Good Friday

Adeena Adler used to wonder, haunted by questions both practical and spiritual. If, for instance, the creator of heaven and earth demanded absolute obedience, why did her family only attend holiday services at Blessed Redeemer? And if they were committed to ruining a perfectly good Friday night with a trip to Guiltsville, why couldn’t they at least show up on time, blending in instead of disrupting the service? Now, at the ripe age of seventeen, her habit of wonder has hardened into detachment. Like a researcher observing exotic rituals, she casts a critical eye over the Good Friday crowd as she walks down the middle aisle, played in by a poorly tuned organ and tired voices singing a tired song about a grace that sounds anything but amazing.

After the family has taken a seat, her mother—a prim woman named Jess—nods and waves toward nearby gawkers, because for backsliders in a town brimming with belief, being seen is the point. Jess pops a piece of gum into her mouth, slips loose a pew-back Bible, and lets it fall open on her knees. To a stranger, this might look like an act of devotion, but Adeena knows that her mother simply prefers books, even that book, to human interaction. Her father prefers dreams. Spent after another long week at work, Cal rests his chin on the knot of the one tie that he owns, a faded blue rag that droops from his collar as though weighed down by its pattern of clockfaces. Presently his eyelids begin to twitch. And her little brother? Hardly worth analyzing. Though Zeke recently turned sixteen, his body and behavior seem frozen in a state of perpetual boyhood. He carries a Game Boy instead of a wallet. The buttons of his shirt are misaligned. Adeena glances at the other congregants, familiar but not quite friendly faces.

Once the singing portion has—praise the Lord—come to a close, the pastor solemnly addresses the crowd. Evening sunlight streaming through the stained-glass windows strikes his bare scalp. A brief call and response serves as an appetizer before the main course. Amen? Amen. While the pastor describes a hill called Golgotha, acolytes in long white robes distribute postcard-sized slips of paper upon which congregants are instructed to list their sins. Sins that drive nails through Christ’s hands and feet. Sins that pierce His perfect side. True believers blink back tears, envisioning the scene: a mob, an emaciated god, a cowardly governor going Lady Macbeth on his blood-soaked hands.

The pastor says, Confession precedes forgiveness.

Sighs blow through the sanctuary, the scratch of ballpoint pens. Adeena’s mother inhales through her nose. Then, as though she might be beginning a grocery list, she writes Grapefruit Juice in her tidy cursive. Her nod tells the kids to mind their own sheets. In imitation of a banner hanging behind the pulpit, Adeena draws a falling dove. She adds an arrow through its midsection, a feathered fletching near its feet, a bloody, V-shaped point beside the dotted oval of its head. Zeke sets aside his slip of paper, leering: across the aisle, a girl bends forward to tie her shoe. Adeena blushes with the shame he lacks.

As the organ drones through “The Old Rugged Cross,” her mother nudges her father awake. He smiles painfully, blinking and fixing his eyes upon the paper. His fingernails dig into a three-day beard; dead skin dusts the shoulders of his shirt. Under his wife’s gaze, he pecks the sheet with the pen’s nib, as though the resulting constellation of dots might coalesce into language. When he gets around to writing a handful of lines, Adeena can’t make out the words, but her mother’s reaction—index fingers sunk into temples—tells her all she needs to know.

Taking up Zeke’s discarded sheet, Adeena prints one microscopic word of her own.

Pew by pew, congregants file forward to nail their crimes against the naked cross. It sounds like shop class. When his turn arrives, Adeena’s father meekly taps the head of his nail. Then, jerking back, he drops the hammer, its sharp crash against the floor startling the pastor, who stands by the communion rail, his mask of contemplation shattered. Cal quietly apologizes, squats, and replaces the hammer on the table.

Instead of returning to their pew, he grabs a second slip of paper and, taking an open seat on the front row, flattens it against his thigh. Fully awake now, he grips the pen in his fist; a ridge of muscle tightens across his trembling forearm. His chin juts forward. His breaths come shallow and fast. For a minute, maybe two, he scribbles. Adeena waits. Finally he stands and retrieves the hammer, running his thumb along the forked claw as though the tool itself were sacred or cursed. He drives home the nail with one swift strike.

Once the rest of the family has started back toward their pew, Adeena nails up her own singular sin.

Zeke, whose history class recently covered the Vietnam War, assumes the worst. Dad probably massacred a small village, he whispers. But her own suspicions are less dramatic. Because pipelining calls him to the field, Cal is often off-screen in the film of family life. When home, he mumbles or yells. He hates uncapped tubes of toothpaste, Butterfinger wrappers in his truck’s floorboard, the backdoor left ajar. Some nights, Cal and Jess retreat into the van, where they can scream at each other freely. When his anger grows too great for words, Cal might wield the bow saw and go in search of a dead limb. He might simply drive away.

