Death in Cold Type

by C. C. Benison

  “Maybe he never got the chance. Or he changed his mind. It’s not the usual career path these days.”

  “Admittedly.”

  “Then what the hell was he up to? Oh, sorry.”

  Father James smiled broadly. “We’re human. Hell, damn, shit. There, feel better?”

  Leo smiled. “A bit.”

  “Father Abbot can’t hear us. And anyway, he can curse a blue streak when he’s provoked. Atones for it later. As do we all. Of course you won’t print that.”

  Leo lifted his pen guiltily. “Of course not.”

  “What Michael was doing here,” the monk continued, “was seeking God.”

  Oh, Him, Leo wanted to say. He wondered if he had the imagination for this. His own religious education flashed before him like a fifteen-second commercial. His father, nominally Roman Catholic, dying when Leo is seven. His mother, nominally Church of England in the old country, having joined the United Church in Winnipeg, making him go to Sunday school. Leo rebelling at age eleven arguing—typical for a kid his age—that the stories about Christ have about as much substance as Santa Claus and the Easter bunny. Does Mom pack him off to that awful church-basement Sunday school anyway? No, she buys his argument, or at least pretends to, then stops going herself.

  “Seeking God,” Leo echoed flatly.

  “Yes, indeed. That’s what we do here. Seeking God is our business.”

  “You’re sure not what I was expecting.”

  “And what were you expecting?”

  “Oh, someone a little…dour. Pious, perhaps.”

  “You’re accusing me of impiety?”

  “Well…I…” Then he noted Father James’s smile. “No,” he laughed. “But somehow you don’t seem to me to be typical.”

  “Now who among us is typical?”

  “Well, from what I’ve read, the typical Trappist monastery isn’t exactly the United Nations. Most have rural backgrounds, lots still come from Europe like—and I’m guessing here—the fellow who met me at the gatehouse. Most join when they’re quite young, and, if you don’t mind my saying, without a heck of a lot of post-secondary education. It’s not a profile Michael Rossiter fits. And somehow I suspect you don’t either.”

  Father James stroked his chin. “Well, I did come from Europe. That meets one of your criteria.”

  “But—”

  “I was born in Ireland, but my family emigrated to the States after the war, when I was very young, to a place outside Boston. I had the typical Irish Catholic childhood, and my mother would have been thrilled if I’d shown any inclination to the priesthood, but I didn’t. During the Vietnam War I moved up here. I lived in Vancouver and the last thing I did before I came here was complete a master’s degree in psychology at the University of British Columbia.”

  “That seems a big leap.”

  “From Gestalt Prayer to Jesus Prayer in a single bound.”

  “Damascus experience?”

  “Not quite. I exaggerate.”

  “But your Catholic upbringing was the groundwork. It helped.”

  “Didn’t hurt.”

  “Then there are some similarities between you and Michael. He was educated and accomplished. So what would bring two talented modern guys to a place such as this, a small isolated community cut off from the world.”

  “As I said earlier, seeking God.”

  Leo groaned inwardly. “Is it really that simple?”

  Father James nodded and added in an Irish brogue, “Yes, my son, it is that simple.”

  Leo laughed and made a few doodles in his notepad. “Did the two of you discuss his past at all?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can I throw out a few half-baked notions?”

  “I’m all ears.” He smiled. “You have to be when you’re blind.”

  Leo glanced up from his pad. “How about: he was running away from something? Or felt really guilty about something and wanted to atone, big time. Or wanted to feel purposeful rather than purposeless. Or thought the whole bloody world was just too much and wanted some fresh air.”

  “Things I might have said if I’d stayed in psychology,” Father James responded. “Although I would have piled on the jargon, of course.” He paused, closing his eyes and lifting his head to catch on his eyelids the warmth of the sun, which had begun to penetrate deeper into the room. “Look, if you think about it your way, you’ve reduced a life to a series of actions and reactions. I know what lay in Michael’s past. Someone of his age who makes a decision like this has a ‘past.’ I had a ‘past,’ too. But I can assure you he was not running from anything, nor was I. He was coming to something—”

  “But what he was coming to is a kind of circumscribed life, a life of silences and penances and permissions. It’s like stepping from the twentieth century into the twelfth and to me that seems like denial, an avoidance of the world.” He paused. “Sorry. Am I going too far?”

