Doc - Mary Doria Russell [140]
It was only when Alexander was seen atop this admirable beast that he felt humiliated and embarrassed. And Indians unerringly took notice.
“Ata! There’s a man with no women to impress!”
“That horse looks pretty sick! Have you tried a sweat lodge?”
“I hope you didn’t trade your gold cup for that big rabbit.”
These sallies, and others like them, were considered the height of comedy. Maybe they were funnier if you spoke the language well, and if you didn’t have to ask for them to be repeated over and over, in a slow and painful effort to understand exactly how you’d just been mocked—an effort the Indians found almost as funny as the mule’s giant ears.
When he finally understood a joke, Alexander did his best to smile, but there was always one remark that made him blush. More mimed than spoken, it needed no translation. One of the women would look appraisingly at the mule’s ears, then at Alexander’s own, and ask, deadpan, “Cousins?”
Hilarity, inevitably, ensued.
Father Paul had warned that such teasing was to be expected among Indians. Paul himself put up with a lot of nose jokes, being Roman in physiognomy as well as in ancestry and faith. So Alexander soldiered on, in baking heat under a glaring sun, with no companion except Alphonsus on the long rides between each round of rejection and ridicule.
The summer and his own resolve wore away.
Alexander often prayed for patience and strength, but once, in what he suspected was the actual, factual geographic middle of absolutely nowhere, he lost all momentum and allowed the mule’s pace to slow to a halt. For a time, he simply sat there, his own head the highest thing on earth as far as the eye could see in any direction, and his heart the lowest.
Perhaps, he thought, it is time to take Schopenhauer’s advice. Eat a toad first thing in the morning; the rest of the day will seem pleasurable by comparison.
Assuming he could find a toad.
Staring at the table-flat horizon, he would sometimes watch an electrical storm gather, build, break, and dissipate, often in eerie silence—the entire drama so far away that he hardly heard the thunder, though he could see the lightning. Late on one sweltering afternoon, a funnel-shaped cloud emerged from the bottom of a towering green-gray thunderhead in the distance. Lengthening, reaching toward the ground, the cyclone wobbled and spun drunkenly across the empty land, its journey as useless as his own.
He had not felt so hopeless since his days as a novice, still learning the community’s ways, still doing everything he could to get thrown out—things that would have gotten him flogged in the military. “Do you want this?” the novice master demanded every time Alexander defied a superior or came to blows with one of his potential brothers in Christ.
“I want what God wants for me,” Alexander would answer, stubborn, willful, and friendless.
Which simply raised the question …
… that was, at last, answered one night on the Oklahoma plains where he lay on the open ground, in the rain and near the mule, probably lost and certainly despondent. To his dying day, he was not sure if he was awake or asleep or someplace in between when he heard a single word: Timothy.
The next morning, at first gray light, he awoke to the bland curiosity of Alphonsus, who watched, munching weeds, while Alexander rolled creakily onto his hands and knees, swatted insects away, checked his boots for scorpions, scratched a dozen new bites, took a piss, and dug a small New Testament out of his oilskin pack. He opened it to the letters of Saint Paul. Before his eyes, the text turned inside out.
Every line of Paul’s praise and encouragement whispered to Alexander of the dejection and frustration that Timothy must have been reporting as he followed in the footsteps of the saint. Like Timothy, Alexander von Angensperg was ready to teach the Gospel, willing to endure hardship as a good soldier of Christ, eager to receive knowledge and understanding from God in the service of God. Like Timothy, everywhere he went, he was considered