The Unspeakable (4 page)

She kept right on walking.

Or so say my reports. Fortunately for me and this office, these notes have fallen into no other hands but my own, thank God. The newspapers clamor in these parts, as I'm sure they do everywhere,
for any kind of news. The more sensational, the better. And in a world of electronic mail and fax machines, bad news travels faster than in times past. Rumors of all kind are only a videotape away, and then a real mess.
Hard Copy
or supermarket tabloids. Although it could have been worse. Had Marbury been tucked away in some tiny congregation in Iron or Fifty Lakes, some place far-off, in the woods or on the prairie, the Diocese might never have noticed. But here, right beneath our noses, the Bishop had no other choice than to act. And act he must.

The Bishop tugged on the end of a cigar, pensively.

He said, “I could make a case for excommunication, you know.”

But that wasn't the Marbury that I knew, a man who would want to toss away everything that he had worked so hard for, and I told the Bishop that.

He just shook his head. “Unless he's gone mad. He might be mad.”

“He isn't mad, I assure you.”

“Then what?”

I shrugged. “Maybe I can reason with him.”

“Reason? He's personally absolving sins now, Whitmore. Only God does that.”

“Where did you hear that from?”

“The church secretary.”

“Surely, she's mistaken.”

“He's healing people like God. Why not go all the way?”

I felt a brush of smoke crash against my body.

“Yes, yes . . . your wonderful advice,” the Bishop said.

“I didn't know it would come to this.”

“You and the Sanhedrin both.”

Then his last words.

He said, “They tried to clean up their mess. Might I suggest you try to do the same.”

I went back to Marbury's church later that afternoon, and walked in unannounced. But Marbury was nowhere to be found. Not in his office, not in the sanctuary, not even in the bathroom, where I looked. I began to feel like he had cut out on me, stood me up, and I was about to leave when a finger tapped me on the shoulder from behind. It was Marbury holding a tray of fresh coffee.

“Where were you?” I asked.

“Oh, I'm around.”

He smiled weakly and handed me one of the Styrofoam cups. I could see that Marbury had already drunk some of his, a tidy row of little teeth marks around the edge of his cup. His trademark. Every cup in seminary, at least the plastic ones, seemed to carry that mark, like that of an animal. Marbury was always scenting out his territory for others to heed.

As he still was.

I followed him into the sanctuary and plunked myself down. Too closely perhaps, for he slowly wiggled away from me and my notes, which started an encroaching tide toward him. Marbury winced a few times at the amount of paper that was coming out of my briefcase, the signed affidavits and testimonials, along with a map of Pennsylvania, which I spread out in large sections over my knees.

Marbury smiled. “A man of many talents. Map keeper, investigator.”

The word “investigator,” despite the fact that Marbury was signing, just seemed to hang in the air and float between us. I had always viewed myself as a priest just like Marbury, not working in quite the same world perhaps, yet still contributing to the faith. But I knew he wasn't as certain.

“How is the good Bishop anyway?” he asked, out of the blue.

“He's troubled. You have us wringing our hands.”

“What on earth for?”

“I think it's obvious. Prayer services. People hearing again.”

“You're making me sound like God.”

“Do you see yourself as God?”

Marbury just sipped his coffee. Stony silence.

I said, “I'm just thinking about the deaf girl. She must.”

“The uniform, Peter. Representatives and all that.”

“I've been told you absolve people of their sins now.”

“From whom?”

“Does it matter?”

“Well, it's ridiculous.”

I nodded and went back to my notes, trying to find out exactly where we had left off. But my concentration was broken by Marbury laughing, or rather convulsing in his seat.

“What is it?”

“Do you remember Price, the fellow with the pants?”

I thought for a moment and then it came back to me. Dwayne Price.

“From seminary?”

Marbury nodded like an anxious child.

