Sun House, page 33
TJ silently offered her a small, canvas-seated, wood-framed folding chair—the only actual piece of furniture in the room. It was so low it left her three inches off the floor beside the books, so she turned to them. The intense focus of Jervis’s tiny library appealed to her at once. Three volumes on Tibetan Buddhism, two on Zen, Nikos Kazantzakis’s mytho-historic novel Saint Francis, The Cloud of Unknowing by Anonymous, and two field guides to American birds filled a third of the row. The other two-thirds were all books by or about the Beguines and their ally Meister Eckhart: Marguerite Porete’s The Mirror of Simple Souls; Mechthild of Magdeburg’s The Flowing Light of the Godhead; Hadewijch of Brabant’s collected writings; The Beguine Pearl by Anonymous; two volumes of Eckhart’s sermons; two books of Beguine and Eckhart scholarship by a man named McGinn. That was it, except for the stack of letters atop the crate. Risa’s immediate, head-to-toe response: As soon as can be, I’ll read this entire library.
Continuing to hold his tongue, TJ made green tea in the tiny Yixing pots and teabowls he favored. After serving her, then filling his own bowl, he unthinkingly deployed his weird athleticism: teapot in one hand, teabowl in the other, using legs alone to drop from a standing position into a half lotus on the futon. Jervis’s rock-hard monk’s bed didn’t budge beneath his weight.
Setting aside teapot and bowl, TJ reached over to the fruit crate, grabbed the stack of letters on top, and carefully selected perhaps fifteen pages. Every page was covered with the small, deft handwriting Risa recognized as TJ’s own. He introduced the letters by meticulously describing the desolate context in which he wrote them, then began to read to her aloud. His full disclosure took two hours. By the time he’d finished, Risa was so moved she never experienced another moment’s doubt about the trouble dolls, or the secret sanctuary TJ had created in which to commune with them.
WHEN AN INCH-LONG steel bolt detaches from an AeroMexico DC-8 cruising at 38,000 feet, drifts seven miles to Earth, and embeds itself in the skull of an eight-year-old girl hoeing weeds in a Mexican cornfield, killing her almost instantly, the term “freak accident” does not appease. The mind continues to grope for explanations. This groping is of course futile. But just as a heart, by nature, can’t stop beating, a mind, faced with a fatal catastrophe, can’t stop groping. One person who learned this the hard way was a young Jesuit novice sent, in the old Mexican priest’s absence, to console the dead eight-year-old’s father and friends at her burial. That Jesuit’s name: Tavish Jacobus McGraff.
Because TJ would be arriving in this father’s life on the day his daughter’s body was to be placed in the earth, he felt he should set eyes on the body to prepare himself. Ixhuatán had no proper morgue, but the child had been stored in a walk-in cooler at a market not far from the church cemetery. TJ bicycled there on the morning of the burial, asked to be left alone in the cooler for a while, and stepped inside, hoping for an encounter that might give him a few words to speak at the grave before the child entered it.
What he found in the cooler did the exact opposite. The instant he set eyes on the girl’s body he was assailed, first, by the fact that it looked totally unharmed and, second, by its perfect little-girlness. The love visible in the way her hands had been folded was a spear to the heart. Her very small, scuffed but fresh-polished black patent-leather shoes; pretty white dress with a white satin waist ribbon; carefully braided black hair ending in another white ribbon; dimples still visible in the pale cheeks: more spears and arrows. TJ had excelled at science in high school and had a very good memory. In the Ixhuatán cooler that day he could probably have still recited half the Periodic Table of the Elements: Seven: N, nitrogen. Eight: O, oxygen. Nine: F, flourine. A beloved child was about to dissolve into that Table. The gulf between the elements and her satin ribbons, mirthful dimples, and perfect black braid shattered thought: the gulf was infinite. At his novitiate TJ had been taught only the canonical solaces. Any such solace spoken at this child’s burial would be a platitude tossed like a cigarette butt into a handy hole in the ground.
