“WANNA RISK IT?” the virgin yelled, and I blushed for him. At least he hadn’t sat in a chair backwards, like the last one.
The boys stared into the wells of their guitars and plucked stray chords, while the girls kept very still and somehow folded themselves tinier and tinier, like those notes we passed in class that told you who you were going to marry. Across the room, Christina sat next to her boyfriend, whose front tooth was dead and the color of fresh concrete.
“Well,” the boyfriend deadpanned, “I’m never flossing again,” so that the whole room broke into laughter the way earlier it had broken into song. Christina pressed closer to him; they were saving themselves for each other. Next to me, Angela’s laughter turned to the habitual barking cough that dragged along the ground like a length of chain, and she tugged her plaid sleeves down over the words she sometimes carved into her arms. “HURT,” the word said this week, though razors are imprecise, and it looked a little more like “HUNT.”
There was a girl with a black widow’s peak and a lovely froggy voice who wore larger T-shirts than the rest of us, and she sometimes sobbed uncontrollably throughout these talks, her friends leaning hard on either side of her as if trying to dive down into her heart, telling her there there with their entire bodies—because, if I have not said it, these people’s veins ran with kindness, and they wanted to do right by each other. Sometimes an adult came and prayed over her. Her father had gone to prison for sneaking into her bedroom at night while everyone else was sleeping—he was drunk, everyone said—and had been released again before we came. I did not know about it then, so I wondered why she cried. Perhaps, I thought, she felt guilty.
But always, the talk would continue, about how premarital sex was like using a dirty toothbrush or drinking a cup of spit. How sex was a fire that belonged in a fireplace, but if it got out of control, it would burn the house down. How bodies, once given to each other, were never really separate again. Not often, but sometimes, the girl cried, and people gathered around her and laid their healing hands.
Once freed, the girl’s father returned to our fall festivals and fish fries as if nothing had happened, a pillar of the church restored to its place. I see ice-pick scars along his cheekbone, I see the same widow’s peak, I see even a shining leather belt. I see him in the gym at St. Lawrence the Martyr, smiling down at the spectacle of our Halloween party, with his large handsome head full of howling black space and the red Mars light of what he had done in the center. His wife stood by; she had not left him. She had prayed, she said, and God had told her to forgive.
Say instead that the wife had prayed, and God had told her to scoop up her children and run, run. Where would she have gone, and how would her family have lived? There were so many of them, and the littlest baby’s palate was cleft clear up to the nostrils. The cleft glistened; it made his smile somehow sweeter. He cooed through it, rocked in one of his sisters’ arms.
St. Lawrence the Martyr was said to have been roasted over coals, and halfway through he called out to his torturers, “Turn me over, turn me over, I’m done on this side!” That is the kind of story we were told, and those were the saints who watched over us.
• • •
AT THE END, we joined hands and prayed for our friends who were battling demons, temptation, and brain tumors. Then everyone who had been blessed with the gift of tongues opened their mouths and dismantled the language, tore down everything residential, until there was no trace of its civilization left, just a pile of shocked components. And with those built their tower to the moon.
“Sham-a-lam-a-ding-dong,” the boy next to me murmured, his hand sweating wildly in mine. Each week I listened with helpless fascination, my hand in the grip of someone who was approaching definite scat territory. Whenever I had tried it, embarrassment had overwhelmed me—it felt like I was sticking my finger down English’s throat. Why would tongues come on command, I wondered, when no other gift of language did? And why would I willingly demolish something I spent so much of my time putting together? If I had had a broader sense of literary technique, I might have seen the possibility in such a scene, have associated it with automatic writing or cut-up text or poets in candlelit circles allowing spirits to speak through them, freeing themselves from meaning in order to find it, but I was so naturally reverential where words were concerned that all I could see was people tumbling down the house where I lived.
After the meeting, I drank a can of Wild Cherry Pepsi and walked in aimless loops through the crowd, among boys discussing their pet snakes and girls pressing books into each other’s hands with millennial urgency. Angela had just lent me one about a band of people struggling to survive during the End Times who oozed a black goo out of their chests when they fornicated, which ruined all their shirts. She promised me it would be awesome. That was the word we repeated above all others: awesome, we said, awesome.
