Tom Piccirilli - November Mourns

He didn’t remember the word, and said, “What’s that?”

“A label name,” he answered. “The nondramatic precursors to the morality play are to be found in medieval sermon literature.”

“That’s right.”

“Homilies, fables, parables, and other works of moral edification.”

“Sure,” he said.

The agony took him over until he cried out once more, then it receded and his mind cleared.

He turned and saw his body on the ground with his face screwed up in pain, sucking air heavily as he slept. Trickles of rain ran in and out of his open mouth.

Above him stood his mother and Hellfire Christ.

“Oh Mama,” he said, and wondered if this was it.

The Jesus before him wasn’t the Christ in Mrs. Rhyerson’s paint-by-numbers portrait. Nor Old Lady Hester’s picture either. You had trouble visualizing this Christ shaking hands with Conway Twitty or sitting on a cloud with Elvis.

Hellfire Christ’s fists were much larger and the wrists thicker than the gaunt icons you saw hanging on dining room walls. He was a stonemason who walked three miles from his village to the cosmopolitan city of Sepherus, where the Romans were constructing along the Sea of Galilee. He worked to the point of exhaustion because the Romans took one-fourth of his pay in taxes. If it was a bad week, they came to Nazareth and forced the two hundred peasant villagers to cough up their tribute in produce and farm animals. He’s learned a great deal about Plato and Aristotle from the Greek artisans laboring on the floor mosaics.

His features were plain, grim, and heavily wrinkled from the desert sun. The corners of his eyes were crusted with grime and dust. About five-eight and slightly balding. With no easy access to a daily bath he had a repugnant odor that nobody in the Middle East would ever notice. Even Shad’s mother was making a face, sniffing the air.

Jesus, whose voice might or might not have been the voice of Shad’s father, whispered something too low to hear.

You come all this way to meet God and the guy mumbles.

“Shad?”

“Yes, Mama.”

“You… are you hurt?”

“Yes.”

“Will you come see me now? Are we going to be together again?” Her face brightened.

“No, Mama. Not just yet. You have to help me.”

“I do?”

“Yes, you have to show me the way out.”

He saw himself now, coughing on the ground. Speckled black phlegm coated his lips. He’d read somewhere that it indicated liver damage. You might survive for a while, but it pretty much meant you were through. Maybe the liver wasn’t on the left side the way he’d thought. Terror seized him again and he looked at Jesus.

No chance at mercy there. Hellfire Christ had a lot on his mind, his burning eyes glancing side to side as he paced around the woods like a prowling animal. He didn’t want sympathy and wouldn’t give any either.

He was as bad as Barabbas, wanting to kill tyrants, cut the throats of soldiers. He stared down at Shad’s body and glowered. Hellfire Christ wasn’t smiling and looked like he’d forgotten how to.

“Shad?”

“Mama, you have to help me!”

He didn’t know which was worse-the fear of dying or the humiliation he felt hearing the squeak in his voice. He gritted his teeth and the frustration yanked at his belly and became something much more awful. He just didn’t want to die up here without getting the answers he was after. He didn’t want to die.

“You should’ve brought Lament,” she said. “The hound might’ve helped.”

Even the ghosts had to get in potshots when they could, say that they told you so.

“Son?”

“I’m here, Mama.”

“Son?”

“I’m still next to you.”

Tears dripped down her cheeks. He’d never seen his mother cry before. She held her hand out to him but he couldn’t touch her.

“I said you should listen to me, son.”

“I know. You were right.”

Her gaze skittered past, then fell on him once more. “The harlot. He lay with the harlot. I still had skin, the earth wasn’t cold, and he sanded his stone and cleaved to another.”

“Enough about Pa. Tell me how to get back to the road.”

“There’s bad will on the road.”

“Just guide me back to it.”

“You can’t return that way. You’ve come too far. You can’t go back. You’ve got to go on. To the harlot.”

Hellfire Christ, his eyes brimming with vengeance, whispered to Shad’s mother again.

She said, “I don’t want to tell him that.”

Oh, Jesus.

Hellfire Christ actually put his hand on Mama, gave her a little shove forward. She said, “No. Please, no.”

“What?” Shad asked.

“Behind you,” she told him. “There.”

Shad had been wrong. Hellfire Christ still knew how to smile. His teeth were tiny and sharp and his leer kept getting wider until you knew for sure he was insane. He must’ve given it to them that way when he was on the cross, spitting down on them, smiling in his scorn. In his last moments, Christ took a piss and really let them know what he thought.

Shad turned.

He didn’t see anything for a second because he was scanning too far ahead. He took a step and hit something at his feet.

Hart Wegg’s corpse had been laid out before him like an offering.

Without a scratch on him, and with his lips tugged into a scant grin.

Hart was twined around the rifle the same way a sleeping child might hold on to a beloved toy. Like the snakes that should have been wreathed around the figure of Hellfire Christ on the Gabriels’ cross.

“But he was your man,” Shad said to the mountains. “And Jerilyn was your woman, she loved you. They died smiling.” And then hissing, so much louder than any of the rattlers. “But not my sister! She wasn’t yours!”

He spun back and his mother was gone. Hellfire Christ stood a yard away, and then a foot, and then an inch until they were nose to nose, and this Messiah stared into Shad’s eyes. His rage was no different than what Shad felt himself. It had nothing to do with fighting for freedom or redemption or heaven’s love. You were simply crazy with hate.

They both reached for each other’s throat, and when he touched God, Shad woke in agony and retched black blood across his own chest.

SOMETIMES HE STOOD OUTSIDE THE MISERY AND watched his body lurch and crawl through the woods.

It had stopped raining. The rags around his belly were gummy with red mud and stuck with foliage and moss, which helped to seal the wound.

His sister’s hand appeared only once, on an incline as he began to flounder downhill. She waved him upward through the brush and he turned and followed and kept stumbling on.

Where’d the story go ? he thought, having trouble remembering how to find his next page. He might have already reached the end of it but was just too foolish to realize it. Like those people who sit in the movie theater watching the end credits roll and say to one another, Is that it? Is it over? No, can’t be. Looking around at the rest of the audience, checking the faces of strangers as they proceeded by. It is? That’s all? The movie’s over? Huh? Well… that sucked ass!

His tenacity proved more powerful than his dread. The fear that had overwhelmed him earlier had slowly been replaced by the understanding that death had already dipped down for him but had chosen not take him. He wasn’t finished yet with what he had to do.

Why had Hart Wegg been killed? Or Jerilyn? Or Megan? What purpose did it serve to keep Shad alive in the face of so much murder?

The woods thinned and shifted into a sparse cherry orchard. A note of memory chimed at the back of his mind and he began to move faster. Everywhere he touched the diseased bark of the spindly trees his hands came away covered with runny purple sap. The fruit was dying.