Afterword: Post 5: Vigil Begins

April brought us a new puzzle.

As you'll likely recall, in early May, the school traditionally would send all the yearlings to camp on a certain island. All the Six except Greg would go as well, but they would camp separately, on retreat. Each would come out for a day or two to teach a workshop, but the real point of the trip was a group vacation for the masters and a group bonding experience for the students.

But that year, Charlie clearly could not go.

It was not exactly that he was too ill to go--he was weak, and probably could not lead his traditional hikes for students, but he could certainly have participated in the retreat, and I and another former student could have led the hikes for him. But going would have meant missing a treatment, and that he could not do.

The others did not want to go without him. He argued back, told them they were all stupid and crazy and neglecting their obligations, and then when they would not relent he at last said "thank you," in a small, reluctant voice.

But what was going to happen with the students? I and the other allies teaching that year were in on that meeting. We discussed various possibilities, from skipping the retreats utterly to sending the students on some kind of local retreat. Eventually Greg pointed out that the yearling students were adults and were perfectly capable of going to the Island themselves. He did not say, but it's also true and also relevant, that the yearlings don't know Charlie and will not mind being away from him for a while.

So, that's what we had them do.

We gave them a debit card, directions, camping equipment, and the use of the vans. We also gave them an assignment--a series of scavenger hunts (photos to be collected, not items) in teams, with the teams changing for each hunt so that everyone would be on a team with everyone else at least once. They were to use the photographs to put together a presentation for campus afterward. Charlie wrote the scavenger hunts, though he did not sign them.

It was well none of us had gone, because the first week of May, a shift occurred; Charlie, who had been living with cancer, instead began dying of it.

I'm not sure how to explain the difference--I was never told any details of his treatments, test results, etc., so I'm not sure how cold, hard facts might have aligned with subtle intuition, but we all felt it. He was more tired, more easily distracted, more frighteningly thin. He seemed, perhaps, more thoughtful. Whatever had changed, he felt it, too.

Once, while checking for scale insects on one of the hanging plants in the car port, he told me, "You know what pisses me off, Daniel? Those stories and such about people being told they have a month to live so they go sky-diving or whatever. By the time you get that news, you're sick. Really sick. It's too late for the bucket list." His attention was on the plant and his voice sounded calm, almost professional. I asked him whether there was anything he regretted not doing. At first he simply ignored my question, but after a minute he glanced at me. "Oh, come on, you know me better than that," he said.

But what did I know?

On another occasion, we walked together down along beside the sugar maple avenue and stopped, sitting in the grass so he could rest. I had little to say, but he seemed unusually talkative, telling me things about his life I hadn't heard before.

"You know, if anything happens, and the stories I tell you prove useful, you have my permission to repeat them. Anything, even the alcoholism stuff. Use your judgment." Of course, he meant if anything happened to threaten the school--at the time I thought such worries somewhat paranoid, though of course I didn't say anything. I was touched by his trust, but didn't say anything about that, either.

He told me of the founding of the school and his role in it, how he had become the Charlie I knew him to be. I'd heard parts of the story before, even from him. He was repeating himself a little, not remembering what he'd told me already. Of course, people rarely do remember--they're always surprised when I recall what they've told me better than they do.

"I never expected to spend the whole rest of my life celibate," he admitted, "but that's what I've gone and done."

"You're life's not over yet," I told him, urgent. He looked at me, amused.

"'Elderly cancer victim seeks willing woman for final fling?' I think not." he said.

But that wasn't what I meant. I could not tell him what I meant.

Charlie had not exactly retired, though he was no longer teaching classes. His life was his work, and vice versa. He spoke with and gave crazy assignments to the various students he already had, for although everyone had chosen new masters by that time, he had insisted on not giving up his role while he could still breathe. He explored and inspected campus and, to a lesser extent, the woods, giving instructions to Raven and Rick to enact on his behalf. He had a walker, a fancy one someone had found for him in a specialty shop, with purple tubing and wheels with hand breaks and a little fold-down seat. He took to using that walker, not just to keep from falling when the weakness took him, but so he could rest as needed. There he'd be, sitting calmly in that fold-down seat, halfway between here and there, getting his breath back. He'd wave or nod as people passed by him. He refused any help.

How much of his calmness was illusion I don't know, but at least some of it was. One morning, when I biked in to campus, a student who knew me shared an interesting bit of gossip he could not explain; the night before, there had been a huge crash from somewhere in the Mansion. He and the others, suddenly woken, had come out of their dorms onto the landing in time to see Security Joe hurrying downstairs, tying his bathrobe closed over his pajamas as he went.

"Go back to bed," he'd said without stopping. "I'll take care of it."

"We'd expected some kind of announcement at breakfast," the student told me, "but there was nothing."

"That's very strange," I agreed. Then, when the student had gone on his way, I hurried over to Charlie's room in the Herbarium and found what I knew I would--Charlie slowly returning somewhat wrinkled books to shelves and cleaning up broken knickknacks. In the night, alone with his helpless rage, he'd pulled the shelves over.

When he felt good, he'd go to his doctors for check-ups or permit various alternative healers, most of them presumably graduates, to come consult. When he was feeling especially bad he allowed nobody to examine him. He was serious about not wanting to be hospitalized. He had a horror of dying under a roof of any kind, and on particularly bad days he would not go inside at all, sleeping instead in a hammock slung between blue spruces next to the Mansion--I'm not sure why those non-native trees had been spared Charlie's axe, but they returned the favor, since the group of them defined an interior private space, a little room where interior branches had been pruned away and he could rest outdoors but away from prying eyes.

