Bennet Sonneford

Bennet Sonneford’s encounter with Father Stefan Wycazik turns the treatment of Winton Tolk into a challenge to the surgeon’s certainty: a small injury disappears during surgery, leaving Sonneford struggling to reconcile what he saw with his long-held atheism.

The Surgeon and Winton Tolk’s Operation

The day after Winton Tolk was shot at a sandwich shop, Sonneford received Father Stefan Wycazik at his home in Chicago, Illinois. Wycazik had found the surgeon’s address through contacts at the telephone company and police department, and arrived at seven-thirty on Christmas night to ask about Brendan Cronin, who worked with him at St. Bernadette’s. In a spacious, fish-lined den, beneath more than thirty mounted fish and among a case of trophies, Sonneford continued tinkering with a fly-casting reel as Wycazik explained his concern that Brendan might be in trouble for interfering with officers. Sonneford dismissed the accusation: without Brendan’s care, he said, Tolk would have died. Tolk had received four and a half liters of blood; at one hundred kilograms, he would normally have had about seven liters in his body, and Sonneford estimated that he had lost more than sixty percent before reaching the emergency room. An additional liter had been given in the ambulance.

The Vanishing Injury and Crisis of Belief

Sonneford’s account of the operation made the mismatch between Tolk’s blood loss and his injuries harder to explain. After locating the bullets on X-rays and beginning transfusions, he found a tiny hole in the superior mesenteric artery and a small tear in a superior intercostal vein. Expecting to find more severed vessels, he clamped both for repair, then stitched the artery first because its bleeding came in spurts and was more serious. When he turned to the vein, its tear had disappeared. The doctor offered no explanation; the missing injury was precisely what Wycazik wanted him to describe.

Rather than rejoice at what Wycazik regarded as the hand of God, Sonneford sank deeper into despair. He disclosed that he had been raised Lutheran but had been an atheist for twenty-five years. Wycazik understood this as the source of the surgeon’s distress and began trying to draw him back toward faith. The scene closes on that hopeful effort with an ominous qualification: before the day was over, Wycazik’s euphoria would give way to bitter disappointment.

Control, Craft, and the Unexplained

The den frames Bennet Sonneford through images of mastery: trophies line the room, a marlin seems forever to swim above his desk, and he works carefully on the small mechanisms of a fishing reel. Even his own pale, slightly protuberant features recall the fish surrounding him. Against this world of collected trophies and precise repair, the vanished injury marks a limit to what skill and observation can command. Sonneford’s despair gives that contrast its force: the unexplained does not arrive as a welcome confirmation, but unsettles the practiced confidence by which he has understood his work and his life.

An Unresolved Witness

Sonneford’s importance lies less in any declared change of belief than in the gap between testimony and interpretation. His surgical account makes him a precise witness to an event he cannot explain, while Wycazik immediately reads that event through faith. The narrative grants neither man a settled victory: Sonneford’s distress resists the priest’s hopeful reading, and the forecast of Wycazik’s later disappointment prevents his appeal from serving as a simple conversion scene. Sonneford therefore remains a point of unresolved contact between medical knowledge and religious conviction, with the unexplained injury altering the terms of his certainty without revealing what he will ultimately believe.