A Gift Upon the Shore (29 page)

Mary had been immediately drawn to Adam. He was small for his age, with fine features and shining black hair. Quiet and shy, he seemed satisfied to sit on the margins of activity, listening avidly. That he admired Luke to the point of worship was obvious.

The other members of this household, Enid and Bernadette, were no more than thirty years old, yet they were classified as Barrens. That had been determined by the Doctor after years of childless marriages and fruitless visitations. When Enid spoke the word Barren, her large, hazel eyes filled with grief and something akin to shame.

Luke called Enid his big sister. She had come to the Ark when she was nineteen after her family was evicted from their farm in the Willamette Valley, and she was assigned to Luke's father's household. She and Luke were the only survivors of that household. Enid seemed quite willing to extend her sisterly affection to Luke's bride, for which Mary was grateful. She recognized Enid as the true center of this household, and Mary couldn't assume the role—she wasn't yet sure what it entailed—of the Elder's wife without Enid's cooperation.

But Enid wasn't even aware that she was the center here. She considered her real work to be weaving—not cooking, cleaning, and organizing the household. She was one of fifteen women expert at spinning and weaving the wool shorn from the Ark's sheep.

And Mary was also grateful that Enid was virtually incapable of silence. Mary learned a great deal about the Ark by saying nothing and letting Enid fill the vacuum.

It was Enid who told her about Bernadette, the other Barren in this household. She was absent from the Ark when Mary and Luke arrived. Enid explained that Bernadette was sometimes away from home—alone—for days at a time. Enid clearly thought such behavior odd. Not even the men who went out hunting traveled in the forest alone. When Mary asked why Bernadette embarked on such expeditions, Enid said, “Healing herbs and roots. She's a nurse and one of the Doctor's students at medicine.” Not only did she venture alone into the forest, but space had been set aside in the greenhouse for her to grow cultivated medicinal herbs.

Bernadette hadn't put in an appearance until the evening meal. She wasn't wearing the de rigueur scarf when she arrived, and her blonde hair curled wildly around her small, squirrel-curious face. She was minimally polite to Mary, but she greeted Luke with a fondness that bore witness to long friendship. She wanted to know about his travels, but he put her off. He was going to tell all the Flock about his journey at evening service. She showed little overt interest in Mary until she brought out the seeds and bulbs Rachel had sent with her. Bernadette examined them, then eyed Mary curiously. “Where do you come from that you have all these plants?”

Luke had again put her off. “Later, Sister. I'll tell you and everybody else about that later.”

Mary turned over, seeking a more comfortable position on the soft mattress. Then she stiffened, surprised by a sound. The creak of floorboards, footsteps moving down the hall toward the kitchen.

Was it Luke? Perhaps he couldn't sleep, either. She waited, wondering whether it would stretch the bounds of propriety here if she and Luke were to simply talk together, even if they were alone.

She threw the covers back, shivering in the chill air despite the long granny gown Enid had given her. Pajamas, apparently, were not appropriate for a woman. She felt on the floor for her slippers. At least, they were hers, like the robe she pulled on. She made her way to the door, then out into the hall, and saw a dim, golden light ahead: a fire in the hearth. When she reached the kitchen door, she paused.

Someone was sitting in front of the fireplace on the far wall, but it wasn't Luke. She sighed her disappointment, absently looking around at the varnished cabinets gleaming in reflected firelight; the cookstove, its cast iron densely black; the sink that had no faucets; the garlands of drying leaves, flowers, and roots hung from the roof beams.

It was Old Nehemiah who occupied the chair facing the fireplace. He turned. His face was in shadow, but his voice was welcoming. “Come in, Sister Mary. Warm yourself up. Gets kind of cold these fall nights.”

Mary felt somehow caught out, but she didn't want to return to the solitude of her room. Nehemiah rose and dragged a chair near the fire for her. She sat down in it, smiled at him. “Thank you. I wasn't really cold. Just couldn't seem to get to sleep.”

He nodded. “Always hard in a strange bed.” Then he gazed into the fire, quite content to have her here, it seemed, and just as content not to talk. The fire wheezed and muttered to itself, a small fire in the big, brick hearth designed for cooking as well as heating; wrought-iron pot hooks were folded against the side walls.

