Our Lady of the Forest

  Sins, said the priest. Let’s start with that one. I—

  I mean I stole stuff constantly, okay? I stole a sleeping bag from the back of a truck. I told these two women I’d watch their stuff, then I took their cooler and their boom box. I pawned stuff left and right, Father. A chain saw once. An air compressor. I also pumped gas and drove off without paying. Many times I did that.

  Before or after you stole the catechism?

  Everything I did was before that point. Before I gave myself to Jesus.

  I see.

  But I already knew—everyone does—thou shalt not steal. It’s wrong.

  Yes.

  So I need to be baptized.

  You’re back to that.

  I can’t be saved unless I’m baptized.

  You didn’t grow up with the Church, Ann?

  I didn’t grow up with anything, Father.

  I suddenly have an idea, said the priest. Why don’t you call your mother right now? You can use my telephone.

  I’m not like one of those posters, answered Ann. One of those posters you see at the post office of somebody who’s like official or something. An official runaway or something.

  Well maybe you could just call socially. For no good reason. Just to say hello. Just to check in. A phone call.

  No, said Ann. That’s the last thing I want to do.

  But why wouldn’t someone want to call their mother?

  I just don’t want to. It’s a long story, Father.

  Long doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter, does it? Because after all, we have all kinds of time here. We’re sitting here talking, isn’t that the case? And I’m a priest. A listener by nature. Not to mention an inveterate talker. So I don’t mind if your story is long. I even kind of like that.

  I didn’t mean long the way you mean it. I mean: I just can’t explain it.

  You mean you can’t explain to me why you don’t want to call your mother? Or you can’t explain what you mean by the word long? Or both? Maybe it’s both.

  I’m lost again.

  Why don’t you want to call your own mother?

  I don’t know. Can we leave it at that?

  Tell me about it.

  I can’t.

  The priest sighed. Okay, he said. It’s just that you seemed in a mood of disclosure. Disclosure and contrition. Confession.

  Ann drank her tea. His mind turned to that. A lissome teen with a teacup at her lips. Tell you what, the priest offered. You spend the night here. Don’t go back to that damp tent of yours. Stay here tonight. Nurse your flu. The couch folds out into a comfortable bed. You’ll be warm and clean. Please stay.

  He tried to remember which corner of hell was reserved for sexual connivers. Was it the First Bolgia with its Panderers and Seducers like Jason of the Golden Fleece or the Second Circle where lustful souls are forever driven on the wind? Ann got up to use the bathroom and he closed the shades tightly, leaving no gaps, in order to prevent the spies outside from looking in on them. Then he waited in a heat of agitation while Ann washed, brushed her teeth, and peed—he heard the hard long stream of her urine rebounding off the porcelain only because he was listening for it—next he performed his own neurotic toilet, brushing his teeth, flossing carefully, massaging his gums, swallowing his multivitamin, lathering his face and hands with scented lotion, combing his hair, swilling with mouthwash, and sitting on the toilet like a woman to pee in order to make less noise about it, in case Ann was listening. Why did he care? He didn’t know. Father Collins assessed himself critically in the mirror. I’m still okay, he decided.

  In the living room they knelt together and recited the Salve Regina. Hail Holy Queen, Mother of mercy, our life, our sweetness and our hope. To thee do we cry, poor banished children of Eve. To thee do we send up our sighs, mourning and weeping in this valley of tears. Turn, then, most gracious Advocate, thine eyes of mercy towards us. And after this our exile, show unto us the blessed Fruit of thy womb, Jesus. O clement, O loving, O sweet Virgin Mary.

  Fruit of thy womb, the priest said afterward. Those underwear people stole that metaphor. Is nothing sacred? he asked.

  They’re Fruit of the Loom, Ann answered.

  It sounds like something left in drawers, if you understand my meaning.

  I like that prayer, it’s one of my favorites.

  So do I. Very much.

  It makes me feel better.

  As it should, as it should. Since Mary is the Consolatrix Afflictorum, she who consoles us in our afflictions. Our comfort and our hope, our Mother.

  Amen.

