Our Lady of the Forest (20 page)

Invoking the devil successfully worried her. She went into a Catholic church in the town of Aberdeen—birthplace, she remembered, of Kurt Cobain. She remembered being on-line at school, she was supposed to be doing library research for a paper on Edgar Allan Poe but instead she read Cobain's suicide note:
There's good in all of us and I think I simply love people too much, so much that it makes me feel too fucking sad.
Ann knelt in a pew. The body of Christ hung over the altar. She went up, touched it, and put her fingers in her mouth. They tasted salty, like seaweed. God, she said, save me from my sins. This was during a psilocybin binge, part of its crescendo. Ann put her fingers between her legs and touched herself absentmindedly. It was private, comfortable, and reassuring; it involved no one else. She pulled off her hood and lay on the floor. Sun flooded the stained-glass arch. She felt warm and had a dreamer's vision, three women pushing her through a door with a stone lintel, a tribe of dogs running lathered through a forest, a ponderous search for shelter, too late, from a heavy, cacophonous rainstorm. Afterward, this was all she remembered. It didn't add up to a story with a theme. Nevertheless she believed that the forgotten parts would have coherence if her memory could capture them. There was a residue of meanings, no images, but meanings on the cusp of her discernment. She carried what she couldn't recall as a deepening disturbance. There was a fold or field around her now and she knew how to sustain it. A protective cloak of her own devising. In the church foyer she gathered leaflets and pamphlets. Can Anyone Be a Good Enough Catholic? A Radical Change in the Sacrament of Penance. Moral Issues of Human Life. How to Pray the Rosary. She kept them on the seat of her car. She bought a set of rosary beads and hung them from her rearview mirror. She bought a dashboard Jesus, too, one that turned a luminous amber as the evening darkness deepened. And she thought she remembered some trippy lyrics, in stereo, from one of Sleepy Jane's wine-and-dope extravaganzas—I don't care if it rains or freezes, long as I got my plastic Jesus. Though it could have been something else.

Ann used too much psilocybin and passed out on the altar of a church somewhere—what town she was in, she didn't know. The priest there found her and called the police, who delivered her to a medical clinic where Ann came to the next day. A doctor, a woman, listened to her story, which she told while blowing her nose into Kleenex. I'm too tired to argue, said the doctor. But I still wish you wouldn't just lie to me.

I'm not lying.

Whatever you say.

My allergies are really bothering me.

It's dust mites, I'm guessing. This time of year. She got up, slid open a drawer, and pulled out a Sample-pak of antihistamines. This stuff, she said, is Phenathol. It's one pill every six or seven hours. I can give you half a dozen, dear. Enough to get you home to Mother.

Great.

The doctor shut the drawer and washed her hands. You go home to your mother, she said. Right away. Pronto.

I am going home.

You said that, said the doctor. She crossed her arms and squinted at Ann. She wore thick glasses; her hair was in a rope. If I was smart I'd call in a counselor, she said. Someone who can deal with a runaway.

Ann took one of the Phenathol pills. I don't really need a counselor, she said. But I do need a ride to my car where I left it parked up by the church.

It's only three blocks to the church, said the doctor. But right now rest. For an hour or so. When you're feeling ready we'll sign you out of here and if you need it someone will walk you over. I'm guessing you're asthmatic, too, given that wheeze I'm hearing.

No, said Ann. I used to be. But pretty much I've outgrown it.

It can come back, the doctor said, if you don't take care of yourself.

When she left Ann lay with her head on the pillow and let the Phenathol work. It did. Quickly. Its efficacy surprised her. Her sinuses cleared, her torment subsided. She pulled open the drawer of pills, took all the packets of Phenathol samples, and stuffed them in her sweatshirt pouch.

