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Show fto was no longer with us. Later, another child was brought in with a broken bone. But the healer was gone; there was no one to set i t . Our people had always reserved the miracles of birth and death and the agony of wounds to the family - to familiar surroundings and loving faces and to the hands of their healer, who had as much influence with the Lord as he had with the science of medicine. It would not be easy to change, to join the s t e r i l e steel-and-glass society of plexiglas chairs and immobile faces and pay dues to hospitals and strangers they suspected of violating their own most important vows. Faces I had not seen for years appeared' befdre mine and the years of separation dissolved in tears and we were one family again. Love bridged the distances and conquered the unknown. Someday, I vowed to myself, I will know them a l l - and they will know me. Each mother and child, each aunt and uncle that were mine through my father and yet had lost i n d i v i d u a l i t y to his encompassing effulgence would become t r u l y mine. Now t h a t he was gone, his shining just an afterglow, we would be able to see each other in a truer light -- for his sake and for our own. Uncle Arthur spoke. Already he had assumed the. heavy mantle of r e s p o n s i b i l i t y and his voice bore the weight of grief and unfathomable duty. Tears escaped that fingers that p e r i o d i c a l l y rubbed his eyes in i r r i t a t i o n - my f a t h e r ' s gesture,-my f a t h e r ' s place. "The l a s t words our Ad e^a r RRuulloonn ssaaid^ to me were, "Arthur, T, _ .. wiq throat clicked and he clenched I m counting on y o u . . . His xnrud.o his t e e t h . "That was twenty minutes before he die After a long, thick silence, he continued. "There |