Our Lady of the Forest (23 page)

But everybody else doesn't see Our Lady.

That doesn't change the nature of your sins. Which for the most part are venial. Venial as opposed to mortal.

Father, said Ann. You have to help me. Help me get away from the devil.

There is no devil; begin with that. If you mean a guy with a tail and horns, there's no devil, period.

There is a devil. There has to be. If you believe in Jesus, the son of God, you have to believe in the devil.

Why?

Because how else do you explain all the bad things?

The devil is just an idea, said the priest. A notion. A concept. An abstraction.

If that's true of the devil then it's true of God.

God is a ceaseless mystery.

Then why isn't the devil a mystery too?

The devil is a mystery.

I just feel strange, Ann said. I feel him breathing down my neck. Like he's right behind me, watching me. I want to be purified.

You're nervous.

I guess.

You're alone.

Sort of.

Why did you run away? asked the priest. Do your parents know where you are?

I don't have parents. I have a mother. But she's… out of it, you would say.

Father Collins rubbed his chin, the gesture, he knew, of a pedant. Out of it? he asked. How so?

Totally out of it.

Well does she know where you are?

No, said Ann. But she knows I'm somewhere.

Everyone is somewhere.

I don't know.

It's true, though. They are.

Their conversation, the priest concluded, had steadily devolved toward the inane. They'd been reduced to commenting on their mere existence. Look, he said, standing now. You're hungry, Ann, you're tired, you're sick, you're wet, you need a shower. You're under duress from all of this. I think we ought to table our discussion. You take a shower, get into clean clothes, eat something, get a good night's sleep. Then, tomorrow, we'll talk, you and I. Believe me, things will look different.

Her smell—her stench—was discernible across the room. She needed toothpaste, soap, and mouthwash. Father, she said, and the word made him sad. Coming from her it made him sad. He found himself thinking of mortality, which was the subject inspired by her tender impoverishment, which was always the subject behind all subjects—sex, the universe, God. Father, she repeated. We have to get busy. We have to build a new church.

         

The priest devised a logistics for her shower that was more than mildly self-serving. Even as he uttered it he knew this was so. Shame, he thought. Incorrigible. Untenable. But the visionary did what he told her to do. She went in the bathroom and shut the door. When she was naked she opened it a few modest inches and dropped her clothes outside on the floor. The priest saw only her thin white forearm and the pale inside of her elbow. He waited until it was clear from the sound of it that she'd stepped beneath the spray of water and then he examined the articles of clothing which did not include a bra or panties, she was too shy to put them in with the rest or she didn't wear such things. Either way it was erotic to think about, though not as erotic as the missing articles, the little catches on the back of a bra, the elastic waist in panties. The priest upbraided himself for being disappointed, for his perverse interest in her underwear. He picked up the other things and held his nose all the way to the washing machine, they were that foul and awful, redolent of sweet high sweat. He turned the pockets of her jeans inside out and found a folded burrito wrapper. In the pouch of her sweatshirt were a half dozen Starbursts, the wet empty husks of sunflower seeds, her Sudafed and Phenathol pills, and three small white seashells. The priest mused. He thought of her beachcombing. He thought about her finding the shells. Fondling them, deciding to keep them. He doubled his normal detergent dose and set the washing machine to use hot water all the way through its cycle. Sterilize, he thought. Purify.

The phone rang four times while the priest squinted at his Caller ID unit, which 90 percent of the time identified no one and told him nothing but Unknown Caller, the indefatigable Unknown Caller, he let the answering machine take such calls including the one coming in at the moment, You've reached Father Donald Collins of Saint Joseph's of North Fork Catholic Church—the priest thought his voice sounded tiny and feeble, he wished, fleetingly, that it wasn't so—and then he heard a more sonorous voice, Hello, this is Father William Butler, I've been asked by Bishop Tracey to look into this matter of Marian apparitions out your way—and Father Collins picked up the receiver, Yes, he said. It's me.

Father Collins?

Right. Yes.

Bill Butler.

Yes Father Butler.

Have we met somewhere?

