(1997) Haunts Magazine
Jesus and May Ellen Frost
Saturday, December 20, 2008
PART I
1.
In the year 1939, Jesep Frost hewed the cross of his Lord from ash trees that he felled himself. He worked like a man possessed, and fashioned it with the hands of a man in love. After nailing it straight to the wall of the living room, he hung upon it a carefully painted life-size Jesus Christ carved of pine by the craftsmen at the Holy Order of Replication, Sioux City, Iowa.Christ cost two hundred and ninety five dollars. The six foot crate arrived through the mail, C.O.D., on a Wednesday in September. Jesep dragged it inside through the back door.
He sent his wife and child away to the far rooms in the house and pried open the box with the axe he kept by the back door for chopping firewood. The lid popped and snapped, the nails groaned against their seatings. When it gave, it gave with a bang, and Jesep wheeled back, off balance. He sat down hard, and the lid rattled to rest on the floor. Within, a gorgeously detailed Jesus Christ slumbered in a pile of wood shavings.
Jesep hauled it up and out, one arm under each of Christ's shoulders. Wood shavings sprinkled everywhere, whispering across the floor boards. Christ slumped, sullen, unwilling to help its new owner. But Jesep would not be deterred. He heaved, and the feet came over the edge of the box.
The replica was heavy, probably weighing over one hundred and fifty pounds. Jesep grunted and wheezed, dragged it toward the cross. Its ankles scraped and left tracks of flesh colored paint in their wake. At the foot of the cross he leaned the thing against the wall. Slick with sweat from the effort, Jesep placed his hands on his knees and struggled to breathe evenly. Christ stared away, its eyes straining for the window.
Eventually his lungs felt strong again, and Jesep wrapped both arms around Christ's waist. Arching his back he lifted it straight up, and peered around its flank to guide it toward the thin steel support wire he'd stretched from one end of the crossbeam to the other. As he readied to actually suspend the thing, his vision doubled in slow, oozing degrees. Pain sang along his spine. Muscles along his legs twitched, and his shoulders jumped with the mounting pressure.
"In the name of Mary," he whispered. "Hang."
He took one last, agonizing step forward, His eyes squeezed shut. Something inside - deep within his chest - gave, and he felt a rushing dizziness, a sweeping weakness. The cool pine leg of the savior, held in an improbable bear hug, pressed against his cheek. He felt Jesus snag the wire, and then Jesep folded to the floor.
When he had kneeled there for some time, and the sun had dipped low, he gathered Katie and little May Ellen out of their bedrooms. They looked upon it. Jesep lay across his wife's lap, and May Ellen stood away, scared by the fearsome visage of the Lord. Her parents wept and prayed. Christ received them in wooden silence.
Six months later Jesep's heart gave up. He awoke, clasped his wife's arm with all his strength, and died right there, next to her in bed. They buried him on a Sunday.
May Ellen looked down into her father's grave, her mother stood behind her, hands tight around her shoulders. "Your pa's with the Lord, now May."
She nodded. She knew.
Late at night, the first night her father was in the ground, little May Ellen stood before Christ and hated him for breaking her pa. She reached up and touched one foot. It felt cold and hard.
*
In 1960, May Ellen lived alone in Postings Grove in a small second floor apartment. The wallpaper (fresh that August) still smelled of paste. It oozed through tiny white flowers on a blue field. Her days were long, full of guilt and boredom. There had never been money, medical school, a husband. In 1949 she'd taken the only vows she could, become a nun.
In 1955 she'd left the abbey on Deer Isle, Maine. Now, her interest in living waning, she sat in her one room apartment above Main Street and sewed, occasionally pricking her fingers so badly that they bled onto the habits she was commissioned to alter and repair.
Every month, in a letter her mother sent, she was reminded of her imperfect love, imperfect piety, imperfect existence. How cruel she was cruel for leading a separate life, away from home. Every month May Ellen sent a letter back to her mother, asking her to move to town with her, to live with her in the apartment, away from that grim artifact in the living room.
Katie Frost died at home, at the age of seventy two, caring for the cross until she breathed no more. May Ellen moved into the old house after her funeral. It was all her family had left for her. She kneeled before Jesus and offered her needle-scarred fingers for him to see. He stared away from them, for they were too unholy to look upon. She wore gloves in the house, and lived in solitude for the last third of her life, sewing habits late into the night, and worrying about the painful lump that grew and reddened at the back of her head.
