The Bighead (21 page)

His cock stuck up her so far she
imagined she could feel it bumping her stomach…

“
Don’t ask me why I think
this, but I’ll bet my benefice pay that that goddamn guy
knows
that these
blueprints aren’t updated. Shit, it says right in the corner frame:
1921!”

Come in me! Come in
me!
she was thinking, feeling each thrust.
That, for whatever arcane reason, was the only thing she wanted in
the world: his semen in her.
His come in
my pussy,
the thought groaned. The fantasy
jumbled on. His arms girded her back like iron braces, his mouth
sucked her tongue, and that’s when she felt it all pouring into
her, like viscid broth, like warm wax.

Oh, shit,
she thought.
I fucking
love you…

“
I’d like to kick that
wussy’s ass up and down the fucking street,” the priest
eloqueneted. “That stick-in-the-mud crusty, lying motherfucker sent
me all the way out here and didn’t even bother to get me new
floorplans.”

“
Father,” Jerrica said,
finally surfaced from the dream. “Do priests use language like
that?”

“
Fucking-A right they do,
honey.” He was visibly outraged, tumultuous. “When our superiors
treat us like fucking subordinate idiots, you’re
goddamned
right we use
language like. That shit-for-brains lazy motherfucker…”

Jerrica was appalled yet fascinated.
She considered it an honor to witness a priest with his dander up,
to the extent of profanity. It seemed to break a sacred rule, it
shattered what she envisioned as the mold of the priesthood. But
then—

Something caught her eye.

She had to agree: the basement seemed
bizarre, even useless. It existed as a single corridor, walled by
bricks on either side. There were no doors, no rooms, nothing. Only
a few broken footing windows offered light. She would’ve expected
to find at least a utility room down here, a mechanical room, a
fuse closet.

“
Nothing,” Alexander
griped. “Not one room down here; it doesn’t make sense. There’s
never even been electricity in this joint; otherwise there’d be
some kind of transformer, and it would have to be down here. But
look.” He pointed upward. The stucco’d ceiling seemed filmed with
carbon-black soot. “Same as upstairs. For the whole time this place
was open, they were using oil lamps, for shit’s sake.”

Jerrica noted the oddity,
but still didn’t quite understand the priest’s irritation.
Why should he care?

That, however, was not the cause of
her query, when she squinted along the wall, pointed, and said,
“What’s this?”

“
You gotta be shitting me,”
the priest murmured.

Another line of brick-demarcation. It
was plain to see. A wedge of newer bricks filled in a block-space
in the wall, as though a doorway had been there years ago but had
been filled in. It was just like the obstruction upstairs, at the
admin office. Only there was one difference:

“
What
the…
fuck?
”
Alexander profaned once more, staring at the incongruently that
Jerrica had already noticed.

“
It looks like,” she began,
but even her own bewilderment choking out the rest of the
words.

The newer insertion of bricks looked,
well—

That’s the strangest
thing,
Jerrica pondered.

—
as though they’d been
impacted by some kind of tool.

As though someone had tried to break
them down.

—
| — | —

TEN

(I)

A cemetery,
Charity thought.
Of
course…

The heat of afternoon quickly burned
off the late morning’s haze. But the interior woods remained cool
in dappled shade, breaking only periodically. Winding footpaths
through the brambles took them away. Aunt Annie had calmed down by
now, almost as if the bunches of flowers in her hand gave her
solace. Charity felt horrible, though, finally aware of the weight
of guilt the graceful old woman had been carrying all these years.
Certainly her previous poverty wasn’t her fault, nor was it her
fault that the mineral settlement had come so late. Charity tried
to reckon what it must be like for her Annie, trodding onward with
all these broken pieces and bad luck…

“
Here we are,” Annie said,
just as the sun dazzled the shade away. The trail ended, emptied
into a long, open dell. Spiring trees flanked to either side, in
surprising symmetry; lush, high grass made a carpet pocked by
simple gravestones, crudely carved. “This is the family cemetery,”
Annie related. She seemed to stare in thwarted awe, as if reminding
herself that she, too, would someday be interred here.

“
It’s very nice,” Charity
said. “It seems much more honest than typical cemeteries, much more
real.”

But Aunt Annie acted as
though she hadn’t heard her, too caught up in more personal
reflections. Charity gazed out into the sunlit dell; it was oblong,
like a coffin.
Appropriate,
she thought. Bees buzzed, hopping from one
wildflower to the next, bundling pollen. Small birds watched them
from the high Mockernuts. The scent of honeysuckle and hickory was
delightfully overpowering, it made Charity high, in a sense. But
eventually, this preliminary sensory impact lagged behind.
She brought me here for some reason,
she remembered. And that could only mean one
thing:

She brought me here to
show me a specific grave…

Charity had a good idea
whose.

“
I’ve never showed ya your
mother’s grave, Charity,” the elder spoke. “And I never told ya the
whole details. You was too young, at least that’s how I saw
it.”

“
I understand, Aunt
Annie.”

“
But now it’s time ya saw,
an’ heard it all.”

Charity followed the old
woman’s fragile form straight out into the burning sunlight. The
ends of the high grass sifted; the flowerscents stirred. Around the
graveyard’s peripheries, she noticed wild roses, stalks of lupines,
sunflowers with great dropping heads. Their feet followed the path
beat down by Annie’s feet day after day; Charity could see it,
swarming forward around the unsophisticated stones. And just then
it occurred to Charity how long this little jaunt had taken—it
must’ve been a good two miles from the boarding house.
No wonder she’s in such good shape for her
age!
Making this walk on a daily basis
would keep anyone in shape.

