This Magnificent Desolation (10 page)

Officer Perry climbs into his cruiser, speaks briefly into his CB, and then his dusty '69 Chevy Impala, with duel exhausts, rumbles slowly down the rutted road, its police light turning in slow amber-red revolutions on the roof, and Duncan nods toward Billy, who smiles, knowing it is for them. Father Toibin asks Brother Wilhelm
to take Billy in for lunch and then to the hospice. We'll talk in a little while, okay, Billy? he says, and Billy nods, glances toward Duncan, and then follows Brother Wilhelm up the path to the gate.

Father Toibin grasps Duncan's shoulders and looks at him. Look at you. You've grown two inches, I swear. Our Lord, Jesus, went into the desert and came back having resisted the temptations of the Devil. What have you done on your journey? What beasts have you seen? What demons have you fought? I gather quite a few, no?

I saw my mother, Duncan says. It was a full moon and I saw my mother in the face of the moon.

Father Toibin nods and smiles.

Do you think that was God's doing? Duncan asks.

I prayed that He would look after you and bring you safely back to us.

But you believe I saw her? You believe God spoke to me when I was born?

Of course. Duncan, wherever you and Billy were and whatever you saw, you can be sure God had a hand in it. Look out there. Father Toibin points toward the range and the valleys and the great hardwoods and firs in the north. Through the gifts of the Holy Spirit we are granted the knowledge, the wisdom to see and understand, to perceive the divine in all things. And it is this ability to see which lifts us from de profundis—out of the depths.
De profundis clamavi ad te, Domine
.
Quia apud Dominum misericordia, et copiosa apud eum redemptio.

This, Father Toibin says and opens his palms to the vista before them—a simple gesture, a mere turning of his wrists that stills Duncan's breath and makes him aware of the warm, charged air in this place where they stand. A wind comes down from the hills, clouds moves above the prairies, and something glitters momentarily in the wide swaths of burn upon the distant slopes, like a space ship falling from the stars—and Father Toibin smiles.

De Profundis
, Duncan repeats in his head.
De Profundis.
They are words without end.

They are in Billy's room in the Home's hospice and Billy is packing his small duffel bag, the one with the picture of Muhammad Ali on its sides. He seems thinner somehow, and when he places his specially laundered and folded shirts upon the wax paper in their drawer, he moves slowly and stiffly, and when he is done, he rubs his hips tenderly and winces. Their trip to Stockholdt took so much out of him, Duncan knows, and he cannot but help feel guilty. He glances out the window at the sound of crunching gravel and sees the small white Ford Econoline van that has come to take Billy to the Children's Cancer Institute at the University of Minnesota in St. Paul, two hundred miles away.

It's here, Duncan says, and Billy nods, smiling, watching him.

We almost made it, didn't we? he says.

Just like the astronauts.

Billy reaches toward him and Duncan hugs him, feels his frail bones trembling against him, then he takes Billy's bag and they
make their way slowly out of the room and down the stairs to where Julie is waiting for them.

It is a clear morning without a cloud in the sky. The monastery is bleached with sun, the light so strong and bright that Duncan's and Billy's eyes can only close to it. There is an odd silence on the flagstone walk—even their footfalls are muted as they walk to the van. The silence is deepened and magnified by the flickering black shape of an eagle soaring wide-winged above the range and by the sound of its faint distant cry.

In the courtyard the wind ruffles Billy's thin hair, and Duncan sees some of it floating away: little white puffs of flax drifting over the grounds toward the prairie. Duncan stares at the ground, and only at the last moment, when Billy has climbed into the van, does he look up, and it appears as if the fragile bones of Billy's face are bursting out of him and might shatter at any moment: the glowing frontal eminence, the raised sockets about the eyes, the sharply defined zygomatic bones and the tender nose—all pushing against his parchment-thin skin. But Billy smiles reassuringly, and says under his breath to Duncan and Julie conspiratorially: If these bastards think they have me, they've got another thing coming!

