The Forms of Water

by Andrea Barrett

  “No,” Brendan said. The people who might be looking for them had likely gone to bed late and would sleep for hours. This was the time to travel—through the hours of the night watch, during the time when he used to wake silently, gather with the others in the choir stall, chant the psalms of matins, and then watch until dawn arrived. During his first years at the abbey, he’d managed to wake his body each night but his heart had been dull and heavy and his hours of meditation had only been waking sleep. Over time he’d gained a certain alertness, and by the end of his fifth year he’d come to cherish those hours beyond all others. Sometimes, in the utter quiet, he’d thought he heard the earth spinning on its axis. Even now he often woke in his bed at St. Benedict’s at two or three in the morning and rested silently until dawn, unable to pray but still able to watch and wait.

  Today he wanted to spend those hours driving. He sat up cautiously—his neck felt frail and thin inside his brace, and his intestines felt as painful and twisted as his toes. “We’ll miss all the traffic,” he told Henry. “The road will be clear, we’ll get to watch the sunrise. We’ll be at the reservoir in time for breakfast, and then we’ll have the whole day. Doesn’t that sound good?”

  Henry yawned so widely his jaw cracked. “If it’s what you want. I can drive if I get some coffee in me.” He clipped Bongo to a leash and stepped outside the van with him. In the silence Brendan heard the hiss and splatter as they relieved themselves. “Do you have to go?” Henry asked. “Do you need your cup?”

  “No. I can’t.”

  “I’ll just say good-bye to Jackson, then.”

  “Let him sleep,” Brendan said, thinking how Jackson was just beginning his long journey into solitude. “It’s all he has.”

  Henry put on a clean shirt he took from the box at the back of the van, and then he dug out some things from Brendan’s plastic bag and changed Brendan’s shirt and socks for him. The attendants at St. Benedict’s had known how to roll the old socks off and the new ones on, but Henry was astonishingly clumsy. “Didn’t you ever dress Lise and Delia?” Brendan asked.

  “They didn’t have feet like this.”

  In the dim light from the overhead bulb, Brendan contemplated his twisted toes, which looked like the neat, crushed packets of bones spit up by owls. Henry dabbed at Brendan’s face and hands, and then his own, with a T-shirt moistened with water from the jug he carried for Bongo. Then he slid Brendan off Jackson’s blankets and folded them into a pile on the ground. He lifted Brendan’s chair into the van and, after a good deal of struggling, managed to get Brendan back into his chair and the chair locked back into place. The garage was still dark and there was no sound from Jackson. Henry scribbled a note of thanks on the back of an envelope and wedged it into one of the lawn chairs.

  Finally, after Henry gathered up Kitty’s blankets and refolded them in back, and after he settled Bongo and found his Red Wings cap and asked Brendan what time it was and then cursed when he discovered that Brendan didn’t have a watch and that his own was tucked into Jackson’s pocket, he started the van and they eased their way down the rough dirt road. It had been dusk when they arrived and was very dark now. After a minute Henry said, “Hell. I don’t have any idea where we’re going.”

  “Just follow your nose,” Brendan said. They banged and rattled through the woods until they came out on a small paved road, which led in turn to a larger road. There, after a few miles, they found an all-night convenience store with a gas pump. Henry bought some gas and some coffee, grumbling about how little money they had left. The sleepy woman who waited on them gave them directions back to their original route.

  “Are you awake enough to drive?” Brendan asked. Henry sucked at his coffee as if it were air. Brendan sipped at his—it was fresh and it tasted fine.

  “Sure,” Henry said. “I’ll just get something going on the radio here, some chatter to keep us entertained. Then we’ll cruise.”

