The Son, The Sudarium Trilogy - Book Two (4 page)

2:9

The image of Hannah, kissing her son on the forehead, flashed around the world. It made the front page of newspapers everywhere and the cover of several weekly news magazines. Most television new programs used it as the final “feel good” segment of the broadcast heralding it as a “Miracle in Mexico.” The footage of the destroyed village was harsh and depressing, and it was not the first time that the world had seen evidence of natural disasters. Hurricanes, tornados, tsunamis – each week brought new proof of a planet that had seemingly gone amuck. However, the moving image spoke of a different world, one in which love still prevailed over carnage and parents could take their children home again.

It ran without names. Mataxi, which few could pronounce correctly, was simply identified as a “remote village in the mountains of central Mexico.” What mattered was the flicker of recognition in the eyes of the son and the compassion in the face of the mother. And the dark mud that, for once had not triumphed over civilization.

In Gothenburg, Sweden, thousands of miles away, Dr. Eric Johanson stared at the television screen in disbelief. He recognized Hannah first. She had hardly changed at all. Even at 39 she still had long blonde hair that fell to her shoulders, the high cheekbones, accentuated even more by time, and the soft, innocent eyes, although in the photograph they were brimming with tears. She remained youthfully slender. (How many times during her pregnancy had he examined that body, pore by pore?)

He went out and bought a news magazine that featured the photo on the cover and studied it through a magnifying glass. He even thought he could detect the faint scar that bisected her left eyebrow, the aftermath, he seemed to remember, of a childhood bicycle accident. The text identified Hannah only as “a distraught Mexican mother,” which seemed curious, he reflected, given her all-American features. But there was no doubt in his mind it was she.

Several pictures showed the blasted remains of the town. Pity, reflected Dr. Johanson, before his eyes settled on a small picture of the mother and father, helping their son down the mountainside. He studied the father through the magnifying glass. Middle-aged, handsome, still with a touch of the Irish in his features. He was certain it was Father Jimmy. Which meant that the young man in the middle was…

He put down the magazine and dialed Judith Kowalski on another continent. The phone rang several times, before she picked it up.

“Have you seen?” he asked.

“Yes,” she replied. “It
is
a miracle. Just like they’ve been saying.”

“God’s ways are wondrous, indeed.”

“So our work will begin at long last?”

There was a long pause on the other end of the line, as Dr. Johanson gathered his full strength. “Yes, Judith, now it begins.” From the sobs, he knew she was crying with joy.

“The others should be informed, if they are not already aware.”

At once, phone calls began to crisscross the planet, linking people in countries near and far, some still blanketed in night, others awakening to the light of morning. Still, they shared one thing in common. They all knew that “Miracle in Mexico” was more than just a catchy headline, calculated to boost newsstand sales and viewer ratings.

2:10

The bedridden woman stared out the window as she did most days and nights. The bed was positioned in such a way that she could see straight down the tree-lined avenue in Lowell, Massachusetts, to the stone church a few blocks away. The trees were green this time of year, so their twisted and arthritic branches were less apparent. The church steeple, which was really all that was visible of the 19
^th
century edifice, was heavy and sooty. There was nothing particularly uplifting about the view of a typical working-class New England neighborhood, but the woman studied it endlessly, as if it contained some message she could unravel, if only she looked hard and long enough.

The church was a constant reminder of her sins. Especially, the steeple. Some nights she was sure the steeple was growing taller and that the cross at the top was going to spring off the structure and come shooting through her window and impale her to the bedsprings. So she kept a close eye on it for signs of movement. Whenever the wind rustled the trees along the avenue, she could tell the steeple was swaying, too. Sometimes she noticed that it swayed when there was no wind at all.

Any moment whatsoever, the cross could come smashing though the window, pierce her body and the soiled mattress and nail her body to the floor. At least, that was what she yearned for. It was the ending she deserved, a far quicker ending than the one she was currently experiencing, a slow eating away of her brain. The doctors had told her it was nothing serious, just “one of the burdens of age,” but she knew better. It was God’s judgment for the sins she had committed.

