Our Lady of the Forest (7 page)

I'll help, said Carolyn.

No you won't. The kitchen's too small. Let me handle it. My blessing.

What a priest, Carolyn said. Equally adept on the pulpit and in the kitchen. Most priests I'm guessing do frozen pizza or microwaved Mexican food.

I do those too, the priest answered.

He served pasta with basil tomato sauce from a jar, warm bread with butter and garlic salt, steamed string beans and a salad of iceberg lettuce dressed with ketchup and mayonnaise mixed to approximate Thousand Island dressing. While they ate on the sofa, holding their plates, he played a tape called
Beethoven Breaks Out:
the second movement of the Ninth Symphony, the Apassionata, the Kreutzer sonatas, the Egmont overture. Lively inoffensive music. Carolyn ate with gusto, Ann with a perfunctory charm. Afterward the priest did the dishes rapidly, then gave them bowls of Neapolitan ice cream, set out a plate of sugar wafers, and made them Darjeeling tea. Finally he told them that if they used the bathroom it was necessary to keep the toilet handle lifted in order to achieve a decent flush and apologized for not having cleaned the sink—I'm not very neat and clean, he confessed. I don't stay on top of the housekeeping.

It was true, Ann found, that the bathroom sink was flecked with shaven facial hair and stained with nasal mucus. On an open shelf stood a package of disposable razors of the sort purchased in preposterous volume at warehouse discount stores. There was a twelve-pack of toilet paper, ten bars of soap, a large bottle of Tylenol, and a half dozen large toothpaste tubes—it was as though Father Collins expected a siege or sudden economic turmoil to disrupt the flow of goods. Two magazines and two books lay on the floor beside his toilet—
Travel and Leisure, Vanity Fair,
J. P. Donleavy's
The Ginger Man,
and Norman O. Brown's
Love's Body.
The visionary, seated on the toilet, pigeon-toed and cramping now, the flow of her period at its heaviest pitch, blew her nose into a wad of toilet paper, opened the Donleavy to its inside cover, and read:
A PICARESQUE NOVEL TO STOP THEM ALL. LUSTY, VIOLENT, WILDLY FUNNY, IT IS A RIGADOON OF RASCALITY, A BAWLED-OUT COMIC SONG OF SEX
. What was the priest doing with a book like this? Curious, she opened
Love's Body
randomly, to page 63, noting on her way how the text was permeated by incessant line breaks, diced into endless cryptic snippets:
The vagina as a devouring mouth, or
vagina dentata;
the jaws of the giant cannibalistic mother, a menstruating woman with the penis bitten off, a bleeding trophy—Cf. Roheim,
Riddle of the Sphinx. She combed through the rest and found that much was much like this, passages about sex and other matters lifted from writers she'd never heard of and placed back-to-back and side by side, as if they added up to something by virtue of juxtaposition. And maybe they did. She didn't know. But why was a priest reading this sort of thing? While sitting on his toilet or anywhere else? She'd assumed when she came in that the magazines would have titles like
Priest Quarterly
or
Catholic Review
and the books would be Saint Augustine's
Confessions
or a Mother Teresa biography—not
Travel and Leisure
or
Vanity Fair,
not a woman with her penis bitten off or a bawled-out comic song of sex.

She couldn't help herself. She peeked into his bedroom. She saw where he slept under an unzipped sleeping bag with two empty pop cans crumpled on the nightstand, more magazines and books on the floor, a digital display alarm clock flashing all red zeroes in the dark. A towel had been thumbtacked over the window, and a pair of dumbbells languished in the corner. What would a priest do with dumbbells? she asked herself. Why would a priest want muscles? He had nailed a crucifix over his bed, a two-foot Jesus long and black, sternum high and exaggerated, chest pronounced like the chest of a great bird, the gut shrunken and shriveled tight beneath the stripes of the rib cage. Ann took three steps into the room where she smelled the sheets on the priest's rumpled bed, nervously touched Christ's thigh with an index finger, crossed herself, and kissed her rosary. Hail Mary, full of grace, she whispered. Then she hurried back into the living room.

