Scars on the Face of God

by Chris Bauer

  I was cried out. Tomorrow was Saturday and Viola’s doctor had hours in the morning; we would see him then. For now Viola had left the house, said she was going for a walk and planned on doing some shopping up Schuetten Avenue. It relaxed her, shopping did, so much so she wanted to stay out as long as she could, even if it tired her. She made me promise I wouldn’t miss the church’s afternoon services if she didn’t get back in time. Knowing how much she liked shopping on the Avenue, and how much I loved her, I agreed.

  26

  As far as handling personal affairs and settling scores went, some had been added to my list that my dearest Viola wouldn’t have stood for if she’d known about them. Out of respect for her, I let things run their course and controlled my temper the best I could. But when the time was right, God help the SOBs at the tannery who’d done this to her.

  It was near three p.m. and I was in Our Lady’s church, sitting by myself in a pew in the second-story choir loft, there only because Viola had made me promise to go. But right then I couldn’t have given a constipated cat shit about any of it. Easter, Good Friday, and least of all a reenactment of the Way of the Cross by kids in dress-up. If not for Viola, I’d have told God to his beautiful disease-free face to take a flying—

  Jeez, clam up, old man, I told myself. I needed to stay in control, for Viola’s sake.

  The church was filling up; Stations started in fifteen minutes. Lots of older folks in here, women mostly, their heads covered with scarves tied under their sagging jowls, or with lace doilies bobby-pinned onto rinsed silver-blue or white or ebony hair, their feeble wrinkled hands tangled in rosary beads. My hands were folded and hanging over the choir loft ledge, the church organ to my left, me with a high, end-zone view of the congregation, each station a miniature sculpted scene fixed to a small ledge that was in turn fixed to the wall. Fourteen stations in all, seven on the right, seven on the left, all lit at bottom by flickering red votive candles. I smelled the burning wax laced with a lingering odor of incense, the incense a holdover from a funeral procession. It was good the loft was empty; I wasn’t feeling up to being cordial.

  Giggling young voices reached me from below, followed by an older voice who spoke low but in a stern enough tone she might as well have been shouting: “Quiet, people,” the sister demanded. “You’re in church.”

  Four columns of uniformed children appeared, Our Lady’s fifth through eighth grades, two columns of boys, two of girls, all carrying their Maryknoll missals. They walked up the aisles, a sister leading each column, the ragged march looking like a lengthening pitch fork, its prongs leading to the pews at the front of the church, where the grade-schoolers began filling them in. There was a break in the stream of children, the aisles empty for a moment until a second set entered, the ones who were handicapped but could move under their own power, some who I knew from St. Jerome’s orphanage. They dragged themselves up the outside aisles, their leg braces and crutches and canes scraping the marble floor, then banging against the wooden kneelers as they filled in more of the pews. The ones in wheelchairs entered last and were parked, or parked themselves, one each at the end of a pew.

  My mind. I couldn’t stop the hate. What did Christ really know about human suffering? Did he ever let himself feel pain, or did he just say he did? As the Son of God, he had the power to turn it off, so why should we believe he let himself feel any of the agony? To impress his father? To redeem our pathetic human asses?

  Far as I was concerned, he felt none of it and still couldn’t. He couldn’t feel the pain of these handicapped children, else he’d do something for them. He couldn’t feel the pain of the living dead neither, the physical and mental agony that came from the total, endless sucking of life from the body of a person with a terminal illness. The agony my Viola would endure until the leukemia finally took her. I knew this pain already, watched it kill my son. I knew it, and I felt it, and God couldn’t, and I wanted to know why, damn it.

  but He does feel the pain, Wump

  In my head, that ocean breeze voice…

  I looked past my hands, past my fingers clamped so tight on the lip of the loft’s wooden ledge their color was gone, then I looked down onto the congregation a full story below and scoured the faces of the children in the wheelchairs. Someone was missing, yet I knew he was here. I waited and listened for the rest of him to show.

  —EEeeEEeeEEeeEEee—

  The last wheelchair rolled out from under the choir loft, up the left aisle. It was Raymond with Leo pushing him, Raymond’s baseball cap in his lap, his blond hair swept behind his ears. “The axle on his wheelchair needs grease,” I said to myself, realizing I’d always have a need to repair things. Raymond spoke to me again.

