Circling the airport, Steve saw emergency vehicles and three ambulances poised beside the runway. The runway was lit. The airport was lit up like a church—controllers having turned on every light they had available. He came in for what he knew would be a risky landing—partly rolling, partly skidding on the pontoon wheels in a strong crosswind. Power cut back and full flaps down, he touched down. Suddenly the plane lurched to the right as a tire blew out on contact with the ground. Skidding on one pontoon and the opposite wheel, the plane almost went into a ground loop. He was dismayed to realize he had no brakes to help him slow down. Grim-faced, on the verge of catastrophy, he struggled in the cockpit to keep sliding straight for what seemed like an eternity. Finally, the plane slowed and scraped to a stop.
As the Otter came to rest, leaning at an angle with a mangled wheel and its pontoon almost ripped off, Steve made a quick Sign of the Cross. He glanced over at Rob with a sigh of relief. Although it was a chilly night, the priest was covered with sweat. He realized he would not be flying again until he could have the plane fitted with a new wheel and pontoon, but he was relieved that he and Rob had brought the men back to safety.
Hands stretched into the airplane through the side doors to help the shivering men out into the waiting ambulances. They would be taken to the Unalaska hospital where they would be warmed out of their hypothermia.
Early on the following morning, Sergei and Steve were at the hospital where they learned that Jake Mackey had died during the night. One of the crew was hospitalized with a heart attack caused by the hypothermia. The others had been treated and released. While Sergei helped the Mackey family with funeral arrangements for Jake who had been one of his parishioners, Steve spent a few minutes with the heart attack patient, then left to go to the hangar that held his plane.
He found the lead mechanic inspecting the damage. “I guess I have to try to get it back to Juneau for repair,” Steve said.
“But the damage isn’t too bad,” the mechanic replied. “If it’s OK with you, I can repair the wheel and have a new pontoon shipped in here in a couple of days. It’d be a lot better than trying to get the plane back to Juneau. I could put on the skiis but there’s no convenient place to land with skiis at Juneau.”
“All right by me,” Steve said as he left to go to the newspaper office.
*****
“Father Murphy, I don’t understand. Why are you being so modest? You participated in a daring rescue. Good God, at night at sea and with a pontoon airplane—that’s big news. Those men would have been goners.” The speaker was a native Alaskan named Corbet, Editor-in-Chief at the paper. He offered Steve a cigarette and a cup of coffee as Steve sat in his office.
“I really didn’t do much. Yes, I flew the plane but the sea was pretty calm when we got there. No difficulty landing in the ocean. Rob, my copilot really did all the work. He was the one who yanked those guys out of the water, performed CPR on one of them. He deserves the credit.”
“Nonsense, Father Murphy. You and Rob are both heroes. We’re not going to play it down or let you forget it. And even if we drop your name from the story here as you suggest, what would be the point? The newspapers in Anchorage have already picked up on the story. It’ll be in their late editions today.”
Steve sat back in the chair. He was exhausted after only a couple of hours sleep. His hand was unsteady as he sipped his coffee. He looked at the tremor in his hand disgustedly. “Coffee’s good, but I’ve been drinking too much of this lately.”
“It’s the cold weather, Father. When I was in the Navy on Arctic duty, we drank Joe all day long. Tell ya, you’ll either get so’s you can take it in stride or it’ll kill you. Now let’s head down to the maintenance shed at the airport. I want a picture of you and Rob standing next to the plane you flew to make the rescue. Rob is over there now. Father, that rescue took gumption. Just because you’re a priest doesn’t mean you can’t take some credit for a heroic act.”
“I was holding back because I had something else on my mind,” Steve said, shrugging his shoulders and tagging along reluctantly behind the newsman.
*****
When news of the rescue hit the papers and TV, Steve was worried that the story would get back to the lower 48 and to Rhinehart in particular. However, rescues in the Aleutians were so common they attracted a lot of local attention, but the reports rarely went beyond Juneau and Anchorage.
