The Sick Man Spits Out the Physician's Healing Cup

Click for full size

The Cup Hit the Floor

The physician set the cup on the stool and waited. Steam rose off the rim, bitter, green from crushed leaves. The sick man turned his face to the wall and shut his mouth.

"Take it," the physician said.

"God heals," the sick man said. "A man with a cup is standing in His way."

He took the cup to prove he had heard. He put it to his lip. Then he spat. The medicine hit the floorboards and ran toward the threshold in a thin dark line. The physician looked at the line, not at the man. He picked up the empty cup, wiped the rim with his thumb, and went out into the heat.

Outside, a neighbor who farmed for a living walked past with dirt on his ankles. He had been in the stall since before dawn. The sick man heard the oxen and called it a lesser life.

The Fever Climbed Anyway

The sick man quoted half a verse. God is the healer. He left out the rest, the part that plants remedies in leaves and minerals and trained hands. The fever had no theology. It climbed.

By afternoon his teeth clicked against each other. The wall he had used as an altar of refusal was only plaster. He asked for water and could not keep it down. He called for the physician and heard nothing, because the man with the cup had other houses and other cups.

Night came in. The room smelled of sweat and the spilled medicine drying in the grain of the wood. He put his palm on the stool where the cup had stood and found it empty. He had sent the help away and named the sending piety.

In another street the physician crushed more leaves with a stone. A child held the bowl. A woman counted drops. The skill that lifts a physician's head is not theft from heaven. It is work God put in the earth and in a pair of hands. The sick man, three doors down, shook and waited for a voice without a body.

When the physician came back at first light, the sick man could not lift his head.

"Bring it," he said.

The words were ugly. They were also the first true thing he had said since the fever started. The physician poured a fresh cup from a flask at his belt. He did not crow. He held the back of the man's neck the way a person holds a child who has decided, late, to swallow.

He Asked for the Cup Back

Bitter liquid went down. The healing he had insulted burned, then sat in his chest like a slow heat that belonged there. Sleep came in pieces. He woke, drank again, slept. By the second morning the fever had broken the right way. His tongue tasted iron. The stool by the bed looked like furniture again, not like an insult.

He paid the physician with hands that still shook. Coins clicked. The physician tied the flask and left without a speech. Then the sick man stood, weakly, and blessed the Maker who had not been too proud to use a cup. He said the Name over the empty vessel. He did not skip the human link in the chain.

In later seasons he still feared fever. He no longer feared the stool. When illness came he sent for the physician first and prayed while the steam rose, not instead of it.

The Farmer Walked Past the Door

While the sickroom had been arguing with mercy in liquid form, the farmer had risen in the dark and led cattle. He is busied with oxen. His talk is with bullocks. His wakefulness is to fill the stall. He sets his heart to plough furrows. No one writes songs about his elbows. The world eats because he does not quit.

Before sunrise he had forked hay, checked a lame hoof, and spoken to the animals as if they were coworkers who happened to have horns. He filled the stall. He leaned his weight into the plough until the share bit and the first furrow opened like a mouth in the dirt.

The recovering man stood in the doorway and watched him pass. Mud on the ankles. A yoke on the oxen. Breath steaming from the animals' nostrils in the cool. The farmer slapped a flank and did not look toward the sickhouse. He had work that did not wait on pride.

The farmer would never prescribe a cup. His work was cousin to the physician's anyway. Both kept bodies alive inside a world God refuses to run as spectacle. One healed. One fed. Neither waited for a miracle to do the job assigned to hands.

The sick man, who had spat out help and then begged for it, watched the furrow lengthen. Glory looked like mud. Across the field the oxen leaned into the yoke. Somewhere a physician washed his hands. Between them the Maker kept staffing the world with people who know how to keep other people alive.