The Volunteer

by Salvatore Scibona

  Later, after the playing of soccer, he knelt on the rug in the hallway where the coats and overshoes of visiting adults were hung from brass hooks. He was observing through the low window there as the crows outside took turns with their chores. One crow perched high atop the lamp pole watching for danger, while the others pecked at probably bugs or crumbs within the gravel over which the tracks ran. The watching crow then cawed, swooped down, and foraged. Another crow was flying up to take its turn atop the lamppost, when behind Janis in the hall the white-haired agent passed, carrying his clothes folded and ironed and probably even washed. Her arms, crucially, were full. “Oh my,” she asked him, “could you help me open the door?”

  This was a trick if ever there was one. And a test.

  The Devil is an angel, as everybody knows. You don’t think of the Devil as an angel when he stretches you over a dilemma like a guitar string to see if you will snap, but an angel he is (the priest had confirmed it). And like all angels the Devil does what God wants. Whether this woman was herself the Devil or was merely doing some deviltry in the service of God’s will was not a question for boys and girls but for priests. It didn’t matter who this woman was or pretended to be. It mattered that she had taken away from him something that he had. This meant either that she was wicked or at least had done something wicked. And now she stood at the door with her arms full, not looking at him but asking him to open the door. In other words, to help her in breaking one of the laws. Had he not learned that the one who helps a thief to steal makes himself a thief?

  He had to choose either to assist her and open the door, or to stay where he was and go back to watching the blessed cooperating crows of Heaven. A test. He feared he would disobey without meaning to and incur the consequences. One of the laws of the Bible even said that disobedient children could be stoned until they died. All his classmates had an opinion about this law. Your parents weren’t supposed to do the stoning themselves. They were supposed to take you to the gate of the house where you lived, and the men of the town did the stoning.

  Then a slow engine, a yellow and black engine of terrible beauty, lacking any follow-on cars, crept up the tracks, and the crows scattered.

  All at once he felt as though electricity had shocked him in the form of an idea.

  He had misunderstood. There existed another explanation for everything he had undergone. It explained everything at once with no contradictions. If he was being tested, then he might still do wrong. And if he might still do wrong he could not be in Heaven after all. In Heaven we do only as God wants. And God wants only good forever. Everything Janis had done here, even sleeping, had required work. The tests required work. And the place where you work to learn not to be wicked anymore after you have died is not Heaven, but Purgatory.

  You would have expected Purgatory involved broken legs, and fingernails pulled out with pliers. But the punishment must fit the crime. For him the punishments were, No supper, Where has Papa gone?, All alone in a foreign country. And tests such as this Devil woman in the hall asking him to open the door so she could put his clothes back in his room. His punishments here were mental. Therefore most of his sins in life had been sins of his mind. Evidently he had done the right things before, in spilling the milk on the egg sandwich in the airport, for example; because now God was presenting him with a harder spiritual examination.

  “Willy?” she said in her Devil sweetness. “My arms are getting tired. Won’t you help me?” Still she did not look at him when she said the name.

  If somebody takes what isn’t theirs but then tries to give it back, does the sin go away? God forgives us when we repent. But first we have to admit we did wrong. And the Devil woman had admitted no such thing. She had merely come back with the clothes. Here was the test: if a person wants to take back a mistake but does not say she’s sorry, should you still let her take it back?

  Yes, he decided.

  He got up and opened the door.

  * * *

  • • •

  SOMEWHERE IN THE WOODS where the priest and the boy were walking, there lived a nesting pair of goshawks, intensely territorial until their hatchlings fledged. Signs at the trailhead advised that from spring until the middle of summer hikers should be wary and prepared to protect themselves. This was the last day of July.

  The priest said, “This beech tree, what does it do?”

  The boy disappointed the priest by answering in German. “It glorifies God.”

  “Which means?”

  “It—I don’t know.”

  “Why say the word if you don’t know what it means?”

  The boy blushed and stuffed his hands further in his pockets. The small clean pockets sagged with new items for his collection. For once, nothing was stuck in his hair but hair.

  “Good job knotting those shoes,” the priest said.

  “Nora showed me.”

  “The Dutchwoman.”

  “Yessir.”

  “Now, likewise, if you know there’s a word for something but you don’t know the word, why call it by some other word? That’s why I don’t want them calling you Willy. You’re somebody else. God knows your name. Can you say it?”

  “Father, I need to make tee-tee or I’ll mess my pants.”

  “Go behind that tree.”

  The boy made one of his grave looks. “No one is supposed to do it outside,” he said.

  “Very well, but we won’t return to St. Thérèse until the afternoon. And we haven’t met anyone else on the trail for at least a kilometer. So no one will see, and it will be all right.”

  The boy’s look now became so lost within itself that the priest almost reached out his hand to touch the boy’s head and comfort him. Instead he snapped, “Oh, what is it now? Are you afraid the hawk will see you?”