After news of the rescue hit Anchorage, the metropolitan in Anchorage was on the phone to his counterpart, Bishop McPherson, the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Anchorage. “My compliments, Dear Brother. Your Father Murphy is a hero. That rescue off Dutch Harbor was a brilliant achievement.”
“Yes, it was,” Bishop McPherson agreed. Although he had read the news account, for the life of him, McPherson couldn’t remember who Murphy was. Had he assigned him to the islands and simply forgotten about it? Was his memory getting that bad? Perhaps Murphy was a visiting priest who just happened to be at Dutch Harbor. Yes, that must be it.
“Father Murphy deserves some special consideration, Dear Brother. Why don’t you visit Dutch Harbor, or better yet, call him into Anchorage for a big dinner in his honor?”
“I’d very much like to but I’m getting ready to travel to Rome. I have to leave tomorrow and won’t be back for several weeks. Let me think about it. Thanks for your interest.”
As Bishop McPherson hung up the phone, he felt bad about not doing something for Father Murphy, but the timing was terrible. He decided to send the priest a letter of congratulation and thanks. Since he did not know Father Murphy’s address, he had the letter forwarded to the Unalaska newspaper office. Reaching into the bottom drawer of his desk, he pulled out a roster of priests serving under him in Alaska but could not find a listing for a Father Stephen Murphy. “Why can’t we keep these lists up to date?” he muttered to himself. Temporarily putting the whole business out of his mind, the bishop sorted his papers for a crucial meeting at the Vatican where he would attend a meeting with the pope.
The next morning, after boarding the flight from Anchorage, the elderly bishop sat back and dozed off. As he did, he kept repeating to himself, “Murphy...Father Stephen Murphy. Where have I heard that name before? I wonder if this is the way it begins with Alzheimer’s. First you lose track of things; you can’t remember little things; then after awhile, you can’t remember anything. I wonder if it ever gets so bad you can’t remember who God is.”
33
In the following months, Steve continued his visits to the outer islands. He found some of the islands virtually deserted while at others he was dismayed to find that many of the inhabitants were cool to his visits and his message. Some were even downright hostile.
Narrowing his scope, he focused on Umak Island. The people on Umak were always happy to see the blue floatplane land in the cove. As the priest taxied the airplane to shore, four or five teenagers would run out over the beach and into the shallows to tie the craft to a stout pole anchored at the water’s edge. Then, shoes off and pants legs rolled up, Steve would hop out into the cold ankle-deep water where he would slosh ashore to be surrounded by smiling villagers. He always brought magazines to the isolated people on the island and cakes, candies and small toys for the children. Occasionally he brought a supply of fresh milk and bread from Unalaska. He never asked for payment and if it was offered, he always declined. Of all the islands he visited, this was his favorite. Father Sergei had been born on the island. He told Steve the people there were friendly and receptive but isolated and would benefit from spiritual and material help.
On Steve’s first visit, Sergei had accompanied him to the island to introduce the priest to the village elders. He seemed not to mind that Steve would try to convert them to Catholicism because he had tried to supplant shamanism with Russian orthodoxy and had failed. Maybe Steve would be able to get through to them. Sergei believed that any version of Christianity would be better for the people than shamanism.
Warily eyeing the tall st
eaming mountain called Atta in the background whenever he arrived on the island, Steve always asked if there had been any noisy rumblings since his last visit that might signify an impending eruption. But even if there were, none of the islanders would admit it because they were afraid that if word got back to the authorities, they would be forcibly moved from their homes to some strange place to which none of them wanted to go. Steve suspected he was never getting a straight answer.
