THE HAND OF GOD

PART ELEVEN:

Ben just looked at her a long time after that, both of them silent. He watched her fingers roll up the end of her shawl, unroll it then roll it up again as though it were the most important work

in the world. She had her lower lip completely sucked into her mouth, her upper teeth clamped down over it, hiding it from view. Black lashes made long shadows on her cheeks.

"Why, Elizabeth," he asked at last, his voice very low, "why'd you leave Cincinnati on that wagon train for such a Godforsaken place as this?"

She blinked and her fingers stopped their motion. "No place has been forsaken by God, Benjamin."

"Be that as it may," he replied, not granting her the point, "why'd you get on them wagons? Why'd you think that was a good idea?"

"Sorrow," she whispered.

"For the baby?"

"For him and...other things." She let her eyes find his. "It kept welling up from inside me as though an artery had been cut and," she paused, "there was no way to staunch the flow of it.

I had to...." She spread her hands, trying to find words. "It was like Eve's. I knew somehow

that was what it was like, vast, hopeless, a primordial grief. Can you possibly know what I'm talking about?"

His lower jaw came out again and he looked briefly to the side, toward the flames. "Once," he said, his voice odd, "once I knew a grief you could call that 'primordial' word."

"And what did you do with it?"

He grinned wryly. "I became me."

As she stared openly at him, her lips slowly curved into the barest, sad smile. Suddenly she understood something vital about him.

"And you?" he continued. "How'd the wagon train deal with that for you?"

"It was a moving stream of sorrow and pain."

"So I've heard," he nodded, "but how'd that go about helpin' you?"

"When we hurt, when we're sure that no one has ever hurt so before and that all other suffering is somehow...less, it's then we need to draw near to the hurt of others."

"That work?"

"Some, but I carried my own darkness with me. Do you understand how that can be?"

He leaned forward, his left elbow on his knee, and rested his mouth on his fist. Closing his eyes, he didn't answer. No one ever asked him things like she did. That high plank he walked on, the one that took him over the heads of everyone else he encountered, was groaning a bit under accumulated weight. Elizabeth was standing on it, not behind him, but facing him.

He was hurt, that had to be it. Tired and hurt and the whole goddamn encounter with Dan had shaken loose something in him that had always been firmly planted. He had bare roots dangling from his hand and he didn't know if he wanted to replant them or just stand there and watch the small clods of dirt fall. He was still trying to figure that out, what all that had meant, what all he'd done, had thought, meant. And here was Elizabeth, asking him if he understood about carrying darkness.

Without opening his eyes, he said, "One man's darkness can be the darkness of the world."  Then he looked at her, letting her see that he understood about that.

And as Elizabeth looked in his eyes, she saw it there, saw that he knew about portable darkness but not about caves. She had known that from the beginning, though, that he did not know about caves. Some missing piece inside her began a slow crawl toward where it belonged. But she did not speak of that, not aloud, anyway.

Without directly making comment on his words, she said, "I left Cincinnati as I'd left Emmitsburg, only moreso, carrying my sorrow and my darkness with me. I was simply running, trying, at least, to outrun them. But it can't be done. There was this one night, we'd lost five people to cholera during the day, and were all so tired, so very tired." Her eyes turned inward,
traveling to the memory of it. "I went to sit alone on the wagon seat, just looking at the stars, thinking about how I simply was not able to get away from all I was trying to leave behind. And it came to me that perhaps I needed to stop the running away and go toward something, seek something." 

She wrapped her arms about herself loosely. "But my arms still yearned to hold my dead child and I could still see the piercing look in the eyes of my father, the utter disappointment in those of the mother superior. There was no way I could command my feelings to stop. But you know what, Benjamin, you can command your will, with God's help you can, when your feelings can't be commanded."

"And what did you will, Elizabeth?"

"I willed to seek, Benjamin, not to leave. I willed that if there is not one thing I can do, but only seek, it will be enough."

His eyes turned to the fire again. "I sought, Elizabeth, at least I thought I did, but it wasn't enough."

"What were you seeking, Benjamin?"

Again the wryly-curved, half-smile. "A small boy walkin' into a train station with his mother."

"You didn't find him?"

"He was no longer there to be found."

"Your son?"

"No, not my son."

"I'm sorry."

He shrugged. "Don't be. It stopped matterin' a long time ago."

"I don't think it did," she whispered. He squeezed his eyes tightly closed, listening to the little dirt clods plopping.

Finally he heaved a deep sigh of a breath. "And you, Elizabeth, what are you seekin'?"

"I'm seeking water in the dry places."

