From the far side of the rusty railroad tracks, where the trail enters the wood and begins to rise, it takes me one thousand steps to the spring. I start with my right hand in a fist and extend one finger for every one hundred steps I take and then I start counting from one again. When I reach five hundred, I go the other way and count the next five hundred by remaking the fist one finger at a time. Then I'm at the spring.
The spring feeds a small brook and the water makes it's way down through the woods even through the driest summer months. Above the spring is an outcropping of granite and there are soft pillows of moss surrounding the pool. You can lay comfortably on your belly and look down into the water as it bubbles up a colorful mix of sand and gravel that then settles back down like a shaken snow globe. This was the main attraction of the spring to Bernie and I when we were kids. Drinking from the spring was exotic and we filled our canteens from it. We were in this woods all the time until we were about 10. It was an easy bicycle ride from our houses. The trains still ran on the tracks back then.
He died when he was fifteen, fifty years ago today. I'm now 66 and Bernie was my cousin. He was beautiful. He looked like an angel when he was an altar boy. I've carried a single rose up the trail in my left hand and put it on the pile of roses that others have left. Some are not old at all and still have their color. The pile gets crushed beneath the winter snow, but it's late spring and the snow has been gone for more than a month.
Bernie's mother, Elaine, was my mother's youngest sister. I think about six years separated them. I was the youngest girl of six children and the ties between my cousin and myself were made as infants. His mother, Aunt Elaine, was a little off and my cousin spent a lot of his time at my house as a little kid. Seven was hardly more noticeable than six around our place.
When we did go to his house, he was different, cautious. We had to be quiet because of Aunt Elaine's nerves. We had to leave our shoes at the door. There were always fresh cut flowers on the table in the hall. If there were cookies they were made without sugar. There was nothing for a kid in her refrigerator. It was maybe the cleanest and most organized refrigerator in town. I've still never seen a refrigerator like it.
When Bernie was about nine he started serving the priests at the altar to please his mother. My older brothers gave him some shit about this and warned him not to let them get their hands on him. But he stuck with it until just before he was to become a Knight of the Altar and would have started teaching the younger boys. Then he suddenly quit. It was soon after he started at St. Sebastian. It was all boys, and I went on to the public school. We weren't in school together anymore, but we still were close. Maybe it wasn't cool anymore to be an altar boy and in high school, but Bernie was never cool.
At first he wouldn't say why he quit, but I kept at him and finally he told me he’d seen the Virgin. As if that answered anything. Actually he called her the Shining Lady. We were in my back yard on a swing set that was still there even though everyone had out grown it.
“Am I nuts?” he asked.
I made a face, tilted my head, but he wanted an answer.
“Yeah, probably nuts.”
“I've seen her at the spring three times.”
I spun my swing around to face him. “Our spring? What's she doing at our spring?” I looked at him expecting to be let in on the joke. But I could tell by his look that it wasn't a joke and finally I let the swing spin away.
“Shit, Bernie.”
“She's just there.”
“You talk to her? And she told you to quit the altar boys?”
No answer.
“What do you talk about? Wait, wait. Back up. Who is the Shining Lady? Are you talking about, like, the Virgin Mary?”
His swing was facing me and I was facing him again.
He wasn't going to answer, so I asked again?
“The fucking Virgin Mary? … Bernie?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, what do you talk about besides being an altar boy?”
“Come with me? See her yourself?”
So we went off on the bikes and stashed them in the weeds at the tracks. A thousand steps later we were at the spring.
“So where is she? Is she like a statue or something?”
“I don’t know. Sit down and shut up will you? Just be quiet, she’ll come or she won’t. She’s not always here.”
So I sat and we waited. For a while I watched the sun shining through the trees and playing on the forest floor. I watched it dance off the surface of the spring. I cupped up some water with my hands and had a drink. I watched Bernie for a cue about where I should be looking, but he didn’t seem to be looking anywhere. Just sitting there. No prayers, nothing weird. I flopped onto my belly and watched the fountain of sand. If you looked long enough you could imagine anything.
I don’t know how long I was staring down into the snowstorm of sand in the spring when I heard Bernie clearly say, “Pray for us, O Holy Mother of God."
His voice was perfectly normal like he was talking to me or you, maybe a little extra polite, but no one was there. I rolled on to my back, sat up, and had a good look around, before looking back at Bernie who was listening, now looking down at the spring. But then he looked up as if there was someone standing right there with us, not in the trees, or the rocks, but right there. Then he looked at me smiling. “See?”
“No, Bernie. I don’t see. I don’t see anything. Anyone.”
He looked back to the imaginary person with us and said. “You’ve got to show Nicky too. She won’t believe me if you don’t. She’ll think I”m screwy.”
And then Bernie seemed to be listening, maybe receiving some instruction. Finally he looked down and said, “I know mothers have it hard, but what about us kids? Nothing’s ever good enough for her. Ask Nicky she’ll tell you.”
I looked at the same air that Bernie was looking at, but there was nothing there. I gave it a try anyway. “Yeah, Aunt Elaine’s crazy. You should see her refrigerator.”
