The Man Who Loved Birds (11 page)

“Well, what part of it stuck in your head?”

Johnny Faye considered. “I liked the part about sitting at the right of God’s throne—I never seen a throne, of course, but I seen one in my mind, all gold and shiny and with clouds all around it, like those.” He pointed up at the bright summer sky, piled with lazy, light-catching cumulus. “And I liked the part about the witnesses in a great cloud around us. That’s the way the dead live on—through us, and them watching, I always felt like that was true. And I know people who are too good for the world, yeah, and who live in the mountains and caves because they caint go out in the world, it’s too filled with meanness. If they’re alive at all. The guys I served with in Nam—seem like it was always the guys that was too good for the world that got hurt or killed, because they had what you’d call principles—they had certain things they was just not able or willing to do and Nam was no place for a guy who had things he wasn’t able or willing to do. And the best guys—least if you’re asking me—were the guys that drew the line and said I aint a-going to do it at all. Which is why I’m sitting here listening to you because I wasn’t one of those guys, I did pretty much everything they told me to do and then some. I’m hoping you or
your Paul will give me to understand why it was that I went, why I killed all those people who never done nothing wrong except get in the way. My way.”

A long silence, except for the chatter and gurgle of the creek over its bed of stones and a lone cardinal’s sleepy midday call
purty-purty-purty-purty-purty
.

“You did your duty,” Flavian said. “At a different point Jesus, who is our final authority, tells us to render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s and to God that which is God’s.”

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning that we should give our government its due—you know, pay taxes and even go to war if that’s what it asks of us.”

“Hellfire. Here you was a draft dodger—”

“
Conscientious objector
.”

“—caint even recognize a compliment when you hear one and telling me to think for myself and then you go telling me Jesus wants me to bow down to the boot. I know that part about Caesar—I remember hearing that and the nuns told us the very same thing, that it was about giving the government its due, but then I gave the government its due and I came away with a whole different notion of what the man is giving us to understand.”

“Oh?” Flavian was amused. “And what do
you
think Jesus is giving us to understand?”

“Well, you show me. What belongs to Caesar?” From his sycamore armchair Johnny Faye threw his arm in a sweeping gesture that took in the trees and the creek and the sky and Flavian, still on his knees in the dirt with the trowel in one hand and the sheet from the morning service in the other. “What do you see that belongs to Caesar? There aint nothing that belongs to Caesar. There aint nothing that belongs to the government, there aint even anything that belongs to the monastery. And so when you tell me Jesus says to render to God that which is God’s and to Caesar that which is Caesar’s, I think that makes a lot of sense. Give the guy credit for some smarts—hell, we’re still talking about him,
he must have had more on the ball than your average Joe. He was standing there talking in front of the Pharisees and he knew damn well what would happen if he said what he wanted to say, and he also knew that it was going to happen anyways but that he weren’t ready for the action. So he says what he says in a way that the people in the know will get what he means and the Pharisees aint got a clue. Because what he wants to say is that not one damn bit belongs to Caesar, every bit of it belongs to God including you and me, your life and my life, and that our job is to treat everything and everybody like it don’t belong to nobody but God and fuck the big corporations and the government.”

“Now where did you learn all that.”

“Didn’t learn it nowheres, just thought it out on my own.”

“Well, you can make Jesus out to say whatever you want, people do it all the time but that doesn’t make it true. At least you have the story right. That’s something. That’s more than most people.”

Johnny Faye grinned and pointed at his temple. “I might be shooting blanks upstairs but I always been good at remembering. You tell me something, a year later I can spit it back to you. I could talk Paul to you chapter and verse if it comes to that, just from the times I heard it read out loud when I was a kid. I had a uncle who was a preacher, he used to tell me I had the gift.”

Flavian hoisted himself to his feet, refolded the day’s epistle, and held it out. “Here. You’ll make better use of this than I will.”

Johnny Faye pushed his hand away. “I told you I don’t got time to read. I like better hearing it spoke out loud.” He looked up at the sun, now a green slant through the trees. “You got time for a swim?”

“Swim? Where would you go for a swim?”

“In one of the monastery lakes, where else? Nobody uses the closest one except for frogs and horseflies. You guys went on city water ten years ago.”

“It’ll be freezing.”

“That’s right. But it don’t get any cleaner nor clearer than this time of year.”

“I don’t have a swimming suit.”

