by Grant Farley
“Truly. But I cannot use it. My mind must remain clear.”
“What now?”
He nods at the drawer in the nightstand. I open it. There’s a pistol inside.
“It is a German Luger,” he says.
It’s small. Blunt and square around the trigger, soft and curving at the handle. It’s real old.
“Take it out.”
“Man, it’s heavy.” It’s clean and reeks of oil, but it couldn’t have been fired in a million years. “You want to use this old thing against the Blackjacks?”
“You see some papers in the bottom of the drawer?”
“Yeah.”
“Those are copies of documents leaving all of this to your mother.”
“I don’t . . .”
“You will have to carry me. The pain is more than I can endure. You will have to make two trips—one for me, and one for the candelabra, bowl, and gun.”
“Okay, okay. Here, I’ll carry you piggyback.”
“The indignity.”
“You got to trust me on this,” I say. “I got experience.”
“Indeed.”
I sit on the edge of the bed. He wraps his claws around my neck. I choke back a gag. I stand, holding his legs that are only sticks and loose skin inside that greasy suit. I haul him to the living room.
“Perhaps I should walk.”
“I can do this.”
I stagger to the front door and kick the screen open. Dark clouds swirl overhead. I carry him across the yard, cloud shadows creeping on the ground.
The sound is far away, maybe the top of the hill. It’s like a half scream, half laugh. It’s coming this way. I glance back at the old man, but his face doesn’t show that he hears them.
“I suggest a brisk pace,” he says.
“Brisk pace, hell. We gotta leave.”
“Do not panic.”
“Yeah, sure. Don’t panic.” I lie him next to the root cellar door.
“Now go back to the house. I want you to bring the candelabra, the bowl, and the gun. Hurry.”
There’s no time to argue. I run back to the house. If the Blackjacks come over the hill, at least the outbuildings will hide us until they’re right on top of the cellar. I grab the gun. It feels loaded. Hell, what do I know about guns? I grab the bowl in the same hand and carry the candelabra in the other. I hear the Blackjacks running and sliding down the hill behind the barn.
A couple raindrops brush my cheeks.
When I get back to the cellar, the old man is leaning against the door. He’s got the key in the lock and he’s swearing ’cause he can’t turn it. I kneel down and twist it. I lift him up, away from the door, and pull it open.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
Bone Cellar
The cool dark of that cellar slides up at me. My head spins. The old man is gone. No, he’s hobbling down the last step. I throw the candelabra down the stairwell, not even caring if it gets bent up. I turn and stare at the corner of the barn, holding the gun up. I hear footsteps.
“No,” the old man says. “Get down here. Now.”
“Not down there. Not again.” I keep my back turned away from the cellar, facing the corner of the barn.
“You must.”
It’s like the blackness is grabbing at my feet. I’m sinking.
“No, I can’t go down there.”
“You’re already down, child. Just reach up and close the doors. You can use the same padlock to lock it from the inside latches.”
“No way. I’ll just stay at the bottom here, with the doors open, and the gun, and face them.”
There’s flickering candlelight behind me. I see purple and gold out of the corner of my eye. This, I got to check out. Turning. Dizzy.
White.
The walls, the ceiling, even the floor is whitewashed. A white that pounds my headache. Then it’s the shadows. All the shadows flickering in the candlelight.
There’s an altar covered in purple cloth even though it’s not Lent. Then I see the gold. A cross, a chalice, candlesticks, everything a dull gold against that purple. It’s no shiny fake stuff. There’s like a window, a crystal, in the middle of the cross. In the window are two twisted yellow bones. I know it’s human bones because nothing else makes sense in such a big-deal thing as that cross. It’s a relic.
“Take the padlock off the outside latch and close the door.” He’s facing the altar so his wheezy voice just whispers off the stones.
“Right.” I take the lock off the outside and pull the heavy door up and over. I don’t know how the old man could have been doing this all these weeks. I hear footsteps running on gravel. A drizzle brushes my face as I let the door drop shut and clamp the lock through the metal latch on the inside.
