Our Lady of the Forest (9 page)

None of it—his father's advice, the Kipling poem—was doing him any good now.

Well maybe, he said to Tom Cross, you're here because you want to change.

Do people change?

They do in stories.

Too bad this isn't a story then.

How do you know this isn't a story? Maybe your whole life is just a story—one that God has written for you but within which you must act with volition.

Assign me an act of contrition, Father. Assign me my penance. Please.

Pray as much as you can, I assign. I know that sounds vague and ridiculous to you. But in the sheer beauty of holy words lies succor and salvation. Like carrying water and hewing wood. Aren't you a hewer of wood, Tom? Strike upon strike of the splitting maul, according to the will of God, until your penance has been realized, achieved, that's what I ask of you. The words themselves, their utterance bringing His light to the world, their utterance lighting your path through a dark wood. So for the rest of your life say as many as you can. A million Hail Marys and a million Our Fathers. That's what I ask from you.

Words?

Yes.

Okay, said Tom. But they won't help.

And why is that?

They're only words.

It had later been Father Collins' duty to call on Thomas Cross the younger—Junior as he was widely known, or Tommy as his mother called him—to take confession from this paralyzed boy who breathed with the help of a ventilator. On his first visit the priest had been apprehensive and felt a stirring of tension and dread: I'm the new priest, he'd said with false cheer, his voice echoing in the Cross family kitchen where the boy sat lashed to his wheelchair, looking out the window into the backyard at nothing of genuine interest. Nothing, really, to look at for very long, a ragged square of mossy lawn, fallen cedar needles, copious blackberry, rotting firewood, a mildewed truck canopy, moss-covered roofing shakes. The kitchen itself was clean but depressing, the pattern in the linoleum worn to a yellow sheen from years of work-boot traffic. Tom Junior had been dressed and groomed for this audience—a turtleneck shirt to conceal from view the tracheostomy hole in his throat, his hair wetted and parted. I have to confess, said Father Collins, that I don't know what to say in your presence. Forgive me for that. This is new to me. I feel more than a little awkward.

The boy looked a little like Stephen Hawking, Hawking if younger and not quite so curled, his left shoulder twitched every now and then and he smelled faintly of urine. He was thin with a high Shakespearean forehead, his ears were large and canted out, and his head appeared to be perched precariously on top of his frail neck. His mechanical breathing was so disconcerting that the priest felt panicked and metaphysically distressed. Steady, he told himself. Try to feign calm. Hi, said Tom Junior robotically, on the exhale. There was a pause while the pump inflated his lungs. My name is. Tommy Cross.

Father Collins remembered that Tibetan monks were made to sit in graveyards at night to thwart their fear of the supernatural and he wished he'd had that sort of training. How could you be human but unable to breathe? The breath of life was infused at birth and left again at the moment of death, which meant that somebody like Tom Cross Junior was in no-man's-land or purgatory. An interesting locus for spiritual questions of the sort priests asked at seminars. I'm very pleased to meet you, Father Collins said. After hearing so much from other people it's good to finally meet you.

Tom Junior's eyes swiveled to take him in and Father Collins, aware of his thoughtlessness, moved immediately in front of the boy—wishing in his rapidity to signal apology—and perched on the edge of a chair. The chair, he saw now, had been placed for him, the boy's mother thinking of this, leaving the chair where it needed to be, the priest felt compelled toward a formal posture and sat with his hands clasped humbly in his lap. Here I am, he said.

The boy packed as much as he could into an exhale. It's really hard to talk. A big effort. An effort for me. I'm sorry.

Don't apologize. Please—don't apologize. But if you need to, whenever you're ready, go ahead and confess.

It's hard to sin. Sin from a wheelchair.

One of the benefits, maybe. I suppose. Although it's possible there aren't any benefits.

No, said Tom Junior. None.

The priest felt certain that a statement such as this was harder to hear than to utter. The rest of us don't want truth, he thought. We only want to hear success stories. Cup-half-full stories. Tales of triumph. I appreciate your honesty, he said.

