Our Lady of the Forest Page 5

  He’d been shoved against a locker once for saying just this sort of thing, the other boy closely breathing on his face, fist poised, waiting. I have an idea, said Donny. If we’re going to get in a fight over this, why don’t we do it where we can impress some girls? Or maybe you don’t care about girls. Anyway, there’s guys around, and maybe you’re okay with that. So go ahead, hit me!

  Donny had smoked a lot of marijuana as a preventative against school boredom and because it made large questions palpable, allowing for their contemplation. As a teenager he’d formulated a metaphysics that was sequenced like a geometrical theorem or a formal causal argument and had presented it, stoned, to a friend named Jerry: that human behavior acts like a wave, a wave has mass as in particles of light, mass has gravity and as cosmologists know, gravity determines the fate of the universe, therefore the behavior of individual human beings, good or bad, right or wrong, contributes either to eternal oscillation or to a cold and lifeless steady-state entropy, to fire or ice, darkness or light, we each make our personal contribution, that was the critical thing about free will, the fate of the universe was literally at stake, the word gravity had two meanings, now do you think maybe you could be less selfish and stop bogarting that bong, Jerry? Wait, answered Jerry. There’s a major flaw. You presuppose action is like a wave. It’s all contingent on that being so. Karma, said Donny. Cause and effect. Now quit stalling and pass me the bong. Effects aren’t waves, Jerry said.

  Donny’s parents, eventually, had become uninflected background noise, Muzak played in an elevator. Their moral impact dwindled steadily until he was able to lie to them with pleasure and aplomb. Chess Club meeting at Jerry’s house. We’re going to watch hockey. The International Brotherhood of Left-Handed Basket Weavers’ Fifteenth Annual Rendezvous. It hadn’t always been that way. The prepubescent Donny and his sisters were sometimes arrayed as though for a firing squad, his father pacing, his mother at hand, his father fulminating and venomous to a degree incommensurate with circumstances, his mother obviously rent by crisis, yearning to support her spouse and also yearning to protect her children, by these opposing intentions paralyzed, and his father might say—his father had once said—I’m asking only one more time, and this time I want an honest answer: Which one of you got into the hi-fi this morning and scratched my Sinatra record?

  They would have been sequestered in their several bedrooms for two hours and forty-five minutes with a decree to give this question thought since none of them would admit their guilt, all three deflecting blame when asked, and so, it was certain, one of them was lying, a crime far worse than touching the hi-fi, which heightened the stakes, compounded the mystery, and left Donny feeling deeply troubled about the looming culmination of events. The innocent had already suffered because of the persistent cowardice of the guilty, a cowardice charting a line parallel to the line of the father’s wrath. The culpable party was keenly aware of the moral complexity of the situation and of what that meant for sibling relations but also admired the father’s strategy, so Machiavellian and fantastically medieval, to divide and conquer was an art. Which one of you? his father said. Which one did it? Or do you all want to spend the whole day doing nothing in your rooms? Or the whole weekend as far as I’m concerned. And you can miss school on Monday too because we’re going to get to the bottom of this. I want to know who scratched my record and who answered no when the truth was yes, that’s the thing that’s got me. If it was just the record that would be one thing, that was something I could have addressed, but the lying, the lying, that I can’t accept, I can never trust you again if you lie, and in a family you have to have absolute trust, now which one of you scratched my record?

  Donny’s endurance wilted. He was whipped ten times on his bare backside, the number ten emblematic of order—his father was a proponent of the metric system—not too many but not too few, an amount that would have to be endured and was not mere symbolic punishment but the real thing, authentic pain. His father, it was obvious, held something back but nonetheless delivered pain in a measure intended to be permanently memorable and forever associated with the notion of lying, using the belt holding up his pants, then threading it back, retucking his shirt, yelling hysterically all the while in a reedy shrill voice they all recognized, Don’t you lie, don’t ever lie again, don’t you ever lie to me!

  His father became inarticulate. He sat down on a chair and checked his belt. Look, he said finally, I don’t want to be mean. Now wait a minute I take that back. Yes I do really want to be mean because I want you to learn a valuable lesson and there just isn’t any other way besides a real punishment that will make an impression. Right and wrong, Donny, right and wrong, it’s not about the Sinatra record. I can always buy a new one of those. Now pull your pants up and buckle them. And stop whimpering like a little girl.

  Don’t call him that, Donny’s mother said. I don’t approve of this.

  You be quiet, said his father.

  They went to Alaska one summer on the ferry and there was a girl with red hair and a backpack on the top deck who had staked out a chaise longue, laid her sleeping bag on it, and passed the miles reading John Muir and eating soy nuts from a bag. She and Donny smoked pot together and rummaged inside each other’s clothing until the ship was halfway to Sitka. The logistics of their liaisons were particularly challenging because passengers tended to linger at night to gaze in search of the northern lights and generally to partake of the solstice dusk, so there was little in the way of darkness or privacy; nevertheless they found furtive corners, places where she pushed against him, reached inside his pants with a cool hand, and whispered encouragements in his ear like Love the one you’re with.

