The Man Who Loved Birds (15 page)

Little executed a little clog dance. “Nobody’s going to end up in the pen. Not me, anyways. Not so long as I got powerful friends in the right places.”

“And who might those friends be?”

Little smiled and made a show of twiddling his thumbs.

“I even so much as hear anybody dealing in that shit and count me out,” Johnny Faye said. “So you make your choice but you understand that I am no party to the hard stuff.”

The argument raged on, until Jerry Bee got the munchies and it was time for dessert. They called to the women, who brought in strawberry shortcake and Cool-Whip. The men and the kids took two helpings while the women took one and joked about their figures but after everybody was served they stood picking at the
leftovers. Then they all took off into the warm summer night and Johnny Faye the last to leave in the big white Ford F150 with JC riding shotgun.

Now he allowed himself a smoke. He drove down the winding lane, onto the U.S. highway to stop across from the little log cabin his mother’s father had built as a hunting blind. Across from the cabin two rounded knobs came together to form a cleavage, mist rose from the creek, and the field was a phosphorescent sea of lightning bugs. It was a peacemaking place and Johnny Faye often came here in search of peace.

This was his problem. He had seen the world and they had not, and one thing he had learned on returning from the world was that there was no way to convince them that what it had to offer was no better than what they already had at hand. This they had to learn for themselves—he’d had to learn it for himself and now when he got restless he turned back to those times and places on the other side of the world when the war had taught him how to pray because there was no other defense against the fear. It wasn’t as if he thought, “I’d better say a prayer,” or “Now’s the time to pray.” It was pray or die and though the former was no guarantee against the latter it was all there was to do and he personally knew of no man who had not done it.

And what Johnny Faye had prayed for, what arose every time in his heart, was this field, these hills, and all he had asked for was to come back here for good. And so when his men got out of hand or the police got out of hand or when the demons came too close, when they started showing up in the daytime as well as at night, this was where he came to remind himself of his answered prayers, of who he was and where he belonged and the importance of standing firm in the place where history had put him.

For several days the weather had been sultry and the close air hummed with electricity. Meena walked the few hundred yards to the Knights of Columbus Hall to attend a party that had been organized to raise funds for equipment for her office and to formally introduce her to the town. As she approached the KC Hall the couples standing in the doorway fell silent and slipped away—“another drink,” “little girls’ room.” Meena made her entrance alone.

The KC Hall was a plain, low-ceilinged room with jaundice-colored walls. The west-facing windows were caked with grime so that, though they were bright with the setting sun, the hall and its occupants were bathed in the glow of overhead fluorescent tubes. At the far end of the hall someone had set up a portable screen and a slide projector. An aged, hump-backed man in baggy brown slacks and a shirt that matched the walls was setting up metal folding chairs. Raucous laughter erupted from people lined up at an open door—this must be the bar.

A large florid woman in floral print pedal pushers seized Meena’s hand. “The good doctor,” she said, and Meena found herself grateful for the adjective.

“You are—?”

