Quoth the Raven(20)
“I won’t forget.”
“And don’t drive faster than fifty-five.”
Bennis didn’t answer that one. She climbed into the driver’s seat, fastened her seat belt out of deference to Gregor, and put the van in gear.
“You know,” she said, “there’s been something else I’ve been meaning to ask you, About Father Tibor.”
“What about Father Tibor?”
“Well, is he all right? Is something seriously wrong with him all of a sudden or something?”
“Of course not,” Gregor said, surprised. “Why would you think there would be?”
“It’s just all these changes, that’s all. We were supposed to go up there tomorrow morning, and then he calls you up in the middle of last night and wants us up there today—”
“It wasn’t the middle of the night, Bennis. It was about six thirty.”
“Whatever. It isn’t like him. When Tibor makes a plan, he usually sticks to it.”
The van was easing out into the sparse traffic on Cavanaugh Street, rolling south toward a red light, and Gregor thought: That’s true. It isn’t like Tibor. The problem was, it hadn’t been not like Tibor, either. It hadn’t been hysterical, or overwrought, or insistent. It had been—sort of small and sad.
“I think,” he said carefully, “that Tibor is a little homesick. You’ve read about the fuss they make out of Halloween in that place. I don’t think he knows how to deal with it.”
“Hannah Krekorian told me that some priest who was here when you were all children said that Halloween was a Protestant plot to turn good Armenian Christians into Devil worshipers.”
“I don’t think Tibor would go that far. I think he just feels out of place and out of step.”
“Out of place and out of step,” Bennis repeated. “Oh, well. That’s practically a definition of the man, isn’t it?”
Actually; Gregor didn’t think it was, but he didn’t have time to protest. As soon as the light turned green, Bennis shifted into first and slammed her foot on the gas.
Two
1
FATHER TIBOR KASPARIAN WAS waiting for them in the parking lot at the back of King’s Scaffold when they drove up, standing hatless, coatless, and sweaterless in the stiff chill wind that had been flowing ever since they first entered the Allegheny Mountains. Maybe it was the Appalachians. Gregor could never get the geography of this part of Pennsylvania straight. In his childhood he had perceived it as a wilderness, a natural fortress that protected hillbillies and leftovers from the old west. Thinking about the fact that Philadelphia, a civilized city, was propped up from the south by places like this had made him lose his sense of linear time. Many years later he had come back and discovered what he should have expected to discover: that this might be the northern tip of the hill country, that hillbillies there might be, but that most of the territory was occupied by what everyplace else was occupied by. Small, neat ranch houses built of clapboard and stone, small collections of false-fronted stores antiqued with specialty vinyl siding, brick and redstone post offices and town halls—it wasn’t suburbia exactly, because there wasn’t enough of anything in any one place, but the aesthetic was in harmony with Levittown and Shaker Heights. Every once in a while Gregor caught a glimpse of something modern in cedar and glass and knew just what it was. The back-to-the-landers had their outposts here, offering up their Ivy League educations on the altar of politically correct environmentalism.
Seeing Tibor, Gregor’s first reaction was fret and frustration. Dressed in nothing warmer than his day robes, the priest had to be freezing. Then Bennis jerked the van to a stop, pulled the Walkman headphones off her head—she had been listening to Joni Mitchell tapes all through the drive up, not talking to him—and cut the engine. Gregor found himself feeling suddenly grateful. He was grateful that the van had stopped. Bennis’s preferred speed in road vehicles was somewhere around ninety-five, and she hadn’t made much concession to the twisting mountainside roads they had had to travel to get here. He was grateful, too, for Tibor. Left on his own, he couldn’t have found a college anywhere in this landscape. There was certainly no sign of one.
Bennis had detached her seat belt and, instead of getting out of the van, gone into the back where the picnic baskets were. Gregor detached his own seat belt, opened his door, and climbed out onto the tarmac.
“Tibor?” he said.
Tibor had been staring at a small shack at the back of the parking lot, near the drive where they had come in. Now he nodded to it, as if he’d been talking to it, and turned his head away.