“the Still, Small Voice”, 4/5

[aadler]

 
Fourth installment



(Part 3 here)

Part IV

Nolan had used the interval to organize his thoughts. The conversation with Quentin Travers had gone roughly as expected; Maclay would be different, he knew, and it helped that he had been afforded a breathing space in which to make ready. At the appointed hour, Travers applied the requisite materials to himself, intoned the preparatory incantation, and entered the closed room; a couple of minutes later, Maclay emerged, looking drawn but moving with rigid control.

“Here, have a seat,” Nolan urged him. “That must have taken a lot out of you.”

Maclay shook his head in denial, but didn’t hesitate to sit. “It wasn’t too bad, actually. Right now it’s as if I’d walked up a high hill at a quick pace. I don’t feel guilty at the thought of you and Quentin doing as much, and I would have given a lot more.”

“I see.” Nolan regarded the other man with an expression of mild concern. “And yet, it still hasn’t been easy. This whole business, I mean. Am I right in thinking you would have rather fought this demon yourself, than see it settle into your niece?”

“It didn’t settle into her,” Maclay corrected without heat. “It emerged from her. And keeping it buried, that is the way we fight such a thing.” He sighed. “But it’s true, I’d bear her burden in her place if I could.”

Nolan nodded, accepting it, and returned to his coffee. Then, into the new pause, he said, “Travers seems to have a high opinion of you.”

Maclay’s lips twitched in what might have been a smile had his mouth not been weighted with weariness. “We shared a few … mutual undertakings, when I was a great deal younger. I was brash, and lucky, and he feels that I did him an important service. I long ago stopped trying to argue with him about it.”

There was considerably more to it than that, of course, but Nolan fixed on the part that served his purpose. “I’ll admit I’m surprised. You seem so, so settled, I would never have pictured you and Travers in what would have been, for you, a youthful adventure.”

Travers had placed the coffeepot on the table before going to take his turn in the vigil, and Maclay poured for himself now. “It was during my pilgrim’s time,” he said; then, seeming to realize that the statement would require explanation, he went on. “It’s one of our customs; the Amish have something similar, I think, and we may even have gotten the basic idea from them. Our way of life, the path of our duty, is demanding, so when one of our young men reaches adulthood, he’s given the opportunity to go out into the larger world, weigh it against the rigors of the Covenant, and make his own choice.” He sighed. “We lose about a quarter of them, and only careful, steady recruitment allows us to maintain our numbers, but it’s all part of a larger design. We need those who remain to be totally committed; and, naturally, bringing in a regular influx of new blood keeps us from becoming inbred.”

He stopped, a shadow falling behind his eyes, and Nolan moved to forestall an uncomfortable silence. “I can’t imagine that sharing, um, ‘mutual undertakings’ with Quentin Travers, would have enticed you to stray from your chosen duty.”

“You wouldn’t think so, would you?” Maclay shook his head. “I told myself I was a soldier of the Almighty, steadfast in my resolve. I told myself I had no need to weigh and consider, I already knew the road I would walk, so I would use this time to fight the darkness directly. I threw myself into the battle with a zeal that amused Quentin, and a degree of success that he claimed to find impressive.” He raised his eyes to meet Nolan’s. “It had been an alliance of convenience, but then he offered me a permanent position in the Watchers’ field action organization. That was when I realized the truth.”

“You were tempted,” Nolan supplied for him.

“I had been trying to escape the whole time,” Maclay said, nodding. “I just hadn’t let myself see it. So sure of myself, and yet I’d spent over a year running away from my responsibilities.”

“There are many ways to serve,” Nolan pointed out. “I disagree with Travers on a number of things, but he does valuable work. There would have been no disgrace in your accepting his offer.”

“No.” Maclay’s demurral was firm and unhesitating. “Our women need us. That was the first duty I ever learned. Once I saw I’d been trying to dodge the choice, the choice was clear.”

“I see,” Nolan said. A moment later he added, “I did you an injustice, when I first learned of your people’s situation. I already told you I was sorry, but I wanted to say it again.”

This time the smile succeeded — barely — in making itself visible. “Any apology I was owed,” Maclay said, “you’ve already fulfilled by your service to me and my kin. If there’s a debt, it’s mine.”

Nolan used a sip of his brandied coffee to fill the space an answer would have fit, then sat and allowed the silence to accumulate. After a minute of this, Maclay spoke again. “My son … he’s stretched his time beyond what it should be. I’ve tried to speak to him about it, but …”

He let the words trail off. Nolan said, “With your own experience, you should be able to show that you understand how it feels.”

