Francis Collins Kneels in Waterfall

We had been walking since before dawn, packs heavy with the kind of gear two residents carried when they needed to be somewhere the hospital could not reach them. The trail followed an old logging road that still held tire ruts from the previous winter. Water dripped from the hemlocks and ran in thin streams along the edge of the path. Collins walked ahead, boots already dark with mud, talking the way he always did when the subject turned to the wards.

He described the woman again, the one whose pain had come in waves that morning. She had gripped the rail of the bed and spoken of Jesus as though the name itself carried weight that could steady her breathing. Then she had looked at him and asked what he believed. Collins stopped on the trail and turned, hands on his hips.

I had heard the story twice already. Each time the detail of her face changed slightly, the way a man remembers a moment that refuses to settle. He said the answer he gave her felt smaller than it should have. He had come to medicine expecting equations and instead found rooms where equations stopped at the door.

We reached the fork where the trail narrowed and began to climb beside the stream. The water ran high from the rain two days earlier. Collins said nothing for a stretch. When he spoke again it was about the book the pastor had given him, the one by the Oxford man who had once been an atheist himself. He had read it in the evenings after shifts, under the lamp in the residents’ room, marking passages with a pencil that left smudges on the margins.

The path leveled for a few hundred yards and then dropped toward the sound of falling water. The waterfall appeared through the trees, narrower than I remembered but still loud enough to make conversation difficult. Spray lifted and settled on the rocks. Collins stood at the edge and looked at the pool below.

He stepped into the water without removing his boots. The current reached his knees and then his waist. He kept one hand on the wet rock face for balance. I called his name once. He did not answer. He lowered himself until the water reached his chest, then bent forward until his forehead touched the surface. The motion was deliberate, the way a man kneels when he has already decided the ground is the only place left to put his weight.

He stayed there. The water broke around his shoulders and ran down the back of his shirt. I could see the tremor in his arms from the cold. After a time he lifted his head, eyes closed, and remained on his knees. His mouth moved. No sound reached me over the rush of the falls.

When he stood again his clothes clung to him and his face had changed in a way that was difficult to name. He climbed out onto the rocks and sat with his back against a hemlock. Water pooled beneath him. He did not speak for several minutes. When he did, the words were simple. He said he had asked for what he could not prove and had been answered in a way that did not require proof.

We walked back in near silence. The rain had stopped. Light moved through the canopy in shifting patches. Collins carried his pack higher on his shoulders than before. At the trailhead he shook my hand and said he would need to speak with the pastor again. That was all.