“Hook,” Dylan said, handing him the phone.
It was the Man With No Hands. After he got the small talk out of the way he asked if Mick could give him a ride someplace.
“Sure. Just tell me where and when.”
“I need to go out to Conyers. It’s about an hour from here.”
“I know where Conyers is. What time?”
“Uh, well, we need to leave early. Is there any way you could pick me up at the bridge at five thirty?”
“Five thirty in the morning?” He’d caught Mick by surprise. He’d figured they were talking about a doctor’s office or something, maybe nine or ten o’clock.
“Yes,” the Man said. “I know it’s early, but it’s important.”
Saturday morning. Layne would be home with the kids.
“Well, yeah, okay. I can do that. Five thirty, by the bridge.”
* * *
Mick spotted him in the headlights as he drove across the bridge, waiting patiently, alone in the darkest part of town. He punched the Off button to kill the radio before he pulled onto the shoulder.
Driving east in the darkness on a deserted Saturday morning expressway, Mick asked the obvious question.
“Where are we going?”
“The monastery,” the Man With No Hands said. He was dressed in his usual khakis. Didn’t look like he was going to church.
“What for?”
He was silent for a minute. “Well, ah . . . you’ll see.”
Mick might have been a little ticked if anybody else had gotten him up in the middle of the night, made him drive out to a church in the middle of nowhere, and then had the nerve to be all mysterious about it. But he’d been around the Man With No Hands long enough to know that there was usually a good reason for the things he did. Besides, there was a presence about him. Mick trusted him.
“So, are you like ... a monk?” Mick asked. He wasn’t even really sure what that meant.
A chuckle. “No, I never took a vow. I’m treated more like a guest these days.”
High streetlights swept by on the sides of the expressway, light coming and going.
“You’re a strange man,” Mick said.
“Oh? How so?”
“Living the way you do. You don’t belong in that world.”
“None of us belongs in this world,” the Man said. “We’re just passing through.”
“I meant the world under those bridges. The homeless world. And you’re preaching again—I hate when you do that.”
“I preach all the time,” he explained. “I just don’t use words most of the time.”
Mick had to smile at that. He was beginning to understand the Man. “What I meant was, I still don’t really understand why you live down there. You’re not a junkie anymore—you could make a life for yourself. At the very least you could have stayed at the monastery. Why do you do what you do?”
“Gratitude,” he said. He had the answer right there, as strange as it was, and it rolled out without a second’s hesitation.
“Gratitude,” Mick repeated. Switching to the left lane to pass a semi, he glanced at the smile on the old man’s face. He was dead serious. “For what? Having hooks on the ends of your arms?”
He laughed out loud at that. “Yes, I suppose so. That’s actually a pretty good analogy.”
Mick waited, figuring he would explain. He did.
“This place, where we’re going—I learned things. When I first got there I couldn’t do much of anything with these hooks. I was clumsy, inept, frustrated. They took me in, and then they put me to work. They taught me to use these hands for simple tasks at first, and then harder ones. They gave me patience, perseverance and dexterity. In their silence, they taught me the meaning of love beyond judgment.”
He held his hooks up in front of him and stared at them with a kind of reverence.
“So, yes, as strange as it may sound, I am grateful for these hands. They’ve never held a syringe. They’re stainless. Indestructible. What I choose to do with them, I do out of gratitude.”
Driving on in silence, the lights flashing past, it occurred to Mick that the Man was a pretty good preacher, even when he used words.
* * *
They pulled down a long drive lined with low trees and parked off to the right, in the parking lot of a little gift shop. No other cars were there. The shop was closed and dark.
Ahead of them, beyond a scattering of poplars on a manicured lawn, sat an imposing structure, tall and white and pointed, with a square bell tower on the left side.
“The abbey church,” the Man With No Hands said. “The brothers came here in the forties and built most of this with their own hands. They believe in hard work.”
A small light mounted up high near the bell tower gave just enough light so they could see their way across the lawn to the front of the church. The massive front doors were bolted, so the Man With No Hands led Mick around to a side door and into a stairwell leading up to the balcony.
Mick had never been in a church building like that one. It was one of those places where the inside was bigger than the outside. The ceiling curved to a point high above, supported by a series of graceful arches. The same simple arch pattern repeated itself again and again down the side aisles and in the two rows of stained-glass windows, one high and one low. The windows were dark. The two of them were alone there, and the sanctuary—the Man called it “the nave”—was lit only by a few candles on tables near the corners and a small candelabra down in front. Just enough light. There was a stillness about the place, a towering silence that made Mick want to walk on the edges of his feet and hold his breath. When they sat down in the front of the balcony the old hardwood pew gave out a groan that echoed from the rafters like thunder.
“They’ll be in presently,” the Man whispered. “The morning service starts at seven.”
“Early risers,” Mick said.
A smile. “This is the second service for the brothers. They rise for vigils at four. Listen, you can stay here if you like. I’m going down there for a bit. I’ll be back.”
