Incorruptible, a long story by E.O. Connors

I

Even at a distance of two miles, Harold White could detect the cemetery on the desert horizon. It was an empty patch of parched earth the size of a baseball diamond, surrounded by a shanty town of wagons and tents that encroached as closely as it dared to the grave of the would-be saint.

In his fifteen years investigating for the San Francisco Chronicle, he’d never met a miracle that wasn’t, at its heart, a two-part poison of chicanery and self-delusion. And he was here, in the scorched, ass-end of Mexico, to write twelve hundred words about it.

Harold hopped off the wagon at the limits of the settlement, already cleaning his spectacles, and smacking the dust from his linen pants and leather brogues. Nothing said chump like dirty shoes.

He circled a corral constructed of bleached deadwood containing a dozen listless donkeys twitching with flies. A huddle of men played cards around a barrel positioned in front of a large tent. Its flap opened and closed on skulking husbands “gone to check on the mules.” When a pox hit their privates in six months, Harold suspected it would be good for the local miracle business.

“Hey pal,” Harold said to a red-rimmed, vague-eyed drunk who’d folded his poker hand.

“Who’s in charge, and where do I find him?” The man pointed over his shoulder, past a pack of boys grappling for supremacy of a boulder, to the church behind the cemetery. The boys shoved and wrestled one another the way he and Jimmy used to do when they were kids on the boxes stacked outside Spangler’s Drug Store. Harold almost smiled until one of them toppled over and stomped a dirty foot on his shoe. Already disgruntled by the heat, dust, and a burgeoning headache, his mood soured.

Above the grunts and shouts of the boys, Harold caught the sound of a distant song, insubstantial but everywhere—agua de rosas, agua milagrosa. It carried across the encampment like the scent of flowers and sickness.

He followed the song, threading his way through hordes of humped backs, withered legs, cleft palettes, skin diseases, tumors. The encampment looked like the freak tent of an itinerant carnival with bodies of every distortion, and it smelled like a latrine. He shook a handkerchief free of his pocket and pressed it to his nose, congratulating himself on the forethought to douse it with lemon oil.

Positioned in a prime spot at the edge of the cemetery, Harold found the source of the song. An old peasant woman sat on a stool, face upturned to the merciless sun. Despite the heat, she wore a shawl and a coarsely woven red skirt that fell to the dirt where only her toes stuck out. A mosaic of goods was arrayed on the blanket before her: sugar candies shaped like flowers, rose-hip jelly, rose soaps, and candles. What held Harold’s eye, though, were slender bottles of water with rose petals suspended inside. The sight shot bile up his throat.

The old woman’s song faded as a mother and son paused at the edge of her blanket. Harold thought he might describe the mother’s pronounced cheekbones and chin as thorny, but decided the word was unsympathetic. He pulled out his pocket notebook and jotted down sharp and desperate instead. For the boy, he noted clubfoot.

The old woman leaned forward, age-speckled hands hovering over her wares, sliding back and forth as though casting a spell. A hand descended on one of the glass bottles as though drawn to it. She swirled it until the white rose petals flurried, and held it up to catch the light. “Blessed by Amaranta,” the old woman said. “For the boy.”

The young mother leaned closer, the promise of a cure temporarily tilting her center of balance. Harold recognized the posture. It was the singular anatomy of hope—a telekinetic shift of the body as it untethered from reason’s weight. He’d seen it at a medicine show on the outskirts of San Francisco. People leaning in to hear the satin-vested words sprinkled from the stage. They guzzled promises of a cure for lumbago, arthritis, women’s complaints, and tuberculosis, all for one dollar a bottle.

He’d seen it at a shrine to St. Peregrine, patron saint of cancer patients, on the saint’s feast day. Believers tipped forward over their tumors toward a bone chip in a silver and glass case that glinted with a seductive light in sunbeams shining through the clerestory.

And he’d seen it in the mothers of Lincoln, Missouri, when they had leaned into the window of Spangler’s Drug Store to spy bottles of cooktop medicine—a mixture of kerosene, turpentine, and sugar—that promised to save their families from the influenza. Harold swallowed back the bile.

