Ancient Church

By David Wooten

Keystone Nests, Patty Sauce

SSSSSSsssssss….QAAAaaaaahhhh…. SSSSSSsssssss….QAAAaaaaahhhh….

Oh, God.

He wasn’t sure how he did it, but he somehow dragged his eyelids away from his cheekbones far enough to see the two blurry peaks of his feet at the end of the bed, then focused his eyes on the oxygen tube laced around his head which was most likely responsible for his current state of being.

Non-death, that is.

The mere effort of focusing on the tube was enough to make him want to lose consciousness again, and he probably would have, had the intern with the clipboard not said anything.

“Paulos Diotrephes?” he asked his clipboard, apparently reluctant to look his patient in the eye.

“Paul,” he said weakly. “It’s Paul. Where the hell am I?”

“Chilton Memorial. Barely.”

This kid’s not known for his bedside subtlety, Paul thought.

Two questions scrambled immediately, screaming, to the front of his mind. This was quite a feat, since they had to compete with the green stoplights, flashing brights, and the banshee wail of rubber on asphalt that still invaded his immediate sensory memory. He was only assuming, of course, that he would actually be able to give voice to these questions in the first place due to his current condition, but Clipboard did the honors regardless. “I should spare you the effort of asking, Mr. Diotrephes, and inform you of some…um…”

“Where are they?”

“They ah, si—ah…” he began, then consulted his clipboard for further prompting, “Mr. Diotrephes, your wife and son did not survive. I’m sorry.” It was the kind of news one normally would have had to take sitting down. Since he already had that beat, and dramatic movement was for the most part out of the question, he simply echoed the ventilator and sighed deeply, sinking into the pillow. He didn’t care if he ever moved again. He closed his eyes and slept.

He awoke again, the same hiss in the background. He now existed, he knew, in that place where you knew on some level that the worst had come upon you, but the full weight of that revelation was stuck cycling in some mental filter somewhere. He was free, then, to explore the evening’s events with dispassion until he pitched headlong into the anguish that he would carry for the rest of his life.

Godparents. Mike and Janie had invited them over for dinner and a Blockbuster night. “It’s been too long,” Janie had said to Paul, “and I want to play with that godson of mine”—referring to Nicky, his and Tasha’s son. It was good to catch up—Paul actually had missed the ritual cigar smoke on the back patio with Mike, a man old enough to be his father, while the women folk caught up on the latest development in Nicky’s seven months of life. While they cooed over how Nicky was already an old pro at scooting, Mike and Paul went over the usual: The Devils weren’t going anywhere this year; neither were the Nets; Father Demetrios needs our help setting up for festival again; Paul’s boss kept riding his ass about deadlines; Mike kept riding his subordinates’ asses about the same…

Goodbyes. Hugs, kisses, lets-do-this-agains. Car. Highway. Exit. Red. Stop. Wait. Green.

The car crept forward, and Tasha’s sleepy head jerked away from Paul towards her window. A gasp, fingertips suddenly pressed hard against the window, her frightened shout fogging up the glass: “Oh, PAULIE! NuUH—!”

His thoughts were yanked from before him by a middle-aged man who cleared his throat in the doorway. Paul opened his eyes and gave the stranger a sidelong glance. Wranglers, belly lapped over the belt—Paul, for some reason, had to remember his father at that moment, who always mentioned Dunlap disease (“Your belly ‘done lapped’ over yer belt!”)—plaid flannel, ball cap that said “My Other Car Is a Bass Boat!” and about two days worth of stubble.

“Doctor said you was awake,” he said. “Been waitin’ a bit for you t’come ‘round. Wadn’t sure y’would for a while,” he drawled in a thick, west Texas accent.

“Uh…thanks,” Paul said uncertainly. “Who are you?”

“Name’s Norman Felder. I was there when you and yer family were t-boned. I’m a trucker, Mr. Dye-oh-tr…Dee-oh…”

“Paul. Paul’s fine.”

“Paul. Well, I got outta my truck to come see if I could be of any help an’, well, I figgered I oughta stick around and see if you made it. Plus, thought I oughta tell you what I saw when I pulled you from the car. I’m still not sure what to make of it myself. Never seen the like of it.”

“O…kay,” Paul said, then bristled. “Wait! You said ‘pulled me.’ You pulled me out of my car instead of my wife and son?!”

“Yessir, but…oh, hell, ain’t no easy way t’say this…the kid who hit y’all—it was a joyride, by the way; a fifteen-year old punk the cops arrested soon as they got there—well, when he hit y’all h—he hit on the passenger side. Hard. I’d say he had to a’been goin’ around ninety when he hit y’all’s car. Your boy…” He trailed off, then knew he had to finish the sentence. “He hit the boy directly. Won’t go into details, sir, but it was plain that wadn’t anything anybody coulda done for him.”

Paul clenched his teeth, squeezed his eyes shut, and pressed the back of his head against the pillow. A small moan escaped from him in the form of a stifled hum, then choked into a quick little hitch of a sob. Paul flashed through the last seven months. Birth. Sleepless nights. Baptism at St. Thomas, the same Church Paul had been baptized in when he was a baby. First grin, first giggle. Sitting up. First Christmas with Tasha’s family in Pennsylvania. Tasha.

