As a Thief in the Night

by Chuck Crabbe

  During the morning ride to school it stood in the sun, by evening, on the way home, in the shadows of the church. He spoke about the Tree each and every time he questioned Elsie about the man he could no longer picture that had left him and his brother behind. Under the influence of this need the impression he held of his father leaving and the lightning scarred tree in the churchyard had been drawn together by some hidden chain of emotional necessity until the two lines of force had become superimposed upon one another. This strange cohesion bound his father's abandonment, the tree, and the lightning that had split it with such singularity that no denial from the sober mouth of reality could now tear them apart.

  There were other similar trees near his mother's house. Two of them stood on a hill not far away. Before he had had the high fields across from his aunt's house to wander in they had been his destination whenever he went off on his own. Even then he had always brought his small sketchpad and pencil. Once he had drawn a picture of a boy sitting under one of the trees while holding his baby brother on his lap. He had long ago lost the drawing, but for some reason he still remembered it very clearly. Ezra went to these trees almost as if he were doing so to avoid the one in the churchyard.

  Yet there were days he found himself leaning against the church fence staring at the Tree. His plain blue eyes would measure the Tree and slowly follow the path the lightning had marked. Sometimes staring like this for ten minutes or so was enough and he could walk away; other times it felt like something more was required, and he would climb over the fence and walk the perimeter of the property, perhaps once, perhaps a half dozen times. Reaching up, he would touch the bottom of the split the lighting had made and then run his hand along the bark. He walked round and round the Tree, carving a circle into his deepening fear.

  Split along the upper half of the trunk with the mark of the lightning, the old oak was still alive. Ezra studied the Tree's thick roots as they clawed at the grass and dark soil. He sometimes imagined the roots were the horribly gnarled hand of a witch reaching up to drag him to her lair. There she would feast on his heart, his blood running down her crooked chin, her cruel mouth deformed with a grin inspired by his annihilation. On other days the curious need to expose the deepest parts of the roots came over him. Twice he had gone home to Elsie with broken fingernails and bloody hands from trying to dig away the hard soil.

  So strange that he felt driven to dig out the roots of a tree until his hands had bled. So strange that he had to avoid a tree just because it had been struck by lightning. For almost his entire childhood Ezra had been no stranger to compulsions and odd rituals.

  The thoughts and performances had begun with persistent feelings of shame. Had he killed the grass and weeds by walking on them? If he had, was it because it was necessary for them to be killed, or was it just another symptom of his corruption? Better to stick to the sidewalk. To watch his step...but then...don't step on the crack or... Just a silly saying, but horrible thoughts occurred to him. Where did they come from? Then came the awful certainty that the turnings of his mind created reality, followed by a terror that he could not control them or their manifestations. Passing by certain trees or signs on the road he had had the feeling he was being called back, sometimes long after he had passed, to touch them. The compulsion persisted until he gave in and ran back, later making up some excuse if his mother, or now Elsie, had had to wait for his return. It was incessant, and it was humiliating: at the mall it might be the shirt he had had to go back and straighten on the rack; at the grocery store perhaps the piece of fruit that had to be moved, or the woman he had to discretely chase down and circle, or the water in the fountain that he had to draw his hand through in some odd way. Bed sheets demanded to be tucked into each other with such accuracy that his momentary emotional balance depended upon it. Shoelaces had to be the same length; if one was adjusted, then the other had to be adjusted in the same way so that precisely the same pressure would be applied to each foot. After turning his bedroom doorknob to open the door, the doorknob on the other side had to be turned immediately, so that things would remain in balance. Entrances and exits always played prominent roles in his rituals, though calling them entrances and exits is not really getting to the heart of the matter, they were thresholds. Ezra did not know why things needed to be done this way; he just knew that it needed to be so.

