Our Lady of the Forest (10 page)

Another woman, who walked just behind them, exclaimed that she'd been to Knock on Feast Day in 1987 and to Moneyglass in County Antrim. There's a folk museum in Knock, she said, that is well worth visiting.

I'm aware of Moneyglass, said the widow.

There's a carved cross at Moneyglass and at the bottom of it is carved a pot and what I guess is a chicken but what they called in old Ireland a cockodel. I think.

It's a cockerel, a young rooster, said the priest. Why a cockerel?

Because Judas' wife told him not to worry, Jesus couldn't anymore rise from his grave than the cockodel she'd boiled could fly from his soup pot—at which point the cockodel did fly from the soup and said something I don't exactly remember like, The Son of the Virgin is safe in heaven! Or something to that effect.

There's a fascinating place in California, said the widow. Out in the Mojave Desert.

I've been there, the other woman said. California City, it's called. It's not as good as Our Lady of Snows. I used to live near Our Lady of Snows. But what I really want to visit is Medjugorje.

My daughter-in-law went. But it scares me too much. I wouldn't go anywhere near that place until these Slavs get things worked out.

That means you just won't ever go then.

Probably. But that's fine with me. I'd rather go to Lourdes.

The visionary stopped to sit on a log and they all took her signal and stopped too, like an infantry at rest on the order of its general, and the priest shared his orange with the widow. He pried the segments apart gently and deliberately and tried to remain inconspicuous, looking down, but the business of the orange attracted a dog who clearly wanted something to eat and the bearded man who'd spoken at the campfire said The poor soul. He's hungry.

Does a dog have a soul do you think? someone asked.

Is the pope Catholic? someone else answered.

I don't know if it's that simple, said the priest. The question of the souls of animals is much debated. Rightly so, I feel.

My dog has a soul, the bearded man said. More than some people, I have to say. Some people seem to lack souls.

Then there's the people who care more about animals than they do about people, someone put in. Those types are all for capital punishment but against cruelty to animals.

And you're for cruelty to animals?

That's not the point.

Look into the eyes of a dog sometime.

You're missing the point. Intentionally.

The priest, picking out the raisins first, gave a handful of almonds to the dog. That food is blessed, pronounced the widow. Fed from the hand of a priest, you are. Fed from the hand of Saint Francis.

They climbed the hill and three times the widow stopped because she was short of breath. She hung her head and leaned on her knees, waiting for her trembling to subside, and the priest impatiently waited with her. Do the right thing, he told himself. She's an old woman and she needs you. The others went ahead, abandoning them, except for a dog of indeterminate breed, a tired black dog with clouded eyes, who took up their cause instinctively. The infirmity of the aged is a curse, said the widow. I grow old, I grow old, I shall wear my trousers, et cetera. In the room the women come and go… I do not think they will sing to me.

I do not think
that
they will sing to me, the priest corrected her dryly. It distinctly changes the rhythm.

Here I am, an old man in a dry month, being read to by a boy, waiting for rain.

A boy, yes—appropriate. Forgive me I apologize. But how does someone in a logging town get so impressively intimate with T.S.?

I'm a UW graduate, I'll have you know. I studied with Ted Roethke ages ago. Would you believe I was once a girl beat poet hanging around the Blue Moon Tavern and skinny-dipping in Portage Bay? Of course you wouldn't. Who could believe that? But I've published my poetry here and there in small journals and periodicals over the course of eons. Never a published collection, though—I'm a firefly, so to speak. But you're our brand new lovely young priest so I must tell you that it was Kierkegaard who caught my interest centuries ago and turned me toward the Lord. My master's thesis was a perambulation on his
Concluding Unscientific Postscript.
I was thirty-seven years old then. My husband was a struggling, tender playwright who taught theater at Lincoln High School. Now I'm an old widow in a logging town, that's the way life goes. I do not genuflect to time or circumstance but move forward in the name of Jesus and have at times been enamored of the Quietism with which you are familiar from seminary, particularly the Quietism of François de Fénelon which you touched on so briefly in your sermon three Sundays ago. On another topic, I reread my V. L. Parrington last summer. And three volumes of the Great Books series. Lately I've been making a little study of Aquinas and Bishop Berkeley.

