The Unspeakable (8 page)

But this death, said Marbury, like so many changes in life, only signaled more turmoil. First came the end of his father's job. A tile salesman, Marbury's father had managed to keep the family together and relatively content with this one job. But shortly after the funeral, his company went bankrupt. Severance checks bounced and the pension that he was promised went to Switzerland, smuggled out of the country in some other guy's pocket.

Money was tight after that, said Marbury. And his father, unable to secure anything better, took the only job he could find. A janitorial position in an office building. He was to keep the place clean, or try to. A nearly impossible task with five floors of restrooms and hallways of tracked-in mud, snow, and rain. But he tried anyway. Months went by. The money, never as good as the old sales job, ran out faster. The family tried to consolidate of course, by moving to a cheaper apartment, then by selling the family car. But these were only short-term plugs in a dike leaking from bad luck. His father knew that and tried
to keep a step ahead, moving every few months to increasingly cheaper and cheaper apartments, ever cheaper until down to the marrow and bone he cut.

Meanwhile bill collectors started to call. Threatening notices were posted, evictions, late-night repossessions. Marbury said that his father picked up other jobs at neighboring office buildings. More toilets. More carpets to vacuum. Saturdays became Sundays. Days became nights. But his father rarely complained, telling his children that despite their apparent string of bad luck, everyone could achieve their dreams if they just had enough faith.

“This doesn't sound like a man who would end up in jail,” I said.

Marbury looked at me and agreed.

He said, “I think he really believed it too. Then Rick died.”

Rick Marbury was the oldest brother. According to Marbury, he was a bright student with dreams of going to college. He was accepted at NYU, an incredible reversal of luck for the family, and they celebrated one night at a local burger place. That's where events turned. A man in a wheelchair sat across from them, obviously a veteran. He was sitting with two other men, also just home from the war, and they were discussing their experiences in Vietnam. It was the first time that Rick had ever seen a real veteran up close, much less someone injured from combat, and it brought the war home to him for the first time.

He said, “It bothered him. Rick thought we should be doing more.”

It was 1965 and one of the first offensives was in full swing. Every night the boys watched the war on television. They watched the helicopters swoop down, the way the grass spread out and flattened against the heels of rushing soldiers, and they were transfixed. Better than
Gunsmoke,
better even than a John Wayne movie, the war was the real thing. And the more he watched, the more Rick started to feel the call. He began to wear army jackets and fatigues.
Then one day, out of the clear blue, he responded the only way that he could. He enlisted.

He was only nineteen.

Vietnam affected my family as well but I didn't tell Marbury that. Two of my brothers went, and I only remember not picking up a paper back then, not even the sports page. And I never turned on the news. If I heard anything about the war, I walked away immediately. I just couldn't think about it until my brothers were home safe.

Marbury snapped his fingers. Like napalm.

He said, “You're not writing.”

I couldn't.

“How many of us joined because of Vietnam?” I asked.

“A few.”

“Come on. Half of us maybe.”

“Half believed, half didn't.”

An image suddenly came to mind but it wasn't Vietnam. I was thinking about seminary and an event that happened while I was there. Something about belief.

“Do you remember the bell tower?” I asked Marbury.

He nodded. “Dave Karl. You're really digging in the past now.”

The bell tower was one of the more beautiful buildings on our campus. It was brought over, piece by piece, by stonemasons from Italy who constructed it to honor God and a promise to new life in America. Every hour the bell chimed, a wonderful sound, though today I couldn't hear it without thinking of Dave Karl.

Where he came from, no one knew. It was said that he was a star pupil from some California school or perhaps even home educated. But that was only speculation. Karl appeared to us, and ultimately left, with more questions than he answered. I met him my first year. I was in search of a role model and I found one, Dave
Karl. He was a bright student, almost meteoric, with an infectious energy that led even the worst of us, slackers at best, to become an army of dedicated workers. He organized food drives for the poor, outreach ministries, counseling, even ministry at summer homes and cabins. Wherever there seemed a need, Dave Karl was there to fill it.

And people helped. I myself offered freely the use of my time because I knew that Karl would somehow get it done. Whatever the task. I had faith in his abilities as a priest and as a man. All traits that I felt held real promise. Honesty, integrity, a sense of quiet righteousness. In retrospect this promise was exactly that, a promise for something paid in funds not yet earned. For only three months after I met him, Dave Karl was gone. A suicide, he was found hanging by the rope of his cincture in the bell tower. Dead.

“They pulled him out in front of me,” said Marbury. “He was blue. All puffed up like a fish.”

I later heard that there was a note, pinned to his body at the time of his death. It just said that he couldn't live up to the expectations anymore, others', much less his own. In reality, I don't think that was true. He just couldn't live with himself. For stories started to come out. Disturbing tales about trips to massage parlors in Minneapolis and Chicago, tawdry visits to street hookers and sex houses. Rumors began to float about what was found in his room after his death. Ads for phone sex, boxes of illicit photographs of young men and women, films and magazines. And all of this was damning.

A few students, however, including his closest friend, tried to reclaim the image of Saint Karl, or resurrect a new one better to their liking. They claimed that the discovery of these materials only proved that Karl was working on a new project, an outreach program for sex workers, and that he was merely educating himself to that world. But I didn't buy it. Neither did the police who checked out his phone records. Apparently all sorts of calls were made, some
hours long, and when they were traced back to the source in Los Angeles, several of the women who spoke with Karl remembered him by his peculiar predilection. They called him the spanker.

But this wasn't the end of Dave Karl. A few months later, a fellow was walking by the bell tower one night when he saw someone standing up there. Curious, he walked up a rickety set of stairs, the only way up, and claimed to have found no one. And the myth was born. The ghost of Dave Karl was responsible for everything after that, from the occasional missed chime to water dripping from the bell on clear days. Even today they still talk about the ghost, and the bell tower, now nicknamed “Karl's Tower” for the new students who look up there and just wonder why he did it.