Leaving Mick alone in the balcony, the old man retraced his steps down the back stairwell they had just come up, and emerged below in the broad aisle running down the center of the church. He walked very softly as he made his way past a few rows of pews at the back, past two long rows of raised seats facing each other in the middle, and right down to where the aisle ended and the dais began. He got down on his knees there, alone in the front of that huge place, and lowered his head.
Mick turned off his cell phone. Even that little chirp seemed to rattle around the top of the arches like a cannon shot.
The Man With No Hands knelt down front without making a move or a sound for a good twenty minutes. Sitting up there alone in the balcony with his elbows on the rail and looking out over that cavernous place, the quiet got to Mick. It felt to him as if the silence itself came and wrapped softly around him and took everything away, just stripped away all the craziness and busyness—the kids and chickens and goats and dogs—and left him nothing but quiet. Right then he felt like he could have reached out and touched God, and deep down he knew—if God was anywhere, he was in that silence.
Then, as the upper level of stained-glass windows started turning from black to purple, the houselights came up a little. The monks in their robes began to file in and find their places in the raised seats on the sides, a few regular people straggled in to sit in the pews, and the Man With No Hands struggled to his feet and ambled back down the aisle with the swaying, precarious walk of a man whose legs are half asleep. A lot of the monks waved to him as he passed, and one or two came out and put an arm around him.
Mick didn’t remember much about the service. Somebody read from the Bible, a trio of monks sang some kind of chant without accompaniment, everybody recited words back and forth, and one guy—the head monk, Mick figured—stood at a little lectern down front and spoke. Later Mick would not remember what the head monk talked about, but he would
remember thinking that the man was intelligent and well-spoken, and he had worthwhile things to say. It was all very quiet and orderly. Dignified. Nothing at all like the church Mick remembered from his childhood. The Man With No Hands sat beside him through the whole thing but Mick didn’t ask any questions because he didn’t want to bother him. He figured this must have been what the Man came here for.
But beyond the silence and the dignity and the strangely beautiful music, the thing that impressed Mick the most was the light. As the sun came up, the stained glass came to life and he noticed that the arched windows were made of a million little colored glass triangles held together by veins of lead. In the beginning the sunlight infused the windows themselves with iridescence, and Mick sat and stared at them like works of art, which they were. But as the sun rose higher a million shards of glass fired color into the air until the rafters sang with an incredible blue and red and purple light. Mick pretty much forgot what was going on down below. Except for the Man With No Hands, he was alone in the balcony at the back, and it felt to him as if the dignified, reverent things they were doing down there belonged to someone else.
The light was for him. And it was singing.
Walking outside later the Man With No Hands asked him what he thought of the service.
He shrugged. “I liked the music, and the light. Never seen anything quite like that light. Apart from that, I didn’t understand much of it.”
“Yes. I suppose the rituals are different from what you’re accustomed to.”
“To tell you the truth, I’m not much on ritual of any kind,” Mick said.
The Man’s eyebrows went up. “Everybody needs rituals. They help people feel safe and secure.”
He showed Mick around the grounds and told him a little about the building of the place.
“The guesthouse was the first building to go up,” he said. “There’s a story the brothers tell about a man from the town hired to help with the construction. He had a very large voice and a particularly colorful vocabulary, and whenever one of his coworkers tried to get him to curb his profanity he would just get louder. But every time he let fly with an expletive there was this one brother who would just bow his head for a moment. Whatever he was doing, he would just stop and bow his head. He never said a word, but after a while the carpenter stopped swearing.”
He smiled, thinking about it. “It was here that I learned a man doesn’t have to preach. All he has to do is bow.”
The sun was well up when they arrived in the bonsai gardens—rows of windswept miniature trees on long worktables. Some of them had little handwritten tags pinned into the moss at their feet telling who had planted them, how long ago, and what kind of tree it was. Some of them were very old.
“This is where I worked most of the time,” he said. “These are my friends.” There were people around, a few monks and a few visitors, but Mick understood the Man With No Hands was talking about the trees. “I learned patience in this place, how to trim and prune—and wait. I helped to shape some of these trees, and they helped to shape me.”
* * *
They stopped for breakfast after they left the monastery, and then hit the expressway heading back toward town. They were almost home before Mick remembered the manila folder on the dash. His pictures. He pulled the folder down, laid it on the seat between them and explained about the juried show.
“I still don’t have much confidence in them,” Mick said. “Start talking about art galleries and professional critics, and I’m out of my element.”
The Man With No Hands laid the folder open on the seat and picked them up one at a time, holding each photograph between his hooks and studying it for a long time.
“Extraordinary,” he said quietly. “God has his hand on you.”
“Huh?”
“This,” he said, touching a hook to the stack. “This is a gift.”
“Yeah, that’s what Aubrey says. But what’s that got to do with God?”
He laughed. “A gift, by definition, has to come from someplace. Let me ask you something, Mick. Have you felt, lately, as if your life and circumstances were being . . . steered?”
