Confused, I look up at the sky and see that the stars have all flashed on like candlelight. I lie back into the mercury poison of the lake and wait for the weightlessness to take hold of my body.
XVIII
I get serious about picking a saint for my confirmation. I study the book my father bought from the Christian store where he sometimes brings us to pick out music cassettes he and my mother approve of. I place the open book on my bed and read, wide-eyed.
The saints have been brutalized. Lit on fire. Hung upside down on crosses. Beheaded. Quartered. Raped. Stoned. Skinned. Drowned. Devoured by lions, dogs, mad cows, even dragons. They endured it, the book tells me, with grace and patience and humility. Like saints should.
I flip the pages, smudging the corners with my fingertips. Throughout the summer I opened the book with mild interest to please my father, but now I am inspired to find moral guidance from a Catholic martyr. But I don’t feel worthy of any of the saints as they look out at me from medieval paintings, their eyes sunken, skin pale, suffering their afflictions. The stolen bras at the bottom of the lake flash in my mind.
Then I find him. Saint Dominic Savio of San Giovanni, Italy. A saint who died at fourteen. His painting looks like he’s cast from delicate porcelain. Two guiltless brown eyes stare out from the page. A halo frames his brown hair. His frail fingers grip a prayer book. He looks like I imagine I did before the summer.
At four, he memorized church prayers. He refused to eat meals with guests who didn’t say grace. If he arrived at church before it opened, he knelt in the dirt and prayed. He considered his first communion the happiest day of his life. Each day he confessed his sins to a priest. When his friends asked him to swim in a river, he refused—it was too easy to offend God with so much skin exposed. At ten, he dedicated his life to becoming a priest. He believed great rewards in heaven awaited those who tried to become a saint. And through all this, he knew he would die young. Saint Dominic didn’t curse his family.
I clench plastic rosary beads between my fingers as I read on. The answers are in this child saint from the nineteenth century. It’s the last story that grabs me by the throat.
Fearing he wasn’t living a pious life, Dominic, who was my age at the time, practiced physical penance, covering his bed with sticks and rocks to suffer while he slept. Through his pain God would understand that Dominic was sorry for his sins—though from what I read, he didn’t appear to have any sins, not like mine—but he became a saint; I just want forgiveness.
In the group of trees where my brother and I sneak cigarettes, I gather fallen pine limbs. I place the sticks in a bucket along with pine needles and any stones I can find in the dirt. My father is back in Tennessee working for the subcontracting company. He won’t be back for another week. He’s hoping they’ll need him for longer. My mother is at church filling orders for the food bank where she has taken back her old duties delivering food to poor people in town. After the incident with her chemo nightmares, the doctors switched her to radiation treatments, deciding the chemotherapy wasn’t working. The radiation doesn’t make her as sick as the chemo. Last week, after making deliveries for the church food bank, she brought home a bag of groceries for us. My brother told me that now we’re the poor people.
When my bucket is full of sticks and rocks, I take it to my bedroom. Ripping off the sheet to expose my stained mattress, I place sticks and rocks in the center where I sleep. The work is like a prayer. I stand back to admire my penance, adjusting a few jagged limbs before I stretch the bedsheet back over the mattress. I interlace rosary beads between the fingers of my right hand. With the same deep breath I take before confession, I lie back onto the debris. A stone knocks against my lower spine and I wince, but then smile. I grind my thighs into the twigs and a delicious pain shoots up to my brain. The reward of physical penance is immediate. The stolen bras appear in my head, and I mash my skull against the pointed stone I secured as a pillow. The image disappears. How had I not discovered this sooner?
I play out all my sins in my mind, chafing my skin harder against the rocks and tree branches with each image. I will atone for what I have done.
When my list of sins has been exhausted, I began to pray that our misery be shifted to someone else. Haven’t we suffered long enough? I say in my thoughts to God. I rub the plastic rosary so hard between my fingers, I fear the white twine holding the beads will snap—but that would be a sign that I’m doing this right.
