“Oh, Carol! When you sing I feel so in love with you my heart could crack.” He laughed, sarcastic, un-Tom-like laughter. “After that last song, my heart is cracked just like a window! And a good thing, too! It’s hard to see anything through stained glass.”
Carol stood transfixed, staring toward him, a fixed look of pain and astonishment on her face, as if someone had stuck a knife into her.
Don Lewiston cupped Father Storey’s skull, holding white cotton padding to his wound. Michael’s shirt was wadded up on the pillow, the flannel already stiffening with blood.
Father Storey’s eyes were open wide, each one looking in a different direction. One stared down and to the left. The other was pointed at the toes of his boots. He smiled with a certain low cunning.
“A thousand prayers every minute everywhere and what does God ever say back? Nothing! Because silence never lies. Silence is God’s final advantage. Silence is the purest form of harmony. Everyone ought to try it. Put a stone in your mouth instead of a lie. Put a rock on your tongue instead of gossip. Bury the liars and the wicked under stones until they say no more. More weight, hallelujah.” He took another little sip of air, and then whispered, “The devil is loose. I saw him tonight. I saw him come from the smoke. Then my head caved in and now it’s full of rocks. More weight, amen! Better watch out, Carol. This camp belongs to the devil, not to you. And he isn’t alone, either. Many serve him.”
Carol stared at her father with a horror-struck fascination. Father Storey licked his lips.
“I brought this on myself. I called weakness kindness and told lies when I should’ve kept a stone in my mouth. I did the worst thing a father can do. I had a favorite. I am so sorry, Carol. Please forgive me. I always loved Sarah best. It is right and proper that I should go to her now. Give me another stone. More weight. I’ve said enough, amen.”
He exhaled a long, dreamy breath and was silent.
Harper caught Carol’s eye. “He doesn’t mean it. He’s suffering from a subdural hematoma. If he’s talking nonsense, it’s because of the pressure on his brain.”
Carol looked back at her with a strange lack of recognition, as if they had never met before. “It isn’t nonsense. It’s a revelation! He’s doing what he’s always done. He’s showing us the way.” Carol reached out, blindly grasping backward, and took Michael’s hand. She squeezed his fingers. “We’ll sing. We’ll sing and call him to the Bright. We’ll give him all the light he needs to find his way back to us. And if he can’t come back to us—if he has to go—” Her voice choked. She coughed, and her shoulders shook spasmodically, and she went on: “—if he has to go, he’ll have our song to guide him and give him comfort.”
“Yes,” Harper said. “I think that’s just right. Go and sing for him now. He needs your strength. And sing for me, because I need your strength, too. I’m going to try and help him, but I’m scared. It would mean the world to me if you could raise your voices for both of us.”
Carol gave her a last, wondering look, then stood on her tiptoes and kissed her on the cheek. It was perhaps the last kindness she ever showed Harper. A moment later she brushed through the curtain and was gone, taking the others with her.
Don Lewiston was getting ready to walk out, too, pulling his sleeves down to button them.
“Not you, Don,” Harper said. “You stay. I’ll need you.”
She circled behind the cot, taking Don Lewiston’s place behind Father Storey’s head. She gently lifted his skull in both hands. His silver hair was drenched in blood. She could feel the place behind his right ear where he had been struck, a warm wet lump, and another place, higher up, where there might’ve been a second blow.
“How did this happen?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” Don said. “I didn’t get the whole tale. Mikey carried him into the camp, found him fackin’ half dead in the woods. I guess it was one of the convicts. That’s the early word. Ben is working on them right now.”
Working on them? What did that mean? Didn’t matter. Not now.
“And Father Storey couldn’t say anything about what happened?”
“Not that made sense. He said it was a judgment. He said it was what he had coming to him for protecting the wicked.”
“That’s the pressure on his brain. He doesn’t have any idea what he’s saying.”
“I know’t.”
She looked at Father Storey’s pupils, sniffed his lips, and caught an unsurprising whiff of vomit. She thought about what she had to do and felt nauseated herself. Not the notion of doing it—it had been a long time since she had been squeamish about blood—but at the thought of getting it wrong.
In the waiting room, she heard voices warming up, heard the Lookouts humming together, trying to find the same note.
“I need a razor to shave away the hair back here,” Harper said.
“Yes’m. I’ll get’cha one,” he said, and took a step toward the door.
“Don?”
“Yes’m?”
“Can you get your hands on a drill? Maybe from the wood shop? A power drill would be ideal, but I don’t imagine you’ll find one that has any charge. I’ll settle for one I can crank by hand.”
Don looked from her to Tom Storey—his white hair shampooed in red froth—and back.
“Oh, Jesus. Anything else?”
“Just hot water to sterilize the drill bit, please. Thank you.”
When he didn’t reply, she looked up to tell him that was all and that he should go, but he was already gone.
In the next room they began to sing.
15
Harper wiped Father Storey’s face clean with a cool, damp kitchen towel, taking off soot and blood in long swaths to reveal the lean, curiously lupine face beneath. Now and then his left eye would well with another drop of blood. It would trickle down into his ear and she would wipe him clean again.
He seemed attentive, listening to the voices in the next room. They were singing the same song Harper had heard the night she first came to camp. They sang they were one blood and they sang they were one life. Harper was sure she would not be drawn into the Bright herself—she could not afford to drift away into that shimmering brilliance, where everything was easier and better. Her place was here, with the dying man. She wondered, though, if Father Storey might not be carried away, and if it might not be a real help to him after all, a replacement for the sedatives and the plasma she didn’t have.
His Dragonscale, though, remained cold, dark swirls and scrawls on his old, loose flesh.
“God is a good story,” he told her, all of a sudden. “I like that one and I also like frying pan and Wendy. We read that one together, Sarah, when you were little.”
In her mind’s eye, Harper glimpsed a serene, lovely face shaped in flame. She squeezed his hand.
“I’m not Sarah, Father Storey,” Harper said. “I’m your friend, Nurse Willowes.”
“Good. Nurse Willowes, I have a private medical blather to insult you with. I’m afraid someone has been playing us like a ukulele. Someone has been singing new words to old songs. It’s important to act now. These savings won’t last.”
She said, “First we have to fix your head. Then we can worry about the thief.”
“I would not put a thief in my mouth to steal my brains,” he said. “Anyway, stones taste better. I think I hit my head on something and knocked my shadow off. Are you going to stick it back on, or did it get away?”
“All I need is a little needle and thread and we’ll have you right as rain.”
“Or at least right in my brain,” he said. “I’m going down the drain. You know my little Sarah was an awful thief, too. She stole away from me—stole away from all of us. Even the Fireman. Poor John Rookwood. He tried not to kill her. I guess he’s going to try not to kill you now. Probably he’s in love with you, which is tough luck. Out of the frying pan and into the Fireman.”