The Unspeakable (6 page)

“What are you talking about?”

“You know exactly. No more healing. No more sign language.”

“I see. Is there anything else?”

“Yes. You'll have to leave here for good.”

Marbury closed the window with a slam.

He said, “I can't leave. I belong here.”

“Then you risk it all, Marbury.”

Marbury walked back to where I had my notes and sat down. He picked up a couple of letters and started reading what I had. I could have stopped him, pulled them away from him, but I didn't.

He stopped himself instead. “Have you ever felt blessed?”

“I can't really distinguish blessing from blind fortune. I'm sorry.”

“Too bad. Then you'll never know.”

Marbury handed me back the pile of letters and smiled.

He said, “I've risked it all before, Peter. I guess I'll have to again.”

It was quiet after that.

Marbury, who was now obviously intent on my cornering him, finding out the exact thing that I would be forced to use against him, just sat there. He didn't seem worried or even angry, unlike me. All I could imagine was anger. Anger that I was assigned to this job, anger that Marbury wouldn't listen to me or talk like a reasonable man. And I hated him for it.

But I tried not to show it. Instead I rearranged my notes, working backwards from the story in Wheelersburg. Marbury just watched me, with some delight I might add, even picking up the notes that fell on the floor.

Finally he broke the silence.

“I lost family too, you know. My brother.”

“What brother?”

“Rick, he died in Vietnam. Not a day goes by without me thinking of him.”

“I thought you were an only child. You told me that.”

“I told you a lot of things. I had to.”

“You mean you told me bullshit,” I said.

“I couldn't tell you the truth, Peter. It might have landed me in jail.”

“For what? Lying?”

“You don't remember the letters, do you?”

I sat there for a moment like an idiot. The letters.

“—from prison.”

And then it started to come back to me. His correspondence.

In seminary, Marbury was always getting these strange letters. They were postmarked from a correctional facility located somewhere in upstate New York, as I recall. I had always assumed back then that Marbury was corresponding with some anonymous inmate, as a form of prison ministry, and he did nothing to dissuade me from thinking that way.

I said, “You mean, your prisoner friend.”

Marbury nodded. “The man in those letters knew my father.”

“He knew him? How?”

“They shared a cell together for almost a year.”

“What are you talking about?”

“A prison cell, Peter. My father was in prison.”

The shock must have been etched on my face, for Marbury smiled.

“See, I couldn't tell you.”

The sound of my stammering.

“Your own father? Why didn't you say something?”

“I was ashamed. Ashamed of myself really.”

I just shook my head, not knowing what to say. What could
one say? We had our stories about Marbury in seminary but nothing like this.

“What—?”

“What was he in for? It's OK. People should be curious. Man-slaughter, he was in for manslaughter. But cancer got him before he could get paroled.”

I tapped my pen against the leather of my briefcase several times, creating this rhythm for me to think. Manslaughter. A nicer word for murder perhaps, though just as deadly.

“And how do I know you're telling me the truth now?” I asked.

“I have nothing to lie about anymore. Check it out, you'll see.”

Marbury leaned back and glanced away from me. He seemed embarrassed, not just about his father but about steering me toward the awful truth. Prison life. I couldn't imagine my own father there, or any father of the men that I went to seminary with. Our lives were all so ordinary compared to this, and I told that to Marbury.

“Another reason I said nothing. I sound like a Dickens novel.”

I nodded, thinking about all those days of incarceration. It must be horrible to be trapped with nothing but time and memories, and I told him that.

Marbury agreed. “But that's not the worst of it,” he said. “My father was innocent.”

“You know this for certain?”

“Of course.”

“But to know for sure—”

“I would have to have been there, yes.”

Somebody walked into the church at that moment, interrupting us. I tended to my cold coffee and thought about what Marbury was telling me, strange stories from both ends of our history together. Then and now. The thought of Marbury concealing that story about his father and then lying about it actually disturbed me. I considered
us close at one time, and I shared with him many of my intimate dreams and fears. And I thought he'd done the same.