The young mother smoothed a hand over her hair. She wore a faded brown skirt belted with rope. The hem had been torn off and wrapped around her son’s twisted, undersized foot. She withdrew some coins. Harold told himself that it wasn’t any of his business if this woman spent her last pesos on nonsense. And yet, he found himself stepping up to the blanket beside her and squinting at the tiny bottle.

“Cuanto cuesta?” he asked, watching the old peasant woman assess his net value by the cut of his suit and the gold spectacles held in place by the bump of a hooked nose.

“Ach,” she said, her mouth turning down in an expression that indicated the cost was a pittance to a man like him. “Five hundred pesos.”

Harold scoffed. No local person made that much money in a year, except perhaps the local priest.

“For you, two hundred,” she said. He shook his head and turned to go. “One hundred. Any less and you steal from Santa Amaranta.”

“She’s not a Santa yet,” Harold said. He held up a penny. “For the bottle. You can keep the water.”

The peasant’s expression hardened, and she spat in the sand at his feet. Harold didn’t care. His little demonstration had done the trick. Doubt crept into the young mother’s eyes. The elastic cost of the liquid had undermined its miraculous properties. She gathered her son under one arm and turned away.

Harold congratulated himself. He prevented a crime; preying on another’s desperation was unconscionable. He trailed after the mother and child as the church bell tolled for evening prayer, waiting for the woman to thank him. Finally, he called out, “Señora.” She looked over her shoulder at him. “Your money will be better spent on a doctor.”

Her eyes strayed to a simple white cross in the cemetery. “Tomorrow we will not need a doctor. The Santa—she will give us a miracle.” She stopped to search Harold’s face. He swallowed. Reflexively, he pulled off his glasses and wiped the dust off the lenses. The damned dust. It was everywhere. Settled into the neck of his collar, tiny grains grinding in the bends of his elbows and knees, between his toes, even in the creases of his eyelids. It made him tired, made him want to close his eyes and recover all the hours of sleep lost on the two-day journey by train and wagon from California.

“And you, Señor?” the woman continued. “You come to see our Amaranta? To see she is a saint?”

Harold replaced his specs. “No, Señora. I came to see for myself that she isn’t.”

II

In October of 1918, the month Harold turned twelve, the churches in Lincoln, Missouri, closed for business. So, too, the schools, shops, and theater. Except for the horse cart collecting the dead, the streets were empty. If you didn’t mind the unnatural silence, it felt like a holiday.

Harold cut through the rose hedges to Jimmy’s house and threw three pebbles at his bedroom window. It was their secret signal. A few moments later, Jimmy burst through the screen door, baseball glove in hand and toast clenched between his teeth. Even though he was a year younger than Harold, Jimmy was an inch taller and smaller on his left side than his right. He had a special lift in one shoe to make his legs the same length. There were more freckles on one side of his nose than the other, and only his right ear was cupped like a catcher’s mitt.

“Giacomo!” Mrs. Arlinetti called, passing a feather duster over the mirror in the entryway. There was a small shrine where candles flickered night and day. The flames glinted off a gilt crucifix and a bottle of miracle water from Mexico. In the center of all this was a framed black-and-white photograph of Jimmy’s grandfather in his coffin, which was too small for the body. The man’s shoulders shrugged forward to fit, rumpling the suit and tie. His eyes were only half closed. He looked like he’d been on a weekend bender. Harold didn’t like having the old man’s eyes on him, so he sidled out of view.

Jimmy dropped the toast into his glove. “I know, Mama. Stay outside and don’t get too close.” The screen door smacked closed.

All the way to the ball field, neighborhood kids fell in behind them like migrating geese. They counted the crepe rosettes placed on the doors overnight for the dead—gray for the elderly, white for adults, black for children. Every night, Harold reported the number to his mother. She said father was safer fighting the Kaiser in France than they were fighting the influenza in Missouri.

