“Who you’re not able to forgive?”
He studies me for a moment, my words more than puzzling to him. “The forgiveness you offer is not your own. It is God’s. You are the messenger.”
“Yes,” I say, acknowledging the correctness of his interpretation, though my tone hints that the scope is too broad.
“But?”
It would be easy to look away from Father Taylor as I say what I do next. Maybe even expected. A furtive, embarrassed glance off toward some dim corner of the sanctuary where candles flicker like some earthbound field of stars. But I do not. I fix fully on him so that he is clear on my meaning this time.
“What if it is personal?” I say. “For the messenger?”
He lets my explanatory question hang there for a moment. The thrust of it does not seem to strike him with any force. Or if it does, he is unmoved by its certain gravity. His only reaction is to look away from me, his own gaze settling on the twinkling ranks of offertory candles arcing before the statue of Mary to the left of the altar. He stares at the chiseled figure, gleaming alabaster representation of who we believe to be the earthly mother of Christ. Looks only at her as he speaks.
“I cowered in a mud shack in Rwanda as men dragged a woman from her home and hacked her to pieces with machetes.” He says this matter-of-factly. No emotion. Just the recounting of a truth noted in a ledger of his life. “She was one life among millions that were taken, but I should have interceded. My calling demanded that I intercede. Still, I did not.”
I knew of Father Taylor’s missionary work in Africa, but never the specifics. He never spoke of it, and to learn that a priest had been on a mission in Africa is akin to learning that space is vast. As a vocation we spread ourselves about the globe. I, myself, spent several months in Brazil, hoping to spread the word of God by deed and example.
But in my brief sojourn to Latin America I was not confronted with tribe on tribe violence, the scale of which Father Taylor experienced in Rwanda nothing short of a genocide conveniently forgotten as it happened.
Though not by him.
“They would have killed you,” I say. “And they would have then killed her.”
He looks back to me and nods. “Yes. That should have been what happened.” His statement is cold and true. The lamb is sacrificed. Jesus went to the cross for us. These things are drilled into us by our church from a young age, and as priests we embrace this concept knowing that we must be willing to do as our Savior did. We should walk through the valley of the shadow of death and we should fear no evil.
We should.
“That one failing on my part,” he begins, “to choose life for myself, does that cast a shadow over all the right things I have done? So much so that they are lost in darkness and seem never to have come to pass?”
I shake my head at his wondering. The question posing the actions of man against those of a super man. An impossible comparison. “Of course not.”
He smiles now, and nods. “Of course not.”
He looks at me for a long moment and I realize that the very solemn question just posed was not for his benefit. It was for mine.
“Of course not,” he repeats once more, and slowly rises, spindly hand clenched atop his cane. He wills his body up, joints straightening with effort. He slides between the pews toward the aisle and shuffles his way toward the exit, pausing to cross himself before the altar. His show of respect for the church which he embraces, and which still embraces him.
Chapter Nine
Still Waters
I have not made peace with myself. But I have with my decision to go on. To move on. To be what I am. To accept my failings as much as my devotion to my calling. There is much still to do in this life I have chosen. What happened to my sister, what was done to her by others, has destroyed enough already. I will let it destroy no more.
Father Taylor’s words to me began my acceptance of this. The days that followed trickled back toward some sense of normalcy, though at times I found myself questioning the ‘rightness’ of many ordinary decisions. Should I have spent more time counseling a troubled parishioner? Is it prudent to have the rectory painted in the spring? Would spending more time with my mother ease memory of me back into her dimming consciousness? These things I wondered on Monday. And on Tuesday.
But not today. Not as I drive up the lightly rutted path through the trees and stop in the small gravel clearing behind the house on Arrow Lake. I am here to put a new storm door in place. I am here for two days and nights of detached relaxation. I am here because this was my plan before hearing Eric’s confession.
I am moving forward.
