A desk stood near one of the windows. Joseph pulled over the chair and sat down across from his nephew. Still David did not look up. Joseph waited perhaps two minutes before he spoke, hoping the silence would inspire confession. It didn’t. At last, Joseph settled on how to begin. “Would you hit your sister, David?”
Without raising his head, the boy glared at him, as if this question were so ridiculous it did not deserve an answer.
“Would you hurt your sister?”
“Of course I wouldn’t!” It sounded like David’s teeth were clenched.
“Would you hurt Tessa?”
“No!”
“Then you mustn’t hurt yourself either, David. When you do, you hurt your sisterandTessa, because they care about you. You hurt me—and most of all, you hurt God.” Joseph leaned forward to take David’s hands gently in his own. “God gave you these hands, David. He gave them to you so you can fasten buttons and turn book pages and a thousand other things you haven’t even tried yet: so you can create music from piano keys and plant rose bushes and…”
“I want to do this.” David raised his bandaged hand a little. “I want to learn how to stitch up wounds and cut out tumors like Grandpa. How to save people.”
“That’s wonderful, David. Your grandfather will be delighted to make you his apprentice.” Joseph stroked David’s wrists with his thumbs. “But you cannot practice medicine unless you take care of the gifts God gave you. Do you understand?”
Slowly, the boy nodded.
Joseph released David’s hands and looked back to the empty frame. “You told Tessa you didn’t like what you saw in the mirror. What did you mean by that?”
“Nothing.”
“David.”
The boy closed his eyes. “Everybody keeps calling me a hero!”
“Youarea hero, David. You saved your sister’s life.”
“We were only alone forone day.”
“I imagine that was the most difficult day—and night—of your life. You must have been terrified. A grown man would have been. But in spite of your fear, you chose the right path.”
His nephew made a sound halfway between a scoff and a choke.
“You could have stayed at Independence Rock and waited in vain for help to come to you. You could have tried to follow the other wagons and become lost. You could have shot at those Indians the moment you saw them—they would have attacked you in kind. You could have been prideful and tried to cross the Platte on your own. Instead, you made all the right choices, David. I don’t think one boy in a hundred could have done what you did.”
His nephew did not reply, but his breathing was becoming ragged.
Joseph knelt and looked up into the boy’s anguished face. “There was nothing you could have done to save your father or your mother or your brother. Is that what’s troubling you?”
David pulled up his legs and crawled away from Joseph using his one good hand. He thumped down from the bed, ran to the nearest window, and wrested aside one of the blue curtains.
“David?”
“I can’t…breathe…”
Joseph crossed to the window and helped him lift the lower sash. David fisted his good hand and raised it. For a moment, Joseph feared he’d break this glass too. But the boy only leaned his arm and his forehead against the panes, sucking in the night air as if he’d been drowning.
Was David remembering his father’s death? Joseph recalledTessa’s mention of nightmares. Perhaps Joseph had been wrong to remind the boy. But Joseph knew what guilt looked like. He’d encountered it many times: a child who was certain he’d caused his parent’s death through some misdeed.
“David?” Joseph asked as the January cold seeped into them. “What is it you think you did wrong?”
“Everybody also says how much I remind them of you,” his nephew muttered. “But I’m nothing like you. You’re perfect, and I’m…”
“I amfarfrom perfect, David. I sin every day, in thought if not in word or deed. Weallstumble. We all need God’s grace.” He touched David’s shoulder through the quilted dressing-gown. “Do you need to make a Confession?”
Still leaning against the window, heedless of the cold, the boy shook his head. “I made one in Missouri, after we got back.”
