Tuesday, August 3, 1989. 7:03 a.m.

Joseph Dromski gazed upward along the length of the crane, squinting through the already stifling haze. His reddened eyes followed the steel arm to where it reached out over the beams and girders, the skinless skeleton of the skyscraper under construction. He wondered just when it was, and how, he had lost it. “God, I’m tired,” he said aloud.

It seemed to him that there had been definite events which had caused it. Lost promotions that had gone to less qualified, as favors and payoffs. Jackie running away, what, seven years ago, eight? Joseph could not see the incidents as the skidmarks they were, merely warning signs on a long, steadily descending stretch of highway. And he did not wonder how negativity and hatred had replaced their opposites in his life, for it was such a gradual process.

And so it was that he did daily now things unconscionable ten years before, justifying his personal evolution in steps as it paralleled his perception of the world’s decline. Each step could be justified from the one preceding it, yet Joseph Dromski had no conception of the huge number of such steps; they ran together in his mind which latched onto only a handful of specific events which must explain, he would tell someone across the bar, the laziness and lack of morality in today’s youth or the warring in the Middle East. And so as he stared through the haze at the crane’s arm, he tried only to justify the action of the previous step, last night … Careless, he thought. Stupid kid.

Joseph Dromski watched the crew spreading slowly out over the site, and he, too, moved sluggishly toward the elevator cage. But as it lurched into motion, lifting him over the city, he felt none of the thrill he remembered once feeling. He sometimes saw it now in the eyes of the younger men, and he thought them foolish, unrealistic. Wise up, he sometimes told them (he’d told Teddie). Wake up and smell the coffee, and the burned toast, he’d chuckle, watching their eyes to see if his blows registered.

Tiny sweat droplets formed on his balding head, and inside, the dull throbbing began again. “God, it’s hot,” he told no one in particular.

Joseph looked around the elevator, peering guardedly at the grim faces of the other six riders, men he had known, it seemed, forever. He remembered when their moods were light and easy, and the men looked up to him, quick with a joke and the next round of Pabst. But now they hardly looked. So they’re guiltier than I, Joseph took this to mean, and knew that soon he could believe it … One more step.

The sun sliced through the wire cage and left lined shadows on the gray overalls of the riders. Their clothing now matched their faces, appearing like a prison chain gang.

Monday, August 2, 1989. 5:19 p.m.

Maggie sat on the concrete steps of the brownstone that was like all other brownstones, anywhere, and waved to Ted as he let her father out and drove off. She liked Ted, had dated him from time to time, and he had lately taken to coming into the bar some nights near closing time. Yet after a couple of drinks he would leer like a predator, overtipping and bragging about “going places.” He acted as if he deserved her rather than wanted her, and at times he spoke of life in the cynical terms he had learned from her father. Jackie had escaped before he could be so influenced, yet Teddie seemed sometimes to lap it up so eagerly. What were they doing in the middle of these nights, she wondered.

“You look like a hooker on the corner of Rush,” she heard her father say. You should know, Maggie thought, not meeting his eyes. “Find a sailor to slap you around a little, huh?” And he was past her and into the building.

Yet the remarks no longer drew blood as they once had, as when Jackie had first left. Maggie silently prayed that this was not because she was drained like her mother, an embalmed body in which no blood remained. She thought again of Teddie, who was apparently unaware that he, too, was losing blood to this man.

Maggie remained on the steps, listening, as her father heavily climbed the wooden steps inside, angrily but without the energy to be. Bitter.

Joseph Dromski entered the kitchen his wife had made even hotter by using the oven. Without a word he took a beer from the refrigerator and slumped into the leather-cracked stuffed chair in the front room. He unbuttoned the straps of the gray overalls, revealing a sleeveless tee-shirt sweat-stained the color of his teeth.

“Do you think you might sometime serve something cool in weather like this?” he called toward the doorway, switching on the television to drown her possible answer.
But she offered none, only acknowledging another check on a mental calendar, another day unchanged. Della had felt her energy, her life in these past years, escaping in tiny wisps, sucked out through the door that each evening he reentered. More and more it seemed locked from the outside behind him.

He used to tell her it was she who had changed, but recently he had begun telling her the opposite—that change was demanded and she had not. “You’ve got to modify,” he’d say. “You’ve got to get tough.”

“They’ll kill us, Del,” he used to tell her, before he had modified. Before he began working nights and talking less.

And Maggie told her not to listen, to take the blows and think of her own dreams, of returning to teaching, or just getting out. But Della did not sleep well, and her dreams she tried not to remember.

She, too, wondered how and why so much had been lost. She did not understand the steps involved, could not trace it. I still miss Jackie, she thought. If I could get past that, I know I’d be better for Joseph. “He’s takin’ you, Ma,” she heard her son, could it be eight years ago, “surer than if he was beatin’ you with his fists …” Thank God, at least, for that, she had thought at the time. Yet now, as she held the counter, the nauseating emptiness warm inside her, she was not so sure.

“Do you work again tonight?” Della asked, calling over the television, spooning chicken casserole onto a faded china plate, its blue flowered design worn unrecognizable. He did not answer, and as she handed him the meal his eyes did not leave the screen.

Maggie remained on the front steps, listening to the television news pouring from the second floor window and thinking of her mother. Finally she rose and checked her watch, knowing she would be early for work.

Tuesday, August 3, 1989. 2:12 a.m.

Joseph Dromski awoke with a start as the filter of the cigarette held loosely between his fingers seared his knuckles. He swore under his breath and stared across the room, completely disoriented. Worn furniture was bathed in blue-gray radiation light emitted from the silent television. Joseph stared blearily through the smoke at the small rectangle of light in which Groucho Marx was miming “You Bet Your Life.” The emcee handed a schoolteacher from Iowa fifty dollars for using the word attached to the foot of a suspended duck. “. . . a common household word, something you see every day,” Joseph mocked thickly. And then all was silent again save for an occasional passing vehicle on the still stifling street outside.

Joseph Dromski glanced at his watch now and rose quickly. He found his work boots lying neatly beside the door and mechanically tugged the laces through eyelets, pulling them tight as his hockey skates decades ago. He did not hear his wife breathing unevenly in the bedroom whose door stood ajar.

