Chapter 21

The next morning, Elizabeth waited for Gabe to stop by. When he didn’t show up by eight, she went over to his room and knocked. There was no answer. Scanning the parking lot, she didn’t see his truck so she returned to her room and waited. She finally grabbed her phone, looked up his number on the business card he’d given her, and called. No answer there either. She picked up Luke’s diary and began skimming through it again. Her son’s voice behind the words soothed her, seemed so recognizable and familiar; yet at the same time the writing appeared so inaccessible, so alien to her ear now. Luke had wanted to become a monk. How could such a thing have happened right under her nose, as it were? In some ways, she’d almost have preferred that he had been gay. At least then, had he lived, Luke would still have occupied the same world she did; he’d still have been her son, someone who would have been a part of her life, even if that life had been different from what she had once imagined. But this life? He might as well have been serving life in prison. It seemed so strange to her, so other worldly. A life of contemplation, Zack had called it. What had led her son down this path? It almost seemed that for every answer she’d managed to glean from this trip, a dozen new questions were spawned.

Around ten thirty, Gabe finally returned.

“Where the hell were you?” Elizabeth asked, annoyance leaching into her voice.

“Met with my realtor again,” he said, rubbing his hands together.

“Your realtor?”

“We looked at a couple of houses.”

“Really?”

“Yes. You ready? We should be able to make Albuquerque by five.”

“There’s something else I have to do,” Elizabeth told him.

“Now what?”

“I need to visit one more place. I Googled it. It’s about a four hours’ drive.”

“What place?”

“A monastery.”

“A monastery? What on earth for?”

“I’ll explain in the truck.”

They stopped and filled up with gas, got coffees and a breakfast sandwich for Gabe. The weather continued cool, with a light drizzle leaking out of a leaden sky. On the GPS, Elizabeth punched in the address in Silver City, and they headed south out of Marrizozo. As they drove along, she told Gabe what she’d found in the diary and from her conversation with Father Jerome. When she’d finished, he looked over at her with that dopey grin on his unshaven face. He looked youthful, buoyant, his face seeming to glow with the promise of something, like a child on the first day of school.

“You’re shitting me?” he said.

“Evidently that’s why he came down here. He was planning on going to that monastery for some sort of retreat. To see if he liked it.”

“Jesus. A monk? And he never told you guys anything about it?”

“Nothing. Not a word.”

“And I thought my family had its secrets.”

Elizabeth took a sip of her coffee and stared out the window. The truck’s wipers made a dull klick-klack, klick-klack as they swept the water away. In the distance the gray mountains looked like giant sleeping elephants, their sides furrowed and rough-textured.

“So what do you hope to learn at this monastery?”

“I want to talk to Brother Vincent. He’s the one my son was in contact with.”

“Do you think he can tell you anything you don’t already know?”

She shrugged.

They’d been driving for a while when Gabe cried, “Is that it?”

Elizabeth followed where he was pointing out the driver’s window, at the cross she’d put up for her son the previous day. With all the new developments since last night, she’d almost forgotten about it.

“Yes.”

“You did a halfway decent job,” Gabe offered.

During the ride, Gabe chattered on about this one house he was considering, just outside of town, that had a barn where he could park his wrecker and work on cars.

“And there’s an attic up above the barn I could convert to a little studio. And it’s all dirt cheap. I have enough to put down a deposit to hold it until I tie up things back east.”

“Aren’t you moving a little fast?” Elizabeth warned him.

“You got to strike while the iron’s hot.”

“I’m just saying you don’t want to go off half-cocked.”

Gabe glanced over at her. “Look who’s talking. Miss Half-cocked herself.”

She glanced over at him. “I don’t mean to sound negative. It actually sounds like a good idea. It really does.”

The rain stopped by mid-afternoon, about the time they arrived in Silver City, a small town pressed up against the mountains. The clouds slowly parted and the sun broke through just above the high peaks, sending gaudy slivers of pale light cascading down them. They followed the GPS north, heading up into the Gila National Forest. Here the mountains were thickly covered by pine and pinyon and juniper, and in the distance jagged peaks rose sharply toward a now bluish-gray sky. The scene looked like something out of a painting by Thomas Moran, all that daring light and high dramatic cliffs. After a while they came upon a sign that said Blessed Mother of the Redeemer Monastery. They turned onto a narrow dirt road that wound its way up a canyon, until they saw a group of tawny-colored adobe structures set amid the forest, their roofs covered with bright Spanish tiles. In the center of the monastery rose a tall bell tower.