  And on that note, I bid you good night. Don’t neglect to take your flu pills.

  I guess those guys are still sitting out there.

  I’ve taught myself to ignore them already. Let them sit in the car if they want. What can we do about it?

  She lay, at last, on the sofa bed. The light from the reading lamp fell across her and suffused her with a boudoir glow that filled him with a terrible yearning. Good night, she said. This really feels good. Thank you for everything, Father.

  Whatever I can do, the priest replied. Whatever I can do to serve you.

  He walked down the hall, shut his door, and leaned against it with his eyes shut. Lord be with me, he whispered. And lead me not into temptation, but deliver me from evil. The priest moved forward, mentally, in Matthew. Watch and pray, that ye enter not into temptation: the spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak.

  He arranged his own weak flesh on the bed. Twice he got up to pull back the shade and peer out at the strange sentinels but there was no sign of movement from their car, he couldn’t see beyond the veil of rain, the halo of light from the porch lamp was insufficient to include them in its reach. The priest curled up beneath his sheets and reluctantly acknowledged his insomnia. He wasn’t going to sleep tonight, not with the visionary just yards away, the two of them alone in his house, it was not just her essential femininity, the proximity of a desirable female, it was also her strong strange spiritual aura, which moved and disturbed him both. It was Ann in her totality, a thing he would not have expected. It was Ann of the Immaculate Vision. Was there any difference, he asked himself, between legitimately, actually seeing the Virgin and believing to have seen the Virgin? An epistemological question at heart—or was it ontological? The priest rolled over, turned on the light, and picked up his copy of The Catholic Reporter. ATTACHMENT TO CORE BELIEFS ENDURES, LINK TO INSTITUTION WEAKENS, NCR–GALLUP SURVEY REVEALS, that was the subhead across page one, against the backdrop of Father Michael Moynihan leading a prayer service in Connecticut. There was an article on the European synod—PASTORAL IDEAS NIXED AS CURIA HOLDS THE LINE—also PHILIPPINE DIOCESE BACKS INDIGENOUS IN MINING CONFLICT, BISHOP CALLS SENATE TREATY VOTE A MAJOR ARMS CONTROL DEFEAT, POPE AGAIN ASKS CLEMENCY FOR TEXAN GARY GRAHAM, and CARDINAL O’CONNOR RETURNS TO HOSPITAL FOR TESTS. The priest read all. He read the letters. He read MARRIAGE TRENDS SIGNAL DECLINING ROLE OF CHURCH and ACCOMMODATIONS TO CONTINUING PRIEST SHORTAGE. Why were there fewer priests? It was much discussed. God’s call, some said, was constant, but men did not hear it as well anymore, there were too many tempting distractions in the world, others said we could not be sure that God’s call indeed was steady. The priest agreed with the former argument. Tempting distractions, obviously. The world was one big Sodom and Gomorrah. Did God make sense, though, in the end? The God who turned Lot’s wife into a salt pillar merely for looking back at the brimstone falling as prophesied across the plain, the God who spoke with Abraham as though they were negotiating the price of a used car to determine the number of righteous men it would take to save the two cities? God wanted fifty but Abraham worked him down to ten by employing deference, humility, and flattery, I who am but dust and ashes, let not the Lord be angry and so on, the same God who later toyed with Abraham by asking him to bind his son, arrange the boy on a sacrificial pyre, then slit his throat with a knife. Just kidding, said God at the last moment. Just checking to see how loyal you are. God the insecure
Mafia don. God the malevolent psychotherapist.

  The priest brooded and indulged his self-absorption, rationalizing that a sleepless man had a right to unrestrained thought. It had been a day full of obligations and endless ministerial duties, including a meeting with Larry Garber regarding his drawings of the sacristy, revised based on their telephone exchange, and a general review of the floor plan for the nave, the baptistry, and the choir. Garber was a plodding interlocutor utterly devoid of irony and bereft of those cultural reference points on which Father Collins’ humor depended. They were over a half million dollars short, a fact that seemed lost on Garber. He used sharp pencils and a three-sided scaler. He took notes on a laptop, kept his blueprints rolled in a cardboard tube, and made use enthusiastically of tracing paper. Father Collins had checked his watch three times while pretending to wring his hands. Then it was over. Good work, he said. The entire congregation appreciates so much your hard work and generosity. I’m invested in this, said Larry Garber. I enjoy what I do. It feels very good. I’m excited about it every day. I can see that, Father Collins said. It’s obvious, your personal investment.

