The Man Who Loved Birds (14 page)

Before taking vows one of the monks had practiced architecture in the cities of the plains and in designing the chapter room had transplanted the long flat lines of the prairie to these lumpy forested hills. Flavian wondered if the contradiction between the room’s flat lines and its undulant setting contributed to the contentious tone of the community discussions. The monks sat on long thin benches of oak beveled and polished to a buttery glow and so hard that Brother Aelred, who had trained as a nurse, claimed they were the cause of the community’s ongoing hemorrhoid epidemic. At least once a year someone proposed investing in cushions but the abbot understood that in decision-making, uncomfortable seats favored management and he took care to pocket the suggestion.

On this particular Sunday morning the community gathered to consider the fate of the dairy herd. The abbot opened the meeting by explaining that they had very little to consider. Corporate producers could supply the milk required to make their cheese at a fraction of the cost and less risk of spoilage than the abbey could achieve. New government regulations governing cheese making required investments that only big, well-capitalized corporations could afford. “Keeping this particular herd amounts to a decision to keep seventy very expensive pets,” the abbot said. “Either we hire local workers at considerable expense and commit ourselves to major capital expenditures to renovate our facilities,
or we sell off the herd and contract with an outside supplier to deliver milk.”

“Or we stop making cheese.” This from Brother Columcille, who spent afternoons holed up in his hermitage—a shack built of materials recycled from the garbage heap—and who abhorred capitalism as nothing more than a sophisticated form of usury.

Aged Brother Crispus used his walker to hoist himself to his feet. “I am as fond of animals as anyone in this room but the time has come to face facts. Twenty years ago we had a hundred and fifty monks, average age maybe forty, some of whom had been brought up as farmers. Now we have seventy monks, average age pushing sixty-five, most of us choir monks. Who among us is capable of the job? None of our two postulants knows anything about cows and anyway they have their hands full taking care of
us
.”

“A Cistercian monastery without animals is like a Benedictine monastery without books.” Cyprian, who studied the literatures of Asia and preferred sleeping in the barns with the cows to sleeping in his monastery cell, spoke from the back of the room. “For a thousand years—
a thousand years
—Cistercian monks have made our livings by farming. Slaughter the cows—because don’t fool yourself, that’s what we’re talking about, selling them for slaughter—and we won’t have a single animal left.”

“Don’t forget about Origen,” José spoke up. “That cat would starve if it weren’t for me. Nobody around here so much as bothers to put water in his bowl. If he were a cow, now, it would be—”

Cyprian ignored him. “While we’re at it, let’s spray a little DDT around the place to get rid of the birds—every time I’m about to hear God, one of them starts chattering.”

“We could donate them to the Benedictines.” This from fat Brother Bede, who had no opinion one way or the other regarding the cows but who enjoyed the sound of his mellifluous voice echoing off the brick walls.

“Progress is progress,” Crispus called out—this time he did not trouble to stand. “And even if it weren’t, old age is old age and
I’m speaking as an expert. Twenty years ago four different dairies in this end of the county bottled and delivered milk. How many are left? Not one. What makes you think we can resist that change? Are the Benedictines still illuminating manuscripts?”

“No, and the world is a poorer place for it.” Flavian, whose minutes tended toward what the abbot called “novelistic,” wrote
angrily
after Cyprian’s comment, then struck the word. “Have we stopped to ask why this outside milk comes so cheaply? Why and how is it that these companies can undercut even our operation, where labor is practically free? What kind of lives do these cows lead and what do they do to them to get them to produce that much milk?”

“You’re just being a paranoid Luddite.”

“That’s the label the big corporations trot out whenever anybody challenges them,” Cyprian said.

Now comments came from all corners of the room, so many and so fast that Flavian could not track who was speaking. He raised his hand, intending to ask for a moment to catch up, to hear himself say instead, “We’ve already had this discussion.” He stopped, brought up short by his own voice. All faces turned in his direction.

“Yes, Flavian?” the abbot asked. “Go on, speak up.”