Harold couldn’t wait to run the bases like Ty Cobb, stealing home beneath everyone’s noses. Jimmy always wanted to play right field like the Babe because he was a lefty, too. When they arrived at the field beside the shuttered brick schoolhouse, they found the diamond had been dug up. A pit stretched from first base all the way to home plate. Two men with cloths tied around their necks to cover their noses unloaded the horse cart. One by one, they dropped the bodies into the pit, stacking them like Lincoln Logs.

The boys decided to play ball in the vacant lot behind Jimmy’s house instead.

Petey Wallace hit a grounder toward third, but the Daniels brothers returned the ball so fast that Petey had to slide into first. He sent up a cloud of dust. It drifted into the washing line where Mrs. Arlinetti’s sheets waved like flags of surrender. She shooed the boys away.

After that, the pack of them played capture-the-hat on Main Street. Jimmy tossed his cap on the pyramids of long pine boxes stacked between the undertaker’s house and the drug store. They broke into two teams, Harold’s vs. Jimmy’s, and retreated to opposite ends of the block. When Mr. Spangler left his guard post beside the boxes to cook up more medicine for his empty shelves, the boys invaded. Jimmy’s team crouched low and ran north up Main Street. Harold’s team ran south behind the buildings and hugged the alley wall. They overran the pine boxes at the same time. Harold nearly broke his foot when it caught in a crack, just to keep Jimmy from winning.

Around sunset, the two boys cut through the rose hedges to Jimmy’s house for dinner. Mrs. Arlinetti set plates of spaghetti down in front of them. She told them not to play on the pine boxes anymore because there were dead people inside. After a bite, Harold said he wasn’t hungry. Mrs. Arlinetti felt his forehead. She felt Jimmy’s too. “To bed, both of you.”

When Harold woke, it was dark. The kerosene lamp burned. Its flame released streams of light that bounced and sparkled around the ceiling and fell like snowflakes that burned his skin, even when he closed his eyes. When he woke again, it was bright out. He floated on the sunlight like a curled leaf on a current.

The next time he awoke, his mother was asleep in the armchair by his bed. Harold’s throat felt stuck together like flypaper. He was so thirsty. “Ma,” he croaked.

She didn’t respond. He swung his legs out of bed, feeling spinny as he nudged his mother’s knee. “Ma.” She still didn’t wake, and now Harold’s stomach threatened to heave because the doorway was tilting and his bed was rocking like a raft on a river, and he’d have to tell Jimmy to pull them ashore or they’d miss the game. He shook his mother’s shoulder, “Ma!” Her head lolled to one side. She slumped forward.

Harold stumbled across the yard for help, careless of the thorny hedge snagging skin and nightshirt. He burst into the gloom of Jimmy’s parlor. “Mrs. Arlinetti!”

Harold gripped the green velvet settee, trying to stop the rocking sensation, trying to listen for a response over his pounding heart. There was no sound, no movement, but the flickering candles beside the bottle of holy water, white rose petals lying at the bottom. Mrs. Arlinetti had called it a miracle in a bottle, a last hope for a worst fear. Harold moved deeper into the house, feeling the half-closed eyes of the dead man in the photograph follow him.

“Mrs. Arlinetti?” Harold stepped into the hallway to call again, but there was no need. At the end of the hall, the door to Jimmy’s bedroom was open. Mrs. Arlinetti was on her knees by Jimmy’s bed. Her hair was pulled high into a tight bun that looked like a dark halo over her bent head. One hand gripped Jimmy’s limp fingers, and the other worked down the beads of a rosary in concentrated silence.

“My mother…” Harold said. She didn’t look up. He took a hesitant step forward. She squeezed her eyes shut, kissed Jimmy’s forehead, and began to hum.

Harold felt the dead man’s gaze on him. Mrs. Arlinetti was so far away. He looked down at the photograph and then at the little bottle of rose water. He didn’t think Mrs. Arlinetti even believed in it, really. If she had, wouldn’t she have used it to save Mr. Arlinetti from his heart attack?

Harold picked up the bottle. It was cool, and he thought maybe it was magical. He clutched it to his chest and fled.

At his mother’s side, Harold swirled the bottle into a tempest and trickled the water past her parched lips. A confetti of delicate white petals filled her mouth. One petal remained, draped and translucent, on her lip. He left it, afraid to tear it with his fingers. He felt himself shaking all over, and lay down on the bed to watch his mother breathe.

