To Play the Fool (25 page)

"What I am trying to explain is why I couldn't see what
is happening to David when we first looked at it on Sunday afternoon.
You, of course, were approaching it from a legal point of view, your
friend saw it from a psychological one, Philip Gardner can see David
only as the colorful Erasmus, and I was stuck at seeing Erasmus as a
perversion of David Sawyer. This morning at that ungodly hour, I
finally turned it around, placed him in an historical setting, and
looked at his actions as if they indeed held an internal logic, rather
than simply reflecting the irrational reactions of a severely
traumatized man." She leaned forward to drive her point home.
"The key idea here is, "covenant.""

Kate swallowed her bite and tried to look intelligent. "A covenant is some kind of agreement, isn't it?"

"A biblical covenant could be anything from an international
treaty to a business arrangement. It was regarded as a sacred
commitment, legally and morally binding, absolutely unbreakable. The
relationship between the Divinity and the people of Israel was
covenantal, for example. I should have known immediately that was what
David was doing--he used the idea twice in explaining himself, the
first time when he was talking to you and Philip Gardner in Berkeley,
the second in the interview on Friday. The passages were on both lists,
but I was seeing it as one of his loosely metaphorical quotations, or
expressing a psychological truth, not a literal one."

"What difference would that make, precisely?"

"A great deal. You see--well, let me take a step back
here." Take several, thought Kate. "What you see in David
is a conjunction of two very different religious traditions that have
been brought together by his personal disaster and welded together by
his need. The idea of covenant is one of them--we'll come
back to that. The other is the tradition of the Holy Fool, a figure
David spent much of his adult life studying. Ten years ago, David took
a long-delayed but decisive action and told Kyle Roberts that there was
no future, no real future, in the academic world for him. David now
attributes his harsh words to his own vanity, which I assume means that
he was too proud of his own status to recommend an inferior scholar for
a post that he, Kyle, was not suited for. I agreed with him at the
time, and still do: One cannot allow oneself to be known as a person
who recommends duds,- the academic world is too small and too
unforgiving for that. At any rate, David's criticism was the
spark that set off a badly unbalanced and volatile personality, and
David's family, his beloved son, as well as three other
innocents, were destroyed in the explosion.

"Now, one of the most basic characteristics of the fool,
either a secular or a religious one, is that he is without a will. Even
inanimate objects are more self-willed than a fool. Think of some of
Charlie Chaplin's brilliant bits where he wrestles with chairs
and clothing and lengths of wallpaper and such and then is beaten by
them. Look at the way your Erasmus depends on his scepter--a
classic piece of foolishness, by the way. He has no will,- he makes no
choices,- he is wafted to and fro by powers he cannot control: Even
when he appears forceful and aggressive, he is acting only as a mirror.
David, in fact, took this to an extreme, though I admit a logical one:
He does not even have words of his own."

She waited until she saw that Kate had followed her this far, saw Kate begin to nod, and continued.

"Only a brilliant man like David could have managed it. And,
more than brilliance. I am not so ready as Dean Gardner to attribute
sainthood to David, but he did have a point, and David's charisma
was always considerable.

"What I think happened, then, is that at the point in
David's life where he had to choose between death--remember
what he said, that the only thing worse than death was wanting death
and being denied it?--and some tolerable form of life, he chose a
life of absolute surrender, of complete will-lessness. Complete and
daily sacrifice, without any risk of doing harm to another by taking
positive action, a form of service to humanity that was properly
demanding and might go some way to make up for what he was responsible
for--and here's where the idea of covenant comes in. Guilt
is a feeling with a limited life span, and David could not take the
chance that someday--in a year, or three years, or five--the
initial impulse that drove him to live the life of a Fool would fade
and he would find some excuse to resume his normal life. So he ensured
that it would be permanent by declaring a covenant, an unbreakable oath
said, I venture to say, over the dead body of his son.

