by Hubert Furey
She wanted something to happen, like what had happened when she was a teenager, when she had emerged from the church feeling peaceful and complete and happy—something wonderful and uplifting and miraculous that would take the misery from her spirit and the hurt from her life and make everything all right again.
Rachel waited, but nothing happened. She had wanted so desperately for some miracle, exactly as she had wanted desperately for something to happen on the bridge, but nothing did. The peace and consolation which she had secretly hoped would result from her presence in the church did not come. Only hatred and bitterness were present: hatred toward the person to whom she had given so much; bitterness toward the life which she had tried to live so well with love and sacrifice—only to receive this in return.
She continued to look in a detached manner at the crucifix, wondering where she had gone wrong, what she could have done better, what she could have done differently. She had always lived her life for others, for her husband, her children, her patients. This was her reward. Better if she had been walking the streets instead of taking her family to Mass every Sunday morning. She would be just as far ahead. God! He seemed to look after the crooks and the Antichrists better, anyway.
And their marriage? They could no longer return to each other. One of them would have to leave. She would have to go back to work, perhaps full-time now. Alimony wouldn’t be enough. And the children. For the children’s sake they would have to agree not to sell the house.
My God, the children. What would happen to the children? She had seen the results of so many broken homes and shattered lives in the emergency ward: the attempted suicides, the broken minds, the drug abuse, the beatings by Mommy’s boyfriend. The thought of her family and her home crashing down around her tore her soul apart. Unable to stem the flow of tears, she slumped forward in the pew, burying her face in her hands.
“Has something awful happened?” The woman’s voice radiated gentleness and concern as she slid along the pew to sit beside Rachel, placing her hand on Rachel’s wrist in a comforting gesture. Rachel made no move to resist, accepting the woman’s presence as naturally as if she had known her all her life.
Cognizant only of the gentle touch on her arm, she poured out the events of the afternoon, the sentences tumbling over one another as she gave vent to her passion, with total disregard for the fact that she was relaying the most intimate information to a total stranger.
The woman listened attentively until Rachel had finished, her only movement being to take a tissue from her coat pocket and proffer it to Rachel. When she spoke, she didn’t look at Rachel, but reverently cast her eyes toward the altar, as if she were reminiscing. Her expression was ordinary, but her voice was consoling, spoken with difficulty through a jaw that moved stiffly.
“I find it’s good to come to the church when stuff like this hits you. Does something for you. Away from it all, you know, in the presence of God Himself, as they say. I remember coming here just like you, one Christmas—Christmas Eve, to be exact, fifteen years ago. Tom there,” as she indicated her husband, “was totally gone to the drink. He’d come home in a terrible way that day, Christmas Eve, now mind . . . loaded drunk, out of his mind, beating everything up.” She stopped and put her hand on her jaw before continuing. “Yes, beat up everything, drove me and the three children . . .”
Rachel looked disbelievingly at the gentle figure of the man adjusting the figures in the crib, unable to conjure up the image which the other woman was describing. The stranger seemed to fathom her thoughts as she looked directly into Rachel’s eyes.
“Yes, my dear, out of his mind with the drink. It’s a wonder he didn’t kill us all. He’d been like that Christmases before, but this was the worst one. I swore I was never going to have another Christmas like that. I went to my sister’s with the children and phoned my brother in Toronto.
“He’d always told me to leave Tom and he would look out for me. That night I went to Midnight Mass—I don’t know where I got the strength—and sat up there, right in front of the crib. While I was waiting for Mass to start, I poured it all out, wondered to Almighty God what I had done to deserve that.
“I said all kinds of other stuff, too, about how hard I’d worked and how I loved them all and how I’d never missed Mass on Sunday. I don’t think I said a prayer all night telling Almighty God what I thought of it all. But you know, the more I talked, somehow it got better. I tried to feel sorry after for saying the things I said the way I said them—blasphemy is a terrible sin, you know—but I couldn’t feel sorry. I felt like I could go on.”
The woman seemed lost in memory, but she revived herself and continued. “Something happened that night. When I left the church, I knew I had the strength to keep going. I didn’t know what I was going to do, but I walked away from that church feeling I could face whatever was waiting for me. There was no more thought of Toronto. Something told me to go home, and I did. And when I went home, there was Tom, sitting there crying his heart out, as remorseful and as sorry as a man could get. He wasn’t expecting me to come back. And what a change in him. My dear, he never took another drink after, from that day to this. Joined AA. And good. Now you couldn’t get no better husband nor father.”
The woman again looked in the direction of her husband, and for a moment Rachel thought she detected a quiet love shining in the soft, thoughtful eyes. Then the woman stood up, straightening a hymn book in the pew as she stepped into the aisle. She stood several moments looking in the direction of the crib. “People says it’s foolishness, but I always says it was the crib. Stay here and pray a little bit. See what happens.”
Then, smiling encouragingly to Rachel, she left the pew and walked to rejoin her husband. Rachel watched them both stand by the crib, where they engaged in a silent conversation, gesticulating toward the arranged trees. Then, looking as if everything was completed to their satisfaction, they left for the sacristy, leaving Rachel alone with her feelings and her thoughts.
