Pray for Us Sinners

by Marilyn L. R. Hall

  Then all of a sudden, she was crying again. “He wasn’t wearing that nasty old suit with his blood all over it.” Then she was weeping—great pulsing sobs that were drawn from the depth of her soul; Juliet mourning the loss of her lover.

  Claire tried to comfort her, tried to hold her. But Rose darted away to the window where Jack had stood. Cynthia awakened and came to stand next to Claire Louise, half hidden behind her billowy flannel nightgown and clinging to her thin legs, which by their very frailty provided scant comfort. From there she watched her mother, clad in her thin cotton gown, crouch down in front of the window in the early morning chill and diligently study the linoleum. What was she looking for? Even Rose didn’t know. Footprints in the dust, maybe? Something. Anything.

  “Jack!” she moaned softly. “My dearest love! You cain’t be gone forever. You mustn’t have gone without me!” And then she slid all the way down and stretched out on the floor, all the while saying his name over and over, until Claire Louise thought she too would go crazy. What should she do? she wondered. It was plain enough to her that Rose had gone over the edge. And with that thought Claire’s eyes took on a look of smug satisfaction and she snorted with a sanctimonious smile and said what she was thinking, out loud. “Well, Papa, our feelings for that man have been proved accurate. Jack Nash has committed his last and most foul sin. He has driven our little Rose Sharon out of her mind!”

  Cynthia looked up at her aunt with a curious and fearful expression. She didn’t understand the meaning of the words she was saying but the tone of her voice was just plain mean.

  Claire reached down and loosed Cynthia’s hold on her. “Get back to your bed,” she told her in a cold voice. “I haven’t got time to deal with you, too.” And the little girl backed off but she didn’t go to her bed. Instead she stuck her thumb in her mouth and sucked on it because she had already learned sucking her thumb was considered a sin by Aunt Claire and she wanted to do something to show her defiance. But at that moment Claire was not interested in childish defiance. All her attention was on Rose and what to do with her. If Walter was here, she thought, he could drive her to a hospital and have her committed. But then she decided that might be too drastic for the time being. That would leave Cynthia Jackleen an orphan and since she and Walter were Rose’s only close relatives, they would be obligated to take her in. Claire Louise would not have spoken her thoughts on that subject out loud but she did not want to take on the responsibility of raising Jack Nash’s daughter. The apple never falls far from the tree she assured herself and the notion that Cynthia would turn out to be a good God-fearing woman was about as far-fetched as one of those heathen fairy tales Rose used to love.

  Claire Louise stood there at the doorway into the living room for a long time, just watching Rose writhe on the floor and suffer through her delusion. Eventually, when she had made up her mind what she must do, Claire resolutely returned to Rose’s bed. After a while Cynthia, having received no response to her rebellious act, followed along behind her and climbed in on her Mama’s side of the bed.

  Then Claire slept right through sunrise, and a little later, JC had to rouse himself to answer the door and let Leo into the apartment. Rose was still on the floor, but now she was kneeling with her arms crossed on the window sill and her head resting on them. Leo and JC noticed her at the same time and while the boy kept his distance, Leo hurried over and bending down, touched her shoulder gently. “How long has she been kneeling here, JC?”

  JC shook his head and shrugged.

  Leo turned to look at him and asked the question again.

  “I don’t know” the boy said. “I was sleeping.”

  “Of course. But where is your Ma?”

  JC shrugged again. “I don’t know. In bed, I guess.”

  Leo was having some difficulty rousing Rose, who was mumbling something but seemed to be entranced or asleep and oblivious to her surroundings. He persisted though and after some anxious moments at last she raised her head and looked up at him. It was plain she was relieved to see him there.

  “Leo! Oh but I’m happy you’re here. Claire Louise won’t believe me.” Then as she let him help her to her feet, she started shivering. Up to that moment she hadn’t been aware of the chill in the room.

  “Are you all right, Child? What in the world are you doing kneeling on that cold floor? You’re apt to catch pneumonia! How long have you been kneeling here?”

