Ceremonies

'Sure wish I'd had a meal like this when I started on my walk,' he said, sliding the platter toward him. He took the carving knife Deborah handed him and sliced off a thick slab of meat. 'Unfortunately, I'd nothing but a few cents change tied up in a handkerchief-just enough to buy myself a bar of chocolate.' He speared the meat and turned to Carol. 'Here, pass me your plate.'

She shook her head. 'Thanks, but no. I don't eat meat.'

He felt a spark of irritation. So that's why she's so skinny.

Deborah looked upset. 'Why didn't you say anything, Carol? I could have made something else tonight.'

'It's really okay,' said Carol. She seemed embarrassed. 'There was no need to go to any trouble. I've been a vegetarian since college, and I'll manage perfectly well on what you've got right here.'

'But Jeremy, why didn't you say anything?'

Freirs shrugged. 'I didn't know. We've only had spaghetti together. Carol, you never even told me.'

'I'm sorry,' she said, 'I guess I never got the chance. Honestly, it's no big deal. I'm happy with the beans and potatoes.'

'Well,' Deborah fretted, 'as long as that's enough… '

'It will be,' said Carol. Poroth could see that she wished the subject had never come up. 'Now poor Sarr, here, all he had to eat was a bit of chocolate.'

'Well, that wasn't till later,' he said, grateful she'd remembered. 'At the time, all I wanted was to find my money.' Carefully he served the others, then himself. 'I suppose it was foolish of me to try.'

'Naive, at any rate,' said Freirs. 'How'd you think you'd recognize the thief? There are a lot of sheepskin coats in New York.'

'I expected the Lord would give me a sign. He's never failed me, you know.'

Freirs looked skeptical. 'Really? Another sign?'

Sarr nodded. 'He doesn't fail believers. And with that knowledge in my heart, I kept on walking north. 'Twas a sour, cold day, I remember, with grey skies and a wind up, but there was no snow on the ground. It must have been a good deal hotter down below, because clouds of steam kept rising from holes in the pavement, and everyone in town seemed to be out of doors, rushing from one shop to the next, studying the goods behind the windows. Most of the goods looked awfully shoddy, with nothing special to them but their prices. I can't for the life of me see how anybody could afford them. Even if I'd had my money, it wouldn't have gotten me much. And yet everyone I saw seemed to have a package or two under his arm. Not a person was smiling – there wasn't a happy soul amongst 'em -but they sure must have wanted the things in those windows, like pigs fighting over a pile of garbage. I guess that's how they celebrate Christmas over there. It's a wonder they don't hate it.'

'A lot of them do,' said Freirs. "The rate of crime and suicide goes up that time of year. But it sounds like you're saying it's just what the people deserve.' Sarr saw Carol's look of annoyance, but Freirs went blithely on. 'You think they're all wicked, don't you?'

'No, I don't,' said Sarr. 'I think a lot of them are wicked, but a lot of others are nothing more than victims, and it's up to us to punish the first and save the second. Sometimes, I'll grant, it can be hard to tell the difference, but still I don't condemn them all. Not even the women who tried to stop me on the street, the ones who called out to me as I passed. I didn't understand, then, what it was they wanted, but I had a sense of it -1 saw as how they weren't dressed for the cold – so I made no answer and walked on.' He had added that for Deborah's sake; he couldn't let her get the wrong impression. 'I know about them now, of course. They said they wanted love, but they really wanted money. Twas all right there in the Bible, though I never thought I'd see it for myself. Some of them were wicked, all right, "an abomination unto the Lord." But some, I'm sure, were just the victims of the city.'

Deborah eyed him with amusement. 'Come on, honey,' she said. 'Tell them what you did.'

'I am,' said Sarr. "What I'm saying is, there were all kinds of temptations in that city: places I could have entered, things I might have done. But I passed them by.'

Freirs grinned. 'You were broke!'

'No, sir,' Sarr said gruffly, 'I was strong. The Lord was with me. I passed the tempters by and kept on walking. I walked until I came to the line of trees I'd seen from down the street. They began just past a low stone wall. It was a bit of greenery at last, the edge of Central Park; I'd heard about it. A dangerous place, that's what I'd been told, but when I looked over the wall I could see there were people all through it that day, out for a stroll, eating roasted chestnuts or just sitting on the benches with their hands' stuffed in their pockets. The street ran right alongside it, but I followed my instincts and walked on up the path toward where the woods looked deepest. I suppose I thought God was going to lead me to the thieves who stole my money. But He had other plans for me… '

A breeze lifted the flowered muslin curtains in the window by the sink. Night was coming on. The sporadic clatter of their knives and forks now rose above the faint rhythm of crickets.

'At first the park was real ugly,' he went on. 'Everywhere you walked you could hear the sound of traffic, automobile horns, people yelling at each other… And everywhere you stood you could see buildings in the background, just behind the trees. Maybe this time of year it would have been different, with leaves to cover up the view, but when I saw it the branches were bare. Besides, the place just didn't seem real. Not to me anyway. It was supposed to look like you were in a forest; I could see how they were hoping to fool you with the rocks and the brooks and that winding little path going up and down over the hills. Yet wherever you looked there was garbage on the ground, and the trees were black with soot.

'But as I kept on heading north, the place began to draw me in somehow. It was so huge for a city park, it just went on and on-'

'It's supposed to be twice the size of Monaco, in fact.'

'Oh, Jeremy, hush!'

'-and I began to lose the sense of being in a city. I could still see buildings far away, behind me and on either side, but the place seemed quieter now. I could actually hear the wind in the branches, and there weren't many people anymore, just a few strange, lonely-looking old men out for a winter's walk. All of a sudden the trees thinned out -1 hadn't been expecting that – and I came to the edge of a great flat meadow. Most of the grass there was dead, with bare patches showing through everywhere. Underneath that dark grey sky it all looked very sad. There were two or three figures in the distance kicking a ball around, but I wasn't interested in them, so I moved off to one side, still keeping to the trees. After a while they began getting thicker again, and the ground got hilly. One minute I was walking over a little stone bridge, the next I was moving through a tunnel. On the other side I couldn't see the meadow anymore. I couldn't even see the buildings. I was inside a tight little ring of trees – a perfect circle, the limbs actually touching one another, like children playing ring-around-the-rosy. And I was in the middle all alone, with not a sound or a sight to distract me. Why, I could have been in the center of a forest, the deepest forest on the face of this planet, with no one there to see me but the Lord.

'I knew at once it was a holy place, God's own preserve in the very heart of wickedness. And I don't mind telling you-' He gripped the edge of the table and leaned forward, talking especially to this new woman who had come among them, who seemed to have some of the Holy Spirit in her. 'I don't mind telling you that in that lonely place, myself a stranger of just seventeen years, I got down on my knees and said a prayer. I said, "Father, make me a vessel of Thy cleansing light and deliver me from evil. And if Thou pointest the way, I shall follow." That's what I said, and I started to get to my feet.

'And just then, out of the corner of my eye, I thought I caught a flash of movement somewhere outside the circle. By the time I turned, I'd missed it, but then there it was again, only far off to the side now, like a pair of dark shapes flitting past the trees. 'Twas only a glimpse, mind you, and then they'd moved away out of sight, but I was sure somehow that God had led me to the black boys I was after, the ones with coats like mine. I was wrong, though, I must have been, because when I ran across the circle and into the woods there was no one around. And the woods were so thick thereabouts, what with creepers and puckerbrush and all, that I didn't see how two people could've run through that way anyhow, one right beside the other, and I thought that what I must've seen was one man running with his shadow, or the shadow of a bird.'