The sidewalk led right to the open mouth of the big canvas tent that she’d seen when she arrived. She walked up to it and peeked inside. A veritable sea of votive candles was burning in there—thousands of them, arranged in tiers, each flame in a green glass tube. You could light a candle here in the tent twenty-four hours a day. Josephine stepped inside, half expecting to choke, but a large hole in the tent top took the fumes away. Fifteen or twenty people were worshipping, one of them a bearded man in a shiny black parka and jogging pants, who was maintaining some kind of martial-arts stance before the candles, swinging his rosary like a lasso and mumbling to himself. His approach to God was strangely hostile, but he was getting the same reception as anybody else. And that hit Josephine like a rock: God didn’t care about a person’s approach. The human things people cared so deeply about on earth dropped through the screen when God scooped you up, panning for gold. Josephine wished they had taught this back in Catholic school. Her insight made her like God more than she could remember ever liking Him before. He was utterly indifferent to all the stuff she worried about. She felt free now to light a candle herself.
A sign said $3 DONATION. Three bucks to light a candle! You got a shot at a Ford Taurus for a dollar fifty. The new God she’d discovered wouldn’t care whether she paid or not, but that was the difference between Him and His agents on earth. His agents wanted the cash. She glanced around; nobody was looking, but she felt guilty anyway. She slipped three singles from her wallet into the Plexiglas box, and stepped onto the wooden platform.
Dear God, she prayed, lighting a candle, I wish I could say I believed in You a little more than I do. I used to, when I was a kid, and if You really exist, then I don’t have to tell You. I don’t believe in these candles, either, but I’m lighting this one for Ricky, my son. He’s a junkie thief, as You presumably know. He’s nineteen, but he won’t get out of my life and go rob and torment someone else. Why did You let my son shoot dope and turn into a germ? He steals from me, his own mother, rips me off and lies to my face about it. Well, pretty soon he’s going to wake up and find me gone. I’m here to get a Saint Joseph to sell my house, which is probably blasphemous or something, but You don’t care about superficial things like that. I just got that point. So let me ask You this: Why does anybody bother talking to You at all? You know everything already. Why does anybody build a shrine like this? Why am I burying a Saint Joseph? It’s because actions speak louder than words, isn’t it? That’s why it’s three bucks for the candle, right? I get it.
She looked at Ricky’s flame flickering in its green glass tube. It was a small, inconsequential thing to put up against the wall of crap her son lived behind. Once, before he stole her TV, she’d checked out the heavy-metal videos he liked to watch when he was stoned and under her roof—the Satan worshippers and leather Nazis acting nasty with guitars they couldn’t even play. This was no turning of any generational wheel; it wasn’t her own mother’s dismay over the Rolling Stones. This was her offspring growing extra legs and wings and turning into a locust or something, and Josephine had decided that the leaders of the country secretly wanted youth this way, that it served some hidden government purpose. How else could she explain the incredible collection of losers she saw when she drove around town these days, every guy Ricky’s age looking just like Ricky, a tattooed doper who smashed bottles on the kids’ playground every night and lived for nothing but whatever jolt he could get in the next fifteen minutes?
She’d hung on till he was nineteen, and that was it. Blood was thicker than water, but it wasn’t thicker than a woman’s whole life.
So I’m taking action, she continued to God. Maybe finding me gone will make him change. I doubt it, but if You could help him do that, that’s all I ask. I’m not asking anything for myself. Well… I am asking to sell my house. And I wouldn’t mind winning that car to have in Florida. Mine’s just about shot. Oh, and Camilla. She’s a great lady. Take care of her for me. Thank You, God.
She stepped down from the tiers of candles, away from the welter of wiggling flames. Hers flickered with the others in its green glass tube, but when she blinked her eyes, she lost track of which one it was.
When she got home, an hour of daylight remained, possibly less. Today was her day off, and she was starting to wish she was going in. She hated the dark shroud that winter dropped over the afternoon. She was a chef at Cantami in Boston, one of the new Italian places where everybody went. The restaurant’s kitchen had no windows and a million small distractions, and you didn’t have to experience the untimely demise of the day.
