When Crickets Cry

by Charles Martin

At dawn, the

shadows fall ahead of you, reaching out to touch the coming day. At noon, you stand on your shadows, caught somewhere between what was and what will be. At dusk, the shadows fall behind you and cover your tracks.

Beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and devil are fighting there, and the battlefield is the heart of man.

And God? He’s in these hills because we are.

I have since come to believe that the cry of the cardinal, heard at random across the planet, out every bedroom window or screened back porch, is the sound of the multitudes pleading for the one.

Trying to fill that God-shaped hole with a bigger house, another boat, a second mistress, whatever.

“From out of your heart, you speak.”

On the front was engraved Above all else, guard your heart . . . And on the back . . . for it is the wellspring of life.

stroked her hair, breathed deeply, and whispered inside myself, I knew it was love, and felt it was glory.

That afternoon many of the pieces fell into place, and it struck me that doctors can help people get well, even prolong their lives, but they cannot heal them or make them whole. That’s something else.

“A joyful heart is good medicine, but a broken spirit dries up the bones.”

“That I’m selling crickets so I can buy somebody’s heart.”

“I shot an arrow into the air, it fell to earth, I knew

not where; for so swiftly it flew, the sight could not follow in its flight. I breathed a song into the air, it fell to earth I knew not where; for who has sight so keen and strong, that it can follow the flight of a song? Long, long afterward, in an oak, I found the arrow still unbroke, and the song, from beginning to end, I found again in the heart of a friend.”

if anything in this universe reflects the fingerprint of God, it is the human heart.

The heart is not only the most unselfish of organs, it is also the most courageous and faithful.

From the moment we are born, every human on the planet is dying.

“Only if you listen closely, and you want to, can you hear when crickets cry.”

“Why do they cry?” Annie thought for a minute. “Because they know.” “They know what?” I asked. She looked at me as if it were so simple. “They know that if Dr. Royer doesn’t find a heart, and Aunt Cici doesn’t find somebody who can put it in me, and I don’t stay healthy until then, and we don’t find

the money to pay for it, then . . . I won’t be here next year to talk to them.” She put her head back down on my shoulder and closed her eyes. “And . . . because they know it’s their life for mine.”

“Guard your heart, for it is the wellspring of life.”

The medical term is cachexia. The more common expression is “death warmed over.”

“Lord, You’re the only one here who knows what You’re doing, so we ask that You come hang out with us a bit. Be the guest of honor at this table.

“Annie, the best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched; they must be felt with the heart.”

If you wanted to know what he was really feeling, what his heart might say, you needed to listen to him breathe through that harmonica.

Like the scalpel I was so accustomed to working with, Emma’s death severed me. I watched my heart roll through the dirt like a discarded piece of rotten fruit, beating outside myself.

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more; it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

But still the heart doth need a language .

Hope is not the result of medicine or anything that science has to offer. It is a flower that sprouts and grows when others pour water upon it.

I loved this, the feeling of absolute and eternal optimism, the feeling that no matter how bad or no matter how dire the circumstances or predictions, that until death has been declared and the sheet rolled up over the patient’s eyes, that even beyond the flatline, anything is possible.

Life is where the blood flows.

The heart doesn’t just pump blood, it is our source of emotion. Out of it and because of it, people laugh, cry, get angry, grow sad, know joy, empathize, live with a full range of emotions.

Remember, I am not the only one. There are others. And we all cry, “Be near me when my light is low, when the blood creeps, and the nerves prick and tingle; and the heart is sick, and all the wheels of Being slow. Be near me when the sensuous frame is rack’d with pains that conquer trust;and Time, a maniac scattering dust, and Life, a Fury slinging flame.”

I am ashes where once I was fire.

Emma lived to be thirty because you gave her the hope that she might live past that.”