Lois put on the blue blouse, and then she took it off.
“Nowadays that one hugs your belly too tight,” Raymond said. And Lois knew, in a certain way at least, that he was right. There was a bit more to hug than this time last year. So, after two more time-consuming tries and fails, they settled on her green blouse – with a big candy cane pin affixed to the left collar. She insisted on the pin and stood her ground on the issue when Raymond pushed back. It was almost Christmas, after all. She would have her pin.
Then Lois and Raymond debated themselves through three changes of skirts. The first he said was too frumpy. He said it accented something he called the “camel haunched bags” of her hips. Lois felt Raymond was misusing some terminology here, but she wasn’t completely sure what the correct terms were.
The second skirt was too short. Despite Lois’ longing for a goldilocks moment, the third skirt was not just right, but Raymond said it would do. While she’d been stuffing herself into the third skirt, he’d glanced at his watch and noticed they were running late.
Raymond tapped his foot and said in a pointed but jokey way, not too mean mind you, just a forceful way with a touch of bile mixed in, “Fuck, Lois. You’ve done us again like you always do. We’re late. For the Christmas concert. Fuck Lois. Late.”
Raymond had not been concerned about timing and tardiness when Lois had tried to move him along after dinner, but had her entreaties fail because Raymond found his second cigar too powerful a force to resist. He’d not said anything about potential lateness when he watched his alma mater all the way into halftime and lamented the sacrifice of the second half he was making for the good of the church. But now it was…Fuck. Lois. Late.
So they left the house and drove to the church campus. The car was warm and quiet. Raymond and Lois didn’t talk. She could hear the tires crunch random patches of ice and snow.
More than once, Lois ventured a hand up the window and wondered at how miraculously cold the glass felt from the December wind magnified by the speed of the car. It was something she had done since childhood, and it had always amazed her although she knew not why.
That simple action, that light touch, had always sparked dangerous and adventurous imaginings within her. And it did again this night. What would it be like to be on the outside of the car right now, grabbing its side like some action movie star? Could she stand the pain? How long could she hang on? If she let go, what would the moments between release and pavement, the moments of air and free flight, feel like?
It was silent in the car, but even with just a fraction of her mind oriented toward Raymond, Lois knew his silence did not indicate peace. He fidgeted and checked his watch. He gassed the engine way too fast and then, remembering the conditions, he slowed down dramatically. Over and over he ran through this sequence, never learning from the previous cycle.
And, not unlike the crunch of winter beneath the tires, Raymond’s beneath-the-breath mutterings became a soundtrack to their drive. “Fuck. Lois. Late. Fuck. Lois. Late.”
They reached their church. The parking lot was remarkably full, especially for a Saturday evening event, so they were stuck in the back of the lot. It was their congregation’s annual Christmas Choir Concert. The lights of the sanctuary were blazing through colored glass and beckoning them inside. Snow was falling, just a little, fat flakes taking their time to land during what had suddenly become a windless night.
Lois let herself drink in the rich image of the flakes, light, and architecture as she and Raymond walked toward the front doors. He tugged at her elbow urging her forward. Once, twice, and a third time, her high heels lost purchase on the slick footing of the parking lot. Each time Raymond simultaneously steadied her and pulled her forward.
“Lois, can’t you walk a straight line?” he said.
“But you wanted these shoes, sweetie,” she answered with eyes still fixed on the beautiful image before her.
“Well, hell, sure. But you shouldn’t own a shoe you can’t walk in. I mean, damn.”
They reached the doors and entered the worship hall. How many times had they done this over the years? She tried to do the math in her head as she shook the snow from her shoulders. 32 years times about 47 Sundays a year. Add in another 8 or so special services per year. So, that was another 8 times 32 added to the 32 times 47. Lois couldn’t get to the sum in her head and quickly gave up. It was a bunch.
The music was in full swing. Lois and Raymond were indeed late. The pews were full – a mild surprise to Lois, but the Lord has a penchant for surprises, or at least she’d always believed that this was the case. Here was a smidge of evidence.
