August 1986
It took me a few frustrating and hungry days, but I finally caught up with this Breece character outside the stationary store.
I was sleeping in the shadows against a telephone pole on the sidewalk opposite the store, having, the day before, decided that I would camp there until I came across him. Hunger, weakness and the ire at the refusal of the old lady behind the counter to give me any information, had driven me to it.
It was a warm, dry very early morning when a beam of light fell across my eyes and woke me. My first thought, of course, was that I was being roused by the police, but the light wasn’t strong enough for that. I put hand up and squinted against the brightness until my eyes adjusted.
The door to the stationary store was wide open. I came to my feet quickly and looked up and down the street, nervous about this oddity at so early an hour of the morning. But the light was like a magnet, and I found myself gliding silently across the street to the muffled voices inside.
I was too late. They were coming back toward the door, forcing me to duck behind a car as the interior light was extinguished and the door closed and relocked.
He stood on the street by himself; his veiled conversation having given me an accent of Harvard or Yale; something Ivy with just enough street patois that it hinted at dereliction and mendacity. A slight breeze carried the bad smell of muddled genius to me; a troubled sour odor of a body abandoned by the mind. He had the familiar smell of the Birch Building.
He was tall and weathered by many a long year, but at the same time graceful in his poise. Like a bedraggled wizard, I thought with some amusement. His hair and his beard were long, gray and styled by the wind. His clothes were a menagerie of layers and fabrics, and I could only guess at how he tolerated them in the heat. The shoes he wore were as leathered as his face, and just as wrinkled, scuffed and worn. But it was his eyes that held me in the shadows.
They were old, and I mean old. But they were radiant too; sparkling in the darkness with a wisdom and despair that were in sharp contradiction to the cataracted film I’d seen over Cleat’s eyes. They scared me, especially when they penetrated the darkness and locked me into place.
“What is this guy, a fucking vampire?” I whispered to myself.
His gaze lingered for a moment, then lifted and lured me into their wake as he turned and strode down the darkened sidewalk.
When I finally moved I stopped and stood where he had stood, looking back at my hiding spot. He couldn’t have seen me, it was too dark. Yet he had. I had felt his eyes on me like a physical touch. He had seen and penetrated my façade in a single glance, confessing all my frailties and weaknesses without amusement, condemnation or pity. He respected the frailty he saw and would change nothing, unlike all the well meaning people before him.
This was my teacher.
I think he knew I was following him. He led me from the stationary store down several narrow streets, through the unlocked tarred-over school yard and finally past the old St. Mary’s rectory.
We were on the edge of town, the moon still strong in the sky, when my steps finally faltered in front of the cemetery gates. Weren’t they still locked at night like they were when I was a kid?
Intrigued and slightly disturbed at his disappearance inside, I pushed myself forward until I realized that they were as derelict and rusted as the bum who had just passed through them. How sad, I thought. Either the diocese was broke or people had simply stopped caring.
I stepped through the broken gates and halted with a shudder. Dark bars of shadow fell from each headstone giving the appearance open graves as far as the eye could see. In the distance Breece was hovering over one of these shadows like a ghoul digging for flesh. I took a deep breath and took one silent step forward, praying that Cleat had not been playing me for a fool and driven me to a person who would help me find my own shadow on this night.
Breece looked up as soon as I moved. It was a long look filled with uncomfortable silence. I heard him mumble something indistinguishable in the distance and then he looked down and returned to whatever he was doing.
I exhaled loudly; releasing the pent up breath I hadn’t realized I was holding, and began walking. Well, at least he knew I was here. I wouldn’t be creeping up on him. But I didn’t go straight to him, my presence had said enough. If he had really seen me in the shadows outside the store, then he knew I was following him and I didn’t want to antagonize him any further until I knew what he was about.
I turned away and began wandering among the stones; his outline always within my peripheral vision. I stopped when I finally realized what I had been desperately trying not to find. Roberts grave. But he wouldn’t be buried here; the church would not have allowed his tarnished remains to taint this sacred soil. I laughed at myself, I was trying not to find what was already not here.
I turned back in the direction I had come from when a desperate whisper floated out across the stones. But it was gone as fast as it had come. I stopped when I heard it a second time and held close to the nearest stone listening in the silence as I watched Breece in the moonlight.
Again it came, a distracted noise of whispering kisses, a slight hesitation and it repeated. I crept toward him and stood in the shadows of a larger than life angel, my heart thumping.
Breece was between two stones on a lamenter’s bench, his attention focused intently on something in his hands. I squinted, trying to push away the darkness, but it was no use, I couldn’t see what he was doing.
He looked up at the moon suddenly and brought up the blunt end of a pencil to his lips. In his other hand I could now see the outline of a sheet of paper.
“Writing?” I asked myself. Here? In the cemetery? In the dark?
This was obviously something private and important, but I gave no thought to that. I went over and sat on nearby headstone and said nothing. I figured with ten years of asylum experience behind me I could probably intuit a sudden burst of animosity and get back to the gates before he even moved.
