Authors: Charles L. Calia
Marbury smiled. “Is that what you really think?”
“The police found your car in New York. Explain that.”
“Maybe it was stolen.”
“From a town I couldn't find on a map? Come on.”
“I didn't run, I assure you that.”
“But the carâ”
“Well, I wasn't driving it.”
“It didn't drive itself, Marbury.”
He shrugged. “Then I guess we do have something in common, Peter. The unexplainable.”
W
e just sat there in silence after that.
Maybe Marbury didn't know that I was aware of what happened to his car to begin with or maybe he didn't have anything else to add. I don't know. But he didn't seem to be too concerned about it. The car, his beloved old Cadillac, was found by the New York City Police Department and later towed away, and Marbury knew nothing about it. Whether it was stolen or Marbury simply drove it there himself, no one knew. He certainly didn't have it when he was found in Altoona, days after the accident, just walking the streets with only a long-sleeved shirt on. No hat, no gloves, no coat even, despite its being winter. He must have looked homeless out there; or worse, he must have looked mad.
I had just finished with my notes when I heard something, a loud growling from the pit of Marbury's stomach. It sounded like a human earthquake.
I asked him, “Are you going to make it?”
He shook his head. “Not unless I get some food. I'm starved.”
Marbury suggested breakfast at the diner across the street and I agreed. We stopped in his office first, a small cube wrecked by an apparent storm of books. They were everywhere and heaped in the most inconvenient of places. There were books serving as doorstops,
stacked on radiators and chairs, on windowsills and on couches. There were even books propping up other books. I looked around for a place to sit, but I finally gave up, realizing that dispersing one pile would only create a second, even more precarious one. It was a strange sight, Marbury surrounded by books. He didn't like reading, and in seminary he was famous for giving away every book he had except for a few. And those he never looked at.
“Where did these come from?”
Marbury was changing his clothes in the bathroom right behind me. He walked back in, standing now in a white oxford shirt like any ordinary citizen, and shrugged.
“The last guy. I guess he was in a hurry.”
He tucked in the tail of his shirt and just stood there. For an instant I considered taking off my clerical collar as well, but I couldn't. It didn't feel right.
Marbury sensed my dilemma.
He said, “If I don't take it off, I'll hear confession with my eggs.”
“Sometimes that's the job, Marbury.”
“Sure, but do I have to starve doing it?”
We ended up walking out of the church into the brisk, spring air. The diner, a gloomy place just off of Lyndale Avenue, looked like it was out of a bad episode of TV. The place was small and cramped, with dim-lit booths decorated in red and green check. And the floor had a thin sheen of grease on it, a bad sign, I thought, for it covered everything else, including my new black shoes. I gave Marbury a look of disgust but he only grinned.
“I know what you're thinking, Peter. But it's really delicious.”
I found that hard to believe but plunked my body in the booth anyway. Food was still left on our table, half eaten, and our waitress, a thin blonde dressed in a skirt too tight for her body, came over to clear it.
The sound of popping gum.
“We're fresh out of hash, boys. No corned beef. Now if you want hash with just potatoes and onions that's another story.”
I glanced at the specials but avoided them. Finally I settled on an omelet and toast, plus coffee, black without cream. I made a point of this. Marbury set down his menu and signed his order to me, which I promptly relayed to our waitress. It took her a moment to make sense of this exchange.
Finally her voice.
“Oh, my God, he's deaf.”
“Actually his hearing is just fine.”
“You meanâ? Not even a word?”
“Not even a peep.”
She just shook her head and walked away, trying to absorb it. I commented to Marbury about her shock but reminded him that he had to expect some of this.
“Act different and you'll be different,” I said.
“I'm not acting. I really can't speak.”
“Then we'll try other doctors, Marbury. I'll talk to the Bishop.”
“You mean shrinks. No thanks.”
“You can't choose to live this way. I don't accept it.”
And I didn't.