The trees could not contain sound, however, and on two occasions, as I approached for our arranged lunchtime visits, I heard things I was not supposed to.

The first time it was the sound of a woman crying and, over that, Charlie's voice, shouting "I am a teacher! I am not a goddam learning opportunity! And I'm telling you to take the ring!" I crept away and came back later. He did not mention the incident, and I would not have known what happened except that Nora, Charlie's primary caregiver and the owner of the sobs I had heard, spontaneously told me, without even knowing I'd overheard.

Charlie had tried to give her her ring.

As you might recall, Nora was a mastery candidate working with Joy. She was already a medical doctor, and on Charlie's suggestion had taken over his care so that she could learn from the experience of losing him. She could not earn her ring until he died, nor until she had passed the job interview or gone through the rituals at Brigid. I'm not even sure how he had procured a ring in her size in May, it was very much not how we did things. He had decided not to care. She'd tried to refuse, which was when he shouted.

"Of course I took it," she told me, looking at it on her hand. "What else could I do? But it's not like it's mine, yet."

"I don't know," I told her. "What's the wording of the ritual? 'Why do you want it,' 'Because it is mine?' Mastery is ours before we step on that stage, but who knows how much before?"

She nodded, accepting my reasoning, then said "I hate this. I hate it, and he hates it, and I hate it for him."

I could only agree.

The next thing I overheard, some days later, was Charlie's voice, quite calmly, saying "Katie. I was wondering if you'd show up."

I had been walking by, not planning to stop in and see him just then, but I stood still then, wondering who Katie might be. He could not hear anything else, just the occasional low, incomprehensible murmur, so I waited, confident I would breach no privacy, to see who might come out.

To my surprise, Kit did.

"You're Katie?" I exclaimed. of course a lot of people in our community use names that aren't the ones from the original birth certificates, and I'd always gathered that "Kit" was a Craft name, meant to honor the red fox that red-haired Kit identified with. But I'd never given a thought as to what she might have been called before.

She looked at me with tear-reddened eyes. For a moment she seemed furtive, angry.

"I didn't hear anything," I assured her, "just the name."

"Yes," she acknowledged. "Go get the story from him. I know you want to. I can't talk right now." And she hurried away.

I could not figure out whether she actually wanted me to know or not, but in the end I went in to Charlie anyway. He looked up at me as I came through the branches.

"Are you here to exorcise your demons, too?" he asked me.

"No. What that...?" I pointed behind me indicating Kit.

"She was here among others. Everybody and their mother's cousin seems to want to have a death-bed scene today." He was not happy.

"Who else?"

"Sarah. This morning. She came to beg me to return to the Church. I should have expected it. She's always worried about my soul."

"What did you tell her?" I asked, having trouble imagining Charlie in a church of any kind, let alone the Catholicism of his youth, a faith I've always associated with stone, with stained glass, with the works of human hands.

"I told her to send her priest, why not?" At my evident surprise he grunted in amusement. "I never left the Church in the first place," he explained. "Except during my drinking, when I left pretty much everything. Other than that, I've spent my life pursuing truth. The search has taken me in heterodox directions, but if anything I've ever done has offended my God, then I am heartily sorry."

He did not sound repentant, but his humility was entirely genuine. I waited, to see what more of the story he wished to tell.

"Kit...Katie...wanted my forgiveness," he said, after a bit.

"For what?"

But he looked at me as though I really should have known, and indeed she has treated him badly the whole time I've known them, and doubtless before.

"I was her teacher," he explained, and it explained much. I'd heard the same from Sarah, years earlier, but I had not known any of them well enough at the time to understand.

"What did you tell her?" I asked.

"I chewed her out, of course. This wasn't for me, if it was, she could have come to me years ago, when I wasn't sick. Now she wants to avoid feeling guilty when I die." His opinion of such an order of priorities dripped from his voice. "I told her that if lets go of the nonsense that caused her to act like a spiteful child, she may consider herself retroactively forgiven by me, even if I'm already gone. One last assignment from me, I suppose, to be graded by the student."

We spoke a little longer before I realized that Charlie, despite being amped-up by anger, was tired. I let him rest.

Later that day I saw Kit and asked if she wanted to talk. She walked towards the Formal Garden and I followed her. She stopped and so I stopped before we got there, beside the magnolia at the corner of the Mansion.

"You did ask him," she said, not looking at me.

"She I not have?"

She shrugged.

"Did he tell you what a spiteful child I've been?"

In those very words. But what I said was "Frankly, Kit, he didn't need to."

She started to smile, embarrassed, but then turned towards me suddenly and flushed.

"Did he tell you why? I bet he didn't. Did he tell you how I did everything he asked me to do, every single fucking thing, and it had exactly the effect he said it would have--I transformed, I found my way to a truth you can't find in a book or a fantasy, or an entheogenic drug, only direct experience and a reasoning mind, and I've based my life on that experience. And everything that I've learned, everything that I've taught, everything that I am, it's all just so much fluff to him. I'm like you--one of the most dedicated, successful students he's ever had. And he will never, never notice."

I had nothing to say--or too much to say for any of it to ever come out. She'd been stupid in her anger and her hurt, far stupider and more cruel than I'd ever thought her capable, but I could not be sure I would not have reacted just as badly were I in her shoes. Stepping into Charlie's shoes at that moment felt harder--though it's true I've taken very few of Kit's teachings to heart. Her kind of witchcraft has not called to me, and I have difficulty believing it. How much of that is Charlie's doing, and how much is simply me seeing what he saw, because it is there to see?

But I did not speak. I put my arms around her, folding her head to my chest, and she, for the first time treating me wholly as an equal instead of as a student, wept in my embrace and took some measure of comfort from me.