The Unspeakable (13 page)

“Well, you can't stay here.”

“I'm not leaving these people. They want me. I'm their priest.”

I couldn't argue with him on that point. Everyone that I talked to seemed to like Marbury. He sparked something within this congregation that had been missing for years, a feeling of independence. The coffers jingled with cash, thanks to record attendance. Not just from the voice and hearing impaired but from others as well. Some were physically challenged, or mentally, others were just searching for a different kind of church, which Marbury provided. Perhaps too different.

I said, “At least give it some thought.”

But he just shook his head, defiantly.

“Then it's all over, Jim.”

I dug into my cake, which was too sweet. Marbury didn't say anything, instead eating or just glancing out the window. He looked like a man abandoned in thought but probably not in what I wanted him to ponder, a life where he didn't have to bring attention to himself by not talking. I no longer believed that Marbury wished himself mute, despite what the doctors said, but rather that something deep within himself had finally surfaced, something too horrible to imagine, like killing a man. And yet, I knew that Marbury was capable of anything, including concocting a story just for my benefit, so I began to ask him some questions. Everything that came to my mind about that day.

Marbury listened to my concerns, crafted as carefully as possible without calling him outright a fraud or a liar. But he took it that way.

“You don't believe me?”

“It's so incredible, Marbury. How many people kill someone?”

“I did. His name was Burk. Henry Burk.”

Then he reached into his wallet and pulled out a scrap of paper.

“If you're curious, I have this.”

It was a newspaper article that was so old it almost crumbled in my hands as I unfolded it. The story was to the point. A man was killed in an Albany bar Saturday afternoon, apparently from a scuffle over money. Charged in the incident was James Marbury, Sr., of Albany, New York. The other man, Henry Burk of Queens, New York, an unemployed truck driver with a criminal record, died on the way to the hospital at 3:19
P.M.
No other details were provided.

“Where did you get this?”

Marbury shrugged. “I've been keeping it. But it's yours now.”

He slipped the article in with my notes, fully aware that I would check it out, verify every fact for myself. But that he gave it to me meant something. That the story had to be real.

He said, “I'm done with that score anyway.”

“I can't believe you've kept this to yourself. You never told anyone?”

“Who would I tell?”

I was going to say that he could have told me but I didn't.

I said, “Your priest.”

“I am a priest. At least for the time being. Remember?”

“No, I meant before.”

He shook his head.

“You could have told the Bishop, Marbury. Got it off your chest.”

“You mean, I could have told you. It's the same thing.”

“I would have listened.”

“Like now? Or like what you've trusted me with over the years?”

“What are you talking about?”

Marbury peered at me with cold eyes.

He said, “Don't take me for an idiot. I'm talking about Sandy.”

My sister.

“Your mother told me everything.”

Maybe I blinked or even tried to swallow a protest.

I said, “She wouldn't tell you. She never talked about it.”

“Then how do I know?”

Marbury touched my arm, trying to connect.

He said, “Let it go, Peter. She's gone.”

I was stunned. Like the force of a brick in my face, those words.

“And nothing will change that. Not even you denying it.”

Denial.

The last time that I thought about my sister, really thought about her, as in missing her, thinking about her life and what she would have done with it, was several months ago. On her birthday. I give myself that now, feeling it appropriate to honor people on days of their birth. And not the other time.

“I haven't thought about Sandra in years,” I said.

Marbury gave me a look as though I were transparent.

“Not that way at least.”

“You don't blame yourself?”

“It just happened, Marbury.”

“A hell of a thing to happen.”

The year was 1959. Autumn. I was ten years old, self-absorbed and stupid, but old enough to have known better. Someone in school told me about laying coins on the railroad tracks. When a train passed over them the coins were left a mashed pulp. It seemed fun at the time, me trying to replicate that look. But in retrospect, I pray that I hadn't.

“I don't remember much about it. Time does that, I guess.”

“You remember. You remember so much that you forgot.”

Marbury was right. That day was like a computer screen with the letters burned into it. But ghost letters, not the real thing. Just
like my memory. I replayed that day so many times in my head that I no longer could distinguish what really happened from what I just thought happened. Finally, nothing happened at all.

“I don't blame anyone, if that's what you mean.”

Marbury looked surprised. “No one? Not even God?”

“Not even God,” I said.

“Then you're a stronger man than I.”

Marbury pushed his plate to the center of the table, empty. Crumbs were everywhere but no cake. Finished. He wet a finger and picked up every little morsel he could find, even moving closer to the crumbs that fell from my own plate. That close. Too close perhaps, for I still had a piece left.

I toyed with the idea of giving Marbury half but I didn't. I just ate instead, watching him look at me like a starving puppy. He was still the sugar junkie. In seminary, I remember Marbury smuggling in pound-sized Hershey bars and eating them, much to the consternation of our superiors, who felt that we should gauge our passions or at least not embrace them with such lust. But that wasn't Marbury. He was hungry and he ate, that simple.

I couldn't take it anymore and gave in. He knew that I would. I pushed the cake to his side, mumbling something about a diet or some such nonsense, and Marbury took it. Seconds later he was picking at those crumbs as well.

“What did you do in Altoona? No food, no candy.”

He smiled. “I got pretty hungry.”

“Do you remember any of it?”

“Not much. I was walking mostly, trying to think.”

“What about?”

“Actually I was thinking about Jacob Barris. He expected everything from God. Maybe he expected too much.”

Marbury went on to the story in Pennsylvania.

He said that one of the nurses from the hospital came in from the outside with a yardstick in her hand. Her finger was well over the two-foot mark and it was still coming down. Somebody said that they heard from the radio predictions of another foot of snow and high winds too, which just sent morale lower. People were getting tired and Marbury said that both the nurses and the doctors slept when they could, picking up a few hours here and there before going back on rounds. The never-ending rounds. For the hospital was so short staffed that many procedures were canceled for lack of qualified surgeons, and even those qualified hesitated to operate unless it was an emergency. There was just no room for error.

