Stone Tears, Crying Statue
The child’s mother, a religious fanatic, cried in church every day, and the child had to sit there and take it. But that was not so bad, as the child, merely five years old, had already determined that she too would become a saint, although definitely not the type that cries half the day. She had in mind the kind of saint who breathes life into clay pidgins.
Her mother had so many children, but it was Anna Lisa, ninth among ten, that her mother had forced into religious devotion. Every day, the small girl fought boredom and embarrassment, sitting beside her mother in the pew. Her mother’s eyes stared with rapture at the bloody cross on the wall. She beat her heart ever so gently with both her knotted fists. Her body rocked until a spasm of trembling overtook her tense shoulders. She folded into herself like a hermit, like Saint Francis. At the same time, the devil worked from one second to the next, trying to make Anna Lisa yawn, which was a venial sin. Her older brothers and sisters had instructed her: if you yawn in church, Sister Humiliana, the Mother Superior, will drag you into the cafeteria by the hair and slap you across the head, and no one will stop her.
Ultimately, she became a perpetual yawner. It was terrible, repulsive of her. Therefore, her ambition to become a saint had to be compensated for, which was nothing much to worry about because she could always perform a miracle to fix things. Something the dreadful Sister Humiliana could never do, or her brothers and sisters. Anna Lisa was destined for sainthood, and that made her better than others. She even had a specific plan. If she focused hard enough, felt longing deep enough, she could make the statue of Mary cry blood tears, and then everyone would know she was a powerful saint not to be ridiculed or told she looked chubby.
Actually, Anna Lisa had to admit that her mother came more to life during mass. But she came to life painfully, whereas, through some strange twist, at home her mother resembled the statue of Mary, sorrowful, silent, unapproachable except as something doll-like. Her mother was mentally deaf as she folded the mountains of laundry, sorted socks, let steam rise in her hair from the giant new mangle her father had bought from Sears. Her mother ironed sheets in the damp basement, which was full of monsters and ghosts and the Frankenstein monster unless her mother sat like a well-composed saint at the mangle. Then, when her mother climbed back up the stairs in silence, not even making a sound on the wood planks, the monsters came back in a minute, and Anna Lisa had to run after her.
Sometimes, all day, her mother sat doing nothing, wearing the same dreamy smile as Our Lady. Her mother did not flinch. Like the sitting statue of a Saint, in particular, the Mother of God. And her father told her to stay away. “I want you busy in the kitchen,” he would say on her mother’s dream days, but Anna Lisa knew that her father meant much more, like how much more can I take of this? Her father had made a selection. She would be the one to bear the weight, just as her mother had decided that Anna Lisa would be the witness.
She learned to be the helper in the kitchen, to cook paper-thin pork chops, and spaghetti with salt, no sauce, and hamburger mixed with oatmeal. She learned to halve the potatoes, and season them in the French Canadian way, with sugar and cinnamon. She did not feel sorry for herself because she had full intentions of producing the miracle, which would be the point at which she knelt before the virgin statue and made Mary cry tears of blood, and everyone would see it was she, Anna Lisa, that the statue was bearing down on with hope. So she cooked for the love of God, for her penance, for the yawning which she barely controlled in the front pew of church, and especially for the painful rush that children were not suppose to feel, when she pressed her bone against the back of the wooden missal holder. More importantly, she would produce her famous miracle to feel superior to her older brothers and sisters who played too much baseball and did not allow her to pitch. They wouldn’t even let her try. And she would produce the miracle for that other sin, which was definitely not venial. And she would make her heart stop, her skin crawl with lice; she would create an itch that could not be itched. Penance could wash away all her sins no matter how bad they were.
When her father worked, she sat beside her mother. She sat on the floor, not the couch where her mother sat. Boredom became more critical every day. And yet at times she stared into the saintly stone face of her mother and found it fascinating. It seemed to Anna Lisa that her mother was already far away in heaven.
The day came when the statue of Mary moved, just as she had known it would. She hadn’t even been thinking about a miracle as she sat beside her mother at mass. She had been doing some of the other things, which were her sins, while her mother engaged in the pain and joy of crying for Christ. It was her mother who trembled from the light of Grace, while Anna Lisa sat yawning like a bear out of hibernation. She had even forgotten about her ambition by then, but out of the corner of her eye she did see it move, the statue. It smiled at her. Then it cried a bit.
Anna Lisa knew that she could speak to Mary, as they say, inside her head.
“Why are you crying?” she asked the saint. And before Mary could answer, do more than laugh quietly with sparkles in her eyes, Anna Lisa said, “I love you.”
“You see that these are tears of blood,” said Mary, bending forward stiffly because she was made of plaster, but then she fluttered like a whole line of sheets on the summer clothesline and stepped off her throne. She moved forward with fluid movements, like fast water in a creek. She smelled like earth and air and something else—like the beautiful, rare lady’s slipper of the woods. She nestled, rather than sat, beside Anna Lisa. She lifted the girl’s chin as if to inspect her. “Didn’t you ask me for tears of blood? Well, here they are.” Our Lady smiled, somewhat amused, as pretty red tears painted the cheeks of her face.
