Our Lady of the Forest (37 page)

There was a bonfire burning in the dank-smelling forest where the apparitions had unfurled. There were pilgrims with shovels, hoes, and picks digging out a large pool. There was an altar of ferns festooned with petitions and with more framed photographs and candles. Propped against its tree, illuminated grotesquely by the bonfire light, stood the half-size statue of Our Lady of Fátima garlanded with its crown of moss. She looked sinister somehow, like the guest of honor at a wake.

Tom came forward tentatively with his water bottles and warmed his hands amid the crowd at the fire. Welcome, brother, someone said. Join us in thanksgiving. Hail Holy Queen, called someone else, an ardent voice from across the flames. Mother of Mercy, our life, our sweetness and our hope, to you do we cry, poor banished children of Eve! It was closing in on midnight now; nevertheless there were at least fifty people gathered close to the fire's heat, filling plastic jugs at the pool and milling about with restless fervor as if unable to leave. The blaze burning deep in the woods, the altar of ferns and the macabre wreathed statue, the firelight reflected in the gleaming black pool—it all felt to Tom like a witches' coven or a sylvan gathering of warlocks. It all felt dangerously supernatural and disconnected from God.

The flames hissed. The forest floor lay wet underneath. Sparks from slowly combusting moss rose through the tree branches like miniature wraiths. Tom turned his back to the people at the bonfire and went down to kneel by the pool of holy water. It was black and smelled of mud and moss and a woman with a hoe who was working nearby—in the dark he couldn't make out her face—said Praise the Lord and Hail Our Lady, what miracle are you seeking?

I'm seeking my ill son's health and salvation.

What illness does he suffer from?

Paralysis, said Tom. He's paralyzed.

He can't move?

His neck is broken.

An accident?

No, said Tom.

What happened then?

I did it to him.

You broke his neck.

That's right. I did.

But how can that be?

I broke it on purpose.

But how can that be? How? Why?

Hatred, said Tom. I hated him.

He filled his water bottles, wiped his hands on his pants. The woman let him do so in silence and then she reached to touch his shoulder. Hail Mary, full of grace, she said. The Lord is with thee. He is.

Leave me alone, answered Tom.

In the woods, by the trail, not far off, he set down the bottles, sat on a log, and smoked the last of his cigarettes. Tom knew he wasn't acceptable now in his language or demeanor. He could still see himself as others saw him. And he was not surprised to be not surprised. He asked himself, Is it me or them? The world or me? Who doesn't see? Who doesn't know? How long have I been going in this direction? When did I start this way?

He hated women. Bitches. Cunts. The faceless whore with her pious pity, Jezebel at the laundromat, Tammy, Heidi Johnston, Jabari, Ann of Oregon, the Cross Family Committee, Eleanor, they were all the same when it came to it, they all wanted to get inside you.

Tom hiked out and drove his truck toward town. The moon was risen. A rare night of few clouds. Wind-driven clouds across the moon reminded him of his Ford Unit hunting camp. Sitting by the fire drinking Budweiser with Kruse and frying backstrap in margarine, listening to AC/DC.

In North Fork Tom found a mob at the church. Cars pulled in: a revival meeting. A candlelight vigil, Bible thumpers. A mass of pilgrims, three state patrol cars, even a couple of television cameras. Okay, he said. All right. This is it. Tom drove up onto the sidewalk, spilled out, and waded into the crowd.

         

V

Assumption

NOVEMBER 15–NOVEMBER 16, 1999

F
ather Collins unlocked the door to his church and noted immediately the odor of mildew perpetually inhabiting not only the vestibule but the sanctuary, hallway, storage room, kitchen, sacristy, and especially his own office. A clammy green must exuded from the carpets, which were laid over concrete subfloors. Church volunteers with mildewcide-laced rug shampoo had sought unsuccessfully to purge this aroma, obstinately repeating their vigorous attempts and applying a variety of chemical products essentially to no avail. For a day or two one noted an improvement, a sterile antiseptic balm, and then the mildew smell returned, putrescent and freshly incubated.

