And what Johnny Faye had prayed for, what arose every time in his heart, was this field, these hills, and all he had asked for was to come back here for good. And so when his men got out of hand or the police got out of hand or when the demons came too close, when they started showing up in the daytime as well as at night, this was where he came to remind himself of his answered prayers, of who he was and where he belonged and the importance of standing firm in the place where history had put him.
Chapter 13
For several days the weather had been sultry and the close air hummed with electricity. Meena walked the few hundred yards to the Knights of Columbus Hall to attend a party that had been organized to raise funds for equipment for her office and to formally introduce her to the town. As she approached the KC Hall the couples standing in the doorway fell silent and slipped away—“another drink,” “little girls’ room.” Meena made her entrance alone.
The KC Hall was a plain, low-ceilinged room with jaundice-colored walls. The west-facing windows were caked with grime so that, though they were bright with the setting sun, the hall and its occupants were bathed in the glow of overhead fluorescent tubes. At the far end of the hall someone had set up a portable screen and a slide projector. An aged, hump-backed man in baggy brown slacks and a shirt that matched the walls was setting up metal folding chairs. Raucous laughter erupted from people lined up at an open door—this must be the bar.
A large florid woman in floral print pedal pushers seized Meena’s hand. “The good doctor,” she said, and Meena found herself grateful for the adjective.
“You are—?”
“Oh, beg your pardon, I’m so used to everybody knowing who I am. I’m Virginia Drummond, Judge Drummond’s wife? But everybody calls me Ginny Rae, at least to my face. And I’m so pleased, I can’t tell you how pleased we are to have a doctor in our little town, the last doctor we had, old Doctor Mudd? Great-nephew of the doctor who treated the man who shot Abraham Lincoln and jailed for his trouble, he was ninety if he was a day, Doctor Mudd, that is, not Abraham Lincoln, ha, ha. You’d go back into that dark little cubbyhole of his office and you didn’t want to ask what was in those bottles that had been on the shelf so long the spiders had abandoned their webs, nosirree, you just took your prescription and marched right out of there and drove forty miles if that’s what it took to get it filled in some place with a flush toilet. When the judge was a little boy—he’s over there, with the wide orange tie with the palm trees? I keep trying to throw that tie away, I sneak in his closet and every time he catches me and I let him know that nobody has worn a tie like that in twenty years but it’s his Kiwanis tie, he got it at a Kiwanis convention and every time he sees it in my hands he lifts it gently as you please and says now honey, you know that’s my Kiwanis tie and I just have to go along even if he does look like a fool when he puts it on. Anyway, when he was a little boy he had this ingrown toenail? And his mamma took him to old Doctor Mudd and Doctor Mudd said—I can hear him now, that big deep voice he took on when he had bad news—‘Son, that’s going to have to come out,’ and Glen saying, ‘Yes, sir,’ like the brave little boy he is and Doctor Mudd saying, ‘You see that robin out the window?’ and pointing, you know, and Glen not knowing any better than to look which is just as well since what did Doctor Mudd do but take up a pair of pliers and jerk out that toenail right there. No painkillers for him, no sir, he thought pain builds character. ‘Pain builds character,’ I can hear him saying that to me when I was in labor if you can imagine, which I guess you would have to beings as you’ve never had a baby, but better childless than out of wedlock like our Maria Goretti Shaklett, bless her heart. A little whiskey, that was the only painkiller he trusted. And I’ve already heard how you saved little Matthew Mark Smith’s life, you here not much more than a month and already you’ve practically resurrected the dead, at least to hear Officer Smith’s wife tell it, I’m sure it wasn’t so dramatic, she likes to—embellish, shall we say, is there something I can get you to drink? Yo, Maria Goretti! Bring the doctor a, I’ll bet you’d like a nice gin and tonic, I hear that’s what they drink in your part of the world, keeps the malaria away, right?”