“Who will I grow up to be?” she asked the saint, her own divine mother, which made Jesus her brother, which made her a God, too.
“Who do you wish to be?”
“Oh!” Anna Lisa knew the answer. “I want to help people.” She had always been sure of that. That had been the one constant in her life. She wanted to help people but she wanted not to suffer from hard work like her father.
“Are you absolutely sure?”
Mary, to her, sounded a little tough-minded, but not all that different from her father when he explained patiently night after night why she had to go to bed.
“Oh yes! I don’t even care if I’m happy. I want to help people.” At the center of her heart, Anna Lisa, whatever her sexual impulses, had been sure of that.
“You may have your wish. But my, what a long wait you will have.”
“You mean I have to grow up first?”
“No, but a great wish may take a long time, and you will not always be happy.”
“I don’t care about the happy part.”
“You will be happy now and then,” and again Mary laughed quietly, and her eyes did swell up with tears.
“Don’t I need proof for the Pope?” asked Anna Lisa.
“If you like. Give me your mother’s crying handkerchief. The one she carries night and day.”
Anna dug into her mother’s purse for the damp handkerchief.
And then Our Lady was gone—right then, when Anna Lisa turned back around with the handkerchief, the laughing Mary had disappeared. She had puffed out like a candle with no smoke.
She was there, and then gone. Back on her throne. Stiff with plaster, sorrowful and happy to be in pain for Jesus. Just like before. Stone and cold and unfeeling. Unflinching.
Anna Lisa got up to admire the saintly statue closely, to see if she were still in there. In the thoughts in back of her head she could see Sister Humiliana rushing forward from the back of the church—like a big swoosh of clothing in a tornado—but still she stared at our Lady, waiting for her to spring to life. She stared after the saint even as the nun collared her, wrenching her arm, and dragged Anna Lisa into the cafeteria through the double church doors.
On the other side of the door, the nun bent in half to reach down into Anna Lisa’s face. She shook a pale, hooked finger covered in chalk. “You dirty girl! Would you dare to come kneel at our Mother’s feet with that dirty hair uncombed? Look at the filth of you!”
Anna Lisa thought it must be some misunderstanding. She sought to set the Mother Superior right. “The mother spoke to me. Didn’t you see those tears of blood?”
“Oh, tears of blood! Oh!” Sister Humiliana stood twitching with her hands hidden inside her sleeves. “Tears of blood is it? Shall we call the Pope and inform him?”
“Go ahead. I have proof!” Anna Lisa produced the crying rag and waved it upward in the nun’s face. When the pale, withered hand flew out of the coarse tunnel of sleeve, Anna Lisa prepared to be slapped across the head—she’d seen her brothers and sisters slapped that way, and so she flinched. But the nun snatched at the rag instead. She snatched it out of Anna Lisa’s hand and inspected closely the three bloody spots like deep red rose petals.
“What, did the little baby cut her hand? You’re no saint. I see you every day, bumping and yawning in the very first pew. Right there beside your saintly mother.”
“Those tears are made of rose petals, Sister.” Anna Lisa thought certain her saintliness was about to be revealed, even to Sister Humiliana. She felt brave because the nun had not hit her. “Rose petals bleed,” Anna Lisa explained with confidence.
“Oh!” the nun slapped her across the head. She pushed Anna Lisa roughly by punching knuckles into her back. She pushed Anna Lisa through the double swinging doors of the cafeteria, back inside the church. When Anna Lisa looked over her shoulder, the nun floated away from the swinging doors and lost herself in the cafeteria. “Butter sandwiches,” Anna Lisa thought. “She’s gone off to pile butter sandwiches on a plate.” Her brothers and sisters had explained, the only good thing about school was when Sister Humiliana, the Mother Superior herself, came in person and handed out the extra butter sandwiches left over from lunch. That was the only time she smiled like a happy person. Otherwise she was mean every minute of the day.
Anna Lisa slipped back into the pew next to her mother, who had not seen a thing. Enraptured, crying, arching her neck in a saintly way, her mother rose and stepped into the aisle with her eyes closed. Her mother walked to the communion rail with her eyes blinded by tears. She located the priest and the host through a trance. Turning around in her seat, Anna Lisa saw the schoolchildren laughing at her mother as they did every day. They had to be careful not to get caught. One or two children always got caught by Sister Humiliana. That was inevitable. But today they pointed at her and laughed because Sister Humiliana had gotten her instead of them.
She didn’t care. She was a saint. She made miracles happen. Even statues cried for her.
She thought that way often, especially when she and her mother were alone in the house, all the children gone to school and her father hard at work. She did love her father. He made oatmeal in a tub every morning. In the evening, she helped him make the dinner, and then he went to his second job.
