The Man Who Loved Birds

by Fenton Johnson

  And then he heard someone coming through the cedar copse and he leapt behind the three-branched sycamore.

  Eventide and Flavian climbed stiffly from where for some timeless while he had been kneeling next to Jesus in agony. His knees were in agony, though not enough to take his mind off his desire. Standing, he felt the sharp corner of something prick his leg—he fished in his pocket and pulled out the day’s reading.

  Early in the morning Jesus came again to the temple. All the people came to him and he sat down and began to teach them. The scribes and the Pharisees brought a woman who had been caught in adultery; and making her stand before all of them, they said to him, “Teacher, this woman was caught in the very act of committing adultery. Now in the law Moses commanded us to stone such women. What do you say?” They said this to test him, so that they might have some charge to bring against him. Jesus bent down and wrote with his finger in the sand. When they kept on questioning him, he straightened up and said to them, “Let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.” And once again he bent down and wrote on the ground. When they heard it, they went away one by one, beginning with the elders; and Jesus was left alone with the woman standing before him. Jesus straightened up and said to her, “Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?” She said, “No one, sir.” And Jesus said, “Neither do I condemn you. Go your way, and from now on do not sin again.”

  On reading these words Flavian rejoiced—they seemed placed by the Spirit in his pocket to convey the message that even a sin so great as his might be forgiven. For the first time that week, his desire lifted from him and he felt some kind of peace. He was lost in an avalanche of feelings and thoughts but he tried simply to be present to his deliverance, to be grateful even for his temptation, without which he would never have known the dimensions of his weakness. Johnny Faye had been his instrument of grace, sent to teach him the breadth and depth and height of his sin.

  Meena stepped outside the blind to see Flavian kneeling by the statues. No moment so private as a moment of prayer, more private even than lovemaking, and she remained motionless against the blind. Then he stood and brushed the leaves from his robe and took a paper from his pocket and began to read. How plain and perfect was his robe! How handsome in ivory and black, the very expression in cloth of submission to the beauty of all that is.

  When he finished his reading and had folded and tucked the paper in his pocket she walked down the slope. A little cough so as not to startle.

  “My Lord. How long have you been here?”

  She pointed up the hill. “I sit there sometimes to watch for birds—you cannot see it, but there is a blind built for that purpose. What are you doing here?”

  “It’s Sunday. I come here sometimes on Sunday. You know that.”

  “Of course. To pray.”

  Silence, broken by familiar bird song, a pure and bouncing melody.

  “I guess I should be going or I’ll be late for Benediction. It sneaks up on me—the sun sets so much earlier these days. And these clouds—it will be dark early tonight.”

  “Yes.”

  “Would you like someone to accompany you back to your car?”

  “No, no, I’m quite fine, thank you. I enjoy this time of day. A good time to see birds, you know.”

  “Yes, so I have been given to understand. Well, you take care of yourself. Don’t get wet.”

  “Yes, thank you.”

  He bent to retrieve the fat manila envelope, leaning against the statue of Jesus. He paused for a moment, considering, then thrust it at her. “This is for you,” he said. “From Johnny Faye. A gift. Please. It’s honest money, honest come by. At least, that’s what he told me. I meant to give it to you a long time ago. Better late than never. Use it according to your judgment. You’ll be doing me a favor to take it.”

  For a long moment she studied it. She made no protest. “I understand,” she said. “I will see that it gets to those who deserve it.”

  Flavian walked rapidly away.

  She sat on the bench and watched until he was out of sight, then she rose and returned to her car.

  At the fork in the path Flavian’s feet turned not toward the monastery but toward the cedar copse and the oxbow bend. He kept walking. Johnny Faye had surely gone home by now but Flavian could offer him a sign that he had stayed away not from anger but because the equinox was upon them, time to leave behind his summer foolishness and return to God. To vanish without some kind of sign would have been the height of bad manners, or so Flavian argued to himself, and though his gesture had about it an element of the alcoholic swearing this drink will be my last, nonetheless he pressed on in the failing light.

  By the time he arrived the creek bed was lit only by the sunset light that remained in the overcast sky. The moon was just shy of full but it was no more than an occasional dull brightness through the clouds. The cedars that for the summer’s length had been so kind were now knitted in some kind of autumn resistance and only his determination and his knowledge of what lay on the other side enabled him to push through. Now he stood at the lip of the bluff—no evidence of Johnny Faye.

