Brother Odd

CHAPTER 8

AT SHORTLY PAST ONE IN THE MORNING, THE guestmaster, Brother Roland, was not likely to be changing the bed linens or delivering a portion of the "two hogsheads of wine" that St. Benedict, when he wrote the Rule that established monastic order in the sixth century, had specified as a necessary provision for every guesthouse.

St. Bartholomew's does not provide any wine. The small under-the-counter refrigerator in my bathroom contains cans of Coke and bottles of iced tea.

Entering my front room, prepared to shout "Varlet," or "Blackguard," or some other epithet that would sound appropriate to the medieval atmosphere, I found not an enemy, but a friend. Brother Knuckles, known sometimes as Brother Salvatore, stood at the window, peering out at the falling snow.

Brother Knuckles is acutely aware of the world around him, of the slightest sounds and telltale scents, which is why he survived the world he operated in before becoming a monk. Even as I stepped silently across the threshold, he said, "You'll catch your death, traipsin' about on a night like this, dressed like that."

"I wasn't traipsing," I said, closing the door quietly behind me. "I was skulking."

He turned from the window to face me. "I was in the kitchen, scarfin' down some roast beef and provolone, when I seen you come up the stairs from John's Mew."

"There weren't any lights in the kitchen, sir. I would've noticed."

"The fridge light is enough to make a snack, and you can eat good by the glow from the clock on the microwave."

"Committing the sin of gluttony in the dark, were you?"

"The cellarer's gotta be sure things are fresh, don't he?"

As the abbey's cellarer, Brother Knuckles purchased, stocked, and inventoried the food, beverages, and other material goods for the monastery and school.

"Anyway," he said, "a guy, he eats at night in a bright kitchen that's got no window blinds-he's a guy tastin' his last sandwich."

"Even if the guy's a monk in a monastery?"

Brother Knuckles shrugged. "You can never be too careful."

In exercise sweats instead of his habit, at five feet seven and two hundred pounds of bone and muscle, he looked like a die-casting machine that had been covered in a gray-flannel cozy.

The rainwater eyes, the hard angles and blunt edges of brow and jaw, should have given him a cruel or even threatening appearance. In his previous life, people had feared him, and for good reason.

Twelve years in a monastery, years of remorse and contrition, had brought warmth to those once-icy eyes and had inspired in him a kindness that transformed his unfortunate face. Now, at fifty-five, he might be mistaken for a prizefighter who stayed in the sport too long: cauliflower ears, portobello nose, the humility of a basically sweet palooka who has learned the hard way that brute strength does not a champion make.

A small glob of icy slush slid down my forehead and along my right cheek.

"You're wearin' snow like a poofy white hat." Knuckles headed toward the bathroom. "I'll get you a towel."

"There's a bottle of aspirin by the sink. I need aspirin."

He returned with a towel and the aspirin. "You want some water to wash 'em down, maybe a Coke?"

"Give me a hogshead of wine."

"They must've had livers of iron back in Saint Benny's day. A hogshead was like sixty-three gallons."

"Then I'll only need half a hogshead."

By the time I toweled my hair half dry, he had brought me a Coke. "You come up the stairs from John's Mew and stood there lookin' up at the snow the way a turkey stares up at the rain with its mouth open till it drowns."

"Well, sir, I never saw snow before."

"Then, boom, you're off like a shot around the corner of the refectory."

Settling into an armchair and shaking two aspirin out of the bottle, I said, "I heard someone scream."

"I didn't hear no scream."

"You were inside," I reminded him, "and making a lot of chewing noises."

Knuckles sat in the other armchair. "So who screamed?"

I washed down two aspirin with Coke and said, "I found one of the brothers facedown on the ground by the library. Didn't see him at first in his black habit, almost fell over him."

"Who?"

"Don't know. A heavy guy. I rolled him over, couldn't see his face in the dark-then someone tried to brain me from behind."

His brush-cut hair seemed to bristle with indignation. "This don't sound like St. Bart's."

"The club, whatever it was, grazed the back of my head, and my left shoulder took the worst of it."

"We might as well be in Jersey, stuff like this goin' down."

"I've never been to New Jersey."

