The Unspeakable (17 page)

We built tombstones in the front of our school and erected creepy monuments to the dead, including the necessary amount of cobwebs, spiders, and rubber bats. Scarecrows too. Some crawling out of graves, their arms exposed or dancing atop them with big grins. Every year the production got bigger, more elaborate, until it became a part of the Halloween celebration itself. People soon came from miles away just to see our school all decorated, and they paid a small admission to tour the grounds. Pumpkins had eerie glows to them, ghouls sat on haystacks, mad laughter emanated from nearby windows. And folks loved it. We sold caramel apples and popcorn. Fresh cider was given out. People played games. It was fun.

And nobody enjoyed it more than Sandra. Despite being deaf, I believed that she heard the sounds in her head and understood them. The haunting goblins, the fake screams. Everything. Certainly she smelled the dry, autumnal air, a fire crackling out its wood smoke and embers, the scent of burning pine and birch. As she must have smelled the leaves, rich and damp, which were bunched into piles where waiting ghosts and skeletons in old sheets wrestled and tumbled for fun. Candy was handed out by neighbors. Our own little trick or treat. Sandra and I walked around with our bags, she was always getting more than me. Sometimes I translated for her as people talked, an awkward conversation about weather and her living away from home, though they could seldom concentrate on which to discuss first.

The next day, the little ghouls in us spent, my family drove us down to the cemetery, where we prayed for departed souls everywhere. It was All Saints' Day. I prayed for my two grandmothers, my grandfather, for a baby that died at birth and others, though I really reserved my prayers for the candy. Death was final but sweets
were another thing. It was an image about death that I carried with me my whole childhood, at least until I first tasted a real death myself.

Marbury must have noticed something, that I was off daydreaming, for he clapped his hands. The sound brought me out of it.

He said, “It's a heavy weight, the world.”

I looked at him and agreed.

“What were you thinking of?”

I didn't tell him of course, but he sensed it anyway.

“You never talk about her, do you?”

“What's there to talk about?”

“You tell me.”

“Is it important to you that I discuss her?”

But Marbury just smiled that damn smile with a look that cut inward like a ripsaw. I hesitated for a moment, then added, “I'm over that anyway.”

“You were over that in seminary, so what's the big news.”

“Then I still am.”

But here he was with his clinical comb, not believing any of it.

I asked him, “Besides, if you know everything anyway, why ask?”

He answered simply, “I want to hear your side.”

“You already know my mother's.”

“That's different. You're not her.”

I secretly wondered if Marbury had some agenda that he was hiding from me. Or perhaps he just wanted to ignite our old friendship, tarnished by the years and the lies that he told me before about his childhood, and how distant old friends usually become. But I didn't know what to say, even how to respond, and having not talked about it for so long gave the story a kind of hollow quality. As though it never happened.

And sometimes I think that it didn't.

I said, “There's not much to tell really. My father was going to the feed store and Sandra and I went along for the ride. A boring place, except for the woods and railroad tracks across the road. We were just out playing. A stupid thing, you saw it every day back then, kids running around railroad tracks, but these days it's practically unheard of. Unless you're a hobo or living in a Woody Guthrie song.”

I told Marbury that trains fascinated me. My uncle, for a birthday present, once gave me a train set with real smoke coming out of the locomotive. And I loved it. I built a small model, in continuing my art work with Sandra, that had a tunnel and a miniature town with trees and buildings, even people milling about. I kept it under my bed, away from my brothers, who liked to cause train wrecks and explosions—right out of the movies they were—but I never let them. Trains were sacred to me.

“I wanted to smell the smoke. Feel the wheels for myself.”

“I thought you just wanted to mash up coins. Impress your friends.”

“Maybe. But that changed when I saw it.”

A caboose.

Just like the one that I had, bright red, it was sitting on a siding track, unused. Maybe it was simply out of commission or awaiting a new set of cars, I didn't know. But it was an opportunity to explore that I couldn't pass up. A real caboose. The steps were more wobbly than I expected and rusty too, but I braved them anyway, walking up.

