The Saint of Fresh Kills

By fourth grade, all the children at Immaculate Conception know that Francis of Assisi could summon animals. With little birds nesting in his friar’s hood, and lovely rabbits snuggling up to him, Francis of Assisi built his reputation. Poring over the Illustrated Lives of the Saints with her classmates, Mary Clare carefully studied his technique: stock still posture, arms extended, eyes elevated. She knows her classmates are fascinated. The fourth grade boys have fought over the dark green Illustrated Lives of the Saints, running their fingers roughly over its gold edged pages. Some acted out the death of Saint Catherine who was fastened to a spiked wheel but miraculously broke free, sending the spikes flying into the crowd and killing several bystanders. The girls covered their ears and shrieked during the boy’s re-enactment, causing the nuns to scold the boys and return the Lives to the girls who cooed over St. Francis’s obedient rabbits and bluebirds. If illustrations of a dead saint’s command of nature so impresses students at Immaculate Conception, Mary Clare hopes that big results, like her summoning a live pony, will get her liked by Patricia who sits behind Mary Clare in Sister Charles’ classroom. Big results, and Mary Clare would be getting one of those invitations that Patricia handed out to her birthday party at the Burger King, the one with the play land out front.

Mary Clare’s arms are getting tired from holding them out so long. She concentrates harder, praying for animals to come, all the while picturing the net with the colorful plastic balls at the end of the slide and all the girls in fourth grade, except Mary Clare and fat George-Ann, tumbling around, laughing and full from french fries and icy Cokes sipped through straws. If Mary Clare were to be invited, then her mother could wait for her in the Burger King parking lot with the other mothers who laugh and chat, tossing their hair in the sunlight.

Mary Clare knows that there is no chance that someone from Immaculate Conception might wander by and catch her summoning a pony. If ever her classmates did pass by, it would always be in speeding cars on the West Shore Expressway, and then they would flash by with their windows rolled-up, holding their noses to keep the smell of the garbage dump out of their lungs. Even standing on the shack or garage, Mary Clare would be a small speck in her white uniform blouse and plaid jumper next to the 400' high mountain of garbage at Fresh Kills Landfill. The dump.

It doesn’t always smell bad. People just like to pretend it does. If it’s a clear day and the wind is blowing to the south, Mary Clare can stand high on the shack and can’t smell it all. On a clear breezy day, the Zuiderzee, with its rolling waves of green cattails, is even pretty to see, but people on Staten Island would never say that.

It’s almost five o’clock, and the West Shore Expressway is still heavy with traffic, carrying drivers to and from the Outerbridge Crossing, the Goethals Bridge, the Verrazano, and other parts of the Island. The constant squall of traffic provides an incongruous zone of background quiet, filtering out the more random and intelligible sounds, and helps Mary Francis concentrate. As the October sun gets lower in the sky, a chill creeps in the sleeves of Mary Clare’s white school blouse, and this gives her hope. Mary Clare knows that the nighttime animals will soon be stirring. She closes her eyes and thinks about racoons and rabbits and foxes and giggles with anticipation. The rabbits and foxes live on the edge of the dump where the grass is high and the bushes grow ragged - Mary Clare’s side of the fence.

Mary Clare holds her breath, happy.

Someone bangs at the window. Mary Clare opens her eyes and looks toward her house. She likes her house with its dark red shingles imprinted with black lines. If she squints, it looks like just like a fine brick house on the hill. Her sister stands at the window with her hands on her hips and motions for her to come in the house, then disappears. Mary Clare knows that if she doesn’t go right in, her grandmother will have to come out and get her. Bridget won’t be bothered. At fifteen, Bridget seems to Mary Clare to be like one of those flashing cars on the expressway everybody on the inside holding their noses to keep the foulness out. Mary Clare hates Bridget for that, but hangs on to her all the same, because in Mary Clare’s family you never know.

Mary Clare walks around the side, and pulls open the sticking door with both hands. She goes in the right away because Grams finds it hard to walk in real shoes and wears slippers worn flat at the heels. Even though they are stained and ripped, she still doesn’t like wearing them outside. Bridget and Grams are in the kitchen but supper is not on the table, just Grams’ overflowing ashtray and the latest of the giant jigsaw puzzles Grams works on all day. Bridget sits with her right foot up on a kitchen chair, painting her toenails, while Grams peers down at 3000 pieces which when assembled will make up a replica of the ceiling of Sistine Chapel in the Vatican.