  Just before his seventh Christmas he'd snuck into Gord and Elsie's closet where he knew they'd hidden the gifts. Ezra really didn't want to see his gifts; he just wanted to ease aside the folds of one of the bags for a peek. He rested his head on the doorjamb so that he could look inside a bag with one squinting eye. Then, on his back, he felt that mysterious touch, that unexplained sensation of being under the eyes of another, and saw Elsie's shadow move on the wall. He turned his guilty gaze and saw her disappointment, then ran through the front door in horror of what his aunt must now have thought of him. Falling to his knees on the front porch he began to sob, and then, to the bewilderment of his aunt who had followed him outside, dug his nails into his own face. He ran them down his swollen cheeks to his neck and shoulders and collapsed in a heap of self-condemnation on the freezing wood of the porch.

  Somewhere near the beginning of fifth grade his teacher leaned over his desk to help him with his artwork. He was working with markers and as she leaned over him the tip of the blue marker he was using brushed against her blouse leaving a thin, crooked streak on the smooth fabric. She did not notice. In a nervous struggle against his offense he kept quiet as she moved on to the next student. The knowledge of his crime gnawed at him throughout the day, but still he pressed his tongue to silence. Ezra spent the entire year returning to the mark he had made. He watched the way she dressed closely, and when he saw her wearing the same blouse, he tried to steal subtle glances at the spot that he had colored. Both at Christmas and at the end of the year, when it came time to buy Mrs. Rose a gift, he had pleaded with his aunt Elsie to let him buy her a blouse. It was far too personal, Elsie had said, and asked what had ever put such a strange idea into his head anyway.

  The summer before he turned thirteen Elsie decided that it was time for Ezra to receive his first communion and to attend confirmation classes. They had begun attending St. Paul's Anglican Church shortly after they had moved to Walpurgis, along with Sarah, George, Little Marty, and Rebecca. And though Elsie did not follow dogma in any strict sense, and even (being a woman of practicality in the spiritual as well as the earthly sense) had an aversion towards it, there were aspects of church life in which she had come to believe. The idea of people coming together as a community, providing each other with support, and spending time with those families and individuals in Walpurgis who were perhaps of a like mind in this regard, was something that, in today's world, Elsie believed could only be found, however flawed, at church.

  Olyvia had half-heartedly argued with her over the decision that Ezra would attend confirmation classes. "Why go filling his head with all that when he's still young enough to learn something authentic? They'll give him fixed stars to believe in when the uncomfortable truth in life is that there are none."

  "What matters to me is that it's one of the rare ceremonies we have left, something that marks a change. I have a lot of good memories of those Sundays, you know." Elsie sighed to herself. " We'll probably never again be together like that."

  Olyvia ignored the last part of what she'd said: "Do you really think Ezra sees it as some sort of coming of age ceremony, or is it just another hoop that some adult is making him jump through?"

  But Elsie would not be swayed.

  Taking small pieces of concrete that had crumbled off of the parking blocks and throwing them at the rusting basketball backboard, Ezra waited after class for church to let out. Two or three times he missed the backboard and the small rocks hit cars in the crowded parking lot behind the net. When he missed the second time he cringed and looked behind him to check if anyone had seen. The second Sunday of classes had just finished. A small, dark
-skinned boy from his class named Leonard was sitting on the steps of the church hall. "Don't worry, I won't tell,'" he said and grinned slightly at Ezra. He was moving something around on the steps beside him that Ezra couldn't see. "Hey, check these out," he said and motioned for Ezra to sit beside him. By his feet were several round painted stones. He pulled some out of his pocket and put them in Ezra's hand.

  Ezra moved them around slowly. " What are they for?" he said without looking up.

  "I found these stones in my basement. They were my dad's." He looked Ezra over. "Your parents making you do this class too?"

  "No," Ezra said looking down and moving the thin layer of pebbles in front of the steps around with his foot. "My mom's not alive anymore."

  "What about your dad?"

  "I don't know my dad."

  "My dad's dead too. You know anything about Native Canadians?" Leonard asked, changing his tone of voice.

  "Maybe a little...from school or whatever."

  "Well, my dad was a Native Canadian, you know; he painted these rocks that I keep in my pocket."

  Ezra passed back the small stones and Leonard passed him some of the others to examine. "So you just live with your mom?"