A knock at the door distracted her attention.

“That you, Sally?”

“It ain’t the Queen of England.” The Jamaican home care provider let out a lusty laugh. With one hand, she opened the door. In the other hand, she balanced a tray of lunch - hot soup, a sandwich and a gelatinous dessert. Sally came six days a week, courtesy of Home Nursing Inc., did a little cleaning, provided a little companionship and tried to see that the woman didn’t starve. Most of the time the woman just pushed the food around, waited until Sally had left and thrust the uneaten remains aside.

“How you doin’, Miz O? Decide to sleep in today? Guess we musta had a nice rest.” Sally’s spirits, naturally buoyant, allowed her to overlook most contradictory evidence.

“There is no rest for me. Not as long as evil lives. As long as I live.”

“Oh dear,” Sally though to herself. It was going to be another one of those days, another day of what she called “Delusions of Badness.” She knew she shouldn’t make fun of the poor lady. But after work whenever her son asked her how old “Bad Ass” was doing, she had to admit it made her laugh,

“I brought you some lunch. Want to sit up?”

The old woman turned away her head and looked out the window. “You know you are in the presence of one of the greatest sinners in the world. Did I ever tell you that?”

“Matter of fact, you have. But I haven’t seen much evidence of it, Miz O. So I guess I’ll just have to take your word for it.”

“It’s evidence you want? Oh, I have evidence. I have all the evidence in the world. Some day I’ll show you. Some day you’ll know.” She pulled herself into a seated position, and watched Sally set out lunch on the rolling hospital serving tray the health service also provided the bedridden.

Sally rolled the serving tray over to the bed and parked it in front of the woman. She wasn’t that old, really. Maybe 60. But the disease had ravaged her face, which was gaunt and drawn. What a fate! This awful wasting away of mind and body! Sally wouldn’t wish it on her worst enemy.

And yet every now and then – Sally hated to admit it – she wondered just how sick the lady was. She had a grip of iron, when she chose. And though the rumpled covers made it hard to tell, the woman’s body was stronger than it appeared. Sally sometimes imagined that the woman was up and about the house all night long, chasing recklessly after her demons. Then at daybreak, spent and pale, she climbed into bed. That would certainly explain the mysterious welts and bruises that came and went on her body.

But other times, the fright in the old woman’s eyes was so real that Sally put all suspicions aside and accused herself of lacking charity for a woman wracked with pain.

Like now. The woman’s eyes were wide with terror. “You believe in Satan, Sally? Because Satan lives. He has worked through me. I know his ways. And I know how he works his will. Because I have seen it. With my own eyes. Seen it, as I am seeing you, this instant.”

She reached up and grabbed Sally’s wrist and Sally was reminded again of the woman’s bursts of strength.

“You are a good person, Sally. Tell me something. Do you think there can ever be forgiveness for a sinner like me?”

“Of course, there is, Miz O. There is forgiveness for everyone. In fact, you don’t have to ask for it. God has already forgiven us before the sin has even been committed.”

The old woman took that in. Then turned away and focused her gaze on the church steeple. “But what if the sin lives on?” She pushed away the tray and leaned back, as if she were trying to withdraw into the bed pillows.

“You see, my sin lives. My sin walks the earth.”

2:11

At a hospital in Jalpán, he was kept overnight for observation. But the doctors could find nothing wrong with him and he was allowed to return to Querétaro with his parents the next morning. At a loss to explain how he survived three days under the mud, the doctors attributed it to youth and good luck. The popular view leaned toward the metaphysical. Outside the window of the hospital room where he’d spent the night, several residents improvised a shrine of candles and flowers.