As they walked up the center aisle to their customary seats, the choir was mashing through Handel’s Hallelujah Chorus, the apex and cliché of all such Christmas concerts.
Then Lois rammed into Raymond’s back. He’d stopped suddenly beside the seats which were, by unspoken rules of tradition and etiquette, theirs – the twelfth pew back from the front, on the right side of the center aisle, the two butt-spots on the cushion closest to the aisle. They always sat there. Everyone knew that this was so.
Lois and Raymond had been members for over thirty years. Half of those years they had given a portion of their hard-won money to the church. And two of those years they had actually tithed – 10% of their income given to their congregation. That 10% had been taken from their after-tax income at Raymond’s insisting. He’d said God understood. You couldn’t control your taxes. He said God understood this and adjusted for it.
But none of that mattered right now. What mattered in the present moment was that there was a man in their seats. To be exact, a man sat in the pew spot right next to the aisle, the place where Raymond sat himself Sunday after Sunday. In Lois’ spot was the man’s backpack – a ghastly, frayed, duct-taped thing with a beaten, Mexican market blanket poking out beyond its half-zipped top.
The man matched his luggage. Lois had been taught to say that this type of man was “from the streets”. And yet here he was, not on the streets, but in their seats. His eyes were crammed shut and he was waving his head from side-to-side like some caricature of Ray Charles or Stevie Wonder. As she watched him, she wondered if he, like them, was blind?
With narrow eyes Lois looked from the choir singing to the mangy invader to the choir and back to this dirty man completely immersed and enveloped in the music of her church’s – and she’d never admit this to anyone – thoroughly unimpressive choir. It all struck Lois as curious. Beyond curious, it was odd. Was he blind, insane, or both? She was in a state of mild shock and awe.
Raymond was reacting differently. He stared at the man as if trying to melt him with some newly-discovered, death-ray power unleashed through his eyes. But the man was oblivious. He’d been carried somewhere else. His eyes were closed, but you could see the sublime transportation in his lips. They were curled up, smiling, pulled back from teeth which, Lois couldn’t help but notice, were arranged into an intense and unsightly overbite.
At this point Raymond started to tap his right foot in aggravation and people in the surrounding pews started to notice the scene even though the choir bellowed on, their musical offering undisturbed and unbroken. It was clear that Raymond didn’t mind the attention of his fellow members. He gestured to them with the upturned, rolling outward flip of the palms that has meant for generations: “Friends, tell me, ‘Who the fuck does this guy think he is?’”
Then Raymond touched the man. He didn’t strike him. No, nothing like that. Raymond tapped him on the left shoulder three times – ping, ping, ping. But it didn’t matter. The choral hallelujahs kept flowing and the dirty man kept drinking them in and letting them bear him away.
With his failure, Raymond started to shake, just a little. He began to vibrate with swelling rage. Lois watched it all in slow-motion, as did the ten people closest to the drama. Raymond’s face and neck took on a twinge of crimson and then, with each added moment of the stranger’s bliss and the ongoing exile of Raymond’s ass from its rightful spot, Raymond became more and more red.
And then Raymond reached a point where he very clearly reminded Lois of one of those thermometer-shaped signs that help an organization’s members keep track of their progress on a fundraising goal. Their church had had one two years ago when it was time to raise funds to freshen up the fellowship hall. You know the kind. Each week the red rises a little higher toward the top of the gauge and then, at last, when the monetary goal is surmounted, the thermometer blows.
That was her husband. His red was moving quickly, inexorably toward his top, toward bursting. And when it did, when he did, the outcome would not be a mission trip to Haiti for the youth group or a new storage shed for the Boy Scouts. It would be an eruption, a paroxysm of rage.
Still the dirty man swayed. Still her husband reddened and went rigid. And then, as if sensing something was about to happen, the stranger came to and looked to his left, looked at Raymond and at her and back to Raymond.
It was in that very moment Raymond died. His heart exploded. He grabbed his chest, arched his back, retched forward, shrieked, and fell to the ground right there in the center aisle of the worship sanctuary. And then a wave of chaos broke over them all.
