Faces in the Night

by Thomas Conuel

  People loved to grab hold of a priest and complain about life. It was one of the givens of the job. And now he had David Scone here by his side, obviously with something on his mind. Why not just interrupt good old Father Phil and waste an hour or so of his time complaining about how tough life was.

  Who cares, Father Phil thought!

  Really! Who cares!

  Why not just take your complaints about life and shove them! Father Phil brushed that uncharitable thought from his mind and managed a smile.

  “True” Father Phil said looking at David Scone, determined to be amiable. “Bad things do happen to good people. “None of us can explain that. It’s just the way it is. God’s way.” Father Phil looked directly at David Scone, trying to catch and hold his gaze, engage him briskly so as to move him along, get to the point, have a brief conversation. “The study of evil has always fascinated me. After all, good and bad define our lives.”

  “Yes,” David Scone replied. “They do. Good and bad. What can you say? It’s all about good and bad.”

  “Well,” Father Phil said with a small shrug, “there’s been a bit much written on the subject already. I certainly can’t add anything to the discussion.” He paused. David Scone drew a deep breath. Father Phil noticed a several beads of perspiration on Scone’s forehead.

  “Well, it’s been good chatting with you,” Father Phil said after several seconds of silence.

  David Scone didn’t reply. His mouth tightened and he stepped closer to Father Phil.

  “What’s in your pocket?” Father Phil asked. It was hard to miss how the little man kept his hand deep in the side pocket of his tan jacket. “You must be carrying your Bible,” Father Phil said trying for some levity.

  David Scone’s hand remained deep in his coat pocket, but he froze for a moment and looked hard at Father Phil.

  A voice boomed from the front hallway. “Hey, back there. Anybody home? Got a package I need a signature for.”

  David Scone jolted as if a hot iron had been placed on his neck and jumped back from Father Phil. Father Phil looked at him, puzzled.

  “Back here,” he called. “I’ll sign.”

  Ralph Landry, the rural letter carrier for the New Salem post office loomed in the door. “Hey, Father, got a package here from the Amherst historical society. Any chance of getting you to sign for it, and throw in a holy indulgence from you while I’m here?

  It was a standing joke from Ralph whenever he encountered Father Phil at the historical society or around town. Father Phil always played along.

  The letter carrier strolled up to Father Phil’s desk and plunked a package down.

  “Consider it done,” Father Phil said to Ralph, bending to sign the proffered form. “One full holy indulgence. I’ll pray and ask the good Lord to knock off ten years; that’ll leave you 90 to do in Purgatory.”

  Ralph laughed a hearty cackle. “You’re some card, Father. Some card, ain’t he?” He turned to include David Scone in the banter, but the little man was already at the door to the hallway. His face had gone very pale and he was now sweating profusely. He pulled his hand from his jacket pocket and waved feebly as he left the room.

  “What about those tax records you wanted?” Father Phil called after him.

  * * *

  PART XII: Discovery

  Chapter 61

  Lester Carlson felt restless. It was a warm June morning with long slanting rays of early morning sunlight curving through the canopy of leaves that shaded his front porch and falling across the grass and shrubs in dappled patterns of yellow and green. A perceptible breeze rustled along near the tops of the oaks and maples separating his lawn from the Belton cemetery.

  As usual, he had spent yesterday poking about in Quabbin, but it had left him restless instead of refreshed. The presence had come for him as always and guided him as he wandered near the northern edge of Quabbin where he had grown up, but the day had left him feeling tired and dissatisfied. The presence seemed to be hovering about the old gray house. Most mornings, when he awoke, a fleeting glimpse of the face of a young girl floated in his mind for a second before vanishing like a vaguely remembered dream sequence. The benign presence guiding him around the Quabbin landscape often came to him after the dream sequence, though he had no idea why.

  He hadn’t slept well that night either. He got up several times expecting to see the other face—the horribly deformed face at his window, but saw nothing. He was tense, or perhaps it was really more a vague feeling of ennui—of having seen it all; of having come to the end of the road; of having spent his allotted hours. Now in the early morning with the streets still quiet and the lawns splashed with dew and dappled sunlight, he felt restless and nervous as if he had drunk too many cups of strong, black coffee.

  And then, the phone rang.

  “Can you do me a favor?” It was Katherine, Blake’s wife.

  “Father Phil, the Jesuit priest, called me this morning,” she said. “He did some research for us. He found out where the bones of this old Durman guy ended up. When they built the reservoir in the 1930s they dug up his grave and reburied his bones in the Durman family plot in Belton. Can you go look?” she asked.

  “Of course. No problem. I’ll check it out.”

  Lester Carlson stepped from his own well-cared lawn onto the hard-packed dirt surface of the road that circled the cemetery. The Belton cemetery was a mixture of old and new gravestones spread out over five acres, circled by the dirt road and intersected down the middle by another dirt road. High arborvitae bushes grew throughout the cemetery, tall and robust white pines clustered near the middle ground, and rose bushes now bloomed in scattered clumps across the thick, ragged grass. Two men were cutting grass in the eastern section of the cemetery and Lester Carlson walked that way.

