As a Thief in the Night

by Chuck Crabbe

  He struggled with the tie and collar and then pulled it away from his neck while Father Michael spoke. Elsie shook her head and silently scolded him. Taking a deep breath, he left it as it was. Gord sat passively beside her, smiling kindly, dressed in his best humble clothing, his beard trimmed and his hands resting on his belly. Ezra's little brother, his hair gelled the only way he would have it, sticking up in one ridiculous spot on his tangled blonde head, sat on Elsie's other side blowing spit bubbles and staring absently. Sarah, his Uncle George, and their daughter Rebecca sat just behind them, his aunt beaming at him as if he were hers. Little Marty, Sarah’s son, was at home in bed. The Friday before he had had four teeth pulled for horrible cavities and his face was swollen.

  "Reverend Father in God, I present to you these persons to receive the laying on of hands." Father Richard, with the bishop standing beside him, projected his voice out over the congregation, paused for the purpose of profundity, and then raised his eyes to indicate Ezra and his classmates.

  Bishop Wrychuss cleared his throat audibly: "Take heed that the persons whom ye present be duly prepared and meet to receive the laying on of hands."

  "I have instructed them and inquired of them and believe them so to be," Father Richard responded.

  Ezra shifted nervously from side to side and looked up at the stained glass windows behind the bishop and the minister. The bright sun broke through the glass and made the inside of the church uncomfortably hot.

  Bishop Wrychuss' voice moved out over Ezra and his well-dressed classmates. He spoke of the obligations and purpose that the confirmed would carry having reached the age of discretion. "In order that by prayer and laying on of hands they may be strengthened by the Holy Spirit, manfully to fight under the banner of Christ crucified, against sin, the world, and the devil, and to continue as Christ's faithful soldiers and servants unto their life's end."

  The Bishop, endowed through piety and tradition, meant to lay his hands on Ezra as the orphan knelt before him and call forth the descent of the dove from whatever azure cathedrals, pillared with faith, it awaits such calls. The 'laying on of hands'? Philip had baptized the citizens of Samaria, driving out the unclean spirits. Screaming and railing against the great worded weapons, sharpened on the tongues of the appointed, the demons had fled. He had healed those who had palsy or were lame, those who had previously stood outside the fiery borders of God's mercy. The apostles, hearing the echoes of God from Samaria, sent Peter and John to them, because, though baptized by Philip, the Holy Spirit had not yet fallen on them. Peter and John laid hands on those who knelt before them, and the cool shadows of the wings of grace fell, all embracing, over the needy. Paul, his eyes still lit with the shocks of his second birth, had done likewise for the people of Ephesus. And so Ezra, having been told this story, knelt before Bishop Wrychuss and waited for 'the laying on of hands'.

  "Do you here, in the presence of God and of this congregation, renounce the devil and all his works, the pomps and vanity of this wicked world, and all the sinful lusts of the flesh?"

  Mr. Pentheus had been through all of this with them. He sat in the front row of the congregation, his hands folded loosely in his lap, listening attentively, certain that he was not as other men were. As they had practiced when responding to Pentheus they now responded to Bishop Wrychuss. "I do," they said in unison. Ezra listened for Leonard's voice and heard it two boys over. In fact, he listened for Leonard's voice more so than he paid attention to the agreements his own was shaping.

  "Do you believe the Christian Faith as it is set forth in the Apostles' Creed?"

  "I do."

  Bishop Wrychuss opened his right hand, palm towards the ceiling, while the other held the small book he was reciting from, and motioned toward Ezra and his classmates, "Will you endeavor to keep God's holy will and commandments, and to walk in the same all the days of your life?"

  "I will, God being my helper," they answered together.

  The mouth speaks, but the soul still slumbers, and for the dream it is dreaming it collects the nourishment it craves from the dark soils of the waking world so that when the flower of its direction bursts forth, its colors contain traces of each touch that has changed us, each moment that has stung the psyche, and each liquid image and word that has coursed through the carnal channels the soul has molded for its purposes.

  That season Ezra was forced to move up an age category and weight division, which meant that he would be with coach Griffin again. The other boys, having already taken those first few awkward steps on the path to manhood, had caught up to and surpassed the natural height advantage he had had over them in previous years. Their chests and arms had grown thicker, as his had remained thin. Their voices had deepened, and among them, his grew silent. And now, completely out of the reach of Gord's rather large ears, the favoritism the boys had suspected the previous year became an outright accusation. To them, the success he had had was a lie, simply a privilege given him out of prejudice. Gord watched sadly, evening after evening, looking on at the boy as he walked slowly to the other practice field as if headed up a staircase to a room he was being sent to as punishment.

  Several of the other players bullied and pushed him around. They called him names that he had no reply for, and the rare attempts he did make to strike back were invariably met with laughter and left him feeling even more awkward. He did not start a game the entire season, which made it all the more clear to the others that his successes during the previous year had been the result of him being deployed in the right situation at just the right time. If he had really been a superior player, how could he possibly be failing so miserably just one year later? And the coaches were not wrong in their decision to sit him on the bench: either he was failing, or his confidence was failing him. It was not until the post season playoffs that the boy who played in front of him, a boy named Josh Southworth, a boy that Ezra despised, was injured.