Being a quad. Quadriplegic. Sucks.

I'm not going to doubt you on that for a moment.

In a movie. About gimps. It's over. In two hours.

Do they make any movies about gimps do you think?

No. Too boring. Nothing happens.

Father Collins nodded grimly. Not entirely true, he thought. Daniel Day-Lewis in
My Left Foot,
Tom Cruise in
Born on the Fourth of July,
Peter Sellers in
Dr. Strangelove.
Gimps could be interesting for maybe two hours but after that, thank God, no more, let's gratefully walk out of the theater.

Since I last. Confessed. I told God. To go to hell. A thousand times. At least.

I have a feeling God'll give you a pass. As your priest I'm giving you a pass for that. A free pass. A get-out-of-jail-free card. You can say that to God a thousand times and God will not drop a thunderbolt on you. But I'm sure He's glad you've confessed to it. And more—do you still feel like cursing him? That's the important question.

Yes. Not as often. Sometimes.

Good. That's progress. And for your penance I assign you to seated meditation on the first of the Ten Commandments.

Okay.

So what were you looking at when I came in here? Out the window there?

I was thinking about. Thinking about stuff.

What kind of stuff?

That my lungs. Feel dry.

Anything else?

Zanaflex.

Zanaflex?

To keep me from. From twitching.

What else?

My leg bag. Stinks.

No it doesn't.

The truck canopy.

What about it?

We camped. With it. In Montana. I was eleven. We went. To a rodeo.

Who went?

My father. And me.

How was that?

Good. Good time.

So you have good memories?

No. A few.

Most aren't good?

Most. Are bad.

How so?

My father. Was mean. Was mean to me.

I'm sorry to hear that, said Father Collins.

The boy made no answer to this. They sat there together listening to the ventilator which was a little like Chinese water torture. Father Collins felt a frustrated pity and profound helplessness. A priest was only a man, after all, and not a magician, wizard, saint, miracle worker, or angel. I don't want to make you talk, he said. I don't want to wear you out.

Sorry. Already. I'm sorry. Talking is hard.

Then, all right, let me do this now—and the priest muttered rapidly the formula of absolution and reached into his pocket for the small silver box in which he carried Tom Junior's communion wafer and his vial of eucharistic wine. Don't, said the boy. Don't touch it. Please. I get. Infections. From people.

So what should I do?

Over there. Are gloves.

Father Collins washed his hands at the sink. There was a box of surgeon's gloves on the counter and he pulled on a pair. The ventilator reminded him of the devil's breathing and made him think of
The Exorcist.
He composed himself. He sat down again. He took Tom Junior's hand in his and said Are you comfortable with me doing this?

I don't. Believe in God, said the boy. But go ahead. If you want.

Father Collins performed the Eucharist with an empty heart. The boy's tongue looked dry and pale. His exhaled breath was sour and sweet. The wafer disappeared down his raw red gullet and his eyes bulged with pain. Father Collins avoided looking at the place where the vent tube penetrated Tom Junior's throat, visible at the sagging lip of his turtleneck. He felt wholly ineffectual. The smell of urine nauseated him. He was frightened and wanted to leave right away. He despised himself and nearly said so. Weren't there priests who worked among lepers, wasn't Christ himself a physician, wasn't he called upon by his very office to salve wounds, anoint the sick, heal, bless, and make hospital visits? Wasn't he called on to look at death, as Mary had looked at her Son's crucifixion? I'm weak, he thought. My soul is weak. You're tired, he said to the paralyzed boy. So I'll leave you now. I'll leave you to rest. And he left with that paltry excuse.

         

On the morning after meeting the visionary, the priest packed a lunch of a cheese sandwich, an orange, and raw almonds mixed with raisins. There was no rain, which cheered him a little, and as he drove out of the trailer court with the defroster fan screeching and scraping against its housing he played his
Miracles of Sant'iago
cassette and plowed directly through the puddles. He was aware that his infatuation with the visionary had expanded slightly overnight, surprising because he had come to expect that his crushes would constrict immediately. In the case of the visionary, Father Collins decided, his attraction was held aloft this morning by the prospect of their campground rendezvous—toward which he sped beneath drab skies—which felt to him like a tryst.