“A couple of years ago. We had this same argument. Discussion. Except it was the poor people we got rid of. We couldn’t stand the poor crowding into the gatehouse for alms. The people in the tour buses didn’t like seeing them and we didn’t like seeing them either. So we decided to give charity through the diocesan and county welfare agencies. And I was in favor of that move, it all made sense—we still benefit the poor but we don’t have drunks fighting on our doorstep. And now everything is peaceful and the rich people can come out here and feel like they’re coming to a national park and they like that and so they give us more money. But you know what? We don’t have the poor to remind us why we’re here in the first place. And now here we go again, except this
time it’s the cows. Why don’t we just change our name while we’re at it. The first Holiness National Park—I kind of like the sound of that.”

The abbot held up his hand. “Not for the first time I remind you: A monastery is not a democracy. I have heard and appreciated your feedback and I will take it under the most serious consideration.”

Flavian left the meeting dispirited. It was afternoon and the hours between None and Vespers passed slowly, offering perhaps the greatest challenge to his faith. These days he held on only for the sake of holding on—life seemed a matter of placing one foot before the other in a slow slog toward death, and all the cherubs on all the ceilings of all the churches of the world could not persuade him that a heaven of fluffy clouds and harp-plucking angels awaited.

About those cows. All right, so he didn’t like the thought of them being turned into hamburger, but some version of that fate awaited every living being and better to be hamburger for creatures at the top of the great chain of being than hamburger for maggots, right? For Flavian the question of what to do with them was not at all academic. When the abbot had shifted him from the dairy herd to desk work his first thought had been
Praise the Lord, I get to go back to sleep between Vigils and Lauds
. In this he sided with Crispus: Eliminating the herd was a simple matter of facing facts. Even if they kept the dairy, the cows went to the slaughterhouse the moment they stopped yielding milk anyway. So what if the monastery shifted to buying industrially produced milk? Just as some hardy souls had continued blacksmithing long after the arrival of automobiles, Flavian was certain that somebody, somewhere would continue to keep milk cows. But for his part he would relish the extra hour of sleep.

And now he found himself speaking up in their defense and being a smart-aleck in the process.

A voice in his head spoke.
You never used to talk like that. First
Holiness National Park. My Lord. Where do you suppose you came up with that kind of talk?
Flavian gave his head a sharp shake. The voice continued.
Who taught you to talk back like that? I’ll tell you who
.

“Leave me
alone!
” Flavian cried.

Hobbling by on his way to the infirmary, Brother Crispus gave him a broad wink. “Up to no good?” he asked, and though Crispus was making a joke, Flavian felt his duplicity written on his habit for all to read.

On Sunday afternoons Johnny Faye’s crew gathered to compare crops and share information and, when that time came, coordinate harvesting and distribution. Johnny Faye’s mother’s house was too small so they rotated among the homes of the other men. All their houses were similar, partly because they shared their crops and their income evenly and partly because whenever one of them made an improvement (a finished basement, an outdoor deck) the others helped him and then added the same upgrade to their houses in turn. These were small houses with small bedrooms, two or three children to each room, with a common room not quite big enough to hold their big families. On the coldest, rainiest days of winter they sent the kids to the basement but in any other weather they set them loose to roam the woods. The women sat on the porch and shared in detail the particulars of their medical histories and complaints and picked apart and reassembled their stories and their children’s stories. The men stood around the garage and talked about cars and guns and the deer they hoped to bag in the coming season or had just bagged the year before. When supper was finished the women washed the pots and pans and burned the paper plates. Then they adjourned to the porch and the conversation shifted from the living to the dead, to their characters and habits, public and private. The men returned to the garage, where they took up the subject of their crops and the law.

Squat, whose head scraped the lintel and whose skin hung
from his bony frame, signaled the subject by loading a pipe, which they passed around, a declaration of the fellowship of lawbreakers, though Martin Stead passed because he never smoked and only grew because it was the only way he could make payments on his farm and Johnny Faye passed because he was the brains of the outfit and it fell to him to think straight.