When almost everyone had gone, I stepped with my rib cage aching into what felt like the entire night, sitting in a black cube on one man’s front lawn. All up and down the street I could see a loose constellation of those yellow ribbons that people tied around the trees in their front yards to protest something called eminent domain, which to my ears sounded like another name for God.
My sister walked ahead of me in a trance of human and higher love, seeming to hover over the grass. My mother was waiting for us at the curb, reading a copy of Prevention and marveling at the healing properties of various superfruits that “Bananas for the Lord” had not yet discovered. I passed two boys playing Hacky Sack, their skills honed to astounding sharpness by countless hours of Christian skanking, and discussing their eventual plans to acquire Komodo dragons, through illegal means if necessary. “Awesome,” the one boy said to the other, “that is truly awesome.” It was a word that sought to split the human atom, a word that contained its own cloud. The dragons, I knew, had grown huge on their closed and isolated island, until they almost counted as another species.
• • •
THE TIGHTEST, MOST SELF-INVOLVED KNOT is connected to strings that go everywhere. When Michael Brown is murdered, a few miles away from where we used to gather, I will watch the videos and study the photos and recognize the subtlest twitch of wind in the trees, the midday slap of sun on the pavement, the mobile shadows and the angles of the stop signs. The police, underneath their black riot gear, will look like the boys I went to school with.
And when I see that strong, surging flux of teenagers in the streets, kerchiefs tied over their faces to protect them from tear gas and lit by flares against the backdrop of American flags, I will fill at once with thudding dread and think, I wonder if they are sick too. They must have fished and waded in the creeks and played pickup games on those dirt lots. Their basements must have flooded in springtime. As they march against a swarm of more imminent dangers, I will wonder if they know, because we did not.
We prayed so much, and were so determined to carry our crosses with good grace, that sometimes we took our suffering for granted. As an outsider, though, I was occasionally uneasy: why were so many of us limping, feeble, milk-white, ill? There were half a dozen kids among my acquaintance whose growth had been stunted by rheumatoid arthritis, who had fragile walks and pink pinpoints on their knees and knuckles like outrageous emeralds. One boy’s eyes were so clouded with it that he was nearly blind; the blue of his irises had a heavenly look. Asthma and infertility and rare cancer clusters, little girls with cysts all over their ovaries. A preponderance of twins, often one sickly and one well. Rashes of stillbirths in nearby St. Charles, which was where we lived when we attended those weekend protests, carrying those signs that said DO YOU HEAR THE SILENT SCREAM? in horror handwriting that appeared to drip blood. Babies born missing eyes, missing ears, conjoined. No one knew why.
I never recall seeing a single CAUTION sign or canary-yellow triangle, though five minutes’ research reveals that the poison was everywhere, stashed at storage sites a
nd piled out in the open. This is where they purified the uranium used in the bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a fact so hidden that even my father, with his abiding interest in world war, was not aware of it. The local landfill contained 8,700 tons of radioactive waste, loosely mixed with topsoil and dumped there in the wake of the Manhattan Project. In Coldwater Creek, which had decades ago been contaminated with uranium, thorium, and radium, people reported seeing two-headed snakes winding with the current and crystalline crawfish snapping clear pincers. The water traveled through Florissant and Hazelwood and curved in a sweeping arc above Berkeley, Black Jack, and Ferguson. The state health department has acknowledged cancer rates are high in these areas, but suggested the residents would be healthier if they ate a salad once in a while—though some of the families who were hit the hardest were the ones who ate vegetables out of backyard gardens.
I will think of the call that came from the Marines when my brother Paul was training at Parris Island, informing us that his jaw had been completely hollowed out by a cyst, I will think of the parathyroid tumor that lopped the top octave off my sister’s transcendental voice, I will think of my mother’s crabbed hands and my own childlessness. It was in this place, after Paul was born asthmatic, jaundiced, and crusted with eczema, that my mother first embarked on her frenzied, all-consuming hobby of keeping us healthy, saving our lives.