Mary Clare looks at the progress Grams has made on it, turning her head right and left to get the full effect of this new section. Four people with big fleshy arms sit in white marble chairs wearing purple, blue, green, and orange robes. They make up the corners to another section in which people, wearing almost no clothes at all, are escaping a flood. Grams said that Michelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel while lying for hours on his sore aching back, and that is why some of the saints and prophets are looking right and others looking left and some are upside down altogether. When it’s finished, Mary Clare’s grandmother will display it next to Mary Clare’s favorite puzzle, the one of Adam and Eve in Paradise which has all the animals two-by-two just like in Noah’s ark: lions, camels, turkeys, dogs, and monkeys. Grams finished that last month, and even though Adam and Eve have no clothes Grams says that it’s a fine puzzle for their kitchen table because Adam is covered by little leaves and Eve by a modest way of sitting. Grams judges a modest way of sitting to be very important. They will have to put away the puzzle of the real castle that looks like Disneyland because there isn’t enough space for three puzzles to be displayed. The real castle was built by an oddball king who lived in the castle for just 180 days before mysteriously drowning, which makes Mary Clare wonder if he slept in all the bedrooms before he died. The only way to get to the castle is by walking or taking a horse up a long hard steep road. Mary Clare once asked her mom if they could go there someday, and she said, Sure love, but now when Mary Clare asks Grams the same thing, she says too many steps, too steep.

Grams grasps a long slim cigarette in the knotted-up fingers of her left hand and pushes a puzzle piece of a swaying tree with a man holding tightly onto it into place with her right. This part of the puzzle, with its naked people trying to escape the rising water, is almost finished now. “What were you doing outside, Mary Clare?” Grams says. “It’s time for homework.”

“I only have religion and I was doing it,” Mary Clare says.

Grams looks up at Mary Clare for the first time. She blows smoke out the side of her mouth. “What religion homework would that be?”

“We have to be like a saint and I picked St. Francis of Assisi.”

“Gwaad!” Bridget says. “She’s praying animals out of that disgusting dump again.” Bridget holds out her nail brush in mid air. “You should have picked St. Jude, patron saint of hopeless causes.” Bridget paints her toes then leans close to inspects them. “You’re such a little queer,” she says without looking up at Mary Clare.

“If I get a pony, all the kids from my class can come out and ride it,” Mary Clare says.

“That,” Bridget says, and follows with a great dramatic pause, then, “is not going to happen.”

Mary Clare wants to tell her about St. Francis and the miracles in Assisi but Bridget tells her, “I don’t care if you got a frickin’ elephant to come out of that dump, no one is going to come out here for a ride on it.”

And that lonely feeling fills up Mary Clare’s chest.

Grams exhales a cloud of smoke. “And why not?”

Mary Clare puts her hand on Grams’s chair.

“Because fourth grade kids don’t drive and what parent is going to bring their kid to our house?” Bridget says.”Bye, little Sally, bye Suzie. Have a goddamn good time playing with the goddamn rats and mosquitos.”

Grams says nothing, but cuts her eyes to Bridget as if to say shut up and goes back to Michelangelo’s ceiling. Mary Clare doesn’t move from Grams side.

Bridget is undeterred. “Hope you don’t get goddamn West Nile Fever, Patty.” Bridget slaps her foot to the floor upsetting the ashtray. Black ash sprinkles onto the puzzle.

Grams stubs out her cigarette and blows a curl of smoke out from her tight lips. “Watch your language, Bridget.” She blows the ash away.

Mary Clare doesn’t understand. She doesn’t understand why teenage girls in dark glasses and boys in white undershirts, who drive cars with flashy silver wheels and thunderous music, drop by just to say hello to her big sister, yet she’s one of only two fourth graders without invitations to birthdays. She doesn’t understand why Bridget gets angry when Mary Clare tries to lure little hungry animals out of the landfill when that’s what St. Francis would do.

Not long after their mom and dad divorced, but before she moved out, their mom told Mary Clare that their house was in an poisonous place. The day her mom picked her up at school, the only day her mom ever picked her up from school, she told Mary Clare that just as soon as she got her head together, she was going to look for a healthy new place for them all to live - including Grams. Like Bridget, their mom hates the dump, but Mary Clare’s mom never once used the words Bridget uses.

“Mom says,” Mary Clare begins, but Bridget has heard the story before.

“Mom’s full of crap,” Bridget says.

“Enough, Bridget.” Grams scolds but doesn’t really seem mad at Bridget, only sad, and Mary Clare wishes she would be mad enough to make her stop. Grams gets up and goes over to the stove. Using two hands, Grams removes the heavy cast iron fry pan from the oven and sets it on the stove. She lights the gas burner and takes a cup of bacon grease from the top of the stove and scoops a generous chunk into the pan.

“If we didn’t live out here next to this G-D dump, I wouldn’t have to explain these things to Mary Clare,” Bridget says. She flicks the excess nail polish from the brush on the side of bottle.

When Bridget talks that way, Mary Clare gets very quiet and doesn’t say anything because when Bridget gets really furious, she talks about leaving Mary Clare and Grams. With Grams that’s too old and hurting to put her swollen feet in real shoes and walk to the backyard, and Mom getting her head together in New Jersey, and Dad living in Queens with his new wife, Mary Clare sometimes wonders where that leaves her. Mary Clare stares at Bridget who glares back, and Mary Clare vanishes. Sometimes Bridget won’t look or talk to Mary Clare for a whole night. She doesn’t speak and Mary Clare doesn’t exist.