She half expected to find Ricky in the house, or some evidence he’d been around—something missing or messed up somehow—but she didn’t see anything. She’d thrown him out a year ago, when he turned eighteen. She would have liked to bounce him sooner, but he’d been remanded to her custody at sixteen, after sticking up a convenience store. Josephine had wanted him sent to reform school then, but the lawyer assured her that institutionalization only made kids like Ricky worse, and then they came home like mutant bacteria that nothing could kill. By this logic, Josephine was left alone with a full-fledged juvenile delinquent. A father’s guiding hand would have been nice, but no court in the world would have let her ex-husband care for Ricky or any other kid, so it didn’t really matter that Sal was halfway through six-to-eight for armed robbery—short time for that offense because he wasn’t the one carrying the gun. Or so the judge had been persuaded to believe. Josephine didn’t even know. She knew that Sal had a gun: she’d seen it a number of times—once pointed at her head. He claimed it wasn’t loaded, but that was why she got her divorce.
When she threw Ricky out, he went to live with his girlfriend, and Josephine changed the locks on the house. But Ricky knew how to pick locks and came in whenever he pleased. Sometimes he wanted to spend the night. Sometimes he just wanted to steal something. Josephine couldn’t keep him out, so she asked him not to come in when she wasn’t around. He came the next day and stole her toaster oven. He called that “borrowing.” By now Ricky had borrowed almost every fenceable thing Josephine owned—her TV and VCR, her stereo, her clock radio, two toaster ovens, a nice floor lamp—along with whole cartons of cigarettes, and cash if she was stupid enough to leave any around. The television set had become his symbolic object, even though Josephine liked to eat toast as much as she liked to watch TV. Every time he came around, he promised to bring the television back. If it weren’t so pathetic, it might have been endearing, this insistence that he had the TV and would return it next time, when Josephine knew perfectly well he’d shot it into his crotch the same day he stole it. That was where Ricky and his friends stuck the dope, in the hairy parts of their groins, so they wouldn’t have marks the cops could find easily.
She made a mug of strong black coffee, and got her garden spade from the basement. She put on her parka and cap and gloves, and stuck Saint Joseph in one of her cargo pockets. Thus outfitted for the wars, she glanced out the kitchen window into her tiny back yard. Something was terribly wrong out there. Everything beyond her property line was gone. The world had broken off like a cardboard picture and fallen away. Her snow-filled birdbath was still there in the foreground, along with her revolving clothesline like some weird antenna on its aluminum mast. After that, it was empty gray sky. A spasm of terror sealed Josephine’s windpipe. Even in her panic, unable to breathe, she blamed herself: God was punishing her after all for burying Joseph, slicing the world right off at her door.
When she shook her eyes into focus, everything was normal again. Yes, she’d been raised by the nuns—when in doubt, assume holy wrath. The cold, cloudy sky was almost the same shimmering gray as her neighbor’s weathered fence, and the two things—gray sky, gray cedar boards—had feathered together in a visual trick, making her yard look like the edge of the earth. She almost laughed, but she couldn’t quite do it. A vision of doomsday shakes a person up, even when it’s an optical illusion. She got the Old Grand-Dad from the cupboard and glugged s
ome into her coffee, had a slurp, and headed out into what had just been, for a second, the end of the world.
Saint Joe belonged dead center in the lawn, she decided, sipping her fortified coffee. She kicked away some powdery snow and set her mug down. The ground felt hard. She dropped the point of her spade; the lawn was like rock. With a purposeful whack, she got maybe a sixteenth of an inch in. She wanted to cry. Then she reflected that the ground would be most frozen near the surface, and softer the deeper she went. Three or four inches down it might not be frozen at all. She had to be the most naturally optimistic person she’d ever met.