After long, hard pondering, all that came to TJ was a vision of dropping to his hands and knees at the grave, kissing the dirt at the edge of the hole this child would be entering, then kissing it again once she was buried in it—and not to consecrate the dirt or act of burial. No priest, no church, held any such power. His only aim would be to honor the other-than-human elements receiving the child with the willing touch of his human lips.
This impulse, TJ realized too late, could have been obeyed. To silently kiss the dirt, before and after, might even have led to a few spontaneous, appropriately shattered words for the crushed father and dazed friends. But TJ didn’t heed his urge. Overwhelmed by the unanswerable, he clung to the canon, translated a few platitudes into his stiff, foreign Spanish, spoke them to those encircling the child’s shockingly unharmed body—and felt his words fall to Earth like junk parts raining down from an AeroCatholic flight to nowhere.
A REPORTER, EDUARDO Nuñez, from the Mexico City newspaper Reforma, was scratching notes at the graveside as TJ spoke his platitudes. Nuñez then published a brief article that gave the name of the girl and her father, and wrote of one thing only: the impossible odds against being struck in the skull by a bolt fallen from a jet passing seven miles overhead.
When, within days, newspapers from all over the globe picked up the story, the sheer number of such papers—not to mention the income from serial rights!—astounded Nuñez. Nothing like this had ever happened to him. Most papers even used his Reforma headline: FREAK ACCIDENT VICTIM DIES IN CHIAPAS CORNFIELD. That his story reduced the girl to a seven-word formula and the father to a nothingness did not impress Nuñez one way or the other. For him there was magic in the fact that FREAK ACCIDENT VICTIM clippings kept pouring in from St. Petersburg, Sydney, Prague, Reykjavik, Buenos Aires, Paris, Haiphong. To share this magic Nuñez began mailing photocopies of the clippings, in groups of ten or so, to the young Jesuit he’d briefly met by the girl’s grave. “The world now knows of you!” his attached note told TJ. “Share these with the family, good Father. It may appease them! So many people touched by this tragedy! So much concern.”
TJ had a slow fuse, but by the time he’d received more than thirty such clippings he telephoned Eduardo Nuñez, took no chances on his rickety Spanish, and said, “Stop sending these, Señor Nuñez. Sensationalism is not concern. Her name is Demetria Annamaria Cabrera, not freak accident victim. And how am I to share anything with her family when her mother was murdered by a death squad in Guatemala, her grandmother died soon after, and her father brought Demetria to Chiapas to start a new life. They came to Ixhuatán to be safe, Señor Nuñez, and for a while she was. Write that. But then—what a bonanza for sleepwalkers incapable of empathy!—down through the heavens fell the hero of your story: a clever little bolt bent on murder! Fuck these clippings, Señor Nuñez. My ridiculous work as Demetria’s priest is to help her father discover some inconceivable reason to keep living despite her lost life, lost sweetness, lost playfulness, face, voice, hair, hands. Write that, Señor Nuñez!”
Not till he’d slammed down the phone did TJ realize that the man he’d been longing to excoriate was himself. Unable to quell his turmoil, he felt driven to spill his guts to a wise confessor. But TJ’s most valued confessor was not an older priest: he was a hunched, sailboat-dwelling, Beguine-loving street samaritan by the name of Jervis Muireadhach McGraff.
Here’s the first letter TJ read to Risa in the “monk’s cell” that day:
Brother Jervis:
Wasn’t it John Lennon who said “Time wounds all heels”? Whoever said it, they were so right. The calendar tells me days are passing, but my life stalled out in self-loathing at Demetria’s burial. Have I told you I was so nervous I’d made notes on 3 × 5 preprinted postcards provided by the Oregon Province of Jesuits? Picture it, Jervis! The petrified priestling from El Norte, teetering on the lip of the girl’s grave, flipping through notecards like Dave Letterman doing a top ten list. Her devastated father watching closely. And what consolations rose from my palmed deck? If only I could forget. “Estoy más triste que puedo decir.” (I’m more sorry than I can say.) “A Dios les ama los que se lleva, además de los que deja atrás.” (God loves those He takes, as well as those He leaves behind.) “Debemos confiar en que, aún ahora, todas las cosas deben llevarnos a la santidad.” (We must trust, even now, that all things are meant to bring us to holiness.) Fuck me, Jervis! When our parents died, I fell into a neck-deep hole. My aspirations of priesthood have only deepened that hole, and my words to Demetria’s mourners pulled them into it with me. Fuck my tiny-hearted sentiments! I wish Demetria’s father had pummeled my face with his fists till I fell on the ground. I wish he’d shouted, You must trust that my fists have brought you to holiness!
