Unburning: Chapter 47

[ROBIN]

Eighteen of us show up to drill on Thursday.

Vaughn’s at the bottom of the hill counting heads without making a production of it, and I feel myself doing it too — that hope you don’t want to look at directly — as we come out of the hall in twos and threes and nobody’s missing. He doesn’t say anything about it. He says good morning, Robin, good morning, Gabe, and sends us up the hill.

Nobody mentions last night at breakfast, and it seems odd but also inevitable. You’d think eighteen men who found out the same impossible thing the night before would have something to say to each other about it, but it’s the same table as always — Ocho is on about a cousin, Callahan salting everything, Tran silent, Whelan working through a bowl of oatmeal with the careful attention of a man whose sunburn has reached the peeling stage and who is trying desperately not to pick at it. The topic we’re avoiding is doing a lot of work, and we can all hear it. We all heard Father Vaughn. Nobody wants to be the first to say those words out loud in the daylight.

Morning session is with Ellis in the rec building again, and it’s the same games.

He has us work in the same pairs, in the same two minute stretches. Except on Wednesday we were doing it as some kind of mysterious icebreaker, and today we’re doing it because we know what it’s for, and you can feel the room lean into it. Callahan watches his partner now like the answer’s written somewhere on him. Pete takes notes. We are all, suddenly, trying very hard to get good at knowing when a person is lying to us, and I sit in the middle of the best-lit room I’ve been in all week and get partnered with Gabe, who holds his breath before he answers, and who tells the room, again, that I cross my arms when I talk about work.

“You do it more today,” he says, friendly, to the room, because that’s the game.

“Cold in here,” I say, and it gets a laugh, and I put my arms down.

But Gabe doesn’t laugh. Gabe holds his breath — the half-second, his tell for a thing he’s about to say and isn’t sure of — and then he says, quieter, just to me, “You’re doing it now.” And he’s right. I’ve folded them again without deciding to, sitting in a room whose entire purpose this morning is teaching eighteen men to notice exactly that. So I make a face like he’s caught me being cold twice and I unfold them and reach for my water, slow, a man with nothing to do with his hands, and Ellis calls the next pairing, and the moment closes. It’s the most work I’ve done all day and it’s not yet nine in the morning.

Friday morning, I run before drill.

Half the cohort runs on their own time— it’s that kind of camp, full of that kind of guy — so nobody looks twice at me on the road that goes toward the gate at five-thirty in the morning. I run the property line because it’s the longest loop, if anyone asks. The fence is welded wire field fencing. Just mesh that won’t keep anything smaller than a large dog in or out, and a lot of cedar posts gone silver. No wire on top of it, and only a little bit rusty. There aren’t any cameras that I can see. The gate where the driveway meets the road is green-enameled pipe, chained at night, and the chain is the kind you’d put on a gate to keep it from banging, not to keep anybody in or out.

There’s never been a guard here, not that I expected there to be. There’s been a need, and I didn’t expect that to have changed. The ground keeps telling me true things while my head keeps drawing the map I drew for her at the table — the ball court’s where I said, the fence line’s close, I had the road wrong by a good bit, I had the whole eastern third wrong because as a kid I never went past the archery range and the map in my head just stopped there and I filled it in with confidence instead of memory. It won’t matter, hopefully.

The loop takes me down along the creek, past the cabins.

They’re padlocked and shuttered, the whole kid end of the camp shut up for a season that isn’t happening this year. The creek runs the way it I remember it running. The watter is shallow, clear, coming up through the gravel already fizzing, little strings of bubbles standing up off the stones like the water’s carbonated, because it is. Soda Creek. When we were nine somebody’s counselor told us it was miners, that there’d been a gold camp up here and the miners put something in the water, and every summer after that we panned the gravel with our hands and came up with pyrite, fool’s gold, flakes and once a piece the size of a molar, and nobody’s mother was ever glad to find it going through the wash. There were never any miners. It’s the wrong part of the state by three hundred miles and the fizz is the same kind of geology that we get all over the state. But at nine, running this bank with wet pockets, rich as a king, it was magical. We believed the whole thing straight down and had the time of our lives inside it.

I run past the cabins and up the far side and back in through the gate before the bell, and I don’t think about next Thursday, because thinking about it isn’t going to make it come any sooner, or the time pass any faster.

My counseling slot is Saturday, mid-morning, after Mass.

It isn’t an office. Vaughn has some of the chairs from the chapel set out on the porch in the shade, angled a little toward each other and a little toward the oaks, and a sweating pitcher of iced tea on a table in between them, and he pours me a cup before I sit down. No notes. No clipboard. Just Vaughn with his sleeves rolled and his intense expression, where you’re the only man in the county.

“This isn’t confession, Robin,” he says, first thing, easy, like he’s setting down a weight for both of us. “Nothing you say here goes past us. It’s just a talk. I’m trying to get to know eighteen men in a month and this is the only real way I’ve found to do it.” He hands me the tea. “Sleeping all right?”

“Mostly.”

“The exercise’ll fix the rest of it by week two.” He says with a smile that fades naturally. He asks about my mother next — does she know I’m here? What does she think? I say she does, which is true, and he nods like that’s the right answer. I don’t elaborate on what she thinks. I haven’t ever asked. He asks about Wednesday, how it’s sitting, and I give him some of the truth, that it was a strange thing to hear out loud in a church, that I keep turning it over. He likes that. He asks did I pray on it and I say I did, which is true, I did, though not for the reasons he’ll assume.