I step from the car, leaving my duffel in the back seat next to the visible half of the storm door. Neither unpacking, nor work, is a priority for me now, and I move away from the car and around the house. Little has changed about it from my childhood days spent here. Some weathering of course, its wood siding graying a bit each winter, but so much remains that was here when I was young. The rowboat upturned beneath the overhang of the woodshed. The tetherball pole just back of the house, its rope frayed, a deflated lump of yellow rubber at its end. Even the woods seem to have stood still in time, no taller my mind tries to convince me. No older. No nearer either apex or demise. Just a thin stand of pines nestled near the building, their limbs intertwined as they climb skyward, weaving a lush green canopy. I follow a short path through the shade beneath and stop where the woods end.
A loon sweeps down from the sky and skims across the waters before me, Arrow Lake a still mirror reflecting the far shore. The bird sweeps along and pulls up, wings pumping gently and carrying it off over the trees, its graceful flight seeming to draw my eye over the symmetry of green earth, shimmering water, and sky tinged purple by the setting sun.
I do take it all in. I breathe the air, chilled and scented fresh. For a while I just stand there, next to the house on the lake, and I feel a calm settle over me. It competes with the weight I have carried these past few days. A burden which has anchored itself to dark places within. I do not know if the serenity which fills me has dislodged the aguish, but its coming mutes all that I have allowed to afflict me, and after a few minutes I smile. The expression true, and warm, and so very, very good.
* * *
The storm door is on, the last screw in its hinge set in the glow of the porch light. Day has disappeared beyond the far shore, the only hint that it was ever here the thin blue outline tracing the shadowed pines in the distance. Stars hang over the lake and dance in duplicate on its gently rolling surface.
I stand just inside the door, cup of coffee in hand, staring out at the settling night. Though it robs form and feature from the land, an exquisite mystery lives in the dark that comes with it. The wind competes with no beautiful bounty for attention when the light is gone, whispering its song through trees and over rocks. Creatures dart about unafraid of attention from man. Just as we close our eyes to sleep, the sun goes down and all things about the earth become their own dream.
Inside, though, it is bright and warm. Two logs have just begun to fully catch, tendrils glowing black and orange creeping over them, scales of bark falling away with flourish, crackling as if conjured from a Norman Rockwell canvas. I turn away from the door to savor this idyllic sight, the hearth blazing in the corner of the gathering room, the largest, most inviting space in the modest house. The kitchen and dining area spill freely into it, their own space defined by function, not walls. Beyond, down a short hallway, are two bedrooms, a closet sandwiched between them which has never been used as such. From my earliest memory it held no clothes, no pile of toys, no overflow of plain stuff which could find a home nowhere else. It has never been a place to keep things.
For no reason I wander away from the front door and down the short hallway, past the bedrooms, to the closet at the end. The old sign still hangs from a tack set into the door’s solid wood. It is no more than a square of cardboard suspended from a length of yarn. Words are printed neatly in fading marker on each side. On one it says ‘Keep Out’. On the other it says ‘Keep Out.’
I smile as I turn the sign to sample the identical warnings, the biting extent of my mother’s humor. But the admonition was ironclad—this door was not to be opened. By anyone but her. Ever.
For the first time I break that inviolable rule, reaching to the simple knob and opening the door, revealing the dark space beyond. A rush of chemical smells wafts out, a vinegary strong mix of the remnants of washes and baths which turned negative to positive, making all that my mother saw through the camera lens finally real. As in the house I grew up in, this place of escape is adorned with framed images captured in and around the lake. Swimming, strolling, skipping stones. A barbecue out front. My father chopping wood out back. All realized in this makeshift darkroom that reeks of a wonderful once-upon-a-time.
I close the door, the sign swinging slightly as the old slab of wood sets in the jamb. This minor exploration might bring me sadness, but it does not. My mother’s fascination with the seizing of moments for posterity leaves me thinking that, as her grasp of the now drains away, there is a chance she is simply retreating into an endless gallery of her yesterdays. Times she can revel in until the end, when she will be made whole again in new life.
