Our Lady of the Forest Read online

  It was, she felt certain, not a fantasy or dream but more like something from a science-fiction movie, a UFO or a government experiment she wasn’t supposed to know about. She didn’t want to present herself out in the open and stayed behind the concealment of ferns where she could watch for it in pursuit of her and, if need be, flee again. But the woods, as always, were indifferently still; there was no sign of a traveling light. Ann clutched her rosary between her cold fingers. Perhaps, it occurred to her, troublingly, the light had something to do with Satan.

  When she saw it again, off to her left, it seemed to her that it was spinning violently, or vibrating and shimmering. It was closer this time, and lower too, and feeling now that she couldn’t outrun it she held up her rosary like a shield. Leave me alone, get out of here! she said. Just get out of here!

  Instead, as she told her inquisitors later, it glided toward her in a frightening arc, dropping first and then advancing. It loomed larger and more distinct until it was clearly a human figure—she could make out a spectral, wavering face and a pair of incandescent hands—levitating just off the forest floor thirty yards away. It was now too brilliant, too luminous, to behold, so still staving it off with the rosary, she used her free hand to cover her eyes and peeked, squinting, between her fingers. Don’t hurt me! she said, feeling at its mercy. Please, please, go away!

  She dropped to her knees, squeezed shut her eyes, and told God she would never sin again in return for divine intervention. She told herself, too, that she meant it. She meant to keep this bargain. When she looked once more, a few seconds later, the light was already retreating through the trees, borne away like a soap bubble, silent, swift, and ascending through branches but touching none, no needles or leaves, avoiding obstacles as if it could see them, guiding itself in departure.

  Ann, relieved, found her way out of the woods in slightly more than an hour. At her campsite she sat in her car for a long time, blowing her nose and shivering. That evening she couldn’t eat anything or concentrate on reading her Bible and feeling uneasy about the coming night, went with a flashlight to Carolyn Greer, who lay in her sleeping bag inside her van, reading by the glow from a candle lantern and eating baby carrots. It’s raining, said Carolyn. Come on in. You don’t really look too… healthy.

  I think I have a cold, answered Ann.

  The shades were drawn and a small cone of incense burned in a cast-iron pan. Rain battered the van’s roof like gravel falling from the sky. Ann’s face, in the candle’s glow, was grave and animated. Carolyn lay and listened to Ann’s story. When it was finished she sighed, sat up, stretched, slipped a marker into her book, and pulled a rubber band around the bag of carrots. It sounds like the sun, said Carolyn.

  I was in the woods. There wasn’t any sun.

  You must have been dreaming.

  I wasn’t asleep.

  You don’t think you were.

  Well take right now. It was like right now. Right now I know I’m completely awake. I don’t have to pinch myself or anything like that. No way I’m really sleeping.

  How do you know?

  I’m completely awake.

  Were you high, Ann?

  That isn’t it.

  A ball of light. Floating around.

  With a person in it, like I said. A ball of light. Exactly.

  It sounds to me like it has to be the sun. Didn’t you ever look at the sun too long? Today—today it was sunny.

  But I was in the woods. In shade.

  That or else you were having a dream. I’ve had dreams I thought were real. What else could it be?

  It could be something like a UFO.

  I don’t think so. UFOs? That just doesn’t work for me. I’m totally rational about things.

  Well it wasn’t normal.

  A UFO?

  It’s crazy, I agree with you.

  How can a little ball of light floating around out in the woods with a person’s face inside of it be an unidentified flying object?

  I don’t know. It’s crazy.

  A UFO is a spaceship. If you believe in UFOs, they’re spaceships.

  I don’t believe in them.

  So it wasn’t one.

  It was something though.

  It was just the sun.

  You keep coming back to that.

  What else is there?

  I don’t know. An experiment? The government doing something?

  Do you mean like maybe the CIA? Is that what you think is going on here?

  I don’t know. The military?

