The Big Brick Review
Building on the narrative of our lives...one brick at a time.
A Guilded Cage
by Alison Smith
IN JULY 1984 my brother Roy died in a car accident. He was eighteen. It was raining when he left for work that morning. A half-mile from our house an oncoming car spun out of control on the wet road and collided with my brother’s car. Both drivers died.
In the days after the accident, our house filled with adults—friends of my parents, distant cousins, the parish priest, a half dozen nuns. Until Sister Pat got the prayer circle going in the living room, they wandered through the rooms of our house looking for coffee and passing around boxes of Kleenex. I was fifteen that summer, old enough to understand death, but I could not believe that Roy was really gone. I walked to the end of the driveway several times that first afternoon, and looked up the road, waiting for Roy’s car to take the turn at the top of the hill and head toward home. He didn’t show up.
Our yard overflowed with adults. I discovered that the only place I could be alone was the upstairs bathroom. I sat on the hamper in the shadowed room, my foot wedged against the door, and called Jesus’ name. Jesus appeared. He took a seat across from me. The hem of his robe was tattered and dust-stained, and he looked winded, as if he had just walked up a steep hill. But I didn’t mind. I was happy to see him. He pushed his hair out of his eyes, tucked it behind his ears, and looked over at me. “Yes?” he said.
It wasn’t the first time I had seen Jesus. The first time happened when I was five. I was in the back yard, in the sandbox. My brother had been called back into the house; he had a phone call from Bob. Roy was a solitary child. He had a limited social circle. Besides me, Bob, who lived across the street, was my brother’s only friend. When he was not with me, he was either alone or with Bob. I was terribly jealous of Bob.
I was waiting for my brother to get off the phone so that we could get back to building a castle. Three mounds of sand stood in front of me, that’s as far as we got before the phone rang. Roy was the mastermind behind all of our building projects and I didn’t dare touch the mounds in his absence. It was a sunny day; the needles on evergreens that grew along the back fence shimmered in the afternoon light. I heard a voice behind me.
‘Knock, knock.’
I turned around. ‘Roy?’
‘Knock, knock.’
I stood up and looked over the fence. The neighbour’s yard was empty and silent. I sat back down in the sand. ‘Who is it?’ A soft-eyed, bearded man in a shapeless white shift stepped out from behind an evergreen. I recognized him right away. He looked exactly like the character in my illustrated children’s Bible.
‘Jesus.’ I said. ‘Aren’t you supposed to be at church?’ I was not allowed to talk to strange men, but Jesus was not a stranger. He was a friend of my father’s. My father had spoken often about his relationship with Jesus Christ.
‘Knock, knock,’ Jesus said.
I blinked at him.
‘Come on. Humour an old man.’
‘You’re not that old.’
‘Knock, knock.’
I looked down at the three mounds of sand, looked behind me at the back door to the house. Roy was nowhere to be seen.
‘Who’s there?’ I said.
‘Aardvark.’
‘Aardvark who?’
‘Aardvark a million miles for one of your smiles.’ He grinned and sat down on the edge of the sandbox. His pale feet crossed, the grass pricked his ankles.
‘What are you doing here?’ I asked.
‘I came to see you.’
‘Why?’
‘You are a child of God.’
‘No. You’re the child of God. I’m the child of my mom and dad.’
I didn’t want to be the child of God. Jesus was and I saw what it did to him: his father was God, his mother was human, he was stuck in the middle, he didn’t seem to fit in anywhere, and then they killed him for it.
‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Have it your way.’ He leaned over and placed a hand on the first mound of sand. ‘What are you making?’
‘Don’t touch that,’ I said.
He pulled his hand away
.
‘My brother and I are making a castle and I don’t want to mess it up.’
The screen door slammed. I twisted my head around and watched Roy walk toward the sandbox. When I turned back to Jesus, he was gone.
The next day, Roy went into the woods at the end of our street to collect lichen moss. He used it as groundcover on his model train set. He usually took me with him on these collection trips, but that morning he took Bob. They left just after breakfast. I watched them go. Roy walked down the road, Bob beside him, a paper shopping bag, folded up and tucked under his arm.
Later that morning, I was sitting in the back yard alone and looking at the castle we had built the day before, when Jesus came walking across the lawn, a grin on his face. I waved. ‘Hi Jesus.’
He retrieved a baseball from behind the maple stump next to the garden and tossed it to me. It fell short. ‘I’ve got a good one for you today,’ he said as I ran after the ball. ‘Knock, knock.’
‘Who’s there?’
‘Centipede.’
‘Centipede who?’
‘Centipede on the Christmas tree.’
I stood up and held the ball in my hand. ‘You shouldn’t make fun of Santa.’
Jesus shrugged. He looked into the sandbox at the castle.
‘He brings presents,’ I said.
I tossed the ball to him. He missed it. His reflexes were so slow that he didn’t move till the ball was well past him. I had never seen such a bad fielder. But I didn’t say anything because, when he did finally reach for the ball, I saw the hole in the center of his hand where they had driven the stake through. His hand looked like a donut. Dried blood still collected around the wound. I wondered why he didn’t wash it off.
From the Bible stories my father had told me, I knew that Jesus had a serious guilt complex. He’d taken on the sins of the entire world and I had always felt sorry for him. And now here he was, wandering the suburban back yards of upstate New York, telling children knock-knock jokes. He looked lonely. I figured that a lot of people only talked to him because his father was God.
‘Do you want to be my friend?’ I asked. ‘Is that why you’re here?’
‘Sure!’ he said, a little too brightly. ‘I have lots of friends. You could be one of them.’
I crossed my arms in front of my chest. ‘Where are they?’
He looked around the yard. ‘Everywhere.’
I sat down in the sandbox. ‘I see.’ I squinted up at him. ‘Do you want to come in my sandbox?’