*
On June 9, 1994, to her relief, the painful lump was diagnosed as a brain tumor the size of a penny. Dr. Thomas Wolff, the only resident practitioner in the Grove, drafted papers for her to take to the hospital in Baxter. He held them out for her to co-sign, but she would not. Instead, she folded her purse under one arm and walked out of the office. The attendant nurse walked out from behind her desk, Dr. Wolff just behind her. The girl begged her to stay. May Ellen turned and stopped the delicate young woman in her tracks.
"Please."
The nurse looked into her eyes, and saw what it was that May Ellen carried within her heart. May turned away, walked through the door and down the hall, outside. For the first time in over thirty years, she saw the end of the tunnel.
The sun beat down on her all the way home.
For the next two months, as the cancerous growth consumed her body, May Ellen found herself unable to eat, sleep or even go the bathroom with any degree of success. Dr. Wolff called often, until she removed the phone from the wall. He visited, knocked, and left. After that, he gave up. She spent more and more time in the living room, sewed habit after habit, stacking them into neat piles along the walls, and finally, kneeled before Jesus.
She bent her neck back to stare up into the Lord's eyes. He could not see her there; he peered at the ceiling. She finally fell asleep, curled into a heap at the base of the crucifix.
2.
She stood in the middle of the living room, awake, her eyes closed. Her breath came in hoarse rattles.He was not on the cross.
She stumbled through the house, whacked her hip on the dining room table, leaned hard against the wide white sink, when she pulled away dragged a cup and saucer from atop a dish towel to its right. The porcelain detonated when it touched the floor. Miniature knives of it made a sudden star on the tile. May Ellen Frost opened the back door and peered wildly into the night.
"Jesus?" she whispered.
Behind her, across the room, where the counter ended, the bathroom door creaked. A sliver of scarlet light stretched out across the dishware strewn linoleum. Water vapor curled into the kitchen.
She watched all this with narrow eyes. Her vision doubled, refocusing as she crossed the floor. Sharp pieces of dishware bit her toes and heels. She reached for the door, touched it gently and it creaked open. Touching it again, she could see inside.
The man reclining in the tub propped his elbows on either rim. Pink bath water slopped over the side, and it sloshed on the floor, collecting in pools around the basin's iron feet. In one hand, he held aloft a miniature meaty red bulb, veined with fat blue arteries. As he squeezed it, the small heart burst and pulpy fluid spurted into his gaping mouth.
She watched his cavity fill, then overflow. He closed his lips together, vileness dribbled down his beard and along his strong, smooth jaw. He shook the collapsed flesh and let it plop into the water, where it floated with a half dozen others. His hand stretched toward the floor, into a scarred wooden bucket, where a small pile of bulging hearts remained. As he did so, he turned to look at her, and she felt her own chest slam.
He grinned, the crown of thorns bit into his forehead, and she could see gore lodged in the spaces between his teeth. He plucked a fresh organ from the bucket - it was small, no larger than his thumb - and squashed it over his thirsty mouth.
She leaned against the toilet, eyelids heavy with shock. The room was oven-hot. Beads of moisture rolled down the walls. He floated serenely under a scum of fatty tissue. His eyes were beautiful, passionate. He sucked a perfect fingernail.
"The hearts are life," he said. "I cannot deny them."
"Let's see those fingers." He turned and leaned over the tub. His beard dripped thick, red lines into the standing water on the floor. His eyes found hers, and they locked.
She peeled off one glove, then the other, and held out her hands for him to see. Every nick, scratch, puncture, every wound she'd every given herself was there, running freely.
He caressed each shredded finger. "You've suffered, too."
He looked up into her eyes, and she saw light in him. His lips parted, and he lowered his face toward her hand.
She did not look away, even when his warm tongue touched her skin. It wrapped her littlest finger to the second joint, and Christ sucked.
With such care, such gentleness, he sucked all eight fingers and both thumbs dry. May held her desiccated hands before her and moaned. He lowered her hands.
"How many habits have you sown?"
"I do not know, Lord."
"Nor I, but I'm sure it is enough."
She stood now before him, naked. Her skin, loose from the sickness that ate up her fat and muscle sagged in sweeping lines.
