Our Lady of the Forest (22 page)

At this the crowd became raucous. Cries and shouts of affirmation, raised arms, leaping in place, utterance of shards of scripture, prayers of petition and adoration, the Ave Maria could be heard recited in monk-like unison, Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. There arose a general piety, a cloud of witness and convulsive homage—during which the ex-bartender stole off, returning demurely to her place in the crowd—a clamor like that at the foot of Sinai when Moses appeared with the tablets of God, or maybe like that at Calvary when Jesus was fixed to his cross. On the other hand, some pilgrims fell contemplative and were turned inward toward silent prayer even as around them unfolded a riot of bald spiritual excess. But these were meditative souls by nature, not prone temperamentally to hysteria, even made fearful by it. Such arousal as they felt surrounding them seemed to their minds the devil's work, like the paroxysms that seized German clerks and burghers during the pageants of the Third Reich.

To Ann it felt like something to shun and produced along the nape of her neck a tingling of despair. Was this really what the Mother of God desired, this surfeit of sudden adulation? She dropped the electric bullhorn, waved, and retreated to her defile of sword ferns, where once again she sat with her hood up and her face concealed between her knees, like a Mexican asleep on a Texas boardwalk at noon in a Western. Carolyn, watching her, felt grave for once. What am I getting her into? she wondered. She sat beside Ann with her head down too, held the girl's hand and whispered to her, You gave a nice speech, it was good.

It was growing dimmer, late in the day, and the prospect of darkness provoked urgency. People began to leave the woods, though not the journalists and photographers, many of whom did not believe that darkness could affect them and felt certain they could thwart it with cell phones. She won't talk to reporters, said Carolyn to the sentinels. Tell them to go their merry way. Tell them to leave her alone.

They were told. They went. They made a variety of manipulative noises in lieu of any farewell. Straggling pilgrims gave petitions to the sentinels, which were summarily passed to Carolyn. Small slips of paper, like a lottery or contest. Pray for me, Susannah Beck. I suffer from irritable bowel syndrome, very uncomfortable and disturbing. I am Leslie Weathers, from Kent. The doctors say I have lupus. My name is Steve, heal my daughter Chastity Ferguson, she was born two years ago with cystic fibrosis. Laurie Swenson, sciatica. Pray for my relief from pain. I also have bursitis in both shoulders. Tom Cross. Pray for my son. He's paralyzed from the neck on down.

         

Tom hiked back toward the North Fork Campground with the sheriff who'd addressed the crowd that morning—a person he knew from high school wrestling—and a deputy named Ed Long. Tom had dislocated Sheriff Nelson's shoulder when the two of them were juniors. The injury still lay like a shadow between them, but since then the sheriff had gathered around him the penumbra of a martial artist and carried himself with cheesy bluster. Nelson was out of shape but solid in a stiff unassailable way. It was clear whenever he walked into a room that he had come to believe in his girth as a bulwark against both criminals and opinions he loathed. He was slow and sure of his view of the world. What Nelson needed, Tom thought, was his other shoulder dislocated as a reminder that his vulnerability wasn't abstract. It might make him less certain of everything.

Tom walked listening to the officers talk. After all the babble about loggers, said Nelson, this is what brings in the tourists.

We need a turnstile, Ed Long answered.

The thing of it is, Nelson said, all of these people are trespassing.

But it's Stinson, said Long. Do they care?

I don't know yet. But I'll hear from them probably.

They let people hunt.

This is a thousand four hundred people trampling everything in their path. That's a little different from hunting.

A little.

Either you guys get a buck this year?

Neither had. They walked for a while discussing past bucks. I've been teaching my kid to shoot BBs, said Nelson. Also a little basic kung fu. A couple of blocks, some kicks, some hand strikes. He's five years old. It's cute.

Good discipline, said Long.

Nelson nodded.

But get him a .45, Long added. It'll save you both a lot of effort.

They laughed at this. Boom! said Long. Cross, said Nelson. How's Junior?

Paralyzed, said Tom. Still paralyzed.

I heard he was like that guy who played Superman.

Yeah, said Tom. Like that guy.

That guy's still alive. He wrote a book. He played in a Alfred Hitchcock–type movie. I read about him somewhere. At the dentist.

Yeah.

First he wanted to kill himself.