But Marbury just shook his head. “You don't have to.”
Then he added:
“It's my life, Peter. I finally got it back and I'm going to keep it.”
The waitress brought out a pot of coffee just then and left it there, along with a fistful of cream and sugar. Marbury made his usual production, which I had completely forgotten about over the years. He pulled out two bags, shook them, and slowly sprinkled them into his coffee, tasting it along the way. Eventually both bags would
make it into his cup but not first without a process. Marbury dribbled the sugar in as though each few granules were enough to make a difference, then he would stir, far longer than necessary. A thin tinkle of spoon and ceramic.
Finally it was perfect.
I just drank mine and settled in as Marbury elaborated about getting back his life. He said that the snowstorm in Wheelersburg was the final straw, and he recognized that his whole existence before the trip had a wild frenzy to it, motion without a center. And he vowed to correct it, change everything in his life, once he came back to Minneapolis. But Minneapolis was a long way off.
I interrupted him. “Did that include your ministry?”
“Yes, if need be. I was tired, Peter.”
“You could have taken some time off. A vacation mightâ”
“I didn't need a vacation.”
“Then what?”
“New skin. I wanted a new life I guess.”
“And I suppose you found that in Pennsylvania.”
Marbury just shook his head.
He said, “No, in Pennsylvania I found the old life, only recycled.”
Pennsylvania.
A voice in Marbury's ear.
“That bench, not exactly the Holiday Inn.”
It was the janitor standing over him, holding a push broom. Marbury, exhausted from driving and the events in the snowstorm, stretched out on the nearest thing that he could find and fell asleep. And now he felt like he was waking up from the dead.
“What time is it?” asked Marbury, light rushing into his eyes.
“Late, later. But it's still snowing,” said the janitor.
Marbury sat up to take a look for himself but he couldn't see
anything. The window was completely iced over with frost about an inch thick. It looked impenetrable.
The janitor peered. “You'll have to take my word on it.”
“Are we plowed out yet?”
“Better chance on finding the ark, Father.”
“But I have to leave.”
“We all have to go somewhere,” said the janitor. “Lucky to be here, we are, instead of out there in that thing. Except if you're Miss Lucy's mother.”
“Why, what happened?
“It ain't looking so hot.”
Marbury excused himself and walked down the hall to Helen's room. During the night several more machines were added and now were hooked up to her body, beeping and running out a long line of graph paper.
Barris was still in his chair, head slumped, his hands folded over the back of his neck as though he were expecting mortar fire. Marbury walked in, past the vase of red roses the doctor had delivered, and knelt down.
“What the hell good is that?” It was Barris.
“Sometimes God intercedes,” said Marbury.
“Godâ?”
Barris stood up, almost whirling, and pounded the closest table with his fist. Marbury thought that it was going to shatter but it didn't.
“âI'll tell you about your blasted God. I've done enough for him. And look where it's got me. Did everything I was told to, I did. Helen said it would work out. Promised it would, but your God ain't dying on some table, now is he?”
“There's still hope.”
“Hope? You sound like that fool child.”
“You're talking about your daughter, Jacob.”
“My daughterâ?” He laughed.
“You're her father, like it or not.”
“I'm not her father. I'm just a stand-in. Like the other guy.”
“What other guy?”
“The last stiff, Joseph. Read your Good Book, man.”
Marbury didn't know what to say. And for a moment he thought that the stress of his wife's injury was just too much for Barris. That he was losing his mind from grief.
But on the contrary, Barris was crystal clear.
He said, “Yeah, Joseph and Mary, you heard me right. He had to be talked into it too, except that nobody knows what happened to him when the action got started. You never read about that. There's no Joseph hanging around at the feet of Jesus, now is there? He's gone. Where I should be. Wonder why that child is sitting there with hardly a scratch? I'll tell you. Because I'm not the father. He is.” And he pointed to a crucifix over the bed.
“You mean God?”