She thought about the shrine as she dug. She hadn’t said a prayer in years, and now she remembered why. Praying was absurd. If God existed, He knew your every thought. He could only laugh when you tried to single out certain ones for His special attention. If God existed, every single thing you thought would be a prayer. Everything you did would be a prayer. Your whole life would be a prayer, Josephine thought, and when she thought that, burying Saint Joseph suddenly made more sense. It was superstitious, but at least that implied action—throwing salt over your shoulder, carrying a rabbit’s foot, wearing specific socks when you played gin rummy. Superstitious people were the most religious of all, Josephine decided, because they lived their beliefs. Their weird obsessions were their ongoing prayer. That made gamblers like her ex-husband the priests and rabbis of the group. Their whole lives were offerings to luck—and what was luck if not fate, and what was fate if not God? Sal was a hood, but he was a spiritual hood—Josephine saw this about him for the very first time. And there he was now in his monastery cell, like the young brother she’d met today. The young brother selling raffle tickets.
She hooted at the sky and sipped her drink. It was a cold drink now, but that was what she needed, whereas before she’d needed something hot. Everything taking care of itself. The statue’s resting place looked pretty good. All she really had to do was get him deep enough so the dogs didn’t dig him up before the sale. After her exertions over his tomb, the hollow Saint Joseph seemed to weigh nothing in her hand. He seemed to float in space before her eyes. She set him down on his back in the hole, but found that she couldn’t shovel the dirt on top of him, not right on his face like that. She turned him face-down, but that seemed worse. When she picked him up again, half-frozen dirt had sifted into his open base. You could see it through the translucent, cream-colored skin: Saint Joseph turning brown as he filled up with soil.
She washed him in the kitchen sink and put him in a Ziploc freezer bag, and when she got back outside, she told herself she’d done her best, plopped Joseph in his hole without looking, and scraped soil over him till he disappeared. She tamped down the remaining earth and threw a few spadefuls of snow on the spot. Then she looked around to see if anyone had been watching. She felt furtive and guilty, not uplifted by the magical presence of a sacred personage on her side. She needed to perform some better ritual, something to improve the efficacy of this whole bad act. She closed her eyes to conjure up an image of her soul at peace, and one came to her—her soul in a hot bubble bath with some more Old Grand-Dad.
She poached herself in the tub and thought about food. Her struggle with the earth had left her ravenous and helped her appreciate the hunger that Sal used to have back when they first got married. He was working as a stonemason then, and came home at night ferocious for the pastas and cheeses and spicy meats his mama had stuffed him with his whole life till then. Josephine, a girl from a tuna-casserole family, prepared meals that Sal didn’t even consider food. And so, nineteen years ago, Camilla had come over to teach Italian cooking to her son’s twenty-year-old bride.
The phone rang out in the kitchen. Josephine slid her ears into the water to make it go away. She had old Camilla to thank for a lot of things—her career as a chef, her changing realestate luck, even her dinner tonight, which she’d brought home from Cantami yesterday because she knew she wouldn’t want to cook today. Lying back in the tub like a dragoness, bourbon fumes escaping her nostrils, she relished the food awaiting her—linguini with calamari sauce, one of her favorite things in the world. Camilla had taught her to make it. In honor of Camilla, Josephine was going to find someplace great to cook in Florida, some incredibly classy restaurant where she’d knock their eyes out and get articles written about herself in the paper. She’d send those articles to Camilla, and Camilla would come to visit her. They’d wade together in the blue Atlantic Ocean.
She appeared in her kitchen in her terry-cloth robe, feeling immensely better. The phone machine wasn’t blinking—her caller hadn’t left a message. That meant Camilla had called; she wouldn’t talk to “jukeboxes,” her word for telephone-answering machines. Dinner resided in two takeout containers in the fridge: from one she plopped cold linguini onto a plate; from the other she poured the nice-looking red sauce with its rings and tentacles of squid. She covered it all with plastic wrap and put it on the microwave carousel. She’d been against zappers at first, but they were surprisingly all right for pasta dishes. Her carpenter had built the microwave into a cabinet on the wall for her, or it wouldn’t have been here at all.
