Page 42 - Vol. VI #3

Jesus’s head rolled down the lawn, its momen- Condominiums now under construction in former c tum halted by the slight rise before the retain- commuter rail! Get in on the ground floor. Breakfast ing wall. It came to rest looking up at the heav- exposed brick and stained glass. Going Fast!
ens, the eyes lidless and sad, the lips parted as
if searching for a lost word. The nose was a soft hollow of dust. The cement torso, which even now retained traces of its original white paint, lay farther up the slope still loosely attached to its base with twisted rods.
base of granite, so Elwin had thought he could keep the whole mess intact. He was wrong. First he’d tried to gently pry the slab up with the edge of his blade, but it was firmly lodged in the frozen earth. He gave the rock one good shove to loosen it, and to his horror, the statue, arms reaching
“Christ,” a man on the sidewalk whispered, a sound immediately consumed by the noise of the bulldozer.
Last Chance!
out to him, started tipping over. When he tried to An older woman, dressed in black, began to sob break the fall with the blade, the head snapped
into her hands. off against the metal edge. Cheap piece of ce-
Under a winter sky the color of stone, parishio- ners had gathered to watch the leveling of their churchyard, not one daring to make eye contact with the other. A few men had their arms folded on the retaining wall, looking away. Flakes of ash fell from their cigarettes and stayed where they landed. With no wind, the smoke rose in thin pil- lars and hung in the air above them.
ment shit, he’d almost said out loud—the guide rods hadn’t gone all the way to the top. The nose shattered on impact, so with nothing to act as a brake, the head bounced away, down the slope, down, down, down, practically bowling over the spectators. He was tempted to get off his ma- chine to collect it, but then what? Throw it into the dumpster like a basketball? Toss it into the crowd? Was he expected to save that which was already abandoned?
Elwin Cooke, the bulldozer operator, backed up to take another pass at the statue, pretending not to notice he’d just lost the head. Wasn’t it just like priests to leave their dirty work for some harm- less boob like him? He’d been sent by the man- agement company to prep the land around Holy Innocents, getting it ready for the developer and crew the next day. “Clear the slate,” his boss had said. “Everything into the dumpster.”
He jammed the bulldozer into a lower gear. He was not a church-going man, and hadn’t been
for years, but he still had his religious feelings. Which was more than what the priests seemed to have, who’d only bothered to find homes for certain items and not others. They’d gotten big bucks from a garden designer for the marble baptismal font, and a foreign wholesaler paid the priests cash for the church bell, organ, stained- glass, and pews. Even the crimson carpet had come to a decent end, salvaged by the moving company to line the insides of one of their vans. But the statue of Christ would have cost more to be saved than destroyed.
“Everything?” Elwin had asked, looking pointedly at the life-size statue of Christ.
His boss shrugged and made a motion across his throat. “The priests knew what would happen to anything left behind,” he said. “We’re just con- tracted to leave the site clean.”
Elwin raised his blade, and with one push the body was completely severed from its base. He
The statue had seemed securely fastened to its 33
Joeann hart
h