Well, times passes for sure! Due to a number of other pressing concerns, this blog and its story have been on hiatus, a break that will have to continue until after the first of the year.
To be honest, more has been involved in the delay than this. I (JL) actually wrote the next posting, titled “Time Passes,” and was ready to post it when . . . how to put this? . . . there was a bit of a rebellion on the part of the characters. I know it sounds as though I am exhibiting dissociative behavior, but I’m actually not. Fiction, any fiction writer will tell you (even schlock-meisters), involves a lot of listening—listening to one’s intuitions, listening to the inner voices that produce . . .
Actually, I have to stop. If I keep writing, they threaten to rebel all over again. It’s Jason mostly, but he’s not the only one.
So let’s leave it thus: sometime after we all recover from the holidays and I launch the next semester’s work, the blog shall reappear. Who, exactly, will be writing it (me or one or more of the characters) is still up for negotiation. In the mean time, I hope you have a wonderful holiday season. And may the new year be gracious and healing for you and yours.
Let me end this with a poem by, of course, Mary Oliver. It’s called “Blue Iris,” and it can be found in her book, What Do I Know (DaCapo Press, 2002, p. 53):
Now that I’m free to be myself, who am I?
Can’t fly, can’t run, and see how slowly I walk.
Well, I think, I can read books.
“What’s that you’re doing?”
the green-headed fly shouts as it buzzes past.
I close the book.
Well, I can write down words, like these, softly.
“What’s that you’re doing?” whispers the wind, pausing
in a heap just outside the window.
Give me a little time, I say back to its staring, silver face.
It doesn’t happen all of a sudden, you know.
“Doesn’t it?” says the wind, and breaks open, releasing
distillation of blue iris.
And my heart panics not to be, as I long to be,
the empty, waiting, pure, speechless receptacle.
Monday, December 7, 2009
Monday, October 12, 2009
The Key
Travis had never been to an Indian restaurant before. Nor had he ever been to Cambridge, though he had done a couple of runs into Boston from Maine when he was in high school—to the Museum of Fine Arts once, and another time to the science museum and the aquarium.
He left the restaurant with his mouth still on curry-fire and joined the others standing on Mass. Ave in Central Square. It was a windy early November afternoon, overcast but unlikely to snow yet. He could tell when snow was in the air. The few trees along the street—spindly little things—rattled brittle with brown leaves; most people bustled past the trees, and the visitors, without a sidelong glance. Everyone he had told about this trip had said that Cambridge was a city, yes, but a city different from Boston or New York or other big places. He didn’t see the difference, at least not on Central Square. A bus belched its exhaust into their faces as it passed them, heading west to Harvard Square, which was their destination as well.
Travis and Jonah’s anyway. They had agreed over lunch to split up, with Travis sitting in on Jonah’s meeting with his editor in Harvard Square, while Carla, Jason, and JackSon were to be off in the other direction, for a visit to Haley House, which Carla explained was Boston’s version of their place on Fourth Street.
“Keep an eye on him,” Jason said to Travis. “He’s liable to get into trouble in that hotbed of radicalism.”
“You mean Harvard?” Travis asked. Jason only smirked as the three took off east on Mass Ave to catch the trolley that had just stopped nearby. They boarded and the doors shut, but the car didn’t get very far before it lost its connection to the overhead wires and whispered to a halt in a shower of sparks.
“Isn’t that dangerous?” Travis asked Jonah as they watched the driver jump down to the street and reposition his connection to the powerlines.
“Not nearly as dangerous as Harvard,” Jonah chuckled, and Travis took a second or two to decide if Jonah was being serious or not.
He ran to catch up to his mentor, who was already heading west into a crowd of people. Crowds seemed to be everywhere; everyone had someplace to go at lunch time, he guessed. They’d been on the move all day. They had driven to Boston last night and stayed with a man names Thomas, an old friend of Jonah’s from his seminary days. Thomas didn’t seem to have a job, but he had a huge old house that he was renovating one brick and board at a time.
Thomas was a good man, Travis knew at a glance, someone he could trust, and so he asked a lot of questions as they—all of them—prepared a vegetarian dinner together. How did Thomas wind up in Roxbury, anyway? The neighborhood seemed really poor, even though Thomas seemed to have an income to support himself (he did, after all, own the building). Did he have any white neighbors? Travis had never seen so many black people all in one place as they encountered on the hilly street they walked up from the Ruggles Station. It was his first experience of being a member of a racial minority there on the street.
On the radio in the kitchen, the local station was playing quiet classical music. Travis knew little about classical music, but he thought it was the perfect soundtrack for their evening together. Thomas’s big, old chocolate Labrador took an immediate liking to Jack, who was better with dogs, anyway, than he was with vegetables. The elders sipped white wine as they all worked the food, which seemed to be centered on a soy based substance that didn’t look like any food Travis had ever seen. Thomas called it toe-foo (Travis wasn’t sure how that was spelled), and he fried it with more confidence than Travis felt appropriate for such an amorphous blob, along with hard, green vegetables in olive oil.
The meal, despite his reservations, was excellent, and they had gone to bed early, exhausted by the long trip on route nine from Troy. The road was amazingly beautiful at this time of the year, with leaves everywhere on fire and shaking almost with delight in the autumn wind. But they were tired. Jack and Travis spread out sleeping bags in a room completely devoid of furniture.
“Hey,” Thomas had said, “at least this room has a floor,” and he warned them to be sure to read the signs he had posted on the other doors in the hallway, lest they enter the wrong room on the way to the bathroom during the night and enter one that Thomas still had not gotten around to, well, flooring.
The hard wood they slept on did nothing to dim Travis’s sense of adventure and warm pleasure at being in a new city with people who were becoming like family to him. His pleasure may have been warm, but the night was cold and the room unheated. The sleeping bag was warm enough, though, and Travis awoke the next morning with the sun—and with the mouse who, unbeknownst to Travis, had been his night companion, and who jumped out of the bag when he unzipped it.
+++++++++++++++
As they walked briskly toward Harvard Square, they approached the fortress-like brick walls lining Harvard Yard. Travis got glimpses of the green campus as they passed each entrance, but Jonah didn’t slow until he saw Travis hesitate at one entrance.
“You want to have a look?” Jonah said.
“Do we have time?”
“We have a few minutes before I meet Laura,” Jonah said, and they entered the Yard.
“It looks just like it did in ‘Love Story,’” Travis said, referring to a wildly popular romantic motion picture from a year or two ago. “Except that it was covered in snow in the movie.”
They walked along a path to the famous statue of John Harvard, and Jonah pointed out the “three lies” associated with the statue: that Harvard was not the founder of the university as the inscription claimed, that the date of the college’s foundation was wrong, and that the face of the statue belonged to some unknown model, not the seventeenth century Briton.
Jonah steered them across the Yard past Massachusetts Hall—the oldest surviving building at Harvard College—through the arched gate and into Square proper. All Travis saw at first were brick buildings and the wires strung overhead for the trolleys—and then the wildest collection of people he had ever encountered. They crossed Mass. Ave to an old church and then crossed a small street and walked into the thick of what could only be described as human chaos.
Students made up the bulk of the crowd, of course, but they were dressed in every conceivable costume. Two guys walked by dressed like medieval court jesters, with bright red sleeves and purple leotards. A huge black woman was practically buried in multiple fringed shawls crusted with spangles and trailing tassels by the hundreds. Three men in white-face juggled balls silently at one intersection, a hat in front of them for proffered donations. They passed a store devoted exclusively to selling Earth Shoes next to a head shop that looked particularly well trafficked. From the storefront blasted Janis Joplin’s full-bodied, if scratchy, plea for anyone listening to “HOLD ON! HOLD ON! HOLD ON!”
As if in response, Jonah did the opposite and proceeded to part a crowd of saffron-garbed Hari Krishnas in front of the the Harvard Coop like Moses portioning out the Red Sea. The Haris didn’t miss a syllable of their gentle, rhythmic chant as Travis and Jonah passed through their cloud of Krishnaic incense.
But just beyond the swaying Haris, Jonah was stopped in his tracks by two flaming-haired women who were clearly sisters. They were older than Travis—he guessed in their late twenties—and they were determined to get Jonah’s attention.
“You’re a priest,” one of them said to him, which seemed obvious to Travis, since Jonah never travelled anywhere unless he wore his collared black suit. The woman wore a blue cotton peasant blouse with a swooped neck, black jeans, and Birkenstocks, with a large gold ring in each ear.
“I am indeed a priest,” Jonah said to her. “And what might you be?”
She gestured to the other woman, who wore bell-bottoms and an oversized mauve sweatshirt covered with symbols that Travis did not understand. “My sister and I,” she said, “want you to buy a copy of ‘The Militant.’”
“What’s ‘The Militant’?” Travis asked her, but Jonah surprised them all by replying.
“It’s the newspaper of the Socialist Workers’ Party,” he said, as he fumbled for his wallet.
“You know what that is?” the woman called Lynne said.
“Oh, yes,” Jonah said. “Catholic Workers and Socialist Workers go way back.”
“You’re Catholic Workers?” Lynne’s sister asked them.
“Not exactly,” Travis said. “But sort of . . . .”
“Well,” Lynne’s sister said, “we’re only sort of Socialist Workers, too.” Her smile was even more radiant than her red hair in the early afternoon sunlight.
“Yelena the kind hearted one,” Lynne said with a bit of an exaggerated wag of her thumb toward her sister, “dragged us down here today. She’s been volunteering as their bookkeeper, but they were short-handed on the delivery front. So here we are.”
“I love these people,” Yelena said. “The socialist workers, I mean. But I need this today like I need a wart.”
“My beloved sister has committed us to cook tonight at the Cambridge Adult Center,” Lynne said. “Unless she can somehow figure out how to be in two places at once . . . .”
“Give me five papers,” Jonah said, and handed Yelena a five dollar bill. “That should get you off the streets a bit sooner.”
“That’s very kind of you,” Lynne said, as Jonah made to go. But Yelena stopped him.
“You’re not gonna toss them in the trash, are you?” she asked him.
“Not at all,” Jonah said, a bit startled at the suggestion. “Where we come from, these are quite rare. I’m thinking I can raise quite a bit of hell with them where I teach.”
“You teach?” she asked.
“I do,” he said, fumbling in his wallet once again, this time for his card, which he gave her.
“If you ever get out our way,” Jonah said, “look us up.”
They were now late for their appointment and so, taking their leave, they headed down Brattle Street toward their destination.
The editor was waiting for them, having commandeered the only table with a view of the street. Jonah had told Travis that the Blue Parrot had a long and colorful history as one of the best places to find original music in the evenings and finely flavored coffee in the afternoon, the latter being a pleasure that, while Jonah and his editor might indulge in, Travis surely would not. They entered the smoky room and Jonah provided introductions. If the woman was surprised to find Jonah with a student in tow, she didn’t betray it.
Jonah had told Travis about Laura Sterling. She was the best editor he’d ever encountered, he said, and although they weren’t working together now, they always made a point to get together when he was in the Cambridge area.
She was apparently not someone given to small talk, though.
“So, what are you working on now?” she asked Jonah even before their waitress had turned away from the table with their order for drinks.
“I’m up to my neck in students and in between writing projects,” he told her. “Doubleday wants me to propose a volume for that New Testament series they’ve launched, but—”
“They’re calling it the Anchor Bible,” she said, cutting him off. “What volume do they want you for?”
“We haven’t gotten that far yet,” he said.
“You don’t want to do another commentary, do you?”
He smiled. “Not really, no.”
Their drinks arrived: a Coke for Travis and two steaming cups of coffee laced with whiskey—what did Jonah call the concoction? Irish coffee? That was a new one for Travis. Technically, Travis could drink, since the legal age for alcohol consumption was eighteen and he was a year past that benchmark. But he knew that Jonah wouldn’t want to be drinking with one of his students, so that was that. Besides, Travis wasn’t much of a drinker. Not like Jack, anyway. And Jack was two years younger than he was.
“If you could write anything you wanted to,” Laura asked Jonah, “what would it be?”
Jonah thought for a moment.
“If you could publish anything you wanted to,” he asked her, “what would THAT be?”
“Good question,” she said, and sipped her coffee. “I think . . . “ she paused for a moment as they watched the three mimes they had seen earlier pass below them on the street, tossing their juggling balls among themselves with precision, not dropping one of them.
“I think,” she continued deliberately, “I would like to see someone like you answer this question.”
She smoothed out the blue linen napkin in front of her.
“We have all sorts of books coming out commentaries on the books of the Bible,” she said. “People like Koester, Stendahl, and your fellow priest George MacRae at Harvard, and Meeks and Malherbe at Yale, are all filling out as best as anyone can the life of the first Christians. Hell, with the Nag Hammadi texts and now the Dead Sea Scrolls, this stuff is turning out to be a growth industry for religious publishing.”
She stopped as the waitress came to the table to check on them.
“What I would like, is to see what you can do with this single question,” Laura said.
She paused again, hesitating—as Travis figured it—because an editor’s job is to get the words just right.
“What one thing do you think the first followers of Jesus ‘got’ that we don’t get?”
“What did they get that we don’t?” Jonah repeated.
“Yes,” she said. “Is there one insight that you think first century Christians took away from the teachings of Jesus that we have somehow lost track of?”
They sat in silence for a moment as Jonah pondered the question.
“You’re not asking for the one thing that summarizes all his teachings are you?” he asked.
“Of course I know better than to ask such a question,” she said. “What I want is a book, not on the essence of biblical thought, but a book that will serve as a key, a key that will unlock what it is that most people—that we—are missing.”
“Why do you think something is missing?” Jonah asked her.
“Look around,” she said. “Look at our own church.”
Travis was surprised for some reason that Laura Sterling was a Catholic. She seemed, well, too independent a woman to abide by the rules of the Church. He had, he suspected, a lot to learn about these matters, women and church and all.
“We are obviously missing something,” Laura said. “What is it? Give us the key, Jonah.”
“You think people would want to read something like that?” he asked her.
“Oh, I know they would,” she said. “And hell, you know it, too.”
Travis was listening closely to this, and wondering how he would answer the question. Right, he thought. After one course in scripture.
Only now did he notice that there was a hearth at the other end of the room and that a wood fire flickered and warmed the pub.
“It’s an interesting question,” Jonah said. “Let me think about it and I’ll get back to you.”
But as things turned out, he never did.
[This ends the first, introductory section of the narrative, and it ends as well our sojourn in the 1970s. Up next: “Time Passes.”]
He left the restaurant with his mouth still on curry-fire and joined the others standing on Mass. Ave in Central Square. It was a windy early November afternoon, overcast but unlikely to snow yet. He could tell when snow was in the air. The few trees along the street—spindly little things—rattled brittle with brown leaves; most people bustled past the trees, and the visitors, without a sidelong glance. Everyone he had told about this trip had said that Cambridge was a city, yes, but a city different from Boston or New York or other big places. He didn’t see the difference, at least not on Central Square. A bus belched its exhaust into their faces as it passed them, heading west to Harvard Square, which was their destination as well.
Travis and Jonah’s anyway. They had agreed over lunch to split up, with Travis sitting in on Jonah’s meeting with his editor in Harvard Square, while Carla, Jason, and JackSon were to be off in the other direction, for a visit to Haley House, which Carla explained was Boston’s version of their place on Fourth Street.
“Keep an eye on him,” Jason said to Travis. “He’s liable to get into trouble in that hotbed of radicalism.”
“You mean Harvard?” Travis asked. Jason only smirked as the three took off east on Mass Ave to catch the trolley that had just stopped nearby. They boarded and the doors shut, but the car didn’t get very far before it lost its connection to the overhead wires and whispered to a halt in a shower of sparks.
“Isn’t that dangerous?” Travis asked Jonah as they watched the driver jump down to the street and reposition his connection to the powerlines.
“Not nearly as dangerous as Harvard,” Jonah chuckled, and Travis took a second or two to decide if Jonah was being serious or not.
He ran to catch up to his mentor, who was already heading west into a crowd of people. Crowds seemed to be everywhere; everyone had someplace to go at lunch time, he guessed. They’d been on the move all day. They had driven to Boston last night and stayed with a man names Thomas, an old friend of Jonah’s from his seminary days. Thomas didn’t seem to have a job, but he had a huge old house that he was renovating one brick and board at a time.
Thomas was a good man, Travis knew at a glance, someone he could trust, and so he asked a lot of questions as they—all of them—prepared a vegetarian dinner together. How did Thomas wind up in Roxbury, anyway? The neighborhood seemed really poor, even though Thomas seemed to have an income to support himself (he did, after all, own the building). Did he have any white neighbors? Travis had never seen so many black people all in one place as they encountered on the hilly street they walked up from the Ruggles Station. It was his first experience of being a member of a racial minority there on the street.
On the radio in the kitchen, the local station was playing quiet classical music. Travis knew little about classical music, but he thought it was the perfect soundtrack for their evening together. Thomas’s big, old chocolate Labrador took an immediate liking to Jack, who was better with dogs, anyway, than he was with vegetables. The elders sipped white wine as they all worked the food, which seemed to be centered on a soy based substance that didn’t look like any food Travis had ever seen. Thomas called it toe-foo (Travis wasn’t sure how that was spelled), and he fried it with more confidence than Travis felt appropriate for such an amorphous blob, along with hard, green vegetables in olive oil.
The meal, despite his reservations, was excellent, and they had gone to bed early, exhausted by the long trip on route nine from Troy. The road was amazingly beautiful at this time of the year, with leaves everywhere on fire and shaking almost with delight in the autumn wind. But they were tired. Jack and Travis spread out sleeping bags in a room completely devoid of furniture.
“Hey,” Thomas had said, “at least this room has a floor,” and he warned them to be sure to read the signs he had posted on the other doors in the hallway, lest they enter the wrong room on the way to the bathroom during the night and enter one that Thomas still had not gotten around to, well, flooring.
The hard wood they slept on did nothing to dim Travis’s sense of adventure and warm pleasure at being in a new city with people who were becoming like family to him. His pleasure may have been warm, but the night was cold and the room unheated. The sleeping bag was warm enough, though, and Travis awoke the next morning with the sun—and with the mouse who, unbeknownst to Travis, had been his night companion, and who jumped out of the bag when he unzipped it.
+++++++++++++++
As they walked briskly toward Harvard Square, they approached the fortress-like brick walls lining Harvard Yard. Travis got glimpses of the green campus as they passed each entrance, but Jonah didn’t slow until he saw Travis hesitate at one entrance.
“You want to have a look?” Jonah said.
“Do we have time?”
“We have a few minutes before I meet Laura,” Jonah said, and they entered the Yard.
“It looks just like it did in ‘Love Story,’” Travis said, referring to a wildly popular romantic motion picture from a year or two ago. “Except that it was covered in snow in the movie.”
They walked along a path to the famous statue of John Harvard, and Jonah pointed out the “three lies” associated with the statue: that Harvard was not the founder of the university as the inscription claimed, that the date of the college’s foundation was wrong, and that the face of the statue belonged to some unknown model, not the seventeenth century Briton.
