“You can talk to people.” Cage patted him on the shoulder. “Just ask them questions about themselves. Everyone likes to talk about themselves. Then just nod and smile and when they finish, ask them another question.”
Nick looked at Cage and nodded. “Okay, I’ll try.”
“What about me?” Harper waved a spoon around from the high chair.
“Yes, Harper?” Frank said. “What don’t you like?”
“Mama smiles at me too much.”
Everyone laughed. Margaret stopped smiling. She said, “I’ll try not to smile at you so much. Anything else?”
“I don’t like Dad’s farts or the smell of his pipe.”
Cage leaned over the table laughing. “Yeah, Dad, you fart like a donkey.”
“Cage Rutledge.” Margaret raised her hand to her mouth.
“Harper,” Frank said with a straight face. “I have been meaning to give up the pipe as it’s hazardous to my health. As for the flatulence—”
Cage interrupted. “It’s in God’s hands.”
I
don’t have much time left. They’re coming. They’ll be here soon. I lie in bed looking up at the ceiling, listening. I hear a siren in the distance, growing closer. They’re almost here. My transgressions are infinite and follow me like my shadow. My sins have become a legion of ghosts that populate my dreams and crowd the room, hundreds of vaporous forms, like Nick was in Bridgewater, but he is not among them. I cannot escape. The ghosts moan softly like angry souls in hell beckoning me to join them. I have repented a thousand times but there is no forgiveness. Dr. Fielding doesn’t believe in Evil but I know it exists. The old monk Father David told me you can smell it. He says when the Son of God was tempted by what he called the devil, he was speaking of personalized Evil. Even when he’s consecrating communion, he feels slammed by temptation and says, Satan, get the hell out of here. In the name of Jesus Christ I command you to go. And Satan leaves. I try it now. I yell out, “In the name of Christ I command you to go!” But the ghosts just move in closer and the stench thickens around me, filling my nose until I can’t breathe and I lie on the bed, gagging.
Harper comes running into the room, saying, “What’s the matter?”
The ghosts withdraw when he enters. My brother. I love my brother. What if they get him, too? They might take the whole family because of me. They’ll kill us all. Of course. On the night before the Son of Man was born. “Do you smell anything?”
“No. Are you okay?” Harper leans over the bed and pats me on the shoulder. “Brother, it’s good to see you. What smell?”
“Evil.”
“What?” Harper squints at me.
I know that he will not understand, so I say, “Eggnog.”
“Come on, get out of bed.” Harper buttons the neck of his shirt and starts to knot a red tie. “We’re leaving in fifteen minutes.”
“I’m not going. We’ll die if I go. We might have a wreck.”
“That’s crazy, brother. Nothin’s gonna happen,” Harper says. “Now come on.”
He drags me out of bed and I walk into the bathroom, where I know the ghosts will be waiting. I turn the hot tap and hold my hand under the tub faucet waiting for the water to warm before I mix in the cold. I picture Monica kissing Nick, then hugging him and at the same time smiling over his shoulder at me with a look in her eyes that said he never has to know until I realize that the hot water is scalding my palm. At the foot of the stairs Mama sings up, “Come on, boys! We don’t want to be late!” Harper yells down, “Cage’s in the shower, Mom. Five minutes.”
I dress in my blue Brooks Brothers suit that I’ve worn maybe twice in the two years since I dropped out of business school, a symbol that I’m a fuckup, of my failure to become a productive individual. That’s one of my sins. I have taken and taken and taken from my parents and I shall be punished by forces older than mankind. Memphis is an ancient city connected by a river of time to the Egyptian city on the Nile and there is an order of old families that is as ancient as the forces. They condemn and destroy depraved miscreants like me. Tonight, on the eve of the birth of the Son of God, they will strike me down. By dawn they will boil me in oil.
“Come on, brother!” Harper yells from the bottom of the stairs.
I don’t want to go but I don’t want to be alone either. They might come for me when I’m alone. I want to be with Harper. I never see him anymore. Downstairs I get an overcoat and go out the kitchen door to the carport where a cloud of toxic exhaust is billowing up in the cold night. Mom drives and Harper sits in front. In the dark in the back I listen for sirens. The police might not come for me. The car could crash, explode into flames. But I say nothing and try to focus on the conversation in the front.