  He had not yet walked through the cemetery despite its proximity to his house. When he moved to Belton in the spring and looked out at the cemetery he saw only a hard crusty mud surface. He had watched from his window the ceremony for the dead Marine and remembered most the wind whipping through the swaying pines. He hadn’t had a desire to walk the cemetery since that day, but that had been in April and it was now June, and thick grass had replaced the gray mud and the air was warm and pine scented and full of the hum of insects.

  Lester Carlson ambled toward the center of the cemetery. The dew was still heavy in the early morning and soaked his running shoes. But they would dry fast. That was one advantage to wearing running shoes for everyday footwear. He had thought the practice ridiculous when it first surfaced back in the 1970s, when he was still in public office.

  His son had started wearing a pair of dark purple running shoes. Wore them everywhere. Even to a friend’s wedding. Lester Carlson had shaken his head back then—shaken his head in a gesture of resignation at the folly he saw all around him. But when Emily died and he retired, he had decided to cast off the robes, so to speak, of his old life. The tailored suits and $50 silk ties were retired to the back closet; the black wing-tip shoes went back there too. Now he favored tailored slacks, a nice shirt from L.L. Bean, good sweater, and running shoes. His son had been right. The damn things were comfortable.

  The cemetery was quiet and fresh and soothing in the early morning. A pair of small black and white birds flitted in and out of the shrubs calling out in high-pitched whistles. Warblers of some sort, he guessed. He had never had time to learn much natural history. That had been Emily’s field. Bird songs and bird identification. She knew them all. They’d be walking across a field in Virginia and she’d be calling out the names of the birds: Wood Thrush over there by the willow tree, female Mockingbird behind you, Indigo Bunting straight ahead in the blueberry bushes. He had always smiled tolerantly and looked where she pointed, usually seeing a brightly-colored bird or two hopping about in a thicket. But as for identifying the little buggers—forget it.

  He had been at the top back then, or near it, and who had time for birds when you were running a war? It was difficult to conve
y the feeling of what it was like at the top to somebody who had never been there. Difficult to convey the feeling of what it was like to fall from the top also.

  Power was like oxygen. You couldn’t detect it with your senses, but you sure as hell could tell when you ran out of it.

  Power. How do you explain it to somebody like the journalist Hudson Richardson who was still asking questions for the stories on Vietnam that he was writing?

  How do you explain to somebody who probably shares an office with a dozen other people the feeling of walking into your own office where 10 people wait to do your bidding? Your office is a clean well-lit world where your every thought, pronouncement, and whim is given the most serious and prompt attention.

  How do you explain limousines, and a barber who comes to your office, and a State Department security detail that watches over you?

  How do you explain looking out your airplane window while crossing the Atlantic with the Secretary of State, both of you on the way to visit the Prime Minister of Great Britain, and seeing four United States jet fighter planes escorting your plane? That was power.

  But there was the other side to all this—the fall from grace, like bending out a window of a high-rise and then losing your balance and sliding over the side. When you lost that office with all those assistants, and had to buy your own lunch, and didn’t have jet fighters escorting you around the world—well, when you were up that high and you fell, you fell a long way and you landed hard. Sometimes a fall from that height could kill you.

  There had been a couple of bright guys over there at State who were always wailing on about the exercise of power and how the scientific revolution had removed all technical limits to the exercise of power. What bullshit. He had been caught up in that myth same as most everybody else. The myth that sound management and the right high-tech toys were all you needed to wield power and that a good balance sheet meant victory.

  Simple mathematics, right?

  Apply sound business principles and technical savvy to war; use proven management techniques to design a winning game plan; create and populate spreadsheets with data that validates your position; gather the best people and give them the best resources, measure and quantify and chart progress. It all sounded so good that everybody, himself included, overlooked one minor flaw. None of it worked against an enemy that didn’t care about the mathematics of kill ratios or the data on a spreadsheet.

  But all that was over and done with.

  One monumental mistake in a career full of successes. Like the pitcher who throws the home run ball in the 9th inning of the World Series—that’s all anybody ever remembers you for. Your failures.

  * * *

  Chapter 62

  Lester Carlson paused in his walk. Under a large white pine surrounded by deep grass lay a cluster of gravestones--old and faded and battered by time and weather. He moved closer to look. A large dark beetle scuttled across one of the stones as he knelt for a closer inspection.

  “Them there stones got some history,” a voice behind him said. Lester Carlson looked up, startled. It was one of the lawn crew he had seen earlier. The man had stopped his lawn mower and was leaning against a large new concrete marker. He was eating a sugar donut and flecks of white powder clung to his dark beard. “Lot of old stones here. Now right there where you’re looking, we got graves go back to the 1700s.”

  “I see. I see,” Lester Carlson said standing up again. “Any old Quabbin graves?” he asked.

  “Oh sure,” the man said, flicking some small crumbs of donut from his fingers. “They reburied couple of the old Quabbin bodies right here. Saved the gravestones intact, they did, when they dug um up. Don’t imagine they got much real body parts, but they got the markers.”

