Our Lady of the Forest (21 page)

Another woman smelled roses in the woods, a second harbinger. Again, skeptics in proximity to this revelation were quick to point out how improbable it was: there were no roses in the woods in mid-autumn. Exactly, said the woman. That proves my point. The roses I smell, they're holy roses. The invisible perfume of Mother Mary. The roses I mean are not real roses. Did you know that at San Damiano rose petals fell in showers from the sky and then from the hands of Mary herself, and that the seer there was Rosa Quattrini, and that Our Lady appeared to Rosa with a rosary made out of white roses, white symbolizing Our Lady's grace, and also with a cross adorned in red roses, red symbolizing suffering? But no one knew these things. The woman pressed on, a small-time pedant. At San Damiano there were many healings. Rays of light fell to earth from the Madonna. A pear tree bloomed in the autumn of the year, as did the branch of a plum tree on which Our Lady stood. On the day of the feast of aviators, American pilots bore witness there. And Rosa was blessed by the Capuchin stigmatic known as Padre Pio. There was joy and light from heaven! There were graces and comforts from earth!

Two precocious high school boys from a Catholic school in Olympia climbed a tree and looked down on people. There's idiots, said one, who think Christian rock is heresy. Or even a band like Jesus Jones, just because of its name.

I don't get that. What's wrong with their name? In Latin America, there's hombres named Hey-sooz. Does anyone down there worry about it, like they're all going to hell?

No.

It's a gringo El Norte uptight thing.

This is freaky.

Best seats in the house.

This is da bomb.

Totally.

It's happening way up here.

Ann had decided to sequester herself in a small defile full of sword fern. The journey had exhausted her and left her feeling deeply chilled by the cooling of her own feverish sweat. She drank her water and took a Sudafed and two of the Phenathol pills. Then she sat with her back against a log and her knees pulled up against her chest in a limber attitude most adults can't achieve, Carolyn sitting like a yogi beside her, the two of them circumscribed, loosely, by self-appointed churlish sentinels, men who kept their arms across their bellies, chewed gum, and wore billed caps, a group of eight who'd gathered cumulatively during the course of the pilgrimage and made themselves into a convoy. Get it together, whispered Carolyn to Ann. People are twiddling their thumbs.

I can't force it, you know. It's not like this is a performance, a circus, with shows at noon and four. Whatever happens, it's up to Our Lady. I'm not really in charge here.

It's kind of a show, though. Like Billy Graham live at Madison Square Garden. Or Jim Bakker or Oral Roberts. You think those guys aren't showmen, Ann? There's such a thing as inspiration. There's willing her—what do you call it? Summoning her, invoking her. Now get on your knees and say your rosary. And put a little pizzazz into it. Whatever it takes. Get it started.

It's Our Lady who'll get things started, not me.

I beg to differ. It's a two-way street. You want the Virgin, you have to invite her. Open the door. Let her in. And take your hood off, sweet thing. It's not polite to wear a hood in the house, especially when you have company.

You don't believe in Our Lady, Carolyn.

Utterly beside the point.

I don't know why you're even here.

I'm here because I love you, girl. She took Ann's hand and pressed it to her cheek. Don't worry. I'm not a lesbian.

Neither am I. I'm nothing.

So we're just two women holding hands. No sexual implications in that. No one should read between the lines, she called out to their male sentinels. Hands touching. That's all.

She pulled Ann into a standing position. The crowd was singing On This Day, O Beautiful Mother in a manner reminiscent of Tibetan monks chanting
om mane padme hum,
the gathering of voices by some principle of acoustics more than the sum of its parts. Carolyn found it moving. She wrapped her arms around Ann tightly and put her mouth to Ann's ear. The sweatshirt hood now reminded Carolyn of the grim reaper's empty cowl, his faceless comic presence. You're beautiful, she whispered, baby doll. And kissed Ann's cheek with tender force. But you need a bath and some mouthwash.

I'm really sick, answered Ann.

