Magdalena Mountain

by Robert Michael Pyle

  “So,” said James. “Who were you really?”

  “To put it simply: Mary of Magdala was a witch. So if I was that chick, so was I.”

  “A what?” Did she say that?

  Mary giggled. “That’s right, a witch. Oh, not a Halloween type with a pointy black hat and a broom, but a witch in the sense of Wicca, the Old Way—women who had special knowledge of herbs and healing, animals, and the countryside.” At that Mary’s head lifted, the dimples below her lips became crescents, and she gave him a calm smile.

  “But I thought you were a Jew—and later a Christian,” James spluttered.

  “I visited Jerusalem, where travelers came bringing tales and lore from far away. I learned of certain women in Syria who followed a goatlike god and the great Earth Goddess and practiced healing arts and gentle ways. So I begged to visit an uncle who had crossed the Sea of Galilee to Syria, and I persuaded my father to send me there on one of his fishing boats. Simon, a mellower man back then, rowed me over. I set off to learn more about these women who brought Pan from Greece, Demeter from Rome, Astarte from Phoenicia, Gaia from everywhere—all secretly, of course—and I took it all in: the teachings and practices were down-to-earth and came from wise women of many lands.”

  “Secretly?”

  “Out of necessity. Already, Pan was being twisted into the devil by big men who feared women and couldn’t handle such a powerful pagan god as the wee piper. Neither could witches—uppity women in their eyes—be tolerated by uptight men. In Canaan, if a woman made love outside marriage, the Levite priests condemned her to death, branding her a harlot. Which brings us back to the stones, and Jesus’s good timing, showing up when he did to call off the stoners. You don’t need to know all the details leading up to it, or what followed. But can you imagine what it felt like when that calm man intervened, placed his hand on my brow, and spoke those words? Like cool water from a flower-scented spring pouring over my head, my overheated heart, my bruises. Like love.”

  “Golly,” said James, and that seemed about adequate. His head was spinning like a spider, fashioning intricate new patterns out of old cobwebs.

  They each looked away, a little embarrassed. Mary’s hand went back to her fine clavicle. After a few breaths James asked, “And Jesus? How’d he take to witches?”

  “He respected women, including lovers and Goddess followers. Much of the Old Way was based on sensitivity to all life. And as I told the brothers here the other day, Jesus was a nature lover.”

  “Really?” James sat upright.

  “It’s right here,” she said, picking up a fat, sprung paperback and turning to a page she’d marked. “I found this in the library here, and it sounded familiar. It’s from the Gnostic Gospels, or Nag Hammadi scrolls. This part is from a scroll called ‘The Gospel of Mary Magdalene,’ how about that? Mary asks Jesus, ‘Will matter then be destroyed or not?’ And Jesus says, ‘All natures, all formations, all creatures exist in and with one another, and they will be resolved again into their own roots. For the nature of matter is resolved into the roots of its nature alone.’ ”

  “Jesus!” said Mead. “That sounds like something John Muir would have said.”

  “Or John Burroughs; he practically did, in The Faith of a Naturalist.”

  “Or Enos Mills, who lived just down the road. Or Aldo Leopold, or Ed Abbey!”

  “Rachel Carson,” said Mary.

  “Right, Saint Rachel of the Silent Spring. But not the JC that I’m used to.” So Jehu was no yahoo, thought Mead, but fortunately didn’t say it. His mind flipped back to Cumberland Pass, where he’d wished that he (or Freulich) had the jawbone of an ass to smite those cycle jerks up alongside the head. Now he wondered whether a New Testament approach might work better.

  Returning to the here and now, he asked, “So, were you—”

  “Lovers? Of course. That’s what we women did, and we loved our love.”

  “Did you—”

  “Have children? That’s another story. Someone will write all about it one day.”

  “And how shall I think of you?”

  Mary looked straight ahead. Mead was glad for that, for her dark eyes were incinerating; he couldn’t take them for long. “I don’t know . . . I can’t seem to remember anything about myself from the time I last saw Jesus to the morning I awoke in Denver.”

  “Wow, that’s—”

  “Yeah, I know, a long time . . . almost two thousand years. Well, hell . . . saint, schmaint. Goddess? Maybe. Witch for sure, of the Wiccan kind. Keeper of nature’s true wisdom from ancient Syria to this modern mountain. And consort and lover of Christ in every sense of the word. At least of the Jesus I knew—or seem to have known—as opposed to the whitewashed version there on the rock. Hooker? Not that I recall. But really? I don’t have a clue.

