There were thumbs up, OK signs, and approval from the back. Ann held one hand forth like an orator and with the other clutched her bullhorn. Rejoice, she said. I greet the many pilgrims who have come here today to this beautiful place in the rain forest. Followers in Christ, amen. The Mother of God asks that you serve her now by practicing charity and good deeds. Our Lady asks that the selfish and greedy change their ways immediately, before her Son Our Lord Jesus Christ raises his arm and hurls the world into such dark sorrow as was never seen before. A darkness that will befall us all if our ways are not soon mended. Jesus is angry and his rage will not be stopped until the selfish and the greedy are redeemed. Now your Mother intercedes, your Mother of the Divine Mercy, Mother of the poor and Mother of the world, a woman clothed with the sun, as it is written, who leads you away from suffering. Away from the snares of the devil, Beelzebub, who is with us here in the world today, here even in this forest. Our Lady brings peace and is merciful, just like any mother. She who holds you to her breast and nurses you in your eternal sorrow. Go with her. Take heart in her. For she is the miracle of miracles, Mother of the perfect heart, Mother of God and the Handmaid of the Lord, she is Mary the Queen of Heaven, and by her assumption into paradise she sits now at the right hand of God and comes to you here in order to warn you: be not deceived by Satan the devil in his many forms and disguises. Be not deceived! But follow in her a true woman of valor, a woman who chose by her own free will to become the servant of God!
Ann paused. There were tears in her eyes. Just as Eve chose disobedience, she said, so did Mary say unto God, Be it done unto me according to thy will, and lo, it was done! And now she stands as a mother might between her children here on earth and God the Father in heaven, between all of you and a terrible judgment! She is like the north star to you, a guide to the gates of paradise, leader of the heavenly choir, Mother of Sorrows who stood in witness as her only Son was crucified. Our Lady is all these things and more. It is she who holds back the hand of the Lord, a woman of glory and divine holy power. The Holy Trinity is incomplete without her grace and understanding. She is Mary Light of the Forest whose church will rise in this very place by our hands, our work, and our sweat. Let us begin our task together. Take heart, rejoice, and follow me! In Jesus’ name, amen.
Ann fell silent, her message complete, and pulled her hood across her forehead. The drawing of a shade or veil, met by a din of silence. Carolyn stepped forward ebulliently and stood beside Ann with her hands clasped thinking, I like that speech, female energy, Tepid Feminists for Catholicism, a little lukewarm feminist theology never hurt anybody. She looked at Ann with a feigned expression of unadulterated spiritual awe—not entirely feigned, however: the elevated diction of Ann’s recitation was genuinely spooky, she had to admit, as if indeed Ann had channeled someone else’s rhetoric and intelligence—and noted at the same time that Ann’s nostrils were flaring reflexively and the vermilion border of her lower lip remained tremulously aflutter. Mellow, said Carolyn. Let me take over. I’ve got it, Ann.
Simultaneously a woman stepped from the crowd, prompting a defensive lurch from two sentinels whom Ann held back with a raised hand. It was the ex-bartender, Carolyn recalled, the woman who’d mentioned Paul Simon’s “Kodachrome” and who’d chain-smoked her way through the forest on Friday; the woman who’d knelt with the rest in deference to Pascal’s pragmatic wager. Forgive me! she cried now, hoarse in the way of some nicotine addicts, but I’m called to testify to a miracle, I’m called to testify! On Friday I traveled with Ann of Oregon to witness for myself her visions of Mother Mary and at that time she prayed for me about which I’ll admit I was pretty skeptical, a doubting Thomas, but guess what? Guess! All my warts have disappeared and on top of that I stopped smoking, without any trouble nicotine is gone, I tried patches, Nicorettes, everything you can think of under the sun, but Ann prayed for me and bang, like that, the two things Ann said she would help me with, the warts and the smoking—they’re gone! I’m bearing witness to her, she’s a miracle worker, I’ve never been particular-religious but here I am to share with you the amazing truth of her healing glory, Ann of Oregon has cured me!
