Our Lady of the Forest (32 page)

That's twenty-four hours of damage, though, Richard Olsen countered.

I don't know, the sheriff said. Maybe you could plant new trees or something. If that's a concern. Plant new ones.

Trees are money, said Carolyn. That's all they really care about—money. Not trees or anything. Money.

You shut up, said the sheriff.

Devine did indeed have a cell phone that was even smaller than Carolyn had predicted and after he'd used it at ridiculous length, standing an aloof twenty yards downstream, redialing a number of times, talking to a variety of people, waving his arms and pacing the bank, holding his temple again in his hand with his eyes shut, grimacing—after all his gesticulating and animated hobnobbing, he tucked the cell phone angrily in his coat pocket, stumbled on a root walking back upstream, and told the sheriff that the Stinson Company agreed to the twenty-four-hour proviso and would allow today's pilgrims to proceed.

Carolyn immediately raised her bullhorn. We're about to move forward again! she announced. You will find a small new bridge at the creek which you should cross with care and as you do, don't neglect to put something in the bucket, two of Ann's followers will be on hand to accept your wonderful contributions in support of Mother Mary's new church!

That's the next step, she said to Devine, arm in arm with Ann again and making her way toward the bridge. First you give us twenty-four hours. Then we build a church on your land. That's the way these things work.

On the wheelchair ramp she swiveled like royalty. Excuse me, she said to the nearest follower. But could you maybe stand here and collect a toll so we can build the church Our Blessed Mother wants? And, she said to those nearby, please give us space on the other side. Ann needs space now in which to meditate and prepare to meet Our Lady.

She and Ann crossed at a stately pace Carolyn enforced. The others waited and let them walk ahead, though two sentinels followed at the minimum distance for private conversation. In the forest of blowdowns, hung from trees, were crucifixes, rosaries, crepe-paper roses, and a wooden cross clearly carved on the spot by a pilgrim adept with a pocketknife and adept at braiding strips of cedar bark into a rudimentary twine. Along the trail—tucked into the furrows of the firs, spiked into rotting logs with twigs, weighted down under spruce cones and stones—were bits of paper bearing petitions, some in small plastic sandwich bags, others in sealed envelopes, others folded into origami birds, others embellished with artwork or calligraphy, and these were collected by a pair of Ann's followers and dropped into mushroom buckets. Set about on stumps and logs were statues of the Rosa Mystica, the Black Madonna, Our Lady of Lourdes, the Infant of Prague, a lamb, Our Lady of Fátima, and Our Lady of Scottsdale. There were also lighted votive candles, miraculous medals, and a variety of small framed photographs—of the pope smiling beneficently, Teresa of vila, John of the Cross, and Christ beneath his crown of thorns, suffering cryptically. This is a little weird, said Carolyn. All these strange little forest totems. All of this weird religious stuff just sitting out here like this.

There's going to be two more visits, said Ann. Our Lady has promised to come two more days. So twenty-four hours—it's not enough.

Hey, said Carolyn. Don't complain. I got you over that bridge, didn't I? So let's cross the next one when we come to it, okay? We can worry about other stuff later.

They're going to put up No Trespassing signs.

Well what do you want me to do about that?

I want you to talk to them and get them not to do it.

Carolyn hugged tightly Ann's small hooded head. Tell you what, said Carolyn. Why don't you talk to Mother Mary? And get her to talk to God and Jesus? Maybe they could have a family conference and straighten these problems out.

Family conference. That's not right.

Well I don't know what you're supposed to call it. It's all unimaginable anyway. Like what is the deal with Christians in the first place? Are God and Jesus really the same person or could they like have a conversation, a father-and-son heart-to-heart now and then, Let me show you how to catch trout, Son, or Hey Jesus, did I tell you how sex works? And Mary who's now your closest friend, where does she fit in exactly, is she just a woman who stepped out on her husband and came up with a bad explanation like—it's God who got me pregnant, Joe, now stop worrying about me and go herd your sheep—or is she part of the so-called “Godhead” which also includes this bizarre third party known only as the Holy Ghost?

She's Our Savior's mother. You know that.

Yeah but it seems like if you throw in Mary what you've really got is a quartet, Ann. A group of four, not a trinity. The Fab Four, with Ringo as Mary, Paul as God, John as Jesus the crucified one, and George as the Holy Ghost.

