Randall Wallace: The Touch

Nell brought up her next patient, an intensely pregnant mountain woman who held her belly and shuffled her feet, clad in slippers made of the same material as towels. “I’m Dr. Blair,” Lara said, shaking her hand.

“Mavis.”

“What are you, Mavis, six months along?”

“More like seven.”

“When was your last doctor’s visit?”

“When my last young’un was born. Six year ago. I just want to make sure this one’s right.”

Lara tried to keep all reaction from her face; she knew the statistics on the lack of prenatal care and its correlation to a high rate of birth defects and maternal mortality. She closed the curtains around her workspace and began an examination. After she had finished, Lara helped the deeply pregnant Mavis to her truck. A silent farmer sat at the wheel, with five children scattered like dogs around the truck bed. In fact there were four dogs with them in the bed of the pickup.

As Mavis wobbled trying to get into the door—the man in the truck did not move to help—Lara steadied her and said, “Whoa! Easy, Mavis. You’re young and healthy, you’ll do fine, but you ought to see a doctor every couple of weeks.”

“Sure!” Mavis said. “If I could leave this brood alone all day and the crops would grow themselves.”

Lara steered Mavis into the passenger seat, then fished the seat belt from between the cushions and clipped it around her. Lara looked back at the load of kids.

“You said you wanted this one to be right. Was something wrong last time?”

“Maggie,” Mavis said, jerking a nod toward her youngest, a girl with blonde curls poking from beneath a hooded sweatshirt.

As Mavis’s husband started the truck, Lara moved to the girl. “Hi, I’m Lara! Are you Maggie?”

The girl lifted her face. There was a hole in the middle of it. The girl had a cleft palate. Everything else about her face—her eyes, nose, ears, cheeks, and chin—were as well formed as those of her siblings, but the hole in her face was all anyone could notice.

Lara stood in silence and watched as the truck pulled away. Maggie sat in the back corner of the truck bed and did not lift her face again, even to her brothers and sisters.

The sunset that evening turned the mountain air pink and glorious. Lara and Jones sat in rockers on the cabin porch, Lara so animated she could hardly stop talking. “—And that old lady, she just kept hugging me like I was her daughter! And that old guy—”

“Cletus?” Jones broke in, with the single word he had wedged into the conversation in the last thirty minutes.

“Cletus! That’s right, Cletus! I just love the names here! Yeah, Cleee-tus! His chest has been burning for months, maybe years, and three dollars’ worth of reflux medicine will make him feel like a king!”

Nell walked up from the trailer, took the tinfoil off two paper plates mounded with homemade food, and handed them up to the porch. “Eat ’em while they’re hot, would’ya?” Nell said.

“Thanks, Nell.”

“Ya’ll be good, now.” With a wink at Jones, she walked to her truck and drove away. Jones and Lara were left alone for the first time that day.

Lara waved and smiled at Nell, but her enthusiasm spilled on uninterrupted. “You know how most doctors specialize and see the same ailment over and over and over? They prescribe the same two or three drugs, they perform the same surgical procedure for their entire careers? But we get to see people, Andrew! We get to put our hands on them and they give us so much back!”

Jones nodded, rocking back and forth in the chair. In that moment he thought of Faith—and how she would have said exactly the same thing.

“But Andrew…” Lara said, slowing for the first time. “That girl, with the cleft palate. Did you know about her?”

“I heard about her from Nell.”

“You know it’s fixable, completely fixable. A forty-five-minute operation.”

“Yes. But it’s two days away from home, and the parents won’t go. And they won’t let anybody else take her. I think they’re ashamed of her—and of themselves, somehow.”

Lara pushed a fork into the roasted pork and green beans Nell had brought. She took a mouthful, chewed it slowly, then stopped. “We could do it here. We could make a sterile room, bring in the equipment, an anesthesiologist. I could do the surgery, and you could guide me in the art. She could be beautiful, Andrew.”

He looked at her for a long time. He nodded, feeling in that moment, surrounded by the dark shoulders of the Blue Ridge Mountains, that he was in a place as sacred as…

As a cathedral.

As the Vatican.

As the Sistine Chapel.

Lara beamed and dug into her food.

When night came they lit lanterns and kept rocking in their chairs on the porch, luxuriating in the peace of the mountains. Lara broke the silence. “Hey. Can you sing a hillbilly song?”

“Sure,” he said. “And I’m way too smart to give you that kind of ammunition.”

He stood and kissed her softly on the forehead. “They’ll start coming at dawn tomorrow.” He headed off toward the trailer.

She called after him. “Dr. Jones? This has been the happiest day of my life.”

He smiled and walked into the darkness. She stood and moved from lantern to lantern, dialing their wicks down until their flames went out.

But then she settled back down into one of the chairs and sat rocking in the Appalachian darkness, and she thought.

No one came to the Clinic on Sundays unless it was an emergency, and there were no emergencies that morning so Jones left a walkie-talkie on the steps of the clinic trailer and put its mate into his pocket, and he and Lara took a walk deep into the hills. Half an hour later they found themselves standing in the middle of a footbridge of rope and wood, suspended over a gorge. A stream ran far below them; they stood suspended in the sky.

“Can you hear that?” Lara asked, tipping her head as if her ears were sniffing the faint scent of sound in the air, beyond the delicious sweetness of the stream rushing over the rocks below them and the fragrance of the birdsong from the trees on either side of the rope bridge.

“Church bells,” Jones told her. “On Sundays the people up here in the mountains hold services morning and evening—and think going to a doctor on the Sabbath is a sin.”

“I want to tell you something… and ask you something.”

“Shoot.”

“In the week I’ve been here, every day’s been happier than the last. The operating room we’re putting together for Mavis’s daughter? I want to make it permanent. Okay?”

“Okay. Did you think I might say no?”

“That wasn’t what I wanted to ask you.”

“I can’t operate on you.”

“I don’t want you to. I’m like Sam, the surgery would kill me. What I want is for you to give me now. What I mean is, give me now .” She placed her hand over his. “I can’t take away your past. I can’t take Faith out of your life, or all she means to you. I don’t want to. All of that is part of you. And I’m in love—with you.”

It was not as if he had not known this already; but there is something about those three words, when they are said aloud. Jones couldn’t take his eyes off her.

She gripped his hand tighter, and her eyes shifted toward the open mouth of the valley where the sound of the bells floated up into the wind, and the mountain village lay, and beyond that larger towns, and cities, and nations, and a vast world that went about its business and felt so important in doing it; but all that mattered to her was the truth that she had found while rocking on a cabin porch, the truth she was telling him right now. “You can’t change my future. You didn’t give it to me, it’s not yours to change. But I have right now. I want to give my now to you. And all I want from you is for you to give me your—”