The Man Who Loved Birds (17 page)

In the darkness Meena turned to the window, to look at the sheets of rain falling on pavement. “And so arrives the monsoon,
maha Bengal
,” she murmured.

“What is Bingle?” Rosalee asked.

“Bengal was my homeland, the place where I came from. A country of more water than land. Now it is divided between India and a part that has become its own country called Bangladesh. I grew up in what is now Bangladesh but I came to the States from India—that part of Bengal that belongs to India. If you think of the world as an orange, then Bengal is precisely the opposite side from where we are standing now.”

“You mean, you couldn’t come from any further away.”

“Any farther and the traveler begins to return home—that is, assuming that she has a home to which she may return.”

“Bingle,” Rosalee said, then corrected herself. “Ben-
gal
.”

Gradually the rain slackened and the cries and shouts grew bolder. Now the crowd was seriously drunk—when the building lost power, the bartender had opened all the bottles and left them out for all to help themselves. In the dim light Meena could see Father Poppelreiter at the bar between two candles fixed in beer
bottles—with their light flickering over his ruddy face, he might have been standing at an altar saying mass.

“You ladies OK?” Harry Vetch passed by, a candle clutched in his hand, its wavering light playing over his smooth features. “We have
got
to put a stop to that man,” he muttered before moving into the crowd.

“What man is he referring to?” Meena asked.

A small laugh from Rosalee Smith. “Oh, Johnny Faye, for sure. This stunt has Johnny Faye written all over it. I mean the slide show. But I wouldn’t put it past Johnny Faye to cut the power, too.”

“I might have guessed. I believe I know the man. A farmer.”

“You could say that.” A rich silence. “You met Johnny Faye?”

“Yes, he came to my office shortly after I arrived.”

“I have a hard time picturing Johnny Faye in a doctor’s office, but I’ll take your word for it.”

“I recall the name. I would have thought it a woman’s name.”

“Sometimes it is, sometimes it aint.” Rosalee lowered her voice. “But I aint pestering you to talk about Johnny Faye. I want to talk about my Matthew Mark. He’s doing OK thanks to you. But that’s what I want to talk about. I mean, it hadn’t ever got this bad but I can see that with that boy growing older and his asthma getting worse—I’ve done all I know to do—give up smoking, keep the cat outside, whatever. I know you’ve done what you can but I’m hoping and praying that you can do more. I beg your pardon if I’m a pest but I knowed I had to ask. Knock and it shall be answered.”

“Dear Mrs. Smith. Rosalee,” Meena said gently. “Asthma surely complicated your son’s situation but it was not the precipitating cause.”

And then they were not alone. The doctor could not see who had joined them but she smelled his aftershave, more powerful than the scent of the early summer rain, its overwhelming cloyness a kind of threat. He was trying to light a cigarette—she heard the scratch of match against sandpaper once, twice, but the air
was damp and his matches slow. Finally the match flared, and in its sudden light she saw that Rosalee had stilled her face and she understood that the man behind her back was her husband, the boy’s father, Officer Smith.

In some fashion, in some way that he might not even be aware of but could accomplish easily enough, he possessed the power to send Meena back where she came from. With one telephone call or one word at one meeting with one person in one office he could undo her years of work.

Between this man and this woman, with the streets and the KC Hall dark, where they were surrounded by the laughter and cries of the partygoers’ search for light, here in this place where everyone knew that this man beat his child and probably his wife and no one would act—Meena knew this place. This was the place where she had come from, a half a world removed and everything had changed and nothing had changed. She was still in the power of men, they were all in the power of anyone who saw the ends as more important than the means, who lived to seek power, and if anything could be known about the world it was that this man would use whatever power he had in whatever way he could. Meena was not likely to change this by drawing attention to what he had done.

But where would that leave the boy? There was always the boy or someone like him, grist for the mill of fate, the children and women and men, once her friends and neighbors and relatives, murdered or raped and left for dead. Meena felt all the massed and indifferent power of the law standing behind her, in the person of Officer Smith.