When my mother calls from the living room that she’s home, I realize that I’m crying as I writhe against the penance in my bed.
Jumping off my mattress, I cover the sheet with a blanket. I wipe tears from my eyes with the backs of my hands. Pain pulses from my feet to my neck. I start laughing. Maybe I’ll be a saint yet.
In the kitchen my mother stocks the cabinet with canned goods she’s brought home. From the generic labels I know she’s taken them from the shelves of food the church keeps locked in the basement. I smile, because soon this will be over. I’ve found the answer.
“I chose a saint for confirmation,” I say to my mother.
“Already?” she says. “You have time to decide.”
“I’m firm in my conviction,” I say in the language I know will please her.
She stops setting cans in the cabinets. “Your father will be happy to hear that,” she says. “I’m happy, too.” She looks more closely at my neck. “You’re bleeding,” she says.
I place my hand to the back of my neck and examine my fingers. They’re smudged with blood—I can make out the faint outline of rosary beads in my flesh.
“I must have scraped it in the woods,” I say.
She wets a towel in the sink and wipes my skin. “You need to be careful,” she says.
“Yes,” I say.
She looks at me and smiles. She returns to putting the food bank groceries away. When she sees me eyeing the generic labels, she says, “Go watch TV while I make dinner.”
* * *
That night I lie across my torturous mattress. My body is sore from my penance earlier that afternoon, but I don’t stop.
I hear my brother’s music playing in his bedroom. When I catch a swear word in the lyrics, I twist my hips and let a stick dig into my flesh and strike bone. I think of other forbidden music I’ve listened to, and I repay each sin with a sting of pain in my calf or elbow. One sin reminds me of another until tears burn my eyes. When the scraping of skin against jagged stones and sticks no longer stirs the thrill of pain, I bash my limbs against the bed to arouse my penance until I am thrashing like a man possessed with the Holy Spirit. Tears roll down my cheeks. Suddenly, the twine on the rosary wrapped between my fingers snaps—rosary beads click against the wall. This is the closest to God I have ever felt.
A low knock on my door breaks my meditation of pain. Through the closed door, my mother’s voice says, “Are you okay?”
“Of course,” I say. “It was a dream, but I’m fine now.”
She tells me to sleep. When I’m sure she’s gone, I begin my cleansing ceremony again, this time with less force to keep from waking my mother. In the book of saints, I had read that when the priests discovered that Saint Dominic was practicing physical penance, they made him stop, but I won’t stop until my mother is well, my father is employed and our lives go back to what they were before the summer.
That night I don’t sleep. I have wakeful dreams of my sins and of pain and I cry and laugh until sunlight peeks through the curtains. Not sleeping will be another form of physical penance. I will hurt myself from my mind out to my skin.
Before my mother or brother wake, I get out of bed, hitting nerves as my skin grazes sticks and rocks. Tonight, I tell myself, I will remove the sheet and lie directly on the debris.
In the bathroom I stand in front of the mirror naked. Purple bruises have already formed on my arms and legs. Each one is an honor, a medal earned by a soldie
r in war. Being naked sends a charge through my veins. I get hard, and I know that’s a sin. I walk to my bedroom and try to lie on my bed, but the pain overpowers my desire for penance. With my blanket wrapped around my body, I lie on the floor and drift off to sleep.
* * *
Sunlight floods my room. I rub my eyes and catch my mother pulling open my curtains. When she glances at my mattress I leap from the floor.
“There’s blood,” my mother says.
“It’s from the cut you saw yesterday,” I say. “Why are you in here?”
“It’s after one,” she says. “I was worried.”
“I’m fine,” I say. I keep the blanket huddled over my naked body. “I’ll be right out.”
My mother eyes the bedsheet again as she walks out. When the door clicks behind her I look down at my mattress. A sweat ring stains the sheet where my body was cleansed by my penance. That’s another sign that it’s working. The sheet is pocked with specks of blood. I’ll wash it later today. It strikes me that I should get fresh sticks to replace the ones that have broken. It’s important I keep the ritual fresh and alive.
