Chapter 29

Ann Arbor, March, 2005 CE

She was packing for the ride back to Pennsylvania when I arrived that last morning to see her off. She was, she’d told me, going home. That word, “home,” had resonated from her voice a few times in a way I didn’t really understand.

Pennsylvania was obviously pretty important to her, but I couldn’t get her to tell me much about it. I knew there was someone named Edna that she thought the world of, and I knew Edna had a son named Joshua who was a lawyer that she also admired. She thought of them as family somehow, but any time I tried to get her to tell me more she’d find some way—sometimes subtle, sometimes blatant—to change the subject. But Pennsylvania was home to her, and while part of her wanted to stay away from it, part of her couldn’t wait to get back. She’d had enough of farting around here in Michigan working with me and toying with college kids. Apparently whatever conflicts were going on down there were settled up and she was done with the Wolverine State. She wanted me to meet her down there in a week or two for more talks once she’d settled in.

When I met her in her hotel room that last morning I cracked up at how much crap she’d picked up in her time in Ann Arbor. She had three huge suitcases jammed with stuff and a big cardboard box full of clothes. Today she was wearing blue jeans and a fuzzy pink sweater and I realized couldn’t remember seeing her in the same outfit twice since she’d arrived in Michigan. Every time I saw her she was wearing something different, and today was no exception. It seemed like she never wanted to stay with the same old same old, yet had a lot of stuff she just wouldn’t let go of.

What really caught my eye, though, was a large Bible. It was old and dog-eared and sitting carefully on top of the folded clothes in one of the open suitcases. I was sure I hadn’t seen it before, but it was so distinctive she must have either got it from an antique shop or had it all along. I guessed it must be the latter because she treated it with a weirdly casual reverence: a few times while she packed I saw her treat it a little carelessly, but then once I saw her smile and rub her hand over it.

“Are you a Christian?” I asked her while she packed.

She stopped what she was doing and looked at me curiously. “What makes you ask?”

“Well, the Bible,” I said, gesturing to the book in her suitcase.

She stiffened a little, with that odd look she got when I was hitting something sensitive. She’d once promised me she’d never lie to me, but I could tell when she was trying her damnedest to keep that promise by changing the subject. “It is a set of religious books,” she said. “I’ve seen a lot of those. This is a nice one.”

“May I?” I asked, gesturing at it.

She looked at me solemnly and nodded. I reached into the suitcase and hefted it out. It was an old, heavy King James Version, with a real hand-made but cracked leather binding. It had looked old, but it felt even older. I flipped open the front pages and found a list of family names scrawled in hand-written letters, noting marriages, births and deaths, in different people’s handwriting. On the first page it listed a Samuel McAllister, married to one Mary Van Der Winkle in St. John’s Presbyterian Church in 1792, and later the births of five children; Jeremiah, Mary, Zachary, Catherine, and Sarah. It went on for a few generations with a bunch of important family events and ended around 1905 with the birth of a boy named Alexander in 1902 and two girls, Rose in January and Edna in December of 1905. It looked incredibly valuable, in more ways than one.

I glanced up and the look in her eye made me stop my first question in its tracks. She stared at me with a look that practically screamed that there was a line here she didn’t want me to cross. I groped for a minute, but before I could say anything a part of her relented.

“Edna gave it to me,” she said, smiling nervously.

I looked back down at it. “Beloved daughter born December the Fifteenth 1905, baptized Edna Ruth Tremblay on the 18^th of December.” I pointed and she nodded.

I had a lot more questions I wanted to ask, but I hesitated. There was a look on her face that made me feel like I was doing something rude. Just looking at her, she seemed, well, violated, like she didn’t even want me to look at this, but was forcing herself to let it happen. This was something sacred to her somehow, like she was ashamed to let me touch it or even look at it. I wanted to hammer her with questions, but I could just tell it would be a mistake to press it right now. For whatever reason, she didn’t want me to ask too much about this.

Still, I looked down at it and didn’t want to let the moment pass. Then another line of questions suddenly hit me and they were at least as interesting. So I tabled the obvious and changed the subject.

“Do you believe in God?” I asked. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t asked that sooner.

She looked a little surprised, then simply said, “Define ‘God.’”

I laughed gently. “No, you define it.”

She narrowed her eyes and pursed her lips, then said, “You asked the question, you define the parameters.”

Right. “Well, the God of the Bible, then.”

She returned to her packing without saying anything for a bit. Then she finally shut the last suitcase and zipped it closed.

“No,” she said.

“You have to know that’s not enough of an answer… how can you, being what you are, not believe in God?”

“What does my existence have to do with the question?”

“Well, I mean, you’re impossible but you exist. Don’t you think maybe God or something had a hand in your creation?”

