Читать книгу In the Cemetery of the Orange Trees - Jeff Talarigo - Страница 23

Even here in Jabaliya, a place only rumored to have seen snow, the cold of Ohio stalks him.

The quarter-sized flakes batter the March landscape, the car being towed away during the late-night blizzard, the almost serene beauty of the snow pelting through the flashing yellow lights of the tow truck, growing smaller, dimmer until gone.

Snow continues to fall and twelve nights later the throttling ring of the phone and now it is his father who has been taken from him. A year before, nearly to the day, he cried while standing over the open casket of his father’s father, fingering rosary beads as the priest plowed through the prayers.

Now he stands above his father’s casket, minus the rosary beads, and thinks of the dwindling number of men in the family and of himself and how he made the two-hundred-mile trip in a borrowed car—his perfectly ironed shirts, done with care by a friend an hour after the phone call, flapping in the breeze of the rolled down window. And he walks up the fifteen steps, following the pall bearers into the church and then to the cemetery he goes across the still-frozen ground in shoes, like the car, not even his own, and he places a rose, red, and feels his lips against the second of April, cold-skinned casket.

That afternoon, following the funeral, he and his friends from Ohio walk past the house where he grew up, but was sold several years before. He looks over the stone wall into the backyard where he once played baseball and football alone for hours. Back then, he could never see over the wall, but now it seems so much lower and the yard so much smaller. His friend, who loaned him the car, comments on how he would love to go into the house and look around. They don’t. He can’t wait to get back in his borrowed car and drive west once again.

The quiet, more than the God, is what he seeks in the church. Each morning he goes to the earliest Mass. A gather of old men and women speckle the spacious pews. He is careful, when kneeling, to hide the bottoms of his shoes so that the woman, two pews back, doesn’t see the holes in them. He responds to the prompts of the priest, takes the Eucharist into his hollow stomach and returns to the pew, the same one every morning, and he wishes to lie down on the soft wood and pillow his head on the hymnals and sleep the mornings and days and nights and ache away.

When he is able to get a car, he goes into the city and begins to meet some of the homeless. One day in the city library he meets a homeless man from Alabama. They talk of the difficulties in going back home and asking for help. The two of them go that evening to a church basement and get a meal. He pretends that he, too, is homeless, but they all know he is not.

Through a patch of woods, five minutes from the house, there is a one room library. He goes there during the days to escape the chill of the house, the loneliness, the knocks on the door, the pestering of the phone. He has never read literature before, only magazines and a lot of newspapers. The librarian leaves him alone, as if she knows.

He begins with the smallest of the books—works by Wilder and Steinbeck and Orwell—and they blanket his coldness, people his loneliness, muffle the knuckles against the door and the gnawing whispers in his mind. This becomes his new church, a place where god answers his prayers.