Meena took Rosalee’s hand, hoping that a human touch might ease what she had to say. “I cannot offer extraordinary promises at this particular moment. I am a doctor of the flesh, not the spirit.”

“That’s right.” The man was at Rosalee’s side, his badge gleaming in the candlelight.

She held out her hand. “Doctor Chatterjee. And you are—”

“Officer Smith.”

“Why, yes, of course. You are the father of the brave little boy whom your wife brought to my office.”

A pause.

“Of course I saw him in the hospital,” Meena said, “but then he recovered so quickly and he was gone before I knew it. I took my day off, and then I returned to find the floor doctor had discharged him—I came back and an elderly woman was occupying his room. Imagine my surprise. I am pleased to have the opportunity to meet.”

He gave her hand a perfunctory shake and turned to his wife. “We got to go, now.”

“Before you go,” Meena said. “Perhaps we could make an appointment.”

“Nothing wrong with me. I suggest you drum up your business somewhere else.”

“I do not wish to speak about your health but the health of your son.”

He stood back so that his face was in shadow. “I’ll raise that boy as I see fit. Then maybe he’ll find what he needs among his own people instead of going halfway around the world where he’s not—”

Rosalee touched his arm. “Honey. Please.”

At that moment the porch light and the building lights blinked on and Meena was grateful for the blinding moment of confusion to gather her wits. She turned to look Officer Smith in the face—his blank, chinless face with its prematurely sagging eyes. Though he was clean-shaven he had heavy stubble, and in this bright light it emphasized what lay beneath, the tension in the cords of his jaws and neck.

Meena laughed a bright laugh she had learned from her grandmother as a means of concealing what had to be hidden in what demanded to be said. “How pleasant to be living across the street! But I wouldn’t think of causing you the trouble of entertaining me. Remember though that in my country to work near the
jungle was to risk a leopard’s attack, and so I learned as a child to walk with the eyes and ears of a leopard. It is my duty to use all my skills in service to my patients. And your son is my patient.”

Suddenly the county attorney was at her side. “Glad I caught you before you left. I just wanted to finish up our conversation. You don’t mind if I phone you up?”

Meena looked not at Vetch but at Officer Smith. “Of course you may ring me at any time. I shall look forward to improving our acquaintance.”

And then Officer Smith left, pulling his wife and son after him.

“Sorry if I was interrupting your conversation,” Vetch said. “But you looked like you needed—well, rescuing.”

“You are so kind to be concerned. In fact your timing was very good.”

“I’ll be giving you a call,” he said, but already she was at the door.

Seen from inside the KC Hall, the falling rain had recalled the warm monsoons of her childhood, but the short walk to her office reminded Meena that these were the rains of the north—chilly even in summer. By the time she reached her office she was shivering.

Bede snuffed out the kerosene lamp while Cyril used a flashlight to lead them through the stanchions and milking machine hoses. A weirdly animated light flickered at the barn windows, then Flavian heard a click and buzz. Through a window he watched a mercury vapor lamp stutter to life. The power had returned and with it the various proofs it offered that men, not nature, control the world.

Bringing up the rear of the crowd of snickering, whispering, cheerful, holy drunks, Flavian glanced back to realize that the light switch was still turned on—when they’d left the room, they’d had no light to remind them to flip it off. He turned back. Inside the office he found several plastic cups half-filled with whiskey,
overlooked in their darkened departure. “Good thing somebody’s paying attention,” he muttered. He poured their contents down the sink, then let the water run for a few seconds to wash away the heady smell. A last check around the room, then he flipped the light switch off and guided himself out by the eerie glow from the windows.

Outside: A million brilliant stars overhead, though the eastern horizon still flashed and grumbled from the retreating storm. For a moment Flavian stood in the barn door, captivated by the source of the glow at the windows: the lightning-split oak that had driven Flavian into the cow barn and into the arms of his brothers in service to the Lord. The oak’s limbs lay shattered on the wet earth, but the great trunk smoldered with smoke and flame. Flavian stood transfixed until he felt a presence at his side. “Thanks for the evening,” Flavian said. “I doubt I’d have stuck around except that you roped me in.”