I return to the gathering room. For a few hours I sit before the fire, thinking on what I will do in the morning. A walk around the lake, likely. Which will lead to an afternoon of reading, settled into one of the two rough hewn Adirondack chairs on the porch. Then another night such as this, relaxing and reflective, before returning to my everyday life the following day. It will have been a good thing to journey here. The right thing.
When I close my eyes near midnight in the room I shared with my sister through summer weeks and winter weekends, I drift into a dreamless sleep. A merciful plunge into a nothingness devoid of thought, or worry, or wonder. A fortuitous ignorance I savor.
Until the wind blows.
* * *
I wake to the slamming near three in the morning, startled awake, a BANG BANG BANG seeming to shake the whole of the house, loudest toward the lake, the cacophony echoing down the hallway in percussive blasts.
My feet slap the cold floor as I get quickly out of the smallish bed which has inhabited this room with its twin since I can remember. I do not search for slippers or robe, and the chill of the northern night swallows me as I hurry groggily from the room. By the time I reach the gathering room and see the moonlit silhouette of the storm door flapping against the house I am shivering. I open the inner door and the cold doubles on me, gusts flooding in, a tempest without form. The storm door beats in a spastic rhythm with each pulse of wind. In my state of contentment before retiring to bed I have forgotten to latch it. With some difficulty I time its swing and grab the inner handle, securing it before closing the inner door, the night left to rush by outside in a hushed, howling blow.
I turn back to the room, the hearth glowing weakly in the corner, no flame left, just embers burning slowly down to ash. There is no warmth here to stave off the chill, and I make my way quickly back to the bedroom, moonlight slanting in the front bay window to skim the old wood floor a milky white. Almost ethereal it seems as I cross it, the few steps through the flat glow like walking on a gossamer cloud. So very delicate that falling through its imagined form would take no more than a stuttered step.
A shadow leans forward of me as I pass through the ashen light, preceding me toward the hallway. The bedroom and downy covers and warmth just a few steps distant. But I do not reach the ready relief from the chill straight away.
Something stops me.
It is one of the many photos that adorn this gathering room wall, framed in simple stained wood, that catches my eye. Draws my attention. Gives me pause.
Katie beams out at me from it, sitting on the rail that wraps the porch. A blanket of winter white rolls over the beach beyond her, dusting the frozen lake and weighing the stout pine branches with puddles of snow. She is a bright high school senior in the picture, on Christmas break, stylish coat wrapping her against the season, knit cap pulled low over her ears.
The cap is beyond familiar. But for coloring it is identical to the one Chris was wearing at Katie’s grave. Its weave and shape point to project more than purchase. Both head coverings made, stitch by stitch.
There is clearly a connection. Likely some burst of interest in knitting both shared during their friendship. Or found at some weekend garage sale, too god awful kitschy to not have. But whatever story there is to the nearly matching caps, it is the reminder of Chris that gives rise to a realization. I treated her abruptly when she happened upon me at the cemetery. She was doing no more than showing deference and concern, and I disregarded both obvious gestures. At that moment, after the night before, I could excuse my behavior, but I should not. If the impression I left with her was that I was more welcome at the place of Katie’s eternal rest than she, that was wrong.
It
is
wrong.
Chapter Ten
The Truth That Isn’t
There is no walk around the lake. No leisurely afternoon spent with the Stephen King I have yet to finish. In the morning I wake, pack my duffel, and retrace my route, leaving the house on Arrow Lake a day earlier than I had planned.
There is something I must do.
A phone call from the road once I have cell reception gets me a number, and a call to that number results in a few minutes of warm pleasantries and an address. A few hours later, as morning ticks over to afternoon, I ride the elevator to the eleventh floor of a residential tower a block off of Lakeshore Drive, a tall stack of condominiums populated by trendy professionals dreaming of relocating to one of the glass towers
on
Lakeshore Drive.
On the eleventh floor I follow the corridor to the west side of the building, any view from units here limited to glimpses of the downtown skyline through clusters of loftier condo boxes. But I have not come to sample any view. I have come to make amends.