“Who are these men?” he asked Crispo. “Why are they kept apart from the others?”
“These are the men who were caught trying to return to Lombardy, Your Grace—the masons who had been working on the cathedral.”
Father Bryce could remember now the Abbot informing him of the attempted defection of a number of the impressed laborers working under the master mason Bonamico. He had told the Abbot to deal with the men’s punishment as best he saw fit, his standard evasion when asked to exercise his authority in matters beyond his ken.
“God forgive me,” Father Bryce murmured, turning to leave the cell.
A voice from the darkest recess of the cell responded: “God, did you say? God?”
The question filled Father Bryce with panicky fear, for the unseen speaker had addressed him neither in Latin nor in the language of Languedoc, but in English.
“Do you think God hears anything that is said in these tombs? Do you think he forgives anything that is done here?”
“Be quiet, Bonamico,” Crispo commanded, “or you’ll get twice your ration of the whip when the Bishop leaves.” The torturer turned to Father Bryce. “The man is a lunatic, Your Grace. Sometimes he jabbers his nonsense to himself for hours at a time. No one can understand a word of it. I thought at first it was the language of the heretics. Some of them come from countries far to the east. But if it is, none of his fellows understand him any better than our interrogators.”
“Let me look at him,” said Father Bryce.
Crispo gestured to one of the torchbearers, who picked his way among the prisoners as they hastened to draw up their knees to make a path for him. At the far wall of the cell, he held his torch close to the face of a man who had struggled to his feet. The man was a foot taller than his jailer, and not yet so debilitated as his fellow prisoners, though his body, like theirs, bore the marks of the whip.
“Who are you?” the man asked, trying to peer past the flickering of the torch that was held so close to his face as almost to singe his ragged beard. The face was familiar to Father Bryce, though not in the intimate way the other prisoners’ faces had seemed familiar.
“Do I know you?” the man said, blinking against the torch’s unaccustomed light. “You spoke in English. I heard you say, ‘God forgive me.’ No one speaks English here. The language doesn’t even exist. Even in England they speak some dialect of French, or else Anglo-Saxon. Who are you? And what the fuck is happening here?”
Father Bryce realized who the man must be. He had seen his face, albeit an older version of the face that he saw now, on the jacket of his book. “You’re Boscage,” he said in English. “You’re Adolf Boscage.”
Tears filled the man’s eyes. “I am,” he said. “Oh my God, it’s over. You have come to take me away from here, haven’t you? I knew it must end some time or other, I knew this could not go on.”
Father Bryce turned to Crispo. “I can understand a little of what he says. He speaks in one of the dialects of the Goths. Could you take me to a room where I can examine him privately?”
“Your Grace, the Legate has left firm instructions concerning these men. I am already at fault in having allowed anyone within this cell.”
“The Legate need not know,” said Father Bryce in a tone of cold authority. He added, more warmly, “And I shall make it worth your while.”
Crispo bowed his head with sly submissiveness. “As Your Grace requires.”
“And let it be somewhere I can breathe the air.”
“Then, in the chief interrogation chamber, Your Grace, on the level above this. The air is much better there.”
“Very good.”
Father Bryce followed Crispo and one of the torchbearers up a winding flight of steps to another stony corridor. The walls here were of cut stone, not mortared rubble, and the stink of the prison was masked by the smell of burning charcoal. They entered a room that was of the approximate dimensions of Father Bryce’s office at St. Bernardine’s rectory. There was even a rough trestle with a chair beside it positioned where Father Bryce’s desk would be. He seated himself in the chair, and without his asking for it to be done, the prisoner was spread-eagled upon the trestle and secured by his wrists and ankles to bolts fixed to the wood. It was barbaric, yet oddly reassuring. Father Bryce had feared being left alone with the man. Now he need have no fear.
“Leave us now,” Father Bryce commanded.
Crispo made no objection. He gave a word to the torchbearer, who placed the torch in a sconce on the wall and then followed him from the room.
