Our Lady of the Forest

  What have you heard about the apparition? asked the woman. Have you heard anything up here?

  I don’t know what you are talking, Pin answered.

  A girl up here saw the Virgin in the woods.

  It’s a sighting of the Virgin Mary.

  They’re Hindus, the man said. Are you Hindus?

  All that evening, more travelers checked in. For the first time in Tom’s brief tenure, the Punjabis turned on the NO VACANCY sign, which cast a bleak red glare. Tom stood smoking beneath the eaves and watched people unload their cars. The couple with the Lincoln did in fact have a dog with them. Pulled up to the cabin beside theirs was a car with two bumper stickers: A JEWISH CARPENTER IS MY BOSS and DON’T TAILGATE—GOD IS WATCHING. On a truck was one Tom hadn’t seen before: JESUS DOES IT BETTER. A trailer across the parking lot was emblazoned with a cross and inscribed with a name—Greater Catholic Merchandise Outlet.

  A man came under an umbrella to the office and in a stringent voice, complained. So Tom had to fix a leaky toilet while Pin and Jabari shampooed the carpet in a cabin that smelled of cat urine. Jabari’s hair, Tom couldn’t help noticing, was bound in a thick glossy braid. Surreptitiously, he watched her at her work; how poignant were her flat thin forearms. Immigration, he supposed, had etched her face with tiny fissures. She and her husband both were soft and measly little people. It seemed to Tom that all through the day the two of them were dressed for sleeping. They both wore extra-large sweatpants. While they worked they ignored him and spoke their own language, mellifluous and exotic. Tom liked to hear it and kept his head down, pretending not to hear in order to listen. He examined the toilet ball valve, a ploy, and let their subdued married chatter move him. He liked the way it left him out. Here were two people, their own constellation, alone in a strange place on the far side of the planet. Their curry-scented, dark-brown presence reminded Tom of the fullness of the world. The planet was larger than North Fork—this thought soothed him a little. His own problems, however deep, were nonexistent in India.

  When Tom finished adjusting the toilet’s lift rod, Jabari put on rubber gloves and a surgical mask to clean the bowl. It was the beef-eating sickness of American excrement she took such pains to avoid, thought Tom—in her mind, we’re the unclean ones, though she would never admit as much. She had things to be afraid of. White supremacists in particular, but she and Pin did an excellent job of appearing not to notice. Did they know how much everyone hated them? He felt they had intimations of it but found strength in denial, like the Jews before Hitler got serious, like ostriches in children’s books or stockbrokers.

  Please what is a sighting of Virgin Mary? Pin asked in his syncopated diction. It is bringing so many customers.

  It’s hard to explain. I don’t get it myself. A religious gathering, I guess you could say. Like a pilgrimage in India. Like people going to the Ganges, maybe. Don’t you go to the Ganges?

  In India we go to the River Ganges every year to make us clean. The toilet is so much quiet.

  That guy was just a royal complainer.

  So now the toilet is very quiet and you are all done fixing.

  Tom repaired to his cabin. He pulled off his boots and locked the door. With permission from the Punjabis he’d installed a deadbolt; he didn’t want to lose his fishing rods, his waders, his binoculars, his knives, his .44, his shotgun, his rifles, or his tackle boxes. Tom lay surrounded by his outdoor gear and watched a football game. The place smelled of mildew, but he only noticed it when he first came in, turned up the heat or raised a window. There was no phone in his room. His shift at the prison ran from midnight to eight, which meant that on off nights at 3 a.m. he was wide awake in his cabin. Bored, he’d appointed himself security officer and made up noise complaints. There would be a room full of young guys, contractor crews, but they wouldn’t like the way Tom looked in the doorway with his long-distance, hazy, out-for-blood pupils and his broad-shouldered posture of logger’s aggression and most were poor at feigning disdain for what he said to them. Tom made it up as he went along. It’s late and we got fishermen with early starts complaining about your little party. So no bullshit, tone it down, and don’t fuck with me. A brief interlude of nervous machismo. Someone would look ready to call his bluff but that was as far as it went. Come on in—he could predict hearing that. Someone would turn the music way down. Do you want a beer, guy? Sure, he’d say, take one, pop the top and walk away.

