They want to keep him in St. Paul, you know, Julie says. His heart is failing.
Do you think his parents will come for him now?
I don’t think they know. Julie shrugs. They gave him up at birth when he looked normal. Just like you. Just like me. Perhaps they didn’t know he was sick. Perhaps if they’d known he wouldn’t live long, they would have kept him, you know.
Ten years, that isn’t too long a time, is it? Even if you’re a famous actress or a movie star or a senator or a war hero. That isn’t too much time to give up, is it?
Duncan doesn’t know if it is or not—he’s been lost for ten years and the time since his birth when God spoke to him and his awakening seems vast and without end. He wonders if that is what it feels like for a parent with a child. He tells Julie that he’s not sure whether ten years is too long or not long enough. He doesn’t know how soon parents tire of their children.
Billy wants to stay here, she says. Father Toibin wants him here, as well.
But why?
This is where Billy’s parents brought him. Father Toibin feels it’s the Brothers’ responsibility to care for him now.
But Billy wants to leave, Duncan says. That’s all he wants to do before it’s too late. He talks about it all the time. We all want to leave.
No, Duncan. Julie shakes her head; her lips are pursed and determined. The wind throws her hair up in small black tufts about her ears and she presses it back roughly with her hand. We all want to go home, she says.
They stare after Billy’s van and out over the valley and beyond, toward Lac qui Parle, where a gleaming sprawl of hastily erected mining shacks, felling cranes, sliders, platforms, and tractors stand derelict and abandoned. From the center of a burn upon distant wooded slopes, an unwavering black line splits the sky in two. There is a flickering high in the eastern sky where the stars will come later, between Cassiopeia and the wide asterism of Cygnus, like a sharp angle of glittering metal, and Duncan sees the disintegrating command module Columbia containing Michael Collins falling, tumbling, blazing down from the sky and Billy’s van a small speck in all of this as it leaves the winding, rutted monastery road and makes its way north out into the world. Just like the astronauts.
Chapter 17
August 1981
It is the Feast of the Assumption, and everyone is busy with chores. In the narrow stone halls filigreed with late sunlight there is laughter amidst the bustle. Duncan and Julie are walking the hall from class when Brother Canice gambols toward them, squeezing between the bodies of pressing, pushing children. The bells are oddly silent and Duncan wonders if he should remind Brother Canice that it’s time to sound them for prayer. His cheeks are crosshatched with small scratches from shaving. On his neck he’s applied small bits of tissue paper to the larger cuts and they’re spotted with blood.
Hello, Duncan, he grunts. Hello, Julie.
Hello, Brother Canice, Julie says. How are you?
Oh, good, good, but it’s a mad day, he says, absolutely mad! And he glares about the hallway at the children pushing around him. I just don’t understand all the fuss, all this rushing about. I mean what on earth is going on?
But isn’t it always this way on the Assumption?
The Assumption?
Brother Canice sucks on his teeth and considers this, looks from Julie to Duncan, and then seems to come to some manner of decision. Duncan! he says suddenly, as if just remembering something, and as if Duncan were at the far end of the hallway and not standing directly in front of him.
Yes, Brother?
Father Toibin wants to see you. You can find him in his office. And don’t dally, what with all this commotion I forgot he had asked me to find you directly after breakfast this morning.
Aren’t you going to ring the bells this morning? Julie asks, and Brother Canice stares at her until they can both see alarm rising slowly in his eyes. The bells, he says softly, like an echo of Julie’s voice, and then grasps the hem of his robe and races down the tile toward the campanile.
On a cushion placed upon the high sideboard next to Father Toibin’s desk, the cat with the green eyes shudders as if it is dreaming and then stretches languidly. Bits of its hair swirl in the thin feathery light cast by two table lamps.
We are all worried, Father Toibin says, and he opens his hands toward Duncan, a gesture to include, Duncan assumes, all the children in his care.
We are all worried when we feel we might not be as attentive as well as we might. Sometimes we become distracted ourselves and are not always mindful of what it is to be a child and the pressures and forces that they feel. If there is anything bothering you, Duncan? You can tell me.
On the mantel, a clock of black polished ash ticks slowly as if it needs to be wound.
Your mother, I know, loves you and misses you very much, but often parents can be misguided by their own wishes, selfishness which is only brought about by love, really, and they fail to see what is best for their children.
Duncan struggles with Father Toibin’s words, and then he struggles to retrieve them. My mother? he thinks, did he say my mother?
We all want what is best for you. Do you understand that?
Father Toibin, my mother?
Father Toibin’s voice falters, but even without the words, he attempts to soothe; Duncan is a small boy reflected in shadowy miniature upon his dark pupil: This is your home for as long as you want and for as long as your mother and we think being here is in your best interest. Do you understand that? Do you?
Father, excuse me, but you said my mother?
Yes, yes. Of course, your mother. Father Toibin frowns, pushes a letter across the desk at Duncan, and, momentarily distracted, waves at the window where a red clay road curls into the north—the same road upon which he and Billy returned from Stockholdt.
She’s coming to get you.
