The church had been built as an afterthought. It was attached to the subdivision like the “amen’s” at the end of Father Domenici’s Sunday prayers. He was a third generation Italian-American who had taken to the Church partly out of a fear of women. He was close to them and yet his mother had been a force for which he had few defenses. She had taught him to tie his shoes but also to fear her. She would readily cuff him when his less-than-noble attributes shown through in his childhood behavior. Thusly, he grew up fast, only slightly resenting his mother. Her churlishness and his father’s absence had set him on a path in which he sought out acceptance through obedience. He was only partly obedient to his fear. The other part was his need for love. It was not that his mother didn’t love him, but that she was single and had to split her time between her work and his five other siblings. She had little time for tenderness though he always tried to show her what she couldn’t show him.
He was the youngest with five sisters. They would tease him for his slightly bucked teeth and he was heavier than most of the other kids at school. When he had decided to commit his life to God, the pounds had dropped off like so much guilt. As a child, he wanted to please his sisters and had gone out for every sport practicable, given his weight. But he was never a good athlete and this only brought more shame to and recriminations from his sisters. He was soundly beaten in wrestling and feared standing naked before matches to be weighed. As he walked out to the mat in his singlet, he felt the eyes of the crowd on him and imagined he could hear the whispers. His coach later told him that he was on the team only as a joke, a kind of cartoon character that brought levity to the rest of the team. They enjoyed watching him lose.
He, as a result, poured out his feelings that no one would understand into journal after journal. He would write until his hand cramped. He avoided masturbation and this was the closest approximation that he allowed himself. As a result, he felt attracted to and, at the same time, tormented by the nubile creatures that surrounded him at school as well as home. Every so often his sisters got a hold of one of his journals though they weren’t so petty as to not return them. But that would only be after exercising their glee amongst each other. Once, they reported the contents of a journal to their mother and were soundly cuffed themselves for being childish. They never did that again and Domenici was eternally grateful to his mother.
His family had not been particularly religious and he, as a child, had often wondered what it would be like to be a girl. This was not an obsession; just a curiosity that further complicated his relationships with girls and later women and that would incline him towards celibacy. The Church welcomed him as if he were its lover. And he was. He loved the Church with every cell in his body and his Masses were filled with a pathos he was sure rubbed off on his parishioners. So when June Merrimack died, his requiem had been one fit for a queen. He had loved her with an affection he imparted to few women but as a polio survivor, she also knew what it was to suffer. And, she had been there every Sunday through his ten years at the Napa Valley parish.
“She may have only had the use of one arm,” he had said at her funeral, “but she lived to hold Christ up high as if she had the strength of Prometheus himself.” He was fond of Greek mythology.
“And though bitterness could have fed upon her soul, like the eagle upon Prometheus’s liver each and every day, she was renewed by God’s love. When the fire of love fades from your hearts, remember June who, with the strength of a Titan, brought light into our lives. She has parted from us, yes, but lives on in our hearts just as the flame of this candle,” he gestured to the table beside him, which held several candles, “lights this very room.”
****
As the line of cars snaked down the highway to June’s burial, a brush fire had broken out on the median and the dry Azalea bushes were all aflame. It was a thirty-minute drive to the new veteran’s graveyard. Jim, her husband had been in World War II and so June could be buried for no cost. Jim, when his time came, would be buried next to her. When they arrived, the wind was blowing. It was early October and unseasonably cold. The family and others gathered in the small tent on the grounds of the new graveyard. There was no landscaping yet and various bulldozers and other machines rested nearby. Dust filled the air and the tent shook with every breath of wind. Father Domenici kept his words brief and a few others, including June’s daughter-in-law got up to speak.
“She was a generous soul,” she said, “and she would talk to strangers as if they were old friends. June loved everybody.”
The wind blew her hair awkwardly and she looked about embarrassed. Soon June’s casket arrived on the back of a pick up truck and was rolled into the tent on a sort of gurney. The wind kept moving the gurney and several people had to keep it from rolling out of the tent. Flowers were laid on the casket that just as quickly blew off and then it was rolled back onto the pickup and driven away to be buried. Mourners made beelines for their cars and began the long trip back through the flaming azaleas. The traffic was horrendous and it was as if hell had descended upon earth. For the time being, June was forgotten by all but Father Domenici. As he drove slowly home in his Subaru Forester, he looked out upon the flames.
“What hath God wrought,” he thought.
He thought about the woman with the withered arm. Something had withered within him by her passing. He was more interested in life than he was in death. He rarely thought of his own mortality, entranced as he was with God’s love. It shined on his life with the magnanimity that his mother was not able to afford. It was unconditional, or so he thought. The requirements of his religion, the traditions and rituals, were to him a small price to pay for the sense of security they instilled in him. In fact, he liked them. He liked being in control. He imagined it was similar to dancing, though he had never danced, with a partner of equal grace. He liked holding people’s hearts and minds in his soft hands. It was a control he never had growing up. He not only held June Merrimack’s soul, but she gave it up to him with a willingness that was almost sensual. And, though she was older than him, he felt a certain passion towards her that he couldn’t quite describe. But now, she was gone, at least in the physical. He tried to feel her presence as he drove past the burning azaleas. Then, it was as if they spoke to him; you have given her the keys to heaven and blessed her passage; you have performed the work that you were ordained to do; you, and no other could have comforted her family and friends and it was your steady and loving hand that integrated life and death into one seamless wave that now breaks gently on the tranquil shores of their grieving; they are better for her passing and, as in all things, there is a lesson to be learned: live well, die well.
