2017年01月

  Tess was a precocious eight-year-old when she heard her Mom and Dad talking about her little brother, Andrew. All she knew was that he was very sick and they were completely out of money. They were moving to an apartment complex next month because Daddy didn’t have the money for the doctor’s bills and our house. Only a very costly surgery could save him now and it was looking like there was no-one to loan them the money . She heard Daddy say to her tearful Mother with whispered desperation, “Only a miracle can save him now.”
  Tess went to her bedroom and pulled a glass jelly jar from its hiding place in the closet. She poured all the change out on the floor and counted it carefully. Three times, even. The total had to be absolutely exact. No chance here for mistakes. Carefully placing the coins back in the jar and twisting on the cap, she slipped out the back door and made her way six blocks to the pharmacy with the big red Indian Chief sign above the door.
  She waited patiently for the pharmacist to give her some attention but he was too busy at this moment. Tess twisted her feet to make a scuffing noise. Nothing. She cleared her throat with the most disgusting sound she could muster. No good.
  Finally she took a quarter from her jar and banged it on the glass counter. That did it! “And what do you want?” the pharmacist asked in an annoyed tone of voice. “I’m talking to my brother from Chicago whom I haven’t seen in ages,” he said without waiting for a reply to his question.
  “Well, I want to talk to you about my brother,” Tess answered back in the same annoyed tone. “He’s really, really sick… and I want to buy a miracle.”
  “I beg your pardon?” said the pharmacist.
  “His name is Andrew and he has something bad growing inside his head and my Daddy says only a miracle can save him now. So how much does a miracle cost?”
  “We don’t sell miracles here, little girl. I’m sorry but I can’t help you,” the pharmacist said, softening a little.
  “Listen, I have the money to pay for it. If it isn’t enough, I will get the rest. Just tell me how much it costs.”
  The pharmacist’s brother was a well dressed man. He stooped down and asked the little girl, “What kind of a miracle does your brother need?”
  “I don’t know,” Tess replied with her eyes welling up . “I just know he’s really sick and Mommy says he needs an operation. But my Daddy can’t pay for it, so I want to use my money.”
  “How much do you have?” asked the man from Chicago. “One dollar and eleven cents,” Tess answered barely audibly. “And it’s all the money I have, but I can get some more if I need to.”
  “Well, what a coincidence,” smiled the man. “A dollar and eleven cents – the exact price of a miracle for little brothers.”
  He took her money in one hand and with the other hand he grasped her mitten and said “Take me to where you live. I want to see your brother and meet your parents. Let’s see if I have the kind of miracle you need.”
  That well dressed man was Dr. Carlton Armstrong, a surgeon, specializing in neurosurgery. The operation was completed without charge and it wasn’t long until Andrew was home again and doing well.
  Mom and Dad were happily talking about the chain of events that had led them to this place. “That surgery,” her Mom whispered. “was a real miracle. I wonder how much it would have cost?”
  Tess smiled. She knew exactly how much a miracle cost…one dollar and eleven cents…plus the faith of a little child .

  There were three of them. There were four of us, and April lay on the campsite and on the river, a mixture of dawn at a damp extreme and the sun in the leaves at cajole Property Management BSc. This was Deer Lodge on the Pine River in Ossipee, New Hampshire, though the lodge was naught but a foundation remnant in the earth. Brother Bentley's father, Oren, had found this place sometime after the First World War, a foreign affair that had seriously done him no good but he found solitude abounding here. Now we were here, post World War II, post Korean War, Vietnam War on the brink. So much learned, so much yet to learn.   Peace then was everywhere about us, in the riot of young leaves, in the spree of bird confusion and chatter, in the struggle of pre-dawn animals for the start of a new day, a Cooper Hawk that had smashed down through trees for a squealing rabbit, yap of a fox at a youngster, a skunk at rooting.   We had pitched camp in the near darkness, Ed LeBlanc, Brother Bentley, Walter Ruszkowski, myself. A dozen or more years we had been here, and seen no one . Now, into our campsite deep in the forest, so deep that at times we had to rebuild sections of narrow road (more a logger's path) flushed out by earlier rains, deep enough where we thought we'd again have no traffic, came a growling engine, an old solid body van, a Chevy, the kind I had driven for Frankie Pike and the Lobster Pound in Lynn delivering lobsters throughout the Merrimack Valley. It had pre-WW II high fenders, a faded black paint on a body you'd swear had been hammered out of corrugated steel, and an engine that made sounds too angry and too early for the start of day. Two elderly men, we supposed in their seventies, sat the front seat; felt hats at the slouch and decorated with an assortment of tied flies like a miniature bandoleer of ammunition on the band. They could have been conscripts for Emilano Zappata, so loaded their hats and their vests as they climbed out of the truck.   "Mornin', been yet?" one of them said as he pulled his boots up from the folds at his knees, the tops of them as wide as a big mouth bass coming up from the bottom for a frog sitting on a lily pad . His hands were large, the fingers long and I could picture them in a shop barn working a primal plane across the face of a maple board. Custom-made, old elegance, those hands said.

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