Duncan holds the letter in his hands as he would the Psalter at Mass, with a sense of the mysterious power of the words on the page before him. He stares at the now-familiar handprint and imagines the letter open upon a table for days before it is sent, and he sees the writer, his mother smelling of guiacol and lily of the valley with her head bowed and her long hair brushing the tabletop, a cigarette smoldering in a glass ashtray, a thin tendril of gray smoke twining toward the ceiling, considering the words over and over again, and wondering if she should send the letter—forever damning herself to him—or tear it up so that no evidence of it or him remains; he imagines that she hesitates, falters, and, finally, succumbing to forces that he may never understand, gives in.
Maggie Bright
34 Divisadero Street
San Francisco, CA 94114
August 3, 1981
Dear Father Toibin,
I have always wanted to do what was best for Duncan and until recently, it seemed in his best interest—and both yourself and Dr. Mathias agreed—that he remain at the monastery in your care. However, given your most recent update, I feel he is ready to come home. I have been separated from my child for too long, and I believe he can and will thrive in the home I provide for him. I am now gainfully employed, have savings in the bank, and close family and friends who are eager to embrace Duncan with love and affection. He will not want for love.
I shall be driving from San Francisco the day after tomorrow, and, after spending some time with friends in Nevada, plan to be at the monastery midday of August the 29th. I would like Duncan to be made aware that I am coming, and that he be prepared to come home with me. I know that, at first, it will not be easy, and that there will be a period of adjustment for both of us, but I am his mother, and however difficult this adjustment might be, it can be nothing compared to what it has been like not to have him here with me all these years. Of course you know something of this from our discussions. There has not been a day or night that I have not thought about my son, and dreamed that he was home with me.
With the blessing of God, I will see you both soon.
Sincerely,
&
nbsp; Maggie Bright
Through Father Toibin’s office window is everything Duncan knows: harrow-ribbed green pastures, still as a painting, and, at a great distance, ashen smoke plumes along the Iron Range, and men walking on the steeper hillsides beating the furze where blazing stars, goldenrod, and asters bloom, and beyond them the striated ridges of hardwood: red maple and pin cherry. Everything I know. And now, his mother coming to get him. Just like in his dream.
Father Toibin is still talking. He’s worried about how such a visit might affect him. Would he like to see her? Is he nervous? Excited? Scared? How does he feel about leaving the Home? Has he been sleeping? How are his friendships with the other children? Brother Canice has had nothing but praise for him, but Father Malachy has mentioned his withdrawal, his recent lack of participation in events, and he is worried because—
But Father, my mother, Duncan says. My mother. I thought she was, I mean, isn’t she … dead?
Chapter 18
Julie fiddles with the brilliantly lacquered black wig she has pulled down over her hair, and smiles. This, she says, was from the children’s production of Whose Baby Are You Now? that the Home put on when she was eight, but of course Duncan wouldn’t remember that. She takes Duncan’s hand as they walk among the gardens. The smells of late summer come and go with the winds that always seem at twisting motion upon the plains. At a bench they sit down and Julie lays her head against his chest and he stares at the fake tea-colored center part in the hair.
On the far side of the garden, toward the soccer pitch: the sound of children at play. The hoarse coughing of the prefix. They laugh as he shouts, and Duncan imagines his ineffectual attempts to control the children or whatever game they are playing. They listen for the names they know, the usual culprits and offenders.
I have to leave, he says. Julie pulls at a knot in her wig. She sighs.
My mother is coming to get me. You’ll get to meet her.
A Brother begins to shout at a boy, and Duncan laughs, expecting Julie to do so also, but she merely stares toward the sound.
I’m the only one who knew you were sleeping, she says. I’m the one that knew you’d woken up from a divine sleep. I’m the one that found you.
I know.
Your mother, she says, is she pretty? Is she a great actress?
I don’t know. I don’t think so. But Duncan does; in his mind he pictures the woman from his dream standing before the Festival of Lights Holiday Train as it glitters in fractured and failing illumination through the swirling snow, and he sees his mother’s bright, damp cheeks, and the fierce blue of her large, almond shaped eyes, and everything—the land, the storm, the train—is lost in her and subsumed by her: In his dream she is the center of the world.
Julie thinks about this for a moment and nods. She says: If your mother is going to leave you, she should be beautiful and rich and fantastic. Those things are important, more important than any child, don’t you think?
On the walkway a group of six girls are playing jump rope. On each end a girl swings two ropes, the rope on the left turning clockwise and the one on the right turning in a counterclockwise loop. They pass the two ropes from hand to hand and their arcs are parabolic, shifting orbits crossing and merging, crossing and merging in a hypnotic blur; and as the girls turn the ropes, and as the other girls skip, they sing.
Julie kicks her legs in time to the skipping song. Faintly: the slap and scrape of the jump rope upon the stone, the girls’ voices in song, unchanging despite the failing light.
Julie stops her legs and grasps at his shoulder with a thin hand. It doesn’t matter anyway, Duncan, she says. She’ll leave you again. She will. It’s what mothers do.