Johnny Faye was gathering up his tools. “You aint wore out your birthday suit.”

“I have to get back for Vespers.”

“No, you don’t. It’s Sunday. Vespers is late on Sunday, you got a extra hour. Come on, live dangerous.”

“The last time I lived dangerous I ended up with an envelope full of cash.”

“You still got that money? Lordamercy, I hope you aint lying awake at night over that. It’s honest money, honest come by, which is a lot more’n you can say about most of the money that ends up on the monastery collection plate. Use it to help some poor son of a bitch that’s got hisself in trouble and then don’t give it a second thought. Now get moving. We hit that lake after the sun’s off it, you really will know what’s cold.”

And so they went for the first time to the lake that in those days they called Basil’s, after the farmer who was the last to work with horses in the monastery fields and who had overseen the damming of the little creek to make the lake and who died of a broken heart, or so they said, when the monastery sold its last draft horse and took to using tractors.

Johnny Faye wrapped his tools in plastic and hid them in a crevice under a rock, then picked up his walking stick and poled himself up the creek bank. Flavian struggled behind, slipping and sliding on the slick clay. With his stick Johnny Faye held the vines aside and pulled forth a big bay horse. “Bittersweet. ’Sweet for short. ’Sweet, meet Brother Tom.” Johnny Faye hoisted himself up on ’Sweet and ran his stick through a loop on the saddle. “Here, put your foot in the stirrup. No, not that foot, dummy, the other one.” Johnny Faye reached down and seized his arm. In a moment Flavian went from idle standing to being hauled up like a sack of potatoes—his shoulder would be sore for a week—and then he was astraddle the horse.

Flavian was uncertain what he was supposed to do. He
couldn’t imagine staying on a horse without being in the saddle—for that matter, he couldn’t imagine staying on a horse while sitting
in
the saddle. There was no place for his arms except around Johnny Faye, and Flavian was too shy to put his arms around any human being, much less a man. He discreetly gripped the saddle’s raised rear lip, trying to keep his fingers from touching Johnny Faye’s buttocks—he could only gain a small hold but it would be enough to enable him to hang on, so long as they rode at an easy pace. “Good thing he’s sweet,” Flavian said with a smile. “Otherwise—”

“Yeeeee-hi!”
Johnny Faye cried, and gave ’Sweet a smart smack on the haunch and they were off at a gallop, JC running and barking at their heels and overhead the great blue bowl of a perfect summer afternoon. For the length of a breath Flavian held onto his shyness but in that same instant the world became a blur of blue and green and he was bouncing up and down exactly out of sync with the horse’s gallop and he was visited by a vision of himself trampled and broken under its hooves and he threw his arms around Johnny Faye and held on for dear life, a life that suddenly seemed dear indeed and absolutely worth the price of the ticket. They galloped away from the creek, over pastures that in seventeen years Flavian had never seen, didn’t even know existed, crashed through brush, climbed up and hurtled down a hill, leapt a small ditch and galloped up to a lake. There Johnny Faye drew up short.

Flavian half-slid, half-fell from the horse, so grateful to be alive and unbroken that he almost knelt to kiss the earth. Then his wits returned and he turned on Johnny Faye in fury. “You—careless jerk. You could have gotten me killed.”

“You’re still alive, aint you? O ye of little faith.” Johnny Faye was already half out of his clothes. “Last one in’s a cocksucker! No kidding, no taking your time on this one, you hold back one second and you’ll never jump.”

And then Johnny Faye was flying through the air with a banshee’s
cry, landing in a cannonball intended to splash water on Flavian. And it worked—Flavian’s pants were drenched and he almost turned and stalked away until he realized that standing on the bank or walking in wet pants was no colder than if he just shed his clothes and braved the lake. And then he was seized by some imp of perverse and tore off his shoes and jeans and blue work shirt and underwear and went cartwheeling through the soft air to land in a great, stinging belly flop in the arctic waters.

Johnny Faye called over his shoulder. “That’ll shrink your balls, all right. Over and back and we’re outta here, keep moving and stay to the left of that big hackberry, I set out a box on the back side a few years ago and there’s a wood duck raises a brood, comes back ever year, keep a eye out and you might see her,” and then Johnny Faye was crossing the lake in powerful strokes and Flavian chugging along behind and in between them JC, who every once in a while let out a gleeful yip.