She opened a bottle of Chianti and poured herself a glass, flipped on the back-yard floodlight and stood at the sink window with her wine, fantasizing about the realestate calls that might come in as early as tomorrow. It was night now and frigidly cold, even to the eye; snowdrifts stood frozen in strange attitudes, like waves about to break. She thanked the Lord for alcohol. Sharp gusts of wind blew powdery snow into the air, where it sifted like silver-blue glitter through the plastic rigging of her revolving clothesline. Saint Joseph, earthly father of the Christmas manger, was out there under the ground, irradiating her property with saintliness.
She got the cordless phone and pushed Camilla’s speed button. The microwave started beeping the instant the number rang. The bells in Josephine’s life always went off all at once. She popped the oven door and lifted a corner of the plastic wrap, averting her face from the steam.
“Hi, Ma,” she said when Camilla answered. “It’sa me.”
“It’sa you, bad girl,” Camilla said.
“I’ma no bad girl,” said Josephine. They always played this game. She clamped the phone between ear and shoulder so she could grab her wine, and walked herself and her comforts into the dining room. “Hey, Ma, you calla me?”
“I no calla you.”
The food was too hot to eat, but she shoved in a forkful anyway. “Oh. O.K.,” Josephine mumbled around the pasta, huffing puffs of steam to save her mouth. “Guess what?”
“No eat when you talk!” Camilla said.
“Sorry. I’m starving.”
“What you eat over there?”
Josephine was burning her tongue with a hot calamari tentacle, and it took her a few seconds to get the answer out.
“You get fresh squid?” Camilla asked.
“Nice and fresh, Ma. From the restaurant.”
“Why you so hungry? You no hava lunch?”
“I’m hungry from burying Saint Joseph. The ground is like a rock.”
“You get nice saint?”
“Got a nice big one. About a foot long. Real nice.”
“Hold Baby Jesus?”
“Of course, Ma. That’s how you know it’s Joseph. ‘Cause he has Jesus.”
“You bury like I tella you?”
“What do you mean, like you tella me? I buried him. He’s in the ground. I put him in a plastic bag so he wouldn’t get dirty.”
“I tella you, head going down.”
“No, Ma. You did not tella me that. What? Straight down?”
“Straight down!”
“Ma, I buried him good, in a nice plastic bag in the back yard.”
“Back yard! No back yard! Front yard!”
“You did not tell me front yard!”
“I tella you!”
“Ma, I live on a busy street. People will see me.”
“How you gonna sella you house?”
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br /> Josephine tossed her fork onto her plate and stood up from the table. “Are you really telling me this isn’t gonna work?”
“I tella you, Josephine!”
“You did not tella me, Ma!”
“I tella you!”
She burst out the back door of the house in her jeans and boots and goose-down parka, cursing Chianti vapors at the arctic darkness beyond the range of her floodlight. She had her spade in one hand, her wineglass in the other. The wind had blown the snow into drifts across the yard, and now she couldn’t find the spot where she’d buried the saint. She stamped around, kicking at the snow. Chianti sloshed out of the glass, staining her sleeve. She drank some more, and then ran the shovel around like a locomotive’s cowcatcher till she found the soft spot she’d made before. She forced herself to go gingerly from there, so as not to disembowel the saint with her spade.
It was too much to ask that she be left alone. Mr. Crocus, her neighbor on the side with only a naked privet hedge, came out into his own postage stamp of a back yard to walk his hateful yippy dog, Felicia. Josephine very much doubted that Felicia had to go. She almost never saw Mr. Crocus walk the dog in winter; she was sure he let the little rodent relieve itself in the basement until spring and saved its business in mayonnaise jars. No, her nosy neighbor had seen her outside with a shovel, cursing and stomping, and he had to know what she was doing. Josephine pretended not to see him, and went on with the exhumation.
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