         

The rain sounded like shotgun pellets against the priest's trailer-house window. He had turned off a second lamp, and they spoke now in the glow from the kitchen spilling across the sofa, concerto music turned so low it was only audible during the brief silences between their uttered thoughts.

So there were six points, the priest was saying. And she mentioned, specifically, selfishness.

Greed too, Father.

But there are so many other forms of sin.

Those were the ones the Blessed Mother mentioned.

Why those?

I don't know.

She didn't say?

No, she didn't.

But the fourth point was her promise to return. For four days in a row, you say. So perhaps we'll find out more.

I can't say, said the visionary.

The priest nodded soberly. Did you ask or did she volunteer her revelation regarding the missing girl?

I didn't ask anything. I listened, Father.

I ask because it differs in substance from the rest of the message you received. It's specific while the rest is general. That's why I ask. It's different.

It's her fifth point that's… different, Ann said. That we have to build a church up there. A church and a shrine to Our Lady the Blessed Virgin. She gave us something we have to do. So on that—we have to get started.

Well, said the priest, sitting back. Big challenge. Big task. I've been trying myself ever since I got here to get a new church built in town because the current version is falling apart, a drafty barn, it smells like mildew, but if you don't mind, let's concentrate on your vision. I, for one, am prompted by your vision to meditate on the nature of illusion. On the seeing of extraordinary things.

Me too, said Carolyn.

I'm interested, said the priest, in the forms of illusion. The various forms of mirage and apparition. Take, for example, crossing your eyes. I can hold my fingers in front of my face and by merely allowing my focus to soften produce the illusion of two index fingers, one immediately beside the other, and that's one form of illusion. Different from a magician's illusion that he has pulled a rabbit out of a hat or cut his assistant in half at the waist—that's just sleight-of-hand and mirrors, I'm not raising the specter of that. If you're camped beside a river at night and sitting dreamily by your fire you can begin to imagine that the sound of the river is really the sound of voices in the woods or when you're falling asleep or in reverie you can feel that somewhere in the drift of your thoughts is something vaguely repetitive of the past, as if you've been in this moment before, but—

Déjà vu, said Carolyn. I'm having one right now.

That's an illusion, said the priest. Though it's entirely possible that in point of fact you might have been here before.

You said that last time, exactly.

The priest smiled. Did I smile? he asked. Did I ask you if I smiled?

I'm completely not religious, said Carolyn, so I don't care if you know this or not you can take it or leave it for whatever it's worth since it's probably some kind of sin or something but I've been on probably two dozen acid trips and seen things like seagulls flying in slow motion and a cat multiplying into twenty cats sort of like in a hall of mirrors and also a tree squeezed so tightly by a cable that I could literally hear it… weeping. And it all seemed more real than real, more real than normal does, but it was just inside my head in the end. It was just something my head made up. It was just a trip I was on.

I know what you're saying, Ann said. But this isn't like that. It's different.

Different how? said Carolyn.

I remember, said Ann, my science teacher in the ninth grade saying that if you were a dog or a bee, everything would be different. You wouldn't see what we see. If you were a fly this teacup wouldn't be here. If none of us were in this room and just a fly was buzzing around there wouldn't be this cup.

What is this, Ann, Philosophy One-oh-one? I thought you believed in God and Creation. What are all these deep thoughts?

I'm just saying—I saw the Blessed Mother.

Look, I have to pee, said Carolyn. So hold the phenomenology, please, until I empty my bladder.

I saw Mother Mary, repeated Ann.

Carolyn got up and went toward the bathroom. Remember to lift the handle, called the priest. You have to hold it for about three seconds if you want the thing to flush right.

Then they were alone together, the visionary and the priest. He could hear her rough, asthmatic breathing. He became self-conscious and began to worry that the fine hairs shooting from his ears now that he was close to thirty were highly objectionable. Ann, he said. That's your name, I guess. The epistemological argument can be a compelling one.