  The military doing something with a little ball of light that has a person stuck inside it.

  Ann gave no answer to this. Carolyn tossed her the bag of carrots. Have some, she said. Go ahead.

  Ann sat with the carrots in her lap. I’m a Christian, she said. Sort of. I guess. And the devil hates all Christians.

  So now you’re saying what you saw was the devil?

  Satan hates religious people.

  Then it’s good that I’m not religious, isn’t it.

  No it’s not. You should be something.

  But science explains things so much better. The earth getting made in six days? Women coming from the ribs of men? Who can believe that nonsense?

  That’s not the right way to read the Bible. You have to interpret it.

  Well what are you saying? Are you saying you were out in the woods picking mushrooms today when Satan attacked you in the form of a ball of light with a person stuck inside it?

  No, but—

  It sounds more like a visit from God. The bright light—it’s a dead giveaway. Bright light, visit from God. Guy with horns, Satan.

  They say that Satan wears disguises, though.

  A ball of light with a person inside it. Satan gets creative.

  Ann laughed. So I’m seeing things, she said. Maybe I’m mental or something.

  Okay. I’ll be candid with you. There’s people around who think that’s true. Because one you’re kind of a loner and two you keep that hood down all the time. You do act a little bizarre.

  It keeps my head warm.

  It’s not me who thinks you’re mental.

  Who is it then?

  Other people in the campground.

  I’m not very good at being social.

  There’s more to it than that I’ll bet you.

  Anyway, said Ann, it wasn’t the sun. And I’m not going out in the woods tomorrow.

  I’ll go along, answered Carolyn. I want to rip off your mushroom spots anyway.

  When Ann insisted she wouldn’t go, Carolyn pulled from around her neck a small canister of pepper spray she wore on a loop of braided leather. No worries, she said. Because this stuff here is totally killer. We see the devil I’ll spray him with this. It’ll give him cardiac arrest.

  In the morning they set out in a mist that blurred the treetops, the woods wet from the night’s hard rain, the light gray and the branches dripping, the maple bottom and the copse of alders sodden with new lost leaves. Carolyn had a quadrangle map and she watched it as much as she watched the world, following the contours with her fingertips and taking readings from the altimeter and compass she had strung around her neck. She wrote notes in a timber cruiser’s field book made of small waxed pages. When they traversed the rotten log straddling the creek she stopped halfway, above its wet boulders, and looked upstream, then at the map, then upstream again. UFO Creek this is called.

  What?

  Fryingpan Creek I mean a tributary of it, depending on how you read this. We’re crossing it here I’m going to guess. At this little V in the contours.

  Don’t fall in.

  Okay. I’ll try.

  That log is slick.

  Okay already.

  They found the elk trail Ann had taken and wound through the labyrinth of blowdowns. Carolyn, two steps behind, meditated on an enduring theme: that her legs were too fat and that no matter what she did, diet, exercise, both together, they would always be bloated and disgusting. Her parents’ genes,
she felt, were a curse. It was her fate to grow fatter despite every effort. On the other hand Ann was too much of a waif. Flat-chested, mousy, no hips, a boy’s gait. A sickly, child-size runway model. We’re headed east, Carolyn said. Isn’t that like the Muslims? Don’t the Muslims always face east?

  They face… Mecca.

  I’ve heard that too.

  Christians don’t do any of that.

  That’s because they own the whole world. They face anywhere, it’s theirs already. They don’t have to choose a direction.

  You’re not explaining it the right way you know.

  This is more like south-southeast. Stop. Let me look at the compass.

  There were mushrooms Ann had missed the day before and they picked them for half an hour. Carolyn pondered a plan for the evening. It didn’t matter to her that Ann was slightly off, obsessive, eccentric, cryptic, a loner. Ann was inoffensive in most regards, and her religious fervor was interesting. Carolyn decided to offer to drive her to the laundromat in North Fork. They could eat next door at the Chinese restaurant while their clothes were in the dryers. Then they could split a cheap motel room, take showers, watch television, sleep between sheets. It would be good for Ann’s cold anyway, her incessant hacking and wheezing. It was time, felt Carolyn, for some creature comforts, ones that didn’t cost very much.

