Forty Martyrs

by Philip F. Deaver

  “Maybe, I dunno, have the girls open a lemonade stand and see if we could parlay the whole thing into payments on Citibank and the water. You know, I got a call yesterday, and they’re going to cut you off the water any second. Bill Epps, at the water company.”

  That reminded Vasco that the sprinkler was still going in the sideyard. He stretched the phone cord toward the window. In the moment he looked at it, the high, vaulting spray of glittering water from the hose wilted to a dribble. “Yeah, Bill Epps did call, didn’t he. I remember now.”

  “Yeah, he’s a friend, but if you don’t pay he can’t just—” She trailed off. Then she started up again: “It’s just one more sign that the system’s breaking down,” she said. “I’ve told you this before, babe—you better watch it.” She was talking about the kids. Melanie would take the kids if it could be proven in a court of law that Vasco was haywire.

  “Hey, Mel, the system already broke,” Vasco said, laughing. “I’m notifying you of an upswing, are you listening to me? From now on, it’s a different dimension. It’s the Virgin Mary, for Christ’s sake.”

  She hung up on him.

  •

  Later in the week, Vasco called Lowell and asked to meet him at the Hungry Bear for lunch. The Hungry Bear was the lunch and snack bar for most of the college people on Lowell’s side of campus. It was ancient, its terrible decor a tradition guarded with care. They arrived around eleven, and the place was mostly empty. Lowell met Vasco with a smile, shook his hand. They sat in one of booths back in the shadows by the cash register. In a front corner of the room stood a real, stuffed Grizzly bear, six feet six inches tall, ancient and moth-eaten, staring through its glassy eyes at the Olds dealership across the street.

  “You look pretty good without an EMT sitting on you,” Lowell said. He laughed as they settled in. They ordered BLTs and ice water for lunch. Vasco could tell Lowell was wondering what this was all about. Within two minutes, he asked: “So, what’s the deal?” He fingered his graying beard.

  Vasco smiled at him. “Okay yeah well, to get right to it, there’s something going on with me. That I wanted to tell you about. I seem to be being visited on a monthly basis by a vision. In my yard.” Vasco watched Lowell’s eyes. They seemed to flicker, but he proceeded. “It’s a vision. The thirteenth of each month, for the last two months.” He cleared his throat. “I haven’t said anything to anybody about it. Except Melanie, and of course she thinks this is the big midlife crack-up she’s been expecting from me since I was twenty-two.”

  Lowell looked down. “A vision of what?” he asked doubtfully.

  “Well, don’t laugh.”

  “I won’t.”

  “It’s the Virgin Mary.”

  This made Lowell spew water onto the table. It leapt out of him, not his fault. Something about the timing. He regretted laughing, Vasco could tell.

  “She’s quite pretty,” Vasco said after Lowell got himself settled down. “And gentle. I know you know I’m in a tough time right now, but she says that’s precisely why she’s visiting me.”

  Lowell stared at him, eyes watering, unable to speak.

  After a while, Vasco said, “I’m virtually certain there’s no scientific explanation for this.”

  Lowell, in the middle of a sip, almost sprayed the table again getting it swallowed. “Yeah, probably not,” he said, coughing.

  Vasco couldn’t keep looking at him, stared away. Nobody talked for a few minutes. They ate their sandwiches.

  “Look,” Lowell said finally. “People are talking. They see you wandering around in your yard. I’m worried about you. You’re going to walk out of here today, and I’m going to hear something bad happened. I think we need to do something. Maybe we need to get you checked in some place.”

  “Pooh,” Vasco offered.

  “It happens to a lot of people. Look at you. You’re under incredible stress. I hate to see this. It wouldn’t have happened if that fucking English department had gone ahead with the promotion.”

  “Okay, there’s a little stress, but things are better. They really are.”

  “It’s money, isn’t it? I heard Annie Rook paid your water bill.”

  “So? I’m not talking about Ann Rook. I’m talking about the Virgin Mary.”

  “Oh for God’s sake, Vasco, please!”

  “Lowell. There’s nothing you have to do. I just—I just want somebody who kind of likes me to know about it and watch what happens. I don’t know what’s going to happen, but somebody else—a friend—needs to know about it. Something’s definitely going to happen.”

