Father Butler removed his glasses, settled them on his lap—against his gut—and began to massage his eyes. You’re difficult to understand, he said. Do you really think the Church will sanction the claims of a girl who admits to the use of a potent hallucinogen? To recurrent use of psilocybin? Why in God’s name do you defend her?
There’s no answer to that, said Father Collins.
They sat in silence contemplating this and feeling weary together. They were silent for a long time and in the absence of their constant noise Father Collins was aware of mildew and of not wanting to age any more. He was aware of his superficiality, of the incessant power of vanity. He noted the visionary’s durable stillness, her labored and obstructed breathing, her ability to sit in a motionless trance like a meditating monk. He began to yearn for a good night’s sleep, partly as an anodyne for his overwrought senses and partly to anesthetize his soul. He wanted to disappear. He wanted sleep’s forgetfulness. It seems to me, said Father Butler, that my work is probably done for this day. So I’ll hie myself to bed, I think. And see you again in the morning.
Father Collins gave him the trailer house key and the key to his battered station wagon. I have to stay, he said.
Duty can be an awful thing when what you need is a good forty winks.
So make yourself comfortable. You know where the towels are. Make yourself entirely at home.
Good of you, brother. I’m with you in spirit.
Hold down the gas pedal when you start the car.
We’ll weather this beautifully, you and I.
I suppose we will. After all.
We’ll laugh about it one day, hoisting a pint. Quaffing a pint together. Someday.
Carolyn came up the aisle toward them and halted with her hands turned backward on her hips like somebody with mild lumbago. Okay, she said. She’s fine for now. So I’m going out to the parking lot because I have to address her followers.
And I’m off to bed, said Father Butler. I can’t waste time any longer.
This isn’t a waste of time, said Carolyn. She’s asking the Lord to soften the hearts of the Stinson Company pharaohs. And you two clerics ought to join her in that. Make phone calls to the bishop, send telegrams to the Vatican. Lead already. Like Moses.
Go on, said Father Butler. Address your followers.
Her followers, said Carolyn, not mine.
Father Butler worked his way out of the pew. I’ll make myself scarce through the side door, he said. I can’t take any more of this business. He gave a chilly automatic wave and went in search of his coat.
Father Collins accompanied Carolyn to the vestibule. I’m worried about Ann’s health, he said. Her breathing is just so seriously congested. I think she has to see a doctor.
Solicitous of you. You’re a man of compassion.
I don’t know why you’ve decided to hate me.
I don’t hate anybody. It’s not worth the effort. Carolyn hugged Father Collins stiffly and thought of Judas Iscariot’s kiss. I’m sorry, she said. I just think you’re weak.
I am weak. You too are a seer.
I also think you’re totally confused.
Yes, said Father Collins. I am.
Carolyn zipped her jacket to the throat and said I have to go out there now and deal with this crowd a little.
I’ll lock up behind you.
Then how will I get back in?
I’ll give you the key, said Father Collins.
Carolyn took it, went outside, and made her way through the crowd of pilgrims with her palms joined in the prayerful position and a beatific smile. The gathering had the feel of a protest now, a swelling militancy. Glory! she called. Praise to the Lord! Our Ann is at prayer in the sanctuary. Abide with me, rest for a while. Have patience, friends, like Jesus.
There were, she estimated, two thousand fanatics, keeping a manic evening vigil and spilling into the side streets. Their faces were illuminated by flickering candles and by the halogen lamps on North Fork Avenue and a group had joined hands to sing a hymn recently familiar to Carolyn, so that as she walked she sang too, casually, as if she’d known it her whole life. We pray for our Mother, The Church upon earth, And bless, Holy Mary, The land of our birth, bestowing the blessing of her smile.