If we could finish this place tonight, he thought as he closed the door and slipped down the wooden stairs, maybe I could get some sleep. Yet as he stepped out into the moonless August night, he was wide awake, his mind actively calculating.

It had been a fine old building, 1920 maybe, and if the yard man believed even older, the bricks could sell for at least twenty-eight cents apiece. At least twenty-two hundred in the truck meant he could cut Teddie his seventy-five—for two hours work, more than I ever made at his age, the ingrate—and still have, what, five hundred plus in his pocket. That would buy a long nap, and maybe an afternoon at Arlington with the ponies.

The truck turned over grudgingly on the second try—the damn thing runs better in a Chicago winter, he thought—and Joseph drove slowly toward the south side, not worried that Teddie may have waited as he overslept. He’ll get paid, Dromski told the rearview mirror, nodding at the deserted streets.

Behind him in the brownstone, Della Dromski lit a cigarette and sat up in bed, feeling somehow better the moment the door closed behind him. Endurance seemed the only goal on nights like this.

Yet it had not always been this way, she counseled herself again. She remembered the winter nights watching from behind the glass as he glided over the ice so swift and full of boyish determination. And then the breezeless summer nights like this one, passing back and forth warm pints of beer on a blanket by the lake. Watching the barge silhouettes far away and the stars. Kissing, laughing. High school, she thought. And then the wedding and the Army and the children and still, she thought, they had been happy. Yet somehow, she could not place exactly when, it stopped feeling the same.

It was partially now, Della thought, that dammit she still loved the man. And partially her upbringing, for her mother would never have imagined leaving her father, whose drinking bouts and violence were much more common than her own Joseph’s. She had taught Della perseverance and preached forgiveness, always forgiveness, and as Della did now, had often blamed herself. And when Maggie pleaded with her to get out, she could never muster the strength to abandon that boy on the blanket by the lake so long since gone.

Della Dromski rose, stubbing out her cigarette, and entered the warm kitchen. With resolve she began laying out bread and mustard and sliced ham, the ritual and the mere motion of it a comfort.

She could not continue to hear the voices of Maggie and Jackie in one ear, and Joseph in the other. Her love went out to both sides, yet she was torn and unsettled.

Della listened to the steady, scuffing beat of the ancient coffee percolator. Outside, a car engine neared and quieted. She heard Maggie’s footsteps on the stairs, and looked up to see the front room an eerie blue-gray as the television played on silently without audience. She turned back to her work.

Tuesday, August 3, 1989. 2:37 a.m.

Maggie closed the door quietly, wearily, and saw her mother’s back to her at the counter, bread laid out in neat rows before her. She knew her entrance had been heard, and moved behind her mother, kissed her cheek.

“Take these over to . . .” her mother began, then stopped, thinking My God, that was just like him, and tried to smile. “Honey, how did it go tonight?”

Della felt suddenly defensive, not wanting her daughter to say a word. Embarrassed to be making him sandwiches in the middle of the night. She turned her head slightly so that Maggie’s words might be channeled into her right ear, Joseph’s ear.

Maggie loved her mother, and she knew what her mother had begun to ask. She understood her, and part of her loved the unfinished order. Was this where she was different from Jackie, she wondered, and more like this woman at the counter?

Yet the part of Maggie that did not love this “slip” by her mother, the unanswered love her action represented, the weakness . . . this part of Maggie hated her father, suddenly and deeply. She realized this feeling had existed for as long as she could remember. Jackie, she thought, help me now.

Maggie had watched her father gouge into people as his own self-hatred went unacknowledged. She felt him trying to take from her all that was inside her, because he had relinquished all that was inside himself. And she had watched him take away her mother’s self-respect and her dreams, almost laughing that it was so easy.

Maggie had watched this since her youth, and had found her mother in tears, or worse, like this now, many times. And she had been there to comfort her. But did she
respect her mother for taking all this—for letting him destroy her because he felt wronged? Part of Maggie despised this weakness in her mother and in herself.

Maggie hesitated. “I’ll run the sandwiches over to Daddy,” she said. “I’m still wired from work, could use the air. I know the area they’re working—Teddie told me the other night.” Her mother looked up seriously.

They stared at each other for a moment. Della’s eyes sought an answer, what two construction workers could be doing in the middle of the night. Then, Maggie thought, they seemed to dart, to withdraw the question.

“I love you, Mom,” Maggie said simply, pouring hot coffee into the thermos.

Tuesday, August 3, 1989. 3:21 a.m.

Joseph Dromski waited by the truck in near-total blackness, sweating. He saw no lights on in the apartment building opposite the abandoned brick structure where he stood, and no sign of human life at all on the other sides, a small park and a dusty, littered vacant lot. Ted emerged from the condemned building, his shirt perspiration soaked, pushing the wheelbarrow laden with clay-colored bricks.

“That’s got to be about it,” Teddie panted. Joseph frowned, seeing room in the pickup for maybe, he quickly calculated, seventy more.

“A few more,” said Joseph Dromski, looking at the truck.

“The interior walls . . .” Teddie began, frustrated, catching his breath. “. . .shouldn’t try,” he attempted, faltering, knowing it was dangerous to spark Joseph’s short fuse.

As Joseph helped him stack the bricks into the bed of the truck, Ted knew that he would reenter the gutted structure. Joseph finally stood still and waited, as Teddie lifted the wheelbarrow the last time.

“Greedy bastard,” Ted muttered under his breath, cursing more himself, for a lifetime of yielding in this game of chicken. He rolled the cart through the doorless entryway and into complete darkness.

Tuesday, August 3, 1989. 3:29 a.m.

Maggie had passed and rounded the same block twice before she recognized her father’s truck. In the blackness it was barely visible beneath the structure that stood, she could tell, without glass in the windows or occupancy of anything but pigeons and rats.

Her Volkswagen stalled, the engine dying, as she saw the barrel-like form of her father and the tall, massless skeleton of Teddie pushing a wheelbarrow. The men exchanged words, but in the silence from a block away she could not make them out. What were they doing?

There was a moment, then, of total absolute silence, which Maggie thought she had been granted to understand something. Something you already knew, Jackie would tell her. But as she watched Teddie reenter the hollow structure she thought, I’ve missed it.

It was not, she would think later, violent or deafening, even played upon the background of complete silence. It was soundless, like a film she suddenly remembered
seeing in grade school, of an earthquake somewhere out west. Buildings fell this way, she remembered thinking. Without narration or description; without emotion.