Marbury helped where he could, which usually meant delivering meals or helping out with snow removal, especially on the roof. There was a growing concern, voiced first by an engineer waiting for back surgery and confirmed later by a lone maintenance man, that the roof wouldn't be able to take much more. The building was old and already certain structural defects were obvious. Cracks ran down the walls from years of settling. And the asphalt shingles, almost creaking and broken in some places, had begun to allow in water. Bedpans were set up. Mops pulled out. But nothing helped.

“Someone had to shovel it so I volunteered.”

“You actually climbed up there?”

Marbury nodded. It was dangerous work. First he had to find a ladder that reached. Then he had to carefully negotiate, a shovel strapped on his back as he climbed, two stories up to an icy and snowy landing. The roof was on a perch above that, maybe five feet, a climb without a ladder. He packed down a lump of snow and climbed atop it, careful not to look below, for he was afraid of heights. Then with one foot up he made it.

The job of snow removal was slow and laborious but he worked at it. Marbury said that he was nearly done with half of the roof when he heard a woman's voice calling out to him from below. It was Abigail.

“Father, you better get down here. It's Helen Barris.”

Marbury made it down faster than he went up and scrambled to the scene. A doctor was leaving Helen's room when Marbury got there. He looked spent, exhausted.

The doctor said, “I'm just trying to make her comfortable.”

“Is there anything I can do?”

“You can keep that jerk away from me.”

Marbury saw Barris pacing like a caged animal. He looked angry. Helen was almost devoid of color now and the machines that registered her heartbeat barely made a sound, only one that was slow. She was dying.

Marbury did what he could.

“Don't do that,” said Barris. “No praying. Anything but that.”

“I don't think she's going to make it.”

“She'll make it. My Helen is strong.”

“She might not.”

Barris looked away. His face began to shrink.

“You have to start thinking about the child. She needs a home, Jacob.”

“She already has a home.”

“I'm talking about someplace safe.”

“What are you saying, padre?”

“I talked to Lucy. She told me everything.”

“Everything?” He laughed. “Nobody knows everything.”

“I do. I know what you did to her.”

Barris suddenly looked worried.

He said, “You can't blame that all on me, padre. I told Helen that she shouldn't be driving, not in this weather. Sure, we had a fight, but I ain't no guy to throw his wife out in the snow.”

“I'm talking about Lucy. Her broken bones and falls.”

“I thought—?”

Marbury said that he wondered why Lucy and Helen were out driving that night. But now it began to make sense. They were
driving not because they wanted to but because they had to. They were escaping Barris.

“You forced them out in that weather?”

“They left. I tried to stop them, but you don't know my wife.”

“Where on earth were they going?”

Barris just shrugged.

He said, “It should have been me. I should be in that bed.”

Marbury wasn't comforting. He didn't say anything at all. The silence in the room was incriminating enough.

Finally Barris said, “Her falls? Is that what Lucy told you?”

“Yes.”

“Then you're worse than these fool doctors.”

“Your daughter had broken bones, contusions. It's on record.”

“Don't point fingers at me.”

“How do you explain it, Jacob?”

“I can't. The kid's queer, like I said. I cut my hand once and she healed it. I'm not asking you to buy it, I'm not sure I do myself.”

Marbury said that he was about to say something, argue his point, when one of the machines that was hooked up to Helen just went flat. She quit breathing. Barris turned around, panicked.

“I'll get a doctor,” said Marbury.

“Forget it. It's over.”

But Marbury was about to get a doctor anyway. Then he heard a voice at the door. It was Lucy. She was standing in her hospital gown and slippers, as though someone had already called her.

She said, “Don't be sad.”

Barris wasn't surprised to see her. In fact, he almost expected it.

“Look at her. That's dying, kid. She's dead.”

“Just a boo-boo, Jacob. Don't cry.”

But it was too late. He slumped in the nearest chair, distraught.

“I don't cry. I'm a big girl.”

“Get her out of here, will you?”

“Big girls don't cry at boo-boos. They hurt, then all gone.”

“Did you tell her that?” asked Marbury. “Before or after you hit her?”

“I don't beat children, padre.”

“You never told her to say that she fell?”

But the question was never answered. For a strange thing happened. What was quiet didn't remain so. The machine that controlled Helen's lungs began to pick up again and with it, a faint heartbeat. The heartbeat got stronger and stronger, filling up the room from the sound of the monitor. And when Marbury and Barris looked to see what was happening, they saw Lucy there, softly stroking the face of her mother.

Helen was alive.

I interrupted Marbury at this point:

“You're telling me that she got better?”

He nodded.

“Well, maybe it was the drugs.”

“Possibly.”

“But you're not suggesting—?”

“I don't know what to think, I've already told you that. And neither did Barris. Except that she was breathing again.”

“It sounds like a coincidence.”

Marbury smiled. “Then God was full of them.”

Our waitress came by and took our plates. She also grabbed the coffee, which we were finished with, and she reached over the table to get my cup. I pushed it closer so she wouldn't have to bend over but she did anyway. Her breasts sagged near my face, a line of cleavage peeking through her open blouse. I could smell the woman's perfume, mixed with the acrid scent of her sweat clinging to her work clothes, and I tried to avert my eyes. But I couldn't. I didn't want to.

I took the bill along with a toothy smile.

She said, “Enjoy your weekend, Father.”

The man with the red beard, who had been ignoring me all this time, looked over right when the waitress gave me this harmless smile. In turn he gave me a similar one, wagging his hands as though they were lighted coals. A compliment for still being a man, maybe, though I didn't take it as one.