Chapter 19
Waiting, Duncan stands on the hill and looks out over the valley. The sun is high, and despite a breeze pushing the long grass this way and that, the air is thick. A small herd of cows lazily chews cud, others flick their tails as they drink from the stream. Cicadas thrum loudly in the trees of the arboretum. Upon the pond the heat of the day shimmers; ducks have been attacking one another all day, and their feathers drift through the air like flax.
Upon the far slope a row of wire bales trembles, flashes refracted sunlight in Morse code. He sees the dust cloud first, and then the car as it speeds through the valley and up the winding road toward the Home, the dust cloud behind it growing larger and more violent. As it comes nearer, it takes shape: a black Chevy Impala from the late sixties, a decommissioned police car with the outline of the original star-shaped emblems upon its doors, blacker than the rest of the faded metal, and it buckles and bottoms out on the rutted, potholed road spiraling up to the Home.
After she steps from the car and stretches her long body, she pauses and surveys the land—isolated farmhouses upon yellowed siderite fields, the dark Iron Range stretching like a storm cloud entrenched across the horizon—and then squints up at the sun. Her skin is so white it looks as if it has never seen the sun, and the wind has turned her hair in knots: it’s as red and as wild as flame. Something in her shifts, something indecipherable and almost undetectable—he senses it in her posture, in the conflict of softness and tension that comes to her face, and he wonders if it is fear—and then she straightens her skirt, reaches back into the car for a wide-brimmed sun hat, which she places upon her head, and takes a determined step toward the gate of the monastery. And that is when she sees him. She stops and the world seems to tilt about her.
Duncan, she says, and he wonders how she knows it is him.
She crosses the dirt driveway and takes his hand and he searches her face for some truth, some sign of fear or hesitation. Her eyes are the same blue as his own.
I’m your mother, she says. You probably don’t remember me—and she laughs as if at the absurdity of it all, and Duncan smiles. From the valley below a wind cock clanging hollow on tin, the faraway thock of axes on wood. Within the monastery’s walls children are running and calling to one another and he wonders if Julie can see him from her window.
So, she says slowly, testing the words for the both of them. Shall we go home? Would you like that?
Yes, he nods, yes, wanting to say Mom yet knowing that he can’t, not just yet, and then she pulls him to her and he holds on tightly, smelling things he will only later be able to identify as her: patchouli, apple-scented shampoo, the pungent red burley of her hand-rolled cigarettes, and strangely, oil and lye-heavy industrial soap of the type men who spend their days working on engines use, as if she had just stepped out of an auto repair shop, and he wonders if this smell comes from the man who might be his father or if her car broke down on the way here and whether it is capable of taking them the vast distance across America to San Francisco and where he imagines home, whatever such a place is, must be.
Beneath the Romanesque arches of the main entrance Brother Canice and Father Toibin are waiting with his bags, a bulging tattered brownish-yellow suitcase held together by old clasps spotted with rust and his army duffel bag. There are some of the boys from his dormitory and other children with whom he has shared classes. Most of them look bored or indifferent and he knows that Father Toibin has arranged this for him. Julie stands slightly to the side as if unsure of what to do or say. The sound of children from the playing field comes to them from over the ivy-covered stone walls.
Today Julie has two red hair clips in her hair, and there is a small beauty spot an inch or so above the far right corner of her lip that he knows was not there before. She pulls him to her, and he can only think of her smell—of glycerin soap and warm, moist skin; of her hair, washed and brushed and shining like lacquer. Finally, smiling, she pushes him roughly away, and he watches the beauty spot rise on the curving edge of her lip. He whispers to Julie that he loves her—and he does—and that he will never forget her.
Brother Canice’s eyes are red-rimmed. The thick, untamed orange-red sideburns that run rampant over the sides of his jaws and neck are matted down with oil. He’s freshly shaven and so severely his s
kin looks raw and tender. A breeze bends Father Toibin’s pant legs lazily around his ankles and he must constantly mat down the thin hair he lays over his bald crown.
Julie stares defiantly at him as the car pulls away, Julie who every year will never age but remain a little girl, thinking that if she remains a little girl, her mother will finally come back for her and she will be everything her mother has ever desired.
They stand at the gates of the orphanage and wave goodbye and he watches from the back window of the car as they drive away, knowing that he will never see them again. He sits watching from the backseat of the car until he can no longer see them and the Home is nothing but a glinting speck in the divide of two valleys darkened by strip mining. Distantly the bell for Vigil tolls from the campanile and he bends his head toward its plaintive, tremulous sound, imagining Brother Canice heaving heavily upon the ropes.
I’m sorry about your friend, Duncan. Father Toibin told me. His name was Billy, is that right?
The sound of his mother’s voice startles him and it takes a moment for him to understand what she’s said to him. He nods. Tattered-looking, windswept clouds move quickly across the sky, seeming to follow their car; in the east a large dark front whips the plains with black virga, and he shivers imagining the cold rain that is coming and the trains that he and Billy never took.
Please turn around, Duncan, and sit down, his mother says gently, and he turns back in his seat and sees for the first time the country that they are passing through: gray furrowed hillsides scraped raw from boring the pith. A fine dusty powder of anthracite ash bleached white from the sun lies upon the alkyl hills and plains.
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