         

As anticipated by certain environmentally aware pilgrims, the maple bottom, the copse of alders, the labyrinth of blowdowns, the thicket of Oregon grape and salal, and the dank mossy forest of the Marian apparitions were all poorly served by the mass of travelers, who stormed through them like Roman legionnaires. Much was flattened. And indeed one pilgrim was detained by injury at the site of the crossing of Fryingpan Creek, a woman with excessive fear of heights who convinced herself prior to making the traverse that Mary and Jesus were sure to guide her if she shut her eyes and let go. She fell and broke two bones in her left wrist and badly bruised a hip. Someone else turned back because of a surge of anxiety brought on by disorientation. A third traveler with chronic vertigo was halted by a bout of stumbling and returned to the campground with assistance. And a man in therapy, rendered vulnerable by the forest, retreated when a minor social gaffe impaired his sense of self-worth. There were other digressions like battery-operated children's toys flailing in the corners of rooms. Dead ends. Marital crises. One couple who had fallen behind found themselves oddly eroticized by the lush density of the ancient forest. Finally they stopped to embrace and kiss. The man laughed gently and put his hand under his wife's shirt so as to run his fingers along her back and next he descended into her underwear which prompted her to say, Your hand is cold. Mother Mary, the man said. I didn't expect her to lead us to the sacrament of woodland fornication. Let's do it, he added. I'm serious. We can't, his wife answered, not out here, are you crazy? Please, he said. For once let's not be so Catholic about this. I'll lean you up against a tree and take you from behind, okay? It's not okay. I don't like that. But why not? Come on, let's do it. Wait until later, she said to him. Wait until tonight in the motel. We have to catch up to the others.

Eventually the main body of pilgrims arrived at the site of the apparitions. Technically they were trespassing on land owned by the Stinson Timber Company but as yet, nobody cared. State troopers attended them with pistols and nightsticks, as did Sheriff Nelson and his deputies; any large group of people was their business, even those bent on salvation. The same could be said of the photographers and journalists who preyed on the pilgrimage like forest gray jays, birds known commonly as camp robbers. A rain fell so light and ethereal that no one could be sure it was rain, perhaps it was a discharge of the trees, splash induced by high breezes. Stragglers perpetually joined the host. People had not stopped arriving at the campground, asking questions, following signs, and probing into the forest. Pink flagging now festooned the way and marked the trail through the labyrinth of blowdowns where it was easiest to lose direction. There was a place where travelers had broken fern stalks and left them tipped over and dead in large numbers and this marked the path as well. The way was heaped with destruction. A shrewd sojourner off the mark could scout from a bolus of freshly dropped human stool to a sandwich bag impaled on the spines of an Oregon grape leaf to a pink pendant hung by a previous pilgrim from the branch of a maple tree. A substantial percentage of travelers had never been in the woods off-trail and felt the natural disorientation that accompanies this condition. The weight of walking brought the water through the moss and soaked their shoes disagreeably. There were people with wet feet, others chilled by the touch of their own sweat, others who had forgotten toilet paper. Arid people who had neglected to bring drinking water and hungry people forced to endure the heedless picnics of others. Religion did not necessarily remind those with provisions to look at things from another's point of view or to remember the importance of sharing. Hence their fellows suffered needlessly. A man doused a hard-boiled egg with salt tapped from a minuscule backpacking shaker, then he did the same with pepper while a hungry man watched with concealed longing. They were oceans separated by continents. This same juxtaposition of food and desire played itself out through the forest. It was the same with drinking water—those who needed it hoped for a charity that widely was not forthcoming. They were unwilling to ask and looked comfortable enough. It didn't occur to those in possession of canteens and bottles that they were surrounded by legitimate thirsts. The woods were full of ignorance and pretense. A bespectacled pilgrim seized a beef sandwich between his teeth so he could page through a trailside reference book, and the oblivious, easy extravagance of that soon galled a hungry woman. He was eating while identifying nearby mosses, lichens, and liverworts. Another man read silently from his Bible with his hand in a bag of pretzels. A group of women ate goat cheese, smoked clams, herring snacks, and marinated sliced red peppers. Most of the pilgrims, hungry or sated, arid or quenched, were moved to consider their mortality by the forest's sea-green cathedral light. The trees rose like pillars. Out of the fallen trees grew new trees. A delirious photosynthetic rapture suffused the air of the place. There was so much evidence of decay and birth it was discomfiting and comforting at once. How could this be here and people matter very much? The indications of human smallness and of the great span of God's time—there they were in everything and who could think about it? Fine shards of fear shot through the atmosphere and pierced the pilgrims in vulnerable places. The message of the woods was simple. You are going to die.

