“Swim? Where would you go for a swim?”
“In one of the monastery lakes, where else? Nobody uses the closest one except for frogs and horseflies. You guys went on city water ten years ago.”
“It’ll be freezing.”
“That’s right. But it don’t get any cleaner nor clearer than this time of year.”
“I don’t have a swimming suit.”
Johnny Faye was gathering up his tools. “You aint wore out your birthday suit.”
“I have to get back for Vespers.”
“No, you don’t. It’s Sunday. Vespers is late on Sunday, you got a extra hour. Come on, live dangerous.”
“The last time I lived dangerous I ended up with an envelope full of cash.”
“You still got that money? Lordamercy, I hope you aint lying awake at night over that. It’s honest money, honest come by, which is a lot more’n you can say about most of the money that ends up on the monastery collection plate. Use it to help some poor son of a bitch that’s got hisself in trouble and then don’t give it a second thought. Now get moving. We hit that lake after the sun’s off it, you really will know what’s cold.”
And so they went for the first time to the lake that in those days they called Basil’s, after the farmer who was the last to work with horses in the monastery fields and who had overseen the damming of the little creek to make the lake and who died of a broken heart, or so they said, when the monastery sold its last draft horse and took to using tractors.
Johnny Faye wrapped his tools in plastic and hid them in a crevice under a rock, then picked up his walking stick and poled himself up the creek bank. Flavian struggled behind, slipping and sliding on the slick clay. With his stick Johnny Faye held the vines aside and pulled forth a big bay horse. “Bittersweet. ’Sweet for short. ’Sweet, meet Brother Tom.” Johnny Faye hoisted himself up on ’Sweet and ran his stick through a loop on the saddle. “Here, put your foot in the stirrup. No, not that foot, dummy, the other one.” Johnny Faye reached down and seized his arm. In a moment Flavian went from idle standing to being hauled up like a sack of potatoes—his shoulder would be sore for a week—and then he was astraddle the horse.
Flavian was uncertain what he was supposed to do. He couldn’t imagine staying on a horse without being in the saddle—for that matter, he couldn’t imagine staying on a horse while sitting in the saddle. There was no place for his arms except around Johnny Faye, and Flavian was too shy to put his arms around any human being, much less a man. He discreetly gripped the saddle’s raised rear lip, trying to keep his fingers from touching Johnny Faye’s buttocks—he could only gain a small hold but it would be enough to enable him to hang on, so long as they rode at an easy pace. “Good thing he’s sweet,” Flavian said with a smile. “Otherwise—”
“Yeeeee-hi!” Johnny Faye cried, and gave ’Sweet a smart smack on the haunch and they were off at a gallop, JC running and barking at their heels and overhead the great blue bowl of a perfect summer afternoon. For the length of a breath Flavian held onto his shyness but in that same instant the world became a blur of blue and green and he was bouncing up and down exactly out of sync with the horse’s gallop and he was visited by a vision of himself trampled and broken under its hooves and he threw his arms around Johnny Faye and held on for dear life, a life that suddenly seemed dear indeed and absolutely worth the price of the ticket. They galloped away from the creek, over pastures that in seventeen years Flavian had never seen, didn’t even know existed, crashed through brush, climbed up and hurtled down a hill, leapt a small ditch and galloped up to a lake. There Johnny Faye drew up short.
Flavian half-slid, half-fell from the horse, so grateful to be alive and unbroken that he almost knelt to kiss the earth. Then his wits returned and he turned on Johnny Faye in fury. “You—careless jerk. You could have gotten me killed.”
“You’re still alive, aint you? O ye of little faith.” Johnny Faye was already half out of his clothes. “Last one in’s a cocksucker! No kidding, no taking your time on this one, you hold back one second and you’ll never jump.”
And then Johnny Faye was flying through the air with a banshee’s cry, landing in a cannonball intended to splash water on Flavian. And it worked—Flavian’s pants were drenched and he almost turned and stalked away until he realized that standing on the bank or walking in wet pants was no colder than if he just shed his clothes and braved the lake. And then he was seized by some imp of perverse and tore off his shoes and jeans and blue work shirt and underwear and went cartwheeling through the soft air to land in a great, stinging belly flop in the arctic waters.
