Read Online Our Lady of the Forest by David Guterson - Free Book Online Page A

towel had been thumbtacked over the window, and a pair of dumbbells languished in the corner. What would a priest do with dumbbells? she asked herself. Why would a priest want muscles? He had nailed a crucifix over his bed, a two-foot Jesus long and black, sternum high and exaggerated, chest pronounced like the chest of a great bird, the gut shrunken and shriveled tight beneath the stripes of the rib cage. Ann took three steps into the room where she smelled the sheets on the priest’s rumpled bed, nervously touched Christ’s thigh with an index finger, crossed herself, and kissed her rosary. Hail Mary, full of grace, she whispered. Then she hurried back into the living room.
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    The rain sounded like shotgun pellets against the priest’s trailer-house window. He had turned off a second lamp, and they spoke now in the glow from the kitchen spilling across the sofa, concerto music turned so low it was only audible during the brief silences between their uttered thoughts.
    So there were six points, the priest was saying. And she mentioned, specifically, selfishness.
    Greed too, Father.
    But there are so many other forms of sin.
    Those were the ones the Blessed Mother mentioned.
    Why those?
    I don’t know.
    She didn’t say?
    No, she didn’t.
    But the fourth point was her promise to return. For four days in a row, you say. So perhaps we’ll find out more.
    I can’t say, said the visionary.
    The priest nodded soberly. Did you ask or did she volunteer her revelation regarding the missing girl?
    I didn’t ask anything. I listened, Father.
    I ask because it differs in substance from the rest of the message you received. It’s specific while the rest is general. That’s why I ask. It’s different.
    It’s her fifth point that’s… different, Ann said. That we have to build a church up there. A church and a shrine to Our Lady the Blessed Virgin. She gave us something we have to do. So on that—we have to get started.
    Well, said the priest, sitting back. Big challenge. Big task. I’ve been trying myself ever since I got here to get a new church built in town because the current version is falling apart, a drafty barn, it smells like mildew, but if you don’t mind, let’s concentrate on your vision. I, for one, am prompted by your vision to meditate on the nature of illusion. On the seeing of extraordinary things.
    Me too, said Carolyn.
    I’m interested, said the priest, in the forms of illusion. The various forms of mirage and apparition. Take, for example, crossing your eyes. I can hold my fingers in front of my face and by merely allowing my focus to soften produce the illusion of two index fingers, one immediately beside the other, and that’s one form of illusion. Different from a magician’s illusion that he has pulled a rabbit out of a hat or cut his assistant in half at the waist—that’s just sleight-of-hand and mirrors, I’m not raising the specter of that. If you’re camped beside a river at night and sitting dreamily by your fire you can begin to imagine that the sound of the river is really the sound of voices in the woods or when you’re falling asleep or in reverie you can feel that somewhere in the drift of your thoughts is something vaguely repetitive of the past, as if you’ve been in this moment before, but—
    Déjà vu, said Carolyn. I’m having one right now.
    That’s an illusion, said the priest. Though it’s entirely possible that in point of fact you might have been here before.
    You said that last time, exactly.
    The priest smiled. Did I smile? he asked. Did I ask you if I smiled?
    I’m completely not religious, said Carolyn, so I don’t care if you know this or not you can take it or leave it for whatever it’s worth since it’s probably some kind of sin or something but I’ve been on probably two dozen acid trips and seen things