Dwayne Price, the fellow in question, was a gangly man, built more like a cornstalk half wilted in the heat than anything else. He was also one of those fellows who seemed to enter our world by sheer coincidence, if not by mistake. For only a grave error could have placed Price in the seminary to begin with. He was a man with no social graces, who left the door of the toilet open while he did his business. But that wasn't even the worst of it. He enjoyed it. He especially enjoyed sitting there singing, his bright yellow pants, the one's Marbury was referring to, wrapped clear down around his ankles. Price would sit there for hours, doing nothing but singing.

“I never saw him off the toilet,” I said.

“Only a few times. When he needed more paper.”

“Maybe it was the food.”

“Maybe it was his head, Peter. A real cuckoo.”

Marbury was right of course, the problem was in his head. Price was asked to leave after only a few weeks of this, whether out into the world or to a psychiatrist's couch no one knew.

I said, “I hadn't thought about Dwayne Price in years.”

“Good. Just don't think I'm in his orbit.”

“Why do you say that?”

“With all that's happened, you might believe it.”

“Crazy? Never. Though the Bishop might argue otherwise.”

“Then what does that leave?”

“A prankster, maybe.”

He smiled. “God's the prankster, not me.”

“If only I could believe that, Marbury.”

“You have to. It's true.”

I sipped my coffee and reviewed my notes again. The story of the accident just kept coming back to me, and I ran it over and over in my mind. A few moments on either side might have changed everything. Marbury might never have stopped and driven himself into real trouble, or he could have spent the evening in Pittsburgh, had a nice dinner and gone to bed early. But he didn't. He took a choice that he made and turned it into something else, a weird kind of event that he was invited to participate in.

“Tell me again why you didn't stop.”

Marbury shrugged. “I just didn't.”

“I'm wondering why you would drive right into the teeth of danger.”

“Oh, that wasn't dangerous.”

“Freezing to death wasn't dangerous?”

“It wasn't if you were already dead. I felt that way, you know.”

But there was still the trip, he said, and his journey to Pennsylvania he tried to plan as a way to recharge old batteries. He would
drive, for one, time to think and see things, time to slow down too, if only for a few days. But threats of an impending storm changed all that, and Marbury soon found himself frantic again, racing against the clock. Exactly the place that he didn't want to be.

“Meeting that little girl changed everything,” he said.

“Yes, I'm curious about that. Was it a miracle or mere coincidence?”

“A bit of both.”

“Well, surely, you're not suggesting—”

“And why not?”

“It's absurd. Children don't heal.” “That's what I thought.”

Marbury explained that the snow at the accident was getting worse, a full-blown blizzard. Visibility was down to zero. The wind became even stronger he said, whipping up drifts and carrying them across the road, the same road where the Bronco and police cruiser struggled to cross. Wheels spun helplessly, and it was only by traveling single file, with the Bronco as the point vehicle, that they made it. The village of Wheelersburg, so small that the town owned only one snowplow, was completely paralyzed. Every store was closed. And the lone Main Street traffic light blinked on and off to itself. Not a soul was seen, walking or even in the houses. Everything looked deserted.

Thankfully the town had a hospital, or what passed as one. The building was old, built in the Eisenhower era, when coal flowed more abundantly in these parts than it did now. The town was larger too, said Marbury, three times its present size, and the decision to build a hospital should have signaled better times but it didn't. Coal was just starting to be imported from other countries, Canada and Brazil mostly, which undercut the prices. Mines shut down. Children left for college never to return. And soon Wheelersburg became little more than a ghost town. Now a ghost town in a blizzard.

The Bronco arrived first. Marbury saw a nurse and two other men waiting at the loading dock, another relic from those old days. Both the truck and emergency-room entrances were one, sharing the same door, which doubled for freight and stretchers. One of the men took the little girl and handed her to the nurse, no wheelchair, for the snow was too deep, while the other one worked on the bleeding woman. A few moments passed and he was still working.

Marbury followed the police cruiser into the parking lot and drove as far as he could to the front entrance. Then he got out. It was still snowing.

A window rolled down in the cruiser.