The last brick . . .

And then she remembered Teddie, as three of the exterior walls of the building in slow motion collapsed upon each other like a house of cards. The coffee in the thermos on the seat beside her remained hot.

Maggie turned the key and the car sputtered. The engine caught. She sat for a moment comforted, concentrating on this low rumbling, grateful. And she spun the car around, in the rearview mirror seeing the figure of her father leap into the cab of the truck. She accelerated, screeching around one corner and hitting the lights, stopping only when she felt out of reach and the telephone booth appeared in her path.

She was quite calm with the police, she thought later. Speaking evenly and giving no names, saying please just send an ambulance quickly I know nothing more. And just as calmly and rationally she somehow knew there was no hope. He has taken from Teddie what he took from Momma, and me, and God knows who else. What he took from the building itself . . . And we will all eventually collapse, she thought, our insides looted but the facades left apparently unblemished, betraying no damage.

Maggie packed quickly, leaving a note in her mother’s handbag, nothing more than Jackie’s address. Yet she knew her mother could not follow her now.

As the first streaks of hazy light appeared in the rearview mirror, Maggie saw the silhouette of the city, the skyscrapers rising proudly from the darkness beneath. And only then did the tears begin to fill her eyes and fall silently onto the work shirt she had never changed. There was something different about these tears, she thought, for they were not shed and lost in the night to be found again the next. They meant something, for they came with motion, and change. She gripped the wheel tightly, staring straight ahead.

Tuesday, August 3, 1989. 7:18 a.m.

The elevator cage stopped at the top of the city, and the man closest to the gate hesitated a moment before sliding it aside. And it seemed to Joseph Dromski that the shadows of prison stripes remained on the overalls of the seven men long after they had stepped out into the sun. “God, it’s hot,” he said.

One-on-One with Author Gregg Cusick

Why does Gregg Cusick write fiction?

Author Gregg Cusick

“I couldn’t not do it even if I never got anything published,” he confides. “I do it for myself.”

He has heard other authors say the same thing, “But it’s true,” he says. “Writing helps me figure things out.”

I’m talking with Gregg about his short story “Gutted—” an excerpt appears in May/Jun issue of The Saturday Evening Post. It’s the first-place winner in the recent Lorian Hemingway Short Story Competition, administered by the granddaughter of Pulitzer Prize-winning author Ernest Hemingway.

Gregg thinks a literary gene must have passed down from his father. “My dad wrote short stories as well as working in management at AT&T. He always wanted to try to make a living at writing, so he took a year off and became a full-time writer. My mom went to work in a department store to support us. I was 11 or 12 at the time. At the end of the year, he went back to AT&T, but he’d sold a couple of stories and won an award.”

Gregg’s own early fiction featured a horse named Nag and was accompanied by hand-crayoned illustrations. He went on to receive a master’s in English-Creative Writing from North Carolina State University in 1990.

“Maybe I got it from my dad, but I always thought being a writer was the best way to make a living. Of course, it’s hard to do. I’ve taught, worked as a paralegal, been a construction worker, moved furniture,” he says. “I couldn’t sit down to be a writer like John Cheever did, where you do it six, eight hours a day.”
He shrugs philosophically. “Today, I work as a bartender. That’s proven to be a real good job, in that it leaves plenty of time to write. And you get a lot of story ideas from being behind the bar.”

Gregg and his wife, Katie, an architect, live in Durham, North Carolina. However, he mostly grew up in upstate New York. “It’s a place I’ve used a lot for settings in stories, a wonderful crystallized memory, magical in a way.”

“I’ve come to realize if I go a certain amount of time without writing, it’s like an itch that gets worse. I find that I need to put something down on paper.”

“Writing is so solitary,” he says. Although his dog Jeepers often keeps him company, his wife gives him space. “She can tell when my need to write starts building up.”
Gregg has had a number of stories published in small journals like Chelsea, The Alchemist Review, Inkwell, and The Bellevue Literary Review—and collected into such anthologies as Wordstock Ten 2008.

“After reading about competitions in Poets & Writers, I started doing the contest thing. I’d do it once a month, package up a short story and mail it off.” He’s twice won The Robert Ruark Foundation Fiction Prize, and placed first in the Ernest Hemingway Festival fiction contest, the E.M. Koeppel Awards, and the Alligator Juniper Fiction Contest, among others.

“Two years ago, I won second place in the Lorian Hemingway Short Story Competition. She was so encouraging, I kept at it and this past year nailed first prize.”
Lorian Hemingway takes pride in her winners’ accomplishments. “I consider it my job to honor the talent of emerging writers—and if those who enter this competition are compelled to continue to write as a result of receiving the recognition they so deserve, then we are each richer for it.”
Yes, no question about it. Gregg Cusick will keep writing. He can’t avoid it.
–Shirrel Rhoades

Gutted The Saturday Evening Post

Outside the theater, a group of true believers had come to take advantage of the opportunity that grace and the modern cinema affords them. They had anchored a plastic statue of their savior to a station wagon luggage rack, and driven to the far side of the parking lot (as close as the law will allow them, I suppose) to wave signs and hand out tracts. I drove past, looking away, and waited in the car until a parking space opened at the front of the lot, then ducked my head as I got out and entered the theater, thankful that they couldn’t see me.

Perhaps a similar vigil still takes place outside Nick’s house, where his mother and stepfather may have settled back into the guarded normality of a troubled marriage, or are separated and deciding to divorce. Nick isn’t with them, for better or worse: He is marking time for the summer with his father’s family, as he did last summer, or maybe taking an extra term in school. In any case I’ve had no news of him since the bitter blessing that we—all of us here: the couple in front of me, the child above, a last few stragglers taking their seats as the lights dim—have come to witness on the screen.