Harold awoke to a loud bang on the first floor. Hasty footsteps trod the stairs. A dark figure rushed at him from the doorway.

“Where is it?” a woman’s voice demanded. Her hair hung like twisted vines. Harold stared at her, pinned to the bed by fear. “Give it to me!” Mrs. Arlinetti seized him by the shoulders and shook him once, twice, eyes filled with tears.

Mother groaned. Mrs. Arlinetti looked at her face for the first time, eyes fixing on the petal upon her lip. She picked the empty bottle up from the floor.

“You’ve killed him,” she whispered.

III

Amaranta’s grave was a simple stone cross, carved with her initials and the date of her death—one hundred years ago to the day. Hundreds of pilgrims pressed forward on three sides against the drooping rope that delineated the boundaries of the cemetery. Against the fourth side, a rose bush of titanic proportions formed a semicircle around the grave where the priest said Mass. A canopy of serrated leaves and thorns stretched heavenwards amid white blossoms. Except for the canyon wall beyond and the bell tower of the pueblo’s adobe church, nothing else matched its proportions. Harold wiped dust and pollen off his glasses and gave a little snort to drive the scent of roses from his nose before it made his headache and exhaustion any worse. He hated roses.

When Mass concluded, the priest plucked a single blossom from the rose bush. The crowd parted, forming two walls of people through which the priest walked toward the pueblo, making the sign of the cross with the flower and stopping to bless those with obvious afflictions. Just before the priest entered the church, Harold stopped him and introduced himself.

The priest responded, “I am Padre Juan Francisco. You are welcome here, Señor. But I wonder how an Americano is interested in our Amaranta?” He was a short man, and slight, with glossy black hair and black eyes. He wore a wooden cross around his neck over a simple brown robe that brushed the tops of bare feet.

“I’m always interested when someone claims a miracle, padre.”

“Amaranta has performed miracles.” He lifted the sprig of rose as though it were proof.

“You see what kind of land this is. Yet the roses appeared. No one planted them; no one cares for them.”

Harold witnessed the scorched wasteland on the trip from Mexico City. Sand and rock stretched for miles in all directions. There was no vegetation but whiskers of scrub brush. Except for the blue sky and the white-hot sun, the world existed in shades of brown. And yet, somehow, a shrub bursting with white blooms thrived alongside a parched riverbed.

“Isn’t it possible that someone cares for the roses in secret? To help the Señorita’s reputation a little?” Harold asked, smiling.

The priest gave him a small, indulgent smile in return. “Ahhh, a man of faith.”

“Believing can be fatal, padre. You have to watch who you trust.”

“Who better to trust than God?” the priest said. “Do you have a place to sleep tonight, Señor White?”

Harold shook his head. The town was much smaller than he had anticipated. The main plaza was no more than a dirt square with a crumbling stone fountain in the middle. There was exactly one building on each side of it: the church, school, general store, and livery. Harold had hoped for a bed in a rooming house at least.

“You may stay in the church tonight, if you wish. And join me for supper.”

Padre Juan Francisco showed Harold through the church to a plain white room just off the main sanctuary. Except for the metal crucifix hung at the head of the bed, it was furnished with the sparsity of a jail cell. Harold figured that the money from the local miracle trade must have been spent elsewhere.

The priest set a pitcher of water on a small table and opened a basket filled with tortillas and bowls of rice and beans. He gestured to Harold to take a seat and perched on the chair opposite him.

“Can I check some details for the article?” Harold asked, flipping open his notebook. Padre Juan nodded. “Amaranta Romero Vargas was born here in 1800, died in 1834? And she had some kind of vision as a child?”

“When Santa Amaranta was twelve, she was blessed with visitations from the Virgin. The Holy Mother instructed her to build a church.”

“She’s not a Santa yet, padre.”

The priest ignored him. “After her death, the rose bush grew. People in the village prayed to her.”

“When’s the first miracle supposed to have taken place?”

