Saint Oswald by Jay Bonansinga (always you kirsty moseley .txt) 📗

Matilda grew up on a farm. Her dad, Caleb, was a six-foot-six pillar of leather and muscle who could rip stubborn tree trunks from the ground with his bare hands. He was also a devout Christian who suffered no fools and insisted on a pious family. He was hardest on his wife, and Matilda always feared that he beat the woman, but Matilda never knew for sure. Then, the terrible indiscretion came. The man had a fling with the local librarian. It was an open secret among the wagging tongues of the little farm town, and it crushed Matilda and her family. Of all people, though, Caleb seemed like the last person one would suspect of adultery.

The part of the story that fascinated Oswald the most was the aftermath of the affair. Caleb proceeded to beg his wife to forgive him, and she agreed. But Caleb was not finished with his atonement. He then hiked all alone, with no food and only a meager amount of water, fifteen miles downstate to a wilderness area. He came back home in a month, emaciated and near death, and yet cleansed of his sin.

Later, Matilda’s mother explained to the little girl that her father had atoned “in the fashion of Isaiah” so that he could be with Matilda’s mother in heaven. Apparently, the man had sat meditating on the top of Whidmoore Hill, alone, for an entire lunar cycle. It was the only way to free himself of the burden of his wickedness.

The lessons of that story had not only seared themselves into Matilda’s soul, but they had also imprinted Oswald’s subconscious.

“I understand,” Oswald now says to Matilda, standing over her deathbed, summoning a weak voice.

She coughs. Then she says in a broken murmur, her eyes welling up again, “It’s the only way, Ozzie. It’s the only way we’ll ever be together again in heaven.” Cough. “Whether it’s seven lives, or eight, or eighty... do this for me... save as many lives as you’ve destroyed by the next full moon.”

Her head droops again. She reaches blindly for him. Oswald takes her slender, bony hand in his. Oswald feels the heat of her gaze. It paralyzes him. She lets out a fusillade of coughs. Oswald looks at her. “Sweetie, do you want me to call 9-1-1?”

She manages to give him a forlorn, loving, melancholy smile. “Too late, Ozzie. It’s okay. Just make sure it’s by the next full moon, like it says in Isaiah.” She coughs feebly. Her eyes go blank, and her breathing slows.

Nodding frantically, Oswald says, “I got it. Save as many lives as I’ve taken. Do it by the next full moon. Got it. Sweetie?”

She has frozen like a doll. Eyes open. Staring. As still as marble.

“Matilda?!”

He squeezes her hand. Shakes her. Screams her name to no avail.

Her eyes have no life left in them. They look like glass marbles.

“MATILDA!!”

8.

The memorial service takes place a week later in the garden out behind the First Unitarian Church in Lombard. The Indian summer has turned prickly and humid, and that afternoon the sun beats down on the meager landscaped courtyard with a vengeance. The air smells of street tar, and the cicadas roar like waves washing up on a beach, at times so loudly the eulogies are drowned by the din. Oswald spends the bulk of the ceremony behind the draping at the front of the makeshift dais, hiding, embarrassed by his ceaseless sniffling. Dressed in his itchy houndstooth, the suit so shopworn it’s shiny in the seat and under the arms, he tries to hold in his sorrow, but it stubbornly keeps quaking through him as though his central nervous system is undergoing a seismic shift.

The event is sparsely attended—Matilda Valkenburg had few friends and even fewer living relatives—to the point that Oswald keeps peeking around the corner of the curtain just to marvel at the paltry number of mourners. He can see Gerbil sitting in the front row, fanning herself with a program, clad in an anachronistic navy pinafore and Easter bonnet, surrounded by empty folding chairs, looking like she would prefer to join Matilda in the urn sitting next to the podium. If it weren’t for her high-top tennis shoes and prominent tattoos, Gerbil Goldstein could pass for Amish. The rest of the congregants—Creepy Uncle Al, the woman from Matilda’s hospice group, Cousin Mary—sit with dour expressions trying to listen to the monotonous, impersonal eulogy delivered by a baby-faced pastor whose name Oswald can’t even remember.

Oswald keeps thinking that Matilda would find the whole event extremely tedious and unnecessary. Matilda was a practical sort, not prideful in any way, and despite her deep religious beliefs, she had not been fond of organized religion. Hence the meager trappings at her funeral.

But that’s not what keeps running through Oswald’s mind that day. Even that night, during the somber, awkward, drunken wake that Cousin Mary hosts in her mobile home up in Kenosha, Oswald can’t stop thinking about the dying woman’s last wish. How does one go about saving lives? And where did all that business about Isaiah and the lunar cycle come from? Oswald feels like a garbage man being asked to find all the trash that he’s hauled away over the years and return it to its rightful owners.

The next few days pass in a blur of weed-fueled paranoia, migraine headaches, flickering hallucinations, and intermittent crying jags. His head injury only seems to add to his grief and sense of massive loss. He loses track of what’s real, what’s a hallucination. He obsesses over Matilda’s last wish. At one point, Gerbil convinces him to go to the hospital and have his injuries checked out.

Under the guise of being carjacked, Oswald uses a fake identity and insurance card to get past the paperwork Nazis at the front desk. He chooses carjacking because he figures it’s banal enough to allay suspicion and common enough to delay any kind of police involvement until he has a chance