Johnny Faye called over his shoulder. “That’ll shrink your balls, all right. Over and back and we’re outta here, keep moving and stay to the left of that big hackberry, I set out a box on the back side a few years ago and there’s a wood duck raises a brood, comes back ever year, keep a eye out and you might see her,” and then Johnny Faye was crossing the lake in powerful strokes and Flavian chugging along behind and in between them JC, who every once in a while let out a gleeful yip.
Flavian was a swimming skeleton—the icy water sucked away his body heat so that he felt only his bones moving and he thrashed as hard as he could to keep his blood from slowing to a stop. Johnny Faye swam ahead and touched the base of the far cliff—this was some kind of ritual—but in mid-lake Flavian reversed course. One bright patch of sunlight remained. Overhead the rays pierced the dark crowns of the trees, and even though Flavian knew that this late in the day the light would carry no heat, all the same he held as a goal the bright sunlit bank on the water’s edge where he could pull on his warm dry clothes—or at least partly dry, which was better than soaked. The dark line of the woods, the darker bowl of the clear lake that doubled the bright sky, the shattering ripples from their moving bodies, and then he was climbing from the water only to have his numbed fingers lose their grip and he fell back in and Johnny Faye was behind him and his hands on Flavian’s thighs and giving him a boost up! He scraped his chest against the ragged rock but he was out and hopping around to stay warm while JC climbed out in some easy doggy way and was shaking himself in one smooth nose-to-tail shower, scattering a cloudburst of rain over their clothes and soaking whatever dryness remained. And then Johnny Faye was out and they were rubbing each others’ arms and hopping up and down.
“You see the wood duck?”
“I can’t see the nose on my face without my glasses.”
“Oh, yeah, right, too bad. She’s over there, all right.”
Johnny Faye pulled from his jeans pocket a scarlet bandana and they toweled the droplets from each other’s backs and then they were climbing into their clothes, the distant tolling of the bells signaling fifteen minutes to Benediction, no way they could get there on time except then they were back on ’Sweet and galloping toward the oxbow in the creek and then over the creek and through the wall of cedars where Johnny Faye knew the one place where a horse and two riders and a dog could penetrate and then they emerged on the gravel lane that led toward the abbey.
They arrived at the back gate to the enclosure—how and from whom had Johnny Faye learned the secret ins-and-outs of that complicated place? Later Flavian wondered this, but right now he was off the horse and slipping through the door into the enclosure. He pulled on his robes and made it into his prayer stall just as the last bell began its slow sweet toll. He had never been so grateful for the scratchy wool warmth of his robes, had never before been so awake and alive to Benediction, to the blessing of the Lord.
Still turbulent from her encounter with Johnny Faye, Meena was at her car when she decided to investigate the abbey church. Bells were ringing, an invitation of sorts, so she drove from the statues, parked and entered through the visitors’ door. The cool high echoing space enforced silence—her blood calmed. She sat in the visitors’ pews and bowed her head.
Time passed and she was joined by a scattering of men and women who knelt or stood. A railing separated the visitors’ seats from t
he monks’ rows of prayer stalls. In the nave a tall cross held a starburst of gold at the intersection of its arms. Centered in the starburst, a round pane of glass. A priest in golden robes entered and mounted the altar. An acolyte followed, carrying a smoking brazier hanging on a chain. He opened a small silver box, from which the priest spooned incense into the brazier. Her heart rose with the smoke. Meena sat through the elevation of the host, the closing hymn, and the monks’ processing to the abbot, who sprinkled each bowed and tonsured head with water from a silver bucket.
When she left the sun was still bright in the trees. She walked down the long allée and was surprised to find Brother Flavian falling in step at her side. “A pleasure to see you sitting in the visitors’ pews,” he said. “We keep an eye out.”