But what he did, in its way, was worse. What he did was stare at the dirt that held his child captive, then murmur, “Gracias, Padrecito.” He who’d lost his wife to thugs, his mother-in-law to grief, his daughter to a vicious absurdity. “Gracias, Padrecito.” Then away we walked, he to his empty hacienda, me to my empty parsonage, where I’ve thought of him nonstop ever since. The fascination of this childless father, Jervis, is that while no one is strong enough to suffer such a blow and remain whole, countless men, women, and children are strong enough to suffer such blows, be horribly maimed by them, yet survive. The great truth here, then, is our tediously terrifying old friend, the Cross, which we try to wrench into the feeling Mighty Jesus will save helpless me. But good souls are hung, same as Jesus, on crosses daily. And Jesus was then taken down by a few fearless women who loved Him. But as far as I can see, this man, Señor Cabrera, and countless others like him, are nailed up and left hanging for the rest of their lives.
I’ve been to see him twice since the burial. On the first visit I told him how sorry I was for the words I’d spoken over Demetria’s grave. I said this at least three times, in three equally wooden ways, then asked if he could forgive me—because it’s always about me! When Señor Cabrera said there was nothing to forgive, then tossed in another, “Gracias, Padrecito,” I started to weep. He pointed at his broken porch steps then, which mystified me. In addition to being a rotten priest I own no tools, no carpentry skills, and I’m so stupid I thought he wanted me to fix his steps. Instead he motioned me to sit.
Aha. I sat. Señor C then sat beside me, the broken steps so narrow they forced our hips to touch.
For a long time I expected words to follow. None did. We stayed on his steps, hip to hip, neither of us speaking, for what felt like years. And sitting with Señor C, motionless, silent, was immeasurably more instructive than all the theology I’ve ever studied then pretended to understand. I needed no epistemology, no Christology, no dogmatics to know I sat hip to hip with a man nailed to an inescapable cross, yet he didn’t moan or groan, and he said absolutely nothing. We stared at the toppled stone wall encircling his tiny dirt yard. We looked down at the cruel dirt or up at the cruel sky. We sat together so long I may have forgotten he was there except that, twice, I heard his breath catch as he turned to the gate in the wall. Each time my breath also caught, as I too half expected to see his child come through the gate.
What stepped through instead, after a while, was one of those short-haired yellow curs you see everywhere in Mexico. Obviously seeking Demetria. Obviously our fellow griever, missing the sweet words and handouts he’d always found in this yard. When he saw two silent men instead, one a priestly fool, the other silent in mid-Crucifixion, he slunk away fast.
A flock of pigeons flew over like sad messengers. The sun set like a sad message. The yard grew as dark as my mind. Gracias, Padrecito.
But as the first stars came out and I at last stood to leave, Señor C also stood, looked me in the eye, then reached out and embraced me. Picture it, Jervis. Suspended on his cross, he ripped himself free of his nails long enough to hold me in his skinny arms. And so became my teacher. My hero. My ravaged love. He then turned without a word to his empty house, I turned toward my empty parsonage, and we walked in silence into the darknesses we are each called to face.
There’s more to tell, Jervis. Much more. But for now I’m too done in by all the crosses.
-TJ
This—the second letter of TJ McGraff to his confessor and twin, again read aloud to Risa as they hunched in the gloom of Jervis’s Hoyt Street monk’s cell—is the last missive TJ ever wrote as an aspiring Jesuit:
Brother Jervis:
I visited Señor Cabrera again. And this time brought a half-pint of tequila. Which we didn’t exactly knock back. But it was good, as we sat on the broken porch steps, our hips again touching, to pass sips of strong religionless communion back and forth as we again considered the dirt yard, stone fence, broken gate, treacherous sky.