****
Back in the rectory, Father Domenici pulled a bottle of wine from within his desk. He always drank from a silver goblet he’d gotten at seminary in Rome. He filled it to the rim. His eyes were tired and watery and still had a bit of the dust from June’s burial in them. He was glad his words had been so consoling on this cold, windy day of sorrow. With evening, the wind had died down. He drank deeply from his goblet remembering the youthful camaraderie of his fellow seminarians in Rome. It was there that he learned of all the variations of Italian wine and now he considered himself quite the connoisseur.
“In vino veritas,” he thought taking another gulp.
He remembered meandering through the streets of Rome on his Vespa, swallowing the thick air that came off the River Tiber. Surrounded, as he was, by thousands of years of history, he felt his life as palpably as he had the grip of fatalism, which had oppressed him as a youth. Sometimes at night, he would dream of Mother Mary, always clad in a clean white robe and she would welcome him into her home and feed him bread, always bread. And it was good, tasting slightly of juniper and rosemary. He would watch her as she refilled her oil lamps that cast smoky shadows. The floor was always strewn with white and gray feathers and her light tread appeared to be as if she were walking on air. There was never anyone else there and they never spoke. He wanted to kiss her and wash her feet but her silence kept him seated cross-legged in the corner on the softest fleece of a sheep.
He put Bach’s Jesus, Joy of Man’s Desiring into his small CD player. As he listened, tears formed in the corners of his eyes and then began to roll down his thin cheeks. The dust of the day was washed out and he felt renewed by both the wine and his tears. He had always been prone to tears in the face of beautiful music. It was his own genius reflected in the music that made him cry and though he had no musical talent, he knew it was his words that sang. He took his bible from the drawer and without looking at it, recited the Twenty-third Psalm out loud:
“He restoreth my soul…Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil…Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.”
His lips lingered on these final words and he wiped his eyes with a large handkerchief drawn from his back pocket. He liked the feel of the pages between his fingers. He poured another cup of wine. June had been a small woman and though she had one withered arm, she carried herself erectly. He had often seen her face alone among his flock. To be honest, her penetrating gaze upon him had at times comforted him and at others disquieted him to his very core. And yet, having learned the skill of introspection, he felt that she was in some way placed among his parishioners to aid him in his search for eternal truth. She forced him to look inward as he stood before them, exposed as Christ had been exposed upon the cross, exposed, as he had been as a young wrestler waiting naked to be weighed. She had seen something in him of whom he was not even aware, he thought. He was still not quite sure what it was. As their eyes would meet he experienced a fleeting sensation of insecurity and then, as if willed by God Himself, he felt the strength of his Father’s, the Lord God’s arms wrap about him. His voice would rise up out of him across the crowded pews unto eternity itself.
He sipped more delicately at his wine this time and reached for his blood pressure medication. Swallowing a pill, he felt fortified as if he would live forever. He would die an old and happy priest. He was tired now.
“I will just lie down for a moment,” he thought reclining onto his office sofa.
He closed his eyes. His mother would have been so proud of him. He always sensed that she was oppressed by a guilt born of his father’s early death. He missed her now.
As the music ended on his CD player sleep came to him, the kind of sleep one sleeps after a long and fruitful day. He meant only to lie down for a few minutes. His handkerchief slipped from his grasp onto the floor. The empty bottle of wine by his lamp cast a translucent shadow against the far wall and from the wall of one of his arteries a small piece of plaque loosened itself. As his heart beat, it traveled up through ever narrowing passages towards his brain. He was dreaming an odd dream. He was young again in Rome. He stood in St. Peter’s Square and in his hand, a note. He was reading the words written in a woman’s hand over and over again. But they were in Italian and he didn’t yet know it well enough. He thought he knew what it said but he couldn’t be sure. There was a slight breeze that riffled the paper as the shadow of the obelisk moved across the crowded square. The obelisk had been silent witness to the Apostle Peter’s death and now rose up in his dream as if touching the white cumulus nimbi that wandered over a marine-blue sky. Death, in its many forms, had now taken the shape of a great stone monument. So much of it lay beneath Fr. Domenici’s feet as well. So many martyrs had died, and for what? What testimony do bones have? He had built his life on bones and yet through him these martyrs lived. They would live in his words and his communions and his parishioners. They would live in June Merrimack until she was bones too. Then there was a gust of wind and the letter fluttered from his hands into the crowd and soon, under their hundreds of milling feet, but not before his eyes caught the words “ti amo” scrawled at the bottom. I love you, they said. ///END///
AUTHOR BIO SKETCH: Nick Harris graduated from Lakeside School in Seattle, WA. He has an Associate of Arts degree from Seattle Central Community College. He is now a candidate for a Bachelor of Arts degree in creative writing at Seattle University.