Some people ducked and others got up to run. The choir shut down instantaneously. A few of its members started down the steps toward them. They were people for whom shock elicits the sacred desire to care. But overall the situation was chaos, as anyone would rightfully expect it to be.
Though alive, Lois was as frozen as her husband. She was frozen by the unreality of it all. She had just run into Raymond’s sturdy back and now he was collapsed and curled up before her. She could feel the weight of his inert body upon the tops of her shoes.
Powered by some instinct, her eyes focused not on her husband but on the stranger. Moving quickly, the man in from the street leaned over her husband’s body, practically went nose to nose with him, and blew a great, breathy whisper into his face. What the man said, Lois could not decipher.
Then the stranger rose up and moved clear of Raymond’s body just as the first responders from the choir reached Raymond and the crowd started to press in. Everyone except Lois was focused on Raymond. The man was forgotten. He moved through the crowd unmolested and made his way for the doors. Then he was gone.
Raymond’s body shook. Lois felt him seize and shake through the feet on which his body had rested in its first moments of death. It wasn’t the people touching him, jostling him, trying to coax him back to the land of the living that shook him. Lois knew this intuitively. Raymond’s body shook as if someone had employed upon him an invisible set of those paddles she’d seen TV doctors wield so often.
Then Raymond sucked in a breath so great it seemed as if he were trying to inhale them all, church building included. On the equally grand exhale, Raymond provided a dazed and primal commentary for all to hear. “FFFFUUUUUCCCCKKKKKK.,” he voiced atop his first breath after returning from whatever other dimension he’d so briefly just visited. But now he lived, again. This much was clear.
In that moment, it all clicked for Lois. It all fell into place, great tumblers of meaning all finding their respective slots, unlocking a door, and revealing something awesome and unpleasant. In that moment she understood, she understood everything, and she was not having it. Any of it.
And so it was with rebellion and anger that Lois wriggled her feet free of her husband and hustled to the exit door. She didn’t look back. She hit the parking lot, kicked off her heels, and, playing a hunch, turned to the right and started to run.
Sprinting, gasping, her stocking feet screaming and possibly bleeding, Lois finally saw him, the stranger, the man of the street, up ahead of her walking beside the road in the deep night. Somewhere Lois discovered another gear in her ancient engine of a body and continued after him faster still.
Then it was like everything slowed down in the most frustrating of ways. It was like a dream where you’re swimming for a shore that, no matter how many strokes you make, never comes any closer than the glimmering sliver on the horizon you first spied in your moment of desperation.
The stranger’s steps seemed broader than the circumference of all time and space. Lois could not gain on him. But then the unthinkable happened. He stopped, turned, and faced her.
She reached him. Lois grabbed the shabby edges of his frayed coat. In an odd random moment, Lois realized that he was wearing a “Members Only” jacket. Even she knew that was lame. The stranger wore a jacket so far out of style as to almost be in style once more. What would Raymond think of it? She shook her head. Focus. Lois. Focus. Focus.
Having a hold of him so he couldn’t leave, Lois allowed herself to heave from her running. A little spittle from her mouth founds its way onto his right sleeve. The man saw it but did not seem to mind. Nor did his body language indicate he was in much of a hurry.
She looked at him. And he looked at her. “I know who you are,” Lois said. “And, I know it not because of why you think I know it. I know who you are because of your head-waving, eye-shutted love for our choir’s singing. And our choir sucks. They SUCK! Only You could love their singing.”
The Stranger just continued to look at her. Having come so far, Lois knew she couldn’t chicken out now. She continued on and tried not to think of the magnitude of what she was doing. She tried to keep her voice under control. She did not want to cower. Nor did she want to wail.
She was angry, but how much anger could she get away with given that she talking to whom she was talking to?
“I can’t go back there. I can’t go back to him. I can’t. I won’t. You fixed his heart, that piece of red, beating flab in the middle of his chest. It had beat for 62 years before it stopped dead in the middle of that shitty concert, and now you went and breathed on him. And, his damn heart’ll beat for another 62 years. I bet it. I do.