For Adeena, the outbursts represent a deviation from her father’s true self, which is loving if not always considerate. She recalls hamburger dates and singalongs and a willingness to listen that her mother entirely lacks. More than these daily examples of his kindness, annual hunting trips support Adeena’s view of her father as essentially good. When she was five years old, he took her out for the first time, despite her mother pitching a fit on the front porch. The blind where they set up was a wooden box on stilts, its exterior spray-painted to imitate the surrounding brush, its closet-sized interior littered with dead wasps. Bundled in a blanket, she slept on the floor and woke to the sprinkler-like sound of a feeder throwing off its load of corn. It was just before sunrise and together they watched the world incrementally come to life—shapes and shadows, then color and movement. She can see it still. One deer then several milled about the chicken-wire enclosure, chewing thoughtfully, sniffing the wind. The blast of the rifle cut through her foam ear protectors. A white-bellied doe leapt, banging her sloped nose against the barrel of the feeder. The deer collapsed as though the dirt had turned to ice. Adeena waited for the doe’s hooves to regain their traction. Then she saw blood. Instead of scolding his daughter for her tears, Cal pulled Adeena onto his knee. Softly, just a hair above a whisper, he began to sing. The songs with which he distracted her from the animal-turned-corpse concerned a preacher whom love had made murderous, impulsive, insane. Don’t cross him, don’t boss him. He’s wild in his sorrow. The sadness of the music made her own seem smaller and less lonely. The preacher kept crying so she could go back to sleep.

Over the intervening years, Cal taught his daughter to determine a deer’s age, diagram its vitals, consider the wind, and shoot with precision. When she grew a little older, they hunted on foot, searching for mule deer in the Davis Mountains—rough-and-tumble work on a chunk of desert some dead ancestor had christened Bear Mountain, partly in memory of the black bears that once roamed the area, partly because of the shape of the mountain itself. Half the time, they hiked all day without seeing another living thing. She adored it. Their third year out together, Adeena spotted a ten-point monster. Her father’s reaction was instantaneous. Because they were so far from camp, Cal gutted and quartered the carcass, packed it out, and shouldered the bulk of the body, giving his daughter two bloody lengths of backstrap to carry.

People from the final rows approach the crucifix, and when the hammering stops, Christ’s sacrifice washes away their corruption, leaving their souls as white as snow. No need to wait for Sunday: Easter arrives the moment a sinner requests forgiveness.

In the loft overhead, the organ sounds the first dreary notes of “His Eye Is on the Sparrow.” Untuned voices fill the hall. As everyone moves toward the exit, shaking hands over discussions of sick relatives and high school sports and oil prices, Zeke says, What do you really think he wrote?

There’s only one way to tell, Adeena says.

While their parents exit the church, the siblings stay in the foyer, feigning interest in a poster advertising a youth ministry. When the church has emptied, Adeena peers back into the sanctuary, where the sins are stored.

Finding it empty, she proceeds to push her brother inside.

Scared isn’t the right word for what Zeke feels. Fear doesn’t make the skin-and-bones sixteen-year-old, who’s still waiting on his growth spurt, trace the woodwork of the heavy door while he searches for excuses. No real threat hides inside the sanctuary, but because his family so rarely attends, church retains a quality of mystery. He doesn’t really get the Bible. Still, its tales of violence excite and repel him with the same emotional push and pull he experiences reading Stephen King by lamplight.

He hears a distant whimpering sound.

I’ll keep lookout, his sister says. Don’t be a titty baby.

The first time his grandfather took him golfing, Zeke lined up his shot, swung, and thwacked the head of his club into the dirt. On his second swing, he dealt a glancing blow to the ball, which skipped a dozen yards down the fairway. You know what that means, his grandfather said, and then explained that boys who fail to hit the ball past the ladies’ tee box are required to prove their manhood. Drop ‘em, the old bastard said.

He tiptoes up the aisle, willing one foot in front of the other, and again hears a faint cry. It seems to come from everywhere at once: from the chandelier chained to the impossibly high ceiling and the stained-glass windows and the blood-and-gold-colored rug beneath his feet and the space between his ears. Empty pews reflect overhead lights. But when he fixes his eyes on the cross that is his destination, shadowy figures populate his peripheral vision, as though the churchgoers never left. Focused on those outer edges, he knees a pew as he nears the altar. The resulting sound—like a knock on a door—reverberates. He glances back, recalls the biblical story of a woman turned to salt, and imagines his remains seasoning a tortilla chip.

Framed by the doorway, Adeena gives him a thumbs up.

He casts a long, hard look at the cross, the slips of paper, crooked nails, splintered wood. In his memory, he can see people with pens in hand, hunched over, scribbling. He was there. He saw the ink. It happened. But the boring, balding preacher spoke the truth. The sins have been erased. The sheets are blank. They rustle on their skewers like leaves on a limb.

Sweat trickles down his spine.

Zeke has believed before—just not all of it. Old people exaggerate. Yes, there is a God, but, no, He doesn't quite live up to His reputation. Hell is probably real—assholes have to go somewhere—but Zeke worries that Heaven is just a big dark room where the singing never stops.