Duncan grins and Julie puts her hand to her mouth to stifle a laugh.

They could never stop you, Billy, Duncan says.

Father Canice accompanies him, sitting on Billy's right, while Billy turns in his seat to look out the rear window at Duncan and Julie waving farewell. The sun glares momentarily upon the glass as the van makes its turn, and Billy's face is a white, sun-shocked orb at the window's center, blinking into the light, and searching—desperately it seems—for them.

Duncan and Julie continue to wave goodbye as, spitting gravel and red clay, the van turns in the roadway before the Home. Sunlight shudders on the rear window and Billy is momentarily irradiated by its glow so that only the hollow orbits of his eyes and the
black line of his mouth are visible. For a moment Duncan sees him as he often does, without disease: His skin is soft and supple, and upon his head a mass of thick blond-white curls, then Billy raises his hand, worsted and speckled and crippled by arthritis, and waves farewell. Duncan knows that even this simple gesture can cause him pain, but that for Billy there is also a certain comfort in this pain—it reminds him that he is still here, waiting in much the same manner as Julie, waiting for someone to return and claim him. The van briefly canters to the left on the rutted track and then straightens and weaves down the monastery's dirt road.

They want to keep him in St. Paul, you know, Julie says. His heart is failing.

Do you think his parents will come for him now?

I don't think they know. Julie shrugs. They gave him up at birth when he looked normal. Just like you. Just like me. Perhaps they didn't know he was sick. Perhaps if they'd known he wouldn't live long, they would have kept him, you know.

Ten years, that isn't too long a time, is it? Even if you're a famous actress or a movie star or a senator or a war hero. That isn't too much time to give up, is it?

Duncan doesn't know if it is or not—he's been lost for ten years and the time since his birth when God spoke to him and his awakening seems vast and without end. He wonders if that is what it feels like for a parent with a child. He tells Julie that he's not sure whether ten years is too long or not long enough. He doesn't know how soon parents tire of their children.

Billy wants to stay here, she says. Father Toibin wants him here, as well.

But why?

This is where Billy's parents brought him. Father Toibin feels it's the Brothers' responsibility to care for him now.

But Billy wants to leave, Duncan says. That's all he wants to do before it's too late. He talks about it all the time. We all want to leave.

No, Duncan. Julie shakes her head; her lips are pursed and determined. The wind throws her hair up in small black tufts about her ears and she presses it back roughly with her hand. We all want to go home, she says.

They stare after Billy's van and out over the valley and beyond, toward Lac qui Parle, where a gleaming sprawl of hastily erected mining shacks, felling cranes, sliders, platforms, and tractors stand derelict and abandoned. From the center of a burn upon distant wooded slopes, an unwavering black line splits the sky in two. There is a flickering high in the eastern sky where the stars will come later, between Cassiopeia and the wide asterism of Cygnus, like a sharp angle of glittering metal, and Duncan sees the disintegrating command module
Columbia
containing Michael Collins falling, tumbling, blazing down from the sky and Billy's van a small speck in all of this as it leaves the winding, rutted monastery road and makes its way north out into the world.
Just like the astronauts
.

August 1981

It is the Feast of the Assumption, and everyone is busy with chores. In the narrow stone halls filigreed with late sunlight there is laughter amidst the bustle. Duncan and Julie are walking the hall from class when Brother Canice gambols toward them, squeezing between the bodies of pressing, pushing children. The bells are oddly silent and Duncan wonders if he should remind Brother Canice that it's time to sound them for prayer. His cheeks are crosshatched with small scratches from shaving. On his neck he's applied small bits of tissue paper to the larger cuts and they're spotted with blood.

Hello, Duncan, he grunts. Hello, Julie.

Hello, Brother Canice, Julie says. How are you?

Oh, good, good, but it's a mad day, he says, absolutely mad! And he glares about the hallway at the children pushing around him. I just don't understand all the fuss, all this rushing about. I mean what on earth is going on?

But isn't it always this way on the Assumption?

The Assumption?