In the shower my wounds burn as the water hits flesh. I turn the faucet until the water is as hot as it will get. I smile and think of Saint Dominic. I bet he didn’t have running water to scald his skin. The bathroom fogs over with steam.
There’s a knock at the door and my brother yells for me to get out of the shower so he can piss. The water no longer burns, so I turn it off and rub my skin raw with my towel. I wipe the condensation from the mirror and examine my back, red and bruised in a way that must please God.
I open the bathroom door and my brother pushes past me. Before he closes the door he says, “Get dressed. We’re going with Mom to her radiation today.”
* * *
On the phone, my mother tells my father Mrs. O’Connor, our neighbor, is giving her rides to the radiation treatments. But she drives the three of us herself. The Christian music station plays low on the car stereo. With every bump we hit, a shock of pain tremors through my body, keeping me from falling asleep in the backseat.
At the hospital, we go through the familiar routine of our mother’s treatments. My brother and I sit on the worn-out green cushions of the waiting room chairs and my mother walks down the hallway of the oncology ward to the machine that will cook her stomach with radiation waves. The nurse takes our mother through two large wooden doors. My brother sits back and turns the page in a sports magazine.
We’re in a waiting room of people whose lives have been ravaged by cancer. I push around the magazines on the coffee table. I sit back and concentrate on the pain that lingers in my body. I have the urge to tell the man next to me, bald from chemo, about the miracle of my penance, but his blue eyes are so sad, I doubt that what I have discovered could cure him.
My skin itches where my T-shirt is tucked into my shorts. I fight the urge to scratch myself. When I dressed earlier after my shower, I placed handfuls of pine needles I collected yesterday beneath my T-shirt. In the saint book, it explained that Saint Dominic made a hair shirt to wear during the day by placing coarse animal hair under his clothes. I decided that pine needles would cause a similar discomfort, and I’m pleased to see that I was right, though most of the needles have settled just above my waistband. The pine needles bulge at my waist; I fear someone will notice. I will perfect this method with time. I scratch at my stomach.
Nurses comment that we are brave boys. My brother whispers to me that the one with the straight black hair and big tits gives him a hard-on.
The radiation kicks the shit out of my mother. She vomits white bile in the hospital parking lot, but her retching isn’t as violent as it was from chemo.
“Get in the car,” she says between convulsions.
She wipes her mouth with a napkin from the glove box as she steadies herself in the driver’s seat. I examine the thick liquid for signs of blood, but it looks clean.
“Do you think you should drive?” my brother asks.
“Why would you ask that?” she says, putting the car into gear.
That night she tells my father that Mrs. O’Connor took my brother and me to McDonald’s while she was in her treatment. After she hangs up, she smokes a cigarette, pacing in the kitchen. Since my father started working in Tennessee, she’s begun smoking more often. When she finishes her cigarette, she mashes the butt into the green ashtray.
* * *
At the next radiation session, my brother talks to the nurse with black hair and big tits, telling her about high school and how the basketball coach told him he’d make varsity in the winter.
“She’s into me,” he says when she walks down the hall.
“She’s just being nice. She feels bad for you because your mother has cancer,” I say. Then I add, “You never talked to the varsity coach.”
He laughs and goes to the bathroom.
When he comes back, a fat nurse tells us our mother is going to need to stay longer. “She’s having a tough time with the radiation today. Where’s your father?” she asks.
“Tennessee,” I say, before realizing I shouldn’t have told the truth.
“Is there another adult who can take you home?” she asks.
“Our neighbor brought us,” my brother says. “She’s getting coffee.”
“Our neighbor brought us,” I echo.
“Tell your neighbor it will be another couple of hours. Your mother needs to be on an IV while she rests.”
I fall asleep in a chair and wake up to my mother shaking my shoulder. “Let’s go,” she says. She looks ashen.