Sorry but I don't follow you.

It doesn't matter when I think about it because your argument isn't really epistemological, it's empirical to its core. It's based on data, raw evidence. It's based on knowing something definitively because you've experienced it directly and explicitly and without questioning the validity of your senses. There's no deduction or induction. Just your sensory impression.

Anyway you don't believe me, Ann said.

I do believe you. I didn't say that. I believe you saw Our Lady.

But you don't believe she was actually there.

That's what I've been talking about. That's exactly the question at hand. What do you mean by actually?

Really there. You know. Not just something that came from me. Something that came from outside of me. That's what I mean by actually there. Really there, Father.

Really there is the central question.

And I can tell you don't think she really was.

I'm just saying honestly that I don't know. I'm just saying it didn't happen to me. I have no direct experience of Mary, unlike you, can you see that? For you, it's one thing, for me it's another. What I have is your report about it which I am not criticizing in any way, but still it's important for me to be certain before I decide that the Mother of God is really, actually present. It's just too important to accept on its face without asking fundamental questions.

She told me I should come and tell you everything.

And in what way would you describe her tone?

I don't know. What do you mean?

I mean is she giving you a firm command when she instructs you to come and talk to me? Is it an order, a request, a suggestion maybe? How would you describe her tone?

It's a command, Father. She commands me.

A command sounds… scary. Is it scary a little? Is all of it kind of frightening?

I'm scared about one thing.

What is that?

I'm scared about the devil, Father.

There isn't any devil, Ann.

Yes there is. I feel his presence.

The priest appraised her disconsolately. It's normal to feel unsettled, he said, in a situation like this.

Ann leaned toward him desperately. Suddenly my whole life is different, she said. I didn't ask for this to happen. But it did happen, and I'm here because of it. Because she told me to come to you.

I'm trying to understand this, said the priest. I think I can guess how it might feel to be seeing the Mother of God, yes.

You think I'm crazy. That I'm seeing things.

I'm a cautious believer. Inherently.

And I've been chosen. I don't know why. Just chosen by the Blessed Mother.

That puts us clearly on two different levels.

Well I saw Our Lady out in the woods.

I don't deny that. I don't deny or affirm. I only ask questions, Ann.

The girl shook her head. Why me? she asked. Why me of all people? I never went through confirmation and I wasn't ever baptized.

Father Collins considered this. You're obviously devout though, he answered.

I've never even been to confession, I've never taken the sacrament, I'm not even officially Catholic, I only got started being religious the last year or so. So why? Why did she choose me?

Because you're pure and innocent, I'm guessing.

I'm so not pure it isn't even funny.

What do you mean?

I'm just not pure.

How exactly?

Everything.

Carolyn tiptoed into the room. You two are whispering, she told them.

         

He agreed to accompany them the following morning on an expedition to the woods in question, though not without making it explicitly clear that by so doing he offered no sanction or any imprimatur of the church, the trip was merely exploratory, he undertook it speculatively, he would meet them at approximately ten-thirty with his raincoat and his boots. He was casual in manner throughout his farewell, but when they were gone he couldn't concentrate on his reading—
Fear and Trembling,
by the angst-ridden Kierkegaard; the priest always read five things at once—and browsed through the
National Catholic Reporter
with its ads for spiritual retreats and sabbaticals, for hermitages and conferences offering massage or tai chi, one quoting the mystic Rumi in a banal and embarrassing marketing ploy:
Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing there's a field. I'll meet you there.
Father Collins combed the classifieds and considered the parish position in Ecuador,
Fishing villages on the sea,
and the pilgrimage to Spain and the Celtic pilgrimage and the possibility of Florida Priest Week, to be held at Boynton Beach. Was there really something called Florida Priest Week? A coterie of priests in bathing suits and zoris, discussing, say, the communion of saints or the origins of the church's sacraments? God be with you, Brother William—and now could you please pass the cocoa butter? Father Collins laughed out loud. He was laughing out loud when the phone rang.