"Sure." Michael led the way. Soon they were on an unpaved lane that went up Rattlesnake Mountain, the hill at the base of which the town nestled. Neither spoke until they came to a bright meadow around a house-sized boulder. Michael scurried to the top of it, then reached back to help Nicholas up. When they were sitting, the stone cold beneath them, Michael said, "I come here to think my best thoughts."
"You're going to need them."
"Why?"
"Because I want you to tell me what to do."
"What's up?"
Wiley looked at him strangely. "You know what's up."
"No, I don't."
Nicholas pulled a creased news photo from his canvas bag. He handed it to Michael. It wasn't a picture of a child now, though, but of a Buddhist pagoda in flames. In the foreground, helmeted Vietnamese Rangers were clubbing an aged monk. It was all too familiar. The Buddhist Struggle had resumed as the war had worsened and become Americanized. The cities of South Vietnam were paralyzed daily by thousands of chanting, frenzied demonstrators. There were reports that taxi drivers and shopkeepers were shaving their heads and dressing as monks to replace those who'd been arrested. It was yet to be seen whether Ky and Thieu would be any more effective against themâthough they were equally brutalâthan Diem had been.
Michael folded the photograph and handed it back to Wiley. "What does it mean to you?" he asked somewhat rigidly. He resolved to keep his own reaction at arm's length until he knew what Wiley wanted.
"Just that we're back where we started three years ago. Catholic government against Buddhist people. Only now the government has three hundred thousand American mercenaries and bombers galore. They're using B-52S now."
Michael hadn't known that. B-52S? Was he so out of touch?
Nicholas shook his head. "The Buddhists don't hope to change their government anymore, you know. They're trying to change us. They know that we're the ones who have to stop the war. We're the ones who pay for it. You and I are the ones who let it happen. And it just keeps getting worse."
Michael said nothing.
Wiley looked sharply at him. "Didn't you learn anything over there?"
Michael felt the blast of the young man's disappointmentâit was there after allâand tried to deflect it. "I learned always to put my chopsticks into the hot rice as soon as it was served. It was the only way to sterilize them."
"Is that what you worried about? Germs?"
Michael shook his head, but of course he had worried about germs.
"You were going to save the children! You were going to make the army take care of the wounded!"
"I was naive, Nicholas. I was wrong. You were right. The only thing to be done about the war is to stop it."
"Well, what are you doing here then?"
"I'd convinced myself that you didn't come here to guilt-trip me. You didn't come here to talk about my life; you came to talk about yours. What's going on?"
"I'm pulling out."
"What do you mean?"
"I'm going to serve the people."
"What do you mean, Nicholas? You sound like Chairman Mao." Michael waited for him to answer, but he didn't. The war had obviously possessed him, as surely as some devil, and now Michael could only try to imagine what he was contemplating.
"I have to volunteer," he said at last. "I have to cut my hair and shave and sign up."
What, the army? Did he intend to go in as a medic or something? But the army wouldn't let him within a mile of itself. Was he thinking of going to Asia with a volunteer agency? Michael knew what that impulse was like, and how futile it would be. For Nicholas it would be dangerous. "What do you mean?" he asked again.
"I have been conscripted and I have to go."
"I want to understand what you mean, Nicholas. Help me to understand."
"Is that all you can say?" He clambered to his feet. "What do I mean? What do I mean?" He raised his arms to the sky melodramatically and threw his head back. His hair rained down like an Indian's, like a prophet's. "How the hell do I know what I mean? The fucking war has got to stop! That's what I mean! The American people have got to stop it! The Catholic Church has got to stop it! 'War no more! War never again!' The pope said that! The
pope
said that!" he began screeching wildly. "Peace now! Peace now!"
Michael stood quickly. Balance was precarious on the boulder. Before Wiley could fall, Michael grabbed him and held him. The young man deflated and shrunk, falling against Michael who sensed in him an infinite relief. Nicholas began to sob. Michael remembered Inge Holz: Is this wrong? Is it sinful? Am I insane? And he had the same reaction. Was it mere rhetoric, a deflection of his own sense of responsibility for what Wiley had become? Perhaps. But he felt it nevertheless. The madness was not in this boy, but in the war.
