The priest put on his reading glasses, unfolded the paper, and studied the writing.
“Hmmm. Looks like ancient Hebrew.”
“That's what I thought. Can you translate it?”
“Well, I think so…I studied it while I was in the seminary, but…” He squinted.“Let's see. It's addressed to…” he began haltingly,“…‘to the chosen others who…who follow and are granted the right to gaze on these hallowed works, the keepers of…of the Sacred Spirit of Anterra, holders of these eternal truths.”Without lifting his head, the old priest looked questioningly up at Tripoli over the rims of spectacles.
“Please, go on,” he urged.
“‘May this flame continue to burn and shed its light on this noble planet, hear the word of Anterra.’”
“Anterra?” echoed Tripoli.
The priest sounded out the letters again. “Yes, An-ter-ra.”
“Does that mean anything to you?”
“Anterra?” He shook his head and handed back the paper. “Never heard of it. This is from those books, I suppose?”
Tripoli nodded.
“And these books?”
“Well, they got me thinking…”
“About?”
“Oh, life and death. Love. Our purpose in being here on the Earth—if there is any. Our responsibility to others. Other people. Other creatures. The planet itself.”
“And what have you discovered?”
Tripoli hesitated to commit himself.“I’m not really sure. But I find myself thinking about things I haven’t thought about before. I’ve always known that I was going to die—as a cop you see death a lot, face it every day. But suddenly now it's taken on a different aspect. I find it frightening and humbling but also, in an odd way, liberating. If I can come to accept my mortality, feel it truly, then I become open to the things that may really be important. Do you know what I’m talking about?”
“Of course,” said the priest. “You know there's a line in Hamlet…”
Tripoli shrugged. Except for a few selections in high school, he had never really read any Shakespeare.
“Hamlet says to his Horatio,‘The readiness is all.’”
Tripoli paused, thinking.“Yes, that's good. The readiness is all.”
“It's about that boy, isn’t it?” said the priest finally.
Tripoli couldn’t mask his surprise.“What makes you say that?”
The cleric's face crinkled in a smile. “It doesn’t take much to come to that conclusion. You’d have to be all but brain dead in this town, this country, not to have heard about him.”
“The listening,” uttered Tripoli.
“Yes, the listening,” echoed the old man. He steepled his hands and stared thoughtfully up at the ceiling. “Well, I’ve been thinking about that myself. There's a parable in the Bible. In Matthew.” He reached behind him and took the book off his shelf. “Christ talks about a sower who went forth to sow seeds.” He wet his finger and thumbed through the book as he spoke. “Some seeds fall by the wayside and the birds come and devour them. Others fall upon rocky places where there's no earth and the seedlings soon get scorched by the sun. Still others land upon thorns and the thorns grow up and choke them. Ah, here we are…” he interrupted himself, then began to read: “‘…and others fell upon the ground and yielded fruit, some a hundred-fold, some sixty, some thirty.”
Tripoli looked at him eagerly.“You mean…?”
“‘He that hath ears, let him hear.’”
“Oh…” uttered Tripoli.
“What's interesting is that the parable begins with ‘Harken.’ And then there are those last words.” He intoned them again, this time ever more slowly. “‘He that hath ears let him hear.’ We assume that because the initiative is with the speaker that the message controls the hearer. But, Lou, it's just to the contrary. An appeal, even the appeal of Jesus, may be frustrated by unreceptiveness. The inability to listen.”
“And you think the boy is a messiah?”
“No. Of course not. But…through the ages the Lord has, from time to time, as He has chosen them, employed His messengers. It's a question, of course, of our being open to listening. A question of the ground being prepared to accept the seeds of wisdom. Fertile and unchoked.”
They spoke for a long hour after that. Then the priest walked Tripoli to the door of the church.
“If you want to talk further,” said the priest, taking his hand, “I’m always here.”