  They were finished eating. Lowell put money on their table for the lunch. “You’ve got my phone number. Any time, day or night.”

  “Okay.” Vasco looked at him as he started to depart. “But you’re here right now. I did call you. You’re here.”

  Lowell was making his way to the front door, past the staring bear.

  “Can’t we deal with it now?” Vasco asked, but Lowell was out the door.

  When he got home, Vasco called Lowell.

  “Hello.”

  “Lowell, it’s Vasco. I…”

  “I really wish you hadn’t told me this one,” Lowell said.

  They said nothing more. Unaccountably, when Vasco hung up the phone, he felt better.

  •

  Previous to all this, Vasco had worried that the mine would be all there was to his life. Now he found that he could lighten up. This didn’t mean that a former English professor was well accepted by the miners. They laughed at him. He didn’t care. He could get on top of things. He had existential breathing room. Somebody, not just anybody, had his back. It was an internal process, however. Anytime he brought it into the light of day, it didn’t work so well. For instance, he told Dean Ferguson, the superintendent of the Murdock Mine, that he was feeling better about his job. He volunteered the information one day, as Dean and two other managers were walking by the slag pile.

  “Listen to me, Whirly, and listen good,” Dean told him. “You still don’t fit out here. Don’t start thinking you do.” Vasco turned and walked toward his car. On his way to the parking lot he got thwocked on the helmet with a piece of coal.

  “This is totally embarrassing,” Melanie Junior said to him one day not long after that, while Vasco was setting out warm plates of Spaghetti-Os for dinner. “Mom told me everything, Dad.”

  In the heat of the moment that Saturday morning, in his call with Mel Senior, he thought he’d asked her to keep a lid on this. What the hell. No telling what she was saying and to whom. Michelle was at the breakfast table, too, stirring the hot red food. She placed her hand gently and consolingly on his arm. “Daddy,” she said. “Everything’s going to be okay.”

  “Thanks, doll.” The beginnings of being parented by your children. How long had they pitied him? “What about Hiroshima?” he asked, hoping for a diversion.

  “Oh, that’s all over.” Michelle smiled. “It cost us three dollars and eighteen cents.”

  “Vietnam cost in the millions,” Mel Junior observed.

  “How do libraries survive?” Vasco sighed. “Did you ever wonder that?”

  “Dad, Dad, Dad,” Michelle said, exasperated. “You’re such a worrier.”

  •

  Lowell called the next morning to try to stop Vasco from reading the Tuscola Review. It was a weekly. In the “Column One” section, left column of the front page, there was an editorial. It had the heading, “Huh??” Vasco dreaded reading it, but did. It referred to “a certain hapless gentleman in the community, frequently seen wandering aimlessly in his yard on Scott Street.”

  “Well, guess what,” the editor wrote. “Now apparently the gentleman has observed the Virgin Mary above his driveway.” The piece went on to suggest that Vasco should secure from her, on her next visit, a prediction of the outcome of the Arcola-Tuscola football game, three months hence. At that very moment, the article was being read all over the community. Vasco shuddered in his chair.

  �
�

  The next morning, as he was arriving home from a night at the mine, he discovered Melanie Senior pulling away from the house in a U-Haul. Melanie Junior and Michelle were in the cab with her. His heart aching, he followed them down Niles Avenue to the highway. On the highway, he pulled up beside them, then veered in front of them, forcing them into the white gravel of the Poplar Motel parking lot.

  He got out of his car and stomped to the truck’s driver’s side window. “What’s going on?”

  “We’ll talk later, ‘kay?” Melanie Senior said to him, not quite looking him in the eye. Her tone indicated she didn’t want a scene in front of the kids.

  “Melanie, I need the girls right now.”

  “We think you’re coming apart, sweetie. We know you need them, but they’re the kids and you’re the dad. Don’t get it turned around.”

  “Daddy, we’ll come visit,” Michelle said. She was sitting in the middle. Melanie Junior was chewing gum, staring straight ahead on the other side. Her headphones were on.

