Brother Carnival

by Dennis Must

  With the abbot positioned outside their cubicles to accompany them in the morning prayer, the monks, stripped to the waist, would repeatedly lash the knotted ropes, the disciplines, across their backs until recitation ceased, followed by the communal bath at 3:45 a.m. The showers in the wintertime were left half-running to prevent the water from freezing. Then back into their cowls and on to matins.

  Adjacent to the barn domicile sat several outside toilet sheds.

  While Arthur was off praying, I sat alone with Brother Paul in the guesthouse living room. Responding to his earlier caveat, I asked, “Brother, why should you have to suffer such vindictiveness in a monastery, of all places? Do God’s will beyond these gates.”

  Brother Paul clutched his hands together and began stammering. His azure eyes appeared chinked with bright amber.

  “I would be frightened to death out there,” he replied.

  And said no more.

  I visited the monastery library, a conference hall off their sanctuary with very high ceilings and hundreds of books lining each of the four walls, towering nearly ten feet or so on sagging pine shelves. The volumes weren’t Dewey-decimalized or, for that matter, organized at all. An exegesis text on the book of Luke would be shelved next to the Institutes of Calvin. Or The Jews from Cyrus to Herod would be resting alongside Karl Barth’s Christ and Adam. Greek, Latin, and a few Hebraic texts—all mingled together. In the empty room’s center sat several tables pushed together with metal chairs haphazardly placed around them. The monks retired at 7:00 p.m. Instructions and the reading of religious texts occurred from 9:30 in the morning until 11:45, prior to lunch. The remainder of the afternoon, physical labor or choir duties followed. When I asked Brother Paul how learned most of these monks actually were, he smiled.

  He had spent untold hours studying alone in this library and countless others more catholic. In vain I sought works of fiction, believing I might at least find a copy of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man among these shelves. I did come across a few old parochial-school readers and a copy of Gray’s Anatomy.

  Prior to departing on Sunday at noon, Arthur introduced me to the abbot during the official visiting hour. I was inclined to share with him that my uncle Raymond was a monsignor and director of the diocese’s Society for the Propagation of the Faith, but I thought better of it. The three of us wandered down to the outbuilding where the monks slept. As we entered their quarters and walked past the open stalls, the abbot hesitated in front of one, turned, and gestured into its interior. The stall was like all the others, just as I have described: a straw mat on boards, a chair, a cowl suspended from a hook . . . and I haven’t mentioned a container of holy water (now frozen) roughly nailed to the partition. But lined against the shared partition wall and piled on crude wooden crates stood a dozen or more plaster of Paris figures painted in garish colors—all saints—several sparkling with fake gold dust.

  The abbot looked vaguely annoyed . . . his cross to bear, I presume. The stall belonged to Brother Stanislaus, an octogenarian from Bavaria, barely articulate in our language and virtually senile.

  “Our exception to the Order,” he volunteered.

  Past the dribbling showers in the converted milk house and out again onto the barren, snow-covered field, he inquired if I would like to see the library.

  “No, Father,” I answered.

  I hoped I might catch the old monk returning from wherever he had gone. In a broken tongue, perhaps he would identify each of his plaster of Paris figures for me. How apt, I thought, Brother Stanislaus alone here in a snow-covered Virginia cornfield among his sole possessions, Kewpie-doll saints and a sackcloth habit, the weight guesser of this hallowed carnival.

  When I bid good-bye to Brother Paul, I looked deep into his eyes, then at the stump he’d begun to mold his hands into, and essayed to speak the tongue of Trappist monks—

  The tongue of silence.

  Paul, don’t let the pricks destroy you . . . Life might have been so much better with you on the outside.

  Except we knew it was just another lie. Besides, he’d placed a pound of butter in my jacket pocket while Arthur, buried deep in thought, shadowed him up toward the gate and our Ford.

  Elizabeth Andrews’s alert had caused me to recall one of his earliest stories in which we’re told of a winter retreat that he and his friend Andrew had made. But rereading it, I was struck by the absence of any compelling mystery the monks engendered in the writer. What did stand out was his heartfelt admiration for Brother Paul, the guest master, and his fascination with the Brother Stanislaus persona. The estranged old monk from Bavaria ignited Westley’s imagination, even if the monastic community itself didn’t.