  Brendan had envisioned himself slipping silently through the liquid darkness, alert for the gentle graying that would mark the sun’s arrival, but the talk show Henry settled on was not, after the first shock, so unpleasant after all. It ran from two A.M. until six each day, and as Brendan listened to the various callers, men and women, rational or deranged, opinionated or gentle-voiced or full of rage and confusion, he was touched to think of all these souls looking for answers during the same dark hours in which he and his companions had searched their hearts. Alone in their rooms, connected by telephones and a web of radio waves, they pondered questions and looked for answers in common. Is abortion wrong? the show’s host asked. A flurry of answers followed. Should we educate our children at home? If a burglar enters your home at night, and you shoot him and he has no weapon, is it murder? Some of the talk was foolish, some of it not. Some callers broke into the subject at hand and said, “I want to tell you a story—something that happened to me, that may interest your audience,” and then related the most astonishing tales. Their voices were broken by time and pain; they gave no names. In place of a church, a priest, a confessional, they had the anonymous absolution of strangers.

  “This goes on every night?” Brendan asked.

  “Every night, all night. There’s one on almost every station.”

  “No kidding.”

  While Brendan listened, the dark road fell away before their headlights. They passed through Nelliston and Fonda and Amsterdam, East Glenville and Scotia and Niskayuna, and the road was so empty that each new set of headlights startled him. The headlights paled, the sky began to lighten, the Mohawk River appeared beneath a cloak of mist. They crossed the Hudson at Watervliet, just south of where the Mohawk poured in and around the time that a band of gold appeared on the horizon. They saw flocks of birds in Cropseyville and a few more cars and the first movements in diners and houses, and then the show was over and the news came on and then the weather.

  “A gorgeous day,” the announcer said. “Clear, bright, highs in the upper seventies.” And then it was day.

  The night watch had been painful for Brendan in China—arid, often despairing. His troubles had stuck in his mind like a swarm of bees, and when he sat in silent prayer the bees rose and buzzed between his ears. The sun had streamed into the cold stone church during lauds and illuminated the faces of his Chinese brethren: of Brother Anthony, who had been poisoned, and Brother Seraphim, whose head had been smashed by rocks; of Brothers Camillus and Anselm, who had died of dysentery during the march; of Brother Norbert, who had broken both legs falling off the narrow mountain trail. They were all gone, as were his companions at Our Lady of the Valley, and yet it was day, and he was alive, and he was out on the road and the sky was soft and golden. Behind Henry’s back, he made the hand signs for the names of all the brothers he could remember.

  They dropped south through the Berkshire Hills and then drove east on roads that grew smaller and smaller. As they began to head north again, Brendan recognized several small towns he’d visited as a boy. They turned left, right, left again, past new houses, new schools, new shopping centers; old churches and cemeteries; women jogging with dogs who set Bongo barking; small boys tossing balls. They came to a road running, narrow and twisted and pale, like a nerve beside a river. Then, almost without warning, they turned at a stop sign and came upon a shady square that looked much as it had fifty years ago.

  “Stop,” Brendan said, his voice shaking with excitement. “Stop here.”

  “Is this it?”

  “Almost. We’re so close I can smell it. The dam is right here in this town—this is the last one in the valley, the only one that was left. I can’t believe we got this far.”

  Henry shook his head and rubbed his eyes. “I can’t either. There’s a coffee shop over there—how about I pull up and get us a little breakfast?”

  “Get whatever you want. I’ll wait here with Bongo.”

  Henry parked in one of the diagonal spaces fringing the square, under a horse chestnut covered with waxy blossoms. He lowered himself stif
fly to the ground. “I’ll be back in five minutes. You’ll be all right?”

  “Fine.” And although Brendan was as numb as a block of wood, although his eyes ached and his head throbbed and his hands were freezing, he still felt wonderful. Of course the names on the storefronts differed from those he remembered, and the big white houses surrounding the square had been cut into apartments or torn down or repainted, and of course the feed store was gone and so was the five-and-dime, but the post office was still in place and so were the Masonic Hall and the Congregational church. The square itself, with its center fountain and the wooden benches and the huge old oaks and sycamores, looked almost exactly as he’d remembered it, a cousin to the square in his vanished village.

