Heart of a Shepherd (6 page)

“But I can't—”

“You will.”

“But I never—”

“You must.”

“Grandpa!”

“I'll teach you.”

I wipe my sweaty hands on my chocolate-covered shirt and nod slowly. Grandma has the towels ready by Grandpa's chair. I head down the hall to the bathroom, and a whole chorus of brain waves is chanting that I can't do this.
This is crazy. You can't pretend to be a doctor just because someone needs you—not when you are only a kid.

I run the water and pump out a big handful of soap. I don't even want to look in the mirror, so I look down at the wet, sticky front of my pajamas. I tug the shirt off with one sudsy hand, dry my hands on the clean side, and kick it behind the bathroom door. The draft from the bathroom window raises a shiver all down my back. I peek down the hall, and no one is looking, so I slip into the dark of Dad's room. I stumble over his clean work boots on my way to the dresser and find his wool flannel work shirt by touch in the drawer. It's blue and brown plaid, and worn thin at the elbows. I wrap it tight around my chest and breathe in the dad smell that is still stuck in the collar.

Dad lets me do stuff. It's just my brothers who think I'm too little.

I let Dad's shirt hang down to my knees and start buttoning. “Piece of cake, Brother,” Dad would say to me. “Grandpa's done sutures a million times. It's about time you learned how.”

Dad would hug me.

I trail my hand over his pillow on the way out the door. I head back to the living room, and everyone is waiting like an audience. Pete's kneeling by Grandpa's recliner with his head right under the reading lamp. Grandma is sitting in the chair, holding Pete's hands. “Holler all you need to, Pete. There's none but the good Lord and them that love you to hear,” she says.

This is not exactly encouraging, but Grandpa smiles at me like stitching up your brother's head is a perfectly normal thing to do.

“Let's take a look,” he says.

Before he can lift up the towel over the wound, Pete turns to me and says, “I'm sorry, Brother. You and Grandpa are doing fine, way more than your share.”

“Dude, the barn looks perfect,” John adds.

Frank nods, and Jim says, “What would we do without you?”

I just open and close my mouth a bunch of times,
so Grandpa says, “Thank you, boys,” for me, and hands me the long tweezers with the bent end. I brace myself to be grossed out by the wound. Grandma starts praying the rosary, with the brothers chiming in, but when Grandpa takes the cloth away it's not nearly as bad as I thought it would be. The main thing is, I can't see Pete's face, plus the cut is only about two inches long.

“You want to pull out the shards just like a wood sliver,” Grandpa says. “Pull them out the same direction they went in. Can you see them?”

I tilt Pete's head a bit more toward the light. I push his bristle-short black hair apart with my thumbs.

“Yup, I see a big one and two little ones.”

“Nice and steady now,” Grandpa says.

I slowly, slowly lower the tweezers and get a grip on the shard. Pete sucks in a sharp gasp. Panic starts to creep up my arms and make my hands shake. Pete gasps again, and then groans. Frank sits down suddenly on the floor and puts his head between his knees.

“Breathe,” Grandpa says softly. “Everybody breathe. Angels are all around us now. We can do this.”

Grandma presses on with the rosary. I shake out my hand and try again. This time I steady my wrist on the top of Pete's head, and it goes much better. Grandpa holds out a saucer for me to put the piece of
china on and a teacup full of rubbing alcohol to rinse the tweezers in. The next two shards are easier because they are small and don't make Pete twitchy when I pull them out. I take one last look.

“Let me do this next part,” Grandpa says, and he takes gauze dipped in disinfectant and wipes out the wound. Pete takes in a big gasp. Every muscle in his arms and shoulders bunches up.

“Okay, now for the stitching,” Grandpa says. He hands me the medium-sized curved needle. I thread a length of black thread on it.

“Remember that stitch I taught you when you were mending your leather gloves? We're going to use the same stitch here, and it will feel a lot the same as working on your glove. Pete's scalp is a bit thinner, but skin is skin.”