“The first miracle happened forty years ago when a boy jumped into the river with his friends and broke his back. He lay paralyzed until Amaranta helped him to walk again.”

Harold stopped writing. “Isn’t it possible that the boy recovered on his own? Flukes happen all the time.”

Padre Juan shook his head. “I tried every day for a year to move my toes. My family fed me, bathed me. Without my wages, we began to starve. One day, Mama carried me to Amaranta’s grave, and left me there. Maybe not to die, but for God to decide.” The priest’s eyes drifted toward the window. The sky had gone pink near the horizon and cast rectangles of light on the deep black of his irises.

“I lay in the sun. My thirst was so great that I prayed to God and Amaranta to take me. On the third night, it rained. I opened my mouth, and it filled with falling petals. In the morning, I stood and walked home.”

The priest fell silent. It felt to Harold not like the absence of sound, but the presence of something intangible that both surrounded the priest and exuded from him—a trust that Harold had thrown off a lifetime ago. Harold felt a spike of jealousy so violent that his vision blurred before it steadied into a throb at his temples.

The priest’s eyes refocused and studied Harold’s face. “And you, Señor. How long have you been a journalist?”

Harold rubbed the side of his head. His immediate thought was since Jimmy died. But he wasn’t there for confessions. “Fifteen years.”

When the priest finished eating–Harold had no appetite–he cleared the table and showed Harold to the rearmost pew of the church. “This one is the most comfortable. Or at least, it is where I catch the most people sleeping during Mass.” He chuckled to himself in the watery light of the sanctuary candles.

Harold thought of the petals in the old woman’s bottles. “Padre, I do this job to stop people from claiming cures they can’t deliver. From taking advantage of others.”

The priest nodded his head. “Noble work. But there is no story of that kind for you here.”

Harold disagreed. Here was exactly where the story started. Amaranta was the source of the so-called miraculous rose waters. People paid for it, saving it for a single, desperate day. If there was no saint, there was no miracle cure. “If Amaranta is exhumed tomorrow, and her body is corrupt, will she still be declared a saint?”

“It is unlikely. The church requires two miracles to elevate a person to sainthood. If her body has decayed, then it cannot be counted as her second miracle.”

“Then my story will make certain that people don’t waste any more hope on her.”

“A lonely job, thieving miracles.”

“There are no miracles, padre. Just good salesmen. And people too stubborn to see the truth.” He didn’t enjoy squashing people’s hope, but indulging in reckless fantasy, touting miracle cures–or believing in them–was its own kind of disease. One that Harold could cure.

Before the padre closed the sanctuary door, he paused. “Tomorrow, when Amaranta is incorrupt, you will see a miracle. Then what will you tell yourself?”

Harold found it impossible to sleep. He lit a cigarette and inhaled. His notebook lay on his chest, and he idly stroked the leather cover with a thumb. His eyes wandered to the paintings on the walls—Amaranta kneeling before the Virgin, Amaranta with hands and feet slashed with stigmata, and behind the altar, the rose bush exploding from floor to ceiling with green leaves and white petals. Jimmy’s mom would have loved the paintings, statues, and little candles. Mother would have hated it. She thought a church should be plain with just a cross in it. Mother always said Mrs. Arlinetti would pray to a spaghetti noodle if it curled just so on the plate. Then Pop would say you might as well pray to a spaghetti noodle, it had just as good a chance of hearing you as God did.

Outside, horses whinnied, people shouted and talked despite the hour, and still, the old woman sang her song—agua de rosas, agua milagrosa. In the corners of the church, statues of saints appeared to sway to her tune, their shadows shifting, shifting in the flickering light of devotion candles.

IV

Harold awoke when Padre Juan opened the church doors and walked to the cemetery to deliver a sunrise Mass before the exhumation. Hundreds of the faithful clustered outside the ropes. He worked his way to the front of the crowd, bone-weary from the heat and restless night’s sleep. Harold rubbed his thumb in small circles on the leather cover of the notebook in his pocket. The pages were filled with facts, dates, and observations as solid as the ground beneath his feet. It soothed him.