  “It don’t matter if anybody sees.”

  “You’ve misunderstood. There’s nothing shameful about passing your water. It’s only that we do these things in private because other people don’t want to have to look at us with our pants down. It would be rude.”

  “God sees.”

  “God sees everything.”

  The boy bounced from the knees and gave him a more peevish look the priest knew to mean both that the boy must go right away and that he had already deduced, from the general principle of God seeing everything, that God saw him now. He did not want to be told what he already knew, he wanted to urinate.

  With the low enunciation he usually reserved for the confessional, the priest said, “If you are in the woods, and you go far enough from the trail not to be seen, then the trunks of the trees become your walls, and the canopy overhead becomes your ceiling. You are inside a room that God has made.”

  The boy pursed his lips and nodded. “You’ll holler when you can’t see me?” he asked.

  The priest said he would.

  The boy ran into the beech forest through the understory of ferns. The priest shouted, “Wherever you are, I can’t see you now.” He had time to recite the Gloria three times aloud and raised his mind to God with humble trust to earn a partial indulgence for someone suffering the temporal punishment for a sin freely confessed. But he was not humble and did not trust. He believed that everybody else but he himself had misled the boy and imperiled him.

  A hawk cawed in the distance, a long peal repeated in increments of six, high at the beginning and descending in tone at the end, a sound that were a human being to have made it would have meant, Please help me. But that from the throat of a goshawk meant, Come no closer.

  All very well to feed the children pretty notions such as that the growth of trees glorified God, but it annoyed him the teachers should catechize the children so shabbily as to leave them incapable of distinguishing “Gloria” from “How’s it going?” The boy had had no idea what he was saying when he had used the word “glorify.”

  “Finish up now,” the
priest called. Three more times, he recited the prayer.

  The hawk’s caw answered him. Then it called again from nearer at hand. Another hawk joined it from farther up the trail making the same plaintive sound, really a curse. He had cut himself shaving his skull that morning, and the wound smarted as the blood moved through the taut scalp in the heat of the sun. The boy’s returning steps could be heard soughing through the needles and leaves in the duff among the ferns. One of the hawks circled above the trail, but so high up now it must have got caught in an updraft.

  A small brown-and-white object flashed from where the sound of the boy’s steps was growing more distinct amid the leaves. The light swung like the arm of a metronome. Then a fawn’s face materialized before it. He had not heard the boy’s steps but the fawn’s. The fawn stepped to him—trusting. Humbly trusting as he had tried to be in prayer and had failed. The fawn’s white flashing tail flicked behind it.

  The hawk circled lower, as though following a drain.

  Would a hawk really feel threatened by a yearling deer?

  The fawn approached him, the head spasming to shoo a fly at its shoulder. A hind hoof scratched its ribs. All about was green but the fawn’s white tail; its bright spots; its tawny fur; its black hooves, nose, and unknowing eyes. For a fraction of a second the priest imagined he saw another pair of eyes right behind the deer. Knowing and human eyes within the woods. What was it they knew?

  He grabbed a rock.

  From the periphery of his vision, up the trail, the spreading striped wings of the hawk’s mate darted to where he and the fawn stood in the clearing.

  Four things he did at once. He threw the rock over the fawn’s head. He shouted to it, “Watch!” He grabbed his scalp. And he fell down.

  The hawk struck him with such speed that when its talons made impact, the priest felt both shoved in the head and stung there.

  * * *

  • • •

  AFTER JANIS PASSED his water among the trees, he shook the dribble from his thing, zipped up, and got a little lost. He was walking near enough to hear the priest praying, so he was not too concerned. Everywhere the beautiful smells of rotting leaves and of hot pine sap promised he would not be tried forever.

  God had made such smells to comfort you while you were being tried. He even made trees that grew out of the moss on top of boulders here, with roots that went through cracks inside the boulders and, over many years of growing, split the boulders in half. What such wonders foretold it was impossible to guess.

  And because God’s appetite for making wonders was inexhaustible, he made also a spotted creature about Janis’s size but with all four limbs on the forest floor and with a wagging and rotating white face that strangely lacked any features—or so Janis gathered at first. But in Purgatory we must remain vigilant not to love our understandings so much that we forget they are only our best guesses for the time being. Every day, every moment, we draw closer to correct understanding: this was not the creature’s face but its backside. It was the white rump of a young deer.

  The moment he saw that it was not the face but the rump, he saw also through the trees to the lighted span of the trail, where the priest had evidently been planning the punishment assigned to him if Janis should fail the test about where to pass his water. The priest held a rock, and so great was his faith in the orders he had been given that he was evidently prepared to stone Janis until he died; even though Janis knew, if he knew anything, that the priest liked him and must have possessed extraordinary knowledge of God’s intentions if he was willing to do such a thing as to kill a child who had already died once.

