Miracle at St. Anna (Movie Tie-in)

by James McBride

  “I ain’t ministerin’,” Bishop said. “I shouldn’t be here with you dogfaces nohow. The only reason I came over here is ’cause my tailor lives here.”

  Hector laughed, but Sam Train saw nothing funny. “Kid here needs a doctor,” he said. “What y’all gonna do about it?” He stopped underneath an outcropping of rock that partially shielded him from the downpour to check on the boy, and the others huddled in close. Racks of rain slopped down from the slab of rock like a waterfall. Train slowly peeled open his field jacket, which covered the kid. The boy’s face was the color of white plaster, his tight little hands balled into fists. Occasionally, his eyes flickered open, then fluttered shut again. For the first time, Train noticed that his breathing seemed labored, and even over the pouring rain he could hear the child’s breath wheezing in and out, as if something were rattling in his throat, making the ripping sound a playing card makes when it’s stuck in the spokes of a bicycle rim.

  “He don’t need no doctor. He needs a hospital,” Stamps said. “Hector, take a look while I check the top of the ridge.” Stamps trotted ahead.

  Hector didn’t even bother to glance at the kid this time. He waved his hand at Train, who looked at him hopefully. “I told you before, he needs a hospital.” He felt sorry for Train’s kid, but not that sorry. He’d seen a thousand of them in Naples, begging at street corners, tugging at the soldiers saying, “Meet my sister. Big titties. Tight pussy.” They reminded him of himself growing up back in San Juan, begging for food at sidewalk cafés, snatching leftovers as the owners chased him down the street, his silent mother praying at mass, his drunken father screaming and punching her out at home. Hector couldn’t stand the thoughts. He turned away and crouched on his haunches, watching Stamps slip up the muddy ridges.

  “Whyn’t you look at him?” Train insisted.

  “I seen him,” Hector said, watching Stamps struggling up the rocky crevices.

  “Whyn’t you put some o’ that powder on him that you got. I seen you use it before.”

  “What powder?”

  “The magic powder.”

  Hector looked at Train sideways. “Sulfa powder. Is that what you talkin’ ’bout, Train? That’s for fevers. I’mma give him that in this rain? He don’t got no fever. He got a chest injury or something inside, I don’t know.”

  “Well, do something.”

  Hector yawned. He suddenly felt sleepy. His nerves were giving way. He watched as Train stared at him, his large eyes bulging with hope like a dog’s eyes. Hector imagined Train as a dog. He’d be a big, black puppy. “Let’s get outta this shit first,” he said.

  Train turned to Bishop. “Bishop, can’t you make ’im look at ’im?”

  Bishop peered at the ridges around them. The rain made a fizzing sound as it hit the leaves and trees. “Don’t talk to me ’bout no little white boy,” he grunted. “You would never see me grabbing no li’l white boy like you done.”

  “But you tol’ me!”

  “Told you, hell. It was your idea. Wasted your time, too, trying to save him. What for?”

  “I done what you tol’ me to!”

  “I ain’t tell you to get us kilt. This is a white man’s war, boy. Niggers ain’t got nothing to do with it. This boy ain’t got no life nohow.”

  “Why not?”

  “ ’Cause a life of goodness is not what white folks has chosen for they children. The Bible says it, Proverbs Twenty-two sixteen: ‘Raise up a child the way you want him to go, and he will not depart from it.’ He’s trained to hate, boy. His life ain’t worth a dollar of Chinese money.”

  Train blinked in confusion, the rain shrouding his giant features. “He ain’t done nothing to you.”

  “Two hours ago you didn’t want ’im.”

  Train said nothing. That was before he knew the boy was an angel. The boy was his now. The boy was an angel of God. He had the power. Train couldn’t give him away now.

  Stamps returned from above, slipping and sloshing down to a stop underneath the rock outcropping, sliding as if into home plate. The rain was falling in sheets now, and he had to shout over the splattering of the downpour. “It’s gonna be dark in ten minutes,” he said. He pointed. “There’s a church bell tower behind that ridge. We’ll hold there. Maybe we can make a fire inside the church.”

  Hector took the lead and Train went last, carrying the kid, who lay limp against him, tiny as a chicken in his arms.