  They ate a breakfast of dried apricots Carolyn had brought folded up in a scarf and some toffee-covered peanuts and potato chips. Ann took her antihistamine, blew her nose, and coughed. This seems right, she insisted. This is where I was yesterday. The hill I climbed is that way.

  It’s going to rain.

  How do you know?

  I feel it in my bones, said Carolyn.

  That’s not very scientific.

  It doesn’t prove Jesus is God’s son, either.

  That’s not a matter of proof.

  Carolyn spread her map on the ground and set the compass on its corner. Then she rotated the map a little until it lay aligned with the land. That hill, she said. Here’s the contours of it. It’s a little north of where you say it is if I’m reading the contours right.

  I’m sure you are.

  You’re more sarcastic than previously noted.

  I wasn’t trying to be sarcastic.

  Uh-huh, said Carolyn. Okay. Sure. What’s up with your car, by the way?

  My car seems like it’s permanently dead.

  Maybe Jesus can start it for you.

  I don’t really know what I’m going to do.

  Why don’t you get it fixed or something?

  Money, basically. I’m broke.

  They climbed the hill and thrashed through the thicket of Oregon grape and salal. Beyond it was the dank-smelling forest in which Ann had seen the ball of light. They went in and began to pick mushrooms embedded in coverts of feather moss. Silence overtook them now. Neither spoke and while they searched for chanterelles they listened to the rain dripping out of the branches. The ground here is spongy, said Carolyn finally. I’m glad I wore my rubber boots.

  This is the beginning of something new for me. I told God yesterday I wouldn’t sin anymore.

  You’re not a sinner.

  Everyone is.

  Then we’re all in the same boat.

  It’s the boat to hell.

  I’m changing the subject, said Carolyn. Get yourself some better shoes so your feet aren’t soaked all the time.

  I’d do that if I had the money for shoes.

  In the meantime let’s smoke dope, okay?

  I told you I can’t sin anymore.

  Dope isn’t sin.

  I don’t want any. Ann stopped and pulled out her crucifix. I’m going to say the rosary, she said. It’ll take me a little while.

  Pray for shoes and an end to your cold.

  I’m just going to say the rosary.

  Pray for money.

  You can’t do that.

  I’ll wait for you. I’ve got a book to read.

  What is it?

  A travel book. I read them all the time. It’s the only way I get any sun.

  Carolyn found refuge under a tree and ate more apricots. What am I doing here? she asked herself. How did I end up in this spot? For seven years she’d taken classes at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, eventually declaring in General Studies and writing papers on Lewis Mumford, Gravity’s Rainbow, Late Pleistocene burials, urban horticulture as a radical practice, and the regulation of organic farming. She’d also participated in a mushroom study in the Olympic Biosphere Reserve. It involved much camping and record keeping and a considerable amount of hash. For two summers she’d worked on a Forest Service crew, burning the slash in clear-cuts. She’d pondered a career in urban planning, also going to graduate school to become a mycologist. But both options seemed compromising. It was better to be a vagabond. Carolyn had liberated herself from the work ethic years before, shedding it like a chrysalis. She was not romantic about unemployment, but her parents felt she was. They lived not far from Terre Haute, Indiana. Her father sold life and car insurance; her mother owned a laundromat. They were banal and overweight Midwest people who incited in Carolyn a deep rage. She rarely visited them and when she did, she sat in terrible judgment. Her father wore wing tips and ate fried chicken gizzards. Her mother smelled like sweat and bleach. Carolyn didn’t admit to them, in private or in public. Together with her sisters she laughed at them both and engaged in parody and ridicule. Carolyn was the youngest of three big-boned girls and knew this truth about herself: that she was indolent, self-serving, and unsavory, like the Beatniks of the 1950s. Sometimes she wished she could have been a Beatnik, but it wasn’t a philosophical proposition. Her ideology about work and freedom was utilitarian, little more. She could present it to her parents as an intellectual construct or eclectic moral regimen beyond their midwestern ken. It made a comfortable argument, an easy false bastion that kept her disengaged from them, freed from obligations.