"You'd like it. Even where it's bad, Jersey is always real."

"They've got one of the world's largest used-tire dumps. You've probably seen it."

"Never did. Ain't that sad? You live in a place most of your life, you take it for granted."

"You didn't even know about the tire dump, sir?"

"People, they live in New York City all their lives, never go to the top of the Empire State Building. You okay, son? Your shoulder?"

"I've been worse."

"Maybe you should go to the infirmary, ring Brother Gregory, have your shoulder examined."

Brother Gregory is the infirmarian. He has a nursing degree.

The size of the monastic community isn't sufficient to justify a full-time infirmarian-especially since the sisters have one of their own for the convent and for the children at the school-so Brother Gregory also does the laundry with Brother Norbert.

"I'll be okay, sir," I assured him.

"So who tried to knock your block off?"

"Never got a look at him."

I explained how I had rolled and run, thinking my assailant was at my heels, and how the monk I'd almost fallen over was gone when I returned.

"So we don't know," said Knuckles, "did he get up on his own and walk away or was he carried."

"We don't know, either, if he was just unconscious or dead."

Frowning, Knuckles said, "I don't like dead. Anyway, it don't make sense. Who would kill a monk?"

"Yes, sir, but who would knock one unconscious?"

Knuckles brooded for a moment. "One time this guy whacked a Lutheran preacher, but he didn't mean to."

"I don't think you should be telling me this, sir."

With a wave of a hand, he dismissed my concern. His strong hands appear to be all knuckles, hence his nickname.

"I don't mean it was me. I told you, I never done the big one. You do believe me on that score, don't you, son?"

"Yes, sir. But you did say this was an accidental whack."

"Never offed no one accidental either."

"All right then."

Brother Knuckles, formerly Salvatore Giancomo, had been well-paid muscle for the mob before God turned his life around.

"Busted faces, broke some legs, but I never chilled no one."

When he was forty, Knuckles had begun to have second thoughts about his career path. He felt "empty, driftin', like a row-boat out on the sea and nobody in it."

During this crisis of confidence, because of death threats to his boss-Tony "the Eggbeater" Martinelli-Knuckles and some other guys like him were sleeping-over at the boss's home. It wasn't a pajamas-and-s'mores kind of sleepover, but the kind of sleepover where everyone brings his two favorite automatic weapons. Anyway, one evening, Knuckles found himself reading a story to the Eggbeater's six-year-old daughter.

The tale was about a toy, a china-rabbit doll, that was proud of his appearance and thoroughly self-satisfied. Then the rabbit endured a series of terrible misfortunes that humbled him, and with humility came empathy for the suffering of others.

The girl fell asleep with half the story still to be read. Knuckles needed in the worst way to know what happened to the rabbit, but he didn't want his fellow face-busters to think that he was really interested in a kid's book.

A few days later, when the threat to the Eggbeater had passed, Knuckles went to a bookstore and bought a copy of the rabbit's tale. He started from the beginning, and by the time he reached the end, when the china rabbit found its way back to the little girl who had loved him, Knuckles broke down and wept.

Never before had he shed tears. That afternoon, in the kitchen of his row house, where he lived alone, he sobbed like a child.

In those days, no one who knew Salvatore "Knuckles" Giancomo, not even his mother, would have said he was an introspective kind of guy, but he nevertheless realized that he was not crying only about the china rabbit's return home. He was crying about the rabbit, all right, but also about something else.

For a while, he could not imagine what that something else might be. He sat at the kitchen table, drinking cup after cup of coffee, eating stacks of his mother's pizzelles, repeatedly recovering his composure, only to break down and weep again.

Eventually he understood that he was crying for himself. He was ashamed of the man whom he had become, mourning the man whom he had expected to be when he'd been a boy.

This realization left him conflicted. He still wanted to be tough, took pride in being strong and stoic. Yet it seemed that he had become weak and emotional.

Over the next month, he read and reread the rabbit's story. He began to understand that when Edward, the rabbit, discovered humility and learned to sympathize with other people's losses, he did not grow weak but in fact became stronger.

Knuckles bought another book by the same author. This one concerned an outcast big-eared mouse who saved a princess.