  I feel Him, Wump, can feel Him, feeling my pain. He’s here with me, and I am grateful for it

  Leo pushed Raymond up the aisle, and Raymond didn’t stop speaking to me the whole way. Told me wonderful, loving things, in comforting, wind-carried whispers, about how God gave his worn-out body real strength, a strength he never knew he had, the strength to endure, the strength to love those not afflicted like him. The strength not to hate. I felt a settling, peaceful warmth come over me. It lasted only a moment, but it was enough to melt my tension. My hardened hands released the ledge, and I resettled them loosely against its varnished finish. Leo left Raymond at the end of a pew, squeezed past him into a seat. The church grew silent again.

  Ring-a-ling-a-ling, ring-a-ling-a-ling.

  The congregation stood. A tiny altar boy took a few short, nervous steps up the middle aisle and stopped just beneath me, his handheld bell pulled in tight against his white surplice, the ringer now in his firm but shaky grip, keeping it silent. A priest in orange and red and gold vestments drew up next to him. No mistaking Father Duncan. Broad shoulders, that large right-turn nose. The congregation faced inward, toward the center aisle where the procession was gathered at the rear of the church. Father patted the altar boy on the back then guided him forward with a touch to the boy’s shoulder. The procession moved up the aisle.

  Except for the altar boys, the children in the procession were all eighth graders, each a Passion Play character in a makeshift costume. Pontius Pilate was in white, a bedsheet wrapped and tucked inside a rope waist, the toes of a pair of forest-green Hush Puppies shoes peeking out from underneath. Mary, mother of Jesus, had her bedsheet gown draped over her hair, the sheet a royal-blue cotton above the light blue of her wool school uniform. Simon, who would be made to carry the cross, wore a tan peasant smock and brown chinos. Veronica’s folded hands gripped the cloth she’d use to wipe Christ’s face, her gown arranged like Mary’s, but in pale yellow. The Roman centurion tugged at his neck, his clip-on tie looking uncomfortable under a dime store gladiator chest plate, his other hand carrying a broom handle spear. And Adam. Dark, tall, and unmistakable as Jesus, his crown of thorns a jumble of Popsicle sticks stained brown and glued together, the handiwork of the fifth grade. Sister Dymphna followed a few steps behind him.

  The procession stopped, turned to face the first station; Father Duncan bowed. His tiny acolyte wobbled into a genuflection.

  Father raised his head and addressed the quiet congregation in his pulpit voice. “We adore thee, O Christ, and we bless thee.” He then read from his missal, told the congregation their response should be “Because by Thy holy cross, Thou hast redeemed the world.”

  “Because by Thy holy cross,” they said, my lips moving with them, “Thou hast redeemed the world.”

  Pilate, his arm across his waist to keep his gown from unwrapping, stepped forward to deliver his line. “M-m-my conscience…”

  I had trouble hearing him, he was talking so low. Sister Dymphna leaned in, said to him in a loud whisper, “Speak up.”

  Pilate responded in a cracked voice, “My c-conscience says you are innocent, but the people say differently. Jesus, I condemn you—to death.”

  Jesus, in front of Pilate, tilted his Popsicle-sticked head a degree or two up, meeting Pilate’
s eyes. It was then I saw Adam’s lips move; Pilate flinched. One thing I remembered about the Way of the Cross: whatever lines Adam had in the play, they weren’t this early.

  Father Duncan finished the first station by launching into an Our Father while young Pilate retraced his steps down the center aisle to the back of the church, just like in practice. The Our Father was followed by a Hail Mary, then a Glory Be. Plenty enough prayer for the boy playing Pilate to come back up the right aisle, find the pew where his classmates were, and elbow his way into the end of it, also just like in practice, except none of this happened. It was then a voice echo faint as a heart murmur reached me, on instinct making me look right at Raymond, and again on instinct making me wait for the next message. When the second echo hit, I realized it wasn’t in my head, that it was coming from the bottom of the stairwell leading to the loft. Sounded like a boy, whimpering.

  I descended the stairwell and here was our Pilate underneath the steps, bent over toward the wall, his forehead pressed against the marble. His cheeks were lined with tears.

  “What’s the matter, son?”

