Saint in Vain
By Matthew K. Perkins
Saint in Vain
Copyright © 2018 Matthew K. Perkins. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.
Resource Publications
An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers
199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3
Eugene, OR 97401
www.wipfandstock.com
paperback isbn: 978-1-5326-0882-7
hardcover isbn: 978-1-5326-0883-4
ebook isbn: 978-1-5326-0884-1
Manufactured in the U.S.A. 09/17/15
For Hailey
The Dead Bury Their Dead
He didn’t look like much, the saint. And he wasn’t. His suit fit him poorly and, now that it was soaked, its cheap polyester material clung wetly to his extremities and he appeared a sorry sight to the other funeral goers. He squinted against the soggy sunlight that leaked its way through the rain clouds and into his eyes as if designed to irritate him. Their attire was as black as their sunglasses, which they periodically removed to clear the water beads off of the plastic lenses. Where they had taken a sidewalk up the cemetery’s steep hill, he opted for the sloping grass, and, after he slipped, his pant knees were splotchy and grass stained. He wondered how it could be rainy and sunny at the same time. He recalled once hearing that an average cumulus cloud weighs nearly one million pounds. There were no chairs set upon the cemetery lawn, and so the turnout braced themselves against the cold rainfall and the death inside of both coffins.
Strange to him that they should just lay in their boxes. Strange that only eleven people came to mourn the two titans of his life.
He stood alone between the two oversized portraits of the cold departed, and as the rain continued to fall he wondered if the water would ruin the giant photos. Would the ink start to run? It hadn’t started yet. And, as the pastor began reading passages from the Bible, he wondered what he was supposed to do with the glossy pictures after today—they were impractically large and they looked nothing like the two people as they were now.
Rain ran off his face the same as it ran off the lacquered wood of the coffins, and there was no telling if he cried. He held nothing in his hands and so they remained clasped in front of him or held to his eyes in order to grant a brief reprieve from the sunlight. For a moment he tried putting them in his pockets but then quickly removed them. He had never worn so much black. The lawn was soft and aerated and it made deep sucking noises under the pressure of his heels. Their graves were cut neatly into the earth and before each casket was lowered, the pastor asked him if he would like to say any words. His cheeks pinched vertically as he tried to look at the attendees through the sun rays. He raised his left hand to act as a visor to his eyes, but then he dropped it back to its clasp. Quiet in the graveyard.
He faced down the meager black mass and he said, It’s times like these when we are reminded to let the dead bury their dead.
The sun prevented him from seeing the confused faces that materialized around the two caskets. Those that weren’t confused only stared blankly back at him, and the pastor regarded him as if waiting for him to say more, but he didn’t. He offered a solemn nod as each coffin descended into its final resting spot. The small group retreated from the hillside to the home of the saint, where faces of the newly dead looked out at them from all corners. While he chewed down a handful of crackers, his aunt asked him about what he said at the funeral, but he waved her off and disappeared into the basement of the home. No one sought him out and it wasn’t long before the house was empty, all except for the soft patter of rainfall on the slatted roof. He spent the next few hours sitting in an old plush rocking chair with his baggy suit now rigid and dried around his frame. He was wondering what to do now. What now? His cat took its place on the ottoman across the room and the two stared at each other. He snapped his fingers in a gesture to call the cat over, but it only burrowed deeper into the ottoman’s cushion and after a while he stopped snapping. He sat for several more hours, and when the rainfall could no longer be heard hitting the house he looked up at the ceiling in a pose of intent listening.
The cat tilted its head as it watched the saint trade his suit jacket for a sweatshirt, and then stalked him upstairs just as he slipped through the front door where his dark figure passed through the dim porch light. His head was hooded and his stern face was revealed only by the distant and intermittent flashes of lightning. The rain had stopped. He tread eastwardly in the wake of the storm and the fence-posts and hedges of yards around him seemed to have parted just for his passing. He walked to the margin of the small town, paused, and then proceeded into the seamless black outland, where the low babel of insects thickened in the rural air and a light wind twisted and bent the tall grass on each side of his path. The thunder was too distant to be heard, but within the dark clouds he witnessed arcs of lightning that lashed at the surface of the earth as if something lay buried there that might appease it. For a moment he stopped, and he studied each bolt as if it held the answer to his most important question. It was quiet, and the country was lightless except for what the lightning was willing to give. By way of a single wide paved road he climbed to the top of a hill and stilled himself against the deep night. The land to the east flattened before him and the storm continued to crawl over the crust of the earth like a purposeful, malevolent slime. In the full dark of that hill he watched—the whites of his eyes and his strange grin only made visible by the occasional flashes from the mute firmament.
Thunderhead
Seven months later he sat on the concrete steps of a small church that hardly knew of his existence, spiritual or otherwise. The steps were still damp from the spring thunderstorm the night before. Only half of the morning sun could be seen, low and rippling through the moist morning atmosphere, and he had been perched on the steps already for some time. He rubbed his hands nervously and picked at his fingernails while the plastic clacking of a boy’s skateboard wheels went by on the uneven sections of concrete in front of the church.
So common was the rattle of trains here, which carted endless amounts of coal into the hungry heart of America, that the townsfolk hardly registered their sound. They were like a village at the base of a waterfall that assumes the whole world lives in a roar. But Silvio registered the metallic hum, and when a train horn came blaring over the rooftops of the neighborhood, he reflexively looked at the southern horizon where he knew it to come from. It wasn’t a town that American had forgotten. It was a town that American had never known. If you were to randomly poll three adult residents, one was a government employee, one worked for the railroad, and one was unemployed. The younger generation talked incessantly about the day that they could “get out,” but for every one of them that got out, there was one that stayed behind to register VIN numbers and lay train track.
Several automobiles ambled by on the street. He stood up to stretch his legs and he threw his arms to each side of his body and as he was sitting back down a large, white pickup chugged its way up to the intersection in front of the church. It towed a steel trailer with large breath holes that was designed for moving large farm animals. Even over the loud introduction of the truck, he could hear the anxious snorting and shifting hooves of the animal within. Silvio tilted his head to try to get a better look into the trailer, but the truck lurched away in a stream of black exhaust smoke and he was again left alone on the stairs. He tapped his foot and continued to rub his hands together.
Four blocks away from Silvio, an old man shuffled through quiet side streets and neighborhoods marked by the homogenous presence of single floor houses with modest three-step stoops and concrete-fiber sidings that came in no more than five different pastel colors. He appeared satisfied with the quality of the morning.