Eventually the main body of pilgrims arrived at the site of the apparitions. Technically they were trespassing on land owned by the Stinson Timber Company but as yet, nobody cared. State troopers attended them with pistols and nightsticks, as did Sheriff Nelson and his deputies; any large group of people was their business, even those bent on salvation. The same could be said of the photographers and journalists who preyed on the pilgrimage like forest gray jays, birds known commonly as camp robbers. A rain fell so light and ethereal that no one could be sure it was rain, perhaps it was a discharge of the trees, splash induced by high breezes. Stragglers perpetually joined the host. People had not stopped arriving at the campground, asking questions, following signs, and probing into the forest. Pink flagging now festooned the way and marked the trail through the labyrinth of blowdowns where it was easiest to lose direction. There was a place where travelers had broken fern stalks and left them tipped over and dead in large numbers and this marked the path as well. The way was heaped with destruction. A shrewd sojourner off the mark could scout from a bolus of freshly dropped human stool to a sandwich bag impaled on the spines of an Oregon grape leaf to a pink pendant hung by a previous pilgrim from the branch of a maple tree. A substantial percentage of travelers had never been in the woods off-trail and felt the natural disorientation that accompanies this condition. The weight of walking brought the water through the moss and soaked their shoes disagreeably. There were people with wet feet, others chilled by the touch of their own sweat, others who had forgotten toilet paper. Arid people who had neglected to bring drinking water and hungry people forced to endure the heedless picnics of others. Religion did not necessarily remind those with provisions to look at things from another’s point of view or to remember the importance of sharing. Hence their fellows suffered needlessly. A man doused a hard-boiled egg with salt tapped from a minuscule backpacking shaker, then he did the same with pepper while a hungry man watched with concealed longing. They were oceans separated by continents. This same juxtaposition of food and desire played itself out through the forest. It was the same with drinking water—those who needed it hoped for a charity that widely was not forthcoming. They were unwilling to ask and looked comfortable enough. It didn’t occur to those in possession of canteens and bottles that they were surrounded by legitimate thirsts. The woods were full of ignorance and pretense. A bespectacled pilgrim seized a beef sandwich between his teeth so he could page through a trailside reference book, and the oblivious, easy extravagance of that soon galled a hungry woman. He was eating while identifying nearby mosses, lichens, and liverworts. Another man read silently from his Bible with his hand in a bag of pretzels. A group of women ate goat cheese, smoked clams, herring snacks, and marinated sliced red peppers. Most of the pilgrims, hungry or sated, arid or quenched, were moved to consider their mortality by the forest’s sea-green cathedral light. The trees rose like pillars. Out of the fallen trees grew new trees. A delirious photosynthetic rapture suffused the air of the place. There was so much evidence of decay and birth it was discomfiting and comforting at once. How could this be here and people matter very much? The indications of human smallness and of the great span of God’s time—there they were in everything and who could think about it? Fine shards of fear shot through the atmosphere and pierced the pilgrims in vulnerable places. The message of the woods was simple. You are going to die.
Milling and waiting, the crowd grew high-strung. There were upward of a thousand pilgrims now, filling the spaces between the trees and trampling the understory. Carolyn Greer had marked the apparition site with long tendrils of pink flagging, but already it had been indicated further with a plastic crucifix propped against a tree, with votive candles, medals, chaplets, plastic water bottles, an Immaculate Heart of Mary figurine, a display of carefully separated orange segments, a handkerchief cradling a handful of walnuts, a tin backpacker’s drinking cup filled with Skittles, everything set in a bed of plucked ferns so that the spot now looked like a holy site for animists recently proselytized. A depository of relics from some forest hagiography in which the saint was still named Raven. An altar freighted with amulets and fetishes. A shrine in accord and perfectly organic; a tabernacle of totems.