  Flavian climbed into the great three-armed throne and closed his eyes. The burble of the creek, the cool moist air that rose from it, the smooth round solid sycamore. This was the place. How could love be a sin? How could it be that sin—a word, an act so small and mean—could have any relation to this looping, benevolent place on God’s earth, where he had tried his best to teach and Johnny Faye had tried his best to learn? Maybe the evil lay elsewhere—not in this place but in the recesses of his own heart, which demanded that Johnny Faye be someone other than who he was. What did it matter, finally, if he could read and write, or even if he broke the laws of man, when he knew and honored the law that mattered—the law of love—love of the Lord thy God, and of thy neighbor as thyself? Indeed the two of them, the monk and the soldier, were teacher and student, but considered in this light had not Johnny Faye, the student, taught Flavian, his teacher, the more valuable lesson?

  Flavian decended from the tree. At the edge of the oxbow bend he paused, then plucked a bud from the nearest of Johnny Faye’s babes and held it to his nose. Involuntarily he pulled back—the smell was that intense, the essence of some other reality. He dropped the bud and turned to tool up the steep bank, and there he saw the crude block letters J-O-H-N-N-Y F-A-Y-E and something fragile in him shattered into splinters and shards as surely as if dropped. He studied the letters, crude and tentative but legible. He took up a stick and drew a circle, surrounding and enclosing the name, Johnny Faye’s name—a sign of something—a sign of love.

  Flavian climbed the creek bank. Away from the crop, the still evening air brought him a different, cloying, manufactured odor that did not belong in these dry September woods. The smell grew stronger and Flavian stopped to sniff. Maybe Johnny Faye had sprayed more wolf piss? Although this smelled nothing like the wolf piss that he had used at the summer’s beginning. Flavian recognized the smell from someplace—an old, familiar smell that in a different context he could have identified in an instant. But then the breeze picked up, the sheet lightning flickered, and Flavian passed through the cedar thicket.

  Some measured moments after Flavian left, Officer Smith emerged from hiding.

  Johnny Faye rode to the blind and sequestered ’Sweet in the bushes. No sign of the doctor’s old Buick at the usual parking place. Why would it matter—how had he let the two of them, both of them, either of them come to matter so much? Why would these people who possessed the key to all mysteries—who could read and write—be interested in him except as a curiosity, a diversion, a toy? After all he had seen and done, nothing mattered or could matter, but he had allowed his heart to get careless, he had invited them in.

  Pinned to the door of his blind, a note. He opened it and smoothed it flat and held it to the light of the moon, just shy of full and rising, to inspect its mystery. The only writing that ever come my way brought nothing but
bad news. He tucked the note in his pocket. He waited in the blind, JC at his feet. The night forest was alive with cicadas and then it was not, the graveled path was dull white in the overcast moonlight and then it was in shadow. Johnny Faye lay on the floor of the blind and looked through the door into the balm of a late summer night.

  Chapter 33

  On this particular September day Brother José, impulsive as always, decided that the cow barn’s infestation of rats demanded action and that firearms were superior to poison or traps, either of which might endanger Origen the cat. But José had never fired a gun and so he called in Flavian to execute the task. Flavian protested that the cows were scheduled to be shipped to slaughter in a few days and that they had no ammunition on hand and that once there was no feed and manure in the barn the rats would disappear on their own, but once José had decided on a course of action he was not to be dissuaded. Passive aggression being something of a monastic specialty, Flavian did not set out to buy ammunition until late afternoon, barely enough time to get to town and back for Vespers. And then as he was heading out the door, gabby old Brother Dismas buttonholed him to tell him the story of somebody telephoning the reception desk to ask for Brother Tom, Brother Thomas Aquinas to be exact, would those jokers never give it up, he thought he’d heard them all and then some guy comes along asking for a man who’s been dead seven hundred years, who’d have thought anybody in these parts would even know the name?

  Flavian was unnerved. The caller must be Johnny Faye—only he and the man they called Little had witnessed Flavian’s little lie, and Flavian could imagine no circumstance under which Little would call the monastery. But why would Johnny Faye telephone? Flavian shook the question from his head.