The sun rose over the canyon wall, pushing a line of light and shadow across the land until, at the end of Mass, it washed over Padre Juan himself. His robe rose from the dirt like a church column in a perfect cylinder to his shoulders. Light chiseled the features of his face like a stone capital. Behind him, the rose bush glowed a livid green, and Amaranta’s white headstone shone. As Harold withdrew the handkerchief and mopped his forehead against the God-awful heat, he had to admit that the time and location of the ceremony were a nice piece of theater.

Before the workmen set to digging, the Padre said a final prayer. “Amaranta we humbly beg forgiveness for disturbing your rest and ask that our efforts today will inspire incorruptible faith.” His eyes fell on Harold, who swiped at a bead of sweat rolling down his neck, and then the priest nodded to two men. They set their bare feet on top of shovels that looked as sharp as knife blades, and kicked hard into the dirt. Harold wondered how they could avoid slicing off a toe.

The digging was slow going despite the sandy soil. Dust roiled, curling across the dried riverbed. Harold massaged his temples, recalling the dug-up baseball diamond. By the end of the epidemic, there were a thousand people stacked in it in tidy rows. The ones on the bottom were encased in pine boxes, the ones on top in sheets. They were all in there—the mothers who fought for the last bottles of Spangler’s homemade tonic, half the kids from the baseball team, including Jimmy. Harold liked to think that Jimmy ended up under home plate. He wiped at the dust in his eyes. It was hot as Hell. His shirt stuck to his back. Nausea rippled through his stomach. His head throbbed hard enough to blur his vision.

When the men stood to their necks in the pit, one of them exclaimed, “Aquí!” A murmur broke through the crowd, and everyone pressed forward.

Padre Juan peered over the edge. At the bottom of the irregular oval hole, patches of canvas were visible in the dirt. Padre Juan Francisco put his nose up in the air like an animal scenting the wind. “Do you smell that, Señor White?” Recalling the odor of death that hung over Lincoln, Harold inhaled with trepidation. The scent of roses met his nose. He sneezed and felt as though his head might crack.

The priest smiled, “The smell of incorruptibility.”

Padre Juan ordered the men out of the pit. One of them stood beside Harold and spiked his shovel into the dirt between them. Padre Juan clambered down to kneel beside the shroud. With gentle hands, he swept it clean. He made the sign of the cross over himself and slid the shroud back until the length of Amaranta’s body was revealed.

The crowd pressed closer. Harold started to shiver.

He forced his gaze from the tips of his brogues, which warped before his eyes for a moment, to look first at Amaranta’s feet. They lay parted, slender and perfectly formed, one almond-shaped scar at the peak of each arch. A nun’s tunic rested unwrinkled at the ankle and draped up the length of her legs. The hands, with wounds matching the feet, were braided with a rosary of wooden beads. The flesh of the hands and feet was brown-gray in color, like a mummy in a museum. Harold took a breath. A knot in his chest loosened a fraction.

“Looks like Amaranta is a little worse for wear, padre.”

The priest’s face contorted in confusion. “Look at her face!”

Harold lifted his eyes. Framed by a white wimple, Amaranta’s flawless skin blushed with life. Long lashes curled upward from a plump cheek. Full, plum-colored lips curved as though they had just sighed in contentment.

“So you see, Señor White. Un milagro.” Padre Juan lifted his head and shouted, “Un milagro!” The cemetery erupted with shouts of joy, everyone pressing in a step further to get a look.

Harold’s fingers and toes began to tingle, and for a moment, dark motes passed before his eyes. He took off his glasses, feeling the grit lining his nostrils and throat.

“Now wait a minute, padre,” he croaked. “Her face is real good. I-I’ll give you that. But what about the hands and feet? There’s a little problem there.”

“I see no problem.”

“You’re a glass-half-full kind of guy,” Harold said.

“I could say the same to you.”

“How do you figure?” Harold asked, his voice rising in agitation. “Did she go into the ground with a beautiful face and mummified feet?”

Padre Juan scowled. “After one hundred years, she should be dust and bones. Even if her face looked like her hands and feet, she would still be a miracle.”