The faint but insistent tapping kept chewing into the edges of Molly's sleep. She rolled over away from the window and tried to bury herself into the pillow, but it kept drilling into her consciousness like a rodent gnawing at her ears.
“Huh?” She awoke with a start and shot upright in bed.
Her eyes went immediately to Daniel's cot. He was in a deep sleep. The noise, however, kept up and at last she realized it was coming from her window: a coin or key was being struck against the pane. The illuminated digits on her clock read 3:20. Cautiously, Molly separated the slats in the blinds and peeked out. At first, she couldn’t recognize the man. Didn’t expect to see him with the beginnings of a beard. Then she eased up the blind and asked, “What's up?”
Tripoli motioned for her and she climbed out of bed and unlocked the front door. “What's the trouble?” she asked, standing barefoot in the doorway. The linoleum was cold, and she was still fuzzy with sleep.
“No trouble,” he said in a whisper, slipped in, and closed the door softly behind him.“I just wanted to talk to you.”
“Huh? At three in the morning!”
“I just wanted to make sure Daniel's okay.”
“Of course he is. He's sleeping.”
“Good. Can I see him?”
He looked haggard. She glanced out the window and saw no sign of a car.“How’d you get here?”
“Oh, I was out walking…” he answered nebulously,“…and then just…just came by.”
Molly took a hard look at him. His clothes were rumpled, the furrows in his face were deep, and the skin hung loose around his neck. Town was a good three miles away.
“Have you been drinking?” she asked.
“Of course not!” he retorted.
“I haven’t seen you in ages.”
“Yeah, I know. I’ve been busy.”
“What's up? You don’t look so good. Looks like you lost weight,” she said, surveying him. It looked as if he had shed pounds, and his skin had an unhealthy pallor as though he hadn’t seen daylight in ages. And his eyes burnt with an intensity that frightened Molly.“Are you okay, Trip?”
“Yeah. Sure. Can I see him?” he asked again.“Just take a look at him. I won’t wake him—I promise.”
It was an odd request.“Cripes,” said Molly. Shaking her head, she relented and led him towards the bedroom. She opened the door, and Tripoli tiptoed into the darkened room.
Daniel was sleeping deeply; his eyes were closed and his lids fluttered in dream. His features, nested in the pillow, were cast in a soft repose.
Tripoli went to the bed, knelt down at the edge, and bowed his head, staring down at the boy. He said nothing, did nothing, just knelt there in silence, his chin resting on his hand. It reminded Molly of that strange couple, with their sickly little boy, who had accosted them.
Daniel, as if sensing Tripoli's presence, smiled in his sleep. His face reminded Tripoli of angels one saw in frescoes painted on the ceilings of Italian churches. Tripoli reached out and lovingly stroked the little boy's cheek with his fingertips.
“I’ve got to get to sleep, Trip,” whispered Molly into his ear, breaking the spell. “I’ve got a full day ahead of me.”
Together, they slipped out of the bedroom. Tripoli took Molly's hand as they stood in the darkened kitchen. “We’ve got to protect him,” he said, his voice soft and throaty.
“Well, of course!”
“Nurture his gifts.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You can’t send him to school,” he sa
id right out.
“Who…?”
“Daniel told me. He's worried. You can’t do it.”
“Of course I can. And I will. And I have to.”
“Putting an exceptional boy like Daniel in an ordinary school is ludicrous. It's a recipe for disaster. Believe me. Look, I’ve got a much better idea. I’ve thought it all through. We don’t have to get married right away if you don’t want to. You could just move out with me. And Daniel loves my place. There's plenty of room. It's in the country. We’ll fix it up together.”
“Do we have to talk about this now, at three in the morning?”
“You can stay home with him.”
“But I don’t want to stay home. I like to work. I’ve got to have some kind of life too.”
“Okay, then I’ll stay home with him.”
“And take care of him?”
“Sure,” he said.“We can school him at home. I’ve got it all figured out.”
“Oh, you’re going to quit your job?”
