The Man Who Loved Birds (10 page)

In this way they kept company, each aware of the other, until the first hot evening of summer, the air as close and breathless as the last evenings before monsoon. She stood and strode across the clearing. He was staring into the trees.

“Mr. Faye.”

“Now you hush up.”

“I understand that anyone may visit—”

“I said
hush up.”

“Sir, I will not
hush up
. I am well aware that anyone may visit
this place of meditation but I must express my extreme discomfort at being watched. As if you are a spy and I am your quarry.”

He turned to face her. “I’ll be damned. You don’t think I been watching
you.”

“That is precisely what I think.
”

“Now why in the hell would I go and do a dumbass thing like that.”

She drew herself up. “Because you are ignorant of the proper ways of courtship and this is the best you can do.”

“Is that a fact.” He looked down at the ground, dug a little hole with the toe of his boot, covered it back. His shoulders shook, a secret little laugh.

“Mister Johnny Faye. Please.” She was annoyed with herself, she a doctor.
His
doctor.

Johnny Faye pointed at the ground a few paces distant. “Here. You come here. Now dammit, I aint going to lay a finger on you, I just want to teach you something. Come over here. Stand here. Right here. Now you
hush up
, like I asked,
hush up, pretty please
, a little sugar for the medicine if that makes it go down better,
Doctor
Chatterjee. Come on, it aint going to break your stiff neck and you just might see something that’s worth looking at instead of plain old me.”

She glared at him. He grinned. He turned to look east, away from the setting sun. He turned his broad shoulders to her—the phrase
broad shoulders
came to her of its own accord, unbidden and unwanted. She was turning away to walk to her car when his hand began to rise, deliberate as sunset. She followed his pointing finger.

At first she saw only a curtain of green trembling in an evening breeze. He kept pointing. She looked until her eyes tired. Then she saw a shiver of leaves, then a flying drop of scarlet so red against the evening’s deepening blue that she caught her breath.

“He’s been up there for almost a month now, don’t know why he’s taking so long. Maybe he was
ignorant of the proper ways of courtship
like yours truly. Anyways he finally got hisself a mate and they been at it for a couple of weeks, I’m expecting to see the young any day, at least if I’m lucky and I pay close enough attention. Scarlet tanager, is what the specs call him but we always called ’em red-birds, not the same as a cardinal, no, this guy is special, not that a cardinal aint special but I always had some trouble with a bird named after a man of the cloth, it aint his fault, of course, but I’m partial to the redbird, maybe because he don’t like asphalt, he aint civilized, he hangs out in the high places in the deep woods.” He turned to face her. “Like somebody else I know.”

She recovered herself.

“Thank you for pointing it out. All the same I would be most grateful if I could have your assurance that you are here only to watch birds.”

“The only way to come at ’em is slow and gentle. You got to shut up and pay attention. You got to test the edges of what you see. You caint come with your questions ready to ask. You got to let the place and the time and the bird tell you what to ask.”

“Nonsense. Birds sing for a reason. To attract a mate, or signal each other that food and water is to be found, or for some other reason. Because we do not yet understand all the reasons does not mean those reasons do not exist. Enough time and intelligence applied to the task and we could find them out. We will find them out.”

He made a great show of looking upward. “Oh, for certain sure. Only birds.”

“Thank you. And now if you don’t mind—”

“Don’t mind at all.” He took her arm. “I hear you saved the life of Rosalee’s boy.”

She withdrew her arm. “And where did you hear that?”

“I got my sources. Good ones, too, but I’d rather hear the story from the horse’s mouth.”

“He came in manifesting acute pneumothorax—”

“Sorry, I aint so good with the big words. You mean the good officer beat him to a pulp.”

“No, not
beaten to a pulp
.”

“Not this particular time, maybe. Give him another year.”

“—manifesting acute pneumothorax. I equalized the air pressure inside and outside the chest cavity, as any physician would. A dramatic but simple procedure.”

“So what happens now?”

“What do you mean?”

“Do you sit around waiting for when he does get beat to a pulp?”

“That is a difficult question but outside the boundaries of my mission.”