“Oh, beg your pardon, I’m so used to everybody knowing who I am. I’m Virginia Drummond, Judge Drummond’s wife?
But everybody calls me Ginny Rae, at least to my face. And I’m so
pleased
, I can’t tell you how pleased we are to have a doctor in our little town, the last doctor we had, old Doctor Mudd? Great-nephew of the doctor who treated the man who shot Abraham Lincoln and jailed for his trouble, he was ninety if he was a day, Doctor Mudd, that is, not Abraham Lincoln, ha,
ha
. You’d go back into that dark little cubbyhole of his office and you didn’t want to ask what was in those bottles that had been on the shelf so long the spiders had abandoned their webs, nosirree, you just took your prescription and marched right out of there and drove forty miles if that’s what it took to get it filled in some place with a flush toilet. When the judge was a little boy—he’s over there, with the wide orange tie with the palm trees? I keep trying to throw that tie away, I sneak in his closet and every time he catches me and I let him know that nobody has worn a tie like that in twenty years but it’s his Kiwanis tie, he got it at a Kiwanis convention and every time he sees it in my hands he lifts it gently as you please and says now honey, you know that’s my Kiwanis tie and I just have to go along even if he does look like a fool when he puts it on. Anyway, when he was a little boy he had this ingrown toenail? And his mamma took him to old Doctor Mudd and Doctor Mudd said—I can hear him now, that big deep voice he took on when he had bad news—‘Son, that’s going to have to come out,’ and Glen saying, ‘Yes, sir,’ like the brave little boy he is and Doctor Mudd saying, ‘You see that robin out the window?’ and pointing, you know, and Glen not knowing any better than to look which is just as well since what did Doctor Mudd do but take up a pair of pliers and jerk out that toenail right there. No painkillers for him, no sir, he thought pain builds character. ‘Pain builds character,’ I can hear him saying that to me when I was in
labor
if you can imagine, which I guess you would have to beings as you’ve never had a baby, but better childless than out of wedlock like our Maria Goretti Shaklett, bless her heart. A little whiskey, that was the only painkiller he trusted. And I’ve already heard how you saved little Matthew Mark Smith’s
life
,
you here not much more than a month and already you’ve practically resurrected the dead, at least to hear Officer Smith’s wife tell it, I’m sure it wasn’t so dramatic, she likes to—
embellish
, shall we say, is there something I can get you to drink? Yo, Maria Goretti! Bring the doctor a, I’ll bet you’d like a nice gin and tonic, I hear that’s what they drink in your part of the world, keeps the malaria away, right?”

“You’re very kind but I don’t drink alcohol,” Meena said, but the judge’s wife was already gone and now it was the judge himself, bearing down on her like a lorry, hand extended. “Dr. Chatterjee, Glen Drummond, my apologies again for dropping you off with so little ceremony but the trash must be picked up, that’s the glamour of being judge executive, somebody’s trash doesn’t get picked up and you-know-who gets called. And now if you’ll forgive me I am always and in every time and place running for reelection, the American blessing and curse, even if nobody is running against me I still have to buy my constituents a drink, ha,
ha
,” and he was off, a fireplug of a man on small feet, just as someone thrust a drink into her hand. “Gin and tonic with a squirt of RealLime, just like you asked.”

“You’re very kind,” she said. She stood with the sweating drink until enough time had passed, then set it behind a plaster statue of a saint in armor, piercing a dragon.

Flavian was climbing the stairs to his cell when he remembered that earlier on that warm, close day he’d used the monastery truck to run an errand. A tympani of distant thunder had underscored Compline’s last reading—after Brother Bede extinguished the last candle and the high, echoing spaces had fallen into darkness, the windows continued to wink on, then off, from distant flashes of lightning.

He retraced his steps and stopped at the tall urn they used as a collective umbrella stand—it was as usual empty—
nobody puts them back, must remember to grouse about that at this Sunday’s chapter meeting
.
Outside, the sun had set into gathering clouds and an all-but-impenetrable gloom and a stiffening wind tangled the gum trees’ limbs. He crossed the prayer garden, went through the screeching gate and climbed the knoll to the milking barn and maintenance sheds. There he found that, sure enough, he’d left the truck’s window rolled down. He gave himself a light smack to his temple as an incentive to
pay more attention
, then rolled up the window and turned back.

He had taken only a few steps when the first drops of rain, gravid with promise of more, struck his head. Before he could quicken his steps, no more than twenty yards distant a bolt of lightning split a great white oak, a century and more old, from its topmost limbs down through its massive trunk, close enough that Flavian was struck with flying twigs and leaves and his bones hummed in his body, or was that from the ear-splitting crack of thunder
ka-boom
? In his next conscious thought he was inside the cow barn, deafened by the pounding of his terror-stricken heart.

Ten thousand drumsticks on the barn’s tin roof. Earlier that day the place had been alive with mooing and blatts, the clang of stanchions swinging shut, the hum of the milking machines, and always and throughout the permeating, penetrating, fecund smell of hay and milk and manure, the before and during and after of the life of a cow. A forest of black plastic tubes dangled from the rafters, each equipped with a teat cup, a machine-age imitation of a calf’s mouth, and all the tubes connected to a great pulsing vacuum cleaner that imitated the joy of seventy calves sucking their mothers’ teats. The milk emptied into steel vats, which the overseer pumped into a truck to be delivered across the road to the cheese room, where it began the conversion that led to immortality. Now with the cows returned to their barn, the black polyvinyl tubes hung in silence. No animal sounds broke the smooth roar of the rain on the roof except the murmur of human voices.

