Sacrament (a Liturgy), by Tara Stillions Whitehead
Photo by Jessica Lewis 🦋 thepaintedsquare: https://www.pexels.com/photo/red-pomegranate-seeds-992815/
Months ago. July. Afternoon sundogs and a slaughter of fruit between us.
My husband and I lay grocery store ads and campaign mailers across the cement porch and have our way with the watermelons. Every season brings lessons. Summer’s is a vivid hunger.
Our son kneels over the halfmoon flesh, chews to the rind and spits the seeds out onto the paper like we’ve shown him.
When there is nothing left to chew, he squats back onto his haunches. Stares morbidly at his hands. At us.
“What’s wrong?”
“It was an accident.”
“What was?”
“I swallowed one.” He peers down at his soft, naked belly and frowns. “What’s going to happen to me?”
My husband and I exchange glances. I see the lie forming on his lips and cut him off before he can make that mistake.
“Nothing is going to happen,” I say. “It will pass.”
“But what if it doesn’t? How big will it get?”
I take his sticky hand in mine. Kiss his fingers reassuringly.
“Your body won’t let that happen.”
“How do you know?”
My husband watches me for a cue.
“I’ve swallowed hundreds of seeds. Thousands!”
Our son calculates. Doesn’t look so sure.
I cup his face with my hands and thumb a piece of melon from his cheek. “Trust me. A body knows what to keep and what to let go.”
*
More than epiphany. More than land. More than being saved.
We wanted you.
Only you.
*
Heparin. NSAIDS. Iodine scrub. A man’s bicep mottled with decades-old bullet scars.
I close my eyes. Recall the texture of melon. Damp heat on our shoulders. Our young son’s long arms carrying soaked paper to the bins behind the shed. I kiss his ten fingers. Help him soap each one.
A vacuum hums. The weight of despair evacuates. Water-stained tiles in the drop-ceiling ebb and shudder.
The body knows what to let go.
I close my eyes, wanting nothing more than to be outside of this reluctant body. I search for my son’s sticky fingers. My husband’s warm mouth. Where are they? My body lurches, pulls back into itself. Something inaudible slips away.
I dig deep, but the memory isn’t there. I feel everything. And all I see are the sundogs.
*
There are no clocks. No windows. I don’t know how long I’ve been here or how long it should take.
After they finish me, they wipe my feet. Feed me grape juice and Saltines. They wait twenty minutes. Check my temperature and blood pressure. Offer polite smiles but no blessings. They charge my credit card and tell me to go. There are others waiting. They need to make room. It is a small place.
The woman who triaged me hours ago instructs me to leave through a different door. It has only one handle. On the inside.
I wander a fenced-in alley full of unmarked dumpsters and small patches of ice until I find a gate that is hard to unlatch. I walk to my car with the sense that north and south have somehow become reversed.
I lean my head against the wheel for a long time. Crank the heat and play the radio.
“God forbid you call their bluff…”
I’m too scared to drive.
“Like the nightmares ain’t enough.”
Home is so far away.
*
Three years. You were a miracle. The only true miracle of our lives. This we believed.
I’m no longer too embarrassed to pray.
But I am never not afraid. I am never certain.
“God, make me an instrument of your peace. Where there are lies, let me bring Truth.”
*
My hood is crushed between asphalt and guardrail at a point in the road that curves alongside pasture. My body is seventy feet from the wreck, in a snowy patch of muddy grass below a red barn wreathed for Christmas. I know this barn. We once bought pomegranates for the pastor’s wife here.
Two medics in navy uniforms and rubber gloves examine my body. They brace my broken neck, note my blood-soaked jeans. The handsome one stares at me long enough for me to wonder whether he is also a good man. He asks where I went to have it done. I tell him about the clinic in the industrial park forty minutes past the state line. Rounding the driver’s side of the ambulance, he tosses his gloves into the gravel, slams the door shut.
It continues to snow.
It’s too dark to see the face of the other medic who finishes lifting me by gurney into the back of the ambulance. When we get inside, he is a blurry hallucination of movement, ripping open sterile IV lines, needling a catheter into my hand, starting a bag of fluids. I’m on a drip before the ambulance lurches across the snowy berm back onto the treated road. There are no sirens.
As the medic leans over me to tighten a strap on the gurney, I finally get a good look at him. His eyes meet mine and I know that he knows that I know who he is.
“You comfortable?” he asks. Muscle Shoals is thick in his voice.
I pull the oxygen mask away from my face.
“So this what happens when you die,” I say. “Instead of Saint Peter holding the keys to heaven, it’s whoever’s playing on the radio when you crash your car?”
Jason Isbell gently slides the mask back over my nose and mouth.
“Please don’t put me in a song,” I say. The oxygen mask fogs up a little.
“I’m not who you think I am.”
“You’re not?”
“Yes. I mean, no. I mean–I am who you think I am, but not really. I’m kind of like an—”
“Angel?”
“Maybe.”
Buzz. A live video feed of my husband and son asleep on the couch in front of our TV appears on the EKG monitor. I try to sit up on the gurney, but I forget about the neck brace and safety straps.
“I have to get home! They’re waiting for me!”
Jason turns to see what I’m looking at. I kick the blanket off and try to unshackle myself from the gurney. A searing pain blooms in the middle of my chest, paralyzing every muscle in my body.
“Whoa, whoa! Hold on, there,” he says. “Not yet–”
Rustle. Click. “There…”
He injects a few CCs of something into my IV catheter. The EKG monitor darkens and then fills with snowy static. Within seconds, I am incapacitated. My heartbeat reappears on the screen, draws a slow, measured line of peaks and valleys. There is no more pain, no way to know I exist.