Her eyes narrowed. “I cannot dismiss the possibility,” she said evenly, her face expressionless.

“Well, I’ve read a lot of what you’ve written in your journals,” I said. “You might not like to admit it, but there’s a pretty heavy spiritual element in there sometimes. You use terms like ‘Good’ and ‘Evil’ and ‘wicked’ and ‘the beauty of life’ pretty freely and with a lot of implied meanings…”

“I use the terms because they are familiar.” She paused, staring at me, acting like she was sizing me up again. Then she took a deep breath and said, “I spent over a hundred years as a nun, living in convents between the mid-fourteenth to the late-fifteenth century, so I am quite well versed in the nomenclature of Christianity. When dealing with concepts such as… what?”

I was trying not to laugh while she glowered at me. I finally gave up. “I’m sorry, I… you’re telling me you’ve been a nun?”

“Yes,” she said, a little crossly. “I have by necessity been many things.” Suddenly she stopped and her eyes narrowed again. “Yes,” she said, her voice going flat. “Yes, I have been both a whore and a nun.”

I laughed a little and then felt embarrassed. “Hey, I’m just teasing you, okay?”

“You have a juvenile sense of humor,” she said, obviously not amused. “I was a very good nun, quite devout in my duties,” she said. “When the Plague began its ravages across France I took the identity of a young Cistercian novice. She and the Sisters of her order had come to tend to the sick. They all died so I took advantage, joining a traveling band of flagellants, eventually landing in my first real convent.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “Tell me more.”

“I’d had plentiful exposure to Christian teaching by then, and I learned more as the years passed in the convents.” She stopped for a moment and her eyes wandered a bit. She said something I didn’t understand: “ut omnis qui credit in ipso non paret sed habeat vitam aeternam,” she muttered. Her eyes suddenly refocused and fastened on me. She saw the confusion on my face and smiled, just slightly.

“That whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have eternal life,” she said. She stared out the window. “Would that it were so,” she whispered. Then her eyes moved back to me warily, like she hadn’t realized she’d said that out loud.

“I was not certain I believed in Him,” she went on quickly, pointing at the ancient book. “But I believed in them. In them. Those sisters, and the friar, the father who accompanied us, they wanted to help people. Serving with them seemed a reasonable tradeoff, especially as time went on and they sheltered me for so long.”

“They knew?” I asked, incredulous.

She shook her head. “Oh, no, never. I never told anyone, not anyone.” She said it flatly, almost emphatically. “No, they burned witches and heretics back then. I was witness to more than one such event and I had no desire to take a starring role.” She shuddered just a little. “I am not certain that there is anything more painful or horrible than fire.” She stopped then and gave me her smoky Mona Lisa smile, seemingly acknowledging the conversation we’d had about fire earlier. “But the order often did good things, truly it did,” she said. “It could also be very tranquil and safe much of the time.”

“But you never believed?”

“It is a bit more complicated than that. Saying you believe or disbelieve is difficult when religion suffuses every aspect of life. I honestly have no idea whether the stories of the Bible are true or not. I always assumed they were, but I assumed that the tales of the old gods were real too, and so….” Her voice trailed off and she looked out the window again. She seemed to be wandering through the endless caverns of her mind again. Then she smiled faintly.

“Throughout most of my existence I believed there were many gods,” she said. “To an extent, on a quite visceral level, I still relate to that polytheism, to what the young ones today call the Asatruar faith, even though I now view it as likely false. But back then, the world seemed full of spirits, driving every facet of existence; the sun, the sky, the moon, the herds, the wolves and boars, the deer, the trees and flowers, the earth itself when it shook.” She stopped and looked around, almost not seeing anything. “Every aspect of the world, it seemed ruled by some God, and every great or small thing happened as a result of this or that God’s will. And there was the Night God’s will, the Demon God’s will, wherein all that was frightening or painful ruled.” She looked up at me suddenly. “Or even my will. Do you understand what I am saying?” she asked.

“I’m not sure.”

She paused, staring up at me yet somehow seeming taller than me. “No, I suppose you would understand it only dimly,” she said, sounding resigned. “You are a rational man of 21^st century America. So perhaps you can never understand what it is to grow up believing that spirits surround you, that all you see is driven by those spirits, that every sound you hear in the night and every rustle of the wind and the leaves is the voice of one or more gods.”

“Well, I think I….” My voice trailed off. She was just looking at me in that faintly condescending way of hers, almost like she could see through me. So I just shut up and waited.

She took a deep breath. “When you know nothing about anything, when your whole life is given over to whether you will find enough food and shelter to make it through the coming days…” her voice trailed off. “When to count beyond your fingers and toes is a skill of amazing power, and anything beyond that unthinkable…” she stopped again. Then her eyes gripped mine, sizing me up. “When you are a 16 year old father whose own father died when he was but 18…” she said, almost but not quite asking a question. “Can you comprehend what an entire world made up of such people would be like?”