“And you’ve got a girl,” he says.

“Claire. We’ve been together for a few months.”

“Claire.” He says it back like he’s filing it kindly. “That’s hard, a month away, this early in a thing. How’s she taking it?”

And this is the easy part, easier than anything Clarity and I practiced. I tell him the truth.

“She knew what she was signing up for.” I say. “The first month, when I was still living in the city, it was a lot of driving. She’s good at waiting — better than I am. I text her every night at ten, and it’ll have to be enough for now.”

Every word of it is true and I watch it land on him as exactly the kind of thing a steady young man says about a steady young woman, and he’s pleased, and I feel the warm sickness of being believed for saying true things in service of a lie, and I try not to be glad for it.

Then he tips his glass a little, watching the ice move in the tea, casual as weather.

“Wednesday night,” he says. “Be honest with me, because there’s no wrong answer and no shame in it either way. Was any of it truly new to you? Sponsors get ahead of themselves, sometimes. A man wants his protegee ready, he lets something slip early, thinks he’s doing a kindness.” He looks up. “Did you already know, Robin? Before that room?”

There it is. There’s no way around this one. And if I admit Silas told me, I don’t know what the consequences will be.

“I didn’t,” I say. “I didn’t even suspect that was what this was about. I about came out of the pew.”

Vaughn holds my eyes a second — not hard, not hunting, just a man taking a reading the way Ellis taught us all to take one — and then he smiles and sits back and the chair creaks and the moment is over.

“That’s what I figured,” he says. “You looked as if someone had hit you over the head with a hammer.” He drinks his tea. “Thank you for being straight with me, Robin. It’s rarer than you’d think, even here.”

I say something back. I don’t remember what. He thanks me for my honesty, and I let him.

Saturday night Ocho can’t sleep.

I know because I can’t either, and the sounds in the room tell you stories in the dark. Gabe’s breathing has gone long and even down at the end, Pete’s turned to the wall with his phone playing a podcast almost inaudibly, and Ocho is across the room, rolling over like a hot dog in a rotary cooker. Finally, the bed creaks as he sits up, and his feet hit the carpet, and instead of the bathroom he crosses over and sits down on the empty bed next to mine — there’s no shortage of empty beds in our room, in a building full of them — and puts his elbows on his knees in the dark.

“You awake?”

“Yeah.”

He’s quiet a minute. Somewhere out in the hall a moth’s going at the one lit bulb. When he talks his voice is pitched low, just for me.

“This isn’t what I expected,” he says. “Any of it.”

“No.”

“I thought — I don’t know what I thought. Leadership camp. Discernment retreat. My sponsor’s my uncle Beto and he made it sound like, you go, you pray, you figure out if you’ve got a calling, you come home, everybody’s proud.” He turns his hands over, looks at them. “I’ve got seven sisters, man. You know how many people in my family I can talk to about last night? Zero. It’s zero people. Beto knows and Beto won’t say a word, that’s the deal, I get it. But I’ve got a mom who thinks I’m at Bible camp getting closer to God, and she’s — she’s so happy about it. She told the whole parish.” A short laugh with nothing in it. “She sends me a prayer emoji every morning. I don’t know what to send back.”

“Send the prayer beads one back,” I say. “She’ll like that.”

“Yeah.” He does something with his phone, a soft glow and gone. “Yeah, okay.”

He doesn’t get up. The moth keeps at the bulb.

“That lady,” he says, lower. “The one Brother Ellis read about. In her garden. Eleven months.” He stops. “They watched her garden for eleven months and then they — and Father Vaughn said she was given every chance, and everybody just — nobody asked the next question. I wanted to ask the next question. I laughed instead, did you hear me? I laughed. In a church.” The shame comes off him like heat off the gravel. “What is wrong with me.”

“Nothing,” I say. “It takes people different ways. Vaughn said so himself.” Which is true, he did, and I hand it to Ocho like it’s mine to give, and I think about telling him he can go home. Vaughn meant it. There’s no wall around this camp, and any man who wanted to could walk out the road in the morning and be gone before the eggs, and Vaughn would speak well of him. I could say that. Part of me — the part that likes this kid, the part that’s already deciding he’s the one who’s really asking a question under the question — part of me wants to hand him the door.

“You know it’s okay to leave,” I say. “If it’s not for you. Vaughn meant that.”

Ocho’s quiet for a second, and then he shakes his head, and I can hear the smile come back into his voice, the regular Ocho, the one who tracked Callahan across a wash narrating the whole way.

“Nah,” he says. “I’m not going anywhere.” He stands, claps my shoulder once on his way back to his own bed. “Somebody’s got to make sure you eat the beans. Night, Robin.”

“Night.”

He’s asleep before long, for real this time; you can hear the difference. I lie there with the moth and the breathing around me and my thumb finds my phone.

It’s easy to write tonight. It hasn’t been, since Wednesday.

Ran the creek this morning. Whole place smells like summer. Goodnight, Claire.

Goodnight, Robin.

✦ ✦ ✦

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