They pulled up in front and parked in a paved circle before the bell tower. Across the road from the monastery the land fell away abruptly, so that above the greenish-blue tree tops a vista continued all the way to the valley miles below.

“Should I come along?” Gabe asked.

“I don’t see why not.”

They headed through an arched entryway and started down an outdoor colonnade when they came upon a man in a dark habit. He was kneeling on his hands and knees scrubbing the floor.

“Excuse me,” said Elizabeth.

The man glanced up at them. He wore thick, smudged glasses and his pinkish head was shaved except for a narrow rim of hair around his skull like a crown. The bald part was shiny with sweat.

“I’m afraid, you’re early for Mass,” he replied, smiling from his knees. At first glance he looked older, but the more Elizabeth stared at him the more she realized he was only in his late-twenties. The severity of the haircut and roughness of the habit made him look older.

“Actually, I’m looking for a Brother Vincent.”

“Oh. He’s probably in the barn now. We’re awaiting the arrival of a new calf.” He said it as if he were an expectant father.

When he didn’t make a move, Elizabeth said, “I wonder if I might speak to him?”

The monk stood finally and dried his hands on a rag. “I’ll tell him you’re here,” he said and headed off down the hall.

“Boy, it’s quiet,” Gabe said, glancing around the place, his voice echoing down the otherwise silent hallway.

The first monk returned in a few minutes accompanied by another, this one a tall, heavy-set man also wearing a dark habit. His head was similarly shaved but without the crown of hair.

“Hello, I’m Brother Vincent,” he said. Elizabeth extended her hand to shake, but the man didn’t reciprocate. He said with a smile, “I’ve been working in the barn, I’m afraid. Brother Thomas here said you wanted to speak to me.”

Brother Vincent was in his fifties, with sleepy brown eyes, a dark beard peppered with gray, and the concentrated look of a professor grading papers. His shaven head exhibited every little bump and recess of his skull.

“My son, Luke Gerlacher, was scheduled to come here for a retreat.”

“Ah, yes, Luke,” Brother Vincent said, nodding gravely. “We were all so upset to hear about the accident. My deepest sympathies, Mr. and Mrs. Gerlacher,” he said, looking from Elizabeth to Gabe.

It didn’t seem the right moment for Elizabeth to correct him. Instead she said, “I wonder if I could ask you a few questions.”

His eyes suggested a certain surprise but he said, “Why, of course. Let’s go someplace where we can talk.”

He led them down the hall and into a small room that appeared to be some sort of library. The ceiling was supported by rough-hewn logs, the walls decorated with framed pictures of religious figures, most with luminous rings of halos around their heads. Half a dozen shelves were lined with worn, leather-bound books, while against one wall stood an old wooden card catalogue, the sort Elizabeth had had back in grammar school. They sat at a square oak table.

“This is our library,” Brother Vincent explained. “May I offer you some refreshments? Tea, coffee? We make our own coffee.”

“No, thank you,” Elizabeth said.

The monk placed his elbows on the table, folded his fleshy hands, and rested his bearded chin on them. Emanating from the man was the sweetish odor of hay and grain, as well as the slightly sour pong of manure.

“Again, let me say just how saddened I was at the news of your son’s death,” the man said.

“Thank you,” Elizabeth said.

“In my conversations with him he sounded so excited to be joining us.”

“Really?” commented Elizabeth.

“Very much so. He seemed like such a fine young man.” Brother Vincent paused for a moment, seeming to search for the right words. “So grounded.”

“Grounded?” Elizabeth asked.

“He seemed as if he knew exactly what he wanted to do with his life. I think he would have made a wonderful addition to our community.”

To Elizabeth, it seemed as if the man was talking about someone else, certainly not Luke. She hadn’t seen those attributes in her son—grounded, knowing exactly what he wanted to do in life. Yet if one thing had become painfully obvious during her trip, it was the fact that she hadn’t seen a great deal in her son that others apparently saw.