When her mother sat on the couch, it never seemed that there was room for anyone else to sit, partly because of her religious trance in which she appeared to be doing nothing but radiating, taking up large pieces of space. But one day as she was reassuring herself about the miracle again, Anna Lisa had a burning desire to ask her mother something.
It might have been frustrating, something to cry over—no paper or pens in the house, ever, but then she found what she needed. This was only because she remembered where her mother hid the sad, religious poems she wrote and cried over, cried and wrote over. Anna Lisa sat beside her mother with one of the poems. She turned the paper over to the blank side. She sat fairly close to her mother but not too close, and it seemed to her that the statue of Mary was telling her, “Try not to get too close.”
Her mother turned slowly, as if surprised to be awakened by something pleasant. Her face changed. Her eyes opened brightly, and she smiled with small pleasure. Anna Lisa did not think getting her mother to speak would be all that hard, not any harder than getting the stone statue to speak.
“Ma,” she said, “Show me what my name looks like.”
Her mother almost laughed in the silent way of Our Lady, “You want to see how to write your name?” She seemed to be waking up from a faraway place.
“Write it in cursive, Ma.”
“But you should learn to print first,” her mother said.
“No, I’d rather have cursive. It’s prettier.”
Then her mother took the paper and wrote. She slid the paper back when she was done. Her mother always did things in a graceful manner.
“There you go.” Her mother spoke in a gentle voice meant for a small, innocent child. As if, Anna Lisa thought, her mother meant to protect her.
When Anna Lisa looked at her name, Anna Lisa Dionne, she was struck by the look of it, written in perfect, neat cursive, the prettiest she had ever seen. You would not ever get a beating if the nuns saw you could write cursive, her brothers and sisters had said.
Her mother was still smiling into her face. “Now copy your name until the whole page is full.”
Anna Lisa nodded. Much later, when she was done, she showed her mother the page, and her mother smiled again. But then she went back to her private world.
So much so that, in time, her mother could not even drive to mass anymore. Her mother couldn’t see anymore, or she saw like a statue. She could not read or write her poems. Even Anna Lisa knew that statues could not read or write, although they could hear your thoughts. They could hear all your thoughts, good and bad. Like when she stole all the poems from the hiding place, just before they took her mother away to the Pine Rest. Anna Lisa was not even supposed to know about the Pine Rest. There were bad thoughts in her heart and that is why she stole the poems. She supposed Our Lady heard everything, and God, and Jesus, and all the rest of them. She did not think she had a miracle to cover that sin, the sin of calling God stupid. She had thrown a baby fit, tearing up most of the poems. Still, it had seemed perfectly natural at the time.
She tried to show a poem to her father. She handed him one that had survived. He read it. “No, I don’t believe you should read this,” he said. But he handed it back to her. She hid the poem again, and not for several years would she remember where.
At eight years of age she sat across the game table at the Pine Rest with the poem in her hands. She showed her mother the cursive on the back side.
“You taught me how to write my name. See Ma?”
Her mother stared forward with her lips barely parted. Someone had twined a Day-Glow rosary around her fingers. Anna Lisa turned the paper over and read:
If my heart
Is crested with thorns
If my tears bleed
If I wander with cut feet
Through the desert,
I will find you,
I will find you.
“That is your poem, Ma,” Anna Lisa said. “I read it to mi-mére the other day. She says it proves you are a saint.”
“No,” her mother answered, speaking for the first time that anyone could remember. “Mi-mére is wrong. It means I took in too much darkness.”
“I want to be just like you, Ma. A saint.”
“If you try, you may not make it.”
“What are you talking about Ma?”
Her mother smiled. Like she had that kind of daughter. One you can say things to.
“You could get lost in the dark,” said her mother. “Don’t get lost in the dark.”
“Ma, I won’t get lost in the dark. Not me, Ma. Or if I did I would dig a hole and get out of that dark!”
After that visit her mother started to knit a God’s-Eye at the Pine Rest. The God’s-Eye was made of rainbow yarn. Then she began talking. Soon, her father said, she could come home, almost good as new. Anna Lisa did not think it was a miracle.
Every day she walked home from school on the sidewalk past the public school and allowed the public school children to taunt her. She was a saint so she bore it well. She walked in the wretched uniform that was hot and heavy like the metal of a child crusader. She placed gravel crumbs in her shoes and tripped half way home until the pain numbed her head.
Unless she took the other way home, the longer way; through the field of violets, a violet carpet spread for miles; through the wild pear orchard that someone had abandoned; through old man Zane’s grapes where, if he caught you inside the barbed wire, he shot at you with rock salt, but she was so much faster than that old man! When she took the long way home, she hardly knew where her mind went, somewhere pretty and soft, like eternity.
Copyright © 2008 by Gretchen Van Lente
