Patterns of Swallows (44 page)

"Skis," Ruth said,
still getting her breath back. "Left 'em over at Mavis
Bilberry's. I'll pick 'em up some other time. No time now."

"Right! We'll take my
car."

The doctor backed it quickly out
of the garage, and Ruth got in.

"Good thing you've got tall
boots," she said. "The roads out our way weren't plowed
when I left. We'll have to walk through some deep snow."

Dr. Moffet only grunted. He was
intent on driving as fast as he could on the slippery, packed snow
the plow had left.

*
* *

The snow plows had reached the
main road leading to the farm, but the side road and the lane to the
farm were untouched.

It was a solid three-quarters of
an hour of plunging through snow that brought the pair to the door of
the farm house.

Mom met them at the door with a
radiant face and a baby on one arm.

Ruth breathed a quick prayer of
thanksgiving while she and the doctor took off boots and winter
clothes.

"Lily's all right,"
Ruth said.

Mom's face sobered.

"I'm sorry, Doctor. I'm
sorry, Ruth. It's too late. Lily's gone."

"No! If only we could've
gotten here faster ..."

"It wouldn't have mattered,
Ruth. Lily only lasted about another ten minutes after you left.
Fifteen at the most. You couldn't have gotten to the doctor and back
that fast. Even if you'd left before the birth. But we didn't know
we'd need the doctor then."

Dr. Moffet said, "Don't
either of you blame yourself. Don't imagine there was anything
either of you could have done differently. Even if I'd made it while
she was still alive, there's not much I could've done if we couldn't
get her out to the hospital for a transfusion. And in this snow,
there's no way we could've gotten her out to the hospital. There's
no one at fault here. Other than the weather. Just one of those
things, tragic though it is. Well, I'll come and see to her. Check
over the baby, too. Hope Lily had a few things for him. D'you have
bottles? I brought some formula."

"Yes, we made sure Lily had
everything she needed to get her started. We'll be all right,"
Mom said, looking at the baby. Her radiance was back.

"Here you go," she
said, motioning for Ruth to take the baby. "I'll go get a
bottle ready for him while the doctor sees to Lily. She's in an
upstairs bedroom, Doc. First right at the top of the stairs."

The doctor left to find Lily,
but before Mom matched action to her words and passed the baby over
to Ruth, she drew closer to speak to Ruth.

"Ruth," she said in an
undertone. "There were two new births that happened here
today."

"Wha'd'you mean, Mom?"

"I have to tell you what
Lily said. Right after you left. She wanted me to pass on a message
to you. She was very weak, but she managed to talk a little."

"What'd she say?" Ruth
asked, overcome with curiosity.

"Well, first she started
off by asking me if I could forgive her, and I said I could and I
did. I meant it, too. It was no time to bear grudges. Then she
asked if I thought you could forgive her. She was terribly upset
that she'd let you leave without asking you to forgive her. She
wanted to make sure I told you she wanted you to forgive her."

"What'd you tell her?"

"I said, 'She already has.
Don't you think she'd already forgiven you before she took you in?' "

"Did she believe you? I
should've stayed, so we could've talked. Didn't do any good to go
for the doctor, anyways. Might've done more good to stay and talk to
her."

"Well, I think she did
believe me. It seemed to set her more at ease, anyway."

"Then what?"

"Then she asked me if I
thought there was any way God would forgive her. I think she knew
her time had come, you see."

"And?"

"Well, it seemed like we
didn't have very long. I had to tell her things the shortest way I
could. I told her that He would. All she had to do was ask. It was
a promise. And hadn't she learned it in Sunday School when she was
little: John 3:16, 'For God so loved the world He gave His only
begotten Son that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish but
have everlasting life ... ' that God sent His Son to die for our
sins? And she said she'd heard it all before, but it was too simple.
She just couldn't make herself believe all she'd have to do to be
forgiven was to ask and to believe that she could be. All this time,
she was getting weaker and weaker. I was praying like mad the whole
time. I didn't know how much more time we'd have, and I couldn't
seem to get through to her. And then, just like that, just like an
answer to prayer, the right words came to me."

"What'd you tell her?"

"I said, 'You believe that
Ruth has forgiven you, don't you?' And she said she had to believe
it because how else could you have taken her in and treated her as
you did if you hadn't forgiven her. Then I said, 'Well, Ruth's only
human. Do you think she could have forgiven you and taken you in
like she did if she didn't have some help?' And she admitted you
probably couldn't have. So I said, 'So whose help do you think she
had?' She thought about that one for a little while. Then I said,
'If God helped Ruth forgive you, don't you think He wants to forgive
you, too? Don't you think He has forgiven you? The forgiveness is
there, bought and paid for, but like in any relationship, you have to
accept it, or it doesn't do you any good.' Then I used you as an
example again, how you could have forgiven Lily and offered her a
home when she needed one, but if she refused your forgiveness and
your offer, it wouldn't have done her any good. I think that made
sense to her."

"Wow! I'm glad I wasn't
here. I'm glad it was you. I don't think I could have put things so
well to her."

"Well, like I say, I think
I had some help, too. Anyway, she didn't say much after that. I
thought she'd gone to sleep. I don't think I realized how very near
the end she was. I still hoped you might make it back with the
doctor in time, so I let her rest. But then she looked up at me and
said something like, 'I asked Him, and He did it.' And I said, 'You
asked Him to forgive you?' and she said she had, and He'd done it,
just for the asking, just like I'd told her, that she knew it.
'Peace.' That was the last word she said. She just whispered it
with a sort of smile on her face. Then she was gone."

