The
Human Touch
Many believe we are alone in the universe, that we
see all there is to be seen. Our science knows better. Our imagination, not our science, fails us. But if not our imagination, nor our science, then perhaps our courage, our very
willingness to face the unknown.
One
Friday, August 13, 2014, 3:15 p.m.
Ten-year-old David Hartman scampered onto the waiting
bus at the edge of town and dropped his last coins into the slot. He
plopped into a back seat, exhausted by the two mile walk from school,
listening to his heart pound and wondering if he would die for having
overexerted himself.
The bus pulled away from the curb and roared down the
highway that cut the small town of Eagle Junction in half. Stores and gas
stations and rows of small, run-down houses with littered yards flowed
quietly by through its big tinted windows. The jiggling and the steady
growl of the big diesel preyed upon his fatigue and lulled him into a
daze. He imagined alien beings swooping down to whisk him away to a world
where his damaged heart would heal, a world in which he would live
forever, but a pothole jolted him awake, and he grinned without opening
his eyes.
Potholes in outer space? Yeah, right.
His sense of humor faded in the light of stark
reality. He was more likely to get whisked away to the hospital and have
needles stuck in his arm. Steve and Tony had cornered him during lunch
period and taken all but the two quarters tucked away in his shoe. He was
using those quarters to reach a destination to the north, and home was
south, uphill all the way.
He hadn't planned ahead at all. Mother had warned
him not to play too hard and let his defenses down.
"Will you be so lucky the next time, David?"
David brushed away tears. There had been nobody to
warn Mother to be careful. It had all happened so fast. Maybe, just
maybe, it wasn't his father's fault that she had died.
"Are you okay, little boy?"
The sing-song voice startled him. A fat woman
sitting across the isle radiated a motherly concern and earned herself his
wane smile of appreciation. "I'm okay, lady. I'm just going to visit my
mother is all."
She beamed back a pleased smile of her own. "How
darling."
And then he saw it, a dark tombstone moving against
the dark blue sky on the crest of an approaching hill. "There she is
now!" he cried, and he bolted to his feet.
A tug on the overhead cord set the brakes to
chugging. Deceleration pitched him forward. He held fast to the chromed
seat handles and dragged himself to the door while the noisy engine wound
down to a rumbling idle. The back door sighed and folded itself open.
David jumped to the curb, but watched the bus pull
away with remorse. The tinted back window framed the old woman looking
down upon him in distress. The bus carried her off with a terrible racket
and left him choking in swirling exhaust fumes.
Suddenly alone, he glanced furtively up and down the
street in search of Tony Doran and Steve Farley. His worst two enemies
lived somewhere in Eagle Junction. He'd be a sitting duck, a dead duck,
if they caught him so far from home.
He saw no familiar faces. Nobody paid him any mind.
He hurried across the street to the wrought-iron fence of black iron
surrounding the cemetery. A scattering of tombstones on the side of the
hill towered like ominous sentinels. Canopies of ancient oaks shrouded
the graveyard in a twilight of gloom.
The gate in front stood open. Cars lined the narrow
gravel road inside. David paused to watch a woman put flowers by a marker
and kneel to weep her grief. He knew how she felt, although he had no
flowers for his mother. Did she need flowers now that she was
dead?
He hurried through the gate and up the gravel path
with his eyes cast to the ground. The big black car that had taken his
mother to her gravesite had parked at the top of the hill. Men in dark
suits had taken her shiny casket to the raw hole dug in the earth in front
of the stone angel. Only at the top of the hill did he venture a glance
off to his right.
And there it stood, the angel of stone who could
never fly. Empty eyes looked to the sky in torment.
Mother would have thought the angel a travesty.
“If angels could make the world a better place, the world would be a
better place.”
He started off through the obstacle course of
gravestones toward the angel and the hump of ground at its base. Soft
spots filled the uneven lawn of rough grass. Now would be a bad time for
his imagination to run away with him. He’d panic, and there would be
nobody to save him.
His foot sank into a tiny sink-hole in the soft earth
and pitched him to the ground before the crumbling gravestone of some man
who had died in 1895. He scrambled back with a startled cry and for an
instant imagined the ground giving out beneath him entirely.
His feet sink to his knees into the damp earth
turned to quicksand. A skeletal hand reaches from the depths and grabs
his ankle like a vice. He is sucked into the ground flailing like a
trapped animal. Stifling wet earth closes over his head. Black earth
ridden with worms and squirming bugs pour down his throat. He claws at
tree roots that snap, crackle, and pop even as skeletal hands eagerly draw
him through a hole torn through the side of a deeply buried coffin.
He tilted his face to the warm sun to break the
spell, sucked cold air, and closed his eyes to still the furious hammering
of his heart. His blood would turn blue if he didn't stop. It had put
him in the hospital twice this year already, and the year wasn’t even half
over yet. If it got too bad, it would kill him.
He sat up and forced himself to look at the raw wound
in the earth that had tripped him. A gopher tunnel? Blushing with
humiliation, he looked around to see if anyone was laughing. He then
climbed to his feet and paid closer attention to the treacherous humps in
the grass until he reached the stone angel that marked an end to his long
journey. With tears streaming down his face, he dropped to his knees and
began to tremble.
"Mom?"
The sun dazzled his eyes, but the air was like ice.
The world held its breath among the gravestones, but in the tallest of the
trees, the breeze whispered like angry neighbors displeased with his
behavior and eager to tattle on him. He sat back on his haunches,
ignoring the damp grass sponging the heat from his body. He rocked to and
fro in misery and didn't care if he got sick and died.
He should never have come. There was nothing here
but a crippled angel of rock and the mountain wind. His mother had warned
him not to let his defenses down. Now he would die for his foolishness
and be buried at her side. He would lie forever in the dark with his
hands crossed on his chest, alone through the long cold winters.