  The church lay beyond a village composed of several houses dug into a dark mountain beside a road that curved along a beautiful sloping ridge. They crawled along the underside of the ridge, sticking close to the dirt road, cut through the woods to bypass the village, and came upon another dirt trail that led to the church. They followed the tiny trail past a small graveyard. Farther up, the road widened and curved again, and they could see, at the very top of the ridge, the church bell tower and a few pastel-colored houses dotting the distant hills behind it. It was a good place to build a church, Bishop thought. If he were really holy and wanted to build a church, he’d build a church here, too. He had just been about to build a new church back in Kansas City when he got drafted. It was the story of his life, that just before he made a big score, his luck ran out. He’d served six months at Parch-man Penitentiary in Louisiana under the name of Mason June for fraud and theft, breaking rocks on a chain gang and sleeping with his teeth on edge after winning cigarettes at poker from the other inmates, big, stupid men like Train—tough, grizzled cotton pickers with long arms and short brains who liked his smooth talk and easy-handed way of dealing cards, finding his funny stories about the white man an ease from the burden of their own tortured, boring existences, which promised no future other than long nights of pining after whores and country women, who promised only a dull life and more plowing. He got into preaching afterward. It was a lot easier than fleecing cardplayers in jook joints, where share-croppers in overalls often found courage at the bottom of a bottle of suds once they figured he’d duped them. Besides, the big-city pimps were moving in and crowding his business, and when they pulled out their pistols, they touched the trigger and told the hammer to hurry. The Bible was an easy study, with lots of extra poontang and chicken dinners thrown in. He had actually grown up in church back in Louisiana, but watching his deacon father punch his mother out every Saturday night, then pray to high holy heaven on Sunday mornings, robbed him of any illusions about God’s work. If God’s around, he’s a loser, Bishop thought, and I’m gonna play him. He spent his last fourteen dollars on a bus ticket to Kansas City and set up shop in front of an abandoned plumbing supply store downtown, serving free lemonade on hot July afternoons and preaching like a madman to tired housekeepers and old gardeners who wandered past on their way home from work: Put down them heavy pots and pans and come to God, he said. Put down that heavy sack and come over here, ’cause Somebody Special wants you. And He don’t have no anger. He don’t know no pain. He don’t give no orders. He’s a pain-getting-rid-of-er. That’s His job. To get rid of your pain faster than this lemonade can go down your little red lane. Why? Ain’t no why! He ain’t got to explain Hisself! He’ll hurl your enemies down to low stones like he hurled Satan outta heaven, ’cause He’s mighty. He’s the baddest kitty kat in the firmament! He got the mojo and the sayso. He knows truth. He knows justice. He knows your pain. And He will heal your pain right now, for free, if you just trust in Him. Ain’t no cost to it! Ain’t no buy-now-pay-later to this. You ain’t rentin’ no couches here! God-don’t-want-your-money-tainted-by-the-filth-of-man’s-sinful-touch and you can take your money home and put it under your mattress where it belongs, ’cause I don’t want it, I want your soul! You got an appointment to keep, and I’m the secretary! I’m here to tell you that Jesus is coming! The train’s leaving the station, and I’m collecting tickets! Don’t be left out. Don’t wait! Leave your money home, but bring your soul! All aboard! Get what you need! Get God! I got what I need! How ’bout you?

  The money poured in like magic, and more peopl
e came. Bishop rented the plumbing supply store, and the congregation grew. They called him Walking Thunder, and when he preached he was so good at making the lightning come that at times he actually believed in God. During those moments, fright would cover him like a blanket and he would disappear from his congregation for a few days and drink joy juice till the feeling passed. He was in the flow, he had it good, he had found his niche. But the Army wanted him, and he made the mistake of showing up at the induction center thinking they wouldn’t sign up a Negro preacher—they made preachers into chaplains with the rank of captain, he was told, and even a fool knew that no white man wanted a nigger being a captain and telling him what to do. By the time he figured the game was played by the white man’s rules, that captains, even Negro chaplains, had college and divinity school degrees, he was doing push-ups at training camp. Now his new church back home was just a dream, and here he was trying to collect his fourteen hundred dollars, staring at a white man’s church in a white man’s land in the pouring rain with a nigger who was carrying a white man’s son who was gonna die, and they’d be blamed for that, too—if the Germans didn’t smoke them first. He needed a drink.