  “Don’t apologize. Michael and I had these very same sorts of talks. There were things he had to wrestle with.”

  “Does this mean you’re giving credence to psychology after all?”

  “Sounds like it, doesn’t it? Look, we do make assessments. There are men who come here who we can tell fairly soon would not be suited to this sort of life.”

  “But was Michael really suited? It’s not just that he had different talents, he was—” Leo wanted to say, a normal person. “—he was fairly social, outgoing. He seemed to like people. He liked women.” He paused. “There’s a child.” He wanted to say children. “Did you know that?”

  “Yes.”

  “And that’s no problem?”

  “No. You see, for a Trappist everything is altered at the gate of enclosure and it’s altered forever. What happened in the past is of little consequence.”

  Maybe here in Trappistville, Leo thought. In the real world, the past had great power to intrude. He tried to imagine Michael Rossiter dressed in the uniform of a monk, waking up long before dawn, working in the fields, spending long hours in prayer or meditation, enduring an austere diet, the silences, the loneliness, the lack of sex.

  “You can leave if you want, right?” Leo put the finishing touches on a World War I bi-plane in his notebook. “The decision to stay isn’t final.”

  “Oh, no. During postulancy, either side may reject the other.”

  “And how long does that last?”

  “Six months.”

  “Do you think he would have made it? Maybe all this was just a romantic impulse on his part.” Although saying that, he thought about Michael relinquishing all that moolah, which seemed pretty damned final.

  Father James gestured toward the room’s interior. “Would you mind getting me a glass of water?”

  “Sure.” Leo swivelled his head around. The room had begun to feel warm. The sun, having travelled farther into the western sky, cast its rays deeper into the room, illuminating a large crucifix and a tapestry rendering of the monastery in a flat Grandma Moses style. At the end of the room, near the door, he saw what he hadn’t noted before, a small counter and set of taps. He rose and located a couple of glasses.

  “Michael was a seeker,” Father James continued as Leo ran the water into the sink to chill it, “and I believe his search was sincere. Yes, I think he would have made it. Yes, he was educated and talented. But sometimes those things we call talents or abilities can be crosses. I think Michael was prevented from coming to Christ by his great possessions.”

  “I don’t think he lived the high life, Father,” Leo said over his shoulder.

  “No, I mean his talents, his abilities, the musical, artistic side. These are great possessions.”

  “But you see these things as a burden. I’d say they made him the human being he was. By choosing to come here, he had to deny all kinds of stuff about himself.”

  “It’s God who chooses.”

  Leo filled the glasses. “And are you sure that God had chosen Michael?”

  “That I can’t say for sure. I’m n
ot party to another man’s relationship to God. You see, that relationship here—one man to God—is primordial. The life here in the monastery is meant to enable a life of prayer and union with God. You make a break when you come here. It has to be God and God alone.”

  What lay unspoken between them like a shadow was Michael’s unexpected death. Taking Father James’s reasoning, Michael had not been chosen for a religious life after all. He had either been called away—and in a violent fashion—by the all-wise God of no-last-name or some great evil had intervened. Neither was an acceptable explanation. Michael’s murder was not an occasion of beneficence or of malice. It had design, but the designer wasn’t supernatural.

  He set the glass of water before Father James in a pool of light cast by the sun. The monk’s hand found the mark readily.

  “I can see shapes if there is sufficient contrast between light and dark,” he said without prompting. “But I’ve learned to depend more on other senses.”

  “This then is relatively recent.”

  “Relatively,” he echoed. The monk’s eyes, with their unresponsive pupils, seemed aimed at the middle of Leo’s head, a vague shape among other varied vague shapes in the room. “It happened a couple of years ago. I had a severe reaction to a wasp sting and the result was damage to the optic nerve.”