  Now he found himself standing in line at the Saint Francis Gun Depot with a box of .22 cartridges in one hand and a candy bar in the other—if he was to be saddled with such an unsavory mission he might as well get a little pleasure from the job. In front of him, a man in uniform—a state policeman. Butterflies in Flavian’s stomach. Ever since his long-ago flight from the draft board, Flavian cringed in the presence of any gun-toting authority—the sight of a uniform was enough to bring a flush of guilt to his cheeks. And now he had given over a summer to helping a criminal grow pot and ended it by choosing desire over duty. He was nothing but a creature driven and derided by desire, unable to restrain his simplest wants—at this very moment he was longing to unwrap the candy bar and eat it on the spot. But someone was wearing aftershave lotion—the policeman, Flavian guessed. There were only three men in the store, and the cashier sported a thick, unkempt beard. The scent was both familiar and overwhelming. So much for the candy bar, Flavian thought sadly, which if he ate it standing anywhere near the policeman would only taste like Old Spice. Yes, Old Spice, that was it. Unmistakable.

  And then Flavian, ever slow on the draw, put the smell together with where he’d so recently encountered it—yesterday evening on the bank of the oxbow bend.

  Flavian stepped away from the cash register and busied himself behind a magazine rack. Guns & Ammo, Firearms and Hunting. Why, when, how had the policeman found the oxbow bend? In his head, the voice of reason: Coincidence. Lots of men wear aftershave lotion. In his heart, the little voice: In God’s universe there is no coincidence.

  The bearded cashier rang up the policeman’s purchase. “I thought they supplied you guys with ammo.”

  “Give me a receipt and I’ll get reimbursed. I got vermin to kill and the early bird gets the rat.”

  The cashier took his cash. “You hit a rat with one of these and all you’re going to have left is a few whiskers and a bloody mess.”

  “The rat I’m after walks on his hind legs and has been a pain in the ass to the people of this county for forty years,” the policeman said.

  “Better buy two boxes.” The cashier dropped the ammunition into a brown paper bag and gave it a little twist and handed it over. “You be careful, Smith. I hear a lot standing at this machine and what I hear these days is talk about trip wires and booby traps and what not. And you aint the only person in the county buying bullets for a .357.”

  Officer Smith laughed. “I’m not shaking in my boots. I got the enforcement officer’s number one weapon, which is surprise,” and then he was out the door and into his cruiser and Flavian was handing over the cash for his shotgun shells and candy bar, which he was still longing to eat but not in a cloud of human exhaust fumes. He took his shells and went out into the hot dusty late summer air and thought here, surely here I can eat my candy bar. Flavian unwrapped the candy but his first bite tasted of Old Spice and carbon monoxide. He tossed the candy into the trash.

  Flavian climbed into the monastery minivan and started for home but the knot of unease grew, a poisonous tumor of dread and guilt. Silly, he thought. This was America, the law didn’t just go out and hunt people down, but anyway if Officer Smith was on his way to arrest Johnny Faye—well, what was Flavian to do about that? A pain in the ass to the people of this county for forty years. Johnny Faye had broken the law and it was high time he learned the consequences, and it would get him out of Flavian’s life for good and solve a lot of problems for everybody including himself, just as the policeman had said. Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and what was about to be rendered unto Johnny Faye was a few years of cooling his heels in the penitentiary.

  At the thought Flavian was instantly physically sick. He recalled the county attorney saying something to the abbot about mandatory twenty-year sentences but surely that was hot air, puffing and blowing for the sake of scaring people into submission. But this much must be said: a criminal would be put away. Flavian struck himself on the side of the head. He had given Johnny Faye proper warning, and it was one thing to stand by passively while someone grew a crop and another to interfere with the execution of the law. But there was that telephone call to Brother Tom, Thomas Aquinas, to be exact. Flavian’s first lie, his original sin. Thank God Johnny Faye didn’t know his proper name. Flavian struck his temple again. He drove through town. The word vermin replayed itself in his head. He drove past the Miracle Inn, past the doctor’s cinderblock office, past Father Poppelreiter’s church. By the time Flavian had reached the outskirts of town, his dread had grown into a certainty that something ugly was underway and that he had been intended to overhear the conversation in the ammo store so as to bring him face to face with his own weakness, the heart of his darkness. The rat I’m after walks on his hind legs. What if something was really afoot? What could he do about it? Nothing. Hide out in the enclosure. He had four-footed vermin to attend to.

