We Shall Win Heaven
To live the life one is given is the most difficult path to holiness. No, it is the only one. That is what the priest told him when Jean-Luc knelt for a blessing. He delicately held the young doctor's hands. A chill rose in the wind as the bells beckoned the morning forward.
***
Footsteps in the courtyard. Another patient dragged through the entrance and placed into the young Jean-Luc's caring hands.
***
I'll never see him again, my boy, my boy, I'll never see him again? His mother's sick, too. I didn't ask for this. He didn't ask for this. God in heaven, I didn't ask for this.
***
Jean-Luc kissed Francoise for the last time. Her eyes filled with crystal glass and for a moment he saw the tears drift from her eyes into the air and hang suspended between them. Whatever she said to him he forgot.
***
Grass and weeds grew overtop the pathway on the outer limits of the courtyard. Gravel had once graced the grounds but when the first plague victims had been brought, the place had grown dormant and cold.
***
He felt haunted here, in the courtyard where the new patients could roam before the effects of the disease grew too harmful. Haunted by the possible lives he could have lived: in the corner he stood dressed in vestments, the Sacrament gold and furious in his hands; Francoise still called to him from the second story window and he still answered her, forever caught in the first acts of love; his mother and father waving goodbye to him when he'd left home for Paris. Of all the hauntings, though, Jean-Luc could not bear the face of his brother, the first patient to die the violent death awaiting them all, standing in the corner, blood spattered on his nightgown and a ghastly look of despair on his face.
***
The way the sunlight hit the trees, in the early morning, just as the wind was picking up. Before the patients woke. This was the world, and it was not enough.
***
Whatever Jean-Luc felt about himself dissipated when the time for rounds came along. He would not don the costume. I am no bird of prey, he said. The patients cursed God; cried for mercy; wept; screamed; denied; coughed; bled. Is this the life they've been given?
***
Hold my hand, the old woman said as she died. And he did. The birds in the courtyard took flight and hung suspended in the sunlight, before perching in the shadows of the upward reaching trees. Jean-Luc kissed the hand of heaven and moved on.
***
The tears that came at night, they were the burden Jean-Luc must carry. When night pressed in and his body wouldn't sleep; when the little cell he'd exchanged Francoise for closed in on him; when the universe of his thoughts expanded to include every possibility, every paralyzing choice; when God appeared weeping and coughing up blood in the corner of his room.
***
The priest placed the host onto Jean-Luc's tongue and the morning sun still shone and the birds outside the chapel sang the very same song and the incense, heavy in the air, smelled as it always did.
***
Jean-Luc woke from his bed, dried his tears, dressed himself, prayed, and stood for a moment at the window. The red and purples of the flowers; the bees swarming them; the swallows perched in the trees. All at once, he remembered.
***
Francoise told him, Do not fear forgetting me. You will never forget me. I will never forget you. In the morning, when you cross yourself, know that I cross myself too. Know the colors of the world. You give yourself to your patients and not to me. This shall be the cross we bear together. See, my darling Jean-Luc, even in our denial we shall win heaven together.