“Who are you?” Boscage whispered. “Are you one of them?”
Father Bryce smiled despite himself. “I seem to be, don’t I? I seem to have no choice. And you? Are you Adolf Boscage? How is that possible?”
“You’re asking me? Jesus, this only gets crazier.”
“I think you should answer my questions,” said Father Bryce. “I think that’s where to begin. What did you mean—‘one of them’?”
“Aliens? Devils? I don’t know. Suddenly I’m back in the fucking Middle Ages. Suddenly people are calling me Bonamico, and I’m supposed to know how to build a fucking cathedral. There are these men inside of treadmills way up in the rafters, like squirrels in a fucking squirrel cage, lifting up these humongous blocks of stone, and I’m supposed to be telling them what to do. And meanwhile there are these processions on the streets taking men and women and even goddamned corpses to be burned because they’re heretics. Albigensians! And now they’re telling me I’m one of these Albigensians myself.”
“Let’s begin again,” said Father Bryce calmly. “How did you come here?”
“How did I come here? On a boat, across the ocean. How did you come here?”
“Never mind about me. I want to know about you. You’re the writer Adolf Boscage. You admit that?”
“What’s to admit? Yes, that’s who I am. But if you know that, you know more than I do. Jesus, can’t you loosen these ropes? This isn’t exactly a natural way to have a conversation.”
Father Bryce smiled. He was actually beginning to enjoy the situation. “No, I’ll have to agree with you there. It’s an unusual way to meet anyone for the first time. Still, here we are. We have our separate roles to play. I must say I don’t envy yours, but I’m not about to put mine at risk. If you’re cooperative, I may try to help you. If you’re not…”
“Then what? You’ll burn me at the fucking stake?”
“Have you made other plans?”
“You are one of them.”
“One of whom, Mr. Boscage? You still haven’t explained that.”
“One of the people who want to burn me at the stake! That’s all I know about it! What do I know about being an Albigensian? Am I a heretic? Anyone from the twentieth century would be a heretic if they were brought back here. You tell them the world is round, and you’re a fucking heretic! Some of those poor fucks in the cell with me, they call themselves Albigensians, and they say the Pope is the Antichrist and all the priests are serving Satan, and at this point I am not about to contradict them. Except maybe I do know a little more than they do, or than you do. Or you wouldn’t be asking me what I know, would you? Jesus, I wish I had a cigarette.”
“It’s a vile habit.”
“You think so? I’ll tell you a joke. A young priest gets caught by his pastor having sex with a nun in the confessional, and the pastor tells him, ‘It’s okay this time, but don’t get in the habit.’”
Father Bryce smiled. “That’s a very old joke.”
“I’ll tell you another. A nun gets on a bus. It’s heading out into the burbs, and at a certain point she’s the only passenger still on the bus. She asks the driver, is he married? He says no. Got any children? He says no. So she propositions him. She says she’s never had sex, and seeing how he’s not otherwise committed, would he do her the favor? He says sure. She says, that’s wonderful, but please, for obvious reasons, do it from behind. So he says fine, and pulls the bus over and he fucks her in the b
utt. When he’s done, the bus driver turns to the nun and says, ‘I’ve got something I have to confess. I am married. And I’ve got three kids.’ The nun smiles, and she tells him, ‘That makes us square. I’m not a nun. My name is Chuck, and I’m on my way to a masquerade.’”
Father Bryce had not heard the joke before, but he did not smile. “Why do you suppose that I’m gay?” he asked.
“Why do I suppose… It’s just a joke, for Christ’s sake! I don’t suppose anything.”
“But why that joke? Do you already know something about me?”
“I was trying to break the ice, that’s all. You said something about cigarettes are a bad habit. Habit, that was the word. So I told a joke, to break the ice. You want to break down barriers, you tell jokes. Right? That’s all it was.”
“You know something I don’t. You know why we’re here. One of your people, the Receptivists, is responsible for my being here. How it was done, I don’t know.”