The villagers lived in two lines of simple homes running beside a snow covered road that served as Umak’s main street. The homes were wooden and inside held reasonably comfortable furnishings. Steve noted that some of the homes had satellite dishes on the roofs. Evidently the villagers knew what was going on in the outside world. A small schoolhouse stood on the lower slope of a nearby mountain. The men supported the village with fishing and crabbing. The excess was sold to a company that ran a cannery on a neighboring island. The villagers were not well off in a material sense, but they were not poor and were content living in familiar surroundings as had their ancestors for many generations. They understood the priest’s gifts were not charity, but simply meant to return the favor for the hospitality and meals he had enjoyed in their homes.
On his later visits to Umak Island, Steve received permission from the parents to take the older children up for short airplane rides. The children, who had never been off their island and never flown in an airplane were astonished to see their village from above and were in awe of the steaming mountain that dominated the landscape as Steve flew the Otter high over the cinder cone at the top. He was careful to remain upwind of the steam and smoke.
On one visit, after landing and helping the children ashore, Steve saw a crowd gather to watch the village shaman in action. A seven year-old-boy had been out fishing with his father a few days before and had somehow gotten a fishhook embedded in the flesh of his leg. The father had promptly cut the hook free of the line and managed to get the hook out, however with quite a bit of damage to the tissues of the boy’s leg. Then, two days later, the swelling began and the shaman was called to heal the boy. Shortly after Steve’s arrival, the shaman, surrounded by a score of villagers, donned his tribal mask and sat cross-legged beside the boy who lay on the open ground on a blanket. Holding the bones of dead ancestors, the shaman began a ritual that filled the priest with wonder. With strange incantations, clicking of the bones, and dirty, scrawny hands held over the boy’s wound, the shaman proceeded to heal the wound. There was an audible gasp from the villagers. Everyone could plainly see the swelling actually go down, although the leg did not seem completely healed.
Steve, standing with the onlookers, thought the red infected wound still looked ominous. He never believed for a moment that a miracle of healing was taking place. The only explanation Steve could think of was that the boy had been put into a hypnotic state and his body was reacting to the swelling by power of suggestion. This did not seem too unusual to the priest because he remembered seeing a demonstration of hypnotism in which a subject was stuck on the forearm with a needle causing bleeding, after which the bleeding was stopped by means of a suggestion implanted by the hypnotist. Then, at the hypnotist’s command, the bleeding was started again and then stopped again. Steve had been convinced there was no trickery in the demonstration. It clearly evidenced the power of suggestion and the power of the mind to exercise some control over the body.
During the village ritual, although he was prepared to believe there was some improvement in the boy’s condition, what struck Steve as utterly ridiculous was the clicking of the old bones held by the shaman. He asked himself what possible ‘power’ could a few old bones hold? But suddenly he thought of the church’s relics of the saints. Weren’t they believed to hold some kind of power or influence with the almighty? Was the shaman doing anything the church didn’t do? Were the bones of native ancestors any less influential with the almighty than the bones of saints?
Despite the intervention of the shaman, within an hour after he had left, strutting away, convinced he had cured the boy, the swelling was back, every bit as painful and nasty-looking as before. The boy lay whimpering in pain. His parents were distraught because they had relied on a remedy that had been used by their forebears over hundreds of years. However, in this case, the shaman’s healing proved to be strictly temporary.
Hurrying to the floatplane, Steve grabbed a few supplies and went back to the boy. As he knelt beside the boy, it was obvious the lad was in terrible pain and a thin red line running from the wound up the leg told Steve the infection was spreading. Soon it would be too late. Steve, feeling he had no other choice, gave the boy a painkiller and waited for it to take effect. Then, after sterilizing a knife in a flame, he opened the wound, drained it, cleaned it and applied a liberal coating of antibiotic ointment. Next he bandaged the wound and told the boy’s parents to let their son sleep. He said he would spend the night on the island—sleeping in the plane, and if the boy was not showing improvement by morning, he would fly the family to the hospital at Unalaska. Mention of the hospital was a mistake because the shaman had convinced the villagers that hospitals were places to go to die. Didn’t everyone know, the shaman had frequently argued, that people would go into a hospital with one problem and die of something else—something bad they caught in the hospital? Wasn’t it obvious that demons lived in hospitals?
