“My loins are filled with burning, and there is no soundness in my flesh. I am utterly spent and crushed; I groan because of the tumult in my heart.” The young man standing next to Kate did moan, deep in his throat. Nearby, a thin young woman began openly to weep. “I am like a deaf man, I do not hear, like a dumb man who does not open his mouth. Yea, I am like a man who does not hear, and in whose mouth are no rebukes.” He paused again, eyes still shut, swallowed, and finished in an almost inaudible voice. “Do not forsake me, O Lord. O my God, be not far from me.”
He bent forward until his forehead touched the grass, held the position for a moment, then knelt back onto his heels again. His eyes opened and he smiled a smile of such utter sweetness that Kate was instantly aware that Brother Erasmus was not altogether normal. Disappointment and relief hit her at the same moment and dispelled the spookiness of the scene she’d just watched: Probably a third of San Francisco’s homeless population had some form of mental illness. Erasmus was obviously one of them, and very likely he had cracked John across the head because a voice had told him to, or John had angered him, or just because John had happened to be there. No mystery.
This cold splash of sobriety had not hit the others,- they still stood around him enthralled. Kate heard feet on the cement steps and turned, to see the dean coming down. He nodded at her politely, and then he saw the tableau beyond.
“What’s happened?” he asked. Before Kate could attempt an explanation, another man, one of the group from the chapel, turned and answered in a low voice.
“He recited Psalm Thirty-eight, making it very… personal. I’ve never seen him like this, Philip. It’s very—”
“Wait,” commanded the dean. Erasmus was speaking again.
“I am a fool,” he said conversationally, and scrambled to his feet, bending to brush off the knees of his cassock. For some reason, this phrase, an echo of Beatrice Jankowski’s cryptic judgment, seemed abruptly to defuse the tension in the crowd. The weeping young woman pulled a tissue from her pocket, blew her nose, and raised her head in shaky anticipation. There were two people with pen and notebook in hand, Kate noticed. Was this to be an open-air lecture? Erasmus had both hands in the pockets of the garment again, and when he pulled them out, there were objects clutched in them—a small book, a little silver plate—which his left hand began to toss high into the air, one after another, rhythmically—juggling! He was juggling, four, five objects now in a circle, and he began to talk.
“It is actually reported that there is immorality among you,” he declared fiercely, glaring at a figure Kate had noticed earlier, a tiny wrinkled woman in the modern nun’s dress, plain brown, with a modified wimple. She blushed and giggled nervously as his gaze traveled on to the man behind her. “I wrote to you in my letter not to associate with immoral men. Not to associate with an idolater, reviler, drunkard, or robber. Not even to eat with such a one. Drive out the wicked person from among you! Do not be deceived, neither the immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor homosexuals, nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor robbers will inherit the kingdom of God.”
Oh Christ, thought Kate in disgust, he’s just another end-of-the-world, repent-and-be-saved loony. Why the hell are these people listening to this crock of shit?
Erasmus had turned his attention to the things he was juggling, looking at them with a clown’s amazement at the cleverness of inanimate objects. He allowed each of them, one after another, to come to a rest in his right hand, paused, holding them for a moment, and then began to toss them back into the air with that right hand, reversing the circle. When he spoke again, his voice was neither hoarse with suffering nor fierce with condemnation, but gentle, thoughtful.
“After this he went out, and saw a tax collector, named Levi, sitting at the tax office, and he said to him, ”Follow me.“ And he left everything, and rose and followed him. And Levi made him a great feast, in his house, and there was a large company of tax collectors and others sitting at the table with them. And when the Pharisees saw this, they said to his disciples, ”Why does your teacher eat and drink with tax collectors and sinners?“ And Jesus answered them, ”Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick.“”
There were seven objects in the air now, different sizes and weights but perfectly, effortlessly maintaining their places in the rising and falling arcs of the circle. Again, Erasmus studied them with the openmouthed admiration of a child, and then suddenly the objects leaving his right hand did not land in the left but flew wildly through the air to be caught by onlookers. The small red book with a wide green rubber band holding it closed was caught by the young woman who had cried, the silver plate by the older man who had spoken to the dean, a palm-sized plastic zip bag by a scruffy young man with lank blond hair. A gray plastic film container hit a tall black woman on the shoulder, and then the last thing left his hand, something shiny that flashed at Kate and she automatically put out a hand to catch it: a child’s toy police badge, the silver paint chipped. She jerked her head up and looked into Erasmus’s dark and smiling eyes.
“I think that God had exhibited us apostles as last of all, like men sentenced to death, because we have become a spectacle to the world, to angels and to men. We are fools, for Christ’s sake, but you—you are wise in Christ,” he said slyly. “We are weak, but you are strong. You are held in honor, but we in disrepute. To the present hour we hunger and thirst, we are ill-clad and buffeted and homeless, and we labor, working with our own hands.” Leaving the staff upright in the grass, he held out his rough hands before him and moved slowly forward, toward the dean and Kate at his side. “When reviled we bless, when persecuted we endure. We are the refuse of the world, the offscouring of all things. I urge you, be imitators of me. The kingdom of God does not consist in talk but in power.” He was very close now, and he was facing not the dean, but Kate. “What do you wish?” he said, and stretched out his hands to her, cupped together, his elbows in and his wrists touching: the position for receiving handcuffs.
♦
SIX
♦
The whole point of St. Francis of Assisi is that he certainly was ascetical and he certainly was not gloomy.
Kate stared for several seconds at the thin pale wrists with their fringe of black and gray hairs before the automatic cop reflex of never react kicked in. She calmly took the toy star, reached up to pin it onto the chest of the black cassock, and patted it. The beard split in a grin of white teeth.
“Our feelings we with difficulty smother, when constabulary duty’s to be done,” he commented, then turned to the dean. “Blessed are you poor, for yours is the kingdom of God,” he said, cocking his head expectantly. The dean frowned for a moment, then his face cleared and he laughed.
“I agree, I’m feeling particularly blessed myself. Omelette or Chinese?”
“O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, killing the prophets and stoning those who are sent to you,” Erasmus said inexplicably. He then looked pointedly first at Kate, then back at the dean, who in response turned to extend his hand to her.
“I’m sorry. Philip Gardner. I’m the dean of this school. Are you a friend of the Brother here?” he asked.
“Not yet,” replied Kate somewhat grimly. “I would like to speak with both you and Brother Erasmus. Privately,” she added, although the people around her had obviously picked up some signal to indicate the end of the—performance? lecture?—and were beginning to move away, up the stairs and across the lawn, most of them clapping the oblivious Erasmus on the arm or back as they went.