Our Lady of the Forest (2 page)

I just wonder if you believe in Jesus.

I believe Jesus eats Reese's Pieces.

Jesus is the reason for the season.

They covered their mouths another time. Jesus saves but Moses invests, that's why the Jews are all rolling in money.

They own Hollywood.

Totally.

I have to go home.

What time is it?

It's time to go.

We need some more 'shrooms.

We need magic 'shrooms.

I'd rather do 'shrooms than get baked, wouldn't you?

I quit doing 'shrooms, said Ann.

She gave them each enough chanterelles to help them dupe their parents. God bless, she said. God loves you.

Okay. Whatever.

He does.

At school the next day they told certain people about the Jesus freak in the forest. They said she was probably a lesbian. God, what a weirdo, totally. Dikes for Jesus or something.

God bless. Jesus saves. Freak out.

Three weeks later they saw her picture in the paper, on the front page beside a long article. It's that freak from the woods, said Crystal.

It's totally her.

I can't believe it.

She got too stoned and hallucinated or something.

That little pothead lesbian bitch. I bet she makes money on this.

They told people not to believe in her. That bitch didn't see the Virgin Mary. She was on an acid trip.

Maybe she hallucinated a Madonna video.

Yeah, Like a Virgin.

No, Like a Sturgeon.

Weird Al Yankovic I think sucks.

So what are you doing after school today?

I'm totally, completely tired for some reason.

This freaks me out.

Me, too.

I'm totally freaked.

That bitch. What a lez.

She didn't see anything.

         

The first apparition—on November tenth at three in the afternoon, in the wake of Ann's two disturbing dreams, which she characterized afterward not as dreams but as pregnant celestial visitations—occurred while Ann cleaned a mushroom. She had taken a bandanna from her jeans pocket, folded it into a sanitary pad, and nestled it into her panties. Then, climbing over a steep hill, she'd entered a thicket of salal and Oregon grape not conducive to mushroom picking. This she passed through in fifteen minutes before coming to a sea of moss. The forest here had a dank smell. There were chanterelles, but few in number. She picked them with no particular urgency; the cold she felt coming made her feel listless, and her bucket was nearly full.

She was brushing dirt from the gills of a mushroom when she noticed a strange light in the forest. Later she described it as a ball of light hovering silently between two trees, also as a bright floating orb about the size of a basketball. It was lit from inside, not from without, not like a mirror, jewel, or prism but more like a halogen lightbulb. It didn't waver or wax and wane like a candle and appeared, like a helium balloon, free of gravity, aloft and attached to nothing. A nimbus surrounded it like fog or gauze. She thought that perhaps it revolved in place like a small planet or a moon.

When Ann felt confident it was not a mirage, a trick of the forest, or a problem with her vision, she picked up her bucket and ran. A number of mushrooms hopped out and spilled, and she lost a few dozen when she tripped on a nurse log, but she didn't stop until her lungs forced her to; then she sprawled behind a tree, pulled free her rosary, made the sign of the cross, and recited, silently, the Apostles' Creed. The light, she thought, hadn't followed her, thankfully, so she said an Our Father and three Hail Marys, and when it appeared that she was safe where she lay, hidden between two clefting roots, she went on through the remainder of the rosary, whispering all of it at high speed.

It was, she felt certain, not a fantasy or dream but more like something from a science-fiction movie, a UFO or a government experiment she wasn't supposed to know about. She didn't want to present herself out in the open and stayed behind the concealment of ferns where she could watch for it in pursuit of her and, if need be, flee again. But the woods, as always, were indifferently still; there was no sign of a traveling light. Ann clutched her rosary between her cold fingers. Perhaps, it occurred to her, troublingly, the light had something to do with Satan.

When she saw it again, off to her left, it seemed to her that it was spinning violently, or vibrating and shimmering. It was closer this time, and lower too, and feeling now that she couldn't outrun it she held up her rosary like a shield. Leave me alone, get out of here! she said. Just get out of here!