Marbury smiled. “You actually crawled around an old caboose?”

“I did more than that. I broke in.”

The lock was broken anyway and the door opened with the slightest push, revealing a depressing scene. The caboose had been badly vandalized. Everything inside was destroyed and trashed in a great heap. There were knocked-over tables and chairs, smashed-up bottles of liquor, and magazines strewn and urinated upon on the
floor. And food. I saw half-dented cans and tins, bits of crumbs lying about, and empty boxes of cereal. The place was a wreck.

I was about to leave when I noticed it, a kind of grand scheme to the destruction that snuck up on me. Upon closer inspection, it wasn't chaos at all in the caboose but a specific plan to resemble chaos. For instance, magazines just weren't thrown straight up, left to fall naturally, but rather, they were tossed in particular places. In piles. Some were even stacked up and left to fall over on their own. Like a library. But the biggest clue was the furniture. I looked at the pile, well over my head, and I saw it. An opening. Large enough for one body. Someone had built a fort, protected from the rest of the trash, and when I looked in, through two linking chairs, I saw a blanket and a fresh bag of chewing tobacco. Somebody was living in there.

“Who?” asked Marbury.

“I don't know.”

Then I did something crazy. I crawled into the fort myself. The place was surprisingly cozy, with a rug on the floor and a good vantage to the door of the caboose that showed whoever was looking out exactly who or what was coming and going. It was a perfect hiding place. I found a few pairs of socks and a copy of
Life
magazine left over from the war. There were other things too. A watch with only the second hand running. And a radio that didn't work. But the thing that surprised me most wasn't any of the booty that was stored in there. Rather it was something that I found sitting in a cup. Hot coffee.

Somebody had just left.

Marbury was curious. “What did you do?”

“What any kid would. I got scared. Too many crazy bum stories.”

I pulled a Marbury and went back to my notes, leaving him wondering the way I always wondered. But I had a job to do and no amount of talking about that day would change it.

I sifted through my notes, the old comfort of paper around me. It was everywhere. Reports and accounts from sources of every kind, even those who barely knew Marbury. I had statements from his old secretary in New Ulm, from acolytes and choirboys, even statements from the neighboring businesses near the shelter. I tried to scour beneath every rock, every stone imaginable, but with a man like Marbury many stones remained wedged in the ground, sometimes for good.

The temptation was for me to take everything with a grain of salt or to believe very little of it. But that was impossible. For I had so many conflicting reports about Marbury that it was difficult to remain neutral about him. People seemed to take him to the extreme, one way or another, and I found it often difficult to draw any parallels between the two versions. Take the shelter. Father Stone saw Marbury as an incredibly gifted yet erratic man who constantly got himself into trouble with his own ego. He got others into trouble too, says Stone, and they frequently had to bail him out. For example, Marbury would often bring in as many people as he could fit despite the fire hazard involved. And if the fire inspector happened to wander by, Marbury would tell him exactly what he wanted to hear. Lies of course, which lieutenants like Stone would have to undo later or cover up.

Others, perhaps less jealous than Stone, took another view. They saw Marbury as the driving force behind every idea, hardly the egomaniac who couldn't or wouldn't compromise, especially if the ends justified the means. Without Marbury, the thinking went, the shelter wouldn't even exist, much less flourish, and that alone was the signature of his skills. One woman, Juanita Haba, a volunteer at the shelter, tells the story of a Marbury who pulled money from his own pocket just to give someone else a second chance.

She said, “In all the years that I knew Father, I never saw him once buy a new pair of shoes. Or anything new for that matter. I think he wanted to give it all away, just like Francis of Assisi.”

When I related this quote to him he smiled.

“I told you, don't go making me into a saint.”

“Those are her words, not mine.”

“Look at me. I'm not barefoot. I must have bought something.”