All at once, Harold felt the collar of his shirt tighten around his neck. He couldn’t breathe. The sun blazed. Light crashed down with the force of a waterfall and he had the disorienting sensation that he might drown in it. He brought his notebook up to shade his eyes.

“What if,” Harold cleared his throat, “what if she’s preserved by the desert? Like the mummies in Egypt.”

Padre Juan stood, rigid. “Enough. You are the one who must prove that we do not see what we see.”

Harold realized at that moment that the priest, the whole pitiful shanty town, thought he was the one who couldn’t see straight. It made him feel tipsy, like he had placed a foot on a step that turned out not to be there. His vision doubled. He gripped his notebook. It was just water.

A hot breeze showered white petals, tumbling and flipping, onto Amaranta’s body. One landed on the brown leather of Harold’s shoe. His head began to spin, and for one awful moment, he thought he might pitch forward into the grave. His hand shot out to steady himself, and closed around the shovel. It seemed the only thing firmly rooted to the ground, entrenched. He felt his only chance to hang on, to not get swept away in the flash flood of nonsensical opinion around him was to pin himself to the earth somehow.

“I’ll prove it,” Harold rasped, the sound barely above a whisper. He looked around at the press of faces revolving around him. They couldn’t change what was really there. “I’ll prove it to all of you!”

Harold dropped his notebook and wrenched the shovel free from the ground. It had a reassuring weight, a heartening solidity in his hands. He held it aloft like the priest with the host. The shovel hovered in the air, blade glinting. Then Harold thrust it with all his might through the top of his shoe. With little difficulty, it sliced through the thin layer of leather, through two toes, and stuck in the sole.

For several seconds, there was no sound.

Nothing moved but the blood pooling in the gash. The shoe filled, overflowed, and spilled blood into the dirt in a fine stream. Padre Juan gasped. He scrambled to staunch the wound with his robe.

“Why have you done this?” the priest demanded.

Harold looked down. The ground rocked. He sat hard in the dirt, landing on the notebook’s corner. It lodged like a thorn. The wall of people surrounding him stretched up into the sky and blocked out the sun. The light lanced through his head, fractured into pieces, and blinked out.

Harold awoke in Padre Juan’s bed. He was aware of a painful, persistent throb in his foot, but didn’t remember why it hurt or how he got there. On a chair beside the bed, his hat was stacked on his shoes. He felt a flicker of recognition. Something about his shoes.

“You’re awake.” Padre Juan entered the small chamber carrying a pitcher of water. “How do you feel?”

“Better,” Harold said. “I must have come down with some kind of flu.”

The priest set the pitcher down on the table and retrieved the shallow bowl beside it.

“That was no flu.” He offered the bowl to Harold. A small pebble rolled around in it like an unopened rosebud. Harold picked it up, wondering for a moment why it was soft before the memory flooded back to him.

“Why have you done this?” Padre Juan said, more gently than the day before.

Harold pinched the pinky toe of his foot. He felt none of the nerves or panic that had beset him the day before. He was a reasonable, methodical man, and this had been the only way to prove himself right about Amaranta.

“The next time we dig her up, you’ll see.” Harold held the little bud out to the priest. “Put this next to her face. If my toe rots and she doesn’t, then you have your miracle. If my toe remains the same,” he said, “then there is no miracle.”

The priest’s face contorted in disgust. “How does that prove anything?”

“If Amaranta is preserved by God, then her face will stay the same because she is miraculous, but my toe will rot like every other human body does. If Amaranta is preserved by nature, then my toe will be preserved, too. Her flesh and mine will react the same way.”

“Why would I allow such a thing? It would be a desecration.”

“To see the truth, no matter the outcome.”

“Everyone here, except you, has seen her for what she is—a miracle,” Padre Juan said.

Harold closed his eyes and shook his head, his mind far away on a night when he cried out for help and no one answered. “It was only water,” he whispered.

The priest clenched his jaw, blue veins curling up his temples. He tilted his head toward the sky and gazed through the window. Some part of Harold hoped that the priest would refuse. It would prove Harold right today and not drag it on any longer. He could put the whole story to bed. Instead, the priest whispered, “You must tell me why.”

