She threw a distracted glance my way, then turned back toward the cars. "I'm fine."
"You don't look fine," I said. "You look like a woman who's worried she'll make a mistake."
She gave me another look, but this time surprised.
"There's no cause for worry, sister," I went on. "Heaven has made our jobs very simple. The compass leads us to our Charges. The hourglass tells us when to act. The scythe cuts the cord that binds spirit to flesh. Then we may joyously greet the freed soul in the Name of our Lord Jesus Christ who judges most…"
I had lost her attention. She took a few impatient steps away from me and peered out over the traffic again.
I was not upset. I have been ignored before. Human nature is devilishly proud and often spurns those who try to help.
"Are you worried about the violence?" I asked. She moved away from my voice, but I followed her. Many try to flee from unpleasantness when they would be happier facing it. "I realize most new Reapers are sickened by the blood," I said. "I would guess you come from genteel society and have never seen the horrors of mutilation and disease. I promise you, though, you'll get used to the ugliness. Everyone does. We may still find it distasteful but not intolerably repugnant. We—"
"Shut up!" she snapped, wheeling to face me. "I'm finding you intolerably repugnant. Blood is just blood. You, you're—"
A truck horn trumpeted up the road, like Gabriel signaling all Reapers of Souls to their preordained missions. A tractor-trailer had been cut off by a lane-hopping sports car; then there was a chaos of brakes, ice, sun, the trailer jackknifing, the truck heeling over on one side as the driver tried to regain the road. The front grill of the truck passed through my insubstantial body as eighteen wheels of death crossed the median into oncoming traffic.
I forced my eyes to stay open. It was an exercise of discipline. I didn't want to watch, so I did. The destruction had a brutal sort of grandeur, like a dance of giants: some parts dizzyingly swift, others slow but inexorable. Brakes squealed and horns blared a musical accompaniment on top of an ongoing percussion of metal on metal.
The spectacle was so dazzling, I came close to forgetting my purpose…but then I saw the fourteen-year-old Reaper scrambling into the overturned tractor-trailer and I remembered my duty.
The Reaping was routine—my Charge was a mousy sort of man in his forties, impaled on the shaft of his steering wheel. The sand in my hourglass was down to the last few grains even as I arrived, but I had been a Reaper for nearly a decade and was adept at my work. Reaching into his solar plexus, I found his silver cord, pulled it out, and levered my scythe under it. As the last grain ran out, a sharp clean jerk severed the cord.
I sang a hymn of thanksgiving, as an example to the other Reapers. I tried to raise my voice loud enough for them to hear over the thundering din around me.
The moment the mousy man's soul slid from his body, he began apologizing. He assumed full blame for the accident…an example of self-centered pride, since he was not the cause, merely the effect. He also assumed blame for unhappiness in his own life and the lives of those he loved, and blame for various future miseries that would result from his death. In short, he was hysterical, and his remorse wasn't worth a cinder. I left him to babble and went in search of the young woman I'd been trying to instruct.
I found her on the embankment, sitting beside the body of a sixteen-year-old boy. Apparently he'd been thrown from one of the cars in the pileup below us. (Boys his age defy seat-belt laws…more self-centered pride.) His head was bloody, his hair spangled with beads of safety glass glinting red in the sunset. The Reaper woman rested her hand on his arm in a tender way I thought ill advised. "It doesn't do to become too attached," I told her as I drew near. "It can only interfere with doing your duty. You aren't even watching your hourglass. How will you know when his time runs out?"
"It already did," she said. She reached around behind her back and produced the hourglass for my inspection. It was as full as a newborn baby's. "I saved him," she said, looking at the hourglass as if she could hardly believe it herself.
"I don't understand."
"I didn't take him. The time came and I didn't cut his cord. After a while, the hourglass filled up again."
"Do you know what you've done?" I shouted at her.
"I've saved him. He's already stopped bleeding." The boy stirred under her hand. "He's going to be all right."
"Nothing is going to be all right! You've committed a monstrous sin, don't you see that? You're supposed to do penance; you're supposed to do as you're told. You've defied the will of Heaven. You've spit on our Savior's mercy!"
"He reminds me of my brother," she said, stroking the boy's cheek. I turned my head away, sickened. "I've been following him for weeks," she went on. "His name's John. He hates being called Johnny, but his mother still does it to tease him. He plays hockey…tries different ways to comb his hair to impress girls…"
"He's an ordinary teenager, nothing more," I said, grabbing her arm and yanking her smartly to her feet. "You've jeopardized your immortal soul on a whim I can't begin to understand. Don't you hold your soul precious? Don't you understand the risks? I had a sister…should I damn myself forever for some woman who merely reminds me of her?"
But it was too late to reason with her. The air around us grew suddenly warm and clean, scented with the breath of roses. I pushed the woman away from me and rushed a few steps down the embankment. For a moment, I glimpsed the radiant hand of an angel reaching out of nothingness to touch the woman's shoulder. Then she was gone.
At my feet, the boy lifted himself groggily on one elbow. Slowly shaking his head, he took the Name of our Lord in vain.
That was the kind of boy she had chosen to save.
For weeks afterward, I tried to put the incident out of my mind, but it repeatedly ambushed my thoughts. If I had one complaint about my role as a Reaper, it was my inability to affect the living world and guide it toward the path of righteousness. Now I had seen a way to have such an effect, but one I dared not use. Still, it fascinated me.
Standing at the bedside of a ninety-five-year-old woman, I suddenly wondered what would happen if I just walked away. Would her hourglass refill itself, her cancer vanish, her senility uncloud? Or would she remain a near-empty husk requiring a few more years of feeding and bathing? What sort of change would either alternative make in God's divine plan?
Watching a fool and his snowmobile crash through thin ice in the middle of a lake, I asked what would happen if I left him. Would he be rescued in some unforeseen way? Would he make medical headlines: Man Survives Hours of Icy Immersion. Would his doctors believe they could work marvels, when in fact it was my doing?
As I kept vigil with a family around the crib of a fevered infant, I thought of how easy it would be to answer their prayers, to give them their miracle. I imagined their jubilation, their relief, their effusive gratitude. With scarcely an effort, I could change their lives profoundly. I could grant them joy.
Oh, it was hard to cut that tiny cord.
In late June, I was relieved to gain a respite from the torment that lured me toward disobedience. I arrived on a Call in a quiet tree-shaded neighborhood, only to find my hourglass still gave my Charge abundant time to live. Three weeks, perhaps? A month? It was possible. Heaven sometimes arranged such interludes as vacations from the stresses of Reaping. Or perhaps it was simply a reward for me, recognizing my faithful ministry in death as in life. In the meantime, I would not be forced to choose between death and life. For a while, I had no tempting decisions to make.