Instead, as she told her inquisitors later, it glided toward her in a frightening arc, dropping first and then advancing. It loomed larger and more distinct until it was clearly a human figure—she could make out a spectral, wavering face and a pair of incandescent hands—levitating just off the forest floor thirty yards away. It was now too brilliant, too luminous, to behold, so still staving it off with the rosary, she used her free hand to cover her eyes and peeked, squinting, between her fingers. Don't hurt me! she said, feeling at its mercy. Please, please, go away!

She dropped to her knees, squeezed shut her eyes, and told God she would never sin again in return for divine intervention. She told herself, too, that she meant it. She meant to keep this bargain. When she looked once more, a few seconds later, the light was already retreating through the trees, borne away like a soap bubble, silent, swift, and ascending through branches but touching none, no needles or leaves, avoiding obstacles as if it could see them, guiding itself in departure.

Ann, relieved, found her way out of the woods in slightly more than an hour. At her campsite she sat in her car for a long time, blowing her nose and shivering. That evening she couldn't eat anything or concentrate on reading her Bible and feeling uneasy about the coming night, went with a flashlight to Carolyn Greer, who lay in her sleeping bag inside her van, reading by the glow from a candle lantern and eating baby carrots. It's raining, said Carolyn. Come on in. You don't really look too… healthy.

I think I have a cold, answered Ann.

The shades were drawn and a small cone of incense burned in a cast-iron pan. Rain battered the van's roof like gravel falling from the sky. Ann's face, in the candle's glow, was grave and animated. Carolyn lay and listened to Ann's story. When it was finished she sighed, sat up, stretched, slipped a marker into her book, and pulled a rubber band around the bag of carrots. It sounds like the sun, said Carolyn.

I was in the woods. There wasn't any sun.

You must have been dreaming.

I wasn't asleep.

You don't think you were.

Well take right now. It was like right now. Right now I know I'm completely awake. I don't have to pinch myself or anything like that. No way I'm really sleeping.

How do you know?

I'm completely awake.

Were you high, Ann?

That isn't it.

A ball of light. Floating around.

With a person in it, like I said. A ball of light. Exactly.

It sounds to me like it has to be the sun. Didn't you ever look at the sun too long? Today—today it was sunny.

But I was in the woods. In shade.

That or else you were having a dream. I've had dreams I thought were real. What else could it be?

It could be something like a UFO.

I don't think so. UFOs? That just doesn't work for me. I'm totally rational about things.

Well it wasn't normal.

A UFO?

It's crazy, I agree with you.

How can a little ball of light floating around out in the woods with a person's face inside of it be an unidentified flying object?

I don't know. It's crazy.

A UFO is a spaceship. If you believe in UFOs, they're spaceships.

I don't believe in them.

So it wasn't one.

It was something though.

It was just the sun.

You keep coming back to that.

What else is there?

I don't know. An experiment? The government doing something?

Do you mean like maybe the CIA? Is that what you think is going on here?

I don't know. The military?

The military doing something with a little ball of light that has a person stuck inside it.

Ann gave no answer to this. Carolyn tossed her the bag of carrots. Have some, she said. Go ahead.

Ann sat with the carrots in her lap. I'm a Christian, she said. Sort of. I guess. And the devil hates all Christians.

So now you're saying what you saw was the devil?

Satan hates religious people.

Then it's good that I'm not religious, isn't it.

No it's not. You should be something.

But science explains things so much better. The earth getting made in six days? Women coming from the ribs of men? Who can believe that nonsense?

That's not the right way to read the Bible. You have to interpret it.

Well what are you saying? Are you saying you were out in the woods picking mushrooms today when Satan attacked you in the form of a ball of light with a person stuck inside it?

No, but—

It sounds more like a visit from God. The bright light—it's a dead giveaway. Bright light, visit from God. Guy with horns, Satan.

They say that Satan wears disguises, though.