In her van she locked up, drew the shades tightly shut, and made up a sign—DO NOT DISTURB: SILENT MEDITATION—which she propped on the dashboard. She lit two votive candles and drank long from a plastic jug of orange juice. After stuffing a handful of hazelnuts in her mouth she ran her hands through the money in the collection buckets, shaking her head and exulting. Praise the Lord! she said aloud, as the candlelight glinted among the coins. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I will fear no evil: for Mammon is with me! Carolyn laughed, bolted more hazelnuts, and fingered her vial of pepper spray. The buckets were full, it was surely a miracle, and she took ten minutes to pick out the large bills and ten more to organize them into neat packets and hide those in the chemical toilet chamber underneath the rear bench seat. By her most conservative, cursory count, she had twelve thousand dollars. She also had the option to exit, depart town quietly at 3 a.m. and make tracks for Cabo San Lucas. She could stop at banks along the way and convert the cash into traveler’s checks that would not be questioned at the border crossing where every year she drew Mexican suspicion because of her hippie-ish Volkswagen van and generally left-wing demeanor. Twelve thousand dollars tucked beneath the seat would definitely raise another red flag labeled, in bold, YANQUI DRUG DEALER. And who needed that? Carolyn just wanted to get where she was going, settle into a beachfront flat, and not be bothered by anyone while she worked on her tan all winter.
The prospect of ennui—of tropical doldrums—presented itself to her mind. In winters past she had noted this: that her Mexico was enticing and seductive from a distance but inert from closer up. The rhythm of life as she’d once known it there—dance clubs, hangover, beach swoon, dance clubs—had been replaced by morning marijuana and light nonfiction reading. Paperbacks on trekking in the Andes, camel-riding the Outback, and bird-watching on Bali. But the stoned frugality of her last few years, it turned out after not very long, was simply newly boring. In fact, she’d found, most things were boring. She was thirty and bored by everything. Most of the time she felt tense and aimless. Free-floating anxiety informed her existence. Being sardonic and wry was a ruse. Inside she was seething with existential turmoil, just like everybody else. Why are we here? Et cetera. Half the time her life seemed meaningless and the other half she felt tormented by her appearance, which would only get worse with the years. Getting older just could not be faced. She would have to descend into the pit of despair in which, she guessed, the elderly wallow and learn the mystery of subsisting there—but not before she went south of the border with a major pile of money.
Money! She flipped through a thick wad of legal tender as though it were a deck of cards. Money, she thought, was a lease on life she hadn’t known before. It occurred to her that with enough of it she could visit a liposuction clinic. What I wouldn’t pay to be sexier, she thought. Streamlined, svelte, sleek, honed. As trim and nubile as the models in Cosmo. Were there side effects from liposuction? Especially the type done in Guadalajara? She made a mental note to research this. My legs, too, she told herself. Thinner legs would be excellent. She thought of her mother’s cellulite, the black-and-blue clots behind her knees, the varicose calves, the spider veins, My God, pleaded Carolyn silently, please never, no, help, give me death or give me surgery, I don’t want to look like my mother!
Carolyn picked up her travel book, A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush. We were in a great meadow of level green grass, springy underfoot and wonderfully restful to my battered feet. She hadn’t read from it since the previous Friday and she missed Eric Newby’s cantankerous mirth and extra-dry British bafflement. She missed vicarious travel and escape. She thought with pleasure of hitting the road. A drive in darkness down the interstate, lounging by morning on the Oregon coast, dr
inking a demitasse of potent espresso and indulging in a chocolate croissant, her wallet stuffed amply with fives, tens, and twenties. On the far bank sheep and goats browsed in a deep water-meadow. Carolyn decided to begin her diet immediately after that breakfast celebration. One perfect morning, with sunglasses, in Bandon. She would wear a scarf like Melanie Griffith, tilt her demitasse with European class, and think of herself as wanton. A voluptuous and mysterious single woman. She liked that word—voluptuous. So maybe she should skip the chocolate croissant. What was the French term for one of those? They were always greasy anyway. Full of butter and calories. There was no way to eat one and remain très chic. A pain au chocolat would undercut everything, make her feel like the hog from Indiana she felt like most of the time.
Carolyn peeked past a curtain. Twelve thousand dollars was very good—especially since posing as Ann’s disciple was a fantastically farcical pell-mell lark, far easier than foraging in the damp for mushrooms—but as long as there remained a crowd outside there remained more money to be pilfered. And why stop now? Why not twenty thousand? A big grift rarely presented itself, if Carolyn understood Hollywood correctly. To not go with it or to go halfway was to miss this god-given, holy opportunity. Carolyn thought she could double her money before it was time to pull out.
