ripe to be vilified from Hedge’s pulpit), from John Webb’s Chinese-spouting Noah, run aground in Cathay, to von Schlegel’s infatuation with Sanskrit. He devoted an entire section to his fellow Harvardian Cotton Mather, whose master’s thesis had championed Hebrew origins more than a century before, when plain-spoken America was still the New Eden. In expounding Mather’s arguments, Gideon allowed a few of his own doubts to creep in, but so subtly and with such restraint that he was certain the most hidebound reader would find nothing to pick at.

Again and again as he stone-skipped through history, he encountered a strange experiment. There seemed to be a recurrent fascination among the language-obsessed with the tabula rasa of infancy. Herodotus wrote of an Egyptian pharaoh who sequestered two newborns in the mountains, with only a shepherd, sworn to silence, to look after them. Between them, the babies produced a single spontaneous word, which the pharaoh interpreted as Phrygian for bread. The subjects of Frederick II’s curiosity had not fared so well. Although the Holy Roman Emperor arranged that their physical needs be met, the children didn’t survive long enough to babble primal words, for, as a monk wrote, they “could not live without clappings of the hands, and gestures, and gladness of countenance, and blandishments.” Gideon wondered whether such considerations had led the Scottish king James IV to appoint a mute to nurse his tiny prisoners, who, it was reported, eventually burst into flawless Hebrew. How else could the king ensure that endearments would not slip out, or whispered words of comfort; that lullabies would not be crooned low on fretful nights?

Thoughts of the children came to Gideon during his own restless nights, when he lay on his back staring at the ceiling, too agitated from the day’s mental exertions to sleep. Before the babies were of talking age, had their cries taken on the nuances of speech? Did they communicate, if only with each other? Or was silence as nourishing to them as bread and milk, sharpening their senses, attuning them to a higher music? And what became of them when the experiment was over? Were they disposed of as coldly as animals, or sacrificed to anonymous labor, forced to haul stones for pyramids or work in the fields until they died? Not one historian had bothered to record their fate.

THE WRITING WENT QUICKLY.
His pen skimmed over the paper; page after page piled up in the corner of his desk, the ink barely dry on one before another topped it. What drove him was not the work he was doing but the book he
would
write. An idea was shaping in his mind, vague but numinous. A lexicon of unique character, combining elements of dictionary and diary. An etymology that would function like an ark, carrying the reader back to that primal place where words were indistinguishable from things. However incomplete, his book would be a key to the natural language that was each person’s birthright. His own experience would be essential, but he realized that he needed to broaden his research, to subject his curiosity to scientific rigor so that its fruits might enlighten others. It seemed to him that he was racing through a desert littered with the mummified remains of other men’s quests to get to his own verdant oasis, where words would stride across the page in full leaf, like the walking trees that the blind man saw. The green!