Charles W. Henderson 16580 Fannin Circle Peyton, Colorado 80831 (719) 749-0492 Fax: (719) 749-0189

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A coward will die a thousand times while the courageous die but once.--Anon.

He thought of Paris and it made him feel worse. Paris had been where he was happiest, when he was a young man filled with love and excitement and life, and for many years he had come to think more and more about it. Years in which he had grown old and unable to live life as he had done as a young man. Now the pain in his back and in his bones and in his chest caused him to wish that he had not wasted so many of his days not taking better advantage of Paris and his youth.

"Cancer," the doctor had said to him. That was a month ago. A week ago he spent three days and two nights in a hospital only to have that doctor say to him that the prognosis looked poor but that chemotherapy and radiation treatments might offer hope. He told the doctor to forget it and he left.

Now he was back at his mountain home. Next to Paris, he worked best on the island and was nearly as happy there, but a revolution had taken that away. His mountain home was now his last source of happiness anywhere close to that of the island or Paris, but most of all he longed for Paris, now that he knew he would soon die.

Outside, he could see the great mountains and the wide swaths of the ski runs that the increasing number of resorts had stripped through the pine forests, and that made him feel worse too. The pilot fish that he mistrusted and had come to despise had followed him here and had led in the rich. Now people were coming by greater numbers since it had become fashionable to be seen at this here-to-fore obscure dot on a road map. Holding tight to a cane that a friend had carved from the heart of a horse chestnut tree struck by lightening outside Lyon, to remind him of a trip through the rain that he and another writer had once taken there, he walked painfully and slowly to a high table where a notebook lay opened.

As he leaned on his special table, built tall so that he could work while standing, since it hurt his back to sit, he looked at the page filled with words hand-written in crisp black letters that he had composed that morning and which told that the rain makes all places strange, even places where you live. After reading the paragraph and knowing what came next, he turned to a fresh page and then picked up his pencil and began to write.

Rather than continuing the tale of a boy and his father riding the train to New York, another idea took hold and he began to write about a friend in Paris 40 years ago. As he pressed the pencil against the paper and formed each letter in a slow and careful hand, his mind left the pain of that present day and traveled back to a modest café where he drank light, dry wine and wrote stories that he struggled to get published for a wage of twelve dollars a page.

For twelve dollars a page, he managed to feed and shelter his beautiful red-haired wife and their baby boy and budget out enough money to get them to the mountains each winter so that they could ski until spring. They had very little during those years, but it saw them through and he was very happy, although he did not realize it at the time.

During those years when they had so little, he longed for success as a writer. He sought recognition and wanted money so that he and his wife and his son could live well and travel to the mountains in the winter and ski and truly enjoy the beauty of the snow and cold and not worry about how they would live beyond the week.

In the years after he had money and began to realize what greater things than wealth he had lost, he came to also know that his happiness had little to do with his being poor. The three of them had very little yet were very happy, but not because they were poor. Poverty is miserable for anyone at anytime. His happiness from those poor years came mostly because they were simpler times. Life had not yet become complex with the money mongers clinging to him and the pilot fish and the rich and the others who came around to be with someone famous simply for that sake.

In those wonderful days when he drank his dry, white wine and wrote in a Paris café and went hungry to save enough so that he and his love and their son could spend winters in the mountains, he was obscure. He could travel anywhere without worry of someone disturbing his work. As he became known and life grew more and more complex, he had to go farther away from the main roads and remain behind secured hedges and walls and in places where most people would be kept out by hired men who did nothing but keep people away from others whose lives had become complex and miserable.

He thought of how it all had come. First there were the pilot fish who discovered him in the mountains of France that last winter and told him how truly wonderful he was and how his writing was the thing, and he trusted them. They went out and told the rich who came and corrupted that world and he became their carnival dog that fetched the stick for them and wagged his tail eagerly while they all told him how wonderful he was and he liked believing that too. Now they followed him and were always at hand and his simple life disappeared, as did his happiness.

A clatter from someone dropping something outside awakened him to this day and returned him to his pain. He looked at the notebook and at the sentence he had written at the top of the fresh page while his mind had explored the years-ago times in Paris and the source of his happiness and he could not remember writing the words. He looked at them and wondered at what they might mean.
Reading the sentence again and again he recalled the story about the man and the wounded cape buffalo and how he found himself and his happiness by taking hold of life and seizing courage and standing his ground in the final moments as the angry beast charged straight at him.

The paper popped raggedly along its edge when he pulled the page from the stitches that had bound it in the notebook. Holding it in his hand, he walked stiffly to the window and again looked at the mountains that rose up around his home. He recalled how beautiful they seemed when he first came here. How they reminded him of his simple life and were so like those long-ago mountains that he and his wife would hike up during the cold hours before morning's first light to avoid avalanches, and would ski the peaks of that high and dangerous snow country.

