Strangers

the muscular dystrophy victims, the suppurating wounds of the burn victims, the battered bodies of those whose parents had abused them: He wept for all of them.
        He could not imagine why Father Wycazik thought this duty would help him regain his lost faith. If anything, the existence of so many pain-racked children only reinforced his doubt. If the merciful God of Catholicism really existed, if there was a Jesus, why would He allow the innocent to endure such atrocities? Of course, Brendan knew all the standard theological arguments on that point. Mankind had brought all forms of evil upon itself by choice, the Church said, by turning away from the grace of God. But theological arguments were inadequate when he came face to face with these smallest victims of fate.
        By the second day, the staff was still calling him Brendan, but the children were calling him Pudge, a long-unused nickname which he divulged to them in the course of telling a funny story. They liked his stories, jokes, rhymes, and silly puns, and he found he could nearly always get a laugh or at least a smile out of them. That day, he went to the men's room and wept only once.
        By the third day, both the children and staff called him Pudge. If he had another metier besides the priesthood, he had found it at St. Joseph's. In addition to performing the usual tasks expected of an orderly, he entertained the patients with comic patter, teased them, drew them out. Wherever he went, he was greeted with cries of "Pudge!" that were a better reward than money. And he did not cry until he was back in the hotel room that he had taken for the duration of Father Wycazik's unconventional therapy.
        By Wednesday afternoon, the seventh day, he knew why Father Wycazik sent him to St. Joseph's. Understanding came while he was brushing the hair of a ten-year-old girl who'd been crippled by a rare bone disease.
        Her name was Emmeline, and she was rightfully proud of her hair. It was thick, glossy, raven-black, and its healthy luster seemed to be a defiant response to the sickness that had wasted her body. She liked to brush her hair a hundred strokes every day, but often her knuckles and wrist-joints were so inflamed that she could-not hold the brush.
        On Wednesday, Brendan put her in a wheelchair and took her to the X ray department, where they were monitoring a new drug's effects on her bone marrow, and when he brought her back to her room an hour later, he brushed her hair for her. Emmeline sat in the wheelchair, looking out a window, while Brendan pulled the soft bristles through her silken tresses, and she became enchanted with the winterscape beyond the glass.
        With a gnarled hand more suited to the body of an eighty-year-old woman, she pointed down to the roof of another, lower wing of the hospital. "See that patch of snow, Pudge?" Rising heat within the building had caused most of the snow to loosen and slide off the pitched roof. But a large patch remained, outlined by dark slate shingles. "It looks like a ship," Emmy said. "The shape. You see? A beautiful old ship with three white sails, gliding across a slate-colored sea."
        For a while Brendan could not see what she saw. But she continued to describe the imaginary vessel ' and the fourth time that he looked up from her hair, he suddenly was able to see that the patch of snow did, indeed, bear a remarkable and delightful resemblance to a sailing ship.
        To Brendan, the long icicles that hung in front of Emmy's window were transparent bars, the hospital a prison from which she might never be released. But to Emmy, those frozen stalactites were wondrous Christmas decorations that, she said, put her in the holiday mood.
        "God likes winter as much as He likes spring," Emmy said. "The gift of the seasons is one of His ways of keeping us from getting bored with the world. That's what Sister Katherine told us, and right away I could see it must be true. When the sun hits those icicles just right, they cast rainbows across my bed. Ever-so-pretty rainbows, Pudge. The ice and snow are like… like jewels… and ermine cloaks that God uses to dress up the world in winter to make us ooh and ah. That's why He never makes two snowflakes alike: it's a way of reminding us that the world He made for us is a wonderful, wonderful world."
        As if on cue, snowflakes spiraled down from the gray December sky.
        In spite of her nearly useless legs