Jonah steered them across the Yard past Massachusetts Hall—the oldest surviving building at Harvard College—through the arched gate and into Square proper. All Travis saw at first were brick buildings and the wires strung overhead for the trolleys—and then the wildest collection of people he had ever encountered. They crossed Mass. Ave to an old church and then crossed a small street and walked into the thick of what could only be described as human chaos.
Students made up the bulk of the crowd, of course, but they were dressed in every conceivable costume. Two guys walked by dressed like medieval court jesters, with bright red sleeves and purple leotards. A huge black woman was practically buried in multiple fringed shawls crusted with spangles and trailing tassels by the hundreds. Three men in white-face juggled balls silently at one intersection, a hat in front of them for proffered donations. They passed a store devoted exclusively to selling Earth Shoes next to a head shop that looked particularly well trafficked. From the storefront blasted Janis Joplin’s full-bodied, if scratchy, plea for anyone listening to “HOLD ON! HOLD ON! HOLD ON!”
As if in response, Jonah did the opposite and proceeded to part a crowd of saffron-garbed Hari Krishnas in front of the the Harvard Coop like Moses portioning out the Red Sea. The Haris didn’t miss a syllable of their gentle, rhythmic chant as Travis and Jonah passed through their cloud of Krishnaic incense.
But just beyond the swaying Haris, Jonah was stopped in his tracks by two flaming-haired women who were clearly sisters. They were older than Travis—he guessed in their late twenties—and they were determined to get Jonah’s attention.
“You’re a priest,” one of them said to him, which seemed obvious to Travis, since Jonah never travelled anywhere unless he wore his collared black suit. The woman wore a blue cotton peasant blouse with a swooped neck, black jeans, and Birkenstocks, with a large gold ring in each ear.
“I am indeed a priest,” Jonah said to her. “And what might you be?”
She gestured to the other woman, who wore bell-bottoms and an oversized mauve sweatshirt covered with symbols that Travis did not understand. “My sister and I,” she said, “want you to buy a copy of ‘The Militant.’”
“What’s ‘The Militant’?” Travis asked her, but Jonah surprised them all by replying.
“It’s the newspaper of the Socialist Workers’ Party,” he said, as he fumbled for his wallet.
“You know what that is?” the woman called Lynne said.
“Oh, yes,” Jonah said. “Catholic Workers and Socialist Workers go way back.”
“You’re Catholic Workers?” Lynne’s sister asked them.
“Not exactly,” Travis said. “But sort of . . . .”
“Well,” Lynne’s sister said, “we’re only sort of Socialist Workers, too.” Her smile was even more radiant than her red hair in the early afternoon sunlight.
“Yelena the kind hearted one,” Lynne said with a bit of an exaggerated wag of her thumb toward her sister, “dragged us down here today. She’s been volunteering as their bookkeeper, but they were short-handed on the delivery front. So here we are.”
“I love these people,” Yelena said. “The socialist workers, I mean. But I need this today like I need a wart.”
“My beloved sister has committed us to cook tonight at the Cambridge Adult Center,” Lynne said. “Unless she can somehow figure out how to be in two places at once . . . .”
“Give me five papers,” Jonah said, and handed Yelena a five dollar bill. “That should get you off the streets a bit sooner.”
“That’s very kind of you,” Lynne said, as Jonah made to go. But Yelena stopped him.
“You’re not gonna toss them in the trash, are you?” she asked him.
“Not at all,” Jonah said, a bit startled at the suggestion. “Where we come from, these are quite rare. I’m thinking I can raise quite a bit of hell with them where I teach.”
“You teach?” she asked.
“I do,” he said, fumbling in his wallet once again, this time for his card, which he gave her.
“If you ever get out our way,” Jonah said, “look us up.”
They were now late for their appointment and so, taking their leave, they headed down Brattle Street toward their destination.
The editor was waiting for them, having commandeered the only table with a view of the street. Jonah had told Travis that the Blue Parrot had a long and colorful history as one of the best places to find original music in the evenings and finely flavored coffee in the afternoon, the latter being a pleasure that, while Jonah and his editor might indulge in, Travis surely would not. They entered the smoky room and Jonah provided introductions. If the woman was surprised to find Jonah with a student in tow, she didn’t betray it.
Jonah had told Travis about Laura Sterling. She was the best editor he’d ever encountered, he said, and although they weren’t working together now, they always made a point to get together when he was in the Cambridge area.
She was apparently not someone given to small talk, though.
“So, what are you working on now?” she asked Jonah even before their waitress had turned away from the table with their order for drinks.
“I’m up to my neck in students and in between writing projects,” he told her. “Doubleday wants me to propose a volume for that New Testament series they’ve launched, but—”
“They’re calling it the Anchor Bible,” she said, cutting him off. “What volume do they want you for?”
“We haven’t gotten that far yet,” he said.
“You don’t want to do another commentary, do you?”
He smiled. “Not really, no.”
Their drinks arrived: a Coke for Travis and two steaming cups of coffee laced with whiskey—what did Jonah call the concoction? Irish coffee? That was a new one for Travis. Technically, Travis could drink, since the legal age for alcohol consumption was eighteen and he was a year past that benchmark. But he knew that Jonah wouldn’t want to be drinking with one of his students, so that was that. Besides, Travis wasn’t much of a drinker. Not like Jack, anyway. And Jack was two years younger than he was.
“If you could write anything you wanted to,” Laura asked Jonah, “what would it be?”
Jonah thought for a moment.
“If you could publish anything you wanted to,” he asked her, “what would THAT be?”
“Good question,” she said, and sipped her coffee. “I think . . . “ she paused for a moment as they watched the three mimes they had seen earlier pass below them on the street, tossing their juggling balls among themselves with precision, not dropping one of them.
“I think,” she continued deliberately, “I would like to see someone like you answer this question.”
She smoothed out the blue linen napkin in front of her.
“We have all sorts of books coming out commentaries on the books of the Bible,” she said. “People like Koester, Stendahl, and your fellow priest George MacRae at Harvard, and Meeks and Malherbe at Yale, are all filling out as best as anyone can the life of the first Christians. Hell, with the Nag Hammadi texts and now the Dead Sea Scrolls, this stuff is turning out to be a growth industry for religious publishing.”
She stopped as the waitress came to the table to check on them.
“What I would like, is to see what you can do with this single question,” Laura said.
She paused again, hesitating—as Travis figured it—because an editor’s job is to get the words just right.
“What one thing do you think the first followers of Jesus ‘got’ that we don’t get?”
“What did they get that we don’t?” Jonah repeated.
“Yes,” she said. “Is there one insight that you think first century Christians took away from the teachings of Jesus that we have somehow lost track of?”
They sat in silence for a moment as Jonah pondered the question.
“You’re not asking for the one thing that summarizes all his teachings are you?” he asked.
“Of course I know better than to ask such a question,” she said. “What I want is a book, not on the essence of biblical thought, but a book that will serve as a key, a key that will unlock what it is that most people—that we—are missing.”
“Why do you think something is missing?” Jonah asked her.
“Look around,” she said. “Look at our own church.”
Travis was surprised for some reason that Laura Sterling was a Catholic. She seemed, well, too independent a woman to abide by the rules of the Church. He had, he suspected, a lot to learn about these matters, women and church and all.
“We are obviously missing something,” Laura said. “What is it? Give us the key, Jonah.”
“You think people would want to read something like that?” he asked her.
“Oh, I know they would,” she said. “And hell, you know it, too.”
Travis was listening closely to this, and wondering how he would answer the question. Right, he thought. After one course in scripture.
Only now did he notice that there was a hearth at the other end of the room and that a wood fire flickered and warmed the pub.
“It’s an interesting question,” Jonah said. “Let me think about it and I’ll get back to you.”
But as things turned out, he never did.
[This ends the first, introductory section of the narrative, and it ends as well our sojourn in the 1970s. Up next: “Time Passes.”]
Friday, September 25, 2009
To Hell and Back
“On days like this, I wish there was more room back here,” Gruff said to Travis. “Then we could just burn everything.”
They were shoveling the overflow of trash that had poured over the big drums kept in the back as far away from the house as possible. All the usual suspects—coffee grounds, egg shells, banana peels and the like—had slipped out of the paper bags they had sogged and split. Night creatures had come by and helped the process along.
“That’s what we do up in Maine,” Travis said, as he exchanged his shovel for a rake to gather up the smallest bits of detritus. “We don’t have garbage men up there. It’s too remote.”
Gruff pivoted one of the barrels on its edge to role it back and forth down the side alley to the truck in front of the house. He stopped to swat a horsefly digging into the back of his neck.
"Spawn of Satan," he said as he slapped the fly down.
“Why doesn’t the house have garbage pickup?” Travis asked.
“Too expensive,” Gruff said.
“The city doesn’t collect the trash?”
Gruff set the drum to rest at the entrance of the alley and wiped his brow with his massive gloved hand. Sweat was already soaking his white Italian undershirt. Travis had never seen anyone in real life who had such a physique. You only saw those kinds of muscles in cartoons or on the covers of body builder magazines in a general store like the one back home. The man was huge!
“The city’s been fighting the union for years,” Gruff said. “Carla won’t have anything to do with a city service if we have an alternative.”
“And that alternative would be—us, right?”
“Grab your barrel, partner,” Gruff said over his shoulder as he hoisted the barrel right off the ground and headed down the alley.
Travis duck-walked his to the street, where he was met by Louise.
“I hear you like driving this beat-up shit bag of a truck,” she said, pointing to the old GBU jalopy that Travis and Jonah had first driven to Jack’s farm.
“Yeah,” Travis said. “It was cool.”
“Most excellent,” Gruff said and handed him the keys.
Louise got in on the passenger’s side and slid along the bench seat to Travis. The smell of stale cigarette smoke wafted into his face.
“I need to be aired out,” Louise said, as if she had a direct line to Travis’s nostrils. “Goin’ along for the ride.”
They drove up the hill into the country in silence. At one point, Louise made to shake a cigarette out the pack she carried around like a rabbit’s foot, but a glance from Gruff and she thought better of it.
“You ever in the service?” Travis asked Gruff, partly to make conversation but also because this man fascinated him.
“Nope,” Gruff said. “Too old.”
“Old?” Louise said. “You ain’t forty.”
“Well, I beg to differ,” he said. “I turn forty-three this fall.”
“Shit,” Louise said. “You’re pretty well pickled.”
To Travis, forty-three qualified as, if not antique, then surely old. He had grown up with multiple warnings about trusting anyone over thirty. He dismissed that idea, of course. Most of the older people he knew were pretty wise. But they were also, well, old.
It was early afternoon on the one day of the week that Travis had no classes after 10:00am. The fall air was heavy with the last humid heat of Indian summer. Once again, he was in this battered old truck driving in the country, and once again he was loving it. It reminded him of home, of the drives he and his buddies took in late summer the year he graduated from high school. The light in the air brought with it a sense of impending autumn, with its beauty and its endings. Some of the trees were starting to turn their leaves into fire.
“So, how did you excape the draft?” Louise asked Travis.
“I’m deferred while I’m in college,” he said. He was a little surprised by the question. Everyone knew college kids were deferred, didn’t they?
“Enjoy it while it lasts,” Gruff said. “It’s a hell hole over there.”
“And to no good purpose,” Louise added.
Travis was beginning to understand what the odd collection of characters he had met at the house had in common. Most of the people he hung out with on campus were in favor of the war. Greenbush University wasn’t Berkeley or NYU. It attracted the traditional, patriotic sons and some daughters of rural upstate New York and northern New England. This crowd with LIA was something else all together. He was comfortable with them in most ways, but their political views were still a stretch for him. When hot topics came up, the war and all, he kept his mouth shut, not because he was afraid they would reject his views, or him, but because he had the good sense (he prized his good sense!) to realize that, whatever position these people had on the big issues of the day, those positions had been formed by experiences he could not even begin to imagine.
+++++++++++++++
The dump was set back from the road about a quarter of a mile and well before Travis could see it, he could smell it. It was a still day and the air on the dirt road was fetid with noxious smells: the sweet, sickly odor of decaying food mingled in equal parts with the acrid smell of smoke. They rounded a last turn and drove up to the edge of an enormous pile of trash. But that was just the dumping off point; beyond it lay a plain of unsettled ground, much of it burned and melted plastic and metal strewn in a huge bed of smoldering ash. For a little town the size of Greenbush, he was amazed at the size of the place.
They joined a short line of vehicles, trucks mostly, waiting to be relieved of their own reeking and seeping burdens. Blessedly, no effort was made to sort any of what they brought. Gruff got out and heaved their refuse onto the edge of the pile and in short order they were out of the place.
He didn’t know why, but Travis was shaken by the experience of so much smoldering stench. Maybe it was the maggots he saw on some of the garbage closest to him in the truck. He hated bugs, and worms, he was sure, were created by God only for the purposes of skewering on the end of a fishhook.
“Gehenna on earth,” he mumbled as Gruff climbed back into the truck and slammed the tinny door shut behind him.
“What’d you say?” Gruff asked.
Travis shifted the truck into gear and steered them out of the parking area.
“I’ve never seen anything like that,” he said. “We always burn our stuff.”
He reached the main road and turned left, heading back to the city.
“You ain’t the queasy kind, are you?” Louise asked him.
“Nah, you know I’m not,” he said. “You’ve seen me corralling the trash at the end of a meal and taking it out back. It’s the shear size of the place, I think, and it reminded me of Gehenna.”
“What the hell is that?” Louise asked.
“Actually,” Travis said, “you got it right there. Gehenna is hell.”
“So why not just call hell ‘hell,’” Gruff said. “You ain’t aiming to impress us, are you? Being college educated and all.”
“He knows better than to try that shit,” Louise said.
“No, not at all,” Travis said. “Jonah was just talking about Gehenna in class the other week, and I remembered what he said.”
Travis went on, explaining to them that in Jonah’s New Testament class someone had tried to corner their priest-professor by asking him if he believed in hell and the eternal damnation of sinners. It was a question that Travis had thought of, too, but was afraid to ask. He was growing in respect and even love for this gentle man who had saved him from ruin after the affair of the mermaid, and dreaded the possibility that someone who was so good would confirm what he had learned in grade school catechism class, with some degree of horror, about the implacable judgment of God.
“So what’d he say?” Gruff asked.
“I’m thinking I can’t tell you,” Travis said, “without sounding like some college-educated punk.”
That got a laugh from both of them, and he continued.
“I don’t remember all the details,” he said, but went on to tell them about the biblical origins of the fire and brimstone of hell: Jesus was approached in the gospels with questions about hell on a number of occasions by people who, Travis suspected, were as trepidatious as he was about how the kind master would respond. This was because on occasion Christ would warn his followers about avoiding the fate of the wicked, which he described as consignment to “hell,” a place of unquenchable fire where the worm never dies.
Jonah explained that in the Greek original of the gospels, the word interpreters translate as “hell” is “Gehenna,” and that Jesus probably got the word—and its associations with fire and worms—from the Hebrew prophets, particularly Jeremiah and Isaiah, whose poetry is rife with threats against those who do evil, thundering that they would be killed and their bodies thrown into Gehenna.
“Sounds pretty straightforward to me,” Gruff said. “You sin, you die, you burn. Just like we were taught.”
“It’s actually not what most people think, though,” Travis said.
The prophets were referring to an actual place outside Jerusalem: the valley of Hinnom. This valley seems to have been a site that was sacred to the people who controlled the area before the arrival of the Israelites at the place that would become their capital city. When the previous occupants were routed and banished, the new owners turned the Hinnom valley into a garbage pit to desecrate what had been a pagan shrine.
“So, when the prophets talk about throwing a body into Hinnom—the Greek form of the word was ‘Gehenna’—they weren’t talking about eternal damnation,” Travis concluded.
“They were talking about garbage disposal,” Gruff said.
“Yuch. I can be a pretty vindictive bitch,” Louise said. “But even I wouldn’t throw my enemy’s body in a dump.”
“Oh, yes you would,” Gruff chuckled. “Where the fire is never quenched and the worm never dies.”
“So, when Jesus refers to Gehenna—hell—as the eventual destination of the wicked,” Travis said, “he may have just meant that when evil people die they don’t go to heaven to enjoy eternal happiness with God. Instead, they just die and are tossed into a pit to rot in oblivion.”
The three of them drove in silence for a while. They were heading down Red Mill Road past GBU and it was easy to be distracted by the view that opened up ahead of them: the tops of the biggest buildings across the river poking up out of the city’s shroud of smoke and dust.
“Camus said that hell is other people,” Louise said.
“What?” Travis said, surprised once again at what came out of the woman sitting next to him.
“It was Sartre, not Camus,” Gruff said, and he leaned forward to face Travis at the other end of the seat. “And I know what you’re thinking .”
Travis blushed.
“Well,” he said after a moment, “how DO you know about Sartre and Camus.”
They were nearing Fourth Street and Louise was back at it with her pack of cigarettes.
“Oh, there’s much you don’t know about us,” she said.
“That’s for sure,” Travis said.
“You haven’t been at the house on a Friday night yet, have you?” Gruff asked.
“True,” Travis said, but was beginning to get the picture. On Fridays after supper, the group gathered for sessions called “Clarification of Thought.” They were modeled after the program originally set up by the Catholic Workers in New York back at the beginning, when Peter Maurin was still around.
“You talked about existentialists on a Friday night?”
“Hey,” Gruff said as Travis pulled up to the curb outside the house. “We’re anarchists, aren’t we?”
Right, Travis thought, anarchists.
The usual collection of people had lined up along the street under the storefront sign, “Love in Action.” They hurried out of the truck and through the front door into the building. They had a meal to serve.
[Up next: The Key]
They were shoveling the overflow of trash that had poured over the big drums kept in the back as far away from the house as possible. All the usual suspects—coffee grounds, egg shells, banana peels and the like—had slipped out of the paper bags they had sogged and split. Night creatures had come by and helped the process along.
“That’s what we do up in Maine,” Travis said, as he exchanged his shovel for a rake to gather up the smallest bits of detritus. “We don’t have garbage men up there. It’s too remote.”
Gruff pivoted one of the barrels on its edge to role it back and forth down the side alley to the truck in front of the house. He stopped to swat a horsefly digging into the back of his neck.
"Spawn of Satan," he said as he slapped the fly down.
“Why doesn’t the house have garbage pickup?” Travis asked.
“Too expensive,” Gruff said.
“The city doesn’t collect the trash?”
Gruff set the drum to rest at the entrance of the alley and wiped his brow with his massive gloved hand. Sweat was already soaking his white Italian undershirt. Travis had never seen anyone in real life who had such a physique. You only saw those kinds of muscles in cartoons or on the covers of body builder magazines in a general store like the one back home. The man was huge!
“The city’s been fighting the union for years,” Gruff said. “Carla won’t have anything to do with a city service if we have an alternative.”
“And that alternative would be—us, right?”
“Grab your barrel, partner,” Gruff said over his shoulder as he hoisted the barrel right off the ground and headed down the alley.
Travis duck-walked his to the street, where he was met by Louise.
“I hear you like driving this beat-up shit bag of a truck,” she said, pointing to the old GBU jalopy that Travis and Jonah had first driven to Jack’s farm.
“Yeah,” Travis said. “It was cool.”
“Most excellent,” Gruff said and handed him the keys.
