The Wounded Land t2cotc-1 Read online

  After she had washed away as much of the blackness as she could reach with soap and water, she donned a dull grey dress that had the effect of minimizing her femininity, then spent a few minutes checking the contents of her medical bag. They always seemed insufficient-there were so many things she might conceivably need which she could not carry with her-and now they appeared to be a particularly improvident arsenal against the unknown. But she knew from experience that she would have felt naked without her bag. With a sigh of fatigue, she locked the apartment and went down the stairs to her car.

  Driving slowly to give herself time to learn landmarks, she followed Dr. Berenford's directions and soon found herself moving through the centre of town.

  The late afternoon sun and the thickness of the air made the buildings look as if they were sweating. The businesses seemed to lean away from the hot sidewalks, as if they had forgotten the enthusiasm, even the accessibility, that they needed to survive; and the courthouse, with its dull white marble and its roof supported by stone giant heads atop ersatz Greek columns, looked altogether unequal to its responsibilities.

  The sidewalks were relatively busy-people were going home from work-but one small group in front of the courthouse caught Linden's eye. A faded woman with three small children stood on the steps. She wore a shapeless shift which appeared to have been made from burlap; and the children were dressed in gunny sacks. Her face was grey and blank, as if she were inured by poverty and weariness to the emaciation of her children. All four of them held short wooden sticks bearing crude signs,”

  The signs were marked with red triangles. Inside each triangle was written one word: REPENT.

  The woman and her children ignored the passersby. They stood dumbly on the steps as if they were engaged in a penance which stupefied them. Linden's heart ached uselessly at the sight of their moral and physical penury. There was nothing she could do for such people.

  Three minutes later, she was outside the municipal limits.

  There the road began to run through tilled valleys, between wooded hills. Beyond the town, the unseasonable heat and humidity were kinder to what they touched; they made the air lambent, so that it lay like immanence across the new crops, up the tangled weed-and-grass hillsides, among the budding trees; and her mood lifted at the way the landscape glowed in the approach of evening. She had spent so much of her life in cities. She continued to drive slowly; she wanted to savour the faint hope that she had found something she would be able to enjoy.

  After a couple of miles, she came to a wide field on her right, thickly overgrown with milkweed and wild mustard. Across the field, a quarter of a mile away against a wall of trees, stood a white frame house. Two or three other houses bordered the field, closer to the highway; but the white one drew her attention as if it were the only habitable structure in the area.

  A dirt road ran into the field. Branches went to the other houses, but the main track led straight to the white one.

  Beside the entrance stood a wooden sign. Despite faded paint and several old splintered holes like bullet scars, the lettering was still legible: Haven Farm.

  Gripping her courage, Linden turned onto the dirt road.

  Without warning, the periphery of her gaze caught a flick of ochre. A robed figure stood beside the sign.

  What-?

  He stood there as if he had just appeared out of the air. An instant ago, she had seen nothing except the sign.

  Taken by surprise, she instinctively twitched the wheel, trying to evade a hazard she had already passed. At once, she righted the sedan, stepped on the brakes. Her eyes jumped to the rearview mirror.

  She saw an old man in an ochre robe. He was tall and lean, barefoot, dirty. His long grey beard and thin hair flared about his head like frenzy.

  He took one step into the road toward her, then clutched at his chest convulsively, and collapsed.

  She barked a warning, though there was no one to hear it. Moving with a celerity that felt like slow-motion, she cut the ignition, grabbed for her bag, pushed open the door. Apprehension roiled in her, fear of death, of failure; but her training controlled it. In a moment, she was at the old man's side.

  He looked strangely out of place in the road, out of time in the world she knew. The robe was his only garment; it looked as if he had been living in it for years. His features were sharp, made fierce by destitution or fanaticism. The declining sunlight collared his withered skin like dead gold.

  He was not breathing.