The woman’s consoling words still fresh in her mind, Rachel turned her eyes toward the crib, an imitation shed of ochre-stained plywood set amid the half-circle of neatly arranged fir trees. The raised figures were clearly visible beyond the altar rail, and she gazed at them for a long time, hoping again for some magical inspiration to arise from the painted images of Joseph, Mary, and the Child, as the woman had experienced, but they said nothing to her.
They just rested there, lifeless and inanimate. No peaceful, uplifting feelings emanated from the scene beyond the altar rail. All she saw were painted plaster figures of people and animals poorly arranged on make-believe hay with a tiny, dull yellow bulb for a star, around which some small imitation angels were hung.
Like the bridge and the figure of the crucified Christ, they did nothing to elevate her or ease her feelings. Instead, the more she gazed on the three central figures of the motif, the more they came to resemble the three people whom she was now coming to loathe for the unhappiness they had brought into her life.
The figure of Joseph was a drunken, lecherous man, brimming with pride at having deceived and fooled her. The figure of Mary became a woman blowing smoke in a bar, laughing raucously, her eyes leering and derisive. The child reached both his arms up to his two parents, claiming them for himself.
Rachel stared at the child, her feelings hardened and vicious. The figure now seemed to turn toward her, a triumphant smile on his infant face.
“You little . . .”
The venomous word formed in her mind, but something prevented her from saying it, even though she was directing the full thrust of her spite and savagery toward the tiny figure. But she could not go on.
For the fourth time she cried, hot, bitter tears that came from deep within her soul and poured down her face freely. That woman had been wrong. It was all superstition and nonsense. Whatever had helped her had not come from painted ceramic figures lying motion
less in a play shed.
The torrent had begun in her life, and there was no way to stop it. Like the river under the bridge, it would simply go on, going ever downward, until all their lives were lost somewhere in the future, where it simply didn’t matter anymore. They would become more statistics in an already endless list of shattered lives and broken relationships. There was nothing left but to watch her marriage and family disintegrate into destruction and hatred and then somehow pick up the pieces and continue on her own.
She gathered her coat around her and stood up, cursing herself for being so sentimental and naive. It wasn’t prayers and silliness that were needed now. More than anything else, she was a fighter, and she would fight, for herself, for the children. She would get a good lawyer, and she would take this . . . this other thing to the cleaners, just like Sylvia Woolfrey did with her husband. She couldn’t even say Aaron’s name. “That woman might get my husband, but she won’t get much else, I’ll see to that. That child will never see another penny of my money, I tell you.”
She was resolute as she stepped into the aisle and genuflected in front of the tabernacle, adjusting her gloves with vicious determination as she turned to leave the church.
Then a child cried. A clear, sharp, distinct cry, shattering the silence of the empty church; the unmistakable cry of a suffering baby; the short, gasping, sucking cry of an infant in pain. Rachel froze, paralyzed by a sudden surge of dread, an inexplicable dread that overwhelmed and consumed her. She was alone. She had been since the couple left. It was impossible! Her mind . . .
The child cried again, lower now, almost inaudibly, and she instinctively knew the source. She fought the impulsive human urge to turn, to confirm the origin of the plaintive sound, but she couldn’t resist. Slowly, very slowly, she rotated her upper body, steeling her eyes in anticipation of some fearful discovery.
Facing the crib, she recoiled, grasping the edge of the pew for support, unable to absorb the horribly contrasting scene that presented itself before her, a scene that was now alive and pulsating with an unmistakable sense of evil.
The star flickered violently, and the angels were fleeing before a cloud of terror that had engulfed the make-believe manger. The cattle had become alive, bellowing and stomping their hooves in fright from some invisible evil force. The shepherds were running, their staffs cast away, looking backwards over their shoulders with panic-stricken eyes.
Rachel stood in a trance, transfixed with fear, her eyes locked onto the scene before her. She tried to turn and leave, but something held her there, rooted her where she stood—something powerful and compelling. Her eyes sought out the figures of Mary and Joseph and the child, but the figures were no longer inanimate or motionless in their peace. Nor were their smiles and manners leering and triumphant, as she had experienced in her mind before.
The figure of Joseph was now running frantically, clutching his robe against the cold, his head bowed in futile defence against the biting wind, fear and dejection marking his every fumbling step. The figure of Mary was in agonizing pain, her face drawn and taut, her gaunt arms twined around her convulsing body. The child lay there unmoving, his eyes filled with sadness and rejection, surrounded by a chilling sense of loneliness and abandonment.
Rachel felt her legs weaken as nausea swept through her body. She grasped her stomach and closed her eyes in an attempt to combat the dizziness which was making her head swim, still clinging to the pew for support, fighting the vertigo which was sucking her into unconsciousness.
She breathed deeply, fully, tightly closing her eyes to regain control, forcing herself into the consciousness in which she knew she had to remain. A moment passed, and she steadied herself, ready to face again the terrible scene that had unfolded before her. But when she reopened her eyes, the quietness of the crib scene had returned.