Louise got in on the passenger’s side and slid along the bench seat to Travis. The smell of stale cigarette smoke wafted into his face.
“I need to be aired out,” Louise said, as if she had a direct line to Travis’s nostrils. “Goin’ along for the ride.”
They drove up the hill into the country in silence. At one point, Louise made to shake a cigarette out the pack she carried around like a rabbit’s foot, but a glance from Gruff and she thought better of it.
“You ever in the service?” Travis asked Gruff, partly to make conversation but also because this man fascinated him.
“Nope,” Gruff said. “Too old.”
“Old?” Louise said. “You ain’t forty.”
“Well, I beg to differ,” he said. “I turn forty-three this fall.”
“Shit,” Louise said. “You’re pretty well pickled.”
To Travis, forty-three qualified as, if not antique, then surely old. He had grown up with multiple warnings about trusting anyone over thirty. He dismissed that idea, of course. Most of the older people he knew were pretty wise. But they were also, well, old.
It was early afternoon on the one day of the week that Travis had no classes after 10:00am. The fall air was heavy with the last humid heat of Indian summer. Once again, he was in this battered old truck driving in the country, and once again he was loving it. It reminded him of home, of the drives he and his buddies took in late summer the year he graduated from high school. The light in the air brought with it a sense of impending autumn, with its beauty and its endings. Some of the trees were starting to turn their leaves into fire.
“So, how did you excape the draft?” Louise asked Travis.
“I’m deferred while I’m in college,” he said. He was a little surprised by the question. Everyone knew college kids were deferred, didn’t they?
“Enjoy it while it lasts,” Gruff said. “It’s a hell hole over there.”
“And to no good purpose,” Louise added.
Travis was beginning to understand what the odd collection of characters he had met at the house had in common. Most of the people he hung out with on campus were in favor of the war. Greenbush University wasn’t Berkeley or NYU. It attracted the traditional, patriotic sons and some daughters of rural upstate New York and northern New England. This crowd with LIA was something else all together. He was comfortable with them in most ways, but their political views were still a stretch for him. When hot topics came up, the war and all, he kept his mouth shut, not because he was afraid they would reject his views, or him, but because he had the good sense (he prized his good sense!) to realize that, whatever position these people had on the big issues of the day, those positions had been formed by experiences he could not even begin to imagine.
+++++++++++++++
The dump was set back from the road about a quarter of a mile and well before Travis could see it, he could smell it. It was a still day and the air on the dirt road was fetid with noxious smells: the sweet, sickly odor of decaying food mingled in equal parts with the acrid smell of smoke. They rounded a last turn and drove up to the edge of an enormous pile of trash. But that was just the dumping off point; beyond it lay a plain of unsettled ground, much of it burned and melted plastic and metal strewn in a huge bed of smoldering ash. For a little town the size of Greenbush, he was amazed at the size of the place.
They joined a short line of vehicles, trucks mostly, waiting to be relieved of their own reeking and seeping burdens. Blessedly, no effort was made to sort any of what they brought. Gruff got out and heaved their refuse onto the edge of the pile and in short order they were out of the place.
He didn’t know why, but Travis was shaken by the experience of so much smoldering stench. Maybe it was the maggots he saw on some of the garbage closest to him in the truck. He hated bugs, and worms, he was sure, were created by God only for the purposes of skewering on the end of a fishhook.
“Gehenna on earth,” he mumbled as Gruff climbed back into the truck and slammed the tinny door shut behind him.
“What’d you say?” Gruff asked.
Travis shifted the truck into gear and steered them out of the parking area.
“I’ve never seen anything like that,” he said. “We always burn our stuff.”
He reached the main road and turned left, heading back to the city.
“You ain’t the queasy kind, are you?” Louise asked him.
“Nah, you know I’m not,” he said. “You’ve seen me corralling the trash at the end of a meal and taking it out back. It’s the shear size of the place, I think, and it reminded me of Gehenna.”
“What the hell is that?” Louise asked.
“Actually,” Travis said, “you got it right there. Gehenna is hell.”
“So why not just call hell ‘hell,’” Gruff said. “You ain’t aiming to impress us, are you? Being college educated and all.”
“He knows better than to try that shit,” Louise said.
“No, not at all,” Travis said. “Jonah was just talking about Gehenna in class the other week, and I remembered what he said.”
Travis went on, explaining to them that in Jonah’s New Testament class someone had tried to corner their priest-professor by asking him if he believed in hell and the eternal damnation of sinners. It was a question that Travis had thought of, too, but was afraid to ask. He was growing in respect and even love for this gentle man who had saved him from ruin after the affair of the mermaid, and dreaded the possibility that someone who was so good would confirm what he had learned in grade school catechism class, with some degree of horror, about the implacable judgment of God.
“So what’d he say?” Gruff asked.
“I’m thinking I can’t tell you,” Travis said, “without sounding like some college-educated punk.”
That got a laugh from both of them, and he continued.
“I don’t remember all the details,” he said, but went on to tell them about the biblical origins of the fire and brimstone of hell: Jesus was approached in the gospels with questions about hell on a number of occasions by people who, Travis suspected, were as trepidatious as he was about how the kind master would respond. This was because on occasion Christ would warn his followers about avoiding the fate of the wicked, which he described as consignment to “hell,” a place of unquenchable fire where the worm never dies.
Jonah explained that in the Greek original of the gospels, the word interpreters translate as “hell” is “Gehenna,” and that Jesus probably got the word—and its associations with fire and worms—from the Hebrew prophets, particularly Jeremiah and Isaiah, whose poetry is rife with threats against those who do evil, thundering that they would be killed and their bodies thrown into Gehenna.
“Sounds pretty straightforward to me,” Gruff said. “You sin, you die, you burn. Just like we were taught.”
“It’s actually not what most people think, though,” Travis said.
The prophets were referring to an actual place outside Jerusalem: the valley of Hinnom. This valley seems to have been a site that was sacred to the people who controlled the area before the arrival of the Israelites at the place that would become their capital city. When the previous occupants were routed and banished, the new owners turned the Hinnom valley into a garbage pit to desecrate what had been a pagan shrine.
“So, when the prophets talk about throwing a body into Hinnom—the Greek form of the word was ‘Gehenna’—they weren’t talking about eternal damnation,” Travis concluded.
“They were talking about garbage disposal,” Gruff said.
“Yuch. I can be a pretty vindictive bitch,” Louise said. “But even I wouldn’t throw my enemy’s body in a dump.”
“Oh, yes you would,” Gruff chuckled. “Where the fire is never quenched and the worm never dies.”
“So, when Jesus refers to Gehenna—hell—as the eventual destination of the wicked,” Travis said, “he may have just meant that when evil people die they don’t go to heaven to enjoy eternal happiness with God. Instead, they just die and are tossed into a pit to rot in oblivion.”
The three of them drove in silence for a while. They were heading down Red Mill Road past GBU and it was easy to be distracted by the view that opened up ahead of them: the tops of the biggest buildings across the river poking up out of the city’s shroud of smoke and dust.
“Camus said that hell is other people,” Louise said.
“What?” Travis said, surprised once again at what came out of the woman sitting next to him.
“It was Sartre, not Camus,” Gruff said, and he leaned forward to face Travis at the other end of the seat. “And I know what you’re thinking .”
Travis blushed.
“Well,” he said after a moment, “how DO you know about Sartre and Camus.”
They were nearing Fourth Street and Louise was back at it with her pack of cigarettes.
“Oh, there’s much you don’t know about us,” she said.
“That’s for sure,” Travis said.
“You haven’t been at the house on a Friday night yet, have you?” Gruff asked.
“True,” Travis said, but was beginning to get the picture. On Fridays after supper, the group gathered for sessions called “Clarification of Thought.” They were modeled after the program originally set up by the Catholic Workers in New York back at the beginning, when Peter Maurin was still around.
“You talked about existentialists on a Friday night?”
“Hey,” Gruff said as Travis pulled up to the curb outside the house. “We’re anarchists, aren’t we?”
Right, Travis thought, anarchists.
The usual collection of people had lined up along the street under the storefront sign, “Love in Action.” They hurried out of the truck and through the front door into the building. They had a meal to serve.
[Up next: The Key]
Friday, September 11, 2009
The Devil's Daybook: On the Absolute Mystery of the Great High God
Carla defies description.
I mean that literally. She would not describe herself for my daybook. I told her, how am I going to document the origins of Fourth Street if you won’t be a source for the story? But beyond the bare minimum, I got nothing.
I even warned her: are you sure you want to leave your part of the saga in my hands? Nothing.
I even went mechanical with a reel to reel tape recorder from GBU. I told her to just talk into the microphone and of course she didn’t want to talk into the microphone but I said go ahead try it. This is as far as we got:
++++++++++++++++
“Is that thing on?” Carla asked.
“I think so,” I said. “But a master of these things, I am not. As you know.”
We were sitting in the tiny courtyard behind the House catching some of the precious mid-afternoon quiet and sun, though I wasn’t sure how long our backsides would last out there, sitting as we were on wrought iron patio furniture designed for, but not outfitted with, cushions. David and Jonathan, the cats from hell, uncharacteristically leave us alone and lie asleep in the sun at our feet, content and oblivious.
“There,” I said, satisfied that the equipment was ready. I started to feel as though I could get into the groove with this interviewing thing.
“This is my first interview,” I told her. “Let’s get started.”
“Go for it.”
“Well.” I moved the microphone closer to her face. “Tell me about yourself.”
She paused and stared at me. I thought she was going to get up and leave, but she surprised me.
“Give me that thing,” she said, pulling the microphone closer. “And don’t interrupt.”
++++++++++++++
“I arrived here,” she began, “actually you and I both arrived here, we all arrived here in this place because, when I first came out east to the university, I chanced to meet Gertrude in the library one afternoon.”
“That old bitch,” I said.
“Don’t interrupt. I’d started college in San Francisco, not far from the Mission District where I grew up. I was a commuter; my parents didn’t dare let me live in the dorms. I was pretty wild back then”.
“Back then,” I couldn’t help myself.
She paused at me. Carla had a way of looking a pause.
“Well, it was the sixties,” I said to prompt her. “And you were in the City That Knows How.”
She ignored that and continued. “I managed to get into some pretty sophisticated trouble even without the convenience of dorm life, and after two semesters my folks packed me off back East to live with my mother’s sister in Albany. (This, of course, backfired on them when my younger brother and only sibling, who presented them with no trouble in high school, insisted on joining me two years later, leaving them three thousand miles away from either of us).
“For the first time in my life, in the hills around the campus, I had the time to just be quiet, and I realized that I didn’t know who I was or where I wanted to be or what I wanted to do. All the usual questions you’re supposed to ask in your late teens and early twenties. And of course I didn’t have to worry about the draft, like the guys did.
“At just this time of day, mid-afternoon, Gertrude walked by as I was paging through some magazine in the library. I remember I was staring at a patch of sun on the orange plastic seat next to me. I must have been fidgeting quite a bit because she stopped at my side and asked if there was something wrong.
“She was wearing a short veil and despite the fact that the college was a Catholic one, I had never shared more than two words with a nun in my life, and certainly not while sitting in shorts, with my legs hanging over the seat of the chair.”
“It’s amazing she didn’t throw you out,” I said.
“True,” Carla said. “Especially since Gertrude was one of the more traditional sisters at the College.”
“So, what happened? Did she give you the old heave-ho?”
“Nothing happened,” she said. “She just looked at me.”
“I know that stare,” he said. “She hated my guts back then.”
Carla smiled. “Her eyes give away nothing, but they weren’t judging me as she gave me the once over in the library that day. Which, I should add, was remarkable, considering how hard we would vex this woman who was by nature anything but non-judgmental.”
“So, what did she say?”
“I don’t recall her actual words, but she offered me a job,” Carla said. “And we became colleagues, you and I.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it for now,” she said, as she looked down at Luke’s bigboy wristwatch. “I have to go cook.”
“Now what?” I asked her.
“Hey, it’s your book,” she said as the legs of her wrought iron chair scraped against the flagstones of the garden.
+++++++++++++++
I was actually surprised that I got that much out of Carla before she split and left the rest of the tale for me to tell.
I met her within a week of her hiring at the library. I’d been hired around the same time (not by Gertrude, since that never would have happened. For the Ster, as I call her just to aggravate her, I was an acquired taste). I was a charity case, enrolled at GBU as part of the school’s outreach to worthy locals and I was a local they considered, for a time, to be worthy. I think that meant I had a pulse and had actually read a whole book before I applied for admission.
I was barely at work a week in the library myself when I was asked—told, really, the nuns didn’t ask—to orient this kid, Carla Dunbar, into the work of the library page. She presented well—short as me but the right height for a girl, with dirty blond hair that had a tendency to curl when she let it grow out. When I met her, her hair was short, though, and that went with her athletic, wiry body type. She was boyish in some ways but not manish, with pale skin (like her brother’s), the kind you don’t mind touching because it always looks smooth and clean and lightly dusted with blond hair. She wasn’t overly strong physically, but she had a strong, determined face with very pale blue/green eyes, much lighter than her brother’s startling cerulean blues.
I couldn’t get her to talk much then, either, as I showed her around the library (a converted coach house for the original estate). But we found ourselves later that week in the same theology class with Father Jonah Lutes. It was an introduction to the New Testament, one of eight (eight!!) required theology classes to which every student at the university was sentenced, without hope of parole.
This meant we had to take a theology course every semester during our sojourn on the campus on Mount Reisendorf, and that meant that there was a strong incentive for people like us to get creative. Both Carla and I had strong reservations about the foundations of the theological enterprise, a/k/a “God, though neither of us had the courage and come on out and self-identify with the godless.
Our creativity consisted of relentlessly badgering Jonah (we saw him as the weak chink in the priestly wall of the theological and philosophical fortress [don’t get me going on all the philosophy we had to take!]). We convinced him to offer a course more suitable to our intellectual palate: he created his most popular course because of us, “War, Justice, and the Common Good.” The war, the draft, and the radical idea that Catholics were toying with—that being a conscientious objector might have been something Jesus would have approved of—all of this made the course one of the must-takes on campus, and Jonah got a name for himself as a radical. Hardly deserved, though he did know a lot of people in town who were working the justice and poverty line.
Which is how we wound up meeting the founder of the Catholic Worker movement, Dorothy Day herself, when she came to Albany one semester to speak at a local union hall.
Well, I say we met her, but really, we sat in the third row and paid attention. She was talking, as she always does, about Jesus and the gospels, but for once this wasn’t a turn-off. I found Miss Day a rather indifferent speaker, untrained in public speaking and kind of monotoned. And she drifted a bit in what she was talking about. I wondered if she was prepared.
Of course, this was quick-tongued Jason the college student critic at work. Later, when Jonah forced us to read some of her work, I came to appreciate the woman for what she had done, practically reinventing service to the poor at a time—the 1930s—when just about everyone was poor, or so it seemed. Hell, my father, whose father was a carpenter with a job, used to hunt woodchucks with a shotgun to put meat in the gravy they sprinkled over the daily macaroni. I admit it: her words may have lacked a suitable rhetorical flourish, but it really was hard to be too critical of a woman who had inspired houses of hospitality all over the country that were serving thousands of meals every day. It didn’t hurt that she was a self-proclaimed anarchist and a pacifist against war in all its forms. That was attractive, for sure.
Anyway, that night, something shifted inside Carla. We all saw it soon enough. I’m sure Gertrude was thinking it was a religious conversion, but it wasn’t. But something did happen with Carla. I date it to that night, but it probably also involved the arrival of her younger brother Luke, and her having to be a role model for him and all.
Carla began to pester Jonah all over again, this time to introduce her to his connections, pro-union stiffs who were leafleting the mills in Troy and others who were demonstrating against the war on and off campus. The other priests gave lip service to Miss Day as a modern saint but didn’t much approve of the details of her program, like opposing the war, so there were some interesting confrontations on campus over the war, and Carla began to get it on with that scene.
She was the one who first spotted the “to let” sign on the house on Fourth Street and she continued to badger Jonah without mercy until he convinced his benefactors—people he met in the parish where he worked on weekends, as well as some of the better off lay faculty at GBU—to bankroll the deal and get a lease signed.
I’m not sure how Carla managed to graduate, but she did—we did—and when she headed downtown to begin her house of hospitality, I followed along. I’d been rejected by the draft board—I’m sure you will have guessed the reason—and was footloose and fancy free, as they say.
Well, hold on. I did say I was going to be honest here.
I did follow Carla to Fourth Street, true. But the reason was not really to work with the poor, not then it wasn’t. I mean, why would I return to the very city, the very part of the city that I had so wanted to escape? I was sure, when I got accepted at GBU and even got a room on campus, that I was Broadway bound! Once I got an education I would be able to make enough money to get my ass to New York City. Instead, here I was, donating a year or so of my precious young life to setting up a house of hospitality. Why? Was it Jesus after all, slipping into the back door of my heart?
Hell, no. It was Carla’s delightful, delectable brother Luke, who slipped into the back door of my . . . life. And yeah, my heart.
But that’s a story for another day.
In any case, it was good that I went along for the ride, since Carla had this problem that did not go away.
When Miss Day founded the Catholic Worker movement, the “Catholic” part was no last-minute add on, like a marketing tool or something. She was a Catholic first, she said, and a worker with and for the poor second. The work came from an identification with Jesus Christ, and a complete devotion to Christ and the Church, which she understood—as a Catholic does—to be the Body of Christ. She worked priests and the princes of the Church to get what she needed for her movement, but she insisted that if the Cardinal Archbishop of New York commanded her to close up shop, she would do it on the spot.
However, our beloved Carla, even as she swooned over the woman and her mission, and deepened her own devotion to the poor, Carla was still—is still—though perhaps somewhat reluctantly, an atheist.
Go figure.
I was the one that got faith.
[For more information about Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker movement, still flourishing today almost thirty years after Miss Day’s death in 1980, see the link below among my favorite sites. Jason’s description of Dorothy Day as a speaker is taken from an early account of her lecture style by Dwight MacDonald in The New Yorker from October of 1952. Up next: “To Hell and Back.”]
I mean that literally. She would not describe herself for my daybook. I told her, how am I going to document the origins of Fourth Street if you won’t be a source for the story? But beyond the bare minimum, I got nothing.
I even warned her: are you sure you want to leave your part of the saga in my hands? Nothing.
I even went mechanical with a reel to reel tape recorder from GBU. I told her to just talk into the microphone and of course she didn’t want to talk into the microphone but I said go ahead try it. This is as far as we got:
++++++++++++++++
“Is that thing on?” Carla asked.
“I think so,” I said. “But a master of these things, I am not. As you know.”
We were sitting in the tiny courtyard behind the House catching some of the precious mid-afternoon quiet and sun, though I wasn’t sure how long our backsides would last out there, sitting as we were on wrought iron patio furniture designed for, but not outfitted with, cushions. David and Jonathan, the cats from hell, uncharacteristically leave us alone and lie asleep in the sun at our feet, content and oblivious.
“There,” I said, satisfied that the equipment was ready. I started to feel as though I could get into the groove with this interviewing thing.
“This is my first interview,” I told her. “Let’s get started.”
“Go for it.”