"I do not understand," she said.
He held both palms out to her. Blood ran from holes through the center of each.
"You have paid for the glory of your sacrifice, and a place by my side."
"Yes," she murmured.
He shifted to make room in the water, pink with heart-blood.
When she was soaking, wrapped in the arms of her Lord, he spoke softly into her ear.
"I beat for you."
She reached behind and ran her gnarled fingers through his slippery hair.
"Oh, yes," she sighed.
She felt his lips against the back of her head, felt pressure building in the vacuum his mouth created. Her skull groaned, her mouth fell open and her throat issued a thin high pitched sound, almost musical. Christ pulled and pulled, his throat taking in her hair and skin and blood as one. His teeth clamped down and splintered the base of her skull, and a sodden, corroded mass of brain broke free, finally ending her cancer.
Beautiful black stars exploded in her vision, and in the nightscape of her being, without the tumor, her arms and stomach and thighs tightened and relaxed, tightened and relaxed. The disease was over. She was saved.
He carried her from the bathroom, her body draped across his powerful arms. As he crossed the rubble strewn kitchen floor, Christ saddened. His methods were painful, not the fashion of a savior from Scripture.
Perhaps he was not Jesus Christ after all. But he was a Christ, for all his failings, he did his job. He looked down at May Ellen.
In the living room, he lay her down before the crucifix, adjusting her arms and legs just so. Stepping back, he looked down at his work. She seemed to sleep so peacefully.
The ashen cross loomed above him. So long had he remained there, diligently suffering for the poor and lonely family. Air swirled around his feet. Habits skittered across the floor, spinning like leaves in the whirlwind.
3.
The heat that August was sweltering. Dr. Thomas Wolff turned off the ignition and let his air conditioning offer some comfort before he got out and walked up the stony dirt path. May Ellen needed treatment, however far along the cancer had progressed. His job - his oath - was to ease her suffering. He had to try.The grass behind the place was six feet high, and the trees circled it closely. He tried to see through the window next to the front door, but there were heavy drapes.
He knocked.
"May Ellen?"
She didn't answer, and the door was locked.
"May?"
The back door was open. A pile of rotting wood was slowly falling to mulch, an ancient axe head was buried in a tree stump. His shirt touched his chest, and he realized he was perspiring freely. He stepped inside.
The house smelled like candles and moldy upholstery. It was very quiet. In the kitchen, the debris of the household plates littered the tile.
"Hello?" First up the stairs, then toward the front.
He stepped through the next doorway, into the dining room. The table was covered in grime, mice tracks crisscrossed its surface.
"Jesus," he whispered, dragging a finger through the dust and foulness. It came up black. He wiped it on his pants and looked into the next room.
Among dozens of black and white habits, May Ellen was stretched as if asleep, lying before a life size sculpture of Jesus on the cross. The hem of her gray dress rested across the fragile calves of her loose-skinned legs. She did not move at the sound his voice, and from where he stood she did not breathe.
He knelt beside her and listened for her heart. He lifted her arm and pressed her wrist for a pulse. Nothing. Her eyes, closed, were those of the sound asleep. In the folds of her sad face, he could see the young woman that once had been; in the knit of her soft eyebrows. Her fingers were pocked and scratched. They were shriveled.
"May Ellen. May Ellen Frost?"
His eyes crawled up to the cross, towering over her crumpled, lifeless body. Christ stared away from the scene, contemplating instead the dirty ceiling.
PART II
1.
Jesus Christ appeared twice in Postings Grove that summer. He first manifested himself in the living room of May Ellen Frost, as she died of a brain tumor. The doctor who found May Ellen's body, had tried for weeks to convince May Ellen to agree to surgery, or failing that hospice.On a warm August afternoon, he stepped across her threshold, and discovered her peacefully arranged corpse before a massive wooden crucifix. She had, at last, freed herself.
Dr. Wolff saw to the necessary procedures, and closed the ambulance doors himself. He patted its hull and sent it off to nearby Baxter Memorial Hospital. He spoke a few friendly words with Harry Dan, the deputy, then peeled the latex gloves from his hands and drove home.
2.
