Tom waited until the brightness drained from the air. Shadowland still smoldered, and a few sparks drifted down the bluff, falling toward a thin layer of ash the rain would take in the fall. When the falling sparks glowed like tiger's eyes, he stood up.
He walked toward the water, carrying the glass sparrow and the book. He went to his knees on the damp sand just before the edge of the water. He set down the sparrow and looked at it. At its center hung a deep blue light. He wanted to say something profound, but profundity was beyond him: he wanted to say something emotional, but the emotion itself held his tongue in a vise. 'Here you go,' was what came out of him. He gave the sparrow a push into the water. It glided an inch or so along the bottom, then a ripple passed over it on the surface of the lake and the sparrow seemed to move against the motion of the ripple, going deeper into the lake. The blue in the glass was identical to the blue of the water. Another unseen ripple took it with it, and the sparrow went — flew — so far ahead under the water he could not see it.
Tom stood up, pushed the book into his belt, and walked back across the beach. Soon he was parting the delicate brush.
The End of the Century
is in Sight
The end of the century is in sight and Tom Flanagan's story was about events more than twenty years back in time. I listened to it here and there about the world, and wondered what sort of story it was and how much of it was invention. I also constantly wondered about what Tom had been reading. His imagination had surely concocted those radical illusions — the speeding of time, the transformations and the sudden dislocations of space, also the people with animal faces, which were straight from the works of symbolist painters like Puvis de Chavannes — and I thought that he had been steeping himself in lurid and fantastic novels. He had wanted to give me good value.
The idea that Laker Broome had been a minor devil was a ripe example of this. It was true that I, like all the new boys, had assumed he had been at Carson for years. Yet Broome had been the Carson headmaster for our freshman year only — when we returned in September a capable man named Philip Hagen had his job, and we assumed that Broome's breakdown and his conduct during the fire had blessedly got him out of the way.
1 wrote to the Association of Secondary School Headmasters, and found that they had no information about Laker Broome. He was not in their files. One night, still trying to find what had become him, I called up Fitz-Hallan and asked him if he remembered what had happened to Broome. Fitz-Hallan thought he had managed to get a post at . . . He named a school as obscure as Carson. When I wrote to the school, I got back a letter saying that they had had the same headmaster from 1955 to 1970, and that no one named Laker Broome had ever been on their staff. However, a penciled note at the bottom said that a Carl Broome had come to them in 1959 as a Latin teacher and had stayed only one year; might I have the wrong name? Why was Carl Broome released after a year? I wrote back on a long shot, but was informed that such matters 'are a part of the confidence which any school of repute must retain with respect to former employees.' This was very fishy — didn't they give recommendations? — but it was clear that they did not wish to tell me what I wanted to know; and anyhow, I was fairly certain that Laker was not Carl Broome, so there was no point in continuing. Lake the Snake had lost his job and disappeared. That was all I knew about him.
Tom's story had abandoned Steven Ridpath as he (presumably) crept out the front door and wriggled through the bars of the gate, and I imagined that a conversation with Ridpath would immediately tell me how much of Tom's story had been fiction. Here I had much more luck than with Laker Broome. Skeleton had gone to Clemson, and universities keep wonderful records. The Alumni Office told me that one Ridpath, Steven, had graduated near the bottom of his class in 1963. From there he had gone to a theological college in Kentucky.
A theological college? A Kentucky Bible school?
It seemed impossible, but it was true — the Headley Theological Institute in Frankfort told me that Mr. Ridpath had attended from 1963 to 1964, when he had converted to Catholicism and left them for a seminary in Lexington. The Lexington seminary, run by an order of monks, eventually wrote me that Steven Ridpath had become Brother Robert, and had been placed in a monastery near Coalville, Kentucky.
I drove from Connecticut down to Coalville to see if he would talk to me.
Coalville was a run — down hamlet — no other word would fit — of three hundred people. Unhappy buildings sat in an unhappier landscape. Wherever a stand of trees grew, behind it was a wasteland of slag heaps and abandoned mining buildings. There was a motel, but I was the only guest. I sent a note to the monastery. Would Brother Robert agree to discuss with me whatever had led him to this unlikely destination? I let the assumption stand that I was doing an article or a book about the decision to enter the church.
Come if you must, came a note by return mail. I expect you have made a useless journey.
I appeared at the monastery gates at the time he had named. It was still early enough for roosters to be crowing within the grounds — there was a farm there, and the brothers raised their own food. I swung the clapper in the big bell and waited and shivered in the early chill.
Eventually a monk pulled open the gates. He wore a coarse brown robe and the hood shaded his face. 'Brother Robert?' I said, startled by this apparition.
'Brother Theo,' he said. 'Brother Robert is waiting for you in the garden.' He turned about without another word and preceded me up a stony path.
We went around the side of a red brick dormitory. 'Our farm,' Brother Theo said, and gestured with a flap of his sleeves. I looked to the left and saw a red barn disgorging cows after their morning milking. It still seemed impossible that Skeleton Ridpath was in such a place. 'The chicken coop,' said Brother Theo. 'We have sixty-eight hens! Good sound layers.'
At last we came to another gate. Over a brick fence I could see massed rosebushes. The brothers would soon have to begin pruning, for the roses were crowded together, fulsome and blowsy. My guide opened the gate. A gravel path led between banks of roses. 'Follow the path,' he said. 'In fifteen minutes I shall see you out.'
'Fifteen minutes?' I asked. 'Can't I have a little more time?'
'The time was specified by Brother Robert.' He turned away.
I set off down the path. It led me around a comer, and when I turned into the garden proper, I nearly gasped. It was set out like a medieval garden, parceled into small plots where varying herbs and flowers grew, and it was a place of great order and serenity, much larger than I had expected. A monk sat on an iron bench before another bank of the overgrown roses. Beside him on the bench something glinted in the early sun: secateurs. When he heard my footsteps on the gravel, he looked up and swept the hood off his head.