  His puffy eyes were focused on his hands as he nervously picked at his fingers. “I’m going to die,” he said, drawing on stunted breaths, his sobs ringing the stairwell, “in a rice paddy, in another country, with my throat cut. He condemned me. Jesus condemned me!”

  “Take a deep breath,” I told him, laying a hand on his shoulder. “Adam’s having a tough time. Just ignore him. He doesn’t know—”

  “He’s not Adam!” he sobbed. “His voice, it was like a full-grown man’s. When he whispered, I—it was like he really was Jesus!” Young Pilate spun from under my arm and untangled himself from his bedsheet, revealing his plaid school clip-on over a flyaway-collared white shirt.

  “I didn’t want to be Pilate. Pilate was a bad guy. I’m sorry, Jesus!” He rushed out from under the stairwell and pushed through the heavy exterior church doors. I followed him outside before the door closed, called for him to stop, but he’d sprinted halfway down the block already, running toward a late afternoon sun beginning its disappearance into evening twilight. Except—

  Out here, the sun—it was too low in the sky for this time of day. It was April; the days were supposed to be getting longer. It wasn’t even three o’clock, and what I saw on the horizon was an dusky-orange sun trimmed in half by a block of row homes, the sun looking tired like it did in the fall, just before it gave way to the bleakness of winter, rather than the way it should be, primed and ready for spring. Its normal fireball color, a burning brilliance that could sizzle a person’s pupils, was paling before my eyes, taking on the flat, dead pewter of a midnight full moon. I stared at it, viewed it head on without blinking, because for some strange reason I could.

  I thought about Viola, that I should look for her.

  “You’re an old fool,” I muttered, then told myself to cut the shit. Could be there was a simple explanation. An unexpected storm front. A rare eclipse maybe; one that came once every hundred years or so. Or a new phenomenon the weathermen would get to study on for decades. I headed back inside knowing only that something wasn’t right. I closed the door behind me and stood there with my back to it.

  The congregation was on its feet. The pews closest to me in the deepest part of the church, farthest from the altar’s artificial lighting, drifted into darkness, the older parishioners squinting at prayer books they now needed to lift closer to their faces. The interior lighting—I needed to switch it on.

  I took to the shadowy right aisle under a wall of stained glass windows set back in alcoves two stories high. At this time of day on brighter afternoons, these windows would be brilliant, overpowering, their thick mosaic panes forming shafts of light that looked like spun cotton candy, the rainbow kind. Sitting in their warmth, Harry told his mother he felt such an unmatched comfort; said it was like God’s smile, so radiant as it warmed his diseased body. But today, at this moment, the panes were the dull color of the walls, a so-what blend of black and white and ash. Single votive candles lit the foot of each ivory-carved station like torches in a medieval castle. Scenes of torture in miniature, these stations were, fitted into marble half-shell inserts between the windows and the floor. I stopped on the fringe of the second station’s squirming, shape-shifting orange candlelight. In the middle aisle Father Duncan’s procession stopped and turned to face the second station as well.

  From across a bobbing sea of children’s heads, I watched this pious priest again recite words that, for him, I figured were more fulfilling than the oath of President.

  Father Duncan: “We adore thee, O Christ, and we bless thee.”

  The congregation: “Because by Thy holy cross, Thou hast redeemed the world.”

  Sister Dymphna trailed the procession. She retrieved my makeshift cross from the last pew, placed the scrap wood creation onto Adam’s shoulder. The procession moved on. On cue at the third station, Adam dropped to one knee.

  “Jesus falls for the first time,” Father Duncan told the congregation, then, “We adore thee, O Christ, and we bless thee.”

  “Because by Thy holy cross, Thou hast redeemed the world.”

  Adam rose to his feet, the cross still on his shoulder.

  Inside the utility closet just off the baptismal chapel I pushed up two switches then backed myself out to see the result. Forged, clear-paned iron lanterns big as old-fashioned streetlamps now illuminated the kneeling congregation; the parishioners lowered their prayer missals to arm’s length. I stepped back into the utility room and threw two more switches, peeked out again into a church now as bright as it was for midnight Mass on Christmas Eve, the domed ceiling fully visible from the spray of spotlights at the base of its upward curve. Again the beauty of this church impressed me, its ceiling a burst of saints and angels in a celestial sky below a mural of God the father, the mural studded by specks of white-paint stars that twinkled from reflections of the spotlighting beneath them.

