Читать книгу A Thin Place - Jack Peterson - Страница 22

January 1, 1992

Austin, Minnesota

Just after dawn, Trent donned his parka and knit hat and stepped outside into the face of a biting, wind-blown snowstorm and ran into the barn. He backed out his Jeep, not bothering to close the barn doors behind. He watched through the rear view mirror as the barn’s weathered façade slowly disappeared through a thick snowfall and marveled how little things had changed. When he inherited his boyhood home, the farm meant nothing more to him than a weekend getaway from his responsibilities as Chief of Staff at the Mayo clinic. His time at Mayo had always been at a premium and, even though the farm was only forty miles away, the isolation always provided both him and Mary some much needed personal time together. When he lost Mary to cancer within a month of his retirement, moving back to his boyhood home seemed to be the most natural place for him to spend the remainder of his life. The farm had a sense of peacefulness from times past, helping to comfort a guilty conscience that had persistently made his life miserable. Tonight, he felt his circle of life beginning to complete itself. He could feel it. The end was near.

Two miles down the road, he set the 4-wheel drive and turned onto a narrow unplowed gravel road that led up a slight hill to the cemetery. He passed through the arched entryway and stopped. Rows of snow-covered headstones laced the hillside without a trace of any visitor’s footsteps. The misfortune of losing a loved one could not be measured by an outsider, and he felt a twinge of guilt for not having more reverence for all the others that lay near his family. Only those who had experienced the loss of a loved one could truly feel the tragedy of their own mortality. He was no exception.

Strong winds slammed snow hard into his face as walked up the hillside toward his parent’s graves. After offering his prayers, he stood and trained his eyes further up the hill. A crooked and barren oak tree about forty paces away swayed as the wind gusts grew even stronger. Two tombstones, an arms-length from the tree, were barely visible through the falling snow. Plodding and kicking, he slowly made his way toward them and gently brushed the snow from the face of each headstone until both inscriptions were legible.

Mary Olsen Trent, a loving wife and mother

John William Trent

A familiar, stinging pain ran through his heart. He brushed back the near-freezing tears from his eyes and sat on a snow-laden bench between the two tombstones. It was the word mother in the inscription that he couldn’t bear. He had accepted his wife’s premature death as a natural life event, but failing her in her time of need was, for him, an egregious sin for which he prayed that God would grant him grace. Even with grace, he knew there could be no penance that would ever appease the guilt he carried in his heart.

He never blamed the war for preventing him from ever seeing his son again. Even though Mary kept her sorrow to herself, he was sure that his own unwavering rejection of having another child after John’s death had broken his wife’s heart. Only the years eventually convinced him that his unilateral decision not to father another child was unconscionable. He never confessed to Mary why he refused to father another child. The truth would have been too cruel. He kneeled, placing his hand on his son’s headstone. Asking his forgiveness seemed selfish but, for now, it was all he could offer.

Later that night Trent sat by the fire in his parlor. A self-imposed guilt he had subconsciously buried since 1927 was surfacing and it wasn’t going away. For the first time in his life, he realized that attempting to correct a wrong for which he believed he may have been directly or indirectly responsible was no longer optional and feared he may have waited too long to start the process of self-redemption. Every bone in his body was finally beginning to hurt. At ninety years of age, time was running out.