  “The weight guesser of this hallowed carnival.”

  Within that character’s clouded mind and his gilded plaster of Paris dolls lay the ineluctable mystery of God, it seemed.

  And with a pound of butter in his coat pocket, my brother exited the monastery’s gate. I read Brother Paul’s gesture as Westley’s underscoring the sublime fatuity of his three-day encounter.

  Westley was actively forcing me to read the ambiguities. In seeking him out, I was unavoidably becoming a person I had never been.

  If I had read Elizabeth’s postcard as a direct, unequivocal clue as to where his persona had taken refuge, “Oh, please,” he might have ragged. “Concentrate.”

  As if those acid-green lights in jelly jars hadn’t presaged something more ominous.

  Or the sound of the window harp.

  I hoped I might catch the old monk returning from wherever he had gone. In a broken tongue, perhaps he would identify each of his plaster of Paris figures for me. How apt, I thought, Brother Stanislaus alone here in a snow-covered Virginia cornfield among his sole possessions, Kewpie-doll saints and a sackcloth habit, the weight guesser of this hallowed carnival.

  The image of Brother Stanislaus and his gussied-up saints had pierced the stifling uniformity of the order for Westley. Yet casting him as the “weight guesser of this hallowed carnival” stymied me.

  What was in his mind?

  Among the stories was one, “To Swallow His Heart,” depicting the narrator’s Uncle Felix, who had left town as a young man to join the circus, and who had obviously left a strong impression on the young author’s psyche.

  It portended that I would not happen upon Westley at the Berryville monastery or any other for that matter.

  We would meet at the carnival.

  TO SWALLOW HIS HEART (excerpt)

  Earlier at the carnival’s gate, he’d reached into his pants pocket, pulling out a five-spot. “Here. You’re on your own. Get an education, Westley.” I didn’t understand. “That woman with the snake standing over there in front of the tent? She or one of her con-artist friends will slip that fiver right out of your hand without you ever knowing. Make it last, boy. The night’ll be sweeter. I’ll meet you back here in a couple hours. I just might not recognize you.”

  “Why?”

  “You might be turned into a man.”

  We met outside the carnival grounds two hours later.

  “So what did you do, son?” He ground the car’s accelerator.

  “Oh, just wandered around.”

  “Did you check out the snake lady’s tent?” He knew I hadn’t.

  Disgruntled, he inquired if I had seen my uncle among the carnies. “He was probably in one of those damn tents.” Instead of heading home, he steered our old Dodge toward the center of town.

  “Which uncle?”

  “My brother Felix. He used to work these shows, you know?”

  Pap always preached that you picked your friends. “God gives you your relatives.” They could’ve all been dead as far as he was concerned.

  “I heard his voice coming from one of those barkers over at a carnival in Sharon once. The ingrate hiding under a clown face, cob-nosed with huge ears, wearin’ a donkey’s erection and waving his arms like a windmill, coaxing all the men to go inside his tent to see the ‘
Niagara Falls Girl.’”

  “You haven’t ever told me none of this, Pap.”

  “You ain’t ever asked.” His pink-veined eyes sharply met mine.

  Our car was now swerving up Mill Street. His thoughts were ricocheting. Father rolled his window down and gulped the night air. “Where’n the hell are we headed anyway, boy?” he cried.

  “Pap, did you speak to Uncle Felix that night in Sharon?”

  “Christ, you know your brother in any company no matter how gussied up he is. But he pretended he didn’t recognize me.”

  “Why wouldn’t he speak with you?”

  “Because he abandoned his wife and kids back here in Hebron without a goddamn dime between them. That’s why!”

  He lay on the horn for a few seconds. Wasn’t nobody around.

  “Pap, I never knew any of this.”

  “Never a damn word. Went off and became a lion tamer. Stuck his head inside the critter’s mouth, if you can believe that.”

  At the post office we stopped short for a red light.