Again we remained silent. Again days, weeks, lifetimes passed. Again, in the gate, the yellow cur appeared, saw two forlorn men and no Demetria, and slunk away. But this time, when we at last stood, I thought to part ways, Señor C did something that terrified me. He turned to his little house of heartbreak, house of emptiness, the very wood, nails, and adobe of his cross. And he motioned for me to precede him inside.
The hacienda consisted of a single room. One window in the center of each wall, each so small they cast a light dim as the portholes of your sloop. No bathroom or running water. A Lady of Guadalupe on one window ledge. Two beds a few feet apart, one, as I’d feared, much smaller than the other. The air cool but, as I’d feared, holding a faint fragrance of a child and her things.
I was already trembling when Señor C motioned for me to sit on the smaller bed. It was so neatly made it showed his adoration, which was heartbreaking. But if it had been messy, as if Demetria had been in it that morning, that might have been worse. Made or unmade I felt a shattering reverence for the little bed as I eased down upon it, then an equally shattering gratefulness when Señor C, as is his custom, sat very close beside me.
With his eyes, no words, he directed my attention to the shallow alcove built into the adobe at the head of the bed—and there stood Demetria’s greatest treasure: her collection of muñecas quitapenas. What we call “trouble dolls.” But quitapenas also means “take away shame,” and shame had been drowning me since the burial. So how medicinal for poor little Padrecito that Demetria owned perhaps fifty Take Away Shame dolls.
They were neatly arranged, the men all in tiny vests and sombreros, the women also in sombreros, long colorful skirts, white blouses, miniature shawls. Everyone’s hair black. Everyone’s skin brown. Everyone’s eyes an inscrutable black dot and eyebrows a somehow wistful black dash. Three sheep, two donkeys, a brown-and-white cow, pink pig, and flock of tiny chickens, which Demetria had somehow managed to stand on teensy wire feet.
Still without words, Señor C urged me to touch the dolls, pick them up, play with them if I liked—and how closely he watched for which ones I happened to choose! In scrutinizing those dolls with Señor C watching, Jervis, I discovered there are huge rooms inside small ones, cathedrals inside tiny haciendas. The instant this or that minuscule woman, man, chicken, entered my hands the walls took off for the horizon, the ceiling lifted toward the sky, and jubilation shot through me. Things before ideas, brother! Beautiful muñecas quitapenas before regurgitated priest-talk about loss.
As if he too felt the room expanding, Señor C was moved, for the first time since Demetria’s burial, to speak. His mother-in-law in Guatemala made muñequitas for a living till her eyes went, he said. The gringos paid her five US cents per doll and for years she could make fifty a day. But the dolls she made Demetria were special. Far more intricate. Four or five a day at most, and I could see it. The bright colors, simple yet mysterious faces, intricate tailoring of tiny clothes, so enchanted me I forgot my priest suit and exclaimed in garbled Spanish over doll after doll. When I finally thought to turn to Señor Cabrera, he was smiling, but with such agony in his eyes that I knew we were about to go somewhere terribly hard.
He then reached for Demetria’s pillow. Lifted it. My breath caught. Underneath lay an exquisite La Sagrada Familia. Joseph and Mary in the usual tiny sombreros. El Santo Niño with a halo made of a tiny circlet of gold wire. Yet as I stared at them lying there, I could only see them as three beautiful nails, two driven clean through Señor Cabrera’s palms, the third into his chest.
He began to describe the precise way in which Demetria had adored them. Every morning before she went out, she stood La Familia before her in a dent on top of her pillow, told them of her hopes and plans for the day, and asked for their protection, but never for anything else, he said. Nor did she pretend to speak for the dolls the way almost all children do. Each evening, after washing and drying her hands, she stood them in another pillow dent and spoke to them again, telling how her hopes and plans had or hadn’t worked out, thanking them for the day’s surprises and pleasures, thanking them for helping her through the hard things. At bedtime she again washed and dried her hands, kissed them good night, taking care to make it a dry kiss, and placed them under her pillow, asking them to love her and keep her safe as she slept, promising to do the same for them.
