his words. I made the sign and knelt beside him, averting my gaze as I placed my ear close to his trembling lips.
“Tell me of the smell of leaves burning in winter,” I said.
He sighed, the sound of dead leaves rustling along the ground. Like the leaves in my own memory. Mr. Jenks hadn’t killed my pet. The sheriff insisted that the dog had been hit by a truck. The old man had placed the body in the leaves so I wouldn’t see it. He had been trying to spare me.
“The smell of leaves burning in winter, they smell like death. They smell like the end of existence. The end of hope. God, forgive me. I had no idea. I hadn’t a clue.”
“Have you ever awoken to the sounds of a child screaming?” I asked.
“It was my son,” he said. “The sound of a child screaming is the death of the father. The death of the mother. The end of all hope multiplied.”
From his lowered head ran pinkish drops, blood mixed with salty tears. There was still one more question to ask.
“What is the sound of flesh burning?”
“The end of life itself,” he said.
Suddenly cold, he stared at me, his face smeared with tears and blood. He gritted his teeth, the sound like a heavy file against concrete. “I was popular with the children in my school, you see. There was nothing they couldn’t ask of me. I was always there for them. For them, yes, but not my son. God knows how long I’d neglected him. God knows the depth of his pain. I’ve wondered for so long...what if he had come to me? What if he had asked me for help? Would I have paid attention? Would I have been there for him? Would I have done it differently? Even after all this time, I don’t know the answer. I am guilty of the harshest crime. He gave me love. I gave him neglect
As was my own crime, I thought.
“I can only imagine how he felt, because I'll never really know. When I awoke that winter’s morning to the screams of my son burning in the leaf pile...when I ran outside and heard his screams, saw the can of gasoline...when he stopped breathing as his lungs filled with fumes...when his skin...ran like butter...”
I knelt with him for a time. The thorns of his crown scraped my cheek. Finally he looked up.
“The Shrove said that our sacrifice will heal the world. It will heal me, they said. We are twelve and twelve makes one and then thirteen ascend.”
From somewhere far away a church bell rang, signaling the end to Mardis Gras and the beginning of Lent.
“The pouch,” he said.
I pulled up my robe and fumbled the pouch from my pocket. It took a few moments, but I finally managed to retrieve the pouch. I opened it and stared inside at the ash within. I knew without asking where it came from. His gaze was far away as I reached inside, applied the ash to my fingers and made the sign of the cross upon his forehead.
“Man is dust, and from dust you shall return.”
He mimicked my movements and made his own sign of the cross upon my forehead. A smile crept along his mouth, and then his expression went blank, his gaze once again far away. I didn’t dare disturb him, so I closed the pouch and placed it around his neck.
We opened the great doors to the street. Outside, the night was silent. The Feast of the Flesh was over and it was in quiet dark that we twelve confessors grasped the ropes and began pulling the float through the streets.
There would be no crowds for us.
Redemption is a lonely thing, and sacrifice is individual.
***
Story Notes: In the mid-90s my mother told me a story about a friend of hers who came home to find her child burned to death in a pile of leaves. It was called a suicide and I couldn’t help but wonder how a survivor could deal with such a thing. I held onto that question for a number of years until I was asked to present a Mardis Gras story to the Twilight Tales Reading Group in Chicago. I wrote this, then read it out loud in the Red Lion Pub. There wasn’t a dry eye in the house when I finished.