Below me a family creeps in, cowed by the darkness and the lighted screen, and finds their seats: Three children sit between their parents. They pass a bucket of popcorn among them. After a few ads for coming attractions, a cartoon comes on, a Bible story told in singing animation: the price we pay for seeking moral uplift at the multiplex. A group of vegetables, complete with eyes and ears, faces and—presumably—souls, reenact the story of Lazarus. A cucumber evangelist—unidentified, but most certainly John, who is called the apostle Jesus loved—relates the Savior’s journey to the house of Mary and Martha, both stalks of broccoli, to find that their brother Lazarus has recently died. At the tomb, Jesus (shown only as a portentous shadow at the foot of the screen), commands the stone to be rolled away. We are transported to the inside of the tomb where light floods the interior as the stone is withdrawn and the Shadow falls across the open door. We hear His voice bid the dead arise and see a crown of cauliflower, laid peacefully on a slab of rock, stir beneath what appear to be a waxed paper shroud. Outside the tomb, the crowd watches first in dread, then amazement as the ruffled, white head inches toward the opening, and Lazarus, blinking, emerges unspoiled into the light. I unzip my jacket and expose the collar that marks me, as much as it can in the dark, for what I am.

And what are we to make of this? What are we to do, marvel as much at the vibrant and tasteless retelling as the miracle itself? How are we to regard the Shadow at whose hands—if It has hands—the miracle has been enacted? What are we to feel for this cruciferous family, reunited and happy in the end? And the crowd of onlookers—a whole produce department of greens and legumes—will they, animate creatures all, ever reconsider what they’ve witnessed, and who or what has not been saved? Why Lazarus, they fail to ask, and why not someone else? For whom is this particular miracle meant?

Of course they won’t. A miracle simply occurs—there is no further question. But why? Will no one ask what the leper felt as he returned to his home to find his children frightened strangers, his wife mistrustful and grudging in her embrace? Or what exactly the blind man saw as his parents aged and died in his restored sight? Or how Lazarus felt on the 10th anniversary of the miraculous day after his long sleep in the tomb?

On that question, the Gospel of John is silent; Lazarus is never mentioned again. As the sun set and the long line of astonished onlookers thinned and drifted off, convinced and unsettled, did he lie down and, for a moment, wish for the cool dark from which he’d come, for the oblivion he hadn’t asked to be awakened from? Did he wonder what, exactly, he’d been spared—and to what purpose? So that he could serve, unvolunteering, as the sign of another’s promise? To live out this odd twilight life the target of stares and whispers? To spend the rest of his days in numb disbelief, dreading again his approaching end? What sort of blessing, what sort of salvation, was this? And what is Nick doing now, I wonder, as the cartoon’s credits end and the feature, made in this odd afterlife of his, begins? I cross my legs and consider the darkness: With all eyes forward, I am all but invisible and no more interesting, unrecognized, than anyone else here who has come to watch the movie and not search the audience for a face they might have seen on television. I am as alone and untroubled as cauliflower in the tomb.

In the classroom he was restless, his fingers drumming out figures of notes, his desktop an imagined piano, his eyes studiously vacant, as if he knew I noticed and would assume him lost in thought, mentally rehearsing a particularly vexing piece. As if he assumed I’d admire his application, his dedicated skill. I did. Nick was a worker, a practicer. Not an original mind, no—I knew this after a week of class: He listened attentively when others spoke, then rehearsed their thoughts in his own balanced prose. His gift is a sort of mimicry, a talent for restatement; and what he writes, he writes beautifully. But still he says nothing new. He has his quirks (for a while all praiseworthy things are ‘quite lovely’—a phrase I underline in red and urge him to avoid), but he’s a talented student, and if he affects nonchalance in his judgments, if his words sometimes stray into pomposity (quite lovely?—from a 17-year-old?), then the sin is easily forgiven: What a teacher praises—what a teacher can come to love, if he is not careful—is the rapt attention of a good student.

The Bishop had hinted as much—and a good deal more. “And this was a student in your classes?” I shrug. It isn’t a question. “And that was all?”

“We hit it off. I got to know him, and his family.” My hands are open, palms up, in my lap. The afternoon sun is bright on the blinds behind him at his enormous desk.

“We had common interests, mostly music, and he excelled in class.”

“And that would explain your visit to the hospital?”

“Not entirely.” I stiffen at his tone, sit up, and level my eyes on his. “There’s also a matter of pastoral care—a student of mine, after all.”

He leans forward, pressing the point. “One you had gotten to know quite well.”

“Yes.”

He looks down. “And his family. Of course.”

Our friendship begins when I recognize a melody he’s whistling at the start of class, less for his own pleasure than to be heard taking pleasure in it, and look up from the roster. “Who’s whistling Liszt?” The class goes silent, off guard, and he raises his hand, caught in an instant of perfect confession. We talk for a moment, before I have to return to taking attendance, about recordings and performers, and after class I quiz him further. His preferences are odd for his age, the landmark recordings of a generation ago. Mention of newer players draws a blank. That night I pull down a recent performance of the second Liszt concerto and burn him a copy. When he comes in the next day, he’s done the same for me with his own recording.

Of course the movie gets the dynamics more or less exactly wrong. The child on the screen is dogged and noble, talentless but determined to rise above his failings. His teacher, a man—a priest—decidedly unlike me, a photogenic firebrand against my clumsy middle age—sees this hidden potential. A bond grows over remedial studies after school. They struggle together, battle the material, and inevitably the boy not only masters his work, but writes an essay, which, in its insight and daring, wins him a scholarship—though not before the necessary complication requiring the miracle arises.

Nick was not insightful or daring. He was a skillful redactor of what he learned. I watched him work hard and read thoroughly, and I also watched him work to please me, which is always the first task of a good student. I was flattered when he glossed my comments in his papers; gratified, as we started a slide lecture in my Art History class, to see him set up the projectors before I could ask; and finally entertained at the comments his friends repeated, angling for some favor of their own—I was his favorite, I was the one he respected. And if I grew to forgive him his occasional solipsism, if I passed over the error that I might have noted in one of his less-talented classmates—and if a common interest seals the bond as we traded discs weekly and discussed music in my classroom over lunch—then it is in just such currency that the debts of affection between teacher and student are paid.

He loved Rachmaninoff and Chopin, the grand and sentimental pieces teenagers always do, and prided himself on his taste. He gave the impression that what he admired somehow made him smarter, as if an inclination for the classics is the mark of sophistication. I didn’t correct that, but when I could, I brought in pieces that I knew would challenge him, and if I hit the mark, I was glad: I am a teacher, after all, and he was a child.