  And over all and under all was the knowledge that by any reasonable standard he was himself a criminal, and he was thinking not only about Johnny Faye’s pot but about the vow he had made before his community and before God, that he had willfully broken.

  —Willfully?

  —Yes, willfully. Why do you suppose you were so eager to get over there every Sunday? Why didn’t you ever tell him your real name? You knew what you were up to from the beginning. And you sinned with your mouth, the very instrument of the Word. How can you even speak the name of Jesus with a mouth so befouled.

  —But he is a man, a living, breathing soul, and—

  Flavian’s chest tightened. He pulled to the side of the road and leaned his head on the wheel. He would not allow himself to put words to the voice in his heart. For some time he sat, uncounted minutes until he raised his head, made a U-turn, and headed back into town.

  Flavian had only a dim idea of the structure of local government but he had met Harry Vetch and while Vetch had no reason to be well disposed toward Flavian all the same he was the desk at which the buck stopped—he had said exactly those words, sitting in the abbot’s office with Flavian taking notes. He climbed the steps of the county attorney’s office and summoned his nerve and pressed the doorbell. Somewhere deep in the house a gong sounded and after a moment the door swung back and there was Harry Vetch, looking slightly rumpled. Some perfunct
ory chat. Flavian was invited to seat himself in the big chair that faced the county attorney’s desk. A pause. Flavian plunged in.

  “I mean I know this sounds really crazy but um, you know this guy, a sort of a wild man, actually, Johnny Faye—”

  Vetch turned to peer at a document on his computer screen. “Brother Flavian. If you are disturbing my quiet evening to bring me a message from Johnny Faye, I have to ask you to spare me the pleasure.”

  “No, this is not a message, no, sir. I should tell you though that he’s been visiting the monastery and I took a liking to him because as it turns out he can’t read or write, that’s why he’s always been such an outsider and so forth.”

  Vetch turned back to Flavian and rested his chin on his thumbs and concealed his mouth with his knitted fingers, the tips of his forefingers touching to form a steeple.

  “So and I thought I might teach him enough reading skills that he could at least hold down a job, I mean, if he could read and write mailing labels, if he could manage even that much we could hire him on at the monastery. So I’ve been working with him and I realized, let’s see, how to put this—well, I figured out that he was growing a crop of marijuana in the back acreage of the monastery and I was—I had gone there to his plot to see it for myself because I was going to threaten to turn him in unless he plowed it under right away, you know, I remembered what you said about marijuana growers on monastery land and I have to say I didn’t believe you then but I guess you were right.”

  “Of course I was right. Did you think I’d waste the abbot’s time on a social call? Why didn’t you come to me right away? Law enforcement is my job, not yours.”

  Flavian flushed with guilt. “I know, I guess I was just—I thought I’d give him one more chance, you know, warn him away. Like Jesus with the adulteress. Whoever has not sinned let him throw the first stone. And I thought if I could just teach him some basic literacy skills, you know, he could get a real job and get out of growing pot. He even wanted to do that at one point in his life, that’s why he joined the army, he told me as much.” Flavian paused for some sign of acquiescence with this simple truth. Harry Vetch was a blank slate. “Anyway, while I was at his plot, at least the plot that I think is his since I didn’t see any sign of him so I’m making assumptions but I have a pretty good idea. Anyway. I have this really sensitive nose and while I was there I smelled this aftershave. Old Spice, you know the kind I mean. And it was a really strong smell, I’m very sure of it. And then today I went to the gun store to buy some shells because Brother José wants me to shoot the rats in the cow barn, doesn’t matter that they’ll all disappear as soon as we get rid of the cows, no, he had to have this done today, so I went to buy some shotgun shells and while I was in the store I stood behind the state policeman, you know, Officer Smith, and I was just overwhelmed by the smell of Old Spice. And you know he was, he is the father of the little boy who was beaten so savagely at the beginning of the summer. And standing in line I couldn’t help but overhear Officer Smith bragging about buying bullets and about how he was going after two-legged vermin and you know that this is the kind of gun you only use for one reason, well, there’s target practice, I guess, but it was pretty clear from what the officer was saying that he was intending to do some human target practice. And I know this sounds crazy but I just got this feeling—I thought I should come to you and let you know because I felt—I just had a bad feeling and I’m really afraid that Officer Smith is—well, you get what I’m trying to say.”