  And why not? A free beer was not to be scoffed at since Tom Cross Logging went defunct. Tom’s two log loaders and his D-7 Cat had gone for ten percent of what he’d paid, so the bank was taking his house. Eleanor and the kids were there for now—Junior in the living room with the television in front of him—until Tom figured something else out. Another logger without Tom’s payments was making a go of it with Tom’s machines, bidding lower than Tom ever did because his books looked better. It irked Tom that it worked this way, that vultures were in ascendance. What he had left was a contract from Stinson set to expire in about four months—which maybe he could pass along at a loss—and his saws and hydraulic jacks, worth nothing. And his pick-up: five grand at best.

  More, there was his looming divorce, which he didn’t care to think about. Putting a number on it at this point anyway was only self-flagellation. Tom rearranged his limbs on the bed and thought, morosely, of Junior’s medical bills, numbers so difficult to comprehend the insurance company might as well present them in cuneiform or hieroglyphs. Tom’s books were a morass, like jackstrawed blowdowns: where should he start untangling? In the past he’d worked his way out of problems; a 4 a.m. start had been the answer. This was during his high-lead days, when he smelled perpetually like diesel and wood shavings and his cuticles were rimmed with grease. He’d run the loader, done the sorting himself, and contracted out the falling. At high pitch twelve people worked for Cross Logging; later Tom streamlined and went into shovel logging. It began to slip with the spotted owl, so he’d auctioned off his machinery. He tried contracting out of his pick-up, his cab a kind of office, a desk job on wheels. But there were fewer contracts, more bidders. Somebody had to go under. Tom went—he and about half the town. They blamed the spotted owl, the Wild Rivers Act, the Sierra Club, and EarthFirst!, not to mention the marbled murrelet and anybody from Seattle. Tom seethed. He increased his communal drinking. Then he took work felling trees for hire. That meant free time in which to grouse and attend seditious meetings. People pushed him to the forefront of the movement because they thought he was less stupid than they were and he ended up in DC finally with five other timber-politics honchos on behalf of the Forest Action Committee. But they were Indians visiting the Great White Chief. The reservation was going to get smaller. Tom went home a treaty Indian. It was in this period of helplessness that he and his son dropped trees together and Tom Junior’s neck got broken.

  Tom slept and when he woke it was ten and he felt afflicted by his detachment from life, by a headache and aching hip joints. His years in the woods had turned him to wire, his tendons and ligaments weren’t spruce anymore, and the truth was he felt ginger a lot, like somebody about to fracture. Was that aging or overwork? A theory he had was that less was better, you could wear yourself out with exercise or labor, each heart having only so many beats, each joint only so many articulations, use it or lose it, maybe that was wrong, maybe if you used it you just used it up, that made more sense—decay. A lot of these lame weary gimps around town were wounded veterans of the timber wars, guys with tight shoulders, lumbar complaints, calcified knees, dead toes. Guys at MarketTime with a six-pack of Bud, a loaf of bread, a tall can of chili, a bag of M&Ms and the newspaper. Tom watched them with morbid reluctance, recalling how it had been for his father, who toward the end couldn’t turn in bed or find a posture to sleep in. He’d sat on the toilet to piss in the wee hours and had begged for cortisone. Tom remembered him bitching and moaning with glum humor and sour resignation: Nothing works, not even my pecker, I can’t even bend down to touch my toes, the o
nly thing left’s a good shit now and then, I ought to be put out to pasture I guess, I’m used up, leftover kibble. I’ll tell you, Tom, whatever I eat, it gives me gas like no tomorrow, I’m a god damn wind machine these days, your mom’s got me taking something called Beano but you know what? It just makes things worse. You wouldn’t want to ride with me no more without the windows open.