Home was a modest three bedroom apartment on the second floor of a white-washed building on June Street. Thomas was Postings Grove's only doctor, and while he could have lived anywhere and done his job for money - he could bring himself to leave the little apartment on June Street. His practice was sufficient. It paid bills. Thomas life was surrounded by memories; ghosts. The bland apartment and its second-hand furniture was home. Of a kind.Thomas stood in the hall, looking at a framed photograph of the three of them - Marge, Manny, and him - at Marconi Beach. The sky in the picture was the color of ash, and the water looked like lead. Marge smiled. Manny stuck her tongue out.
"Shit." He moved the snapshot into the drawer of the sideboard. He walked into the bathroom and drew a bath.
He was half asleep. The phone rang in the kitchen, the portable on the toilet bleeped softly.
The magenta void of his closed eyelids dissolved, and he leaned forward. The bath water steamed, and the orange heat light hummed. BLEE-EE, purred the phone.
He lifted it in one sopping hand, thumbing the talk button.
"Hello?"
It was Jerry Simms, from Baxter. He relaxed again in the water.
"Caught me in the bathtub, that's all Jerry. No, it's not a problem. What do you need?
He listened a long time.
"What? Yeah, I'm still here. What did you say? Oh, for Christ's sake, Jer', the tumor was three and a half inches across. No, I don't think they're lying. No. Listen to me, we're talking golf balls. You don't miss that. No, no, no. I'll call them. Yeah. Okay. Thanks anyway. Bye."
With his eyes closed, phone in hand, dangling over the edge of the tub, he pictured May Ellen's X-rays. At the base of her cerebellum, a chunk of hateful flesh, a large black blob on the film. He thumbed the phone on and dialed in the number for Baxter Memorial.
3.
At the morgue, just after nine that evening, Thomas showed his ID to security; a behemoth in brown uniform. Security waved him in."Thanks Larry."
He tucked his wallet back into his jacket as he walked through the swinging door. Dr. Marsha Crane looked up from her work table, a pretty woman, blonde, hair bobbed in the professional way that women unwilling to give up youth for practicality often did.
"Jerry called me." He shook her hand after she snapped off the glove. "When one of my patients exhibits miraculous healing powers, I tend to make a house call."
Crane turned off the equipment over the table. "The miracle's a little late."
She walked to the cooler door and pulled. It opened with a hiss and tendrils of cold mist leapt from the frame, vanishing almost instantly. They stepped inside.
"Our X-rays showed minor scar tissue, some evidence of what your diagnosis indicated," she said.
They walked along the narrow length of the cooler, to the back, where May Ellen Frost's feet protruded from a plain white sheet. Thomas folded it down from her face, and carefully tilted her head to one side. The skull looked undisturbed.
"I'd like to see the X-rays." He touched the back of her head gently.
"I'll trade you."
Her arms were crossed and little puffs of breath appeared in front of her mouth. He half- smiled and nodded, reached into his jacket and produced his own pictures.
"I brought them along, just in case."
They stared at very dissimilar images on the lighted panels. His X-rays showed a malignant tumor, the hospital's showed an unblemished cerebellum, save for a tiny ring of discoloration.
"What is that?" He traced the ring with his finger.
"It looks like a scar to me."
He stood back, tilted his head and tapped his lips with his forefinger.
"When are you going to have a look?"
Dr. Crane reached under the panel and clicked off the light.
"We haven't been able to locate any family, yet. It'll take a few days to determine if there is anyone we need to get permission from."
"When you do," he said, "I want to see."
4.
They popped open sometime later. He rolled over to see his digital clock. It read 3:12. It was dark, except for the faint glow creeping down the hall from the light over the kitchen stove. He imagined Marge asleep, her lover or husband wrapped around her, Manny in between.He stumbled into the bathroom and urinated out a bladder full of spent coffee. It smelled like acid. In the kitchen he poured a mug of spring water, and rolled his head around to work out the cricks in his neck. He felt completely awake now.
There was a crumpled bag of Smartfood from the cabinet, and he hooked the jug of water in the same hand as his empty mug. He sank into the bean chair in front of the TV and clicked it on. The screen lit up the room. The walls flickered as he hopped from channel to channel.
He clicked into the upper numbers, and made for the roll over to channel 2. He dropped the remote before he got there.
Held in focus, sans commentary or any sound at all, was the cross that stood in the Frost living room. The image jittered a little. Thomas stared into the screen, the striking difference between what it showed and what he'd seen yesterday afternoon dawning in his mind. Christ was gone from the cross.