Yeah.

I guess his wife can still… get satisfied. How that works, I don't get.

Me neither.

How could that work?

I don't know.

There's guys who aren't paralyzed can't satisfy their wives.

Yeah, said Ed Long. But they're not Superman. The Man of Steel, right?

Nelson gave Long a look of consternation. Jesus, he said, and sniggered.

It has something to do with the nervous system, said Long. It's automatic, a hard-on.

Fuck you, Ed.

There's Viagra you know.

Fuck you again.

Maybe this vision girl can help you with it, Randy. Maybe she can rectify your problem.

She can't rectify shit, okay? She's just a skinny little mushroom eater. She eats psychedelic mushrooms.

I like chicks skinny, answered Long.

This is a scam. It's a scam, said the sheriff. And that other girl's in on it. The one on top of the Volkswagen bus. That smart-ass redhead hippie with the bullhorn. They're playing games with everybody. That's what's really going on here.

Nelson put a hand on Tom's chest in order to bring him up short. Look here, he said. Whoa. Hold on.

A man wearing a complicated backpack and two women with lesser backpacks were waving at them from between the trees, stumbling in their direction. One of the women was carrying a skull. Hello! said the man. Yo! Sheriff!

Look at this, Nelson said. Granola eaters turned headhunters.

The trio of travelers caught up with them. Nelson pulled on rubber gloves of the sort Tom associated with cavity searches conducted at the prison. Ever since
AIDS
we gotta wear these, said Nelson, and immediately took possession of the skull in lieu of any other greeting. Where did you find this thing? he asked. You know you should have left it where it lay. Left it exactly where it came from.

Sorry, said the man. We didn't know that.

We're really sorry, said one of the women. But the whole maxilla's intact, as you can see. And there's a handful of premolars in there still. So with dental records, if there's someone missing, it should be an easy ID.

You sound like you watch too much television, said Long, laying his thumbs on his belt. This is real life, not
NYPD Blue.
And the rule is, Don't touch a crime scene.

Excuse me, said the woman. I'm sorry.

She shook off her backpack with difficulty. Her legs were like sausages encased in spandex. The other woman drank from a plastic water bottle and had a savage eczema on her forehead.

We came from north-northeast, said the man. About forty, forty-five degrees.

Don't listen to him, said the woman with eczema. He's terrible with directions and always gets lost. He never knows where he's going.

I took good bearings the whole way, said the man. I worked out my line of travel, made notes. He pulled a compass from under his shirt, worn around his neck on a string. I can get you back there, if you want.

What I want is an answer, the sheriff said. I want to know where you got this.

The woman with the eczema said they'd gotten lost, thanks to the man with the compass: her husband. They'd made the classic hiker's mistake so often warned against in outdoor manuals of blustering forward frantically even when they knew they were lost, until they came to a precipice. Here she'd ventured off with toilet paper and was winding her way through moss-draped maples that were eerie and somehow frightening, she said, because they were so throughly moss-inundated, as if they were being throttled alive, and underneath one of these disturbing trees she found what she thought was an elk or deer bone, desiccated and green. She brought it back and the three of them examined it, especially the other woman in their party, the one in the spandex hiking gear, who had gone briefly to medical school at Johns Hopkins University. This woman seemed to know with certainty that what they had was a small human femur, a leg bone, a child's thigh bone. On the basis of this they'd searched some more and had come up with the green-tinted skull.

And we found these, too, said the man.

He fumbled inside the top pocket of his pack, pulling out a water purifier and a plastic bag of trail mix before finding what he wanted. Then he handed Nelson a long green bone, the tattered remnants of a rain poncho, and a plastic hair barrette.

Nelson's face had the same pinched look Tom remembered from wrestling practice. The coach would demonstrate a difficult new move that Nelson couldn't quite comprehend and his face would constrict a little. As if the thought required to learn it overwhelmed his faculties. The sheriff seemed patently dumbfounded now and stood in silence with his lips pursed, blinking, holding in one hand the small worn skull and in the other these three forest icons, the bone, the poncho, and the hair barrette.

Lee Ann Bridges, Long said.

Probably, replied Nelson.