“I can imagine it, but I don’t think I could really comprehend it,” I said.

She nodded with almost visible relief. “As I have told you, there was a time when I believed the gods spoke to me.”

“Yeah I kind of have a hard time getting that.”

“Imagine growing up in a dark world of death and violence from your very earliest age, when even rudimentary math and literacy were unknown, where a very old man was a man of fifty,” she said, her eyes boring into me again. “Can you imagine it?”

I paused. “Okay, that would be pretty different from now.”

“Now, imagine being completely alone for decades at a stretch, with no one to talk to but yourself and whatever gods you believed in.”

A light went on in my head. “So you thought when you were meditating that you could hear…?”

“I was utterly alone and I utterly believed,” she said. “I heard the voices of the gods in everything. the birds, the wind, the water, the rain…” She paused again and then sat on the edge of the bed. “One day I realized I had completely tired of human companionship and truly did not need them to survive anymore. I fled into the woods to hunt and forage for myself. There, after many years, some men encountered me and I frightened them but relented briefly to allow one of them to dally with me. The next season he and some other men returned seeking my company. Then he and others returned with their sons, and those sons brought their own sons, and so they always found me, unchanged and unchanging. The more capricious I became the more they deferred to me. They built an altar, they made offerings, and I thought, ‘men do not make offerings to mere women.’”

“They don’t?” I asked.

She stopped and looked up at me again, a rueful smile on her lips. “Well perhaps they do,” she said, laughing softly. “But rarely so blatantly. Yet they did keep coming and leaving these offerings, and though I sometimes cursed them they kept returning. It all made sense and was so very easy to believe.”

“So, when you encountered the Christians, it was just another God.”

She paused, thinking about it. Slowly, she said, “No, the Christians were different..”

“How so?”

“They believed there was one, one and only one, like the Jews. They had the Father-God, but they rejected the Mother-goddess, the War god, the Earth goddess, the sun god and the moon goddess…” Her voice trailed off, and she looked at me with a little laugh. Then her cheeks suddenly turned pink as she looked at me unblinkingly. “The huntress goddess,” she said, a little embarrassed.

As I gathered my thoughts, she went on. “Yet when these Christians appeared, they said there was one and only one, and they were willing to sacrifice all, even their own lives, to Him. So who was He? They believed they had an answer, but more importantly, they believed there were no others but He.”

“But you never believed?” I asked.

“Of course I was intrigued. Christ promised eternal life to his followers, so how could I not perk up my ears at that? But when I realized they had to die to obtain that eternal life I could see no reason to think that what Christians believed was any more or less true than the gods of old, even as the old gods faded.” She paused for a bit, her eyes downcast. “But they were different, these Christians, more willing to take a stand and stay with it, to sacrifice themselves to the greater good.” She paused, and shook her head and looked at me again, looking a little cynical. “Still and all, belief in the divine seems simply to be something people do. I no longer have any firm beliefs beyond my own senses. Yet I’ve no interest in challenging anyone’s faith.”

“So you don’t believe in the Christian God at all?”

Her eyes turned stormy. “I must be honest with you,” she said, darkly. “If He does exist, I have some very pointed questions for Him.” She paused. “Some very, very angry questions.” Then she relaxed. “But I simply don’t know. I was always a pagan and in some ways I suppose I still am.”

I thought about that for a minute. I didn’t know where to go with it, so I just asked. “So you really thought you were a goddess?”

She laughed a little nervously: “Yes, I did.”

“When you met Rufus you thought that,” I offered.

“Yes, Rufus,” she sighed, “just his capture of me should have ended my foolishness, but it only set the stage for much worse. He had come to those forests looking for me, drawn by the stories of the locals. Boar hunting was little more than a pretense, something he could use as a face-saving tool should I turn out to be a myth or a fraud. He had ambition, believed himself favored by the gods. The Roman mythology was full of tales of the offspring of the union between gods and mortals.”

“I’ve studied the Romans a little,” I said. “They always seemed less enamored of those kinds of things than the Greeks.”

She gave a little smile and chuckled. “Marieko would have agreed with you, but his explanation would have been simple. He would have told you that the Romans had done their typically sloppy job of interpreting the grand mythos of the Greeks.”

“Marieko. You took his name. Did you marry him or something?”

Her eyes narrowed and she stared at me like I was nuts. Suddenly the air peeled with a sound I’d only heard once before, back in her hospital room—laughter. She sounded almost like a schoolgirl.

“Marieko?” she asked, incredulously. “Marry him?”

