Cursed by Christ

by Matthew Warner

  Afterward, Mother returned to her seat, still radiating hurt at having to face the altar alone. Alice tried to say something, but the service was proceeding. Momma opened her hymnal.

  To her dismay, the undercurrent of tension rose instead of fell. The air of expectation … She realized the angel’s wings were still at work, quivering within her. The parishioners’ mind energies blew against its feathers.

  The congregation sang, “Time is now fleeting, the moments are passing, passing from you and from me.”

  The wings were about to launch from her head. Oh, it was so unfair. … Had to send them somewhere, now. Her gaze fell on the iris flowers. Yes, had to give them flight, or else return to the sick bed of only a few weeks ago. Eyes rolling back, Alice unlocked her internal cage.

  Momma. Again, the storm of her mother’s thoughts—suffocating, have to get out of here!—drew her off course and sucked her in. Momma’s eyes, Momma’s skin, they wrapped around Alice like cloth. Trembling, pain. From Momma’s perspective, the walls shook with color.

  The singing voices tore at her: “Shadows are gathering, deathbeds are coming, coming for you and for me.”

  A cramp tore Momma’s stomach, doubling her over and Alice a moment later. “No, Jesus, stop it!” Momma said. She collapsed, fire in her skin, bile and the too-sweet taste of wine filling her and Alice’s mouths.

  The music stopped.

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  Because the guest room was close to Momma’s bedroom, Alice that night slept in there on a trundle bed. Tried to, anyway. She lay awake in the darkness, exhausted after saying all day long that she was not ill, really, only overcome at seeing her mother collapse. In truth, she was queasy, some part of her perhaps still in contact with Momma, who lay sick in the next room.

  Like a mad person running down a hallway of paintings, her mind revisited recent events: Momma and Forney on the church step, Momma collapsing, relatives whispering too loudly that the water freshet in the rice fields had caused a malaria outbreak, these same people slipping away in their carriages with handkerchiefs over mouths and noses, the Settlement II negroes tidying the sand pile in front of the house and lighting upon it a bonfire of pine logs. Major Norwick, everpresent as death itself and apparently still after her, had taken charge of this last task, his back ramrod-straight with an officer’s pride. He had said, “You should light bonfires every night to drive out the malaria.” Worried they were losing their master and their mistress, the older slaves who’d known the family for decades kept a vigil by the fire until John O’erseer bellowed about their curfew.

  Alice had been reluctant to go to bed. What if Momma died during the night? The cycles of fever and chills did after all seem like malaria. … She refused to believe the communion wine was the cause. Jesus couldn’t be that cruel.

  Despite her own sick stomach, Gramma Wharton refused to retire for the night. She worked with pushed-up sleeves, helping Momma to the slopjaw whenever she got diarrhea. Except for the doctor, she refused to let anyone—not even the house negroes in the basement—see her daughter-in-law in this state of unseemliness. Lying in bed, Alice listened to Gramma pace. She got up when she couldn’t take it anymore.

  “Gramma, why don’t you go to bed?” she called through Momma’s cracked door.

  “I told you why.”

  Sighing, Alice traced her fingertips along the door’s cross design. “I’ll stay with her.”

  The door opened. By the light of the kerosene lamp, Alice saw blue bags under Gramma’s eyes. “All right,” Gramma said, “but don’t let no one in here.”

  Alice went to her mother’s bed, which smelled of urine. Momma’s hair cascaded in wild waves over her pillow. Her quilts were just as tangled despite Gramma’s care. At least she was asleep.

  Gramma came to the other side. She cooled Momma with the paper fan Hannah had given her last Christmas. “Out like a candle,” she said. “I just pray the Lord will heal her.”

  The Lord? Alice thought and snorted in contempt.

  Gramma said, “You do hope she’ll get better.”

  “Of course. But I fear no one can help Momma except herself.”

  Gramma stopped fanning. “That’s a cold statement from one who needed others so desperately these months past.”

  Alice pointed at a splotch of pinprick red dots on Momma’s cheek. “Did you see these?”

  “Don’t ignore me.”

