Light from Distant Stars

by Shawn Smucker

  “You said it was probably dead by now,” Cohen said quietly. There was no anger in his voice, no bitterness or blame. He looked at Than. Than nodded, a weary gesture. The two looked at Hippie. She blinked, and her eyes stayed closed for a moment.

  There was nothing else to say. The three of them pushed open the doors and walked into the funeral home, their own shadows melting into the darkness.

  fifty-five

  Who Will Make It through the Night?

  “Is she still singing?” Cohen asks Kaye as she joins him in the cafeteria.

  She nods. He looks through the floor-to-ceiling windows, the ones that look out onto Duke Street, and notices the sky is growing dark yet again. The moon is off to the north in sharp relief, barely visible, tangled up in the sycamore branches. The days keep coming and going, the earth keeps spinning.

  “What day is it, anyway?” he asks, taking a bite of an apple, staring into his coffee.

  Kaye laughs. “Good question. I can only remember the days because of Johnny’s schedule. Today he had practice, which means it’s . . . Thursday night, I think?”

  “Sounds about right. What are you eating?”

  “I think it’s oatmeal,” she says, laughing again in a light voice.

  “What’s she singing now?” Cohen asks.

  Kaye takes a bite of oatmeal, her mouth taking its time with the food, her eyes staring absently at the table. “What isn’t she singing? That’s the question. ‘Amazing Grace.’ ‘How Great Thou Art.’ ‘Great Is Thy Faithfulness.’”

  “The classics.”

  “I guess so. But also hymns I never heard before, songs I never knew existed.”

  “It’s amazing she remembers it all,” Cohen remarks. “She’s never been back to church, has she?”

  “We went a few times, you know, after we left. But since then? Not that I know of. I think she would have told me. But a lot of those hymns, as soon as she starts singing, I remember the words too.”

  “Yeah, me too.”

  “Do you sing them at Saint Thomas?”

  “Not most of them. They’re a different set of hymns, a different history. That stuff she’s singing, it comes straight from that old church, when Dad was preaching fire and brimstone.”

  “The sermons Mother wrote for him,” Kaye says.

  “The sermons Mother wrote for him,” Cohen repeats. His words bear the weight of an echo, the way things shouted into a mountain come back to you deeper, slower. He sips his coffee, considers his next sentence. “Honestly? I think it sounds kind of nice.”

  Kaye looks at him in surprise. “You do?”

  He nods, takes another sip.

  “Me too,” she says.

  “Don’t tell her I said so.” He laughs quietly. “And Dad?”

  Kaye looks up at him as if he has charged her with something. Talk of him seems to make her nervous. “Dad?”

  “Is he”—Cohen pauses—“still breathing?”

  She nods, and Cohen thinks about his own breathing, becomes acutely aware of the movement of his rib cage, the expanding, the contracting, the feel of air moving in and out of him, the coolness of it on the back of his throat, the warmth of it going out. He wonders what it will be like when that stops.

  “Have they said anything?”

  “Who?”

  “The doctors. The nurses.”

  “About him dying?” Kaye asks with unusual directness.

  “Yeah.”

  “No. Without food and water, without the ventilator, they said he probably won’t last the night.”

  The night, Cohen thinks. The night. Making it through the night seems to be the goal of everyone there. Make it through the night. See another sunrise. Watch all the light from those distant stars fade and witness the morning creep up over the city, glaring off the cars and the windows and the puddles on flat rooftops.

  Who will make it through the night?

  fifty-six

  The Painting

  “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.”

  The air in the chapel is as still as water not quite frozen. There is the smell of incense burned long ago. Cohen looks up over his shoulder and sees the unobtrusive clock spinning off the seconds, the minutes, the hours crawling toward midnight. He wonders if his mother is still singing, if his father is still breathing, if his sister is still contracting.

  He feels an urgency—he needs to get back to his father’s bedside. There’s a desperate desire in him to be there when his father dies, to be present when his father takes his final breath. He hopes it will bring him closure, or peace, or maybe something else, something he can’t quite identify. Something in him is missing, he knows this now, and he thinks it might be filled if he can be beside his father when he dies.

  Yet equally powerful, perhaps more so, is this desire to confess. It has become an important addition, the quiet walk to the church in the middle of the night, the somber entry into the chapel, the relief at seeing Father James behind the screen, waiting for him, sitting still, as if receiving Cohen’s confession is the sole purpose of his life.

  “The Lord be in your heart and mind, Cohen, and upon your lips, that you may truly and humbly confess your sins: In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.”

  “Amen.” The word passes Cohen’s lips, but some part of it stays behind, like a pinpoint of light. It feels like a word from a foreign language—new, like a word he has never said before. Amen.

  “Amen,” he says again, glancing away from the confession screen and up toward the painting. Something about it doesn’t seem right, and then he realizes—it’s not the same picture.

  “When did you change out the painting?” he asks Father James.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “The painting. When did you replace it?”

  The priest pauses, and his confusion seeps through the screen, so that Cohen can feel it like a mist.

  “I don’t know what you mean, Cohen. That’s the same painting that’s always been there.”