  “I’m supposed to have had a life as Mary G., but she’s as lost to me as Mary M. One of us really did go to France, as legend says, and rusticated among the flowered Alps. Maybe that’s why I was so drawn by these mountains . . . why I dream of them.”

  Mead merely listened, the spider spinning.

  “So who the heck am I?” asked Mary. “In Paradiso, Dante wrote that I was ‘a sunbeam in clear water.’ I think I’ll settle for that.”

  Mead said, “That’s lovely. Reminds me of what Enda Mills told me that Thomas Hardy wrote upon hearing of her father’s death: ‘It is as if a mountain peak had sunk below the horizon.’ ”

  The sun passed over the ridge of the building and the ridge of Magdalena Mountain that it mimicked. James and Mary faced each other in the diminished light. “I guess all this doesn’t have much to do with your butterfly,” she said.

  “Yours, if anyone’s. Mary, have you seen the butterfly that bears your name?”

  “No. Annie has promised to show me. Is it very beautiful?”

  “Like a sunbeam in black water,” he said. “But you’d better hurry—its flight period won’t last much longer.”

  “I’ll go as soon as Annie is free to take me.”

  “Look, I have to go to New Mexico for a quick visit home. But when I get back, if you haven’t seen your namesake by then, we’ll go find her. Likely be a female, this late.”

  “I’d like that. Maybe I can learn something from her, too.”

  Having safely escaped Mary’s eyes and crescent dimples without actually disgracing himself, Mead walked back along the Peak to Peak to the lodge. Lost as he was in Mary’s face and story, it came as a shock to read the postcard that awaited him. The return address in Colorado Springs showed it was from Dr. Brown, the author of Colorado Butterflies. He hadn’t expected an answer so soon. He read it on the balcony:

  Dear James: Your card in the morning mail. Mike Heap’s theory about Mary Magdalene’s feast day (which is fast upon us) won’t wash. Strecker was irreligious!

  He gave the name Jehovah to a very dull sort of moth just to antagonize his best friend, a parson. As a matter of fact he antagonized everyone with his blasphemous comments. If in any way it could be construed as derogatory to a biblical character, he used magdalena in that fashion. You would not be wrong in assigning the name to commemorate Mary Magdalene, but not to honor her: more likely to rub his parson pal’s face in her besmirched reputation. Let me know your thoughts on E. magdalena when you have a chance. Good luck to you, Brownie.

  Mead felt shell-shocked. Mary’s blow to the solar perplexus, Brownie’s uppercut about Strecker . . . and the great F. Martin Brown asking for his thoughts on magdalena? By now he’d certainly had a lot of them, and heard of a number of others’ views, but he wished he’d been able to query Carson on the matter. Carson! He remembered Mary’s reference to Saint Rachel Carson, and he flashed on George Winchester pulling out his file drawers: Carson, Hampton . . . Carson, Rachel . . . should be in between—yes, here it is. “Damn!” he said. “I completely forgot to ask Mary about October Carson, my other main object in this weird scavenger hunt. Oh well, next time.”
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br />   That night, with a moist breeze sifting the lace curtain of his window across his face, Mead fell into deep sleep. His dreams—wild, crazy, sacrilegious, yet sweet, with soft, swirling crescents, long, lithe limbs, and sunstruck water all through them, could never be told.

  35

  On a cloudless August morning, Erebia, now slower, browner, reticulated with small scratches but still robust, sets off for his first sortie very near the top of the north ridge. As the sun sinks lower to the south and also sinks behind the mountain earlier each day, his activity centers farther upslope. The nights are not yet cold enough to militate against a bivouac at thirteen thousand feet. Nor do his sallies extend as far downslope before he turns back. There is not always a handy updraft to rise upon, and gaining altitude under his own power is becoming harder each day.

  At the same hour, Mary Glanville leaves the monastery on foot. Oberon, occupied with the business of the merger, does not see her go. Annie too, busy with the Boy Scouts at Camp Tahosa, begged off the field trip (“I’ve got to gather the bacon bits now,” she told Mary, “because there won’t be many gigs come winter”). But she pointed out where Mary must go to see the alpines. So Mary sets out, reluctant to wait for Mead’s return in case the weather should change and the alpines finish their flight without her. Grown strong again since coming to the mountains, Mary assays the steep pinestone slope behind the monastery and reckons she can do it. An hour or two of agreeable climbing should take her to the rockslide.