  “Well then, you tell me if this is just the flu.” The words tasted like cinders. Perhaps she shouldn’t talk while so frayed. “What do you feel in your bones, Gramma?”

  Remarkably, tears rose in the old woman’s eyes, making Alice feel ashamed. Gramma stepped to the window. “It’s just a stomach twister like mine.”

  “But you’re still on your feet.”

  Gramma wheeled on her. “You want me to despair before you? That what you want? Tell you how lost I am that my boy only had one child who lived—and who never had a son?” Now Alice turned away, but Gramma continued. “This morning, after you threw the hair ornament on the floor, I would have sewn it with all my silver—given it my very skin—only if it’d make me a male to carry on the name.”

  “Stop.”

  “I’m just starting. Some of this is your fault. Yes, your fault. Would’ve been easier if you’d had children by now. You’re twenty-years-old, for God’s sake. They wouldn’t be Whartons, but at least—”

  “Poppa sent my suitors away when they proposed. Said they weren’t rich enough.”

  Momma suddenly sat up, somehow flinging off her quilts without moving her arms. “Stop it, both of you! I can’t—” She broke off, color draining from her cheeks. Alice and Gramma rushed to support her.

  “Get her something!” Gramma said, gesturing at the water pitcher. “Can’t you see you’re traumatizing her?”

  Minutes later, with Momma asleep again, groaning at unseen demons, the two women stepped into the hallway. They looked into each other’s eyes, and after a long moment, held each other.

  “I’m sorry,” Gramma said. “It’s—it’s that Lincoln man, running for president. Got me upset. Country’s gone to hell on the devil’s back.”

  How she’s changed, Alice thought. A year ago, she’d been a vibrant woman who practiced the art of optimism as if it were a religious devotion. But now, in the extremis of grief, she was as frail and bitter as anyone.

  Alice smiled and told her to go to bed. The words about her lack of children, more powerful and damaging than Gramma knew, still danced behind her eyes, but she stuffed them away.

  Back in the bedroom, she extinguished the lamp in favor of the candles already burning. No sense wasting kerosene on someone who was going to—

  No, how dare she think that way. Pessimism in every moment, imagining horrific meanings in every gesture, as with the communion wine. Despite her best efforts, Alice had never been much of an optimist like Gramma, whose favorite saying was, “You gotta make cream out of that milk, child, gotta make cream.” Yet now even Gramma surrendered to worry. …

  Sitting down on a chair probably older than she—rickety, everything falling apart and ending—she cried in short, quiet sobs. Her eye caught on a glass bottle the doctor had left behind. Raised lettering read, “C.F. Apothecary,” and below it on a handwritten label, “for stomach sickness.” As ruddy as clay, the liquid’s medicinal value was doubtful. She sighed heavily. Couldn’t take losing them both. Not fair.

  Momma’s mind voice answered: Is fair. Torture I deserve.

  Alice leaned close. “Momma?”

  But Momma wasn’t aware of her. The open, crying eyes searched the ceiling. As her lips moved silently, her mind voice synched, Jesus fair.

  Alice watched her mother drift back into sleep. The suggestion enraged her. Fair? Did Jesus actually judge this fair? To curse the innocent girl that had been her mother with otherworldly powers she never wanted, then refuse to reclaim them so He would have the justification for adulterous “communions”? And then to permit th
ose powers to pass to Alice—the only Wharton child perhaps because of the accursed angel’s wings …

  If Jesus were fair, decent, then He would have accepted the bargain Momma implicitly proposed by kneeling on that altar cushion. The stories Alice had loved of Jesus healing the masses, speaking piously on the Mount, now were so much hypocritical garbage.

  Healing the masses? … An idea.

  It was the only glimmer of hope she had felt about anything in days. If she truly had inherited the misappropriated powers of Heaven, could she not heal Mother as Jesus had healed others?

  Alice focused on Momma’s eyes, this time searching for the angel’s wings within them both. Why not indeed? As the edges of her vision dissolved, it felt right to gently press her thumbs into the soft undersides of Momma’s brows. Wind rose to flutter the feathers behind her own eyes. …

  And for a long minute, she felt warm health entering Momma’s stomach and the snaking intestines below. Even the particles of blood turned to regard her, as if Alice upon her wings had crashed into a prison to liberate them. All the while, she called to Momma: Come! Unfold your angel’s wings, and help me heal you!

