Why Call Them Back from Heaven

29

Sometime in the night the wind had blown down the cross again.

Ogden Russell sat up and rubbed the sleep out of his eyes.

He sat flat upon the sand and stared at the fallen cross and it was more, he thought, than a man should have to bear. Although, by now, he should be used to it. He had done everything he knew to keep the cross erect. He had hunted driftwood and had tried to brace and prop it. He had found some boulders at the water's edge and, with a great deal of work and time, had lugged them up the beach and with them formed a supporting circle at the cross's base. He had dug hole after hole in which to plant it and had used a heavy piece of driftwood as a tamper to pack the sand solidly about it.

But nothing worked.

Night after night, the cross fell down.

Might it be, he wondered, that this was no more than a persistent sign that he was not about to find the comfort and the faith he sought and that he might as well give up? Or might it be a testing of his worthiness to receive the boon he hunted?

And what were his shortcomings? Where had he failed?

He had spent long hours upon his knees, with the hot reflection of the running river water and sand scorching jjjrn, turning his hide into a peeling loathesomeness. He had wept and prayed and cried upon the Lord until his legs went dead from lack of circulation and his voice grown hoarse. He had practiced endless spiritual exercises and he had allowed to flow out of him a yearning and a need that would melt a heart of stone. And he had lived entirely on the river clams and the occasional fish and the berries and the watercress until his body had shrunk to skin and bones and his stomach ached with hunger.

Yet nothing happened.

There had been no sign.

God went on ignoring him.

And that was not all. He had used the last of the fuel from the two ancient pine stumps he'd found on the edge of the willow clump which grew back from the sandy beach. He had grubbed out the last of the roots that he could reach the day before and now all the fuel that he had left was the occasional piece of driftwood that he came across and the dead branches of the willows, which were largely worthless as fuel, burning out quickly to a fluffy ash.

And as if this were not enough of tribulation, there was the man in the canoe who, throughout the summer, had snooped about the river and at times had tried to talk with him, not seeming to understand that no proper and dedicated hermit ever talked with anyone.

He had fled from people. He had turned his back on life. He had come to this place where he'd be safe from both life and people. But the world intrudes even so, he thought, in the form of a man paddling a canoe up and down the river, perhaps spying on him, although why anyone should want to spy upon a poor and humble supplicant such as he, he could not well imagine.

Russell came slowly to his feet and, using both his hands, brushed the sand off his back and legs as well as he could manage.

He looked at the cross again and knew that he would have to do something better than he had been able to accomplish heretofore. The only answer, he told himself, was to swim ashore and find there a longer piece of drift-wood to make a new upright for the cross and then sink it deeper in the sand. More deeply planted, it would not be so top heavy and might not tip so easily.

He walked across the sandbar to the river's edge and knelt there, dipping water with his two cupped hands to scrub his face. After he had washed, he stayed kneeling and looked out across the fog-misted plane of steel-gray water that moved with unhurried strength against the ragged background of the forest that crowded close against the other shore.

He had done it right, he thought. He'd followed all the ancient rules of hermitry. He had come to a waste place of the earth, deep in the wilderness, and had isolated himself on this sandbar island in the middle of the river, where there was none or nothing to distract him. With his own hands he had made and reared the cross. He had nearly starved. He had followed proper form in his petitioning; he had wept and prayed, humiliating both the spirit and the flesh.

There was one thing. One single thing. And through all these weeks, he knew, he had fought from knowing it, from admitting it, from saying it. He had sought to keep it buried. He had tried to make himself forget it, make his mind and consciousness erase it.

But it came bobbing to the surface of his mind and there was no way to push it back. Here, in the quietness of this day which had yet to come to life, he was face to face with it.

The transmitter in his chest!

Could he seek for a spiritual eternity while he still clung to the promise of a physical eternity? Could he play at cards with God and have an ace tucked up his sleeve?

Must he, before his petition could be heard, get rid of the transmitter in his chest, turn himself back into a mortal man?

He sank forward on the beach, collapsing.

He could feel the moist sand grinding on his cheek and when he moved his lips, the corners of them collected little gobs of sand.

"Oh, God," he whispered in his fear and indecision, "not that, not that, not that…"