“I’m hungry,” I say, but she doesn’t answer.
That night she tells my father about the generosity of Mrs. O’Connor. The way she describes the imaginary events sounds so nice—I wish her lies were true. She strains to keep her voice steady. She winces while she talks, but her voice never breaks.
When she hangs up, she lights a cigarette in the kitchen and smokes a few drags, then runs to the bathroom to be sick. I’m smoking a cigarette in the backyard while I gather new sticks for my penance. I can atone for the cigarette in bed tonight. Through the bathroom window I see my mother shaking over the toilet, but it’s still not as bad as when she was sick with chemo. It’s almost peaceful in comparison. She stands and wipes her mouth with the back of her hand. In the kitchen, my brother picks up my mother’s lit cigarette and takes a few quick drags. The hot cherry burns bright red. He blows the smoke into the air and replaces the cigarette in the ashtray.
Feeling light-headed, I untuck my T-shirt and orange pine needles tumble onto the ground. I brush at my stomach to be sure I’ve gotten rid of them all. My skin is scratched red. I finish gathering fresh sticks for tonight. Rocks seem most durable for physical penance, but sticks are better at piercing flesh. Tomorrow I’ll need to wash my sheets secretly.
In the kitchen I stare into the empty shelves of the refrigerator. I reach my hand under my T-shirt and rake my nails over my skin.
“Do you have a rash?” my mother asks, ashing her cigarette into the green ashtray.
“Maybe it’s an STD from that trailer park girl,” my brother whispers behind me.
* * *
I try to be careful. The next morning I fold the sheets in a tight ball, and I hide them in an armful of clothes. When I walk through the kitchen to go down the basement stairs, I trip on a baseball and drop my clothes. My mother is quick to help, saying, “Let me do your laundry. I’m feeling well.”
I resist, but then she yells, “I’m your mother.” Her tone shocks me. I think she might cry. “I’m your mother,” she says again, quieter this time, reaching for the pile of laundry.
She sees the sheet crumpled in a ball and she shakes it out, revealing the white salt stains from my sweat and the flecks of blood from my wounds. She looks at my neck and pulls the collar of my T-shirt to examine my bac
k.
“Take off your shirt,” she says.
I don’t move. Embarrassed, a flash of heat spreads over my skin.
“Off,” she says.
Grabbing the hem of my shirt, I lift it over my head to reveal the tapestry of penance splayed across my skin. She turns me around by the shoulders.
“What is this?” she asks.
“Penance,” I mutter.
“What?” she says, confused. She runs her fingertips over my wounds. Despite the shame of being caught, I’m pleased by how pronounced the reds and purples of my bruises appear.
“Saint Dominic—he did it.”
She covers her mouth with one hand while her other hand continues to move over the artwork of my atonement.
“Show me,” she says.
I go down the hallway to my room, shirtless, and my mother follows. With the bedsheet removed, the fractured sticks and rocks can be seen in the outline of my body.
My mother gasps when she sees my bed.
“Why would you do this?”
“To make things better. It was in the book.”
She hugs me to her body and runs her hands through my hair. I start crying. I am so fucking confused—I thought this was what God wanted. I lay my head on her shoulder. She feels smaller than before.
“Forgive me for doing this to you,” she says, “for abandoning you and your brother.” My mother pushes me away from her and looks in my eyes. “This isn’t what God wants. He wants us to be happy. He wants children to feel joy.”
My skin pulses from the bruises. I promise her I’ll stop. My mother doesn’t respond. She just hugs me tighter and repeats over and over, “Forgive me, forgive me,” in a chant that feels more painful than stones piercing my spine.
* * *
My mother doesn’t vomit again after her next radiation treatment. My father’s contracted job in Tennessee is extended another week. My mother tells him we’ll be fine. “Mrs. O’Connor is taking good care of us,” she says, tapping her hard pack of Marlboro Lights against the kitchen counter.
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