The question troubled him, and he didn’t answer right away. He was busy turning off the expressway ramp and merging into street traffic, and he was glad for the interruption. The bridge was only a few blocks away.
“Well?” The Man kept watching him, waiting.
“I don’t know,” Mick lied. “Look, I’m just an ordinary guy trying to live an ordinary life.”
He shook his head, laughing again. “There are no ordinary guys, Mick.”
As he said that Mick was slowing the truck, pulling onto the shoulder of the road at the end of the bridge. From where they were sitting they could look down the hill and see the hive of homeless people under the bridge.
“The people around here look plenty ordinary to me,” Mick said.
“I’m talking about potential. Do you think these people have found their gifts? Reached their potential? I believe every one of us was designed—in his mother’s womb, before birth—to do something extraordinary. The trick, if I may call it that, is in avoiding all the distractions, learning to hear and recognize the voice that guides you into your gift.”
Mick switched off the engine. “You’re preaching again.”
“Yes, I am. You see that thin man down there whipping the column with a broken fishing rod?”
“Uh-huh.” Young. Barefoot. Shirtless. A ton of hair. He was wearing that column out.
“His name’s Bill. Eight years ago he was the youngest man ever to pass the state bar. But he had to stay up nights cramming, and he discovered the magic of speed. He never sleeps anymore. He’s also not a lawyer anymore—he doesn’t even know who he is anymore, and it’s just a matter of time until his heart collapses under the strain. He wasn’t designed to be ordinary. The man could have been a senator if he hadn’t sold his soul for amphetamines.”
“Sold his soul. Is that what you call it? I don’t know, preacher, it seems to me you go out of your way to make everything a God story. In the real world, people don’t sell their souls.”
“Sure they do.”
“Only in the movies. And then only so they can get rich and famous, or incredibly talented, or powerful—not so they can live under a bridge.”
“Right, but in the movies it’s always a lie, isn’t it? Most people do sell their soul, they just can’t get their price.” His eyes were watching Bill whip the column with the remains of a fishing rod.
Mick’s fingers drummed on the steering wheel. “So, what’s your point?”
“You have to let go, Mick. You have to give your soul away, let it go—because it’s not a matter of commerce, it’s a matter of faith.” He looked Mick in the eye and wiggled one of his hooks at him when he said this. It sent a chill through him and made him look away.
“Anyway,” Mick said, in a blatant attempt to change the subject and draw attention back to the pictures, “Aubrey wants me to come up with titles for some of these for the show. I ain’t got a clue.”
“Really? It doesn’t seem hard at all. You have only to see the story behind the picture.”
Mick thumbed through the stack and handed him the one of Ben watching his kite soar away. It was a head shot. Ben had his hands together, looking up at the distant sky, and his eyes were positively lit.
“He was watching a kite,” he explained. He didn’t bother with the rest of the story; he wanted to know what the picture said on its own.
“That’s hope,” the Man With No Hands said, just like that. He recognized it instantly, the way Mick might have recognized a picture of a baseball and said, “Oh, that’s a baseball.”
Mick took the photograph back, pulled a pen out of the pocket in the dash and wrote HOPE across the back. Then he handed him the one of the old home with the empty rockers on the porch and Ben peeking out the right-hand window.
“Emptiness,” the Man said. Again, instantly.
“Why emptiness?”
“The rockers, the house. The aftertaste of death and loss.”
“But it’s not empty.” Mick pointed to Ben’s face. “See?”
He nodded. “Yes, I saw that. There’s always hope. Death and loss is never the end of the story. They always leave something behind. That’s what makes this a great picture.”
He scribbled EMPTINESS on the back.
When Mick handed him the picture of the little black kid hugging the pack the Man With No Hands laughed out loud. “They call him Dirt,” he said. “I love that kid. I hope he makes it. This one’s easy—it’s joy.”
The one of Dylan handing the loaf of bread to the old guy under the bridge he called charity. That one Mick could have almost done himself. The one of Toad leaning out the door of the old house in her faded cotton dress he called hunger.
When Mick handed him the picture of Toad flying through the air toward his outstretched hands he had the weirdest reaction of all. He busted out in a bright, celebratory laugh, the way Mick would laugh if his clean-up hitter hit a ninth-inning walk-off home run. It was a laugh of pure joy.
“I can’t believe you don’t see this one,” he said, still laughing. “This one’s a snap.”
Mick took the picture back, looked at it for a long time, and finally conceded. “I’m afraid I just don’t see whatever it is you’re seeing.”
“It’s faith. Children are full of uncluttered, unbroken, unembarrassed faith. They just have it in them, like they’re born with it. We lose it somehow, growing up. Life drives it down like a nail, and we forget. We grow up, we learn the reasons behind things, we see the springs in the clock, and bit by bit we forget how to believe in something we can’t explain. I’m old now. I own the wisdom of bitter experience, but you know what? I’d trade thirty years of experience for thirty seconds of a child’s faith.”
Mick looked at the picture again.
Summer of Light Page 19