Lines of sight became difficult to maintain. The fiercely selfish carved out views and turned territorial in a neurotic way—the sort of people who suffer the illusion that in a crowd, individuals have rights. But no angle of vision was sacrosanct. Early postures could not be defended, even by those unabashedly obnoxious. Uh hey, excuse me, we were here first, we got here forty-five minutes ago, you can’t just squeeze in front of us like that, but already there were more invading pilgrims committing even more grave offenses and oblivious to the complainant. So few could see. The gathering took on a claustrophobic cast. Given the wet ground, it was difficult to sit. The less fastidious accepted damp pant seats, but the majority stood or sat on their rain gear. A group of women took solace in the rosary, concluding with the Fátima Ejaculation, an appellation that induced sniggering among certain nearby males who knew themselves to be perennially immature but nevertheless couldn’t help how they were struck. To them, it was funny. The Fátima Ejaculation. O my Jesus, forgive us our sins, save us from the fires of hell, and lead all souls to heaven, especially those in most need of thy mercy. You shouldn’t be laughing, a woman said. I can’t seem to help it, a man answered. It’s like trying not to… ejaculate. At this the men laughed all the harder.
There was too much anticipation to be suffered. A disturbed zealot filled the emptiness of waiting with a high-pitched soliloquy, while those around him feigned disinterest or lack of consciousness. Conspiracy in the Vatican! he proclaimed. An Italian actor travels to Austria and is altered by the finest Viennese plastic surgeon to look like Pope Paul VI! Cardinal Casaroli and Cardinal Villot are the villains behind this dastardly plot in league with the Freemasons and international banking, the Rothschilds and their cronies in Brussels, for which we will suffer World War Three and after that the Ball of Redemption, a comet such as this world has never seen, more deadly than the asteroid of Armageddon! Indeed! We are sure to see episcopal censure and an attempt to unleash satanic forces against our undefiled Ann of Oregon since the Red Hats are all fallen today and the Purple Hats surely are next! The devil is strong! Be not misled! The pope you see is an evil impostor and the one true pope our conduit to heaven has been subdued and is today sequestered in the Roman catacombs where he languishes under the influence of drugs and awaits our crusading intervention! Indeed the symbols of Beelzebub . . .
In another bay of the sea of pilgrims, a woman had taken up juggling rubber balls purchased expressly for that purpose and stowed in the bottom of her backpack. She was skilled and modestly entertaining, passing the balls behind her back and underneath her long raised legs, but someone nearby took offense at her antics and began to argue that such a spectacle was appropriate to a carnival perhaps but unsuited to the matter at hand and an insult to Mother Mary. So there was no more juggling. Some pilgrims played card games. Others examined photographs—Polaroids of cloud formations resembling Jesus, the door to heaven, angels. Cells of devotees arrayed themselves in tight-knit circles and prayed together feverishly. A woman sighted a butterfly about which there were various opinions, Painted Lady, Lorquin’s Admiral, Anise Swallowtail, Mourning Cloak, but the time and place was inauspicious for all these and the only possibility, a bearded pilgrim loudly proclaimed—after labeling himself a “poor man’s B-league lepidopterist”—was Nymphalis californica, whose name, he added, chortling, was a juxtaposition not inappropriate for a number of Hollywood strumpets. Think Neve Campbell, he said. Or Cameron Diaz. Nymphalis californica. That’s not anything we need to hear, a pilgrim nearby admonished him. Butterflies are harbingers of Mary.
Another woman smelled roses in the woods, a second harbinger. Again, skeptics in proximity to this revelation were quick to point out how improbable it was: there were no roses in the woods in mid-autumn. Exactly, said the
woman. That proves my point. The roses I smell, they’re holy roses. The invisible perfume of Mother Mary. The roses I mean are not real roses. Did you know that at San Damiano rose petals fell in showers from the sky and then from the hands of Mary herself, and that the seer there was Rosa Quattrini, and that Our Lady appeared to Rosa with a rosary made out of white roses, white symbolizing Our Lady’s grace, and also with a cross adorned in red roses, red symbolizing suffering? But no one knew these things. The woman pressed on, a small-time pedant. At San Damiano there were many healings. Rays of light fell to earth from the Madonna. A pear tree bloomed in the autumn of the year, as did the branch of a plum tree on which Our Lady stood. On the day of the feast of aviators, American pilots bore witness there. And Rosa was blessed by the Capuchin stigmatic known as Padre Pio. There was joy and light from heaven! There were graces and comforts from earth!