Nehemiah was not, like Enid, a compulsive talker. He had said very little during the evening meal when all the household gathered at the kitchen table. He seemed as tough and hard as weathered wood, and he had undoubtedly been a man of great physical strength in his youth, but now the squared angles were rounded, his wide shoulders tended to hunch forward, his right hand was misshapen with arthritis.

He had no left hand. His arm ended just above the elbow. He was wearing a wool robe now, and the left sleeve hung loose. The absence of half his left arm had been more apparent earlier when his shirtsleeve was folded and safety-pinned at the end of his truncated limb.

She studied his gray-bearded face, in profile to her, assessing the calm steadfastness in it, and finally spoke. “Brother Nehemiah, would it offend you if I asked what happened to your arm?”

“Offend me? Of course not, Sister.” He lifted the stub of an arm. “It's a miracle, this. A miracle that I'm still alive.”

“What happened?”

“Well, it was three years ago. I was east in the mountains with a hunting party. We'd shot a big buck, and I was boning it out. Done it a hundred times, you know, and never slipped once. This time the knife caught on a tendon, and when it let go, it ran up my left hand, laid it open down to the bones.” He frowned uneasily. “Sorry to be so . . . well, I know women sometimes get upset at that sort of talk.”

Mary shook her head. “If I was flinching, it's only because I've boned out a few deer myself, and it always made me very nervous.”

“Had to bone out your own game, did you? Well, I admire that in a woman—doing whatever you have to.”

“Are you . . . unique in that sort of admiration?”

He gave her an oblique smile, then shrugged. “I suppose some of the Flock were surprised to see a woman here with pants on. And maybe I should tell you, there's some would think it odd for a woman to be talking to a man without anything on her head.”

Mary self-consciously ran a hand through her hair. “I didn't realize that. I mean, I saw Bernadette—”

“Oh, Bernadette's sort of . . . well, people look the other way with her. But she's the best there is for a nurse or midwife.”

A midwife? Mary wondered how much experience Bernadette could have acquired at that. “You were telling me about your arm. . . .”

Nehemiah settled back in his chair. “Well, the trouble was, when I cut my hand so bad we were five days away from home. The Brothers with me did what they could, but it got infected. By the time we got back, I couldn't walk, couldn't even hold myself up on a horse. My arm was all swollen up and turning dark. Hurt like hell, too. Excuse the language, but I can't believe Satan's got much worse to offer. The Doctor said gangrene had set in. The only way he could save me was to amputate, and he wasn't real sure I'd live through it. But I did, and it was a miracle. The Doctor took off the arm, and I didn't feel a thing. Well, I did afterward while it was healing up, but I didn't mind that.”

Mary stared at him. “You mean the Doctor used an anesthetic?”

“Yes. Not the kind they had in hospitals before Armageddon. The Doctor kept a supply of medicines like that, but he said most of them didn't last. But he had the poppy. We grow them in the greenhouse. The Doctor says the poppy was put on Earth to ease suffering, but sinners made it the scourge of generations. Well, I can testify that the way the Doctor used it was God's way. He saved my life.” A long sigh, then: “He's a saint, the Doctor. He's our rock, just like the Apostle Peter.”

Luke had described the Doctor in nearly the same words.

Mary disciplined her features to betray none of her skepticism. A saint? Certainly a man of dazzling presence, a man to command attention, and perhaps awe.

The evening prayer service had been, more than anything else she experienced today, revealing. All the Flock had crowded into the candlelit sanctuary, and the air was charged with the array of their odors and the astringent tang of the cedar logs of which the church was built. Mary wondered why the Doctor asked Luke to speak before, rather than after, the service. She listened to Luke tell the story of his journey and was only surprised that he said so little about Amarna. “A farm where I was taken in when I was sick and nursed to health by Sister Mary and the old woman who worked the farm with her.” That was all.
Old woman
. Damn him. Yet Mary was relieved that he didn't try to explain Rachel to these people. Nor did he mention the books.

