The Next Queen of Heaven-SA (38 page)

“Perfect. We can let Momster lie down right here.”

“It looks like an autopsy table,” said Hogan, approvingly.

“She’ll fall off it,” said Kirk.

“Come on. She can’t even get her thumb into her mouth to suck it, she’s not going to start rolling around like some fourteen-year-old Russian gymnast at the fucking Olympics.” The time had come to leave her. They could go upstairs and listen to some music for a while, and Tabitha would find a pencil and a paper somewhere and drop a note in the collection basket. They were making an offering of their mother. Take her with all our best wishes, XXX

OOO. She’s in the cellar on the stone table. Merry X-mas. Merry XXX-mas.

They stood at the door and looked back. The light fell upon her face, which was facing the ceiling. Her eyes were closed. Hogan had folded her hands in a religious way on her stomach.

She looked like a stone carving of a knight in some old English church, except for the black jet beads. “Sorry there’s no refrigerator,” said Tabitha. Really, it was the only thing missing.

“Wait,” said Kirk. He pulled something from his pocket. “I found this picture of Grandma Prelutski on the living room floor the other day. Remember how she was rooting through those boxes in the cellar? I think she was looking for photos; that’s why I brought the albums up. She might want to keep this with her.” He tucked it between her hands.

This isn’t good-bye, Tabitha said to herself, as they hurried back to the car, to sneak into the chapel from the front without anyone seeing. This is something else.

“You’re not expecting me to go into a Catholic voodoo cannibal service, are you?” said Hogan, when Tabitha had parked the car around front.

“Hogan,” said Tabitha, “I’m going to say one thing to you.”

“Promise? Only one?”

“Turk Schaeffer is a Catholic, and he’s helping Jack Reeves. And it won’t hurt any of us to be seen together at a service. Especially if someone is prying for clues about the fire at Our Lady’s. And I’m taking the keys so you can’t drive away and abandon us here out in the woods with
Mother.”
It felt good to take Pastor Huyck’s word from him.

Even Tabitha could see that there were lots of ways to argue against this, but Hogan sure as hell wasn’t going to sit in a cold car while Tabitha and Kirk went inside. The wind was strong and the snow stronger. “You are a regular Christmas bitch,” muttered Hogan, somewhat appreciatively, and he followed them into the chapel.

The place was warm and dark. Something different here, as far as Tabitha could tell. It wasn’t the talk show self-i-ness that hovered like a faint stink in Catholic mass during the daylight. It was something older and more secret. Something kinder, richer, harsher. Something farther away. Darker, obscurer. The mistake that the Radical Radiants made, and the Catholics made during bright modern Sundays, was trying to get in your face so much. In the middle of the night, with the snow billowing outside, Tabitha could comprehend this more clearly. The candles and their thin, black-chiffon streams of smoke. The glints of gold and the slow-motion gestures in the paintings, the statues. Even the choir up there was sounding decent, wreathed with the tendrils of ancient melody. That nut-job Jeremy Carr was looking distinguished, not frazzled.

The instruments were beginning to speak in concert.

“It’s a puppet theater,” hissed Hogan. “Look at those idols in the front. What happened, somebody kidnap the Baby Jesus for ransom? He’s missing.”

“Look at the angels in the ceiling,” Tabitha said to Hogan, since he hadn’t come to Sister Alice’s funeral. “So stinking gorgeous.”

In this light the angels made a rack of wooden origami, rank upon rank of them, almost hidden in the high shadows. One of them looked darker than the others. Lucifer, maybe? No, Lucifer wouldn’t be attending a Catholic mass. Maybe a leak in the roof, and the snow was melting and staining the wood. Yes, that was it, must be, for the room was already filling up, but below that angel the lusty garrulous Catholics were avoiding the pew. Water must be dripping, perhaps into a bucket.

Caleb Briggs would be here somewhere—maybe she’d remembered that deep down, or maybe not, but now she realized it up front and personal—because Polly Osterhaus bobbed perkily in the choir, looking in red and green like a tortured poinsettia. Tabitha could wish peace on earth and goodwill to all men and even all women except P.S. not Polly Osterhaus.

Tabitha put her head down to avoid seeing Caleb—at least, not yet—and, since she appeared to be praying (“You phony,” muttered Hogan next to her) she thought, Oh, what the hell.

The only thing she could think of was the Lord’s Prayer. But it came out funny. It came out slowly, as if each line needed to be thought about before she could go on. Maybe that was the baby inside; everyone said babies slowed you down and kept you in the present. Could it be happening already?

