My adrenaline up, aching with feelings I couldn’t yet name, I still had my foot pressed firmly to the accelerator on the way home after dropping her off, and I ended up skidding right through a stop sign and into a speeding pickup that made mincemeat of my Civic. The guy in the pickup was hurtled through his windshield and across the road, his body blazing a thirty-foot meteor-like channel through somebody’s front lawn. This turned out to be a good thing because after smashing into my Civic, the fuel line in his pickup caught fire. I woke to heat, gasoline burning in my nostrils, the frantic screel of metal-on-metal as paramedics tried to cut me from the pinned wreckage with the Jaws of Life before I passed out again. My own foretaste of hell. I know some of this because the pickup driver later came to visit me in the hospital, a lanky kid wearing a Twins baseball cap, his arm in a cast since they’d had to replace lost skin there with skin from the back of his legs. He was otherwise miraculously unhurt. “You got a raw deal here, dude,” he’d said. “This is why I don’t wear a seatbelt.”
The cops searched my crushed car for the money and didn’t find it. Harry Larkin cleared me of suspicion; the burden falling on Maura, who disappeared that night. She never checked into the hospital where I would spend the next ten days.
The more I thought about it, the more I wondered. If Maura had stolen the money, she could have lied about other things.
Where did you go, Maura, and why? Were you really pregnant and unsure about the father and what to do next? Did you really miscarry? Did you feel even a shadow of what I felt for you?
“Do you want to be saved?” the Reverend Elijah was asking from the front. “Is there anyone here who wants to get up and leave behind the darkness of the grave and walk into the light?”
Every head bowed while mine was still lifted. My throat parched and dry. Right there in the church I smelled burning gasoline. Reverend Elijah watched me. Even Roland had raised his head. I stood and stumbled, pushing past Roland into the center aisle.
“Come, young man,” the preacher said, his eyes on me and his voice soft and beckoning, the people with the bowed heads swaying and murmuring. They knew someone was approaching the altar. And I don’t know how to explain it, but there was an energy in the room. I felt it, like light at the base of my spine, urging me toward the altar. Years later, I’ve wondered over it, because in that moment, I heard the pain in the preacher’s voice. He was hurting, too. He needed me as much as I needed him. As light calls to dark. Or dark unto dark.
I took one step toward him, my head down. My vision had gone blurry. I was terrified that one of the migraines I had begun suffering since the accident was coming on, but in that moment I wanted him to lay hands on me. I wanted to believe. I wanted him to lay hands on me and say, He is not dead, only sleeping.
Instead, I turned on my heels and lurched toward the front door. He didn’t call out after me, instead addressing the congregation, moving on with his prayer.
Outside, a snarling wind bit into me. I felt the tears on my face freezing. A cold that torched my lungs. I kept on stumbling across the parking lot like some wounded animal until I made it to my car. Trembling, wrung out, I climbed into the Continental. I didn’t deserve any forgiveness. I had failed to save a good person, helped steal a wife from a husband, a mother from her daughter. I had been an accessory to a crime that I didn’t even know was being committed. Her husband had named my condition correctly. I was dead in my sin.
I didn’t start the car up right away, but sat shivering in the front seat trying to steady myself by gripping the wheel. When I glanced back at the church I could see Roland standing sentinel by the front door, watching me curiously. After another coughing fit, the engine turned over. When it sparked and rumbled to life, I peeled away.
Maura, did you tell me the truth about your husband? His violence? Were you really afraid of him? That man, back there?
I never saw any bruises, but I believed I had touched her wounds just the same. After she disappeared, I called the local police to tell them what I knew, to accuse Elijah Winters, but I had no idea if they followed through with any kind of investigation. I had believed Maura when she had no one else to turn to. No one in the world but me. She wouldn’t go to a shelter. There was no place safe from him, she’d said. Not for her, or her daughter. I had to come back, had to let him know who I was, but I didn’t know how I’d find the courage.
I had to see him again, but I no longer knew if I was the light or the shadow in this story.
Concerning the Unkindness of Ravens
In one of the religion classes I attended, the prof talked about primitive tribes who believe that the fontanelle, the soft spot on a baby’s skull, is a doorway for spirits. Through membrane where the brain pulses underneath, stretching and flexing like spongy muscle, spirits trickle in. This makes babies both holy and wholly vulnerable, attended by seraphim and spectra, until the bony plates grow over that fleshy place, hardening, and a world of possibility shrinks to the mundane every child must muddle through to reach a humdrum adulthood, where no spirits ever visit.
My car accident split me open body and mind. I’d broken three ribs in my left side, had four silicone screws stitching together a busted collarbone, and my left hip had been fractured. At the hospital, the attending surgeon told me he had expected to put me into a medically induced coma so he could drill into my skull to release the pressure, but my brain hadn’t swollen. I was lucky, he said, to emerge from the wreckage without any lasting damage to my spinal cord and neck. After I recovered from the concussion, troubling migraines lingered, so I left the hospital with a serious arsenal of medication: Percocet for pain, sumatriptan for the migraines, Effexor after they diagnosed me with what they called “situational depression.” While I didn’t drink, partaking of this cocktail of pharmaceuticals played with my perception of reality. I hurt all the time and couldn’t imagine a life beyond the hurt. My survival didn’t feel like luck, but there is this: when my skull cracked like a clay jar, I didn’t just become ultrasensitive to light and sound. I saw things I had never seen before and have not seen since. My damaged skull throbbed like a fontanelle opening unto a spirit world where most mortals cannot tread.
All these years later, even if this second sight has dimmed, the cracked places healing over, I can’t forget what I saw. The Apostle speaks of powers and principalities at work in this world that are invisible to the human eye, a struggle beyond flesh and blood, a spiritual evil that lies upon the earth. I am not certain about any of what happened next—some of it feels so impossible—but I know this much. That winter of 1999, just before the turn of the millennium, I walked with angels and demons.
Following my visit to Rose of Sharon, the demons came for me first.
Ravens arrived the next morning, blown south from Canada as if by fallout. Big black birds with glossy wings and devil eyes. When I took Kaiser on his morning walk, I marveled at the storm of birds up in the barren grove, all bristly like wind in leaves. A hundred and then a hundred more, filling up the pines on the ridge. I heard anger in their croaky choir. So many, it was as if a seam had unzipped in the gray sky and out poured these birds, bickering in the branches like they had taken a wrong turn somewhere and couldn’t agree on which way to go next. Kaiser made a whimpering sound, like he could sense something wrong in the ravens, both of us stunned by the confabulation of their caw, caw, cawing. I had never seen such a wonder, both beautiful and terrible.