Father Collins admitted Father Butler to his church and locked the door behind him. It was eight-thirty-nine and he had come to feel—in fact it had been the tenor of his day—that Father Butler was tiresome. They'd gone from the woods to the campground to the trailer court, where Father Collins had turned down the sofa bed and plumped his colleague's pillow. Always there'd been Father Butler's voice, sonorous, grating, presumptuous, categorical, and full of ministerial self-regard. He'd expounded on the Holy See, the Catholic Theological Union, Vatican II, Cardinal Martini of Milan, and the recent Synod of Bishops. He'd related a number of Third World narratives unified by the theme of difficulties. Absurd difficulties regarding basic matters—water, housing, transportation, sanitation—that Father Butler found comic and telling. The strapping young priest with his quinine water, buzz cut, and stalwart good humor, abroad among
backward indigenes.
Father Collins had to remind himself repeatedly that his brother-in-Christ had been a young adult during the Eisenhower administration and therefore had missed out on diversity as a worldview and had not been inculcated into the nuanced semantics of the multicultural sensibility. He had never learned to be PC, which actually was a kind of relief. Nevertheless it was still galling to hear him prattle on about
natives
and to hear him pepper his speech with unfashionable, antiquated, and objectionable locutions like
primitive, oriental,
and
uncivilized.
And eventually it was also exhausting.

The two priests out of boredom had supped early at Gip's, where they'd argued about Western metaphysical dualism after Father Collins asserted that racism was an organic product of European philosophical thought—trotting out Luther, Calvin and Descartes, Saint Augustine's platonic theology, and Freud's insinuation that leadership of the human species fell to the European nations—a debate neither clergyman cared very much about though it nicely passed the minutes until their hamburgers arrived, at which point they called a cease-fire. The heady smell of grease and meat and a brief silent prayer from Father Butler. Father Collins liked a hamburger now and then more than he cared to admit to himself and ate them with guilt because good forest land had been destroyed to make graze for South American beef cattle, though on this evening Father Butler's red-faced presence suppressed his carnivorous appetite and inspired in its place an idealist's ascetic self-denial. Father Collins picked at his french fries, played with his ketchup, and took note of the brightly decorative mustard festooning the corner of Father Butler's mouth as he dispatched his hamburger with unabashed relish and much labial noise.

Now they sat in the church office digesting grease and listening to the baseboard heater click, and Father Butler picked at his teeth and repeated something he had said before dinner, I think you've misread your Augustine, Collins. With all your talk of the Manichean Realm of Light and Christ's place in the Manichean cosmogony, to use your term—cosmogony. I don't think it works in your argument. Your abstruse racism argument.

So let's leave it then, said Father Collins. We've done enough with that tired subject. Though I'm well acquainted with
The Confessions,
I'll have you know. I still refer to them often.

With their emphasis, Father Butler said, on control of the restless passions, Collins. Control of the restless passions.

Your point being what?

That you have a ceaselessly roving eye. Come on, now, don't play dumb, I've noted it more than once today—and look, proof, you're turning beet-red, as scarlet as the scarlet letter! Noted it among the goodly women who follow your little friend Our Ann, and again with our prim pert hamburger waitress. Father Butler wagged an admonishing forefinger. Not good for a priest to look so much. Not good for a celibate brother-in-Christ. What was your Saint Augustine's phrase? The broiling sea of fornication?

I'm only a man like other men, brother. I don't pretend to be otherwise.

And didn't he say that the impulses of the spirit and those of the flesh are at war with one another?

It's the impulses of the spirit and the impulses of nature.

For all intents and purposes the same. So I got a bit of the language wrong. Father Butler pressed his fingers together, forming a tent or rafters. That mold smell is awful, he announced.

It's a nasty sort of peculiar mildew. Peculiar to rain-beaten logging towns.

