Under the Healing Sign by Nick O'Donohoe

Author:Nick O'Donohoe
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Fantasy, General, Fiction
ISBN: 9780441001804
Publisher: Ace
Published: 1995-03-02T08:00:00+00:00

F•OU•R•T•E•E•N

THE NEXT MORNING, Annie came by the cottage. BJ, feeling guilty but selfish, threw a sheet over the Healing Sign so that they could talk in peace. Unlike Dave and Lee Anne, Annie fell immediately in love with the place; she touched the table, the portable X-ray, and the anesthetic equipment as though it were magical. "I can't believe you've brought in all this equipment. It's perfect."

It was, BJ realized, the difference between university or urban medicine and a practice in the Third World; Annie had lived with inadequate equipment since shortly after graduation.

She also adored Horvat. "Come here. You're so pretty, come here." Horvat backed up, showing his teeth. BJ picked him up and he consented, grudgingly, to having his ears scratched and stomach tickled.

Daphni rubbed frantically against Annie. BJ remembered that Annie had once walked into a circle of Wyr to rescue a flowerbinder; perhaps Daphni could sense something.

BJ made them breakfast (fresh venison from the Meat People, two eggs each, sliced fruit and fresh cream) while Annie read BJ's additions to Lao's Guide. Then, at Annie's insistence, BJ sat and read her friend's diary while Annie did the breakfast dishes.

The diary made BJ uncomfortable at first; in addition to being Annie's record of her time in Chad, it was a devotional journal. Annie interspersed the high and low points of her work with prayers for safety, for the health of others, and in praise of Jesus for everything from the arrival of a vaccine shipment to the continued survival of their rusted and dented '74 Chevy truck. BJ murmured polite comments at first, then became absorbed.

Annie had carefully and without exaggeration recorded all the harrowing details of work in a refugee camp: of seventy-two-pound adults who could barely crawl, of children scarred with stray bullets from civil conflict in Sudan, of the constant fight to keep flies away from children too listless to protect their own eyes.

There was a clatter at the pump by the sink. "These are done," Annie said mildly. "Where do they go?"

BJ looked up blankly, completely disoriented. How could Annie come back to dishes and cupboards so easily? "Up there, on the left."

"Thanks." Annie smiled and washed out the sink, while BJ looked wonderingly at her.

BJ had felt noble about meeting the needs of Crossroads, and self-reliant in setting up her practice. She couldn't imagine making the sort of sacrifice that Annie had—not for anyone, let alone strangers.

When the cottage was straightened, Annie picked BJ's notes up, and the two of them read in that amiable, Sunday-morning fashion that happens once in a hundred mornings. After half an hour, BJ looked up, startled. "What's that?"

Annie, enthralled by BJ's notes on firelovers, murmured, "Just a truck." Then she dropped the notes, looking up.

BJ remembered. "Lee Anne." The two of them ran outside as Lee Anne, in a white van with the name of a commercial bakery carelessly painted out, rumbled up the lane at twice the speed either of them would have dared in a truck.

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