Young Writers Society

Immanuel’s Veins

~

On the edge of sleep, just after I dream about Mother, I dream about Father and his eyes.

Father has very dark eyes, and time has only made them darker.

They’re cold, hard, and flat, like the black stones in the bottom of the well in our garden. His eyes are too dark to see that the floors never get any cleaner, despite the colored water in the tin washtub. They are too dark to see that the wallpaper was never pasted, but is secured to the plaster with pins. They are too dark to see the empty spaces in the house where Mother used to be.

There are things, however, that Father’s eyes do see. He sees the hellfire shade of amber rum in the bottles on the kitchen table, and it comforts him. He sees the swollen purple tits of the town whores, and they arouse him. He sees the bruises his hands leave on my face and arms, and they delight him.

Mother tells me to save him.

Father has very dark eyes.

He pulls me out of bed by my hair when the morning is still gray with fog. Grimacing, I raise myself to my knees when he releases me. He always tears at my hair—I think it reminds him of Mother. It’s pale like hers was. He calls me a prick and I can feel his spittle on my neck. He demands me to give him money because he’s going to buy some milk in town. A lie. He hasn’t purchased a bottle of milk in three years. He asks for the last of my silver dollars I got from selling papers—just enough to pay a whore’s wage. The coins slip through my hesitant fingers and scatter at his feet. He plucks them up from the floor with his long, dirty fingers, like a bird scouring the ground for worms. A drink and a woman will keep him occupied for a few hours, surely. I just want him out and away. Away from me.

I pray he doesn’t bring the woman here. Father brings them over night all too often—and the walls are like paper. When I was a boy, I would lie awake and wrap myself in the cool bed sheets while covering my ears.

When Father leaves, I watch his tall darkness from the window and wait for him to vanish into the trees of the woodlot that borders our cottage. His coat is black like a crow. Regret crawls in my gut—I shouldn’t have given him the money. I should have suffered at his hands, but for his sake. Like Mother.

Only after I lose sight of him do I go to the well to fill the wide tin tub with water. Father will think I’ve been cleaning the floor, as he always does.

I drag the tub into the front room after it is full, the cool water spilling over the rim. I push the couch, chairs, and table aside and then I go to the fireplace. Three boards left of the hearthstones, Mother’s paint jars and brushes are hidden beneath the floor. Two of the nails are loose enough so that I can pry the wooden plank off of the foundation frame. The jars are tucked into the crawlspace.

I still remember when Mother first showed me where we could paint without Father seeing it. I remember that haunting sound, that crisp crumpling of the shale-colored wallpaper as she folded it away from the plaster with her shining hands. “Look here, Ewen,” she said to me, her lips bending in a frightened, lovely smile. She showed me her paintings behind the wallpaper, dozens of them—my favorite being the Blessed Virgin. Mother had painted her face white like a moon, her robes blue, and had put stars in her hair. She was holding the God-child, whose face was small and beaming in her arms. She told me she painted it shortly before I was born.

“My baby boy,” Mother said while touching a white hand to my little belly, “we only paint what is good on these walls.”

With a rare giddiness, I gather paint jars in my arms, as many as I can hold to my chest. Their clinking reminds me of Mother’s laughter—light and high like bells. Mother only had six colors of paint when we started: white, red, blue, green, yellow, and black. I collected more over the years, buying jars when Mother would send me out while Father slept drunk on the porch.

After I set the jars by the tub, I dip the brushes in the water to soften them and I press the traces of old paint out of the bristles. I try to recall the last thing I painted— its ghost, bleeding from the brushes, flavors the water.

It was the Virgin Mary’s Assumption. On the wall by the door leading into the kitchen. I portrayed the Virgin floating above the hills, her moon-colored hands glowing, her star-studded hair like a raven’s wing. I can still see her rising, even behind the wallpaper.

I painted it after Mother was taken.

The room—with the paper tacked up, the front door shut, the hearth cold—is varying stale hues of gray. I hate gray. But not as much as I hate black. Mother told me that black is the color of sin. When I unpin a sheet of the wallpaper, the color rushes out and I am greeted by faces painted by Mother—barrel-chested Simon Peter with his fishing net, Mary Magdalene in the garden with the tombs, and Agnes with long rolling locks covering her breasts. These faces are more familiar to me than my own—I’ve been told I have Mother’s thin nose and light eyes, Father’s square chin and tall brow.

Above the saints are words of an old church hymn that she had penned:

There is a fountain filled with blood,

Drawn from Immanuel’s veins;

And sinners plunged beneath that flood

Lose all their guilty stains.