“You’re very kind but I don’t drink alcohol,” Meena said, but the judge’s wife was already gone and now it was the judge himself, bearing down on her like a lorry, hand extended. “Dr. Chatterjee, Glen Drummond, my apologies again for dropping you off with so little ceremony but the trash must be picked up, that’s the glamour of being judge executive, somebody’s trash doesn’t get picked up and you-know-who gets called. And now if you’ll forgive me I am always and in every time and place running for reelection, the American blessing and curse, even if nobody is running against me I still have to buy my constituents a drink, ha, ha,” and he was off, a fireplug of a man on small feet, just as someone thrust a drink into her hand. “Gin and tonic with a squirt of RealLime, just like you asked.”
“You’re very kind,” she said. She stood with the sweating drink until enough time had passed, then set it behind a plaster statue of a saint in armor, piercing a dragon.
Flavian was climbing the stairs to his cell when he remembered that earlier on that warm, close day he’d used the monastery truck to run an errand. A tympani of distant thunder had underscored Compline’s last reading—after Brother Bede extinguished the last candle and the high, echoing spaces had fallen into darkness, the windows continued to wink on, then off, from distant flashes of lightning.
He retraced his steps and stopped at the tall urn they used as a collective umbrella stand—it was as usual empty—nobody puts them back, must remember to grouse about that at this Sunday’s chapter meeting. Outside, the sun had set into gathering clouds and an all-but-impenetrable gloom and a stiffening wind tangled the gum trees’ limbs. He crossed the prayer garden, went through the screeching gate and climbed the knoll to the milking barn and maintenance sheds. There he found that, sure enough, he’d left the truck’s window rolled down. He gave himself a light smack to his temple as an incentive to pay more attention, then rolled up the window and turned back.
He had taken only a few steps when the first drops of rain, gravid with promise of more, struck his head. Before he could quicken his steps, no more than twenty yards distant a bolt of lightning split a great white oak, a century and more old, from its topmost limbs down through its massive trunk, close enough that Flavian was struck with flying twigs and leaves and his bones hummed in his body, or was that from the ear-splitting crack of thunder ka-boom? In his next conscious thought he was inside the cow barn, deafened by the pounding of his terror-stricken heart.
Ten thousand drumsticks on the barn’s tin roof. Earlier that day the place had been alive with mooing and blatts, the clang of stanchions swinging shut, the hum of the milking machines, and always and throughout the permeating, penetrating, fecund smell of hay and milk and manure, the before and during and after of the life of a cow. A forest of black plastic tubes dangled from the rafters, each equipped with a teat cup, a machine-age imitation of a calf’s mouth, and all the tubes connected to a great pulsing vacuum cleaner that imitated the joy of seventy calves sucking their mothers’ teats. The milk emptied into steel vats, which the overseer pumped into a truck to be delivered across the road to the cheese room, where it began the conversion that led to immortality. Now with the cows returned to their barn, the black polyvinyl tubes hung in silence. No animal sounds broke the smooth roar of the rain on the roof except the murmur of human voices.
Flavian thought his imagination was playing tricks—the rain varied in intensity, close his eyes and he could hear it pounding now soft, now deafeningly insistent, and its rhythm might be taken as the chattering voices of the storm gods. But underneath the sound of the rain he heard a laugh, then a raucous shout. Light leaked from under a door at the room’s far end—the source of the shout? In any case that light should not be on now, long after Compline. Flavian felt his way through the dangling tubes to open the door and shut off the switch.
Inside: Cassian, Bede, Cyril, José, Aelred, Denis, Cyprian. Cassian, skinny and long with bony hands to match; Bede, swarthy and soft as an odalisque; Cyril, with his great mule’s ears and long face and thick black beard flecked with gray; José, whose bushy eyebrows met to form a startling arc over the bridge of his nose—he had a certain rakish air, and insisted that they pronounce the “J” in his name; Aelred, tall as a poplar and bald as a new potato, with a great bulbous nose and protruding eyes magnified by thick lenses; Denis, a flat face, featureless as a plain except for his pouting rosebud lips; and Cyprian, a dark-skinned orphan from a tropical place who spoke deeply accented English, for whom the animals were the brothers and sisters he’d never had. Each monk held a plastic cup, and in the center of the circle was a bucket of ice and a near-empty bottle of bourbon and no cap or mixers in sight. The dim light brought out the hollows in their cheeks and the deep lines in their foreheads, and Flavian realized how much younger he was than these men, all of whom were old enough to be his father.