But he was not my child, and when the talk turned to family (I was curious, I’ll admit: Who nurtured his interests? Who first played that Liszt concerto for him? Who preceded me?), his conversation cools. I have met his mother, a pert and careful woman, young to have a child in high school, but already in a second marriage: “She’s just a Midwestern cheerleader,” he says with a shrug. And his stepfather?

“He’s an ass.”

“Why do you say that?”

He looks away. “He just is.”

“Everyone hates his father at your age—I did.” The disc player on the table beneath the chalkboard falls silent. The disc within hisses to a halt. The piece has ended.

“He’s an ass. That’s all. It’s private.” He stands up to leave as the bell rings. I am his teacher, after all—and only that. And he is a child.

The Bishop shifts in his seat and drums his plump fingers on the surface of his desk. “I’ve had a chance to review the file,” he says casually, tapping a manila folder as if he expects me to recognize it. He sits forward and smiles, resting his elbows on the desk as if sharing a confidence. “I won’t be recommending further action.”

“Further action?” I stare back blankly across the expanse of his desk. “I don’t understand. This is what you wanted to tell me?”

“No, no—of course not.” And he is suddenly all business, drawing himself up and brushing off the blotter as if sighting a crumb. “There’s the question of how we should respond.”

“Respond to what?”

“Well, there hasn’t been a complaint—not exactly.” He opens the file and leafs through the top few pages before lifting out a form. Light from the window behind him glows through it, lighting it in reverse. “This is the police report.”

“The police report? How did you—”

“It’s public record.” He looks at me sternly for a moment, then the conspiratorial smile reappears. “Miracle cures. Any doctor can tell you stories, maybe a few of them—things he’s heard of, even seen. And with the Church still investigating.” Another shrug. “Cooperation is easy in some things.”

“A police report of the cure?”

“Oh, goodness no—the cure?” He chuckles to himself, then, “Of the domestic disturbance, as they call it.” He lays the paper flat and points to the phrase as if citing a verse, “The argument between the mother and stepfather.” He frowns and looks up. “You’re certainly aware of that?”

“Of course.”

“Well, it seems that a certain comment has arisen. About your place on the staff, your work, and your relationship with the boy.” He looks up, brightly. “I understand. I taught for a while myself. A particular fondness, right?”

“Well, yes, but as a student. A student in class—”

“And whose treatment in a hospital you were aware of.”

“Only after prayers were requested. On the announcements.”

“But also before that, I believe.” His eyes are down, he is arranging a sheaf of papers before him in a grid: a game or a puzzle he appears absorbed in working out. “The relationship, I mean.”

“The parents requested his schoolwork—the mother called me.”

“There,” he says, dropping a last page into place. “She called you. And you took that as an invitation to visit—of course. Due diligence as teacher and pastor. Entirely plausible.”

The diagnosis, when it came, was less a surprise than a possibility I had consciously put out of mind. For a week he had found it hard to type, and the imagined improvisations no longer occupied his fingers on the desktop. He complained of headaches, and a looseness in his handwriting crept into his papers. He was absent on a Friday, and three days later his mother called the school with the news. A biopsy would be performed that afternoon. Prayers were requested.

The whole anxious episode is omitted from the film. Our hero learns of his student’s illness and unthinkingly, selflessly rushes to the ward, arriving before the child is out of the anesthetic. But I sat in the parking lot where a few days later the faithful would come to stand with signs and prayers of their own, and I debated what right I had to be there, what right to intrude. I was not family, and this was not an occasion for a casual call, no matter how I would later make it seem to the Bishop. Even the Gospel story has Jesus hear the suggestion that for Lazarus nothing more could be done. But still he caused the stone to be rolled away, and still I got out of the car and crossed the lot to the hospital. Miracles are worked, after all, and worked as much for those whose lives are affected as for the crowd of witnesses inevitably gathered to certify that something—something improbable, something that should not have been accomplished—has taken place in their sight.

And that was not quite how it happened. In the film, in the minds of those around me in the theater, a young man in a black and Roman collar, clean-cut and desperately hopeful, extends his hand toward the boy in the hospital bed. He raises his other hand to God and offers a prayer intimated in whispered voice-over. In the film—in fantasy—the child is angelically asleep, but Nick was awake when I arrived, and smiled as I said hello. He turned his head to show me the scar. His mother, watching from the corner, smiled palely, dark circles under her eyes. I placed my hand on his head impulsively and gently brushed the stitches with the side of my thumb. “Does it hurt?”

“Just a slight headache—just like they said.” His scalp is warm beneath my palm, and for a moment I am acutely conscious of how much I care for him—how I would lift him up and hold him if I could. But he is too old for that: He’s 17—another fact the believers in the parking lot and in the seats around me have gotten wrong; they see a winsome cherub, not the unshaven adolescent in a rumpled hospital bed, his body giving off the tang of unwashed flesh in the still heat of his room.

His mother sighs and smiles again, and is about to speak when I look down sharply. I had felt a crumbling sensation under my thumb, as if a thin crust of blood had dried along the edges of the incision and is now flaking away. But this is more: The stitches themselves break apart, spilling down the side of his head and trailing past his ear. I jerk my hand away, afraid I might have hurt him, horrified at the thought. “What’s that?” he asks, suddenly alert. His mother starts up and stares. She sees what I see: The bristles of the sutures are scattered on his neck and shoulder, below a wound that looks half-erased, a sketch of an injury left incomplete, with the skin whole and unbroken where it had once been sewn.

“What is it?” he asks, sitting up, and I place my hand back on his head and push him gently down, my thumb retracing the path it had swept along the bristling surface of the scar. His mother and I gape unthinking as the last of the ugly line crumbles and falls away, the stitches dropping across his cheek as his hand comes up to feel them. She gasps and takes an incredulous step back from the bed before looking wildly toward the hallway and lurching from the room, a hand across her mouth as a sob escapes her. I take my hand away: Only a slight red line remains of where the incision had been. “What?” he demands. But I can’t speak. His mother is shouting in the hallway. “Is it all right?” he asks. My stomach buckles, and I step back into the bathroom behind me. Doubled over, head swimming, I hear the nurses rush into the room where their patient now shows no evidence of their care. The miracle is complete.

