At Grift & Sift, Chapter 10


And a cross? Why would anybody hang one on their neck?

The two on the pockets of my Grift & Sift skirt—if that’s what they are, crosses—are just for some chintziness. Sue’s skirt, I mean, if it was hers. But the Jesus-and-the-two-thieves kind, dolled up or not, smack too much of sorrow and shame.

In my next-to-last chapter in Sticking Points (2011—nobody read it), obsessive-compulsive Anna toils over an article she might send to Harold Epp, the editor of her church magazine. Same as all his readers, she was raised on picture books vivid and cruel—

I was enamored by Jesus’ birth in a barn, and after he grew up, his wild miracles. He went out and collected a ragtag assortment of friends, and dazzled different audiences with instant wine, fish and buns that multiplied, fixed-up legs, even the spectacle of somebody sitting up in his coffin. Yet Jesus was setting his face toward his pernicious destiny. On a dark night in Gethsemane, the evildoer ne’er-do-wells appeared. Peter reached into his scabbard and took a swing at a bystander, but Jesus said, “No more of this—put up again thy sword into his place, for all that take the sword shall perish with the sword.” Right there in front of the ruffians he felt around in the grass for the piece of warm ear and pasted it back on. He matched up the edges and reconnected the twitchy nerves, allowing the man to get back to his rubbernecking.

But despite his conciliatory efforts, Jesus still had to drip between two criminals.

It made me ill if I looked too long at the picture in our storybook, his bony frame stretched out like a rack of lamb. And in the burial scene, he’d turned grayish. They’d stuck him into a cave, rolled up in sheets. His beard was too jabby. It poked out, stiff and frazzled as an old paintbrush.

I didn’t wonder why God stepped outside his own parameters. I didn’t ask why God forbade killing yet prescribed the Old Testament sacrifice laws, rescindable only by a mob’s call for blood—by Jesus’ violent demise, the most sacrilegious infraction possible out of all. But now I’m guessing it was just a lynching.

I still think Anna had a point. And a clinkety cross strung on chains, winking and twinkling—how does that jibe?

 


 


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