“Well.” I moved the microphone closer to her face. “Tell me about yourself.”
She paused and stared at me. I thought she was going to get up and leave, but she surprised me.
“Give me that thing,” she said, pulling the microphone closer. “And don’t interrupt.”
++++++++++++++
“I arrived here,” she began, “actually you and I both arrived here, we all arrived here in this place because, when I first came out east to the university, I chanced to meet Gertrude in the library one afternoon.”
“That old bitch,” I said.
“Don’t interrupt. I’d started college in San Francisco, not far from the Mission District where I grew up. I was a commuter; my parents didn’t dare let me live in the dorms. I was pretty wild back then”.
“Back then,” I couldn’t help myself.
She paused at me. Carla had a way of looking a pause.
“Well, it was the sixties,” I said to prompt her. “And you were in the City That Knows How.”
She ignored that and continued. “I managed to get into some pretty sophisticated trouble even without the convenience of dorm life, and after two semesters my folks packed me off back East to live with my mother’s sister in Albany. (This, of course, backfired on them when my younger brother and only sibling, who presented them with no trouble in high school, insisted on joining me two years later, leaving them three thousand miles away from either of us).
“For the first time in my life, in the hills around the campus, I had the time to just be quiet, and I realized that I didn’t know who I was or where I wanted to be or what I wanted to do. All the usual questions you’re supposed to ask in your late teens and early twenties. And of course I didn’t have to worry about the draft, like the guys did.
“At just this time of day, mid-afternoon, Gertrude walked by as I was paging through some magazine in the library. I remember I was staring at a patch of sun on the orange plastic seat next to me. I must have been fidgeting quite a bit because she stopped at my side and asked if there was something wrong.
“She was wearing a short veil and despite the fact that the college was a Catholic one, I had never shared more than two words with a nun in my life, and certainly not while sitting in shorts, with my legs hanging over the seat of the chair.”
“It’s amazing she didn’t throw you out,” I said.
“True,” Carla said. “Especially since Gertrude was one of the more traditional sisters at the College.”
“So, what happened? Did she give you the old heave-ho?”
“Nothing happened,” she said. “She just looked at me.”
“I know that stare,” he said. “She hated my guts back then.”
Carla smiled. “Her eyes give away nothing, but they weren’t judging me as she gave me the once over in the library that day. Which, I should add, was remarkable, considering how hard we would vex this woman who was by nature anything but non-judgmental.”
“So, what did she say?”
“I don’t recall her actual words, but she offered me a job,” Carla said. “And we became colleagues, you and I.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it for now,” she said, as she looked down at Luke’s bigboy wristwatch. “I have to go cook.”
“Now what?” I asked her.
“Hey, it’s your book,” she said as the legs of her wrought iron chair scraped against the flagstones of the garden.
+++++++++++++++
I was actually surprised that I got that much out of Carla before she split and left the rest of the tale for me to tell.
I met her within a week of her hiring at the library. I’d been hired around the same time (not by Gertrude, since that never would have happened. For the Ster, as I call her just to aggravate her, I was an acquired taste). I was a charity case, enrolled at GBU as part of the school’s outreach to worthy locals and I was a local they considered, for a time, to be worthy. I think that meant I had a pulse and had actually read a whole book before I applied for admission.
I was barely at work a week in the library myself when I was asked—told, really, the nuns didn’t ask—to orient this kid, Carla Dunbar, into the work of the library page. She presented well—short as me but the right height for a girl, with dirty blond hair that had a tendency to curl when she let it grow out. When I met her, her hair was short, though, and that went with her athletic, wiry body type. She was boyish in some ways but not manish, with pale skin (like her brother’s), the kind you don’t mind touching because it always looks smooth and clean and lightly dusted with blond hair. She wasn’t overly strong physically, but she had a strong, determined face with very pale blue/green eyes, much lighter than her brother’s startling cerulean blues.
I couldn’t get her to talk much then, either, as I showed her around the library (a converted coach house for the original estate). But we found ourselves later that week in the same theology class with Father Jonah Lutes. It was an introduction to the New Testament, one of eight (eight!!) required theology classes to which every student at the university was sentenced, without hope of parole.
This meant we had to take a theology course every semester during our sojourn on the campus on Mount Reisendorf, and that meant that there was a strong incentive for people like us to get creative. Both Carla and I had strong reservations about the foundations of the theological enterprise, a/k/a “God, though neither of us had the courage and come on out and self-identify with the godless.
Our creativity consisted of relentlessly badgering Jonah (we saw him as the weak chink in the priestly wall of the theological and philosophical fortress [don’t get me going on all the philosophy we had to take!]). We convinced him to offer a course more suitable to our intellectual palate: he created his most popular course because of us, “War, Justice, and the Common Good.” The war, the draft, and the radical idea that Catholics were toying with—that being a conscientious objector might have been something Jesus would have approved of—all of this made the course one of the must-takes on campus, and Jonah got a name for himself as a radical. Hardly deserved, though he did know a lot of people in town who were working the justice and poverty line.
Which is how we wound up meeting the founder of the Catholic Worker movement, Dorothy Day herself, when she came to Albany one semester to speak at a local union hall.
Well, I say we met her, but really, we sat in the third row and paid attention. She was talking, as she always does, about Jesus and the gospels, but for once this wasn’t a turn-off. I found Miss Day a rather indifferent speaker, untrained in public speaking and kind of monotoned. And she drifted a bit in what she was talking about. I wondered if she was prepared.
Of course, this was quick-tongued Jason the college student critic at work. Later, when Jonah forced us to read some of her work, I came to appreciate the woman for what she had done, practically reinventing service to the poor at a time—the 1930s—when just about everyone was poor, or so it seemed. Hell, my father, whose father was a carpenter with a job, used to hunt woodchucks with a shotgun to put meat in the gravy they sprinkled over the daily macaroni. I admit it: her words may have lacked a suitable rhetorical flourish, but it really was hard to be too critical of a woman who had inspired houses of hospitality all over the country that were serving thousands of meals every day. It didn’t hurt that she was a self-proclaimed anarchist and a pacifist against war in all its forms. That was attractive, for sure.
Anyway, that night, something shifted inside Carla. We all saw it soon enough. I’m sure Gertrude was thinking it was a religious conversion, but it wasn’t. But something did happen with Carla. I date it to that night, but it probably also involved the arrival of her younger brother Luke, and her having to be a role model for him and all.
Carla began to pester Jonah all over again, this time to introduce her to his connections, pro-union stiffs who were leafleting the mills in Troy and others who were demonstrating against the war on and off campus. The other priests gave lip service to Miss Day as a modern saint but didn’t much approve of the details of her program, like opposing the war, so there were some interesting confrontations on campus over the war, and Carla began to get it on with that scene.
She was the one who first spotted the “to let” sign on the house on Fourth Street and she continued to badger Jonah without mercy until he convinced his benefactors—people he met in the parish where he worked on weekends, as well as some of the better off lay faculty at GBU—to bankroll the deal and get a lease signed.
I’m not sure how Carla managed to graduate, but she did—we did—and when she headed downtown to begin her house of hospitality, I followed along. I’d been rejected by the draft board—I’m sure you will have guessed the reason—and was footloose and fancy free, as they say.
Well, hold on. I did say I was going to be honest here.
I did follow Carla to Fourth Street, true. But the reason was not really to work with the poor, not then it wasn’t. I mean, why would I return to the very city, the very part of the city that I had so wanted to escape? I was sure, when I got accepted at GBU and even got a room on campus, that I was Broadway bound! Once I got an education I would be able to make enough money to get my ass to New York City. Instead, here I was, donating a year or so of my precious young life to setting up a house of hospitality. Why? Was it Jesus after all, slipping into the back door of my heart?
Hell, no. It was Carla’s delightful, delectable brother Luke, who slipped into the back door of my . . . life. And yeah, my heart.
But that’s a story for another day.
In any case, it was good that I went along for the ride, since Carla had this problem that did not go away.
When Miss Day founded the Catholic Worker movement, the “Catholic” part was no last-minute add on, like a marketing tool or something. She was a Catholic first, she said, and a worker with and for the poor second. The work came from an identification with Jesus Christ, and a complete devotion to Christ and the Church, which she understood—as a Catholic does—to be the Body of Christ. She worked priests and the princes of the Church to get what she needed for her movement, but she insisted that if the Cardinal Archbishop of New York commanded her to close up shop, she would do it on the spot.
However, our beloved Carla, even as she swooned over the woman and her mission, and deepened her own devotion to the poor, Carla was still—is still—though perhaps somewhat reluctantly, an atheist.
Go figure.
I was the one that got faith.
[For more information about Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker movement, still flourishing today almost thirty years after Miss Day’s death in 1980, see the link below among my favorite sites. Jason’s description of Dorothy Day as a speaker is taken from an early account of her lecture style by Dwight MacDonald in The New Yorker from October of 1952. Up next: “To Hell and Back.”]
Thursday, August 27, 2009
I Am Your Passing Guest
It was a particularly hot spring day and Travis, country born and bred, had not yet adjusted to the muggy air that cities belched forth, or the fetid, stagnant atmosphere that clung to the dining room at LIA when the heat arrived. He was sweating like a stevedore when Louise sidled up to him and asked him—told him, really—to join her in the courtyard out back for a smoke.
He followed her out, grateful for the excuse to leave the room now that the guests had all been fed and it was time to clean up. He could not imagine lifting the soup pot, even empty, in this heat.
He declined her offer of a cigarette as they sat together in the shade of a small elm that had somehow found its home in the grubby little flagstoned yard behind the house.
“You shouldn’t be offering me a cigarette,” he said to her, once again surprised at the actions of this woman, who was unlike anyone he had met before. Offering a cigarette to a minor? It had never happened to him before.
“Kid,” she said as she sucked in a double lung full of the soothing smoke, “the words ‘should’ or ‘should not’ are no longer part of my working vocabulary.”
“You shouldn’t be smoking,” he said nonetheless. “Not with that cough of yours.”
As if on cue, or to mock him, she coughed, hard.
“Part of my heritage,” she wheezed.
“How so?”
“Ahm an injun, son,” she said, and cackled. “Hell, you knew that. I look just like every cigar store Indian you ever saw, don’t I?”
“The thought did occur to me,” Travis said. “What tribe?” She didn’t look like the Indians he had met in Maine.
“The biggest one left, Navajo” she said. “My daddy said I was born to the Rainmaker clan, but we were part Hopi, too.”
“How did you wind up in New York?” he asked.
“It’s a long story,” she said.
Travis sat in silence and waited. He knew—because people were always telling him—that he was a good listener for someone so young.
She told him that she was born on the Navajo Great Reservation in Arizona but didn’t know much about her native tradition, since she was sent away to a Catholic boarding school at an early age, where she was fortunate to get a good education and graduate from high school with honors.
“And I graduated a virgin, which was even more important to me,” she said. “Those nuns were tough, boy. In fact, they were the ones who taught me how to cuss with eloquence. Cajuns mostly, out in the desert pissed as hell at God.”
“You were taught by Cajun nuns in Arizona?” Travis asked.
“Hey, stranger things have happened, even to me,” she said, and she went on with her story, about how she graduated and, faced with a return to the family hogan outside Tuba City, took up with the first man who would have her even though, as she said, while she was looking for freedom and some adventure, and maybe even love, he was out for snatch.
“Snatch?” Travis said.
“Yeah, snatch,” she said to him. “Boy, you really haven’t lived, have you.”
Now Travis was blushing and hating it.
“You know,” she said, “Pus---“
“Got it,” he cut her off.
“He had a car and a destination,” she continued. “New York, the city of dreams.”
But he also had a habit and it wasn’t long before she found herself one, too. His drug of choice was heroin; hers was sweet, cheap wine.
“So you dumped him,” Travis said.
“Hell, no, boy,” she said and what began as a laugh ended as a growling cough.
“You really are young,” she said when she had caught her breath.
“I married him,” she said.
They lived in the Bronx, taking odd jobs—her favorite and, as it turned out, the one with the most helpful skill set, was waitressing—and being high on the Grand Concourse well into the night.
“Then he left me,” she said. “One day he was there in that filthy apartment on Lorillard Place and the next day he was gone, gone, gone.”
“And then what happened?”
She seemed to be eying him carefully for a minute.
“To be honest,” she said, “I am not exactly sure what happened next.”
Travis waited.
“The next thing I remember is going to confession here in town at the Magdalene church.”
“So, you’re Catholic,” he said. “Baptized at the boarding school?”
“Nope,” she said. “I am still genuine, one-hundred percent heathen.”
“Then why did you go to confession?”
“I have not a clue,” she said. “Maybe it was because I was at rock bottom and I saw the sign for the church and remembered the Magdalene whore and—how do they say it?—I identified.”
Travis shook his head.
“I know,” she said. “Seems weird to me, too.”
“Not weird at all,” he said. “That was God, drawing you back.”
“Let me say it one more time,” she said. “Boy, you are really, really young.”
Before he could object, she added, “That’s how I met Jonah. He was working the box that afternoon.”
“The confession box,” she added, since his confusion was apparent. “I dried out, I lived for a while in a settlement house in Albany, and when Jonah and Carla were fixing to start up this place on the other side of the river, they told me they had a job for me here and here I am.”
“No more wine?”
“Kid, I am one stubborn bitch,” she said. “When I put my mind to something, it happens. Not one drop since the day I met Jonah.”
A truck rattled down Fourth Street and drowned out the next thing she said. Travis sat quietly enjoying the faint breeze that slipped through the new leaves on the tree over their head.
“What?” Louise barked. “I have to tell you about my life story but you don’t have to tell me anything about you?”
“I’m sorry—“ he began.
“Two more words I left behind years ago,” she said.
“I didn’t hear you,” he said. “I’m kind of hard of hearing in one ear.”
“I said,” she raised her voice slightly, “How the hell did you get the name Travis, anyway?”
“Oh, it’s a long story,” he said.
“You ain’t twenty yet,” she barked. “It can’t be that long. Besides, I am giving you a reason to skip cleanup, and from the looks of you, you should take it.”
“I look that bad.”
“Go on in and get me a cup of coffee and get yourself a glass of water.”
“Talk to me,” she said when he returned. “Tell me a story.”
And so he did. He was a direct descendent of William Travis, the famous hero at age twenty-six.
“Famous for what?”
“William Travis was the commander at the Alamo,” he said.
“How can you be the direct descendent of someone who died that young at the Alamo, boy?” she asked him.
“William Travis did die young,” he said. “But he also married young, and to a woman who was sixteen. They had a son and his wife was pregnant with a daughter when he died, and I am descended from that daughter, Susan Isabella Travis.”
“I thought you were Catholic,” she said. “Far as I know, there weren’t a lot of Catholics in Texas back then, except Mexicans, of course, and you ain’t Mexican.”
He told her the rest of the story, how Susan and her brother were raised in North Carolina by William Travis’s wife and her second husband; Susan married a man from Savannah and so she raised her family in Georgia, and somewhere along the line, some of the family came into the fold.
“You ever hear of the writer Flannery O’Connor?” he asked her.
“Jonah reads her and says I would like her stories,” she said. “He says her sense of humor reminds him of me.”
“Well, I can’t prove it, but we may be related to her,” he said. “She was from Georgia, too.”
Two guests Travis didn’t recognize appeared at the door to the kitchen with shopping bags of trash and looked around for where to put them. He got up and pointed the way to the trash pen. Louise made no move to get back to work, so Travis sat down with her again. They sat in silence as the men tossed the bags into the trash cans, clanged the lids down and returned to the kitchen.
“My man Travis was a hero, all right,” he said. “He died for his country, something anyone should be proud to have done.”
“Yeah, well, I’m not sure dying for your country is the best way to be a hero,” Louise said, and Travis sensed he had hit a nerve. A lot of the people associated with the house were more liberal than he was in these matters, and what with the war and all, he had learned to tread lightly in conversations like this. He silently kicked himself for bringing the topic up. But Louise didn’t seem to want to pursue it, either.
“Travis ain’t a saint’s name,” she said. “Don’t Catholics have to be named after saints?”
“Well, yes, they do,” he said. “And I was.”
“So your ancestor was not just a hero but a saint, too?”
“No, no, my middle name is a saint’s name,” he said. “That’s good enough for the Church.”
“And your middle name is . . . ?”
“George,” he said. “Travis George O’Connor at your service.”
She felt her pockets for her cigarettes, found them and made to light another one.
“My second husband’s name was George,” she said. “Now, there was a saint.”
“Really?”
“Would you want to be married to me?”
“Where is he now?”
“Good question,” she said. “They told me he was a POW in Korea, and he never came back.”
“I’m sorry,” Travis said. “Did you have any kids?”
“One son, Reggie,” she said.
“And where is he?”
She shook her head and smiled. “You’re a veritable fountain of questions, ain’t you, kid. You are overflowing with curiosity.”
“I’m sorry,” he said again. “I didn’t mean to pry. I was just being, well, neighborly.”
“No problem,” she said. “I like that in a man, curiosity.”
She got up and stood there. Even with her standing and him sitting, they were at eye level. Louise had a piercing way of looking at you; Travis met her gaze and held it, though.
“Reggie’s like his father in many ways, some good, some not so good,” she said. “Where is he now? Beats me. He’s a POW just like his dad was.”
“Wait,” Travis said. “Your son is a POW now? In Viet Nam?”
She turned and headed for the door. Then she stopped and turned back to him.
“As you can probably imagine, I’m not a fan of war heroes,” she said. “The real heroes are in there”—she pointed to the kitchen. “Carla’s a hero. Jason and Gruff, too. Hell, you stick around here long enough and you’ll be a hero, too.”
Travis felt as though he had to say something but he had not a clue how to respond.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean, I mean, I meant . . . .”
She waved his apology away. “No, no, NO!” she fixed him in place with this sudden burst of passion. “Feed the hungry. Smell the poor and don’t walk away. Hell,” she laughed almost to herself, “sit down and listen to an old broad rambling. That’s what it means to be a hero.”
As Louise went into the kitchen, Travis found his mind wandering to the John Wayne movie, The Alamo. William Travis had a big part in it—he was played by one of the stars, Laurence Harvey—and Travis grew up engrossed by the film whenever they showed it on television. He was proud of his ancestor, who died for his country, even though the country he died for was, well, Texas. He was proud of his uncle, currently serving outside Saigon. Worried about him but proud.
Proud. Yes, he was.
“Travis,” Carla called. “Can you come into the kitchen? Gruff’s not here today. We need you.”
Not feeling particularly heroic, and knowing he had not avoided an encounter with the soup pot from hell, he went in.
++++++++++++++
“Hear my prayer, O Lord,
and give ear to my cry;
do not hold your peace at my tears.
For I am your passing guest,
an alien, like all my forebears.
Turn your gaze away from me, that I may smile again,
before I depart and am no more.”
--Psalm 39:12-13 [NRSV]
[Up next: “The Devil’s Daybook: Carla.” Thanks to Joe of the Bronx for creating the backstory for Travis in even more detail than I was able to incorporate here.]
He followed her out, grateful for the excuse to leave the room now that the guests had all been fed and it was time to clean up. He could not imagine lifting the soup pot, even empty, in this heat.