  A Steller’s jay perched on the ridgeline of the monastery notices a figure in blue, like his own but softer, with a saffron cape, leaving the building and entering the forest. A few minutes later a gray jay sees a second person take the same route. This other one wears gray too. Even jays, with their sharp color vision, would have a hard time following this dun animal once it reached the rocks. And that is its intention: to remain unseen. The gray jay scrawls an alarm call across the sky, but no one who matters hears.

  When Mary reaches the rockslide, she chooses a boulder and sits to watch. James had told her that the best way to see the alpines is simply to take up a perch where they are likely to fly by and to be watchful and patient. While she waits for the sun to come out from behind a small cloud, she amuses herself by watching pikas. Apparently she has planted herself on the edge of several territories, because four or five buck pikas begin calling at her irately with their absurd little voices. Mary can’t help laughing at their utter indignation and answering back: “Peent!” she squeaks.

  Then a dark fleck crosses the rods of her eyes and the back of her brain. Swinging her head to point up the scree, Mary catches full sight of the Magdalena alpine as it drops over the boulders toward her place. She freezes, knowing from Annie that any rapid movement of hers might startle the insect away. So she becomes part of the late-summer landscape, an immobile piece of alpine furniture, watching and waiting.

  Mary wears a bright pink bandanna as a scarf. Taking it for a patch of moss campion, Erebia directs his flight straight toward her face. Or is it the flick of her dark, iridescent hair that draws him down to her? Anyway, down he comes, to within inches of her eyes, settling for a second or two on her bandanna and again on her hair. Receiving no scent, no taste worth sticking around for, he flutters there in place for a second and takes off again to her right. Mary cannot see, but she somehow knows that she was touched by the butterfly.

  But the cloudlet chases the sun again and the Magdalena drops onto the rocks. Though he becomes invisible against the black lichen on the granite, Mary spots another a few yards away. She approaches carefully, closely, and for several minutes she is allowed to watch the creature bask. This one is a new female, one of the last to emerge. Erebia had followed her down the defile, the only reason he was low enough to encounter Mary. Without the distraction she provided, he might have reached the female of his own kind; he might yet. For now, drawing still nearer, Mary places her forefinger before the bright black butterfly, who, sensing the warmth, crawls onto her hand. For just a moment she holds the butterfly that bears her name.

  Why a black butterfly? she wonders. Is my reputation really that bad? To be stoned and sainted and still stigmatized seems a sour joke. But why should black be an insult in any case? After all, Mary thinks, is this not a glorious creature with which to share a name? Forgetting herself in all this, she is lost in the beauty of the butterfly as it shimmers in the sunshine. Only hours old, she is still fresh, ebony, iridescent, unlike her prospective mate, who lingers in the rocks nearby, waiting for the interloper to leave.

  If Mead were here, he would have told her that few persons have been so well honored. His possible kinsman, Theodore Mead, did very well with patronyms such as Mead’s sulphur and Mead’s wood nymph, while his sweetheart Edith lives on in her copper. An otherwise largely forgotten monarch won a kind of immortality in Queen Alexandra’s sulphur, a butter-yellow and lime-green Colorado beauty, and Queen Alexandra’s birdwing of New Guinea, which has the wingspan of a robin. But no one else could claim the matronym of this splendid black animal. It carries the name of Mary Magdalene, and none other. Forget the reason. That fact alone is sufficient unto its purpose.

  But Mead is not here on the rockslide, nor is Oberon, nor anyone to warn Mary of the danger hulking nearby. Once or twice, out of the corner of her eye, she thinks she sees a gray object moving from rock to rock, but she takes it for a pika or a marmot or a hawk dropping behind a boulder.

  Mary contemplates “her” butterfly, deciding that she likes it very much. Thus intent, she remains still, and all is silence on the mountain for several moments. Then a shrill whistle pierces the thin air from a few yards above her as a marmot calls its ancient alarum. As every other marmot in the vicinity ducks, Mary looks up barely in time to see a missile shooting toward her. Quick reaction yanks her aside just enough to miss it. As rock splits rock hard beside her, feldspar splinters sting her hand.