  Hector, in the lead, slowed as the others gathered around him at the side of the road and stared at the church. “That’s where the Germans would be if they were near here. Camped inside,” he said.

  “Don’t see no Germans,” Stamps grunted. “Just keep goin’.”

  “This is close enough,” Hector said. “We don’t need to walk in the front door and get our asses shot off. There’ll be Germans around here soon enough if they’re not here now.”

  Stamps was exhausted. “We stay in there or out here. One or the other. You and I’ll go take a look. You take point.”

  “Shit no,” Hector said. “Point or not, it don’t matter who’s got the point if there’s a whole regiment in there having dinner and there’s only four of us. If you and me get hung up there, who’s gonna back us up? Them two?” He pointed to Bishop and Train. “I say we go together.”

  Stamps felt his command slipping from him, but there was nothing he could do. He was so tired he wanted to lie down right in the rain and rest forever. “Shit, it don’t matter. Let’s all go.”

  Hector moved forward slowly, crouching, advancing to the edge of the road. He lay on his stomach and peeked around the curve. He lay there for what seemed like an hour, then finally got up and motioned for the others to follow as he dashed across the road and took cover in some bushes on the other side.

  Train felt himself going invisible again, and he fought the impulse. Invisibility, he felt, always brought problems. He had not wanted to get the boy and he would not have done so had he been visible and in his right mind, angel or not. He would not have waded into the Cinquale had he been visible. He would not have done any of those things. But they were done now. The boy was his responsibility now. He still owed Bishop money. He still did not know where he was. Everything needed clearing up. If the boy stopped breathing, he thought, that would be a disaster. The notion began to terrify him, that the boy would die. Train had seen dozens of kids dying before, in Lucca, in Naples, starving, begging, their wounds wrapped in gauze, big pus-filled sores on their feet and legs, but they were not connected to him, them being Italians and him being colored. But this one was different. He had felt it. How to explain to them that the boy was an angel? How to explain to God that he’d let an angel die?

  He rose and followed the others, dashing across the road. His feet splattered the mud, telling him he was not yet invisible, which meant problems, too. Invisibility meant life but problems. Visibility meant being seen and shot. There was no way he could win. Bishop trotted over, and he and Train huddled together in the bushes and peered at the church, which lay beyond Stamps and Hector, who squatted behind boulders on either side of the road ahead of them.

  The church lay in the middle of a tiny piazza. From their vantage point, the men couldn’t see any object stirring about it. Debris was piled up in front of the church, the pews had been burned, obviously there had been some sort of firefight. The four men were approaching slowly, in a crouch, spread out by ten feet or so, on either side of the road, when Sam Train spotted St. Anna.

  Her likeness was set just above the church doorway, which overlooked the tiny piazza, her face jutting out about three feet. The eaves shielded her from the weather. She was just a bust, not an entire statue. Train stared at her, mesmerized. He had never seen a white person so expressive in all his life. He glanced at the head of the Primavera statue in its webbing at his side, then back to St. Anna. They looked so different, yet both were so beautiful. They stirred something inside him, the two of them, easing him into solace, opening the pad-locked door of his heart. Train suddenly felt happy, and warm, the two of them together bewitching him with sudden comfort. This second statue was a sign. It had to be.

  Without thinking, Train stood up, unaware that he was exposing himself to enemy fire, and slowly staggered forward in the rain as if in a trance, holding the shivering, pale boy in one arm. As Train walked forward, an odd and sudden chill hit him and the smell of fresh death crashed against his nostrils so hard he could barely stand. He suddenly felt like weeping. He tried to turn around and run but could not. His rifle slipped off his shoulders to his waist, and the statue head at his side bobbed and suddenly felt heavy. He covered his face with one hand, still holding the boy, and staggered through the muddy piazza toward the bust of St. Anna. He walked with a weaving motion, as if drunk. He ignored Hector, Bishop, and Stamps, yelling at him to come back. He couldn’t stop himself.

