The Wounded Land Read Online Free PDF

hesitate. Striding up the steps, she pounded on the front door.
    That door led to a screened veranda like a neutral zone between the dwelling itself and the outside world. As she knocked, the porch lights came on. Dr. Berenford opened the inner door, closed it behind him, then crossed the veranda to admit her.
    He smiled a welcome; but his eyes evaded hers as if he had reason to be frightened; and she could see his pulse beating in the pouches below their sockets.
    “Dr. Berenford,” she said grimly.
    “Please.” He made a gesture of appeal. “Julius.”
    “Dr. Berenford.” She was not sure that she wanted this man’s friendship. “Who is she?”
    His gaze flinched. “She?”
    “The woman who screamed.”
    He seemed unable to lift his eyes to her face. In a tired voice, he murmured, “He didn’t tell you anything.”
    “No.”
    Dr. Berenford considered for a moment, then motioned her toward two rocking chairs at one end of the veranda. “Please sit down. It’s cooler out here.” His attention seemed to wander. “This heat wave can’t last forever.”
    “Doctor!” she lashed at him. “He’s torturing that woman.”
    “No, he isn’t.” Suddenly the older man was angry. “You get that out of your head right now. He’s doing everything he can for her. Whatever’s torturing her, it isn’t him.”
    Linden held his glare, measuring his candor until she felt sure that he was Thomas Covenant’s friend, whether or not he was hers. Then she said flatly, “Tell me.”
    By degrees, his expression recovered its habitual irony. “Won’t you sit down?”
    Brusquely she moved down the porch, seated herself to one of the rockers. At once, he turned off the lights, and darkness came pouring through the screens. “I think better in the dark.” Before her eyes adjusted, she heard the chair beside her squeak as he sat down.
    For a time, the only sounds were the soft protest of his chair and the stridulation of the crickets. Then he said abruptly, “Some things I’m not going to tell you. Some I can’t—some I won’t. But I got you into this. I owe you a few answers.”
    After that, he spoke like the voice of the night; and she listened in a state of suspension—half concentrating, as she would have concentrated on a patient describing symptoms, half musing on the image of the gaunt vivid man who had said with such astonishment and pain,
Why you?
    “Eleven years ago, Thomas Covenant was a writer with one bestseller, a lovely wife named Joan, and an infant son, Roger. He hates that novel—calls it inane—but his wife and son he still loves. Orthinks he does. Personally I doubt it. He’s an intensely loyal man. What he calls love, I call being loyal to his own pain.
    “Eleven 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.
    “When 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