  Cohen has the feeling that he’s in a dream or is perhaps losing his mind. “I’m sure it’s not,” he says. “I’m sure of it. Before, the face of Christ was, I don’t know, disappointed somehow. Not looking directly at me, but definitely thinking of me. He looked down to the side, where I always imagined John and Mary stood, or someone else he knew, but his disappointment was never directed at them. His disappointment was somehow for me. In me.”

  The father gives a subtle laugh. “What do you see now?” he asks, and there is still a smile in his voice, always kind, always hopeful.

  “You can see it,” Cohen replies, frustration grabbing at the edges of his words. “The face of Christ is looking at us, directly at us. His eyes, those green eyes with dark brown flecks, they’re almost real.” His voice has dropped to something barely above a whisper.

  “What is the crucified Christ saying to you in this moment through that painting, Cohen?”

  Cohen continues staring at the eyes, the way they blend with Jesus’s dark skin, the way the background is an infinity of space and time and sky. The disappointment is no longer there, but what is it that he’s seeing? What is that expression?

  “I don’t know,” he replies. His voice trails off.

  “I think you do.”

  The two men sit. One is old and at peace. The other is middle-aged and torn. Cohen feels the same confusion arise in his mind about the past, the present, what is separating them, what is keeping them intertwined in his head.

  “Are you sure that’s the same painting?” Cohen asks, his voice full of doubt, rising almost to an indictment.

  “I am sure,” Father James says quietly. “I know that painting well. I have spent many, many hours contemplating it during my decades here. Cohen, the painting has not changed. But what you see has changed. Or perhaps you have changed, are changing. This is miracle enough. If you’re seeing something new, then you will soon hear something new. The seeing and the hearing do not always co
me at the same time, but they move together, like thunder and lightning.”

  Cohen takes a deep breath. The change in the painting disconcerts him. When he walked into the chapel, he felt a great sense of peace. Now he isn’t so sure.

  “I confess to the Almighty God, to his Church, and to you, that I have sinned by my own fault in thought, word, and deed, in things done and left undone, but especially in regards to removing my father from life support and hating my mother.” The words come out of him in a careless manner, light and thoughtless, but they end with a kind of sob and hot tears.

  Father James does not respond.

  Cohen continues to the end, talking at a fast pace, his words clipped. He fights the tears with an uncharacteristic cynicism. “For these and all other sins which I cannot now remember, I am truly sorry. I pray God to have mercy on me. I firmly intend amendment of life, and I humbly beg forgiveness of God and his Church, and ask you for counsel, direction, and absolution.”

  “I am sorry to hear about your father,” Father James says after a brief silence. “May you find peace in such deep loss.”

  Cohen almost speaks. He almost explains how small a loss it actually is, how badly his father hurt him in the past, how simple life will seem when he can walk away from the funeral home, the business, the constant death, death, death. But he doesn’t say any of it, because inside of him is the deep desire to be present at his father’s death, and this desire seems to contradict everything else he thinks he feels.

  “Our Lord Jesus Christ who has left power to his Church to absolve all sinners who truly repent and believe in him, of his great mercy forgive you all your offenses; and by his authority committed to me, I absolve you from all your sins: In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.”

  “Amen,” Cohen whispers.

  “Why do you hate your mother, Cohen, when it was your father who betrayed her?”

  When he said he hated his mother, he had thrown the words into the air without thinking about them, the way a child will say he hates broccoli or rainy days. But when Father James asks him the question, when he takes Cohen’s words and hands them back in a way that forces him to consume them, they make his breath catch in his throat. He can’t reply.

  “Do you know what I think, Cohen?”

  Cohen leans forward and slightly to the side, away from Father James. The heat in the building switches on, and a rush of warm air swirls through the chapel. It smells of dust and ancient things. When Cohen doesn’t reply, the priest speaks slowly.

  “I think you hate her because she’s not your father. I think you’ve loved your father because, in a strange kind of way, you realize you are your father. You have the same weaknesses, the same faults, the same possibilities. This is frightening for a son to consider, that he may be inclined to make the same mistakes his father made. But most of all, I think you hate your mother because she was the one who left.”

  Again Cohen remembers the day the car pulled away, Kaye in the back seat, growing smaller, their car speeding away, kicking up dust, belching exhaust, the tires screeching around the distant bend. His father stood there for so long in the middle of that unlined country road that eventually Cohen stopped waiting for him, went back inside on his own.

  The sound of Father James’s voice brings him back.

  “I’m sorry. That was improper of me. I should give you space to discover your own answers to these questions. I suppose I’m not as patient in my old age as I would like to be.”

  When Cohen doesn’t reply, he continues. “The Lord has put away all your sins.”

  “Thanks be to God,” Cohen replies, standing.

  “Go in peace, and pray for me, a sinner.”

  fifty-seven

  There’s a City of Light

  Cohen walks up Duke Street from the church to the hospital, against traffic, the shadows lengthening and shortening while the headlights pass. The windows are dark. There is not a single person walking the sidewalks, crossing the street. Only cars, few and far between, sweeping south on Duke, their headlights dazzling his vision.

