Our Lady of the Forest (3 page)

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 thoroughly 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.

The mystery of this lost girl no longer disturbed North Fork, a town beleaguered by newer discontents and by a sense of deep injustice. It had thought of itself until recently as a prosperous timber community, had sawn down its adjoining forests with purposeful enthusiasm, but was at the time of the purported apparitions a place impoverished and psychologically defeated, a casualty, in its view of things, of urban liberals and their representatives in government, who wanted all the trees left standing. As a result, stores were closed on Main Street. The Chamber of Commerce encouraged tourism by opening a History of Logging Museum, but few travelers visited. A prison was built in the vicinity, a baleful presence south of town that hired ex-loggers as guards and clerks, but many in North Fork stayed unemployed.

There were clear-cuts on the edges of town in the sullen, mangled state of disrepair common to war-torn landscapes. In side lots the tackle of logging operations was already seized by blackberry creepers and rusted in silent heaps. The sawdust and sluff at mills rotted. Mildew stained certain trailer homes. Sheds and buildings sat boarded up, and the mud puddles in the side streets, iridescent with motor oil, were as long as logging trucks. Rain fell from a leaden sky, which cast a permanent pall over North Fork even in the best of times, and these were far from the best of times, these were closer to the worst. No one quite knew what to do now that the era of logging was past, a chapter in history with a museum to commemorate it. A number of families moved away to wherever the hope of employment took them, selling their homes at a loss without exception or turning them over to the banks. A few ex-loggers became fishing guides, working the rivers in drift boats, making sack lunches at 4 a.m. Others living up in the hills or along spur roads in old clear-cuts took to growing marijuana in pits dug under their trailer houses. As a result it was not considered safe anymore to drive back roads inquisitively or to poke around very much. Mushrooming for cash was popular, as was brush foraging, seed-cone gathering, and scavenging the last of the cedar stumps. The taverns still did a viable trade: the woman who thought of the lost girl's ghost had worked in one until recently, drawing beers, mopping the bar, leaning against the cash register, chain-smoking, and watching football. She was let go because, after separating from her husband, she began to drink unreasonably, and then she lost what was left to her and ended up in the campground.

On the evening she heard of Ann Holmes' apparition, she went to the phone booth outside the convenience store and called the lost girl's mother in North Fork, a woman whose husband still had a job as a custodian at the high school. There's somebody picking mushrooms out here who saw a ghost in the woods, she said. Maybe it was Lee Ann.

I don't think I believe in ghosts. But sometimes, you know what? I feel her nearby. Lately I feel her. Her presence.

There's more to the world than what we see.

I guess so, said the lost girl's mother. Anyway, it can't hurt anything if I come out there around ten o'clock, which is the earliest I can come tomorrow. And hey—something else. One more thing. Please don't tell my husband.

And so by midmorning they were a party of five: the fervent Catholic, the mother of the lost girl, the onetime bartender with the drinking problem, Carolyn Greer—appalled by her own interest—and finally the visionary, carrying her catechism, her hood drawn tightly around her face.

They set out in a file through the woods, underneath a light rain. Carolyn and the ex-bartender had brought along their picking buckets but for the others this was an expedition whose purpose was a scrutiny of Ann and not the gathering of mushrooms. In fact as they were crossing Fryingpan Creek the Catholic woman ventured the opinion that gathering mushrooms, for her at least, might indicate a kind of irreverence. If in truth Our Lady was present, who would want to stand in Her light with a bucket of mushrooms at hand? The Catholic woman felt that the loss of income accruing from a missed day of picking was a small sacrifice. But it's up to the individual, she said. I'm not going to judge you for picking today. Go ahead and pick away. But to me, it just doesn't feel right.

I feel judged whatever you say.

I'm sorry. What's your name?

Carolyn.

I'm sorry, Carolyn.

I see you don't mind bringing your camera.

I always carry it. I take photos as a hobby.

Well maybe you can sell your Virgin Mary pictures to a tabloid magazine.

They stopped to rest alongside the elk trail, under the shelter of a blowdown fallen across another blowdown. Ann swallowed her antihistamine with a draft from a water bottle. They sat on the moss in a semicircle and the Catholic woman, apologizing first, asked about the lost girl. She was seven, said her mother, so if she was here she'd be graduating from high school this year.

Going to the prom.

All those things.

How did it happen?

She was fishing with my husband.

You weren't there?

I was home that afternoon.

She just walked off?

No one knows exactly what happened. There wasn't a trace of her—okay, I apologize. I can't really talk about it.

The mother of the lost girl hung her head. The Catholic woman plucked at something that looked like clover festooning the bed of moss. What is this stuff? she asked. I'm sorry.

It's oxalis, said the mother of the lost girl. Some people actually plant it.

They traveled on through the labyrinth of blowdowns and climbed the steep hill northward. Ann seemed to the others aloof, traveling at a slight remove. The rain had penetrated through the trees now, and passing through the Oregon grape and salal they were all soaked to the knees. The ex-bartender pulled a scarf over her head and snugly knotted it under her chin until it made a dimple in the fat there. I look like my grandmother this way, she said. But at least my hair won't be wet.

We all look like our grandmothers these days, the mother of the lost girl answered.

It's disconcerting.

I'll say it is.

What's to be done?

Nothing I don't think short of botox.

Well I can't afford a new face.

They came into the deeper forest, home to the purported apparitions, before twelve o'clock. I'm going to say the rosary, announced Ann, when they reached the spot she had led them to, a bed of moss beneath fir trees whose tops they couldn't see. Also a prayer for your missing daughter, if that's all right with you.