  Though it felt like voyeurism, Carolyn peered over the top of her book to watch Ann’s devotions. She herself, who didn’t pray, who didn’t believe in any faith, felt pierced by loneliness. She indulged a sadness about the tone of her life, then focused again on travel. Down by the water a large herd of black and white cattle, smallish beasts with humps, were feeding on the grass that grew in round pin-cushions among the stones. Carolyn mentally tallied the sums in her checking and savings accounts. To this she added two more weeks of mushrooms. Her hope was to pass the winter in Mexico, though she was overweight, right now, by ten pounds at least. Definitely, she told herself, she would have to drop at least five of them before she could even cross the border, she couldn’t be seen on a beach like this, a veritable butterball, a walking advertisement for Weight Watchers but only the BEFORE part. There were also flocks of fat-tailed sheep high up on the hillsides and some angry-looking goats.

  There it is, she heard Ann say. There it is again.

  I don’t see it.

  Right over there.

  You’re seeing things.

  No I’m not.

  Carolyn stood. It’s what I thought, she said. You’re seeing things. You’re psycho.

  Ann stood, walked twenty yards, dropped to her knees on a bed of moss, and clasping her hands in front of her, gazing up between two trees, said Yes, yes, I will.

  Carolyn reported later to the bishop’s representative that Ann’s gaze remained fixed, that three times she tilted forward, that once she smiled and gasped softly, and that her eyes welled up and overflowed. At the end of her ecstasies she collapsed as if the breath had ruptured out of her and finally she deflated—that was Carolyn’s word—with her face settled in the moss.

  Are you all right?

  I’m called. I’m called!

  Take it easy.

  Give me a second.

  What happened?

  Just give me a sec. Let me catch my breath for a sec. It’s like… I can’t even breathe.

  When Ann rose to her knees again, her face was so thorou
ghly stained by tears she looked as if caught in a rainstorm. Carolyn noted the convulsive trembling seizing Ann’s chin and shoulders. The girl pulled back the shroud of her hood and dried her cheeks with her forearm. She blew her nose on the sleeve of her sweatshirt. Why me? she asked. Who am I?

  You’re somebody who’s seeing things out in the woods. Do you grasp what I’m trying to say to you? You’re having delusions, hallucinations. You need professional help.

  Ann held her face in her hands and rubbed her eye sockets with her palms. What? she said. You didn’t see her?

  I didn’t see who?

  The Blessed Virgin.

  Jesus Christ.

  She spoke to me.

  Oh Jesus Christ. You’re certified.

  She called me to her ministry. I have to come back at this time tomorrow. Right here. I promised her.

  They’re going to have you in a straitjacket by then.

  I’m not insane. I saw Our Lady.

  You are insane. You just can’t see it.

  It’s you who can’t see, answered Ann.

  By late evening there were two other women who wanted to witness with their own eyes the ecstasies of Ann Holmes. Carolyn had mentioned to another picker that the strange girl who wore the sweatshirt hood had claimed to see the Virgin Mary while picking east of Fryingpan Creek, and by 10 p.m. a number of people living in the North Fork Campground had heard it mentioned, questioned, or scoffed at, or had scoffed at it themselves. The idea of an apparition was mostly disparaged but in the case of the two women there was zeal for it, enough that they came forward the next morning hoping Ann would permit them to go along, the first out of a fervent Catholicism, the second because it occurred to her that what Ann had seen was not the Virgin Mary but the ghost of a girl who’d been lost near the campground eleven years before.