“You shouldn't park there, Father. You'll get stuck.”

“I'll only be an hour or so,” replied Marbury.

“An hour in this weather is like a week. Good luck then.”

And the police drove off.

Marbury walked into the front lobby, a dreary place with green walls and nothing on them but paint chipping to the floor. He explained to the receptionist who he was and the scene of the accident that he had just witnessed, but she just shrugged ignorance and pointed him in the direction of the emergency room to wait. The lobby there was deserted as well, as though nobody was working or even around. Marbury went up to the desk and banged on a bell. No response. So he sat on an old chair that sagged in the middle and read magazines, waiting for someone, anyone, to appear. But they didn't. He said that he must have waited into the dinner hour, wet and already exhausted, and his empty stomach was readying him to leave when another man approached.

The man said, “You must be the priest. They told me you were here.”

Marbury said that he was.

“The name's Barris, Jacob Barris. Like in the Bible.”

The man thrust out a hand. It was like shaking the hand, bony and cold, of the dead.

“That was my wife you found out there.”

“I'm very sorry,” said Marbury.

The only thing that he could say really, or the exact thing that Barris expected him to say, for he responded with a kind of resigned shrug. Marbury described Barris as an angular man, thin, with a face shrunken into his skull. His cheekbones were ruddy and protruding with spider veins, as many old people's were, and his hair flew up in a great tuft, all gray and frizzy. Marbury said that Barris had the peculiar habit of blinking his left eye while he talked, as though he was struggling to keep it open.

“Maybe he had something in it,” I said, interrupting him.

“And maybe he'd had a stroke. Anyway, it gave me the creeps.”

“My beard gives you the creeps.”

“Only because you can't grow one,” grinned Marbury.

I brushed off his cheap wit. “How long did you sit there?”

“Hours. I felt like I was waiting in line for purgatory.”

Marbury said that they just sat there, these two men, in silence. They didn't read, they didn't talk or anything, they just sat. Every so often an alarm would go off and the intercom would blare out a physician's name, but no doctor ever walked by. Barris started to nod off but caught himself before actually falling asleep. His head bobbed up and down like one of those old dolls found on dashboards, except one with a broken spring in its neck.

Finally the sound of shoes. A doctor. Barris arched himself upright.

The doctor was young and looked like he was already working on through his sleep. Five o'clock shadow. A stethoscope dangled in his hand.

He said, “First the good news. Your daughter is fine. Not a scratch on her body. I couldn't believe it, wouldn't have, given the impact, but there it is.”

Barris shifted in his seat. “Stepdaughter. The kid isn't mine.”

“Well, she's fine regardless. If you wish to see her—”

“And Helen?”

The doctor looked at Marbury. “Are you the family priest? Because if you are, she could use one now.”

Barris stood up just then and demanded, “I want to see her.”

The doctor put up an argument at first, but then agreed. He led the two men back behind the main emergency-room doors and through a skinny hallway. A few of the rooms were occupied, though most were empty. A good thing, for only about half the staff made it in through the storm. Marbury could see everyone pitching in, from the janitors helping with bedpans to the nurses busy folding linens. But none of them looked at them as they walked by, not knowing themselves what to expect.

In the last room was Helen, who had taken a turn for the worse. No miracle anymore, she was just lying there, the blood and gashes all wiped off and nicely bandaged. Marbury noticed several machines hooked up to her, machines that ran and circulated fluid into her veins, another that pumped her heart and blood oxygen, which beeped at irregular intervals. The beeps weren't very strong.

The doctor said, “We're trying to keep her alive. But I must tell you, every minute on these machines lowers her chances of survival. And they're plenty low now. Do you understand me, Mr. Barris?”

“You mean, she's a vegetable?”

“What I'm saying is that it may not matter.”

“But she'll recover.”

“Not likely.”

Barris dropped to the nearest chair, stunned. He looked at his wife but she was opaque, with the same kind of pallor found in department-store mannequins. Not alive at any rate.