“He’s your patient, aint he?”

“A patient whom I have cured.” As she spoke she was edging away. “I cannot be responsible for the future. The terms of my contract are clear. I serve at the pleasure of the authorities who invited me. If they become dissatisfied for any reason, they need only notify the health service and my appointment will be terminated. If I lose my appointment, my visa will be rescinded and I must leave the country. It is unlikely that I would find another place—appointments for foreign doctors are filled a year and more in advance. The boy is the son of a police officer, the agent of the law. I have spoken with his mother, but she does not want me to speak to his superiors for fear that her husband may lose his job and from fear of her husband. Am I to violate her wishes? You see the difficulties. I have promised the boy’s mother that I would do what I can, but if I lose my position I can do nothing.”

“And so you do nothing. All right, well, whatever.”

“Mr. Faye—”

“That’s Mister Johnny Faye to you, Ms. Doctor Chatterjee, and you got nothing to fear in these woods so long as I’m around. Now you go back to your car and your
mission
and I will go back to watching my friend the redbird and I will keep my eyes strictly
off of any and every blackbird, even if she does plunk her beautiful shiny self right down and all but yell
Look at me!
You have yourself a good afternoon.”

He walked away, followed by his dog.

Sunday afternoon in high spring and Brother Flavian’s main thought was to get away from the tourists who arrived at the monastery like so many grackles searching for spiritual food. The allée leading to the main gate was full of their buses, and a cloud of diesel smoke from their idling engines drifted over the enclosure walls. Flavian knew that if he stuck around the enclosure likely as not Cyril, who had desk duty, would corner him to explain how his arthritis was bothering him and would Flavian mind taking the job? Besides which there was that manila envelope still tucked under his mattress.

He set out for the copse of the sleeping apostles, brooding over why he had become a monk except out of what a lot of people would call cowardice and how devoutly he wished he were anything, anyone, anywhere but here. The problem was that a monk’s life, every life, took on its own inertia. At one point, too young to understand that actions had consequences, he made decisions—he had decided that under no circumstances would he allow himself to be hauled off to an illegal war, he had decided to join a monastery. Now, years into the job and it had become mere employment instead of a way of life, a job in which the never-completed list of things to be done took on a life of its own, the mornings flew past and then it was the midday hour, then there was dinner, then a nap, then two hours of prayer and meditation that had become a daily indulgence in guilt and self-recrimination. Then the evening services, with their formulaic predictability—years into their chanting and he was over and done with the psalms, way over and done with the psalms. What was the point of all this ritual anyway?

At the fork to the statues his feet took him to the left, deeper into the forest. He let them take turns of their own devising until
he found himself facing the wall of cedars through which he’d pushed to encounter Johnny Faye and his dog JC. Over the beating of his heart he could hear the chup and thunk of a hoe.

Flavian hesitated for a moment—nothing but trouble on the other side of those cedars. But he was here and Johnny Faye was here and this time he could find out where he lived and then he could return the envelope. The man was on monastery property and Flavian had a responsibility at least to see what he was up to, or so he told himself as he set about finding the parting in the cedars that opened onto the bend in the creek.

But now the trees were so dense that he was scratched and bleeding by the time he shoved through them to reach the lip of the bluff. From there he caught a glimpse of a straw hat and the familiar torn white singlet, but then his boot hit a patch of slick mud and he was down, sliding like a sled over the creek bank clay to land with his boots ankle-deep in water and the vegetable patch right in front of his eyes, the corn already sprouting its spring-green leaves and Johnny Faye nowhere to be seen. He had been there and now he wasn’t, a conjuring trick if ever Flavian had seen one, so remarkable that Flavian shook his head and rubbed his eyes, and when he opened them there was Johnny Faye.

“I was shared skitless. I thought you was Officer Smith or the like coming to haul me off to the pen and the crop barely in the ground.”

“Scared? What for?”

“Next time you sneak up on me, give me a little warning.” Johnny Faye pursed his lips and cooed. “
Ooo-aahh, ooo, ooo, ooo
. Like a mourning dove.”