  Now Tom wished he’d encamped with a dictionary. He needed one for his paralysis research, which he did with the nine-dollar reading glasses he’d bought off a revolving display rack. Impenetrably distant science writing, but the point was that when the spinal cord went it couldn’t be healed, you didn’t need a dictionary to get that right, for nine dollars Tom had that sussed. He knew the question, but not the answer. Was there a greater helplessness anywhere in the world? Like watching your child stabbed to death while you’re bound to a post and gagged. Like watching your child flail in a lake through a telescope on a mountaintop. Except that in a stabbing or drowning a finite if horrible end is achieved. To get Tom Junior into his underpants you had to roll him around on the bed, treat him like the fetus of a whale or a blob of protoplasm. You had to splint him every night, arms and legs, a trussed human pig, or he’d permanently curl like a slug. You had to floss his teeth and shave him. You had to clean his ass with a rag, swab his ears, sponge his testicles. You had to listen to his mechanical breathing—the ventilator’s endless hiss and squeak—and empty his stinking piss bag. In short, you had to devote your life to his until your own was obliterated, until it vanished.

  But Tom’s had already vanished. Tom was already dead. That was why he went to mass each Sunday, watching the back of his wife’s head and hoping his daughter would turn around, catch his eye, acknowledge him, maybe smile. But what did she have to smile over? Those days were behind her now. Since Junior’s accident she’d become a teenager; she’d been suspended from school that fall for smoking dope with an older girl, driving aimlessly, listening to music, then pulling into the parking lot where the teacher on lunch duty smelled dope on her breath as soon as she stepped from the car. Colleen was apathetic about this trouble and passed her suspension in front of the computer with headphones on, snapping gum. Her face wasn’t the same as before, was full of truths life ought to reserve for older people closer to death—there was no God or, if there was, He didn’t feel love or pity. He didn’t feel human pain. He was too far beyond interpreting—so far beyond He didn’t exist or had no shape, like water. Tom half concurred with his daughter on these things but tried not to think about them. Lolling aimlessly in his motel cabin, he tried to turn off his brain. The thing of it was, not thinking was as hard as thinking, maybe even harder. After a while, thoughts crept in. The brain did not much care for lulls. Once it had slept it was ready with a vengeance for constant cogitation. Tom washed his face, laced up his boots, went out and lit a cigarette. He had fought with going to the Big Bottom long enough and now it was time to go.

  Every cabin was taken tonight. The lights were on in most of them. It was raining with a genuine fury, as though the sky had been torn open by a God bent on angry floods. It was raining as if to beat the earth into a wet submission. You couldn’t hear a truck on the highway.

  When Tom drove past the motel office he peered beyond the sweep of his wipers and through the picture window there, hoping to glimpse Jabari. He wanted merely to see a female, for whatever that might be worth. But behind the desk, the television was on and Pin was watching with his head on the counter, his fingers limp above his greasy head—small, caramel-colored fingers. It was the fingers that bothered Tom the most—something like that could get to him. He was weak and tender underneath. It’s all too sad, he thought, and drove off. Even just ordinary sadness.

  The Big Bottom was crowded but not lively. Despite the impoverished tenor of the times, drinking establishments still flourished in North Fork as though it were a frontier boom town. The Vagabond, the Big Bottom, HK’s, and TJ’s were filled with dipsomaniacs. Almost every patron’s life was complicated by debt, by decisions devoid of the most basic logic, and by a generalized confusion. Somebody would lose half their teeth, a couple of fingers, a spouse and a truck in seven days’ time. Somebody else would shoot a horse in a field, drive a borrowed car into a ditch, stumble drunkenly into ferns and sleep, bleeding, until 2 p.m. It was inexplicable by the more reasonable standards of the American upper middle class—people who folded their underwear at night and watched their mutual funds in on-line portfolios—but there it was, another slant on things without roots in better judgment. How to explain two unemployed loggers who smashed in the door of HK’s one dawn, then sat at the bar drinking shot glasses of Jack Daniel’s until the sheriff finally loomed over them? We needed a place to sleep was not a viable explanation. Or the logger who heard at the Vagabond one night that laughing gas was an aphrodisiac and so broke into North Fork Dental, sprawled in the chair with his pants at his ankles, twisted a valve, pulled on a mask, groped himself, and died? Or that already on probation and in disobedience of a restraining order by virtue of being in the tavern at all, an ex-con left TJ’s at 2 a.m., crept into a van, hot-wired it—melting a nest of wires beneath the dash—then put the van in first gear, not reverse, and drove through TJ’s rear wall? There was no explaining these things. It was all one tale, like low-rent soap opera. The town was an extended family teeming with dark associations. Stories of loss were loved in North Fork: episodes of inexplicable behavior exhibiting a feckless and reckless bravado; head-shaking morality tales from a twisted universe. They mostly corroborated what North Fork knew: that an orderly life was unnatural, lived against the odds. Things happened because of the Sierra Club, the ACLU, and Jane Fonda. CHARLTON HESTON IS MY PRESIDENT a ubiquitous bumper sticker read. There was another that said KILL DOLPHINS. No one knew why all this was so and you couldn’t really blame the rain for it because rain is as much a cathartic precipitation as a purveyor of ridiculous sorrows. Monstrous, dark and claustrophobic woods could not be imputed either. A dark rathole, wrote one explorer. A weight upon my sensibilities, added a nineteenth-century reporter. They brought their unhappiness with them to the woods. A billion places are ripe for discontent. You can’t blame trees for your soul’s condition. Was it perhaps the absence of light, then, a condition medically named?