He looked at her again, nodding toward the room. "I'd say you done come to the right place for that. All's you got here is snowmelt."

"There's always a well, Benjamin. Every desert has its well."

"I sure don't see none hereabouts, LizzieBess. Why'n hell would O'Brien choose this for you?"

"Because it's desolate and barren, dark and cold, and very like a cave."

"More like a tomb," Ben snorted.

"Exactly!" she smiled.

"He send you here to die?" His eyes widened a bit.

She nodded and he growled, "Bastard!"

She smiled at him with an open fondness. So, this was how it was happening. She'd had no idea it would come like this.

"Why you lookin' at me like that, LizzieBess?  You seekin' somethin' now you think I got to give?"

Now she laughed. "How am I looking at you, Benjamin?"

"Like I was a tortilla and you ain't had a bite for a week."

The fond smile was there again. "Yes, Benjamin, I am seeking something you've brought with you."

"What'd I bring?" Now he was puzzled.

"Yourself, Benjamin. You brought yourself."

He cocked an eyebrow. "And that do somethin' for you, does it?"

"It does more than you have any idea, though I hope you will."

His intelligent mind wanted to grasp what in hell she was talking about. "What idea don't I have, Elizabeth? What?"

"About you...being you...here in the tomb, in the cave. About how that's just what I needed."

"What could you need from me in a cave? I ain't give you nothin' but trouble since I fell in your door."

"I was too alone, Ben, too alone to see what I had to see."  She smiled, aware she'd called him 'Ben'.

"So now you got me here, pissin' on your floor. What's that help you see?"

"Me. It helps me see me."

"You gonna piss on the floor, too?" He was being deliberately obtuse now.

"In a way it does. Your, um, piss helps me see my piss."

"Why'd you go and find a need to see that?"

"It was the biggest need I had."

"Hell, LizzieBess, I can work up another batch if that's what you need."  He grinned, his hand moving most of the way down to his crotch.

"You can drop that, Benjamin." Her voice had changed to a quietly firm tone.

"Them?" He indicated his pants. "You want me to drop them?"

She leaned toward him. "I want you to drop that huge shield you use to protect your aloneness."

He was utterly taken aback. "I never...."

"Ben," she shook her head, "you always."

"I...."

"You do, and if you're honest with yourself, you know you do."

"Honesty ain't never been much good for gettin' me where I wanted to go."

"And where, Ben, just where do you want to go now?" She captured his eyes with hers.

He wanted to lower his gaze, but couldn't. For the first time in his life, he could neither
dominate with his eyes or even look away. A muscle in his jaw worked furiously for a while,

then slowly he licked his lips. "I don't know, Elizabeth. I don't know." He paused. "That's probably the first totally honest thing I've said in a long while."

"Where are you coming from, Ben? Where?"

"I'm comin', LizzieBess, from not bein' hung."

"Somehow I'm not surprised."

"Why not? I got rope burn on my neck?"

"No, Ben. You've got it in your eyes."

He lifted a hand, covering his eyes. When he spoke again, it was as though someone had punctured his voice, letting all the air out of it so that it had settled heavily back into his lungs. "I'm weary, Elizabeth."

"Of what?"

He uncovered his eyes, keeping his lids half down. "Of it all."

"Have you known that for a while?"

He nodded. "For a long time now. It's all...old. I...," he scrubbed both hands over his face roughly. "I had a bit of a change to it, just a few days ago. Somethin' caught my interest, you might say, and I was curious where it was leadin'."

"Where did it lead, Ben?"

He frowned sharply. "Nowhere. It didn't lead nowhere." His eyes finally came back to hers. "No, I guess that ain't quite true. It led to here. Only thing is, I don't know where 'here' is."

"'Here', Benjamin, is where you are...and if it's important enough, it doesn't really matter what name you give the place."

"I'm still decidin' about its importance."

"That may not be yours to decide," she smiled.

He snorted again. "Always my decision. Mine."

She didn't reply. Instead she added some more wood to the fire, then sat back down, studying

his eyes. They were a marvelous green that changed color with the flow of the light, eyes with

an almost defensive intellect, and she could see in them that whatever this thing was that had caught his interest recently, haunted him. Maybe not all of him. There were flickers, flashes in them from a part of him that refused to let anything haunt him. Somehow she thought, though, that the part of him that rather flaunted his refusal, just might be the most deeply haunted part of all.

 
"Would you tell me something, Ben, about this thing that caught your interest?"

He sighed. "There was this man, a one-legged rancher with two sons, and I told him somethin'." His eyes got that glint of humor to them again briefly. "I was pissin' as I told him."

