The Unspeakable

by Charles L. Calia

  A winning basket.

  The ball bounced on the floor until it died. I lost. In all my years of playing Marbury I had never lost; I had not even come close to losing. And he seemed to recognize the occasion, the rarity of it, for he smiled.

  He said, “Easy roll. It’s the rim.”

  Marbury was being gracious. But the truth was I knew better. He beat me, thrashed me soundly, despite the score. A part of me could blame it on my physical condition or on the fact that I was rusty. I hadn’t played in several months. But that didn’t cut water. I lost because I assumed myself to be better, fat, in Marbury’s words, presuming to know the outcome of something before it even began. I was no better off than Marbury; I was just presuming something different.

  “It’s only a game, Peter. Forget about it.”

  I glanced at him, his blue eyes flashing delight. And then it came to me. An image of him in the pool hall, hustling all comers into a contest of wit and guile. What if Marbury had always held back, even in seminary? What if he never played as well as he could? Maybe Marbury was like one of those Zen masters who perfected failure as some bizarre form of meditation. Where would that leave me? All those years of gloating, my personal reveling in his destruction on the court, might have been nothing but a giant sham. A simple con.

  “You weren’t dogging me, were you, Marbury?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, this is a first. You never win.”

  He didn’t say anything. He didn’t have to. My own imagination was saying enough. Maybe Marbury was tired of my dominance over the years and practiced for this moment. Working himself with hours of dribbling and shooting just on the off chance that we might meet up again. Maybe he even planned it that way, mysteriously losing his voice just to force this game and his eventual outcome in it. Or the lost voice itself might be the real game here, the final victory to negate every other defeat in his life. His father, his mother, Jill, the man Burk in the bar. I could have kept on thinking these thoughts until I realized something. That’s what a con man does. He forces you up against yourself.

  I said, “I’m just surprised, that’s all. I thought you didn’t play.”

  “I don’t play. Doesn’t mean I still don’t shoot around.”

  I took his explanation in stride. Whatever the reason, I’d lost.

  “I guess a guy can’t lose forever, Marbury.”

  Words that I pulled out from my past. For I’m not sure that I really believed it. Growing up, watching certain farmers lose year in and year out, despite the weather, despite the lay of the land, had taught me otherwise. My father always referred to these poor fellows as unlucky, without any hope of luck, which only made me think about the opposite of that. The lucky. That was us, for a while. Our farm prospered. Even during rough times we somehow averted disaster, whether by our wits or luck or just plain intelligence I could never quite figure out. Sometimes it was hot and people lost their corn, but we rarely did. It was the same with other crops, and even our animals. We sold at always the right time. Never low enough to bury us; never too high to make us zealous. It was like someone was looking out for us.

  My mother said that someone was God. That God looked out for all pious people everywhere, helping them whenever the Almighty deemed it necessary to intervene. And I grew up with that explanation, I might even have believed it until that day when I realized that we weren’t so lucky, just awaiting our turn at life’s guillotine.

  It started when my father got sick, several months before Sandra and the railroad tracks. He never had a good heart but we didn’t think much about it, he was so strong. But a heart attack changed all that. He became frail, losing fifty or so pounds of muscle built up over the years by hoisting hay and seed. My brothers took over the farm, except that they were only kids themselves, still in school, and we needed to hire help, which was expensive. But we persevered this way for over two years, everyone pitching in where they could.

  At least until the grasshoppers came.

  It was the hottest summer on record, I remember that. No rain for two months straight. And the only clouds were clouds of grasshoppers moving across the fields like hungry demons. You couldn’t walk without crushing a fistful of them. They would jump through crops and strip a field bare. What there was left to strip. For the ground was like concrete, hard and cracked like those pictures of the desert in magazines. Except that this desert was our own land. Entire lakes dried up under the scorching heat. Rivers ran into nowhere. Fish died. Leaves turned brown well before autumn. And the heat made everything brittle, ready for a match, lives as well.

  We went into debt that summer. My father sold a tractor just to make ends meet. But that didn’t last long. He had a payroll to meet and when he couldn’t pay anymore the workers just left. No sympathy, for they had families to feed as well. We sent more animals to slaughter but prices were low, and the luck that we enjoyed all those years expired without so much as a friendly good-bye.

  A man can’t lose forever. My father said that, walking around with a cane, his crops dying, the grasshoppers eating up the last of his self-respect. He said it as a rallying point for the family, but I don’t think he saw it that way. For we were surrounded by losers. People who had lost farms, fathers who had lost sons in wars, mothers who had lost daughters, people who had lost faith. In life, it sometimes seemed that people could go on losing forever and often did, though they called it something else.

  Marbury gave me a sideways glance.

  He said, “Losing I’ve never been afraid of. It tempers one anyway.”

  I’ve heard people say that before. On radio, on television talk shows, in self-help books. But I must admit to never believing any of it. Nobody likes pain, and even if that pain could be exchanged for something else, something greater than the sum of its parts, it could never equal the pain itself.