He stepped over the edge and stood next to the three-towered castle. The morning light filtering through the holes in his hands, his pale, bloody feet planted deep in the sand. ‘Knock, knock,’ he said.
I smiled. ‘Who’s there?’
Over the next ten years, I saw a lot of Jesus. He waited for me on the front stoop in the morning and walked me to the school bus. At night, when I was restless, he sat at the end of my bed until I fell asleep. He showed up during particularly trying spelling tests at Saint Thomas More Elementary. I learned that Jesus preferred grape Bubblicious to strawberry (just like me), that he was a terrible speller, that he preferred Bread to The Beatles and that he cried when ET flew away on the bicycle. When we played ball, I was very patient with Jesus. Every time he missed a throw, I ran after the ball and retrieved it for him. And, no matter how much time he spent with me, no matter how many surprising things I learned about him, I kept our friendship a secret. I figured he would want it that way. I never even told Roy.
But my father figured it out. He saw me talking to the empty air in the back yard, gingerly tossing a ball and then running after it and he knew. I could tell my father was impressed. In our insular Catholic world, Jesus Christ was still a big celebrity and I was his best and possibly only friend. Whenever my father mentioned my connection with Jesus, he did so quietly, on the sly, so that Roy and Mom did not hear. He knew how important it was to protect Jesus’ privacy and I respected him for knowing that.
One day, while we were out in the back yard sprinkling plant food on his prize roses he said, ‘Why don’t you ask Jesus for that baseball mitt? You know he loves you best of all.’ He smiled and patted my shoulder. I was stunned. I stood back and watched him shake the powdered food over the roses. Clearly, my father understood things only up to a point. He had no real grasp on how to be friends with the man whose father was God. You don’t just go around asking him for things, especially things you know your father is already getting you for your birthday. If you ask Jesus for things then you just look like any other star-struck, needy fan. I was disappointed in him. But I didn’t want to offend my father. After all, he was the only one who had figured out that I was friends with Jesus. So I smiled appreciatively, as if he had just said something really smart.
The next day, I mentioned the conversation to Jesus. I wanted him to know that I knew other people asked him for stuff but that I was above that.
‘Dad wants me to ask you for a baseball glove,’ I said, ‘but don’t worry about it. I know he’s buying me one for my birthday.’
Jesus didn’t say anything, but he looked relieved. I offered him a piece of grape Bubblicious. He accepted.
‘Knock, knock,’ he said.
‘Who’s there?’
‘Ammonia.’
‘Ammonia who?’
‘Ammonia a bird in a gilded cage.’
By the summer of1984 I’d known Jesus for over ten years and I had never outright asked him for something that I really needed. But that afternoon in the bathroom I was desperate. I sat on the hamper and watched Jesus. Perched on the edge of the tub across from me, his hands folded in his lap, he looked small and pale. His skin was so white that he almost blended into the white tile behind him. But this frail, fragile man was well connected. His father had the power to bring Roy back.
‘Where is Roy?’ I asked Jesus. ‘When are you going to let him come back?’ I was too shy to come right out and say I wanted my brother home right away, but we both knew what I was getting at.
Jesus did not answer my question. He would not even look at me. He stood up. He wavered for a moment on the tile floor. He seemed nervous—his fingers played with the cuffs on his sleeves. I waited for him to answer me, but he did not. Instead, he turned around and he walked away. I remember watching him go, looking at the back of his head, at his long hair where it fell over his shoulders and across his robe. I realized that, in all those years, I had never seen the back of Jesus before; he had never turned away from me.
I sat on the hamper and waited. I imagined Jesus going off to consult some divine ledger in which he could look Roy up. He’d scan the pages, a pencil in his mouth, his finger running down the column of tiny print. He’d find Roy’s name, his birthdate and the date of his pre-ordained death. He’d stop there, his finger on the death date, remove the pencil from his mouth, erase ‘1984’ and write in ‘2044’. It was easy: just change three numbers and Roy would be back. After ten years of tossing the ball and running after it for him, laughing at every one of his tired jokes, it didn’t seem too much to ask.
I waited. The minutes ticked by. The sun wound its way across the sky. Outside the door, I heard my father weeping on the stairs, the women chanting Hail Mary’s in the living room, the clatter of dishes in the kitchen. But inside the bathroom, there was just silence. It had never been this quiet before. I felt a panic rise in my throat. I swallowed, pushing it back down.
Perhaps Jesus was waylaid. There was some delay at the divine records office. Or perhaps he was with my father. My father was taking the news of the accident pretty badly so it would not surprise me if Jesus went to sit with him. I left the bathroom and went looking for him. But my father was alone, sitting on the third step of the stairs, an untouched cup of tea beside him.
Downstairs, Sister Pat cornered me in the front hall. She leaned in and said, ‘He’s with God now.’ I nodded. I squeezed her hand. I said, ‘I know.’ She walked away. But I didn’t know if she was referring to Roy or Jesus. Who was with God? I looked through the living room, the kitchen, the back hall, the basement—no Jesus. I ran out to the yard to the very back, past the swing set. I looked in the garage, in the fort. He was gone.
I used to tell people that I lost my faith the day my brother died. I would tell them that as a child I heard Christ’s voice and that it was beautiful, but one day I realized that God was a fraud. And I stopped. I turned my back on faith. But now I don’t think that’s true. I never rejected Christ. He rejected me.
Alison Smith's memoir, Name All the Animals (2004, Scribner) is a luminous, true story, and an unparalleled account of grief and secret love: the tale of a family clinging to the memory of a lost child, and of a young woman struggling to define herself in the wake of his loss. For more information, visit www.namealltheanimals.com.
"A Guilded Cage" photo © 2014 Gregory Gerard
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