“But, I don’t bet you fixed his heart, the one that beats at the center of his will, his words, his ice cold touches, and his dead stares.
“I can’t go back…Well, hell, I could. Sure I could.
“After all, you’ve gone to worse places, haven’t you? Far worse places, like that cross you went to, that place you died, that place I remember every time I touch the silver charm ‘round my neck. I could go back. I could. You’ve gone worse places. That I know.
“But, I won’t go back. I love you, I worship you. I follow you. But, I ain’t you. I…Ain’t…You. You gotta take me with you.”
With her last words launched and her defiant vigor spent, Lois slumped to the ground and sat on the shoulder of the road looking up into his eyes. He looked down at her.
Then he reached out his right hand in her direction. His hand was close, but it wasn’t there to help her up. It wasn’t close enough for her to grab unless she started to scramble to her feet on her own.
He held his right hand out toward her with its palm up and facing toward the sky. With swift movements he curled and extended, curled and extended four of his fingers twice. Bam! Bam! The motion was a voiceless “Come! Now!”
Lois lifted herself and took his hand.
Raymond died at the age of 107 exactly 45 years to the day of what his congregation came to call (but never to his face) “The Hallelujah Chorus Incident”. He died in a nursing home. No one was with him when he breathed his last.
When the nurse found his body, Raymond was holding a photo of his long-departed Lois. Everyone knew the story. On that snowy and terrible December night decades before, Lois’ insane confusion and grief over Raymond’s apparent death had driven her into the night never to be seen again.
It was a story lodged deep in the lore of the church and in the fibers of Raymond’s grieving heart. As far as he could tell, there was only a single silver lining to the tragedy. And it was this one little slice of good news Raymond had repeated to himself over and over again through the years.
Lois’ wild and desperate actions bore clear testimony to the fact that Raymond had always been a good husband, indeed a great one, a man able to call forth such a reaction in his woman.
“Nowadays that one hugs your belly too tight,” Raymond said. And Lois knew, in a certain way at least, that he was right. There was a bit more to hug than this time last year. So, after two more time-consuming tries and fails, they settled on her green blouse – with a big candy cane pin affixed to the left collar. She insisted on the pin and stood her ground on the issue when Raymond pushed back. It was almost Christmas, after all. She would have her pin.
Then Lois and Raymond debated themselves through three changes of skirts. The first he said was too frumpy. He said it accented something he called the “camel haunched bags” of her hips. Lois felt Raymond was misusing some terminology here, but she wasn’t completely sure what the correct terms were.
The second skirt was too short. Despite Lois’ longing for a goldilocks moment, the third skirt was not just right, but Raymond said it would do. While she’d been stuffing herself into the third skirt, he’d glanced at his watch and noticed they were running late.
Raymond tapped his foot and said in a pointed but jokey way, not too mean mind you, just a forceful way with a touch of bile mixed in, “Fuck, Lois. You’ve done us again like you always do. We’re late. For the Christmas concert. Fuck Lois. Late.”
Raymond had not been concerned about timing and tardiness when Lois had tried to move him along after dinner, but had her entreaties fail because Raymond found his second cigar too powerful a force to resist. He’d not said anything about potential lateness when he watched his alma mater all the way into halftime and lamented the sacrifice of the second half he was making for the good of the church. But now it was…Fuck. Lois. Late.
So they left the house and drove to the church campus. The car was warm and quiet. Raymond and Lois didn’t talk. She could hear the tires crunch random patches of ice and snow.
More than once, Lois ventured a hand up the window and wondered at how miraculously cold the glass felt from the December wind magnified by the speed of the car. It was something she had done since childhood, and it had always amazed her although she knew not why.
That simple action, that light touch, had always sparked dangerous and adventurous imaginings within her. And it did again this night. What would it be like to be on the outside of the car right now, grabbing its side like some action movie star? Could she stand the pain? How long could she hang on? If she let go, what would the moments between release and pavement, the moments of air and free flight, feel like?