  He motioned to JC “Bring one of those blankets over here, son.”

  When he had wrapped it around her, he noticed she was smiling at him. “Well, Rose, I’m glad to see that smile on your face, anyway. Have you spent the night in prayer? Have you made your peace with God?”

  Rose nodded and let herself be led to the divan where she sat and curled her feet under her. Then Leo lowered himself into the chair across from her. His smile was hopeful, but what she said next floored him.

  “Jack was here.” She said it and then sat watching his face to see his reaction.

  He was too stunned to say anything at first. He could only think that Rose was much more damaged than any of them had supposed. At last he found his tongue. “You mean you had a dream he was here.”

  “Not a dream, Leo. Jack was here. He was standing right there by the table, in front of that window and he was as solid as you are.” After a little pause, she added, “I couldn’t see through him, I mean. Like as if he was a ghost.”

  Leo cleared his throat a time or two and then nodded. “What did he do, Rose? Did he say anything?”

  She shook her head. “He just grinned at me!” And then she giggled. “He just vanished when I went to put my arms around him.”

  Leo nodded and looked over at JC who was riding the arm of the sofa as if it were a horse. “Did you see him too, JC?”

  The boy turned his head and flashed his Jack Nash eyes at him. “I guess I slept through the whole thing,” was all he said.

  “Uh-huh.” Leo was still nodding his head, but Rose knew he didn’t believe her any more than Claire Louise had.

  “Leo,” she said quietly, “do you think I’ve lost my mind?”

  He looked at her and his face flushed with embarrassment. “No Rose, no! Not at all!” But then he looked down at his hands in his lap and discovered he had been twiddling his thumbs, which was his unconscious sign of agitation and everybody including Rose Sharon knew that. His flush spread down to the collar of his shirt and Rose smiled.

  “Don’t feel bad, Leo. I understand if you think that.”

  “But that’s not what I think, Rose.” Then he cleared his throat a couple more times. “I think you’ve just gone through a terrible experience and you need some time to deal with it.” He took a handkerchief from his pocket and daubed at his eyes and for the first time Rose realized he had been crying. “I’m not going to be very much help to you though, Liebchen, I’m sorry to have to say so, but Old Leo is just a big dumb grocery man who don’t know much of anything except which products the ladies in the neighborhood are apt to spend their nickels on. When it comes to important things like what ails the spirit of a person or her soul, I’m a dummkoph! And this lack of wisdom is a terrible burden to me now, when you are so in need of someone with true wisdom.”

  A look of genuine surprise came over Rose’s face and she scooted forward to grab hold of Leo’s hands. “How can you think that? You and Viola are the wisest and dearest people in the world. You are the ones who helped me get through all those awful lonesome times after Jack left. You are the ones who have showed me how to be a proper mother to my little girl. And you are the ones who led me to the true church and guided me all along the way. If it wasn’t for you and Viola, I would have given up a long time ago and run off somewhere to turn into a floozy or something. Honest to goodness, Leo, without you takin’ care of me and overpayin’ me for the little work I do downstairs, I would have lost my soul and Cynthia Jackleen a long time ago.” After a moment or two looking into each other’s eyes, Rose leapt up off the couch and
started pacing the floor.

  “Only now, I don’t think there is any more help for me. I don’t see how I can go on now. The thing that kept me goin’ all these years, I mean besides you and Viola, was the notion that Jack would come back someday. I really believed that with all my heart.” She stopped pacing for a minute to look down into JC’s face and to squeeze his thin shoulders affectionately and sigh at him. “And now, I know that can never be. I saw his life go out of him while I held him in my arms.” Then she was pacing again. “I know he cain’t come back and love me in this world ever again. Even last night, when he stood there lookin’ so beautiful and alive again, he wasn’t really in this world or my arms would have held him and never let him go.”

  Then she was quiet for a while, thinking about the vision she had seen. “But he was in some other place and he just came to let me know that. God let him come to show me he was there. And safe … but someplace else than this world.” She’d stopped walking again and was bent over the back of Leo’s chair with her arms on his shoulders and her head resting on top of his. “Jack Nash cain’t live in this world anymore. But I could live in his.”

