Last week, I shared with you all that I needed to escape, that I needed to go to Phoenix and spend as much time as possible simply lying in the sun, being quiet. I got to do that, but something unexpected happened. I had thought that the healing, the return of words, would come slowly and by the end. In fact, when I got on the plane to Phoenix from Houston, I read ten pages of Anne Lamott and suddenly my fingers burned and itched with a short story, which I share here. I have, unlike my other stories, gone back to this one for the past couple days, refining and rewriting sections of it. I think it a kind of confession, perhaps, and yet so much more at the same time. It’s a bit of fiction, as usual, but a bit more raw. And, surprise to us all, most of all myself, it seems to be the least Catholic, but the most catholic, of all I have ever written.
“Paper Wasp”
Asher House was built as the parsonage of Morningsong Baptist in the once vibrant apple orchard of Terrance Farms, which was now overrun by eucalyptus trees hanging low enough to kiss the tops of the overgrown field beneath it. In the summer, the proud stalks were burned dark amber, a gentle wind enough to snap them in two, scattering them across the vast fields and into neighboring properties, long since abandoned. In winter, the barren space was never truly cold, but lifeless all the same, harsher with wind and bitter when it rained. Only in spring and by chance in autumn was the property alive, green and hopeful, strong enough to overcome the wind by bending with it, moving as it moved, and accepting what offering of rain was granted, though there seemed to be less every year. There was no reason to keep the property tended, not with Reverend L’Engle and his wife being the last in the house and the church only a slight walk down through the neglected orchard and beyond the swaying eucalyptus. Each Sunday morning, evening, and Wednesday evening—and on that particular Friday and Christmas Day—five legs made their way from the house, through the orchard, around the eucalyptus, and down the dusty lane road the fourth of a mile to the church, which sat slightly elevated on a small hill.
“I had hoped Ezekiel to have been here to walk with us.”
“I know,” the Reverend replied, his cane making a slight click against a harder portion of the road. “I had hoped so too. That University has changed him or maybe it was something he always had, buried inside, that only has now come to bloom.”
The road was as amber as the scorched field, the sunlight laid across it without interruption, an unforgiving lover, baking the flesh until the earth split and cracked, seeming to cry out as if in labor, though its child was stillborn. They continued on for a time in their quiet, the Reverend’s wife keeping cool beneath her large sunhat, which flopped gently as she walked, one arm linked with the arm of her husband’s that was unoccupied with the cane.
“I wrote this for him.”
The Reverend’s wife studied the earth that her feet moved across, tempted to apologize for her steps, willing herself to tread more lightly across it. “You’ve been writing sermons for him for years,” her words were soft sometimes, so he had to strain to hear her as she often forgot he was losing the ability. “At some point, Holy Ghost has to be responsible for him too.”
The Reverend made a slightly defiant tap of the earth with his cane, for which his wife was also tempted to apologize, as they proceeded on, no longer discussing the matter.
When they reached the base of the hill, she went before him, ascending the few feet up and keeping a steady eye on her husband, looking back after each step, first at the stability of his cane and then at the placement of his feet as he rose, until both of them had reached the summit, an incline of only about seven feet. She linked her arm in his once more and they proceeded into the church.
Morningsong Baptist was a whitewashed, rectangular building with a notable steeple. The paint was chipping from its exterior walls, leaving it speckled in some places, turned tawny in others from the dust that beat against the sides during the worst of the summer winds. Inside, the wooden floors creaked and protested each step, from foot or cane, that was set against it as the pews too let out groans, nailed to floor, linked to it, so that its pain was its own. At the back stood a pulpit, aligned with the center aisle, a cross hung beyond, solemn and made of a polished mahogany. Eucalyptus leaves were arranged about the room, the solemn greens of the country chapel. To the left was a piano, its yellowed keys offering hymns at cost, for each chords had a twang that threatened to shake the walls themselves. The windows were open, a compromise because of the heat, but it covered the room with a whisper of amber, dust and chaff filtering in and falling on soilless ground.
The Reverend’s wife took her seat at the piano, starting the first notes of a hymn she could not remember the title of as her husband began to make his way toward the front row. They sang three standards, one about God being a stronghold and fortress, one about the longing of the soul for restoration, and the last about the grandeur of the world that He had made. At the close, the Reverend slowly stood, the cane leaned on harder than usual, which his wife took note of and the floor appealed. Three legs made their way to the pulpit, rounding out to stand behind it as one leg was set aside, propped against the stand as hands took position to steady the man. He produced glasses and a half-sheet of notes from his jacket pocket, trembling slightly as he placed the glasses on his face and unwrinkled the page, pressing upon it thrice before satisfied, as he then opened the old church Bible, which never left the pulpit, to Leviticus.