Flavian was a swimming skeleton—the icy water sucked away his body heat so that he felt only his bones moving and he thrashed as hard as he could to keep his blood from slowing to a stop. Johnny Faye swam ahead and touched the base of the far cliff—this was some kind of ritual—but in mid-lake Flavian reversed course. One bright patch of sunlight remained. Overhead the rays pierced the dark crowns of the trees, and even though Flavian knew that this late in the day the light would carry no heat, all the same he held as a goal the bright sunlit bank on the water’s edge where he could pull on his warm dry clothes—or at least partly dry, which was better than soaked. The dark line of the woods, the darker bowl of the clear lake that doubled the bright sky, the shattering ripples from their moving bodies, and then he was climbing from the water only to have his numbed fingers lose their grip and he fell back in and Johnny Faye was behind him and his hands on Flavian’s thighs and giving him a boost
up!
He scraped his chest against the ragged rock but he was out and hopping around to stay warm while JC climbed out in some easy doggy way and was shaking
himself in one smooth nose-to-tail shower, scattering a cloudburst of rain over their clothes and soaking whatever dryness remained. And then Johnny Faye was out and they were rubbing each others’ arms and hopping up and down.

“You see the wood duck?”

“I can’t see the nose on my face without my glasses.”

“Oh, yeah, right, too bad. She’s over there, all right.”

Johnny Faye pulled from his jeans pocket a scarlet bandana and they toweled the droplets from each other’s backs and then they were climbing into their clothes, the distant tolling of the bells signaling fifteen minutes to Benediction, no way they could get there on time except then they were back on ’Sweet and galloping toward the oxbow in the creek and then over the creek and through the wall of cedars where Johnny Faye knew the one place where a horse and two riders and a dog could penetrate and then they emerged on the gravel lane that led toward the abbey.

They arrived at the back gate to the enclosure—how and from whom had Johnny Faye learned the secret ins-and-outs of that complicated place? Later Flavian wondered this, but right now he was off the horse and slipping through the door into the enclosure. He pulled on his robes and made it into his prayer stall just as the last bell began its slow sweet toll. He had never been so grateful for the scratchy wool warmth of his robes, had never before been so awake and alive to Benediction, to the blessing of the Lord.

Still turbulent from her encounter with Johnny Faye, Meena was at her car when she decided to investigate the abbey church. Bells were ringing, an invitation of sorts, so she drove from the statues, parked and entered through the visitors’ door. The cool high echoing space enforced silence—her blood calmed. She sat in the visitors’ pews and bowed her head.

Time passed and she was joined by a scattering of men and women who knelt or stood. A railing separated the visitors’ seats from the monks’ rows of prayer stalls. In the nave a tall cross held
a starburst of gold at the intersection of its arms. Centered in the starburst, a round pane of glass. A priest in golden robes entered and mounted the altar. An acolyte followed, carrying a smoking brazier hanging on a chain. He opened a small silver box, from which the priest spooned incense into the brazier. Her heart rose with the smoke. Meena sat through the elevation of the host, the closing hymn, and the monks’ processing to the abbot, who sprinkled each bowed and tonsured head with water from a silver bucket.

When she left the sun was still bright in the trees. She walked down the long allée and was surprised to find Brother Flavian falling in step at her side. “A pleasure to see you sitting in the visitors’ pews,” he said. “We keep an eye out.”

“But surely I am permitted. I saw the others and assumed—”

“Oh, yes, the visitors’ gallery is open to all. Even Hindus.
Especially
Hindus.”

She hesitated a moment. “You are a monk—surely I may share this with you, yes? When you call me a Hindu, this is something I find very difficult to hear. Before the British no such concept existed. For us religion is not a separate thing that we label and practice in church on Sundays. It is how we live—it is who we are. Then the British came and told us that all civilized people must have a religion and that a religion must have a central book and services held in a church and so forth. And we wanted to be good servants of the Empire and so we created something called Hinduism, so we could be what the British wanted us to be. And then I was forced to choose—the circumstances are not important, what is important is that I was forced to choose between the old superstitions and the new world of reason and progress. You see where I am, the choice I made, but I still know what it is to be drawn to the old way of knowing things, the spirits in the forest and the hills and especially the rivers. So now when you tell me that I am Hindu that is a very complicated thing for me to hear. Because even though yes, I am Hindu and yes, I am Indian, I am
Bengali first. Once that meant everything and now it means nothing. And Bengalis are known for holding ourselves a little—apart.
Above
, some would say.”