  "My mom and my stepfather. He's from Florida."

  "You like him?"

  "Not so much."

  From that morning on the two sat with each other on Sundays during their classes. Ezra was glad he had made a friend and liked the way he felt around Leonard because none of the things that bothered him seemed to bother Leonard. He had a matter-of-fact calmness about him that none of the other children Ezra knew had—that and the fact that he made fun of Mr. Pentheus all the time.

  Christopher Pentheus, his confirmation teacher, was a painter who had entered divinity school after finishing his fine arts degree. He had come to help at St. Paul's at twenty-eight as part of the requirements for the program. Tall and thin, with short black hair and a rough but cleanly shaved face, he was always animated as he spoke.

  To instruct his students about the life of Christ he used art slides that he projected onto the faded yellow wall of the church hall. Ezra had always sat through church services unmoved, trading candy and pokes and light punches with Layne under cover of the pews, but the pictures that Mr. Pentheus projected onto the wall seemed to be from another world entirely, and he wondered if the terror, the pity, and the loneliness he saw in the paintings had anything at all to do with what he had endured Sunday after Sunday.

  There were two old paintings in particular. To depict Christ just before his resurrection Pentheus had selected Hans Holbein's "The Body of the Dead Christ In The Tomb". Pentheus stood silently in front of the painting and looked out over the dozen or so students. "Interest in the painting you see up on the wall seems to be in what many art experts, and certain artists, have called its 'humanity'. What they mean is that, to them, Christ looks very human—not Godlike—in it. Actually, there are those that argue that in all Christian art this is the most human picture of Jesus. When you look at it closely, what do you see? A man or a God?" He stood quietly for a moment allowing them to think then switched the slide without waiting for an answer.

  The second painting that interested Ezra, Luca Signorelli's "Sermon and Acts of The Antichrist," was put up during the last two weeks of instruction as Mr. Pentheus spoke about The Book of Revelation. Two things about this painting continued to draw his thoughts to it in the days after he had seen it on the crumbling wall: that the man who had painted it had made the false prophet in the image of Jesus, and that Satan, who stood to his side whispering in his ear, and the man who looked so much like Christ, seemed to share a left arm and hand.

  Another story was read to them about a man in prison who had killed another man in a bar fight. Mr. Pentheus told them how the man had become a Christian while in jail and of the ways the man believed becoming a Christian had saved his life. "You see," Mr. Pentheus began after he was done reading, "the world out there, no matter where we go or what we have, leaves us with the feeling that something is missing, doesn't it? Ask yourselves if you feel like that's true and you will see that in your schools, or with your friends, or by yourselves, or even with your families, who love you as much as people can possibly love one another, that the feeling that something is missing, is always there. If I am wrong, please tell me." The children looked down at the table nervously and shifted in their seats to avoid eye contact with one another. Now there was something different about the way he was speaking to them. He clasped his hands in front of his face with his index fingers pointing at the ceiling and resting on his mouth. "We know it, don't we? Something is wrong. We look everywhere to try to rid ourselves of that feeling. And how do we try and fill up this painful hole that we feel within ourselves? With desire for the things we find out there, but those things can never fill the emptiness, can they? So we reach out for others, we reach for sex, we reach for comfort, for alcohol, or, in our ultimate frustration we act out aggressively, violently, and selfishly. But when we get those things, when we do them, we don't find that the hole has been filled, we find that it has widened. The truth is that that space can only be filled, that wound can only be healed, by one thing: God. That is why people come to church, and that is why they read the word of God, and that is why they pray."

  The room was silent for a moment so the scratching of Leonard's pen beside him caught Ezra's attention. He saw that his friend had drawn a series of elaborate mazes and spirals on the back of this Sunday's handout, a reminder to parents that the Apostles Creed, The Lord's Prayer, and The Ten Commandments had to be memorized for next week in order to be prepared for the final service with the Bishop. Leonard didn't seem to be paying the slightest attention to what was being said, whereas, for once, Ezra had been paying very close attention.