They went out to the altar of ferns with its baubles and offerings. The great crowd stretched around them in all directions, plebes in the Colosseum. But Carolyn felt more like a Mayan high priest when Ann dropped suddenly to her knees in a choreography of resignation, pushed back her hood like a condemned prisoner, and pulled her rosary from her sweatshirt. Now her young face with its wan complexion was visible to her followers. They saw that she was a child and rejoiced, that her hair was cut like Joan of Arc's, that she reeked of humility. Behold, someone yelled, the handmaid of the Lord! and the voices of the singers lifted in a crescendo. There was a palpable, militant stirring through the crowd, pilgrims jockeying for position. Carolyn took cover behind a tree. One of the sentinels frowned at her, a man in a blaze-orange hunting vest. Alms buckets, she saw, were going around, and people were eagerly filling them. Huzzah! she thought. Was that the word? It was easy for Carolyn to feel greed and detachment. Eventually this would all be behind her. A lot of bad movies ended with people basking frivolously in tropical climes, laughing and drinking margaritas, taking their leisure in the ample sun, primed for a twilight of hedonism. Carolyn knew she was one of those characters. There were worse fates, but few so meaningless. She understood that she should not get attached to suntan lotion and Third World discos as philosophical propositions. There was a valid critique to be made of sensualism, one that was selfish, not ethical, since worship of the flesh led to premature despair and an investment in cosmetic surgery. Either that or roomy floral dresses and exile to retail boutique clerkdom in Tucson or Boca Raton. Fine to be an adventurer now among the young in exotic locales, but well-sunned, somnolent, geriatric tourists were a dime a dozen in Key Largo and Palm Springs and died without marring the landscape too much, except for the time-share condos left behind and the scent of cocoa butter. Ugh, thought Carolyn. Celluloid shades could conclude with a million dollars, beach recliners, and cocktails decorated with festive small umbrellas, but what of those flickering, gorgeous phantasms subsequent to the final credits, when the theater is strewn with sad spilled popcorn, and the cinephiles have all gone home to work on last-minute dishes or bills before going quietly to their beds? What of starlets and promiscuous heroes in the silence of living afterward, while no one watches and they grow older by the second? What then? thought Carolyn. A confirmed old biddy with sun-leathered skin? A lonely spinster with skin cancer?

Ann's raptures began in the midst of endlessly repeated Hail Marys. She stiffened, first, like a pointing dog, then quivered epileptically on her knees, then tilted forward past her center of balance as if frozen during a springboard dive, a trick that fueled her followers' fire because it was as eerily unsettling as a Hindu mystic on a bed of nails or a yogi folded up like a pretzel with his ankles behind his head. There seemed to be a principle of physics abrogated by her very posture that might well be divine in origin. Ann raised her eyes toward the treetops and stretched her arms like Jesus at the Mount and those close by could see her weeping in a manner suggestive of a thorough catharsis, nodding her head, mouthing silent utterances, conversing with her invisible interlocutor, her face kindled from moment to moment by the nuances of a conversation no one else was privy to. Someone yelled Hallelujah! Glory! and someone farther back yelled Mary Mother of Redemption save us from our sins! The boys in the tree were seized by the spectacle such that neither could be cynical temporarily, and each considered in private the priesthood, the prospect of hell, his own myriad sins, the pulsing thralldom of the ardent crowd, and the sexual charm of the visionary. The girl was pornographic in ecstasy, a male projection of female religious passion, as if God had entered her. She looked like the limp wilted models in magazines who have been arrayed so as to call attention to the sexual allure in the poverty of their bodies, their awkward features brought to the fore, their odd angles championed, pouchy stomachs, sagging shoulders, starved cheeks, dead eyes—heroin addicts on 42nd Street in the era just after disco expired; Patti Smith on the cover of
Horses
—the better to make them human, responsive, is there anything sexier than a flagrant flaw, a nipple off center, a port-wine-stained hip, limp hair, uneven breasts, a mole on the throat, bad shoulder blades? Ann was, potentially, all of these. She stood, naked without her hood, unkempt, disheveled, incandescent. Spiritually aflame, it was palpably clear, and trembling as if in postcoital meltdown. It had stopped raining. Shafts of light now penetrated the trees. Beams from heaven! a pilgrim cried, and began taking Polaroids feverishly.

Our Lady's message, Ann said suddenly. I greet the many pilgrims who have come today to—

Louder! yelled someone. We can't hear out here in the boonies! We can't hear anything you're saying!

