The Man Who Loved Birds (12 page)

“But now you’re an American.”

“As easy as that,” she said softly. “One speaks the word and it comes to pass. How extraordinary, so strange to me, that these are things one
chooses
. And that my own country depends not on my history and culture and the call of the heart but on pieces of paper properly stamped and filed. I have chosen to become an American. I am learning how to become an American. I must learn to understand the world in this way.”

They walked down the allée. “Your church uses the same incense that the priest used in the chapel of the Loretine sisters’ school in Calcutta—I recognized the smell. Perhaps that scent brought out all those feelings—smell can be so powerful! These labels and definitions seem so important—they shape a life, and without them one cannot say one even exists. Or so one thinks, and then one moves halfway around the world to find that the labels mean nothing. I hear so often in the American news this phrase—
born again
. I never understood what that meant before coming here. Now I find that I must work to be exactly that—
born again
.”

From the end of the drive Flavian pointed to the top of a nearby hill. “From the statue of Saint Joseph we can see the sunset. Shall we climb?”

“We’d be fools not to.”

As they climbed, the broad sweep of the valley opened before them, the fluorescent green of early summer flecked with brown-and-white cows, their heads nuzzling the rich, knee-deep grass and in the distance the valley’s dark wooded rim. They took their seats in the Adirondack chairs at Saint Joseph’s feet.

“And so I am a bit—
amused
, here in America, to see men still worshipping a piece of bread. I could as well be with my grandmother by the fireside, where before every meal she set aside a bit of food for the gods.”

Below them the cows began moving through the pastures toward the barn. “That piece of bread,” Flavian sighed. “I used to see it as more than that, but seventeen years here and I’ve changed my mind. Now it’s a just a metaphor—a symbol. It makes so much more sense that way.”

Meena nodded. “So comforting, when everything makes sense. I believe in the power of reason to make sense of the world. That is why I became a doctor. Then I come to America to find myself among people barely less superstitious than the village women of my childhood. The stories the women tell me here I can hardly believe! We educate our women as well or better in Bengal. The women here have been kept ignorant, by whom and for what reasons I do not yet know, but their ignorance is serving someone’s cause, of this we may be sure. They should consider becoming nuns.” At this Flavian laughed out loud. “But no!” she said. “I am serious. A monk or a nun is making a real contribution. To choose to refrain from bringing more children into our overcrowded world—to choose instead to give yourself over to a noble ideal—this is a responsible choice. A
reasonable
choice.”

“I’m not sure how much choosing was involved—to be honest, I was on the lam from the draft board.” He waved his hand at the fields, the line of slowly moving cows, the abbey church. “I needed a place to hide out and this place offered it.”

“Then you too are a war refugee. We have more in common than one might have thought.” A moment of silence, then, “I have met this funny man. Another war refugee, you might say.” A small laugh. “He is my patient, though I have met him at your statues. A farmer, he calls himself, though he spends his days watching birds.”

“You mean Johnny Faye.” Flavian picked a daisy and began plucking at its petals.

“Why, yes, you know him. Though I am hardly surprised. You and he share that quality of being a monk—not a monk in the particular way of your order but in some deeper way. I see it in the way you walk.”

Flavian held up the daisy, shorn of all but its last petal. He plucked it and tossed the stem over his shoulder.

Below them a car with a broken muffler sputtered as it passed, the bitter smell of exhaust rising on the still evening air. Meena waved at the last of the cows passing through the gate. “I do so enjoy watching the cows!”

“Take a long look. They’re not long for this world.” Flavian told her about the abbot’s plan to decommission the herd.

“You mean selling them for slaughter.”

“Well, yes, I guess you could put it that way. The accounting books make their demands and even the most idealistic must comply. It’s about labor. Which means it’s about dollars and cents.”

“As are most difficult decisions. Institutions must make difficult decisions. I love children but reason dictates that
someone
must refrain from bringing them into our overcrowded world. I have made that choice. And I love cows but I understand why they must go.”