“The thing is, Brother Vincent,” Elizabeth began, “my son hadn’t told us about any of this. I mean, about wanting to come here.”

“He didn’t?”

“No.”

“Ah,” he said, stroking his beard as you would a cat.

“Is that, well, normal? For a young man not to say anything to his parents?”

“It happens,” Brother Vincent replied, nodding.

“It just seems to me such an enormous decision for someone that age to make on his own. Without telling his family.”

“You’re right. It’s the biggest decision a person can make. To enter a religious order. In my experience, though, sometimes a young man isn’t quite ready.”

“But I thought you said my son knew exactly what he wanted to do.”

“He did. What I meant was he wasn’t ready to tell his parents. Sometimes a young man might be afraid to disappoint his family.”

“Disappoint?” Elizabeth asked.

“Some parents don’t understand such a choice. They might feel short-changed.”

“In what way?”

“That they won’t have a daughter-in-law. Grandchildren. That their son can’t just drop by for Sunday dinners. What they see as a ‘normal life,’” he said, making quotes around the words with thick fingers that had tufts of dark hair along the knuckles. “So on occasion a young man will come to us without informing his parents.”

Elizabeth thought how she would, indeed, have felt cheated, had her son entered the monastic life. But now, she realized how much she’d have preferred that to him being gone. She would have gladly accepted the smallest piece of her son now.

“Did he tell you why, Brother Vincent? I mean, why he wanted to become a monk.”

The man looked from Gabe to Elizabeth, smiling as if he were going to tell them they had just won some sort of prize. “He hoped to deepen his relationship with God.”

Elizabeth didn’t quite know what to say. She didn’t even go to church and here her son had wanted this deep relationship with something she wasn’t sure she even believed in.

“Frankly, Brother Vincent, I find this all hard to fathom. I mean,” she began, glancing around the room, “why would my son choose this when he could have had . . .”

“A wife and family? A good job? Golf on the weekends?” Brother Vincent said in a slightly bemused tone.

“Well, yes.”

The man nodded sympathetically. “No, I understand what you’re saying, Mrs. Gerlacher. I really do. This is a strange way of life for most people to understand. A difficult way of life. Why someone would give up all that,” he said, waving his hand toward the outside world before he settled it onto the table before them, “for this.”

Elizabeth thought of the Blake poem she had read in Luke’s diary: To see a world in a grain of sand and heaven in a wild flower. Was this place the grain of sand for Luke?

“May I make a suggestion?” the monk offered. “Perhaps I could show you around a little bit. It might give you a better sense of what your son was hoping to find here.

“I don’t know if we have time,” Elizabeth said, looking at Gabe. In fact, she wasn’t sure she wanted to stay. To learn more about this place. There was this unformed urge in her to run, to get out of here and leave it all behind.

“We got time,” Gabe said.

“Well, okay, then,” she said, acquiescing.

Brother Vincent stood and led them out of the room and down the hall. As they walked along he explained about the place and the life of the monastery.

“Ora et labora,” he said. “Prayer and work. That’s the Benedictine motto. We have our horarum, or the daily schedule, which is filled with work and prayer, as well as time for quiet reflection. We feel that in organizing our life carefully we can live closer to God.”

As he spoke, Elizabeth glanced around at the place. She tried to picture her son here, in this place, this life, one so far removed from that he had known with her and Zack.

“This is our kitchen,” Brother Vincent explained, indicating a room where three men in the same dark habits stood at a butcher block table cutting up vegetables. They looked up in unison at the visitors and smiled. Their smiles, Elizabeth noted, appeared both genuine as well as a little bit unnatural, as if they were high on some sort of drug. After that Brother Vincent showed them the laundry room where a single young man, hardly out of his teens, stood ironing clothes, steam rising up around him. His pink face was soft, almost unformed, his cheeks flushed from the heat. Over his habit he wore a kind of black apron.

“That’s Llywelyn. He’s our new postulant from Wales.”

“What’s a postulant?” Elizabeth asked.

“Sort of like a monk in training.”

“Is that what my son would have been?”

“Yes. If he had decided to join us.”

“He’d have been ironing clothes?”