“One of my people?”
“Your cult.”
“I’m not a fucking heretic! I don’t know anything about the goddamn Albigensians. As far as I’m concerned, they’re ancient history. All I am is a fucking science fiction writer who wrote a book about fucking UFOs, and you want to know the truth? Okay, it was all bullshit. Does that answer your questions? I made it up, I have a good imagination. And until I went to the goddamn UFO convention in Rodez, that’s the whole story. Drugs, maybe. I took drugs, I had some fantasies. It’s how I make my goddamn living. There’s men with dogs’ heads, and they’re checking out my private parts on a flying saucer. It’s a fantasy, okay? So, for years I busted my balls writing novels. But then I thought, hey, people want to believe this shit. Don’t write novels. Write your goddamn memoirs. Tell people how you were abducted by aliens. Make it real. That was the story of my life. Till now. Till I went to Montpellier-le-Vieux and got zapped into this nightmare.” There were tears in the man’s eyes. “You’ve got to believe me,” Boscage insisted.
Father Bryce took a deep breath. “I do,” he said. “Unfortunately, I do.”
24
“This is so nice of you,” Margaret declared to the fat middle-aged man who was her son. “Peter,” she added emphatically, by way of indicating this was one of her good days, when she knew who he was. “This is a real treat. Such weather! What is so rare as a day in June? Someone wrote that, in a poem. Do you have any idea who?”
“Are we playing Jeopardy, Mother?” the fat man said, sidestepping her question.
“It was James Russell Lowell. If you had been on Jeopardy, you’d have lost. It’s from ‘The Vision of Sir Launfal’:
And what is so rare as a day in June?
Then, if ever, come perfect days;
Then Heaven tries earth if it be in tune,
And over it softly her warm ear lays.
I used to make all my fourth and fifth graders memorize that. Watch out for the beer truck!” She pressed her foot against an imaginary brake pedal.
“I see the beer truck, Mother. And it sees us.” Then, after he’d pulled out into the passing lane, he said, “But I don’t see, ‘Over it softly her warm ear lays.’ What does it mean?”
“You’re just like them. There’d always be someone in the class who’d ask a question like that. Why does it have to mean anything? It’s poetry, so it can be a little mysterious. ‘Over it softly her warm ear lays.’ It’s lovely. You are driving too fast, Peter.”
“We’re already running late, Mother.”
“And I’ve apologized for that. I couldn’t find my white shoes. If we’re a little late, we may miss some of the sermon, but if we’re there for the consecration, that’s what counts.”
Peter pulled back into the slow lane, and Margaret settled into her seat with the contentment, which had become so rare in her life, of having someone do what she’d told him to. The green grass whizzed by on either side of the thruway, and occasionally they drove under an overpass or a pedestrian bridge. Signs announced exits. It seemed one might drive forever without encountering any kind of blemish, nothing but the smooth concrete and the endless valley of neatly mowed grass enclosing it on either side. In some ways the world did improve, and this was one of them.
They exited into Willowville, and drove only a short distance on real streets with houses, and then they pulled into the parking lot of St. Bernardine’s Church, which seemed almost as spacious—and full of cars—as a supermarket parking lot. She waited sedately for Peter to get out of the car and walk around and open her door and help her out. Except for its sheer bulk, the church was not that impressive from the outside. Not even particularly churchlike, except for one small white marble statue of a monk at the edge of the parking lot.
But inside, oh my! It was like a continuation of their drive on the thruway, bright and plain and simple, like heaven’s own kitchen. “It’s lovely,” she whispered to Peter, who shushed her. They’d entered at the side of the church, so they were already close to the pulpit, where a woman in ordinary street clothes was reading aloud from a huge book supported on its own pedestal. Margaret disapproved of women butting in on the Mass, but she’d seen enough of it to not be shocked. Peter tried to lead her toward the pews at the rear of the church, but she insisted on going to the front, where she could hear what was being said. If people wanted to stare, let them! She’d stare right back. After a certain age, one had special privileges, and one of them was the right to pretend to be invisible and inaudible in public places. It was your revenge for all the years that other people had pretended the same thing about you.