He declined her offer of a cigarette as they sat together in the shade of a small elm that had somehow found its home in the grubby little flagstoned yard behind the house.
“You shouldn’t be offering me a cigarette,” he said to her, once again surprised at the actions of this woman, who was unlike anyone he had met before. Offering a cigarette to a minor? It had never happened to him before.
“Kid,” she said as she sucked in a double lung full of the soothing smoke, “the words ‘should’ or ‘should not’ are no longer part of my working vocabulary.”
“You shouldn’t be smoking,” he said nonetheless. “Not with that cough of yours.”
As if on cue, or to mock him, she coughed, hard.
“Part of my heritage,” she wheezed.
“How so?”
“Ahm an injun, son,” she said, and cackled. “Hell, you knew that. I look just like every cigar store Indian you ever saw, don’t I?”
“The thought did occur to me,” Travis said. “What tribe?” She didn’t look like the Indians he had met in Maine.
“The biggest one left, Navajo” she said. “My daddy said I was born to the Rainmaker clan, but we were part Hopi, too.”
“How did you wind up in New York?” he asked.
“It’s a long story,” she said.
Travis sat in silence and waited. He knew—because people were always telling him—that he was a good listener for someone so young.
She told him that she was born on the Navajo Great Reservation in Arizona but didn’t know much about her native tradition, since she was sent away to a Catholic boarding school at an early age, where she was fortunate to get a good education and graduate from high school with honors.
“And I graduated a virgin, which was even more important to me,” she said. “Those nuns were tough, boy. In fact, they were the ones who taught me how to cuss with eloquence. Cajuns mostly, out in the desert pissed as hell at God.”
“You were taught by Cajun nuns in Arizona?” Travis asked.
“Hey, stranger things have happened, even to me,” she said, and she went on with her story, about how she graduated and, faced with a return to the family hogan outside Tuba City, took up with the first man who would have her even though, as she said, while she was looking for freedom and some adventure, and maybe even love, he was out for snatch.
“Snatch?” Travis said.
“Yeah, snatch,” she said to him. “Boy, you really haven’t lived, have you.”
Now Travis was blushing and hating it.
“You know,” she said, “Pus---“
“Got it,” he cut her off.
“He had a car and a destination,” she continued. “New York, the city of dreams.”
But he also had a habit and it wasn’t long before she found herself one, too. His drug of choice was heroin; hers was sweet, cheap wine.
“So you dumped him,” Travis said.
“Hell, no, boy,” she said and what began as a laugh ended as a growling cough.
“You really are young,” she said when she had caught her breath.
“I married him,” she said.
They lived in the Bronx, taking odd jobs—her favorite and, as it turned out, the one with the most helpful skill set, was waitressing—and being high on the Grand Concourse well into the night.
“Then he left me,” she said. “One day he was there in that filthy apartment on Lorillard Place and the next day he was gone, gone, gone.”
“And then what happened?”
She seemed to be eying him carefully for a minute.
“To be honest,” she said, “I am not exactly sure what happened next.”
Travis waited.
“The next thing I remember is going to confession here in town at the Magdalene church.”
“So, you’re Catholic,” he said. “Baptized at the boarding school?”
“Nope,” she said. “I am still genuine, one-hundred percent heathen.”
“Then why did you go to confession?”
“I have not a clue,” she said. “Maybe it was because I was at rock bottom and I saw the sign for the church and remembered the Magdalene whore and—how do they say it?—I identified.”
Travis shook his head.
“I know,” she said. “Seems weird to me, too.”
“Not weird at all,” he said. “That was God, drawing you back.”
“Let me say it one more time,” she said. “Boy, you are really, really young.”
Before he could object, she added, “That’s how I met Jonah. He was working the box that afternoon.”
“The confession box,” she added, since his confusion was apparent. “I dried out, I lived for a while in a settlement house in Albany, and when Jonah and Carla were fixing to start up this place on the other side of the river, they told me they had a job for me here and here I am.”
“No more wine?”
“Kid, I am one stubborn bitch,” she said. “When I put my mind to something, it happens. Not one drop since the day I met Jonah.”
A truck rattled down Fourth Street and drowned out the next thing she said. Travis sat quietly enjoying the faint breeze that slipped through the new leaves on the tree over their head.
“What?” Louise barked. “I have to tell you about my life story but you don’t have to tell me anything about you?”
“I’m sorry—“ he began.
“Two more words I left behind years ago,” she said.
“I didn’t hear you,” he said. “I’m kind of hard of hearing in one ear.”
“I said,” she raised her voice slightly, “How the hell did you get the name Travis, anyway?”
“Oh, it’s a long story,” he said.
“You ain’t twenty yet,” she barked. “It can’t be that long. Besides, I am giving you a reason to skip cleanup, and from the looks of you, you should take it.”
“I look that bad.”
“Go on in and get me a cup of coffee and get yourself a glass of water.”
“Talk to me,” she said when he returned. “Tell me a story.”
And so he did. He was a direct descendent of William Travis, the famous hero at age twenty-six.
“Famous for what?”
“William Travis was the commander at the Alamo,” he said.
“How can you be the direct descendent of someone who died that young at the Alamo, boy?” she asked him.
“William Travis did die young,” he said. “But he also married young, and to a woman who was sixteen. They had a son and his wife was pregnant with a daughter when he died, and I am descended from that daughter, Susan Isabella Travis.”
“I thought you were Catholic,” she said. “Far as I know, there weren’t a lot of Catholics in Texas back then, except Mexicans, of course, and you ain’t Mexican.”
He told her the rest of the story, how Susan and her brother were raised in North Carolina by William Travis’s wife and her second husband; Susan married a man from Savannah and so she raised her family in Georgia, and somewhere along the line, some of the family came into the fold.
“You ever hear of the writer Flannery O’Connor?” he asked her.
“Jonah reads her and says I would like her stories,” she said. “He says her sense of humor reminds him of me.”
“Well, I can’t prove it, but we may be related to her,” he said. “She was from Georgia, too.”
Two guests Travis didn’t recognize appeared at the door to the kitchen with shopping bags of trash and looked around for where to put them. He got up and pointed the way to the trash pen. Louise made no move to get back to work, so Travis sat down with her again. They sat in silence as the men tossed the bags into the trash cans, clanged the lids down and returned to the kitchen.
“My man Travis was a hero, all right,” he said. “He died for his country, something anyone should be proud to have done.”
“Yeah, well, I’m not sure dying for your country is the best way to be a hero,” Louise said, and Travis sensed he had hit a nerve. A lot of the people associated with the house were more liberal than he was in these matters, and what with the war and all, he had learned to tread lightly in conversations like this. He silently kicked himself for bringing the topic up. But Louise didn’t seem to want to pursue it, either.
“Travis ain’t a saint’s name,” she said. “Don’t Catholics have to be named after saints?”
“Well, yes, they do,” he said. “And I was.”
“So your ancestor was not just a hero but a saint, too?”
“No, no, my middle name is a saint’s name,” he said. “That’s good enough for the Church.”
“And your middle name is . . . ?”
“George,” he said. “Travis George O’Connor at your service.”
She felt her pockets for her cigarettes, found them and made to light another one.
“My second husband’s name was George,” she said. “Now, there was a saint.”
“Really?”
“Would you want to be married to me?”
“Where is he now?”
“Good question,” she said. “They told me he was a POW in Korea, and he never came back.”
“I’m sorry,” Travis said. “Did you have any kids?”
“One son, Reggie,” she said.
“And where is he?”
She shook her head and smiled. “You’re a veritable fountain of questions, ain’t you, kid. You are overflowing with curiosity.”
“I’m sorry,” he said again. “I didn’t mean to pry. I was just being, well, neighborly.”
“No problem,” she said. “I like that in a man, curiosity.”
She got up and stood there. Even with her standing and him sitting, they were at eye level. Louise had a piercing way of looking at you; Travis met her gaze and held it, though.
“Reggie’s like his father in many ways, some good, some not so good,” she said. “Where is he now? Beats me. He’s a POW just like his dad was.”
“Wait,” Travis said. “Your son is a POW now? In Viet Nam?”
She turned and headed for the door. Then she stopped and turned back to him.
“As you can probably imagine, I’m not a fan of war heroes,” she said. “The real heroes are in there”—she pointed to the kitchen. “Carla’s a hero. Jason and Gruff, too. Hell, you stick around here long enough and you’ll be a hero, too.”
Travis felt as though he had to say something but he had not a clue how to respond.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean, I mean, I meant . . . .”
She waved his apology away. “No, no, NO!” she fixed him in place with this sudden burst of passion. “Feed the hungry. Smell the poor and don’t walk away. Hell,” she laughed almost to herself, “sit down and listen to an old broad rambling. That’s what it means to be a hero.”
As Louise went into the kitchen, Travis found his mind wandering to the John Wayne movie, The Alamo. William Travis had a big part in it—he was played by one of the stars, Laurence Harvey—and Travis grew up engrossed by the film whenever they showed it on television. He was proud of his ancestor, who died for his country, even though the country he died for was, well, Texas. He was proud of his uncle, currently serving outside Saigon. Worried about him but proud.
Proud. Yes, he was.
“Travis,” Carla called. “Can you come into the kitchen? Gruff’s not here today. We need you.”
Not feeling particularly heroic, and knowing he had not avoided an encounter with the soup pot from hell, he went in.
++++++++++++++
“Hear my prayer, O Lord,
and give ear to my cry;
do not hold your peace at my tears.
For I am your passing guest,
an alien, like all my forebears.
Turn your gaze away from me, that I may smile again,
before I depart and am no more.”
--Psalm 39:12-13 [NRSV]
[Up next: “The Devil’s Daybook: Carla.” Thanks to Joe of the Bronx for creating the backstory for Travis in even more detail than I was able to incorporate here.]
Wednesday, August 12, 2009
The Devil's Daybook: Origins
If he hits one more pothole like that one, I thought but did not say, there won’t be enough left of CloudBoy’s ashes to scatter.
I know that people consider the deserts of the American Southwest to be among the most beautiful vistas in the world and, I admit, even I, the urbanist of urbanites, can take some solace in open space on occasion.
But Jesusmaryandjoseph, couldn’t they figure out a way to keep the roads paved? This was the interstate, after all.
Luke was doing the best he could. And I loved Luke. The hair long and golden back then, the way the skin of his gold-dusted arm, palest of the pale in its natural urban state, warmed in the sun from the slightest shade of pink through a buff orange and then to a nice even brown, like bread from a mother’s oven. Ummm—Umm. Good enough to eat.
Which I did. Regularly.
We were lovers then. Lovers on a mission from someone else’s God.
+++
“That’s not the way you want to start this,” Carla said.
“Why not?”
“Don’t give me that naïve shit,” she said and then she grunted as she hauled her number one soup pot out of the industrial sized sink I had gotten her last year. She was grateful when I found her the sink, even if it took us two months to find a guest who could install it.
“Make yourself useful,” she said, but before the words were out of her mouth I was heading to the rack of dishtowels drying in the corner by the stairs.
I love Carla.
“You don’t want to start your book by rubbing everyone’s nose in the messiness of your sex,” she said. “And what’s this ‘I loved Luke back then’ stuff? He’s not dead and gone. He’s just in Italy for the semester. You writing a historical novel or something?”
The two of us toweled the pot dry and Carla stashed it away.
“First of all, young lady,” I said, “who are you to tell me what I want to do, please?”
Luke’s cornflower blue eyes stared back at me from under her—how do they put it in novels?—under her knitted brow.”
“Get us some coffee, old man” she said. I was four years her senior. “We’ve got about an hour before the next round arrives.”
I walked across the scrubbed gray linoleum of the dining room to the hundred-cup perpetually grumbling coffee machine and filled two chipped ceramic mugs of indeterminate color and brought them to the near end of the closest of the long tables that filled the considerable room. If we had to, we could feed seventy-five down here in the basement.
“Here’s the thing,” she said as she sat down across from me. “Do you, or do you not, want people to read your book? I mean,” she cut me off with the wave of a hand before I could speak, “real people, not just our kind.”
“Are we not real?”
“You know what I mean,” she said. “You have a story, we have a story here that needs to be told. Jonah can’t do it, and so you volunteered.
“As you know, I didn’t exactly volunteer.”
“Well, whatever it is you are going to write, if you want people to listen, you shouldn’t repel the reader on the first page.”
“Why not?” I objected. “What planet do you live on, lady? Shock and revulsion sell.”
“In your case—in our case—it also misrepresents.”
She took a long draft of the lukewarm coffee and I knew she was missing a cigarette, two years after she gave them up.
“You could fill this room with people who think I’m revolting,” I said. “In under an hour. Easily.”
“You know what I mean,” she said. “Jason, even at your worst you’re not one person, one kind of person. There are all kinds of folks in there.” She pointed to my head with a calloused finger. “But pornographer is not one of them. Let them out, the real ones. On the page. Now.”
She was right. Carla is always right.
We sat in . . . I almost said “silence” but that would be an untruth. Even in the basement we could hear the traffic on the highway up the valley past the university to the Land of the Very Rich and the Very Unhappy.
“You need to talk to Jonah,” she said as she got up.
I was grumbling as I got up, but Carla was right.
++++++++++++++
I found Jonah, as expected, on the veranda of the faculty club, an open space of brick-red walls and a broad slate floor with the best view in town; from this point on the campus, one looked out over the whole of the valley and across the river to the city, hazy in the distance with the smog of late spring and early summer. Up here the air was still fresh and the noise of traffic could be confused, with only a little effort, with the passing of a breeze through the birch and maple woods of the lower campus. The song I could hear faintly in the distance—must have come from a radio in the kitchen—had it right: Air Supply was droning on, yet again, referring to a very different context about “afternoon delight.”
He was sitting with Marian, the two of them seemingly lost in thought after a good lunch as they gazed out at the view. I startled them, though their pleasure at seeing me, I hasten to add, was genuine.
“Bless me father,” I said once I had situated myself at the table for my share of the panorama below. “I need help.”
“Not today’s headlines,” he said and took a long pull from his water glass. “This
would be about the book.”
“It would be indeed,” I said.
“You don’t know how to start,” he said. “Happens to me every time.”
“Au contraire. I know how to start,” I said. “But Carla won’t let me.”
“Not the sex, Jason,” Marian said. “Don’t start with the sex.”
“Carla and Marian won’t let me.”
Marian called herself “just a housewife” who never went to college because early on she met a rich husband, but she was sharp all right.
A crow flew past us, out beyond the terrace. May you be the Holy Spirit in drag, come down from above to enlighten us all.
“You priests are prejudiced against—“ I began, but Jonah cut me off.
“Prejudiced against sex?” he said. “Don’t go there. That’s—“
I graciously maintained the higher ground here, mouth shut, as a young waiter, serious looking in horn rimmed glasses, with nice wide shoulders and a crisp lilt to his step, brought me my own tall glass of ice water. As a rule I don’t care for polyester, but his tight brown pants . . . .
“Jason!” Marian shouted at me as the waiter hustled off.
“Hey, he’s probably a graduate student,” I said.
“You are thoroughly shameless,” she said and fumbled in her purse for a cigarette.
The wind lifted Marian’s smoke out into the wide space before us, rustling the trees below. I am the city incarnate, but I had come to appreciate the sound of the wind in the leaves. Especially on a warm night with the windows open, lying in the arms of—
“How exactly do you write a book, Padre,” Marian asked Jonah.
“Dull as it sounds, you just start,” he said. “The prospect may be wearying, but eventually you write yourself into it.”
He lit a cigarette and his smoke joined Marian’s, wafting out into the great beyond.
“Mostly, it depends on what you’re writing,” Jonah said. “A book about the origins of Fourth Street, that was Carla’s idea, not yours, right?
I nodded. “I mean, I’m open to doing it,” I said. “I said I would, and it needs to be done.”
“And you might be the one to do it. But I’m not sure that’s how you should begin. Not,” he said, “if the purpose is to get your mind off your troubles.”
In the corner of my eye I could see Bubble Butt at the other end of the terrace, escorting my old linguistics teacher and his equally elderly wife to a table.
“Maybe what you should do is start with a daybook,” Jonah said.
“What’s a daybook?” Marian asked.
“It’s hard to say. That’s why it’s a great way to start,” Jonah said. “It’s a place you can put down anything.”
“Not like a diary, right?” I said. “All full of feelings and sh—stuff. If there’s one thing I don’t want to do to get my mind off things is to hash and rehash them out in a diary.”
“No, that’s not what a daybook is,” Jonah said. “Think of it as a mental scrapbook, a place where you jot down your observations of all aspects of your life—conversations you have with people, ideas that occur to you and you don’t want to forget, books you read, movies you see.”
He put out his cigarette in the glass ash tray on the table.
“Anything that interests you is grist for that mill,” he said, and he made to leave, probably for a class. “And if after a while you turn it into an account of the founding of the house, all the better.”
“My take on theology?” I asked, and Jonah nodded.
“And the sex?” I continued. “I could put in the sex?”
Jonah shared a glance with Marian.
“In your daybook, just tell the truth. If that involves theology or sexuality, or even a theology of sexuality, put it down,” he said. “But my suggestion would be to do it in a way that will help a reader, Marian here for instance, to understand what you are talking about.”
“Padre,” Marian said, “you’re telling Jason to--.”
“To teach you about sex, yes,” he said. “And theology.”
“This won’t be very orthodox, you know,” I said, and he chuckled.
“I said you should tell the truth, right?”
The truth was settling in for Marian.
“Oh, dear God,” she muttered, and reflexively reached for her cigarettes.
“I’ll take care of the check on the way out,” Jonah said. “Why don’t you two sit here a bit longer and enjoy the view?”
“For sure,” I said, looking for the waiter.
“Jason!” Marian squawked with mock displeasure.
“A daybook,” I said to her.
“The daybook from hell,” she said.
Yeah. I can do that.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++
“I think no man can go with his thoughts about him, into one of our churches, without feeling that what hold the public worship had on men is gone, or going. It has lost its grasp on the affection of the good, and on the fear of the bad.”
--Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Divinity School Address,” July 15, 1838.
I know that people consider the deserts of the American Southwest to be among the most beautiful vistas in the world and, I admit, even I, the urbanist of urbanites, can take some solace in open space on occasion.
But Jesusmaryandjoseph, couldn’t they figure out a way to keep the roads paved? This was the interstate, after all.
Luke was doing the best he could. And I loved Luke. The hair long and golden back then, the way the skin of his gold-dusted arm, palest of the pale in its natural urban state, warmed in the sun from the slightest shade of pink through a buff orange and then to a nice even brown, like bread from a mother’s oven. Ummm—Umm. Good enough to eat.
Which I did. Regularly.
We were lovers then. Lovers on a mission from someone else’s God.
+++
“That’s not the way you want to start this,” Carla said.
“Why not?”
“Don’t give me that naïve shit,” she said and then she grunted as she hauled her number one soup pot out of the industrial sized sink I had gotten her last year. She was grateful when I found her the sink, even if it took us two months to find a guest who could install it.
“Make yourself useful,” she said, but before the words were out of her mouth I was heading to the rack of dishtowels drying in the corner by the stairs.
I love Carla.