Brother Vincent chuckled softly, a playful glimmer momentarily sliding into his somber dark eyes. “We all take turns sharing in the work needed to run our home. We feel work brings us closer to God. Your son would have taken turns doing necessary chores. We serve each other, as in any family.”

“How long would he have been a postulant?”

“Usually several months. Until he was ready to move on to the novitiate stage. That usually lasts for a year, or until a candidate is ready to make his temporary vows.”

“Then he would have been a monk?”

“If we felt he was ready to progress to that stage. And if he desired to continue.”

Elizabeth looked at the monk ironing clothes and tried to imagine Luke in his place. It occurred to her then that the young man was from Wales, where she had first lost Luke. It seemed somehow significant, a symbol of something, though of what she wasn’t quite sure.

They continued on into a beautiful garden cloister that smelled richly of basil and mint and some other herb Elizabeth couldn’t name. Another monk was on his knees working the soil with a trowel. After that Brother Vincent showed them the refectory where the monks ate together, followed by the chapel, the infirmary, and then into the gift shop which smelled heavily of coffee. “We buy the beans from all over the world and make our own coffee. It’s one of our few cash crops.”

“So it’s all right to make money?” Gabe asked.

“We try to be self-sufficient but we still need to buy some things.”

Next they were shown into a building with a central hallway off of which was a series of small, shadowy rooms. Brother Vincent opened the door to one and invited them to peer in. “This is Brother Anthony’s room,” he explained. The bed, shoved against one wall, was narrow and low, more just a cot covered by a woolen blanket that had been pulled military-taut at the edges, and a thin lumpy pillow. Beside the bed stood a night table on which sat a lamp and a framed photograph showing a family, a single cane-back chair, and a small three-drawer bureau. There was no mirror in the room, Elizabeth noticed. On the wall over the head of the bed hung a crucifix carved of some dark wood.

“These are our cells,” Brother Vincent said.

“Cells?” Gabe replied, glancing at Elizabeth.

“I know it sounds like a prison,” Brother Vincent replied, smiling again. “On the contrary, we feel that the simplicity of our rooms gives us the quiet and privacy needed for contemplation. For growing closer to God.”

Staring into the dark, stuffy chamber, Elizabeth felt it was so unlike Luke’s bright, airy room at home, a room that had expansive views of the lake, a room that, when Luke was little, she had taken great pains to make cheery and homey, welcoming and embracing. Nothing like this dark and sinister-looking cell.

As if reading her mind, Brother Vincent offered, “We try to simplify the external, so that we may live abundant spiritual lives. Thoreau said that for the person who simplifies his life, solitude won’t seem like solitude, nor poverty as poverty. Too much in our lives comes between us and what’s really important.”

“So this was important to my son?” Elizabeth said.

“Very much so,” he replied. “For those who come here, peace and quietude are essential to spiritual growth. Socrates warned of the barrenness of a busy life. Come,” he instructed.

He showed them into a barn made of sheet metal, where half a dozen cows in stanchions stood eating from a trough.

“We do all our own milking. Make our own cheese,” the monk explained. “It’s one of our few luxuries.”

In one stall Elizabeth saw a newborn calf feeding from her mother’s teat.

“That’s our latest addition,” the man said, leaning an elbow on the gate of the stall. “Sarah,” he said.

“Brother Vincent,” Elizabeth began, “if my son had come here, would I ever have been able to see him?”

“Yes, of course. Not right away. But later on, after he took his vows. In fact, many of our brothers take their vacations to see family. And we do have internet. Some even use Skype.”

“Could I have come to visit him here?”

“Yes. We do permit visiting periods. My own mother who’s in her seventies came just last year to visit me.” He looked directly at Elizabeth. “As in any other marriage, you don’t really lose a son.”

Elizabeth stared into the stall at the newborn calf which appeared to be trying to perpetrate some sort of violence upon its mother’s body. The animal pulled viciously on the teat, jerking its head and sucking savagely to draw life from its mother.

“I’d like to show you something,” Brother Vincent said after a while.

He led them back into the main building and down the hall of the monks’ personal rooms. He entered one which turned out to be a little larger than the other rooms but just as spartan. It appeared to be an office, with a desk at the far end and two folding chairs in front of it. On one wall Elizabeth noticed what seemed to be a schedule of the weekly duties for the monks.

