As a Thief in the Night (28 page)

After his father had left, Ezra's mother had destroyed all of the pictures of him, except one. She had thrown them into the fireplace without thinking of Ezra and Layne and the questions they might have in the future, but when she removed the final Polaroid from the album the thought suddenly struck her: They would wonder what he looked like. So Moira kept it, and after she was killed, Elsie took it and put it away for the boys. Sometimes, when they were younger, they would ask about him and she would begrudgingly bring out the picture and show them. It was of him holding a fish he had caught. The hook was still in its mouth and he held it up to the camera by the fishing line. Whenever he thought of his father he thought of this picture, and it was precisely in this guise, the face the same, the clothes the same, that the man holding his mouth shut from behind stepped around and revealed himself. 

All of them, in some terrible league with one another, some conspiracy he had felt but never recognized, seized him violently and forced him along the beach. They whispered behind him and finally, after making their way around a headland, came to a ship. It was a huge old ship, perhaps from thousands of years ago, with high black sails that pushed back and forth in the wind. It was anchored off shore and looked to be deserted in the waves. Pastor Mark was waiting on the shore in front of it.

"Who is this with such a delicate face?" the pastor, in words Ezra suddenly understood, asked them.

"He's to be sold and bought in the marketplace to the master and the judge and the distant stranger," one of the cops answered.

"You have made a grave mistake," Pastor Mark said.

"The master and the judge and the distant stranger are free from blemishes, no mistake can be made."

"And yet one has been made, by you, or by him..." Looking at Ezra, beaten and bloodied, he continued, "Pardon us, young man, for I see the shadow and vine in you."

"What shadow?" Ezra asked, tasting blood in his mouth.

On the ship the pastor was behind the captain's wheel. Ezra was bound, lying on his side, on the worn wooden deck. He watched the pastor and saw that he was unsure at sea. Mr. Deshamps, Ezra's ninth grade teacher from St. Anne's, was lying on a huge beach towel allowing his frighteningly pale belly to burn. He couldn't tell if the fat man was awake or asleep behind his oversized sunglasses. The two cops—Ezra tried to remember their names—sat at a big table closer to the front of the boat. The table was covered, just as it had been on the night he had been arrested, with coins, stacks of bills, and the muddy clothes that the police had taken from the boys as evidence. A huge book hovered over their head like a roof, giving them shelter and comfort, and at the same time blinding them to the sun and light. They still wore their police uniforms but impotent wings had grown out of their backs. Mr. Pentheus had apparently finished his time at divinity school because he now wore a proper minister's collar, over which he wore a loose, richly ornamented, ceremonial mantle. Attached to his ankle by a long prisoner's chain was a lamb that was either unconscious or dead, and attached to the lamb by another length of chain was an iron crown run through by a heavy anchor. The young minister, his arms flexing with the effort he was making, pulled his burden towards a beautiful woman who was lying further up the deck, naked, her back arched and her full chest heaving toward the sky. Heavy streams of sweat ran down his face. Alex DaLivre danced round a heavy bag that hung from one of the masts. It was the same bag that hung in his grandfather's cellar.

Ezra used his shoulder to push himself up so he was sitting. One of the police officers saw him do this and he was sure he had alarmed him and that the cop, thinking his prisoner was about to escape, would resume his beating. Instead, the grounded angel of the law only continued to take survey of and note the evidence on the table.

The others were the same. None of them seemed to be paying any attention or bothering with Ezra at all. He felt as if his oppressors had ruined him, haphazardly, like he was an insignificant casualty that was killed and forgotten on the way to some much more important gain. And that was why they ignored him now, silenced and tethered and beaten as he was, as they continued across the sea. But he saw, watching the indifference of his father, his church, his school, and all the other guardians of his imprisonment, that it was he, the prisoner, that had allowed this. He had allowed it through his meekness, his deference to the paths and beliefs they had so forcefully laid before him, the value he had placed on their blindness, and his refusal to heed the forbidden song calling upon him to be his own shepherd. Ezra stood up in his chains.  His movement finally caught the attention of the strange assortment of pirates that had taken him, and with one voice they yelled for him to lie back down.