Double or nothing, she said out loud, tinkering with the dial on her compass and noting its insistence on north. Yet she had to admit to a strained moral doubt. To a compunction grounded in fear and trembling. There was Pascal’s wager, always, to consider. And in truth she felt no sympathy for the devil. She thought of herself as a decent person who didn’t cause harm to sentient beings. So what was this about right now? This fraud she perpetrated on a major scale? Ripping off the religious faithful—not to mention Ann of Oregon—was certainly no way to hedge one’s bet against that ultimate, looming cardsharp, vast, colorless eternity.
No atheist, she thought, is ever firm. Even at near complete conviction the pittance left over was consternating: fire and brimstone, geysers of flame, those popes in Dante stuffed head to toe down orifices in Beelzebub’s cellar. Chilling. Gruesome. Popes in a chute. In college she’d memorized twelve lines of that canto for the express purpose of anticapitalist recitation. Ah, Simon Magus, and you his wretched followers, who, rapacious, prostitute for gold and silver the things of God which should be brides of righteousness, now must the trumpet sound for you, for your place is in the third pouch.
How ironic, thought Carolyn. But I’m committed already. A secular humanist. A material girl. All I wanna do is have some fun. And I definitely can’t be one of these Christians with their myriad insanities: God’s son, of all things, ridiculous! So what does that leave? Nothing, I guess. All I can say at Saint Peter’s Gate is, I’m sorry, I went with Mexico and science, Darwin and margaritas.
Carolyn picked up Ann’s catechism and quickly rehearsed the Hail Mary, since it was very short, a few sentences. She made sure of it. She said it aloud. Then she grabbed her electric megaphone, slid open the van door, and set all the picking buckets on the roof. They were full of change and one-dollar bills with an occasional five or ten mixed in, and they made her feel clever and deceitful. She clambered up after them and said exultantly, addressing herself to two thousand people who waited in the deep damp part of the night, My friends, praise be to Mother Mary, hallelujah, hail thee, Immaculate Mary, all praises to thee, Ave Maria, Hail, Holy Queen, our life, our sweetness and our hope!
The gathering moved in her direction with the collective will of a school of fish and she paused for a moment of self-adulation and private congratulation. I’m good, she thought, and getting better. This mob of pilgrims is at my command. I’ve grown into the job, I guess. From this high vantage she could see to the street where deputies milled uneasily, two cars from the sheriff’s department and three from the state patrol. Hallelujah! she called again. Hallelujah, hail thee! Our sweet and wondrous Mother Mary!
As if there was no need to give it thought she passed four picking buckets down from the van’s roof and into the nearest outstretched hands desperate to be of service. Reserving the last bucket, she held it aloft with the drama of a torchbearer. A sea of people stood before her now, squeezed into the spaces between the cars, as mesmerized as the audience at a magic act. Looking up with wonder and hope and what Carolyn thought was adoration. Our Lady, she said, who is full of loving-kindness, asks us to build her church!
She reached into her own pocket, drew forth five twenties, and cast them into the bucket. She passed that bucket to the crowd too and said Now let us pray together. Hail Mary, full of grace, she began, and everybody joined in unison. It was frightening to Carolyn, robotic and fascist, as if they were all in a trance. The Lord is with thee; blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen.
Amen, repeated Carolyn. Amen to that, my friends. We have before us a set of grave circumstances. Circumstances brought on us by the Stinson Timber Company, which has chosen to deny us tomorrow’s pilgrimage in the name of private ownership of land and in flagrant opposition to the will of Our Lady, who has called Our Ann to come forth tomorrow into the woods once again.
Praise Mother Mary! somebody yelled. Let Ann go to the woods!
This arrogant, cut-and-run timber corporation which is a subsidiary of a larger multinational conglomerate has opted to set itself against us, my friends, as it has set itself against the will of common people for I don’t know how many years. Stinson doesn’t care about you and me, only about its pocketbook and fat bloated bank accounts. Its CEO needs another swimming pool, the members of its board need estates on the Riviera. Friends, when the Blessed Mother talks about greed, she is talking about them—Stinson Timber.
