The Patience of Vegetables and Saints, I

He had never noticed before how many shades of red shimmered at the back of the church. The window faced east and at just this time of the year the sun slipped over the top of the Fairweather Arms two blocks over past the parking lot, poured through the maple leaves bristling in street-dirty morning wind coming off the river and up the street, and set the glass to dancing.

It was oddly appropriate, the colors of the window mottled and quivering, overlooking the stolid church interior below. There she was—the Magdalene—her crimson clothes billowing pure and radiant in the stained glass wind. The artist (Carla’s brother Luke) had tried and, yes, somehow had succeeded in capturing just the right posture for a comely woman who is the embodiment of the wonder, who has lost hope and then run smack into it in, of all places, the land of tombs, the place of putrefaction and death.

Her black hair, streaked with light and caught by the pure wind, slipped out from under the cloak at just the moment it began to slide away from her—

“Um, Father.” A gravel voice by his side trying to whisper. Tom Ulder, the seventy-seven year old altar “boy.” “Are you all right?”

He nodded and picked up where he had left off. He did know where he had left off. He wasn't that far gone, lost in thought, lost in the lady’s crimson.

He continued the prayer.

On the night before he died, he took the bread, broke it, and gave it to his disciples, saying . . .

He raised his eyes to follow the host he was elevating and this time the distraction was not mental, not the diversion of a beautiful windblown scarlet woman standing on a cliff. This time he was struck blind.

What the hell? he thought but had the presence of mind not to say, as suddenly he was indeed blinded by a light that he had the presence of mind to blink away. He shifted from one foot to another and the light was gone. He finished the prayer with spots before his eyes, but a clear head.

His meditation after communion, the quiet one he entertained himself and God with as all sat in the church in silence, brought him back to that great, maligned lady, the Magdalene, standing up over the choir loft in her serenity, in the holy wind of spirit.

++++++++++++

“It's a hole, all right.”

He gasped involuntarily in fright. The woman seemed to have materialized behind him. It was unclear to him how a woman that big could move so quietly in an empty stone church. They were up in the choir loft after mass, just under the damaged stained glass window.

“I can see that, Gladys,” he said. “What I can't see is how it got there.”

“Try this,” she said and handed him a baseball. “If it was a golf ball it would be a hole in one.”

“Where the devil . . . ?”

She pointed to a corner of the loft where the cobwebs had been disturbed.

“A nice, clean shot,” she said as she stooped with difficulty and retrieved the perfectly round gold piece of glass the ball had punched to the floor.

She handed it to him. Clean indeed. He had no idea the window glass was that thick, an inch or more. He cradled the piece of color in his hand, caressing it and enjoying the feel. It had the heft and slick surface of a piece of cooled, molten liquid. Which is, of course, precisely what it was.

“But why would anyone throw a ball . . .?”

“Well, as you may recall,” she said as she turned to go, “the rigors of youth do not usually include reading signs closely.”

He looked at her, bewildered. Why did this woman insist on speaking in riddles?

“The parking lot,” she said. “Until the city gets the funds to build a playground down here someplace, that's where the kids are gonna play ball.”

She took a deep breath; she was already focusing on the next thing: she would now have to take the stairs.

“The sign the pastor put up before he left, remember?”

He did. It was an embarrassment, but he was just filling in on weekends until the next pastor was appointed, so he didn’t feel he could remove it.

“This is a parking lot!” it announced (with exclamation point). “Do not skateboard! Do not play ball! Do not loiter! Do not park here unless you are going to Church.”

Ah, he thought, priests. He could have at least dropped the do-not's and replaced them with thou-shalt-not's. It was a church parking lot, after all.

“Has this happened before?” he asked, but she was already hefting her body down the spiral stairs.

“Nope.” Her voice echoed up the narrow stairwell.

“Any ideas who did it?”

“Yep.”

[To be continued. In the Roman rite, July 22 is the Feast of Mary Magdalene, Apostola apostolorum, “Apostle to the Apostles”]