  “Yikes.”

  “It’s rare, though not unheard of.”

  “You keep bees here, don’t you? And sell Trappist honey?”

  “We’ve just started honey production again. The brother who had been in charge had been very ill. And I was never involved with the apiary in the past. No, this happened in one of the barns. I disturbed an angry wasp. I never knew I had an allergy. However,” he added without irony, as though the explanation were obvious, “it was God’s will.”

  Leo felt like kicking something. To hell with God’s will. If Father James had gone into that barn a minute earlier or a minute later he might never have encountered the insect. It was no more God’s will that Father James be blinded than it was God’s will that Michael Rossiter be murdered by a blow to the head. Both events hinged on a series of circumstances that could at some point have been altered. God, whoever he was, didn’t live in events such as these. He gave Father James an edited version: “I have trouble finding a divine purpose in tragedy.”

  “Perhaps I’ve phrased it too simply. I don’t believe God’s the author of my disability, but I believe it’s His will that I find meaning within the changes it brought to my life.”

  “But what about Michael’s death, his murder? How can we find meaning in this?”

  “You’re asking me to answer the most troubling question in all the world: reconciling the presence of evil in the world with the nature of God.”

  “Is this a tactful way of avoiding the question?”

  Father James laughed. “Perhaps,” he said. “But I look for meaning within the context of my faith in Jesus Christ. I’m not sure what I can do for you. I’m a seeker, too. My position here doesn’t provide me with all the answers.”

  “But still, you think there might be some meaning in all of this.”

  “I think everything, ultimately, serves God’s purpose.”

  Leo disagreed in spades but decided not to press it. He took a swallow of his neglected water. It was well water, a far cry from the chlorinated stuff that percolated through the city’s arteries. This was how water was supposed to taste—cold and sweet. He put down the glass and looked at Father James, feeling as he did that an unbreachable gulf separated them, which it did, in a way. He decided on a more practical line of questioning.

  “When was the last time you saw Michael?”

  “Late May. He was here for a few days on a retreat.”

  It must have been a week or so after the Victoria Day holiday when he’d first met Stevie. Had Michael already set his mind on this momentous change in his life at that point? Had he been thinking about Our Lady of the Assumption while they stood around his yard and his house eating his food and drinking his liquor? He asked Father James the same questions in abbreviated form.

  “He wrote Father Abbot a letter shortly afterwards asking permission to join our community in August. Normally there is an observership period where someone is integrated into the life of the community for a week to a month before postulancy, but Michael had already shown us he was ready during earlier retreats. We were looking forward to his arrival.”

  “And yet he didn’t arrive in August.”

  Father James swallowed the last of his water. “A letter came shortly after the first one saying he was going to postpone his arrival.”

  “There was no sense, then, that he had changed his mind.”

  “No. He made clear that his decision to join us was firm. He would come in the fall.”

  And then Michael had gone off to Europe.

  Leo tapped his pen against the side of his notebook. “And was that letter the last you heard from him?”

  “No. A letter arrived Friday reconfirming his intention to join us. I gather he had spent longer in Europe than he had intended.”

  Leo thought with rising excitement back to his conversation with Sharon Bean. She had mentioned Michael going off to mail something on the day of his death. He thought, too, of the missing computer disks.

  “Was it typewritten?”

  Father James smiled. “I couldn’t tell you. It was read to me.”

  “Of course. Sorry.”

  “Look, this has been a terrible tragedy. I was wondering if you might like to take a look around. It may help you understand Michael’s decision.”

  Leo didn’t think it would help at all, but what the hell.

  “Sure,” he said, rising from his chair. “Can I give you any help?”

  “When we get outside I’ll take your arm.”

