The Man Who Loved Birds (28 page)

And then she recognized their surroundings—they were back at the clearing. He led her past the statues and up the hill to the blind. JC trailed behind.

At the blind he pulled aside the hanging vines that formed the door and led her through. JC laid down outside with a heave and sigh.

Inside he fumbled in his pockets—the flare of a match, then the flame from the stub of a candle, at first timid, then bold. It was as much light as she could bear. He sat on the clean-swept earth and tugged at her hand. After a moment she sat next to him. Their shadows large and monstrous on the blind walls. He rested his hand atop hers. After a small while she turned hers over and linked their fingers.

He told her his stories then, stories of Vietnam, of desolation
and terror and sorrow. She responded in kind—stories of Bengal, of planes flying over her grandparents’ home, flying east to bomb her parents’ village. While they spoke the insects’ infernal buzz grew louder, grind and racket and saw, until as if by some invisible, inaudible signal they stopped. Now there was only the thin lone chirp of a cricket and the pounding of her pulse. The candle guttered. “That is what I know. That is what I remember,” she said, but in telling these stories she understood for the first time why her father had taken her as a young country girl to Calcutta, why he took her for eye examinations for her nearly perfect eyes every month for three years, why he left her at the cinema alone—unheard of! a little girl, left alone in the great city—for those long afternoons of American films, why he exacted her promise, eagerly given, never to tell her mother where she had been. Her father, who read only poetry written earlier than Wordsworth—what monthly “business” could he have had in Calcutta? Sitting in the blind with Johnny Faye, she understood that her father had made these journeys because he had taken a lover.

She had never been so revealed, to herself or to another. Desire stripped her naked. She turned to him and pulled him to her and covered his mouth with hers.

After some time he leaned back. “You wait.” His voice was thick. “You hold on.”

He stood and knelt to his boots, ankle high and caked with dirt, and unlaced them and took them off and stood them one beside another, witnesses. He unzipped his jeans—they dropped to the floor . . . He fought his way out of his t-shirt, then stepped out of his underwear in slow motion, or so it seemed to her, she who wanted him all at once. He was slim-hipped, smooth above, hairy below—a satyr. She was clothed and he was not, and in his nakedness she understood many things—the power of clothes, the yielding of his nakedness, how much he had known and done to understand this.

She stood and seized his hand and held it behind him and
covered his lips with hers and seized him at the root and he raised her skirt with his free hand and worked her until she gave a great shout and he was shouting with her, both of them shouting in tongues.

He sank to the floor amid the littering twigs and leaves, his chest rising and falling. He unzipped and pulled down her skirt—how strange it seemed that she was still clothed. He pulled her down to him and raised himself on one elbow to unbutton her blouse and cup her breast and then she was unclothed in the warm summer night and they kissed, a long, proper embrace.

They lay in silence. He cleared his throat as if to speak and she placed a finger to his lips. Around them the high thin call of the tree frogs, an owl’s
hoo-who-hoo-who?

After some time she rose and took up her clothes. He lay watching until she was dressed—he of the sun-darkened arms and chest and shoulders and legs, a band of white flesh pale as moonlight between his waist and each thigh. For a while they watched each other—she clothed, he naked. Then he shook his head free of some thought from the other world. He pulled on his clothes and followed her outside.

The sky was clear now, the bowl of stars overhead, the white graveled path plain before their feet. In silence they walked to her car. The starlit night became a great mother heart, a silence more profound than any voice.

At the car they kissed—she felt again the clutch of desire from a place deeper than knowledge. Then Johnny Faye disappeared into the night forest.

An indifferent Monday. What concatenation of chance and choice, destiny and free will, had brought Flavian to this place, where his morning’s task was to enter addresses and telephone numbers from cheese and fruitcake orders into the newly acquired computer, pride of Brother Cassian? This was the work of the Lord? Why was he here? Why had he become a monk and, more to the point, why had he stayed?