But the film shows something different. The priest, alone with the boy in the bed, kneels and extends his hand in thrilled assurance toward the sleeping child, his prayer no less fervent for his confidence in what will happen next. His hand makes contact, squarely covering the dark line in the skin with his palm, and a sort of electric pulse passes between them as the light around the bed shifts subtly and music wells up. The camera stays on the tense and ministrative hand until the swell of sound peaks and it relaxes and pulls away: His scar is gone, the healthy flesh restored. The boy’s eyelids flutter as he wakes and turns his face upward, into the light. Around me in the darkness, a few of the faithful break into weak applause. A cell phone lights up in the rows below, creating a halo around its user’s head before it is snapped shut.

Of course there was no music. There was no glow or odor of sanctity in the room—if anything, the heat from the closed window and the crush of bodies brewed the sour reek of vomit and, before Nick was bundled onto a gurney and rushed from the room, the place had the usual human scent commingling about us, all sickness and confusion as the hurried nurses quelled raised voices, made a few hushed and urgent intercom calls and then, as his mother and I watched from the hallway, wheeled him away to certify the substance of things hoped for.

I leaned forward and placed both hands flat on the Bishop’s desk. “If I’ve been accused of something, I believe I have the right to—”
“There’s been no real complaint. None whatsoever.” He gathers up the papers one by one and taps their edges flush. “Not about you, at least. But the atmosphere among the students, the parents at the school—you understand?” It isn’t a question.

“I have a job, don’t I?”

“We’ll cover for you, there. The term is ending after the coming week. Certainly you can leave plans, a final exam. That can be taken care of?”

“Then where are you sending me? What’s going on?”

“Healing is what’s going on, that’s all: a time to recoup, to meditate on a fortunate event. At a distance.”

“Where?”

“Another parish school—you’ll have work to do, real work with new students. Just as you’ve done so well in the past. But a different setting. At least for the time being.”
I
n the diagnostics waiting room, his mother holds my hand and weeps, her face buried in a tissue she clutches to her nose. She rocks in her seat as the bay window before us shows her son’s body, shrouded in a blanket, his head at the center of the machine that rotates around him and maps the site of the surgery, the machine that will confirm my worst fears: There is no longer any scar—that much we know—and every trace of the surgery is also gone. The growth that had revealed itself to the same instruments the afternoon before is now missing from the readings, a dark knot in his brain has been untied without evidence, and only the clear, untroubled map of God’s creation is manifest on the screen before the frowning technicians.

That night, my picture appears on television, and I have to take the phone off its hook. After a dozen calls—from the formerly hopeless and the newly curious—I’d sat down for a moment, considering whether someone might not have heard the story, might not have seen the doctors interviewed, might not have heard the word miracle flaunted as if it were not a term of personal judgment—someone who, absorbed in their own sorrows, might be in genuine need. Then the phone begins to ring again, and I count 25 long pulls at the bell before it stops. I take the receiver from its cradle and wait for the dial tone to cut off.

Two days later he is home from the hospital, his discharge as much for his sake as to discourage the throng of well-wishers who have come to glean their share of the story. They have massed at the edge of the hospital grounds, clutching rosaries and placards attesting to their faith. They have prayed and stared up, unsure exactly which window lit the scene they replay in their minds: A man in a black and Roman collar, clean-cut and hopeful, places his hand on the head of a boy in the bed beside him. They have found out the back entrances, hidden themselves in closets and posed as patients or staff. The night before he is discharged, a police officer is posted at either end of the corridor, as if the boy had somehow become dangerous. One confused and resourceful young woman, finding his room, knelt beside him for a few moments as he slept, staring raptly at his face in the half-light before she is apprehended and escorted out of the building. That night she appears on the evening news, recounting her story: an incurable illness, vaguely described, which is already—she is sure of it—cured. First Nick’s picture, then mine, taken from a recent yearbook, is flashed on the screen behind the sound of her voice. “God is here with us,” she intones. “I could feel Him.”

A similar scene plays out at school: Students slow their steps as they pass my room, staring in bemusement. Sharp whispers before the bell each hour settle into rapt distraction. My students are uncomfortably quiet, both alert and distracted. No hands go up when I ask a question or prompt a response. Each hour is measured out and endless. Conversation falters over lunch. A fellow teacher in the room across the hall, an older woman who has never stopped mourning a child lost to leukemia a decade before, waylays me at the end of the day. “Is it true?” she asks, her eyes tense and despairing. Why could a miracle not have happened for her? she must wonder. Why Nick and not her child? When I visit him a day later I find a group on the street outside his house, and the word goes out as I climb the steps: The wonder-worker has arrived.

The visit is difficult. I sit stiffly in a chair opposite him; he is stretched out on the couch under an afghan. His stepfather, a tongue-tied, rough-edged man, frets between us, uneasy with a priest in the house, as if he fears he might give inadvertent offense less to me than to God Himself. Nick is dull and tired, still on the pain medications his doctors prescribe and irritable from all of the attention. Mine is not the only phone off the hook these days. “They get all excited if I look out a window,” he says, waving loosely at the street. And for my part I am ill at ease as well: What is there to say? News of the doctors’ reports, news that no verifiable cause can be found for the missing lesion—a spot incontrovertibly documented on celluloid—has been confirmed in the local papers, witnessed on the evening news. After a few minutes of polite conversation, I rise to leave, and as the door shuts behind me, I hunch my shoulders and look down, ducking into the car and driving off in the direction opposite the shouts from the corner.

On screen the story also ends abruptly, but before I would have called it done. After a scene of thanksgiving, after an embrace that clumsily includes the priest, the boy, his mother, and a doctor (once doubtful, now brought to the threshold of belief, we are somehow assured), the miracle worker throws his coat over his shoulder and boards an elevator. He descends to the lobby in silence, accompanied by medical staff and a girl in a wheelchair, and watches the girl ushered out by her parents through wide glass doors. Then he follows, the street gradually filling with light until he is no more than a thinning silhouette, a shadow in the white confusion of the day. The screen fades to white and music rises as credits roll upward. So it ends.

But nothing really ends, of course. Mornings I am greeted uncomfortably or—which is worse—too warmly, though the all-consuming topic is never broached, and soon I am alone in the teachers’ lounge, alone at the mailboxes in the office. Attendance declines in my classes as students stay away or their parents have them transferred, and I stop taking attendance. The woman across the hall hurries to class and shuts her door, refusing to meet my gaze. I am surprised in the school parking lot, interviewed and prodded, and stutteringly made to explain that I had no explicit desire for a cure, and no comment on the outcome—and I am asked why not? As if a miracle had to have been my intent; as if I must have meant somehow to consciously manipulate the mechanics of grace.