It was silent in the car, but even with just a fraction of her mind oriented toward Raymond, Lois knew his silence did not indicate peace. He fidgeted and checked his watch. He gassed the engine way too fast and then, remembering the conditions, he slowed down dramatically. Over and over he ran through this sequence, never learning from the previous cycle.
And, not unlike the crunch of winter beneath the tires, Raymond’s beneath-the-breath mutterings became a soundtrack to their drive. “Fuck. Lois. Late. Fuck. Lois. Late.”
They reached their church. The parking lot was remarkably full, especially for a Saturday evening event, so they were stuck in the back of the lot. It was their congregation’s annual Christmas Choir Concert. The lights of the sanctuary were blazing through colored glass and beckoning them inside. Snow was falling, just a little, fat flakes taking their time to land during what had suddenly become a windless night.
Lois let herself drink in the rich image of the flakes, light, and architecture as she and Raymond walked toward the front doors. He tugged at her elbow urging her forward. Once, twice, and a third time, her high heels lost purchase on the slick footing of the parking lot. Each time Raymond simultaneously steadied her and pulled her forward.
“Lois, can’t you walk a straight line?” he said.
“But you wanted these shoes, sweetie,” she answered with eyes still fixed on the beautiful image before her.
“Well, hell, sure. But you shouldn’t own a shoe you can’t walk in. I mean, damn.”
They reached the doors and entered the worship hall. How many times had they done this over the years? She tried to do the math in her head as she shook the snow from her shoulders. 32 years times about 47 Sundays a year. Add in another 8 or so special services per year. So, that was another 8 times 32 added to the 32 times 47. Lois couldn’t get to the sum in her head and quickly gave up. It was a bunch.
The music was in full swing. Lois and Raymond were indeed late. The pews were full – a mild surprise to Lois, but the Lord has a penchant for surprises, or at least she’d always believed that this was the case. Here was a smidge of evidence.
As they walked up the center aisle to their customary seats, the choir was mashing through Handel’s Hallelujah Chorus, the apex and cliché of all such Christmas concerts.
Then Lois rammed into Raymond’s back. He’d stopped suddenly beside the seats which were, by unspoken rules of tradition and etiquette, theirs – the twelfth pew back from the front, on the right side of the center aisle, the two butt-spots on the cushion closest to the aisle. They always sat there. Everyone knew that this was so.
Lois and Raymond had been members for over thirty years. Half of those years they had given a portion of their hard-won money to the church. And two of those years they had actually tithed – 10% of their income given to their congregation. That 10% had been taken from their after-tax income at Raymond’s insisting. He’d said God understood. You couldn’t control your taxes. He said God understood this and adjusted for it.
But none of that mattered right now. What mattered in the present moment was that there was a man in their seats. To be exact, a man sat in the pew spot right next to the aisle, the place where Raymond sat himself Sunday after Sunday. In Lois’ spot was the man’s backpack – a ghastly, frayed, duct-taped thing with a beaten, Mexican market blanket poking out beyond its half-zipped top.
The man matched his luggage. Lois had been taught to say that this type of man was “from the streets”. And yet here he was, not on the streets, but in their seats. His eyes were crammed shut and he was waving his head from side-to-side like some caricature of Ray Charles or Stevie Wonder. As she watched him, she wondered if he, like them, was blind?
With narrow eyes Lois looked from the choir singing to the mangy invader to the choir and back to this dirty man completely immersed and enveloped in the music of her church’s – and she’d never admit this to anyone – thoroughly unimpressive choir. It all struck Lois as curious. Beyond curious, it was odd. Was he blind, insane, or both? She was in a state of mild shock and awe.
Raymond was reacting differently. He stared at the man as if trying to melt him with some newly-discovered, death-ray power unleashed through his eyes. But the man was oblivious. He’d been carried somewhere else. His eyes were closed, but you could see the sublime transportation in his lips. They were curled up, smiling, pulled back from teeth which, Lois couldn’t help but notice, were arranged into an intense and unsightly overbite.