I had more questions about the incident but I could see that Marbury was busy. It was late and I started to pack up, my intrusion here being apparent. Marbury didn't notice. He was talking to a young woman at the front of the church who was obviously deaf and quite shaken. I could see her hands moving but I could only make out half of what she was saying.

And then I heard it. A baby.

I saw Marbury peek under a red Indian blanket that the woman was holding and smile. The baby started to cry again. Not the crying of a hungry child or even one who was tired, for I've heard my brother's kids, but a sick child. The woman was now frantic. I saw her hands moving, pleading, and I reached for my glasses. She was telling Marbury that her baby wasn't right, I could see that, that the baby cried for hours on end often without consolation. And now she faced another fear, that the child was just like herself. Deaf. A neighbor tried pots and pans, she said, but no response. And now she was worried why God would do such a thing, whether God even cared. Worse, whether there even was a God to care.

I watched Marbury closely. He bent over the child, pulled back the blanket, and kissed its forehead. Nothing else. The woman cried and hugged him, and Marbury told her that everything was secure in God's hands. That she shouldn't worry. That everything would be the way that God intended. And then he said one other thing that haunts me even now.

He said, abandon yourself to God.

Marbury saw me watching him as he came back. He fell into the seat next to me, knowing full well that I had witnessed everything, and he said, “I didn't know what else to say.”

“You should have told her to go to a doctor. That child might be sick.”

“Some folks don't trust doctors.”

“And they trust you?”

“They trust God, Peter. I'm nothing.”

“This is exactly what I'm talking about. Do this and you won't last.”

Marbury peered at me. “Are you telling me that a priest can't pray?”

“I'm telling you that you can't heal people.”

He smiled and gurgled some more. Laughter.

“Con men and road show preachers heal,” I said. “Not priests.”

I tossed the notes into my briefcase, punctuating my point. Marbury just sat there and stared at me, making me feel uncomfortable. He was right that a priest ought to be able to pray for healing, but I couldn't admit that. Not now. Not under these circumstances.

“You set up false expectations, Marbury.”

“I don't. I never said I could heal. I didn't even suggest it.”

“Then why would anyone say it of you?”

Marbury just shrugged. “I guess because of Pennsylvania.”

I sat down again, for in my rush of anger I had stood up.

“What the hell happened to you out there anyway? Tell me.”

“I found God, Peter.”

“God?”

“It's amazing what you can find in a blizzard.”

Marbury said that the snow was getting worse in Wheelersburg, now a full-fledged emergency. Everything was shut down. There were reports on the radio that the National Guard was being mobilized, though nobody could confirm that. When Marbury looked outside, he couldn't see how anyone could mobilize in this kind of weather, military or otherwise. The snow was now well over a foot deep and still coming downward. The sky and the ground matched perfectly, absolute whiteout conditions, and nothing moved, except
for the power lines that swayed in the wind and threatened only darkness.

Fears of losing power aside, the hospital readied its emergency procedures. Meals were brought out of storage. Electric generators and batteries were brought up to speed, should they be needed, and special operating rooms set up for any incoming. Somebody called over to the town hall about the snowplow but only got a recording. It was just sitting there anyway, stuck in the snow like every other vehicle, and the hopes of being cleared out anytime soon evaporated after that. They were stuck.

Marbury pitched in where he could. He spent the evening delivering coffee to the staff, and even did a bit of shoveling. Abigail, the night nurse, saw Marbury working on the loading bay, which had more snow falling from the concrete overhang. He was almost waist deep in it but he tried to shovel it anyway, intent on clearing a route for future emergency vehicles.

“Forget it,” said Abigail. “Folks are on their own in this weather. We couldn't save anyone if we had to, Father. The roads are all closed.”

Marbury asked her if she heard any updates from the radio.

“It's pretty grim. Another foot, maybe more.”

“I'll never get out of here,” he said.

“You'll get out. It just might take a while.”