  On one of the benches near the sidewalk in front of the van, an old man was feeding pigeons. He had a big plastic sack on his lap, full of stale bread, and as Brendan watched he cast a handful of crusts around his feet. The birds, white and gray and tan and mottled, pecked at the crusts and at each other. The man threw some crusts away from the main clump of birds, toward two pigeons too shy or too young to fend for themselves, and when the other birds rushed in that direction he threw more crusts, distracting them, so that the two outsiders could eat. Then he took a bite from his own breakfast, a doughnut folded in white waxed paper.

  His appetite, and his obvious enjoyment, made Brendan think back to the days when he could still eat happily. At his place in the refectory at Our Lady of the Valley, he had had a water jug, a spoon, a fork, a knife, a heavy mug, an enameled plate, and a large napkin draped over his mug. He’d eaten in silence, like the others, signing with his hands for bread or salt and listening to the low voice of the reader while he savored each mouthful. When he was done, he’d rinsed his utensils in his mug and dried them with his napkin, emptied the water from his mug into his soup bowl and dried the mug, and then draped his napkin over the mug, as it had been in the beginning. He’d given thanks for the food he’d eaten, but he’d never thought to give thanks for the desire or the ability to eat it.

  Hunger had left him long ago, and now even the ability to force down food was gone, but he watched the old man and his pigeons with pleasure. The man finished his meal and scattered the rest of his crumbs. Then, to Brendan’s astonishment, he rose and made his way slowly to the van. The bench was no more than twenty feet away, but it hadn’t occurred to Brendan that, sitting with his face pressed to the window, he was as visible to the man as the man was to him.

  The man wore a short-sleeved white shirt, open at the neck, and faded pants belted high on his stomach. His face was blotched with liver spots and his eyes were pale and watery. Although he looked to be about Brendan’s age, his white hair was still very thick and rose in a neat brush cut. Brendan raised a shaky hand to his own wispy strands and Bongo barked as the man tapped on the window. Brendan needed both hands to roll the window down.

  “Morning,” the man said brightly. “Fine day, isn’t it?”

  In his voice, Brendan heard the loneliness and eagerness for talk that had made him wheel his own chair out to the stoplight near St. Benedict’s. He wondered if this man sat on the bench each morning, snagging passersby. “It is,” he agreed.

  “Couldn’t help but notice your van. You new in town?”

  “Just passing through.” Brendan found it odd to be on the receiving end of one of these conversational ambushes. Imagine, he thought. A man so lonely he wants to talk to me. He made an effort to be friendly. “I used to live around here,” he said. “A long time ago.”

  “Did you.” The man leaned toward the van, craning his neck for a better look at Brendan’s face. “Would you be having family here still?”

  “They’re all gone,” Brendan said. “We were from Pomeroy—one of the villages that’s under the reservoir now.”

  The man’s face brightened. “Hell, my family lived in Nipmuck—what’s your name?”

  “Brendan Auberon.” Nipmuck had been the second village down from Pomeroy, just south of Stillwater and Stillwater Falls. He had once climbed two-thirds of the way up a horse chestnut in front of the church and seen the entire valley spread out below him. Had they cut down that tree? “My parents were Frank and Eileen Auberon,” he continued. “They had a place out Williamson Road, near the abbey.”

  “Brendan? You’re Brendan? Don’t you remember me?”

  Brendan couldn’t find a trace in this man of anyone he’d ever known. “Marcus O’Brian,” the man said. Brendan searched his memory.

  “Your brother was the one I really knew,” Marcus explained. “Frankie and I were altar boys together, and I used to come out to your folks’ place sometimes. Frankie and I went into the service the same month. But that was later, after you took off.”

  “Marcus,” Brendan said. A hazy memory surfaced—a small, wiry, red-haired boy who had tagged after him, along with Frank junior, during some of his rambles through the woods. Marcus and his family had walked to the Catholic church in Pomeroy each Sunday, and after Mass, Frank junior had often brought Marcus home.

  “Your folks had the summer camp,” Brendan said. “Camp Nichewaug, where all the rich kids from Boston came.” Was the camp gone? The tidy white bungalows, the warm wooden docks with the splintery ramps, the canoes lined upside down on the racks?

  “That’s right. Of course that’s gone now.” Marcus rocked on his heels. “Do you have a few minutes? Why don’t you come out and sit with me for a while?”

