He lost me there, but by that time we were working our way up the path to the Costas’, and were almost to the little cleared terrace in the hillside that it sat on. I looked at Kathryn and she thanked me for distracting him with a quick smile. We hefted him up the last steps.
The Costas’ house gleamed black against the trees and clouds. Mando came out and greeted us. “How are you, Tom?” he said brightly. Without answering Tom tried to stand up and walk through the door into their house. He couldn’t do it, and Kathryn and I carried him in. Mando led us to the corner room that they called the hospital. Its two outer walls were oil drums; there were two beds, a stove, an overhead trap door to let sun and air in, and a smooth wood floor. We put Tom on the corner bed. He lay there with a faint frown turning his mouth. We went into the kitchen and let Doc look at him.
“He’s real sick, huh?” said Mando.
“Your dad says it’s pneumonia,” Kathryn said.
“I’m glad he’s here, then. Have a seat, Henry, you look bushed.”
“I am.” While I sat Mando got us cups of water. He was always a conscientious host, and when Mando and Kristen weren’t looking, Kathryn and I smiled a little to see him. But not much; we were glum. Mando and Kristen talked on and on, and Mando got out some of his animal drawings to show her.
“Did you really see that bear, Armando?”
“Yes, I sure did—Del can tell you, he was with me.”
Kathryn jerked her head at the door. “Let’s go outside,” she said to me.
We sat on the cut log bench in the Costas’ garden. Kathryn heaved a sigh. For a long time we sat together without saying a word.
Mando and Kristen came out. “Pa says we should find Steve, and get him to come up and read from that book,” Mando said. “He said Tom would like that.”
“Sounds like a good idea,” Kathryn said.
“I think he’ll be at his house,” I told them. “Or down the cliff right by the house, you know the place.”
“Yeah. We’ll try there.” They walked on down the path, hand in hand. We watched them till they were out of sight, then sat silently again.
Abruptly Kathryn slapped at a fly. “He’s too old for this.”
“Well, he’s gotten sick before.” But I could tell this time was different.
She didn’t answer. Her wild hair lifted and fell in the nippy onshore wind. Under the growing clouds the valley’s forest was intensely green. All that life…
“I think of him as ageless,” I said. “Old, but—you know—unchanging.”
“I know.”
“It scares me when he gets sick like this!”
“I know.”
“At his age. Why, he’s ancient.”
“Over a hundred.” Kathryn shook her head. “Incredible.”
“I wonder why we get old at all. Sometimes it doesn’t seem… natural.”
I felt her shrug more than saw it. “That’s life.”
Which wasn’t much of an answer, as far as I was concerned. The deeper the question the shallower the answer—until the deepest questions have no answers at all. Why are things the way they are, Kath? A sigh, arms touching, curled hairs floating across one’s face, the wind, the clouds overhead. What more answer than that? I felt choked, as if oceans of clouds filled me to bursting. A strand of Kathryn’s hair rolled up and down my nose, and I watched it fiercely, noted its every kink and curl, every streak of red in the brown, as a way to hold myself all in… as a way to grab the world to me with my senses, to hold it against me so it couldn’t slip away.
Time passed. (So all our ways fail.) Kathryn said, “Steve is so tense these days I’m afraid he’s going to break. Like a twenty-pound bowstring on a sixty-pound bow. Fighting with his pa. And all that shit about the resistance. If I don’t agree with every word he says, he starts a fight with me. I’m getting so sick of it.”
I didn’t know what to say.
“Couldn’t you talk to him about it, Henry? Couldn’t you discourage him about this resistance thing somehow?”
I shook my head. “Since I got back, he won’t let me argue with him.”
“Yeah, I’ve seen that. But in some other way. Even if you’re for the resistance yourself, you know there’s no reason to go crazy over it.”
I nodded.
“Something other than arguing with him. You’re good with words, Henry, you could find some way to dampen his enthusiasm for all that.”
“I guess.” What about my enthusiasm, I wanted to say; but looking at her I couldn’t. Didn’t I have doubts, anyway?
“Please, Henry.” She put her hand on my arm again. “It’s only making him unhappy, and me miserable. If I knew you were working on him to calm him down, I’d feel better.”
“Oh Kath, I don’t know.” But her hand tightened around my upper arm, and her eyes were damp. With her hand touching me I felt connected with all this world that rushed over us, so chill and so beautiful. “I’ll talk to him,” I said. “I’ll do my best.”
“Oh, thank you. Thank you. No matter what you say, he listens to you more than anybody else.”
That surprised me. “I’d think he’d listen to you most.”
She pursed her lips, and her hand returned to her lap. “We aren’t getting along so well, like I said. Because of all this.”
“Ah.” And I had agreed to help her there (I would always agree to help her if she asked, I realized) at the same time that I was conspiring with Steve in every spare moment to take the San Diegans into Orange County! What was I doing? When I thought about what I had just done it made me feel sick. All my connection with the green and white and the sea smell and the trees’ voices disappeared, and I almost said to Kathryn I can’t do it, I’m with Steve on this. But I didn’t. I felt a knot tie inside me, over my stomach.
Steve appeared on the path below, leading Mando and Kristen and Gabby, carrying the book in one hand and waving with the other. Mando and Kristen had to jog to keep up with him.
“Halloo!” he cried cheerfully. “Ahoy up there!”
We stood and met them at the Costas’ door.
“So Doc brought him here, eh?” Steve said.
“He thinks he has pneumonia,” said Kathryn.
Steve winced and shook his head. Under his thick black hair has brow was wrinkled with worry. “Let’s go keep him company, then.”
Once inside I began to lose the knot, and when Steve and Tom went into their usual act I laughed with the others.
“What are you doing in the hospital, you old layabout? Have you bit any nurses yet?”
“Only to discourage them when they’re washing my body,” Tom said with a faint smile.
“Sure, sure. And is the food terrible? And the what d’you call thems, the bedpans is it?”
“Watch it, boy, or I’ll turn a bedpan over your head. Bedpan indeed—”
And by the time they were done tussling and pounding each other, Steve had Tom up in his bed and leaning back against the oildrums. The rest of us crowded into the hospital and sat on the other bed, or the floor, and laughed like we were at one of Tom’s bonfire parties. Steve could do that for us. Even Kathryn was laughing. Only Doc stayed serious through it all, his eye on Tom. Over here Tom was his responsibility, and already you could see the strain on him. I don’t think Doc liked being our doctor. He’d rather have stuck to gardening, if he’d had his way. But the custom was that he did the doctoring in the valley, and though he had trained Kathryn to assist him, and swore she knew everything he did, only he was trusted with the care of our sick. He was the one with the knowledge from the old time, and it was his job. But even in the mildest cases I could see he didn’t like it; and now, with his best friend in his care, he looked truly distressed.