He glanced over at me, his eyes a dangerous gleam as they drifted, but he said nothing and refused to be drawn from his task. He wiped the back of his hand across his mouth and continued his penance.
Later I would find out that this was exactly what it was: penance. A self imposed ordeal of writing love letters never read, and a slow elongated pawning of remorse to paper. But it seemed to me to be beyond remorse, beyond grief even. The strength it would take to return here mourning night after night seemed a flagellation of the soul; its white smooth skin puckering with each leaden stroke of the pencil.
But the writing was not the end, as each verse was complete he begin a slow and methodical ornamentation of his craft and turn each slip of paper into a rosebud. The bouquet, when finished, he would lay at the base of the stone on front of him only to have it all whisked away by wind or rain or man. But before being whisked away, he would take a lancet out, prick his finger, and top each rose with a drop of his own blood.
“It’s all I deserve,” he said, “less than nothing.” And he walked away.
Over the next five years I would watch him do this over and over again. Sometimes he would sit all night long whispering into the dark, letting it eat away his every written intimacy as he filled paper upon paper with all the sweet incense of light his pencil could muster.
At the stationary store he bought verdant greens, luscious reds, deep crimsons, and violent maroons. The green sheets were seedlings, stems and the vine of the fruit of his daily offerings. When the green sheets were filled he would exchange them for the weeping hues of red, churning his delicate act of bereavement into prose before folding all into paper roses, green stemmed and leaved on a paper so fine that the dew would render it pulp by morning.
Many a night I would watch his hands as he did this. They seemed too rough for this delicate trade, like the pad of a dog’s paw and as flaky as an onion peel. Yet this action, his complete and total capitulation to the power of regret, made me question what
I had really done to enshrine Robert’s memory. Had I done anything but weep? And if my long unfaded agony ceased, what then? What did I have that I could grasp and show the world? What monument had I erected that could proclaim that Robert’s death was not in vain? And Snow, what of him? Or Bruce even? Was there anything even vaguely worthy of such lives?
In the end Breece would tell me that grief was a private thing. After all the public wailing and sadness, you were still left alone with an empty hole in your heart that nothing and no one could ever completely fill, no matter how good their intentions.
*****
On the following night the line of the horizon had grown hard with the coming sun when I realized that he had finished and had turned his eyes on me. He sat with his chin resting in his palm and his elbow cupped in his opposite hand.
“Why does the cur invade the cemetery?” he asked me.
I stared at him blankly.
“Why are you here?”
“I’m here to learn,” I replied.
He studied me for a moment. “You lie,” he responded. “I think you came to remember some lost happiness,” he informed me, refusing to release me from that unrelenting gaze.
His hand came out from under his chin and swept over our surroundings. “Is this what you want for yourself? To live here with me among the dead?”
I glanced out over the empty lanes of St. Mary’s. There was something desperate in that question, something ardent and rough that pushed a vague uneasiness through me. It was as if he had threatened to reveal the shadows that haunted my thoughts; had threatened to pierce my halo of secrets. Could he be such a smooth and intuitive thief?
I stole a glance at him and reaffirmed my first assessment. This was a man that could teach me the cold naked form of anguish and the awkward gait of misery. I could see its brilliance in the silver cloud of suffering that hung around him. I turned to him and nodded. “Yes.”
He sighed. “Well then, welcome to nowhere.”
Chapter Fifteen
June 1989
Over the years Breece had lectured that truth was liquid. That it evaporated in the heat of passion, froze in the cold of fear, and bent itself around virginous, unpurposeful fibs. It could churn and pull you under, drown you in itself, or let you ride upon it like a surf. But truth was always reflective. It showed blackheads and blemishes, fat rolls and sags, scabs and scars. Truth was fearful, angry and dangerous, and that was why so many people did their utmost to avoid it.
He thought this especially true of me.
“Cut the umbilical,” he said after listening to me recount my trip to New Orleans one day.
I left my visual study of the marble slabs of reminiscence that surrounded us and looked at him for explanation.
“You’ve blinded yourself,” he said, his voice flush with conviction. “In your desperation to expose the hidden, you hide the obvious.”
“The umbilical?”
“Yes. Cut it,” he reiterated before he went back to his roses.
There was a long silence between us while he finished the last twists and folds. He nodded his self approval at the morning’s libation and placed the flowers in the stone vases beside Lisa’s headstone.
“Love is a rare thing,” he said as if reminding himself of the fact. He looked at me directly and dropped his voice an octave. “Very rare.”
He continued, holding me with his eyes as he spoke.”You grab at it when it’s offered because you usually only get one chance.”
His words lulled me into a momentary, but reflective silence. “You’re talking about Manuel.”
He nodded. “And, the fact that love has been offered to you more than once.”
There was no need to reply. It was true and we both knew it. But I’d avoided acknowledging that fact simply because I had wanted it so much. Too much to see it or readily accept it at the time.
“Breece?”
He looked up at me, the quiet radiance of passion still in his face from looking at Lisa’s headstone.
“What’s the value of rain?”
