I, of course, saw my chances in Rome as remote at best, but my mother had a point. The ministry was calling and it was my duty, indeed my ancestral destiny, to respond. My uncle was a priest, along with some other relatives, each one charting his way through the past like some familial apostolic succession. We Whitmores could trace part of our Catholic lineage back to popes long since dead, and our service was well documented. Monks, teachers, parish administrators, anywhere the calling led us. My mother reminded me of these servants as I boarded the Greyhound for Iowa, ironically the same bus from Minneapolis that Marbury had scoffed at. She kissed me good-bye, her lips touching my cheeks in the softest manner, as I imagine mothers sending their children off to die. “Carry with you the pride of the family,” she said. I remember those words as the doors swished shut, heavy diesel in the air, a black cloud blocking out everything, my pride included.
Marbury was there waiting for me as I left the bus. We didn’t speak except for a hello, but then we didn’t have to. His mere presence spoke volumes. In one moment, Marbury had cut down every image I had ever had of the priesthood. Maybe it was the jeans and sandals that he wore, though others had adopted that same way of dressing. Or maybe it was just the way that he carried himself, aloof yet with a watchful eye. He was always alert, on the lookout it seemed. Later I heard stories about him. Other students, apparently feeling sorry for me having Marbury living next door, filled me in on the gossip. Rumors circulated about Marbury dodging the draft, dodging the police as well, with wild stories ranging from theft to drugs. For his part, always coy, Marbury confirmed or denied nothing. And this only made people talk more. Our superiors gave more fuel to the rumors when I heard one of them tell another, “Christ took sinners into the fold. Who are we not to do the same?” And from that moment on I saw Marbury as our very own Mary Magdalene, who traded one life for the best one offered.
When I told Marbury about my first impressions of him, especially just walking off the bus, he smiled.
He said, “I was a loose torpedo back then. Still am.”
I nodded. It was something that I couldn’t disagree with.
“But then you’re here, aren’t you? You know that already.”
“Talk spreads. It isn’t every day that people feel the presence of God.”
“Oh, that—”
He waved me off with his nonspeaking hand as if a response wasn’t even worthy. But then he reconsidered, saying, “That’s just the voice, Peter. Or lack of one. People want to relate. Deep inside they want you to feel what they feel, you know that. Some go too far.”
“And how far is that? Healing people?”
“I never said I could heal.”
“You don’t have to. People say it of you,” I said.
“Do you believe everything people say?”
“When it’s about a priest, I listen.”
“Then what’s the word on you, Peter?”
I looked at Marbury, studied him with a burning glance. “Just that I’m a good priest, I hope. What you should be.”
“Oh, you’re questioning my goodness now.”
“Only your intentions, Marbury.”
“My best intentions,” he said, looking away, “I left in a snowstorm a thousand miles from here.”
The snowstorm.
Marbury’s trip to Pennsylvania, and the subsequent blizzard that followed, is generally agreed upon to be the dividing line between the old Marbury and this one. Before Philadelphia and the conference that lured him out there, Marbury was a priest like any other, exuding nothing so unusual or scandalous that would warrant the attention of this office. We were naturally aware of his talents, especially the uncanny knack he had for creating interest and furor over any project that he took on. This was particularly true of his shelter, which he started after an encounter with the homeless.
The story went like this:
One night, while walking home from a hospital visit, Marbury came across a man sleeping outside. The man was huddled inside a sleeping bag, freezing and hungry, but Marbury offered no help. He just walked on, like most people do, forgetting the incident altogether. That night the temperatures plunged well below zero and everything solid froze, including the homeless man whose dead body graced the next morning’s headlines. Pictures too. Marbury, telling a reporter this story several years later, saw the event as a turning point in his life, an epiphany. He scraped together enough funds to start his own mission after that, independent from this office, I might add, and he found an old warehouse with a perfectly located storefront to accommodate his vision, which he aptly called St. Francis of Mercy.
The mission grew and grew some more.
What was originally intended for only a few dozen homeless multiplied like so many loaves to many, almost migrating hordes of people. Winter was the worst. On those ice-cold evenings, December and January especially, the thermometer would dictate the evening’s turnout. Freezing cold, people abandoned their boxes over heating grates, their riverside caves, the hidden stairwells and rail cars, and made a pilgrimage to the shelter, now consuming half the building, all for a warm meal and a comfortable bed. It wasn’t unusual to find whole families huddled together, sharing soup and conversation, maybe even a movie on the television. They could stay as per Marbury’s rule for as long as necessary, a rule that quickly became the noose around his own neck. For families grew, demanding more beds, larger kitchens to feed them, more showers, more clothes, et cetera, until a small community began to crop up, hundreds, plus the attendant cooks, volunteers, and social workers. With more bodies came added costs, the constant need for funds, always more money. And Marbury found himself working around the clock until there were no more hours left.
Nathan Stone, Marbury’s assistant at the shelter, a man with the stress of his job etched on his face, said that the persistent pressures of constantly battling for money, not to mention the flood of more people, was getting to his boss. Every cot, every pillow and blanket, every morsel of food had to be accounted for, fought for, a war unto itself. Marbury grew erratic. He could no longer sleep, and often Stone would see him walking through the empty kitchens at night, just looking around, like a general surveying the landscape before the big battle.