A body thumps against the outside of the door. Then voices from outside:
“Sonofabitch, I almost had ’em.”
“The old man down there?”
“RJ. I saw RJ down there.”
“RJ? Shit, this is better than I thought.”
“The old man, he’s gotta be down there, too. Let’s check out the house. It’s ours again.”
“What about them?”
“They ain’t going nowhere.”
Sound of footsteps on dirt, then jumping on the porch.
I turn back to the room. It’s smaller than I remember it, maybe ’cause it’s all crowded what with the altar and the two of us and some blankets that got that funky wet wool smell, and my brain slides me back to being locked in Father Speckler’s coat closet on a rainy day, whiffing peanut butter and Free-toes, the sound of water dripping off yellow raincoats, my nose against the bottom of that door, sucking air and listening to Father Speckler droning on about all God’s children, which I wasn’t ’cause I’m like Mother Catherine said, out of bounds to the Lord . . .
“RJ! Take slow, deep breaths.” The old man wheezes, bringing me back to the here and now.
I take slow, deep breaths and squeeze the key. The sounds of splintering wood, gonzo laughter, and a wolf howl drift through the rain and down the air vent into the here and now.
“It’s time, RJ, for you to hear my confession.”
“I ain’t a priest.”
“That is your finest qualification.”
The old man turns over, lying on the moldy wool blanket with his head against the altar. He breathes in soft rattles, like a baby’s breath. I kneel on the edge of the blanket. If he can hear the sounds coming from the house, he don’t give a sign.
“Now I will tell you my tale. Then you will help me die. Shhh, do not answer, child. I was born in France on April tenth 1893. I was one of seven children on a small farm in Provence.”
Each word, each sentence he says is perfect. Like it’s all memorized, and all he’s doing is reciting.
“Even as a child I felt alone, distant. But I could sing. A sweet alto who could sustain each note of the kyrie with a clarity that made the monsignor’s fat lips tremble. I was sent to the monastery.”
His head tilts to the side so that he can stare at me as he’s talking, though his eyes look like they’re seeing back to that other time.
“Every poor family dreamt of losing one of its burdens this way. The monastery was cold and hard and lonely. For the only time in my life I felt at home.”
There’s something clear and hard way deep inside the old man, like that creepy old body is just a shell he’ll toss away any time he feels like it. I sit back listening, wondering if he’ll die with the next word or just rattle on with his tale into forever.
The Old Man’s Tale of Festering Horrors and God’s Litany
I was ordained at nineteen. Then the Great War began. Nothing in my experience, my faith . . . prepared me for . . . sustained me against . . . the carnage. Oh, I understood the necessity of evil to ensure free will. But what com
fort is theology in the face of kneeling brothers massacred at prayer? It broke my faith. I left the priesthood and enlisted in the artillery out of revenge on a God who for me no longer existed. I endured most of the war on a single battlefield, Verdun. Endured kneeling in a concrete bunker that thundered beyond human sound. God’s litany, I called it. Lord have mercy upon us.
I tended the carrier pigeons. The birds became my solace . . . releasing them to soar untouched above the carnage. In the bunker, soldiers recognized me as a former priest and approached for spiritual solicitude. I told them I believed in nothing. The bunkers teemed with petty human terrors. Much as a monastery. Soon everyone knew of this former priest who believed in the nothing, who knelt not in prayer but in silence against God’s litany. Christ have mercy upon us.
The concrete ceiling cracked above us. The ground rippled below us. Men gathered about me, kneeling defiantly against God’s litany. Rumors of our defiance spread across the front as officers, awaiting commands fluttering down in the grasp of my sweet birds, instead unfolded the spiritual ramblings of a . . . a madman. But in our close confines, the officers could not risk the revolt that would follow my court-martial. Lord have mercy on us.
