THE CAVERN OF DEEP HARMONY

PART SEVENTEEN:

Wadsworth was getting restless.  He wasn't in harness so wasn't "working", which left him free to want to run. Standing, he stepped onto the blanket and poked his nose against Marshall's neck as if to say, "Ok, enough of this sitting about."

Marshall chuckled and turned, ruffling the fur of his neck. "He wants some playtime. He hasn't really had any the last couple of days."  Adjusting the position of his sling, he apologized to the dog. "I can't roll around with you today, boy," he said regretfully.

"What do you usually do to, um, play with him?" Eden asked.

"Oh, we chase around and he trips me and I fall down and then he jumps on me and we tumbled about a bit."

Eden's eyes widened. "Not with that shoulder!"

"Right, not with this shoulder."  He ruffled Wadsworth's fur some more. "You heard that, I hope?"  He turned his head toward Eden. "Would there be a pinecone or something lying near the blanket?"

"There's a couple just...here," she replied, leaning out to pick up two fat cones not far away.

He took one of them in his right hand, turning it over with his fingers to make sure it wasn't sharp. Wadsworth keenly watched his every movement, his muscles gathering in anticipation.  Marshall pulled back his right arm and threw the cone as hard as he could. Instantly Wadsworth was off after it, covering the ground in great leaping strides.

"Uhhhh!" Marshall moaned, clenching his teeth. The pitch had pulled the sprained muscles

and tendons of his left shoulder. He clutched his right hand around his shoulder. "That was stupid," he gritted.

Wadsworth was quickly back, dropping the cone onto Marshall's lap. But Eden grabbed it up and tossed it, maybe a third of the distance Marshall had. "He's too fast!" she gasped. "And, you, you'd better lie back a bit and rest that shoulder.  I'll do what I can to entertain Waddy."

"Deal," Marshall sighed, lowering himself gingerly back onto the blanket just as Wadsworth returned again, this time stepping with his front paws onto Marshall's stomach.

"Off, beast!" Eden laughed, actually concerned as she pushed on Wadsworth's broad chest.  "I thought your job was to serve and protect, not mutilate your master."

"He's not in harness," Marshall said again. "When he's not, he's just my big ol' dog." 

Wadsworth, agreeing, happily licked Marshall's chin, picked up the dropped cone, and set it high on his chest from where it promptly rolled off.

"I've got it," Eden announced, tossing it again.  She did that over and over for nearly half an hour while Marshall lay perfectly still, trying to calm his shoulder.  "You said...what was her name...Mellow?...wasn't a shepherd?"

"Yellow lab. Most guide dogs nowadays are some sort of lab or retriever. They don't use shepherds very much any more."

"Why not?"

"Too protective. Some of them can get a bit aggressive about it."

"But Wadsworth...?"

"He comes from a long line of guide dogs. His father and grandfather both sired lots of good ones with such a proven reputation, that they keep using them.  I think they mostly match them with grown men, though.  They're very careful about the matches they make.  And Wadsworth

is a big shepherd, 120 pounds of dog, so it takes a bigger, stronger blind person to handle him."  He winced.  "Which, however, is not me at the moment."

"Would you tell me more about when you were a boy, what it was like for you then?"

"You really want to know?"

"Mmm hmmm," she said, lying beside him, hoping Wadsworth would get the message she was tired of throwing the cone. The dog tried a few more times to get her to toss it, but finally settled beside Marshall, his chin resting across his master's thigh.

"All my first memories revolve around Jeffrey. I guess that's inevitable."

"You say he knew you were blind, even when he was very little?"

"Somehow he did. The other kids his age didn't really seem to understand, but Jeffrey was different. I was really premature, very small for a while, and my mother told me how he would hover around, watching over me even when he was just three himself. By the time I was two or so, I'd caught up with my growth and he wouldn't let me stay in the playpen where my mother thought I'd be safe.  I didn't want to stay in the playpen, either, so between the two of us my mother seldom had a peaceful moment."

"What sorts of things would he do, other than teaching you to walk with the box, I mean?"

"He wanted me to know what things were so he was always putting something in my hands for me to feel or taste or use. It's very hard when you're discovering the world small bit by small bit

to understand what a whole, large thing is like. So he'd take me to the driveway and have me

feel all the different parts of my father's car, then sit me down and put a toy car in my hands

and we'd go over the same parts kind of back and forth with the real car so I'd grasp somewhat what a full-sized car is like."

"I'd never thought of that," she murmured.

"Even with something as simple as a chair," he continued. "I learned a chair by feeling its rungs and its legs and its seat and its back, but left on my own, the concept of a whole chair wouldn't be real for me. So he'd bring home a chair he'd borrowed from some little girl's dollhouse and let me feel it. He did that with as many small versions of big things as he could get ahold of.  I still have no real idea how right I am in how I perceive certain things.  There's no way to communicate that to a sighted person. And, then, well, there are things there just are no small versions of...like the sky."

"And rainbows," she said softly to herself.

He held out his right hand to her again and she slid hers into it.  His fingers curved around hers then glided slowly over the surface of her palm. "This is how I see," he whispered, "and sometimes I can almost feel my hands breathing."  His fingers continued moving over her hand. "This is how I gaze at your hand. It's smooth and warm and I can hold the whole of it in my own hand; I can hold it, rehold it, go on holding it and that, for me, is gazing. Shape, texture, weight, temperature...those are the things I look for.  Jeffrey wanted to be sure I didn't find...lack...in myself, that my perceptions were simply another way of seeing, another way of being.  He didn't want me to see blindness as an unalterable negative condition but as something secondary to my personhood."

Entranced, she watched his fingers moving over her hand. He'd done something similar back at the B&B, and the pure delight of it was instantly there again. His touch made her feel 'known'

in a new way, a deeper, more thorough way.  His thumb pad moved around her wrist, lightly turning her hand, sliding up the back of it, along the ridges of her knuckles. She trembled slightly.

He lifted his head toward her face as though asking a question. "I...I like it when you gaze," she said almost inaudibly.

Setting her hand gently down, his fingers moved to her neck, sliding from her jaw line down around under her ear then across to the hollow where his thumb made light circles as his forefinger explored up the length of her collar bone. She closed her eyes, tipping her head back, baring her throat to him. He slid his whole palm up the length of her neck, fingers spreading out, meeting at the tip of her chin, then spreading again, curving up to her lips, one fingertip lightly passing over the warm, wet softness inside her lower lip.

A sudden breeze kicked up, blowing the edge of the blanket over her leg. Wadsworth lifted his head, looking around, then shifted his position and settled back alongside Marshall, his large

tail swishing into his master's face. Marshall made a sound half-sigh, half-chuckle and moved his hand from Eden's face.

"It's getting cloudy," he said.  "Probably rain by suppertime."

She looked up at the grey clouds moving in from the west, low stratus ones blowing toward them over the distant treetops. He was right. For someone who could only guess at what the sky was, he was pretty good.  They got to their feet and, together, folded the blanket.  She held his hand and, harness-free, Wadsworth bounced along nearby as they headed up the smooth slope to where she'd parked the car.

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