• • •
BUT WE COULD BE CURED of anything, we knew. Some of us had made pilgrimages to Fátima and seen the base-metal crucifixes of our rosaries turn precious. Others had bathed in the waters of Lourdes. Miracles came to the little villagers, and so they could come to us.
And to believe with that kind of wholeheartedness, I can describe only from a distance, as you might describe a city on fire.
It felt: like the axis of the earth exited through my feet. Like I had grown a steeple. Like getting stopped at the top of a Ferris wheel, alone in my seat and exhilarated, one sandal hanging off the tip of my toe. Like the sunlight flashing off one of my facets or the water of me coming to a boil. Unhinged in the highest sense, so that my whole front door was gone, and the wind of what may come blew through. A church silence, a church stillness, reverberant with the last notes of the organ, filled with sustain multiplied into eternity. I was saved, set apart, snatched off the streets. The halo was a flaming hoop I had leaped through. I was on the other side.
Everything signified. Everything I looked at was designed for my eyes. The fabric of existence was cut to fit me; all ceilings were as tall as I was high; each book in the library fell open and let the word “rapture” leap toward me. The greatest gift of rapture was that it existed independent of the intellect; I needed no education to feel it. It was a capability, and born in the body when I was born—a reflex that sprang back gold against the hammer. We held hands and closed our eyes and felt our bones glow, and when there was pain, we offered it up.
I never wanted to write about any of this particularly, but when I began, my ink was suddenly liquid, like the dried blood in the glass vial. The conviction that we were part of a pattern is still so powerful I cannot shake it; these are the pages where it is hardest to tease out what is connected and what is not. And even now I could not tell you which curves of that circle were harm and which were haven. I know the house was always open. I know the prophet welcomed strangers there for decades, offering them food, offering them drink.
• • •
“I NEVER LIKED IT,” my mother tells us on the way back from St. Louis. “I never liked that Gang. You know, every time Billy saw your father, he told him he was praying for God to open his heart. That’s worse than giving him a book about the universe.”
But no matter what I write now, I fit there. I did somehow fit. I did not have the right clothes, I did not have the right information, I had long ago grown timid in the face of my father’s thunder. The horizon was limited, so my thoughts went perpendicular. My thoughts shot up and up, and my body chased after them, fizzing high over the sad and secretive rooftops, the swelled baptizing rivers, the emptying streets and soon-to-be-abandoned church spires of my town. I looked down on it all as I evaporated upward, and around me swirled the blue skirts of the patron saints, the poured-out martyrs, the powerless ladies of mercy, who watched over and could do nothing.
After 9/11, air traffic plummeted so sharply that the new runway fell into disuse and was soon seen for what it was: a great folly, a delusion of grandeur. Kinloch was gutted for nothing, and its community driven out to the hostile wilds of white suburbs, all for nothing. As of this writing, the Bridgeton landfill is smoldering underground, and the fumes of it are so overpowering that often children cannot play outside. My mother sometimes sends me articles from her nemesis The New York Times about what will happen if the fire reaches the radioactive waste at the nearby West Lake Landfill; it is creeping closer every day. The contaminated creek still winds through those counties, many of them poor and some growing poorer. I believe a great number of people do not know, as we did not. I believe most could not leave if they did.
“What are you afraid of?” we once asked a pale, eyeglassed boy who came every week, who cried within that ring in the prophet’s basement and could not stop. “What are you afraid of?” we asked him, in a single voice grown strong on singing, our hands raised above his head and our fingers turned to blazing rays. “Of . . . being . . . possessed,” he sobbed out to us, ashamed, collapsing suddenly as if he were centered around a dark star, and we saw ourselves at once in the mirror of him, clutched with the same terror of being howled full of black wingbeats and wind and other will, of the forces we could not control. Yet even as we were afraid, what a thrill to feel ourselves fought over by light and darkness, desired with equal fierceness by high wild heaven and the leaping flames.