He was surprised to find, though, on arriving there, that a party of more than a dozen pilgrims had gathered around the girl's morning fire, where they drank from thermoses, poked at the flames, and milled with their hands in their pockets. A blanket of heavy, smothering mist pressed against the treetops. Sparks spiraled through moss-hung maples and the river just beyond her camp ran the hue of dulled gunmetal. The girl's car looked derelict, her canvas tent improbably antique, like something from World War II. The morning air felt rheumatically damp and the ground seemed permanently sodden. The priest thought it an ill stroke of history that the Romantic poets had not come here, since these woods might have fully drawn out their lyric melancholy. He imagined the sickly Keats, coughing, seated under a hoary spruce and pondering the tubercular chill in the air; Byron about with his walking stick, brooding and poking dashingly at the moss; Shelley the atheist; the restless Wordsworth; all grappling with odes to gloom. The mossy coverts and vales of the rain forest would have spoken to their forlorn souls, and the clean and desperate beauty of the trees would have spurred them to new flights of fancy. What a marvelous place to be depressed about the very conditions of being, thought the priest. The constitutionally philosophical, those with a tender awareness of mortality, had simultaneously no business here and no better place to go.

Feigning calm, he approached the fire and held out his hands to warm them. There were seven members of his congregation, a trio of dogs, five utter strangers, and the two who had come to him the night before with news of the apparition. The girl's cold, he thought, had worsened; she appeared more spent and pale. Why are you here, Father? a bearded man asked. What's your purpose here?

Those are the fundamental questions of my life. I wish I could answer them.

What have you heard? What do you know?

I've heard no more than what you've heard. So I've come to see for myself.

Praise the Lord, a woman said—a stoop-shouldered widow from his congregation whom he knew to be half blind. She was overly fervent at prayer, he thought, and trembled when she sang, a charismatic Catholic. Behold, our priest is among us, she croaked. We can count our priest among our numbers. As it is written in Revelation: There appeared a great wonder in heaven: a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars!

Yes, said the priest. I'm here, as you say. Good morning, Ann, he added. I hope you're taking care of that cold.

I'm trying, Father, said Ann.

I didn't sleep.

Neither did I.

I stayed awake in anticipation.

The same with me. All night.

Not with me, said Carolyn. I crashed hard. Completely tired. I slept the sleep of the dead.

They set out in the manner of an expeditionary force—after the priest, ten others showed up—their trampling pace and enthusiasm for travel at odds with the muted woods. They were like a race of warlike ants advancing fanatically through the forest, some of them vaulting over logs and deadfalls and getting ahead of the visionary before slowing against their will. The dogs, like most dogs, were impressionable and, feeling the fervor of the situation, became manic and feverish and could not be checked from dashing forward far into the distance. One took up the trail of a deer and could be heard barking at a considerable remove until its owner began blowing on a pocket whistle in such shrill, piercing and strident blasts that nothing else could be discerned. I'll tell you what, said Carolyn to the priest. This is probably what the Crusades felt like. An invading force. With zeal.

Except that there aren't any Turks with scimitars.

We've got loggers.

Are they out here you think?

Like Saladin. But with chain saws.

The priest assisted the stoop-shouldered widow through the log crossing at Fryingpan Creek and afterward took her arm at the elbow as they wound through the forest of blowdowns. The flaccidity of her triceps muscle was so complete as to disturb Father Collins with its intimations of mortality and her odor was of ill digestion. I have a son in Toledo, she told him. So I've been to Our Lady of America.

Our Lady of America?

The Blessed Virgin appeared there too. To a Sister Mildred. In 1956. In a hallway—isn't that interesting? The Virgin appearing in a hallway.

The priest didn't answer. He steered her through the woods. Sister Mildred of the Sisters of the Precious Blood in Fostoria, Ohio, said the widow. You ought to visit sometime.