“Well, whatever you say, but you don’t often see doves down in a creek bed.”

“You’re a bright boy, Brother Tom, even if you are a dumbass. That’s the point.
You
know that and
I
know that but most people wouldn’t give it a second thought. So when I’m down here and I hear a dove calling I’ll know it’s you.”

“Well, OK, but why all this cloak-and-dagger stuff over a patch of vegetables?”

Johnny Faye rolled his eyes and knelt to his task. He was weeding with a trowel. For a few minutes he worked in silence. Flavian located the white-and-tan sycamore throne and was about to take his seat when Johnny Faye straightened and stretched. “Against your religion to work on Sunday?”

“Well, yes, actually, except in cases of dire necessity.”

Johnny Faye tossed Flavian the trowel and sure enough he caught it. “If I don’t get these weeds out, the next time I’m down here they’ll be choking my—
vegetables
, and I won’t be able to pull up the weeds without taking the
vegetables
along with them. I’d call that dire necessity. Stay away from the seedlings—you can tell them easy enough—they’re the ones lined up between the corn and with the little mound of dirt around their stems. Another week and they won’t need a thing, but transplanting is hard on a plant and a person both, least until they get theirselves rooted.”

Flavian knelt to the dirt and worked his way down the row—weeding the corn plants was no problem but he had to concentrate on working around the little feathery plants in between. The silence grew uncomfortable. He looked up to see that Johnny Faye had taken a seat in the sycamore throne and leaned back and turned his head, eyes half-closed, to the sky.

“So what kind of vegetables are these, anyway?”

Johnny Faye raised his head—one corner of his mouth twisted as if in pain. “You still believe in the Easter Bunny?”

“Well. The Easter Bunny. Well, no, at least not strictly speaking, but the Easter Bunny is a type, you know, of the risen Christ. Pre-Christian cultures saw the rabbit as a creature given to . . . fertility, and as a harbinger of spring. Then at some point Christians saw an opportunity to embody in a children’s myth the principles of rebirth and renewal that are central to Christ’s Resurrection.”

Johnny Faye laid his head back against the trunk and sighed, a heave of exasperation. Flavian understood that he had failed to grasp some important point. “Well, I’m sorry.”

“Tomatoes.”

“Tomatoes?”

“I grow a shitload of tomatoes. My old lady cans ’em and gives ’em away at Christmas time. Let’s talk about something else.”

“Like what?”

“I thought you told me the only thing you know anything about is God.”

“Something like that.”

“Well, then, I guess then you’d better talk about God. It’s Sunday. I hadn’t been to church. You’re on, preacher.”

For a moment Flavian was at a loss for words, until he remembered that on Sundays he folded the sheet with the day’s epistles and stuck it in his pocket for later reading. He pulled out the sheet and cleared his throat. “Well. This is from the Letter of Paul to the Hebrews. You know who Paul was.”

“Sure, who don’t.”

“OK, then, let’s look at the letter for today.”

Flavian flattened the crumpled sheet of paper against his thigh and began to read. “‘Some had to bear being pilloried’—Paul is talking about the Hebrew prophets and faithful in the centuries before Jesus arrived, some of whom were chained up and mocked in public for their beliefs.

Some had to bear being pilloried and flogged, or even chained up in prison. They were stoned, or sawn in half, or killed by the sword; they were homeless, and wore only the skins of the sheep and goats; they were in want and hardship, and maltreated. They were too good for the world and they wandered in deserts and mountains and in caves and ravines. These all won acknowledgment through their faith, but they did not
receive what was promised, since God had made provision for us to have something better, and they were not to reach perfection except through us.

With so many witnesses in a great cloud around us, then, we too should throw off everything that weighs us down and the sin that clings so closely, and with perseverance keep running in the race which lies ahead of us. Let us keep our eyes fixed on Jesus, who leads us in our faith and brings it to perfection. For the sake of the joy which lay ahead of him, he endured the cross, disregarding the shame of it, and has taken his seat at the right of God’s throne.

Johnny Faye made a show of looking alert. “OK, you got your work cut out for you. Tell me what all that means.”