I take my rosary with glass beads from my pocket and loop it around my neck. I pray that angels will send Mother to inspire me. I envision that she comes to me as she did in my dreams last night and as she has done hundreds of nights before. In my dreams, her sea-glass eyes are gleaming as she stands in the air, her hands holding mine, her silver hair covering me like a shroud. I hold up my hands and half-expect them to be filled, to be touched by Mother’s long, graceful fingers.

I find a blank stretch of wall. The space is circular, framed by Peter’s net and Mary’s tombs. One of those tombs had been the Lord’s before He rose from death. The death of God—how supremely hideous an idea. I remember when Mother took me to see an eastern cathedral dedicated to St. Michael to remove me briefly from Father’s fury. Upon its altar was a life-sized sculpture of the Crucifixion. I was struck by the sight, by the glorious, fearsome symmetry of God bound to that tree, His veins severed, His blood like red stars on His hands. I cried out to Him when I saw it, how great His suffering, how great my own. How could He still love the people who slew Him, love those hands that killed Him, love those tongues that mocked Him?

At the memory, my rosary feels as though it is a collar of fire around my neck.

I know what I want to paint. I go to my jars, find my red, blue, purple, white, brown, yellow, orange, and gold. With brushes, I lay sashes of each color on a plate—I blend them, test them, trust them—mixing the paints the way Mother taught me is a ceremonial as much a part of my religion as the Hail Mary. I touch the wall with the earthy, bloody red on my brush. In a familiar rhythm, I exchange brushes; large ones for basic shapes, smaller ones for detail. I rinse them in the tub, shuffle through the shades on the plate already ablaze with color. The picture, the mantle, grows slowly and confidently.

I recall the time I first asked Mother why we concealed our paintings behind the wallpaper. Father was not bitter when I was a child. In those green summers, I would follow his tall, warm shadow into the woods and meadows. He would call me his good boy and we would look for toads in the dirt while walking barefoot, we would stalk the grasses for deer, and he would lift me up onto his great shoulders to find magpies and cardinals in the trees. He showed me where to find wild cherries and we would pick and eat them until the ground was littered with pits. Even still, Mother hid our art. She breathed in my ear, “God scares your father. That’s why we hide it.” She told me that he wasn’t even ever baptized.

On my fifteenth birthday, Father told me he would take me to see the town’s brothel, said I was becoming a man and that the women there love young men. I told him that God doesn’t approve of prostitutes, and he beat me until my backside was blue and yellow with bruises. His hands were so sharp, my bones so brittle against his strength. “Fucking saint, eh?” He snarled in my ear when he bent down to spit in my face. “I tried to get that damned religion out of your mother and I’ll try to get it out of you.” I curled up on the floor and told myself it was because he was afraid, because he so dreaded conviction.

It may be sacrilegious, but I think St. John was wrong when he said that there is no fear in love. There was and is still a close marriage of love and fear in all the ways I am bound to God, Mother, and Father, and them to each other. In the lines of our hearts, love and fear surely border each other.

As I paint, I try to recollect illustrations of the human heart I’ve seen. The heart is shaped like a pear crowned with branches of arteries. I aim to keep the details sharp with purple shadows. My hands, wrists, and arms are spotted with bruises and I let the red paint cover them. I paint the briars around the heart, highlighting the braided thorns with strokes of gold and bronze. I wait to paint the fire. The fire will be last.

I don’t know when Mother and I lost him. There was never an immediate change from him being my beautiful, dark father sitting under the cherry trees to the terrible drinking man with dead eyes. Mother told me it was because Father was sick. “Does he have a fever?” I asked.

“No,” she said. “It’s a different kind of sickness. But we’ll take care of him. We’ll pray.”

It was that man in the woods, that good man named Saul, that Mother was trying to save. There is too much of the devil in him now, though. And I don’t know that evil can be undone.

Every night one spring, Mother would sneak out of her bed and come to me with a candle to read me Quo Vadis: A Narrative of the Time of Nero. I can still hear her voice, quiet, but stern as she read, “It is not enough to love the good. We must love the wicked also, since by love alone it is possible to expel evil from them.”

I was too young then to understand that she was trying to tell me something about Father, about myself. She was asking me to continue to love him despite his cruelty. Perhaps she was even begging herself—ravaged by his lust every night, shamed by his derision every morning, broken by his violence every afternoon—to keep loving him as well.