I waited for an answer, but nothing. I didn’t hear anything, I didn’t see anything. Bernie looked at me expectantly, but I just had to shake my head.
“Well?” he said.
“I don’t see anything.”
“She’s gone,” said Bernie while I checked around one more time. “If you didn’t see her, who were you talking to? Did you hear her?”
“Not really.”
“Well why did you tell her my mother was crazy if you didn’t hear her?”
“I don’t know.”
The next time we went to the woods, Bernie took a rose from the the hall of his house. I told him his mother would kill him.
“She'd have to come out of her room first.”
When we got there he laid the rose on the rock above the spring the same way he handed things to the priest at the altar with one hand pressed against his chest. And we waited.
We went back a few more times together and I never did see the Shining Lady, but I got to sit in on their chats. Over the summer he saw her a bunch more times, both when I was there and when he was alone. I told him he had to tell someone.
That’s how Father Donovan got involved. He was old and did the Latin Mass. Bernie told him in private. I think the Father tried to talk some sense into him, but Bernie knew what he knew, and was sticking to it. Finally Bernie took the priest to our spring. Old or not the Father hiked out there, across the railroad tracks to the spring, but he didn’t see the Virgin Mary or the Shining Lady any more than I did.
Soon after that it seemed like everyone knew, the priests, the nuns, and even the kids at school, and they wouldn’t leave him alone. I couldn't do anything to shut them up. He wasn't even in my school anymore. Even my family started thinking Bernie had gotten pretty weird.
And then the Shining Lady stopped coming to him. She just stopped showing up. He waited there alone. I sometimes went with him, but nothing.
Bernie told me it was fine, maybe it was even easier, now he could just forget the whole thing. But, it seemed kind of chicken shit to me. You know? Get somebody all worked up and then just drop them like that. Who’s going to be able to just forget they saw the Virgin Mary?
I wasn't buying it. If he wasn't pissed off, I was pissed off for him. “What’s fair about that? … I’ll tell you, Bernie. Nothing.”
When the priests showed up at Bernie’s house to see his mom and dad, they must have noticed it wasn't exactly normal around there. Aunt Elaine completely disappeared after the visit from the church.
His dad hired a housekeeper who cleaned and made meals. She made great Snicker Doodles, but still it was odd being there and knowing that Aunt Elaine was in the house somewhere having a nervous break down.
More priests went to see the spring, even some nuns. They brought me in to answer some questions. All by myself. In a round about way, they found out what I knew about sex. And, if Bernie and I were up to anything.
“He’s my cousin,” I told them.
I was informed that cousins could be “intimate.”
I told them they were crazy. I told the priest that we slept together as little kids, but that had ended when we were probably ten or so. Years ago.
Of course it was because of me that Bernie knew the detailed differences between boys and girls. And I had filled him in on where babies came from, which was no secret around our house. For that matter most of his sex education probably came from me, but I didn’t share that with the priests. All that seemed like none of their business. They're the ones that seem to think you can have babies without having sex, at least when God gets involved. So, I figured they were a little backward on the subject.
They did straighten me out on one thing though. That’s the Immaculate Conception, which I always thought meant that Mary could be a virgin and still have a baby. But that’s not it really. It means she, Mary, was born without sin so she could be a perfect vessel for God. Vessel?
So, anyway, they asked me about the Virgin. What did I know? What did She and Bernie talk about? Did I see her? Did I talk to her? Did she talk to me? And I told them I talked to her a few times, but she never talked to me, or showed herself. And they asked me why I talked to someone I couldn’t see or hear, like I was crazy or something.
Now that too was a bit weird, this priest giving me a hard time about talking to someone who wasn’t there? This coming from a guy who makes his living standing in front of people talking to God - but I wasn’t disrespectful. I tried to explain the best I could that it was just that sometimes I was part of the conversation and I had to answer up.
The priest tried to pin me down on this, “Was there a presence?”
“Yeah you could say that, - kind of a presence. It was sure real for Bernie and he’s not crazy like his Mom.”
About a month after that, Bernie died. It was a shock to everyone. They said it was spinal meningitis. What do I know? He was fine on Thursday and dead by Sunday. He was the first person I ever knew who died. My cousin, my best friend. The whole deal sucked.
His mother, Aunt Elaine, went to the funeral, but never left her room again after. She died before the next summer. The second person in eight months. All in my family.
I guess I never could protect Bernie from them, and off and on I’ve felt a little guilty about that. They made an official church ruling on whether the Virgin had appeared to my cousin or not and decided, no. Officially he was just a crazy kid. Certainly no saint.
I brought the first rose a year after he died and others bring a rose now and again, over the years. I don't know who they are. Just people looking for the Virgin. Maybe they didn't even know Bernie. I just see that there are more dead flowers every year.
Do I believe Bernie saw the Shining Lady? It’s been a long time, but my cousin wasn’t crazy. For a while anyway, all those years ago, the Virgin Mary was there talking to Bernie as sure as there’s 1000 steps to our spring. I believe that there are things both seen and unseen.
BERNIE