“This is distilled water,” he said. “I got it at the nurses’ station, and it’s physically pure, free of germs and pollutants.”
“Can the same be said of the bedpan?” RuthClaire asked.
“Oh, yes, ma’am. It’s been in an autoclave.”
“Well, Adam’s already had a sponge bath, Reverend McElroy. I gave him one this morning. There’s no need to repeat it now.”
“Has he been baptized?”
“What?”
“Has he received the sacrament of ultimate cleanliness?”
“I’m not sure I—”
“Has he been washed in the Blood of the Lamb?”
“From a bedpan?” I wondered aloud.
McElroy laughed. “The Lord and I make do with what’s available. By remaining unbaptized, Adam has begun to doubt his possession of the soul that even now he’s in danger of leaving to the Prince of Darkness forever. I can’t allow that, sir.”
Her hands on T. P.’s shoulders, RuthClaire stared at the evangelist as if he had proposed dousing Adam with lighter fluid. “This is in the worst possible taste,” she finally managed.
“You may be right, Mrs. Montaraz. Damnation has the weight of public favor on its side nowadays—it’s the in thing to shoot for—but your husband isn’t one to go along with the crowd simply because it’s a crowd. Ask him what he wants.”
Realizing that McElroy had played an unanswerable trump, RuthClaire pulled Tiny Paul onto her lap and numbly shook her head.
“I’ll ask him, then.” Looking down on Adam, McElroy said, “Do you wish to receive the holy benison of baptism?”
Adam made the gesture signifying Yes.
RuthClaire shook her head again, not believing that her husband would consent to what she regarded as a parody of the baptismal rite—but loving him too much to forbid him to continue.
McElroy closed his eyes. He asked God to further purify the water in the bedpan, immersed his hands, lifted them dripping, carried them to Adam’s head, and dramatically brought them down on the faint sagittal crest dividing his skull into hemispheres. “Be careful,” RuthClaire warned. “Adam’s jaw is a jigsaw puzzle of fitted pieces. If you slow his healing, I’ll…”
She stopped, but the warning got through McElroy’s devout trance to his understanding. Crooking his elbows, easing the pressure on Adam’s head, he intoned, “Adam Montaraz, husband and father, by the authority invested in me as a minister of the gospel, I baptize you in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Amen.”
“Amen,” I said. The word slipped out, impelled, I think, by an unconscious memory of my slipshod Congregationalist upbringing in Tocqueville.
Theoretically a believer, RuthClaire gave me a dirty look.
McElroy wiped his hands. “Mrs. Montaraz, please know that I’ve also lifted a prayer for Adam’s speedy recovery.”
“Thank you.”
“What about that handsome boy there?”
“What about him?”
“Has he been baptized?”
RuthClaire folded her arms around T. P. “You’ve performed your ceremony for the day. It’s time for you to leave.”
“Delay could be a mortal mistake, ma’am. It could cause—”
“He’s hardly in danger. Baptists wait until they’re twelve or thirteen, don’t they?”
“You’re not Baptists, ma’am. Nor are we at the Greater Christian Constituency. We embrace the denomination, of course, but my own doctrinal origins are Methodist. We’re brother and sister, Mrs. Montaraz.”
Adam began to sign, feebly but urgently.
“No,” RuthClaire told him. “Absolutely not. If it’s done, it’ll be done in a church, with a congregation and a robed minister.” When Adam persisted, she bore down: “You’re overstepping what you have a right to ask! You’re not the only one in this room responsible for Tiny Paul’s spiritual dispensation!”
McElroy said, “There’s a Biblical injunction commanding wives to—”
“Get the holy hell out of here!” RuthClaire yelled. T. P. burrowed into her armpit. Adam’s eyes fluttered shut. Like me, he had probably never heard her utter an epithet stronger than “Heck!” or “Drat!”
McElroy appeared ready to keep the argument going, but a portly man and a youth in his early twenties stopped at Adam’s doorway, distracting him. The younger of the two men reproduced McElroy’s lank physique almost exactly.
“Daddy,” he said, “Dr. Siebert’s come to take you to your next lecture over in White.”
“Adam, stay in touch, hear?” McElroy said cheerily. “It’s been a joy, sanctifying you in Christ’s sweet name. The boy next time, mebbe.”
“Take the stupid bedpan with you,” RuthClaire said.
McElroy gave her a thin smile and spoke to his son: “Come get the font, Duncan. I’m finished with it for today.”
Duncan McElroy obeyed, retrieving the bedpan from the cantilevered tray and carrying it out of the room like a wise man bearing a thurible of perfumed incense. The evangelist gave a perfunctory salute, then followed Duncan and Dr. Siebert out of the room—off toward the elevator and another elevating session with some of Candler’s theology students.
RuthClaire, wrung out, began very quietly to cry.
Over the next week, RuthClaire and I visited Adam daily, spelling each other when one of us needed a break. Livia George managed the West Bank in my absence. I drove down twice to check up on her, but her efficient handling of matters made me feel about as useful there as a training wheel on a tank.
Adam improved rapidly, but his doctors still forbade the removal of his plastic chin support and the bandages holding it in place. So he took nourishment intravenously and talked with us with sign language. Also, he had a lap-sized electric typewriter that he had taught himself to use by the hunt-and-peck method.
McElroy returned to Louisiana the day after Adam’s baptism, but one unsettling consequence of the Bedpan Ceremony was the habiline’s frequent recourse to prayer. The Lord’s Prayer. The prayer of St. Francis of Assisi beginning, “Lord, make me an instrument of Thy peace.” Any number of Old Testament psalms. “Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep.” The Pilot’s Prayer. The Newspaper Columnist’s Prayer. A few obscure Eastern supplications, including Hindu, Buddhist, Taoist, and of course Sufic formulae. And a small anthology of weird but occasionally moving prayers—petitionary prayers—that Adam had written himself.
Indeed, although Adam had accepted baptism in Christ Jesus’s name, the prayer ritual in his hospital room had an ecumenical cast. Here is one of his prayers, typed out on the little machine he used to engage in animated dialogues with us: