Doc

by Mary Doria Russell

heart. “Yes, but I don’t know how!” So he held her instead, and they stood together, letting themselves be lifted away, carried outside themselves toward a time and place beyond their imagining as the music raced and tumbled and sailed out through the darkness toward the Kansas prairie, demanding more and more of the man who played it— Going cold, Wyatt thought, He can’t keep this up. He’ll start to cough. His lungs will bleed again. But it was Wyatt himself who could not breathe, gripped by a fear so strong, it seemed to stop the beating of his heart. Fear that this dance would end too soon. Fear that this music would be wrenched away from Doc—from all of them—before it was meant to end. And though none of Wyatt’s prayers had ever once been answered, and though he knew that his soul was not pure and his faith was not strong, and though he could not understand why God always took the best and the sweetest to his bosom and left the dregs to get meaner and worse—in spite of it all, he