He crawled from the bean bag, popcorn skittered across the hardwood and his mug rolled over with a PLUNK. On his knees in front of the screen he reached up to the cable box and switched the channel.
The program changed to a jarring infomercial; a shrinking has-been singer. The picture held for a few seconds then rolled. The sound cut out, and the screen showed a familiar beach scene, his wife and daughter. It rolled again, then the cross in the living room returned.
His breath escaped in a low hiss. Every pore on his skin contracted. He flipped, and soon the image was not preempted at all, but filled each channel with a silent meditation on a vacant cross.
Thomas backed into the kitchen.
He picked up the phone, paused. The clock on the microwave displayed 3:25. Who would he call?
He looked back into the living room. The television was silent, the only movement on its face was the occasional quiver. Thomas crossed to the bean bag and fumbled around for the remote. He pointed it at the TV and stabbed the power. The screen snapped to darkness, save for a tiny white dot at its center, which soon faded.
"Okay, okay, okay." He sat at the breakfast table. Scattered across its top were supermarket coupon flyers and a sizable pile of ads and offers that he'd never opened, along with this month's bills. Finally he stood up, running his hand through his hair.
In the bedroom, he squeezed his feet back into his sneakers and grabbed his jacket. Down the stairs and out the door. He forgot to lock it behind him.
5.
The doors pinged, slid open, and Thomas walked to the security desk at the end of the hall. Larry had been replaced by a old man.He showed his identification. The elderly guard held it in one hand and reached for the phone.
"Please." Thomas placed two fingers on the receiver before the man could lift it. "I'll only be a moment."
The guard stared at him strangely, but said nothing, and Thomas saw that he stayed that way, even when he pried the ID from his old fingers and passed through the swinging doors. His skull itched. His ears whined like they used to after concerts, after Led Zeppelin in Boston, when he was young. It had been a sloppy show, mixed too loud, he couldn't hear a thing the next day. The world had seemed alien, detached. Like it did now.
The morgue was dark, save for blue nightlights along the walls. He pressed the main switch, and the panels on the ceiling came on one by one.
Opening the cooler, he walked into the cold and to the back, where May Ellen lay. He looked at the tag tied to her left big toe. At the bottom was a line for comments. It read AUT/CRANIAL/EXPLTY and was initialed by Dr. Crane.
He walked back into the morgue, looked around. A large rubber bag, with a zipper down the middle, hung over a stainless steel sink. He lifted it off its hooks and carried it into the cooler.
6.
Dr. Thomas Wolff parked his car in front of May Ellen Frost's stony dirt path for the second time in as many days. He got out, and walked to the rear passenger door. The rubber bag was sitting up, leaning against the window, and when he opened the door, it fell into his arms.He carried it around back, to the kitchen door. Thomas was not a very strong man, but tonight, he was accomplishing unusual feats, such as this, or such as carrying the body of May Ellen Frost from the hospital without interference. He did not know how it was possible. It simply was. The world remained far away. He walked through it.
He rested the bag against the side of the house, punched in a pane of the door window glass and reached inside to turn the latch. Blood dripped from his knuckles. He carried the bag inside, into the living room.
The cross towered, floor to ceiling. Christ was indeed there, locked in a moment of suffering, his head turned ceilingward, as if appealing to the exposed rafters of the leaning farmhouse. Thomas laid the bag on the floor, which was still littered with nuns' habits. He unzipped it, top to bottom, and lifted her tenderly from inside.
Thomas set May Ellen on the floor, arranging her, carefully folding her hands over her chest. She seemed serene in the shadow of the Lord.
Above him, the Lord looked away. Thomas stood. His fingers brushed its painted wooden surface. Hard and cool against his fingertips, it was real.
Along its thigh, his hand explored upwards, stopping at the hem of his loincloth, where letters had been stenciled into the fold.
HOLY ORDER OF REPLICATION
SIOUX CITY, IOWA
The letters - tiny, gold stencils - blurred in his vision. For what purpose, this giant wooden martyr? Why here?
Warm tears left the corners of his eyes. He whispered his questions. He leaned backwards. Christ had turned. The Lord looked back. Long, wooden locks dangled about his face, his eyes were closed, his mouth slightly apart.
