Cachement
It was three years since he’d heard from his brother when he got the call. Samuel was at the University hospital in Albuquerque, New Mexico with advanced leukemia. Yes, he’d asked for him specifically by name. Yes, he’d better come as soon as he could. And so Father Timothy made his preparations to leave.
Today was Friday. When he told the parish secretary that he would be absent for the weekend round of Masses and why, her mouth dropped open in a little “o”, which she covered with her hand. Then she said her husband happened to be making a delivery to Albuquerque and would he like her to ask if he could ride along. Father Timothy said he’d be much obliged, and so it was that he, like so many other travelers on their way to I-70, left St. Joan’s behind him– though he knew what lay within, ready to receive them. There was beauty, visible and invisible, placed with care by mostly forgotten people a hundred years ago and more who had thought it worthwhile. America was full of places like that if you paid attention. Father Timothy had visited many himself. Sometimes he thought of their builders like squirrels, storing up whatever nourishment they could in hidden-away places out of some vague and poorly-understood instinct, only to forget where they had lain it. The days when people thought that kind of value was worth storing up were gone now, of course. The steeples were obscured by what had grown up around them. Maybe those days would come back. Maybe the forgotten places would sprout out of their obscurity to nourish generations yet unborn. Maybe not. It made no difference to him.
The secretary’s husband let him off at a truck stop outside Albuquerque, and he took an Uber to the hospital. The driver turned out to be a Catholic, from Eritrea, and asked for a blessing before he got out.
Inside, he told the desk clerk he was here to visit his brother. Soon, a nurse in blue scrubs came out to see him. Father Timothy gathered that Samuel was in bad shape. What the nurse said specifically was that it was a miracle Samuel had walked in on his own feet, and that he probably only had a couple days.
“I just want you to be prepared for when you go in,” he said. “It’s going to be a shock.”
Father Timothy thanked the nurse and followed him through the access doors and down a series of hallways. Finally they came to the right room, and the nurse pointed to the bed at the end, behind blue privacy curtains.
He was unable entirely to suppress his reaction when the nurse pulled them aside. Samuel was wasted almost completely away, his paper-thin skin livid and bruised where it wasn’t broken in open sores all over his exposed arms. Still, his eyes looked bright, and they fixed the priest’s own.
“Hi, Tim,” he wheezed out. “I guess I look worse than I feel.”
Father Timothy moved to lay a hand on his brother’s, then hesitated, looking questioningly at Samuel’s eyes. Samuel gave a slight nod.
“Truth is, the only reason I’m not in a hospice is they don’t think I’d survive the move. They brought a whole class of med students through here yesterday,” he said. “Said it’s the most aggressive case they’ve ever seen. I’m going to be in a medical journal. Though they’ll probably chalk it up to the X-ray work. And, hell, maybe they’re right. But that’s someone else’s problem now. You’re here, so I guess you’ll give me the unction?”
“If that’s what you want.”
Samuel nodded gravely. “Let me tell you how I ended up here. Though there are parts even you aren’t going to believe.”
Father Timothy sat in a chair next to the bed. It struck him that for all his time in and around hospitals, he had no idea what a healthy heart sounded like on a monitor. But he knew enough to recognize that Samuel’s was in dire shape.
“I’m out of San Diego these days,” he said. “You know I run the service contracts for the whole Southwest now? Anyway, I was out on a round of service calls. One of them was supposed to be at this very hospital, in fact. But first there was one– and here’s the first part you’re not going to believe– in Truth or Consequences.”
“No, I believe that part.”
“Heh. I didn’t at first. The place is actually named after some old game show. Anyway, it turns out a little orthopedic practice there bought a machine and a service contract from us way back in 1951, and never had us come out to work on it since.”
“I guess they don’t make them like they used to.”