***
Michael knew from his own experience that what Nicholas Wiley needed was some ordinary living, a taste of the pleasures and duties of work and friendship, a spell in the realm of the utterly unnewsworthy where alone he could be safe from the ravaging News. Death held sway over the world, after all; life over only the smallest pieces of it. Over little places like Aina and Saint Joseph's. From what Michael learned on their subsequent walks, Nicholas had become less and less connected in New York. After leaving the
Catholic Worker
he'd attached himself to a settlement house in Harlem for a time, had written for a Quaker magazine, had joined, then quit, the Newman Club at NYU in the Village. He attended demonstrations and had gone to Washington twice, once as part of a group of Quakers who held a vigil outside the Capitol while Congress debatedâand passedâa special four-billion-dollar appropriation for the war. It was then he'd begun to fast, and he hadn't eaten right since. Despite all this, his part in the peace movement remained tangential. He'd made no close friends. He was no longer in touch with his family, and along the way he'd stopped seeing his therapist. So Michael offered him a job as his helper in the garden at Saint Joseph's and convinced him to take it. Surely he'd tracked Michael down hoping for such an intervention, even if he couldn't admit that to himself.
Behind the sacristy there was a room with a cot where Nicholas slept, and he stayed through the spring. At first he was too depressed to express much in the way of gratitude, but that was the last thing Michael required of him. At times he was downright sullen and at other times, often after watching the nightly news in Michael's room, he was hysterical about the killing in Vietnam. But Michael stayed at him. There was no question now of arguing about the peace movement. All Michael wanted to do was help restore the equilibrium Nicholas needed to deal with his experience creatively. Eventually Nicholas began to respond. The rectory housekeeper treated him like the son she wanted, and the hard physical work gave him an appetite for her plain food. He gained weight and a bright sunburn replaced his pallor. Even the pastor softened toward him and said that if he'd shave his beard and cut his hair, he could start taking up the collection at Mass. Nicholas refused, of course, but politely, though to Michael he joked that he was tempted because he could have used the extra income.
One morning, while Michael was taking his vestments off after Mass, Nicholas came into the sacristy from the garden. He wore an expression of pure joy and he said, "Father, you've got to come outside."
Michael followed him.
Nicholas led the way to the star magnolia and with a ringmaster's panache he stepped aside and swept his arm toward the tree's first-ever flower. "I said to the magnolia, 'Sister, speak to me of God,' and the magnolia blossomed." Wiley grinned as he watched Michael approach the branch and put his nose to the flower. "Isn't it great?" Wiley asked. "Isn't it just so great!"
It was the boy who seemed great to Michael; there was such happiness in him. Michael grinned too and said, "And this is just the beginning, Nicholas. You'll have flowers coming up all over the place before you're done."
Wiley nodded. "I think you're right, Michael. I think you're right."
"Hey, guess what?"
"What?"
"You just called me Michael."
"I did?" Wiley leaned toward him, showing his amazement.
"Just now."
"God, I never thought I'd be able to."
Michael felt as though he'd won something, a prize, an important medal. What a strange effect the use of his own name could have on him. "I knew you would, Nicholas."
"Does that mean...?" He hesitated, looked down shyly, blushing.
"It means we're really friends now, Nicholas."
Nicholas looked up at him, tears brimming, relief extravagantly on his face. "Thank you, Michael. Thank you."
Michael shook his head, implying, I should thank you. He struck a pose and recited, "I said to Nicholas Wiley, 'Brother, speak to me of God,' and he called me Michael."
It was absurd, such a small thing, such happiness from it. But they both felt it. They embraced in their rough, athletic way, and they laughed and laughed.
A few days later Michael was going into Manhattan for a clergy meeting and he thought Nicholas might enjoy some time in the city too. But Nicholas didn't show for breakfast. Michael went looking for him. He knocked on the door of the little room behind the sacristy, but there was no answer. He's still asleep, Michael thought, and he opened the door quietly. But Nicholas's bed was neatly made already, army corners and all. He'd gone into Aina probably. Too bad. Michael couldn't wait. He'd have enjoyed the company. He was about to close the door when something caught his eye on Nicholas's table, a copy of the
New York Times.