“Some people who’ve been through a lot of therapy become so . . .
selfish
,” Harper is saying. “They do exactly what they want to do with no regard for others. Their therapist told them it’s okay.”
The last stretch of Union before you reach St. Mary’s runs past a row of pawnshops and I think of my grandfather’s Belgium Browning twelve-gauge and the power tools and guitar I pawned on my manic spree and I know that I’ll have to pay for these, too. Every action is remembered forever and the culpable shall perish in ultimate pain. Past the pawnshops, the cathedral towers up in the night like a Gothic fortress. Hunkering by the cathedral, Dad’s office looks like a haunted house.
I
never lived in Memphis, so going there is always an exotic trip. St. Mary’s rises out of the abandoned no-man’s-land between the renewed downtown on the river and the middle-class neighborhoods of midtown. The diocesan headquarters was originally the bishop’s rectory, a Victorian limestone mansion with gables and tall, narrow windows. The parking lot is full but there is one space marked
Reserved for Clergy
near a side entrance to the church.
“We shouldn’t park here,” Cage says from the backseat. “We don’t have the right.”
“Of course we do, Cage,” Mama says cheerfully. You might accuse it of being a voice of false cheer but it isn’t. Constant but never false, evidence of her determination.
“Mom works as hard as most of the clergy,” I say. “She orga-nizes events, writes for the diocesan newspaper, helps out with all sorts of things. I think she deserves to park here.”
“Thanks, Harper.” Mom pats my thigh with her gloved hand.
“But why do they call this a cathedral?” I say. “Notre Dame is a cathedral. It’s pretentious. This is just a big church.”
“The seat of a bishop is a cathedral, Harper,” Mama says. “If you had paid any attention growing up, you would know that.”
We’re late. For as long as I can remember on Sunday mornings we always arrived late. Dad would drive in before for the eight o’clock service and Mom would be left to get Cage and Nick woken up and into seersucker suits and me dressed in shorts like Christopher Robin, all of us into the station wagon and across Baton Rouge to St. James downtown by the river. Invariably we were late. Mom would lose her temper when we dawdled stubbornly. More than once she swatted me on the butt with a hairbrush when I refused to dress.
“Hark the Herald Angels Sing” resounds through the wide space when we enter the cathedral. The acolytes are already leading the procession up the center aisle toward the altar. The church is crowded with Christmas and Easter devotees. “Merry Christmas,” we say to the ushers, who greet Mom by her first name and smile at Cage and me. Only in the far wings of the transept, the arms of the cruciform shape of the church, are there any seats.
During the service Cage’s face is contorted with pain, his cheeks squashed up in worry lines from the corners of his eyes. I try to get him to sing. He has a good singing voice and I think the hymns might take him out of his misery for a few moments but he just shakes his head. I put my arm around his shoulders but he shrugs it off and mumbles, “They’ll think we’re gay.”
“Who will?” I say. “Nobody will.”
Cage nods at four men in colorful sweaters sitting on the pew in front of us.
“So what? They’re gay and nobody cares.”
“You don’t know,” Cage whispers, his face drawn like the agony of Christ.
“Gays aren’t damned for their sexuality anyway,” I say.
“
We
are damned,” he whispers.
“No, we’re not. Nobody’s damned. Just repent for whatever’s tormenting you and you’ll be forgiven.”
Cage shakes his head. Mom says softly from my other side, “Shush.”
Dad mounts the pulpit in his robes and the pointed miter hat. He begins the sermon by quoting from the Gospel of St. John: “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth. We have beheld his glory, glory as the Son of the Father.” It never made much sense to me, an omnipotent God who sent a savior two thousand years ago into a world full of pain, disease, and violence to bring us eternal salvation, and whose arrival did nothing to diminish everything terrible in the world.
