Unburning: Chapter 45 | Robin

Missed a chapter? Click here to see previous episodes.

✦ ✦ ✦

[ROBIN]

Monday runs on bells.

Drill at six, which is Father Vaughn and the hill, and the hill is at least as long as it was when I was thirteen. He runs it with us, even though he’s maybe sixty, at the back of the group, encouraging whoever is dying the loudest. By today, the second day, he knows all eighteen of our names, and he uses them every time he talks to us, first names, even at six in the morning. I’ve been introduced to a lot of men at the Lodge. Most of them call you “son” for a month because it’s easier. Vaughn didn’t.

Breakfast is at seven, with fifteen minutes to shower and change before hand which would be a problem if the group was any larger. Father Vaughn sits with us, not at the top table with the other instructors. I keep track of what he asks us at meals. So far it’s home parishes, family trades, favorite foods and the things we liked in school, or plans for further study. He has intense hazel eyes and when you talk to him, he looks at you like he isn’t hearing anything else in the world. He remembers everything, even without writing it down.

After that, there’s a classroom session at eight, which feels unexpected. There are eighteen chairs set up in the rec hall and a whiteboard with nothing written on it.

The classroom belongs to Brother Ellis, the younger one with the glasses from the staff table. He doesn’t write anything on the whiteboard all morning. What he does is games. He has us pair up and talk for two minutes — home, family, anything — and then turn back-to-back and answer questions about each other. Not the facts. The other things. Did he touch his face when he talked about his father? Did he look left or down? What did he do with his hands when you asked him something he liked? Gabe and I pair up, and it turns out Gabe holds his breath a half second before he answers anything, every time, like a man stepping onto a ladder, and Gabe tells the room that I fold my arms when I talk about work, which I didn’t know.

“Attention,” Ellis says, at the end, “is a form of charity.” And that’s the whole lesson. No homework. He collects nothing.

The afternoon is work detail — clearing brush along the west side of the grounds, which suits me fine — and the evening is study hour, an hour of scripture at the long tables with Vaughn walking the rows. Lights out at ten. There will be other sessions added later, but this is the schedule for now. I leave my phone in the dorm, turned off, except to text Clarity to check in. Some of the boys are reading or watching videos on their own devices, but my legs are killing me, and I’m ready to sleep almost before I can turn it off.

Tuesday morning belongs to Silas.

Today he’s teaching us fieldcraft. He walks us off the mowed ground and into the oaks and spends three hours teaching us to read dirt — where the deer moved and when, what a scuff means against a print, how long ago a branch broke by what the break has done since. He teaches the way he’s always taught me things, which is by making you do it wrong twice and then showing you the third way like the first two were necessary. He has Ocho track Callahan across a dry wash by sign alone, and Ocho does it talking the entire time, a running commentary like a golf announcer, and Silas laughs until he has to sit down on a rock, and then makes him do it again silent, and Ocho does it faster silent, and Silas looks around at all of us like: see.

“Ground doesn’t lie,” he tells us, on the walk back. “Everything that moves writes it down. You just have to be the man who reads it.”

It’s a good morning. It’s a truth that sits uncomfortably on me now. Learning from Silas has always been interesting, but knowing what I do now, I can’t help but think of the ways he expects me to use this in the future.

Tuesday night I sit on my bunk with the phone.

Remember the family friend I told you about, who was like a father to me? Silas? He’s here too. It’s great.

Send. Delivered. Read. Then the three dots, and then: That’s lucky. Tell him hi if that’s allowed. Goodnight, Robin.

Goodnight, Claire.

Wednesday is off by small amounts all day.

The posted schedule has the evening free block crossed out, one line of pen, and VIGIL written over it in Vaughn’s handwriting. Nobody says what for. At lunch the staff table is quieter than it has been, and Silas isn’t at it. Ellis isn’t eating, and there’s a cup of coffee going cold in front of him. The morning is a lecture about living your faith that feels so rehearsed that it could practically be the religious equivalent of the videos we watched in school when teachers were too busy to actually teach. In the afternoon we get a recreation block at the pool for the first time, two hours of guys acting our shoe size instead of our age, and from the shallow end I watch Vaughn and Silas walk the path from the chapel together, slow, heads down. Vaughn is doing the talking.

After the pool I towel off and dress at my bunk, and my hand stops on the second button of my shirt, and then finishes the buttons, and I go to dinner.

Dinner is early and short. Nobody announces anything. The bell that would usually mean study hour rings at seven-thirty, and one of the instructors we don’t know yet is at the mess hall door saying chapel, gentlemen, straight to the chapel, and so we go up the gravel path in the last of the light, all eighteen of us, in a quiet that spreads by itself.