A ball of light with a person inside it. Satan gets creative.

Ann laughed. So I'm seeing things, she said. Maybe I'm mental or something.

Okay. I'll be candid with you. There's people around who think that's true. Because one you're kind of a loner and two you keep that hood down all the time. You do act a little bizarre.

It keeps my head warm.

It's not me who thinks you're mental.

Who is it then?

Other people in the campground.

I'm not very good at being social.

There's more to it than that I'll bet you.

Anyway, said Ann, it wasn't the sun. And I'm not going out in the woods tomorrow.

I'll go along, answered Carolyn. I want to rip off your mushroom spots anyway.

When Ann insisted she wouldn't go, Carolyn pulled from around her neck a small canister of pepper spray she wore on a loop of braided leather. No worries, she said. Because this stuff here is totally killer. We see the devil I'll spray him with this. It'll give him cardiac arrest.

         

In the morning they set out in a mist that blurred the treetops, the woods wet from the night's hard rain, the light gray and the branches dripping, the maple bottom and the copse of alders sodden with new lost leaves. Carolyn had a quadrangle map and she watched it as much as she watched the world, following the contours with her fingertips and taking readings from the altimeter and compass she had strung around her neck. She wrote notes in a timber cruiser's field book made of small waxed pages. When they traversed the rotten log straddling the creek she stopped halfway, above its wet boulders, and looked upstream, then at the map, then upstream again. UFO Creek this is called.

What?

Fryingpan Creek I mean a tributary of it, depending on how you read this. We're crossing it here I'm going to guess. At this little V in the contours.

Don't fall in.

Okay. I'll try.

That log is slick.

Okay already.

They found the elk trail Ann had taken and wound through the labyrinth of blowdowns. Carolyn, two steps behind, meditated on an enduring theme: that her legs were too fat and that no matter what she did, diet, exercise, both together, they would always be bloated and disgusting. Her parents' genes, she felt, were a curse. It was her fate to grow fatter despite every effort. On the other hand Ann was
too
much of a waif. Flat-chested, mousy, no hips, a boy's gait. A sickly, child-size runway model. We're headed east, Carolyn said. Isn't that like the Muslims? Don't the Muslims always face east?

They face… Mecca.

I've heard that too.

Christians don't do any of that.

That's because they own the whole world. They face anywhere, it's theirs already. They don't have to choose a direction.

You're not explaining it the right way you know.

This is more like south-southeast. Stop. Let me look at the compass.

There were mushrooms Ann had missed the day before and they picked them for half an hour. Carolyn pondered a plan for the evening. It didn't matter to her that Ann was slightly off, obsessive, eccentric, cryptic, a loner. Ann was inoffensive in most regards, and her religious fervor was interesting. Carolyn decided to offer to drive her to the laundromat in North Fork. They could eat next door at the Chinese restaurant while their clothes were in the dryers. Then they could split a cheap motel room, take showers, watch television, sleep between sheets. It would be good for Ann's cold anyway, her incessant hacking and wheezing. It was time, felt Carolyn, for some creature comforts, ones that didn't cost very much.

They ate a breakfast of dried apricots Carolyn had brought folded up in a scarf and some toffee-covered peanuts and potato chips. Ann took her antihistamine, blew her nose, and coughed. This seems right, she insisted. This is where I was yesterday. The hill I climbed is that way.

It's going to rain.

How do you know?

I feel it in my bones, said Carolyn.

That's not very scientific.

It doesn't prove Jesus is God's son, either.

That's not a matter of proof.

Carolyn spread her map on the ground and set the compass on its corner. Then she rotated the map a little until it lay aligned with the land. That hill, she said. Here's the contours of it. It's a little north of where you say it is if I'm reading the contours right.

I'm sure you are.

You're more sarcastic than previously noted.

I wasn't trying to be sarcastic.

Uh-huh, said Carolyn. Okay. Sure. What's up with your car, by the way?