"A covenant is either whole or it is broken--nothing in
between, no amendments or retractions. In the most archaic forms, the
symbolic recognition of a covenant is a split carcass, down the halves
of which a flame is passed or the people walk. In fact, in the Hebrew
language a covenant is 'cut," not just made, which serves
as a reminder that if one party goes back on his part of the agreement,
he may be split down the middle as the carcass was.

"I can see I'm losing you, and I freely admit that
it's a very cerebral explanation. In fact, I doubt very much that
David thought of it in anything like this manner. His was, I imagine, a
'gut' response to the option of suicide. The fool's
way of thinking came naturally to hand--it fit--and he
clamped on the oath, sworn on his son's body, like a suit of
armor. No--more than armor,- like an exoskeleton, a rigid carapace
that held him together and allowed him to justify living. The
inflexibility of the vow, the safety of speaking in other men's
words, the freedom that comes with letting go--that has become his
life. A life of service to the homeless, of ministering in different
ways to the spiritually impoverished middle classes and to the
dangerously isolated seminarians."

"And now, jail," said Kate slowly. "And probably prison."

"What do you mean?" Professor Whitlaw said sharply.

"I have had the strong feeling the last few days that Sawyer
is reconciling himself to being incarcerated, that he doesn't
really care whether he's in or out. At any rate, he certainly
isn't afraid of it anymore, like he was at first."

"God. Oh God. Yes, I can see that. His ministry in prison. Oh Lord, what can we do?"

"We must make him talk. We have to find out what he knows
about John's death. Professor Whitlaw, I am being horribly
unprofessional by saying this, but frankly I have serious doubts that
David Sawyer killed the man. However, I think he knows who did. He must
tell us."

The cafe lunch tide that had risen around the two women was now
starting to ebb, and Kate only now became briefly aware of her
surroundings. After a long time, Professor Whitlaw looked up at her,
and to Kate's astonishment the woman did not seem far from tears.

"I want David back, you do understand that. He was my best
friend in all the world, and I have missed him terribly, every day, for
all these years. However, much as I would rejoice in having him return
to himself, I have to admit that what you want could finally destroy
what remains of his life. If you make David break this strange vow of
personal speechlessness, you will force him to break faith with his
murdered son, and I suspect that for David that would be intolerable.
It would negate the whole last ten years of his life. I do not wish to
be overly dramatic, but I very much fear that if you break his oath,
you will break him. You could kill him."

"What would you recommend we do?"

"You might find the real murderer."

Kate suppressed a surge of irritation. "Yes," she said dryly.

"Other than that, frankly, I do not know what you can do.
Self-preservation is too low a priority for him to respond to that
particular appeal, and you have already tried to convince him that he
has the responsibility to help bring the man's killer to justice,
with no result whatsoever. Unless you can convince him that his silence
positively harms others, I can't see that you'll budge
him."

Kate began to pile her dishes together. She did not say anything,
could not say anything without it being inexcusably rude. Even a
"Thank you very much" would inevitably sound like sarcasm,
and this woman was only doing her best. Still, even with all the pretty
words she'd dressed it in, she had told Kate no more than she
knew already: Erasmus would not talk, Sawyer would not save himself. So
she said nothing. Professor Whitlaw, however, had one more observation
to throw in.

"Martyrdom has always been the act of fools. It's the
ultimate absurdity, giving up one's life for an idea."

"Martyrs stand for something," Kate said, suddenly fed
up with words. "There's nothing to stand for here.
He's just being stupid, and a real pain in the neck."

With that judgment, she tipped her plate into the tub marked DISHES and walked out into the rain.

...
The abrupt simplicity with which Francis won the attention and favour of Rome
.

A few days later, David Sawyer was returned to the jail, along with
a lengthy psychiatric evaluation that said, in effect, that the man was
eccentric but quite sane enough to stand trial. That evening, on her
way home, Kate stopped by his cell to see him. She stopped in the next
night as well, to take him a book of poetry that Lee had sent, and the
next. It soon became a part of her day, and twice when she was out in
the city and might normally have gone directly home, she found herself
making excuses to drop by her office first and then go up to the sixth
floor for a few brief words.