  He’d gone in the late afternoon on his rounds, Sunday visits to the bedridden of his flock or to those by other means indisposed, and he’d felt like a country doctor. A toothless logger dying at home of pancreatic cancer, another logger convalescing from triple bypass surgery, and then Tom Cross the younger. How are you today? he’d said to Junior. I’m catheterized, the boy had answered in his disturbingly aspirate exhaling whisper. I have. An infection. And pain. In my legs. Phantom pain. I’m on a drug. It makes me. Makes me tired.

  His mother had left them in the kitchen alone on the principle that confession was a private matter so it was just the priest and the paralyzed boy with the vent tube disconcertingly at his throat and his faint sad smell of urine. He’d twitched in his chair, which was tilted back, his legs and arms flopped involuntarily but he was well secured by a seatbelt. Father Collins had asked if he wanted to confess and the boy had said no and took communion, Father Collins wearing rubber gloves to serve this particular paschal banquet and quoting spontaneously from John 6:53: Truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink his blood, you have no life in you.

  Okay.

  Your suffering is inexplicable, Tom. But in suffering we glimpse God’s mystery. In suffering we know Him better.

  Okay.

  And suffering can have redemptive meaning. In pain we are drawn much closer to God, not merely he who suffers himself but all those around him also, all right? Everyone in his presence.

  Yes.

  And the prayer of faith will save the sick man, and the Lord will raise him up—the Lord will—and if he has committed sins, he will be forgiven.

  Okay.

  I pray for your soul every day, said the priest, and took the boy’s limp hand in his own. I ask the Lord to comfort you, he said. I ask the Lord to be with you.

  Now Father Collins turned restlessly in bed and pondered the sinewy corpus of Our Savior that seemed to watch him from the wall. Soon he would sit in conference with the bishop to review his initial year of service and to jointly reflect on his future as a man of God, a servant of the Lord, a slave of Christ, a proclaimer of the Gospel. Had he acted in persona Christi Capitis and in a manner consistent with his priestly sacrament and did he wish to continue his ministry? On these matters the bishop would pontificate, though he mostly seemed a preoccupied man, distracted by the complexity of his calling—at heart an administrator in vestments. A dour weary traditionalist with beady eyes, expressive hands, and extremely bad halitosis. Father Collins imagined himself suggesting that prayer and reflection had led him to believe in the need for an introspective hiatus from his duties as a priest. His rhetoric would incorporate an air of confession. He would seem to be forthcoming about his inner life. He would use the phrase the will of God as if his own will were not involved in the outcome of the matter.

  But all of that lay in front of him. In the meantime here was this Marian apparition unfolding, apparently, in bizarre full force in his own backwater parish. The priest imagined busloads of pilgrims bent on divinely inspired chastisements and evangelical devotional fever, hailing the advent of Mother Mary, saluting a cardboard ephemeral church, Ann as substitute for authentic worship, for the mundane daily variety of faith that composed his own enervated ministry. A thousand people, the girl had said; more than a thousand, probably. And how many more by tomorrow? There came a perplexing knock on the door. How did he look? Accoutered in briefs and a crew neck t-shirt? He arrayed himself in a more manly posture, on one elbow, recumbently regal. Yes, he said. Come in, Ann.

  His heart fibrillated—moral confusion. She opened the door, a silhouette, a vision. I can’t sleep, she said. My allergies are acting up. And I keep thinking about . . . a lot of things.

  It’s all right to think, Ann.

  I have a bad feeling.

  Don’t you worry. God is with you. Sometimes we just need someone to talk to. Someone to share our deepest thoughts with. A little honesty sometimes.

  Yes.

  So be honest, Ann.

  Okay. I will.