Well it's perfectly evil. Perfectly wretched. As if the door to Pandemonium were located beneath your church.

That would be, technically, a sulfurous emanation, brother. Fire and brimstone, et cetera. Very drying to mildew.

At any rate can't you do something soon? It's abhorrent, this much must.

Well, said Father Collins. I'm glad you're here. Taking notes on our humble physical plant. And soon going home with notes in hand. Taking our message to the diocese. The message being that out here in North Fork we need to do something about a mildew crisis. Not that they haven't heard from me. Not that I haven't informed them incessantly. Made like a fly in the bishop's ointment. Offered elegantly simple choices. A, start over and get a vapor barrier under the slab, or B, build a brand-new church.

Your lighting is drab as well, said Father Butler. The general atmosphere is depressing.

Father Collins, sulking behind his desk, thought of Father Butler as a cross to bear and reminded himself that this sort of irritation was incidental in the long run. If Christ could wear a crown of thorns, couldn't he suffer Father Butler? In the past twelve months he'd learned prodigiously about the nuances of professional endurance and become a seasoned veteran when it came to forbearance. Yet he worried that Father Butler's investigation would drag on interminably and that perforce he would have to bear at length this chattering, orotund, clerical fool who resembled the wrestling and football coach at Father Collins' prep school. Father Ted with a whistle around his neck. And now here came this Father Bill. Everyone's friend but a tough sergeant too who knew his rote theology. You know, said Father Collins. Out here like this. So far away from the bishop's office. I haven't gotten much of a chance to see for myself what he's like.

The bishop? Father Butler replied. Are you asking me about the bishop?

In a nutshell maybe. Don't feel the need to write his biography. But in a nutshell—yes.

The bishop as I know him is a pragmatist and compromiser. A realist about what can actually be accomplished. And relatively above the fray. Anything but a detail man. He likes to delegate wherever he can. Middle-of-the-road but canted right by nature. Yet malleable when circumstances demand. I've seen him turn left against his instincts. I respect him, ultimately, yes I do. He's a politician, unlike me. And in the long run he gets things done.

So in other words he's no ordinary Ordinary.

Clever wordplay.

Fun with homonyms.

Well what is it exactly you want to know? Is he going to build you a new church out here? I don't think that happens anytime soon. Because he's fully cognizant of budget constraints. In fact he's excellent at crunching numbers. In another life he might have kept books. Anyway, he's hard to ruffle. I guess I have seen him become impassioned about aggressive proselytizing by Protestant groups. That sort of thing really bothers him. Fundamentalist fanatics.

Father Collins leaned back in his chair. It was a cheap padded task chair from Office Depot with a pneumatic height-adjustment lever, plastic casters, and molded arms, utterly homely but enormously comfortable in a way that was bad for his lumbago. Eighty-eight dollars. Father Collins had paid for it himself but didn't plan to keep it after he left because it had come to smell like mildew. It had been a tax deduction once as an office expense and would be again as a charitable contribution. The next priest could douse it with mildewcide.

It's closing in on nine, he said. Maybe we should discuss Our Ann a little. Preliminaries. Before she arrives. Some thoughts about her. In preparation.

Father Butler pulled at his priestly tab like a man loosening his tie. I'll be frank, he said. I'll be quite frank. She's a dope-smoking runaway, period. She isn't going to stand up to scrutiny or even take very long.

How do you know?

Because I can just about smell the dope on her and see it in her eyes. In her case I can use what I call Procedure A, approved and recommended by Father Groeschel as he recapitulates Father Poulain, namely that there are some simple considerations which permit an open-minded observer to dismiss a reported revelation without doing too much investigation. And one of these—I'm extrapolating from Poulain now, because Poulain didn't have to endure the sixties—one of these is drug use.