At this the crowd became raucous. Cries and shouts of affirmation, raised arms, leaping in place, utterance of shards of scripture, prayers of petition and adoration, the Ave Maria could be heard recited in monk-like unison, Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. There arose a general piety, a cloud of witness and convulsive homage—during which the ex-bartender stole off, returning demurely to her place in the crowd—a clamor like that at the foot of Sinai when Moses appeared with the tablets of God, or maybe like that at Calvary when Jesus was fixed to his cross. On the other hand, some pilgrims fell contemplative and were turned inward toward silent prayer even as around them unfolded a riot of bald spiritual excess. But these were meditative souls by nature, not prone temperamentally to hysteria, even made fearful by it. Such arousal as they felt surrounding them seemed to their minds the devil’s work, like the paroxysms that seized German clerks and burghers during the pageants of the Third Reich.
To Ann it felt like something to shun and produced along the nape of her neck a tingling of despair. Was this really what the Mother of God desired, this surfeit of sudden adulation? She dropped the electric bullhorn, waved, and retreated to her defile of sword ferns, where once again she sat with her hood up and her face concealed between her knees, like a Mexican asleep on a Texas boardwalk at noon in a Western. Carolyn, watching her, felt grave for once. What am I getting her into? she wondered. She sat beside Ann with her head down too, held the girl’s hand and whispered to her, You gave a nice speech, it was good.
It was growing dimmer, late in the day, and the prospect of darkness provoked urgency. People began to leave the woods, though not the journalists and photographers, many of whom did not believe that darkness could affect them and felt certain they could thwart it with cell phones. She won’t talk to reporters, said Carolyn to the sentinels. Tell them to go their merry way. Tell them to leave her alone.
They were told. They went. They made a variety of manipulative noises in lieu of any farewell. Straggling pilgrims gave petitions to the sentinels, which were summarily passed to Carolyn. Small slips of paper, like a lottery or contest. Pray for me, Susannah Beck. I suffer from irritable bowel syndrome, very uncomfortable and disturbing. I am Leslie Weathers, from Kent. The doctors say I have lupus. My name is Steve, heal my daughter Chastity Ferguson, she was born two years ago with cystic fibrosis. Laurie Swenson, sciatica. Pray for my relief from pain. I also have bursitis in both shoulders. Tom Cross. Pray for my son. He’s paralyzed from the neck on down.
Tom hiked back toward the North Fork Campground with the sheriff who’d addressed the crowd that morning—a person he knew from high school wrestling—and a deputy named Ed Long. Tom had dislocated Sheriff Nelson’s shoulder when the two of them were juniors. The injury still lay like a shadow between them, but since then the sheriff had gathered around him the penumbra of a martial artist and carried himself with cheesy bluster. Nelson was out of shape but solid in a stiff unassailable way. It was clear whenever he walked into a room that he had come to believe in his girth as a bulwark against both criminals and opinions he loathed. He was slow and sure of his view of the world. What Nelson needed, Tom thought, was his other shoulder dislocated as a reminder that his vulnerability wasn’t abstract. It might make him less certain of everything.
Tom walked listening to the officers talk. After all the babble about loggers, said Nelson, this is what brings in the tourists.
We need a turnstile, Ed Long answered.
The thing of it is, Nelson said, all of these people are trespassing.
But it’s Stinson, said Long. Do they care?
I don’t know yet. But I’ll hear from them probably.
They let people hunt.
This is a thousand four hundred people trampling everything in their path. That’s a little different fr
om hunting.
A little.
Either you guys get a buck this year?
Neither had. They walked for a while discussing past bucks. I’ve been teaching my kid to shoot BBs, said Nelson. Also a little basic kung fu. A couple of blocks, some kicks, some hand strikes. He’s five years old. It’s cute.
Good discipline, said Long.
Nelson nodded.
But get him a .45, Long added. It’ll save you both a lot of effort.
They laughed at this. Boom! said Long. Cross, said Nelson. How’s Junior?
Paralyzed, said Tom. Still paralyzed.
I heard he was like that guy who played Superman.
