During the next month she worked out every detail down to the very clothes he would wear. She bought, and stocked with supplies, an old shack in the San Gabriel Mountains where he was to hide out while waiting for her. His nearest neighbors were members of an obscure religious cult. It was with the children that he first became acquainted, the oldest a girl about ten. She was fascinated by the sound of his typewriter, peering at him from behind trees and bushes as he sat on the back porch typing because there was nothing else to do.
She was a timid little creature with odd flashes of boldness. “What’s that thing?”
“A typewriter.”
“It sounds like a drum. If it was mine I’d hit it harder and make more noise.”
“What’s your name?”
“Karma.”
“Don’t you have another name, too?”
“No. Just Karma.”
“Would you like to try the typewriter, Karma?”
“Does it belong to the devil?”
“No.”
“All right.”
He used Karma as an excuse for his first visit to the colony. As his loneliness grew more unbearable, there were other visits. Excuses became unnecessary. The Brothers and Sisters asked him no questions: they accepted it as perfectly natural that he, like themselves, should have turned his back on the world and sought refuge in the mountains. In turn, he appreciated their community life. There was always someone around, always some chore to be done which kept him from brooding, and their rigid rules gave him a sense of security.
He had been in the mountains for over a month when the bad news came in a letter:
Dearest, I have only a minute now to write, I’ve made a mistake and they’re onto me. I’ll be gone for a while. Please wait. This is not the end for us, it is just a postponement, dear one. We must not try and contact each other. Have faith in me as I have in you. I can endure anything knowing you’ll be waiting for me. I love you, I love you...
Before he burned it, he read the brief note a dozen times, whimpering like an abandoned child. Then he took the blade out of his safety razor and cut both his wrists.
When he returned to consciousness he was lying on a cot in a strange room. Both his wrists were heavily bandaged and Sister Blessing was bending over him: “You are awake now, Brother?”
He tried to speak and couldn’t, so he nodded.
“The Lord spared you, Brother, because you are not yet prepared for the hereafter. You must become a True Believer.” Her hand on his forehead was cool, and her voice firm and gentle. “You must renounce the world and its evils. Your pulse is steady and you have no fever. Could you swallow a bit of soup? As I was saying, you can’t enter the Kingdom of Heaven without some preliminary spadework. You’d better start now, don’t you think?”
He had neither the strength nor the desire to think. He renounced the world out of apathy and joined the colony because it was there and he had no other place and no other people. When the Brothers and Sisters moved north to their new quarters in the Tower, he dug up the money he had buried in an old suitcase and went along. By that time the colony had become his home, his family, and, to some extent, his religion. He reburied the suitcase and the long wait continued.
On a trip into San Felice with Brother Crown he had learned Alberta’s fate from a newspaper he found lying in a gutter. He sent her a religious pamphlet with certain words lightly underlined to let her know where he was living. He made it look like the kind of thing a crank might send to someone in trouble. Whether it passed the prison censor, and whether she understood it if it had, he could only hope. Hope and fear alternated in him; they were twin heads on a single body, equally nourished.
The years passed. He never spoke her name aloud to anyone. He made no further contact with her nor she with him. Then, on a summer morning, he was in the kitchen with Sister Blessing, and, still dazed with weariness, he heard her speak the ominous words: “You were talking in your sleep last night, Brother. Who’s Patrick O’Gorman?”
He tried to avoid a reply by shrugging and shaking his head, but she was insistent.
“None of that now, do you hear me? I want an answer.”
“He was an old friend. I went to school with him.”
Even though it was the truth she didn’t believe him. “Really? You didn’t sound as if he were an old friend. You were grinding your teeth and scowling.”
She dropped the subject at that point, only to pick it up a few days later: “You were mumbling in your sleep again last night, Brother, all about O’Gorman and Chicote and some money. I hope your conscience isn’t bothering you?”
He didn’t answer.
“If it is, Brother, you’d better tell someone. A bad conscience is worse than a bad liver. I’ve seen plenty of both. Whatever you did in the outside world is of no importance here except to you, how it affects your spiritual health and peace of mind. When the devil gnaws your innards, cast him out, don’t give him sanctuary.”
Throughout the days that followed he would turn to see her watching him, her eyes sharp and curious as a crow’s.
The stranger Quinn came and went, returned and left again. Sister Blessing, released from her isolation, was pale and haggard.
“You didn’t tell me O’Gorman was dead, Brother.”
He shook his head.
“Were you responsible, Brother?”
“Yes.”
“It was an accident?”
“No.”
“You meant it? Planned it?”
“Yes.”
She looked at him with eyes no longer curious, only worried and sad. “Quinn said that O’Gorman left a wife and the poor woman is suffering from terrible uncertainty. Wrongs like this must be righted, Brother, for the salvation of your soul. You cannot bring a murdered man to life, but you can do something to help his widow. You must write a letter, Brother, confessing the truth. I’ll see to it that you’re not caught. The letter will be posted in Chicago and no one will ever suspect that you wrote it.”
He took precautions anyway. He used his left hand to disguise his handwriting. He mixed fact and fantasy, and, in the mixing, revealed more of himself than he thought he was revealing. Composing the letter afforded him a peculiar satisfaction. It was as if he was finally laying O’Gorman to rest, inscribing on his tombstone a nasty little epitaph which he doubted a grieving widow would ever show to anyone.
At his insistence. Sister Blessing read the letter, making little clucking noises of disapproval. “You needn’t have been so—well, frank.”
“Why not?”
“It seems vindictive to me, against her as well as him. That isn’t good, Brother. I fear for the salvation of your soul. You’ve not cast out the devil if you still harbor hatred for your victim...”
Every morning when he woke up in the hayloft his first thought was that this might be the day; the day of liberation, of reward, of security and a new life. But the days came and went and they were all the same, and when each one was over he put another mark on the wall of the barn. The days were as alike as the marks. There weren’t even any alarms. The last of the sheriff’s men had departed a month ago, and even if they came back they would find no signs of him in the Tower or the community kitchen. He avoided both these places and stuck to the barn; hour by hour he concealed all traces of his presence. Before he left the hayloft in the morning he fluffed up the hay with a pitchfork to remove the imprint of his body. He buried his spoor and garbage, and at night, after putting out his small fire, he covered the ashes with pine needles and oak leaves. What had started out as a game of outwitting his enemies had become a ritual of self-effacement.
Only rarely did he think of leaving the Tower and going to a city to hide. The idea of being alone in a city terrified him. Besides, more than half the money was gone now, he had to save the rest of it for the future. He often worried about explaining the missing money to her when she came. He planned his approach: “Listen, dearest, I had to do what I did. If I’d run away from the Tower by myself, the authorities would have known immediately that I and I alone was the guilty one. As it is, by bribing the Master to disperse the colony, I confused the issue. They probably still haven’t narrowed the search down... Oh, the Master was bribable, all right, because he was desperate. He saw the beginning of the end for the colony and he knew the only way to save it was for the members to go out in the world to seek new converts, and then eventually return here. And the only way this could be accomplished was with the money, your money. That’s why I’ve stayed here at the Tower, to save the rest of it.”