Flavian thought his imagination was playing tricks—the rain varied in intensity, close his eyes and he could hear it pounding
now soft, now deafeningly insistent, and its rhythm might be taken as the chattering voices of the storm gods. But underneath the sound of the rain he heard a laugh, then a raucous shout. Light leaked from under a door at the room’s far end—the source of the shout? In any case that light should not be on now, long after Compline. Flavian felt his way through the dangling tubes to open the door and shut off the switch.

Inside: Cassian, Bede, Cyril, José, Aelred, Denis, Cyprian. Cassian, skinny and long with bony hands to match; Bede, swarthy and soft as an odalisque; Cyril, with his great mule’s ears and long face and thick black beard flecked with gray; José, whose bushy eyebrows met to form a startling arc over the bridge of his nose—he had a certain rakish air, and insisted that they pronounce the “J” in his name; Aelred, tall as a poplar and bald as a new potato, with a great bulbous nose and protruding eyes magnified by thick lenses; Denis, a flat face, featureless as a plain except for his pouting rosebud lips; and Cyprian, a dark-skinned orphan from a tropical place who spoke deeply accented English, for whom the animals were the brothers and sisters he’d never had. Each monk held a plastic cup, and in the center of the circle was a bucket of ice and a near-empty bottle of bourbon and no cap or mixers in sight. The dim light brought out the hollows in their cheeks and the deep lines in their foreheads, and Flavian realized how much younger he was than these men, all of whom were old enough to be his father.

Fixed by seven guilty stares, Flavian grasped that someone had cadged a bottle and that a party was under way, to which he had not been invited. “Uh—excuse me, I was just—”

“Not a word to the abbot!” This from Cyprian, with a laugh that meant business.

“Stick around, Brother Tom. Pour yourself a drink.” This from the deep shadows at the corners of the room, and it was a moment before Flavian figured out that the voice came from Johnny Faye.

And then somewhere very near at hand a bolt of lightning
rent the air and a smack of thunder sewed it up, leaving their ears singing and the room pitch black.

Meena watched as two amiable drunks used their hands to concoct a shadow play in the square of light thrown by the slide projector. First two birds flew across the screen, then in one corner a hunter raised a rifle, but before the play reached its climax she was accosted by a slender man—the only man wearing a suit. “Harry Vetch,” he said, holding out a gin-and-tonic. “You looked a little dry.”

“You are very kind,” she said, “but I have been served.”

Vetch gave the drink a stricken look. “In these parts it’s an offense against nature to turn down a drink.” He took a sip from each glass. “Opportunity presents itself when we’re looking in the wrong direction. The challenge is to turn around and say yes.”

“I am somewhat stuck, I’m afraid, in steadfastly facing forward.”

An awkward silence. He took a second sip, then set down the drink and extended his hand. “I’m the county attorney,” he said. “The organizer of the party. The guy who’s raising money to buy you an air conditioner. The guy who’s charged with introducing you to your patients.”

She laughed then and took his hand. “Then I owe you my thanks.”

Some casual chat, in which the county attorney revealed that he also came from far away and that he was the first elected official of the county who hadn’t been born to or married into the job. “Or married into anything, for that matter.” He wiggled his ringless fingers. “That’s a joke, sort of, but somebody once told me every joke contains a grain of truth.” Meena asked after his parents—did he miss them? He screwed up his face and scratched his head. “Not really. My father was a corporate attorney, my mother was a nurse. They retired out West. Arizona, I think. I call them every so often. Is that what you mean?”

“My father taught English in our little town. It was what the
men of the family had done for many generations. In this country, you are what you do. In my country, you do what you are. There was no escaping it, really. His father taught, so he taught.”

“But
you’re
not a teacher.”

She smiled. “How that came to be is a long story.”