The abbot entered, all hustle and bustle, a short good morning before he sequestered himself in his office to make calls from his very handsome white oak desk. Several times Flavian stood and walked to the abbot’s door, seeking the courage to walk in and say—what? “I’ve been helping the local renegade grow pot and I’m falling in love with a woman from halfway around the world and I quit.”

Abruptly he stood and entered the abbot’s office and sat. The abbot looked up from his paperwork. “Flavian. You have lived in community long enough to know that a knock before entering—”

Flavian studied his hands in his lap during this gentle and appropriate reprimand. When the abbot finished he raised his head. “Brendan. Why do the innocent suffer?”

The abbot scrunched his lips and tilted his head sideways and frowned. “Flavian, something’s bothering you. Something’s been bothering you for a while.”

“At any particular time of day a lot of things are bothering me, but what’s bothering me right now is why innocent people suffer. You tell me. I want to hear the standard operating procedure argument because when you get right down to it, what is the point of religion if it can’t answer that basic question? I mean, we have these smoke-and-bell services that make people feel all holy and good, and then they go back to their desks and sign orders to drop bombs. Or whatever their jobs’ version is of dropping bombs. I mean, not everybody drops bombs but if you want to follow the chain of responsibility even we’re dropping bombs because we’re paying taxes and so we’re supporting the guys who are dropping bombs.”

“As a matter of fact we don’t pay taxes.”

“So much the worse then, because what we have here is a deal whereby the guys who
are
dropping the bombs or, in the case I’m thinking of, beating his kid to within an inch of his life, those guys are saying to us, ‘OK, here’s the deal, you make us feel good about screwing everybody else for our benefit and we’ll let you dress up in costumes from the twelfth century and play at medieval theater tax-free.’ Why aren’t we
doing
something, anything? What is the point of all this navel-gazing?”

The abbot sneaked a glance at the wall clock.

“Brendan, I’m serious.”

The abbot sighed. “I know you’re serious. But I’m a better administrator than theologian. As you know.”

“But you’re the abbot.”

“Right you are, for better or worse.”

“We’re practically rolling in dough and here we sit, making and selling cheese and chanting prayers while the world suffers. And—” he indicated the correspondence on the desk “—preparing to ship to the slaughterhouse our last connection to the real, beautiful, created, animal world.”

“Better than dropping bombs,” the abbot snapped.

A moment of silence in observance of this remarkable departure from equanimity.

The abbot swiveled in his chair to look out the window at the green canopy of the meditation garden’s ancient gingko. “Um, look. I have to review last quarter’s financials and get them off to the bean crunchers by the end of today. Your question is, I’m sorry to say, not going to go away, whereas if I don’t review these financials in time for tomorrow morning’s conference call, the community may well be reduced to stealing bread.”

“Sure, fine, don’t call me, I’ll call you.”

The abbot swiveled back. “Now, Flavian.”

“Brendan. Hear me out, please. I’m not being naive. Seventeen years without red meat and I still dream of a good hamburger and it’s not like I don’t know where it comes from. I’m not saying we have to keep the herd. I get the picture. But I just don’t think we’ve thought that one through nearly as much as we ought, considering what’s at stake. These are creatures of God, after all, who give us so much in return for so little. Maybe that’s why I really became a monk—not to dodge the draft but to be a man of faith. If the rains fail and the cows die or my back gives out when I’m unhooking the milking machines, that’s a challenge to my faith that I can rise to, or so I hope, with my brothers at my side to lend a hand. But when the milk comes to us in big stainless steel tankers from who knows where I’m not working for God anymore. I’ve become just like everybody else—I’m a capitalist who’s taken his faith away from God and placed it in a corporation shielded by an insurance policy and the government from whatever lives or places or animals it nukes along the way. And we’re not everybody else—at least, we’re not supposed to be. We’re monks. So what do we say when people look to us to be models of faith? How can we ask them to have courage when we’re being cowards?”

Here he paused for a silence that grew longer until finally the abbot spoke. “Flavian, I’ve noticed that you’ve been—distracted. You’ve missed offices—a
lot
of offices. You need a break. Go visit the foundations out West. The change of scenery will do you good. By the time you get back we’ll have this business with the dairy herd settled.”