The woman finished reading and stepped down from the pulpit, and a prune-faced old layman took her place. He put on a pair of bifocal glasses and began to read, in a raspy voice, from the Gospel according to Saint Mark. It was the story of the man possessed by devils, whom Jesus meets and exorcises, at which point the devils enter into a herd of swine, and all the swine—two thousand of them, according to Saint Mark—run down the side of a mountain and jump into the sea and are drowned. Margaret had always thought this one of the more unsavory stories in the New Testament. Why did Jesus have to destroy so many pigs in order to help the man? Couldn’t he have just sent the devils back to hell, where they belonged? It seemed almost like an act of vandalism, not to mention cruelty to animals. Then, when the man who’d been exorcised had asked Jesus if maybe he couldn’t travel around with him, like one of his disciples, the answer is No, go home, get lost.
God certainly works in mysterious ways sometimes, but the old fellow reading the Gospel didn’t appear to have any misgivings about the story. He read it with a kind of gloating satisfaction, like a newscaster reporting on the total destruction of Saddam Hussein’s army. She was beginning to wish she’d never let Peter talk her into coming here to surprise Patrick.
Then the priest came up to the pulpit to deliver the sermon, and that was the last straw. He was another old codger, like the layman who’d read the gospel. She leaned sideways and whispered into Peter’s ear, “That isn’t Patrick!”
“I can see that, Mother. But please don’t make a fuss. People can hear you.”
“I thought you said Patrick always said the eleven o’clock Mass.”
“Mother. Please.”
Margaret folded her hands in her lap, and looked up at the priest in the pulpit, who was looking down at her with an identical smile of peeved false patience.
When he seemed satisfied that she’d been shushed, he smiled a benign smile and announced, “Today is Father’s Day!” He seemed to be claiming personal responsibility for the fact, as though he were a school principal announcing an unexpected holiday. Then he went on for a while about how wonderful fathers were, and how much we owe them for working hard to support our families, and how if we thought about it, every day ought to be Father’s Day. And it was, in the sense that every day was a gift from our Father in heaven, and we should think about how much we owed Him, and that led around to Saint Joseph, and how the angels had alerted hi
m to Herod’s intention of massacring the innocents, and you could see what would come next—abortion.
Abortion was a new massacre of the innocents, and a sin that everyone shared in, if they didn’t do something to combat it. And that included men as well as women. The protests at the abortion clinics were a step in the right direction, but when you went to those protests, who did you see? Women and children. Perhaps Herod—that is, the government—didn’t take the protests seriously because Catholic men weren’t doing their share. More could be done. The priest did not condone the bombing that had just taken place in Edina, but he could understand the anger and frustration that had prompted it. Violence was seldom the right course to pursue, but there might be other steps that could legitimately be taken. Any men—any fathers—who wanted to become involved in a positive way were advised to attend the next meeting of the Knights of Columbus, next Thursday evening at eight o’clock in the parish hall.
Margaret felt herself becoming unaccountably angry, an anger provoked not so much by what the priest said, most of which she agreed with in theory, as by the man himself. At first, it was more of an irritation, the way sometimes complete strangers can rub you the wrong way—by smoking where they shouldn’t or just by a tone of voice. But soon it went beyond that. Soon she began to be all pins and needles. She had to bite her lip to keep from saying something out loud, though what she’d have said she didn’t know.
She knew who the priest was, up there in the pulpit. Of course, she’d probably seen him other times she’d come here to see Peter’s twin brother, Patrick, who was the pastor of St. Bernardine’s, and she might even have spoken with him one or more of those times and not remembered. But she was certain that that wasn’t the way she knew him. It went back farther. He’d been part of her real life, before she’d gone into the nursing home.
Long before.
THE PRIEST A Gothic Romance Page 20