  Her discipline made her move. She knelt beside him, felt for his pulse. But within her she wailed. He bore a sickening resemblance to her father. If her father had lived to become old and mad, he might have been this stricken, preterite figure.

  He had no pulse.

  He revolted her. Her father had committed suicide. People who killed themselves deserved to die. The old man's appearance brought back memories of her own screaming which echoed in her ears as if it could never be silenced.

  But he was dying. Already, his muscles had slackened, relaxing the pain of his seizure. And she was a doctor.

  With the sureness of hard training, self-abnegation which mastered revulsion, her hands snapped open her bag. She took out her penlight, checked his pupils.

  They were equal and reactive.

  It was still possible to save him.

  Quickly, she adjusted his head, tilted it back to clear his throat. Then she folded her hands together over his sternum, leaned her weight on her arms, and began to apply CPR.

  The rhythm of cardiopulmonary resuscitation was so deeply ingrained in her that she followed it automatically: fifteen firm heels of her hands to his sternum; then two deep exhalations into his mouth, blocking his nose as she did so. But his mouth was foul, cankerous, and vile, as if his teeth were rotten, or his palate gangrenous. She almost faltered. Instantly, her revulsion became an acute physical nausea, as if she were tasting the exudation of a boil. But she was a doctor; this was her work.

  Fifteen. Two.

  Fifteen. Two.

  She did not permit herself to miss a beat.

  But fear surged through her nausea. Exhaustion. Failure. CPR was so demanding that no one person could sustain it alone for more than a few minutes. If he did not come back to life soon-Breathe, damn you, she muttered along the beats. Fifteen. Two. Damn you. Breathe. There was still no pulse.

  Her own breathing became ragged; giddiness welled up in her like a tide of darkness. The air seemed to resist her lungs. Heat and the approach of sunset dimmed the old man. He had lost all muscle-tone, all appearance of life.

  Breathe!

  Abruptly, she stopped her rhythm, snatched at her bag. Her arms trembled; she clenched them still as she broke open a disposable syringe, a vial of adrenaline, a cardiac needle. Fighting for steadiness, she filled the syringe, cleared out the air. In spite of her urgency, she took a moment to swab clean a patch of the man's thin chest with alcohol. Then she slid the needle delicately past his ribs, injected adrenaline into his heart.

  Setting aside the syringe, she risked pounding her fist once against his sternum. But the blow had no effect.

  Cursing, she resumed her CPR.

  She needed help. But she could not do anything about that. If she stopped to take him into town, or to go in search of a phone, he would die. Yet if she exhausted herself alone he would still die.

  Breathe!

  He did not breathe. His heart did not beat. His mouth was as fetid as the maw of a corpse. The whole ordeal was hopeless.

  She did not relent.

  All the blackness of her life was in her. She had spent too many years teaching herself to be effective against death; she could not surrender now. She had been too young, weak, and ignorant to save her father, could not have saved her mother; now that she knew what to do and could do it, she would never quit, never falsify her life by quitting.

  Dark motes began to dance across her vision; the air swarmed with moisture and inadequacy. Her arms felt leaden; her lungs cried o
ut every time she forced breath down the old man's throat. He lay inert. Tears of rage and need ran hotly down her face. Yet she did not relent.

  She was still half conscious when a tremor ran through him, and he took a hoarse gulp of air.

  At once, her will snapped. Blood rushed to her head. She did not feel herself fall away to the side.

  When she regained enough self-command to raise her head, her sight was a smear of pain and her face was slick with sweat. The old man was standing over her. His eyes were on her; the intense blue of his gaze held her like a hand of compassion. He looked impossibly tall and healthy; his very posture seemed to deny that he had ever been close to death. Gently, he reached down to her, drew her to her feet. As he put his arms around her, she slumped against him, unable to resist his embrace.

  “Ah, my daughter, do not fear.”

  His voice was husky with regret and tenderness.

  “You will not fail, however he may assail you. There is also love in the world.”