  The procession swayed its way up one side of the middle aisle then down the other, stopping across from each station’s platform for Father to deliver his prayers. At the eleventh station, Father raised his head and announced soberly, “Jesus is nailed to the cross.” He offered the prayer, “We adore thee, O Christ, and we bless thee.”

  “Because by Thy holy cross…”

  He read once more from his Maryknoll missal. “The executioners throw our Lord onto the cross. His arms and legs are extended. Hammers fall, and His body is nailed to the wood. The cross is raised for the whole world to see. The weight of His body tears at the nails. Rivulets of blood make their way to earth. Cramps and suffocation set in. Every nerve of His body is taut with agony. The King of Heaven and Earth willingly lies helpless.”

  Sister Dymphna removed the cross from Adam’s shoulder. Adam rose to his full height, tall, lanky. His forehead looked wet from gleaming sweat as it drained from under his crown of Popsicle-stick thorns.

  Except it wasn’t sweat. The consistency, the color, they were both wrong. Too thick and dark. On cue Adam lifted his arms as if to mimic the outstretched Christ on the cross. He tilted his head slightly, turned it in my direction and raised an eyebrow, seeming to see me over the heads of his classmates. The brightness of the lighting glinted off the syrupy trails on his wet forehead, and for a few swollen moments I was again on a midnight battlefield in France, hugging dirt in a foxhole, shells screaming overhead, bomb-fire in my path, my soldier buddy from Tennessee fifty pockmarked feet of earth away from me, me and him wondering how we looked to each other, our fearful eyes granted fleeting black and white snapshots of ourselves from the shells busting up the ground around us. A hellfire blast ripped off my helmet, left globs of blood-tinged sweat on my temples and brow. I stared blindly to my left, into the battlefield darkness, waiting for the next bomb-burst glimpse of my GI buddy, waiting and listening while arcing rockets ripped holes in the air, and found their marks in distances from us which shortened with each exploding descent. The next flash
revealed what the first blast had done, my buddy’s helmet gone, his scalp gone with it, his face and ears a mask of dark, drippy red molasses, this young man from Tennessee only seconds away from a death I wouldn’t see.

  I blinked again at Adam and took an instinctive swipe at my forehead, now realized it was me who was doing the sweating and Adam who was doing the bleeding.

  He was no longer a boy playing Jesus. I was jolted instead by the image of a battered man, a halo of blood creeping down from the crown of his head. I blinked hard, tried to clear my eyes, but the gore-soaked Jesus was still there. His eyelids were open only part way, and when his head again swung in my direction, he nodded. It was a signal; I was sure of it. Something a back-alley gambler on the con gave someone else in the trade who may have been on to him; my stomach lurched in response. There was a buzz in the congregation, and my wonder whether others saw what I was seeing was confirmed. Some began raising their voices in panic. Others showed tears of joy, said they saw Christ, and it was a miracle.

  To hell with you, Adam.

  He smiled at me, still in his pose, his arms stretched out from his sides like a doll on a stick. Then he raised his head toward the domed ceiling. I followed his eyes, and I was awestruck.

  I felt my face redden. My ears tingled, my nerves, my whole being, snapped to a frightened, electrified attention. I watched as he watched: one by one, each of them twinkling stars on the ceiling dissolved.

  The church lighting sputtered, on the walls and ceiling both. A final power surge was followed by the screams of terrified children and adults, all of it making me realize this wasn’t some shell-shocked, faraway battlefield vision, this was real, and it was happening now. The altar candles and the votives that illuminated the Stations of the Cross all snuffed themselves into smoky trails. The church plunged into a gray-black din.

  My eyes adjusted as I lifted kid after sprawling kid by whatever parts of their clothing I could grab, pulling them off one another at the end of each bottlenecked pew, then standing them on scrambling feet that all hit the ground running. The nuns barked orders to their charges to remain calm while adults led the kids and each other to safety through the back and side doors, the old folks among them rapidly blessing themselves over and over, their frenzied fingers crossing their chests but never really touching any part of their bodies in the process.