Dinner Along the Amazon by Timothy Findley Page A

quick. She’s locked the door and you gotta come quick.”
    While they waited, Bertha telephoned, or at least tried to telephone Dr Hamilton, but she got many wrong numbers and irate answers before she finally reached him. All this while Harper stood, hands behind his back, standing silently by the front door.
    The situation having been explained, the first policeman, when he finally appeared on the verandah, carried an axe in his hand.
    Bertha was still on the telephone getting Dr Hamilton out of bed, so Harper let them in. “Please now, come quick,” she said and banged down the receiver. “The door’s upstairs,” she said to the policeman. “I guess she locked it first and then I broke another key trying to get it open. But we just got to get inside.”
    “All right m’am. We’ll try and be careful.”
    Harper followed at a distance behind them and stood at the far end of the hall while they broke the door down with the axe. Actually, all they did was hit it with the blunt edge of the axe-head and the lock and the doorjamb shattered, swinging the door wide on its hinges.
    Before they went in they set the axe against the wall beside Harper’s chair.
    “Is there a light?” one of the policemen asked Bertha.
    “Yes sir—over here.”
    Harper heard the light switch go on and then there was silence.
    Outside, the storm had broken and Mrs Jamieson had turned all the lights on in her house. Harper saw them flicker on through the window at the top of the stairs.
    Voices drifted from his mother’s bedroom and presently one of the policemen came out into the hall. He walked past Harper, patting him on the head as he did so, and went down the stairs at a trot.
    Presently Dr Hamilton came up the stairs in his black overcoat and hat, but underneath still dressed in his pajamas. He passed Harper and went straight to Mrs Dewey’s bedroom. The door closed.
    Harper sat at the top of the stairs. He was numb and cold and he could think of nothing to think about except Mrs Jamieson’s lights shining inquiringly forth from next door.
    In half an hour his mother’s door opened and another policeman came out and stood in the hall.
    “Harper?” he said.
    “Yes.”
    “Come here,” he said gently, “don’t be frightened.”
    Harper got up and pulled his pajama bottoms up tighter around his waist. He took a final look at Mrs Jamieson’s windows and went meekly down the hall. The policeman took his hand.
    “Your nanny wants to see you,” he said.
    Harper guessed that he meant Bertha.
    When they went in the lights had been turned very low and Harper could only just make out the shapes of the furniture in the room. It still smelt of the spilt perfume.
    Bertha was sitting on the far side of his mother’s bed and Dr Hamilton was standing on the near side. There were three policemen in the room, huddled over by the highboy. His mother lay on the bed under a blanket.
    The policeman took Harper around the foot of the bed to beside Bertha.
    Bertha took his hand now and the policeman went back to the bedroom door.
    Harper focused on Bertha.
    “Honey,” she said, “I guess we didn’t just pray enough—and now we’ll have to pray a whole lot more.” She was crying, but she pulled him close to her shoulder and looked right into his eyes and smiled. “God does a lot of funny things—he has a lot of funny ways for us to walk. I’m just awful sorry that I ain’t walked closer to your mother and to you these past few months or this might never have happened.” She blinked away some tears and looked down for a moment. She buttoned up his pajamas coat where it was undone and looked at him again. “We went and lost her, Harper” she said simply. “We went and lost your mother to the Lord.”
    Harper looked shyly at the bed.
    His mother was covered to her chin with a blanket, which was folded back down from her face onto her chest.
    She looked confused and her forehead was wrinkled as though in deep thought and conjecture. Her