Samuel gave a little cackling cough and winced. “We actually couldn’t even find the contract, because it had never been migrated over to electronic. It was this old guy who’s been with us fifty years, you know the type, who remembered where all the old records were, and when they went digging for it, sure enough, there it was on carbon paper. They’ve been paying us eighty bucks a year for almost three quarters of a century.”
“Wow, and you honored it?”
"Legal said we had to, something about the wording. Don’t you worry, they made out like bandits. Their machine had a broken vacuum tube, so we just replaced the whole thing for free.
“Well, then, I was going to stop there for the night. I went out to get food. It was dark when I was heading back to my hotel, on the west side of town, toward the forest, and I noticed there was no one out on the street. Like not a single soul. Then I ran into this nasty old woman. Don’t look at me like that, it’s the only way to describe her. She looked like she had walked straight out of the Brothers Grimm. Stringy hair, dirty, hunchbacked, the longest, crookedest nose I ever saw on a human face, with a wart, and this incredibly sour expression. And– here’s the part you really aren’t going to believe. I swear to God, her hands were actually wrapped up in dirty old rags.”
Samuel paused for a moment to catch his breath.
"She hobbled up to me and looked me right in the eyes and said ‘Give me your car keys’. And it’s the damnedest thing, but I suddenly felt like I really wanted to. Like it was just the most obvious thing to do. It was like some kind of a compulsion. And my hand was actually in my pocket grabbing onto them. You know why I didn’t give them to her? Because I remembered that I had just replaced my catalytic converter after it got stolen last month. So instead I took my hand out of my pocket and told her to f- uh, to go away. And then she looked at me with the most horrible look you can imagine and she said ‘You’ll be sorry’, and she hobbled on off down the road. And I went back to my room and didn’t think any more about it, though I remember now when I got to the hotel the concierge told me to take care.
“The next morning I packed up and went down to get my car from the garage. And just when I went to put my key in the door, I saw something in the glass. I turned around and there was that nasty old woman again. She threw something at me, like a pinecone wrapped around with a bunch of feathers, and it was smoking like there was a fire in it. And it hit me in the chest, and then the next thing I knew I was halfway off the rumble strips on I-25 outside Albuquerque. I figured it had been a dream. So I drove up to do the service here, and halfway through I collapsed, and they told me I had leukemia. That was Friday morning. Wild, huh?”
“And that’s why you’re asking for extreme unction?”
“Yes. Not that I expect any kind of miracle cure,” said Samuel. “I remember enough catechism to know it doesn’t work like that, even if I had been going to church like I should.”
He paused again.
“Let me see again if I can make you understand. That second time I saw her, what I remember most is the look on her face. It was like she hated me, personally, intimately, the way you can only hate someone who ruined your life when it was just getting started, and you’ve just been festering, waiting to get back at him ever since. It was like her whole face was a mask, and all the wrinkles and grooves in it only showed the shape of who she really was when she let that hate out. All except for the eyes. Her eyes were bored, like she didn’t care about any of this at all. Bored with a boredom bigger than the whole world, bigger than despair.”
Samuel screwed his eyes shut in a pained grimace. Father Timothy could see a little bit of moisture squeezed out from the corners.
“That was what killed me, I think,” Samuel went on, “more than whatever voodoo she did. The instant I saw that look in her eyes, I felt something inside me wither and die.”
Father Timothy crossed himself. Neither of them spoke for a long while, and the room was silent except for the beeping of the heart monitor, insistent but timorous as though even it knew it wasn’t any use.
“I never thought I believed in the devil,” said Samuel slowly, “but–” and he gestured around the room with a hand so weak and languid from exhaustion that it seemed almost weightless, trailing the IV line behind it like a kite string. “Now I still don’t know if I can rightly say I think God exists. But if he doesn’t, I guess I don’t really want to hang around here anyway. You think that’s enough?”
“I believe it is,” said Father Timothy, and laid out his little bag of oils.
“She was right though,” said Samuel when the sacrament had been administered. “I am sorry for her.”