The chapel is full of candles. The overheads are off and there are candles on the sill of every amber window and a bank of them at the front, and the staff is already seated, all of them, in the front pew facing us — turned around, watching us come in, like this is something special.

Silas is second from the left with his hands folded. He looks like a man at a funeral for someone he loved. Vaughn stands at the front, no notes, no microphone, same as the first night. The last of us in is Pete, who closes the door behind him quietly, and finds his seat.

We fill four pews. Nobody talks. The candles flicker and do the weird thing they always do, where the faces look older and timeless at once. I’ve been to enough candlelit masses to know.

“Thank you for coming up this evening,” Vaughn says. “I’m going to tell you some things now, and I’m going to tell them plainly, because you’re men, and because the men who put your names forward told us you were ready to hear them.”

He looks down the pews, left end to right end, taking his time about it, first names in his eyes if not his mouth.

“Witches are real,” he says. “They are not a story, or a joke, or a wacky television religion. They live among ordinary people, in ordinary houses, and they are very good at making you think they are those things. The Order you are training to join has existed for a long time because somebody has to find them and keep them from hurting ordinary people. That is the work we do, That is why you were chosen, and that is why you are here.”

That’s all of it. Four sentences. Somewhere behind me a pew creaks sharply, as if someone moved and thought the better of it.

I keep my eyes on Vaughn and my hands on my knees. Beside me Gabe has gone very still, and his breath does its half-second hold with nothing after it, twice. Across the aisle Pete’s pen is in his hand — he brought the pen out of habit, to study hour — and he looks at it like he’s never seen one, and puts it away. Tran doesn’t move at all. The kid with the sunburn has his eyes shut and his lips going, and it isn’t the response, because there’s no response yet; it’s the Hail Mary, at speed.

Ocho laughs.

One syllable, up front, strangled the same instant it’s born — and in the silence after it he says, “Sorry. Sorry, Father,” and Vaughn says, “It’s all right, Alberto. It takes people different ways,” and means it, and moves on, and the back of Ocho’s neck stays red for ten minutes.

“You’ll have questions,” Vaughn says. “Most of them will be answered by the work, and some of them tonight. But first I’m going to teach you something, and I want you to learn it the way you learned your prayers, because it will keep you alive and it will keep you honest. Here is the first question: what is a witch?”

Nobody says anything, because how would we know.

“A lie walking,” Vaughn says. “That’s the whole of it. Not a woman in a story. Not a fairy tale. A person who has made themselves into a lie and walks around in it among people who trust them. Everything else we will teach you comes from that. Now — what is a witch?”

“A lie walking.” Maybe six voices, ragged, mine not one of them. Gabe inhales. I do too. Gabe says it the second time and I say it the second time, with him, a beat behind the room finding its feet — ten voices now, twelve.

“Again. What is a witch?”

“A lie walking.” Most of us. It sounds terrible in a chapel and nobody says so.

Vaughn nods, unhurried, a teacher with all summer. “You’ll have it by August,” he says, and then he comes down off the sanctuary step and sits on it, elbows on his knees, the way men sit at a fire, and the whole room tilts toward him without anybody moving.

“Ask,” he says. “Tonight you get to ask.”

Nobody does, for a minute. Then Pete, of all of us, with his pen back in his pocket and his hand half up like it’s school: “How long, Father? The Order. How long has this—” and he doesn’t finish it, and doesn’t need to.

“Longer than this state,” Vaughn says. “Men doing this work walked up this coast when the missions did. Before the missions there were men doing it in Spain, and before Spain there were men doing it wherever the Church was, all the way back. You won’t find us in a book. That’s not modesty. That’s the work done right — the second thing you should learn tonight is that we are better at not being seen than they are, and we have to be, because they only have to hide themselves. We hide a war.”

Callahan, slower, his arms crossed: “How many of them are there?”

“Fewer than there were,” Vaughn says, and lets that be the whole answer, and the pew under me is suddenly a very hard piece of furniture.

Gabe doesn’t raise his hand. Gabe asks it with his breath held first, the half-second, and then: “Our families. My mom’s on the auxiliary. She runs the coat drive. Does she—” and stops.

“She runs the coat drive,” Vaughn says, gently. “That’s true. The Lodge your mother knows fixes church roofs and runs pancake breakfasts and pays for funerals when no one else can, and every bit of that is real. She believes what she believes because we built it for her to believe, and we built it well, and you’re going to leave it standing. This is not a lie we tell our families. It’s a roof we hold over them. There’s a difference, and by the end of the summer, you’ll understand that.” He looks down the rows. “Your mothers gave you to us for a month thinking it was retreats and ropes courses and fellowship. Let them keep that. It’s a mercy, and a small one, that they do not have to know what is out there to need protection from.”