But it was a losing battle. Increasingly, Marbury spent more and more time asking for money. He spoke with anyone who would listen. Wealthy individuals, corporations, fiefdoms if he could find any. The sound of him crunching numbers could be heard at all hours, creating the backbone of graphs and charts that he used to lure people in to the solvency, or perhaps the insolvency, of his vision. A vision that included more expansion. More bodies. Battered women. Runaway children. Hospice care. Home care. Day care.
“We were spread so thin,” Father Stone later confided in me, “that we could barely serve the folks we had already committed to. And Marbury still wanted more, always willing to load up his bag with more. Looking back, I wonder if he was really just trying to sink us.”
When I relayed this quote that I had from Father Stone to Marbury, he took it in stride, as though he had heard it all before.
Marbury said, “If anyone was trying to sink us, it was God. We just kept getting more. What could I do, turn these poor people away? I already walked away once.”
I just shook my head. “You can’t blame yourself for someone dying in the streets, Marbury.”
“I’m not. I’m talking about Pennsylvania.”
What I myself have heard about the trip, beyond the fact that Marbury was discovered wandering on the side of a mountain road near Altoona, Pennsylvania, half naked, his voice lost, missing for an entire week, would be enough to fill the blank side of a match-book. I knew, or rather suspected, only the following:
On Friday, November 30, 1990, Marbury confirms his travel plans with the Reverend José Manuel of Philadelphia, ostensibly to discuss ideas about resource sharing. But he never made it, and Manuel, assuming that Marbury was necessarily delayed or even had canceled without notice, failed to rep
ort his absence to conference authorities for another three days. Add to that the missing travel time and Marbury was unaccounted for almost a week, the time in question.
A few of these days I can vouch for myself. On Sunday, December 2, Marbury checks the weather and gases up his car at a local Fina, for which purchase I have a copy of the credit receipt. He drives 1-94 east through Wisconsin and Illinois, and I have another receipt from a Super 8 motel, right outside of Elkhart, Indiana, where he spends the night. Monday, December 3, after a breakfast of cereal, danish, and coffee, Marbury prepares for the long day’s journey across the rest of Indiana and Ohio, then into Pennsylvania. He is warned, at least according to a waitress that I interviewed by phone, who remembers Marbury because of his generous tip, of an impending storm, one centered around the Great Lakes, with all the moisture associated with these lake storms, and it was moving rapidly. But Marbury ignores this information and drives on anyway, hoping to beat out the weather.
Obviously a fateful decision.
Marbury heard my version of the events only to correct them with a quick sweep of his hands.
He said, “Breakfast was bacon and eggs. Nothing mystical there.”
I nodded and opened up my notebook, where along with my file on Marbury I had assembled some of the various accounts from people who knew and worked with him, including the nurses and doctors who handled his case as he was recuperating, after the incident, here in Minneapolis. As far as I knew, no one had heard the entire story before, not even the authorities in Pennsylvania.
“You’re writing this down?” he asked.
“I have to, you know that.”
“Then you better get the facts right.”
Marbury explained that he had most of the day’s driving under his belt when it started. A light rain at first, outside of Cleveland. It didn’t stop him, he said; if anything the rain just made him push harder. At least until he hit the Allegheny Mountains.
“Why didn’t you stop in Pittsburgh,” I asked, “instead of continuing?”
“I really thought it would end. Despite the forecast, there were peeks of sun.”
The radio, admitted Marbury, contradicted all of this. Dire predictions of a blizzard filled every station. Warnings of ice storms, massive whiteout conditions, road drifts, and snows of near biblical proportions were predicted. But he didn’t listen. Marbury swung past Pittsburgh and into the mountains, through one of those famous long tunnels, and when he emerged again, it started. Snow. Big flakes at first, like in one of those Christmas shake-ups, then gradually harder.
Shelter was being advised on the radio. And many of the roads, now covered and drifting, were becoming impassable. Marbury said that he would have kept on driving that night, probably to his own doom, if not for the one thing that stopped him.
The accident.
Ahead of him blue and red lights cut through the falling snow, obviously the police. In the distance Marbury said that he could see a car, all crushed up like an accordion and turned on its side. Several men in green parkas hovered about, with crowbars, working to free someone. Anyone. Marbury said that he slowed down to a crawl as he approached, out of respect partially, but also because he could no longer see. The snow was now moving in wild swirls, and the men with the crowbars almost had to brace themselves against the wreck to stay upright, or risk getting blown over and down a ravine by the wind.
Suddenly one of them waved and staggered forward. Marbury stopped the car and waited for the green parka to catch up, then in one breath:
“We got a bad one here, mister. The snow’s cut off anything behind you. Ahead, God knows. You might want to follow us back to town for the night.”