Two precocious high school boys from a Catholic school in Olympia climbed a tree and looked down on people. There’s idiots, said one, who think Christian rock is heresy. Or even a band like Jesus Jones, just because of its name.
I don’t get that. What’s wrong with their name? In Latin America, there’s hombres named Hey-sooz. Does anyone down there worry about it, like they’re all going to hell?
No.
It’s a gringo El Norte uptight thing.
This is freaky.
Best seats in the house.
This is da bomb.
Totally.
It’s happening way up here.
Ann had decided to sequester herself in a small defile full of sword fern. The journey had exhausted her and left her feeling deeply chilled by the cooling of her own feverish sweat. She drank her water and took a Sudafed and two of the Phenathol pills. Then she sat with her back against a log and her knees pulled up against her chest in a limber attitude most adults can’t achieve, Carolyn sitting like a yogi beside her, the two of them circumscribed, loosely, by self-appointed churlish sentinels, men who kept their arms across their bellies, chewed gum, and wore billed caps, a group of eight who’d gathered cumulatively during the course of the pilgrimage and made themselves into a convoy. Get it together, whispered Carolyn to Ann. People are twiddling their thumbs.
I can’t force it, you know. It’s not like this is a performance, a circus, with shows at noon and four. Whatever happens, it’s up to Our Lady. I’m not really in charge here.
It’s kind of a show, though. Like Billy Graham live at Madison Square Garden. Or Jim Bakker or Oral Roberts. You think those guys aren’t showmen, Ann? There’s such a thing as inspiration. There’s willing her—what do you call it? Summoning her, invoking her. Now get on your knees and say your rosary. And put a little pizzazz into it. Whatever it takes. Get it started.
It’s Our Lady who’ll get things started, not me.
I beg to differ. It’s a two-way street. You want the Virgin, you have to invite her. Open the door. Let her in. And take your hood off, sweet thing. It’s not polite to wear a hood in the house, especially when you have company.
You don’t believe in Our Lady, Carolyn.
Utterly beside the point.
I don’t know why you’re even here.
I’m here because I love you, girl. She took Ann’s hand and pressed it to her cheek. Don’t worry. I’m not a lesbian.
Neither am I. I’m nothing.
So we’re just two women holding hands. No sexual implications in that. No one should read between the lines, she called out to their male sentinels. Hands touching. That’s all.
She pulled Ann into a standing position. The crowd was singing On This Day, O Beautiful Mother in a manner reminiscent of Tibetan monks chanting om mane padme hum, the gathering of voices by some principle of acoustics more than the sum of its parts. Carolyn found it moving. She wrapped her arms around Ann tightly and put her mouth to Ann’s ear. The sweatshirt hood now reminded Carolyn of the grim reaper’s empty cowl, his faceless comic presence. You’re beautiful, she whispered, baby doll. And kissed Ann’s cheek with tender force. But you need a bath and some mouthwash.
I’m really sick, answered Ann.