That was unusual enough, since Nicholas didn't read the paper either, but in that first glance, the front page seemed wrong. Then Michael realized there was a hole in it, something had been clipped, and a clothing ad was showing through from page three. Michael wondered about it, but not for long.
The clergy meeting was at Holy Trinity in Greenwich Village and lasted through lunch. Michael enjoyed the company of priests his own age and was reluctant to return to Aina, but the other priests scattered when the meeting ended. They were big city men and all had their appointments. So Michael decided to take a long walk. It was a beautiful May day. Washington Square was full of painted hippies wading in the fountains, tossing Frisbees, passing marijuana, playing guitars. A pretty girl with hair to her waist was sitting in the grass breast-feeding her baby while her young beau serenaded them on his flute. New York, especially after Aina, seemed charmed, and he wished Nicholas had come with him. For a moment he wondered again where the kid had gone off to so early.
By midafternoon, Michael found himself at Saint Patrick's and he went in to kneel and pray while the tourists gawked and the shoppers, rattling their bags, sat and rested. He loved the place. He couldn't go there without remembering his ordination or reclaiming that sense of hope he'd felt, that sense of God's kindly touch. He knelt for a long time, offering his gratitude, his relief. He was the man, at last, he'd wanted to become.
When he came out into the bright glare he stood at the top step of the cathedral and watched the traffic of Fifth Avenue, the fancy cars and the tricked-out secretaries on their breaks, the most beautiful girls in the world. He thought of Jesus watching the goldladen caravans from the pinnacle of the Temple. "All this I will give you," the devil had said, "if you will worship me." Michael knew for the first time why Jesus had said no. He didn't need the gold or the cars or the stunning girls. He had everything he wanted.
As he walked down the stairs he saw a group of cops on the corner near a newsstand. One of them looked toward him, and something in the man's eyes drew Michael. There were five of them, and they were craned toward a nearby motorcycle's radio.
As he walked toward them he passed the newsstand, and had to step around a stack of papers, that day's
Times.
"What's up, fellows?" he asked.
"Hey, Father, you won't believe this one."
"What?" He cocked an ear toward the police radio, but it was all static. He let his eye fall to the newspapers. On the front page was a photograph of a Buddhist monk seated in the lotus position on a Saigon street, and he was aflame.
"Some guy," the policeman said, "over at the U.N. douses himself with gasoline and lights a match. Some peacenik kook."
Michael reeled, exactly as if that cop had jammed his nightstick into his stomach. As if he'd brought it crashing down onto his skull. No. The cops were so surprised they didn't catch him when he fell.
Â
Nicholas Wiley died that night in the burn unit at Bellevue. Michael was with him. Nicholas never regained consciousness, and when Michael anointed him there was no place he could touch him with the sacred oil that wasn't burned. He bent over him and began to whisper into the charred hole that had been his ear the words of the Act of Contrition. "O my God, I am heartily sorry for having offended Thee..." Standard procedure. The idea was that the unconscious person might somehow register what was being said and assent to it.
But Michael was unable to finish the recitation. He began to sob. He wanted to rest his head on Nicholas's chest, even that scorched chest, but he was afraid to touch him for fear of causing pain. The stench of burned flesh was familiar. All too fucking familiar.
Michael began to whisper again when he could, but instead of the Act of Contrition he said simply, over and over, "I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry."
***
Reporters were waiting for him outside the ward. Michael was stunned by their assumption that they had the right to question him.
"Was he your protégé?"
"What?" Michael had trouble focusing on the reporter who'd asked the question. There were a dozen or more, men and women, and some had thrust microphones at him.
"He was your employee?"
"He was my friend," Michael said, and he pushed through them.
"Dorothy Day says he was not a Catholic Worker, the Quakers say he was not a member of any meeting, and the archdiocese says they had no record of him on the Church payroll. Was he connected with your parish or not?"