  “I don’t believe that, Marbury. Steel is tempered but it’s hard. It’s hard because it can’t feel. Same with people. Push them hard enough and they wind up feeling nothing. They wind up as nothing.”

  I was breathing fast, almost blurting out my words.

  “Is that what happened to you, Peter?”

  I just looked at him.

  “Your mother said you witnessed it.”

  “I saw everything, yes.”

  “Even the train?”

  The train.

  I could hear the whistle but I was wheezing too bad to move. My sister was still running and she never turned around. The man from the caboose was just standing there making sounds with the whistle, going choo-choo like he was a little kid.

  And then it turned a corner.

  I looked up and saw the brakeman. But he couldn’t see what it was that I was seeing, Sandra going at a direct intercept. She was running past the few inactive tracks down a small ravine and then up again where the main track was. Trees were on one side. Another blast from the whistle.

  She couldn’t hear it.

  The man from the caboose stopped his idiotic whistling and started running. He didn’t know that Sandra was deaf but he could see what was happening. I never saw anyone sprint so fast. He was like some sort of wild animal, jumping over holes and logs trying to get to her. Then I started running as well, I had to, but my lungs were failing me.

  The train took the last stretch and the brakeman blew the whistle. His view was still blocked by the trees and he slowed down just a bit. Not nearly slow enough. Sandra turned now, the only time she ever did, and saw the man from the caboose running after her. She only ran faster.

  The caboose man was closing in and I was right behind, puffing along. But the train was faster. Sandra made a last dash across the trees. I knew where she was going. Across the road to my father, who was probably finishing his business at the feed store.

  But she never made it.

  Everything went into a dream after that. I saw a body flying and the sound of screeching metal brakes. Sparks and fire and smoke filled the air. The man from the cabo
ose, thinking that he was at war again perhaps or maybe aghast with the horror, threw his arms over his face and screamed. I screamed too.

  The train limped to a stop a few hundred yards later. Several men ran out of the locomotive yelling and acting all frantic. I caught up to the man from the caboose by now, who was standing over Sandra’s body. One of the men pushed him out of the way and slid into her, tearing open a medical kit. But he didn’t need one.

  “Aw, Christ! No! No!” he said.

  Voices and confusion.

  “I didn’t see her!” cried the brakeman.

  “Nobody saw her.”

  “But the whistle—?”

  “To hell with the whistle!”

  Another one said, “I’ll radio a doctor.”

  But the first guy just grabbed his arm.

  He said, “Radio an undertaker. She’s dead.”

  “What should I say?”

  “Tell them it’s an accident.”

  Double take on the man from the caboose.

  “—tell them we’re not sure.”

  My house after Sandra’s death wasn’t like a real place. Or maybe it was too real. Nobody talked about it even though we all walked around like zombies. At night I could hear my mother downstairs at the kitchen table, praying, her words low and mumbled as though she was too embarrassed to voice them aloud. But I knew what she was doing anyway. At least she knew that Sandra was dead. More than my father, who just blocked her out of his mind. He never prayed again. And he never stepped back into a church again after the funeral. He was done with God, I knew that.

  Gradually, and this is the incredible thing, gradually life began to come back. Baths were taken again, food eaten, cars driven. We went on. But our luck was never the same. Sandra’s name was never mentioned again in our house. Her photographs were stripped from the walls, along with the needlework and paintings that she gave to my parents. And the contents of her room were packed up. Sold off. Clothes were donated to the Goodwill. Gone were her dolls, her bike, her bed, and all her furniture. Gone too were her memories, for it was like she had never existed, or just walked away one day and vanished. Even in our minds.

  I tried to join the family in their denial but I wasn’t always as successful. Sandra would just pop into my mind for no apparent explanation. I certainly wasn’t thinking about her. I avoided that like everyone else, but there she would be. Not that I could talk about it. Nobody wanted to hear anything that I had to say. Even after the accident I never had the opportunity to explain myself, to tell people what I really saw. My mother didn’t ask me what happened, having learned it from my father, and he didn’t try to clarify anything. He just went along with my story.

  I remember once, months after the incident, that I tried to tell my teacher. It was after school and I waited for everyone to leave, thinking that I would get a sympathetic ear. But instead I got someone who didn’t know what to say, and not knowing, she just tried to say everything. I could barely spit a word out edgewise. My teacher talked about God and how everything had a purpose, even things so horrible that we can’t imagine them, and then she started quoting things, people that I’ve never heard of, until she lost steam and I lost the desire to say anything else.

  I haven’t opened my mouth about the incident since.

  Marbury looked at me and said that he was sorry. But I just shrugged him off. Sorry counted three decades ago, not now.

  “You have to worry about yourself, Marbury.”

  “What’s the worst on my plate?”

  “A tribunal,” I said.

  “Oh, it won’t come to that. Trust me.”

  “Then you agree to my conditions? First, a declaration that you can’t heal, could never heal, and a disavowal of everyone who claims to have been healed by you.”

  “Don’t forget about my desk job.”

  “That’s already waiting for you.”

  Marbury smiled and twirled the ball on his index finger like a pro. It fell off only when it quit spinning.