At this point Raymond started to tap his right foot in aggravation and people in the surrounding pews started to notice the scene even though the choir bellowed on, their musical offering undisturbed and unbroken. It was clear that Raymond didn’t mind the attention of his fellow members. He gestured to them with the upturned, rolling outward flip of the palms that has meant for generations: “Friends, tell me, ‘Who the fuck does this guy think he is?’”
Then Raymond touched the man. He didn’t strike him. No, nothing like that. Raymond tapped him on the left shoulder three times – ping, ping, ping. But it didn’t matter. The choral hallelujahs kept flowing and the dirty man kept drinking them in and letting them bear him away.
With his failure, Raymond started to shake, just a little. He began to vibrate with swelling rage. Lois watched it all in slow-motion, as did the ten people closest to the drama. Raymond’s face and neck took on a twinge of crimson and then, with each added moment of the stranger’s bliss and the ongoing exile of Raymond’s ass from its rightful spot, Raymond became more and more red.
And then Raymond reached a point where he very clearly reminded Lois of one of those thermometer-shaped signs that help an organization’s members keep track of their progress on a fundraising goal. Their church had had one two years ago when it was time to raise funds to freshen up the fellowship hall. You know the kind. Each week the red rises a little higher toward the top of the gauge and then, at last, when the monetary goal is surmounted, the thermometer blows.
That was her husband. His red was moving quickly, inexorably toward his top, toward bursting. And when it did, when he did, the outcome would not be a mission trip to Haiti for the youth group or a new storage shed for the Boy Scouts. It would be an eruption, a paroxysm of rage.
Still the dirty man swayed. Still her husband reddened and went rigid. And then, as if sensing something was about to happen, the stranger came to and looked to his left, looked at Raymond and at her and back to Raymond.
It was in that very moment Raymond died. His heart exploded. He grabbed his chest, arched his back, retched forward, shrieked, and fell to the ground right there in the center aisle of the worship sanctuary. And then a wave of chaos broke over them all.
Some people ducked and others got up to run. The choir shut down instantaneously. A few of its members started down the steps toward them. They were people for whom shock elicits the sacred desire to care. But overall the situation was chaos, as anyone would rightfully expect it to be.
Though alive, Lois was as frozen as her husband. She was frozen by the unreality of it all. She had just run into Raymond’s sturdy back and now he was collapsed and curled up before her. She could feel the weight of his inert body upon the tops of her shoes.
Powered by some instinct, her eyes focused not on her husband but on the stranger. Moving quickly, the man in from the street leaned over her husband’s body, practically went nose to nose with him, and blew a great, breathy whisper into his face. What the man said, Lois could not decipher.
Then the stranger rose up and moved clear of Raymond’s body just as the first responders from the choir reached Raymond and the crowd started to press in. Everyone except Lois was focused on Raymond. The man was forgotten. He moved through the crowd unmolested and made his way for the doors. Then he was gone.
Raymond’s body shook. Lois felt him seize and shake through the feet on which his body had rested in its first moments of death. It wasn’t the people touching him, jostling him, trying to coax him back to the land of the living that shook him. Lois knew this intuitively. Raymond’s body shook as if someone had employed upon him an invisible set of those paddles she’d seen TV doctors wield so often.
Then Raymond sucked in a breath so great it seemed as if he were trying to inhale them all, church building included. On the equally grand exhale, Raymond provided a dazed and primal commentary for all to hear. “FFFFUUUUUCCCCKKKKKK.,” he voiced atop his first breath after returning from whatever other dimension he’d so briefly just visited. But now he lived, again. This much was clear.
In that moment, it all clicked for Lois. It all fell into place, great tumblers of meaning all finding their respective slots, unlocking a door, and revealing something awesome and unpleasant. In that moment she understood, she understood everything, and she was not having it. Any of it.
And so it was with rebellion and anger that Lois wriggled her feet free of her husband and hustled to the exit door. She didn’t look back. She hit the parking lot, kicked off her heels, and, playing a hunch, turned to the right and started to run.