  Train stood before the bust in the pouring rain, hypnotized, staring up, then felt himself rise, floating, until he was face-to-face with St. Anna. He gazed at her quizzically. Her expression was a mixture of sadness, knowledge, wisdom, and joy all at once. Her sedate marble eyes gazed back at him, and it was as if she could see through him. Suddenly, he felt invisibility again. All of the millions of pieces of knowledge and the truths he’d known, and some he could never know, flowed behind his eyeballs: the secrets of plants, why rivers flow north to south, the arithmetic of dams, why dinosaurs walked the earth. He saw cities under water, seas that parted, where wizards live. He understood why steel ships float, the magic of pyramids, the shaping of the mountains, each and every one of God’s miracles. And as each revelation flowed by, it paused for a moment, allowing him to examine it mentally in the tiniest of detail. Train shuddered and gazed at St. Anna again in awe, and as he did, the saint’s head tilted slowly to one side. He watched in disbelief as a large tear formed in one of her eyes and slowly made its way down her face. He reached out to wipe away the tear and found himself standing on the ground, touching Bishop’s face.

  To Train’s horror, he could not remove his hand. It remained, frozen, stuck to Bishop’s face. Bishop, all 210 pounds of him, also seemed frozen to the spot, transfixed, staring at Train with a look of shock and compassion, fear, and even understanding in his eyes. They stood, the two soldiers, in the open piazza at dusk, the rain pouring down in goblets, the giant Negro with the child clutched to his chest gently touching the smaller man’s face. Train suddenly recoiled in horror as Bishop, as if under a spell, snapped back to himself and flung Train’s hand down. “Get your wrinkly raisin paws off me, you wobbly nigger! Get the fuck off me! What’s that smell? Christ!”

  Train tried to stammer an apology, but Hector cut him off. “Look over there, man! There’s somebody over there!”

  All four soldiers dropped to a crouch and followed Hector’s pointing finger. Atop a hill on their right, several yards beyond the burned pews in the piazza, a lone figure stood with its back to them, staring out over a ridge, the wind blowing its pants against its legs. The figure appeared to be a man, and from a distance, appeared to be unarmed. The soldiers fanned out and approached him.

  There were ten feet off when Hector shouted at the man, “Hey!”

  The man turned and they flattened, rifles at the ready, save Tr
ain, who ducked behind a tree, clasping the youngster.

  The man squinted at them through the dark, driving rain, then turned his back to them and looked out over the ridge again, his hands in his pockets. He began pacing back and forth, talking and gesticulating, his feet splattering the mud as he paced. He appeared to be arguing with someone who was beyond the ridge and beneath him, moving his hands as if trying desperately to prove a point. Whoever he was talking to in the approaching darkness was out of their sight line.

  “Let’s cut outta here,” Bishop said. “This place gives me the creeps.”

  “Watch my back,” Hector said.

  Train, Bishop, and Stamps watched the surrounding trees and hills as Hector approached the man cautiously. Five feet from him, Hector called out again, “Hey!” The man stopped talking and turned to face Hector, who crouched, ready to fire. The man waved a hand absentmindedly and said something to Hector that was lost in the wind and rain, then turned away and began arguing again with the person beneath him, below the ridge.

  Hector addressed the man in Italian. The man ignored him, laughing and pacing as he talked, gesturing openly with his hands as if to say, “You see what I mean?”

  Hector slowly crept forward, until he was standing parallel to the man on the ridge, about five feet away. He pointed his rifle at whoever was beneath the ridge, then motioned with his head to the others that it was safe to come forward. They trotted forward and looked down.

  There was no one there.

  The soldiers turned their attention to the man, who had stopped pacing and was staring at them. Up close, the man looked ragged and spent. His jacket was split and torn. He had only one shoe on. He was filthy and completely drenched. His face was unshaven, with two front teeth missing and several others blackened by cavities. The black teeth together with his rail-thin limbs and the jawbones that jutted from his flattened cheeks gave him the appearance of being a walking skeleton. He glared at them for a long moment, then began pacing again, jabbering in high-speed Italian as he walked back and forth, arguing with the ridge below.