“I have a reputation for that,” Johnny Faye said. “They’re good guys, this crowd anyway. Watch out for them priests, though. They got a hand in the honey pot, they’re in it for the power and they’ll rat on you in a heartbeat if they think it’ll make them look good with the boss.”

“Maybe some are like that, but these are lay monks. There was a time when I worked with them side by side and I hope they know I won’t run tattling to the management. But I don’t know that I could have gotten comfortable with them, or they with me, without your greasing the wheels.”

“It’s the whiskey that greased the wheels but I thank you kindly.”

“They trust you and they figure that if you trust me, then I must be worth trusting. You know how that works.”

“I do indeed.”

“It takes somebody comfortable in his own skin to make that happen. You meet somebody who’s comfortable in his own skin, it makes you comfortable in your skin.”

“That’s the whiskey talking, but I’m obliged all the same.”

“No, I mean, sure it’s the whiskey but there’s something more too.”

“Well. I am what I am.”

They stood a minute longer in silence, watching the pillar of fire and smoke glowing against the clear starry spring night, the great living thing struck dead in its prime for the crime of having raised its head higher and lived more grandly than its neighbors. Then Johnny Faye strolled down the hill, humming a tune and interrupting himself with an occasional riff on a chorus.

And Flavian stumbled down the hill after him, heading toward the monastery, guided by the blue light of the mercury vapor lamp that hung over the enclosure gate. Halfway down the hill he turned back to the great burning oak and executed a little bow, and then—with a glance to make sure that no one was watching—he bent one knee to the ground and signed himself with the cross, while Johnny Faye went singing into the night.

Men will seek beauty, whether in life or in death.

—
Bhagavad Gita

Justice, in Johnny Faye’s case, took the form of the state’s oldest courthouse, a small brick temple built by men whose architectural talents ran to churches but who were acutely aware of the need for a clear distinction between church and state. Nature had taught them proportion, they had heard reports of Jefferson’s Monticello, and they had on all sides a forest of chestnut and poplar and walnut and oak. And so their courthouse was symmetrical, with a pedimented porch whose columns reached as tall as those virgin trees. After all that looking up, the eye found its rest on an octagonal cupola sporting a red cock for a weathervane that in the hot summer breeze of the day of Johnny Faye’s trial twisted and turned as readily as the day it had been mounted.

But those same builders were frugal men who understood in muscle and bone the relationship between the labor of cutting wood and the warmth of a room in winter, and so they would not build rooms with ceilings as tall as those columns. The courthouse so impressively entered held a courtroom whose low ceiling barely accommodated a spectator’s gallery in which a short person might scrape his head and a tall person was out of luck. In the courtroom proper, an oak railing with octagonal posts echoing the cupola separated the judge’s dais and the straight-backed chairs of the jury from the benches that filled the rest of the room. Curtains patterned in dahlias and passionflower prevented snoops from spying
on the proceedings. A plaque commemorated an especially bloody Civil War day when boys—some in blue, some in gray, some in the work clothes they’d been wearing when they left their farms—lay on the courtroom floor side-by-side in the comradeship of dying and death, and on every anniversary of the battle even the educated people of the town had heard echoes of their cries.

The judge, a glossy tent in black that might have sheltered a revival in its folds, was a woman—widow of her predecessor to be sure, but all the same modern ways were making themselves known. On either side of the room: Officers Smith and Boone—round versus square, shapeless versus chiseled, plump versus plank. A jury had been assembled for Johnny Faye’s trial, and they were called forth.

Johnny Faye represented himself. The judge did not advise against this choice because she knew the jury to be more susceptible to eloquence than to law and she was confident that in this Johnny Faye could hold his own.

Harry Vetch presented the state’s case: At previous summer’s end Johnny Faye had been apprehended in a half-acre of fully grown marijuana within sight of the state highway, carrying a sheaf of black plastic garbage bags and clippers. Brief testimony from Officers Smith and Boone. A map of the field, some photographs of the crop. The county attorney rested.