The Man Who Loved Birds (13 page)

The first cow to arrive was paunchy Bede, who had resisted the new-fangled milking machines to the point of requiring what Brother Cyprian pointedly called a hand job. She nuzzled Flavian’s outstretched palm. “Sorry, dear, I don’t have a snack,” he said, but her large, darkly iridescent eyes showed no sign of annoyance. Flavian sighed. “Oh, to have the faith of animals,” he said aloud, then took a seat on a small rock outcrop. “Oh, to be as dumb as beef. Ignorant of our destiny.”

If you’re telling me you’re growing pot behind the cow barn, I’m telling you to pull it up
.

But he didn’t have a patch of marijuana behind the cow barn. OK, so that was sophistry. Courtesy of Harry Vetch’s visit, Flavian could no longer ignore the obvious: he
knew
about a patch of marijuana—what else could Johnny Faye be up to?—and in the eyes of the law that was no different from growing it. His duty was clear: Tell the abbot what was going on. Either that or tell Johnny Faye that he, Flavian, had a responsibility to his community to turn him in. “And then the next time I go back, the plants will be gone, and so will he,” Flavian said aloud.

He stood and promptly fell down—his legs had fallen asleep. He lay flat on his back on the ground, looking up through the branching pines to the indifferent sky. “I
am
a common sinner,” he said. “But I am not going to turn Johnny Faye in to the police. I
am
going to tell him that he’s seen the last of me, and that the police are wise to the game, and that if they come looking for him, he’s on his own.” He closed his eyes and stilled his heart and opened his ears to any retort he might hear, but he heard only the high-pitched cry of a hawk and the sighing of the wind in the trees.
Yesssss. Yesssss
.

Yessss
that he was a common sinner? Or
yessss
that he had struck an acceptable compromise between kindness and duty, between helping a poor man keep food on his mother’s table and what the law required?

On this promise to himself he stood: He would stop visiting the oxbow bend. This coming Sunday he would bring this strange acquaintanceship to an end. He wasn’t, after all, turning Johnny Faye in, he was just putting an end to his own involvement with a highly suspicious activity. A vision rose to mind of the abbot being carted off to the penitentiary in one of those orange jumpsuits inmates wore when they picked up highway litter. Flavian shook it from his head and set out for the enclosure.

This is the time of year in this part of the world when the glorious days of early summer lengthen and no one can entertain the notion that summer will ever end, that anyone or anything will ever die. Every living thing reaches to the sun, which is nearing its solstice but has not yet reached its brutal midsummer strength. The days are long and warm but the earth has not yet taken the heat as its own and the nights are deliciously moist and cool. On such a warm bright Sunday afternoon Flavian found himself standing in front of the tight wall of cedars, dreading his mission but firm in his resolve—to announce his intention never to return in terms carrying a not-so-veiled warning.

He pursed his lips and hollowed his cheeks into a passable imitation of a mourning dove
Ooo-ah—ooo, ooo, ooo
, and immediately he heard a responding call. The cedars parted for his passage. He picked his way down the bank and arrived at the bottom upright to encounter Johnny Faye shirtless and in overalls, a hoe in one hand, mopping his forehead with a scarlet bandana.

“Good timing, preacher. I was just about to take a break.” With the hoe he waved toward the fallen sycamore. “OK, climb up into your pulpit and make it Sunday.”

“I’m not sure what you mean.”

“I make time for this particular patch when I can but it’s pretty well established by now and it could go a couple of weeks
on its own. But I always make it here on Sundays because this here is monastery land and I figure there’s something about setting foot on monastery land that makes it kind of like Sunday even if it’s not. And then you show up and it’s Sunday for sure.”

“Actually, that’s not what I came to talk about.”

“Well, that’s what I came to listen to. How ’bout if I take a break while you talk about what I want to listen to and then I’ll lay back and listen to what you came to talk about.”

Flavian felt in his pockets. “As a matter of fact, I have today’s epistle.”

“Well then there you have it. All I got is time and what’s time to a hog?”

Something about this question struck Flavian as both ridiculous and inarguably true, but in the absence of being able to put a finger on either he took the printed epistle from his pocket and smoothed it against the trunk, then climbed to the hollowed out seat. He patted one of the armrests. “Here. You can sit on one of the limbs and read over my shoulder. We can take turns.”