Yeah, said Tom. Like that guy.
That guy’s still alive. He wrote a book. He played in a Alfred Hitchcock–type movie. I read about him somewhere. At the dentist.
Yeah.
First he wanted to kill himself.
Yeah.
I guess his wife can still… get satisfied. How that works, I don’t get.
Me neither.
How could that work?
I don’t know.
There’s guys who aren’t paralyzed can’t satisfy their wives.
Yeah, said Ed Long. But they’re not Superman. The Man of Steel, right?
Nelson gave Long a look of consternation. Jesus, he said, and sniggered.
It has something to do with the nervous system, said Long. It’s automatic, a hard-on.
Fuck you, Ed.
There’s Viagra you know.
Fuck you again.
Maybe this vision girl can help you with it, Randy. Maybe she can rectify your problem.
She can’t rectify shit, okay? She’s just a skinny little mushroom eater. She eats psychedelic mushrooms.
I like chicks skinny, answered Long.
This is a scam. It’s a scam, said the sheriff. And that other girl’s in on it. The one on top of the Volkswagen bus. That smart-ass redhead hippie with the bullhorn. They’re playing games with everybody. That’s what’s really going on here.
Nelson put a hand on Tom’s chest in order to bring him up short. Look here, he said. Whoa. Hold on.
A man wearing a complicated backpack and two women with lesser backpacks were waving at them from between the trees, stumbling in their direction. One of the women was carrying a skull. Hello! said the man. Yo! Sheriff!
Look at this, Nelson said. Granola eaters turned headhunters.
The trio of travelers caught up with them. Nelson pulled on rubber gloves of the sort Tom associated with cavity searches conducted at the prison. Ever since AIDS we gotta wear these, said Nelson, and immediately took possession of the skull in lieu of any other greeting. Where did you find this thing? he asked. You know you should have left it where it lay. Left it exactly where it came from.
Sorry, said the man. We didn’t know that.
We’re really sorry, said one of the women. But the whole maxilla’s intact, as you can see. And there’s a handful of premolars in there still. So with dental records, if there’s someone missing, it should be an easy ID.
You sound like you watch too much television, said Long, laying his thumbs on his belt. This is real life, not NYPD Blue. And the rule is, Don’t touch a crime scene.
Excuse me, said the woman. I’m sorry.
She shook off her backpack with difficulty. Her legs were like sausages encased in spandex. The other woman drank from a plastic water bottle and had a savage eczema on her forehead.
We came from north-northeast, said the man. About forty, forty-five degrees.
Don’t listen to him, said the woman with eczema. He’s terrible with directions and always gets lost. He never knows where he’s going.
I took good bearings the whole way, said the man. I worked out my line of travel, made notes. He pulled a compass from under his shirt, worn around his neck on a string. I can get you back there, if you want.
What I want is an answer, the sheriff said. I want to know where you got this.
The woman with the eczema said they’d gotten lost, thanks to the man with the compass: her husband. They’d made the classic hiker’s mistake so often warned against in outdoor manuals of blustering forward frantically even when they knew they were lost, until they came to a precipice. Here she’d ventured off with toilet paper and was winding her way through moss-draped maples that were eerie and somehow frightening, she said, because they were so throughly moss-inundated, as if they were being throttled alive, and underneath one of these disturbing trees she found what she thought was an elk or deer bone, desiccated and green. She brought it back and the three of them examined it, especially the other woman in their party, the one in the spandex hiking gear, who had gone briefly to medical school at Johns Hopkins University. This woman seemed to know with certainty that what they had was a small human femur, a leg bone, a child’s thigh bone. On the basis of this they’d searched some more and had come up with the green-tinted skull.
And we found these, too, said the man.
He fumbled inside the top pocket of his pack, pulling out a water purifier and a plastic bag of trail mix before finding what he wanted. Then he handed Nelson a long green bone, the tattered remnants of a rain poncho, and a plastic hair barrette.