The corner of her mouth twitched slightly as she got a clear mental image of him facing a dragon. He was holding a shield made entirely of his humor.

 
"It was dark and Apaches was creepin' up on us."

"And you had to...to...."

"Piss," he supplied.

"Then?"

"A man can't always choose just when his bodily needs overtake him. Anyway, as I said, I was pissin' and them Apache was creepin' and I says to this rancher that if you do one good deed

for somebody, somethin' decent, that I imagined it would be habit formin', that seein' a grateful look on somebody's face'd make you feel like Christ Hisself." He shrugged. "So that's why I don't mess around with doin' nothing good. That's what I told him."

"And is it?"

He cocked an eyebrow questioningly.

"Habit forming?"

"I ain't had a chance to find out."

"What about the grateful look?"

Ben's mind flashed back to his view through the metal grating of the boxcar. Dan was standing just outside, a definite light of gratitude in his eyes...distracted by it so that he'd turned his back on all that was coming up behind him. Ben had seen it first, seen that death certificate in Charlie's hand. He'd felt almost with an awe how quickly the thick pall of inevitable darkness could wipe the smile off his own face. That one, brief instant he and Dan had looked at each other, that fleeting second of the victory of decency. Then it flooded over him, into him, how goddamn stupid he'd been to expect that darkness wouldn't win in the end. He had, in the

oddest of unexplainable ways, for that one split second as he looked into Dan's eyes, felt like Christ Himself. He laughed mirthlessly at the memory, bowed his head forward, and fisted

both hands in his hair.

"The grateful look don't mean shit," he choked out.

He felt her hand on his arm. She'd come forward and was kneeling close beside him. "Don't, Elizabeth." He moved his arm but her hand remained. He let his own hands slide out of his hair, slowly and in a way that they brought long strands of it forward over his face. It was a shield.

He knew it and he knew she knew it. But he wanted a shield right then.

"Cuss me," he whispered, startling her, "or hit me. Just don't be gentle or...."

It was too late. His right hand moved quickly behind her head, pushing it toward his face, and before she could inhale a breath, his lips were hot on hers, his tongue become a seeking, probing thing. He moaned down in his throat as he kissed her, his whole body springing to insistent life.

 
Brendan had not kissed like this. She had not known there was such a thing as kissing the way Ben was kissing her. Instinctively, she pulled back from it, confused, astounded, but his hand

was behind her head and her lips were trapped, enveloped by his. She could neither speak nor move, and in her immobility, she realized she was melting. All of her was melting in the desire

of her form to flow into his. She had lain with Brendan three times, each a soft, temperate
thing, her mind aware, noticing things like the patterns of the poplar trees or the scudding of night clouds. At this moment, though, her only thought was that she was losing all ability to think and would soon completely fall off the earth itself. 

He felt her yielding, knew that if he were to lay her back, her knees would open. And he wanted her. My God, how he wanted her! All the disjointed parts of what he thought loving was, the pain, the quiet arrogance, the sorrow, the superiority, and the endless loss inside his soul...all

of it melded in him into one great, pressing need to take her. He wanted his seed inside her, wanted that his living wetness spurt into her warm passages, knew he had a mindless, wild hope that his pain and loss and even his weariness would flow with it and be absorbed in her, fading into nothingness in the presence of her light.

 
And that was what stopped him. That one last shred of calm thinking that he always kept in reserve. This was Elizabeth Ann. He pulled back from her, the moisture from her mouth still

on his lips, and looked at her with one agonized glance before shoving himself back on the pallet and folding his forearms over his face.

She was just as shocked by his withdrawal as by his advance and remained where she was, blinking slowly. Gradually, her ability to think coherently returned. She put her hand over

her mouth. Her lips were throbbing slightly, still tingling. Her tongue felt strange, as though

it had become fire for a moment and touched a matching flame. Her body had done things, felt things....

Ben. Oh, God...oh, God...Ben. Now? Here? Ben?

She moved forward, resting her upper body weight on her left palm as she reached out with her right. Her fingertips hovered a fraction above his right shoulder. Even with the tiny space between them, she could tell his shoulder was shaking.

"Oh, Ben," she half-whispered, half-moaned. She pulled her hand back without touching him and got to her feet. For a while she stood looking down at him, filled with strangely unconflicting tidal flows of lingering desire, compassion and understanding. Going closer to the fire, she curled up in a tight ball on her shawl. There was too much to think about, too much to feel. And she hadn't even gotten to explain about the cave yet.

She lay trying not to listen to the muffled sounds a man makes when he doesn't want a woman

to know he's crying.

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