He shrugged. “Look. I’m not happy, if that’s what you’re asking. But I must believe the doctors were doing their best.”

I couldn’t believe his tolerance. Most people would have been at a lawyer’s office. I guess the Reb felt if there was a reason for his rescue, it wasn’t to file lawsuits.

“Maybe I have a little more to give,” he said.

Or get.

“When you give, you get,” he said.

I walked right into that one.

Now, I knew the Reb believed that corny line. He truly was happiest when he could help someone. But I assumed a Man of God had no choice. His religion obliged him toward what Lincoln called “the better angels of our nature.”

On the other hand, Napoleon once dismissed religion as “what keeps the poor from murdering the rich.” Meaning, without the fear of God-or literally the hell we might have to pay-the rest of us would just take what we wanted.

The news headlines certainly endorsed that idea. In recent months, there had been terrorist train blasts in India, greedy executives sentenced in the Enron fraud case, a truck driver who’d shot five girls in an Amish schoolhouse, and a California congressman sent to jail for taking millions in bribes while living on a yacht.

Do you think it’s true, I asked the Reb that day, that our nature is evil?

“No,” he said. “I believe there is goodness in man.”

So we do have better angels?

“Deep down, yes.”

Then why do we do so many bad things?

He sighed. “Because one thing God gave us-and I’m afraid it’s at times a little too much-is free will. Freedom to choose. I believe he gave us everything needed to build a beautiful world, if we choose wisely.

“But we can also choose badly. And we can mess things up something awful.”

Can man change between good and evil?

The Reb nodded slowly. “In both directions.”

Human nature is a question we’ve grappled with for centuries. If a child were raised alone, separate from society, media, social dynamics, would that child grow up kind and openhearted? Or would it be feral and bloodthirsty, looking out solely for its own survival?

We’ll never know. We are not raised by wolves. But clearly, we wrestle with conflicting urges. Christianity believes Satan tempts us with evil. Hindus see evil as a challenge to life’s balance. Judaism refers to a man’s righteous inclination versus his evil inclination as two warring spirits; the evil spirit can, at first, be as flimsy as a cobweb, but if allowed to grow, it becomes thick as a cart rope.

The Reb once did a sermon on how the same things in life can be good or evil, depending on what, with free will, we do with them. Speech can bless or curse. Money can save or destroy. Science can heal or kill. Even nature can work for you or against you: fire can warm or burn; water can sustain life or flood it away.

“But nowhere in the story of Creation,” the Reb said, “do we read the word ‘bad.’ God did not create bad things.”

So God leaves it to us?

“He leaves it to us,” he replied. “Now, I do believe there are times when God clenches his fist and says, ‘Ooh, don’t do it, you’re gonna get yourself into trouble.’ And you might say, well, why doesn’t God jump in? Why doesn’t he eliminate the negative and accentuate the positive?

“Because, from the beginning, God said, ‘I’m gonna put this world into your hands. If I run everything, then that’s not you.’ So we were created with a piece of divinity inside us, but with this thing called free will, and I think God watches us every day, lovingly, praying we will make the right choices.”

Do you really think God prays? I asked.

“I think prayer and God,” he said, “are intertwined.”

I stared at him for a moment, marveling at the way he was speaking, analyzing, making jokes. Just weeks ago, hands were being wrung for him, tears were being cried. Now this. His daughter called it a miracle. Maybe it was. I was just relieved that he was better-and that his eulogy could wait.

We heard a honk. The taxi had arrived.

“So, anyhow” he said, wrapping up, “that is the story of my recent life.”

I stood and gave him a hug, a little tighter than usual.

No more scares, okay?

“Ah,” he laughed, jerking a thumb skyward. “You’ll have to take that up with my boss.”

The story of my recent life. I like that phrase. It makes more sense than the story of my life, because we get so many lives between birth and death. A life to be a child. A life to come of age. A life to wander, to settle, to fall in love, to parent, to test our promise, to realize our mortality-and, in some lucky cases, to do something after that realization.

The Reb had achieved that.

And so had someone else.

Not Henry-although he certainly lived many lives.

But I refer here to his trusty elder, the man with one leg, who nudged and cajoled me until finally, on a cold night, in a plastic-covered section of the church, he said, in a scratchy voice, “Mister Mitch, I got to share this with you…”

Anthony “Cass” Castelow, it turned out, did have an eye-popping tale: he’d been a star athlete in a big family, gone to the army, come home, become a local drug dealer.

“But okay, now. Here’s what I really need to tell you…”

And this was the story of his recent life.

“Eighteen years ago-back when I had both my legs-I was stabbed in the stomach in a place called Sweetheart’s Bar. I was selling drugs outa there. Two guys came in, and one guy grabbed me from behind and the other guy took the drugs and stabbed me. I nearly died in the hospital. I was gurgling blood. Doctors said I’d be lucky to live through the night. But when I got out, I went back to drugs again.

“Not long after that, the drugs got me sent to prison. Three years. I became a Muslim in there, because the Muslims were clean, they took care of their bodies, and a guy named Usur showed me how to pray, you know, five times a day, on the prayer mats, do the salahs, say ‘Alahu Akbar.’

“But this guy, Usur, at the end of it all, he’d whisper, ‘In Jesus’s name, amen.’ I pulled him to the side one day and he says, ‘Listen, man, I’m a Muslim in here, but my family out there, they’re Christian. I don’t know if it’s Allah or Jesus Christ after this life. I’m just trying to get in, you understand me? ’Cause I ain’t never going home, Cass. Do you understand that I’m gonna die in here?’

“Well, I left prison and that kinda messed me up. I drifted away from anything with God and I got back into drugs-crack, pills, weed. Lost all my money. With no place to go, I went back to the Jeffries Projects, where I grew up, and which was abandoned now and being torn down. I kicked in the back door of a unit and slept in there.

“And that was the first night I called myself homeless.”

I nodded along as Cass spoke, still not sure where he was going with this. His hat was pulled over his ears and his glasses and graying beard gave him an almost artsy look, like an aged jazz musician, but his old brown jacket and his amputated leg told a truer tale. When he spoke, his few remaining teeth poked from his gums like tiny yellowed fence posts.

He was determined to get through this story, so I rubbed my hands to keep warm and said, “Go on, Cass.” Smoke came from my mouth, that’s how cold it was in the church.

“All right, Mister Mitch, now here’s the thing: I almost died a couple times in those projects. Once, I came back at night and as soon as I walked in, someone whacked me over the head with a gun and cracked my skull open. I never did find out why. But they left me there for dead, bleeding, with my pants pulled down and my pockets turned out.”