Nelson’s face had the same pinched look Tom remembered from wrestling practice. The coach would demonstrate a difficult new move that Nelson couldn’t quite comprehend and his face would constrict a little. As if the thought required to learn it overwhelmed his faculties. The sheriff seemed patently dumbfounded now and stood in silence with his lips pursed, blinking, holding in one hand the small worn skull and in the other these three forest icons, the bone, the poncho, and the hair barrette.
Lee Ann Bridges, Long said.
Probably, replied Nelson.
Tom sat down on the remains of a log and stuffed his hands in his pockets. The mushroom girl had called this one, she’d told Bridget Bridges exactly this, that Lee Ann had died in the forest. It was—Jesus—spooky. Such clairvoyance unsettled him. The mushroom girl appeared authentically to have the gift of visions. Plus she’d cleared that woman of warts and put an end to her smoking. Tom thought of the bumper sticker back at the motel: DON’T TAILGATE: GOD IS WATCHING. Maybe, he thought, I’m scared, like a child. Or maybe it was just comforting to think that in the end, or after it, lay darkness, stillness, instead of something he wasn’t ready for, like heaven, hell, another life. Now his Catholicism seemed like yearning, not belief itself. And his sessions in the confessional seemed like jaw-flapping when the stakes were all or nothing. But what now? So what? He needed someone to tell him what to do. A million Our Fathers and a million Hail Marys. This god damn priest didn’t seem to know his shit. Words weren’t going to get him anywhere. Tom’s condition was serious.
The man with the compass had a map out. The woman who had castigated his navigating skills was poring over it with him. Long and Nelson had turned their backs to engage in a private confab. The woman who had used the word maxilla was eating trail mix with undignified haste and washing it down with Gatorade. And how are you? she asked Tom, smiling. I’m doing great, Tom answered.
III
Woman Clothed with the Sun
NOVEMBER 14–NOVEMBER 15, 1999
On Sunday evening the priest masturbated. It happened without his intending it. He was sitting in his reading chair with The Ginger Man propped open on his lap when it dawned on him that his idle self-fondling might usefully become less idle. The priest, as always, could not go forward without pondering moral and spiritual implications, but these he set aside sufficiently to indulge with only the barest shame in that feat of deliberative stimulation which is, according to the catechism, intrinsically and gravely disordered.
Afterward he felt ashamed, self-conscious, aware of himself as a celibate priest who’d engaged in onanistic pleasure, in sinful self-gratification. He was, at the same time, vaguely wistful, regretting that he hadn’t taken the time to squeeze more pleasure from the act. It had bee
n swift and perfunctory and he was not that sort of self-lover generally, reasoning instead on most occasions that an indulgence was at least partly wasted whenever it wasn’t thorough. And since sporadic self-abuse was the whole of his sex life, such omissions of attention meant more to him than they might to other people. Oh well, he thought. Maybe next time. Greater discipline next time. He was tidying up when someone knocked on his door, three insistent raps. My God, he said aloud, it’s the Thought Police already. Panicked, he tucked himself quickly away and checked the vicinity of his zipper for stains. I’m completely ridiculous, he thought.
There was a humorless-looking man on his doorstep, behind him the girl who claimed to see the Virgin Mary, and behind her, another man. Their car was idling with its wipers running, and the priest could see, in its headlight glare, a puddle that looked like a pond. As usual it was raining with bland insistence, not a downpour but a misty effervescence, diffuse and weightless as snow. Are you Father Collins? said the man at his door. Father Donald Collins?
The priest tried to look around him. He was a man with a belligerent mustache, squarely built, wearing a vapid zealot’s expression and a hunter-orange nylon raincoat. The other man stood at a short remove, an obscure and forbidding background figure with his arms folded across his chest, a pose like Superman’s. Ann, said the priest. Good to see you.
These guys gave me a ride, she said. I—
You should never accept a ride from men. They could easily turn out to be dangerous or something. You never know—I hope you gentlemen will excuse my saying this, but I think you’ll agree my point is valid—you never know about men, Ann. You shouldn’t trust them, period.
We’re not dangerous, said the man with the mustache. I see your point but in this case, Father, you can be sure we’re fully to be trusted.