Our Lady of the Forest (11 page)

Excuse me, the priest implored the widow. A moment privately if you don't mind.

I'm perfectly fine on my own, you know. I merely go a bit slower.

You'll need help at the creek crossing, though.

I suppose so. It's very sad.

Then the priest walked alone with the visionary, whose face was still luminous with tears. He could not stand the loveliness of that and bit his lip about it. He sauntered along with his hands behind his back like a monsignor in the movies, like a cleric in a multibuttoned frock. He felt he needed a magenta-hued sunset and more somber, oval glasses. The visionary smelled of mossy humus and had pulled back her sweatshirt hood so that he caught a hint of wood smoke mingling with the rankness of her clothes. She was more enticing than before. She had not lost any of her luster to excess, as can sometimes be the case. It was her purity that moved him, he thought. Her essential, if sickly, purity. The church, she said, pausing among ferns. When do you think we can start?

I'm going to contact the bishop, said the priest.

Why him?

He'll know what to do.

The visionary put a hand on his heart. In the forest's deep shade he felt its warmth. You know what to do, she told him.

         

II

The Adornment of Worship

NOVEMBER 13–NOVEMBER 14, 1999

T
om Cross was one year separated from his wife and had lost his logging company, so he was now a guard at the North Fork Correction Center and encamped at a motel on the south edge of town for forty dollars' rent a week and on-call maintenance work. The motel, once called the R&M but now called the Tired Traveler's Guesthouse, was a row of cabins beside the highway owned by a Punjabi couple. The Punjabis sent Tom from cabin to cabin with a list of menial tasks. He cleaned pea traps and pinched between his fingers the hair and scum clogging the drains. On a Saturday afternoon he was out in the rain taking the motel's icemaker apart when a car pulled up and a man handed him a laminated road map and asked directions to the North Fork Campground. What have you heard? the man asked.

Haven't heard anything, Tom answered.

I heard there was a Virgin sighting.

There's no virgins left up here, said Tom.

That's a good one, answered the man. But's it's the Virgin Mary I mean, Mother Mary, not a sexual virgin.

This is the first I've heard of it, Tom said. What's that about? A Virgin sighting?

Have you heard of Lourdes? Lourdes in France? A place where Our Mother came to earth and made herself known to human beings? Is that what's happening out here?

The icemaker needed a new compressor. Tom went inside to discuss that with the Punjabis. The motel office smelled of curry and pomade, and the Punjabi children, a boy and a girl, watched him with cavernous, doleful gazes. The Punjabi man was emaciated and wore thin cotton shirts and sandals that made him look like an extra from
Gandhi.
In the flaccid, fluorescent light of the office, his carefully combed hair shone with motes of dandruff. His wife was silent and homely despite her beautiful skin and hair and despite her beautiful teeth. The Punjabi's name, Tom thought, was Pin, though probably that wasn't the proper spelling. Pinh? Pen? Pem maybe? The wife was Jabari, Tom guessed; that was what he thought he overheard when the Punjabi husband addressed her.

Bagged party ice, Tom told them now, was available at the convenience store down the road. No, it was not necessarily the custom in America to offer complimentary ice to motel guests. Some motels had it, some didn't. It wasn't a crucial amenity on a par with towels or soap. No one made their choice of lodgings based on the availability of ice. While he was explaining these deep American things a pair of travelers came through the door, a man and a woman leaving behind a white Lincoln Continental idling in the rain. It's pouring, the man observed. They already know that, the woman answered. They're capable of looking out the window.

Excuse me, said the man, for stating the obvious.

Okay, you're excused, said the woman.

Pin performed a fastidious check-in. His little fingers with their long nails picked up the credit card. Dogs were allowed, he made it clear, but please that is ten-dollar surcharge. He was formal and polite about it, softly belaboring his explanation—The bedspreads must need get little hairs in them that are very difficult for me to remove so you must please be so careful that the dog is comfortable to be sitting on the floor rug and no pet is sitting on the bed. We don't have a dog, the man said. Or we do but we didn't bring him with us.

What have you heard about the apparition? asked the woman. Have you heard anything up here?

I don't know what you are talking, Pin answered.

A girl up here saw the Virgin in the woods.

It's a sighting of the Virgin Mary.

They're Hindus, the man said. Are you Hindus?

All that evening, more travelers checked in. For the first time in Tom's brief tenure, the Punjabis turned on the
NO VACANCY
sign, which cast a bleak red glare. Tom stood smoking beneath the eaves and watched people unload their cars. The couple with the Lincoln did in fact have a dog with them. Pulled up to the cabin beside theirs was a car with two bumper stickers:
A JEWISH CARPENTER IS MY BOSS
and
DON
'
T TAILGATE
—
GOD IS WATCHING
. On a truck was one Tom hadn't seen before:
JESUS DOES IT BETTER
. A trailer across the parking lot was emblazoned with a cross and inscribed with a name—Greater Catholic Merchandise Outlet.