Reading the page once again, he remembered what he had meant and he laid the paper on the round table that stood next to the window. He had reminded himself of who he really was and how with this sickness he had become like the man in the story when he faced the wounded lion in the beginning and had fled in terror when the animal rushed out of the bush and how the white hunter killed the lion and then regarded the man as a coward. It disgusted him to think that he had now begun to flee too. He had run from the truth of his sickness--his wounded lion--and now he knew.

Four rifles and two shotguns stood in the walnut gun cabinet next to the fireplace. He looked at them standing behind the diamond-pane door, all of them freshly cleaned and oiled by his son who had visited him the day after he came home with the latest news of the cancer.

" Papa," his son had said, "we can deal with this. They have had great luck with these new treatments. You just have to give these doctors a chance to beat this thing. We're not going to let it take you. You have to fight it."

The words seemed so empty then and now rang even more hollow. They embraced false hope and worked to corrupt the dying man into a desperate coward wanting to seek out and believe the impossible. Chase the false hope and not face the truth and because fear had taken control suffer a prolonged and wretched death, writhing in fear and gasping to still flee every man's final truth.
No one, not him, his son nor any of the others who gathered at the other side of the house this day, waiting for him to finish work and join them, could face the truth. They could not even bring themselves to call it by its name. They spoke of it as this thing, this problem, this illness. None of them called it cancer.

Only his son had felt the real weight of the news and recognized its meaning. Then he quickly alluded away from its truth by becoming a cheerleader and talking of cures and hope and about life and how they would all help him beat this death.

" What does the boy know of death?" he said as he looked at the mountains and the sky. "He has not lived and seen life stop in a person. He has never looked into a man's eyes and watched them go clear and deep and empty while talking him through it and hearing him tell his last thoughts. How could this boy know what to say to a dying man?"

Closing his eyes, he placed his hands on the fireplace and ran them along its natural rock face and felt its rough coolness and thought of his son as a child and how deeply he loved him. His hands traced along the mantle's stonework and he remembered the trout and how he and his son caught them and then cooked the fish on an open fire and how the boy was so small and cold in the evenings and would cuddle next to him to get warm. He remembered the fragrance of the pine and the water and how it smelled of trout.

It made what he knew he must do more difficult and he felt the coward that had grown in him these past weeks again surface and try to believe in his son's false hope. Then he remembered what he had written on the paper and he opened his eyes.

Feeling down in his pocket, he touched the keys and the rabbit's foot worn smooth and hairless and pressed his thumb against the sharp, stiff claws. He carried it for luck and guessed it had finally run out as he took the last painful steps to the gun cabinet and opened its lock.

His back hurt him more now than he could ever remember and it was difficult to bend down to the bottom of the case and pull out the drawer which held the shotgun shells. Their waxy smoothness felt cold against his fingers as he selected one and curled his hand around it.

Pain knifed through his back as he stood and dropped the shell in his pocket with the keys and the rabbit's foot. He tried not to think but his senses seemed to sharpen as his racing pulse pounded in his ears and he recalled how when he had no money for lunch and went hungry when he was young and in Paris it too had seemed to sharpen his wits. His breath quickened from frustration and he felt anger begin to boil within him as the glass-pane door at first held stubbornly and then rattled loudly and shook as it finally gave way to his pull. The gun came out easily and felt strangely warm in his hands and smelled sweet from the oil that his son had rubbed on its stock and two barrels.

Resting the shotgun across his left forearm, he grasped the small of the stock in his right hand and pressed his thumb against the latch and broke the gun open. The two empty barrels glistened in the light as he walked back to the window and watched the sky above the mountains and felt in his pocket for the shell. Without looking down, he dropped it in the left barrel's chamber and then snapped the gun shut.

"All is ready," he said. "I can take this medicine and I will be fine. Cure the sickness and end the pain."

He thought of how it must be to finally pull the trigger and imagined it as sudden whiteness and noise and then nothing, just as he had written it in the story about the man who found his courage and gained happiness when he faced down the wounded cape buffalo as it charged toward him. He kept thinking of the buffalo, its eyes red and angry and its head low and bleeding from the earlier shot, as he sat on the stool next to the window and set the shotgun's butt on the floor with its muzzle pointed toward his eyes and bowed his head over it.

The triggers felt sharp against his thumb and he froze. Then he thought of Paris and of his friends that he had loved there and of his son who was born there and of his first wife who he had sworn never to leave but did, and he began to cry. A breeze blew through the screen door and disturbed the page on which he had written the sentence and had left lying on the round table next to him, and as the paper rustled and he wept for his lost youth and wife and happiness, he found the strength to end his cancer.

Someone who had come to visit from New York heard the sharp blast of the gun and ran inside the house and found the writer lying on the floor, his head torn to pieces and the page still lying on the table. His blood had left a fine, red spray across the paper and the last words that he ever wrote: "Courage returned to him and so did happiness."
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Copyright 1994 by Charles W. Henderson