  He was sixteen. He became ill while they were under way and could not continue with these assignations, but in Sitka he saw her at the Raptor Rehabilitation Center—a ceremony for setting free an eagle that had successfully convalesced. How are you? she said. Better, he answered. I think I’m in love with you.

  I’m not with you. What is love? I think you mean lust, not love.

  The liberated eagle flew two hundred yards, settled on a limb, and looked back. Some of the tourists clapped and cheered but something about this conventional response, as if they were spectators at a football game, seemed inappropriate from the moment it started, and a hush soon descended. They stood waiting for the eagle’s next move.

  I mean love, insisted Donny. I think I know the difference.

  No guy knows, said the red-haired girl. Don’t be completely ridiculous.

  Jilted, he mooned through the chamber musical festival. She was there, too, and afterward he approached her. You’re not for me, she said.

  Why not?

  You’re too intense.

  What do you mean?

  You’re just too wired. You think too much. It’s not something I want to deal with. I didn’t come up here for spiritual angst. Is there a God, isn’t there a God—I don’t want to approach it with words.

  Sorry for ruining your vacation, said Donny.

  Fuck you, too, she answered.

  Ann told her story with chronological precision, as if the order of things was the point. Finally she pulled out her rosary. Everything is totally true, she said. In Jesus’ name, Father. I swear.

  Father Collins scratched his brow, shook his head, and sighed. This is—how to put it—I don’t know. This is just really… mind-boggling.

  Nice description, said Carolyn.

  This is a serious claim you’re making.

  All I know is what I see. And hear, too. What I hear.

  You see and hear her.

  Ann nodded.

  But no one else does. Not these others. Not your friend here or any of these other people who went into the woods with you.

  I didn’t see a thing, said Carolyn. And didn’t hear anything, either.

  I did, said Ann.

  But, said the priest, like you see and hear me?

  No. Not the same.

  Well how does it differ?


  I can see through her. Like she’s made of light. I can’t see through you. You’re solid.

  Like looking through a window?

  No. Not really.

  Like what then?

  I can’t put it into words.

  Well what about her voice. Is it just like mine?

  It’s a woman’s voice.

  But is it like a person speaking?

  It’s far away. Like under water. That’s the best I can describe it.

  People can’t speak under water, said Carolyn.

  I think I can see what she means, though, said the priest. It’s a figurative description. Not literal.

  I mean if you could speak under water, said Ann. If you could, that’s what you’d sound like.

  Right, said the priest. But does it seem to you that the words you hear from her travel to you directly through the air—like ordinary words, like my words, sound waves—or is it that you hear them in your head as if they arrived there by telepathy? Instead of hearing them through your ears?

  Telepathy. In my head.

  A telepathic voice then? Not like thoughts? Not the sound of your own internal voice? Not the sound of your own thinking but somebody else’s voice?

  It’s the sound of her voice in my head—her voice. That’s how she speaks to me.

  But do you see her lips move? Is it something like lip-syncing? Her lips move, and telepathically, you hear her words in private?

  Her lips aren’t moving, no.

  You can see that clearly? She’s close enough?

  Her lips aren’t moving. Definitely.

  And how close is she?

  Like twenty yards.

  Does it seem to you that you could touch her, though? If you reached out, could you take hold of something? Or would your fingers—I don’t know—maybe go right through her? Like a ghost or like us, three dimensions?

  You’d go right through her. I guess. Sort of. I can’t explain it very well.

  Would there be, say, a ripple, do you think? Like parting water with your hand? Or nothing—like parting air?

  I think it would be more like parting mist. Like putting your hand through a cloud.

  What makes you say that?

  It’s just an impression.

  An observation?

  Yes. Observation.

  So her texture is like the texture of a cloud?

  I guess so. I don’t really know.

  Well how does seeing her compare to a dream? Is it the same sort of thing? Like dreaming?

  No. I don’t think so. I know it isn’t. It’s not like dreaming, no.

  How is it different?

  What do you mean?

  What are the differences between this experience and the experience of having a dream?

  The difference is, it’s not dreaming. I’m awake when this is happening. It’s more like now—like right now. Don’t you know for sure right now that you’re awake and not asleep?

  Yes.

  Well that’s what it’s like when I see her.

  I didn’t mean to imply otherwise at all. I’m sorry if it seemed that way.

  It didn’t.

  I apologize.

  It’s okay, Father.

  I’m pressing you, forgive me for that. He lifted his crossed leg, set it on the floor, and brought the other up. I’m acting like a lawyer, he said.

  Not really, answered Carolyn. You haven’t billed us yet.

  Do you think, said the priest, that you could tell me the whole thing again, just repeat everything that happened? And would you mind if I stop you along the way and ask a few more questions?

  It’s after seven, said Carolyn. Maybe we’ll go eat and come back.

  Please, said the priest. Eat with me. Stay. I was just about to throw something together when you two knocked on the door.

  He noted the disdain of the visionary regarding the subject of dinner. It was clear to him from the tension in her posture that she had no inclination to eat. He thought it was in part the malaise of illness, in part her Marian obsession. Let’s just take a time-out, he said. I’m going to cook—linguini marinara. I’ll be in the kitchen. Read something, or take a nap. Nurse your cold, turn on the television. Relax for a little while.