"Oh, God."
The Lord's eyelids opened, and from hollow sockets streamed straight, sharp rivulets of crimson. The blood splattered Thomas's open eyes, stinging and blinding him. Thomas moaned, a steadily rising pitch. His hands grasped the Lord's hips, and he pressed, white knuckled, until his shoulders twinged. The blood poured and poured, and it filled his mouth and ears. But the blindness passed, and as his moan became a gargling choke.
7.
The fires roared, and the wood entered them. It was a drying and a seasoning, and it lasted an eternity. Locked within each length, a savior, but each had to wait its turn.They opened the wood when ready, drove it down and lifted it again, submerged it to soften, painted it with resin and curatives. The tools bit and gouged, shaved and sliced. Form emerged, and like any birth, even immaculate, there was pain.
When the Lord had taken shape, he was consecrated, baptized. Water and blood, poured into a web of sigil and design that laced the yet unfinished body. A proper time of rest followed. The baptismal fluids burned down to the very heart of the wood, and it went on and on, and on.
The final carving. More pain to endure, but by now, the torture was welcomed. Passage was achieved. Form complete. Mummification in oils and sealants, and coats of pigment to flesh out the illusion.
A great suffocation ensued. Wood shavings pressed in from all sides, and there was hammering. Like so long ago, the journey began with hammer and nails. Darkness, jolts and jostles, the sounds of speech and spoken secrets outside the box in which it rested. It learned the tongue of its creators from within its packing crate.
At last, emergence, light exploding around it, and it was transported to - of all places - the cross. In its desperation it fought. It balked at the new crucifixion. It could not win, but it exacted revenge - the man hanging it on the hewn cross killed by the exertion.
And suffering commenced. Day after day, night after night, the chamber it tried to ignore is filled with the thoughts and prayers of the slowly dying. There was no respite. Even decay was impossible, for its tormentors endlessly repaired it, endlessly restoring its surface to faux brilliance.
Death claims the second keeper, but soon there was a third. No respite. It hanged there, listening to the thunderclap rasp of needle puncturing cloth. It wished, at last, to have never been made. And in that spiraling wish, it went mad.
The insanity set it free, and its raving cellulose mind grew strong again. It could smell this third tormentor, smell death eating its way through her soft shell.
So, it waited, and when her shell finally failed, the replica Christ came down from its cross - its legs, at first unsure, but its mind and heart were strong. It roamed the exterior world, slipped into the forest, hungry for both life and death.
Back at the house, soaking in the wondrous waters that soothed its aching limbs, it consumed the essence of life, swallows down the heart blood of jumping, running, scurrying creatures from the woods around the house.
It filled itself to the eyeballs with their juices, and then invited the dying woman into its pool, so as to take her death away, and into itself. In her destruction, it achieved the purpose: There will be again the joy of sucking life and death from the soft, breathing, hurting beings. It would save them all from the hurting. Reclaiming its place upon the cross, it settled.
Soon, however, it felt alone, and unreminded of its work. Casting out, it made a new connection, bringing another breathing sufferer. He would arrive soon. Soon, it would have purpose again. In the darkness, waiting, the Lord looked to the rafters.
8.
"Have I earned it?" he asked.His sightless face peered toward the empty eyes of the wooden Savior. He could not see that Christ once again looked away.
Swollen with power, it clasped him about the shoulders and lifted from the floor. Blind and ecstatic, Thomas cried out.
"I have earned it!"
And Christ lifted him higher, all the way to his face. His head twisted down, and his lips brushed the sufferer's forehead.
"Your wife and child, how long have you lived without their love?"
Thomas sobbed, suddenly, without warning. Hot water fell from his blood-beaten eyes. The act of it stretched the muscles of his face. Blood oozed from the edges of his sockets.
"Long enough," Christ said. "You have paid for the glory of your sacrifice; your place by my side."
Thomas hitched, sob slowing, and his ruptured ducts dribbled watery red.
The Lord kissed his forehead. " I blind," he whispered, "So that you might see."
Thomas felt Christ's lips against his forehead, felt pressure building in the cavity of the Lord's mouth. His skull twitched, he groaned.
Marge and Manny on the beach, against an ashen sky, like a grainy home video, playing over and over in his mind.
"I love you," Thomas sighed. He gasped.
He, too, was saved.
