In the front seat, Edom and Jacob murmured agreement with the narrator's sentiments. Monday night, Edom and Jacob booked adjoining units in a motel near the hospital. They called Barty's room to give Agnes the phone number and to report that they had inspected eighteen establishments before finding one that seemed comparatively safe.
In regard for Barty's tender age, Dr. Franklin Chan had arranged for Agnes to spend the night in her son's room, in the second bed, which currently wasn't needed for a patient.
For the first time in many months, Barty didn't want to sleep in the dark. They left the door of the room open, admitting some of the fluorescent glow from the hallway.
The night seemed to be longer than a Martian month. Agnes dozed, fitfully, waking more than once, sweaty and shaking, from a dream in which her son was taken from her in pieces: first his eyes, then his hands, then his ears, his legs
The hospital was eerily quiet, except for the occasional squeak of rubber-soled shoes on the vinyl floor of the corridor.
At first light, a nurse arrived to perform preliminary surgical prep on Barty. She pulled the boy's hair back and captured it under a tight fitting cap. With cream and a safety razor, she shaved off his eyebrows.
When the nurse was gone, alone with his mother as they waited for the orderly to bring a gurney, Barty said, 'Come close.'
She was already standing beside his bed. She leaned down to him.
'Closer,' he said.
She lowered her face to his.
He raised his head and rubbed noses with her. 'Eskimo.'
'Eskimo,' she repeated.
Barty whispered: 'The North Pole Society of Not Evil Adventurers is now in session.'
'All members present,' she agreed.
'I have a secret.'
'No member of the society ever violates a secret confidence,' Agnes assured him.
'I'm scared.'
Throughout Agnes's thirty-three years, strength had often been demanded of her, but never such strength as was required now to rein in her emotions and to be a rock for Barty. 'Don't be scared, honey. I'm here.' She took one of his small hands in both of hers. 'I'll be waiting. You'll never be without me.'
'Aren't you afraid?'
If he had been any other three-year-old, she would have told a compassionate lie. He was her miracle child, however, her prodigy, and he would know a lie for what it was.
'Yes,' she admitted, her face still close to his, 'I'm afraid. But Dr. Chan is a fine surgeon, and this is a very fine hospital.'
'How long will it take?'
'Not long.'
'Will I feel anything?'
'You'll be asleep, sweetie.'
'Is God watching?'
'Yes. Always.'
'It seems like He isn't watching.'
'He's here as sure as I am, Barty. He's very busy, with a whole universe to run, so many people to look after, not just here but on other planets, like you've been reading about.'
'I didn't think of other planets.'
'Well, with so much on His shoulders, He can't always watch us directly, you know, with His fullest attention every minute, but He's always at least watching from the corner of His eye. You'll be all right. I know you will.'
The gurney, one wheel rattling. The young orderly behind it, dressed all in white. And the nurse again.
'Eskimo,' whispered Barty.
'This meeting of the North Pole Society of Not Evil Adventurers is officially closed.'
She held his face in both hands and kissed each of his beautiful jewel eyes. 'You ready?'
A fragile smile. 'No.'
'Neither am I,' she admitted.
'So let's go.'
The orderly lifted Barty onto the gurney.
The nurse draped a sheet over him and slipped a thin pillow under his head.
Having survived the night, Edom and Jacob were waiting in the hall. Each kissed his nephew, but neither could speak.
The nurse led the way, while the orderly pushed the gurney from behind Barty's head.
Agnes walked at her son's side, tightly holding his right hand.
Edom and Jacob flanked the gurney, each gripping one of Barty's feet through the sheet that covered them, escorting him with the same stony determination that you saw on the faces of the Secret Service agents who bracketed the President of the United States.
At the elevators, the orderly suggested that Edom and Jacob take a second cab and meet them on the surgical floor.
Edom bit his lower lip, shook his head, and stubbornly clung to Barty's left foot.
'Holding fast to the boy's right foot, Jacob observed that one elevator might descend safely but that if they took two, one or the other was certain to crash to the bottom of the shaft, considering the unreliability of all machinery made by man.
The nurse noted that the maximum weight capacity of the elevator allowed all of them to take the same cab, if they didn't mind being squeezed a little.
They didn't mind, and down they went in a controlled descent that was nevertheless too quick for Agnes.
The doors slid open, and they rolled Barty corridor to corridor, past the scrub sinks, to a waiting surgical nurse in green cap, mask, and gown. She alone effected his transfer into the positive pressure of the surgery.
As he was wheeled headfirst into the operating room, Barty raised off the gurney pillow. He fixed his gaze on his mother until the door swung shut between them.
Agnes held a smile as best she could, determined that her son's final glimpse of her face would not leave him with a memory of her despair.
With her brothers, she adjourned to the waiting room, where the three of them sat drinking vending-machine coffee, black, from paper cups.
It occurred to her that the knave had come, as foretold by the cards on that night long ago. She had expected the knave to be a man with sharp eyes and a wicked heart, but the curse was cancer and not a man at all.
Since her conversation with Joshua Nunn the previous Thursday, she'd had more than four days to armor herself for the worst. She prepared for it as well as any mother could while still holding on to her sanity.
Yet in her heart, she wouldn't relinquish hope for a miracle. This was an amazing boy, a prodigy, a boy who could walk where the rain wasn't, already himself a miracle, and it seemed that anything might happen, that Dr. Chan might suddenly rush into the waiting room, surgical mask dangling from his neck, face aglow, with news of a spontaneous rejection of the cancer.
And in time, the surgeon did appear, bearing the good news that neither of the malignancies had spread to the orbit and optic nerve, but he had no greater miracle to report.
On January 2, 1968, four days before his birthday, Bartholomew Lampion gave up his eyes that he might live, and accepted a fife of blindness with no hope of bathing in light again until, in his good time, he left this world for a better one.
Chapter 62