  Mr. Pentheus spoke in summation: "Unlike so many other young people in the world, you have the opportunity to enter into a real relationship with God, here and now."

  Leonard looked up from the spiral he was drawing and interrupted his teacher. "But Mr. Pentheus, you've been telling us from the very first day of class that it was God that made us."

  Slightly put off by the interruption, yet tolerant, Mr. Pentheus turned his head curiously to one side as if he thought Leonard was speaking of something entirely different than the topic being discussed. "What do you mean, Leonard? I don't understand what you're asking."

  "What I mean is, if all those desires you talk about are no good, and they're of this world and all that, then wasn't it God that made us with those desires or faults or whatever?" The students quickly turned their heads to Mr. Pentheus for an answer.

  "No, Leonard. God made us with the desire to know Him, and we have confused that with the desire for the things of this world."

  "Then wouldn't it be God that made us confused? And since God knows everything, wouldn't He have known that everyone wasn't going to get it?"

  "We are the ones who need to realize, Leonard."

  "I don't understand."

  "What do you understand, Mr. Peltier?"

  "It made sense to me when you said that God works in mysterious ways."

  "God is not won easily."

  "Or maybe not at all."

  The young minister clasped his hands in front of his mouth again and squinted slightly. "Are you trying to be clever, Mr. Peltier?"

  "No," Leonard said innocently.

  "Is your mother attending service today?"

  "Yes."

  "Have her come and see me when the congregation is let out."

  "Okay," Leonard said nervously, not quite understanding what the problem was.

  The week before they were to be confirmed Mr. Pentheus tested each of the students on whether or not he had memorized The Ten Commandments, The Lord's Prayer, and The Apostles' Creed. Each stumbled badly as Pentheus prompted him. When it was Ezra's turn to recite his cheeks flushed when he faltered and he looked at the ceiling and floor in search of the words he had so diligently studied at h
ome. Instead of looking Mr. Pentheus in the eyes, he focused on the small window just above his head. It was raining outside. Leonard's turn to recite came and he barely knew a single verse, though he seemed not the least bit concerned. Mr. Pentheus told him that he would have to repeat all three next Sunday before he would be allowed to take part in the service with the Bishop.

  Even today, with Ezra dressed in a shirt and tie, his hair cut and gelled appropriately, and standing before the approving eyes of the congregation, Olyvia had not come to church. Elsie had become angry with her the night before and called her selfish. Selfish, she said, because she could not get past herself for the sake of the boy. Even so, Olyvia had spent the night. She was trimming the vines and checking the grapes near the driveway when they had left, and she had not even looked up as they got into the old Beaumont.

  They had almost arrived late for the service. As usual, preparing to leave had been an ordeal. Ezra and Layne refused to move quickly enough, Elsie became angry at Gord because he wasn't being helpful or moving quickly enough himself, Gord grew angry at Elsie because he thought she had been rude to him in front of the children, and lastly, all of the clothes Layne had finally put on were grass stained and filthy. Elsie was always waiting for them in the driveway. She sat in the Beaumont, laying on the horn for them to hurry. Just after they left they had discovered that they had no money for the offering, and Elsie had had to run back into the house to scrounge up five dollars.

  The Beaumont was in bad shape. They always had problems with it. In the back seat the floor on one side had rusted right through so that Ezra and Layne saw the road move beneath them as they drove. Gord would become furious with them when they laughed and dropped things through the hole as they drove. Because they could never afford to fix the car properly he was always coming up with some ridiculous way of keeping it glued together. Household string or wire was used to keep the exhaust system secured to the bottom of the car, two windows were held in place with electric tape, the hood ornament was broken off, and rust framed the whole churning rattling monstrosity. Once, the police had pulled them over and then followed them all the way home saying that the car was unfit for the road and dangerous. Elsie glared at Gord as the officers walked back to their cruiser. She never said another word all the way home. But that was all they could afford, so that is how they pulled up to the church, seconds before the service began. They stopped outside the large arched double doors and Elsie shooed Ezra, his shirttails flying out behind him, out of the rusty green disgrace and into the house of God.