And soon we are all back in the news. His mother and stepfather have had an argument, and the watchers outside the house, alert to every noise and nuance of light and shadow on the drawn curtains, call the police. Their miracle, they imagine, is in danger. On the evening broadcast Nick and his mother are shown being escorted from the house, their eyes averted, his mother holding a handkerchief to her face. The next day school is alive with rumors, and I learn that they have taken refuge in a local motel. I have no doubt about what has happened: A marriage already sinking has been asked to carry the weight of an act I did not ask to perform, of the blessings we’ve all received unbidden. How much grace, I wonder, should anyone have to bear? The credits over, the screen ahead fades slowly to black, and I get up, zipping my jacket up to my chin, hunching my shoulders and looking down as I find the exit.

A few days later Nick stops by school, returning a disc I had loaned him. His face looks puffy and flushed against the collar of his white shirt, but he tells me only good news: The brain scans still show nothing, his doctor has taken him off his medication, and his handwriting is improving. “Here,” he says, handing me a small envelope.

“What’s this?”

“Just a card,” he says, and shrugs. “It took me an hour and a half to write.”

I turn it over, rub my thumb across my name on the envelope as I did when I brushed the stitches away. But my name, in his odd, attenuated handwriting, remains.

“I’m sorry, Nick. I didn’t mean to—”

He bristles: This is not the scene he’d decided on. “That’s all right. That’s private. Never mind.” Private? Of course. In the end, I’m his teacher. “Look, I’m going to spend the summer with my dad. I’ll see you when I’m back.” That’s a lie, and we both know it, but we say goodbye, and I watch him walk down the hallway, his white shirt catching the glare of the sunlight through the windows above the rows of lockers, before he turns and disappears down the stairs.

The Bishop looks up from the file. “Maybe in the fall all of this will have blown over. Then we can talk again.”

“I asked for none of this,” I say pleadingly. “I didn’t do anything.”

“Of course not. Miracle cures! Not every unknown is the agency of the divine.” He turns in his chair, looks out the window behind him. Trees are coming into leaf on the grounds below. “But something did occur—a miracle, if we read the papers. And a miracle is upsetting—by its nature, upsetting—and that upset requires an opportunity to heal.”

Outside the theater I am blinded in the midday light and stumble into a boy who’s placed himself squarely in the path of the exiting audience. His head is shaved and he wears a starched white shirt, and for a moment my heart stops before my vision clears, and he pushes a pamphlet into my hands. “Do you believe in Jesus?” he asks me.

I squint back at him. “What?”

“Do you believe in Jesus?” he asks again. He smiles, and the effect is to wipe Nick more firmly from my mind, brush his face away and replace it with this new one in just the way I once erased a scar from an inch of incised flesh. No music, no holy, hopeful glow, only the murmurs of the crowd that parts around us and fans out into the parking lot and the hard light of a summer afternoon, the light that must have made Lazarus blink back sharp tears as he awakened and, pulling the shroud away, stared uncomprehending at the crowd coming into focus before him.

I hand the pamphlet back. I know everything it could possibly say, and what it doesn’t say as well. “Of course,” I tell him as I shoulder past and find my car, relieved again to be unrecognized.

Who was the apostle Jesus loved? It wasn’t John. It was Lazarus, whom he sent ahead into death only to call him back again; Lazarus who made the journey first. And what did that love provide? A lifetime of doubt and discomfort. That is the miracle.

For more information on The Lorian Hemingway Competition go to www.shortstorycompetition.com

“Lazarus”: The Expanded Version The Saturday Evening Post

“Writing a book, grandpa?” she asked from the backseat.

“Why?” I said, eyeballing her in the mirror. She was smiling at her friend. “What’s it to you?

“A subplot is not just another plot, you know,” she said.

“I know that,” I said.

“It’s an echo of the main plot,” she said.

Roslyn is 14 years old. She’s read all of Poe already.

“Hemingway said it,” she said.

“Really, Ros?” I said. “You’re reading Hemingway?”

Hemingway was someone I had wrestled with. Hemingway was something I knew about.

“We found it in the stuff at his house,” said Olivia, who is 15.

“I like the story where they cut each others’ hair off,” said Ros. “Shorter and shorter. Really short.”

“Interesting,” I said.

“Really interesting,” murmured Olivia.

That’s when we found out what was really going on.

She was ours now, Roslyn, daughter of Nell and our son. She came into our lives at the age of nine, reluctantly on her part. Could we ever do enough for her? A child of the wilderness, she arrived in Key West “learning to love alone,” she once told me.

The story's author, Mark Howell, won honorable mention in the Lorian Hemingway Short Story Competition.Photo courtesy Mark Howell.

Wanting to save her from herself, I tried to give her everything. She’d have none of it. Her grandmother tried a bit of the opposite with no more success. It was not dire things that happened so much as disobedience awesome enough to leave us breathless.

How many days had she skipped school? Especially days when I myself had dropped her off and picked her up.

My theory, shared by Olivia, was that Ros’s face looked the same on both sides. A rare thing shared by movie actors and models, a symmetrical face is immediately attractive to babies, to teachers, and to sheriff’s deputies. Ros had won face-offs with all three.

The cell phone we bought for her, to keep us in touch, had cut her off from us completely, linking her with a circle we had no part of. The only way we kept in touch was through transportation. A bike or a bus would never get her from New Town across to the other side of the island—to the heart of the heart of Old Town—in anywhere near the time she needed to get there. So we gave her a ride.

I was never quite sure where she actually went. “We have a back way in,” was what she told us. I only knew that it was at the far, purple end of Mullet Lane, where I dropped her off just about every weekday.

“Bye,” I’d say each time, and each time she’d bounce out of the back seat, slam the door and canter off down the lane, cell phone in ear, directly to whatever mystery awaited her at the end of the lane.

I was conflicted about the gateway and she knew it. Olivia was one thing, but who else hung out beyond it? She said his name was Carlos, a boy in high school. His mother owned a cottage there, or someone in her family did, and Carlos and his gang had built tiki huts in “a garden beyond the garden,” according to Ros.

