Andrea Barrett: The Forms of Water

“We’ll pray in tongues for you,” the woman had said. “We’ll do a soaking prayer. We’ll soak your being in the love of Jesus until the evil spirits leave you and you’re healed.”

“You can leave my being be,” Brendan had told her. He’d thought of how, after compline, the single lamp that lit the Rule for the reader had been extinguished, leaving the monks to chant the psalms in darkness and exorcise the terrors of the night. Compline: the completion of the day. The last of the day’s canonical hours, when the sins of the day were reviewed. He’d given that up, he’d wanted to say to the woman. Why would he accept her feeble prayer?

The woman had bowed her head sorrowfully. “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked,” she’d said. “Who can know it?”

“Who indeed?” Brendan had said, and he’d wondered who could heal him now. He had tumors on his kidneys and in his lungs, others dotting his liver; in his colon, the mass had spread so far that what he swallowed came up as often as it went down. He believed that the seeds of those tumors had come, like the arthritis that crippled him, from the years he’d spent in northern China during the Second World War. Those freezing nights in the abbey’s dormitory, which had swarmed with ticks; the even colder hours in the choir, listening to the Chinese novices wrap their tongues around the Te Deum; the months in the Japanese internment camp — those were the things that had made him sick, and if those were evil spirits, they were not the sort that could be chased away.

He closed his eyes and gave himself over to the swirling water. Then he opened them again, aware that Henry’s flow of complaints had stopped.

“How are you feeling?” Henry asked. “Really, I mean.”

“All right,” Brendan said. “About as well as you’d expect.”

And that was as much concern as he could get from Henry, who sank back into his own worries instantly. “This man I know,” Henry said, “just like me except he built office parks instead of residential developments, he got arrested last week in Buffalo for robbing a bank. I saw it in the paper. The police said that this was his fourth one. There’s so much office space standing empty now that he couldn’t lease a single square foot, and he had a family and cars and a big house and a summer place and he couldn’t make the payments on anything, so he started robbing banks …. You can’t believe what it’s like out there. You don’t have any idea.”

Henry’s voice trailed off again, and as it did the voices next door rose in a sudden, excited babble that sounded to Brendan like “wa-ka- wa -ke, wy-a- wee -no, ko- tay -nu, ko- ba -lu, way -lo, wa-ka- wa -kee …” Of course it didn’t make sense, it wasn’t supposed to make sense. “Praise the Lord!” someone called clearly through the babble. “Praise his works, his ways, his days.” In his beloved abbey in the Paradise Valley — not the one burned to the ground in China, not the austere one in Manitoba nor the inhospitable one in Rhode Island but his first abbey, his true abbey, which had lain beneath the Stillwater Reservoir for half a century now — he had praised the Lord seven times daily, his voice blending with sixty others in a cry that rose up from the choir like smoke.

Henry stared into the whirlpool. “They’re going to send him to jail,” he said. “That guy. I played golf with him. I met his wife.” He shifted his eyes toward Brendan, as if checking to see what effect his story had had, and Brendan knew he was thinking about the land and what it might be worth.

The land was worth nothing, in Henry’s terms; it had no price, it could not be turned into money. On a wooded ridge in Massachusetts, overlooking what had once been the Paradise Valley and was now the Stillwater Reservoir, lay the only remnant of their family’s land that hadn’t vanished underwater. Frank junior — Brendan’s brother, Henry’s father — had built a cabin there after the evacuation of the valley, and Henry and Wiloma had lived there until the accident that killed their parents. Brendan had held on to the piece that passed to him until Henry and Wiloma were grown. Then he’d held on to it longer, fearing Henry’s greed and Wiloma’s impulsiveness.

The mess they’d made of Coreopsis had proved his decision was right, but now the doctors had told him that he was running out of time. And so last week, first during Henry’s Saturday visit and then again, on Sunday, when Wiloma had come, he had finally revealed what he meant to leave them. They had stared at him as if he were mad.

“That was Da’s land,” Henry had said. “Da sold it after the accident, to help pay for raising me and Wiloma.”

“Half of it,” Brendan had explained. “He sold half. He made a will before you were born and left half to your father and half to me. After your parents were killed, he sold the part where the cabin was. But I still own the other two hundred acres.”

Wiloma had been equally puzzled. “In the valley?” she’d said. “How can you own land in the valley? There is no valley, it’s all gone. I thought the place where you grew up was underwater now.”

“It’s near the valley,” Brendan had told her, feeling tired and exasperated. Sometimes Wiloma was as dense as a tree. “Near the valley, adjoining the valley, the land your grandfather owned on the ridge — you lived there. Don’t you remember it?”

She’d stared at him blankly. “I was eight,” she’d said. “When Mom and Dad were killed. You expect me to remember everything?”

“Something — don’t you remember anything?”

“I remember the cabin, sort of. I remember Mom listening to the radio and acting stranger and stranger. I remember the day Dad came home from the war.” She had paused and looked at the wall. “I remember the night they were killed. You were gone.”

She had paused again, and the pause had opened into the hole that swallowed him whenever he let himself think of his brother’s death. No one had been able to tell him how that accident happened, because no one had been around; there had been no other cars on the stretch of empty road and no survivors. In place of Wiloma, sitting across from him, the accident he’d envisioned so many times had flashed before his eyes again.

The inside of the old gray Plymouth is steamy and the windshield keeps fogging up. Frank junior has both hands on the wheel and drives silently while Margaret chatters about the friends they’ve just seen at the VFW dance. The road is slippery and rain pounds on the roof of the car. Margaret’s dress is white. They are almost home; they are on the last curve of Boughten Hill before it dips into the valley and rises again to the ridge. Margaret says something to Frank junior, and just as he begins to answer, a deer flashes across the road. He taps the brakes once and then again. The deer bounds safely into the woods. But the brakes lock, the car skids, Margaret shrieks and he wrenches the wheel. There is no guardrail on this stretch of road and the rain has turned the shoulder to mud. The car lurches, tips, falls heavily onto its side and then rolls, over and over and over, to the base of the ravine.

“Uncle Brendan?” Wiloma had said, and the vision had vanished and he’d seen her face again. He’d been in China, in a hospital bed, when that accident had happened: waiting to be shipped home and unaware that he had no home. He hadn’t seen his brother for twelve years. He’d never met his brother’s wife.

“It’s our family’s land,” he’d told Wiloma, who stared at him as if she blamed him for his long-ago absence. “It’ll be yours when I go — yours and Henry’s.”