  Later, as he drove back down the gravel road that led to the main highway, reminding himself that he had to make one stop in Charleswood, Leo considered that he might have come a little closer to understanding Michael’s decision to join a religious community. Walking around the monastery grounds had helped. Would he have felt the same if the sky had been dark with rain or the landscape deadened by snow? Probably not. But on a day of high sun, fragile clouds, and air scented with hay and honey, he thought being in nature might be a fair exchange for the sacrifice of career and money and the other givens of modern life. Within this pattern of golden fields, working to the rhythms set by sun and soil, was the life that so many seek—community, good work, peace.

  Or some such bullshit, he mused, composing parts of the story he intended to write when he returned to the city.

  God, Not Mammon

  Murder victim sought monastic life

  It was a terrible irony, he thought, that Michael had been killed just when he had been about to die to the world anyway. Those who gained by his death would have soon gained by his retreat to the monastery. Similarly, anyone who felt loss would have shortly experienced that loss. Except, perhaps, for one person. Did someone have reason to fear Michael’s retreat into silence, someone who knew of his plans?

  33

  Keys

  It was well past noon before Liz crawled from bed. She had slept fitfully, dreaming violent dreams from which she would emerge in a sweat to fight for air, gasping, her mouth parched, her nostrils clogged by the desiccating atmosphere of a room sealed against nature. Something alien about the hardness of the bed, the clatter of carts in the hallway, the pattern of dark and light would alert her muddled brain that she wasn’t in her own home, in her own bed. A sickening spasm of regret would follow. Then she would again sink into troubled sleep.

  At 11:00 she awoke fully for the final time—tired, her head throbbing from hangover, unable to coax sleep’s return. Drapes slung untidily across the ribbon window were poor filter to painful sunlight. To her ragged vision, the orange material seemed to bulge and glow as malevolently as a jack o’lantern while the rest of the room simmered in shadow, the shapes of the fake
wood bureau, desk and table against the opposing wall blending into one horrible chocolate mass.

  She had gone down to the hotel bar late in the evening, seeking an antidote to her restlessness, the long afternoon walk having done nothing to relieve her distress. She had had dinner in her room and then switched on the TV, but Hockey Night in Canada bored her silly, and the alternative programs—idiot American sitcoms—were worse. She eyed the instructions for ordering one of the adult movies through the cable, but watching a bunch of strangers mindlessly rutting held no enchantment. Perhaps with a lover—and a scoop of irony—it might have. But the lover was absent. So was the irony. She had turned back to her novel finally, but she had come to repent her choice. She had thrown Anna Karenina hurriedly into her bag when she left the house Friday evening thinking that a big fat read would be just the escape she needed. Had it been that long since she first read it? How could she have forgotten that it was the story of a woman who abandons her pompous husband for a passionate liaison with another man? Everything that she sought to push from her mind kept crowding back again and again as she turned the pages.

  She had been seated at the bar only a few moments when a man dressed casually in jeans and a striped golf shirt took the adjoining stool. From a glimpse in the mirror behind the array of bottles she judged he was a little younger than she. He appeared to be in his early thirties, handsome enough, with a lean hawkish face, and a sleek hairline receding from a widow’s peak. His intentions couldn’t have been clearer and she found herself appraising the possibilities for diversion. In this particular idiot American sitcom, this was the bar scene where the weekend cowboy tried to pick up the lonely and lovely lady. She was not far wrong, as it turned out. She let him buy her a drink and he told her he was in town at a locksmiths’ convention. He was a locksmith; well, in the security business really, he explained with the kind of false modesty meant to suggest reserves of influence and power. But she preferred the word “locksmith” with its suggestion of medieval craftsmanship. As she continued on to the next vodka she began to find the craft strangely interesting, quizzing him on everything from technological advances to the rising paranoia of homeowners. It was one way of deflecting the conversation from anything too personal and he seemed to enjoy the attention. It was so easy to slip into the reporter thing, to appear interested. She guessed he had a wife who was superbly bored by his line of work. That he had a wife was not in question, although he didn’t say so and she didn’t ask. But the white line on his tanned ring finger couldn’t be disguised.