  It was a little while before Leo understood what she was saying, and when he did his heart just about stopped. He bounded to his feet and stepped behind her, jerked her up and to his own horror as well as hers and JC’s, raised his big square hand and slapped her across the face.

  Her look was one of stunned amazement, and little JC was so horrified he jumped off the arm of the couch and started to pinch and bite and kick and create whatever mayhem he had to, to rescue his beloved from the clutches of that wicked abuser who up to that moment had been a kind, if boisterous, gentleman in his eyes.

  It took some time for Rose and Leo, whose remorse was immediate and who would apologize without ceasing for the rest of his life, to convince JC there was no malice in the slap and that Leo had only struck out at her because of his fear that she might be thinking of harming herself. That was not an easy thing to explain to a 6-year-old boy who saw sin the way his adoptive mother did, in black and white with no excuse accepted. And with the stress of the explanation, the cause was forgotten and never did get the airing it probably should have.

  Shortly after that, Claire Louise awoke and called out to the boy to come close the bedroom door so she could get dressed in private. When she walked out into the living room a while later, she was the Claire Louise whom Rose remembered from her youth. That skinny, orange-haired shrew whose tight mouth constantly proclaimed her interpretation of the Almighty’s Wrath and who considered herself the embodiment of his punishing angels. Gone entirely was that penitent creature she had portrayed to everyone the day Walter brought her to Jack and Rose’s apartment to bow down her proud head and ask their forgiveness. The woman who had sat and prayed while Cynthia was being born, the generous sister who had insisted on buying new curtains and all those pretty presents of fine clothes and candy had just deflated and floated away somewhere, leaving Jack’s “saggy-assed old hypocrite” in her place.

  Without any pleasantries, and without even looking at them she scurried to the cooking stove while her hands busied themselves readjusting some pins in her hair. “Rose has a lot to see to today, Leo. I hope you don’t mind if we ask you to leave us alone for a while.” And then as an afterthought she said. “And if it’s not too much trouble, could you stop by Mary Jean’s on your way downstairs and ask her to come get Cynthia? It would be a big help to us not to have her underfoot this morning.”

  Leo looked at Rose, who shrugged and seemed undisturbed by her sister’s demands. So he nodded his head and tromped to the door. “Good morning, Missus Bradley” he said grumpily on his way out. “Good morning and good day!” and though she looked across her shoulder at him, she gave no reply, seemingly unruffled by his denouncement of her rude manners. He grumbled all the way downstairs. That woman was exactly what Jack always said she was. For a while, Leo had figured that Jack just didn’t want to share Rose with her family and portrayed them as ogres to prove his point. But all Sister Claire’s charitable ways after Jack left must have been put-on. She couldn’t have turned into the witch she was this morning overnight, could she? And what was she planning for Rose and Cynthia that needed all that privacy? Rose was terribly confused right now and maybe she was even capable of doing harm to herself if she thought she could find Jack again. Didn’t that woman see the state she was in? Didn’t she have any sense at all?

  He didn’t intend to ask Mary Jean anything. In the first place, he thought Rose needed Cynthia right now and he knew Cynthia needed her mother. Why was that woman trying to separate them? The longer he thought, the madder he got. By the time he walked through the grocery store door, he was almost foaming at the mouth. And Mary Jean just happened to be there helping Viola stock some shelves and discussing Rose’s future. Neither of them had seen the side of Walter Bradley’s wife he had just witnessed, and they didn’t take his worries all that seriously.

  “She’s probably just as distraught as the rest of us,” Viola said. “It’s probably a mistake to judge her by the way she’s behaving today. None of us are ourselves after what we’ve seen Rose go through.”

