» The Cross

During that first druggy summer at the commune, 1970, when I was 18, there was absolutely no reason, no foreshadowing whatsoever, for my building the crucifix. I had virtually no church, no religion, in my background. As I was growing up, ours had been a secular household. But for who-knows-what reason I chose piece after piece of weathered, scrap barn-wood from a pile by the barn and tacked it together. After several days I had built a gray-brown sculpture five and a half foot wide by six and a half foot tall, something I didn’t have a use for. It certainly didn’t earn me any brownie points with the rest of the crew–What the hell are you doing with that thing?

As if I knew.

Eventually, the following summer, I fixed it to the east wall of the milkhouse where I had a garden, to let pole beans climb up it. And there it stayed for some time, until the spring of 1977 to be exact. After I had gotten religion in a big way and had become a Bible-reading, regular-church-going kind of guy, Father Dan said, “I’d like to have an unfinished wood cross for the altar at Easter.”

I said, “I know where one is.”

In the course of seven nearly-Canadian, New York winters, two or three pieces had fallen to the ground. I tacked them back on before pulling the thing from the milkhouse wall and lashing it to the top of our car. Dan, and the church in general, was overwhelmed; it would be false modesty on my part to say differently. The crucifix didn’t stay just for Easter; it became the logo of Christ Church, Morristown. It remains there on the wall by the altar. And I still see it in my mind: the drooping hands, the slumping torso, the feet–and I remember there’s one distinctive piece where the heart would be.

But it’s not something I’ve thought about in ages. So sitting in church yesterday–I go about half the time for who-knows-what reason–I was doing mental calisthenics during the sermon. At some point I was studying a fresh flower arrangement by the altar: five white blooms in a row across, set off by a vertical row of crimson blooms above and below the center white one. Those flowers jogged my memory. I leaned and whispered to Marcia, “Remind me to tell you about a dream.” I was laughing to myself, thinking I don’t believe it; it’s too much.

In the fragment of dream I’d remembered from the night before–that I would not have remembered but for the altar flowers–I had been standing before the wood sculpture with a white lily in my hand. And as I passed the lily close to the heart-piece, it turned crimson. Draw it away, white; pass it back, crimson. And I was saying to someone, “Look, it really works.”

It seemed so ridiculous in daylight, and I was laughing when I told Marcia later. She said something about maybe it’s a sign, and I said, “You’d better be kidding.” But she was looking the other way so I don’t know. I was thinking more about the humor quotient–It’s time to call The National Inquirer.

Last night at work, in the quiet between one a.m. and six, I either began to wonder or got tired and flaky. What do you do with this stuff? Only a fool would discount it entirely.

Saul Bellow said, in a 1984 interview, that he had turned away from a “suffocating orthodoxy. . . . But the religious feeling was very strong in me when I was young and it has persisted. . . . Just say that I am a religious man in a retarded condition, and I write to square myself.” I like that. Who knows what might be valid and what’s not, once you get past the cumbersome orthodoxy?