They went out to the altar of ferns with its baubles and offerings. The great crowd stretched around them in all directions, plebes in the Colosseum. But Carolyn felt more like a Mayan high priest when Ann dropped suddenly to her knees in a choreography of resignation, pushed back her hood like a condemned prisoner, and pulled her rosary from her sweatshirt. Now her young face with its wan complexion was visible to her followers. They saw that she was a child and rejoiced, that her hair was cut like Joan of Arc’s, that she reeked of humility. Behold, someone yelled, the handmaid of the Lord! and the voices of the singers lifted in a crescendo. There was a palpable, militant stirring through the crowd, pilgrims jockeying for position. Carolyn took cover behind a tree. One of the sentinels frowned at her, a man in a blaze-orange hunting vest. Alms buckets, she saw, were going around, and people were eagerly filling them. Huzzah! she thought. Was that the word? It was easy for Carolyn to feel greed and detachment. Eventually this would all be behind her. A lot of bad movies ended with people basking frivolously in tropical climes, laughing and drinking margaritas, taking their leisure in the ample sun, primed for a twilight of hedonism. Carolyn knew she was one of those characters. There were worse fates, but few so meaningless. She understood that she should not get attached to suntan lotion and Third World discos as philosophical propositions. There was a valid critique to be made of sensualism, one that was selfish, not ethical, since worship of the flesh led to premature despair and an investment in cosmetic surgery. Either that or roomy floral dresses and exile to retail boutique clerkdom in Tucson or Boca Raton. Fine to be an adventurer now among the young in exotic locales, but well-sunned, somnolent, geriatric tourists were a dime a dozen in Key Largo and Palm Springs and died without marring the landscape too much, except for the time-share condos left behind and the scent of cocoa butter. Ugh, thought Carolyn. Celluloid shades could conclude with a million dollars, beach recliners, and cocktails decorated with festive small umbrellas, but what of those flickering, gorgeous phantasms subsequent to the final credits, when the theater is strewn with sad spilled popcorn, and the cinephiles have all gone home to work on last-minute dishes or bills before going quietly to their beds? What of starlets and promiscuous heroes in the silence of living afterward, while no one watches and they grow older by the second? What then? thought Carolyn. A confirmed old biddy with sun-leathered skin? A lonely spinster with skin cancer?
Ann’s raptures began in the midst of endlessly repeated Hail Marys. She stiffened, first, like a pointing dog, then quivered epileptically on her knees, then tilted forward past her center of balance as if frozen during a springboard dive, a trick that fueled her followers’ fire because it was as eerily unsettling as a Hindu mystic on a bed of nails or a yogi folded up like a pretzel with his ankles behind his head. There seemed to be a principle of physics abrogated by her very posture that might well be divine in origin. Ann raised her eyes toward the treetops and stretched her arms like Jesus at the Mount and those close by could see her weeping in a manner suggestive of a thorough catharsis, nodding her head, mouthing silent utterances, conversing with her invisible interlocutor, her face kindled from moment to moment by the nuances of a conversation no one else was privy to. Someone yelled Hallelujah! Glory! and someone farther back yelled Mary Mother of Redemption save us from our sins! The boys in the tree were seized by the spectacle such that neither could be cynical temporarily, and each considered in private the priesthood, the prospect of hell, his own myriad sins, the pulsing thralldom of the ardent crowd, and the sexual charm of the visionary. The girl was pornographic in ecstasy, a male projection of female religious passion, as if God had entered her. She looked like the limp wilted models in magazines who have been arrayed so as to call attention to the sexual allure in the poverty of their bodies, their awkward features brought to the fore, their odd angles championed, pouchy stomachs, sagging shoulders, starved c
heeks, dead eyes—heroin addicts on 42nd Street in the era just after disco expired; Patti Smith on the cover of Horses—the better to make them human, responsive, is there anything sexier than a flagrant flaw, a nipple off center, a port-wine-stained hip, limp hair, uneven breasts, a mole on the throat, bad shoulder blades? Ann was, potentially, all of these. She stood, naked without her hood, unkempt, disheveled, incandescent. Spiritually aflame, it was palpably clear, and trembling as if in postcoital meltdown. It had stopped raining. Shafts of light now penetrated the trees. Beams from heaven! a pilgrim cried, and began taking Polaroids feverishly.
Our Lady’s message, Ann said suddenly. I greet the many pilgrims who have come today to—
Louder! yelled someone. We can’t hear out here in the boonies! We can’t hear anything you’re saying!
Carolyn dashed up with the electric bullhorn, held it to her lips and exclaimed Oops!, then handed it to Ann with parodic obeisance and retreated again, a vaudevillian. Hello, said Ann, tinnily, and her voice evoked less mysticism amplified, she sounded like a junior high school thespian nervously engaged in a talent show. She also sounded adenoidal, asthmatic, and seriously phlegmatic. I’ll start over, I guess, sorry, okay? I’m sorry that you couldn’t hear me.