A man came under an umbrella to the office and in a stringent voice, complained. So Tom had to fix a leaky toilet while Pin and Jabari shampooed the carpet in a cabin that smelled of cat urine. Jabari's hair, Tom couldn't help noticing, was bound in a thick glossy braid. Surreptitiously, he watched her at her work; how poignant were her flat thin forearms. Immigration, he supposed, had etched her face with tiny fissures. She and her husband both were soft and measly little people. It seemed to Tom that all through the day the two of them were dressed for sleeping. They both wore extra-large sweatpants. While they worked they ignored him and spoke their own language, mellifluous and exotic. Tom liked to hear it and kept his head down, pretending not to hear in order to listen. He examined the toilet ball valve, a ploy, and let their subdued married chatter move him. He liked the way it left him out. Here were two people, their own constellation, alone in a strange place on the far side of the planet. Their curry-scented, dark-brown presence reminded Tom of the fullness of the world. The planet was larger than North Fork—this thought soothed him a little. His own problems, however deep, were nonexistent in India.

When Tom finished adjusting the toilet's lift rod, Jabari put on rubber gloves and a surgical mask to clean the bowl. It was the beef-eating sickness of American excrement she took such pains to avoid, thought Tom—in her mind, we're the unclean ones, though she would never admit as much. She had things to be afraid of. White supremacists in particular, but she and Pin did an excellent job of appearing not to notice. Did they know how much everyone hated them? He felt they had intimations of it but found strength in denial, like the Jews before Hitler got serious, like ostriches in children's books or stockbrokers.

Please what is a sighting of Virgin Mary? Pin asked in his syncopated diction. It is bringing so many customers.

It's hard to explain. I don't get it myself. A religious gathering, I guess you could say. Like a pilgrimage in India. Like people going to the Ganges, maybe. Don't you go to the Ganges?

In India we go to the River Ganges every year to make us clean. The toilet is so much quiet.

That guy was just a royal complainer.

So now the toilet is very quiet and you are all done fixing.

Tom repaired to his cabin. He pulled off his boots and locked the door. With permission from the Punjabis he'd installed a deadbolt; he didn't want to lose his fishing rods, his waders, his binoculars, his knives, his .44, his shotgun, his rifles, or his tackle boxes. Tom lay surrounded by his outdoor gear and watched a football game. The place smelled of mildew, but he only noticed it when he first came in, turned up the heat or raised a window. There was no phone in his room. His shift at the prison ran from midnight to eight, which meant that on off nights at 3 a.m. he was wide awake in his cabin. Bored, he'd appointed himself security officer and made up noise complaints. There would be a room full of young guys, contractor crews, but they wouldn't like the way Tom looked in the doorway with his long-distance, hazy, out-for-blood pupils and his broad-shouldered posture of logger's aggression and most were poor at feigning disdain for what he said to them. Tom made it up as he went along. It's late and we got fishermen with early starts complaining about your little party. So no bullshit, tone it down, and don't fuck with me. A brief interlude of nervous machismo. Someone would look ready to call his bluff but that was as far as it went. Come on in—he could predict hearing that. Someone would turn the music way down. Do you want a beer, guy? Sure, he'd say, take one, pop the top and walk away.

And why not? A free beer was not to be scoffed at since Tom Cross Logging went defunct. Tom's two log loaders and his D-7 Cat had gone for ten percent of what he'd paid, so the bank was taking his house. Eleanor and the kids were there for now—Junior in the living room with the television in front of him—until Tom figured something else out. Another logger without Tom's payments was making a go of it with Tom's machines, bidding lower than Tom ever did because his books looked better. It irked Tom that it worked this way, that vultures were in ascendance. What he had left was a contract from Stinson set to expire in about four months—which maybe he could pass along at a loss—and his saws and hydraulic jacks, worth nothing. And his pick-up: five grand at best.