  The man finished his donut and wiped his mouth with a flannel sleeve. “I tell you though,” he said, “just notice the beautiful engraving on some of them stones right by you. Those are old Quabbin gravestones. You don’t see work like that anymore. People don’t care enough now days.” The man started his lawn mower with the flick of a switch, settled onto the seat, and puttered off.

  There was a cluster of a dozen gravestones on the small grassy knoll near where Lester Carlson stood. He peered down at them. One gravestone in particular drew his attention--a plain gray granite marker, faded with age, the inscription carved into the stone almost indecipherable, but with an elaborate stone cross embedded with a blue stone protruding from its front.

  Lester Carlson bent closer to look. The cross had been carved from a pink marble, gray now with age, but with long trailing edges of fire sweeping into the center of the cross. Embedded in its center was a small blue stone, shaped like a human eye, but light blue on the outside and a darker blue inside. The blue stone seemed to throb with light. As Lester Carlson peered at it, the stone appeared to grow brighter, blinding him for an instant. He staggered back, momentarily dizzy. He drew a deep breath and stepped closer to examine the cross. A small dab of ancient cement bonded the cross to the faded headstone. It was a fine piece of old stone work, though unusual—certainly not fitting into the traditional religious motif of the cross and Christ. The flames entwined the cross like vines on a pedestal. There was no human figure on the cross, just the blue stone throbbing with light at the center of the cross.

  He bent closer to look at the name The blue stone in the center of the cross flashed at him. He peered intently, adjusting his glasses on the bridge of his nose. Lester Carlson squinted close to the stone and read the name off the tombstone. For an instant, he froze and then he jumped up as if stung and backed away from the marker. There, faded but still legible, was the name Elijah Durman, and a date of death—1787.

  Lester Carlson stared for a long moment at the headstone and the strange cross on its front. He looked up at the pine trees. A high wind had risen and was whistling through the cemetery. The pines swayed and sighed with the wind.

  He glanced once more at the headstone and then walked quickly from the cemetery, head held high and his shoulders trust back--a pose he had assumed throughout his adult life when troubled, a pose that presented him to the world as confident and in command and hid his real thoughts. He walked with his head up and tilted back for another reason. It was a posture that many, who didn’t know him well, assumed to be one of arrogance. The reality was simpler. His glasses tended to slip down his nose when he walked fast unless he held his head high and tilted back.

  He had been startled and now needed time to think. Katherine and the Jesuit priest had been right. The gravestone of Elijah Durman was practically in his own back yard.

  But so what?

  Really, what was the big deal?

  He had happened upon an old historically interesting gravestone of a former Quabbin resident now reburied in Belton cemetery. A small coincidence on an early morning walk.

  The Durman legend?

  Just because some old codger at an afternoon tea mentioned it, it still meant nothing.

  “You take care of yourself, young fellow,” the old codger had said. “Ain’t no harm in being cautious ‘bout the old legends. You were there to help build this here reservoir, and you moved all the old graves, and there is that Durman legend.”

  The Durman story was about some old coot who lived here over 200 years ago. So what if his grave had been moved—just like all the others. One had to be careful not to start reading into the myriad coincidences of life a pattern of darkness.

  Back in his days with State, he had known a fighter pilot who had flown 300 missions over North Vietnam, about triple the normal number of combat flights. The pilot’s name was Tip Winter and Lester Carlson had come to know him on one of the fact-finding tours that he periodically ventured out on.

  Later, this would have been in the early 1970s, Tip had returned to the United States and come by for dinner with Lester Carlson and some of his top aides. It seemed a good idea to Lester Carlson to expose some of the paper pushers at the State Department to a man with real combat experience.


  After dinner, with the guests gone and the waiter bringing successive rounds of cognac, Tip told Lester Carlson about his last weeks in Vietnam. Two pilots—both good friends of his—sent on separate missions, days apart, had gone down—now presumed dead. For all the remaining pilots and crews, a feeling that Tip described as a node of death, descended on the squadron.

  It was an intense, wholly irrational fear that a cycle of three deaths was at work upon the fighter group. Nobody wanted to speak about it. Nobody wanted to admit it existed. But everybody was afraid. The node of death was waiting for one more victim before moving on.

  Toward the end of that week, Tip readied his plane for a bombing run to the north. He had taxied toward the runway, revved the jet engines and started down the tarmac when suddenly and inexplicably his right tire had blown. Tip skidded his plane to a stop and returned to the base. Another pilot went out instead; Bill Griffin and he never returned. Somewhere near the Cambodian border a rocket fired from dense jungle caught his F-4 Phantom and knocked it from the sky. Bill Griffin was gone.

  After that, the node of death lifted. The crews in Tip’s fighter squadron felt it let go, though again, nobody said a word. It was understood. The node of death had descended, taken its allotment of victims, and passed. Tip left Vietnam the next week.

  Tip had sipped his brandy and looked Lester Carlson in the eye after telling that story.