Borucas

“Between here and the altarpiece is the usher and then the nun. Past them...that’s all you can see from here,” the boy said.

“You’ve never been inside?” The look of the cathedral itself answered his sister’s question with its upward thrust from the plaza that thrilled the blessed but threatened the uninitiated.

The boy nodded his head. “Yeah, I have.” He opened his clenched fist. The sliver of wood, a wicked looking splinter, stuck to his sweaty palm.

“I can smell the ocean and clouds and fire in it,” he said, examining the splinter in his hand. “You’ll see why when you see the altarpiece.”

The ocean is two blocks from the cathedral, the girl thought, and here in Beneficio we line the shore with factories that produce only smoke. That is what you smell, she thought, but she merely nodded to acknowledge the presence of the sacred relic.

“He’s moving,” the boy said.

From the shelter of the thorny shrub under which the children lay, they could see across the scorched courtyard to the usher manning the entrance to the cathedral. They saw him move, but only in a long, slow circle. His reconnaissance of his existence complete, the usher realigned himself on an invisible pedestal, waiting for the end of the day to be retired, stacked up in a closet with the other old ushers like extra chairs.

Perhaps if they were respectable children, if the boy wore something made from a black and stiff fabric and his sister was adorned in a pattern of stitched doilies, they would withstand the usher’s scrutiny as they crossed the courtyard to enter the cathedral. Perhaps if they were someone else’s children the usher would bow to her and remark at the young man’s height. Perhaps they had better wait for another vigorous pass of the usher’s handkerchief to wipe his eyesight away along with his sweat. That would be more likely.

“Does he ever leave?” The girl asked.

The usher swabbed his forehead and pressed his thumb and forefinger into his eyes. He paid the urchins that he had spotted lurking beneath the shrubs no mind. His thoughts were far from them. Mrs. Usher was at home roasting an animal that sweat its fat into the fire. Would she, the husher, as he had named her for his benefit alone, grant him an appendage, even a breast, or would he watch again the choice meat packaged into a rag for a potluck honoring lord knows which enfeebled priest? He knew the answer to that question; it was better to take his place in the closet with the other ushers and find empathy, if not breasts. He scrubbed his face with his beleaguered handkerchief a few more times to wipe away the look of disappointment that had tended to settle on his features over the past decades.

The usher lowered the handkerchief to see that the children at the edge of the courtyard were gone. At least I am saved from dealing with those needy kids, he thought. He did not take the time just yet to turn around to see that brother and sister had darted past him while he had wiped the sweat from his face.

The chilly exhale blowing from the cathedral’s nave halted the progress of brother and sister toward the altarpiece. Or perhaps it was the knot of pilgrims pressed together in the church’s entry that stopped them. The nun cinched the knot at the door. The children bumped up against the backs of the pilgrims gathered to listen to the nun’s speech.

The girl looked wistfully at her brother standing next to her in the back of the group of pilgrims. In this heat, it would not be so bad to learn about the construction of the cathedral’s thick walls instead of tracing the heritage of her brother’s sacred relic. But her brother did not stop studying the nun to return her look.

The nun’s nose was not so big, but the lack of a lower jaw elongated her overbite. She resembled a church-dwelling insect that slid its hardened mandible along the marble floor, snuffling for coins. Between her nose and the cuff of her garment just below her knees was a brown mass of material that emitted no impression of shape or womanly form. Her legs were tubes of dense pantyhose packed with chorizo.

“Good afternoon, Sister Clara,” remarked a passing priest.

And with that greeting from the priest as the catalyst, Sister Clara metamorphosed for all the pilgrims to witness with curiosity. The insectival sister fluttered into a gaudy display of smiles and fidgeting fingers that lingered too long on the flesh hidden in the recesses below her jaw.

“Let’s go,” the girl said, looking behind them at the slowly rotating usher. But the boy was struck by this emergence of ephemeral womanhood from decades of dormancy. He had underestimated the obstacle to reaching the altarpiece that Sister Clara presented; this was a being far more supernatural than the cuckolded usher.