I glanced at Marbury's boots. They were so old that I almost thought that I recognized them. From his motorcycle days. In seminary Marbury was famous for having a wardrobe supplied almost completely from handouts and from the Goodwill. This was fine until we had some official function to attend, when I would usually step in and lend him something, a jacket and a tie, and despite his being slightly taller than I was, he would force body and sleeve to match. I felt like a department store, albeit a poorly stocked one.

When I backed up the statement by Ms. Haba, that I too remember him as someone who purchased nothing, Marbury became coy and elusive, as though he were trying to rewrite my impression of things.

“Didn't you borrow clothes from me?”

“You had rags, Marbury.”

“Was it really that bad?”

“Worse.”

He backpedaled some.

“Well, that was twenty years ago. My tastes now are more refined.”

“Brooks Brothers? Armani? What?”

“Don't put me in the same category as Francis, that's all I'm saying.”

He was so intent on downplaying all praise about his character, at least the praise that others heaped upon him, that I decided to cut straight to the chase. His enemies.

“Some weren't so generous with their opinions. Nick Holland for one.”

“Nick Holland? Figures you would unearth him.”

“Why?”

“Worms always surface sooner or later.”

“He said that he was on your board of directors until you—”

“Fired him? Is that what he told you? He quit.”

“Your version. Something about lost funds.”

It was perhaps little more than a coincidence when Nick Holland, a former director at Marbury's shelter, came to us a few weeks back with a story. Maybe he had heard about Marbury losing his voice and healing people in his new church or maybe he was just emboldened now that the boss was gone, I couldn't say. But the tale was a disturbing one. Cash was missing. Money that Marbury had direct control over.

When I asked Marbury about it, he just shrugged.

He said, “A bookkeeping error.”

“Then there were several.”

“What are you saying, Peter? Spell it out, man.”

“It doesn't look good, that's all.”

“So you think I'm a crook.”

He gave me a piercing glance, as though it were designed to bore inside of me, mine out any remaining shred of integrity I had left. Suddenly I felt lower than the lowliest grub.

“A fraud and a crook. Confidence from the Bishop, I see.”

“It's my job, Marbury.”

“Better yours than mine. You can write that down.”

I stopped with my notes when he said that, realizing that I was still writing. It was second nature now, like breathing.

“Do you like it, your job?”

But I didn't answer. I couldn't.

I said, “What happened, Marbury?”

“I don't know. A lot was going on that I couldn't control.”

“And that was your job,” I said, turning the tables back on him.

He agreed with me.

“I'm curious, does Stone see me as a crook?”

“A crook, no. But I wouldn't rule out megalomania.”

A big smile. I believe that Marbury enjoyed the attention that people paid him, good and bad, as though he revolved around a universe where, if a person like Marbury didn't exist, the real Jim Marbury would do his best to create one. And he worked at that impression. For everyone that he came in contact with walked away with some story, some weird anecdote that they seemed to carry on through their lives. I know I was like that.

“I've been called that before.”

I said, “You've probably been called worse things.”

He nodded. “Both as a priest and as a man.”

I shared with Marbury a few of the insults that I've fielded in my day. Absolute strangers have nicked me with every expletive imaginable, many aimed at God, but since the Almighty wasn't available, I took the hit instead. One fellow even spat at me, sizing me up with a mouthful.

“Give me names any day. Just keep the bodily fluid to yourself.”

Marbury agreed. “Spit's bad. But it's worse in prison. I know from my father. They practice.”

Marbury's mention of it made me think about prison life.

Most of my images from this world came not from firsthand experiences but from television and the movies. I remember especially the old black-and-white films of actors like Edward G. Robinson and James Cagney, both of them gangsters and inmates, and I imagined that's how it really was. Life behind bars. I remember as well the images of priests in prison. Many of them were Irish, former street thugs themselves who turned over a new leaf. And yet
beneath the surface there was a shadow of that former life that remained, just waiting to claw itself out. Good tension in films, though difficult in real life.