He gave me a small moue of consternation and pulled a small lancet from his pocket. Obviously I had asked the wrong question, or maybe it was that I hadn’t advanced as far under his tutelage as he thought I should have. Either way, I instantly realized my mistake. Value was a word without meaning to him, and I should have known that by now.
“Not value,” he said finally, after I had watched him prick his finger and top each rose. “Substance. Meaning,” he said, shaking his blood tipped finger at me. He waved his hand at the brightening sky. “A raindrop is the bitter tear of heaven, Charles. It falls in sorrow at our own dereliction; at our idiocy and selfishness,” he said expansively. “It’s like a star crashing to earth, plowing into broad plank floor of obstinacy. It shows us that through our own fault we are but a bug in the penumbra of true rapture. That’s the significance of rain, Charles.”
I stared at him in silence.
He tilted his head and shot his eyebrows up with a slight smile. “Too deep?”
I nodded. “How about in English?”
He smiled. “We never see what we have until it’s too late, Charles. We spend so much time focusing on the greener grass that we fail to appreciate how much grows in our own garden. We’re too willing to pluck out something as a weed because we’ve grown bored with it, or because we’re unwilling to allow it to fully blossom before we’re trolling around for new seedlings. Then all of a sudden we turn around and see nothing but raw dirt and holes in the ground and we wonder why and how we have come to such a derelict place. Not realizing we did it ourselves. But that doesn’t mean it’s too late to start valuing what you have already, Charles,” he added with a slightly emphatic nod.
“And what is it I have?” I asked him.
He looked at me silently, concern troubling his face. He stood without comment, surveyed the morning’s tribute and motioned me to follow. We went back to town and slipped in the last pew of St. Mary’s Church to watch a child’s baptism from a thick and silent distance.
“Notice that they’re already imbuing that child with lack,” he whispered.
“How so?” I asked. We descendant’s of the southern aristocracy that Charlotte claimed as our roots made me unfamiliar the ceremonies of the Catholic Church. Nor did I understand our presence here and Breece’s interest in the family in front of us.
“The priest poses the question: ‘What does the child want of the Church?’ The response is ‘faith.’ Explain to me how that child was born without faith. How it came from the womb knowing pain and fear but not trust? Why does it not know love instead of the scant charity of its parents?”
He waved his hand at the scene and the church that encompassed it. “It all means nothing,” he murmured in utter sadness. “The sacrifice that was given in love has been obliterated by our desire, by our need for petty chaos and delusion.”
He slipped from the pew suddenly and led me on a chase down Providence Street passed an abandoned factory and over the bridge of the Pinnaug River. As he moved I watched him assess the people we passed, as if he wondered at the depths of their souls. Perhaps he wondered what they did behind the façade they presented to the world, the lies they told, and the iniquities they committed. Maybe it was an impression he wanted of them; his curiosity aroused about their vagrant fates. Or maybe, he was simply marking their vulnerabilities. I never did remember to ask.
We came to a halt in a high walled, dead end alley near the middle of town. The space was littered with the silence of neglect and the burnt hum of a thousand flies whispering about the dark secrets trapped by these walls.
Soot encrusted graying brick lorded over piles of refuse, old needles, used condoms and a ripped yellowed pair of boy’s underwear. There were no windows, just row upon row of precise man made stone looking down upon the itinerant derelicts and hustlers that ventured into this dismal arena.
Breece stood in the midst of this carnage glaring at me. He was ex
pecting something of me, but I didn’t know what. A revelation? An unveiling of the discernment he possessed? Some spontaneous understanding of why he’d brought me here?
“What is this place?” I asked him.
“A small plot in the garden of the very poor,” he replied, pointing at the underwear. “Sanctuary of l’enfants perdus,” he added as if speaking to himself.
In a sudden jolt of movement he grabbed his pencil and a yellow slice of origami paper from his pocket. It was so bright and fresh that it was like sunshine bursting from his clothing in this dark alley. He paused thoughtfully for a moment and began a hasty scribble.
Amazed that he was writing outside of the cemetery, I looked on from his side, stretching my neck to see what he wrote, and to see if he wrote it with as much passion as he did with the verse he left for Lisa.
From childhood’s hour I have not been
As others were- I have not seen
As others saw- I could not bring
My passions from a common spring.
From the same source I have not taken
My sorrow; I could not awaken my
Heart to joy at the same tone;
All that I lov’d, I lov’d alone.
He pursed his lips a moment, as I recognized Poe’s work, then in another burst of motion, he folded a paper daisy in his hands and let it flutter to the ground. It was the only unavoidable point of light in this whole visage of doom.
Without a word he took my arm and led me out of the alley. Across the street a small cove of bushes marked the end of a park. He led me there and pointed back at the alley with a hushed reverence, settling in for an extended wait as I stood and looked at him.
I wanted to ask what we were waiting for, but Breece did nothing without a purpose, so I sat beside him and waited. A little while later, the blemished truth of the alley’s purpose became clear.
He was thin and willowy, young; the fragile line of his jaw nodding furtively to the older man beside him. I had seen the curve of that slender face, the trail of those delicate hands in a thousand faces at Sanctuary and immediately got up to stop it.
The Value Of Rain Page 12