Sister Clara turned on the group; she had resumed the pupae stage.

“The monsignor, only he knowing the will of the Holy Spirit to impart to us the simpler of Christ’s teachings, has prepared a testimony to the cathedral’s place in god’s logic on this laminated card that I will hand to each of you in turn for reflection.”

The first pilgrim summarily passed the card to the next visitor. Sister Clara’s beak twitched to scent the progress of the card.

“You cannot comprehend the card without reflection.”

The girl looked back; the usher took an angled step in his ritual rotation. A few more steps and he would be looking straight at them where they stood exposed at the back of the group of pilgrims. The church history arrived in her brother’s hands. He folded it back and forth. The usher succumbed to the inevitability of another step. The girl pleaded with her brother silently. What’s the plan?

At that moment, the boy played his best card: an order form for the aforementioned soviet bloc leggings with the boxes checked for Sister Clara’s dimensions. He pocketed the nun’s laminated card and sent the order form back to Sister Clara through the hands of the other pilgrims.

When it reached her, Sister Clara did not immediately recognize the paper in her hand. The pilgrims, who had all scanned the order form on its way to the nun, waited for the cue, for recognition to kindle in Sister Clara’s eyes. They waited, waited, and there it was: terror in her eyes like the warm glow of sunset. The nun looked up from the order form to see the gazes of the pilgrims drop to inspect her panty-hosed limbs. Twelve sets of eyelids dipped like a wave crashing. The onrush of attention that Sister Clara had spurned for a lifetime invited her to collapse to the floor to unconsciously inspect the cathedral’s marble, and taste it with a lolling tongue. Before she could freely lick the ground though, she was caught by the usher who had charged from his pedestal to catch her.

The two faithful church servants clutched at each other on the floor. What is this insurrection of passion Sister Clara thought? For decades they had stood several short steps away from each other, forced apart by propriety, but that day the barrier was rent and they collapsed inward upon each other with the power of dying stars. The customary few seconds afforded to a rescuer to hold his charge turned into many seconds. More than one photo was snapped of the usher holding Sister Clara across his knees; the Pieta that graces churches around the world was reversed that day on the marble floor of the Cathedral of Beneficio.

Through that scene of rapture, the children walked with impunity past the fallen defenses of the church. The secrets of the cathedral, so closely guarded by its now prostrate keepers, unfolded for them. The crucified Christ watched with wooden eyes their progress toward the cathedral’s center from his place over the altar.

Despite his stare, with Sister Clara and the usher incapacitated by each other’s embrace, the children felt no need to creep along the aisles. Instead, brother and sister advanced without caution, without regard to the staring eyes of Jesus, toward a mural that lit the altar with its fiery pigment. In the scene, a burning sailboat streaked like a meteor away from earth. The two-masted fireball was trailed by a line of white smoke spouting from the placid sea bordered by a fecund jungle below. A smiling peasant manned the tiller.

Without discussion, compelled by decorum that flooded them gently, but pervasively, the children knelt in a pew in front of the mural.

“It has the same grain,” the boy said.

“How can you see that? It’s just a painting.”

“No, look.” He produced the relic, the splinter that smelt of fire and ocean, and held it up so it was flush with the image of the sailboat. The girl squinted one eye. Then the other. She did not say anything at first. Neither did her brother. They both looked again at the splinter; their shoulders touched as they turned toward it. For once they did not jerk away from each other.

I think this is what my mother’s touch would have felt like, thought the boy. I am blessed if this relic is nothing else except a bridge to my sister. She must feel the same way, she kneels so still. It would be appropriate if I were to tell her so here. He turned to his sister.

“Children.”

They startled in their pew. Their concentration on the moment had masked the approach of a priest shrouded in a black cape. The gold ciborium that he held and the pectoral cross that hung at the priest’s midsection at once made the identity of the man unmistakable. The crucifix quivered on the end of its chain far below the peering eyes of the priest. The archbishop’s voice was soft.