“God gave us reason so that we could prove His existence, the better to worship Him. Or so Thomas Aquinas would say.”

“And the next thing you know we are saving lives with penicillin and contraception.”

“And destroying them with bombs. And slaughtering the cows.”

They fell silent, watching as the sun lowered itself into its nest of clouds, scarlet to red to orange to yellow fading to lavender and to the east the deep purple of encroaching night. The first lightning bugs of the season emerged, until the pastures crawled and blinked with their miniature semaphores:
I’m here, I’m here! Take me, love me!

Meena stood. “Another visit, another time. I enjoyed the service.”

Flavian led the way down the path. Halfway down he turned and spoke. “The boy—Matthew Mark. Can I ask how he’s doing?”

“Of course you may ask. I suppose it is not a violation of confidentiality
to acknowledge what we both saw. The boy had been beaten, presumably by his father. Whether that brought about the pneumothorax is impossible to say but it is difficult to imagine otherwise.”

“I have kept him in my prayers. I wish I believed that makes a difference.”

“Do you believe that God cares what happens to this little boy?”

Flavian studied the opalescent sky. “I used to believe that. Now I don’t know what I believe.”

“My life has been a flight from evil wrought in service to religions, each as bad as the other, Hindu, Christian, Muslim, Buddhist. Pray if that brings you comfort but know that prayer is no substitute for an adequate foster home.”

“There has got to be something that can be done. The man nearly killed the boy. What if the next time he does?”

The great disk of an early summer moon was rising. At the monastery the mimosas were coming on, cascades of pink, umbrellas of roseate. Meena and Flavian were at the allée before she spoke. “How American you are!” she said softly. “You are the fish in the sea and what does the fish know of the sea? ‘Something must be done,’ ‘something can be done.’ It is why I longed to come here, to a place where people believe always and everywhere that something can be done. You have your electricity and your cars and your telephones, and what is astonishing is not only that you have these things but that you know that they will work, you take for granted the fact that they will work, here it is so easy to take everything for granted, good health and a long life and seeing the birth of one’s grandchildren and great-grandchildren, all this you may take for granted. How dull and safe it all is! How I longed for this dullness, this safety! I came halfway around the world for it.”

While she spoke the moon rose to silhouette St. Joseph, so that for one moment the statue seemed to bear a bright disk in its upraised arms. “You are a doctor and you have taken a vow,” Flavian
said gently. “Might that require you to put the boy’s interests above all other considerations?”

“And you are a monk, and you have taken a vow. Might not that require you to be better stewards of your cows?”

Flavian halted in the darkness under the gum trees. “Let’s be kind to each other, all right? I just can’t—that evening. I can’t get that boy out of my head. I can’t bear to be in the presence of such suffering without, I don’t know. Doing something.” He gave a hollow laugh. “Which, of course, is why I chose the world’s most useless profession.” The first bells announced Compline. “I have to go,” he said. “Please forgive me.”

“If you will forgive me in turn. It is a terrible matter.”

The sweet gums cast shadows so black she stumbled. Flavian took her arm again and kept her at his side until they stopped at her car, where she paused. She took his hand in a firm shake. “What is that funny thing you say? Oh, yes. Let us stay in touch.” She climbed in her car and drove away.

The abbot had requested that Flavian take notes during his meeting with Harry Vetch, who was brief and to the point. Now, some moments after Vetch’s departure, Flavian sat in silence, waiting for the abbot to resume dictating a letter to corporate milk producers that had been the morning’s first business. But the abbot had swiveled in his chair to study the rippling leaves of the ginkgo that reigned over the meditation garden. His back offered no conversational clues.

The abbot was a small dark-eyed man of delicate bones and a fine sense of diplomacy, who kept his heavy beard trimmed for the sake of visitors—when he returned from his annual retreats it was scraggly and unkempt. Finally Flavian cleared his throat. “Should we continue? Let’s see. ‘. . . deadline for bids to supply the abbey with sufficient milk . . .’”

