His Hands
"The greatest mistake in the treatment of diseases is that there are physicians for the body and physicians for the soul, although the two cannot be separated." - Plato
From the beginning she loved his hands.
They were tan and large, firm and strong. They reached out, asking nothing in return, seeking only to aid.
She'd watch as he battled death, tendons and veins standing out in stark relief in the lamp glow of a dusty cabin, his fingers life's sole advocate as he held fast to a spurting artery.
They could be infinitely tender, cradling a newborn child, so small and fragile, much too early with little chance to live. And yet he would hold it within his hands, warming and protecting it against the world, the only human contact the child might feel in it's brief life. Even as it slipped away, departing like a candle snuffed out in the wind he cradled it, a seemingly pointless act of love that bore so much meaning to her.
She'd see him, tears nearly choking her, as he'd quietly cover up the small body and lay it in a wooden box, mourn at the grave beside the couple as they buried it in the ground, resting his hands on the two small markers beside it.
And then she'd watch, aching, as he'd go to his cabin, sit on the porch with his Victrola and a jug of moonshine clenched in his hands, knuckles white against the spilling amber droplets, and drink himself into a stupor.
He was destroying himself over the child and a hundred more like it and she couldn't bear to watch, to see those hands, the same ones that held the scalpel that saved Bob Allen and others like him, slowly kill him.
Because those hands were the last true part of him.
His hands were a contradiction of the man, as if his heart, nearly cold and buried deep inside, beat and spoke through them, conveying emotions too raw to voice. For all the sharpness of his tone, the bitterness in his mannerisms as he railed against a world he had little faith in and a God he didn't believe it, there was a goodness in him, a decency that he had not been able to crush or mask.
She'd seen him among the children, heart stripped bare, breaking as he watched them suffer and could do so little. He was a doctor, after all, and she knew how it must hurt him, wound him through and leave him bleeding to be powerless.
It tore her heart out to watch him suffer so, to be unable to pull him to her and comfort him, to hold him against the horrible blackness that seemed to engulf him at times.
She loved him.
He didn't court her with rich words and poetry, bring flowers, or tell her she was beautiful. He was simply there, an anchor to hold her to earth, a rock to support her when she was too weary to go on. He completed in her what she hadn't known was lacking, filled up a hole somewhere inside that she'd thought wasn't hollow.
He spoke little of love, of hope, or joy. Perhaps they were emotions he'd buried and cast aside. Sometimes he claimed not to have them, eyes angry and wild like the lighting across the mountains.
But she knew it was false, that the love and hope still remained, buried deep perhaps, but still breathing. She felt it when his hand brushed her's.
And even if his eyes lied to her, his hands never could.