Our Father, who art in heaven
—how did it go?

…
Forgive us our trespasses

As we forgive those who trespass against us.

Ah. A tricky part. How to work it out? It was like algebra, at which she’d tanked. The equation was about God forgiving us the way we forgive others—like, say, if she forgave Caleb Briggs. Or Pastor Huyck if she could ever manage it. The equation didn’t say anything about being forgiven by other humans like, say, Mom. Maybe God’s forgiveness was supposed to supersede your own mother’s, so you didn’t need to wait around for her forgiveness. You could pick up and walk out without it.

Wait’ll Mom gets a load of
that.

The choir was starting. A sprightly rhythm to it, as if goats and shepherd boys were going to do a folk dance across the altar. After a few verses Tabitha glanced sideways at Kirk. She had kind of forgotten about him. If he was really stuck on Jeremy Carr, this stuff must be hard for him to sit through.

“You okay?” she said.

“Oh, yeah.” A dour mood that sounded as if it was going to take about ten years to lift.

“Cheer up. It’s Christmas.”

“Christmas in hell.”

“Well, I can understand. He is kind of cute.”

Kirk slanted his eyes at her without moving his head. A cautious expression of surprise.

But not, she thought sadly, surprise at her admitting Jeremy’s appealing manner and looks. Kirk was surprised that Tabbers could understand her baby brother. Or anything at all.

Luckily, a greatest hits carol began—“The First Nowell”—that everyone in the chapel sang. Kirk went liltingly up at the end of each chorus, which caused Catholics to turn around and smile convertingly at him. He did have a nice voice, she had to admit it.

She dozed on and off. Well, it was late, and she was always so tired these days. She managed to avoid peering around for Caleb. Jack Reeves and his wife entered; she hadn’t known he was Catholic too. Father Mike Sheehy flapped about in his costume, greeting people. Crippled old nuns hobbled up and down the aisles passing out music sheets. A blond soprano with an expression like a Nazi stormtrooper began a glorious hymn, and the lights went down except for the candles in sconces along the wall. “Oh, holy night,” sang the lady, over-articulating as if she were singing on a language tape for immigrants. The program advertised her as Mrs. Leonard (Peggy Moynihan) Mueller.

Everyone turned in their pews and looked at the choir loft, and so did the Scales kids.

“Oh Jesus,” said Hogan. “Duck. It’s a little bundle from heaven.”

“Long lay the world, in sin and error pining,” sang the Mueller.

“Is this like New Year’s on TV?” whispered Hogan. “When the Baby hits the manger, it’s officially Christmas?”

The hush was reverential. The Baby was suspended and some parishioner wearing black gloves gripped the Baby’s feet. For a second Tabitha thought it was a real baby and she had to fight an uprising of panic, but she took a chill pill. It’s only a Christmas pageant and you sat through a hell of a lot of those while Kirk was into it.

“Till He appeared, and the soul had its birth,” sang the soprano.

The black-clad midwife let go of the Baby’s feet, and the Infant began to sink, headfirst, through the gloom of the chapel. Everyone said “Oooooh!” softly, as if the Baby had just burst into cartwheels of sparkles, like the Fourth of July.

“Fall on your knees,” the soprano commanded, and most of the congregation obeyed.

“Oh hear the angels’ voices.”

The Baby made a dignified approach toward the waiting plaster family below. His sacred parents weren’t looking up, but the cow seemed to be guiding Him in with a filmy, dyspeptic expression. The Baby wobbled head to toe in mid-air, rocking like a football as He descended.

Then He got stuck, and stopped about twelve or fourteen feet up in the air.

Stuck in a holding pattern just underneath the leaky angel. A murmur of dismay, the way people sound when a dog comes through the open doors during a summer service and parades with evil ignorance around the room. Tabitha whispered to Kirk, “Maybe the angel has dripped some roof tar or something sticky onto that wire. That Baby’s not going nowhere.” The soprano kept on but no one was listening to the words any more.

A man sitting nearby, with an apologetic look at his neighbors, got up and stood on the pew. He reached up, trying to tap the Baby past the speed bump, but he was too short by a yard or so.

One of the altar boys, apparently at Father Mike’s calm instruction, waffled in his crimson robes to the front of the chapel, and knelt down by the crib. He gently shook the guy wire, trying to jostle the Baby loose.