  “A lion tamer?”

  “Uh-huh. Eva, my sister, strips for the Elks ’n’ your Uncle Stephen’s a monsignor in the Holy Roman Catholic Church too—if you can make any sense of that!” As if he’d let off a firecracker inside the Dodge. “Yeah, go on and say it. ‘Holy shit, Pap!’”

  “Why haven’t you ever told Jeremiah and me?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “Did Uncle Felix ever go up on a trapeze?”

  “If he smelled pussy he might’ve.” We’d begun to slow down. “I’m hungry. How ’bout you, boy?” He pulled our car up in front of Coney Island, a chili dog establishment. I ordered two with everything and a buttermilk; he ordered his dogs and a bottle of Fort Pitt.

  “You knew your grandfather Jake Muller built the Washington Street and Jefferson Avenue bridges right here in the center of town?”

  “I knew that.”

  “But a mean son of a bitch, huh?” Grabbing a dog, he swung himself into the booth. “When he drank, he liked to punish Felix, stringin’ him up by his thumbs on leather loops screwed in the doorway between our Jefferson Avenue flat’s kitchen and living room—then whippin’ the piss out of him with a cat-o’-nine-tails.”

  Pap slapped his calloused hand against the leatherette booth.

  “Your uncle always had that beautiful western outfit on, white silk shirt with mother-of-pearl buttons, the kind that go a quarter of the way up your arm,” Pap rhapsodized, “and white twill riding jodhpurs, and those shellacked black hand-tooled boots with a nosebleed-red cardinal embossed right into each of their sides . . . little mustard-seed eyes cut into their heads. Even had one tattooed onto his back shoulder.”

  He leaned over real close. The onions weren’t masking the whiskey.

  “The old man used to beat him so bad . . . come home late from the saloon every night looking for Felix. The nuns would go down to the bridge work site and snitch to the old man that Felix wasn’t showing up for school.

  “‘Where in the hell’s your brother?’ he’d rage at Stephen and me. We all slept in the same bed, and Felix’d be wedged between the bed and the wall, hiding.

  “‘Joey, where’s your sonofabitchin’ brother?’ I ain’t ever done that to you or Jeremiah—have I?”

  Pap ate his frank in three gulps.

  “I came home from school once and saw Ma huddled over in the corner, crossing herself, worrying the rosary like somebody’d died. In the dark kitchen doorway was your uncle, hanging by his thumbs.

  “‘Ma!’ I yelled. Like she didn’t hear me.

  “‘Don’t touch him,’ she cautioned flatly. ‘Your father put him up. Says he’ll take him down.’

  “‘Joey . . .’ Felix whispered.

  “‘What?’

  “‘Outside on the windowsill. Look.’

  “I saw only the brick of the neighboring tenement an arm’s length away.

  “‘That bird,’ he said. ‘The cardinal . . . see it sittin’ there starin’ in at me? Do ya?’

  “Weren’t nothing there, Westley.

  “‘Grab it for me, Joey. Sneak up ’n’ grab it for me.’ Felix hanging there—laughing. “‘Don’t scare it away. Grab it. I’ll open my mouth real wide—you bring it to my face and I’ll swallow it whole, feathers and all.’”

  “‘Jesus Christ . . . why would you want to do that?’ I asked.

  “Mother was chanting the rosary, and Felix, looking older than Jake, says, Because I want to swallow my heart, that’s fucking why!’”

  Pap looked at me like he wanted to cry.

  “To Swallow His Heart” might well be a companion piece to the “Monks” installment. The narrator is cast into an unfamiliar though captivating environment. From the father’s point of view, upon exiting the carnival’s gate, the son has failed the manhood test. Likewise, when the narrator quits the monastery’s grounds, we can assume he’s disappointed his friend, Arthur, and is not about to become a novice in the Trappist order.

  Sex and celibacy. Yet he opts for neither.

  What jumped out at me were the personas of Felix and Stephen viewed independent of their backstories. It’s as though the narrator is uncertain who he is. Shorn of any real identity, he is attracted to these antithetical ones. It’s not for the accompanying storylines but simply for what they represent: a priest and a clown.