Usually Flavian found the bells announcing midday service to be an annoyance but today they spared him a response to the abbot’s suggestion. He gathered his notebook and pen and tote bag. “I don’t want to be a monk,” he said. “There. I quit. That’s it, pure and simple,” and so it seemed, though as he spoke the words he felt something willful in them, something to do with fear and a failure of heart, a loss of faith.

The abbot leaned back and passed his hand over his eyes. “Well within my time here, and not long before yours, we would have conducted this conversation with our hands. Often I think that might have been for the best. Words, so seductive in the mouth and to the ear, have a way of betraying the heart.” Here he reached across his desk and touched Flavian’s hand, an extraordinary gesture—it was the first time Flavian could recall any physical contact with another brother that was not work-related. “I will offer a few last words, speaking from my place as your abbot: A man who’s never had a crisis of faith isn’t to be trusted. A monk who’s never had a crisis of faith isn’t paying attention. You are being taught to pay attention. That’s the good news. Now is the time. The way is dark but God has given you hands. Feel your way forward, in faith.”

After the midday office, after dinner, after a nap, back in front of his blinking, beeping machine, Flavian groaned aloud. “You could find a moral dilemma in a baked potato,” he said and at that moment the computer froze up. He tried all the tricks the salesman had shown him—
CONTROL ALT DELETE
, plug/unplug—and then threw in a few tricks of his own, including a gentle slap to the side of its vomit-colored casing (
o Queen of Computers, forgive me
). Nothing. Flavian sighed and turned to sorting the day’s mail, which included an envelope from the office of the county attorney.

Only a few months before, he’d have opened it and placed the contents in the abbot’s in-box. Now he furtively tucked the envelope into his tote bag. He had grown so jaded that his once-bedeviling conscience did not register a peep of protest.

In his indecision and anxiety he forgot about the filched letter until that night, when he was preparing for bed and pawing through his tote bag. He pulled out the envelope and, using his forefinger as a letter opener, ripped back its flap, which rewarded his impatience by slicing his skin, a nice paper cut that sprouted a drop of bright red blood. “Only what I deserve,” Flavian said aloud. He sucked on his finger as he read through a press release paper-clipped with Harry Vetch’s card
FYI
.

MEDIA RELEASE

502-628-7898

The Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force, consisting of representatives from the Drug Enforcement Administration, State Police, Internal Revenue Service, and Federal Bureau of Investigation have entered an investigation of residents growing marijuana outside the state. To date marijuana has been seized from 29 sites, including 25 farms located outside the state. Law enforcement officials have seized a total of 182 tons of marijuana. Sixty-eight persons have faced federal or state charges concerning this marijuana.

Evidence collected by the Task Force has revealed that the marijuana seized was produced by an organized group of residents who pooled money, machinery, knowledge and workers to create the largest domestic marijuana producing organization in the history of the United States. The cooperative frequently obtains leads on farm land that is for sale through real estate firms. In many cases, one cooperative member will travel to a certain geographic
area to observe and evaluate farm properties for lease or sale. A second cooperative member then travels to the area and purchases a pre-selected property, with a minimum down payment and a contract for payment of the balance due over a period of years. Deed to the property, therefore, does not transfer to the buyer until payment of the balance. Thus, many of the farms are not seizable under federal forfeiture statutes.

The cooperative generally plants marijuana in corn fields. The corn is planted late, which leads neighbors to believe the planters have little knowledge of farming. However, the later planted corn stays green longer, concealing marijuana for a longer period of time.

Once the marijuana is planted, one or two people move to the farm to monitor the crop. At harvest time, bands of workers, often consisting of the growers’ wives and children, travel to the farms to harvest, process, and package the marijuana. Many workers have $300 to $500 on them at the time of their arrest, apparently for getaway money, should law enforcement disrupt their activities. Oddly, this money, as well as money used to make down payments on farms, is usually moldy, dirty, and has an unusual smell.