In large print?

With a magnifying glass. Built into a kind of helmet. I found it on-line two years ago. It's something like a watchmaker's visor.

I've never seen that, said the priest. So Aquinas and Berkeley lately, you say. Then you must know the answer to the age-old question: How many angels is it, approximately, that can dance on the head of a pin?

Twelve, I suppose. I don't know for certain. If only Saint Thomas had thought of us here, out in these woods asking humorous deep questions, he might have finished his
Summa Theologica
and we would have that information.

Are we ready to catch up to the others, my dear?

A cold coming we had of it, just the worst time of the year for a journey, and such a long journey—let's go.

They made the crest arm in arm, waded through the Oregon grape and salal—following the lead of the old black dog, who seemed to have fixed on the scent of the others—and entered the dank-smelling forest. The priest felt happy to have found somebody who was reading Aquinas and Bishop Berkeley as opposed to
Fishing and Hunting News
or
Cosmopolitan
magazine. In ten minutes they found their fellow pilgrims, now milling like a restive theater audience, and the widow whispered, Set me down now, it's dry right here, and you go among the others.

All right, said the priest. Bless you.

They were in a forest mostly of firs, most of which wore moss on their branches—moss draping the vine maples and deadfalls and hanging over everything smotheringly like a botanical parasite. The priest recognized feather moss because he had taken a handbook to the forest on two successive gray afternoons and thought he recognized nearby as well something called old-man's beard. It confounded him that his memory for flora was so poor, an insufficient and paltry instrument; he would learn a plant's name and then, within days, it was as though he hadn't learned it. He did recall reading or hearing somewhere that moss grew only on the north sides of trees, a theory of nature flagrantly at odds with the reality of these throttled firs which were slightly sinister, slightly macabre, as though dipped in some green virus.

The visionary knelt in a bed of moss with her hood pulled tightly around her face and her rosary clutched in her hands. Most of the pilgrims knelt now too, and one in an elegantly wavering voice read solemnly from the book of Acts And it shall come to pass in the last days, saith God, I will pour out of my Spirit upon all flesh: and your sons and daughters shall prophesy and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams. Someone else shouted Behold the handmaiden of the Lord be it done unto me according to Thy word! and a shrill, addled voice cried Hail Holy Queen Mother of Mercy our life our sweetness and our hope to you do we cry poor banished children of Eve! Another pilgrim lit a candle and pleaded Mirror of justice, vessel of honor, virgin most venerable, virgin most renowned, eliminate all sin. The priest heard the half-blind widow, too, Were we led all that way for Birth or Death? and saw that her hands were clasped in prayer while she recited T. S. Eliot.

The visionary's ecstasies began in earnest in the midst of these exhortations. The gathered host fell gradually silent and the priest, too, dropped to his knees because he felt loomingly conspicuous. He observed that in the throes of rapture, Ann appeared more diminutive than ever, her hood close like a monk's cowl, her angle of carriage preternaturally forward, her gaze directed toward the tops of the trees, her hands clasped in desperate supplication, and he tried to commit her image to memory since he was convinced now by the scene at hand that inevitably he would be required to participate in the unfolding of this spectacle, that this was to be an apparition, with its accompanying inquest and hysteria, he could neither avoid nor escape. It was going to have an effect on him, an impact on his ministry. When she fell forward someone cried Lady of the Holy Rosary, consecrate our hearts this day! but no one else took up this call or felt it proper to renew their prior clamor and there was again silence while the visionary lay like a small heap of lost children's clothing on the wet forest floor. It was like that moment at the end of a symphony when no one is certain that indeed it is ended and for a brief hiatus there is no applause because each member of the audience fears leading the rest toward embarrassment. No one did a thing, not even the priest, who had to admit that he too felt spellbound and in the presence of something holy.