The abbot did not turn around. “I hope you took good notes.”

“As always.” Flavian flipped forward through his memo pad. “Harry Vetch, county attorney, personal interview, June 16th, 10:45
A.M
. ‘Revised federal statutes place the burden of proof on the owner, meaning that if marijuana is found growing on abbey acreage the abbey must prove that it did not know of such activity. Law enforcement officials believe that criminal elements are moving operations to the farther reaches of the abbey properties so as to escape confiscation of their own properties in the event of prosecution.
As a public servant and devout Catholic I am paying you this visit’—uh, I’ll skip that part—‘the revised procedures permit the state and/or the federal governments to seize any and all property that may be involved in such activities.’”

“Any suggestions about how to check three thousand acres for pot plants?”

“Hire a teenager?”

“I’m not sure how one proves to the satisfaction of a court of law that one does
not
know about a particular activity,” the abbot said. “Review what he said about personal responsibility, please. I don’t want to hear it, which usually means I need to hear it.”

Flavian ran his finger down the pages. “‘In the same way that you are the abbot of a monastery, I am the desk at which the county law enforcement buck stops’—that’s him talking, not you—”

“I should hope so. If twenty-five years of administration have taught me anything, it’s the art of being away from the desk when the buck stops in. Go on.”

“‘—and so as abbot you may be held personally responsible for any illegal activity found taking place on monastery lands.’”

The abbot sighed. “Better me than the community.”

The deep-throated bell began its call to midday office. Flavian gathered his notebook and pen and stood. He paused at the door. “Brendan?”

“Yes?”

“Is growing marijuana a sin?”

The abbot laughed. “Well, it’s against the law.”

“I know that. What I’m asking is, is it a sin?”

The abbot considered this. “An interesting question. The fact of its being illegal does not necessarily make it sinful. The saying of mass has been illegal in a variety of times and places but that hardly makes it sinful. The question probably falls under the rubric of rendering unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s. At various points the Bible stresses that we are to respect authority.”

“If Jesus had respected authority we wouldn’t be here today.”

“A point well made, if usually ignored.”

“Besides, what about this interpretation. Maybe Jesus wasn’t telling us to obey Caesar. Maybe he was speaking ironically—he was a pretty smart guy, after all, and there he was standing right in front of the Pharisees, and he knew that they would interpret what he said one way while his followers, who knew where he was coming from, would hear it a different way. Maybe he was saying that since everything belongs to God, our job is to render everything to God, and if we do that well enough then what we owe to Caesar—who after all belongs to God like everything else—will take care of itself. Maybe he was saying that finally we owe everything to God and nothing, or at least nothing that matters, to Caesar.”

“Now there’s a thought,” the abbot said. “I don’t think it would hold much water in a court of law, canon or otherwise, but I once heard a theology professor offer more or less the same gloss on that passage. But if you’re telling me you’re growing pot behind the cow barn, I’m telling you to pull it up.” He grinned and nodded at the door. “We’d better make tracks or we’re not going to make Sext.”

After the midday meal Flavian changed from his white robes into jeans and a work shirt and went for one of his afternoon wandering walks. Some high scuddy clouds blocked enough sun so that Flavian cast no shadow. His first thought was to visit the statues, but just as he opened the door a tour bus disgorged its load of chattery, camera-toting faithful, and while Flavian knew he should keep a generous heart toward these dear people whose purchases and donations brought them prosperity, in fact he fled. Visiting the statues was out of the question—one might as well seek solitude in a bus station—and so he crossed into the dairy pastures to visit the cows.

They had scattered themselves across one of the nearer pastures. As soon as he appeared several lumbered to their feet and came slowly walking his way—a few still carried him buried in their memories. Flavian was touched by their bovine devotion, or
at least their capacity to associate a human being with feeding time. The brothers had given them cow names (“Tulip,” “Honeybun”) but Flavian had never troubled to learn these. Instead when he worked among them he had secretly named each cow after one of his fellow monks—the herd and the community being similar in numbers.