Stop thinking, Carolyn. It's a mystery.

Thought is my way. My path. My yoga. How am I not supposed to think? How do I turn off my brain?

Your brain can never get you there.

Then I guess I don't really want to go. And where is
there,
by the way?

They left the forest of blowdowns behind and negotiated the steep hill northward. Last Thursday, said Carolyn, it was just you and me. Up here rooting around for mushrooms and eating apricots out of my handkerchief. You were just plain Ann from the campground. Just that girl in the next little campsite. Now we're dragging around five thousand fanatics who bring us tea and yogurt for breakfast. It's just so completely unbelievable, Saint Ann. It just makes me want to laugh.

Our Lady brought her followers here.

Whatever you say.

She brought you too.

Okay—she brought me.

Well why are you here then?

I really couldn't tell you, said Carolyn.

It's because of Our Lady. That's why. Our Lady.

Whatever you say, repeated Carolyn.

The path through the Oregon grape and salal was as though trimmed artfully with electric shears and put Carolyn in mind of topiary in a Victorian English garden. They stopped here to rest momentarily while Ann blew her nose and coughed in her fist so that first the sentinels caught up with them, then the spryer journalists and photographers mingled with impatient pilgrims. The sweating priests eventually arrived too, Father Butler wiping his brow, Father Collins with his overcoat draped across one forearm like a gentleman on his daily constitutional. The priests, it seemed, had engaged each other in a stringent theological row, the sort of altercation that passes time during a woodland hike. But I have, said Father Butler, always decried the image of Mary as an avatar of passive femininity and propound her instead when I propound her at all as an icon of genuine female empowerment. You may decry such, said Father Collins, nevertheless the Church plays its sorry part in perpetuating her image as handmaid of the Lord, juxtaposed against Eve. I wouldn't be so certain of that, said Father Butler, there are factions and then again there are factions. Father Collins gravely shook his head, The basic thrust from Rome is the same, barefoot and pregnant and exclaiming after Gabriel Be it done unto me according to thy Word, Be it done unto me, it's sexual passivity, anyone reasonable can see that. The Angelus, said Father Butler, is an exaltation. Or a devotion composed in the twelfth century. I wouldn't read too much into it. More to the point is the Magnificat, Collins, if I were making your specious argument. The exultant prayer of Our Lady herself. But I don't know how much you could make of it. I'm not sure it's really of assistance to you while you devise your tangled web.

Here, said Father Collins, is where the Hebrew comes in. The missing Aramaic no one adheres to.
Ecce ancilla Domini. Fiat mihi secundum verbum tuum.
Does the Latin catch the original substance? Be it done unto me according to thy word. “Done unto me.” Is that quite it? As opposed to your reference from the Gospel of Luke? Wherein we have “be it
unto
me according to thy word,” note the sense of “done” is not included, at least in accurate translations. So no one is doing anything to anybody, no one is getting “done,” Father Butler—unless Rome says so, I guess, afterward. Having excised the feminine principle entirely from the godhead.

You sound like Graves regurgitated.

Graves makes sense. So does Jung. And Goethe too,
Das Ewig-Weibliche.
We aren't going anywhere decent, you know, without the Woman-Soul.

Father Butler began cleaning his glasses. It's the times, he said. The tenor of the times. You're simply full of sixties backwash and can't help being faddish and foolish any more than, I don't know, let me think of somebody. What about Timothy Leary?

You're out of touch, Father Butler. Father Bill. I humbly submit you're out of touch.

Well I look for what is universal. Universal and timeless, I suppose. Not merely the flavor of the moment. Because fads are ephemeral by definition. But God—God remains.

So does Mary. Insistently.

Yes, but as handmaid of the Lord.

The procession pushed into the dank-smelling forest with its moss-veiled vine maples, nursery logs, devil's club coverts, and fern grottoes. It came to the dark and uneasy grove where Ann's apparitions had ensued. The limbs of the trees here were seized by moss as if in suspended animation. Like crab claws on the sea floor, desiccated by years. A vast photosynthesis covertly went forward and its hallmark was utter stillness. No birds sang. Sojourners in this silent landscape expected something imminent ahead which on reflection couldn't be named. They felt as someone in a landscape painting looks whose purpose is to indicate scale and imply his own insignificance. The density, girth, and magnitude of trees made feeling small transcendental. Some of the pilgrims experienced religious awe and indulged an instinctive animism. Others felt like gentrified adventurers with knapsacks, walking sticks, and volumes of poetry reciting Whitman on a New World promontory overlooking an abyss. Theirs was a majestic claustrophobia, a darkness infused with largesse. For them this was a chilly northern jungle shot by Ansel Adams on an optimistic day or a Bierstadt landscape if Bierstadt had wandered into forested higher latitudes. All was green and good and godly. All was God's evidence, God's sign. Except what belonged to Satan.