I lay down my brushes and reposition pieces of newspaper beneath my mural. I lick my lips and I scoop up gold, yellow, and white with my fingers. The fire. I throw it at the wall—it flows from my hands to the plaster and piles itself above the heart like hills and sweeps down its sides. I comb through the flames with my fingers as I would through Mother’s hair. It fills the empty space, touching the edge of the garden tombs and the hem of Peter’s net.

The Sacred Heart of Christ.

I step back, one step, and then two. Three steps.

The bright, thorny heart—the flames might just swell and consume the entire front room and burn away the gray wallpaper. My rosary is heavy and comforting around my neck as I pray: O most holy heart of Jesus, I offer you this poor heart of mine.

The Sacred Heart is the one heart that could love the very lance that pierced it. This was the object of compassion Mother clung to, even when her own heart was torn. With fire still on my hands, I fall to my knees, haunted by the image of Mother in the garden. On that black day, the drum in my own chest had stilled, had become a great, shadowy chasm.

I was thirteen years old.

There were crows, laughing, inky black crows. They watched us from the yard, from the bruised indigo skies, from the cherry trees whose roots were littered with rotten fruit. Their laughter crawled over my skin and tears carved lines into my face. I found Mother by the well. Her blouse had been torn open and her breasts were staring at me like two eyes, two eyes to replace the pair that had been wrenched from her skull. Her empty sockets were deep and murky, the color of vinegar. Her hair, white against the green grass, was a halo.

When he heard my cries, Father came out from the cottage, his eyes low and tight with a hangover. He told me it must have been the crows, but I knew he had gouged out Mother’s eyes with his own filth-darkened fingers. I could have screamed—it bubbled up at the back of my throat as bitter water colored with my hatred for him, by my devastation, by the fear that had won, and the love that had lost. But he slapped me across the head, threw a shovel at me, and asked that I not bury her too close to the house. His cold indifference left deeper welts than if he had lashed me with his belt a hundred times. I wanted to see Father burn for what he did to her. And I knew the devil was in the air with the crows, and the flutter of their wings answered me—perhaps he would burn. Someday.

I spent the rest of the evening digging the grave in the soft soil by a juniper tree. I prayed over her, touched her face with my blistered hands, and when the waters of grief climbed too high up in my throat, I vomited in the woods. My work was illuminated by candles and fireflies knotted in the grass. There were no stars.

When the grave was deep enough, I did my best to close Mother’s eyes. She was so heavy in my arms as I laid her in the ground. My bloody hands were burning and left red stains on the shovel and Mother’s white dress. My sobs filled the empty spaces in my bones, the spaces that hope had left behind when it fled. I could be with her still—I could step down into the hole, lie cold and still with her, and pull the dirt down onto us. I could leave Father behind.

I lowered myself into the grave—when I touched her, my legs crumpled beneath me. I clung to the sides of the pit and something told me that if I went all the way down, I would not get up. Arching over the sounds of the crows, from the house, I could hear voices of valor, louder than hell—the painted saints and martyrs standing behind the gray wallpaper. They told me everything would be all right. They told me to rise.

The first bit of dirt I pushed onto her fell black over her chest, into her open mouth, and inside the hollows of her eyes. I retched into the juniper’s roots and the crows laughed at me.

I hate the color black.

I stayed with her overnight after she was buried. I patted the earth, lying on the grave until my blisters were clotted with dirt. The biting stench of the soil seeped into my skin and clothes so that I would smell it for days after. I marked her grave in the morning with a stake and etched her name into the wood: Lucia. I carved my own name, Ewen, into the back of the post. I had buried half of myself with her.

Three years later, I can still hear the sound of black wings, still smell the dirt, still taste the agony, like metal, on the back of my tongue. Father’s crimes linger with me, crouch in the corners of the house, whisper in the cellar, and creep in the trees. But the saints, Mother, and God have not left me, so I have not left Father.

Father is sick. Mother wants me to save him.

The water in the tin tub is red with the Sacred Heart. My painting is still wet and the light from the windows makes it shimmer. I rinse off my hands—

The house shudders and the paint jars rattle together, but, rather than laughter, their clinking sounds like crying. The door quivers on the threshold and bursts open like a seam. Father’s hideous shadow spills into the room and pools on the floor. I guess by the violet bruise beneath his eye that he had been too rough with a whore and she fought back—it would explain his early return. I can feel the sharpness of his leer scourge the walls.

I didn’t have time to refasten the wallpaper.

His eyes meet those of Mary Magdalene, Peter, and Agnes. His dark eyes.

The square of his face turns gray and his words, colder than the lowermost pit of hell, claw their way up his thick throat and through his purple lips: “What the fuck is this?”