  “I can’t.” Brendan realized that Marcus could see only his head and shoulders through the window. “But why don’t you come in?”

  Marcus fumbled with the van door, and then his face fell as he saw Brendan’s wheelchair. “Ah,” he said. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know. You’ve been in that long?”

  He climbed into the van and sat down in the passenger seat. “Long enough,” Brendan said.

  “The war? No, of course not. You went into the monastery, I remember. After high school. And then when they tore it down, they sent you all away. I heard some of the brothers went to Tennessee.”

  “Not me. I went to China—I was there during the Japanese occupation. That’s when this happened.” Brendan pointed to his legs. “Just arthritis. But it got a little out of hand.”

  “China? You monks get around.”

  Brendan made a face. “I left the Order thirty years ago.”

  “No,” Marcus said. “You didn’t.”

  “I did.”

  Marcus leaned forward and rested his hands on his knees. “Was it women?” he whispered.

  Brendan laughed. Marcus and Frank junior, he remembered, had once been caught getting drunk on sacramental wine. “No,” he said. “Not women. It was a lot of things—I was just worn out. It stopped making sense to me.”

  “I can see that. Never made sense to me in the first place. All those lists and rules—I was sick of it by the time we were out of school. Remember Father Quinn?”

  “Who could forget him?” Brendan said, but then he turned the conversation. When he’d dreamed of this trip, he’d never thought he might see anyone he knew. For years he’d thought of himself as the valley’s last survivor, although there was no reason why this should be so—he was only eighty and plenty of people lived longer than that. There were plenty more, a few years younger than him, who might still remember the valley and yet be only in their seventies. But as glad as he was to see another survivor, he found that he didn’t want to call back his childhood. Or not yet, at any rate, and not here: just thinking of his old home, with the woods stretched all around him and Frank junior still alive and making mischief with Marcus, was enough to make his heart stutter. He remembered that he and Marcus hadn’t really been very close, especially as they’d grown older. But your parents, Marcus had said when he’d heard of Brendan’s decision to enter the Order. Who’s going to help them out? You’re leaving Frankie stuck with everything. Hadn’t Marcus said that, sixty-odd years ago?

  “But what have you been up to all these years?” h
e asked Marcus now. “What happened to you after I left?”

  “I moved to Athol when they cleared the valley. Worked there for a while. Then there was the war. Then I came back, got married—Annemarie Scanlon, you probably don’t remember her—and we had three kids. I sold insurance, thirty years. Annemarie died in ‘74.”

  Marcus paused and ran his fingers over the dash. He had tufts of white hair in his ears, Brendan saw. They made him look like an old cat. “Two of my kids live in Michigan now. One’s on the West Coast. I live here.” Marcus gestured toward a shabby white house across the square. “I’ve got a nice room there, and a nice part-time job—you know. It’s just a life.”

  Just a life, thought Brendan. As if anyone’s were ever that. He longed for details, but when he tried to imagine telling Marcus about his own life, he could see why Marcus had been so brief. It would take hours, days, for them to explain themselves to each other, and the telling would mean reliving everything. And who could stand that? Just surviving was work enough.

  He felt tired, suddenly—enormously, overwhelmingly tired—and he wished he’d found Marcus a decade ago, when he’d still had some energy. His hands shaped a few signs in the air, the first signs of the Lord’s Prayer, but he didn’t realize they’d done so until he looked up and saw Marcus watching him curiously. “We used to hear you guys talked to each other with your hands,” Marcus said.

  “True enough,” Brendan said, but he tucked his hands under his shirt and willed them to be still. Bongo, who’d been watching them patiently, sighed and yawned and flopped to the floor and closed his eyes. Brendan wished he could lie down beside him.

  “Nice dog.” Marcus reached down and scratched Bongo’s ears. “Yours?”

  “My nephew’s. He’s the one who’s driving—he went to get some coffee.” Brendan was so tired he thought he might be asleep already, his eyes open but his brain completely disconnected. He struggled to keep the conversation going. “This job you have. What is it?”