  Momma did respond, but not in the way Alice expected or wanted.

  With a gasp, she found herself back in her own body, still hunched over the bed. Alice had been blown out like dust from a glass.

  “Momma, why?”

  The shivering woman didn’t answer—she wasn’t even conscious—but the shame of her infidelity moved her eyes beneath closed lids. Could it be impossible to heal her? For if Jesus were an adulterer, then the stories of healing people might have been lies.

  And to Alice’s astonishment, Momma’s face opened.

  A well of spiraling color, black in the center, swallowed Alice’s hands. A hurricane blew upward. No, this wasn’t happening. She was simply so close to Momma that—

  ohJesuspleasehavemercy!

  The wind screamed it from the hurricane’s eye. Jesus appeared there upon His crucifix. Rivulets of blood sprang from where the crown of thorns bit His skin, tracing lines down His forehead.

  Every image spoke but one message: punishment. Punishment for who Momma was, what she had stolen, and what she now refused to give. Punishment for presuming to overrule the will of Christ, and for using the mind of man to outreason the divine. Momma felt the pain of this demon upon the cross, felt it in her own hands and feet, for Christ had disowned her of His legacy. He had suffered His pain for every soul except hers, and now she would bear the agony of her own crucifixion.

  The bed trembled as if a locomotive were passing in the hall. The chair Alice had sat in lifted from the floor and hovered.

  “Stop it, Momma! Stop it, Jesus!”

  Alice couldn’t withdraw her hands from the maelstrom that used to be Momma’s head. Jesus, his eyes rolling back to whites, smiled at her. He nodded at the chair. It rotated until the four legs pointed at her.

  “Stop it!”

  The chair flew at Momma like a pitchfork. Alice had no choice—she shielded her, taking the blows in her back and shoulder. The chair rolled to the floor.

  Alice sensed that this was Momma’s angel’s wings at work, drawing on her last reserves of strength, wringing every blood droplet for energy. If Momma survived this, she would be weak for days. … And yet it wasn’t Momma—couldn’t be. It had to be Jesus, using Momma’s own angel’s wings against her.

  The bedsheets snaked around Momma’s neck.

  “No. No!”

  Invisible hands still held Alice’s wrists within the black storm, where Jesus laughed with a toothless mouth. Helplessly, she watched the bedsheets twist on themselves—forming a better rope—and cinch tight.

  No, damn Him, she would go to hell for this if necessary. Unable to free her hands, Alice instead reached out with her own angel’s wings, groping for the ends of the sheets. She fought to loosen them, and failing that, she psychically tore at the fibers.

  The sheets shredded like paper, startling her with success. More powerful than she knew!

  But even as she realized this, the assault continued from other quarters. A hairbrush launched from the bureau and struck Alice’s head like a minieball. She cried out. But it wasn’t intended for her, though, not yet. She was merely in the way. Alice threw herself on top of Momma to shield her. She didn’t care that this caused her to fall so far within the black cloud that she could see the individual pores in Jesus’s angry face.

  The room flashed as if from lightning. Lashed with wind—coming from inside the room—the window flew open, exposing a cloudless sky. The curtains blew outward.

  Someone pounded the door and rattled the handle. “Alice?” Gramma called out. “Let me in. Alice!”

  The bureau flew open, one drawer after another, and flung petticoats at them. The water pitcher floated to hover over the bed. Alice turned away just as it dumped its contents onto her head and neck. A dumbing pain crashed into her scalp, right where the hairbrush had hit, and a moment later the pitcher rolled to the floor and broke, scattering hand-painted fragments.

  “Alice! What are you doing?” Gramma said. Her voice cracked with a sob. “Why is this door locked?”

  Alice wanted to tell her that Jesus, using Momma, had locked the door, but her attention was drawn back into the cloud. On His cross, Jesus laughed as His eyes dropped completely into His head, leaving empty sockets. Alice pulled in vain against the suction binding her wrists. She watched Him rip His hands free of the nails, spurts of gore trailing in the air. Then He leapt at her, His feet also ripping free.