Brother Canice sucks on his teeth and considers this, looks from Julie to Duncan, and then seems to come to some manner of decision. Duncan! he says suddenly, as if just remembering something, and as if Duncan were at the far end of the hallway and not standing directly in front of him.

Yes, Brother?

Father Toibin wants to see you. You can find him in his office. And don't dally, what with all this commotion I forgot he had asked me to find you directly after breakfast this morning.

Aren't you going to ring the bells this morning? Julie asks, and Brother Canice stares at her until they can both see alarm rising slowly in his eyes. The bells, he says softly, like an echo of Julie's voice, and then grasps the hem of his robe and races down the tile toward the campanile.

On a cushion placed upon the high sideboard next to Father Toibin's desk, the cat with the green eyes shudders as if it is dreaming and then stretches languidly. Bits of its hair swirl in the thin feathery light cast by two table lamps.

We are all worried, Father Toibin says, and he opens his hands toward Duncan, a gesture to include, Duncan assumes, all the children in his care.

We are all worried when we feel we might not be as attentive as well as we might. Sometimes we become distracted ourselves and are not always mindful of what it is to be a child and the pressures and forces that they feel. If there is anything bothering you, Duncan? You can tell me.

On the mantel, a clock of black polished ash ticks slowly as if it needs to be wound.

Your mother, I know, loves you and misses you very much, but often parents can be misguided by their own wishes, selfishness which is only brought about by love, really, and they fail to see what is best for their children.

Duncan struggles with Father Toibin's words, and then he struggles to retrieve them. My mother? he thinks, did he say my mother?

We all want what is best for you. Do you understand that?

Father Toibin, my mother?

Father Toibin's voice falters, but even without the words, he attempts to soothe; Duncan is a small boy reflected in shadowy miniature upon his dark pupil: This is your home for as long as you want and for as long as your mother and we think being here is in your best interest. Do you understand that? Do you?

Father, excuse me, but you said my mother?

Yes, yes. Of course, your mother. Father Toibin frowns, pushes a letter across the desk at Duncan, and, momentarily distracted, waves at the window where a red clay road curls into the north—the same road upon which he and Billy returned from Stockholdt.

She's coming to get you.

Duncan holds the letter in his hands as he would the Psalter at Mass, with a sense of the mysterious power of the words on the page before him. He stares at the now-familiar handprint and imagines the letter open upon a table for days before it is sent, and he sees the writer, his mother smelling of guiacol and lily of the valley with her head bowed and her long hair brushing the tabletop, a cigarette smoldering in a glass ashtray, a thin tendril of gray smoke twining toward the ceiling, considering the words over and over again, and wondering if she should send the letter—forever damning herself to him—or tear it up so that no evidence of it or him remains; he imagines that she hesitates, falters, and, finally, succumbing to forces that he may never understand, gives in.

Maggie Bright
34 Divisadero Street
San Francisco, CA 94114

     
August 3, 1981

Dear Father Toibin,

I have always wanted to do what was best for Duncan and until recently, it seemed in his best interest—and both yourself and Dr. Mathias agreed—that he remain at the monastery in your care. However, given your most recent update, I feel he is ready to come home. I have been separated from my child for too long, and I believe he can and will thrive in the home I provide for him. I am now gainfully employed, have savings in the bank, and close family and friends who are eager to embrace Duncan with love and affection. He will not want for love.

I shall be driving from San Francisco the day after tomorrow, and, after spending some time with friends in Nevada, plan to be at the monastery midday of August the 29th. I would like Duncan to be made aware that I am coming, and that he be prepared to come home with me. I know that, at first, it will not be easy, and that there will be a period of adjustment for both of us, but I am his mother, and however difficult this adjustment might be, it can be nothing compared to what it has been like not to have him here with me all these years. Of course you know something of this from our discussions. There has not been a day or night that I have not thought about my son, and dreamed that he was home with me.

With the blessing of God, I will see you both soon.

Sincerely,
Maggie Bright