And then the war moved on, and we emerged from the bunkers into the light of a pale sky. Those who had knelt with me now averted their eyes, turned their backs. Prior to the war, Verdun had been fertile farmland edged by woods. Now the landscape was a nightmare of twisted ground, ravaged trees, and unspeakable harvest. So began the burial of the dead. We collected plaque d’identité . . . dog tags to the Americans . . . and dumped corpses in the trenches and filled in the earth. We stole from the dead with impunity . . . a coin, a gold ring, a locket, a crucifix . . .
Units mustered out to the final front. As rain pressed hollows into the soft dirt of the mass graves, less than a hundred of us remained to enter the forest. We wandered the woods, burying charred, mutilated, festering horrors. The smell was such a part of us that we could no longer go into the villages. I joined two of my former celebrants as we hoarded our finds together, making a pact to share equally in the unlikely event of our survival.
One day we stumbled across the roof of a stone chapel buried by mud and debris and overgrown with vegetation. Rather than dig out the chapel, we decided to break through the moldy roof. Of course, I was the one chosen to violate the sanctity. I dropped down the opening, the light from above cutting the chapel in two. I took shallow breaths against the stench that was all the foulness from above become intimate, like a whore’s bedroom perhaps. I turned away from the corpse of a priest and gazed upon that altar . . . at the gold cross with a crystal at its apex and bones embedded within that crystal. This relic lay on purple linen, surrounded by these sacraments.
It was the chapel containing the relic reputed to be the toe bones of St. Jerome Emiliani, the patron saint of orphans. I had visited this very chapel as a seminarian. Truly, this vault had been transformed as profoundly as . . . as myself . . .
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
Our Father
The storm hits with this pounding like stones hammering the roof.
“God’s litany.” The old man tries to smile, but ends up sucking for air.
“You tell a mean tale.”
“Likewise, RJ.”
So much in his story I don’t understand. Maybe it’s grown-up stuff that someday if I get out of this mess I’ll look back and figure it out. Or maybe it’s a mystery for only him to know. The rain smells like ocean. Like if I went up the stairs, threw open the doors, and stuck my tongue out at the sky, the raindrops would have a kelpy taste.
“I never heard a storm come on so hard and sudden like that.” I shiver and take slow, deep breaths.
The old man is shaking. Not big shakes, though. Just hard, small shudders. I can’t figure if the shakes come from him trying to push the pain out or hold the life in. Maybe it’s both.
He turns over and leans up against the altar. He takes deep breaths, his eyes closed. His face is red and waxy in that candlelight.
“Do you know the Lord’s Prayer?”
“Yeah, but . . .”
“Recite it with me. ‘Our Father, who art in Heaven, hallowed be thy name . . .’”
I repeat it with him. By the time we both get to “Amen,” his voice is hardly even a breath.
Then there’s music in the rain. Can the old man hear it, or is it only in my head? His eyes glance up. He hears it. The Blackjacks have a boom box cranked up so that hollow house echoes like a loudspeaker. I laugh as Zep’s “Stairway to Heaven” weaves through the rain and slips down the air vent and into my headache. Every lame-ass school dance ends with that song. But now, it’s like that music was written just for this hard, pounding storm. Sweet incense smoke rubs at my clothes and slides along the walls, creeping toward the air vent.
“Did your Mr. Sanders tell you ‘The Pardoner’s Tale’?”
I got this picture of Mr. Sanders sitting on that moldy sofa in front of his trailer, sipping from a mug filled with Jack Daniel’s, the youre hooste sign hanging over his head. “Yeah. Three dudes go looking for death and this old man tells ’em about this tree and they find gold under the tree and kill each other over it. It was pretty cool.”
The music stops. There’s no sound from the house. That silence is the creepiest of all.
“Such a fate that brings an old man to find a boy to whom he must bestow a terrible burden, only to discover that boy has prepared his entire life to fulfill such a quest.”
I got to kneel right in front of him to hear his words, my ear almost against his nose.