God, moribund in many parts of the planet, was not dead in Mexico. The Virgin appeared regularly – not just in lofty churches and majestic natural settings, either, but in windowpanes, cake pans and rumpled dishcloths, as well. Her munificence could not be discounted in what was a rich, not to say surrealistic, tradition of daily miracles.

At first the neighbors in Querétaro treated him with ill-disguised awe, but he stayed to the garden that occupied the center of the house, resting, reading, trying to make sense of the strange experience he’d been through.

Several reporters came by, enquiring for the whereabouts of “the miracle man”, but were politely turned away.

Less easily discouraged were his siblings – Teresa, who looked just like her mother had at 17, and James, Jr., or Little Jimmy, who at 12 was on a collision course with adolescence. Little Jimmy was tireless with his questions.

“Was it like drowning?”

“No, it was like sleeping. Sleeping and waking at the same time.”

“How can that be? You’re either asleep or you’re awake…Did you dream?”

“Dream?” He hesitated. “No.”

“Was it scary?”

Hannah’s voice cut across the patio. “Little Jimmy, don’t bother your brother.”

“Such a pest!” said Teresa, poking Little Jimmy in the ribs.

“Boy, you can’t even ask a simple question around here,” Little Jimmy sputtered, stomping out of the garden.

Things, reflected Hannah, were getting back to normal.

The media fire eventually died down for lack of fuel, which is what Hannah and Jimmy had hoped for. They could go back to their quiet life as shopkeepers, selling native crafts from around the country.

Their shop, a 19
^th
century Colonial house on Cinco de Mayo, had not been an overnight success. Most wealthy Mexicans preferred not to be reminded of their native heritage and bought modern furniture imported from the States. But mail orders kept them afloat. They picked their merchandise carefully in the villages around Zacatecas, Patzcuaro and Oaxaca. Eventually, the shop had developed a reputation for quality, as Querétaro itself traded its image as a slightly rundown Colonial backwater for that of a Baroque jewel in the very heart of Mexico.

It had seemed so safe, so remote, so sleepy, when they’d settled there twenty years ago. The city was off the tourist map - far, both geographically and spiritually, from the tequila parties on sandy beaches that constituted most people’s image of Mexico. Those who passed through Querétaro were usually businessmen heading north to the metropolis of Monterey, or the rare historian, who wanted to visit the hill where Emperor Maximiliano had met his death in the mid -19
^th
century at the hands of a Mexican firing squad. That had been Querétaro’s one moment of international notoriety. Afterwards, it had become a bastion of conservatism, whose inhabitants minded their business, went to mass regularly and treated strangers with the chill of indifference. If Hannah and Jimmy had hoped for a more anonymous place in which to shield their family, they could not have done better.

But change was afoot. Every day, it seemed to Hannah, the town shed a little more of its past and took on a few more trappings of the 21
^st
century. The outskirts, which had once been corn and broccoli fields, were now
parques industriales
. More and more English was spoken in the streets. They had always known things wouldn’t stay sleepy forever, but change – the Oxxo convenience stores, the automatic tellers and, yes, the Wal-Marts - seemed to be coming faster with each passing year. The old guard fought to preserve the Colonial buildings with their opulent courtyards and their elegantly grilled windows. The new guard fought for more parking lots.

For the first couple of weeks after the accident, the young man barely left the house. He was happy to stay in the garden, play with the dog, read some and sleep. He slept a lot. While he did, Hannah watched him protectively from the colonnade that surrounded the garden. She and Jimmy had never told him of the unusual circumstances surrounding his birth. They had worked hard, in order that he might have an ordinary life. And now this!

Then one day, nearly a month after the mudslide, he announced that he felt like going out for a walk. “I can’t stay closed up in the house forever.”

He swung open the heavy door that gave on to the Avenida Venustiano Carranza. The knotted wood creaked, as it always did. Silhouetted by the blazing sunlight, he turned back and waved to his mother.

Hannah watched him leave with a sinking feeling. He was going back out into the world again. But this time she could no longer pretend his anonymity protected him.