I can’t breathe—my lungs, heart, stomach, and throat are tangled in a single trembling mass. Christina the Astonishing could cast herself into furnaces, plunge herself into the deepest lakes, and thrust herself upon the sharpest briars and never be harmed. I would tear out my own heart if it meant I could have her iron skin now.

I open my mouth, but words don’t come.

“You made my house into an altar.”

I hold my hands to my chest, afraid that if I shiver any more, my bones will shatter. “I did these with Mother.” I’ve triggered something—the demons twitch behind the swell of Father’s chest, inside the vacant chamber where his heart was once hidden. He saunters toward me and the paintings and I step away just so that I am out of his reach. He swipes at the wall and his sharp fingers tear through the Sacred Heart. Strands of red paint run down the plaster to the floor.

He whirls around and faces me, his eyes like boiling pitch. “I told that bitch that God isn’t allowed in my house!” Father throws himself at the walls and rips away sheets of gray paper until they lie in shreds upon the floor and furniture. His vicious breathing shakes the walls and he pauses. I remember now that I am not alone.

Upon the walls, my saints watch Father with such ferocity that their stares seem to pin him to the floor. Among the many, there is Boniface felling the black pagan tree, ragged-faced Christopher and his glassy green river, Joan in her chainmail holding her standard, Clement tied to an anchor beneath the sea, beautiful Catherine and her breaking wheel, the fiery angel Raphael, John the Baptist with water in his hands, and, finally, Mother—Lucia—with new jade eyes, long gold-silver hair, and a crown of candles.

Mother’s painted gaze holds him the longest. Father cowers from the walls and finds me with his eyes. I can see something flicker behind all of his distortions, his sickness, something I haven’t seen in him in years. Conviction—no. Regret.

He lunges at me. I evade his hands, but they snatch my rosary. The chain splits apart and the glass beads scatter across the floor. I fall into a chair and its legs break beneath me.

Father turns around, his face a blur of shadows. I kick away the broken chair and claw myself away from him. His glare carves a line in the floorboards as it moves from me to the paint jars. Like a climbing wave, the realization of what he’s about to do swells in me. A scream, mangled with horror, surges from my lips as he stoops and seizes a jar. “Don’t!”

He wrenches the lid free and pours the contents out into his hands—glossy black paint spills through his fingers and falls around his feet in tendrils. He hurls fistfuls of it at the saints with tears in his eyes. It smothers Joan, Catherine, Agnes, Peter, John, and Paul in long streaks, falling upon them like obsidian rain. He slashes through the bodies of Mother’s martyrs, covers them until they’re nothing more than spectral smudges. I feel as though the devil is rending my own skin as I watch Father rake the walls with his fingers.

Father lifts his uncertain hands to the image of Mother. He cries and smears his face and neck with the paint as if to hide himself from her stare—to cover his sin. I rise to my feet. The saints watch me from their murals and encourage me.

My words fill the silver air of the room: “She suffered for you.” They are heavy with truth on his shoulders, heavy with the weight of all of Calvary. Father turns and staggers toward me, but he slips on rosary beads beneath his boot. He catches himself on the rim of the tin tub—his hands leave black prints on every surface he touches.

Mother, her voice backed by all of heaven, crowds my thoughts.

Save him. Save him from himself.

I throw myself onto his large shoulders and force his head into the tub. The red water rushes over us and it sweeps across the floorboards like a fan. My hands feel like lead as I fight against his strength, the ropes of muscle in his arms and back quivering. I sat on these shoulders when I was a boy—the rosary beads strewn about the room look like cherries.

I can hear him cry my name from beneath the water, the cords of his neck pulled taut, his voice stretched high and thin with desperate fear, my own with desperate, violent love. This is for your own good, Father. Don’t fight it. Mother’s with us. She’s going to get us through this. Tears are hot on my face and I can taste the coppery tang of anguish in my mouth. My fingers are in his hair and I push his head, neck, and shoulders deeper.

I wait until he stops struggling, until both he and the blood-colored waters become still. I bear him in my arms and lay him down on the floor where I watch him to see if he’s breathing. He is quiet and still. I can sense Mother—she is standing over me, over Father. I imagine that she covers him with her hair. She tells me that Father is with her now. Everything is all right.

The light from the windows falls upon Father, the water gathered around him, and the saints that encircle us. The light shows me that this man is the one I knew in those green summers. Dark, warm, and gentle.

But his eyes are pale like Mother’s now, flashing like stars.

His hands are white.