“How wonderfully ironic . . .” That putrid baby’s breath voice. He even gurgles, except it’s not a happy baby gurgle, more a deep, sad kind of rattle. “. . . that at this moment, for the first time in . . . in years, I wish to live. I will finish my confession.”
The Old Man’s Tale of the Stolen Horde and God’s Children
I knelt in that chapel as though to pray. My eyes adjusted to the amber shadows, and I saw jewelry scattered on the cold stone . . . the rings and bracelets, the silver and gold, the pendants and crucifixes, the pearls and diamonds, the ornate and the simple . . .
Villagers, enduring our world’s insanity, had entrusted their precious treasures to a saint of another world. Children’s offerings lay among the jewelry . . . shattered dolls, rotted stuffed animals, pathetic toys. How long did I kneel amid their tribute before I became aware of the other two staring down at me, at the treasure? I could not pretend this did not exist. I lifted the wealth up to them. Soon the three of us knelt on the moss beside the chapel staring at the golden cross and chalice, and at the jewelry piled in our helmets like a cruel offering.
We discovered a great oak, split by an artillery shell, a hundred yards from the chapel. We would bury the treasure there and come back for it after the war. The shade clung to my skin, stung my nose. Perhaps that stench was merely the remnant of the blast, but to me that oak embodied all the cruelty that had been and all that would be.
Francois would go for food and drink while Henri and I buried the treasure. A look passed between them, and I knew my fate. It was a greater fortune if divided by two rather than three. But there are times a man may defy fate.
We buried the horde deep in the hollow between the roots. Darkness closed about us as Francois returned. The faint almond scent confirmed my suspicion that the poison was in my wine. I pretended to drink with them, spitting out the wine or tipping it to the ground. I fought against the weariness until they passed out.
They would have killed me, no? If not with poison, then another way. I used this Luger. It is small, but feel how heavy. I shot Henri in the head as he slept. Francois sat up, groggy from wine and sleep. The first shot grazed his arm. The second hit his gut. The third to the chest as he reached toward me finished it.
After the Great War I moved to America. It was
many years before I finally returned to uncover the horde. I packed and shipped the treasures to myself in America. Perhaps I hoped to be caught. The jewelry financed my life insurance business in Los Angeles. I bought a small bungalow in the foothills overlooking the San Fernando Valley, isolated from my neighbors. I built a concrete bunker . . . an atomic bomb shelter, the neighbors would someday call it . . . and began secretly celebrating Mass. I longed to rid myself of the holy objects, but they held me in their grasp.
“We ask you to transform us into children so that we may one day enter the Kingdom of Heaven.”
Obscene housing tracts besieged me, and I nurtured bougainvillea as a purple veil against the outside world. Earthquakes cracked the bunker; fires raged in the hills; a mudslide buried my neighbor. Yet my iniquity endured the wrath of God.
I had but one brief indiscretion. Clara was a temp at my office, an innocent, though not young—a devout Christian who must have thought she saw some mystery in this older man who could sell insurance and yet dwell outside mundane humanity. Men had no doubt found Clara’s elongated limbs and gaunt face unattractive, but I saw only her languid spirituality, a heavenly beauty reminiscent of Goya’s saints. She surrendered her purity. When I abandoned her, I lost any hope of redemption. She slipped away, and I never heard from her again.
I read in a magazine that the chapel of St. Jerome Emiliani had been restored, yet the relic remained lost. Ah, the pictures of the empty altar announced my sin to the entire world! I still dreamt of one day placing the gold and crystal and bone back in the amber light of that chapel. Whether I could not let go of the treasure or it would not let go of me, I do not know. But soon a decade passed and I became old. Then another decade passed and all hope was lost.
Two days after my seventy-fifth birthday, a lawyer informed me that I had a son by Clara. The evidence was indisputable, but nothing was demanded of me. He was in his early thirties by that time. She had left it in her will that I should be informed of his existence, nothing more.