“That's no problem. I’ve got a little bit of savings that’ll carry us through until the spring. I’ve got lots of land. Then we’ll start growing crops. The soil isn’t the greatest, but we can grow enough for us and then some to sell. I was thinking of doing vegetables. Maybe beans and tomatoes. Some melons.”
“Trip!”
“And we’ve already got some animals. They’ll have babies. We’ve got milk. Cheese. There's wool.”
She tried to interrupt, but he kept excitedly pushing on. The more he talked, the more he sounded like Danny. Like a little kid. The less like a life's partner.
“Trip, will you do me a favor? Just go home and go to sleep, please.”
“The wild fires and hurricanes, the heat waves and floods, the crops that have failed in Canada and…I suddenly understand,” he said with an intensity that frightened her.“The world's on the brink of catastrophe! And we’ve got to do something—”
She looked at him as if he were a stranger.
“The tornado that hit town,” he pleaded, clutching both her hands in his.“You saw that with your own eyes, right?”
She realized that she had made the mistake of nodding, and that had launched him further. He started going on about some books he had found, about Anterra, the spirit of Anterra.
“Anterra?” she said.
“I’m a little punchy, I realize that. I haven’t slept much. And maybe I’m not making perfect sense right now, but—”
“Well then go home and go to sleep.”
“Daniel. You don’t understand how important he is. He's the key. The link in the—”
“And let me go back to sleep, too, willya?”
She pushed him out the door, but he was still rambling on, even as she locked it behind him.
After he left, Molly couldn’t go back to sleep, much as she needed to. Was Tripoli, she wondered, turning into another one of these fanatics who believed that Danny could make the lame walk and the blind see? Obviously he was going through a rough time, still blaming himself for the old man's death. School, she thought. Of course he had to go! Keep Danny at home? That would just isolate him further, make him yet more different. The poor boy needed a chance to live his life, make friends, play in a school yard, for God's sake. Baseball. Basketball. Football. Molly didn’t care what. And she wanted a life for him, not just for herself. She wanted him to dance and fall in love with a nice girl, have a decent job, not become a mystical goat herder. All she desired at that instant was to save him from the world, not burden him with the task of saving the world from itself. If it was burning up, that wasn’t his making. Oh, dear God, she thought, help me do what's right.
“It just hit me!” said Rosie bolting upright in bed. She rolled over and shook Ed, who was sound asleep.
“Huh?” he said, slow to rouse. ‘What the…What's going on?” He blinked in the darkness trying to focus.
“He's getting ready to take off again.”
“Who?”
“Daniel. Daniel!”
Ed raised himself up on an elbow. Yawned and scratched his chest.
“That's why he insisted that we walk over to the railroad beds.”
“What time is it?” Ed squinted at the illuminated numerals on the clock.“Shit, four! Rosie, I’ve got to get up in another hour.”
“Will you just listen to me!” Rosie turned on the light by the bed.
“Do I have any choice?” He blinked in the pain of the bright light. Hearing Rosie's heated voice, the babies started mewling for milk.
“If she puts him into school, he's gone.” Rosie stumbled out of bed. Her feet and hands were swollen again. When she went to pick up the twins, she noticed that there was a new, large bruise on her arm. She found another on her leg, but couldn’t remember injuring herself.“I’ve been spending some time alone with Daniel,” she said as she brought the babies back into the bed. “Here, hang onto Freddy a second.” She popped open one side of her nursing bra. “The things that little boy knows. The things he says…” She took Freddy back and brought the infant's hungry mouth to her nipple. In a moment she could feel the heaviness in her breasts being eagerly drained on both sides.“…the wisdom he has…”
Ed was already fast asleep, his breath wheezing through his lips.
chapter twenty-one
“You’ve tricked me!” cried Daniel, as a cluster of parents and children swept past the school entrance, turning to stare at him. Daniel dug his heels into the ground. “Please let me go!” He struggled to break loose from Molly's grip, but she hung on.