  But Leo, who was usually the one defending somebody’s quirky actions to the two women, was not at all impressed with his wife’s reasoning. “I guess you’ll just have to see for yourself.” He said with a superior look on his face. “But you’d best look in on Rose now and then. I have a feeling that woman is plotting something and that it’s not for our Rosy’s good.” And then, out of spite, he decided to give Claire’s message to Mary Jean. “Claire wants you to come take Cynthia off her hands. She says she doesn’t need her underfoot today.”

  Mary Jean looked at Viola who returned the look and then they both looked at Leo. “She wants me to take Cynthia off her hands?”

  “That’s what she said.”

  Viola was shaking her head and her eyes had a worried look. “I think Cynthia needs to be with her mother,” she said. “After all she’s gone through.”

  Leo snorted and mumbled something under his breath as he walked to the front of the store.

  But Mary Jean started for the back door. “I agree with you, Viola, but I think I need to look in on her anyway. I’ll tell you what I think after I talk to Rose.”

  When Leo heard the door close behind her, he called to Viola. “Come up to the counter, Viola.” And when she got there he leaned his hands on the counter and blew out a long breath. “I didn’t want to say anything in front of Mary Jean, but I’m really a lot more worried about Rose than I was yesterday.”

  “Why Leo?—what’s happened?” Viola stared at him across the counter but because he was looking down, she couldn’t see his eyes. “Look at me, Leo and tell me what’s worrying you?”

  Then Leo told his wife about Rose’s vision in the night and what she said about going where Jack was because since he vanished in her arms she knew he couldn’t come back to her in this world.

  “Oh dear God!” Viola gasped. “Do you think she’s lost her mind?”

  “Oh, no, no,” Leo frowned and shook his head. “No. She’s sane as any of us. But she’s lost the will to live, Viola. Even poor little Cynthia can’t take the place of that man and now that he’s dead and she knows he’s never coming back, she doesn’t want to live anymore either.” Viola thought he looked angry and she asked him why.

  “I can understand how Rose feels,” he said softly, “I know she and Jack had a very special relationship when there was just the two of them. Lord knows we all had good times together and we loved Jack just about as much as she did. And I know how lonely she’s been for him these past 4 or 5 years. She’s handled it very well, I think, considering how lonely she’s been for him.”

  Viola was nodding her agreement to every word.

  “But I am angry with her too. She’s forgetting her little girl needs her as much as she needed Jack Nash. And now I’m afraid she’s really thinking about leaving all of us
to go with him.” He sighed a couple of times and then he blew out another long breath. “We are just going to have to make her see how important she is to all of us. And to Cynthia especially. And I don’t know what to think of that sister of hers. She could be a real troublemaker. She’s an altogether different woman this morning, Viola. Hard as stone. And domineering! You had to be there I guess, to believe it. I swear she’s up to something. I just wish I knew what it was.” And then he slapped his hand against the counter. “And I’m mad at God too. He’s a pretty harsh God who would take Jack Nash so violently away from Rose after all those years of patient prayers and trust!”

  “Oh, Leo!” Viola cringed at his outburst against God.

  “I know, Viola, and I’ll be properly contrite tomorrow, but right now, all I can feel is Rosy’s pain and it just makes me boil!”

  Mary Jean knocked on Rose’s door and JC came to let her in. She gave him a pat on the head and a smile and then saw Claire at the gas range stirring something in a pan. The coffee pot was percolating and Cynthia was at the table drinking from a glass of milk. JC went back to his seat across from her and watched Mary Jean warily.

  “Are you going to take Cynthy away?”

  Claire turned and gave him a warning glance. “What Mrs. Turner is going to do or not do is none of your business, Son.” And then she nodded to Mary Jean. “Take a seat at the table. Cynthia’s just about to have her breakfast.”

  Mary Jean did as she was told then noticed JC’s attention was still on her and that his expression was somber. She smiled at him again but his eyes didn’t get any friendlier. So she reached over the table to pat Cynthia’s hand and asked her where Rose was.

  The child started to answer but Claire interrupted, “Rose is getting dressed, I believe,” and sat a bowl of hot cereal in front of Cynthia. “Hurry and eat now, so you can go with Mrs. Turner.”