It had all disappeared, as quickly as it had come.
The angels dangled from their cords of string; the figures of the shepherds, the oxen, the ass, were exactly where they had been placed. The little bulb burned dull again, and the figures of Mary and Joseph remained unmoved in the kneeling position in which they had been cast, looking down at the figure of the child with its arms outstretched.
Whatever had happened was over, in an instant. She turned away and looked quickly back again, expecting the scene to re-enact itself, but there was no further movement in the collection of figures or the stillness of the scene before her. The only movement came from the flickering of the vigil lights in the little stand by the side of the crib and the passing of shadows across the snow-encrusted windows that surrounded her.
“What happened? What did I see? How . . .”
The uncompleted thoughts raced through her mind, pushing her to the verge of panic. She instinctively looked around, to seek confirmation of her experience in some other presence in the empty church, but she was alone.
Only the crackling and hissing of the radiators along the sides of the walls, and the occasional sounds of the rising of the wind on the outside, encroached upon the deep, unmoving silence, a silence that hung about her like a presence. She looked again toward the crib, but it was one with the stillness in the church.
“My God! Has it all been too much? Am I going insane?”
The panic she had been staving off finally caught hold of her as she ran with frantic steps toward the exit. She stopped in front of the holy water font and compulsively turned one more time to glance back at the crib, but the scene remained unchanged. There was nothing that suggested any of the foreboding and dread that had accompanied the earlier vision.
Rachel left the church, still running, stumbling down the steps on her way to the car. Two women stared at her curiously, but she ignored them, driven to get away from the church as fast as possible. She turned on the ignition and sat there breathing heavily, in a desperate effort to relax, the impact of the scene still with her, fighting to control the jumble of thoughts that were running rampant though her mind.
“Did I really see . . . ? What does it mean? It was all so fast. I know I wanted something fantastic and miraculous to happen, but this vision, this hallucination, this . . . then this terror, this evil . . . . My God, that sense of evil . . . . Cribs and churches aren’t supposed to be like that.”
And if it were some kind of message, what was it telling her? She waited for the car to warm up, turning the scene over and over in her mind, trying to assign some meaning, some interpretation, to what had happened, but she was too upset to make any sense of it. All she could think of was the horror and terror and evil that she had witnessed in that awful moment, and how it had frightened her beyond description. She had no idea what it all meant or how she was to apply it in any way to herself.
She drove the car away, still thinking, when it struck her that something indeed had happened before the crib, something so profound and subtle that she had to concentrate to perceive its reality. Rachel sensed that a change had come over her, a change that was unrecognizable in its beginning, but which was now growing to encompass her whole person. She became aware that her frame of mind was totally different. Just like that other woman, she no longer wanted to run. She was no longer angry. And she was no longer afraid.
She still didn’t know what she was to do, but she did know that running and escaping and lashing out were not the answer. Perhaps that was what the crib was telling her: slow down, get things in focus, think it through. But what about the evil that she saw that one frightening moment?
“Evil where there’s supposed to be good! In a crib? In a church where God is supposed to be present? I was made to watch a man, a woman, a child . . . suffering! Why? A frightened man, a sick woman, a rejected child, looking to me for rescue. I was made to watch it as if I’m expected to do something.”
But what?
Her head ached as she drove along, striving to get her thoughts in order, but no ready soluti
on presented itself. The image of the abandoned child came into her mind, and it prompted her to think of her own children, whom she had abandoned so unthinkingly. Pangs of guilt tore at her inside as she saw again the horrified looks on their faces.
“I shouldn’t have run out on them like that in the first place. That woman in church didn’t run out on her children. That’s it.”
She would begin by going back to them, easing their fears, salvage what she could with them. Perhaps that’s what the crib was telling her. She guided the car through low mounds of snow that were forming here and there on the street, firm in her resolve to undo the damage she knew she had wrought.
Yet for some reason she did not automatically turn the car in the direction of home, as if she were simultaneously and unconsciously thinking of another course of action. It was as if some larger need was drawing her onward, a need that superseded even that of her wish to be with her children.
Going home was a perfectly rational inner suggestion—indeed, the only one that made any sense—yet for some reason she hesitated. Something was telling her that the children would be all right, that she had raised them to be strong and independent, that they would stick together until she returned.
My God, Aaron!
The name, familiar as it was, struck her like a thunderbolt as the struggling figure in the crib appeared in her mind, clutching his robe against the storm. My God! It was Aaron. She was being warned about Aaron. There was no question about it. What was she thinking?
She had plummeted so far into her own hurt and self-pity, become so enmeshed in her own devastated emotions, that she had never given his welfare a single thought. Now the consequences of her self-absorption flooded her mind as she revisited his near-tragic death seven years before. In his totally distraught, irrational state he would turn again to the bottle as his only solace, exactly as he did when Mikey got killed. Her mind responded in horror to the image of her unconscious husband asleep in the snow by the fire hydrant.