  I’ll help, said Carolyn.

  No you won’t. The kitchen’s too small. Let me handle it. My blessing.

  What a priest, Carolyn said. Equally adept on the pulpit and in the kitchen. Most priests I’m guessing do frozen pizza or microwaved Mexican food.

  I do those too, the priest answered.

  He served pasta with basil tomato sauce from a jar, warm bread with butter and garlic salt, steamed string beans and a salad of iceberg lettuce dressed with ketchup and mayonnaise mixed to approximate Thousand Island dressing. While they ate on the sofa, holding their plates, he played a tape called Beethoven Breaks Out: the second movement of the Ninth Symphony, the Apassionata, the Kreutzer sonatas, the Egmont overture. Lively inoffensive music. Carolyn ate with gusto, Ann with a perfunctory charm. Afterward the priest did the dishes rapidly, then gave them bowls of Neapolitan ice cream, set out a plate of sugar wafers, and made them Darjeeling tea. Finally he told them that if they used the bathroom it was necessary to keep the toilet handle lifted in order to achieve a decent flush and apologized for not having cleaned the sink—I’m not very neat and clean, he confessed. I don’t stay on top of the housekeeping.

  It was true, Ann found, that the bathroom sink was flecked with shaven facial hair and stained with nasal mucus. On an open shelf stood a package of disposable razors of the sort purchased in preposterous volume at warehouse discount stores. There was a twelve-pack of toilet paper, ten bars of soap, a large bottle of Tylenol, and a half dozen large toothpaste tubes—it was as though Father Collins expected a siege or sudden economic turmoil to disrupt the flow of goods. Two magazines and two books lay on the floor beside his toilet—Travel and Leisure, Vanity Fair, J. P. Donleavy’s The Ginger Man, and Norman O. Brown’s Love’s Body. The visionary, seated on the toilet, pigeon-toed and cramping now, the flow of her period at its heaviest pitch, blew her nose into a wad of toilet paper, opened the Donleavy to its inside cover, and read: A PICARESQUE NOVEL TO STOP THEM ALL. LUSTY, VIOLENT, WILDLY FUNNY, IT IS A RIGADOON OF RASCALITY, A BAWLED-OUT COMIC SONG OF SEX. What was the priest doing with a book like this? Curious, she opened Love’s Body randomly, to page 63, noting on her way how the text was permeated by incessant line breaks, diced into endless cryptic snippets: The vagina as a devouring mouth, or vagina dentata; the jaws of the giant cannibalistic mother, a menstruating woman with the penis bitten off, a bleeding trophy—Cf. Roheim, Riddle of the Sphinx. She combed through the rest and found that much was much like this, passages about sex and other matters lifted from writers she’d never heard of and placed back-to-back and side by side, as if they added up to something by virtue of juxtaposition. And maybe they did. She didn’t know. But why was a priest reading this sort of thing? While sitting on his toilet or anywhere else? She’d assumed when she came in that the magazines would have titles like Priest Quarterly or Catholic Review and the books would be Saint Augustine’s Confessions or a Mother Teresa biography—not Travel and Leisure or Vanity Fair, not a woman with her penis bitten off or a bawled-out comic song of sex.

  She couldn’t help herself. She peeked into his bedroom. She saw where he slept under an unzipped sleeping bag with two empty pop cans crumpled on the nightstand, more magazines and books on the floor, a digital display alarm clock flashing all red zeroes in the dark. A towel had been thumbtacked over the window, and a pair of dumbbells languished in the corner. What would a priest do with dumbbells? she asked herself. Why would a priest want muscles? He had nailed a crucifix over his bed, a two-foot Jesus long and black, sternum high and exaggerated, chest pronounced like the chest of a great bird, the gut shrunken and shriveled tight beneath the stripes of the rib cage. Ann took three steps into the room where she smelled the sheets on the priest’s rumpled bed, nervously touched
Christ’s thigh with an index finger, crossed herself, and kissed her rosary. Hail Mary, full of grace, she whispered. Then she hurried back into the living room.

  The rain sounded like shotgun pellets against the priest’s trailer-house window. He had turned off a second lamp, and they spoke now in the glow from the kitchen spilling across the sofa, concerto music turned so low it was only audible during the brief silences between their uttered thoughts.

  So there were six points, the priest was saying. And she mentioned, specifically, selfishness.

  Greed too, Father.

  But there are so many other forms of sin.

  Those were the ones the Blessed Mother mentioned.

  Why those?

  I don’t know.

  She didn’t say?

  No, she didn’t.

  But the fourth point was her promise to return. For four days in a row, you say. So perhaps we’ll find out more.

  I can’t say, said the visionary.

  The priest nodded soberly. Did you ask or did she volunteer her revelation regarding the missing girl?

  I didn’t ask anything. I listened, Father.

  I ask because it differs in substance from the rest of the message you received. It’s specific while the rest is general. That’s why I ask. It’s different.

  It’s her fifth point that’s… different, Ann said. That we have to build a church up there. A church and a shrine to Our Lady the Blessed Virgin. She gave us something we have to do. So on that—we have to get started.