I don't think so. Maybe.

Your name is familiar.

There's another Father Collins in Federal Way.

You're not him?

I'm Donald Collins.

I guess we haven't met before.

I don't think we have either. Bill Butler. It isn't familiar. But my memory for names is terrible.

Mine as well.

It's something of a problem.

This girl out there. I'm calling about that. It's starting to show up in the newspapers.

That doesn't surprise me, said Father Collins. Apparently today a thousand people followed her into the woods out here. I was going to call first thing tomorrow.

First thing tomorrow I'll be in North Fork. So I would have missed your morning call. Where would I find you, Father Collins?

Father Collins felt, already, admonished for his lack of activity. He felt, already, like Father Butler's son. The man sounded older, wiser. Where would you find me? Father Collins asked.

Where would I find you to get a briefing.

At the church, let's say. Nine-thirtyish. Anytime after nine-thirty tomorrow. Because I have to go out to our prison at eight and take confession for an hour.

Your prison?

Yes.

The town has a prison?

The state's way of giving loggers work.

So where are you exactly? Your church out there?

Left at the light. The only light. Two blocks east on the left.

Left at the stoplight.

North Fork Avenue.

If I'm late it's because the roads were bad.

Well I'm in my office anyway doing desk work so it isn't a problem to wait for you. I'll be busy until you arrive.

I think I heard you say a thousand.

I don't know for sure, but yes.

Where did you get that?

It's rumor, hyperbole. This is a chatty little town, North Fork. It might be closer to a hundred.

I've never been to North Fork, Washington.

Logging mostly. Or used to be. Before they opened the prison.

A prison sounds ghastly.

It is ghastly.

A prison casts its shadow on a town.

I'm afraid this town already had a shadow before its prison was recently installed because it rains eighty-five inches a year, if you can believe that number.

I'll bring my raincoat. Nine-thirty or so.

And rubber boots.

You're serious.

Unless you want wet feet all day.

Are we going somewhere?

Out into the woods. That's where she has her apparitions. Two miles back in the woods.

There was a pause at the other end of the line. Father Collins made no effort to fill it. Last year, sighed Father Butler, I looked into the case of a girl near Yakima who was hearing the Blessed Virgin's voice rising out of an irrigation canal at the edge of a cherry orchard. That one, I nearly froze to death. Something like twenty degrees over there. So this—this should be better.

Forty and wet is worse than twenty and dry in my humble, unprejudiced opinion. This place will chill you to the bone.

Sounds miserable. All right then. I'm warned.

I only want you to be comfortable.

Anything else?

She's young, said Father Collins. A teenager. Just a little girl, so expect that.

And a child shall lead them, said Father Butler.

That's it, said Father Collins. So go easy on her.

When he'd hung up he had to ask himself, as in the old rousing Wobbly hymn, which ineluctably he began to sing, Which side are you on? This Father Butler sounded vitriolic and highly unpleasant to be around. Father Collins did not look forward to lugging him around North Fork the next morning.

He put a small neat packet together—a pair of sweatpants he rarely wore, a clean white t-shirt, a v-neck cardigan, winter-weight woolen socks. All of that seemed innocent enough. He didn't need to castigate himself about choosing this essentially loose-fitting and androgynous wardrobe. When the shower went off he called through the door, I've got clothes for you, right out here, I'll leave them here, I'll be in the kitchen, there's lotion if you want it, do you see where it is? I should have showed you before, I'm sorry. It's on the shelf. About eye level. And down below, two shelves down, if you look around, poke around back there, there's a toothbrush still in its packaging. And dental floss—you'll see where it is. It's right there beside the sink. Next to the bottle of mouthwash, Ann. Anyway, I'll set these clothes down. How was the shower, by the way?

Good.

It's a little hard to adjust sometimes.

He guessed from the muffled sound of it that she was rubbing her hair with the towel just now, that was why she didn't answer, maybe she hadn't heard what he said, not that it mattered very much, he was lingering for no legitimate reason, he liked the idea of talking to her while she was naked just beyond the door, which he also knew wasn't right. Okay, he said. I'll leave you to it. I'll just be in the kitchen.