“Nothing doing. I’ll sit down here. You’re the preacher, you belong in the pulpit, you know the fancy words.”

“But that’s part of the point. This is a religion of the Word and it has to be spoken out loud. Something about getting your lips and tongue around what’s being said—it makes it concrete, it makes it physical so the words stick in your head better, and when they stick in your head better that means they’ll stick to your heart, which is where you want them to stick.” He motioned Johnny Faye to the horizontal limb that formed one of the arms of the throne. “Sit here. I’ll help you out with the big words.”

Johnny Faye hesitated, then climbed into the crotch of the tree but stayed standing at Flavian’s back.

“No, no, it’ll work better if you sit here, in the crotch.” Flavian leveraged himself onto one of the armrests of the throne and thrust the epistle at Johnny Faye. “That way you can read better. I’ll sit up here and look over your shoulder.” Flavian gave the
epistle a shake and pointed at the sycamore seat. “Go on, sit down. Don’t be such a mule.”

Johnny Faye took the paper between thumb and forefinger as if Flavian had handed him a poisoned lily. He stood looking at it for a second, then wadded it into a ball and threw it down. “I caint read.”

“Sure you can. I can help—”

“I told you I
caint
read. How many ways do I have to say it for you to figure it out? Jesus, you aint that big of a dumbass.”

A long silence.

“I don’t believe you.”

“Well aint that a fine piece of shit. You want me to prove it to you? How do you prove to somebody you caint do something?”

With some discomfort Flavian recalled the abbot posing the same question, albeit with more decorum. “I mean, you spent two years in Vietnam. The Army doesn’t take men who can’t read.”

Johnny Faye made a noise somewhere between disgust and contempt. “There you go with the Easter Bunny again. There was a war going on that nobody in his right mind would go fight. I knew how to point a gun and nine times out of ten, sometimes more on a good day, I hit what I was pointing at. They didn’t give a flying fuck if I could read the writing on my tombstone. You caint have a war unless you got bodies willing to die and they’d already made sure their own kids was too smart to fall for that one. So they come for us good ol’ boys and we, a bunch of dumb fucks if I ever seen one, jumped on board. Every time I was handed a piece of paper they made sure there was somebody close by to fill it out. Come to think of it, that was the last serious offer of help I got from Uncle Sam.”

Another silence.

Flavian reached up and took Johnny Faye’s hand. “Sit. I’ll teach you how to read.”

“You won’t be the first to have tried that, nor the first to give up neither.”

“It’s not that hard. Look, if you can ride a horse and plant a crop you can read.”

“Says you.”

“You told me to teach you what I know. Well, this is what I know.”

Another silence.

“Look, I been doing just fine without words on paper. I got myself through the military, I even got a honorable discharge, which considering what all trouble I got into is like a redneck Purple Heart. I never had much use for authority. I’m independent as a hog on ice, aint nobody going to change that. Uncle Sam tried and gave up, and if I stood down the big brass ass of the United States Army I can sure as hell stand down you.”

“That I do not doubt. I’m not asking you to stand down. I’m asking you to
sit
down.” Flavian tugged on Johnny Faye’s hand, a gentle tug but he did not let go, did not allow himself the thought of letting go and after a long moment Johnny Faye sat down and Flavian began to teach what Johnny Faye had never learned.

And it was not easy, Johnny Faye got that much right. In that first moment when Flavian realized that Johnny Faye couldn’t read he thought,
He’ll sit down and I’ll walk him through a sentence or two, and pretty fast he’ll figure out that he really can read, he just thinks he can’t read, he’s just forgotten because he never picks up a book
. Flavian retrieved the wadded sheet from the ground and tried having Johnny Faye read a line from that morning’s readings—
The stone the builders rejected has become the capstone
. Fast enough it became clear that Johnny Faye recognized nothing. Flavian might have taken Johnny Faye’s hand and pulled him down to sit but Johnny Faye never took up the page, never once took the printed words between his fingers.

After a hopeless while Flavian folded the page and tucked it in his pocket. “OK, that’s enough for today.”