“You don’t want to start your book by rubbing everyone’s nose in the messiness of your sex,” she said. “And what’s this ‘I loved Luke back then’ stuff? He’s not dead and gone. He’s just in Italy for the semester. You writing a historical novel or something?”
The two of us toweled the pot dry and Carla stashed it away.
“First of all, young lady,” I said, “who are you to tell me what I want to do, please?”
Luke’s cornflower blue eyes stared back at me from under her—how do they put it in novels?—under her knitted brow.”
“Get us some coffee, old man” she said. I was four years her senior. “We’ve got about an hour before the next round arrives.”
I walked across the scrubbed gray linoleum of the dining room to the hundred-cup perpetually grumbling coffee machine and filled two chipped ceramic mugs of indeterminate color and brought them to the near end of the closest of the long tables that filled the considerable room. If we had to, we could feed seventy-five down here in the basement.
“Here’s the thing,” she said as she sat down across from me. “Do you, or do you not, want people to read your book? I mean,” she cut me off with the wave of a hand before I could speak, “real people, not just our kind.”
“Are we not real?”
“You know what I mean,” she said. “You have a story, we have a story here that needs to be told. Jonah can’t do it, and so you volunteered.
“As you know, I didn’t exactly volunteer.”
“Well, whatever it is you are going to write, if you want people to listen, you shouldn’t repel the reader on the first page.”
“Why not?” I objected. “What planet do you live on, lady? Shock and revulsion sell.”
“In your case—in our case—it also misrepresents.”
She took a long draft of the lukewarm coffee and I knew she was missing a cigarette, two years after she gave them up.
“You could fill this room with people who think I’m revolting,” I said. “In under an hour. Easily.”
“You know what I mean,” she said. “Jason, even at your worst you’re not one person, one kind of person. There are all kinds of folks in there.” She pointed to my head with a calloused finger. “But pornographer is not one of them. Let them out, the real ones. On the page. Now.”
She was right. Carla is always right.
We sat in . . . I almost said “silence” but that would be an untruth. Even in the basement we could hear the traffic on the highway up the valley past the university to the Land of the Very Rich and the Very Unhappy.
“You need to talk to Jonah,” she said as she got up.
I was grumbling as I got up, but Carla was right.
++++++++++++++
I found Jonah, as expected, on the veranda of the faculty club, an open space of brick-red walls and a broad slate floor with the best view in town; from this point on the campus, one looked out over the whole of the valley and across the river to the city, hazy in the distance with the smog of late spring and early summer. Up here the air was still fresh and the noise of traffic could be confused, with only a little effort, with the passing of a breeze through the birch and maple woods of the lower campus. The song I could hear faintly in the distance—must have come from a radio in the kitchen—had it right: Air Supply was droning on, yet again, referring to a very different context about “afternoon delight.”
He was sitting with Marian, the two of them seemingly lost in thought after a good lunch as they gazed out at the view. I startled them, though their pleasure at seeing me, I hasten to add, was genuine.
“Bless me father,” I said once I had situated myself at the table for my share of the panorama below. “I need help.”
“Not today’s headlines,” he said and took a long pull from his water glass. “This
would be about the book.”
“It would be indeed,” I said.
“You don’t know how to start,” he said. “Happens to me every time.”
“Au contraire. I know how to start,” I said. “But Carla won’t let me.”
“Not the sex, Jason,” Marian said. “Don’t start with the sex.”
“Carla and Marian won’t let me.”
Marian called herself “just a housewife” who never went to college because early on she met a rich husband, but she was sharp all right.
A crow flew past us, out beyond the terrace. May you be the Holy Spirit in drag, come down from above to enlighten us all.
“You priests are prejudiced against—“ I began, but Jonah cut me off.
“Prejudiced against sex?” he said. “Don’t go there. That’s—“
I graciously maintained the higher ground here, mouth shut, as a young waiter, serious looking in horn rimmed glasses, with nice wide shoulders and a crisp lilt to his step, brought me my own tall glass of ice water. As a rule I don’t care for polyester, but his tight brown pants . . . .
“Jason!” Marian shouted at me as the waiter hustled off.
“Hey, he’s probably a graduate student,” I said.
“You are thoroughly shameless,” she said and fumbled in her purse for a cigarette.
The wind lifted Marian’s smoke out into the wide space before us, rustling the trees below. I am the city incarnate, but I had come to appreciate the sound of the wind in the leaves. Especially on a warm night with the windows open, lying in the arms of—
“How exactly do you write a book, Padre,” Marian asked Jonah.
“Dull as it sounds, you just start,” he said. “The prospect may be wearying, but eventually you write yourself into it.”
He lit a cigarette and his smoke joined Marian’s, wafting out into the great beyond.
“Mostly, it depends on what you’re writing,” Jonah said. “A book about the origins of Fourth Street, that was Carla’s idea, not yours, right?
I nodded. “I mean, I’m open to doing it,” I said. “I said I would, and it needs to be done.”
“And you might be the one to do it. But I’m not sure that’s how you should begin. Not,” he said, “if the purpose is to get your mind off your troubles.”
In the corner of my eye I could see Bubble Butt at the other end of the terrace, escorting my old linguistics teacher and his equally elderly wife to a table.
“Maybe what you should do is start with a daybook,” Jonah said.
“What’s a daybook?” Marian asked.
“It’s hard to say. That’s why it’s a great way to start,” Jonah said. “It’s a place you can put down anything.”
“Not like a diary, right?” I said. “All full of feelings and sh—stuff. If there’s one thing I don’t want to do to get my mind off things is to hash and rehash them out in a diary.”
“No, that’s not what a daybook is,” Jonah said. “Think of it as a mental scrapbook, a place where you jot down your observations of all aspects of your life—conversations you have with people, ideas that occur to you and you don’t want to forget, books you read, movies you see.”
He put out his cigarette in the glass ash tray on the table.
“Anything that interests you is grist for that mill,” he said, and he made to leave, probably for a class. “And if after a while you turn it into an account of the founding of the house, all the better.”
“My take on theology?” I asked, and Jonah nodded.
“And the sex?” I continued. “I could put in the sex?”
Jonah shared a glance with Marian.
“In your daybook, just tell the truth. If that involves theology or sexuality, or even a theology of sexuality, put it down,” he said. “But my suggestion would be to do it in a way that will help a reader, Marian here for instance, to understand what you are talking about.”
“Padre,” Marian said, “you’re telling Jason to--.”
“To teach you about sex, yes,” he said. “And theology.”
“This won’t be very orthodox, you know,” I said, and he chuckled.
“I said you should tell the truth, right?”
The truth was settling in for Marian.
“Oh, dear God,” she muttered, and reflexively reached for her cigarettes.
“I’ll take care of the check on the way out,” Jonah said. “Why don’t you two sit here a bit longer and enjoy the view?”
“For sure,” I said, looking for the waiter.
“Jason!” Marian squawked with mock displeasure.
“A daybook,” I said to her.
“The daybook from hell,” she said.
Yeah. I can do that.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++
“I think no man can go with his thoughts about him, into one of our churches, without feeling that what hold the public worship had on men is gone, or going. It has lost its grasp on the affection of the good, and on the fear of the bad.”
--Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Divinity School Address,” July 15, 1838.
Wednesday, August 5, 2009
Intermission
Hi, folks! This is your story teller, taking a moment out from the narrative for a couple of reasons, now that the blog is up and running. For one thing, the promised Devil’s Daybook is giving me more trouble than expected and I need a bit more time. For another, a number of people reading this are new to the world of blogs, so I need to note that on arrival, the best way to read this is to go to the list to the right of this text and begin with the posting titled “Introduction,” and then follow the posts down the line in order.
But the main reason for this intermission is the fact that my friend Joe of The Bronx who has been reading this—he is the follower called josephley in the line up to your right (hey, Joe, give us a picture already!)—called earlier this week and I wanted to share some of that conversation.
I had told Joe that he was the prime inspiration for the Travis character, and sort of off handedly asked him, “Do you have any idea how Travis got his name?” My original backstory was that Travis was conceived (unlike Joe!) in the back seat of his parents’ car before they were married, when they were going through their country western phase. For a variety of reasons (taste included) I had jettisoned that one (be forewarned: taste will not normally be a criterion for editing stories).
Well, Joe took my question seriously and came up with a great explanation for Travis’s name that I am tweaking a bit but which will appear shortly as a separate post. Here is why I am bringing this up: Joe’s suggestion demonstrated to me—and will, I hope, remind you of—the capability that we all have to imagine, and promoting imagination when it comes to important values and issues is, to be honest, the primary reason for all of the work I do.
Consider letting your imagination run free a bit and sending suggestions to fill out or bolster the plot. One of you has already suggested that we all write the story together; I am a bit unnerved at losing all control over the narrative (and having to deal with bruised egos as things get tweaked, edited or dropped), but hey, I am open to that if enough people want to jump in. Another reader has volunteered to add some original poetic commentary on occasion, and still another—Janice of Texas, a/k/a Juanita Technologia—wrote and suggested the map now found at the bottom of this page so we can get a sense of who is reading with us.
I am hoping that as we go along, others will enter what I want to be a conversation, with suggestions for plot and character, yes, but also ways to improve the blog site, links of common interest to add, and most especially, commentary on the issues raised by the story (I also would appreciate corrections of grammar, typos, anachronisms, and the like, but I would ask you to spare my pride—and other readers’ time—by sending those to me privately at jlanci@comcast.net). If you are a bit shy about sharing your plot suggestions with the universe, do feel free to send them to me at that address and we can chat and perhaps develop your ideas.
Doing this blog over the last few weeks has opened my eyes to the very diverse (dare I say weird?) community of people I know and enjoy in the many different social worlds I inhabit. So far, readers include—among others—a couple of grad students, a poet who works in a prison, some undergraduates on summer holiday, a marine biologist, a UPS driver, a couple of just-exonerated library trustees, some old style housewives, a school bus driver, a couple of college professors and an archaeologist or two, as well as my friends Janice and the other poet, and my only blood-related sibling. The thought of some of you being in conversation with each other, and not just me, boggles (should I say bloggles) the mind.
Think about it.
In the meantime, in honor of the fact that so many of us were born in August and are thus, to a greater or lesser degree, contemplating mortality, here is a bit of poetry from—surprise—Mary Oliver. It is taken from the poem, “To Begin With, the Sweet Grass,” found in her newest book of verse, Evidence (Boston: Beacon Press, 2009) 38-39:
“What I loved in the beginning, I think, was mostly myself.
Never mind that I had to, since somebody had to.
That was many years ago.
Since then I have gone out from my confinements,
though with difficulty.
I mean the ones that thought to rule my heart.
I cast them out, I put them on the mush pile.
They will be nourishment somehow (everything is nourishment
somehow or another).
“And I have become the child of the clouds, and of hope.
I have become the friend of the enemy, whoever that is.
I have become older and, cherishing what I have learned,
I have become younger.
“And what do I risk to tell you this, which is all I know?
Love yourself. Then forget it. Then, love the world.”
But the main reason for this intermission is the fact that my friend Joe of The Bronx who has been reading this—he is the follower called josephley in the line up to your right (hey, Joe, give us a picture already!)—called earlier this week and I wanted to share some of that conversation.
I had told Joe that he was the prime inspiration for the Travis character, and sort of off handedly asked him, “Do you have any idea how Travis got his name?” My original backstory was that Travis was conceived (unlike Joe!) in the back seat of his parents’ car before they were married, when they were going through their country western phase. For a variety of reasons (taste included) I had jettisoned that one (be forewarned: taste will not normally be a criterion for editing stories).
Well, Joe took my question seriously and came up with a great explanation for Travis’s name that I am tweaking a bit but which will appear shortly as a separate post. Here is why I am bringing this up: Joe’s suggestion demonstrated to me—and will, I hope, remind you of—the capability that we all have to imagine, and promoting imagination when it comes to important values and issues is, to be honest, the primary reason for all of the work I do.
Consider letting your imagination run free a bit and sending suggestions to fill out or bolster the plot. One of you has already suggested that we all write the story together; I am a bit unnerved at losing all control over the narrative (and having to deal with bruised egos as things get tweaked, edited or dropped), but hey, I am open to that if enough people want to jump in. Another reader has volunteered to add some original poetic commentary on occasion, and still another—Janice of Texas, a/k/a Juanita Technologia—wrote and suggested the map now found at the bottom of this page so we can get a sense of who is reading with us.
I am hoping that as we go along, others will enter what I want to be a conversation, with suggestions for plot and character, yes, but also ways to improve the blog site, links of common interest to add, and most especially, commentary on the issues raised by the story (I also would appreciate corrections of grammar, typos, anachronisms, and the like, but I would ask you to spare my pride—and other readers’ time—by sending those to me privately at jlanci@comcast.net). If you are a bit shy about sharing your plot suggestions with the universe, do feel free to send them to me at that address and we can chat and perhaps develop your ideas.
Doing this blog over the last few weeks has opened my eyes to the very diverse (dare I say weird?) community of people I know and enjoy in the many different social worlds I inhabit. So far, readers include—among others—a couple of grad students, a poet who works in a prison, some undergraduates on summer holiday, a marine biologist, a UPS driver, a couple of just-exonerated library trustees, some old style housewives, a school bus driver, a couple of college professors and an archaeologist or two, as well as my friends Janice and the other poet, and my only blood-related sibling. The thought of some of you being in conversation with each other, and not just me, boggles (should I say bloggles) the mind.
Think about it.
In the meantime, in honor of the fact that so many of us were born in August and are thus, to a greater or lesser degree, contemplating mortality, here is a bit of poetry from—surprise—Mary Oliver. It is taken from the poem, “To Begin With, the Sweet Grass,” found in her newest book of verse, Evidence (Boston: Beacon Press, 2009) 38-39:
“What I loved in the beginning, I think, was mostly myself.
Never mind that I had to, since somebody had to.
That was many years ago.
Since then I have gone out from my confinements,
though with difficulty.
I mean the ones that thought to rule my heart.
I cast them out, I put them on the mush pile.
They will be nourishment somehow (everything is nourishment
somehow or another).
“And I have become the child of the clouds, and of hope.
I have become the friend of the enemy, whoever that is.
I have become older and, cherishing what I have learned,
I have become younger.
“And what do I risk to tell you this, which is all I know?
Love yourself. Then forget it. Then, love the world.”
Wednesday, July 29, 2009
The Patience of Vegetables and Saints, II
There he was, Travis, driving a beat up old pickup truck across campus on a late spring morning. He had never driven a truck before and was a bit taken aback when Father Jonah asked him if he wanted to take the wheel. Taken aback and, of course, thrilled. As the truck rumbled and clanked up dust over the dirt access road in the shadow of Reisendorf Hill, he bounced a bit more than strictly necessary on the straw bench seat. This was university property he was driving; his senses were alert, and he could smell the freshly cut grasses drying in the fields they passed, waiting to be bailed for the barn.
They reached the edge of campus and Travis turned left onto Red Mill Road and headed up and out of the valley. Damn, he thought but of course did not say out loud. Hot damn.
Jonah was telling him where they were going, and why, but it was hard to pay attention, what with the sun and all the pale spring green and the yellow flowers in the fields and the traffic . . . well, there wasn’t that much traffic . . . hard to pay attention until he caught Jonah saying, “. . . and then, out of the blue, she died.”
“Huh?” He turned to Jonah. “I’m sorry, I missed that.”
Jonah paused and stared at the road ahead as it wound up the hill, and Travis could see the hint of a smile that indicated that the priest knew he hadn’t been paying attention, and that it was okay.
“I was saying,” Jonah said as he turned to him, “we’re going up to Sand Lake to the Martin farm to pick up some canned goods for the house.”
Travis nodded. “But who died?”
“Charles Martin—the farmer? His wife,” Jonah said. “About a year ago, she was in perfect health, but suddenly she started canning like she had never canned before. Fruit, tomatoes, anything she could get her hands on, she put up. It got to the point where he was stacking canned food in the barn.”
“Is that safe?”
“Hell if I know,” Jonah said. “I doubt he’d do it if it wasn’t.”
They drove a way in silence before Jonah picked up the story.
“Then, when she had finished canning every foodstuff she could find, she went to bed one night and died in her sleep.”
“Whoa,” Travis said. “What happened to her?”
“Doctor said her heart just stopped.”
“How . . . ?” Travis wondered. “She knew she was gonna die and so she put up all that food for her husband before she left?”
“Her husband and their four sons,” Jonah said.
“Wow,” Travis said. And then, “But if he has a family, why is he giving all this food to the house?”
“It hurts too much to have it around,” Jonah smiled wanly. “He said every time one of the kids went into the pantry—or the barn—for some tomatoes and brought it to the kitchen, the sight of the jar near broke his heart all over again.”
Travis felt the heaviness of the man’s sorrow, but it was at war within him with the bright sunshine and crisp morning air.
“It’s been over six months now,” Jonah said, “and I guess he thinks this is what he has to do to move on.”
Travis thought about the man, a widower with four kids. At the Troy Road, Jonah gave further directions, and they sat in silence as they drove along the ridge on the other side of Reisendorf that offered them an unobstructed view of the city and the river below.
“Tell me more about Fourth Street,” Travis said, hoping to lighten their mood to match the glory of the day.
“What do you want to know?”
“Well,” he said. “How did Love in Action get started? And who is Carla? I heard people talking about her as though she was pretty much in charge, but she hasn’t been there the two times I’ve volunteered.”
Jonah paused before speaking, almost as though he were hesitating.
“Am I asking something I shouldn’t?”
“No, not at all,” Jonah said. “I was just thinking that you would be a great reader for the manuscript Jason is working on. It’s about Carla and the others and how they first met.”
“Far out,” Travis said. “Jason’s writing it all down?”
“Well, he’s trying to.” Jonah shook his head. “It’s hard for Jay to sit still long enough to do the writing.”
“Jason’s an odd guy,” Travis said. “He’s, well, he’s . . . “
“He’s your first homosexual, right?”
Travis thought he would blush, but he didn’t. “He’s so quiet,” he said. “I haven’t heard two words out of him in two visits.”
Jonah’s laugh—more like a sudden bark than a laugh—surprised Travis. “Jason quiet?” He laughed again.
“I get the impression he’s kind of shy,” Travis said.
“Just the opposite,” Jonah said.
“Now I’m confused,” Travis said. “Are we talking about the same guy, Jason Santini?”
“We are indeed,” Jonah said. “You’re just catching him at a bad time.” He directed Travis to take a right at the light. “Jay will come around when he gets out of the funk he’s in.”
Before Travis could pursue this, Jonah cut him off.
“There’s the turn to Martin’s farm,” he said.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
They found Chaz Martin in what Travis would come to know as an uncharacteristic position—not at work, but sipping a glass of what looked like iced tea on his front porch. He was a short, compact man, well built, maybe a little younger than Travis’s father, but not by much. His hair was receding and flecked with gray, but Travis could feel a vitality he didn’t sense in his father, who had a desk job in Portland. This was a man at home outdoors, tanned and strong from hard labor.
“Padre,” the man said, standing and beckoning to them. “Come on up.”
Jonah introduced Travis as a volunteer from GBU and Chaz asked them if they wanted something to drink.