Tom sat down on the remains of a log and stuffed his hands in his pockets. The mushroom girl had called this one, she'd told Bridget Bridges exactly this, that Lee Ann had died in the forest. It was—Jesus—spooky. Such clairvoyance unsettled him. The mushroom girl appeared authentically to have the gift of visions. Plus she'd cleared that woman of warts and put an end to her smoking. Tom thought of the bumper sticker back at the motel:
DON
'
T TAILGATE: GOD IS WATCHING
. Maybe, he thought, I'm scared, like a child. Or maybe it was just comforting to think that in the end, or after it, lay darkness, stillness, instead of something he wasn't ready for, like heaven, hell, another life. Now his Catholicism seemed like yearning, not belief itself. And his sessions in the confessional seemed like jaw-flapping when the stakes were all or nothing. But what now? So what? He needed someone to tell him what to do. A million Our Fathers and a million Hail Marys. This god damn priest didn't seem to know his shit. Words weren't going to get him anywhere. Tom's condition was serious.

The man with the compass had a map out. The woman who had castigated his navigating skills was poring over it with him. Long and Nelson had turned their backs to engage in a private confab. The woman who had used the word
maxilla
was eating trail mix with undignified haste and washing it down with Gatorade. And how are you? she asked Tom, smiling. I'm doing great, Tom answered.

         

III

Woman Clothed with the Sun

NOVEMBER 14–NOVEMBER 15, 1999

O
n Sunday evening the priest masturbated. It happened without his intending it. He was sitting in his reading chair with
The Ginger Man
propped open on his lap when it dawned on him that his idle self-fondling might usefully become less idle. The priest, as always, could not go forward without pondering moral and spiritual implications, but these he set aside sufficiently to indulge with only the barest shame in that feat of deliberative stimulation which is, according to the catechism, intrinsically and gravely disordered.

Afterward he felt ashamed, self-conscious, aware of himself as a celibate priest who'd engaged in onanistic pleasure, in sinful self-gratification. He was, at the same time, vaguely wistful, regretting that he hadn't taken the time to squeeze more pleasure from the act. It had been swift and perfunctory and he was not that sort of self-lover generally, reasoning instead on most occasions that an indulgence was at least partly wasted whenever it wasn't thorough. And since sporadic self-abuse was the whole of his sex life, such omissions of attention meant more to him than they might to other people. Oh well, he thought. Maybe next time. Greater discipline next time. He was tidying up when someone knocked on his door, three insistent raps. My God, he said aloud, it's the Thought Police already. Panicked, he tucked himself quickly away and checked the vicinity of his zipper for stains. I'm completely ridiculous, he thought.

There was a humorless-looking man on his doorstep, behind him the girl who claimed to see the Virgin Mary, and behind her, another man. Their car was idling with its wipers running, and the priest could see, in its headlight glare, a puddle that looked like a pond. As usual it was raining with bland insistence, not a downpour but a misty effervescence, diffuse and weightless as snow. Are you Father Collins? said the man at his door. Father Donald Collins?

The priest tried to look around him. He was a man with a belligerent mustache, squarely built, wearing a vapid zealot's expression and a hunter-orange nylon raincoat. The other man stood at a short remove, an obscure and forbidding background figure with his arms folded across his chest, a pose like Superman's. Ann, said the priest. Good to see you.

These guys gave me a ride, she said. I—

You should never accept a ride from men. They could easily turn out to be dangerous or something. You never know—I hope you gentlemen will excuse my saying this, but I think you'll agree my point is valid—you never know about men, Ann. You shouldn't trust them, period.

We're not dangerous, said the man with the mustache. I see your point but in this case, Father, you can be sure we're fully to be trusted.

The priest looked past him, out into the rain. Ann, he said. What happened to your loyal female friend? The cynical chairwoman of the Karl Malden Fan Club? Why didn't you get a ride with her? Carolyn, right? Where is she?

Her friend may or may not be loyal, the man with the mustache countered. That's been difficult to pin down.

What? said the priest. Excuse me?

Carolyn Greer. The woman you mention. You talk about issues of trustworthiness, I bring up her name.

He's right, said the second man. We're a little suspicious. It's best to withhold any judgment on Greer until a few answers come in.

The rain was starting to saturate the priest's hair to the point where he felt how cold it was. Let's go inside, he said to Ann. To you gentlemen I say, thank you very much. Thank you for your kind service. Thank you for your help.