  On the way to the game he and Layne sat in the backseat of the Old Beaumont with their equipment on. The harvest had taken place in the days just before and his unwashed hands were still stained purple around the fingernails with the juice of the grapes. It had been a poor harvest, and once the wine was bottled, Elsie predicted that she would only be able to bring half of what she normally brought to the Parnassos restaurant. Ezra looked down at his hands and began to hum, and then to sing along with the song that was playing on the radio. It was a song about a car—a car in which the woman singing wanted to escape. There was a man that she wanted to escape with, too. Her own mom had run away, and she could no longer stand the place she was living and the people that looked down on her. The song was about the feelings she'd had as she'd made her getaway. Now, new thoughts raced through her head; the man held her, and things would be different where she was going, things would be different and she would belong.

  Ezra memorized the chorus and continued to sing it to himself even after the song had ended. Even as they warmed up for the game, and in between plays after it had started, he sang. He mouthed the words so no one else could hear them, and before long the music began playing him.

  Ezra led his team in tackles the day that he sang to himself. As he mouthed the words he stretched his hands out underneath his face mask, palms down, and looked at the grape juice stains on them. On two consecutive plays at the end of the third quarter he stopped the opposing ball carrier on the one-yard line, avoiding scores that would have put his team behind. Moving sideline-to-sideline, and feeling as if he were in pursuit of the fame that was rightfully his, he had eight solo tackles, two sacks, and one fumble recovery.

  In the days following the game there was a short respite from the self-doubt he had felt pressing in on him all autumn long. When the final whistle blew his coaches and teammates looked at him again, he imagined, like he was one of them. Gord beamed at him when they met on the field. He would not have to be propped up or consoled today. Elsie told him that coach Griffin had written him up as one of the game's top players and that
his name would be in the paper. He carried this victory, arrogantly, like a banner into practice the next week, only to have it burned.

  Before the practice began he walked up to a group of his teammates that were standing together, and, in an obvious and awkward attempt to force the news of his long deserved glory into the conversation, interrupted one of the other boys who was talking about a girl he liked. The boys exchanged knowing smiles in the awkward silence that followed Ezra's boasting, and Mark Loft, usually the only other boy on the team he could count on, postured in front of the others.

  "What are you talking about?"

  Realizing now that he had made a mistake, Ezra tried to recover. "You know how they write about us in the paper every week? Well, this week me, and you, and Thad are gonna be in. You guys for offense and me for defense." He looked nervously over at the boy who had been speaking and tried to place himself into the conversation. "Anyway, who's this girl?"

  But Josh Southworth would not let him get away so easily. "Doesn't your aunt give those names to the paper?" Ezra's face flushed and he looked at the ground.

  "Yeah"

  "Why don't you live with your parents?"

  Ezra felt tears coming to his eyes but held them back. His face burned and he moved back and forth uneasily. The other boys, realizing a line had been crossed, squirmed uncomfortably in Southworth's obvious cruelty. Ezra stammered, "My mom...she..." and then the whistle blew for the warm-up lap.

  All that summer he thought about how to fix his problems at school. He thought mostly about mistakes he had made with his clothing, mistakes Elsie had helped to create through the silly shirts and pants she had chosen for him. They had teased him for wearing the old vineyard t-shirts she had made up years ago. Those shirts were ugly and too big for him and he wouldn't wear them anymore. He made his new choices based on what he had seen the other kids wearing.

  Just before their Labor Day weekend trip to Sarah's cottage he had been allowed to buy his first two cassettes: RUN DMC's Tougher Than Leather and Def Leopard's Hysteria. He had decided that he would always bring his Walkman and headphones to school. Other groups of kids walked around the school in groups with ghetto blasters, but he did not have a ghetto blaster, and was not convinced that anyone would have walked with him even if he had had one. The key thing was that he had gone out with Olyvia to buy white hi-top running shoes. Then he had had an idea that pleased him: on one shoe he used red laces, while on the other shoe he used black ones. Jenna Ricketts had seen him wearing those shoes on the first day of school, her first day of high school, and she had complimented him. That, of course, had been enough.

  They played football at recess. There he had prowess, despite the problems he was now having on his team, to always stand out. That, combined with his new clothing and the strides he had made concerning what was expected of him by his peers, allowed him to move through the wolfish pack of children at his school. He replaced his failures on the field with accomplished lies, and buried his blemishes there with false pride.

  This year the boys had begun grabbing at the girls in school. Ezra and a group of the other kids had begun watching. Timid, and with their drives still lacking the strength to overcome their inhibitions, they participated vicariously in the bolder adventures of their classmates. Every Friday a bus came to take them to another school for shop and home economics. During these rides some of the kids on the bus began playing a game called "Chicken" with one another. "Chicken" went like this: A boy would place his hand on a girl's leg just above her knee. Using his fingers to walk up her thigh he would take a step, stop, and then make eye contact with her. If she said "go", then he could move up the next step; if she said "chicken" (as in I'm too much of a chicken to let you go further), then he had to stop. After she had said "chicken", she would take a turn with him. There were three boys that had let girls go all the way down inside their pants, and the girls bold enough to do this were not shy about telling the others what they had found.