Fixed by seven guilty stares, Flavian grasped that someone had cadged a bottle and that a party was under way, to which he had not been invited. “Uh—excuse me, I was just—”
“Not a word to the abbot!” This from Cyprian, with a laugh that meant business.
“Stick around, Brother Tom. Pour yourself a drink.” This from the deep shadows at the corners of the room, and it was a moment before Flavian figured out that the voice came from Johnny Faye.
And then somewhere very near at hand a bolt of lightning rent the air and a smack of thunder sewed it up, leaving their ears singing and the room pitch black.
Meena watched as two amiable drunks used their hands to concoct a shadow play in the square of light thrown by the slide projector. First two birds flew across the screen, then in one corner a hunter raised a rifle, but before the play reached its climax she was accosted by a slender man—the only man wearing a suit. “Harry Vetch,” he said, holding out a gin-and-tonic. “You looked a little dry.”
“You are very kind,” she said, “but I have been served.”
Vetch gave the drink a stricken look. “In these parts it’s an offense against nature to turn down a drink.” He took a sip from each glass. “Opportunity presents itself when we’re looking in the wrong direction. The challenge is to turn around and say yes.”
“I am somewhat stuck, I’m afraid, in steadfastly facing forward.”
An awkward silence. He took a second sip, then set down the drink and extended his hand. “I’m the county attorney,” he said. “The organizer of the party. The guy who’s raising money to buy you an air conditioner. The guy who’s charged with introducing you to your patients.”
She laughed then and took his hand. “Then I owe you my thanks.”
Some casual chat, in which the county attorney revealed that he also came from far away and that he was the first elected official of the county who hadn’t been born to or married into the job. “Or married into anything, for that matter.” He wiggled his ringless fingers. “That’s a joke, sort of, but somebody once told me every joke contains a grain of truth.” Meena asked after his parents—did he miss them? He screwed up his face and scratched his head. “Not really. My father was a corporate attorney, my mother was a nurse. They retired out West. Arizona, I think. I call them every so often. Is that what you mean?”
“My father taught English in our little town. It was what the men of the family had done for many generations. In this country, you are what you do. In my country, you do what you are. There was no escaping it, really. His father taught, so he taught.”
“But you’re not a teacher.”
She smiled. “How that came to be is a long story.”
“More interesting than most people’s stories around here. Maybe you could tell it to me sometime over dinner. We could drive up to the city—there’s no place around here to take a date.”
She paused and the moment grew too long. “I beg your pardon,” he said. “I have good intentions, believe me.”
“Everyone is so kind,” she said finally. “In my experience these matters are arranged by the families, in consultation with stars and bank accounts. I hardly know what to say.”
“How about ‘yes’?” Vetch emptied his glass and took up the drink he’d brought for her. “Well. I think you might benefit—I think you might be doing yourself and the county a favor—look. Nobody who wasn’t born here knows this county like I do. Why not let me show you around? That might be more fun than dinner, and good for your practice.”
“You are very kind indeed to think of my needs.” She caught a glimpse of a familiar face and raised her hand in recognition. “You will not mind, I hope, if I take some time to respond—I am so busy with organizing my practice. A challenge I am happy to have.”
Maria Goretti approached them, a glass of wine in one hand and a drink in the other. The county attorney took her by the arm, lifting the drink from her hand. “You’re too late—our guest is fasting. Dr. Chatterjee, may I introduce Maria Goretti Shaklett, I think you guys know each other from the hospital? And now I think the time has come to badger the judge into kicking this thing off.” Vetch directed Maria Goretti toward a pair of friends from her high school days. He steered the doctor toward Rosalee Smith, standing near the door. “You won’t mind waiting here? I’ll give you the nod when your introduction comes. Rosalee, be a good hostess and keep our newcomer occupied.” He weaved through the crowd.