It's nothing, replied the second man. You go in. Go ahead. We'll wait out here. In the car, right here. You don't have a back door, do you, Father? A second point of ingress?

The priest took Ann's small hand in his and pulled her into his living room. No, he said. Just the one. Good night now, gentlemen. Thank you.

He shut the door before they could respond, hoping his trailer wasn't tinged with his shame, with the telltale odor of spilled seed one notes in the bedrooms of teenage boys. The priest recalled with terrible embarrassment that the collage of his masturbatory fantasies, unfolding only minutes before, had fleetingly featured the very girl who stood before him now. There was something residually erotic, he found, in her fleshly presence at the very moment when he had just arrested temporarily his desolate sexual desire. In fact it was sexual serendipity. It was as though he had made her from degenerate thoughts—like God making Eve from clay or a rib, except that God was not corrupt—as though he had conjured her.

As I remember it yesterday you were sans bodyguards, he said. You were still yourself, for the most part.

Ann loosened the drawstrings on her hood but didn't lower it. Her pallor, clearly, had worsened since the day before, and he worried, again, about her health. Those two just appeared, she answered.

Are you saying they're apparitions too? Maybe that's the way to think of them.

They sat and she accepted his offer of a cup of chamomile tea. A little something for your cold, he said. I don't think it's just a cold, she answered. I think I'm coming down with the flu.

Are you taking something?

Sudafed.

Is it helping, do you think?

For some reason, no.

You need to see a doctor.

No I don't, Father.

Your health comes first.

No it doesn't. Building Our Lady's church comes first. Before my health. Before anything.

The priest excused himself delicately and went to put the water on to boil. A domestic task that calmed him a little in the face of such fierce dedication. Alone in his kitchen, arranging biscuits on a plate, he thought of words like
vicar
and
parsonage
with their pastoral associations. Finger sandwiches with cutaway crusts. Chocolate madeleines and Wiltshire Haystacks. Mr. Collins from
Pride and Prejudice,
invited to the Bennets' as entertainment. Mr. Collins the clergyman. Father Collins' namesake.

When he returned, the girl still hadn't removed her hood and was sitting with her kneecaps pressed together, as if thwarting an urgent bladder. It's really uncanny, Father Collins said, but you look a little like a visionary. As if you were born to the role.

What's a visionary supposedly look like?

Like Bernadette at Lourdes, I guess, who was fourteen when she saw Our Lady. Or the three shepherd children of Fátima. Or the two cowherds at La Salette. Like you, they all needed showers, Ann. They all needed to do their laundry.

She smiled, thinly, and chewed on a cuticle. You're welcome to clean up here, said the priest. I'm blessed with a washer and dryer on the premises, and plenty of shampoo and soap.

Thank you, said Ann. But what about the church? We have to get started on the church.

Is it okay for you to take a shower first? Before you put on your tool belt?

Nothing's okay for me, said Ann, except to do what Our Lady asks.

The priest sat down beside her on the couch. That sounds hellish, actually, he observed. Like your life isn't yours any longer.

It isn't.

I can see that.

I serve Our Lady.

It sounds like a form of possession, though. You don't even have time for a shower.

Yes I do.

There's a clean towel in there.

What about the church first?

What about today? asked the priest. Back up to today, Ann. Did you have another vision today? Another visitation?

Yes.

At the same place? Out in the woods?

With, like, a thousand people watching. Called there. By Our Lady.

A thousand people.

The sheriff said there were fourteen hundred. The whole campground's full.

The sheriff?

He was there too.

How come?

Crowd control.

A thousand people?

More than that.

You're kidding me.

No I'm not.

Father Collins experienced a lurch of his heart, a stroke of arrhythmia; a catch. He'd understood from the gossip at church that a crowd had gathered for today's apparition, but a thousand people? A thousand? Well, he thought, I'm calling the bishop. This has gotten over my head. This has become a phenomenon that cries out for church investigation. How did a thousand people get up there? he asked. Way out into the woods?

They walked.

I see.

Just like you did.

Father Collins hooked one leg over the other, as if he was just warming up to the subject, as if he was in it for the long haul. So in this context of a thousand people, a number I'll presently take at face value, what did she say to you?