Annie stopped at a pale granite stone.
The inscription, obviously carved by hand, read: SISSY.

That was all.

At its foot lay a dried
cache of yellow coneflowers and tarweeds.
Yesterday’s offerings,
Charity
speculated.

“
This is your mother’s
grave, dear,” finally revealed. “My sister.”

Charity already knew the gist of the
details: her mother had committed suicide shortly after her birth,
and shortly after that, her husband—Charity’s father—had been
killed in a mine explosion. Charity had never even seen a picture
of her mother. Everyone out here back then was too poor to even own
a camera.

Aunt Annie was stifling tears. “I’m
just so sorry, Charity, things did work out like they shoulda,” she
sobbed. “I hope you know that, and I hope Sissy knows
it.”

“
Of course she does, Aunt
Annie,” Charity consoled. “You did the very best you could to raise
me. The state taking me wasn’t your fault.”

But Charity could scarcely
think of more to offer. This was difficult.
I’m standing before my own mother’s grave,
she told herself. It was a bizarre
realization.

Annie took up the old dried flowers
and replaced them with new ones. But the second new bundle remained
in her arms.

“
She was a wonderful gal,
your mother,” Annie elaborated. “A fine woman and a good mother.
But she just let the bad things get to her…”

Charity burned, however sadly, with
the next question. “How—how did she commit suicide?”

Annie blinked, staring down at the
sparsely marked grave. “I cain’t talk about it right now,
sweetheart. But I’se realize ya got a right ta know about yer mama,
and I’ll tell ya all about it later, back the house.”

“
That’s fine, Aunt
Annie.”

But the woman looked crestfallen, she
looked like a sleek, grand vine hammered too intently by the sun.
“Charity, dear, what I’d like ya to do if ya don’t mind is take
these old flowers and wait fer me back by the path. I’ll just be a
minute.”

“
Sure, Aunt Annie,” Charity
agreed, taking yesterday’s dried bundle of flowers.

“
There’s…another grave I
need ta stop by,” the elderly woman said.

Charity did as instructed, secretly
grateful to be out of the fierce blade of the sun. She couldn’t see
much of her aunt for that time, just the vague shape of the woman’s
billowy dress moving down the rows. Then she seemed to stop, gazing
down with more regret in her eyes.

She was standing in front of another
grave, weeping.

Whose…grave?
Charity struggled to wonder.

Did Annie have more
relatives out here? Well—of course she did; she’d said this was
the
family
graveyard. But Charity’s question itched at her like a fresh
patch of mosquito bites under anxious fingernails.
Whose grave?
she
wondered.
Whose grave?

She blinked, staring into the torrid
sun. The question would not cease to form on her lips.

(II)

“
So what do you think?”
Jerrica asked. The Mercedes’ open windows let in voluminous wind.
“Don’t you think that was strange?”

“
The whole place is
strange,” Father Alexander tacked on. “My boss is strange. The
whole Catholic Church is strange.”

He was sideswiping the question,
something, she’d learned, that he was very good at.

“
Come on, Father! Bricking
up the administration office is one thing. But that room
downstairs?”

“
We don’t even know that
it
is
a room,” he
reminded her. As he’d done upstairs, he’d tried to break into the
basement anomaly, via the sledgehammer. He’d failed.
However set these bricks,
he’d said,
weren’t the same crew who
did the pissant job upstairs on the admin office.

He’d barely dented the face of new
bricks.

“
And what’s weirder is the
blueprints,” she added. “What was it they said?
Undesignated?”

“
Un
excavated,
” he corrected. “And I
ain’t arguing with you. You’d think my friggin’ monsignor would’ve
given me updated blueprints. According to these, there isn’t even a
goddamn basement. What kind of shit is that?”

Again, Jerrica felt oddly charged by
the demeanor of this profane priest. Just something about hearing
such words come so casually from a clerical mouth.

Evening drained into the valley, with
the beginnings of more of last night’s heat lightning. It had been
a long day, but not once did Jerrica regret asking to go to the
abbey with the priest.

They’d happened upon several other
oddities too. Upstairs, along the long hall, they examined the
nuns’ sleeping quarters, arranged almost like military barracks.
Each room possessed a cot, a wall locker, and a spartan metal
nightstand. The cots were stripped of their bedding, which made
perfect sense, but the wall lockers and nightstands, however
dust-laden, still seemed to contain a minutia of personal effects:
letters, writing materials, rosaries, wind-up alarm clocks. And
more personal effects were found in the nightstands in what must’ve
been the in-patient dorm, where the sick priests were kept. Yes, it
was strange, and Jerrica easily sensed that these loose ends
bothered the priest.

“
So what’s this you’re
writing for the
Post?
” he asked, steering down Route 154. It was almost as though
he’d asked this sudden question as a distraction, to change topics.
As though he didn’t want to talk about the abbey anymore. “An
article on rural communities, something like that?”

“
A
series
of articles, three
Weekenders
in a row. The
societal symptomologies of the modern Blue Ridge Mountain culture,”
she tried to embellish as articulately as she could. “I want the
works. The people, the economy, the history, even the
folklore.”

“
Sounds like an interesting
piece,” Alexander said, sticking a butt in his mouth.

Jerrica, with a cupped hand, lit the
cigarette for him, then lit one for herself. “It’ll be more than
interesting, it’ll be a step up the ladder. I could kick myself,
though, for not bringing my camera.”