Milling and waiting, the crowd grew high-strung. There were upward of a thousand pilgrims now, filling the spaces between the trees and trampling the understory. Carolyn Greer had marked the apparition site with long tendrils of pink flagging, but already it had been indicated further with a plastic crucifix propped against a tree, with votive candles, medals, chaplets, plastic water bottles, an Immaculate Heart of Mary figurine, a display of carefully separated orange segments, a handkerchief cradling a handful of walnuts, a tin backpacker's drinking cup filled with Skittles, everything set in a bed of plucked ferns so that the spot now looked like a holy site for animists recently proselytized. A depository of relics from some forest hagiography in which the saint was still named Raven. An altar freighted with amulets and fetishes. A shrine in accord and perfectly organic; a tabernacle of totems.

Lines of sight became difficult to maintain. The fiercely selfish carved out views and turned territorial in a neurotic way—the sort of people who suffer the illusion that in a crowd, individuals have rights. But no angle of vision was sacrosanct. Early postures could not be defended, even by those unabashedly obnoxious. Uh hey, excuse me, we were here first, we got here forty-five minutes ago, you can't just squeeze in front of us like that, but already there were more invading pilgrims committing even more grave offenses and oblivious to the complainant. So few could see. The gathering took on a claustrophobic cast. Given the wet ground, it was difficult to sit. The less fastidious accepted damp pant seats, but the majority stood or sat on their rain gear. A group of women took solace in the rosary, concluding with the Fátima Ejaculation, an appellation that induced sniggering among certain nearby males who knew themselves to be perennially immature but nevertheless couldn't help how they were struck. To them, it was funny. The Fátima Ejaculation. O my Jesus, forgive us our sins, save us from the fires of hell, and lead all souls to heaven, especially those in most need of thy mercy. You shouldn't be laughing, a woman said. I can't seem to help it, a man answered. It's like trying not to… ejaculate. At this the men laughed all the harder.

There was too much anticipation to be suffered. A disturbed zealot filled the emptiness of waiting with a high-pitched soliloquy, while those around him feigned disinterest or lack of consciousness. Conspiracy in the Vatican! he proclaimed. An Italian actor travels to Austria and is altered by the finest Viennese plastic surgeon to look like Pope Paul VI! Cardinal Casaroli and Cardinal Villot are the villains behind this dastardly plot in league with the Freemasons and international banking, the Rothschilds and their cronies in Brussels, for which we will suffer World War Three and after that the Ball of Redemption, a comet such as this world has never seen, more deadly than the asteroid of Armageddon! Indeed! We are sure to see episcopal censure and an attempt to unleash satanic forces against our undefiled Ann of Oregon since the Red Hats are all fallen today and the Purple Hats surely are next! The devil is strong! Be not misled! The pope you see is an evil impostor and the one true pope our conduit to heaven has been subdued and is today sequestered in the Roman catacombs where he languishes under the influence of drugs and awaits our crusading intervention! Indeed the symbols of Beelzebub         .         . .

In another bay of the sea of pilgrims, a woman had taken up juggling rubber balls purchased expressly for that purpose and stowed in the bottom of her backpack. She was skilled and modestly entertaining, passing the balls behind her back and underneath her long raised legs, but someone nearby took offense at her antics and began to argue that such a spectacle was appropriate to a carnival perhaps but unsuited to the matter at hand and an insult to Mother Mary. So there was no more juggling. Some pilgrims played card games. Others examined photographs—Polaroids of cloud formations resembling Jesus, the door to heaven, angels. Cells of devotees arrayed themselves in tight-knit circles and prayed together feverishly. A woman sighted a butterfly about which there were various opinions, Painted Lady, Lorquin's Admiral, Anise Swallowtail, Mourning Cloak, but the time and place was inauspicious for all these and the only possibility, a bearded pilgrim loudly proclaimed—after labeling himself a “poor man's B-league lepidopterist”—was
Nymphalis californica,
whose name, he added, chortling, was a juxtaposition not inappropriate for a number of Hollywood strumpets. Think Neve Campbell, he said. Or Cameron Diaz.
Nymphalis californica.
That's not anything we need to hear, a pilgrim nearby admonished him. Butterflies are harbingers of Mary.