I am never going to wear leather anything for the rest of my life.

“Okay, start with the end nearest you and take a bite with your needle about a millimeter back from the edge.”

I breathe in a big gulp, grit my teeth, and then stick the needle in Pete's head. He squeezes his praying hands together tighter but doesn't make a peep.
“Excellent, now do the same on the opposite side…. Perfect, now draw them together…. Now the knot.” Grandpa walks me through each step.

“Hey! The edges on either side of the thread just joined up and stuck together! Wow, Grandpa, that was the weirdest thing!”

“That's the miracle of healing right there, Brother. We were meant to be whole and healthy.”

I snug the knot down tight and move to the next stitch. As I do, I see clear yellowish fluid seep into the margins of the cut and form the shiny shell of a new scar. Amazing.

I chew that idea about healing over good, because ten minutes ago I was trying to kill Pete, and now that he really, really needs me, I've never loved him so much.

I tie off the last knot and blow out a huge breath of relief.

“Beautiful!” Grandpa says, and his warm hand squeezes my shoulder. “Just a dab of this and you'll be done.” He hands me a tube of ointment.

“Is it over?” Frank says, still hiding his head.

“He was awesome,” Jim says, pulling Frank to his feet.

“Don't worry, we'll make a cowboy of you yet,” John says. “You don't even have to put the stitches that close together when it's a cow.”

The brothers gather around to inspect my work. I squat down and take a look at Pete. He looks a little gray and his hands are shaky, but he gives me a smile anyway

“Sleep,” Grandma announces briskly. “Growing boys need sleep.”

The brothers grumble a little just for effect, and Grandpa puts another log in the woodstove while we settle our blankets under the tree.

Hours later, when the brothers are long past snoring, I've got my head propped on Pete's belly and my feet up on Frank. I keep drifting in and out of sleep, watching the red glow of the fire wave like a flag on the living room wall. When I dream, there are rivers of blood and singing, and when I wake up again I can see how Pete's wound sealed up just like magic. But then I fall asleep and dream of fires and bells, and wake up freezing. The fire is out, but the phone is ringing. Pete sits up and reaches for it on the coffee table.

“Dad?” Pete mumbles. “Dad! Hey, Merry Christmas!”

It's Dad. I'm warm clear to the ends of my fingers.

I start to nudge the brothers awake. Pete is saying, “Yeah, Dad, of course … all of us under the Christmas tree. We remembered…. Listen, Dad, I think you'd better speak to the man of the house.”

And Pete hands the phone straight to me.

F
EBRUARY

It's the first Sunday of Lent, the first almost warm day of the year. The last patches of frozen ground have gone mushy and there are pale green buds on the cottonwood tree on the sunny side of the barn. Grandma lets me drive the truck the first mile to church, but once we are off our own land I get out and sit in the backseat with Ernesto.

“What do you think the new priest will be like?” I ask Grandma after we've switched places.

“Taller.”

Grandpa grunts out a laugh, his hands folded over his black leather journal.

“Thanks. Very helpful.”

Our last priest, Father Rosetti, was the size of a Hobbit and getting shorter, with the face of an evil
dwarf—all north-and-south wrinkles and beady black eyes. If you met him on the street, you would immediately suspect him of poisoning Snow White. But he had a beautiful voice, with a lift at the end of his words like the Italians do. At least I guess they do. Father Rosetti is the only person I've ever met that actually came out of Italy

I remember him standing on a box to see over the lectern and preaching in his beautiful voice about how having faith is like falling in love. If he hadn't been 112 years old, I would have definitely asked him how he knew about love. Father Rosetti is retired now—or maybe he just got so small they can't find him anymore— so we've got a new priest, a circuit-riding Jesuit named Ziegler.

“He's from New York City,” Grandma says. “We'll have him for a year.”