Jason’s face becomes a dark, animated Rorschach.
I don’t bother removing my mask. I know he can hear my thoughts, whether I want him to or not.
“How do I know you’re not the Devil?”
*
We have to do it. We promised each other we would always do it when the song comes on. No matter what. No matter where.
I love him for this.
It’s easy because we are already undressed and quiet in the darkness. Our son is asleep in his bed, and through the open bedroom door I watch his projector cast mini galaxies into the hallway. Andromeda creeps across my husband’s back.
Since our son, we’ve had to relearn our sacred way of needing. We’ve rediscovered ecstasy. We realize now that our bodies have always belonged to us and that piety was the thief.
After we come together, I hold my husband’s body against mine and let his heart beat a new prayer through me.
Please, God, it says. Don’t let this be the last time.
*
How long have we been driving? Are we going anywhere at all?
Jason scribbles something down on a notepad. It’s in a language I cannot read.
“What is that?” I say.
Jason flips the pad closed and tucks it into the front pocket of his uniform. “Notes.”
“About me?”
He smiles apologetically. “I heard something when we picked you up and needed to write it down.”
“Did I say something?”
“No. There was a sound coming through the trees.”
His eyes drift to the window, and I wait for him to explain, but doesn’t. “Tell me what it sounded like.”
“I can’t.”
“Why not?”
“Because you’re not ready to hear it yet.”
*
Silo, cemetery, silo, car, silo, pomegranate tree, rope–
“I started listening to you when you and I were both drunks. And then we both got sober. I listened to you when my son was born and you had Mercy.” Then, “It makes sense you’d be here when I die.”
Jason pulls a blanket over my shivering knees and distracts himself with detangling my oxygen line. “You just keep talking,” he says.
“I don’t have anything to say.”
“Gibberish. The alphabet. Anything that comes to mind. Just keep talking.”
The tiny ambulance window flickers like a movie screen. I watch the spent road edge away from us into twilit oblivion. Acres of famished soy. Impotent silos. A cemetery. My car smashed into the pasture. A jump rope tied a pomegranate tree.
“Did you know pomegranates have 613 seeds? One for each commandment?”
An alarm beeps innocuously behind my head. The scenery continues to pass unchanged–silo, cemetery, car, tree. It’s an impossible zoetrope spinning and spinning, draining all color from the light, the cab.
A black and white Jason lays his warm hand over mine. “Keep going,” he says.
I tell him that a fallopian tube is wide enough to pass a pomegranate seed. And if you slice through my uterus, you’ll see the anatomy, how the endocarp makes a V. I tell him that’s where the seed made its impossible roots.
“This wasn’t supposed to happen again. My husband and I made sure of it. We paid the doctors and took the tests.”
I tell Jason how it started to leak out of me. How, when faced with the task of extracting the impossible seed, the doctors presented their exegesis of the Sacrament without fully understanding the Passion. They pressed soft, balsam crucifixes to their chests while I lay dying, waiting for God to intervene.
I tell him that I left with the impossible seed still inside of me and drove to an out-of-state address my sister-in-law gave me.
“We waited three years to have our son. We prayed.” Then, “What good is a dead mother to him?”
Jason picks the blanket up off of the floor and pulls it back over me, “My grandaddy was a Pentecostal preacher who said man’s logic isn’t God’s and that Job knew that.”
“Job lost everything.”
“And then got it back. Tenfold,” he says.
“We both know that’s not how the story really goes,” I say.
Jason nods, says, “I’m not my grandaddy.”
I search Jason’s eyes for some deeper knowing. Instead, I see the event horizon, an unintelligible universe expanding.
“What are you?” I ask.
He shrugs his shoulders and leans back against the defibrillator, strokes a patch of stubble that has just begun to form under his chin.
“When we get to the new hospital, and they find out what I’ve done, you know what they’ll do to me.”
There is understanding, sadness in his voice now. “I do.”
“They’ve already done it, haven’t they?”
“I’m sorry.”
We pass the cemetery. The silo. My smashed car. The pomegranate tree.
I want to tell Jason that when “Danko/Manuel” comes on the speaker, my husband and I stop whatever we are doing and make love.
I want to tell him that I know there is no hospital.
But I’m tired of telling him the things he already knows.
“I changed my mind,” I say. “Write a song about me. Something my son can sing when he wants to feel me close by.”
Jason reaches underneath the gurney and pulls out his Redeye. He flips open the small notebook filled with the language of angels.
“Whenever you’re ready,” he says.
I’ve never written a song before, and he can tell by the look on my face.
“You can do this,” he assures me. “It’s your song. There’s no wrong way to write it.”
The flickering scenery in the ambulance window incandesces white. Jason places the notebook gently in my lap and watches as his words rise like vespers from the page and hurdle towards me at the speed of sound. The incantations penetrate me with such force that I can no longer feel my body. I have been reduced to sonic totality: the comprehensive sound of a completed life.
Jason removes the oxygen mask from my face and tosses it to the floor. He strums an A minor and waits.
I close my eyes for the last time and listen. Our son’s feet pound the oak floors. A door flies open. The wind chimes shatter.
My husband’s voice swaddles our son in lies. He is a good father. He is easing the pain.
The body knows what to keep and what to let go.
I open the foreign instrument of my mouth to sing.
But it is full of pomegranate seeds.
Tara Stillions Whitehead is a filmmaker and writer from Southern California. Her latest book, They More Than Burned (ELJ Editions 2023), which is a Small Press Distribution best seller, is currently being adapted for film. She is Assistant Professor of Film, Video, and Digital Media Production at Messiah University in Pennsylvania.