“Well what, was it a coincidence?”

She took a step back and leaned against the hotel room wall between the bed and the nightstand, her right hand wrapped around her ribcage. “That crotchety old bastard?” she asped. “That hairy, skinny, know-it-all, snooty old cuss?”

I’d known her for six months and I’d never heard her bust a gut like this. As she leaned against the hotel room wall between the bed and the nightstand, in her tight blue jeans and a fuzzy pink sweater, she looked like a 15 year old girl. With a shock I realized that she’d never looked more human than she did at that moment. She looked like every woman I’d ever known who bitched about how silly and annoying men could be. For all the times she’d seemed spectral, ethereal, even gigantic and spooky, suddenly she was just a girl laughing her head off. She was all of 5’3”, maybe 115 pounds, pretty as hell but no supermodel, her chest quivering through her sweater as she laughed. I marveled again at how much she had filled out since her hospital days. She’d seemed almost sticklike then, but not anymore.

“Marieko,” she said, subsiding a little. “Oh, sweet, wonderful, snotty old Marieko,” she said. “No, I never married him. But I never forgot him.”

I caught a little of her laughing. “Okay, so, his name is the same as your name. That’s a coincidence?”

Her laughter subsided and she looked at me sideways, still leaning against the wall. “No, of course not. I adored him, and I did take his lovely name.”

“Why?”

“Can you imagine what it is like to live a thousand years with no name of your own except whatever anyone who happened to own you decided to call you? Even those who worshipped you?” Her voice and her face were serious.

“Well, no.”

“Well try to imagine you had lived such a life, then imagine one day you chose a name for yourself that no one else had ever called you.”

“Okay…?” I asked, waiting.

She stopped, gave a little harrumph and parked her curvy bottom on the hotel bed. “Names are powerful things,” she said, “and for several lifetimes I had no name but whatever those who owned me gave me.” She stopped, reached into her purse and dragged out another of her Camels. “Truly I had no name for a very long time, except perhaps some variation of ‘whore.’” She paused, lighting her smoke up, staring at the flame as the ember on the end of her cigarette glowed orange and hot. “That’s what ‘Utha’ meant, you know,” she said, puffing and regarding me levelly. “When they first gave it to me. Later it came to be a boy’s name, but no one remembered that and they simply thought it meant ‘provider.’”

I was stunned, a little aghast. She saw that, and gave me her smoky half-smile again. “Life is what it is,” she said.

I couldn’t think what else to say. So I just looked at her and waited.

She thought about it for a bit before speaking again. “Utha was not all I was ever called, but it was perhaps the one I remembered best for some time, even when others took me as property and provided their own names for me. But then I finally abandoned ‘Utha’ and I took the name of a huntress-goddess for my own because my worshippers called me that. I let myself and others use it for centuries. But that, too, was a lie and one day I finally had to choose—if only for myself, and no one else—a name I would call myself forever. I chose two, one for myself that was uniquely my own, and one for the family I knew I would never have. For the family name I chose Marieko’s. Partly because I thought it beautiful, partly because it seemed unique, and partly because I wanted always to remember him.” She stopped again, and took another deep drag on her cigarette. I cleared my throat.

“Well you didn’t marry him. I guess from what you’ve said you weren’t even really intimate with him.”

“Intimate?” she asked, chuckling a little again. “Oh we were intimate. But not in the way you think. In that way, I was utterly Rufus’s woman and would have had no other man. But Marieko was almost like a father to Rufus and Rufus forced him to open up a whole new world up to me.”

She paused and took another deep drag from her cigarette. Then she blew it out slowly, coating the room with silky smoke. “Ah, Marieko.” She paused, and then looked at me solemnly. “You should realize that in two thousand years, I have shared that name with no more than a few dozen people. It was and is my own,” She took another drag from her smoke. “It is not a name for sharing and I almost wish I had never shared it with you. But I needed a name I would always know myself by, one I would never doubt.” She paused and took another deep drag, staring into space. “One I could never fool myself with.”

She stubbed out her cigarette. “It was my fault that he died,” she said, flatly. “Not that I realized it was coming, but still it was my fault. I would like to believe he would be honored if he knew that I chose his name, and I believe he would have been—though he likely would have pretended to be offended. In any case, he gave me a most amazing gift before he died, perhaps the most precious gift I ever received.”

“That’s a hell of a thing to say about a guy,” I said. “So what was it?”

“Funny, grumpy old man,” she murmured. “Not that he ever approved of me, but he changed everything for me.” She looked at me again and I could see something in her eyes I really hadn’t seen before, a kind of misty sentimentality, and she smiled at me.

“I know you wish to pursue this, but… not today. I need to be done with this place. I need to go home.”