The house of the prophet was taken up into the sky by the airport, which is what it had wanted all along. My friends and our pattern were scattered. I could not visit even if I tried—those suburbs are just erased, nothing there, all trees now. I have seen pictures, and it is green, green, old-names-of-dinosaurs green. It looks like the planet after people are gone.
But locked into the circle, laying hands on each other, it did not seem likely that we would ever leave. Our work was there, and our rearranged language, and our shared songs. We used to walk up to strangers sometimes, ones who appeared in our sight with an unmistakable bold outline, and deliver them the message and say, “It was laid on my heart to tell you this.” We used to say that and mean it.
18
POWER AND LIGHT
Darrell is dying, but we don’t know that yet. For now, he seems like the only normal person here.
I’m carrying a bowl of grapes through a sea of twenty-five seminarians, which parts to let me through. I recommend doing this any time you want to feel like a symbol. As their faces turn toward me, I can sense myself streamlining down to the neat, empty, skirted shape that lets people know they’re going into the right bathroom. My lordly father, who is presiding in a folding chair at the front of the room, catches sight of me and cries out, delighted, “You look like a goddess of the harvest!” We never could control what comes out of our mouths, which means that most of the time we say stupid things and then sometimes something beautiful pops out, whole, intact, and sweet, like a piece of fruit in reverse. How nice of him to say “goddess of the harvest” instead of “the little daughter who went down into the underworld.” I curtsy to him formally and set the bowl next to the cheese and crackers, the tubs of ice and bottled beer, the chilled white wine. The seminarians circle the tables while they wait; they are hungry. They have been locked in a stone tower all semester, inhaling one another’s arguments and exhaling their shared conclusions. The food at the seminary isn’t good, they have informed me, and the daughter of the cook dresses sluttier than the Book of Revelation.
My own skirt might be too short. I keep tugging it down to fingertip length, the old sch
ool rule. I step away from the grapes and the men descend.
• • •
EVERY YEAR MY MOTHER cooks gumbo for the seminarians. Don’t ask me how this tradition got started. It’s just more proof that my father associates spirituality with shrimp. The gumbo is not authentic, exactly—if my mom ever saw a bayou, she would shout “DROWNING HAZARD!” and “WATERY GRAVE!” as loud as she could till men came to drain it, and that would be the end of Louisiana—but it’s at least respectful. There are no tomatoes in it. All morning she’s been chopping vegetables for the trinity (celery, onion, and bell pepper), but her hands are so knotted with arthritis that it’s taken her twice as long as usual, and my father is losing his patience. I’ve come to placate everyone with snacks.
It’s always strange to encounter words like “trinity” and “mercy” and “infinite” outside the dictionary of the church. Seeing them in the wild is like seeing a teacher outside of school, dressed in normal clothes. It must be how people feel when they come to our house and see the priest wearing nothing but an enormous pair of boxer shorts. I survey the room: shaggy seminarians, short and bald seminarians, virgin seminarians, older and wiser seminarians, a seminarian who converted from Judaism, seminarians from overseas, two seminarians wearing free T-shirts they got at a Christian car wash, six corn-fed seminarians from the Midwest.
We’re gathered in the narthex of Christ the King. “Narthex” is a word that never fails to make me laugh, because it sounds like a poison chamber or the foyer of a mastermind’s lair. The narthex is another in-between place—not outdoors and not fully a church yet. Historically the narthex was the place where people who weren’t allowed in the real church could go, and now we are here.
The front window looks out on the bus stop, that will take you across town. Whenever I glance across the street, it seems to be surrounded by a sphere of rain. Sometimes, when that sphere is raining harder than usual, the mothers who are waiting for the bus step inside the narthex with their little children and stand there until the subtle currents of “Do you belong here?” carry them out again. Then they take their children by the hand and collect themselves for a moment outside, under the shelter of the statue of Jesus that looks like it’s made of endless breadsticks, and cross to the other side.
Priestdaddy Page 24