“See, I told you so.”

“No, I didn’t say I’m quitting, I said that’s enough for today.
For one thing we can’t work from this. We need something with bigger letters that are easier to read. And we need something to write on. The best way to learn your letters is to write them down.”

“I caint write neither.”

“I figured as much. I’m going to teach you how to read
and
to write. But I didn’t bring a pen and unless you are in the habit of carrying a pen with you, which seems unlikely, then we don’t have anything to write with. Though I guess we could use a stick and write in the mud—it was good enough for Jesus.”

Flavian jumped down from the sycamore armrest and broke a branch off one of the tree’s dead limbs and leaned down to write in the soft, wet clay. With the point of the stick he spelled out:

J-O-H-N-N-Y F-A-Y-E

“There. Is that how you spell it?”

“You’re asking me?”

“I see your point. But you’re telling me you don’t recognize any of this?”

“Yeah, I recognize that, sort of. I seen it often enough.”

“Well then, you can read! That’s a start, anyway.
J
. Not the place I might have started but it will do. Come on down here.” He handed the stick to Johnny Faye. “You make it. Go on. Make one just like that one.”

“If it’ll make you happy. I don’t see no point in it myself. I got along fine for close to forty years just like I am and anyways in my life the only writing that ever come my way brought nothing but trouble.”

And so it went. Right away Johnny Faye scratched out a legible imitation of the letter
J
, but when Flavian wiped away the letter with the toe of his boot and asked him to write it on his own he got nowhere. Johnny Faye remembered the “J” and the “O” but he stumbled on the “H” and that was that. After several frustrating minutes Flavian found himself thinking that Johnny Faye was just
being ornery—he was not a dumb guy and how hard could it be to learn to write an “H”? After a quarter hour, he began to think something else was going on, that maybe his student lacked some necessary intelligence required to link a letter with its picture.

In any case—the thought came to Flavian of its own volition—there was no question of stopping his Sunday visits or turning Johnny Faye in. Now Flavian was on a mission—he would teach Johnny Faye to read and write, and with that skill he could get a real job and give up his life of perdition.

After too many tries—Johnny Faye smart-mouthing all the while but not giving up—Flavian took the stick from his student’s hand. “That’s enough for today. We don’t want to set the woods on fire. Besides, we’ve got a job to finish with those tomatoes.”

A long pause. Johnny Faye screwed up his mouth and twisted one eye up at the lowering sun, then bowed his head, then looked back up at the sun. “OK. You take a seat. Up there on the sycamore. Go on, we can get back to the garden in a second, those weeds aint going to grow that fast. I think you better be sitting down for this one.”

Flavian climbed back into the sycamore and sat.

“They aint tomatoes.”

Flavian sighed. “I know that.”

“You do?”

“I know a tomato plant when I see one and those don’t look like any I’ve ever seen.”

“Then what do you think they are?”

“I have a pretty good hunch, but I’d just as soon not have to say it out loud. If you know what I mean.”

“I know what you mean. A thing aint happened til it’s been told.”

“You could look at it that way.”

For a while there was the silence of the woods on a warm Sunday afternoon in summer. They heard the distant cry of a rain crow,
a breath of air stirring the trees, the burble of the creek over the stones. Flavian sighed. “I do so like the smell of water over rocks.”

“You can smell that?”

“Sure, can’t you?”

Johnny Faye sniffed. “All I smell is cowshit and that only when the wind is blowing from your herd.”

“Smell it while you can. They’re on their ways to the slaughterhouse.”

“So I’ve heard.”

“From whom?”

“I got my sources. Caint have no cows around the joint, no sir, their stink might keep the Virgin away, caint have that.”

“It’s more complicated than that.”

“It always is, Brother, it always is—except for the cows, it’s going to be pretty simple for them. Anyways. Come on out of that tree, to hell with the weeds, time for a swim.”

And they were up and off on ’Sweet and this time Flavian threw his arms around Johnny Faye before they loped across the pastures and through the distant, unknown forest. As they charged through the fields the thought came to Flavian one word at a time, the sentence punctuated by the banging of his buttocks against the horse’s haunches:
I’ll. Go. To. Hell
.