"Mom, I'm so sorry. I wish
..."

"Don't bother wishing
anything, Ruth. I'm not sorry. I can't be. I can't be sorry I was
the one who was left behind to talk to her. I wouldn't have missed
seeing Lily Turnbull change into a different person right before my
very eyes for anything. I'm trying to be sorry that she died, but I
can't even feel that. The peace I felt – I think both she and
I felt it – in that moment was so strong that I can't forget
it. It's still with me. Maybe there was no other way she would have
found forgiveness and peace, and her life was miserable without it,
and she was intent on making everyone else's miserable, too. I am
sorry that we never got much time to mend bridges, but even though
the time was short, our bridges got mended, I think. I ... I don't
know. I don't know how to explain it. I can't explain how I feel
about it all. Peace. I guess that's the best word for it."

"Why don't you come and see
her. You'll see what I mean," Mom said.

Something in Ruth shrunk back.
She'd faced more death in her life than she'd ever wanted to, and she
had no desire to face it again. But curiosity won out.

In Ruth's mind, Lily had never
been beautiful.

She had been able to see her as
pretty in a cheap, tawdry, artificial kind of way. Lily's beauty had
been the kind of beauty that could be bought, and to Ruth's way of
thinking, beauty that could be bought was not beauty.

But in her death, Lily was
indisputably beautiful. Ruth drew a sharp intake of breath when she
saw her. Her bottle-created, golden-red hair shone like a halo as
the sun found its way through the window and onto the pillow. Her
skin was a match for her name. The porcelain white, contrasted with
the gold of her hair, made Ruth think of a china angel. But it was
her face that finally succeeded in giving Lily true beauty and not
for its perfection of shape and feature but for its expression. It
was an expression Ruth had never seen Lily wear in life.

"You see what I mean?"
Mom whispered.

"Yes, I see it. Peace,"
Ruth whispered back. She felt it, too.

*
* *

While Mom heated a bottle in a
pan on the wood stove, Ruth looked at the sleeping baby in her arms
and understood Mom's radiance.

Feelings she had only before
imagined feeling caught her off-guard and swept her away.

He was so helpless.

It was his smallness and his
helplessness and his aloneness that struck her through the heart. He
was perfect and beautiful, too, of course, but it was his need that
drew her.

As he began to wake, she watched
his little head shift from side to side and his little mouth opening,
searching instinctively for a life-giving breast, but searching
uncomplainingly and soundlessly.

A passion more powerful and
fierce than any she had ever known, even for her husband, enveloped
her. There was nothing she wouldn't do for the little, helpless,
alone person in her arms. If necessary, she would have died for him.
It made no difference that it was not her body that had carried him
for nine months or that had given up life to give him life. From
that instant on, he was hers just as much as if she had borne him.

Then she saw it.

The moment she'd had, looking
down on a sleeping Arrowhead, of questioning God's wisdom in
ordaining such a method of entrance into the world came back to her,
and the questions she'd had were satisfied in a moment of looking
down on the sleeping infant.

What a picture it was! Since
the very moment that our fallen world had become a fallen world, what
a picture of the true nature of things had been built into its
nature! Because of the fallenness of our world, new life could come
about only through blood and anguish.

And that blood and anguish did
not belong to the new life making its way into the world. The blood
and anguish were the undisputed property of the one responsible for
bringing the new life into the world. Yet the one responsible for
bringing that new life into the world counts it all worthwhile in
order to bring about that new life.

There was no sacrifice too
great. Like Lily, she too, would have given her life for the little
one she now marvelled at. All the bloody anguish was worth it for
the sake of the new life.

Ruth had, somewhere along the
line, come to see the death of Joshua Bella as a kind of a picture in
her own mind of a greater reality. She now saw Lily's death as a
different picture of the same greater reality.

Lily's death was not a waste.
Her death had given life to her child. And in the midst of her
death, she had met the One whose death had given life to her.

Yes, bringing new life into the
world was a messy, perilous, costly business. But from the point of
view of the one bringing it into the world, it was worth all the mess
and peril and cost. That was what it meant to love. She had a new
understanding of God's heart. Toward herself. And toward even one
like Lily.

"You have to know one thing
about your mother, Little One," she whispered to the baby. "You
have to know she gave her life for yours. You need to know about her
sacrifice for you. And I think she loved you in her way. She did
ask me to look after you, after all. These are the things I'll tell
you about her when you're older. Maybe someday, I'll even be able to
tell you what I learned through them.”

*
* *

"Does he have a name?"
Dr. Moffet, just finishing up, asked Ruth as she fed the baby. She
couldn't bring herself to give him back to her mother-in-law just
yet.

"What are you going to call
him, Ruth?" Mom asked.

"Me?" Ruth said,
startled.

"Well, who else?" Mom
said, smiling.

"But you're his grandma.
It shouldn't be my choice."

"You promised Lily you'd
look after him."

"And I will, of course. We
both will. But it shouldn't be me who names him."

"I think you'd better. I
don't have any names for a baby."

Ruth considered in silence,
examining the baby for inspiration.

"He's so perfect. Just
like a little angel. And it's so close to Christmas. A little
Christmas angel. How about Gabriel?"

"It's not a common one
nowadays. Not like Joe or Jim. It'll be nice for him to have
something a little different," Mom said.

"In Hebrew, Gabriel means,
'God is my strength,' " Dr. Moffet put in.