“But surely I am permitted. I saw the others and assumed—”
“Oh, yes, the visitors’ gallery is open to all. Even Hindus. Especially Hindus.”
She hesitated a moment. “You are a monk—surely I may share this with you, yes? When you call me a Hindu, this is something I find very difficult to hear. Before the British no such concept existed. For us religion is not a separate thing that we label and practice in church on Sundays. It is how we live—it is who we are. Then the British came and told us that all civilized people must have a religion and that a religion must have a central book and services held in a church and so forth. And we wanted to be good servants of the Empire and so we created something called Hinduism, so we could be what the British wanted us to be. And then I was forced to choose—the circumstances are not important, what is important is that I was forced to choose between the old superstitions and the new world of reason and progress. You see where I am, the choice I made, but I still know what it is to be drawn to the old way of knowing things, the spirits in the forest and the hills and especially the rivers. So now when you tell me that I am Hindu that is a very complicated thing for me to hear. Because even though yes, I am Hindu and yes, I am Indian, I am Bengali first. Once that meant everything and now it means nothing. And Bengalis are known for holding ourselves a little—apart. Above, some would say.”
“But now you’re an American.”
“As easy as that,” she said softly. “One speaks the word and it comes to pass. How extraordinary, so strange to me, that these are things one chooses. And that my own country depends not on my history and culture and the call of the heart but on pieces of paper properly stamped and filed. I have chosen to become an American. I am learning how to become an American. I must learn to understand the world in this way.”
They walked down the allée. “Your church uses the same incense that the priest used in the chapel of the Loretine sisters’ school in Calcutta—I recognized the smell. Perhaps that scent brought out all those feelings—smell can be so powerful! These labels and definitions seem so important—they shape a life, and without them one cannot say one even exists. Or so one thinks, and then one moves halfway around the world to find that the labels mean nothing. I hear so often in the American news this phrase—born again. I never understood what that meant before coming here. Now I find that I must work to be exactly that—born again.”
From the end of the drive Flavian pointed to the top of a nearby hill. “From the statue of Saint Joseph we can see the sunset. Shall we climb?”
“We’d be fools not to.”
As they climbed, the broad sweep of the valley opened before them, the fluorescent green of early summer flecked with brown-and-white cows, their heads nuzzling the rich, knee-deep grass and in the distance the valley’s dark wooded rim. They took their seats in the Adirondack chairs at Saint Joseph’s feet.
“And so I am a bit—amused, here in America, to see men still worshipping a piece of bread. I could as well be with my grandmother by the fireside, where before every meal she set aside a bit of food for the gods.”
Below them the cows began moving through the pastures toward the barn. “That piece of bread,” Flavian sighed. “I used to see it as more than that, but seventeen years here and I’ve changed my mind. Now it’s a just a metaphor—a symbol. It makes so much more sense that way.”
Meena nodded. “So comforting, when everything makes sense. I believe in the power of reason to make sense of the world. That is why I became a doctor. Then I come to America to find myself among people barely less superstitious than the village women of my childhood. The stories the women tell me here I can hardly believe! We educate our women as well or better in Bengal. The women here have been kept ignorant, by whom and for what reasons I do not yet know, but their ignorance is serving someone’s cause, of this we may be sure. They should consider becoming nuns.” At this Flavian laughed out loud. “But no!” she said. “I am serious. A monk or a nun is making a real contribution. To choose to refrain from bringing more children into our overcrowded world—to choose instead to give yourself over to a noble ideal—this is a responsible choice. A reasonable choice.”
“I’m not sure how much choosing was involved—to be honest, I was on the lam from the draft board.” He waved his hand at the fields, the line of slowly moving cows, the abbey church. “I needed a place to hide out and this place offered it.”
“Then you too are a war refugee. We have more in common than one might have thought.” A moment of silence, then, “I have met this funny man. Another war refugee, you might say.” A small laugh. “He is my patient, though I have met him at your statues. A farmer, he calls himself, though he spends his days watching birds.”