Carolyn dashed up with the electric bullhorn, held it to her lips and exclaimed Oops!, then handed it to Ann with parodic obeisance and retreated again, a vaudevillian. Hello, said Ann, tinnily, and her voice evoked less mysticism amplified, she sounded like a junior high school thespian nervously engaged in a talent show. She also sounded adenoidal, asthmatic, and seriously phlegmatic. I'll start over, I guess, sorry, okay? I'm sorry that you couldn't hear me.

There were thumbs up, OK signs, and approval from the back. Ann held one hand forth like an orator and with the other clutched her bullhorn. Rejoice, she said. I greet the many pilgrims who have come here today to this beautiful place in the rain forest. Followers in Christ, amen. The Mother of God asks that you serve her now by practicing charity and good deeds. Our Lady asks that the selfish and greedy change their ways immediately, before her Son Our Lord Jesus Christ raises his arm and hurls the world into such dark sorrow as was never seen before. A darkness that will befall us all if our ways are not soon mended. Jesus is angry and his rage will not be stopped until the selfish and the greedy are redeemed. Now your Mother intercedes, your Mother of the Divine Mercy, Mother of the poor and Mother of the world, a woman clothed with the sun, as it is written, who leads you away from suffering. Away from the snares of the devil, Beelzebub, who is with us here in the world today, here even in this forest. Our Lady brings peace and is merciful, just like any mother. She who holds you to her breast and nurses you in your eternal sorrow. Go with her. Take heart in her. For she is the miracle of miracles, Mother of the perfect heart, Mother of God and the Handmaid of the Lord, she is Mary the Queen of Heaven, and by her assumption into paradise she sits now at the right hand of God and comes to you here in order to warn you: be not deceived by Satan the devil in his many forms and disguises. Be not deceived! But follow in her a true woman of valor, a woman who chose by her own free will to become the servant of God!

Ann paused. There were tears in her eyes. Just as Eve chose disobedience, she said, so did Mary say unto God, Be it done unto me according to thy will, and lo, it was done! And now she stands as a mother might between her children here on earth and God the Father in heaven, between all of you and a terrible judgment! She is like the north star to you, a guide to the gates of paradise, leader of the heavenly choir, Mother of Sorrows who stood in witness as her only Son was crucified. Our Lady is all these things and more. It is she who holds back the hand of the Lord, a woman of glory and divine holy power. The Holy Trinity is incomplete without her grace and understanding. She is Mary Light of the Forest whose church will rise in this very place by our hands, our work, and our sweat. Let us begin our task together. Take heart, rejoice, and follow me! In Jesus' name, amen.

Ann fell silent, her message complete, and pulled her hood across her forehead. The drawing of a shade or veil, met by a din of silence. Carolyn stepped forward ebulliently and stood beside Ann with her hands clasped thinking, I like that speech, female energy, Tepid Feminists for Catholicism, a little lukewarm feminist theology never hurt anybody. She looked at Ann with a feigned expression of unadulterated spiritual awe—not entirely feigned, however: the elevated diction of Ann's recitation was genuinely spooky, she had to admit, as if indeed Ann had channeled someone else's rhetoric and intelligence—and noted at the same time that Ann's nostrils were flaring reflexively and the vermilion border of her lower lip remained tremulously aflutter. Mellow, said Carolyn. Let me take over. I've got it, Ann.

Simultaneously a woman stepped from the crowd, prompting a defensive lurch from two sentinels whom Ann held back with a raised hand. It was the ex-bartender, Carolyn recalled, the woman who'd mentioned Paul Simon's “Kodachrome” and who'd chain-smoked her way through the forest on Friday; the woman who'd knelt with the rest in deference to Pascal's pragmatic wager. Forgive me! she cried now, hoarse in the way of some nicotine addicts, but I'm called to testify to a miracle, I'm called to testify! On Friday I traveled with Ann of Oregon to witness for myself her visions of Mother Mary and at that time she prayed for me about which I'll admit I was pretty skeptical, a doubting Thomas, but guess what? Guess! All my warts have disappeared and on top of that I stopped smoking, without any trouble nicotine is gone, I tried patches, Nicorettes, everything you can think of under the sun, but Ann prayed for me and bang, like that, the two things Ann said she would help me with, the warts and the smoking—they're gone! I'm bearing witness to her, she's a miracle worker, I've never been particular-religious but here I am to share with you the amazing truth of her healing glory, Ann of Oregon has cured me!