Ann walked with eyes cast down, as much the attitude of the highly devout as it was of the humble mushroom picker still instinctively casting for chanterelles. She retrieved a handful of petitions from the ground and picked up a Saint Christopher medal that made her remember against her will the Saint Christopher medal Mark Kidd had worn and how on more than one occasion he had forced her to clutch it between her teeth because that gave him an erotic charge while he held her by the throat and raped her. At those times she'd felt asthmatically strangled, close to death by asphyxiation; she'd felt the world of the living slip away in a flood of phosphorescent darkness. Walking, Ann tried to deflect her shame as she had tried many other times. She was sometimes seized not as much by memory as by the acute recognition of her haplessness in the face of physical aggression. Was rape, too, the will of God, like earthquakes, mud slides, and Sudden Infant Death Syndrome? Like everything that happened to Job? Like Jesus' crucifixion? Ann unfolded a petition and read,
Dear Blessed Ann of Oregon. My name is Sydney Ellen Mullen. Six weeks ago I was diagnosed with leukemia by a doctor in Reno, Nevada, where we live. I am married, 29 years old and have two children, a boy Joel 5 and a girl Erin 3. My husband is a firefighter and I have left him at home with our children in Reno so I could come here and, I pray, be healed by you. God bless.

I tried Christian Science but was not impressed, especially because I still have leukemia even after doing what it says in
Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures
and am supposed to be getting radiation this week and at the start of next week. A lot of thoughts go through your head when you're traveling alone (plus I slept in the car on the way, so that meant lonely night hours). One is that radiation and chemo are gifts from God and in turning away from both those treatments maybe I'm turning away from Him, which I don't want to be. So I guess I should take the radiation and chemo. A lot of people are helped by them. Maybe what God really gives us are miracles like radiation and chemo. What do you think about that possibility?

There's a verse from
Isaiah
I like a lot: Fear thou not; for I am with thee: be not dismayed; for I am thy God: I will strengthen thee; yea, I will help thee; yea, I will uphold thee with the right hand of my righteousness. This gives me strength. But it also raises issues. Maybe radiation is the right hand of righteousness. I think this trip up into the forests has convinced me I should just do the treatments, trust to the doctors and just do them, have faith. But I'm afraid of nausea. In radiation they slowly kill you in order to kill the cancer cells, which scares me. I'm afraid. That's the bottom line. I'm scared.

I believe in Our Lady and in prayers to Her & hope you will keep me in your prayers & will help me to find a miracle today & will ask Our Lady to intercede when you speak to her next time, please. And God bless & keep—Sydney Mullen.

There were a few hundred of these.

         

While the multitudes gathered at the place of apparitions, a report circulated that somewhere in the forest a statue of the Black Madonna had begun to glow a copper hue and that all around it in a shaft of light gold dust fell from the sky. In another version, rose petals fell as silently as snow while the Black Madonna radiated light in a nimbus or a halo. It was also said that these phenomena accrued in fact not to the Black Madonna but to a statue of Our Lady of Lourdes. Either way, pilgrims discussed and celebrated this meaningful adjunct spiritual occurrence. Some wandered off to see in privacy to their inevitable personal needs. Carolyn made a bullhorn speech about proper woodland sanitation, the principles of which were far easier to describe than to put into present practice. Most of the pilgrims did not want to dig or saw no valid reason to dig or would not entertain the possibility of digging without a tool. Instead they lifted out a swatch of moss, did what they came to do, and replaced the moss in, at best, superficial and cursory deference to etiquette. There were soon five hundred of these barely disguised shitholes and, before much longer, at least a thousand. Richard Olsen pointed some out to Sheriff Nelson and said, It's just what I warned you about, Sheriff, a health inspector who came up here would shut this all down right away. We already decided on twenty-four hours, said Nelson. And believe me, nature will clean things up. Shit don't really hurt dirt.