Kate was not the only one to fall beneath the spell of Brother
Erasmus. One evening he held out a flowered paper plate and offered her
a home-baked chocolate chip cookie. A child's drawing
mysteriously appeared, Scotch-taped to the wall of his cell. Once,
late, following a long and depressing day, Kate entered the jail area
and heard the sound of Sawyer's voice ringing out clear and loud
among the astonishingly silent cells. When she came nearer, she saw him
stretched out on his narrow bed, reading aloud from a book called
The Martian Chronicles.
The other inmates were sitting, lying down, or hanging on their bars,
listening to him. Kate turned and left. Another night, even later, Kate
passed by on business and heard a voice singing: a repetitive tune,
almost a chant, with every second line exhorting the listener: Praise
Him and glorify Him forever.

He had visitors, too, over the next couple of weeks. Those of the
homeless who could work up the courage to enter the daunting Hall of
Justice came for brief visits: Salvatore once, the three Vietnam vets
once each, Doc and Mouse and Wilhemena twice each. Beatrice came four
times in the first six days after he had returned to the jail. From
Sawyer's other worlds came Dean Gardner, who visited regularly,
and Joel, the grad student who had given Erasmus rides to Berkeley.
There was a steady stream of others from the seminary, professors,
staff, and students, and from Fishermen's Wharf, the owner of the
store that sold magic supplies and the crystal woman.

Brother Erasmus even had his own newspaper reporter, who had adopted
him and argued with his editor about the newsworthiness of a jailed
homeless man. Ten days after Sawyer had been brought back to San
Francisco, the reporter's efforts paid off with a full-page
human-interest story in the Sunday edition on homeless individuals, one
of whom was Erasmus. Photographs and interviews of the homeless men and
women connected to him, and of their more settled neighbors, succeeded
in drawing a picture of the homeless population as a community of wise
eccentrics. The feature spread resulted in a great deal of cynical
laughter among those responsible for enforcing the law, a flurry of
letters to the editor in praise and condemnation, a brief increase in
the takings of the panhandlers across town, and even more visitors for
David Sawyer.

It was a popular article, and two days later the reporter submitted
another, smaller story, this one looking at the murder case itself in
greater detail. His editor cut out half the words and changed it from
an investigative piece to one with a greater emphasis on the people
involved, but still, there it was in Wednesday's paper, with
interviews of five of the homeless, a review of the facts, and
photographs of Erasmus, Beatrice, and the colorful Mouse.

The guards grumbled at the number of visitors they had to handle for
this one prisoner. However, they did not stop bringing him plates of
food their wives had made and snapshots of their dogs.

The only person Erasmus flatly refused to see was Professor Eve
Whitlaw. Everyone else he listened to, smiled at, prayed with, and
presented with a pithy saying to take away with them, but the English
professor from his past, he would have nothing to do with. She tried
twice but not again.

During the weeks after David Sawyer's arrest, Kate had been
immensely busy, not only with the case against Sawyer but with another
investigation that she and Hawkin had drawn, the lye poisoning of an
alcoholic woman (who had looked to be in her sixties but was in fact
thirty-two), which could have been either accident or suicide but was
looking more and more like murder. It involved long hours of
interviewing the woman's large and predominantly drunken extended
family, and it left Kate with little time to spare for Erasmus, safe in
his cell.

It was over a month since the murder, and Kate felt the Sawyer case
slipping from her. She had neither the time nor the concentration to
pursue it further, and she was uncomfortably aware that she might let
it go entirely but for the continued entreaties of Dean Gardner and
Professor Whitlaw. She came home late on a Monday night, aching with
exhaustion, cold through, and hungry, and found a series of five pink
"While You Were Out" slips lined up for her on the kitchen
table: Philip Gardner, Eve Whitlaw, Rosalyn Hall, Philip Gardner, Eve
Whitlaw.