Now, overhead, in a stained-glass window, Roman soldiers jab spears at the figure of Jesus Christ. Moving across the wall toward the next pane, Christ slumps under the weight of his cross. Droplets of blood roll slowly down his face. Christ’s knees wobble, and Zeke’s knees wobble, too. The savior looks how Zeke feels: uncertain, overwhelmed. After collapsing, Christ slides out of the frame and down the wall. He cries out—a sound Zeke recognizes from earlier. A man in a white robe with a blue sash across the belly helps Jesus to his feet. They move slowly up the side aisle, toward the front of the church.

Approaching the altar, Christ gives Zeke a sideways glance. Their eyes meet for no more than a second, yet He sees what Zeke truly is.

Evil.

Zeke has lied and lusted, dodged his duties, neglected God. Last month, he drove his grandfather’s golf cart into a tree and then, while a bruise formed on his shin, swore that he didn't know who had dented the bumper. One Christmas, he climbed onto a cinderblock fence and watched a cousin unfasten her bra through the bedroom window. He has smoked cigarettes, stolen his father’s beer, coaxed a homely girl onto the Ferris wheel and left the gondola and her shirt soiled and never acknowledged her again. On hunting trips, he intentionally took piss breaks rather than help his sister gut a deer. Tonight, during the service, he focused his attention on the slack jeans of a girl in the front row and neglected the sermon; even now he envisions the stretched Y of her thong.

Christ sees all that, reaches out, closes his fist around the nails, flares his toes, and dies for Zeke. It takes a while. God suffers. There’s a thunderclap. There’s a phrase in a foreign language. There’s enough time for Zeke’s heart to shatter his sternum.

A long blink returns Christ to the stained-glass prison where he belongs.

Adeena stands waiting in the doorway. When he tries to call to her, his sister taps an imaginary watch on her wrist. Hurry. One last time, he looks at the crucified scraps to certify that he hasn’t lost what she likes to call his meager little mind.

Blank. They are all blank.

But near the bottom, where Christ’s feet were nailed, he sees the impression of letters. Zeke pulls off a page. While the side facing out is blank, the side facing in is covered with writing. As it is on every other scrap. He can hear his sister’s voice in his head: You are such an idiot. And she’s right. Of course, he thinks. Of course people would nail up their sheets with their sins facing the wood, where no one can see.

Zeke strips the cross, stuffing the sins into his pocket. And while Adeena is poking her head into the foyer, playing lookout, he grabs the stack of blank sheets leftover on a nearby table and jams them into his other pocket. Why? He might want to actually use them—to honestly relate his mistakes and pray to be released from the weight of guilt. But the opposite could also be true: one theft begets another. He almost takes the hammer, too.

A whistling sound reaches him then. When he looks up, Adeena is gone. Rather than rush for the exit and risk getting busted, he hops onto the stage, hurries past the communion rail, and slips into a cramped closet, wherein a single window permits a slice of sunset.

Measuring his breaths, he silently reads through the stack of sins. He can hear voices speak inside of his head, announcing their secrets:

Every day another lie

Jack and Coke, Jack and Coke, fear of death, Jack and Coke

I don’t have the guts to kill myself

That time over the summer calling that poor girl hook-eye

“Shacking up”

Gay

Grapefruit Juice

Sticky magazines

My poor children

Throwing up

Lust I’m sorry but why does my secretary wear stockings to work?

When he died, I stopped believing

Dear God I’m hideous

He shuffles through the sheets until he recognizes his father’s handwriting. Under the heading Things I Didn’t Do, his dad lists washing dishes, Valentine’s Day, a new career in a new town. Under Things I Did (But Shouldn’t Have) is a second list: Have a gun—fire it. Have a dick—try to use it. Have kids—raise them as I see fit.

Deeper in the stack, he finds another page with identical handwriting. There are several words, maybe a sentence or two, that have been struck through so thoroughly he can’t make them out.

Then he reads: Sher.  Sher moaning. I’m sorry I’m sorry dear Jesus I’m sorry.

            Five minutes later, once he thinks the coast has cleared, Zeke steps into the foyer, where his sister is impatiently waiting. Her questions come hard and fast. Why did he take so long? What did he find? Why is he staring at the floor like he’s been kicked in the head by a mule?

We should get out to the van, he says. Dad’s going to be pissed.

I told them we’d walk home. Did you find it or not?

He starts to speak, but quickly swallows his words. There’s something delicious about her desperation. When they stand back to back, his sister is half a head taller than Zeke, but now Adeena appears bug-like, a creature seen through a pair of backwards binoculars, too small to be entrusted with a man’s sins. He feels a complicated impulse, equal parts loyalty, purity, and power. Zeke recalls the conviction he felt at the cross. He wants to pass along that momentary faith, performing a miracle all his own.

He says, The slips were blank.

What do you mean blank?

Power in the blood. Like the preacher told us.

Bullshit, she says.

Reaching into his pocket, Zeke produces the stack of clean papers with a magician’s flourish. Go on, he says. See for yourself.