A movement caught Kate’s eye, one of the white-gowned deacons at Dean Gardner’s side. It took a moment for her to realize it was David Sawyer. It took a while longer for her to recognize him, to her astonishment, as Brother Erasmus.
The service flowed past them. People stood up and read, haltingly or fluently. A hymn was sung, and another, and then Philip Gardner was raising his hands in blessing and declaring that the Lord would guide our feet into the way of peace, and it was over. The cassocks and surplices fluttered up the aisle, people began to shuffle in their wake, and then Sawyer, or perhaps Erasmus, was sitting in the pew ahead of Kate, with Lee’s hand in his. The ring, Kate noticed, was back on his hand. She made the introductions, although they hardly seemed necessary.
“The wounded healer,” he said quietly in response to Lee’s name.
“I might say the same of you,” Lee answered.
“Ah. Answer a fool according to his folly,” he said with a grin.
“And are you? A fool, that is?” Lee leaned forward in the chair to study the old face opposite her. “Am I speaking with Brother Erasmus, or David Sawyer?”
“I am Fortune’s fool,” he admitted. “An old doting fool with one foot already in the grave. A lunatic, lean-witted fool. How well white hairs become a fool and jester.”
“I think white hairs suit a fool very well. How does it go? ”This fellow’s wise enough to play the fool.“ ”
The old man looked, of all things, embarrassed, and he seemed grateful for the interruption when Al Hawkin joined them. He stood up to shake Hawkin’s hand.
“Is this the man that made the earth to tremble, that did shake kingdoms? Hast thou found me, O mine enemy?”
The detective laughed. “Never that. I just wanted to thank you for your help and wish you well.”
“All’s well that ends well.” He turned to Kate, and she waited for his smile and his words, taken from someone else but made his own, and they came: “May the Lord bless you and keep you; may the Lord make his face to shine upon you, and grant you peace.”
“I take it you’re planning on going back onto the streets?” she asked.
“It is better never to begin a good work than, having begun it, to stop,” he said quietly.
“You’re getting old, David,” she said bluntly. “It’s a young man’s life. Talk to Philip Gardner. You can do your good work at the seminary.”
He nearly laughed. “Amongst all these stirs of discontented strife. O, let me lead an academic life!”
Kate had not heard Professor Whitlaw’s approach until the English voice came from behind her, sounding both disappointed and sad.
“He was a scholar,” she said, stressing the past tense, “and a ripe and good one.”
Brother Erasmus focused his gaze over Kate’s shoulder but only shook his head gently.
“Well,” Kate said, “for God’s sake, take care of yourself and don’t do anything stupid like you tried that day with the young drunk. You could get hurt.”
His face relaxed into amusement, and something more. They could see, shining clear as day, the regained source of his serenity. “The Lord is my light and my salvation,” he said simply. “Whom shall I fear?”
♦
TWENTY-EIGHT
♦
Yet the friends of St. Francis have really contrived
to leave behind a portrait, something almost
resembling a devout and affectionate caricature.
Brother Erasmus, he who once was the Reverend Professor David Matthew Sawyer, spent the next twelve days with his old friend Eve Whitlaw at the house she had borrowed in Noe Valley. When Easter morning dawned, however, he was not at her house,- he was not even in San Francisco.
Neither Kate nor Al ever saw him after that. But among the homeless, the marginal, the discarded citizens of a number of large cities, the people of the street talk about Brother Erasmus. They say that he was a rich man who humbled himself, and that he had a small black-and-white dog, a sort of familiar spirit, who was killed by a demon man, who in turn was vanquished by Erasmus. They say that he healed a sick boy, that he foretold the future, that he transported himself magically across the waters.
They say he is dead. They also say that he lives and walks the streets unrecognized. Some call him a saint. Others say he was a fool.
These things they say about the man who called himself Brother Erasmus.
And they are all true.