A Good High Place

Chapter 33

c H A P T e R T H i R T Y - T H R e e UncleGeorgeisn’ttherethenightMamadies.He’sgonetoAldento try to find doc Mulcahey and bring him back. it’s snowing, the Torch River Bridge impassable, so he has to leave the team at Hendersons’ farm and use snowshoes from there. Six hours in the blizzard, six hours back to the team once Uncle George finds doc Mulcahey. Mama is gone before they get back. lotsofcrying.ordididreamthat?it’simpossibleformetoseparate what happened from the dreams, nor can i distinguish what happened those few days from the thoughts i’ve been thinking for fifty years. For instance, the room doesn’t seem square but cone shaped. Mama is down in the pointed end of the cone, and the closer i get, the farther away she seems—like looking the wrong way down a pair of field glasses. And that is the first time i notice my field of vision start to get cloudy. Mama has always been one color, but now she’s more so. Her hair and eyebrows—even her eyes, which are a light, light hazel—match the color of her skin, which is sand gray, but it’s more like an absence of color, like the shells of snails i’d seen in the garden when i was worming. This lack makes the edges of her face fuzzy and indistinct. And thisamazesme. Really amazesme. Becausedespitehercoloring 176 L.E. Kimball and until that night, Mama has always seemed overwhelmingly obtrusive to me, even at a distance. i pick up her left hand. She has small hands with slender fingers. They’d always had round, clean, pink nails, though the skin was mostly chafed from the never-ending scrubbing she did. Now her nails are thick, dirty, and yellow, the fingers curled up like a claw instead of lying flat, the hand swollen and hot like she’d been sitting too close to the fire, her wedding ring seared into the flesh. But the room is cold. Mama doesn’t wake up when i take her hand. Her hair ismattedonthepillow,andshehasfurrowsbetweenherbrowsanda frown on her face, like she’s ciphering. Mama was good with figures, could do complicated sums in her head, said she could see them in neat long columns, and she liked that. The same expression is on her face—like she’s concentrating for all she’s worth on the answer to one of those problems, as if it takes every ounce of her strength and focusing power to answer it. i guess it takes a lot of ciphering to die. i didn’t plead with Him or bargain with Him the night Mama died or even ask Him why because i knew it wouldn’t matter. i figured elizabeth Hopkins had begged and pleaded when her father lay lingering for two weeks after that logging accident, and Mrs. Jacobs had done plenty of begging when little Adam died of the diphtheria the fall before. And cap had been crying and asking Him to give Mama His grace and mercy these last two nights while we were waiting for little emily to come. There were plenty of better people than me asking for God’s help, but i don’t think that’s why i didn’t ask. This is the part that’s tough to separate out because i couldn’t have been thinking all this at the time, being only seven. i just never thought He ran the world that way. Prayer isn’t asking for stuff; it’s conversation, back and forth, like emerson said. So i’m not sure why, but whenever they’d let me in to see Mama, there was only one thought in my mind. i’d stand there and stand there and stand there, watching her concentrate, thinking how could i help her get this thing done? ...