  The air is much warmer than when he had walked south toward the church only twenty minutes earlier. There’s a light breeze, but it has lost its winter’s edge, and it carries the hint of spring moisture, the smell of seeds. The smell reminds him of the shallow ditch that lined the road between their country house and the narrow road, the one that, in the spring, filled with wriggling tadpoles. Those waters teemed with life, the miniature sea creatures swam, and day by day their tails shortened and their stumpy legs grew. Then one day they were gone, slapping their sloppy, halting jumps across the street toward the creek or burrowing deep in the long grass.

  Could that kind of transformation happen to him?

  Another car, another line of light, another wake of darkness. It’s strange, these competing desires. When he’s in the room with his father, he feels caged, as if he must get out, do something. But when he’s away, a sense of panic wells up inside of him that he might not be there when his father dies, that he won’t be standing beside the bed when his father takes his last breath.

  He walks faster.

  Inside the hospital, he can hear his mother from down the hallway, the sound of her voice clear and unwavering. He wonders if she stopped even for a moment while he was gone, if she has taken a drink, eaten anything, used the restroom. She has certainly gotten louder. He turns into the room. She doesn’t look up at him or even seem to be aware of his gentle arrival into the room. She starts a new song.

  “A mansion is waiting in glory,

  My Savior has gone to prepare;

  The ransomed who shine in its beauty

  Will dwell in that city so fair.

  “Oh, home above,

  I’m going to dwell in that home;

  Oh, home of love,

  Get ready, poor sinner, and come.

  “A mansion of rest for the weary,

  Who toil in the vineyard of love;

  O sinner, believe, and be ready

  To enter that mansion above.

  “Oh, home above,

  I’m going to dwell in that home;

  Oh, home of love,

  Get ready, poor sinner, and come.”

  The words move around inside his head, and he remembers once, long ago, really believing that there was something beyond this, something out there more ancient than the stars and their faraway light. An ache fills him, a sadness for the belief he lost somewhere along the way. He wants it back. This is why he has been going to confession, and he realizes it there, listening to his mother sing: he wants to find that belief. He wants to rediscover it. Would he ever feel that way again about God, the way he felt when he was a child?

  Cohen looks for his sister and finds her standing by the window, gazing out over the nighttime city. To him, she looks like a queen, grand and majestic, on the verge of birthing the first inhabitants of a new world. It’s the beginning of time and they are somehow there, nothing in front of them except all the ages to come.

  His father remains unchanged, although his breathing is so shallow that at first Cohen thinks he has died. He moves closer, bends over him, and then hears it, or perhaps senses it. The light breaths, the ins and outs, spaced apart and slow as if each is its own effort, each disconnected from everything else. It brings tears to Cohen’s eyes. He has trouble pulling himself away. What if this breath is the last? Or this one? Or this one?

  A nurse comes in and squeezes past him. The nurses have less and less to do now, but they continue to stop by, mostly as a courtesy.

  Cohen straightens up. “How will we know when he’s died?” he asks her. “What if he takes his last breath and we don’t realize it?”

  Her face is sympathetic and soft. “Sometimes people slip away without their loved ones realizing it at first. It’s not always a sudden, dramatic thing. This gradual slipping away is a process. I think it’s a blessing to have these quiet moments with him.”

  Coh
en nods, but he’s not so sure. These quiet moments have brought up more from his past than anything else he’s ever experienced. These quiet moments have dug deep, pulled away calluses, disturbed the living skin, so that he feels a constant ache.

  In the silence left behind by the nurse, he notices his mother’s voice again.

  “There’s a city of light ’mid the stars, we are told,

  Where they know not a sorrow or care;

  And the gates are of pearl, and the streets are of gold,

  And the building exceedingly fair.

  “Let us pray for each other, nor faint by the way,

  In this sad world of sorrow and care,

  For that home is so bright, and is almost in sight,

  And I trust in my heart you’ll go there.”

  “Is this allowed?” Cohen asks. “Shouldn’t she quiet down? I can ask her to.” After a pause he adds, “I don’t think she’ll listen to me.”

  The nurse gives a kind smile and offers a barely noticeable shrug. “None of the nurses on this floor mind it, and we haven’t had any complaints from other patients or guests. It’s okay with me.”

  “Do you think she’s disturbing my dad?”

  The nurse glances down at his father. “He’s fine. I’m sure he can hear her. Do you know of any reason the sound of her singing might be disturbing to him?”

  Cohen looks away from her, toward his father. There is somehow less of him than there was before, and what remains is haggard and weary and weighed down in the bed.

  “I’m sure it’s fine,” Cohen says.

  Again he remembers those old days in the revival church, lying on the floor on hot summer nights, the sound of people fanning themselves, the simultaneous creaking of pews when they stood to sing. He would lie there in the shadow of the pew, feeling the summer breeze come in through the long windows, listening to his father’s emotional plea for the eternal salvation of one more soul. From there he watched the feet of people on their way to Calvary, shuffling their way past the standing crowd, gliding up the center aisle to the stage. He could hear people wailing. Under the pews, between all the feet, he could see them kneeling.