“My dear children, you lighten my heart with your piety.”

The priests that they had known, those who were half-blind, seeing the world without its dominant tint of lust and sin, had a smudgy incompleteness to them, a softness around the edges. In history the smudginess has been called an angelic glow.

The archbishop was not one of those priests. He looked at the children’s clothes with a face cut by chemical; he was Durer’s lost Benefician masterpiece. In the archbishop the children had found the church’s armorer. He was a man who mustered enough fidelity to bankroll a small papal state protruding from Italy and gathered such influence that those dictators who have broken down the doors of Beneficio’s churches looking for its weaponry of revolution, but found only calm-eyed peasants, left only with incomprehension.

“When you have nothing else, no food, no home, no clothes...” the archbishop’s eyes continued to finger the clothes of the children, “no clothes ...to speak of, your faith will sustain you.”

The archbishop leaned into the boy’s face; there was a chewed morsel of meat tangled in the priest’s gristly beard that jiggled when he talked.

“Your faith will lift you above all.”

The archbishop turned to the mural that they knelt in front of. He studied it for several moments, then gestured to a small town depicted in the painting. A caravan of people snaked through the forest toward it.

“In my youth, in my first century, I went to this town, to Borucas, see,” he indicated the village in the mural, “to hear the confessions of the people. What you don’t see in this painted affront to this holy place, to this house of God, is what I found there.”

The archbishop made to go on with his sermon. He spoke with the calm of someone who was practicing a speech alone. If the entirety of his congregation was in fact listening, he would speak the same. He never hurried in order to avoid interruption or to spare his listeners from boredom. It never would have occurred to him that his parishioners would have these reactions to his words. For this reason, he was confused at first, then angry, when the boy spoke unexpectedly.

“I was given this in Borucas,” the boy said.

He held the relic up for the archbishop him to see. The boy did not think twice to reveal his sacred relic to this man, who the boy had heard sheltered the souls of an entire city, and the countryside beyond, beneath the roof of the cathedral. The boy thought that if the archbishop was tasked with this duty, he could be trusted completely.

The relic’s edges were as sharp as the day it had been pried from its mother wood. The point stuck in the archbishop’s mind; he felt it like a particularly jagged splinter that had lodged in his ass cheek while scooting over for the Archbishop of Managua. The nurses had pulled it out, their faces reflected in the translucent skin of his ass. No doubt that splinter had passed from nun to nun who revered it for pricking his flesh until it had been smoothed down to nothing by the touch of a thousand virgin fingers. It would be foolish to let a progenitor of his mystique fall out of circulation he thought; he had better pass this off as the splinter and recycle it in the sisterhood.

“You must not believe in these relics.”

He plucked the splinter from the boy’s fingers without encountering resistance. The boy pondered his empty fingers while the archbishop tucked the splinter away in his black cloak.

“Put your faith in the lives of the saints my child.”

Confused by his loss, by the theft of the only material possession that he did not wear, the boy looked at the man in the painting for relief.

“That one? Celso! You think he is a saint? Do you know what I found in Borucas?”

The girl started to answer, but the priest would not hear it.

“A hive of sinners standing on each other to climb into heaven, and this one, Celso, on top with his grubby feet in the others’ faces.”

The girl’s defiance materialized at her brother’s elbow in the moment of his defeat, as he sat dumbfounded by this unwelcoming reception in the holy place. The man must have done something good to be painted on the cathedral wall she thought, and she should say so now she knew. She sneaked a look at the archbishop who perched like a gargoyle on the pew’s railing. The beast snarled at her. “He must have done something good,” she managed to retort.

“What do you know?” sneered the archbishop. The youthful glitter of the children’s irises coalesced defensively in response to his question. He adopted his confessional voice.

“Tell me, what have you heard?”

The boy traced the smoke trailing from the soaring sailboat to a cottage in the jungle below where the man in the sailboat had been forced out of his home and into myth.