  He rose from the cloud and clamped her neck. Squeezed, laughed. But now Alice was lying in Momma’s place on the bed—she was Momma—looking up into the cackling face of her daughter, who sat on her chest and strangled her.

  Demon, stop showing me lies!

  The vision dissolved like smoke, and Alice found herself atop Momma, hands on Momma’s chest and not around her throat. Momma stared up at her—past her—face beet-red and mouth caked with vomit.

  The bedroom door opened under the shoulder of a young male slave. Behind him, Gramma gaped at the disaster.

  Alice stumbled numbly off the bed. The curtain, which had billowed from the gale moments before, again pointed at the floor, perhaps to her final destination.

  Chapter 4

  The nearest constable being an inconvenient three miles away in Herbstown, and with Gramma as a sympathetic witness, there was not a criminal investigation. There were no marks on Momma’s neck, and Momma after all had been one stop from the grave, so there was no cause for suspicion—at least that’s what Gramma said to anyone who inquired.

  But Alice knew better. She didn’t need the angel’s wings to detect the doubt twitching at the corners of the old woman’s mouth. Gramma loved her, but Alice knew this might be the blow that killed the golden-egg-laying goose. In the sleepless confusion of the next day and night, she saw this in the way Gramma glared at her with fear or anger even as she assured the remaining visitors that Momma had died of stomach flu and not from malaria or foul play. Nothing could be done to change Gramma’s true convictions, however; she had never known of Momma’s or Alice’s powers, so there was no point in broaching the topic now. Until the day she died, Gramma would certainly believe another reason for her daughter-in-law’s death—and maybe her son’s as well—and Alice bitterly despised Jesus for this. Punishment to the fourth generation, indeed.

  And in the silence of the following night, after the long discussions about funeral arrangements and the tastelessly premature talk about money, and after a three-hour cry, Alice shuddered under her covers.

  Did I kill her?

  No. Jesus had killed her, just as He had killed Poppa. Whether He killed Momma through Alice’s own hands or by more subtle means, such as sickness, Jesus was still the one pulling the trigger.

  Wasn’t He?

  A kernel of uncertainty, that’s all it took, and Alice was throwing off the quilts. Running through the dark house in her b
are feet, she searched through tears for a rose—or any living thing—to control the angel’s wings. Jesus no doubt was behind this loss of control, tormenting her at her most vulnerable moment.

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  The next morning, she arose feeling more rational—marginally. As Hannah the slave girl buttoned her dress for her, Alice decided she would leave the Herbstown area as soon as possible. Best to get away from Gramma and preclude the appearance of profiting from her parents’ deaths. Perhaps that fourth cousin, Jamison, would give her a tiny corner of his house and a spinning wheel to pass her remaining days.

  “A spinster might as well play the part,” she whispered.

  Hannah looked up from the buttons in alarm. Alice saw the fear there; she knew Hannah still gossiped about Alice’s ‘sickness’ and was as rattled as anyone by the events of the past week. “What you need, Miz Alice?”

  Alice took hold of the remaining buttons, noting how Hannah recoiled from her fingers. “Thank you, I’ll finish.”

  It was of course the blue dress with lace trim she was wearing. Alice wore it intentionally, again so that Jesus would not fail to overlook her pain during the morning’s funeral, and also because she intended to burn it that afternoon. Weeks of meditating on roses had taught her to confine emotions to certain objects. She thought it a quite efficient way to control herself: associate a flower or article of clothing with an unpleasant thing, deal with it, and then cast away that symbol like a used menstrual rag.

  At Alice’s behest, they held the service graveside. When arrangements were made yesterday, she had told everyone she couldn’t handle an identical funeral to Poppa’s. Saying such a partial truth was easier than confessing the larger reason: she was afraid that if it were held in the sanctuary, then what happened before might occur again. She was not accustomed to lying, however—it conflicted with her church upbringing, and bothered her. But why should it? Everything Christ had taught was now a lie. On the way out the door, Alice irritably shook off the shawl Hannah tried to drape over her.