“I would like this morning to speak on the holiness of God.”
His sermons used to be longer. They would sometimes last nearly an hour, but they had in recent years with maturity of age and spirit been shortened to the point that he now spoke no more than twenty minutes, if he even went that long, skipping over introductory items and what he increasingly believed was milk-based theology to harder, richer questions and abstracts. But what his sermons now lacked in length, his funerals made up for, comprising a narrative that spanned from creation to atonement to final resurrection and was always delivered standing upright, cane firmly planted in the earth, directly above the grave of the recently asleep and in any condition of weather or season, without any form of protection over him, save the resiliency of his faith.
To that end, he had yet to endure a sickness from his labor.
It was the first Sunday of the month and, by ordinance, the church was to observe the Lord’s Supper. The Reverend’s wife had baked the unleavened bread at home, which she produced a slice of wrapped in wax paper from her purse, along with the sealed mason jar of grape juice. She placed them on the piano top as three legs approached her, one hand reaching out to touch the bread, reciting the passage from one of the letters to the Corinthians, placing his hand on the mason jar when he reached the part that considered the cup. When he was finished and the congregation was invited to partake, the Reverend’s wife broke a small portion of the bread for herself, eating it, then unscrewed the lid of the jar, taking a drink from the cup, then turning her eyes down in prayer. Her husband followed her actions, the two moving into a quiet space for several minutes before the jar was screwed closed once more, the wax folded over the remaining bread, and the items placed back into the wife’s handbag.
They sang a hymn about steadfastness then were dismissed. Five feet ambled slowly down the center aisle, out into the front steps as the sun continued its assault on the earth. The couple made their silent journey home, down the dirt lane, ducking around the eucalyptus branches, through the barren orchard, and up to the parsonage, which creaked in welcome when the cane was set firmly upon its porch, followed by two right legs, then two left.
“It was a very good sermon.”
“Then He had a hand in it.”
When they entered the house, she went ahead of him, toward the kitchen, to remove the extra place setting from the table so that the Reverend wouldn’t see it and be disheartened after such a good Sunday. To her surprise, the act was unnecessary. Sitting at one end of the table, jade eyes alight with amusement and auburn hair aflame in the summer light that pierced the kitchen windows, Ezekiel thumbed through the prayer book on his lap and made the sign of the cross just as his mother entered.
“Ezekiel!” she cried in delight, moving with what haste she could muster to embrace him, though he offered her a hand of caution as his lips moved to complete the last of the Litany, to cross himself one last time, before he gently closed the book and set it with care down upon the table, rising to embrace her. He smelled of incense and altars and dissatisfaction.
“Hello Mother,” it was nearly murmured, but it was affectionate enough.
“You could have come with us to church.”
The Reverend was standing in the doorway, his cane firmly pressed into the floor beneath him, his eyes fixed sternly on his son.
Ezekiel pulled away from his mother, who was accustomed to the argument and busied herself with the preparations for lunch. They would have cold-cut sandwiches on homemade bread and potato salad she would make fresh then, keeping herself occupied to not be misunderstood to be a participant in the conversation.
“You know I simply can’t,” the young man protested. “A boxy building, old and dying. It’s hardly a church at all.”
The Reverend took a seat at the table, across from his son. The cane was leaned against the wall behind him as he leaned back in his chair, hands folded and placed into his lap. There was a silence for a moment, save for the running water from the tap that the Reverend’s wife was running the flat-leaf parsley under. Eventually, the Reverend nodded, as if understanding something for the first time. “I see. And what did God say to the Samaritan woman in John 4.”
“Jesus,” Ezekiel stressed the correction, “said in the Gospel of St. John that there would come a time when worship did not take place either on the mountain or in Jerusalem, but in the spirit.”
“And are we without the Spirit here?”
The jade eyes flashed in annoyance. “Certainly not, but we should always give God our best. If a church is rundown and falling apart, it’s as if we’re telling God that the space we invite Him to come dwell within doesn’t need to look good, that we’re too busy with our own desires and wants to make a place consecrated.”
For a moment the Reverend seemed to consider the ceiling carefully, studying something that flew across it and had caught his eye. Ezekiel’s eyes followed, finding the small brown insect he had observed and ducking in fright when it flew a little too near his own head. He nearly uttered an expletive, but he remembered himself and where he was, holding it back as his father began to speak.