The county attorney and the judge mounted a stage fashioned from empty cases of beer and a slab of plywood. Harry Vetch took the microphone and greeted those present, thanking them for their past contributions. The room went dark, while they watched slides of the conversion of the old gas station into the office she now occupied. Then the lights came up. The county attorney introduced her—she mounted the stage, where in her nervousness she bowed, her hands coming together in a gesture from that other, older world. She busied them smoothing her skirt. Scattered applause and she stepped down. The county attorney made his pitch—he was eloquent on her behalf, extolling her sacrifice, urging generosity. Checkbooks were produced, checks written.
Outside the windows the darkness had thickened and the patter of the first drops of rain against the glass made it difficult to catch what Vetch was saying, but then someone fiddled with the amplifier and after a screech of feedback the volume improved. He was taking the opportunity to introduce his project—the new golf course subdivision.
From the shadows, a murmur from Rosalee Smith. “He sure sounds like he’s running for something.”
“Yes, I would say so.”
“Mamma, let’s go.” This from Matthew Mark, pulling at his mother’s hand.
“Just a minute longer, sugar. We have to wait for your daddy.”
Meena crouched to whisper in the boy’s ear. “Stand quietly and I promise I will tell you another story.” Matthew Mark opened his eyes wide and pinched his lips shut.
“For more than a year I’ve been involved in the planning of a major housing development,” Vetch was saying. “Ridgeview Pointe will be built around a golf course in the style that you may have seen in your travels to other, wealthier parts of the country. The building of the course and its houses will jump-start our economy, creating construction jobs that bring good salaries and good benefits. After Ridgeview Pointe is completed, its success will inspire imitations. And it’ll have created permanent jobs for those who manage the golf course fairways and maintain the greens.
“And so I asked the project architect to create a few slides that will allow you to visualize the final project—to see rolling fairways and emerald greens where now you see only rocks and trees, to see houses where there are none, and to see how the unemployed of this county, now dependent on welfare, will have the opportunity to earn respect and decent wages in a pleasant work environment.” Vetch picked up the control unit for the projector. “Our first slide shows the property as it currently exists.” He clicked the bu
tton. Up flashed a slide of a horse’s hindquarters. Suppressed titters. Vetch clicked the button again. A second slide—the hindquarters of a mule. An open guffaw from someone in the crowd. “Mamma, lift me up!” Matthew Mark cried. “I want to see too!” The judge raised his hand to cover his mouth. A third slide—a pig’s haunches and curly tail.
“We have got to teach that man a lesson,” Vetch muttered to no one in particular and, courtesy of the microphone, to the room at large.
And then a bright flash lit the windows and a peal of thunder shook the walls and the screen went dark.
For a long while the monks scrabbled in the darkness—“Murder in the dark!” someone cried, and “Belly of the whale!” Finally someone found a flashlight, then a kerosene lantern, and before long they were sitting again, drawn closer together by the lantern’s small circle of light.
Johnny Faye took up the bottle. “Another round, boys, in honor of the storm.” He refilled their cups, then emptied the bottle with the last and most generous drink for Flavian. “Go on, Cyprian, finish up your story.”
“All right. Well. Old Mrs. Hawthorne came roaring in here, had to talk to her spiritual advisor—would somebody tell me who made up that title? Every time I hear it I think of Casper the Ghost—on a matter of such importance that she could not wait, no, buildings must be moved so that she could speak to the abbot right here, right now, because, it turns out, she had wanted a diamond for her twenty-fifth anniversary and her husband gave her an emerald.”
The rain on the roof was making a fearful racket but still Flavian, since childhood always the one to ask why, needed an explanation. “Why on earth,” he asked, “would her husband give her an enema?”
The Man Who Loved Birds Page 12