“I’ve got tea here,” he said. “I don’t drink hot beverages. But I can make coffee for you if you like.”
They both declined and then sat on two of the Adirondack chairs that lined the broad front porch.
“A good school, GBU,” Chaz said. “I’m hoping my oldest will go there next year.”
“You have four boys, right?” Travis asked.
“Hey, you’ve been doing your homework,” Chaz said to him. “Yeah, four of them. And four is a trial, I’ll tell you that.”
“Not as bad as four girls, I bet,” Travis said. “Talk to my folks. They had me and then three daughters. Talk about your trials.”
Chaz turned to Jonah. “I can see why you recruited this one,” he said. “You talk to him and he’s right there with you.” And when Travis looked surprised, he added, “I do my homework, too, kid.”
“Father J told you he recruited me?” Travis asked.
“Sure he did,” Chaz said.
“And no,” Jonah said, “I didn’t tell him about the mermaid.”
“What mermaid?” Chaz asked.
“Another time,” Jonah said. “Hey, I have class in a little over an hour. We’d better get that truck loaded.”
Chaz got up and called for his son Jack, who came from inside the house. He was a slightly smaller version of his father, skin brown as a nut and sporting a full head of chestnut curls, just like mine, Travis noticed; hell, we could be brothers. Except Jack was apparently shy, for he blanched white as the proverbial ghost when he was introduced to Jonah. Because he was meeting a priest, maybe?
“Why aren’t you in school?” Jonah asked him.
The boy was obviously uncomfortable, but said nothing.
“Jack has a bit of a temper,” Chaz said. “Got into a fight with another kid a year ahead of him, and got himself a nice one-week suspension so he could help his dad on the farm full time, instead of just doing his usual chores.”
The two boys went off to the truck to take it down to the barn and fill it while Jonah and Chaz resumed their seats on the porch.
“You don’t sound very mad about Jack.”
“Nah,” Chaz said. “He’s a good kid.”
“But violent?”
“Actually, no, not particularly violent.” Chaz looked out at the flower garden that spread out from either side of the path to the front of the house, in lieu of a lawn. “A lot like his mother, though.”
“How do you mean?” Jonah asked.
Chaz smiled and sighed. “You remember Janie, her temper when she got it into her head that someone was a victim of injustice.”
“I do remember,” Jonah said. “She was the one who originally found Carla the house on Fourth Street.”
“You know why Jack got in trouble?” Chaz looked at him. “He beat up a kid who is, apparently, a notorious bully. A real thug. Would have beat the shit out of him, actually.”
“Let me guess,” Jonah said. “The kid wasn’t bullying Jack, was he?”
“Course not. No one bullies my guys.”
Two swallows swooped down from a cherry tree by the road and caught the men’s attention for a moment.
“Why haven’t I met Jack before? He’s old enough to come down to the house to help out, and if he’s like Janie . . . .”
“Baseball’s his love and probably gonna be his life, at least for a while,” Chaz said. “If he gets into GBU or anywhere else, it’ll be on a baseball scholarship.”
“Where’s he play?”
“Where doesn’t he play?” Chaz said. “He and his buddies find games everywhere. Though lately . . . .”
A door slammed and the two men watched the boys close up the barn and secure the truck, talking all the while.
“Lately there’s this girl down in Rensselaer that Jack met, and so I think he and his buds have been spending more time down there.”
“Jack’s in love?”
“Anything but,” Chaz said. “He says she’s one of the best ball players he’s ever met. Almost as good as he is.”
“Now that is rare praise for a teenager,” Jonah said as the truck trailed dust up the hill to the house.
“He ever play down near the church?” Jonah asked. “In that big lot that Monsignor commandeered for parking?”
“Not that I know of, but it wouldn’t surprise me,” Chaz said as they got up to meet the truck.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++
“Thanks for not blowing my cover,” Travis said. “About the mermaid.”
“You are welcome,” Jonah said. “Seal of the confessional.”
“Say, did you see how Jack turned all white when his dad introduced him to us?”
“I did.”
“I found out why,” Travis said, with a bit of triumph in his voice.
Jonah stared ahead and said nothing for a time.
“Did it have anything to do with baseball by any chance?” he asked.
“Now how did you know that?” Travis was way too often amazed at what adults seemed to be able to know with no preparation whatsoever. "He wants to talk to you."
"I figured he would."
And that was how it came to be that Jack, Son of Chaz, eventually nicknamed "Jackson," came to make regular visits—after school hours and baseball practice—to the Love in Action House of Hospitality.
[“The patience of vegetables and saints” is a line taken from the poem, “The Lily,” by Mary Oliver, found in her book, Why I Wake Early (Boston: Beacon Press, 2004) 25]
[Next: Notes from The Devil’s Daybook]
They reached the edge of campus and Travis turned left onto Red Mill Road and headed up and out of the valley. Damn, he thought but of course did not say out loud. Hot damn.
Jonah was telling him where they were going, and why, but it was hard to pay attention, what with the sun and all the pale spring green and the yellow flowers in the fields and the traffic . . . well, there wasn’t that much traffic . . . hard to pay attention until he caught Jonah saying, “. . . and then, out of the blue, she died.”
“Huh?” He turned to Jonah. “I’m sorry, I missed that.”
Jonah paused and stared at the road ahead as it wound up the hill, and Travis could see the hint of a smile that indicated that the priest knew he hadn’t been paying attention, and that it was okay.
“I was saying,” Jonah said as he turned to him, “we’re going up to Sand Lake to the Martin farm to pick up some canned goods for the house.”
Travis nodded. “But who died?”
“Charles Martin—the farmer? His wife,” Jonah said. “About a year ago, she was in perfect health, but suddenly she started canning like she had never canned before. Fruit, tomatoes, anything she could get her hands on, she put up. It got to the point where he was stacking canned food in the barn.”
“Is that safe?”
“Hell if I know,” Jonah said. “I doubt he’d do it if it wasn’t.”
They drove a way in silence before Jonah picked up the story.
“Then, when she had finished canning every foodstuff she could find, she went to bed one night and died in her sleep.”
“Whoa,” Travis said. “What happened to her?”
“Doctor said her heart just stopped.”
“How . . . ?” Travis wondered. “She knew she was gonna die and so she put up all that food for her husband before she left?”
“Her husband and their four sons,” Jonah said.
“Wow,” Travis said. And then, “But if he has a family, why is he giving all this food to the house?”
“It hurts too much to have it around,” Jonah smiled wanly. “He said every time one of the kids went into the pantry—or the barn—for some tomatoes and brought it to the kitchen, the sight of the jar near broke his heart all over again.”
Travis felt the heaviness of the man’s sorrow, but it was at war within him with the bright sunshine and crisp morning air.
“It’s been over six months now,” Jonah said, “and I guess he thinks this is what he has to do to move on.”
Travis thought about the man, a widower with four kids. At the Troy Road, Jonah gave further directions, and they sat in silence as they drove along the ridge on the other side of Reisendorf that offered them an unobstructed view of the city and the river below.
“Tell me more about Fourth Street,” Travis said, hoping to lighten their mood to match the glory of the day.
“What do you want to know?”
“Well,” he said. “How did Love in Action get started? And who is Carla? I heard people talking about her as though she was pretty much in charge, but she hasn’t been there the two times I’ve volunteered.”
Jonah paused before speaking, almost as though he were hesitating.
“Am I asking something I shouldn’t?”
“No, not at all,” Jonah said. “I was just thinking that you would be a great reader for the manuscript Jason is working on. It’s about Carla and the others and how they first met.”
“Far out,” Travis said. “Jason’s writing it all down?”
“Well, he’s trying to.” Jonah shook his head. “It’s hard for Jay to sit still long enough to do the writing.”
“Jason’s an odd guy,” Travis said. “He’s, well, he’s . . . “
“He’s your first homosexual, right?”
Travis thought he would blush, but he didn’t. “He’s so quiet,” he said. “I haven’t heard two words out of him in two visits.”
Jonah’s laugh—more like a sudden bark than a laugh—surprised Travis. “Jason quiet?” He laughed again.
“I get the impression he’s kind of shy,” Travis said.
“Just the opposite,” Jonah said.
“Now I’m confused,” Travis said. “Are we talking about the same guy, Jason Santini?”
“We are indeed,” Jonah said. “You’re just catching him at a bad time.” He directed Travis to take a right at the light. “Jay will come around when he gets out of the funk he’s in.”
Before Travis could pursue this, Jonah cut him off.
“There’s the turn to Martin’s farm,” he said.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
They found Chaz Martin in what Travis would come to know as an uncharacteristic position—not at work, but sipping a glass of what looked like iced tea on his front porch. He was a short, compact man, well built, maybe a little younger than Travis’s father, but not by much. His hair was receding and flecked with gray, but Travis could feel a vitality he didn’t sense in his father, who had a desk job in Portland. This was a man at home outdoors, tanned and strong from hard labor.
“Padre,” the man said, standing and beckoning to them. “Come on up.”
Jonah introduced Travis as a volunteer from GBU and Chaz asked them if they wanted something to drink.
“I’ve got tea here,” he said. “I don’t drink hot beverages. But I can make coffee for you if you like.”
They both declined and then sat on two of the Adirondack chairs that lined the broad front porch.
“A good school, GBU,” Chaz said. “I’m hoping my oldest will go there next year.”
“You have four boys, right?” Travis asked.
“Hey, you’ve been doing your homework,” Chaz said to him. “Yeah, four of them. And four is a trial, I’ll tell you that.”
“Not as bad as four girls, I bet,” Travis said. “Talk to my folks. They had me and then three daughters. Talk about your trials.”
Chaz turned to Jonah. “I can see why you recruited this one,” he said. “You talk to him and he’s right there with you.” And when Travis looked surprised, he added, “I do my homework, too, kid.”
“Father J told you he recruited me?” Travis asked.
“Sure he did,” Chaz said.
“And no,” Jonah said, “I didn’t tell him about the mermaid.”
“What mermaid?” Chaz asked.
“Another time,” Jonah said. “Hey, I have class in a little over an hour. We’d better get that truck loaded.”
Chaz got up and called for his son Jack, who came from inside the house. He was a slightly smaller version of his father, skin brown as a nut and sporting a full head of chestnut curls, just like mine, Travis noticed; hell, we could be brothers. Except Jack was apparently shy, for he blanched white as the proverbial ghost when he was introduced to Jonah. Because he was meeting a priest, maybe?
“Why aren’t you in school?” Jonah asked him.
The boy was obviously uncomfortable, but said nothing.
“Jack has a bit of a temper,” Chaz said. “Got into a fight with another kid a year ahead of him, and got himself a nice one-week suspension so he could help his dad on the farm full time, instead of just doing his usual chores.”
The two boys went off to the truck to take it down to the barn and fill it while Jonah and Chaz resumed their seats on the porch.
“You don’t sound very mad about Jack.”
“Nah,” Chaz said. “He’s a good kid.”
“But violent?”
“Actually, no, not particularly violent.” Chaz looked out at the flower garden that spread out from either side of the path to the front of the house, in lieu of a lawn. “A lot like his mother, though.”
“How do you mean?” Jonah asked.
Chaz smiled and sighed. “You remember Janie, her temper when she got it into her head that someone was a victim of injustice.”
“I do remember,” Jonah said. “She was the one who originally found Carla the house on Fourth Street.”
“You know why Jack got in trouble?” Chaz looked at him. “He beat up a kid who is, apparently, a notorious bully. A real thug. Would have beat the shit out of him, actually.”
“Let me guess,” Jonah said. “The kid wasn’t bullying Jack, was he?”
“Course not. No one bullies my guys.”
Two swallows swooped down from a cherry tree by the road and caught the men’s attention for a moment.
“Why haven’t I met Jack before? He’s old enough to come down to the house to help out, and if he’s like Janie . . . .”
“Baseball’s his love and probably gonna be his life, at least for a while,” Chaz said. “If he gets into GBU or anywhere else, it’ll be on a baseball scholarship.”
“Where’s he play?”
“Where doesn’t he play?” Chaz said. “He and his buddies find games everywhere. Though lately . . . .”
A door slammed and the two men watched the boys close up the barn and secure the truck, talking all the while.
“Lately there’s this girl down in Rensselaer that Jack met, and so I think he and his buds have been spending more time down there.”
“Jack’s in love?”
“Anything but,” Chaz said. “He says she’s one of the best ball players he’s ever met. Almost as good as he is.”
“Now that is rare praise for a teenager,” Jonah said as the truck trailed dust up the hill to the house.
“He ever play down near the church?” Jonah asked. “In that big lot that Monsignor commandeered for parking?”
“Not that I know of, but it wouldn’t surprise me,” Chaz said as they got up to meet the truck.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++
“Thanks for not blowing my cover,” Travis said. “About the mermaid.”
“You are welcome,” Jonah said. “Seal of the confessional.”
“Say, did you see how Jack turned all white when his dad introduced him to us?”
“I did.”
“I found out why,” Travis said, with a bit of triumph in his voice.
Jonah stared ahead and said nothing for a time.
“Did it have anything to do with baseball by any chance?” he asked.
“Now how did you know that?” Travis was way too often amazed at what adults seemed to be able to know with no preparation whatsoever. "He wants to talk to you."
"I figured he would."
And that was how it came to be that Jack, Son of Chaz, eventually nicknamed "Jackson," came to make regular visits—after school hours and baseball practice—to the Love in Action House of Hospitality.
[“The patience of vegetables and saints” is a line taken from the poem, “The Lily,” by Mary Oliver, found in her book, Why I Wake Early (Boston: Beacon Press, 2004) 25]
[Next: Notes from The Devil’s Daybook]
Tuesday, July 21, 2009
The Patience of Vegetables and Saints, I
He had never noticed before how many shades of red shimmered at the back of the church. The window faced east and at just this time of the year the sun slipped over the top of the Fairweather Arms two blocks over past the parking lot, poured through the maple leaves bristling in street-dirty morning wind coming off the river and up the street, and set the glass to dancing.
It was oddly appropriate, the colors of the window mottled and quivering, overlooking the stolid church interior below. There she was—the Magdalene—her crimson clothes billowing pure and radiant in the stained glass wind. The artist (Carla’s brother Luke) had tried and, yes, somehow had succeeded in capturing just the right posture for a comely woman who is the embodiment of the wonder, who has lost hope and then run smack into it in, of all places, the land of tombs, the place of putrefaction and death.
Her black hair, streaked with light and caught by the pure wind, slipped out from under the cloak at just the moment it began to slide away from her—
“Um, Father.” A gravel voice by his side trying to whisper. Tom Ulder, the seventy-seven year old altar “boy.” “Are you all right?”
He nodded and picked up where he had left off. He did know where he had left off. He wasn't that far gone, lost in thought, lost in the lady’s crimson.
He continued the prayer.
On the night before he died, he took the bread, broke it, and gave it to his disciples, saying . . .
He raised his eyes to follow the host he was elevating and this time the distraction was not mental, not the diversion of a beautiful windblown scarlet woman standing on a cliff. This time he was struck blind.
What the hell? he thought but had the presence of mind not to say, as suddenly he was indeed blinded by a light that he had the presence of mind to blink away. He shifted from one foot to another and the light was gone. He finished the prayer with spots before his eyes, but a clear head.
His meditation after communion, the quiet one he entertained himself and God with as all sat in the church in silence, brought him back to that great, maligned lady, the Magdalene, standing up over the choir loft in her serenity, in the holy wind of spirit.
++++++++++++
“It's a hole, all right.”
He gasped involuntarily in fright. The woman seemed to have materialized behind him. It was unclear to him how a woman that big could move so quietly in an empty stone church. They were up in the choir loft after mass, just under the damaged stained glass window.
“I can see that, Gladys,” he said. “What I can't see is how it got there.”
“Try this,” she said and handed him a baseball. “If it was a golf ball it would be a hole in one.”
“Where the devil . . . ?”
She pointed to a corner of the loft where the cobwebs had been disturbed.
“A nice, clean shot,” she said as she stooped with difficulty and retrieved the perfectly round gold piece of glass the ball had punched to the floor.
She handed it to him. Clean indeed. He had no idea the window glass was that thick, an inch or more. He cradled the piece of color in his hand, caressing it and enjoying the feel. It had the heft and slick surface of a piece of cooled, molten liquid. Which is, of course, precisely what it was.
“But why would anyone throw a ball . . .?”
“Well, as you may recall,” she said as she turned to go, “the rigors of youth do not usually include reading signs closely.”
He looked at her, bewildered. Why did this woman insist on speaking in riddles?
“The parking lot,” she said. “Until the city gets the funds to build a playground down here someplace, that's where the kids are gonna play ball.”
She took a deep breath; she was already focusing on the next thing: she would now have to take the stairs.
“The sign the pastor put up before he left, remember?”
He did. It was an embarrassment, but he was just filling in on weekends until the next pastor was appointed, so he didn’t feel he could remove it.
“This is a parking lot!” it announced (with exclamation point). “Do not skateboard! Do not play ball! Do not loiter! Do not park here unless you are going to Church.”
Ah, he thought, priests. He could have at least dropped the do-not's and replaced them with thou-shalt-not's. It was a church parking lot, after all.
“Has this happened before?” he asked, but she was already hefting her body down the spiral stairs.
“Nope.” Her voice echoed up the narrow stairwell.
“Any ideas who did it?”
“Yep.”
[To be continued. In the Roman rite, July 22 is the Feast of Mary Magdalene, Apostola apostolorum, “Apostle to the Apostles”]
It was oddly appropriate, the colors of the window mottled and quivering, overlooking the stolid church interior below. There she was—the Magdalene—her crimson clothes billowing pure and radiant in the stained glass wind. The artist (Carla’s brother Luke) had tried and, yes, somehow had succeeded in capturing just the right posture for a comely woman who is the embodiment of the wonder, who has lost hope and then run smack into it in, of all places, the land of tombs, the place of putrefaction and death.
Her black hair, streaked with light and caught by the pure wind, slipped out from under the cloak at just the moment it began to slide away from her—
“Um, Father.” A gravel voice by his side trying to whisper. Tom Ulder, the seventy-seven year old altar “boy.” “Are you all right?”
He nodded and picked up where he had left off. He did know where he had left off. He wasn't that far gone, lost in thought, lost in the lady’s crimson.
He continued the prayer.
On the night before he died, he took the bread, broke it, and gave it to his disciples, saying . . .
He raised his eyes to follow the host he was elevating and this time the distraction was not mental, not the diversion of a beautiful windblown scarlet woman standing on a cliff. This time he was struck blind.
What the hell? he thought but had the presence of mind not to say, as suddenly he was indeed blinded by a light that he had the presence of mind to blink away. He shifted from one foot to another and the light was gone. He finished the prayer with spots before his eyes, but a clear head.
His meditation after communion, the quiet one he entertained himself and God with as all sat in the church in silence, brought him back to that great, maligned lady, the Magdalene, standing up over the choir loft in her serenity, in the holy wind of spirit.
++++++++++++
“It's a hole, all right.”
He gasped involuntarily in fright. The woman seemed to have materialized behind him. It was unclear to him how a woman that big could move so quietly in an empty stone church. They were up in the choir loft after mass, just under the damaged stained glass window.