  And the more I pondered this, the even greater significance I attributed to “Going Dark.”

  I was now viewing Westley at the critical moment of being lured by these two irreconcilable identities . . . yet he felt he could not adequately perform either.

  The midway and the church.

  Why couldn’t he embrace both?

  I could now better comprehend the demented old monk and plaster saints metaphor: a multicolored flame leaping off its wick in a votive glass, unique among the plethora of fiery orange ones in the nave; the midway denizen chanting “Kyrie, eleison” while weighing one’s sins for a dime.

  The crux of it all was that my journey was a quest for meaning. My brother was on that very same path.

  And to save ourselves, we had to reconcile.

  I was both elated and diminished by this insight.

  And that evening, awaiting sleep, I saw the jelly jars’ green lights flickering on my ceiling like cicadas in headlights on deathly humid nights.

  So if and when I found Westley, I should not be surprised at his inability to square with me, to confess that his character was an impermanent one. I feared that he was locked into these two identities, performed at separate intervals. As if channeling Felix and Stephen, our paternal uncles.

  While working this through in my head, a disturbing thought suggested itself:

  Was he holding firm to either of these two personas, switching from one to another, to engage, in an all-encompassing and conflicting manner, the identities in stark contrast to each other so as to keep his mind from returning to the bridge?

  The roles his life preservers, so to speak?

  In one he performed the role of God’s shepherd, whereas on the midway or under a tent he cast himself as an entertainer, proficient in make-believe or dupery. Besides, the multifarious pageantry of each persona helped him become larger than life enables us to be.

  And I thought back to “The Window Harp,” where the two brothers, often left alone, occupied themselves for hours on end scripting and performing Punch and Judy–like dramas.

  Had Westley gone back to his childhood to seek refuge?

  And why did this all seem so familiar to me?

  CHAPTER TEN

  FIND HIM BY BECOMING HIM

  What was the evidence that I was on the cusp of meeting my brother?

  Yes, I knew more about him than when I began. It’s also true I sometimes felt we were virtually one. That I was, in fact, Jeremiah, and soon the three of us would be united, with Westley commending me for having so rigorously pursued the quest when often even he might have given up.

  But
truthfully, I was no closer to connecting with him than I had been when we were absolute strangers.

  It was all in my head.

  I’d believed I would encounter geographical evidence in his stories that I could trace. Failing in that effort, I chased the seminary lead, following his various pastoral assignments with what I perceived to be some success. Except I was no closer to physically meeting him than would be a biographer of his long deceased subject.

  In truth, I had been fooling myself.

  Did I require more evidence that the acid-green lights on the bridge had illumined the pathway to this bilious-tasting self-awareness?

  And that evening—concluding that even the initial visit to my father to bid him good-bye had been, at best, a naive one—I was still acting out the child, deceiving myself that it was the honorable gesture a son owed his father.

  “Made in God’s image” had imploded, fallen in upon itself. I was nothing. Nobody. A ready-made self handed to me at birth that I had willed myself to grow into. Then one day it will breathe its final breath in me and I will deflate.

  I lay in bed watching the car lights outside my window circle on my ceiling and thought about feeling my way, hand over hand, on the bridge’s parapet to its center. There would be no phoning my father this time. Enough of that. Let them recall me as they created me. Who was I anyway? My brother’s keeper?

  And that brought a caustic grin to my face.

  How about if this is where we reunite, I thought. At its center. One of us has to go first. Am I braver than you?

  And then I recalled his story. But was it mine? I no longer knew for certain. For I had been at this very place before. I distinctly recall my father saying, “Hold on.”

  “This is an emergency, lady. My number is 7-6208, Sharon exchange. Charge it to me.” I could hear him mutter, “My boy’s in some kind of distress.” She kept repeating, Five cents, please, deposit another five cents. “Christ, can’t you hear me, lady? Santa Muerte, festooned with green lights, is winging my kid across the dark Allegheny—and they’re about to merge with the fucking Ohio! It’ll be in all the papers in the morning if you don’t let us continue this conversation.”