Me, I was past wondering.

I looked at Marbury and said, “He was a coward. He conned everyone into thinking something about him that wasn't true.”

“I don't know about that. He did some good.”

“You couldn't stand him.”

“I couldn't stand him because I was jealous.”

“Are you still? I mean, you're beginning to sound like him.”

Marbury arched his body back in the pew and smiled.

He said, “I think you should resign yourself to the fact of my fate. I have. The way I see it, the Bishop has no other choice.”

“You're not giving him one. Understand his dilemma. If he sanctions that you can heal, that God took your voice in some mysterious snowstorm, then he sanctions divine intervention. That God picked you out individually for this. Next, folks will be praying in your name.”

“The hell with that. You know what they did to Theresa. Ripped her body up for relics.”

“I don't think it'll go that far, Marbury. Sainthood.”

“Neither did she.” He smiled.

But I wasn't amused. “Do you wish to remain a priest?”

“I'll still be a priest, Peter. No matter what you do.”

“You'll be a man who calls himself a priest. A big difference.”

Marbury looked at me. His eyes almost burned with anger.

“Why are you here? You don't want the truth, Peter, unless it's easy.”

I was offended. My whole spiritual life was a quest for the truth, no matter the form, and I told him so. But Marbury just shook his head, wagging it, as though mocking me.

“Your spiritual life is based on reason, Peter. Don't part from that.”

I protested, “You're wrong.”

“Am I? Then explain to me why you ran that night.”

Marbury's memory was astounding.

What he was talking about was a story that I only told him once, and yet it must have made an impression, for he still remembered it. We lived in those days just outside of a small town called Pennock. Hardly even a town, certainly not more than a stop on the highway, Pennock was a feed store and a bar. Little else. My father met my mother, a Norwegian, right before the war and they married. They were given a piece of land out there from my uncle, less than a hundred miles from Minneapolis, and my father, having no career of his own at the time when the war ended, decided to give it a year to see if he liked it. That was 1946.

I was born on that farm, along with one of my brothers and my sister, Sandra, and our childhood revolved around farm life. Work was plentiful. There were animals to feed, crops to be planted and harvested, and school, which meant an old one roomer, only a few miles up the gravel road from our house. I had to walk to school and back every day and night, and I was doing exactly that when it happened.

I was ten. It was winter and the night was cold, well below zero. The sky was electric with stars and I dawdled as I walked. I
kicked a chunk of ice down our long road, thinking that I was Gordie Howe probably, my feet crunching the frozen snow with every step. Maybe I didn't notice the light behind me or maybe I suddenly turned around, I don't know. All I remember is seeing it. Like a flashlight beam hanging in the sky.

At first I thought it was lightning but I didn't hear any sounds. It was quiet, like maybe a comet or the northern lights, except brighter and smaller. I just stood there and watched it. Then a funny thing happened. I noticed that the light wasn't just hanging there, it was moving. And moving toward me. I watched it some more to see if it was a plane, but I couldn't hear anything. No engines, no distant rumbling. Nothing at all. The light, as I watched it, appeared to be getting closer, much lower in elevation than I thought. And it was getting brighter, a stronger beam that started to illuminate objects on the ground, mounds of snow, mostly, the odd standing cornstalk, and finally, me.

My fear got the best of me, this being the late fifties, and I started to run. I kept thinking about the movies of Martians and flying saucers that I saw, huge crafts with death beams and robots attacking earth, and I started to pick up the pace. But it was terribly icy and I found myself slipping and falling. The light didn't stop. It was closing in on me, focused now only on me, and I started to run wildly, off the road and through the fields, where the snow was even deeper. I tried to zigzag away from the light, which was at my heels, but I couldn't shake it.

My house was straight ahead, a few hundred yards away, and I ran faster, picking up my knees through the snow, but that only made me tire quicker. The light was closing in, presumably to suck me away, vaporize me or whatever aliens did, and I was running for my life. Then it happened. I stepped in a ditch or something, a huge drift at any rate, and the snow was up past my waist. I was stuck. The light flickered around me. I couldn't see the stars anymore. I couldn't see anything but my own death.

“Then what?”

I looked at Marbury and shrugged. “It just veered away and left.”

I told my family about the light, I even inquired about whether anyone had seen it. But they hadn't. I don't even think they believed me. Certainly not my brothers, who tortured me after that. They left cardboard aliens on my bed at night, and walked in while I was sleeping with flashlights against their faces, whooping and yelling. After a while, I began to doubt the story myself. None of the big papers, from Alexandria to Saint Cloud, had even a hint of a UFO encounter in them, if indeed this was one, and I found no one to confirm that anything unusual happened. Despite the early hour of the evening, despite the fact that someone had to be driving home, there were no witnesses, no reports at all except for mine.

“I lived but it wasn't easy. I was a laughingstock for a while.”

“What do you think it was?” asked Marbury.

“I don't know.”

“But you saw something.”

“Maybe it was a military plane.”

“And maybe it was something else.”

“It was probably nothing,” I said.

“So you ran away from nothing?”

“I was a kid, Marbury.” I heard my voice rise a few decibels.

“Why didn't you hold your ground? Weren't you curious?”

“More like I was afraid.”

Marbury shook his head violently.

He said, “No, you ran because you couldn't explain it. You ran to protect your little world, not because you were afraid of something unknown in the sky but because of something unknown inside of yourself, Peter.”

A part of Marbury was right but I didn't tell him that. Instead I tried to steer the conversation back to a place where I was more comfortable, back to Marbury's story.

I said, “The same could be said of you. That you tan.”

My face felt flush. I could feel the anger starting to well up.