Tasha. He stopped there and looked up at Norman, who seemed to guess his thought.

“Your wife, actually, was alive when I got there, and you were out cold,” he said. “You didn’t look good, buddy, but then…well, that’s what I can’t make out, exactly. What she did next, I mean.”

Paul was afraid to ask. “What do you mean, ‘what she did next’?”

Norman shifted his considerable weight uneasily. “She was sayin’, well, somethin’. An’ fast. Sounded like another language. Y’all know any other languages?”

“I’m Greek. My wife’s grandparents were Russian, but she doesn’t…” he caught himself and felt as if he were going to vomit the next word, “didn’t know any.” Tasha had actually learned both a little “Church Greek” from the services and “kitchen Greek” from the little old yia yias at St. Thomas, which she attended far more than he did nowadays. Paul asked, “What’d she say? Did you make out any of it?”

“Well it wasn’t just what she was sayin’ but rather what she did to you while she was singin’ that song, and especially after she, well—” Norman trailed off.

“Singing?” Paul couldn’t imagine.

“Yeah. She had blood on her fingers and made a cross on your forehead with it, over and over. Man, she just wouldn’t stop, and she kept singin’ somethin’ ‘bout ‘Keystone Nests’ and ‘Patty Sauce,’ and other stuff b’sides that, and she just kept tracin’ that cross on you while folks tried to pry open her door to get her out.”

Paul stared absentmindedly at the privacy curtain as it waved slightly in the air conditioning. Keystone Nests…Patty Sauce. Keystone Nests…Patty Sauce.

“But the weirdest thing was, just before the paramedics got there, she just…stopped, put her head on your shoulder and her hand on your chest. And when she did that”— Norman folded his arms and pursed his lips— “and I just want you t’know I ain’t no ‘Hallelujah, Thank y’Jesus’ type, right?—when she did that, she looked at you in a way I ain’t never seen nobody look at nobody, man. She wadn’t scared, she wadn’t cryin’, but she just looked at you calmly like she—“ he was really fumbling with the words now—“like maybe she saw somethin’ nobody else could see, somethin’ maybe even she ain’t never seen before when she looked at you. Then she just said, real low and peaceful-like, ‘We’ll rise, baby. We’ll all rise.’ Then she just shut her eyes, smiled, and that was it.”

Paul had his eyebrows hunched down hard as he stared at this hick, this stranger who was telling him about the last, brave moments of his wife’s life. “She actually said, ‘We’ll rise?” Paul asked. He knew Tasha was more serious about God and faith than he was but something this cryptic and mysterious was odd even for her.

“Swear t’God,” Norman replied, “and like I say, I ain’t all that keen on talkin’ to Him anyways. Right at that moment, though, man, you started to wake up.” They came and got y’all, guess she didn’t make the trip up here…”

Paul was only half-listening now, as the full realization of what his wife had been doing for him had begun to sink in. Keystone Nests…Patty Sauce…

“Christos anesti ek nekron, thanato thanaton patisas…” Paul started slowly. Norman’s eyes got wide.

“Yeah! That’s it! That’s what she was singin’! That Greek?”

Paul sighed, his eyes wide and his brow furrowed. “Yeah.”

“Well, if you don’t mind my askin’, what’s that mean?”

“It’s an Easter song we sing in church. The part you heard is”— Paul swallowed hard—“‘Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death…’” He couldn’t finish. He couldn’t decide if he was just too tired physically or overwhelmed emotionally. It had been Tasha’s favorite hymn from church; she always hummed it to Nicky as she rocked him to sleep and, whenever he heard it, Paul would join in humming it as well. He shut his eyes. “Thank you,” he said weakly to Norman. “Thank you for telling me this.”

“Sure thing, buddy. Glad I could help out. Looks like whatever life she had rubbed off on you; looked to me like that mighta been what she wanted. Damn horrible thing in all, really.” He glanced around for a moment, then shifted towards the door. “Well, guess I’ll be goin’.”

Norman paused at the door and waited for a response from Paul, who gave none. He left quietly, and Paul imagined the black-haired beauty that was his wife praying a hymn over him moments before she herself passed on into the next life. They would pray for her in the coming weeks at St. Thomas, yet there she was using her last breaths to tell him through a chubby, Texas truck driver that maybe she wasn’t gone, that maybe their son’s torn and crushed body wasn’t the end. He lay there in bed, and the tears, one after another, rolled. He wept, yet strangely it was not from a despairing sadness. He felt, of course, the absence of his wife and child already clawing at his mind, his emotions, even without seeing the bodies first, as well as the anger at the injustice of it all at the hands of some stupid kid, but present also was that hymn she had prayed, cycling through his mind and tinting all other emotions:

Christos anesti ek nekron, thanato thanaton patisas, ke tis en tis mnimasin, zoin charisamenos.

Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death, and upon those in the tombs, bestowing life.

He didn’t have the slightest idea whether he owed his current chance at life to his wife’s prayer, to her declaration that he would rise, that they would all three rise one day. He thought drowsily that he might just ask Father Demetrios tomorrow when he broke the news to him. Maybe he’d know what was behind his wife’s last words.

The night nurses on duty that evening commented on the young accident victim who was humming a tune in his sleep.

– David Wooten, © 2006