  Then he released her, stepped back. His eyes became commandments.

  “Be true.”

  She watched him dumbly as he turned, walked away from her into the field. Milkweed and wild mustard whipped against his robe for a moment. She could hardly see him through the blurring of her vision. A musky breeze stirred his hair, made it a nimbus around his head as the sun began to set. Then he faded into the humidity, and was gone.

  She wanted to call out after him, but the memory of his eyes stopped her.

  Be true.

  Deep in her chest, her heart began to tremble.

  Two: Something Broken

  AFTER a moment, the trembling spread to her limbs. The surface of her skin felt fiery, as if the rays of the sun were concentrated on her. The muscles of her abdomen knotted.

  The old man had vanished. He had put his arms around her as if he had the right, and then he had vanished.

  She feared that her guts were going to rebel.

  But then her gaze lurched toward the dirt where the old man had lain. There she saw the used hypodermic, the sterile wrappings, the empty vial. The dust bore the faint imprint of a body.

  A shudder ran through her, and she began to relax.

  So he had been real He had only appeared to vanish. Her eyes had tricked her.

  She scanned the area for him. He should not be walking around; he needed care, observation, until his condition stabilized. But she saw no sign of him. Fighting an odd reluctance, she waded out into the wild mustard after him. But when she reached the place where her eyes had lost him, she found nothing.

  Baffled, she returned to the roadway. She did not like to give him up; but she appeared to have no choice in the matter. Muttering under her breath, she went to retrieve her bag.

  The debris of her treatment she stuffed into one of the plastic specimen sacks she carried. Then she returned to her car. As she slid into the front seat, she gripped the steering wheel with both hands to steady herself on its hard actuality.

  She did not remember why she had come to Haven Farm until the book on the seat beside her caught her attention.

  Oh, damn!

  She felt intensely unready to confront Thomas Covenant.

  For a moment, she considered simply abandoning the favour she had promised Dr. Berenford. She started the engine, began to turn the wheel. But the exigency of the old man's eyes held her. That blue would not approve the breaking of promises. And she had saved him. She had set a precedent for herself which was more important than any question of difficulty or mortification. When she put the sedan into motion, she sent it straight down the dirt road toward the white frame house, with the dust and the sunset at her back.

  The light cast a tinge of red over the house, as if it were in the process of being transformed into something else. As she parked her car, she had to fight another surge of reluctance. She did not want to have anything to do with Thomas Covenant-not because he was a leper, but because he was something unknown and fierce, something so extravagant that even Dr. Berenford was afraid of him.

  But she had already made her commitment. Picking up the book, she left her car and went to the front door of the house, hoping to be able to finish this task before the light failed.

  She spent a moment straightening her hair. Then she knocked.

  The house was silent.

  Her shoulders throbbed with the consequences of strain. Fatigue and embarrassment made her arms feel too heavy to lift. She had to grit her teeth to make herself knock again.

  Abruptly, she heard the sound of feet. They came stamping through the house toward her. She could hear anger in them.

  The front door was snatched open, and a man confronted her, a lean figure in old jeans and a T-shirt, a few inches taller than herself. About forty years old. He had an intense face. His mouth was as strict as a stone tablet; his cheeks were lined with difficulties; his eyes were like embers, capable of fire. His hair above his forehead was raddled with grey, as if he had been aged more by his thoughts than by time.

  He was exhausted. Almost automatically, she noted the redness of his orbs and eyelids, the pallor of his skin, the febrile rawness of his movements. He was either ill or under extreme stress.

  She opened her mouth to speak, got no further. He registered her presence for a second, then snapped, “Goddamn it, if I wanted visitors I'd post a sign!” and clapped the door shut in her face.

  She blinked after him momentarily while darkness gathered at her back, and her uncertainty turned to anger. Then she hit the door so hard that the wood rattled in its frame.