  Everything worked according to God’s plan. He made the sap rise through the trees and turned it into needles that fell on the forest floor so that Janis could smell their smell. He made the priest test Janis about where to pass water. Janis had evidently failed. And the priest was willing to carry out the punishment God had assigned to Janis right up to the point of throwing the rock!

  Janis saw through the foliage to the priest’s eyes—and the knowledge in them.

  But at the very moment the hand was swinging with the rock in it, the angel of God took the form of an enormous bird with red eyes and dark stripes under its wings, which opened wide behind the priest’s head and knocked him down. The rock landed somewhere in the ferns.

  This was how Janis learned to trust in the providence of the Lord. It seemed even unfair that others should have to learn about it and hope for it and trust in it but never to experience a proof of it as he had.

  So many innocent people had suffered so much. What had he really suffered? His father, for example, Janis had lately come to conclude, had not died with him in the explosion of an airplane. As best Janis could now understand, his father had closed him in the bathroom stall and left him on purpose, because he knew Janis was to die there, in the bathroom. Whether God had commanded his father to do this or he had taken it on himself hardly mattered. It must have felt as mean either way. His father was somewhere suffering and praying to be forgiven.

  The deer did not just run away but vanished. Where it had stood, Janis found the rock and put it in his pocket. He vowed to keep the rock always and to speak of it never with anyone. It was more than the acme of his collection of objects from out of doors. It was a gift and a marvel and a sign. When he lost hope, he held the rock firmly in his hand, and hope came back to him.

  * * *

  • • •

  BEFORE THE WOMAN CALLED Nora Wolbert had even taken her seat opposite the priest in Miss Fuchs’s office, she informed him artlessly that whatever a Christian home might be, hers was the opposite and would stay that way.

  The priest found himself revising his opinion of her immediately. He admired true believers of all kinds and recognized them by this very inability to resist confessing their belief exactly when it risked sabotaging their other intentions. That her belief lay in unbelief was immaterial.

  Miss Fuchs brought coffee and scones. Her guests ignored them. The priest began the interview in Dutch, intending to leave Miss Fuchs mostly in the dark and, with any luck, to bore her into going away. Nora wore a ruby-colored stud in her nose, various plastic rings in the shapes of insects on one hand, a normal wedding ring on the other, green plastic boots, and contact lenses matching the boots. The priest looked no less nutty with surgical tape all over his head.

  “This is not a Pre-Cana consultation, madam,” he said. “You needn’t demonstrate you’ll raise the boy in the Church for us to let him live with you. But you should know that the Working Group of State Youth Authorities stipulates adoptive parents must guarantee the child’s free practice of his religion.”

  “Yes, children should be free,” Miss Fuchs interjected, comprehending incompletely.

  “More urgently,” the priest continued, “I must advise you that the stability of your home life will compel the judge’s scrutiny in a way that will likely feel intrusive.”

  “I’m prepared for that,” Nora said.

  “So if I pry, I hope you’ll accept my questions as preparation for what more consequential interviewers will certainly ask you later.”

  She regarded coolly the photographs cut from glossy magazines that were stuck in the corkboard behind the director’s desk: children in a landfill picking through piles of electronic junk; children potbellied, harelipped; children eating mush from the fingers of nuns. “I didn’t want to leave you with any illusions about what my husband and I believe,” she said. “Of course, we won’t stop Willy if he wants to pray, to your God or anyone else’s; it makes no difference. All religions are false.”

  However she might have intended this last remark, she spoke it with a clarity the priest so envied that he could not resist trying it out in his heart. All religions are false, he said inwardly. It gave him a rush of peace, as if he had surrendered in a battle, or admitted an error, or drunk a fatal poison after a long ill
ness. For a moment he knew the promise that in the end his being would not be concentrated to an essence but would disperse; that he was a child not of God but of no one. He sunk for a moment into the warm pool of the dream that he did not matter. The warmth, the complete peace of not mattering. The peace of no one mattering. And yet he could not deny that Willy mattered.

  “You might come across as more respectful of the judge’s position,” the priest said, “if you used a phrase like ‘we wouldn’t stop him.’”

  “All right.”

  “Your husband,” he said, “is this your future husband or your former husband?”

  “There’s only the one. We never divorced.”

  Miss Fuchs understood enough at this point to say, “There you are. Don’t wait for others to find out your deficiencies.”

  “I fell in love with another man and left my husband two years ago,” Nora said straightforwardly.

  “At which time you moved here from Holland?” the priest asked.

  “That’s right.”

  “You remained married to Mr. Wolbert while cohabitating in Hamburg with the second man?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “And now you’ve changed your mind? Don’t worry about my judgment. I can offer the court only my observations. I have no authority here.”