Why Call Them Back from Heaven

35

Ogden Russell stopped his digging when he hit what he thought to be a rock. All he had to dig with was his hands and the hole was not deep enough and the cross that had plagued him all these days—that cross would beat him yet.

He straightened in the hole, which reached halfway between knee and hip, and looked at the cross stretched upon the ground, the cross piece now affixed by the lengths of grapevine to the longer piece of driftwood he'd found on shore and towed across the river.

There was no question that he had too long an upright that required too deep a hole. A shorter one would have been far better. But there had been little choice; he'd taken what he found. And he had no saw or ax he could use to shorten it.

To hold the cross erect, as now constructed, the hole would have to be twice the depth it was. And now he'd have to start all over at another place, several feet removed, because even if he could dig around the rock, there'd be no way to haul it from the hole.

He leaned wearily against the wall of the hole and pounded petulantly at the rock with a bare heel and as he pounded at it, he became aware that the rock did not seem as hard as a rock should be.

He stopped the pounding and leaned there thinking of the strange non-hardness of the rock, and as he thought about it, he remembered something else, that the rock had seemed far smoother than was the case with the usual rock.

He shook his head in puzzlement. It might not be a rock and if it was not a rock, then what could it be?

He squatted down into the hole again, his body cramped in its close confines and ran his hands over the hardness at its bottom, and he had been right. The rock was smooth. He put a palm against it and pushed and it seemed to him there was a strange sense of resiliency to the smoothness at the bottom of the hole.

Mystified and excited, he dug several handsful of sand out of one side of the hole and found that he could dig below the level of the rock.

He dug some more and his fingers found the edge of the smooth hardness and wrapped themselves around it. He jerked, putting as much power as his cramped position would permit into the effort. The thing he'd thought of as a rock peeled back and upward and he saw it was not a rock, but metal, eroded and pitted and flaking off in tiny specks of brown-red pieces, the old rusted bits of metal that had stayed intact until this moment of disturbance.

Beneath the peeled-back piece of metal was a cavity, half filled with drifted sand, but with objects, wrapped in what appeared to be yellowed paper, thrusting from the sand.

Russell reached down and snatched up one of the paper-wrapped objects. The paper was old and brittle and crumpled at his touch. When he stripped it off, he held in his hand an object carved in an intricate design.

Straightening up and holding out his hand in the full light of the sun, he saw what he had—a piece of carved jade, shaped most cunningly. The blue-green of the base was the water from which the white jade carp arose, with each scale graved in delicate perfection. The workmanship was exquisitely performed and Russell's hand, holding the carving, trembled as he looked at it.

Here was beauty, here was treasure, here, if each of the paper parcels held another piece of jade, was a fortune such as few men ever dreamed.

Carefully he set the carving on the sand outside the hole and quickly bent down to come up with other parcels. In the end, spread out on the sand before him, were more than two dozen of the carvings done in jade.

He looked at them, laid out in solemn rows, and his eyes were misted and tears ran down the stubble of his cheeks.

For weeks he had begged and pleaded, for weeks he'd eaten out his heart with anguish and had fed on clams, which he detested, and all the time, in the sand beneath his feet this treasure had rested, an unexpected and mysterious cache which had waited to be found, for how long no man knew, until he had begun to dig this deeper hole to erect a better cross.

Treasure, he thought. Not the treasure he had sought, but undeniably a treasure and the kind of treasure which would make it possible for a man to enter on his second life on a sound financial footing.

He clambered from the hole and squatted by the jade, staring at it, occasionally reaching out a finger to prod at a certain piece, unable to convince himself that he had really found it.

A treasure, he thought. One he had not sought, but one which he had found while he had sought yet another, perhaps less substantial, treasure.

Was this, he wondered, yet another testing, one with the clams, one with all the discomfort and frustration and misery he had suffered on this island? Had the carvings been placed here, by some method he could not comprehend, to determine whether he might be worthy of that other treasure?

Perhaps he was wrong in hesitating. Perhaps he should snatch up all the carvings and heave them far out into the river as a sign that he renounced all worldly things. And having done that, go back to the digging of the hole so he could plant a cross that would not be blown over by the wind. And after that, perhaps, as a further evidence of faith, rip the transmitter from his chest and also throw it in the river, thus to strip himself of everything that bound him to the world?

He huddled on the sandbar and rocked back and forth, hands clasped around his middle, in the depth of misery.

Would there be no end to it? he asked himself. Would there ever be an end? Was there no limit to the debasement that a man must heap upon himself?

God was kind and merciful—the books all said He was. He yearned to win the souls of men and bind them close to Him. And the way was always open, the road was always clear—all one needed was to travel it to reach eternal glory.

But on this island there had been no mercy. There had been no sign and no encouragement. No road had been revealed and the jade had been in a rusted container of some sort of metal and that would not be the way of it had it been planted by divine intervention.

After all, he asked himself, why should God put Himself to the bother necessary to achieve such intervention? Why should He bother with him, at all? With him, one silly, stupid man when there were so many billion others. Why had he expected it? How could he have expected it? Was not the very fact he had expected it a sign of vanity, which was in itself a sin?

He reached out and picked up one of the pieces tight inside his fist and lifted it and cocked his arm to throw. Sobs shook him and his beard was soaked with tears already shed.

He cocked his arm to throw and he could not throw. His tightened fist came open and the jade slid from it and fell upon the sand.

And in that awful moment he knew that he had lost, that he was wanting in that essential capacity for humility that would unlock the gates of understanding he had sought so earnestly and, now it seemed apparent, priced at a cost too high—a cost that his basic brute humanity would never let him pay.