  On the way in from recess Ezra saw Rob Duke jump upon a girl's back and make thrusting motions with his hips into her backside. This filled Ezra with an overwhelming sense of fear and embarrassment, and though the girl had laughed and did not seem to mind, he felt badly for her. His unconscious belief in the absolute innocence of the girls did not clash with the overt liberties they allowed the boys to take, or with the truth that they had begun doing the same things themselves. Rumors began to circulate about things that had happened in the back corner of the schoolyard, sometimes between whole groups of his classmates, while they lay crouched and hidden on the far side of a deep ditch that bordered a farmer's field. The boys began to talk about which girls had breasts and which ones did not, and judged them accordingly. A group of about four or five of them began to smoke.

  Football season came to an end and Ezra felt only relief. Both his and Layne's teams had won league championships, but this gave Ezra no satisfaction because he felt as if he had not contributed in a meaningful way. During the final game he'd lost "contain" on a kickoff and allowed the ball carrier outside him for a big gain. Coach Griffin had screamed at him on the sidelines, and Ezra had started to cry.

  In the other division, Layne had won the "Defensive Player of the Game" award and was later chosen as the "Defensive Player of the Year". True to form, Layne didn't seem to think it was too important.

  Autumn slipped into winter. The leaves fell off the vines, and from time to time Ezra helped Elsie and his aunts with the maintenance. He and his classmates began to look forward to the graduation trip that the school took to Boston each year, and he worried about whether or not his aunt and uncle would be able to afford to send him on the trip. As a family they went up the hill each Sunday for dinners at the Parnassos Restaurant as partial payment for the wine they provided each vintage. Gord and Elsie planned possible renovations to the old schoolhouse and began making arrangements with the bank for a loan. They hoped to extend the front of the house and make use of the attic that had previously only been used for storage. Gord's brother, who had served in the Canadian Army, had hidden two guns in a shoebox up there. Ezra hoped and waited in vain for the first signs of puberty—the first crack in his voice, the first bit of hair.

  He trudged through the snow and slush to the churchyard and the oak tree. The split in the trunk was more pronounced when the tree had no leaves. Under the low clouds of December he sat against the church wall upon a garbage bag he had found. From out of his backpack he pulled a pouch of small round stones he'd gathered and some markers wrapped in a thick elastic band. Slowly, one by one, he decorated the stones then placed them back in the pouch. Leonard didn't come to church anymore.

  SOMETHING CONSUMING IN SALEM

  Continual financial stress was like a virus that had begun to attack the other aspects of Elsie and Gord's marriage. Their vehicles, always on the verge of ruin, were not reliable (wake up on a cold winter morning: "Will it start? Will it start?"), and forever seemed to be on their last legs. The septic system of the old schoolhouse was always broken, particularly in wet weather, and there were intervals when the toilet could not be flushed for days at a time. They would have to trudge out into the snow or rain to one of the two old outhouses on the property. In fact, the septic system had had to be dug up on two different occasions, and they had needed small bank loans for each repair. Added to this was the fact that their one bathroom had been under renovation for over two years. Elsie habitually wrote cheques at the market for groceries on Wednesdays, praying that they would not be cashed until Friday. But for Gord, as long as the car ran today, as long as the toilet flushed and the phone was connected, as long as there was food on the table, all was right with the world. Gord's undaunted attitude finally exasperated Elsie beyond all tolerance; she could stand no more of it, and her attacks became spiteful and without mercy.

  Layne and Ezra had changed, too. When they were younger, they had been enough for her. Her satisfaction and sense of fulfillment had come from caring for them. A de
ep sense of service had attended each morning as she woke up, and the day's purpose had been their development, and their healing, and fulfillment had come for her each evening in a satisfied sigh after they had fallen asleep. But they were growing up now and they no longer needed her the way they used to.

  Elsie was only twenty years old when she'd become pregnant, and she had spent the two years after her child's death in a state of grief that often reached inconsolable depths. She stayed in her bed, nearly catatonic at times, lost much too much weight, and grew her unwashed hair into long tangled knots.

  Then, one day, she looked out at the long, wide front lawn, and a strange thought occurred to her. With no plan and no real idea of what she was doing, she got out of the bed that she had come to see as the grave that fate had prepared for her, and went into town to purchase cuttings from which she intended to plant grapes in the front yard.

  That evening Gord had come home from work and found her digging. He had not seen her outside in months, and without even asking what she was doing, he got a shovel for himself and joined her.

  During those first years, once they had established themselves, the vines had covered perhaps a fourth of the property, and Elsie had spent her evenings meticulously tending them. Slowly, with the maturation and health of these vines, she had found her own vitality again—a gift we can receive when we nourish the life and intelligence of plants, a gift that the celebrated German poet Goethe had understood, which was why he became a botanist as well as a poet. In the years that followed, the acres that Elsie and Gord owned surrendered to the vines; Elsie had a new job, and a new hairstyle. And just as her hands had finally stopped trembling at the death of her own child, two new children had been placed in them for care.