“No, that’s not it,” Maclay said. “I do understand, I suppose, but it really isn’t the same for him. I was much angrier than he is, but also more sure of myself. He’s very uncertain, and I don’t know what to say to that because … because …” He looked to Nolan, and seemed to draw steadiness from the openness and acceptance the priest was trying to project. “Because I’m responsible for the things that have him in such turmoil. I don’t know what else I could have done, but I know that … that I didn’t do very well, in the choices I made.”

As a confessor of many years’ experience, Nolan knew exactly how to encourage and facilitate what was happening. “Your sense of duty, obviously, is very keen. Whatever the choices you’re speaking of, you must have believed you were doing the right thing.”

“I’m not sure I did,” Maclay said. “I mean … I tried to do what was right, but I couldn’t always be sure what that was.”

Nolan nodded. “A conflict between different aspects of your duty?”

“Something like that, yes.” Maclay put his hands on the table in front of him. “My wife … she meant the world to me, I would have done anything to make her happy, but she … wasn’t. She was never happy. The life she had to lead, the strictures she had to follow and the things she had to give up … she just wasn’t suited for it. Her existence had a certain shape to it, had to because of her heritage, but that shape was a prison for her, and I was the jailer.”

“For her own good, you had to impose on her a set of limitations that she found confining,” Nolan said. “Is that what you mean?”

“Yes, but more than confining,” Maclay told him. “It was as if her spirit was being strangled, as if part of her was dying while I watched. And not only could I not help her, I was … I was the one doing it to her.”

“Conflict,” Nolan said, nodding. “Between one duty and another. And yet I can’t see that you really had any choice.”

“I was weak,” Maclay said. “She never said it, she never accused me, but I knew that fate had made me my wife’s oppressor. I felt guilty, and so I … did nothing, when she began to stray from the path.”

Nolan frowned. “The path? The practices that safeguarded her from, from what has happened to your niece?”

“No, no, of course not.” Maclay seemed impatient at the misunderstanding rather than offended. “I never would have let her endanger herself in that way. No, I meant something else. Our lives are ordered by routine and by faith. The routine has two purposes, to keep the women’s demon nature in check and to bolster our faith; and in the same way, the faith serves both to reinforce the physical practices and to keep us strong in our purpose. The women submit to us, but we submit to our duty as their guardians and protectors, and we need to believe in what we’re doing.

“She didn’t. She recognized the necessity, she didn’t resist that, but she became estranged from the faith that made it possible. She began to look … elsewhere. To nature, to the human heart, to mysteries and hints of other levels of reality …” Maclay stopped, as if he had heard and understood the meaning of what he was saying. “She was trying to find the only freedom she could, she was making what peace she could with a life that was burying her a bit at a time. I told myself that it was harmless, that she deserved some small escape, I told myself that I could carry the faith for both of us. That was my job, after all. I allowed her these little … eccentricities, and focused on the part that was mine, and tried to believe we were both making the best of a hard bargain.”

“Maybe you were,” Nolan offered. “I believe in faith as strongly as you do, but we both know it can’t be forced on someone else. They have to embrace it on their own, or not at all.” He paused. “How far — astray — did she go?”

“I don’t know,” Maclay said. “These were things … if I’d studied them too closely, I might have felt I had to oppose them, and I didn’t want to rob her of the only liberty she had.” He looked to Nolan. “But, when she started to sicken … she was very close to our daughter, and Tara was terribly upset by her illness. They formed a special bond during that time, and I didn’t have the heart to interfere, so that’s another thing I let happen.”

Nolan tilted his head, frowning slightly at the other man. “You believe that her, her alternative practices, were connected to her illness?”

“No,” Maclay said. “She had ALS — Lou Gehrig’s disease — and in the end she died of it. It happens. If there was a connection, it went the other way: as she got sicker, she went deeper and deeper into these false beliefs. I let myself not see what they were, and I let myself not see that she was teaching them to our daughter.”

“New Age,” Nolan said with a sigh.

“Magic,” Maclay corrected. “At the very least, magic. I don’t know if it was strictly what we would call witchcraft, though I used the word at one point, but it was kin to it. Out of what I told myself was love for my wife, I gave her no anchor while she drifted toward destruction.”

Though he longed to reassure the man, Nolan didn’t want to halt an admission that clearly had not come without pain. Instead he said, “If that was the worst of your failings, you’ve done better than many.”