I mean gang in the friendliest way. It was good these kids were still in town. Ros had only one real friendship, with Olivia—and that could be turbulent—but in fact she knew a load of kids. In common with each other, they were all, unsteadily, losing their orbit around school.

One time when her class-cutting got really out of hand, I went in search of Ros, following clues given me by Olivia who had never cut a class in her life. Her penciled sketch got me to Big Pine Key, north of Key West, 30 miles of bridges and islands and then left at a crossroads and at last, in the back country, an overgrown grove of campers and trailers.

At the fence I’d called Roslyn’s name. From a variety of windows popped the heads of several girls. Then came the heads of the boys, older and with longer hair. I had blundered onto Pinocchio Land. Here was where the runaways came, where they paid the rent with whatever it was they could lift from their parents’ houses and pawn for cash.

To our knowledge Ros never revisited Pinocchio Land once her path slid across Carlos, whose mixed group of former Goths and travelers at the end of the lane were managing, somehow, mostly, to stay in school. Ros and Olivia, I guessed, were the youngest of them.

Until that evening when I picked them both up in the car and Ros came up with her nugget on subplots, I had no idea she’d scored a bulls-eye in our family’s literary history.

Hemingway and me, we go way back, to school afternoons as a young idiot reading my own life revealed in his writing; later still to the oceanic work not published for years, providing pleasure purely in writing, in pure writing, in writing “beyond the bones of the others.”

Truth, as a consequence, pierced deep.

“You’ve been hanging out at his house all this time?” I asked her in the car.

“We swim in his pool after hours,” said Olivia. They squealed.

“You’re kidding,” I said. “Are you making this up?”

Ros described the pool; Olivia told of its temperature. They recited the story of Ernest being pissed off with Pauline about the thing.

“You told me about these people,” said Ros. “Are you conflicted about this, grandpa?”

“Oh, I cannot begin to tell you,” I said. “I am lost for words. We must talk.”

“Turn the car round,” she commanded. “We’re going back in.”

“Yes!” said Olivia.

So I turned the car around. We arrived back at the lane and my heart began to beat with a serenity that my mind felt when I first opened a book by him.

The girls instructed me to park at the end of the lane. Twilight had come fast. Within a minute, in a tropical switch from one world to another, the streetlights were brighter than the daylight.

We snuck out of the car and the two of them crept away to the right, away from the gateway that had caused me so much conflict.

How we entered the grounds is a secret that I swore to Ros I would never reveal, and her secret is safe with me. But we did get in, to the empty house and the garden at night, as different from the open house and the public garden of daytime as moon from sun.

The girls ran barefoot across the lawn. They led me by unknowable means inside the writing lodge and to a bloated trunk stamped E.H. on its hide. They took me to his collection of Western novels and a shelf of his own books in strange languages (“Far Vail Till Vap Neu”). They took me to his master bedroom, the big bed and its carved headboard illuminated by the tall windows. On the pale bedspread sprawled a great white cat. A snoozing black cat lay wedged between the mattress and a corner post.
They played with the cats like the bed was their own, and for the moment it was. Ros was at peace in this place. She seemed at home.

“What have you learned here?” I asked, then conflicted the question. “Have you learned anything?”

They looked at each other, unwrapped their limbs from the cats and loped off to another room on the northwest corner.

Somehow a book had already been liberated by the time I got there, from out of a glassed-in bookcase. They were sitting on the floor with it. “This one’s the best,” said Olivia.

I noticed it wasn’t one of Hemingway’s own copies. It was published years after he killed himself. A bright red book covered in plastic. Olivia pointed the spine at me.
“The Garden of Eden,” it said.

“It’s crazy,” said Ros. “He’s a famous writer—” she looked at me with scorn  “—and his wife wants him to have sex with another woman on their honeymoon.”

“Wait,” said Olivia, “that’s not it. They swim in the cove together, they eat all these meals. It’s about everything.”

“Yes,” said Ros.

“She wants him to cut his hair like hers,” said Olivia. “And bleach it the same color.”

“Shorter and shorter,” said Ros.

“So he doesn’t know who he is,” said Olivia.

“Then,” blurted Ros, “she burns all his writing,”

“That is too bad!” I said. A grievous shock. I almost shouted. “He deserved that?”

“He was two-minded, Grandpa. It’s a sin.”

“Ah,” I said.

“Look at how he handled his wives,” she said. “It wasn’t so good.”

“You think I’m two-minded?” I said. I was still on my knees.

“You want to talk,” she said, “and then you say you’re lost for words.” She wiped her nose with the back of her hand. “It’s difficult, Grandpa. It’s hard when you’re like that.”

Olivia slammed the book shut. “The cats!” she yelled.

Both of them were up and gone before I was on my feet. I trailed their chattering down the stairs and into the blacks and the blues of the garden. We regrouped in a far corner of the grounds, around a lignum vitae tree. It was wizened and wise though probably still young. “I love this tree,” I said.

“Of course,” said Ros.

“Cats!” yelped Olivia once more and all kinds of them began arriving, silent creatures pretending neglect and neediness but their smarts gave them away. They were interested in us—or not, as the case may be—yet they harbored no pretense in their minds. We messed about with the cats for quite a while, stunned to be in a cave of bushes with them, amid the broken flowerpots and piles of dirt.

“Do you want to go see the basement?” Ros asked me.

“Nah,” I said. “Too deep.”

The three of us quit the grounds then, in the secret way, and reentered the world.

Weeks after that sacred night, Roslyn marched in through the front door. Instead of retreating to her room, she came straight for me and she hugged me.

I realized she was leaving us.

“I love you, Grandpa,” she said. “Say thanks to Grandma. I love her.”

I leaned back. “You’re going to your father’s?”

“I bought the ticket,” she said.

I hugged her again. “I want you to be a movie star,” I said. “I’m quite single-minded about it.”

“Why am I crying, Grandpa?”

Kids don’t understand why they cry, they don’t know their emotions. I’d have to give this my truest shot.

“We cry for what we can’t be,” I said. “But you don’t need to cry. You can be Marilyn Monroe, Judy Garland…”

“Some role models,” she said, her perfect face creased and wet. She sobbed again. “I’m crying because I’m happy, Grandpa.”

And with that she left us.

Not Just Another Plot The Saturday Evening Post