After dinner in one of the villager’s homes, Steve gathered some of the children around him at a campsite fire. He told them of the greatest shaman of them all—one named Jesus Christ.
The children fired questions at him: Did the greatest shaman talk to God as well as the demons? Did the greatest shaman heal the sick? Could he bring the dead back to life? Where is Jesus, the great shaman now?
Steve answered their questions by telling the story of Jesus’ call to the dead Lazarus to come forth. He told them of the blind man in the tree that Jesus cured. He told the wide-eyed children how the greatest shaman fed five thousand people with the fish in just a few baskets and how he had walked on the water. The children, in frightened wonder, began scanning the sea looking for the greatest shaman to come walking to their island on the water.
One little girl raised her hand: “Father Steve, what is that thing you have hanging down in front on your chest?”
Steve smiled at the pretty girl with jet black hair cut short with bangs in front. “It’s what we call a Crucifix. It has a figure of Jesus on it and the cross he died on. Now tell me, what’s your name and how old are you?”
“It’s Anya. I’m seven.”
“Sounds like a Russian name. Do you also have an Alaskan name?”
“Yes. It’s Oumam.”
“My that’s a pretty name,” Steve replied. “And how about you, young man. What’s your name?”
“My name is Pyotr and I’m a boy, not a man. After all, I’m only ten. My parents did not give me an Alaskan name.”
Looking around at the group of children, Steve asked, “Are all of you from Russian backgrounds? Do you go to a Russian church?”
“Most of the families are Russian,” Pyotr replied. “But we’re also Americans. I guess, mostly we’re Americans. We don’t go to Russian church; we don’t go to any church because there’s no church on Umak.”
“But doesn’t a Russian priest visit here once in awhile?”
“Yes, Father Sergius comes maybe once a year. Why do you come here anyway?”
“I come to bring gifts and to tell you about the Lord, Jesus. As soon as Jesus was born, a bright star appeared in the sky and Three Wise Men came from the east with gifts for the baby. Many people realized he was no ordinary baby.”
“Why? Was he fat? Did he weigh twenty pounds?”
“Well, no. What I mean is people believed Jesus was the Son of God.”
“Do you believe that, Father Steve?” Anya asked.
“Yes, I do. In fact, from the things Jesus said and the miracles he did, millions and millions of people believe it.
“
Now, Pyotr,” Steve asked, “do you know where your name comes from?”
“From my parents. They gave it to me.”
“What I mean, Pyotr, is the original meaning of your name. It means Peter. The rock. Jesus said to Peter, who was a fisherman: ‘You are the rock and upon this rock I will build my church.’ So, Pyotr, you are named after the man that Jesus picked to start his church.”
“My father’s a fisherman too,” Pyotr offered, apparently pleased about his ties to a fisherman of old who was selected by Jesus to do important things.
As Steve stoked the fire, he told them how Jesus had allowed bad men to crucify him so he could save the world from the bad things people did. He told how Jesus had brought himself back to life, and how Jesus, the greatest shaman who ever lived had descended into Hell where the most horrible demons dwelt and how he vanquished them and ordered them to remain in Hell for all eternity.
A little girl raised her hand. “Did Jesus smell bad like our shaman?” she asked.
“Certainly not,” Steve replied with a smile. “The greatest shaman smelled like the wildflowers you have here in your valley in springtime.”
Pyotr raised his hand: “You say Jesus was nailed to a cross and died. If he was such a great shaman and raised someone from the dead, why didn’t he save himself?”
“Many people have asked that same question, Pyotr. The answer is that Jesus wanted to suffer and die as a sacrifice for people’s sins. God the Father accepted the sacrifice of his son because people had done many bad things. Jesus’ death would allow people to go to heaven to be with God.”