Sprinting, gasping, her stocking feet screaming and possibly bleeding, Lois finally saw him, the stranger, the man of the street, up ahead of her walking beside the road in the deep night. Somewhere Lois discovered another gear in her ancient engine of a body and continued after him faster still.
Then it was like everything slowed down in the most frustrating of ways. It was like a dream where you’re swimming for a shore that, no matter how many strokes you make, never comes any closer than the glimmering sliver on the horizon you first spied in your moment of desperation.
The stranger’s steps seemed broader than the circumference of all time and space. Lois could not gain on him. But then the unthinkable happened. He stopped, turned, and faced her.
She reached him. Lois grabbed the shabby edges of his frayed coat. In an odd random moment, Lois realized that he was wearing a “Members Only” jacket. Even she knew that was lame. The stranger wore a jacket so far out of style as to almost be in style once more. What would Raymond think of it? She shook her head. Focus. Lois. Focus. Focus.
Having a hold of him so he couldn’t leave, Lois allowed herself to heave from her running. A little spittle from her mouth founds its way onto his right sleeve. The man saw it but did not seem to mind. Nor did his body language indicate he was in much of a hurry.
She looked at him. And he looked at her. “I know who you are,” Lois said. “And, I know it not because of why you think I know it. I know who you are because of your head-waving, eye-shutted love for our choir’s singing. And our choir sucks. They SUCK! Only You could love their singing.”
The Stranger just continued to look at her. Having come so far, Lois knew she couldn’t chicken out now. She continued on and tried not to think of the magnitude of what she was doing. She tried to keep her voice under control. She did not want to cower. Nor did she want to wail.
She was angry, but how much anger could she get away with given that she talking to whom she was talking to?
“I can’t go back there. I can’t go back to him. I can’t. I won’t. You fixed his heart, that piece of red, beating flab in the middle of his chest. It had beat for 62 years before it stopped dead in the middle of that shitty concert, and now you went and breathed on him. And, his damn heart’ll beat for another 62 years. I bet it. I do.
“But, I don’t bet you fixed his heart, the one that beats at the center of his will, his words, his ice cold touches, and his dead stares.
“I can’t go back…Well, hell, I could. Sure I could.
“After all, you’ve gone to worse places, haven’t you? Far worse places, like that cross you went to, that place you died, that place I remember every time I touch the silver charm ‘round my neck. I could go back. I could. You’ve gone worse places. That I know.
“But, I won’t go back. I love you, I worship you. I follow you. But, I ain’t you. I…Ain’t…You. You gotta take me with you.”
With her last words launched and her defiant vigor spent, Lois slumped to the ground and sat on the shoulder of the road looking up into his eyes. He looked down at her.
Then he reached out his right hand in her direction. His hand was close, but it wasn’t there to help her up. It wasn’t close enough for her to grab unless she started to scramble to her feet on her own.
He held his right hand out toward her with its palm up and facing toward the sky. With swift movements he curled and extended, curled and extended four of his fingers twice. Bam! Bam! The motion was a voiceless “Come! Now!”
Lois lifted herself and took his hand.
Raymond died at the age of 107 exactly 45 years to the day of what his congregation came to call (but never to his face) “The Hallelujah Chorus Incident”. He died in a nursing home. No one was with him when he breathed his last.
When the nurse found his body, Raymond was holding a photo of his long-departed Lois. Everyone knew the story. On that snowy and terrible December night decades before, Lois’ insane confusion and grief over Raymond’s apparent death had driven her into the night never to be seen again.
It was a story lodged deep in the lore of the church and in the fibers of Raymond’s grieving heart. As far as he could tell, there was only a single silver lining to the tragedy. And it was this one little slice of good news Raymond had repeated to himself over and over again through the years.
Lois’ wild and desperate actions bore clear testimony to the fact that Raymond had always been a good husband, indeed a great one, a man able to call forth such a reaction in his woman.
RSS Feed