The Man Who Slipped Away Each Night

The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want.

I stood at that window in the dark and I watched Walt Behrens read the twenty third Psalm to a dying stranger, and then I watched him set the book down and sing. I could hear it faintly through the glass, low and not very good, an old man’s voice gone rough. It was “Abide With Me.” Fast falls the eventide. And the old man in the bed, who had not moved, moved his lips along with it, just barely, the way you move your lips to a hymn you have known so long it is written somewhere under your skin.

I do not know how long I stood there. The tears came and I let them. I was ashamed of myself all the way down to my shoes, Darlene Fisk’s poison still sour in my mouth, this is what I had followed him to find, this is the secret I had crept down a county road to catch him at.

A nurse came out the side door to dump something in the bin and saw me standing there crying at the window, and she did not seem surprised. She was a broad kind woman with reading glasses pushed up in her hair, and she came over and said, “Are you all right, hon. Are you here for someone.”

“No,” I said. “I’m, no. I’m with that man. In there.”

She looked through the window and her whole face softened. “Oh,” she said. “You’re with Walt.” Like that explained everything, like being with Walt was a known and good thing. “He didn’t tell you.”

“He didn’t tell me anything.”

She leaned against the brick next to me, this stranger, and she told me, because I think she could see I needed it told.

The old man’s name was Earl Tolliver. He had been at the care center eleven years. He had no wife, no children, a nephew somewhere in Oregon who did not come. In eleven years almost nobody had come for Earl Tolliver. And three days ago, a man none of them had ever seen had walked in off the county road, right up to the front desk, and asked the nurse a question she had never been asked in twenty two years of nursing.

He had asked: who here never gets a visitor.