“O holy night,” began the soprano again. “The stars are brightly shining.” Maybe they were, but between the stars and the Baby an awful lot of stormy wind was bringing snow onto the roof, and some of that snow melted down through the angel’s wings. The knot of black yarn fastening the Baby to his high wire was visibly dripping. The Baby was getting wet, too; drops splashed on His head and ran, with terrible accuracy, down His perfect stomach, where they collected in the folds of His plaster diaper and dripped off of His holy bottom. He looked like a Baby who badly needed a change.

“Fall on your knees,” sang the soprano again, and the kneeling people took this as a sign they could get up and sit down now.

The man nearest—it was Turk Schaeffer—was being helped to climb even higher. He balanced his feet on the backs of adjacent pews. This gave him another eighteen inches or so, which was still too low. Loyal parishioners leaned against his knees but propriety forbade them from shoving their hands against his behind. Without that tripod sort of support, he couldn’t swing with any assurance.

“O night divine.” Then she hit the famous high note—“O night di-viiiiine”—and Tabitha thought the reverberations might be enough to spring that Baby free. Most of the old nuns had remained on their knees with their heads in the hands. Their shoulders shook.

“O holy night,” began the Mueller again. The choir, out of boredom or maybe solidarity, began to
ooh
in the background. Lots of
oohs
oozed out. Jeremy Carr was looking frantic, gesturing to the two violinists, who began doing something with long drawn out notes. Someone else whipped out a harmonica and it was O Holy Night on the Range, where the deer and the antelope play with the syphilitic camels.

Solange Lefebvre’s grandmother handed Turk Schaeffer a folding umbrella. Other parishioners were lifting up umbrellas and a couple of crook-handled aluminum canes. “A Jesus piñata!” whispered Kirk, delighted. “Is He stuffed with candy?”

“This is a goddamned zoo,” muttered Hogan.

“I hope they don’t break Him,” said Tabitha.

“Fall on your knees,” pleaded the choir.

The song was nearing that stratospheric note again. Tabitha wondered: Was the emotion of the moment going to inspire
every member of the choir
to try to reach that high note? It looked as if Jeremy was afraid of the same thing: he began to wheel his arms about like a teacher trying to keep a bunch of kindergartners from dashing across the street without looking. The altar boy, meanwhile, had reached Turk Schaeffer’s side, and whispered in his ear. Turk hoisted the kid onto his shoulders in a piggyback. Someone handed the kid an umbrella.

The choir hit the high note with recklessness. The altar boy took aim, and let fly with a mighty wallop. His whack was heard all over the church. The congregation allowed itself a soccer goal cheer. But the Baby kept its sleeping eyes shut and barreled toward its destination.

Tabitha thought, wow, isn’t that too fast? There’s no one at the end of the incline to slow it down. It’s going to smash to bits in the cradle.

She wasn’t the only mother who stood, fearful for any baby, even a holy plaster one. She saw the crib shift an instant before the Baby made touchdown. It hopped, then tipped over, and the grille it was sitting on opened like a trapdoor. Mary and Joseph looked down devotedly to see what child is this. Up popped the head of Mrs. Leontina Scales, eyes blinking in the light, as if the choir’s exertions had woken her at last. Several people in the front pew screamed. The Baby caught Mrs. Scales in the forehead and smashed into a thousand holy pieces. Tabitha’s mother juddered backward, hitting her head on the floor-level iron housing of the grille behind her, but she didn’t lose her balance.

“What the hell is going
on
here?” she said into the fading echo of the choir’s final, divine word.

“YOU’RE NOT WELL enough to go,” said Tabitha.

“Don’t you take that tone to your mother,” said Mrs. Leontina Scales. “I may have been under the weather, but now I’m peppy as the first cup of Folgers. Do you think the green or the pink?” She held up a lime-colored spaghetti-strap straitjacket poxed with sequins. The pink was cut more matronly, a twin-set with shoulder pads.

Tabitha thought that with her new close-cropped haircut, dear Mother would resemble a walking bottle of Pepto-Bismol. “The pink looks sucky. I don’t even know why you’re invited.”

“The pink it is, then. If you disapprove, that makes it respectable. Listen, honey. I work on the Republican voter registration committee with Caleb’s mother, Betty. And there was a time when their marriage wasn’t doing so well that I considered becoming Mrs. Leontina Prelutski Scales Hauenstein Garrison Briggs. So Caleb could almost have been your stepbrother. What do you think of that?”