It would be worse than even that. Death was far more
absolute, so much so that even grown adults would not face the truth. His
mother had said so. In their own sneaky way, even the adults in his life
wanted to believe that she was somehow still alive. During the funeral,
Reverend O'Connor had droned on about sin and salvation and what it took
to get to heaven, but he had said nothing about the injustice of a mother
getting killed in a stupid car accident. He had watched the curtains to
either side of the coffin in hopes of seeing her pretty brown eyes peek
from around a corner. It had never happened, and he had panicked when the
funeral ended and everybody started to turn away, willing to leave his
mother alone in the closed coffin covered in flowers.
She was gone. He had come all this way and risked
everything to be comforted and reassured without stopping to think about
how his dead mother could accomplish any of that. Horror movies were his
only experience with graves. In movies, the dead could come back to life
as
beautiful ghosts, or half rotted corpses hungry for the taste of human
flesh. It all started with dirt stirring on the grave.
A patch of grass ruptured on the ground before him.
Like a broken frame of film, the world came to a standstill. From the
black dirt beneath, a pink nose and whiskers poked out into the open. He
recognized the innocent gopher too late to stop the ear-piercing shriek
that galvanized him to his feet. He turned to flee in mindless panic.
A dark figure blocked his way. He rebounded against
legs like tree trunks, reeled back, and staggered to keep his balance. A
powerful hand caught him and held him fast. David shrieked again,
convinced that he had fallen prey to the bad strangers his father had
warned him about.
"David! David, snap out of it!"
He was shaken until his teeth rattled. The broken
and husky voice and the fact that he was being shaken by only one hand
identified his assailant in an instant. His panic shattered like broken
glass.
"Dad?"
"David, what in God's name are you doing here?"
He was yanked closer and embraced by strong arms. He
choked on alcohol fumes spewing from his father's mouth like dragon's
breath. John Hartman's eyes were bloodshot, and his face twisted with
indecipherable emotion. David thought at first that it was rage.
"Don't hit me! Mother said never to hit me!"
His father's expression turned to helpless surprise,
like flames doused by ice water. "Nobody has ever hit you, David. I told
you we would pay Mom a visit together when the time was right." His
father tried to blink away tears of his own. "I told you never to come
here alone."
“But how did you know I was here?”
“Late coming home from school? Where else would you
go?”
"But I don't want her in the ground! Dad, it's cold
out here!"
John Hartman shook his head frantically. "It's not
like that. David, your mother is in heaven."
"No!" David pushed away in rebellion. "Mother never
believed in that stuff and neither do I!"
John rose to his full height. He mulled over the
challenge to his authority with a darkening expression. He looked around
nervously to see if anyone was watching, then took notice of something in
the near distance and sighed as if having made a reluctant decision.
"Come here, David. I want you to see this."
His father hurried away with strides three times the
length of his own. David trotted after him, thankful for the timely
rescue and vowing never to venture out on his own ever again.
His father stopped. David drew up at his side and
scanned the gravel path. Something about the road was supposed to catch
his attention. The squirrel, maybe? The squirrel had been run over by a
car and flattened days ago. Only its fluffy tail sticking in the air
identified it for what it had been. That and one tiny, uninjured paw,
like it had been trying to signal surrender to the violence being wrought
upon it.
David looked up at his father. “I don’t get it.”
"Your mother was a strong woman, David, but strength
can be a burden and truth can be hard to bear. If heaven is too much for
you to accept, is that poor little guy cold and uncomfortable do you
think, or just plain dead?"
The squirrel was dead. It was nothing. “Dead,” he said aloud. “It’s just a squirrel. Or was.”
"That’s the point exactly. The Reverend and a lot of
people believe people are special and go to a special place when they
die."
David knew what his mother believed, but he wondered
what his father believed. His father never talked about these things.
"I'm not trying to tell you how things are," John
said, voicing the thought as if reading his mind. "I'm just telling you
that your mother didn't have all the answers. Neither does Reverend
O'Connor. But if we have to live with our ignorance, we're entitled to a
little elbow room when we think about these things. If your mother was
right about anything, it’s the need to question the source of our beliefs,
whether we believe because we have clear reason to, or because we want
to.”
The most futile and desperate of his secret hopes and
fears sprang to life and made good its escape from his lips before he
could stop it. "But she might come back and there won't be anybody here
to help her!"
That sounded really foolish. The dead were left
alone in cemetery because nobody was ever coming back.
His father stared down at him in dismay. "I knew
something like this would happen."
Mother had called his imagination a gift. His father
thought it a curse. David stared despairingly at the dead squirrel and
thought about how really crazy it would be for it to suddenly get up and
run away.
His father spoke in a gentler tone of voice. "Is
there anything more you need here?"
David looked back at his mother's grave, and then
used the toe of his shoe to push the dried-up squirrel into the grass
where it wouldn’t be run over again. "No. I want to go home now."
His father led the way down to the car parked just
inside the gate. David followed close behind, acutely aware of his
father's stagger. His father had lost his driver's license after the
accident that had killed his mother. His father had been drunk that day.
He was just as drunk now. If Sheriff Gene Packerson stopped him on the
way home, he would go to jail.
David Hartman stared nervously into his lap on the
long drive back. The heater blew hot air and someone on the radio sang a
pretty song, but he felt embedded in gloom like a fly trapped in tar.
Things were bad. It would take so much to make his ruined heart better
and to make his father stop drinking that if it happened, it would be like
watching the smashed squirrel actually come back to life and run up a
tree.
And that would be a horror, not a wonder, because no
matter how hard he pretended, he knew in his heart the things that were
possible and those that were not.