“It’s nothing but a paper wasp,” he replied, a glance passing to his wife, who stiffened slightly but willed herself to be unaffected as she began to chopped the parsley with rough, guided movements. “They aren’t aggressive by nature, more afraid of you than you ever will be of them. You have to work fairly hard to stir them up. They’ll sting eventually, of course, but not without quite a bit of provocation.”
“Like the cup of iniquity,” the Reverend’s wife murmured, the knife falling hard into the last bit of the parsley, which she then gathered on the cutting board into a pile and dropped into the bowl that stood beside it.
Ezekiel was about to say something in response, to point out the archaic view of the cup and God’s wrath, but fell silent when the Reverend continued.
“Scripture also tells us that when two or three gather, God is present.” He held up a hand against the protest that already seemed to be on his son’s lips, brushing aside the instance to use particular terms when describing the persons of the Trinity. “So when your mother and I attend church together, dilapidated and rundown as it is, that place you can’t seem to stand, is He not also present?”
“He’s present everywhere.”
The Reverend sighed and shook his head, a small laugh on his lips as he raised his hands in surrender. “Surely He is.” Looking to his wife he licked his lips and smiled slightly, as if waking from a dream too impossible to believe. “How soon until lunch?”
A heavy-handed stirring of the salad brought with it a declaration of triumph. Ezekiel, once asked, helped bring the food to the table and he also relinquished his seat at one of the heads to his mother, taking his place between the Reverend and the Reverend’s wife. The latter was asked to say the blessing over the meal, which she began to, but stopped when their hands were broken by Ezekiel’s insistence that he cross himself, which produced a grimace from his father, until they rejoined hands and his mother began her prayer once more. At the close, Ezekiel crossed himself once again, pronouncing the “amen” with an emphasis on a soft pronunciation of the first syllable, unlike his parents, who emphasized it with a long vowel.
They ate quietly for a time, until the paper wasp descended too near the table for Ezekiel’s liking and he lashed out at it with his hands, trying to force it away, which only unsettled the table some and produced a lazy retreat from the wasp, who disappeared somewhere into house. When he settled back down, the silence of their meal resumed. Outside the wind cut through the amber stalks and they bent, snapping despite their protest, as the eucalyptus leaves dragged like fingers through the remaining limbs.
“How was church?” Ezekiel ventured it curiously, tentative almost with how he broached it. This kind of question had a history, one that usually was part of Sunday lunch and ended in frustration, the Reverend and his wife feeling that their faith was perpetually seen as inferior and Ezekiel convinced that they were secretly worried he was a heretic. But he asked it regardless, because silence frightened him, and he could not bare the terrible burden of it any longer and there was no cause to talk about the things he studied at university or was currently reading, not if he wanted it to actually be a conversation.
“It was wonderful,” the Reverend’s wife said, setting her fork down delicately upon the top edge of her plate. “Your Father preached a wonderful sermon.”
“It was alright.”
His mother leaned a bit closer to Ezekiel and said, loud enough that the Reverend could still hear, despite his difficulty, “It was extraordinary.”
“I think it must be easy to preach such a sermon when the congregation is comprised solely of your wife.”
Ezekiel had meant it as a joke, but that topic had history too, and while his mother looked at him with a sense of weighed frustration, his father only shook his head, choosing not to engage. His son tried to shift the focus. “The homily at Our Lady was a disappointment. The priest there is miserable. Today he kept talking about chastity as being about guarding our hearts from sexual lust, when it’s so much more than that. Chastity in the virtuous sense means rightly ordered affections and love— ”
“I’m sure,” the Reverend offered, laying his sandwich down on his place, “That the man was trying to get across a rather large point in a very short amount of time. You can’t fault him for that.”
“There are ways of doing it,” Ezekiel insisted, slightly more animated than he had been previously, “There are ways of addressing the complexities in ways that everyday people will still understand.”
The Revered let out a small sigh. “Sometimes you may consider the burden placed on people in ministry, at times, perhaps darker times than others, knowing they have the Law and the Prophets is a comfort.”
Ezekiel blinked, as if holding back tears, “It’s only because I love the Church.”
The Reverend’s wife looked as if she were about to say something, but changed her mind at the last minute and decided to clear the table. As she picked up the Reverend’s plate, he spoke, “No one was questioning that. But all of us sitting here love the church and yet we don’t see these things the same way.”
“I just feel so burdened by it all.” Ezekiel blinked several times, straining his vision slightly, before he turned back to look his father in the eyes, jade pools wet around the rims. “I want so badly for people to see.”
The Reverend’s wife rinsed the plates under the tap, calling over her shoulder, “But it is not our place to spit in the mud and put on the eyes. We make holes in the roof, that is our role.” She turned away, pulling a dishtowel from a drawer and being to dry the plates in quiet.