“You mean Johnny Faye.” Flavian picked a daisy and began plucking at its petals.
“Why, yes, you know him. Though I am hardly surprised. You and he share that quality of being a monk—not a monk in the particular way of your order but in some deeper way. I see it in the way you walk.”
Flavian held up the daisy, shorn of all but its last petal. He plucked it and tossed the stem over his shoulder.
Below them a car with a broken muffler sputtered as it passed, the bitter smell of exhaust rising on the still evening air. Meena waved at the last of the cows passing through the gate. “I do so enjoy watching the cows!”
“Take a long look. They’re not long for this world.” Flavian told her about the abbot’s plan to decommission the herd.
“You mean selling them for slaughter.”
“Well, yes, I guess you could put it that way. The accounting books make their demands and even the most idealistic must comply. It’s about labor. Which means it’s about dollars and cents.”
“As are most difficult decisions. Institutions must make difficult decisions. I love children but reason dictates that someone must refrain from bringing them into our overcrowded world. I have made that choice. And I love cows but I understand why they must go.”
“God gave us reason so that we could prove His existence, the better to worship Him. Or so Thomas Aquinas would say.”
“And the next thing you know we are saving lives with penicillin and contraception.”
“And destroying them with bombs. And slaughtering the cows.”
They fell silent, watching as the sun lowered itself into its nest of clouds, scarlet to red to orange to yellow fading to lavender and to the east the deep purple of encroaching night. The first lightning bugs of the season emerged, until the pastures crawled and blinked with their miniature semaphores: I’m here, I’m here! Take me, love me!
Meena stood. “Another visit, another time. I enjoyed the service.”
Flavian led the way down the path. Halfway down he turned and spoke. “The boy—Matthew Mark. Can I ask how he’s doing?”
“Of course you may ask. I suppose it is not a violation of confidentiality to acknowledge what we both saw. The boy had been beaten, presumably by his father. Whether that brought about the pneumothorax is impossible to say but it is difficult to imagine otherwise.”
“I have kept him in my prayers. I wish I believed that makes a difference.”
“Do you believe that God cares what happens t
o this little boy?”
Flavian studied the opalescent sky. “I used to believe that. Now I don’t know what I believe.”
“My life has been a flight from evil wrought in service to religions, each as bad as the other, Hindu, Christian, Muslim, Buddhist. Pray if that brings you comfort but know that prayer is no substitute for an adequate foster home.”
“There has got to be something that can be done. The man nearly killed the boy. What if the next time he does?”
The great disk of an early summer moon was rising. At the monastery the mimosas were coming on, cascades of pink, umbrellas of roseate. Meena and Flavian were at the allée before she spoke. “How American you are!” she said softly. “You are the fish in the sea and what does the fish know of the sea? ‘Something must be done,’ ‘something can be done.’ It is why I longed to come here, to a place where people believe always and everywhere that something can be done. You have your electricity and your cars and your telephones, and what is astonishing is not only that you have these things but that you know that they will work, you take for granted the fact that they will work, here it is so easy to take everything for granted, good health and a long life and seeing the birth of one’s grandchildren and great-grandchildren, all this you may take for granted. How dull and safe it all is! How I longed for this dullness, this safety! I came halfway around the world for it.”
While she spoke the moon rose to silhouette St. Joseph, so that for one moment the statue seemed to bear a bright disk in its upraised arms. “You are a doctor and you have taken a vow,” Flavian said gently. “Might that require you to put the boy’s interests above all other considerations?”
“And you are a monk, and you have taken a vow. Might not that require you to be better stewards of your cows?”
Flavian halted in the darkness under the gum trees. “Let’s be kind to each other, all right? I just can’t—that evening. I can’t get that boy out of my head. I can’t bear to be in the presence of such suffering without, I don’t know. Doing something.” He gave a hollow laugh. “Which, of course, is why I chose the world’s most useless profession.” The first bells announced Compline. “I have to go,” he said. “Please forgive me.”
The Man Who Loved Birds Page 9