“It was only the beginning,” Maclay said. Tension had tightened the skin over his face until it was almost skull-like. “After her mother died, Tara … I didn’t know how to deal with her, I could see that, and I suspected — I still do — that she, too, thought I had crushed her mother’s spirit. I didn’t want her to feel I was trying to do the same to her, so I was … lax. She had turned her grief inward, and poured everything into her schoolwork. She did well enough to earn a special scholarship to … to a college in California. She begged to be allowed to go; it was the only thing she ever asked of me. I should have held fast, refused to let her reach for a life she could never have, but I couldn’t bear to refuse this last bit of freedom. I gave her a year. I made sure she understood that it couldn’t be more than that, because then she would be nearing the age when the demon’s nature comes fully into its own and has to be actively suppressed.” He lowered his head, closed his eyes. “That’s properly a husband’s duty; we try to make sure they’re married by that age. Tara wasn’t much for boys, but a lot of the time the marriages are arranged by the families, so that part wasn’t really important.”

He fell silent, seeming to sink into himself. After a moment Nolan observed, “From the sound of things I would guess that it, er, didn’t go according to plan.”

Maclay looked back to the priest and said, “No, it didn’t. When her cousin had already been gone five months, Beth told us something Tara had said, that she didn’t ever intend to marry. Tara didn’t want to produce a daughter who would have to face the same fate as … as her, and her mother, and all the women before them. That was when I began to face the truth of what was happening.”

“It can’t have been easy,” Nolan said. “I can see that much. This was a matter of … ancestral obligation, and yet honoring it meant forcing your own child into a way of life she didn’t want. Duty is so much easier when we only have to impose it on ourselves.”

Maclay shook it away. “You’re trying to be kind, but the difficulty doesn’t excuse my failures. Hard duty is still duty. Would a loving father refuse to give his child a life-saving vaccine, just because the child screamed at the sight of the needle? That would be selfishness shamming as love. Nobody would excuse such negligence, and that’s exactly what I’m guilty of doing.”

“She went her own way,” Nolan said. “She may have made the wrong choices, but once she was an adult, they were her choices to make. Your duty, however stern it may be, can’t demand that you do the impossible.”

Maclay came up out of his chair. Not violently, not with any intimation of threat, but as if the intensity of his emotions demanded movement. “My duty to her was to raise her with the discipline and example to allow her to make the right choices. I know what you mean, I’ve seen people torture themselves, second-guessing things they couldn’t have known at the time, but when I look back at my actions, I know exactly what I did wrong and exactly why. In my weakness I failed my wife, and I failed Tara, and now I’ve failed Beth.”

“No.” Nolan shook his head. “You’re claiming responsibility for things you didn’t have the power to control. You’re talking about three grown women. You can’t be held accountable for their decisions.”

“I can,” Maclay said. “I can. I was never strong enough, I never made them see the importance of the choices they were making. I tried, again and again I tried, but I always let myself hold back, fall short, settle for too little.” He had been pacing, but now he wheeled to face Nolan. “When I went to Sunnydale to get Tara, I took Donny and Beth with me; I was finally going to take responsibility, be the example for them that I always should have been. I couldn’t do it. I failed again. The people she was with, they were all caught up in the same stupid, destructive fascination with magic that had seduced my daughter, and they had this … this …” He gestured helplessly. “I don’t know what it was, some kind of test that was supposed to prove she had no demon in her. And she believed it, no, leaped to believe it, because it was what she wanted to believe. I let it happen, I walked away, I … I was so angry. That one man, the East End hoodlum with the bleached hair: he dismissed it all as a myth, a, a, a lie to allow us to keep our women docile, and the others were looking at me with this, this knowing contempt, and they didn’t know anything! We were her family, we were ready to do what was necessary to protect her; but they called themselves her family, working in their ignorance and arrogance to destroy her, and she denied us and went to them.”

“And the demon within her?” Nolan prompted. He knew the answer, but the words had to come from the other man. “Did it ever emerge?”

“No.” Maclay lost some of the frantic energy that had possessed him, and took his seat again. “Even back home, thousands of miles away, I focused what I could of my devotions onto my daughter. By then I was responsible for Beth, too, but Donny helped; even though he’s not eager to take a wife, he was willing to do what he could to save his sister. And when I was at Tara’s lodgings at the college, I saw packets of the herbal preparation our women use to help contain their darker nature, so maybe she continued using that even though she rejected the rest of her upbringing. And she was still several months short of her twentieth birthday, so we had that time to try and fortify her in advance. She may have been one who would have manifested late — some women do — and she may have found … other means … of keeping herself in check, even while making herself believe she was free of the taint. I don’t know. I’ll never know. For a year and a half Donny and I poured ourselves into preserving her, and then she died.”