  Mary shrieks and recovers her balance enough to glance upward at the hurler. Her butterfly flies off, as does the waiting Erebia, and if Mary could, she would be with them. But alas, groundborne, she is left behind to face her assailant.

  At first she does not recognize him, as he is dressed in gray work clothes instead of a brown habit. But his mad voice cannot be mistaken as he screams, “Woman! Harlot! Temptress! I said you should never come here, but you came. I warned Oberon, I warned them all—I warned you. Now see what you have done? I must destroy you, so the others will stay away. I will take the mountain and the monastery back.” Then he lifts another great stone and heaves it in Mary’s direction, roaring “Die, Jezebel!” But it’s too heavy, his aim is bad, and Mary dodges it easily.

  “Attalus!” Mary implores. “Why?”

  “You know why, witch!”

  “But you cannot kill me—I’ll come back, as I have this time. And my sisters will come to the mountain regardless.”

  “Then stand and be stoned,” Attalus snarls. “I can kill you—as it is written—and I shall. You are not who you say you are, you’re just a madwoman, a common whore, come to destroy the brotherhood. Mary Magdalene admitted her carnal sins, repented, and was forgiven. There is no repentance in you. Even if you were the Magdalene, you deserved stoning then and you deserve it now. Saint—bah!” And he hurls another rock.

  So far, both have been rooted in the here and now. But seeing that he has every intention of killing her, Mary finds her feet. She runs—as well as anyone can run over a rockslide at twelve thousand feet. Attalus follows, spitting obscenities, cursing, and throwing rocks at intervals. Mary, much the younger and fitter of the two, gains distance for a while. But each time she stumbles in her horror, tearing the blue dress and abrading her knees, knuckles, and arms, he comes nearer. Attalus moves deliberately, with the experience of a longtime rock crawler, across the habitat of his beloved lichens.

  There ensues a time more terrible than any Mary has ever known, in this or any life. For hours the grisly chase continues, som
etimes in slow motion, sometimes in bursts, both hunter and hunted stopping for breath in sight of the other when they can go no farther without rest. Although the monk’s projectiles fail to find their mark, Mary bleeds from tumbles on the unforgiving stones. The sun drops over the far ridge, and the clarity of the day begins to thicken. If only I could go down, she thinks. But Attalus has worked his way into a position below her, so he can cut off any route she attempts. She angles up, to the north, to try to get around him.

  Now it is Attalus who falls and cries out, so that Mary looks back and sees him disappear behind a cabin-size boulder. She sees a chance and takes it. The chase has taken them to the top of the northern ridge, halfway across the mountain from the trough she originally ascended. Over the ridge, a vast talus of huge boulders rolls down toward the Roaring Fork and Peacock Pool. Each of the rocks could hide an elephant, and here and there crevices between them make cavelike fissures. As the light begins to fade in earnest, Mary chooses one of these and dives for it. By the time Attalus, more crazed than ever in his pain, baldpate bleeding, appears on the ridgeline, Mary lies concealed in a close cocoon of silky gray granite.

  Attalus searches and curses all around her, coming within a few feet several times and once, as she holds her breath, peering into her very holt without seeing her. Then he moves off over the ridge again and Mary breathes easier for the first time, for she can see his dusky retreat. She thinks about making a run for it toward the Longs Peak Trail far below, where there would be hikers and help. But she’s seen it only on a map, doesn’t really know the way, and besides, every part of her aches, and bruises stiffen her limbs. Exhausted from labor on the hard rockpile, drained by fear, and desperately thirsty, seeking any way out of the nightmare, Mary sleeps.

  Deep in the night, the temperature hovering around forty-five in her hidey-hole, Mary awakens shivering and almost screams coming back into her terror. At first she doesn’t recognize her impossible surroundings, and for a moment she wonders if she is back in the home, finally driven mad. But the reality is still worse. She remembers, and despairs. If she doesn’t freeze (and now the cold hurts as much as her wounds, but how to separate them?), what will the daylight bring? Another day’s chase across the bony incline, a game of tag where “you’re it” means “you’re dead”? Or cat and mouse, with rocks for claws? Mary pulls her woolen cape around her—thank God for that affectation, of a color she always loved, found in a monastery closet, worn in the spirit of the place, and almost gone without for what she expected to be a short hike on a warm afternoon—and wonders where her persecutor is now.