The mouse had less impact on him than the bunny did, but, oh, he loved the mouse, too. He loved the mouse for its courage and for its willingness to sacrifice itself for love.

Three months after he first read the story of the china rabbit, Knuckles arranged a meeting with the FBI. He offered to turn state's evidence against his boss and a slew of other mugs.

He ratted them out in part to redeem himself but no less because he wanted to save the little girl to whom he had read part of the rabbit's story. He hoped to spare her from the cold and crippling life of a crime boss's daughter that daily would harden around her, as imprisoning as concrete.

Thereafter, Knuckles had been placed in Vermont, in the Witness Protection Program. His new name was Bob Loudermilk.

Vermont proved to be too much culture shock. Birkenstocks, flannel shirts, and fifty-year-old men with ponytails annoyed him.

He tried to resist the worst temptations of the world with a growing library of kids' books. He discovered that some book writers seemed subtly to approve of the kind of behavior and the values that he had once embraced, and they scared him. He couldn't find enough thoughtful china rabbits and courageous big-eared mice.

Having dinner in a mediocre Italian restaurant, yearning for Jersey, he suddenly got the calling to the monastic life. It happened shortly after a waiter put before him an order of bad gnocchi, as chewy as caramels, but that's a story for later.

As a novice, following the path of regret to remorse to absolute contrition, Knuckles found the first unalloyed happiness of his life. At St. Bartholomew's Abbey, he thrived.

Now, on this snowy night years later, as I considered taking two more aspirin, he said, "This minister, name's Hoobner, he felt real bad about American Indians, the way they lost their land and all, so he was always losin' money at blackjack in their casinos. Some of it was a high-vigorish loan from Tony Martinelli."

"I'm surprised the Eggbeater would lend to a preacher."

"Tony figured if Hoobner couldn't keep payin' eight percent a week from his own pocket, then he could steal it from the Sunday collection plate. As it shook down, though, Hoobner would gamble and butt-pinch the cocktail waitresses, but he wouldn't steal. So when he stops payin' the vig, Tony sends a guy to discuss Hoobner's moral dilemma with him."

"A guy not you," I said.

"A guy not me, we called him Needles."

"I don't think I want to know why you called him Needles."

"No, you don't," Knuckles agreed. "Anyway, Needles gives Hoobner one last chance to pay up, and instead of receivin' this request with Christian consideration, the preacher says 'Go to hell.' Then he pulls a pistol and tries to punch Needles's ticket for the trip."

"The preacher shoots Needles?"

"He might've been a Methodist, not a Lutheran. He shoots Needles but only wounds him in the shoulder, and Needles pulls his piece and shoots Hoobner dead."

"So the preacher would shoot somebody, but he wouldn't steal."

"I'm not sayin' that's traditional Methodist teachin'."

"Yes, sir. I understand."

"Fact is, now I think on it, the preacher was maybe a Unitarian. Anyway, he was a preacher, and he was shot dead, so bad things can happen to anyone, even a monk."

Although the chill of the winter night had not entirely left me, I pressed the cold can of Coke to my forehead. "This problem we have here involves bodachs."

Because he was one of my few confidants at St. Bartholomew's, I told him about the three demonic shadows hovering at Justine's bed.

"And they was hangin' around the monk you almost stumbled over."

"No, sir. They're here for something bigger than one monk being knocked unconscious."

"You're right. That ain't the kind of fight card that draws a crowd anywhere."

He got up from his chair and went to the window. He gazed out at the night for a moment.

Then: "I wonder… You think maybe my past life is catchin' up with me?"

"That was fifteen years ago. Isn't the Eggbeater in prison?"

"He died in stir. But some of those other mugs, they got long memories."

"If a hit man tracked you down, sir, wouldn't you be dead by now?"

"For sure. I'd be parked in an unpadded waitin'-room chair, readin' old magazines in Purgatory."

"I don't think this has anything to do with who you used to be."

He turned from the window. "From your lips to God's ear. Worst thing would be anyone here hurt because of me."

"Everyone here's been lifted up because of you," I assured him.

The slabs and lumps of his face shifted into a smile that you would have found scary if you didn't know him. "You're a good kid. If I ever would've had me a kid, it's nice to think he might've been a little like you."