“Please, sit,” he said. He went over to a wooden file cabinet and opened a drawer. He put on a pair of reading glasses and searched for a moment. When he found what he was looking for, he walked over to Elizabeth. 

“I wouldn’t normally do this,” he said. “I regard such a thing as private. Like a confession. But under the circumstances, I think it would be appropriate to give this to you.”

Brother Vincent handed Elizabeth a piece of paper. She glanced at it. It was a letter, she realized, handwritten on yellow legal paper. As soon as she saw the handwriting, she recognized it as that of her son. 

“We corresponded a little,” the monk explained. “Our postulants often have questions.”

August 5, 2013

Dear Brother Vincent,

I’m looking forward to meeting you. I should be arriving sometime on August 13th, if all goes well. I thank you for your kind letter and for answering my many questions. I appreciate your advice. I hope that I didn’t sound uncommitted or indecisive, because I am not. As you warned me though, discernment is a big step. Venturing into the unknown, leaving all that one knows and loves. Yet it is not so much for me that I’m concerned as it is for my parents. I don’t think they have a clue as to my intended vocation. It’s mostly my fault for keeping this decision from them. This will be especially hard on my mother. She will, I fear, take this personally, that I’m somehow abandoning the life she wanted for me or even that I’m abandoning her. Of course, this couldn’t be further from the truth. Still, I will need to find a way to tell her that my choice is not one of leaving her but of moving toward God, of getting her to understand that I don’t love her any less because of this. 

I want to thank you again for all your help. One last question—does it get cold there in the mountains? Should I bring a winter coat? 

Ut in omnibus glorificetur Deus,

Luke Gerlacher

When Elizabeth finished reading, she thought, So that’s what he wanted to tell her. That he was coming here. That he knew it would be hard for her to understand. That he loved her. Tears, hot and abundant, sprang effortlessly to her eyes. Gabe reached into his back pocket and handed her one of those smelly rags of his. Elizabeth gave him a look, then smiled through the tears.

“Your son,” Brother Vincent said, “was mature for his years.”

“More so than I ever knew,” Elizabeth replied, wiping her eyes.

“You must have been very proud of him.”

She thought for a moment, then replied, “Yes. I am.” 

As she sat there holding Luke’s letter, a memory came to her. In it Luke was a little boy, perhaps four or five. They were at a park somewhere, just the two of them. It was cold out, early spring, the trees bare and gray. She was at the foot of a metal slide and her son was at the top, about to come roaring down. Be careful, she’d warned. I’m not a baby, he insisted. Yet she recalled the look in his eyes, a hesitant, apprehensive expression. Will you catch me? he asked. Of course. She remembered him holding on for a while more, building up his courage. Then finally, letting go and with a triumphant whooo flying down toward her waiting arms.

Brother Vincent escorted them out of his office and toward the chapel. The day had turned bright, even warmish, with sharp blue skies stretching to the horizon. Steam rose up off the pavement in front of the monastery, and wafted skyward.

“It’s beautiful here,” Elizabeth said. “And so peaceful.”

“Yes, it is,” Brother Vincent said. “I hope that gives you a better sense of who we are, Mrs. Gerlacher.”

“Do you think he would have been happy here?”

“I don’t know if ‘happy’ is the word to describe our lives here. It’s certainly not an easy life. Perhaps ‘fulfillment,’” he said, using the finger quotes again, “is a better word.”

Though the idea of Luke finding his home here, so far from her and from the world she knew, from the world he had lived in, made her a little sad, she welcomed the thought that her son would have fit in, found his place, his niche. Found fulfillment. She glanced out over the trees to the valley below. In the distance there were more mountains and beyond that still more, stretching as far as the eye could see. She imagined her son waking to that every morning, being surrounded by the pure silence and assured brotherhood of these men.

“Mrs. Gerlacher,” Brother Vincent said to her, “Would you like to join me in lighting a candle for Luke?”

She hesitated for just a moment, then said, “Yes, I would.”

“Do you mind if I light one, too?” Gabe asked. “For my daughter.”

“Of course,” the monk said, as he led them into the chapel.

As she entered the chapel, Elizabeth was struck by a single sensation: the profound silence of the place. She wasn’t sure if she had ever encountered such perfect stillness in her life.