"I will not!" Ezra said, and felt a strange sensation in his feet. Pastor Mark turned away from the ship's wheel, smiled, and then nodded encouragement. The pirates hurled insults at him but did not move to strike him or throw him back down.

"Thief! Criminal! Judas! Monster, freak and foreigner! Pervert! Liar and betrayer and coward!" The words came like weather from the four directions.

"I am all those things...and others, all to my greater glory."
  The answer came from his stomach without being shaped by his mind.

"Lie down in your shame!"

"I know, shame is your great weapon. But I will not be ashamed before you any longer."

At the front of the boat his father turned away from the sea and faced him. With measured eye and step he walked across the deck toward his son. When he reached him he took the chain that bound his hands. His father lifted Ezra's hands up in front of his eyes. His left hand was bleeding again, just as it had been that day they had broken into the church.

"Do you see your hands, son?"

"My eyes have never left them," Ezra answered.

"Then you know that they are
my
hands?"

"That was my fear."

"And what can cursed hands ever accomplish?"

"Your hands have been a curse to you, Dad, but a blessing to me."

His father laughed. "A blessing, eh? Women have turned you into a fool. Those hands are a blessing?"

"The trauma they have laid upon my head has opened the seals of the mystery."

Has the power of flight ever visited you as you slept? Who gives wings when our eyes have been closed? Ever taken off from the broken ground you stood on and looked down upon all you had left behind as if
it
, and
not
your flight, was the illusion and mistake? Or perhaps the powers Morpheus delivered to you were of a different order. Objects became yours to touch and bring to life as you saw fit; the earthy mud became the balm by which you healed the blind; you held the candle in mid-air above the crowd in the darkened theater. The lyre of that great seducer of the underworld was given to you and now you surprise yourself and the world with music neither you nor they thought was hidden inside your broken heart. But what became of Ezra as he stood on the deck of that ship on the wine dark sea, in the midst of the oppressors and pirates of his freedom, was something different.

In the very hands his father had just been speaking of he found Olyvia's staff, the one with the pinecone on the end that she had used to stir the must every vintage. With it as a weapon, a wand, a crutch, a gift, a curse, a paintbrush and a pen he drew the magician's circle around himself. Certainty and ecstasy ran like new blood through his veins and flooded his brain.
  The stones, chains, and wounds of his attackers fell outside of his circle like raindrops outside a window, and casting the eye of the god who had been pursuing him all his days into the sky above them, Ezra lay claim to his soul's freedom, fall, the beauty of her sins and graces, and the lifeblood for which her beautiful fingers now reached deep into the soil. For her treasure was not in the skies, but in that subterranean world of guilt and shame and sorrow that Ezra had wasted so much of his vitality trying to escape from. He found
roots
in his moment of power. Liberation lay in turning what he had been fooled into believing would be his destruction into a voluntary act.!
Ducunt volentem fatum, nonlentem trahunt
.

Deep in the bowels of the ship Ezra planted his seeds. And then, his bare feet on the ground, he called them up. Two mighty vines, like snakes hungry for the sky, shot up around the ship's mast. The music of the flutes came from the sea, and as if called out of some long sleep tigers, panthers, a lynx, and the old goat came out of the entrance that led below deck and lay down at Ezra's feet. Other vines shot up between the deck boards and seized onto what they would. His father, Mr. Pentheus, and all the others looked as if they had turned mad. Mr. Deshamps, now as red as a great fat lobster, sprang up from his sunbathing and leapt overboard.
  But, just as he took to the air, absurd and oily as he was, he changed. His feet became a crescent tail, his hands turned to fins, and he disappeared under the water. Ezra's father ran to the side of the boat, and seeing what had happened to Deshamps, turned to question Ezra, but as he did, his own odd metamorphosis began. His nostrils expanded and his mouth widened and he too jumped overboard. Alex DaLivre reached desperately for an oar, thinking he could row them away from whatever was overtaking them, and his hands turned to fins and he joined his fellows in the sea.  One after the other they leapt over the bulwarks and into the water until only Pastor Mark was left behind the wheel. Terrified, still human, he looked at Ezra standing in the middle of the circle with strange symbols scrawled inside it, the animals lying lazily about his feet.