Again knowing the facts, Nolan asked anyway. “How?”

“Violently,” Maclay said. “The people she associated with, her ‘family’, they attracted trouble. They got into a public brawl with another of their ilk, and he bought a gun and went looking for revenge. He wasn’t after Tara, he didn’t even know she was there, but I doubt that he would have cared, he just started blazing away. She died, and the police never caught him.”

“I’m sorry,” Nolan said. “It’s a hard and terrible thing, but it could have happened to anyone.” He wasn’t about to comment on the prospect of justice catching up to Tara Maclay’s killer — what happened to Warren Mears, deserved or not, had nothing to do with justice — but he added, “Your daughter was trying to build a life for herself. She may have been wrong in the choices she made, but no one else could make them for her. And I can see that she was loved. If you’re blaming yourself for her death, you shouldn’t.”

“Not for her death,” Maclay said. “We all die. She died of a bullet, her mother died of disease, and both were untimely but if it hadn’t been those things it would have been something else, dying comes with living and no one escapes it. I mourn for them, but I don’t question God’s ways. No, I blame myself for what I let happen to their souls.”

“I don’t think you can judge such things,” Nolan said. “I think it’s presumptuous of you to try.”

“I don’t pass judgment,” Maclay shot back, “but I don’t ignore what my judgment tells me. I let my wife turn away from the church that kept her human, compromise herself with ungodly beliefs and practices. I let her teach these things to our daughter, and then let our daughter leave the sanctuary of our faith so she could fall even farther. When she allied herself to the wrong people, I let her stay with them. Not only did she die with her salvation threatened by unbelief, I learn now that she served as an inspiration to Beth; like Tara, my niece tried to escape the demon inside her by running away from the very things that kept it chained! My wife is dead, my daughter is dead, my son is ready to desert the calling we’ve followed for three dozen generations, my niece is buried in demon flesh … I’ve failed everyone who depended on me, I’ve let them be damned by my weakness!”

He had come to his feet again in his agitation, and Nolan likewise rose, placing his hands on the other man’s shoulders. “Mr Maclay — Robert — listen to me. You and I come from very different corners of the faith, but at the end we pray to the same God. Will you agree with me in this?” Even in his distress, Robert Maclay would not deny his belief; he nodded, wordless and pale, and Nolan went on. “I’ve had my fortitude assailed in many ways over the years, but there’s one thing I’ve always been able to fall back to, one phrase that anchors me to the bedrock: God is not less than I am. Do you see what I mean? I may falter, but He is eternal; I may fail, but He will never fail me. And it goes farther than that. You loved your wife and daughter, you love your son and niece; you’d do anything in your power to safeguard them, and forgive them anything if they would just follow you to the salvation that you see waiting. Isn’t that right? Well, God isn’t less than you, either. However much you agonize over the souls of your loved ones, you can be sure they mean even more to Him. If they need help, there’s no help better; if they need mercy, there’s no mercy greater; if they need guidance, they have a Guide. I’ve staked my own soul on that, and you’ve done the same with yours. He will sustain us. He will sustain them. If we can’t believe that, we have nothing. And I believe it.”

Maclay had begun to tremble, and by the time Nolan had finished he was weeping silently. At last he found his voice. “They turned away from the faith,” he whispered. “Will He force salvation on those who refuse it?”

“They were foolish, and selfish, and weak,” Nolan said. “But they know better now, and they have eternity to make it right.” He smiled at Maclay. “Your church doesn’t hold much to the idea, but mine still believes in Purgatory. Some people see that as a temporary Hell, but others — and I’m among them — believe it’s a time when people can work to correct the mistakes they made in life, make themselves ready to stand before God. Wouldn’t a loving father grant a child every decent chance to clean up her own mess? You would, I know, and I’ll say it again: God isn’t less than we are.”

“I want to believe you.” Maclay looked to the priest with desperate need. “I want so much to believe what you say.”

“Then pray with me.” Nolan steered the man back to his chair, then resumed his own seat. “Pray for the souls of your treasured dead, and for those of the children still in your care; and while we’re at it, we’ll pray for our own souls as well.”

They joined hands across the table, united in trust and hope and purpose, and were still locked in their prayers when Quentin Travers came out at the end of his hour.

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