“I say we shift the whole operation up north, Iowa, Illinois, wherever.” Club-footed Paddlefoot had his crop closest to the highway—like Johnny Faye he had been arrested more than once. “They’re getting serious about cracking down—Squat here says he saw two suits come by the county attorney’s office. Now,
suits
. We don’t know where they’re coming from but I aint never seen a suit that didn’t mean trouble. Here we already got land leased up north, season’s just starting up there. We did pretty good up there last year and we didn’t so much as put a hoe to the crop once it was in.”

“That’s a hell of a lot of trouble to go through for something you caint eat.” This from Jerry Bee. “I don’t think we got no cause to worry. Harry Vetch just needs to have a few heads hanging over the courthouse door. Once he gets those, it’s back to business as usual.”

Little cleared his throat and hawked a gob into an empty paint can. “You guys are first of all playing Little League and second you’re going to get caught and you’re going to get screwed. Let me put it this way: How much do you get paid for a truckload of pot? And what do you have to go through to make it look like something other than a truckload of pot, so you can deliver it? Think about all that field work in the sweat and chiggers of the July sun and then you end up rolling down the U.S. highway in a dump truck asking to be busted. I know a guy in the city, plugged in with those rich people on the horse farms, he’ll pay us in one night what we’d work a season to earn growing pot.”

“And what is he asking from you for this great favor?”

“Clear a flat place in the woods and help them fly in a little plane under the radar. And the pilot of the plane hands us a few little
bags and we stick those in our pockets and drive them up to the city and drop them off. One night’s work. One year’s pay.”

Johnny Faye took the pipe and stuck it in his pocket. “You been smoking too much of your own crop. My mamma never had no problem with my growing pot. Her daddy did it and her granddaddy did it and that was enough to make it all right with her. She’s been known to take a puff when the damp gets to her joints. But she made me promise I’d have nothing to do with the hard stuff and I gave her that promise because I am in the habit of obeying my mamma and because it seemed to me a smart promise to make.”

Martin Stead spoke up. “You start dealing in that stuff and you can count me out.”

Little made a great show of rolling his eyes. “You tell me which is smarter, a hundred thousand dollars that’ll fit in your pocket or ten thousand dollars that you need a dump truck to haul around.”

“What are you talking about, a hundred thousand dollars? What would you do with all that money anyway? You caint put it in the bank, you try that and you might as well check yourself straight into the pen.”

“I’d buy myself a new truck. And a brand-new .270 Marlin with a Redfield scope.”

“OK, so you just got rid of maybe twenty thousand. You got eighty thousand to go.”

“I’d figure out something. I aint in the habit of dealing with the problem of too much money under the mattress but I expect I could get used to it.”

“They catch you with hard drugs in your pocket you really
will
be in trouble.”

“Check it out—I did,” Little said. “I had a nice long conversation with my friend Officer Smith. You get the same sentence from growing a field of pot as you get for carrying those little bags off the plane. That didn’t used to be true but the feds have made it true now. You get arrested growing ten pot plants, they take your farm,
you go to jail for twenty years. You get arrested carrying crack cocaine, they take your farm, you go to jail for twenty years. So why not take the safe and easy way the feds have laid out?”

“You don’t know from shit,” Johnny Faye said. “I seen what the hard drugs do to people. I’m telling you, keep your nose clean. And since when has Officer Smith been your friend or any of ours?”

“What do we care what it does to people? They want to fuck themselves up, that’s their problem. It’s just capitalism at work. They’re the demand, we’re the supply.”

Johnny Faye moved to the center of their circle. “Our brother Little aint satisfied with enough, he’s got to have more. Here we have ourselves a little farming cooperative—each of us gets to do what he does best, which is hunt and fish and farm, and we aint getting rich but we’re not doing so bad for ourselves, neither. Somebody’s crop gets chewed up or busted, the rest of us make up the loss. Somebody needs a new furnace put in, we help pay for it and do the work. That’s the code of the hills. Let me ask you this: Are you ashamed of growing good pot? No, you aint ashamed because you were raised to do it, it just happened to be tobacco that you learned on but same thing only different.”