‘One day what?’

‘. . . we can go across the country in an RV.’

He laughed. ‘Where did that come from?’

‘I think about it a lot. All that lovely freedom—parking in churchyards overnight, stopping at flea markets, sketching in meadows. I’ll let my hair go gray and knit while you drive.’

What a wild notion. He never knew what to expect from his wife.

‘Speaking of hair,’ she said, ‘when are you going to get a cut?’

The bloody nuisance of it.

•   •   •

HE LAY AWAKE, listening for Dooley to come home. Barnabas would bark a couple of times, out of courtesy to the household.

Eleven-thirty.

Ten ’til twelve.

Midnight.

Dooley was twenty-two years old. Kenny was nineteen, soon to be twenty. Yes, but Sammy was seventeen, and there was the memory of the college president’s son and his surly minions.

Twelve-twenty.

There went the barking. A light glowing on the stair. Dooley coming up and going to his room across the hall and the stair light switching off and the door closing.

Thanks be to God.

•   •   •

THE PHONE RINGING . . . ONE O’CLOCK.

Addled, he remembered that Dooley was across the hall, so this wasn’t the call every parent feared.

‘It’s Mary Talbot, forgive me, Father. It’s Henry . . .’

‘Henry.’

‘He left the house at six this evening. In his running clothes.’ Mary Talbot was breathless, as if she had been running. ‘He hasn’t come home. I should have called sooner, but I hated to involve . . . You’re the only one . . .’

‘His car?’

‘It’s here. His billfold, his watch, everything is here. What shall I do, Father? I mustn’t call the police, it would attract attention . . .’

‘Let me think. No, let me dress. Don’t worry, I’ll be in touch.’ He hung up, grabbed his khakis from the back of the chair.

Cynthia stirring.

‘I’m going out for a time. Henry Talbot.’ He pulled on a shirt, a sweater, cords, socks, a jacket; it was cold out there. His wife turned over, sighed, slept on.

He needed a flashlight, he needed Dooley.

‘Wake up, buddy. Wake up.’

‘What?’

‘I need you to come with me. Sorry. Get up.’

Dooley got up, sat on the side of the bed, stared at him. ‘What?’

‘It’s important. Please get dressed.’ He handed over the clothes Dooley had just taken off.

•   •   •

DOOLEY DROVE THE PICKUP to the hospital and around to the rear of the building and parked near the entrance of the trail into the woods. In the beam of their headlights, cans, bottles, fast-food bags, detritus.

‘What do you think?’ said Dooley.

‘I’m not thinking, just going on instinct. This is where he runs, I don’t know, it could be a dead end.’

They got out of the truck; he switched on the flashlight.

‘Spooky,’ said Dooley.

‘Why anyone would run back here is beyond me.’

They entered the trail, which he had checked out years ago as a possibility for his own route—a round-trip three-mile stretch of rough ground, tailor-made for spraining an ankle or sprawling over the gnarly roots of old trees.

If Talbot left his house at six, he would have had less than thirty minutes of diminishing daylight. An odd time to go running over this terrain.

‘Man,’ said Dooley.

‘Thanks for coming with me.’ He didn’t like the feel of this. ‘How did it go at Bud’s?’

‘Some guy from Winston merked Sammy, they were shootin’ straight pool.’

‘That’s good.’

‘What’s good?’

‘Losing once in a while will help keep his feet on the ground.’

‘Yeah, well, I don’t like losing.’

‘Who does?’

What had Talbot lost, that he would run only where he could hide?

They concentrated on negotiating the path and ignoring the trash. He was so wired, his teeth chattered. Maybe they were wasting precious time in here, and yet the hunch was too strong to ignore. The night was damp, claustrophobic; a nearly full moon had vanished behind sullen clouds.

Midway into the path, they heard a movement to their right. An animal scurrying through leaf mold. And the smell . . .

‘Puke,’ said Dooley.

They stopped, panned the trees with the beam of the flashlight. Maybe someone had come in here with a bottle of whisky, but the smell was different—he knew the stink of alcohol-related vomitus.

The small movement again; the sour reek. The hair stood on the back of his neck.

‘Careful, Dad.’

He lowered the beam, illumined the form sprawled in the leaves by a tree. ‘Who’s there?’ he said.

A voice—hoarse, unintelligible. Somebody drunk or in another kind of trouble.

He was aware of a slippery feel beneath the soles of his shoes as he walked toward the tree; he stumbled, righted himself, the fumbled beam of light picking out a couple of empty water bottles, a discarded jacket, Henry Talbot’s agonized face.

Dear God.

He fell to his knees. Henry lay on his back, eyes open, pupils dilated. Henry’s hairpiece was missing. The sight of him without it was jarring.

‘“Living darkly,”’ Henry whispered, ‘“with no ray of light . . .”’

He handed the flashlight to Dooley, pressed his fingers to the carotid artery, felt the faint, rapid pulse.

‘Henry! It’s Tim and Dooley Kavanagh.’

The suffocating smell.

‘Can you get up? Can we help you up?’

‘I was coaching back then . . .’

‘Let’s get him into a sitting position,’ he said. ‘Go easy, we don’t know . . .’

Henry Talbot might have been a rag doll, his limbs and torso dead weight, his upper body and running shirt slick with vomit. He could not be set upright or brought to his feet; they laid him again on the ground, on his back. Apparently nothing was broken, or pain would be evident. They needed a plan.

Talbot was easily six-two, one-eighty or one-ninety. No way to get an ambulance or Dooley’s truck into these woods.

‘We’ll have to carry him out, what do you think?’

‘We can do it.’ He heard the alarm in Dooley’s voice, and the resolve.

But he’d been too quick. Wilson lived roughly a block from the hospital, and had a golf cart—Wilson’s wife was often seen wheeling her husband’s lunch to the side entrance.

‘Better plan. Go to Wilson’s house and ask for the golf cart. Tell him we’ll see him in ER, and bring a medic with you if one’s available.’

Dooley hesitated briefly, then set off running.

The light bobbed along the trail and vanished—he was alone in the night with a man who could be dying.

‘Jesus,’ he whispered into the darkness.

This was a dream, nothing about it smacked of reality. He shivered in the damp air and felt about for the jacket to put around Henry, but it was saturated with a cold slime, and useless.

He had spent a few nights camping with youth groups, but was hardly an outdoorsman. The silence unsettled him; he needed the sound of the human voice, he needed something to put under the head of a broken man lying in the woods, surrendered to fear and remorse. There was nothing to do but wait. He hunkered on the ground by Henry’s side.

‘“Living darkly, with no ray of light . . .”’ He repeated Henry’s quote, drawn from the half-delirious poem by John of the Cross.

‘“And darker still, for I deserved no ray.”’ Henry’s voice might have emanated from an octave never before heard.

‘God loves you, Henry.’

‘“Love can perform a wondrous labor . . . and all the good or bad in me takes on a penetrating savor . . .”’

His hand gripped Henry’s shoulder, to give some mite of warmth.

‘It is very hard to die. Or if I have died, I confess I expected more.’ A deep tremor in Henry’s body, his whole frame agitated, the breath ragged. ‘Perhaps this is purgatory, or I have passed directly to Sheol. But the people . . . the people . . .’

‘Tell me.’

‘They had grown fat on honey and I gave them bitter root. Tell them I learned to love them. Lying here, it came to me that I love them and deeply repent of my cold disfavor toward them and our Lord. I was unable, I was coaching then. Ask them to forgive my manifold sins against God and this parish. It was winter, you see, and I was but ten years old; my sled had come apart against a tree . . .’