More, there was his looming divorce, which he didn't care to think about. Putting a number on it at this point anyway was only self-flagellation. Tom rearranged his limbs on the bed and thought, morosely, of Junior's medical bills, numbers so difficult to comprehend the insurance company might as well present them in cuneiform or hieroglyphs. Tom's books were a morass, like jackstrawed blowdowns: where should he start untangling? In the past he'd worked his way out of problems; a 4 a.m. start had been the answer. This was during his high-lead days, when he smelled perpetually like diesel and wood shavings and his cuticles were rimmed with grease. He'd run the loader, done the sorting himself, and contracted out the falling. At high pitch twelve people worked for Cross Logging; later Tom streamlined and went into shovel logging. It began to slip with the spotted owl, so he'd auctioned off his machinery. He tried contracting out of his pick-up, his cab a kind of office, a desk job on wheels. But there were fewer contracts, more bidders. Somebody had to go under. Tom went—he and about half the town. They blamed the spotted owl, the Wild Rivers Act, the Sierra Club, and EarthFirst!, not to mention the marbled murrelet and anybody from Seattle. Tom seethed. He increased his communal drinking. Then he took work felling trees for hire. That meant free time in which to grouse and attend seditious meetings. People pushed him to the forefront of the movement because they thought he was less stupid than they were and he ended up in DC finally with five other timber-politics honchos on behalf of the Forest Action Committee. But they were Indians visiting the Great White Chief. The reservation was going to get smaller. Tom went home a treaty Indian. It was in this period of helplessness that he and his son dropped trees together and Tom Junior's neck got broken.

Tom slept and when he woke it was ten and he felt afflicted by his detachment from life, by a headache and aching hip joints. His years in the woods had turned him to wire, his tendons and ligaments weren't spruce anymore, and the truth was he felt ginger a lot, like somebody about to fracture. Was that aging or overwork? A theory he had was that less was better, you could wear yourself out with exercise or labor, each heart having only so many beats, each joint only so many articulations, use it or lose it, maybe that was wrong, maybe if you used it you just used it up, that made more sense—decay. A lot of these lame weary gimps around town were wounded veterans of the timber wars, guys with tight shoulders, lumbar complaints, calcified knees, dead toes. Guys at MarketTime with a six-pack of Bud, a loaf of bread, a tall can of chili, a bag of M&Ms and the newspaper. Tom watched them with morbid reluctance, recalling how it had been for his father, who toward the end couldn't turn in bed or find a posture to sleep in. He'd sat on the toilet to piss in the wee hours and had begged for cortisone. Tom remembered him bitching and moaning with glum humor and sour resignation: Nothing works, not even my pecker, I can't even bend down to touch my toes, the only thing left's a good shit now and then, I ought to be put out to pasture I guess, I'm used up, leftover kibble. I'll tell you, Tom, whatever I eat, it gives me gas like no tomorrow, I'm a god damn wind machine these days, your mom's got me taking something called Beano but you know what? It just makes things worse. You wouldn't want to ride with me no more without the windows open.

Now Tom wished he'd encamped with a dictionary. He needed one for his paralysis research, which he did with the nine-dollar reading glasses he'd bought off a revolving display rack. Impenetrably distant science writing, but the point was that when the spinal cord went it couldn't be healed, you didn't need a dictionary to get that right, for nine dollars Tom had that sussed. He knew the question, but not the answer. Was there a greater helplessness anywhere in the world? Like watching your child stabbed to death while you're bound to a post and gagged. Like watching your child flail in a lake through a telescope on a mountaintop. Except that in a stabbing or drowning a finite if horrible end is achieved. To get Tom Junior into his underpants you had to roll him around on the bed, treat him like the fetus of a whale or a blob of protoplasm. You had to splint him every night, arms and legs, a trussed human pig, or he'd permanently curl like a slug. You had to floss his teeth and shave him. You had to clean his ass with a rag, swab his ears, sponge his testicles. You had to listen to his mechanical breathing—the ventilator's endless hiss and squeak—and empty his stinking piss bag. In short, you had to devote your life to his until your own was obliterated, until it vanished.

But Tom's had already vanished. Tom was already dead. That was why he went to mass each Sunday, watching the back of his wife's head and hoping his daughter would turn around, catch his eye, acknowledge him, maybe smile. But what did she have to smile over? Those days were behind her now. Since Junior's accident she'd become a teenager; she'd been suspended from school that fall for smoking dope with an older girl, driving aimlessly, listening to music, then pulling into the parking lot where the teacher on lunch duty smelled dope on her breath as soon as she stepped from the car. Colleen was apathetic about this trouble and passed her suspension in front of the computer with headphones on, snapping gum. Her face wasn't the same as before, was full of truths life ought to reserve for older people closer to death—there was no God or, if there was, He didn't feel love or pity. He didn't feel human pain. He was too far beyond interpreting—so far beyond He didn't exist or had no shape, like water. Tom half concurred with his daughter on these things but tried not to think about them. Lolling aimlessly in his motel cabin, he tried to turn off his brain. The thing of it was, not thinking was as hard as thinking, maybe even harder. After a while, thoughts crept in. The brain did not much care for lulls. Once it had slept it was ready with a vengeance for constant cogitation. Tom washed his face, laced up his boots, went out and lit a cigarette. He had fought with going to the Big Bottom long enough and now it was time to go.