  Their mother sat agitated in the driver’s seat, chewing gum, her eyes flashing. “We may have a week or two of peace before this crap runs in the Mattoon paper and humiliates us off the face of the earth.”

  The rental truck revved.

  “Mel,” Vasco said, appealing to Melanie Junior. “Don’t leave me.” Headphones blaring, she couldn’t hear him.

  “Gotta motate, hon, sorry,” his ex-wife said. She smiled that hard, tough smile of hers.

  “We’ll come visit, Dad,” Michelle sang out to him again as the truck lurched away.

  •

  Okay, fine. They wanted to leave him alone, go be in Mattoon with Doubting Thomasina right at the most inspiring moment, great. He drove home. He went upstairs. He looked in the girls’ rooms. Their clothes, their toys, their beds, their chests of drawers, their gerbil, their goldfish. Gone, all of it. Lint and pieces of paper and parts of old games littered the ruglines where furniture used to be. An old wrinkled math test was on the floor in Melanie Junior’s room. In Michelle’s room, a stuffed bunny was sitting straight up in the corner like she left it there as a signal. Fine. Vasco went down the long hall to his room and sat on the bed. The house was quiet. It was a twostory house, big, the house of his childhood. This is way more than you wanted to know: He decided to lock himself in the room. No more rummaging around. No more coal mine. No more people. He’d come out June thirteenth. It was only twenty days away.

  He called Gloria Steinem and had her call her friend Harold Luce, the town handyman, to change all the locks in the place. Locked in his room high and deep inside his locked house, he should be okay. He moved in a little refrigerator that was going to be Melanie’s at college. There was enough food. He had a phone. The master bath was right there. He locked the bedroom door and pushed the dresser in front of it. He had a rosary and a few books. He got down on his knees and ran the beads through his coal-blackened fingers. He slept. Late that night, he showered, slept more. He set up some pictures on the dresser, pictures of the girls. A day or so passed, then a few more. Nobody missed him. Fine.

  More time passed. On a few occasions, he heard a knock on the front door. After a while, visitors gave up and ran away. Once he heard someone in his yard below his window. He peeked out. It was Father Kelleher, the parish priest. No moon, it was very dark out, and Vasco couldn’t be certain what he was seeing. For sure it was Kelleher. And he appeared to be working his way along the edge of the driveway with a metal detector. Vasco raised the window and was almost ready to speak to his visitor.

  Kelleher looked up, startled. “Er. Hi. It’s you. I was looking around.” He tried to hide the metal detector behind his back.

  “Well, feel free,” Vasco said.

  “Look. You’ve got to retract this business. It’s going to ruin us all. Very bad. Very.”

  Vasco closed the window.

  “Not for just me,” Kelleher shouted. “All of us!”

  After a while Vasco couldn’t hear him down there anymore.

  The house telephone was hooked to an old answering machine. Mostly there were whole days between phone calls, especially right after Vasco locked himself up. But eventually the messages began to flow in.

  Melanie Senior called, said she was going to call the police if he didn’t snap out of it. “Vasco? Vasco pick up the phone this instant. Vasco.” She just realized he’d had the locks changed on the house, and she couldn’t get in. If he was dead, she said, she didn’t want him rotting on the carpet.

  Gloria Steinem called: “Vasco Whirly?” She waited a moment. Then he could hear her laughing. “I’ll tell you what, you’re a lot more interesting these days than when you were in high school.” Pause. Gone.

  One day Lowell Wagner called: “Hey, buddy. You okay in there? I’m next door at the Rittenauer’s. You need to send out some kind of message or wave at the window so we know you’re alive and you didn’t off yourself or something. Your ex-wife wants them to break down the door and rush the place because you’re whacko. Orson’s out here, if you want to just wave and let him know you’re okay.”

  Vasco went to the window and waved at Orson Morrell, the police chief. Henry Green, the editor of the paper (and author of the Column One article), was standing next to him pointing a camera with a long lens toward the window. Vasco shot him the bird, pulled the curtain. As he was pulling it, he noted something. There seemed to be a lot of cars parked along Scott Street.