  He said, “I have a better idea. Let’s shoot for it, Peter. First one to miss caves in. What do you say?”

  I said that I couldn’t.

  “Too bad. Then I guess I’ll have to wait for the cavalry.”

  Chapter 10

  I left Marbury after that. I was sweaty and tired and every vein in my head throbbed and ached. At home I ran a bath and sat in it, nursing a few bottles of beer and thinking, but the dirt just wouldn’t soak off me.

  The sun must have woke me up, for my eyes opened. A streamer of light ran from my outside window down to the tub, where I had fallen asleep, and it hit me in the face. Warmth.

  It was Easter Sunday.

  I got to Marbury’s office a few hours before Mass. He was sitting there, his feet propped up on his desk reading a newspaper. Not a care in the world. He took one look at me and smiled.

  “Your skin. Are those wrinkles on your hands?”

  I looked down. White prunes attached to my wrists.

  “You’re not suddenly aging on me, are you?”

  “Just a long shower.”

  “You still take long showers?” He smiled.

  I brushed him off by pushing a pile of books from the couch, which mysteriously had gotten there overnight like a growing fungus, and onto the floor. A loud crash. But Marbury didn’t flinch from his article. He was used to chaos.

  The sun was beaming through his window as well. It was cold outside, maybe forty degrees, but the sky was the color of the sea, a washing of blue. And it felt like Easter. I thought about all the Easters in my life, a kind of rapid montage of places and events and people too. Then it came to me.

  “What are you laughing about?” asked Marbury.

  “I was thinking about seminary. The guy with the cross.”

  “Sure, you mean Lou Waters.”

  “God, you actually know his name?”

  “Why not?”

  The man that I was referring to was seen only once a year. On Easter. Whether he was a local or a vagrant who just drifted in for the occasion, I don’t know. But I was shocked that Marbury actually knew him, for everyone saw him as a nut. He always showed up on the chapel stairs around sunrise, thinking that he was the resurrected Christ, I suppose, wearing only a cloak and sandals. He wore a crown of thorns as well but nobody noticed that. They only noticed the cross.

  It was huge. Maybe eight feet long made from real lumber that was hammered together. He dragged that damn cross around every year on Easter morning, signifying exactly what I had no idea, for it wasn’t Good Friday. And he never said anything. Not a sermon. Not even a quote from Revelation, which was usually standard fare.

  “You spoke to him?” I asked.

  “I took him to lunch. Of course, he had to park the cross.”

  I almost burst out laughing. The thought of Marbury feeding the Jesus man, as he was later to be known, was the craziest thing that I’ve ever heard. I could imagine them together at a diner, everyone in town glancing up from their soup and cheeseburgers only to wonder who brought in the circus.

  “He was interesting. But I love fanatics anyway.”

  Marbury said that for one day of the year, Easter, the Jesus man actually lived the way Christ had. He ate similar food, or what he hoped was similar, dressed like him, and generally spent the day walking around with a cross draped over his shoulders. And everything began at sunrise.

  “Why?”

  “I guess that’s how he celebrated.”

  I couldn’t believe that Marbury was defending a man who was clearly just this short of being institutionalized. But he was.

  “Surely you don’t buy this, Marbury?”

  “Maybe he got people to thinking. You still remember him.”

  “I remember him because he was so bizarre.”

  “I’m sure the real Jesus struck some folks as bizarre.”

  I looked at him but he was smiling.

  “Is that what you are, Marbury? A man holding a cross on a street corner?�
��

  “No.”

  “How do I know that?”

  “Well, I could have stayed in Pennsylvania, for one.”

  Pennsylvania.

  That scraping noise was the sound of freedom, said Marbury. Two snowplows fresh off the interstate were already working away on the roads, slowly pushing huge heaps of snow to the rear of the parking lot. Marbury watched them from the window. The sky was clearing by now, a thin ribbon of blue starting to break from the clouds. And sun. Already Marbury could see the dripping of water, melting snow, but there was plenty left. The town had received over three feet of snow, all said, though blowing and other accumulations made that number rise.

  It was a ton at any rate.

  But the snowplows brought another thing. They brought hope. For the first time since the snow began, things were coming back to normal. Laughter could be heard in the hospital and people whistling. Doctors had a spring to their step. Janitors stole extra-long breaks while the nurses gossiped about everyone else’s life.

  “What are you going to do once they spring us?”

  “Foot massage, if I can find one.”

  “Not me. A nice, hot shower.”

  “You can keep your shower, girl. I’m in bed before I shut these eyes.”

  “I can think of a few other things to do in bed.”

  Giggle, giggle.

  “You girls are crazy. I’m going to treat myself to a good breakfast.”

  “With real eggs.”

  “And Belgian waffles with strawberries.”

  “Strawberries? Where are you going to find fresh strawberries?”

  “They’ll have to be frozen, I guess.”

  “I’m eating nothing frozen.”

  More laughter. Finally one of the nurses asked, “Hey, Father, what are your plans?”

  Marbury said that he didn’t know. He could continue on to the conference, which was now half over, or he could turn right around and head back to Minneapolis.