So you see, Father Butler droned on, it's the short version out here in North Fork this week, short by the Church's historical standards which means very long by anyone else's—but you know that as well as I do. I talk to her. Or we talk to her. We talk to everybody. One at a time. Anyone who's had dealings with her. I have my assistant back at the office do extensive research, too. Where she was born, school grades, arrest records, credit history. Whatever we can dig up, specifics. Then I put my report together and the bishop broods for five minutes.

There's something tragic in all of that.

Well I'm not required to entertain such notions. Tragic or not there's a job to perform. There are motions we have to go through.

Father Collins bit his lip and thwarted his impulse to comment further, to suggest that for him the tragedy of it lay not just in the girl's undoing but in the length of the Church's paper trail, in the Church's bureaucratic imperatives and incessant record keeping. The grottoes underneath the Vatican were no doubt filled with slate and vellum, desiccated rag pulp ledgers, and meeting minutes recorded on parchments made by eighth-century Moors. How many scriveners and amanuenses had toiled in service to the Vicars of Christ, their secretariats, councils, and tribunals? Was there any institution on earth that made greater use of ground wood fiber? The Prelate's Recommendation to the Holy See Regarding the Phenomenon of Our Ann of North Fork would be filed in front of the six-month fiscal report from the Pontifical Council for Laity and behind a European Synod position paper on special papal appointees. Going through the motions, said Father Collins. I suppose that must be necessary.

Dot i's, cross t's, and, to paraphrase Sir Thomas More, keep your affairs… regular.

Father Collins checked his watch. I'll tell you what, he said with false authority. You wait here. Relax. Unwind. I'm going to put some water on for tea and wait for Our Ann in the vestibule.

Tea?

Yes.

I'll have some then.

Our Ann has a flu for which tea might be good.

As you say, said Father Butler. I'll take mine as a digestive.

Father Collins strode down the hall like a harried parish beadle bent on a mission, lit a burner on the stove in the kitchen, and ran the rust through the pipes thoroughly before filling the teakettle with cold water.
Our Ann,
he thought, ashamed of himself for having used the name ironically in deference to Father Butler's dominion. The kitchen had a close, water-stained ceiling, curling squares of linoleum, rotting baseboards, chipped Formica counters, and that air of occasional sporadic use that renders the contents of a refrigerator suspect and suggests that the biscuit flour, corn meal, and cooking oil comprising its depressing contents should all be immediately thrown out. Over the sink, typed in a capital Zapf Chancery font, was a set of instructions for kitchen use inside a plastic sheath. Its syntax was atrociously mangled, as was much of its spelling. SCRUB SINK WITH CLENSER AFTER UTLIZING. FOR HYGENE'S SAKE GOOD HOT WATER SHOULD BE UTLIZED. DRY DISHES ALL THE WAY BEFORE PUTTING BACK. WIPE COUNTER TOPS COMPLETELY DOWN WITH RAG. DISPOSE OF USED COFFEE FILERS. USE TWISTEES ON GARBAGE BAGS WHEN BAGS ARE FULL. THANK YOU AND GOD BLESS OUR KICHEN!

Father Collins took solace in his moment of privacy, standing over the stove. He had not had a moment alone all day in which to contemplate the befuddled embarrassment he'd felt that morning in the presence of the visionary, appearing, as he had, as feeble handmaid to her stern, dogmatic inquisitor. As Father Butler's whipping boy, yes-man, and valet. There he'd sat beside Father Butler in that claustrophobic Volkswagen van where there was no escape from the visionary's scrutiny of his pusillanimous shit-eating face. Father Collins' embarrassment was partly moral—the young priest seething with contradictions—but also, he knew, partly romantic: he'd felt as action hero compromised and even metaphorically castrated. He'd stood before Ann with his soul excised and displayed in Father Butler's hands. And no doubt it had revealed itself as the dead gray matter it was in truth so that he could no longer hide from her. She would know that his reluctance to support her cause arose from his systemic male malaise and from the same inherent cowardice that had driven him toward the priesthood, out of the realm of corporeal struggle with its sex, blood, and animal violence, its frightening Darwinian rules.