Marbury agreed and let the engine idle. The scene looked bad. The car had spun into an embankment and then into a tree that almost cleaved it in two. A body was lying next to the car, bloody and unconscious, or maybe dead, Marbury couldn’t tell. Someone was working frantically on the body, but the wind and snow just wouldn’t cooperate, blowing pieces of the car, a torn airbag, and parts of the dashboard all around.
And then the man in the parka again:
“You’re a priest, aren’t you? If ever we needed one, Father.”
I interrupted Marbury at this part of his story, an easy thing to do given that I still had a speaking voice and asked him, “How could he have possibly known that?”
“Clergy sticker. It came with the car.”
“But it was snowing.”
“I had to clean the windshield with my glove, it was that bad.”
I nodded and wrote this down. I wrote down everything that Marbury told me for several reasons, not the least being that it was a way for me to organize and structure my own thoughts. Often an investigation would take me where the other person was comfortable going, and I had to be comfortable as well. Even if I didn’t always believe in where I might end up.
Marbury went back to the story without missing a beat. He said that a body was lying on a stretcher now, clearly that of a woman, maybe middle-aged. Her body was limp, absolutely lifeless.
The man in the parka again:
“She stopped breathing once, Father. I can’t say she’ll make it.”
Marbury reached into his glove compartment for a Bible. He stepped out of the car, the snow and wind driving at his body, and made his way to the stretcher. His feet plunged into the snow and back out again, leaving only deep holes.
Another man screamed:
“I’m losing her!”
Marbury trudged faster. When he got to the woman he said that he fell on his knees, not out of prayer or sorrow, for he didn’t know this woman, but because the wind had knocked him down.
“Father!”
On his knees, Marbury started to pray.
As I listened to this story, actually Marbury’s retelling of it, I watched the way that he spoke, how forceful his hand actions were, the way he reenacted it perfectly. Every line seemed to weave in at the exact moment, neither detracting from the story nor inflating it unnecessarily. But there was something else. Marbury spoke so convincingly that I felt that I was really there, and the event was right before my eyes when I closed them. I could see everything. From the cops to the woman dying on the stretcher, and that perhaps was the very thing that fascinated me most.
The woman.
In my job, I know of few dying women. My duties as a priest are now strictly administrative, pushing papers and such, but I do miss the energy of a ministry like Marbury’s. I bury no one, and except for my attendance at official functions, I might just as easily forget that death exists. Or rather, that I was trained to play a part in it.
“What do you say in these instances,” I asked, “when you pray?”
Marbury gave me a strange look. “I pray for God’s will.”
He was doing just that when the sound of bending metal stopped him. The workers were digging in the wreck again, this time with blowtorches and blankets, which meant only one thing. Someone else was still in the car. Marbury said that he went back to his prayers but could concentrate only on the torch, which sounded like a wild snake hissing and thrashing about in the wet snow. He was about to give up on the prayers altogether, close his Bible and walk off, when he heard a loud voice. It was a child.
One of the workers:
“She’s in here. Christ, I can’t believe it!”
More commotion and bending metal. Several men in parkas rushed in with spare hands, and great pieces of the car began to shake and move. Then someone reached in and pulled out the victim, a young girl, hardly more than three or four. She looked cold, though otherwise healthy. A worker wrapped a blanket around her, mummy-style, and ran her over to a Ford Bronco, which was now serving as a makeshift ambulance. On the side of the vehicle, Marbury noticed a faded decal that through the falling snow read WHEELERSBURG POLICE.
The little girl, now alert, was given another blanket and a glass of water, which she quickly drank. Somebody looked her over and concluded that she was all right
, remarkably uninjured. Her eyes darted around, checking out the men and vehicles until she saw the bloody woman on the stretcher, her body now being carried into the truck. The girl winced slightly, but didn’t cry.
One of the men in the parkas said:
“Your mommy’s hurt, but we’ll do our best. OK?”
The little girl nodded slowly, again with no emotion.
“She’s going to the hospital, where doctors can help her.”
The man snapped his fingers. “Do you understand me?”
“Shock,” said another voice. “Let’s move.”
The stretcher was pushed in next to the little girl, who was placed to make room in the truck. One of the men in the parkas, a paramedic, cupped a plastic respirator around the woman’s mouth and turned it on. But she didn’t breathe.
Someone looked at Marbury. “She needs God now, I’m afraid.”
“Not in front of the girl,” barked the paramedic.
“Oh, she’s not all here anyway.”
But the man was wrong.
The little girl saw the woman, and like in some movie, reached over with her hand and touched her on the forehead. What happened next, said Marbury, was nothing short of confusion. The woman on the stretcher, one moment ago dead or steps away from death, suddenly opened her mouth and gasped for air. She gasped like a swimmer underwater who was surfacing quickly and from the depths, that much.
“Did you see that?” yelled the paramedic. “She moved!”
But somebody else had doubts. “Nerves. Those are just nerves.”
“Sure, an involuntary reaction,” said another.
And then the woman took another breath, louder than before.
“Is that involuntary, Father?” asked the paramedic. “You tell me.”
Marbury leaned over the woman and heard her breathing. It was faint, but breathing nonetheless. He shook his head.
“That,” he said carefully, “that I call a miracle.”
The Unspeakable Page 2