  What are you really thinking about? What is it really that’s keeping you awake? Your deepest thoughts. Confess them, Ann. Ask yourself what you’re really thinking and tell me without hiding anything.

  That’s easy.

  I’m glad you can say that, the priest answered. His heart was more gravely aflutter now. He could throw it all over, he knew he could. Everything to lose himself. Disappear, become somebody else. She was exactly what he thought he desired, the nexus of God and lust.

  You know what I’m going to say, Father.

  I hope I know what you’re going to say.

  I’m thinking about building Our Lady’s church.

  That’s exactly what I thought, the priest lied.

  She sat on his bed—sniffling, sneezing, blowing her nose—and it took him nostalgically back to high school, teenagers engrossed in late-night profundity replete with unspoken eroticism. She pulled up her knees and set her head against them; one of the things that made her pornographic was her mindless flexibility, the suggestion that with comfort and ease she might attain the positions described in the Kama Sutra. She’d stripped off the cardigan, so here she was now on his bed in his sweatpants and through the t-shirt he’d loaned her he could see one nipple. But what was the point of looking at it, a man could look and never stop looking, at a certain point he had to turn away, what was wrong with now, immediately, the nipple seemed rather large to him in relation to the size of her breast. I think, she said, that if I understand what the catechism says I’m going to need to be baptized.

  What?

  I was just looking at your catechism—checking. I can’t be saved unless I’m baptized.

  Is this a part of your vision? From Mary?

  She hasn’t said anything about it, Father.

  So why are you feeling this all of a sudden?

  It isn’t sudden, the visionary said. I told you—I’m scared of the devil.

  Father Collins felt awkward beneath his sleeping bag wearing only his briefs and t-shirt while conversing with this girl. It was perfectly possible that she was insane, sitting on his bed at one in the morning with her pall-like flu and sallow complexion, her allergies and rapt expression, assailing him with talk of the devil, a manipulative vamp, a psychotic seductress, secretly out to ruin his life, the intentional undoing of a priest. Or maybe not. He didn’t know. But what was she doing on his bed like this? Look, he said. We better put things on the table. Because this is getting a little weird, Ann.

  Weird?

  Well I’m a priest and you’re a sixteen-year-old female. Sitting on my bed in the middle of the night. I mean, you have to admit this would look pretty compromising, say to those men keeping watch outside, if anyone were to see this situation it would have to look pretty compromising and more than mildly suspicious, right? People would
say that this is just wrong. There’s no moral justification for it. A photograph of it—that would end my career. I’d have to leave the priesthood.

  Ann descended into the fetal position, a closed flower, a snail. I’m not here for… that, she told him.

  Good, said the priest. Because I’m celibate.

  I’m here to get baptized, Father.

  Father. Despite himself he felt wounded by her lack of interest, which seemed to border on disgust. But after all he was nearly twice her age. A gaunt wry priest with thinning hair. Baptism, he said. You mean right now? You want me to baptize you now?

  Could you?

  Is there a reason to be in such a big hurry?

  I don’t want to die unbaptized, Father.

  Well I don’t think you’re going to die tonight. And if you read your catechism carefully, Ann, the Church indeed makes room in heaven for those who expire with the explicit desire to receive the sacrament of Baptism.

  But it also says that in a case like that I’d have to have already repented my sins and performed acts of charity.

  True.

  So maybe it’s better if we do the baptism.

  But do you mean right now? Literally? Because it can’t be done. It just can’t be. You would have to complete a conversion course. A course known as the catechumenate. An initiation into Christian faith. It generally takes a full year.

  I think I’m ready right now, Father.

  How so?

  I’ve seen Our Lady.

  For me to baptize you now, Ann, would be tantamount to affirming the veracity of your visions. Lending my priestly support to them. I’m not quite sure I can do that.

  Why not?

  Because I don’t yet believe your visions are real.

  What would it take to make you believe?

  It would take—well—hard evidence. The evidence yielded by the process of discernment. A set of facts and circumstances that appeared… incontrovertible. All that would make me believe.

  But do you have evidence of God, Father?

  Your visions, Ann, are different from God.