The moment passed. His wavering skepticism righted itself. The priest felt certain that a literal interpretation—the actual presence of a Madonna from heaven—was absurd and erroneous. He did not believe that Mary had descended from her blissful place at the right hand of God to speak to a mushroom picker. He did not give credence to apparitions, not even to the seven the Vatican had legitimized, believing instead that the deposit of revelation ended with Jesus Christ. The priest understood his spiritual frisson, his moment of yearning toward a facile acceptance, as a small leap of natural desire, undoubtedly archaic at source—autonomic fear of stars, of thunder, lightning, the shaking earth, of large waves, darkness at noon, a shadow across the sun. A polytheistic urge or impulse to meet a forest wraith. In his role as self-reflective anthropologist, the priest thought of pagan seekers who starved themselves intentionally in the hope of passionate revelation, in the belief that the hallucinations of hunger would grant them dreams and names. Pain, sex, crack cocaine, copious sweat, a near miss with the reaper—by these means are spirits induced when otherwise spirits are most reluctant to show their hideous faces. By these means, the dying beast seeks life. By contrast the priest's elected route was a stark one of scholastic contemplation. There was no drama in that, of course, which was precisely what made it difficult. Blundering on like the magi in the widow's poem could not hold a candle to the advent of a ghost who speaks to a pauper in the forest.
There were times we regretted/The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,/And the silken girls bringing sherbet
—the widow's recitation still echoed in his ears and he regretted it all, a familiar regret. He didn't know why he was a priest.

When the visionary stood and faced the crowd he noted again how small she was—
And a little child shall lead them,
he thought. She now looked clearly feverish, ill, someone who should be in bed. She clasped her hands in an attitude of prayer and said in a thin plain-speaking voice, Our Lady asks me to share Her message, and still she hadn't removed her hood, her face lay hidden in its shadow. Dear children, she said, put your faith in Mother Mary and answer her call to Christian service which means to serve Our Lord Our Jesus through acts of loving-kindness. Pray for the sinners that they might be made whole again and freed from their selfishness and greed before Jesus in anger visits destruction on us. Carry Our Lady's message of hope to the ends of the earth with your whole soul and for sure you will bring an end to poverty. Build a church at this very place which will be like a beacon to unbelievers and bring them into the presence of God your Father your Protector. Give your hearts to the Precious Son and take refuge within His wounds and He shall protect you always. I am as your own Mother and gather you here as a Mother might to keep you safe from the hand of evil and to deliver your petitions to the Lord Himself, in Jesus' name, amen.

As for the grieving mother who has petitioned Me on this day, Lee Ann went peacefully to the embrace of Our Lord after wandering alone in this very forest and didn't suffer but was cold toward the end, was hungry and finally reached exhaustion, at dusk she curled beneath a tree where she slept deeply to fend off the cold and in sleep rose to the kingdom of heaven on the wings of loving angels.

My children, said Ann. Jesus is merciful and will keep all believers safe from the Evil One. Rest assured your petitions shall be heard in the name of Jesus and of Our Lord God I take leave of you now, amen.

         

To me it's like she freaks out and everyone goes for it, said Carolyn to the priest when they were walking back toward the campground afterward, the crowd dispersed in the gloom of the woods, reduced to small excited groups speaking rabidly of what they'd seen and to lone spellbound sojourners silenced by the spectacle they'd witnessed. Perhaps, said the priest, that's the nature of revelation. How could it happen otherwise? How else to define belief?

I don't think so, said Carolyn. That kind of thing is circular. The Virgin Mary is either there or not there. It doesn't work some other way.

And in your opinion?

Two thumbs down.

You doubt with enormous certainty.

No I'm certain without any doubt.

I wish I could do that, said the priest.

For a while he gravely accompanied the widow, arm in arm, guiding her, taking comfort from her scent of decay, of garlic, dried flowers and old Mason jars, from the way it shrunk his earthly needs and humbled the demon in his groin, until the visionary appeared out of nowhere at his shoulder and walked beside him in unnerving silence.