When Luke concluded his story, the Doctor ascended to the pulpit, and the service began in earnest. First, the music, with Sister Judith at the pump organ, the Flock singing like a trained chorus fifty voices strong in three-part harmony. Some of the hymns were familiar, like “Bringing in the Sheaves,” but most she had never heard. She didn't care. It had been so long since she'd heard music, she didn't notice the words, only the melodies, the harmonies, the rhythms.

When she was nearly limp with the power of the music, the Doctor began his sermon, taking his text from the Book of Ruth in honor of Luke's return with his bride-to-be. That the story wasn't particularly appropriate didn't seem to concern him. He built on it a lesson in faith, and for a solid hour urged the Flock to feats of faith for the sake of eloquently vague glory, threatened them as a consequence of failure of faith with an equally eloquent—and intensely specific—hell. His resonant voice boomed in the shadowed confines of the church, and the climax was wringing. All it lacked was a thunder of applause. Instead, he took his accolades in the form of a final exultant hymn, “Give to the Winds Thy Fears.”

It was only then that Mary understood why the Doctor had let Luke speak first. It was pure theatre. He intended to provide the climax of the evening's “entertainment.”

Nehemiah rose to put a piece of wood on the fire. The flames probed around the wedge of fir, seeking a foothold.

Mary asked, “Is he really a saint?”

“The Doctor?” Nehemiah sank stiffly into his chair. “Well, I don't know. He's not . . . perfect. Far as I know, there's only been one perfect man to walk this Earth: the Lord Jesus.”

“But he wasn't just a man, was he?”

“I guess that's why He was perfect. The Doctor's a man. He's not perfect. But I've never met a man quite like him.”

“Neither have I.” Mary stared into the flames and remembered fires in the hearth at Amarna, wondered if Rachel were at this moment gazing into another fire.

No. Don't dwell on that, on Rachel.

“Brother Nehemiah, didn't Enid say you were one of the charter members of the Ark?”

He beamed proudly. “I sure was. I knew the Doctor when he was in Portland. Went to the same church, so to speak—his little church on skid road. I was working for the Social Services Division. Gave that up when I saw I could do more good working with the Doctor and the Lord than for the government. Me and my wife and my sister and her husband all came to Canaan Valley with the Doctor and helped build the Ark. Both Adam senior and I were chosen as Elders.”

“You're an Elder?”

“Yes. I mean, I
was
an Elder—one of the only three original Elders to live through the Long Winter.”

Mary hesitated, puzzled. “Then you . . . you were Elder of
this
household before Luke came home.”

“Well, yes, I was.”

“Does it bother you to have Luke step into your place like that?”

Nehemiah laughed softly. “No, it doesn't bother me. Told the Doctor that today. Luke, too. Besides, there's not a lot for the Elders to do anymore. Everybody here pretty much knows what has to be done and when. And if they don't—well, the Doctor can usually handle it.”

As he
handled
the replacement of an Elder, Mary thought. That had been done today with no more than a word from the Doctor.

Nehemiah pulled in a deep breath. “Yes, I'm stepping down now, and like the Doctor says, it's time. And only right. Luke's going to take the Doctor's place, probably, sooner or later. We all know that.”

Luke take the Doctor's place? Mary tried to imagine Luke in the pulpit urging the Flock to righteousness, threatening them with an agonizing hell. She tried to imagine Luke in the role of a saint.

She said, “But that's bound to be a long time in the future.”

“Maybe. We never know what the Lord has in store for us. The Doctor's had some trouble with his heart lately. Bernadette's always boiling up foxglove for him. Not that he can't work with the best of us, long and hard. Still, you never know. Got to look to the future.”

Mary wondered how much future Nehemiah foresaw if he, like the Doctor, believed the second coming of Christ was imminent. But she hadn't decided how to word that delicate question, when Nehemiah stretched and came to his feet. “Well, I'd best get back to bed. The cows'll be waiting early on for milking.”

She looked up at him. “I enjoyed talking to you, Brother Nehemiah.”

“I enjoyed it, too. You'll be a blessing for Luke and for the Flock. Good night, Sister Mary.” And with that he lumbered away down the hall. She heard the latch on his door click.