The Wounded Land Read Online Free PDF Page B

being loyal to his own pain.
    â€œEleven years ago, an infection on his right hand turned out to be leprosy, and those two fingers were amputated. He was sent down to the leprosarium in Louisiana, and Joan divorced him. To protect Roger from being raised to close proximity to a leper. The way Covenant tells it, her decision was perfectly reasonable. A mother’s natural concern for a child. I think he’s rationalizing. I think she was just afraid. I think the idea of what Hansen’s disease could do to him—not to mention to her and Roger—just terrified her. She ran away.”
    His tone conveyed a shrug, “But I’m just guessing. The fact is, she divorced him, and he didn’t contest it. After a few months, his illness was arrested, and he came back to Haven Farm. Alone. That was not a good time for him. All his neighbors moved away. Some people in this fair town tried to force him to leave. He was to the Hospital a couple times, and the second time he was half dead—” Dr. Berenford seemed to wince at the memory. “His disease was active again. We sent him back to the leprosarium.
    â€œWhen he came home again, everything was different. He seemed to have recovered his sanity. For ten years now he’s been stable. A little grim, maybe—not exactly what you might call diffident—but accessible, reasonable, compassionate. Every year he foots the bill for several of our indigent patients.”
    The older man sighed. “You know, it’s strange. The same people who try to convert me seem to think
he
needs saving, too. He’s a leper who doesn’t go to church, and he’s got money. Some of our evangelicals consider that an insult to the Almighty.”
    The professional part of Linden absorbed the facts Dr. Berenford gave, and discounted his subjective reactions. But her musing raised Covenant’s visage before her in the darkness. Gradually that needy face became more real to her. She saw the lines of loneliness and gall on his mien. She responded to the strictness of his countenance as if she had recognized a comrade. After all, she was familiar with bitterness, loss, isolation.
    But the doctor’s speech also filled her with questions. She wanted to know where Covenant had learned his stability. What had changed him? Where had he found an answer potent enough to preserve him against the poverty of his life? And what had happened recently to take it away from him?
    â€œSince then,” the Chief of Staff continued, “he’s published seven novels, and that’s where you can really see the difference. Oh, he’s mentioned something about three or four other manuscripts, but I don’t know anything about them. The point is, if you didn’t know better, you wouldn’t be able to believe his bestseller and the other seven were written by the same man. He’s right about the first one. It’s fluff—self-indulgent melodrama. But the others—
    â€œIf you had a chance to read
Or I Will Sell My Soul for Guilt
, you’d find him arguing that innocence is a wonderful thing except for the fact that it’s impotent. Guilt is power. All effective people are guilty because the use of power is guilt, and only guilty people can be effective. Effective for
good
, mind you. Only the damned can be saved.”
    Linden was squirming. She understood at least one kind of relationship between guilt and effectiveness. She had committed murder, and had become a doctor because she had committed murder. She knew that people like herself were driven to power by the need to assoil their guilt. But she had found nothing—no anodyne or restitution—to verify the claim that the damned could be saved. Perhaps Covenant had fooledDr. Berenford: perhaps he
was
crazy, a madman wearing a clever mask of stability. Or perhaps he knew something she did not.
    Something she needed.
    That thought gave her a pang of fear. She was suddenly