“Who else?” Barris said, “Helen's no spring chicken, padre. Doesn't take a genius to put together two and two. She's well over fifty, despite her looks. But the seeds were all dry at forty. A proven fact. Go ask her doctor. I just married her. The truth is, no man would have her but me. Not that there isn't love, I'll admit my love.”
I interrupted Marbury at that point and said, “This is insane.”
“That's what I thought.”
“You mean, he was actually convinced that God fathered his child?”
“To him it was Gospel.”
Marbury said that Barris told him the story of how it happened.
It was almost five years ago.
Barris explained that Helen drove out to his farm one day to give him a freshly baked pie. But that wasn't the only gift she had. They knew each other, and Barris once rebuilt her family's leaky roof and every so often she would drop off a pie out of thanks.
Usually it was around Christmas. But this time she came by a few months earlier, impelled by a dream that she had that told her to go to a farm with lots of broken machinery lying around, and the only place that she could think of was owned by Jacob Barris.
Barris had already heard the scoop. That Helen was pregnant, well over seven months by now, and that nobody knew the father. He was shocked like everyone else. Helen was seen as something of a spinster in town, never married, and she devoted much of her time to the church. Her father had left her some money, not a fortune but just enough to live on, and she spent most of her day baking meals or quilting, with the proceeds going to the poor. Everyone considered her a religious woman, virtuous and moral, at least until she got pregnant.
“Then all hell broke loose,” said Barris, “as you can imagine. Nobody believed it when she said that she was a virgin. They called my Helen every name from slut on down.”
“But you believed her?” asked Marbury.
“I didn't have a choice. I mean, I thought it was hooey, a crock of you know what. But something happened. Hell, I can say it. I felt the baby kick. Put my hand right there, I did. Now I've never been one for children before, but seeing that foot just reeled me in like a mud river catfish in spring. Ever feel a baby kick before?”
Marbury said that he hadn't.
“A hell of a thing. Got me right here.”
But Barris caught his tenderness before he got carried away.
He said, “But that's how the bastard works. A cheater he is, letting my Helen rot here. I did what I was supposed to, I took in the little brat. Helen promised me that this time it would be different. No dying on a cross or any other way.”
Barris stood over his wife and tears began to well up.
And one last time he said:
“God's a traitor, padre. I'd kill him, I tell you that. I'd kill him already, if he wasn't God.”
The waitress came by with our food, interrupting the story. I set down the notes that I had been working on and watched Marbury, who dug into his ham and eggs with gusto, the same voracious appetite that he had in seminary. He was always a good eater, albeit not a very healthy one. Marbury seemed to exist on nutritional fumes, living on such delicacies as pizza, doughnuts, and soft drinks. In seminary he was always the first in line at dinner as well, eating his fair share and always flaunting his appetite, in an Aunt Bee kind of way, to the other students who pecked and plucked at their food as though it were birdseed.
“Jesus didn't starve,” he told anyone who would listen, “so why should we? There's little virtue in hunger, you know.”
Not that Marbury was a glutton. He didn't blow up, grow fat like one of those old Roman emperors. The opposite was probably true. The more Marbury ate, the thinner he actually became. Some of this I attribute to his running. Not jogging but track, he called it, back in 1971. Marbury was the first person I ever knew who ran for entertainment. After class, he would don his gray sweatpants and sneakers, nothing high-tech in those days, no Lycra, no expensive running shoes, and he would jog out into the countryside. Sometimes he ran for hours and returned so exhausted that I almost feared he couldn't eat. But that fear never materialized.
“So how is it?” I asked.
“Good. Better my voice than my tastebuds.”
I smiled. As for my own food, it didn't taste extraordinary or even all that different from any other omelet I've ever had. That was the big contrast between Marbury and myself. In sensual matters he devoured like a child, always a first time for him, his eyes open with great excitement and anticipation compared to my old tried and true method, which wasn't a method at all. It was just living.