Harold pictured Jimmy’s house, a glass bottle of petals in water, watched over by a dead man. He suddenly felt angry. “Because miracles mean that God plays favorites, Padre. If he only saves one, hasn’t he murdered the others?”

Padre Juan’s face relaxed. “God commands me to save men’s souls. Yours, I think, needs more help than the rest.” Padre Juan Francisco extended his hand, palm up. “For this reason only will I do it.”

V

The San Francisco Chronicle ran a small special interest story about the Venerable Sister Amaranta, a nun in Mexico who would likely be canonized in the coming years. Harold’s mother had cut out the article and pasted it in a scrapbook ten pages after the brittle yellow obituary of the Arlinetti boy. The article stated that Sister Amaranta’s body would be disinterred and placed on view when construction of a shrine was completed in five years’ time.

It took ten.

The shrine gleamed with white marble imported from Carrara. It stood just beyond the boundary of the old cemetery. Large windows overlooked the enormous rose bush and desiccated river. After her final disinterment, the windows would provide pilgrims with an unobstructed view of Amaranta’s holy remains, which were to be placed in a glass casket. A small shop would sell commemorative items, including small bottles of blessed water with a single rose petal inside.

In the graveyard between the rose bush and the new shrine, Harold watched as Padre Juan knelt in the freshly dug pit and swept Amaranta’s shroud clean for the final time. Except for wavy hair turned white, the priest looked very much the same. He still wore a brown robe but no shoes, every tendon in his feet articulated like the roots of a tree trunk.

In the years since he’d last visited Mexico, Harold had gone to sleep every night with the image of Amaranta’s face in his mind. He had imagined, and re-imagined, the moment when Padre Juan would pull his toe from the wimple, whole and fresh. And sometimes, in dreams as vivid as a hallucination, Padre Juan would put Harold’s toe back on Harold’s foot, and then Jimmy and Harold would run through the rose hedge to the baseball diamond together. As sweet as the dream was, Harold always woke up with a splitting headache that blurred his vision.

Harold felt the cold crawl of fear through his guts as Padre Juan worked the shroud free. He extended a hand to brush a fine layer of silt from Amaranta’s flawless skin with such tenderness that Harold looked away.

“Let’s see it, Padre,” he said.

The priest pushed up his sleeve and slid his finger into the space between the wimple and the young woman’s face. He pulled out a small round object. The toe was a brown-gray nugget, a dried-up piece of twig. Even as Padre Juan cupped it protectively, tiny flecks of skin dropped off and blew away.

“My son,” Padre Juan said with great tenderness, “I know what this means for you. I’m sorry.”

Harold took it in his palm, suddenly feeling a hundred pounds heavier. His hand shook. The little bud jittered and nearly dropped in the dirt. Thoughts hurtled through his aching head like wild pitches. He swung at them to save his head from splitting apart. The holy water was miraculous. Crack! Foul. It would have saved Jimmy’s life. Crack! Foul. Harold was responsible for killing his best friend. Crack!

The migraine struck like a lightning bolt through his left eye. Harold’s vision doubled, tripled. He squeezed his eyes shut, then blinked and blinked and shook his head until a thought rattled loose: his mind had only played a trick on him. Yes. He leaned toward that hope and felt a great weight unknot itself and lift away.

Harold opened his eyes. A halo of light shimmered from his open palm. He couldn’t look at it straight on, but askance, the form recoalesced in his periphery. His toe looked as alive as it had been when it was connected to his foot, down to the tiny white crescent of toenail.

The sense of deliverance nearly knocked him off his feet. “I knew it,” Harold whispered. “It was only water.” Tears of relief spilled over as he thought of Jimmy buried beneath home plate. Bottle or no bottle, he would have ended up there. Harold felt light enough to float.

He repositioned his glasses. “No need to be sorry, Padre. Amaranta and me, we’re just the same.”//

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

---

About the Author

Books N Pieces Magazine

Administrator

Since 2017, Books ‘N Pieces Magazine has featured short stories, interviews w bestselling and new authors, poetry, art and more. FREE to read.

Visit Website View All Posts