“I can see that, Gladys,” he said. “What I can't see is how it got there.”
“Try this,” she said and handed him a baseball. “If it was a golf ball it would be a hole in one.”
“Where the devil . . . ?”
She pointed to a corner of the loft where the cobwebs had been disturbed.
“A nice, clean shot,” she said as she stooped with difficulty and retrieved the perfectly round gold piece of glass the ball had punched to the floor.
She handed it to him. Clean indeed. He had no idea the window glass was that thick, an inch or more. He cradled the piece of color in his hand, caressing it and enjoying the feel. It had the heft and slick surface of a piece of cooled, molten liquid. Which is, of course, precisely what it was.
“But why would anyone throw a ball . . .?”
“Well, as you may recall,” she said as she turned to go, “the rigors of youth do not usually include reading signs closely.”
He looked at her, bewildered. Why did this woman insist on speaking in riddles?
“The parking lot,” she said. “Until the city gets the funds to build a playground down here someplace, that's where the kids are gonna play ball.”
She took a deep breath; she was already focusing on the next thing: she would now have to take the stairs.
“The sign the pastor put up before he left, remember?”
He did. It was an embarrassment, but he was just filling in on weekends until the next pastor was appointed, so he didn’t feel he could remove it.
“This is a parking lot!” it announced (with exclamation point). “Do not skateboard! Do not play ball! Do not loiter! Do not park here unless you are going to Church.”
Ah, he thought, priests. He could have at least dropped the do-not's and replaced them with thou-shalt-not's. It was a church parking lot, after all.
“Has this happened before?” he asked, but she was already hefting her body down the spiral stairs.
“Nope.” Her voice echoed up the narrow stairwell.
“Any ideas who did it?”
“Yep.”
[To be continued. In the Roman rite, July 22 is the Feast of Mary Magdalene, Apostola apostolorum, “Apostle to the Apostles”]
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
The Tale of the Purloined Mermaid
“Instead of a mid-semester examination for Introduction to Christian Theology, I want you to do a little field work and then write a report. Review the notes you took during our discussion about the nature and purpose of religious art and the way it has shaped Christian faith through the centuries. Then take a walk around the campus, noting the different kinds of artwork that have been installed over the last century. Find one that particularly engages you and sit with it a bit. Afterwards, write an essay describing the art and speculating on its power to influence the members of the GBU community. Don’t be afraid to include your own reaction to the piece; for this assignment, you can use the personal pronoun ‘I.’”
Travis O’Connor’s mood was as clouded as the late March sky. He was, by his own admission, probably a bit too serious for a nineteen year old, but this was different. He was in trouble.
Travis walked down Fourth Street checking the number over each door. This was not a part of Rensselaer he had ever seen before; he was, as his grandmother said, “a good boy,” and this was not a neighborhood where good boys wandered. Down by the river, the air was stale and unhealthy, and smelled of gas fumes and burning coal. The afternoon was dark, the sidewalks’ snow never shoveled; ice and soot now covered his shoes and much of the lower part of his jeans. He was cold and forlorn, Travis was, full of self-pity; he was right on the edge of crying, this good boy, something he couldn’t remember doing once since the fourth grade, or maybe when his grandfather had died junior year of high school, not even when his parents and his girlfriend left him on GBU’s campus last fall, completely alone for the first time, and hundreds of miles from their home in Maine.
He shivered and shoved his hands deeper into his pockets. Get on with it, he thought. The address he was hunting for 108 Fourth Street.
He saw it from a block away, or at least he hoped it was 108, the stretch of immaculately shoveled sidewalk across the street. He spotted the sign over the door, “Love in Action,” painted in rough red strokes, and his gloom lifted a bit, but he was almost run down by a milk truck as he crossed the cobble-stoned street and then almost slid into a woman busy in front of the building. She was sweeping the icy sidewalk with a broom. She was short and she was old; with a gray wool blanket or shawl drawn tight around her shoulders, she looked like a peasant out of one of the Dostoevsky novels he had been reading since he had learned of the Russian novelist in freshman lit.
The two of them stepped back at the same time and she looked up at him in silence. He couldn’t tell if she was angry or drunk or simple; she just looked at him, no, she looked through him, and then he was scared and cold all over again. He looked over her head to the sign. “Love in Action.” He knew the reference; Father Jonah had told them in class. It was from Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Worker movement, quoting someone else (he couldn’t recall who): “Love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing.”
They stood there facing each other in silence, he and the woman. Her eyes were dark, her hair silver white and she had the look of . . . what? Was she an Indian? She had the heavily creased, leathered skin of an old Indian, the kind Travis knew from westerns on TV. But what would an Indian be doing in upstate New York sweeping sidewalk ice clean of grit?
She spoke first.
“You born in a barn?”
“I beg your pardon, ma’am?”
She stared at him as though sizing him up.
“You ‘ma’am’ me fine,” she said. “But you gonna let an old woman sweep this sidewalk without even offering to help?”
He knew who she was. Father J had told him about her.
“You’re Louise, aren’t you?” he said.
Now she was really sizing him up.
“You’ve got the advantage, kid,” she said. “Who the fuck are you? Should I know you?”
Dirty Louise, Father had said. Swears like a coal miner but has a deep heart. He relaxed and decided to go along for the ride. He tried to take the broom from her, but she held it firm.
“Answer the question, asshole.”
“I’m a friend of Father Jonah’s, a student of his, really, at Greenbush University,” he said. “He told me about you one day after class.”
“That bastard talking about me again?” She shook her head in the direction of campus, up the hill and out of the valley a couple of miles. She did not look amused but, for the moment at least, Travis had found his center again, and he smiled and he reached for the broom. This time she relented.
“He’s inside,” she said as she turned to the door. “I’ll tell him he has a visitor. A rude visitor.”
Travis cracked the crooked grin that he knew could melt a heart in the right circumstance (which, of course, this was not) and shook the cold out of his hair and commenced to sweeping he knew not what off of the ice and into the slush of the gutter. The snow back up in Maine, a carpet of crisp white even at this time of year, was completely different from what collected and congealed on the streets of this part of Rensselaer; Maine might as well have been sited on the moon as far as he was concerned now.
When they found out, his parents would probably disown him.
He felt rather than saw a figure behind him and looked up. Jonah was standing in the doorway watching him, the good boy, a tall rail-thin college freshman with a glorious mop of brown curls, and a precocious talent for theology, brushing air along ice.
“It was you, wasn’t it?” Jonah asked him. “I figured as much.” But he was smiling.
+++
Once inside, Travis was immediately put to work by Louise.
“We have seventy guests coming for dinner, kid,” she said, “and we’re short about three hands.”
She pointed to a bread knife and a bag of, well, they were baguettes, a bag of baguettes. “Cut ‘em into pieces about two inches long.”
He got to work. The crusts were hard; hell, this bread was almost stale and pieces of crust flew everywhere, no matter how carefully he tried to cut it. Father Jonah returned to salad prep, shredding lettuce and dicing vegetables into a large aluminum bowl. Before long, Louise and another man no one bothered to introduce had placed red checkered table clothes on the rows of tables that filled most of the room. A huge man carried an equally gigantic pot of what looked to be minestrone soup. The man was solid with bulging muscle and heaved the pot onto the serving table next to Father Jonah as though it were empty.
“Hey, sailor,” Louise shouted to the giant. “Aren’t you supposed to be watching your back?”
“For cops and evil doers, yeah,” he said, and then noticing Travis, he nodded his head in silent greeting and returned to the kitchen.
The guests who had lined up on the sidewalk were suddenly let in by the man Travis did not know and for the next half hour he was too busy serving them to even think about the weirdness of the experience.
The dinner was over, the guests departed. Windows had been heaved open in the kitchen and the night breeze off the river was doing what it could to replace the ripe stale air with what passed for fresh down here by the greasy Hudson. The dishes were cleaned and stacked away. Everyone had pitched in, and Travis knew that the giant was a man named Gruff (not a sailor exactly, he explained, but a member of the merchant marine who worked out of the Port of Albany across the river and volunteered for kitchen duty when he was in town) and the other, quiet man whom he did not really meet until taking a place next to him at the sink, was a poof named Jason Santini. Travis had never met a homosexual before, at least none that he knew of, but what with all of the strange experiences he was having tonight, that was just another one to throw onto the pile.
“I lost you for a while,” Travis said to his teacher, who was pouring himself a last cup of coffee from the urn before Gruff hauled it to the sink to be washed. “Did you leave?”
“I was here the whole time,” Jonah said. “I think you more likely lost yourself.” He sat down at a table nearby and signaled for Travis to join him. “Now, talk to me,” he said. “Tell me what happened.”
And Travis did. He found it surprisingly easy to tell the story, probably because he was pretty tired after working this dinner shift. And because he admired this wirey old man with the delicate hands folded around his coffee cup. Admired and trusted him completely.
“You already know what I did and why I did it, don’t you?”
“It was my lecture.”
The priest brushed a hand through his thatch of gray hair, and waited.
“It was.”
“When I told you about the crucifix up by the Big House,” he said. “The crucifix and the mermaid.”
Father J’s enthusiasm about the nature of sacred art had been almost contagious, the way he went on and on about its creation, placement, and how veneration of religious beauty built up the community’s sense of itself and even healed the soul. Travis had been transported for a moment, utterly convinced. But then Jonah’s tone changed and he reminded them of the garden next to the main administration building—the estate building around which the rest of the campus had grown. For decades the prayer garden and the grotto down by the back entrance of the college had been the two best places to pray, he said. And to neck, he added without any sense of judgment, reminding Travis why he was so attracted to this teacher. But the garden had been desecrated, and by a priest of all people, a recent president of the college who, at the conclusion of one of his frequent trips to parts unknown and far away had returned with a statue of a naked mermaid which, after minimal deliberation, he had installed in the midst of a fountain outside his office window. In the prayer garden.
Travis had walked through the garden hundreds of times on his way to the athletic center but had never noticed the desecration. Now, he could not get it out of his head. From his vantage point on the cross, Christ now looked down and in his last moments contemplated the fulsome breasts of a woman with the tail of a fish.
And so one moonless night, the mermaid disappeared from her fountain.
The campus police was alerted. The president was furious.
“You knew it was me,” Travis began, “because . . ..”
“Your essay was rather, how shall I say, declarative,” Jonah said. “And then you showed up here like a guilty puppy.”
“I’m doomed,” Travis said. “I’m here on scholarship. If they find out it was me . . . .”
Across the river a train whistled, heading south to New York or west to Chicago, either way slipping away into the cold, dark night.
“Let me see what I can do,” the priest said, getting up from the table.
And so it was that a naked mermaid was discovered undamaged a few days later contemplating a patch of ground in one of the back fields of campus and was quietly put into storage in the old milking barn nearby. And so it was that the Love in Action House of Hospitality acquired its newest worker.
[Up Next: The Patience of Vegetables and Saints]
Travis O’Connor’s mood was as clouded as the late March sky. He was, by his own admission, probably a bit too serious for a nineteen year old, but this was different. He was in trouble.
Travis walked down Fourth Street checking the number over each door. This was not a part of Rensselaer he had ever seen before; he was, as his grandmother said, “a good boy,” and this was not a neighborhood where good boys wandered. Down by the river, the air was stale and unhealthy, and smelled of gas fumes and burning coal. The afternoon was dark, the sidewalks’ snow never shoveled; ice and soot now covered his shoes and much of the lower part of his jeans. He was cold and forlorn, Travis was, full of self-pity; he was right on the edge of crying, this good boy, something he couldn’t remember doing once since the fourth grade, or maybe when his grandfather had died junior year of high school, not even when his parents and his girlfriend left him on GBU’s campus last fall, completely alone for the first time, and hundreds of miles from their home in Maine.
He shivered and shoved his hands deeper into his pockets. Get on with it, he thought. The address he was hunting for 108 Fourth Street.
He saw it from a block away, or at least he hoped it was 108, the stretch of immaculately shoveled sidewalk across the street. He spotted the sign over the door, “Love in Action,” painted in rough red strokes, and his gloom lifted a bit, but he was almost run down by a milk truck as he crossed the cobble-stoned street and then almost slid into a woman busy in front of the building. She was sweeping the icy sidewalk with a broom. She was short and she was old; with a gray wool blanket or shawl drawn tight around her shoulders, she looked like a peasant out of one of the Dostoevsky novels he had been reading since he had learned of the Russian novelist in freshman lit.
The two of them stepped back at the same time and she looked up at him in silence. He couldn’t tell if she was angry or drunk or simple; she just looked at him, no, she looked through him, and then he was scared and cold all over again. He looked over her head to the sign. “Love in Action.” He knew the reference; Father Jonah had told them in class. It was from Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Worker movement, quoting someone else (he couldn’t recall who): “Love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing.”
They stood there facing each other in silence, he and the woman. Her eyes were dark, her hair silver white and she had the look of . . . what? Was she an Indian? She had the heavily creased, leathered skin of an old Indian, the kind Travis knew from westerns on TV. But what would an Indian be doing in upstate New York sweeping sidewalk ice clean of grit?
She spoke first.
“You born in a barn?”
“I beg your pardon, ma’am?”
She stared at him as though sizing him up.
“You ‘ma’am’ me fine,” she said. “But you gonna let an old woman sweep this sidewalk without even offering to help?”
He knew who she was. Father J had told him about her.
“You’re Louise, aren’t you?” he said.
Now she was really sizing him up.
“You’ve got the advantage, kid,” she said. “Who the fuck are you? Should I know you?”
Dirty Louise, Father had said. Swears like a coal miner but has a deep heart. He relaxed and decided to go along for the ride. He tried to take the broom from her, but she held it firm.
“Answer the question, asshole.”
“I’m a friend of Father Jonah’s, a student of his, really, at Greenbush University,” he said. “He told me about you one day after class.”
“That bastard talking about me again?” She shook her head in the direction of campus, up the hill and out of the valley a couple of miles. She did not look amused but, for the moment at least, Travis had found his center again, and he smiled and he reached for the broom. This time she relented.
“He’s inside,” she said as she turned to the door. “I’ll tell him he has a visitor. A rude visitor.”
Travis cracked the crooked grin that he knew could melt a heart in the right circumstance (which, of course, this was not) and shook the cold out of his hair and commenced to sweeping he knew not what off of the ice and into the slush of the gutter. The snow back up in Maine, a carpet of crisp white even at this time of year, was completely different from what collected and congealed on the streets of this part of Rensselaer; Maine might as well have been sited on the moon as far as he was concerned now.
When they found out, his parents would probably disown him.
He felt rather than saw a figure behind him and looked up. Jonah was standing in the doorway watching him, the good boy, a tall rail-thin college freshman with a glorious mop of brown curls, and a precocious talent for theology, brushing air along ice.
“It was you, wasn’t it?” Jonah asked him. “I figured as much.” But he was smiling.
+++
Once inside, Travis was immediately put to work by Louise.
“We have seventy guests coming for dinner, kid,” she said, “and we’re short about three hands.”
She pointed to a bread knife and a bag of, well, they were baguettes, a bag of baguettes. “Cut ‘em into pieces about two inches long.”
He got to work. The crusts were hard; hell, this bread was almost stale and pieces of crust flew everywhere, no matter how carefully he tried to cut it. Father Jonah returned to salad prep, shredding lettuce and dicing vegetables into a large aluminum bowl. Before long, Louise and another man no one bothered to introduce had placed red checkered table clothes on the rows of tables that filled most of the room. A huge man carried an equally gigantic pot of what looked to be minestrone soup. The man was solid with bulging muscle and heaved the pot onto the serving table next to Father Jonah as though it were empty.
“Hey, sailor,” Louise shouted to the giant. “Aren’t you supposed to be watching your back?”
“For cops and evil doers, yeah,” he said, and then noticing Travis, he nodded his head in silent greeting and returned to the kitchen.
The guests who had lined up on the sidewalk were suddenly let in by the man Travis did not know and for the next half hour he was too busy serving them to even think about the weirdness of the experience.
The dinner was over, the guests departed. Windows had been heaved open in the kitchen and the night breeze off the river was doing what it could to replace the ripe stale air with what passed for fresh down here by the greasy Hudson. The dishes were cleaned and stacked away. Everyone had pitched in, and Travis knew that the giant was a man named Gruff (not a sailor exactly, he explained, but a member of the merchant marine who worked out of the Port of Albany across the river and volunteered for kitchen duty when he was in town) and the other, quiet man whom he did not really meet until taking a place next to him at the sink, was a poof named Jason Santini. Travis had never met a homosexual before, at least none that he knew of, but what with all of the strange experiences he was having tonight, that was just another one to throw onto the pile.
“I lost you for a while,” Travis said to his teacher, who was pouring himself a last cup of coffee from the urn before Gruff hauled it to the sink to be washed. “Did you leave?”
“I was here the whole time,” Jonah said. “I think you more likely lost yourself.” He sat down at a table nearby and signaled for Travis to join him. “Now, talk to me,” he said. “Tell me what happened.”
And Travis did. He found it surprisingly easy to tell the story, probably because he was pretty tired after working this dinner shift. And because he admired this wirey old man with the delicate hands folded around his coffee cup. Admired and trusted him completely.
“You already know what I did and why I did it, don’t you?”
“It was my lecture.”
The priest brushed a hand through his thatch of gray hair, and waited.
“It was.”
“When I told you about the crucifix up by the Big House,” he said. “The crucifix and the mermaid.”
Father J’s enthusiasm about the nature of sacred art had been almost contagious, the way he went on and on about its creation, placement, and how veneration of religious beauty built up the community’s sense of itself and even healed the soul. Travis had been transported for a moment, utterly convinced. But then Jonah’s tone changed and he reminded them of the garden next to the main administration building—the estate building around which the rest of the campus had grown. For decades the prayer garden and the grotto down by the back entrance of the college had been the two best places to pray, he said. And to neck, he added without any sense of judgment, reminding Travis why he was so attracted to this teacher. But the garden had been desecrated, and by a priest of all people, a recent president of the college who, at the conclusion of one of his frequent trips to parts unknown and far away had returned with a statue of a naked mermaid which, after minimal deliberation, he had installed in the midst of a fountain outside his office window. In the prayer garden.
Travis had walked through the garden hundreds of times on his way to the athletic center but had never noticed the desecration. Now, he could not get it out of his head. From his vantage point on the cross, Christ now looked down and in his last moments contemplated the fulsome breasts of a woman with the tail of a fish.
And so one moonless night, the mermaid disappeared from her fountain.
The campus police was alerted. The president was furious.
“You knew it was me,” Travis began, “because . . ..”
“Your essay was rather, how shall I say, declarative,” Jonah said. “And then you showed up here like a guilty puppy.”
“I’m doomed,” Travis said. “I’m here on scholarship. If they find out it was me . . . .”
Across the river a train whistled, heading south to New York or west to Chicago, either way slipping away into the cold, dark night.
“Let me see what I can do,” the priest said, getting up from the table.
And so it was that a naked mermaid was discovered undamaged a few days later contemplating a patch of ground in one of the back fields of campus and was quietly put into storage in the old milking barn nearby. And so it was that the Love in Action House of Hospitality acquired its newest worker.
[Up Next: The Patience of Vegetables and Saints]
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