The Reverend had nothing to add and Ezekiel feared saying more, lest he be reduced to tears for the great burden he felt within him that no one seemed to quite understand, least of all his parents, whom he loved for their ridiculous foolishness, refusing to leave the small church in the middle of a Godforsaken land where they comprised the only members after every other had passed away, all because they had not sensed the voice of Holy Ghost instructing them to leave.
He excused himself from the table, ascending the stairs in the hall to the room he took when he was home from university. The Reverend and his wife stayed in the kitchen for a half hour, keeping a silent vigil, before they both agreed that an afternoon nap was in order and they retired to their bedroom.
In the evening, they shared another quiet meal, in which little was said out loud. Afterward, Ezekiel fled to his room as hastily as he had done at lunch, solemnly ascending the stairs. On the landing he heard a faint buzz and thought he saw a flash of brown from the corner of his eye. He ducked on instinct, trying to swat away the wasp as it threatened him, despite his father’s assurance that it would not be provoked to attack. Quickly he entered his room and shut the door.
In his bedroom, Ezekiel had positioned a standing crucifix on his dresser so that he could kneel before it and recite evening prayers. As he reached the words of intercession, he prayed for his parents to become broadened in their views of God’s holiness and to see Him more clearly as Other and not a being. He recited a monk’s hymn he had learned the previous semester and followed it by making the sign of the cross. He stayed on his knees for a good twenty minutes, though he used to do so for nearly an hour, supposing it was an acceptable time of ascetic worship, right when his loins began to ache and right before his limbs fell into sleep. Slowly, two legs were stood upon and the young man retired.
That night, the harlot cheat came to lay with him, Lady Lust and all her handmaids. He gave them space upon his bed and did not deny them when they made to press their bodies to his. He kept them close enough for comfort, then was unable to stop the path of lips and the slippery promise, so he lay with them and gave himself into the ministrations of a false sacrament by his own hand, refusing to protest when they took from him what he prided himself on having defended so chastely, feeble as the defense was, until he was left alone in the bed, messed, cursing himself and the darkness for his betrayal to flesh.
To his forced horror, it was nearly as if he felt nothing for it. The moment had passed over him, himself but not himself, and now that it was done he could without much effort see it as if done by some other. Surely, recognizing it as wrong was a form of repentance, it was sufficient, as was the hurried promise he made in the dark to God or to whoever was listening that he would, this time, be able to overcome it in the future. He fell asleep with the murmurs of the half-hearted prayer still on his lips.
His sleep was fitful and nightmares chased him through the night. Ezekiel woke with a start in darkness. He felt that he would be sick and groped the bed trying to remember where he was for a moment before recalling it, stumbling out of the bed and hurrying toward his door, which he opened aggressively, two legs staggering out into the hall to feel along the wall for the bathroom door.
When his left heel descended hard against the edge of the carpet that met the floor molding, he heard the crunch and felt the sudden sharp sting at the same time, letting out a startled cry as he recoiled, tripping over his own feet while trying to discover the source of his pain, letting out a startled cry as he lost his place and discovered nothing below his right foot, pitching forward, falling down the stairs. He smacked his head against the wall at the base, letting out an alarmed cry of pain and frustration.
The sound of lights clicking on., hurrying feet. Four legs, one pair well ahead of the other, hurried down the hall toward him.
“Ezekiel? Oh, Christ, Ezekiel, what happened?” It was the Reverend, without his cane, bracing himself with his hands against the walls until he had seen his son had fallen, when he fell to his own knees to crawl frantically to him, to cradle his head as tears began to fall on his face.
“A light!” Ezekiel cried out, “Turn on the lights, please, so that I can see!”
“Ezekiel,” the Reverend’s wife murmured, tears falling from her eyes as she came up beside her husband, seeing the curious, brown, small, smashed wings and form pressed on Ezekiel’s left heel. “My son, my son,” she whispered over and over, kneeling down beside her husband to brush the hair from her son’s brow, seeing the blood from the small gash that had split forth there, as the earth had split from the sun. “The lights are on,” she finally said, more tears falling on his brow as she tried to steal herself, placing her own brow against the Reverend’s shoulder, who held his son in silence, as Ezekiel began to cry out in fear and agony.
“I’m blind!” He yelled. “I’m blind!” And the whole of the world heard him, through the barren orchard that hadn’t been tended for years, to the eucalyptus trees, whose branches hung so low that when the summer night wind rolled through them, they dragged like fingers across the dried fields and snapped the proud stalks, sending chaff and amber spreading into all the fields beyond.
© 2011, Preston. All rights reserved.