  One afternoon the low and rumbly voice of Abe Holden, his friend on the safety crew at the mine, came on the recorder: “Hey Vasco. You in there? Listen, is it true you’ve gone crazy? Hey, the boys at Murdock, they hope you’re okay—seriously. They like you, they said. People are talking all over the place. You gotta get out here and defend your honor, boy.” Then he whispered: “Hey, oh yeah and Dean says you’re not fired yet. He’d of come here and told you himself, but he broke his nose yesterday. Walked into the wrong end of a shovel.” Click.

  Vasco heard a lot of activity outside. But he didn’t look. He lay on his bed, staring at the ceiling. Why would the boys at the Murdock start liking him all of a sudden? That night a rock crashed through his window while he was sleeping. He stared at it, on the floor in a stray beam from a streetlight. His heart was whamming. Wrapped around the rock was a Letter to the Editor, torn from the latest issue of the college newspaper. Oh how he dreaded reading it:

  Virgin Mary, Quite Contrary…

  I’ve been following this Vasco Whirly business. If anyone wonders why we on the college promotion and tenure committee failed to provide tenure to this individual, maybe it is clear now. One of the dangers of coming to a provincial region to teach in college is that we can sometimes become ensnared in the unseemly small-mindedness around us. It is now becoming clear that Mr. Whirly is a case in point.

  As we in academia so well know, the most profound grief of all in this country, in this generation, is bound to be the grief deaver accompanying the arrival of the greatest realization in history: that there is no living God, and there never was. We are alone out here, and we will have to make our own way. In the backwater regions, such as this one, where religion’s roots have traditionally been fundamental and deep, that grief is bound to have its most profound impact. For some, it could even cause insanity.

  Benjamin Carlyle, Ph.D.

  Chairman, Dept. of English

  It was nearly a day before the answer machine clicked on again. Ann Rook: “I hope you’re enjoying your water,” she said in the quiet voice she was known for. “Sorry to bother you. I wanted to call and tell you some stuff nobody else is probably telling you. The community development committee just signed a deal to build a big store. The big cheese in from Chicago heard about you and the ‘sightings,’ as this stuff is being called. He said, ‘We believe this is just the environment for a Wal-Mart.’ High school kids have a t-shirt that says ‘BVM, welcome to Tuscola.’ And did you hear about Ben Carlyle’s letter in the college paper? That’s been the funni
est of all. It turned all the churches in your favor! This past Sunday Father Kelleher proudly said from the pulpit that he spoke with you recently, in your yard, that the two of you are pretty good friends. He’ll be over to see you again soon, I’m sure. He’s on crutches right now with a sprained ankle. Well. I’ve been thinking of you. Okay. Somebody’s at my door. Later.” Click.

  On another day, a call from his daughter Michelle, plaintive and forlorn: “Daddy, what’s going on?” Pause. “We love you.” Click.

  On the first of June, the recorder picked up a call from WCIA in Champaign, the TV station. They wanted to interview him on the phone. In a big, frosty broadcaster’s voice, the woman from WCIA said she wanted to discuss the “sightings” issue, plus Ben Carlyle’s letter to the editor in the local college newspaper.

  On the tenth of June, the phone rang and it was Lowell. “Hey, pick up the phone. I’m next door at Rittenauer’s again, and the lady from WCIA is right here.” Vasco took a breath, tried to collect himself, and picked up.

  “Hello.”

  “Ah. He speaks,” Lowell said. It was the first Vasco had spoken to anyone in many days.

  “Lowell. Thanks for hanging in there.”

  “Hey. It’s been unusual. We’ll talk later. Here’s the TV lady.”

  “Hello?” she said, big broadcaster’s voice.

  “Yes.”

  She said her name, but he didn’t hear it. The Rittenauers’ cordless phone was getting too far from its base. “Okay. Okay, now, Mr. Whirly?”

  “Yes.” Sometimes Vasco could hear a little voice squawking into the woman’s earphone. It was like he was talking to an intelligent electronic impulse instead of a human.

  “Okay, tell me in your own words exactly what she said.” The woman was intense, her voice big but flat.

  “Who?”

  “You know who. We’re live.”

  “Well, if it’s in my own words it won’t be exactly what she said.”

  She was away from the phone a moment, then back. “You know what I mean, right?”

  Vasco didn’t respond.