It's hard to get a priest in a little country parish like ours because they don't want to live out here, so the bishop checks one out to us like a library book. The priest rides the circuit of three parishes, sixty miles apart. We've never had a priest stay with us more than two and a half years. What we need is a priest who grew up around here and wants to stay, somebody who understands how people who live off the land pray

We get to church half an hour before everyone else because Grandma has the keys and pretty much runs the show here at Sacred Heart. We climb out of the truck, and Ernesto takes the coffee cakes and doughnuts over to the parish hall for after Mass.

There's already a car in the lot. It's a hybrid.

“This is fancy” Grandpa says. To him, “fancy” is practically a swear.

Grandma shushes him with a flap of her hand because there's the new priest, sitting on the church steps, in jeans, city shoes, and a businessman's shirt. He is tall and thin, and a bit pale for these parts.

“You're early,” Grandma says.

He stands up, smiling, and when he says good morning it's in an accent I've never heard in my life, so it must be a New York City accent. “I gave myself some extra time. I haven't driven a car in years. There was never a need when I lived in New York.”

That remark meets with dead silence, since it's practically the same as admitting you forgot how to tie your own shoes.

“So did you have trouble finding our church?” I offer after we've all spent a few moments digesting his lack of driving experience.

“No, it was easy. There's pretty much just the one road.”

This is not true, but it occurs to me that none of the other roads around here are on the map, and maybe this guy is expecting us all to show up in donkey carts.

Grandma tells him our names and he says his name is Father Ziegler, and after a bit of the usual grown-up chitchat Grandma unlocks the door. I carry the altar cloth Grandma ironed last night up to the front of the church.

Grandma goes over to the Mary statue. She puts fresh candles in the stand and then gives Mary a little kiss on the toes, which seems weird to me even though I know it's a normal devotion and Grandma's probably done it every Sunday of her life. I asked her about it a while back, and she said that once you have babies, you kind of fall into the habit of toe-kissing, and then it seems like an ordinary thing to do. But seriously, now that I know about the toe-kissing thing, I'm absolutely not becoming a dad, because what are the odds that it's the only gross habit you pick up from babies?

Father Ziegler just stands there looking around the
church, and I wonder if he's thinking, Where the heck did the bishop send me this time? I bet he's used to a tall church with stained-glass windows and stone arches.

Grandpa turns on the lights and the heat and gets out the broom to sweep the entry. Father Ziegler still stands there, looking around our plain little church with twelve pews to sit on, six clear glass windows, a piano in the back, and a little altar that Dad and Grandpa made out of an oak that came down on the ranch almost thirty years ago.

“It used to be a schoolhouse,” I say, walking back down the middle aisle toward the new priest.

“Beautiful.” He takes a deep breath. “Did someone build that altar specifically for this church?”

“Well, yeah.” I steal a look at Grandpa but I don't say anything, because humility is very big with him.

“It's perfect,” Father Ziegler goes on. “Exactly the right size for the room, and the same proportion as the windows.”

So now we know he'll get along with Grandpa even if he doesn't get along with anyone else. Not that Grandpa's a parishioner or anything, so the jury is still out as far as I'm concerned.

Grandma and Grandpa finish their tidying up and
meet each other by the church door, just like they have forever. They hold hands and bow their heads until their foreheads touch. They only pray for a few seconds, and then Grandpa kisses Grandma, and she strokes the side of his face. He zips up his coat and goes outside, and she takes up her usual pew.

I secretly love that little minute the Grands spend together before church, because it gives me a solid feeling of we-will-make-it-through-no-matter-what-happens. But now that I see Father Ziegler watching them, I wonder what he's thinking. I bet his grandparents don't have a problem with going to the same church.

So I say, “He likes to sit outside and listen to his Inner Light on a Sunday.” Father nods very seriously at this, and then I say, “And he writes his Sunday letters,” in case listening to Inner Light sounds just a little too much like something a New Age hippie would do.