  He came back almost at once. His voice hurled acid at her. “Maybe you don't speak English. I-”

  She met his glare with a mordant smile. “Aren't you supposed to ring a bell, or something?”

  That stopped him. His eyes narrowed as he reconsidered her. When he spoke again, his words came more slowly, as if he were trying to measure the danger she represented.

  “If you know that, you don't need any warning.”

  She nodded. “My name is Linden Avery. I'm a doctor.”

  “And you're not afraid of lepers.”

  His sarcasm was as heavy as a bludgeon; but she matched it. “If I were afraid of sick people, I wouldn't be a doctor,”

  His glower expressed his disbelief. But he said curtly, “I don't need a doctor,” and started to swing the door shut again.

  “So actually,” she rasped, “you're the one who's afraid.”

  His face darkened. Enunciating each word as if it were a dagger, he said, “What do you want, doctor?”

  To her dismay, his controlled vehemence made her falter. For the second time in the course of the sunset, she was held by eyes that were too potent for her. His gaze shamed her. The book-her excuse for being there-was in her hand; but her hand was behind her back. She could not tell the lie Dr. Berenford had suggested to her. And she had no other answer. She could see vividly that Covenant needed help. Yet if he did not ask for it, what recourse did she have?

  But then a leap of intuition crossed her mind. Speaking before she could question herself, she said, “That old man told me to 'Be true.'”

  His reaction startled her. Surprise and fear flared in his eyes. His shoulders winced; his jaw dropped. Then abruptly he had closed the door behind him. He stood before her with his face thrust hotly forward. “What old man?”

  She met his fire squarely. “He was out at the end of your driveway-an old man in an ochre robe. As soon as I saw him, he went into cardiac arrest.” For an instant, a cold hand of doubt touched her heart. He had recovered too easily. Had he staged the whole situation? Impossible! His heart had stopped. “I had to work like hell to save him. Then he just walked away.”

  Covenant's belligerence collapsed. His gaze clung to her as if he were drowning. His hands gaped in front of him. For the first time, she observed that the last two fingers of his right hand were missing. He wore a wedding band of white gold on what had once been the middle finger of that hand. His voice
was a scraping of pain in his throat. “He's gone?”

  “Yes.”

  “An old man in an ochre robe?”

  “Yes.”

  “You saved him?” His features were fading into night as the sun dropped below the horizon.

  “Yes.”

  “What did he say?”

  “I already told you.” Her uncertainty made her impatient. “He said, 'Be true.'”

  “He said that to you?”

  “Yes!”

  Covenant's eyes left her face. “Hellfire.” He sagged as if he carried a weight of cruelty on his back. “Have mercy on me. I can't bear it.” Turning, he slumped back to the door, opened it. But there he stopped.

  “Why you?”

  Then he had re-entered his house, the door was closed, and. Linden, stood alone in the evening as if she had been bereft.

  She did not move until the need to do something, take some kind of action to restore the familiarity of her world, impelled her to her car. Sitting behind the wheel as if she were stunned, she tried to think.

  Why you?

  What kind of question was that? She was a doctor, and the old man had needed help. It was that simple. What was Covenant talking about?

  But Be true was not all the old man had said. He had also said, You will not fail, however he may assail you.

  He? Was that a reference to Covenant? Was the old man trying to warn her of something? Or did it imply some other kind of connection between him and the writer? What did they have to do with each other? Or with her?

  Nobody could fake cardiac arrest!

  She took a harsh grip on her scrambled thoughts. The whole; situation made no sense. All she could say for certain was that Covenant had recognized her description of the old man. And Covenant's mental stability was clearly open to question.

  Clenching the wheel, she started her car, backed up in order to turn around. She was convinced now that Covenant's problem was serious; but that conviction only made her more angry at Dr. Berenford's refusal to tell her what the problem was. The dirt road was obscure in the twilight; she slapped on her headlights as she put the sedan in gear to complete her turn.