"Being me isn't something I'd wish on anyone, sir."

"Though if I was your dad," Brother Knuckles continued, "you'd probably be shorter and thicker, with your head set closer to your shoulders."

"I don't need a neck anyway," I said. "I never wear ties."

"No, son, you need a neck so you can stick it out. That's what you do. That's who you are."

"Lately, I've been thinking I might get myself measured for a habit, become a novice."

He returned to his chair but only sat on the arm of it, studying me. After consideration, he said, "Maybe someday you'll hear the call. But not anytime soon. You're of the world, and need to be."

I shook my head. "I don't think I need to be of the world."

"The world needs you to be out there in it. You got things to do, son."

"That's what I'm afraid of. The things I'll have to do."

"The monastery ain't a hideout. A mug wants to come in here, take the vows, he should come because he wants to open himself to somethin' bigger than the world, not because he wants to close himself up in a little ball like a pill bug."

"Some things you just have to close yourself away from, sir."

"You mean the summer before last, the shootings at the mall. You don't need no one's forgiveness, son."

"I knew it was coming, they were coming, the gunmen. I should've been able to stop it. Nineteen people died."

"Everyone says, without you, hundreds would've died."

"I'm no hero. If people knew about my gift and knew still I couldn't stop it, they wouldn't call me a hero."

"You ain't God, neither. You did all you could, anyone could."

As I put down the Coke, picked up the bottle of aspirin, and shook two more tablets onto my palm, I changed the subject. "Are you going to wake the abbot and tell him that I fell over an unconscious monk?"

He stared at me, trying to decide whether to allow me to change the subject. Then: "Maybe in a while. First, I'm gonna try to take an unofficial bed count, see if maybe I can find someone holdin' ice to a lump on his head."

"The monk I fell over."

"Exactly. We got two questions. Second, why would some guy club a monk? But first, why would a monk be out at this hour where he could get himself clubbed?"

"I guess you don't want to get a brother in trouble."

"If there's sin involved, I ain't gonna help him keep what he done from his confessor. That won't be no favor to his soul. But if it was just some kinda foolishness, the prior maybe don't have to know."

A prior is a monastery's disciplinarian.

St. Bartholomew's prior was Father Reinhart, an older monk with thin lips and a narrow nose, less than half the nose of which Brother Knuckles could boast. His eyes and eyebrows and hair were all the color of an Ash Wednesday forehead spot.

Walking, Father Reinhart appeared to float like a spirit across the ground, and he was uncannily quiet. Many of the brothers called him the Gray Ghost, though with affection.

Father Reinhart was a firm disciplinarian, though not harsh or unfair. Having once been a Catholic-school principal, he warned that he had a paddle, as yet never used, in which he had drilled holes to reduce wind resistance. "Just so you know," he had said with a wink.

Brother Knuckles went to the door, hesitated, looked back at me. "If somethin' bad is comin', how long we got?"

"After the first bodachs show up… it's sometimes as little as a day, usually two."

"You sure you ain't got a concussion or nothin'?"

"Nothing that four aspirin won't help," I assured him. I popped the second pair of tablets into my mouth and chewed them.

Knuckles grimaced. "What're you, a tough guy?"

"I read that they're absorbed into your bloodstream faster this way, through the tissue in your mouth."

"What-you get a flu shot, you have the doc inject it in your tongue? Get a few hours' sleep."

"I'll try."

"Find me after Lauds, before Mass, I'll tell you who got himself conked-and maybe why, if he knows why. Christ be with you, son."

"And with you."

He left and closed the door behind him.

The doors of the suites in the guesthouse, like those of the monks' rooms in another wing, have no locks. Everyone here respects the privacy of others.

I carried a straight-backed chair to the door and wedged it under the knob, to prevent anyone from entering.

Maybe chewing aspirin and letting them dissolve in your mouth speeds up absorption of the medication, but they taste like crap.

When I drank some Coke to wash out the bad taste, the crushed tablets reacted with the soft drink, and I found myself foaming at the mouth like a rabid dog.

When it comes to tragic figures, I've got a much greater talent for slapstick than Hamlet did, and whereas King Lear would step over a banana peel in his path, my foot will find it every time.