“We’re just going to go in to look and meet some of teachers.”
“No, I can’t.” He was starting to cry. “Please.”
“Oh, Honey,” she said, crouching down to bring him close.“But I told you we were going to go here.”
“I don’t care what you told me, I’m not going in.”
Earlier, hoping to create the air of a festive occasion, Molly had taken Daniel to the Moosewood Restaurant for dinner. When she had first hinted at visiting the school, he hadn’t really reacted and she guessed things might go smoothly. Daniel had seemed perfectly happy in the restaurant; he liked the Russian cabbage pie and the waiters who doted on him.
“We didn’t order that,” said Molly when Siddhartha, the cook, brought out double desserts—a heaping serving of fresh mango ice cream and a big slice of carrot cake, thick with nuts.
“This is on the house!” Siddhartha's white teeth glinted through his dark beard as he ceremoniously served the boy. “For our own Daniel.”
“Mmmm, it's good,” said Daniel looking up with a full mouth of the homemade ice cream. “Can I have some of that cake, too?” He pointed with his spoon at the cake.
That evening, the Ithaca School District was scheduled to hold its annual system-wide registration and Molly, after much deliberation, had decided to enroll Daniel in the South Hill School on Hudson Street. It seemed the perfect elementary school. It was right in town, within walking distance of her office, yet sufficiently removed from most of the city traffic; a small school in a quiet residential neighborhood of older, well-kept homes, a solid brick structure that felt safe and secure. And they had a guard and an electronically controlled door. No strangers got in. No little children wandered out.
“We’re just going to go and take a good look at the school,” she had said as they left Moosewood, trying to prepare him.“And maybe talk to one of the teachers.”
“They’re going to try and keep me there and never let me out.” He had started to balk on the street. “For years!”
“Oh, don’t be silly. It isn’t a jail,” she urged him along.“All children go to school. And you’ll be out and free, every afternoon. And the weekends will be all—”
“They’re going to teach me things I don’t want to learn.”
“How can you say that if you’ve never been there?”
“I know,” he had said, looking her deep in the eye. “I just know!”
Molly gl
anced around as more people brushed past them at the school doors. “You’re going to make lots of new friends here and have plenty of fun.”
He turned his head away.
“Now stop acting foolish.” Some of the parents with their little kids in tow stopped to gape at Daniel and Molly. “Come on, Sweetie,” she whispered in his ear,“Everybody's looking at us. Don’t make a scene.”
“I don’t care!” he whispered back.
“We’re not going to the dentist. Just look at all the other children. How excited they are.”
“I’m not a child!” he objected.
“You’ve still got lots of things you have to learn.”
“But not here.”
Rising to her full height, Molly took both of his hands and scooted him forward.“One way or another you’re going in,” she said finally. He started to resist again, but she was adamant and finally he relented, following her into the building with head bowed, his lips set in a miserable pout.
The brightly lit gym was already crowded with dozens of parents and children milling about, their eager voices echoing off the polished wood floors. There were tables set up for the various classes, and the school's teachers had turned out for the occasion.
Dianne Lifsey spotted them and, waving, pushed her way through the crowd.“Well, hello, Molly!” she piped.
“Hello, Mrs. Driscoll,” said little Stevie when Mrs. Lifsey poked him. He seemed to Molly a little overdressed for the occasion in his white shirt and bright red bow tie. “Hey Danny,” he grinned. “’Member me?”
Daniel was in too much of a funk to notice him or anyone else.
“And how is our famous Daniel doing?” inquired Mrs. Lifsey, leaning over to get a closer look. She was almost breathing in his face.“I’ll bet Daniel will be in Stevie's class.”
Daniel, who was studying his shoes, flushed a deep crimson.
“Come on,” Molly nudged,“at least say hello.”
“Hello,” he muttered, grinding the toe of his shoe into the floor.
THE LAST BOY Page 38