  At the Big Bottom Tom Cross sat by himself and stared at a football game. It was Saturday night and raining so hard that the Big Bottom’s windows were translucently smeared and beyond them in the parking lot the rain was like an electric field illuminating the windshields of trucks and sparking off the ground. Rain rumbled outside, a dissonant, percussive chant. The out-of-work loggers sat at lone tables or in small clutches with pitchers in front of them, blandly cursing at the television. There was little enthusiasm or animation. No music played. Serious drunks in this atmosphere simply became more sullen. Someone shouted a football comment—These guys better get a nigger running back like all the good teams got these days—and this initiated a sporadic dialogue, more random gridiron commentary. Third and long’s starting to make me sick. Whatever happened to the forward pass? That guy’s worse than the Boz ever was. Maybe the Seahawks should bring back the Boz. Where’s the Boz when you need him anyway? He’s smeared to the bottom of Bo Jackson’s shoe. He’s Hollywood. He tried to be Arnold. If the Boz had been a big fast nigger maybe the Hawks coulda been in the Super Bowl. Niggers can’t throw, someone said.

  A row of women hunched over the bar, talking in furtive undertones. They’d arranged themselves in an elaborate betting pool that involved guessing the score of the game not only at the end of each quarter but also at the two-minute warnings. The bartender had strictly attached herself to them—a comforting klatch of old crones, she thought—and made only obligatory forays to serve the men at their tables. She stood posted by the cash register, smoking with obvious craving. What about this girl seen the Virgin Mary? one of the crones ventured. Or suppose to seen the Virgin Mary I don’t know which it is.

 
I heard she seen that little girl’s ghost. That one was lost—you know.

  That one who works at the school cleaning up.

  Jim Briggs. His daughter.

  I heard she seen the Virgin too. It’s Jim Bridges. Bridges.

  I heard she seen them both is what I heard. From somebody who went up there, went with her up into the woods.

  Who went?

  Pat Mendencamp.

  Going into the woods like that? No thanks they can have it.

  A group of people went up there.

  Well they can all have it, far as I’m concerned. I’m not going out into the woods like that to be abducted by a UFO.

  Is that what you think?

  Who knows? It maybe could be. That’s how these things get started, don’t they? Someone thinks it’s one thing or another and it turns out to be something else. There’s a lot of stupid people’ll fall into anything and they’re the ones end up in spaceships.

  Maybe it’s the devil, the bartender said. Doing his dirty work.

  For the ten millionth time in her professional life, she scanned the tables of men. What did they want? What did they need? Where were they in their drinking? She went to pick up their empty glasses and to find out what came next. The devil she meant was just a notion—still there was clearly bad shit in the world, and it had to come from somewhere. Hey, she said to two pool players. You heard about this girl at the campground seen the Virgin Mary?

  Bloody Mary, one of them said. She seen the Bloody Mary.

  She didn’t see jack.

  Maybe they should make her coach of the Hawks.