"Don't be afraid," Ezra said to him and beckoned the pastor to the side of the boat. Just beneath the surface of the clear blue sea the pastor saw a group of dolphins swimming together.
  Here and there one rose to the surface and shot a spray of water into the air.

"Are those men?" the pastor stuttered.

"They are." Two vines shot up around the pastor's feet.

"No, please..."

Ezra put his hand on the man's shoulder. "You have nothing to worry about, my friend," Ezra said, and then summoned the vines up around the pastor's body until a thick cluster of grapes flowered in front of his face. "Relax, eat. I will steer the ship from now on."

"But you don't know how."

"I no longer fear discovering, by night or by day."

"To where will we sail?"

"Naxos," he said, filled with the joyful paradox of knowing nothing about his destination, and yet knowing everything.

Darkness was all around Ezra when he awoke. In his stupor his eyes struggled with the unfamiliar outlines of the chairs and tables in the room. He had an odd feeling headache. The place had a strange smell that told him he was in a hospital. The door to the room was halfway closed, and the hall outside was lit with fluorescent light. People in hospitals always seemed to have tubes coming out of them somewhere so he checked his arms but there was nothing there.  All the machines around his bed looked like they were turned off. 

In a few minutes he heard footsteps coming down the corridor and saw a blurry figure cross in front of the door. "Excuse me," he called out. A heavy woman in a nurse's uniform opened the door.

"So you're awake," she said with a heavy Eastern European accent.

"Where am I?"

"You're at Leamington District Memorial Hospital. You had poisoning from carbon dioxide. Don't you remember?"

"I remember being inside the wine vat. But I was wearing the gas mask."

"Maybe your mask does not work so well. Your grandfather brought you in with a little Indian man."  She waved her hand over her face as if the action would change her skin color.
"Oh, Ruiz... He's not Indian, he's Mexican." The woman shrugged her round shoulders as if the distinction was meaningless.

"Then your mother and father came. They stayed very late."

For a minute the distinction between reality and the dream he had just stepped out of became hazy, and he thought that perhaps his mother and father had been there. "That was my aunt and uncle," he coughed, and sat up in his bed.

"In the morning the doctor will be in to see you again. Now you should rest. Do you want anything?"

"I'm okay...some water maybe."

The nurse left and came back with a pitcher of ice water and a glass. She filled the glass, handed it to Ezra, and set the pitcher on the table beside his bed. "I'm at my desk in hall. If you need anything press the button and I will come." She passed him a small device with a button in the center.

Ezra laid his head back on his pillow. His dream was still more or less clear in his mind.  But when he woke in the morning, all that remained were murky remnants, both of the nurse he had spoken to, and the ship and sea journey he had made his own.

Elsie and Gord arrived early the next morning. He was already awake and staring blankly at the ceiling when they came into the room. She hugged him and asked how he was feeling and then proceeded to berate her father for putting him in danger. Ezra explained to her that it had been his fault and that he had gone to clean out the vat without anyone knowing. They had shown him the proper way to do it, but he had done otherwise. Elsie was not convinced and insisted that he come home with them and that his summer on the island must come to an end. But Ezra would have none of it, and after he had gone out for breakfast with his aunt and uncle he called his grandfather's house and asked to have Ruiz meet him at the ferry station with the truck. Gord and Elsie said goodbye to him for the second time.