There were chuckles of agreement, a ripple of mild laughter, and Carolyn paused, as if for effect, but in truth she didn’t know where to go next or what she wanted to say. For the first time in her life she had an audience at hand—her own audience, in thrall to her voice—and all that occurred to her was to babble on long enough to make sure the buckets went around. God I’m an empty person, she thought. And so, she said, we are at an impasse. Irresistible force meets immovable object. Us against NO TRESPASSING signs. The people against our global oppressors. Carolyn knew her rhetoric was wrong but she seemed to have no choice in the matter; what came to her was what came. So we will have to make a decision tomorrow. Are we going to back down, back away, retreat, or will we protect our Ann of Oregon on her path to the place of apparitions, the place of healing waters? Will we do what is right by the laws of God or by the laws of man? I hate to speak such dangerous language and I am not advising a turn to violence, after all we’re righteous Christians, we know it’s good to turn the other cheek, walk peacefully in the name of Jesus, deeply respect these law-enforcement officers who are good men doing a difficult job, standing by in the street over there—Hello, you guys, we love you, peace!—but there is such a thing as disobedience, organized civil disobedience like Martin Luther King or Mahatma Gandhi, we can trespass tomorrow in orderly fashion, accept the inevitable arrest of the few in the name of the victory of the many. And in this I ask: Are you with me?
There was a chorus—Yes!—but not loud enough, and Carolyn, raised on eighties rock concerts, saw that a degree of repetition could contribute to her onrushing filibuster. Are you with me? she said again, emphatically, to which she received an emphatic Yes!, Are you with me? she repeated, and when they rejoined with more raucous power she said, softly, Then you’re with Jesus, yes my friends, then you walk with God.
The buckets were filling. What else was there to say? Bail, said Carolyn. Our arrested martyrs will need to make bail. She displayed another twenty-dollar bill and waved it feeling like a game-show host. We’re going to build that church, she said. With the Lord’s help, and yours too, we’re going to walk into the woods tomorrow to the place of healing waters!
Shouts of consen
t, a raising of hands, and Carolyn said, For tonight we must have patience, friends, while Our Ann keeps vigil inside the church, praying for a righteous outcome. Our Ann has sent me to tell you all that you must keep vigil and pray with her, offering your prayers up to Our Lord and to the Blessed Mother, Queen of Peace, that the woods will be open tomorrow!
Stay, said Carolyn. Keep watch. Bear witness. And be as generous as you can, please, in the name of Our Lady of the Forest.
She picked her way down from the roof of her van, where she was intercepted by a sentinel she recognized, the man in the blaze-orange hunting vest with the Slavic-looking Cro-Magnon cranium and the salt-and-pepper mustache. All the buckets are out there, she said. Still, I’m locking my van.
Is Ann safe? asked the sentinel. Inside there?
Come again? What was that?
Our Ann. Is she safe? In the church there?
Carolyn locked her door and tried to move away, but he took hold of her arm with painful force, squeezing it across the triceps. He was strong and she nearly dropped the bullhorn. Wait a minute, he said.
Carolyn looked at his fingers with disdain, as though he had warts or running sores. There are two possibilities here, she said grimly. The first is simple uncomplicated assault defined by your hand on my arm right there which is forcibly and illegally detaining me. The second is complicated sexual assault in which that hand is construed by me as a totally unwanted sexual advance—and believe me, guy, it’s definitely unwanted, because not only are you completely disgusting and totally unpalatable as a sexual partner but that orange vest is completely pathetic, dude, and makes you look like Elmer Fudd.
The sentinel released her. I’m assuming, he said, she’s endangered in there. Unless I hear you say otherwise.
Carolyn brushed her nails against her arm, whisking away his germs. Smiling, she stepped into the crowd, lost him, and blended in among the Christian lunatics with her beatific grin aglow, as if she wore a nimbus. Hail Mary, she said through the bullhorn, and kept moving, regal and patient.