Marbury stuffed the shovel into the nearest snowbank and kicked the ice from his feet. No boots. He was cold and it was almost morning, though the sky looked the same old puffy white, hardly brighter.

“How's Lucy?”

“About time for my rounds if you want to come.”

“I'd like that,” he said. “What about Helen?”

“Still on the machines.”

Marbury took off the coat that he'd borrowed from an EMS worker and slipped it back in the fellow's locker. He'd never know.

They walked down the hall to Abigail's station, where she picked up her clipboard and the few things that she would need on her rounds. A blood-pressure cuff, for one, child's size, and they went to Lucy's room.

“Who's Franklin?” asked Marbury. “You said her name was Franklin.”

“That was the mother's name. I guess the stepfather wanted nothing to do with the child, since it wasn't his.”

“And the birth father?”

“None. No records anyway. You see that a lot in hospitals. We get more immaculate conceptions than even you guys. Women without boyfriends or husbands. Hear them talk and you'd swear it was God.”

Abigail walked through the door first. She flipped on a light and went over to the bed where the child was sleeping. Marbury looked at Lucy closely. She had dark hair, which was shoulder length, that curled up around her neck and onto her pillow. Her nose was small, like that of a pug, and matched her face. Baby fat. She looked younger than her four years.

“I have to take your blood pressure, Lucy. Stay asleep if you want.”

But the girl just rubbed her eyes. “Is that you, God?”

Abigail glanced at Marbury and smiled. “See what I mean?”

Marbury didn't pay any attention to someone waking up, especially waking up in a room as gloomy as this one. Gray walls, no window. No pictures. Hardly even a bed. It looked like a room in a penitentiary.

“I remember you,” said Lucy, cracking her eyes. “Terrible accident.”

“This is Jim Marbury. He's a priest.”

The sound of ripping Velcro. Her blood pressure was normal.

“How are you feeling?” asked Marbury.

“Bad boo-boo.” And she rubbed her head.

“Your head hurts?”

“My head, and Mommy's head. She's sleeping with the angels now.”

The nurse glanced at Marbury and frowned. Not far from the truth.

Marbury said, “You're right. Your mommy's very sick. Now you have to pray, Lucy. We're all praying.”

“But I'm not allowed to pray.”

“Who says?”

“Jacob. Jacob's mean to God, but God isn't mean back.”

“Then we'll keep it as our little secret. How's that?”

“Secrets are fun as long as you don't tell.”

Marbury watched me write, scribbling things down as fast as I could. I wasn't going to take notes, but I did anyway, a habit of mine, and this time was no exception. While I scrambled to catch up, Marbury had left and brought us back a few beers that he had stashed somewhere, and he opened them up. I took a long swallow.

He said, “I heard Rinker's burned down.”

Rinker's. It was an old seminary bar where we sometimes snuck away to. Hardly more than a neighborhood hangout in Decorah, Rinker's had a jukebox and that kept us sane. Plus talking or watching sports on the TV.

I said, “That place was a firetrap. Probably electrical, eh?”

“Not this time. A woman came in with a can of gasoline and torched the place. She said her husband was spending too much time there with his girlfriend.”

“Good riddance then.”

Marbury smiled and worked his beer.

He thought for a moment, then said, “Do you ever miss it?”

“Rinker's?”

“No, I mean out there. Do you ever miss it?”

Out there.

I set down my notes and looked at him. Marbury was using those words but he didn't mean them. Those were just words behind the words. He was really talking about something else. Something we both knew but were afraid to acknowledge, that many priests were afraid to acknowledge.

He was talking about sex.

I thought about it too, and just like Marbury I often used another word to describe it, though in the end it was still sex. Creeping middle age hasn't slowed these thoughts either—not that I'm sure I want them slowed. Like slowing up a part of life. Even celibate I could still feel. I had to feel, for it was only by feeling that I could fight off the very temptations that gnawed at me, that sent every other temptation running for cover. The temptation for peace. A home, a wife, a family.