Come to the Edge_ A Memoir - Christina Haag [101]
I raised my head, following his gaze, and, squinting, tried to make out the buzzards from the hawk. He explained the differences as he always did. Head, belly, tail, wingspan. I’m not sure whether I could see them or not, or whether I just liked hearing him tell me. It was something that made me love him fiercely, this conviction of his that it was of utmost importance that I, as a member of the human race, know the difference between a red-tailed hawk and a turkey buzzard, and he wouldn’t quit until I did.
As I scanned the sky, he told me that hawks bond beyond mating, some for life, and that when they court, the males make steep dives around the females until their talons lock and they spiral together to the ground.
“That’s awful—you’re making it up!” I cried.
Pleased by my response, he kept on.
“But you, Puppy, the way you will tell red-tailed hawks is by the way they shriek when they are hungry for rabbitsandsnakesandsquirrels, just like when you are hungry and you shriek and squeal.”
“I do not. Stop it, John!”
“Oh, but you are right now.”
“You’re tickling me!” I yelled, and ran to the car. We were still laughing when we pulled up to the general store for sandwiches. We both knew, when he said I was hungry, that it was he who needed to eat.
Passing over Bixby Bridge with Big Sur fading behind us, I turned and touched his cheek. “King,” I said to him, “let’s come back next year.”
The afternoon before I was to leave the Hermitage, I met with Father Daniel for spiritual direction. I walked to the chapel fingering a jade Buddha on a red string that my brother had brought back from China. He had given it to me the day before the biopsy, and now it hung, day and night, around my neck. The doors of the church were heavy. I opened them and met a round man in a white robe who looked like he had lived. He led me to a small room near the font of holy water, and when he quoted Jung and Robert Johnson, I liked him at once. For more than an hour, I told him about my life. I told him everything I could remember, the last failed love affair, guilts I had forgotten, anything that weighed on me. I even spoke of the pain I’d felt years before when I’d found out that John had gotten married on Cumberland. It surprised me. So much time had passed, but an inkling of it was there, deep within me.
I told him how afraid I was. I said that now, when I needed it most, I could not pray. It was as though my knees would not bend. As I spoke, I realized I was ashamed I had cancer.
“Pray from where you are,” he said.
“But I am so broken,” I whispered back. The scar across my breast was in my heart as well.
“God loves you just as you are. Pray from where you are.”
“But I don’t know if I still believe. I doubt so much—I don’t know why I’m here. I don’t know if I’m still a Catholic. There’s so much I question.”
He smiled, leaning back in his chair, and folded his hands over his belly. “I imagine you are because you question.”
“But, Father … I don’t believe in sin.”
He waited for me to go on, and when I didn’t, he said, “Sin, in the Greek, means missing the mark. An archery term. That’s all it is. That which has kept you from God.”
He asked if I wanted to receive the sacrament of reconciliation, what I knew as confession. And although I’d sworn to myself that morning that I would not confess anything because I didn’t believe in it; although it had been more than thirty years since I’d said my Hail Marys in the dark and leaned against the confessional grate in the cold hall outside the Sacred Heart chapel, trying to make out the priest’s face through the crisscross of metal (wondering if he was the handsome one or the old one); although I hated the words sinner, penance, unworthy with the ire of a rebel, I said yes. And when I did, words fell and unburdened my heart of secrets I hadn’t known were