Then he nods at the end of the front pew, and Ellis stands up with a card in his hand, glasses catching the candlelight, and reads it the way a man reads parish announcements, which turns out to be the worst voice anything has ever been read in.

“Porterville. Six years ago. A parishioner reported that a neighbor’s garden came through the January frost that killed every garden on the street. The Lodge assigned attention. Over eleven months, brothers documented forty-one indicators — visitors on certain nights, purchases, patterns of speech, a healing the family doctor couldn’t account for. In the spring the finding was confirmed by a senior brother.” He turns the card over, finds nothing on the back, and sits down. “She was fifty-four. A grandmother. Sang alto in the choir.”

The candles tick. Eleven months. Somebody watched a woman in her garden for eleven months.

Pete again, quieter: “What happened to her?”

“She was given every chance to confess,” Vaughn says in a final way, and stands up off the step. It’s all the answer that question is ever going to get, and the whole room knows not to ask it twice. I make sure I don’t move at all — not my hands, not my face — because the thing rising in me isn’t shock and it can’t make it onto my face.

Silas speaks once the whole night.

Vaughn asks him to, with a look, and Silas stays seated, and turns halfway around to face us with his arm along the pew back, and says: “You’re going to want it to look like something. It doesn’t look like anything. Frost spares a garden. A lady’s neighbor goes to the hospital for no reason. They wear your neighbor’s face.” He lets that sit. “That’s the job, boys. That’s the whole job.”

The candles keep doing their work. I watch the row of faces I’ve eaten nine meals with get four years older in an hour, and I sit inside my own face and keep it doing what Gabe’s does, a half beat behind — attention, trouble, trust — which is not hard, because two of the three are true.

It’s strange to hear it out loud in a church.

At the end Vaughn stands back up and blesses us, and then he makes his closing remarks for the night.

“Any man who wants to go home may go home tomorrow. No explanations needed, no shame in this room or any room of ours. We will not speak ill of you. I mean that. Look at the man next to you — there’s no wall around this camp. There never has been. Sleep on what you heard, and any man still here at drill tomorrow, I’ll take that as your answer. This is not the work for everyone, and there is no shame if you are not called to it. All we can do is offer your the opportunity and training to answer if you are.”

He waits. The candles flicker. Somebody’s stomach growls, incongruously, and nobody laughs. Nobody moves, either.

“Good men,” Vaughn says, softly, and it’s done.

We come out into full dark where the gravel paths are still hot from the afternoon sun but the air is cooling fast, and the cohort strings out down the walkway in ones and twos, quiet as can be. Ocho falls in next to me and doesn’t say anything, which is the first time since the parking lot I’ve heard him silent and awake this long. At the fork where the path splits for the hall I slow down without deciding to, so he doesn’t walk the last stretch alone, and we go the whole way not talking, and at the door he says, “Dinner was good tonight,” and I say, “It was,” and that’s all we say.

I’m the last one on the walk when the hand lands on my shoulder.

“Walk with me a minute, Robbie.”

Silas steers me off the path, out onto the dark gravel of the lot, out of the light. Up close he smells like smoke and the same aftershave he’s worn my whole life. He stops by the flagpole and faces me, and even in the dark I can tell he’s smiling, because it changes his voice.

“I wasn’t supposed to show you what I showed you,” he says. “Not that young. Not without asking anybody.” He says it easily, the confession of a man who confessed it to himself a long time ago and got absolution out of his own pocket. “So thank you for tonight. For not spoiling it for the others. You’ll be a good leader for the others.” He grips my shoulder, once, the grip that means more than the words, the same as it did over a porch slab and a first rifle and a coffin. “I knew you’d be good with it. I told them so before I put your name on the list.”

There are a lot of things a man could say. What I find is: “They took it okay, I think. Better than I would have cold.”

“They took it fine,” Silas says. “The ones who matter took it fine.” He looks back up the path at the last lit window of the hall, and whatever he’s counting, he finishes counting it. “Go to bed, Robbie. Big week ahead.”

He walks off toward the staff housing with his hands in his pockets, unhurried, a man on his own property in every way that counts, and I stand by the flagpole until the door closes behind him.

In the bunkroom the lights are already out. Gabe’s awake — I can hear it in his breathing — and not talking, and Pete’s rosary is clicking very quietly under his blanket, one bead at a time. Ocho’s either asleep or doing the best impression of his life.

Ten o’clock came and went during the vigil, so I’m late, and she’ll know it, and tomorrow the schedule will say what it says. I type in the dark.

Long day. Evening session ran late. Goodnight, Claire.

✦ ✦ ✦

That's all for now...

Want to keep reading?

The Starlit Society reads five chapters ahead of the free serial.

​JOIN THE STARLIT SOCIETY​

Thank you for reading—and for helping me keep telling these stories. 💜

— Elle