The Prayer I Had to Take Back

At the valley of the shadow his voice went unsteady, and he stopped, and swallowed. Then he started the line over and finished it and did not let go of my hand.

We said that Psalm three times before the ambulance came tearing up the lane. I do not know that I have ever been so cared for in my life.

When the paramedics took over, Garrick stepped back, and I saw that his hands were shaking. He had held them steady all that while, and now that it was not needed, they shook like leaves. As they closed the doors, I saw him standing by the woodpile with his hat in his hand and the broken step in two pieces at his feet.

“Garrick,” I said.

I had not called him by his first name in a year.

He came to the doors.

“Call Lavon.”

“Already did. She’s on her way. I’ll be right behind you.”

He was.

The hip was broken through at the neck of the bone, and they would put in a new joint that afternoon. The doctor said whoever got to me when they did had very likely saved my life.

Lavon, crying beside the gurney, said, “That was Garrick.”

“I know who it was,” I said. As the doors began to swing, I looked back through the glass of the waiting room. He was standing against the wall in a T-shirt and his work pants, because he had given me both his coats and nobody had thought to hand one back. He gripped his cap in both hands. He did not come in. He was not family, and he knew it.

He stayed in that waiting room eight hours.

I learned that from Tobin, who drove over the pass from Portland without stopping and got there by one o’clock. When he came through the sliding doors and asked about his mother, a man rose from a plastic chair in the corner with a paper cup of cold coffee in his hand. “She’s in surgery. It’s going well. They said another hour.”

“How long have you been here?”

“Since seven. About.”

“Have you eaten?”

“No, sir.”

Tobin, who has never met a man he did not size up in four seconds, held out his hand. “Thank you for not leaving her out there.”

Garrick shook it. “She’d have done the same for anybody.”

“Would she?” Tobin said. He did not mean it unkindly. He told me later he was asking himself.

I woke that night in a room with a machine that counted something and Lavon asleep in the chair with her head against the wall. The pain was a distant sort of weather. And out of old habit, in the dark, I opened my mouth to say it.

Not that boy.

The words were not there.

They had gone the way a tooth goes when the nerve is taken, leaving a clean place, and I put my tongue to the place over and over and could not find the prayer. I lay until dawn with nothing at all to say to God. It was the strangest hour of my life. Something in me that had been bracing for a year let go, the way a fist lets go when the hand sleeps.

They moved me to the care center on the fourth day, five weeks of rehabilitation if I did what I was told.

At half past five the first evening, Garrick came through the door with a steel thermos, two foam cups, and a ham sandwich in wax paper the way my own mother wrapped them. “Lavon says you take it black with one sugar.”