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By Root 429 0

The sweet-sick face, blank eyes, simpering lips, and arms spread wide in a gesture of embrace. The hips were broad as a woman’s, and the chest hinted at breasts-unless those were only folds in the cloak. Dear Lord of Golgotha, Abbot Zerchi breathed, is that all the rabble imagine You to be? He could with effort imagine the statue saying: “Suffer the little children to come unto me,” but he could not imagine it saying: “Depart from me into everlasting fire, accursed ones,” or flogging the money-changers out of the Temple. What question, he wondered, had they asked their subjects that conjured in the rabble-mind this composite face? It was only anonymously a christus. The legend on the pedestal said: COMFORT. But surely the Green Star must have seen the resemblance to the traditional pretty christus of poor artists. But they stuck it in the back of a truck with a red flag tied to its great toe, and the intended resemblance would be hard to prove.

The girl had one hand on the door handle; she was eying the car’s controls. Zerchi swiftly dialed FAST LANE. The car shot ahead again. She took her hand from the door.

“Lots of buzzards today,” he said quietly, glancing at the sky out the window.

The girl sat expressionless. He studied her face for a moment. “Are you in pain, daughter?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“Offer it to Heaven, child.”

She looked at him coldly. “You think it would please God?”

“If you offer it, yes.”

“I cannot understand a God who is pleased by my baby’s hurting!”

The priest winced. “No, no! It is not the pain that is pleasing to God, child. It is the soul’s endurance in faith and hope and love in spite of bodily afflictions that pleases Heaven. Pain is like negative temptation. God is not pleased by temptations that afflict the flesh; He is pleased when the soul rises above the temptation and says, ‘Go, Satan.’ It’s the same with pain, which is often a temptation to despair, anger, loss of faith-”

“Save your breath, Father. I’m not complaining. The baby is. But the baby doesn’t understand your sermon. She can hurt, though. She can hurt, but she can’t understand.”

What can I say to that? the priest wondered numbly. Tell her again that Man was given preternatural impassibility once, but threw it away in Eden? That the child was a cell of Adam, and therefore- It was true, but she had a sick baby, and she was sick herself, and she wouldn’t listen.

“Don’t do it, daughter. Just don’t do it.”

“I’ll think about it,” she said coldly.

“I had a cat once, when I was a boy,” the abbot murmured slowly. “He was a big gray tomcat with shoulders like a small bulldog and a head and neck to match, and that sort of slouchy insolence that makes some of them look like the Devil’s own. He was pure cat. Do you know cats?”

“A little.”

“Cat lovers don’t know cats. You can’t love all cats if you know cats, and the ones you can love if you know them are the ones the cat lovers don’t even like. Zeke was that kind of cat.”

“This has a moral, of course?” She was watching him suspiciously.

“Only that I killed him.”

“Stop. Whatever you’re about to say, stop.”

“A truck hit him, crushed his back legs. He dragged himself under the house. Once in a while he’d make a noise like a cat fight and thrash around a little, but mostly he just lay quietly and waited. “He ought to be destroyed,” they kept telling me. After a few hours he dragged himself from under the house. Crying for help. ‘He ought to be destroyed,’ they said. I wouldn’t let them do it. They said it was cruel to let him live. So finally I said I’d do it myself, if it had to be done. I got a gun and a shovel and took him out to the edge of the woods. I stretched him out on the ground while I dug a hole. Then I shot him through the head. It was a small-bore rifle. Zeke thrashed a couple of times, then got up and started dragging himself toward some bushes. I shot him again. It knocked him flat, so I thought he was dead, and put him in the hole. After a couple of shovels of dirt, Zeke got up and pulled himself out of the hole and started for the bushes again. I was crying