Fell of Dark (15 page)

Courtship

I SOMETIMES MISS MY
mother. Since Lincoln the Gentleman divorced his wife to capture my mother, I don't see much of her, or them. “You don't need me, really,” she said. “You're too smart and independent to need anything from me.”

They shower, they cuddle, they eat, they sleep, they walk, they talk. All of it together. Lincoln is good to me, a father. He always has a dollar, always listens. But he loves my mother. She'll be his true wife, so she comes first, as she should.

For us, since we'll happen so fast, we'll court each other after we're a done deal. Instead of a courtship that ends in marriage, we'll have a marriage that starts our courtship. We'll charm each other to keep what we have. We'll have a movie night once a week, a date night. We'll flip a coin to decide the theater, and we'll go after dinner. We'll get there whenever we get there and see what's playing next. No matter what the movie is, whether it's supposed to be good or terrible, we'll see it. We're there for the company and to make the best of it. We're there to turn off our brains and to hold hands in the dark. For two hours, we won't want to be anywhere else. Then we'll walk home.

Of course, to make this happen, we have to meet.

Size

MY MOTHER IS RIGHT.
I don't need her much.

I've reached 6'9" and 225 pounds, no sign of stopping. I'm sixteen and a half. I've outgrown Martin the Irishman, who stopped at 6'5¾" and weighs about fifty pounds less.

You'd think I would play basketball, like Martin, or football. I've been recruited and recruited, but I want no part of it. Too violent, too aggressive, and I have no interest in hurting or getting hurt.

I found the perfect sport for me: rowing. After school once, I walked a long way around toward the subway home. A rowing team gliding over the river, perfect union, barely touching water, and I thought,
That's for me. Nothing else but that.

Rowing has made me strong, almost stronger than Jacob, who wrestled with an angel. Or was it a man? Or was it God?

I want to row by myself in a single scull. The water, the oars, God, and me, in motion, inseparable, peaceful.

Matthew, Mark, and Luke

READING THE BIBLE ISN'T
easy. It takes me a long time. Especially in the Latin, which is how I've been taking it, side by side with English. School Latin and nothing else.

I read every word because every word matters.

Maybe not every word, since I skipped over the genealogy of Jesus in Luke after reading it in Matthew. Mark leaves it out.

Anyway, I read almost every word, but I keep falling asleep. It's not that I get bored. All the talk of miracles and antichrist and betrayal and torture and death and resurrection, no, I don't find it boring. It tires me out. Concentrating wears me down.

Sometimes the words rise up off the page and dissolve, and sometimes the pages stick together with honey. I always smell flowers when I read.

Some languages are considered dead, like Kwadi, Esuma, Chorotega, Thracian, Etruscan, Assan, Mahican, and Beothuk. Experts say languages die every day, maybe tens of them.

Some nearly died. Irish came pretty close to the coffin. And others are kind of dead: Aramaic, Sanskrit, and Latin, which show up in various ways, though no one uses them day to day. I wouldn't recognize Aramaic if it bit me.

Latin, deadish, centuries of bad breath and coughing, still serves the one book almost nobody on earth can seem to avoid, whether you visit a motel or live in the jungle, the book that may be the most alive: the Bible.

et respondens angelus dixit ei ego sum Gabrihel

intrate per angustam portam quia lata porta et spatiosa via quae ducit ad perditionem et multi sunt qui intrant per eam

exinde coepit Iesus ostendere discipulis suis quia oporteret eum ire Hierosolymam et multa pati a senioribus et scribis et principibus sacerdotum et occidi et tertia die resurgere

et perducunt illum in Golgotha locum quod est interpretatum Calvariae locus

Gabriel, the messenger angel.

Jesus describes the narrow gate of heaven and the wide gate of hell.

Jesus foretells His death and resurrection.

The Place of a Skull.

The Place of a Skull, where men and a god ended crucified. Crucified. I can't even wrap my pea brain around this. Nailed to a rough cross and left to hang until dead. Bleeding and broken and thirsty and hungry. What kind of mind thinks of this?

Matthew, Mark, and Luke. Who were they? Did they even exist? They couldn't have been the only people writing about Jesus. Why are they here and not others? Why aren't there six or twelve or twenty-four Gospels? Why no Gospel written by a woman? Or a sixteen-year-old boy? Jesus went about His Father's work when He was twelve, Luke says. By Father, he meant God.

Those first three Gospels, all miracles, disease, suffering, dirt, blindness, devils, blood, anger—so much anger—weakness, and mockery. Not much in the way of peace.

The miracles come again and again, like arrows. Arrow after arrow after arrow at His enemies.

The stories and parables, His stones.

Parable and Blood

“THE BUILDER AND THE
OX”

A man in a town decided to build a stone house with the help of an ox. He quarried the fieldstone by himself. Imagine the geometry of the work: the parallel planes of sky and field; two arcs, the blade of a shovel and its cut in the dirt; a coiled rope; a taut rope; the oblong muscles in his grinding jaw and the shape of each creaking tooth; the slope of his back; a triangle, the arches of his feet and the center of his skull its vertices; the iron globe of his heart.

The town said, “Why would you do this by yourself? So much work when you can have a house put up in a day with our help?”

“What can I say?” the builder said. “A voice told me this is the house I have to build and the way I have to build it.”

The town went away dissatisfied with the answer, grumbling to itself, but it left the builder alone with his work.

The builder devised a wooden staging to go up with each story. He built a treadmill on the staging for the ox to work lifting the stones into place. Early on, he tried to catch a falling stone and lost two fingers of his right hand, cracked and pulped as if between a giant's molars. He suffered little else other than a broken toe, caught beneath the hoof of his sidestepping ox.

One year from the first sight of buried rock, the man and his ox set the final stone. The rest of the town turned out to witness the end of his solitary work. The ox turned the wheel; the ropes snapped and quivered; stones rubbed.

His work ended here.

The man skimmed mortar from the edge of his trowel with his thumbnail. The town watched him rub the flat blade. A single handclap sounded. This collision of hands, like a collision of flint, threw a spark. Another man caught fire and went up in applause. Each clap was a flying, popping ember; fire consumed the crowd. An ovation blazed.

The town celebrated and grew hungry. Once unyoked, the tireless ox was slaughtered on the staging, its meat roasted and divided among the people. The builder himself requested a portion from the blackened shoulder. He sweat ox blood as he ate. The blood stained his temples and ears.

I'm glad I don't have to explain this. I take my lead from Jesus. He never explained His parables.

I'm bleeding. It stains my temples and ears.

As far as I know, this is my last miracle. Nothing else.