The same message. Jesus is angry. There's too much sin. Believers are supposed to act on her behalf, perform deeds of loving-kindness. She'll return, she promised—two more visits. I'm supposed to tell you everything. We're supposed to get started on the church.

The priest sighed. Okay, he said. Okay—the church. Let's get started building the church. But first we'll need to see who owns the property. Then we'll need to buy it, right? Then we'll need an architect, won't we? Someone to come up with a design and plans who isn't too busy with other jobs? And maybe the architect finishes in nine months. He has to work with an engineer, and that takes, maybe, three more months. Meanwhile, we hope to find potable water—reasonable hereabouts, I guess, fortunately for us. And we also hope the land perks—less reasonable: clay soils. We take the architect's plans into town and submit them for review and approval to a bureaucrat who asks us, four times, to resubmit. This takes—oh, nine months, a year. Meanwhile the county wants a septic design. There will have to be an environmental assessment. An environmental impact statement. A cataloging of environmental assets. Botanists will want to count the plants; someone will check for eagle aeries, yew trees, pileated woodpeckers, and then count the newts and voles. Not to mention a wetlands delineation. After twelve to eighteen months, if we're lucky and everything goes without a hitch, maybe we'll have a construction permit and the right to go ahead. Then we can hire a road builder, so we have a way to get equipment in. The road builder will put us on his schedule. There's always a window of opportunity for road building when things dry out, which is never. Then we'll bring power up from the campground over a distance of probably two miles, which might cost a hundred thousand dollars, I'm making up that figure. Again, the power company will have a schedule. And then—then we can build the church. Once we have power, permits, and a road. All we'll need is two or three years, probably two or three million dollars, blood, sweat, and considerable tears, and then we'll be ready to start.

I don't see how you know all this.

I'm already trying to build a new church. Because our current site is dying of mildew. Mildew and carpenter ants.

Ann shrugged. So the first step, she said, is to see who owns the property.

I'll make the phone call. First thing tomorrow. Or I'll go to the county assessor's office and look it up in person.

The kettle in the kitchen began singing. Excuse me, said the priest. You stay right here. Relax for a while. Calm yourself. Think about something other than the church. There's nothing wrong with just relaxing. Quiet repose. Meditation. It's very good for the soul.

I can't relax.

That's not good.

There's things to do.

There are always things to do in life.

There's things Our Lady has asked me to do.

First, said the priest, just relax.

But instead she followed him, bolting from the couch, and while he fussed with the tea bags over his stove she stood in the doorframe, pulled off her hood, and revealed her sickly young face. There's something else, she said.

Okay.

It's personal.

That's still okay.

It's actually a bunch of things.

A bunch of things. That's okay too.

I'm sort of embarrassed. Really embarrassed.

Don't be, said the priest. I'm a priest.

She stood in silent scrutiny of him, as if to verify this statement. The priest picked up his plastic tray with its teacups and nicely arranged biscuits. You can tell me in the living room, he suggested.

It's this, replied Ann. I'm full of sins.

No you're not.

Yes I am.

Do you want to confess?

I can't. I'm not baptized.

Pretend you don't have to be baptized, then. Pretend you don't have to worry about that. Consider me less of a priest right now and more… a friend, a good close friend. Baptism isn't required.

He motioned with the tray. Living room, he said. The living room of this trailer house is my unofficial confessional.

In the living room, she perched on the couch. She didn't touch her tea or look at him. He sipped from his own tea, took a bite from a biscuit. He was patient and held to a siegelike silence. Finally the visionary blew her nose and spoke. I'm going to hell, she said.

No you're not. Don't say that.

Satan has a hand on me. I'm going to burn in hell.

The priest, unnerved, bent toward her paternally. He took in her odor of long-soiled clothing. Ann, he said. You don't believe that. You don't believe in Satan, do you? You don't have to think that way.

Father, she said. I've used a lot of drugs. Magic mushrooms and marijuana. I've cheated. I've lied. I've ripped off people. I even stole my catechism. I had an abortion. I ran away from home. I've suffered from… venereal diseases. And I… you know… touch myself constantly. I did it twice, Father, on the day I first saw Our Lady.

That all sounds very normal, the priest said, though he had to admit, privately, a misguided, prurient, tantalizing interest in her obsessive masturbation. You sound human to me, Ann. A human being with faults and a history. Like everybody else. Like everybody.