“From after Thanksgiving to before New Year’s, the stories of Christmas are told and retold. They are read to wide-eyed children from large illustrated books or heard on the radio or seen on television.” Dad preaches without notes, gazing out into the congregation. Nick used to say that Dad would have made a good politician. As a boy I wished that he were more important than a preacher, a word Mom disliked. Call him a minister, not a preacher, she used to say. I think she was embarrassed to be associated with Baptist fundamentalists.
“They range from the heroics of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer to the death and resurrection of Frosty the Snowman, from the reformation of the Grinch Who Stole Christmas to the repentant Scrooge of Charles Dickens’s
A Christmas Carol
,” Dad goes on in his ridiculous hat. I’ve heard this sermon several times over the years.
The men in front of us whisper to each other. Cage leans toward me and says, “See? They’re mocking Dad because he isn’t the real bishop.”
“Oh Jesus, of course he’s the bishop.” I wonder how God could have inflicted this disease on Cage. Is it a trial to test Mom and Dad’s faith?
I flunk the test.
“The secret of these stories is that they are maps of the human heart. They tell us about basic human responses.” Dad’s voice is deep and sincere, magnified by speakers through the nave. “They cut through the adult world of moral ambiguity to state basic truths that have the power to renew the human spirit. How many times have we heard Charlie Brown proclaim that the true meaning of Christmas is the love that gives life to a broken-down tree? How many times have we followed the dastardly doings of the Grinch knowing full well that no one can resist the grace of a star? And how many times have our hearts warmed when Scrooge finally sees the errors of his ways and responds to the spirit of Christmas?”
Too many, I think. Too many times have I heard these stories, for now they fall on deaf ears.
A
t the end of the service, while Mom and Harper are greeting parishioners, I know with certainty that my end is nigh. My fears were confirmed again and again through the midnight mass. The ushers placed us in the far left of the church like outcasts. The trumpets sounded like snorting pigs. The fags poked fun at Dad’s sermon. The reading said that a light would be focused on the wicked. After the reading I had waited for a spotlight to shine down on my pew but it never came and I understood that they were teasing me, drawing out my capture, telling me secretly that they would come in the night and find me and drag me away and boil me in oil. I see myself tossed into an enormous bubbling pot, the oil scalding my flesh and flaying it from my body until my skeleton floats in the thick yellow liquid, all the impurities, all the sins of my flesh burned away with the flesh, the final cleansing which destroys as it purifies.
Harper is standing in the aisle talking to the McFarlands. He smiles at them as if they were not among the old families, part of the old order that has condemned me. They smile back so as not to betray the secret. They will not tolerate the profane and the unproductive. The old order will crucify me for the common good. The world will be better off without me.
Harper walks over. “How you doin’, brother?”
I can think of nothing to say that he would understand.
“There’s the Jenkinses. They like you. Let’s go say hello.”
“They smile but they don’t like me.” I sit back down in the pew and pray, Dear God, make it fast and painless.
“Come on, Cage. Get up. Let’s go say hello to the Jenkinses.”
“Look deep in their eyes, Harper. Look deep and you’ll see they’re part of it.”
“Part of what?” Harper asks as Mom arrives beside him.
“The old families.”
“Old families?” Mom asks.
It is time now to tell them. “I can see something that has been hidden from us forever. Now I can see the design. Memphis is named after the ancient Egyptian city because there is an ancient order that runs thousands of years back to the city on the Nile,” I say slowly so they can follow. “Everyone who is not a productive member of society, everyone who has not had children and raised them well, everyone who has violated the laws of nature will be boiled in oil.”
“You’ve been productive, Cage,” Harper says quickly. “You’ve worked hard and you’ve helped a lot of people. You haven’t committed any unforgivable sins.”
“We are not one of the old families. Our whole family will be put to death.”
“We may not have much money but we come from one of the oldest families in Tennessee,” Harper says.
“Very old families,” Mom says.
“Besides,” Harper says, “they wouldn’t crucify the bishop.”
“Dad is not the real bishop. Dad is an impostor.”
Harper smiles in disbelief but he will see. Soon he will see for himself. Dad has gone back to the sacristy to change out of his vestments. The church is nearly empty now and I apprehend that when it is vacant they will come for us. “Let’s go.”
“You boys go on.” Mom gives the keys to Harper. “I’ll come with your father.”