Where?

I'll just be in the kitchen.

Pulling back one corner of the shade, he looked out the window at the two men in the car, vigilant sentinels like baleful shadows behind their rain-smeared windowpanes, and then he waited in his reading chair where he worried that his thinning hair was more unattractive all the time, there were always methods of intervention like Rogaine or plugs, but he urged himself to consider these things from the perspective of his highest values. He had mentioned the kitchen only because it was as far away from the bathroom as he could get and he wanted her to feel entirely confident that he was not in the vicinity, that he was thoughtful enough to give her privacy while she showered in his house. Like everything else, mentioning the kitchen had a sexual subtext and sent a libidinous message. Even pretending that everything didn't had a carnal objective, too. What man could help it? Who wasn't human? Even a priest was subject to these rules. Lust, said the catechism, was a disordered desire, an inordinate enjoyment of sexual pleasure, but every man felt lust all the time, the question was how to contend with it, on this the Church was not silent either, it urged liberation from earthly passions, it also urged self-mastery which was an infinite and exacting work, never acquired like a car or liver spots or season tickets or herpes simplex, instead self-mastery was a permanent quest, it presupposed renewed effort at all the stages of life.

The priest meditated on his celibacy. As in Sirach 1:22: Either man governs his passions and finds peace, or he lets himself be dominated by them and so remains unhappy. As in the Presbyterorum Ordinis: Accepted with a radiant heart, celibacy radiantly proclaims the Reign of God. As in Saint Augustine: While he is in the flesh, man cannot help but have at least some light sins. As in Romans 11:32: God has consigned all men to disobedience, that he may have mercy upon all. It was enough material for a sermon, thought the priest, who usually wrote sermons on Tuesday afternoons, brooded and revised them carefully on Wednesdays, let them sit on Thursdays and Fridays, and reconsidered their contents on Saturdays so as to deliver them with confidence on Sundays. In fact he'd sermonized that very morning on the communal character of the human vocation and on the human desire to come to God, the latter a little bow toward the visionary, whose presence in the forest north of town had infected the mood of his congregation, whose presence was like an agitation to his poor beleaguered flock. Only through God, the priest had said—aware that he was jealous of the visionary's magnetism—only through God can human beings find the happiness they restlessly seek; only through God lies surcease from pain and an end to that perpetual discontent informing every second of life. Father Collins believed this without irony. He believed that his personal ceaseless anxiety was a universal ceaseless anxiety that could find no salve in the things of this world but only in God expansively defined, how life-effacing the thought of that was, how rarefied, abstract, bloodless, conceptual, unreal, and transcendent. Certainly God was complicated, Father Collins had never meant to suggest to his friends who were thoughtful worldly atheists that the God he meant was otherwise or easily assailed by arguments, that wasn't the God he meant to propose when he told them he believed in God. But what did he mean? they wanted to know, to which he could only shake his head and reply, like the arcane Jews who read the Kabala, There are no words, God is ineffable, the name of God cannot be spelled, to look for God with the tools of man is like trying to capture the sun's light in our hands, perhaps, he thought, I should have been a Jew, that quaint Jewish simile makes perfect sense, he was thinking this when the visionary appeared, dressed in his sweatpants and cardigan sweater, her hair combed sleekly and wetly back, white lotion at one wing of her nose, and it occurred to him in that incidental moment that attraction was wonderfully capricious. All right, he said. All showered.

Yes.

Your clothes are in the washing machine.

Thank you.

So now would be a good time for dinner.

What about those guys outside?

I'll go talk to them about it.

He went outside beneath his umbrella, which had caved in on one side, sprung a rib. They were not even listening to the radio. They were sitting on watch with a dour discipline. The windshield had been fogged by their breathing, though they'd cracked their windows to defeat this. Who were these men and why were they here? Gentlemen, said the priest, let's ponder for a minute. Are you sure you want to sit here in the rain? Because I don't think we need any bodyguards. And we're going to be a while.