Grams takes out last night’s boiled potatoes and Sunday’s boiled ham and begins dicing. When the bacon fat is sizzling, she tosses two handfuls of potatoes into the pan, dropping potato chunks onto the yellow linoleum. She picks up the carving knife and drops it, too, just missing her foot.

“You girls are old enough to be cooking simple meals,” Grams grumbles.

And with that, Bridget leaves the kitchen.

“I’ll help, Grams,” Mary Clare says, because that’s what St. Francis would do.

“Get out the eggs and a can of mushrooms,” Grams says. She tosses the ham into the pan. “We’ll have western omelets. After a while, she looks at Mary Clare. “Bridget doesn’t mean to hurt anybody’s feelings. She just says what’s on her mind,” she mumbles.

“It’s dangerous business,” Mary Clare says, trying to remember what her mother said.

Mom told Bridget and Mary Clare just days before she left that having a heart to break is dangerous business, but having one too brittle to break is even more dangerous business. Mom tried to pat Bridget’s shiny hair, thick and dark like her own, but Bridget wouldn’t allow it. Mary Clare squints her eyes shut, worried she’s already forgetting what her mother looks like, and when Mary Clare opens them again, it’s Bridget who’s standing before her.

“You’re full of crap too,”Bridget says, frowning, but she touches Mary Clare’s hair. “You ought to wash your hair every day with baby shampoo, like I told you.”

She pulls Mary Clare’s hair into a ponytail, yanking it a bit, and when Mary Clare winces, Bridget laughs and calls her a big baby. She tells Mary Clare she’ll paint her nails after supper and though Mary Clare knows she never will, she feels happy again. Bridget has a strict set of rules about their appearance. Sometimes Mary Clare watches Bridget when she’s reading her beauty magazines and knows that Bridget is creating rules. Bridget’s beauty rules govern her life and she expects them to govern Mary Clare’s as well. She applies a second coat of polish in long confident strokes. Red Storm. Mary Clare doesn’t care about hard red nails or shiny shampooed hair but Mary Clare wants Bridget to touch her, so Mary Clare asks Bridget if she can have Red Storm too, and when Bridget nods and hums, Mary Clare knows this means that she would like that too.

Grams cracks three large eggs into a bowl and stirs them with a little water. She pours the eggs over the potato ham mixture to which she’s added button mushrooms, golden onions, and green peppers and stirs until the eggs are fluffy. Mary Clare makes the toast.

When Bridget finishes her nails, she stares out the window towards the chain link fence and the world’s largest dump. “The fence wasn’t there when I was little,” Bridget says. “You couldn’t even see the dump from the house, back then.” She turns from the window and frowns.

Through it’s barely dark, Grams tells Mary Clare that she’s to get to bed early tonight, and Mary Clare knows this means Grams is tired. The phone rings.

“I’ll get it,” Bridget says, and races upstairs to talk in private. Telephone calls are almost always for Bridget anyway.

Later that night, Mary Clare wakes up because she hears the whispering. It’s not the frequent squabbles or the shouts that wakes her; it’s always the whispering. It’s the whispering that makes her afraid, and it’s the whispering that means terrible things are being said. Mary Clare must lie in her bed and not let Bridget and Grams know that she can hear whispering about a boy in a car out front and how Bridget’s to tell the boy to go home, but she says she won’t. Bridget says she might as well leave tonight. Forever.

“Bridget,” Grams whispers after several minutes. “Iffin I do let you go out this once, against my better judgement, it’s on one condition. You must promise never to say what you said in front of Mary Clare again,” she says, and pauses.

Mary Clare holds her breath. She knows Grams is at the kitchen table staring at the Sistine Chapel.

“You must promise never to talk badly about your mother to her again. Do you understand me?”

“Somebody has got to tell her,” Bridget says. She still thinks mom and dad are coming back,” Bridget whispers. After awhile, Bridget says, “Mom called this afternoon,” and Mary Clare lets out her breath.

“Where was I?” Grams asks.

Bridget shrugs. “Bathroom?”

“You didn’t say anything about it at supper,” Grams says.

“I didn’t want Mary Clare to hear.”

A long pause follows.

“She wanted me to know that she still loves us,” Bridget says. “She wanted me to be sure to tell Mary Clare too. I said come here and tell her your goddamn self.”

“Why?” Grams asks.

“I told her that Mary Clare never talks about her any more.” Bridget says in that hard way of hers.

“I asked you why?” Grams asks again.

“I don’t want her calling here any more and getting Mary Clare’s hopes up.”

“What’s wrong with hope?” Grams says, matching Bridget’s hardness.

And Mary Clare listens to hear if hope lives in Bridget’s voice.

“It’s a lie. She ain’t ever coming back. And she drove our dad away so far, he can’t ever come back. If she doesn’t have the guts to tell Mary Clare, I will.”

“Why?” Grams says, more demanding now.

“Because I’m her goddamn sister.”

Mary Clare pushes her face in her pillow.

“Me,” Bridget explodes with fury. “And I’m all she’s got.”

Mary Clare says her St. Francis prayer so she won’t hear Bridget - the prayer Sister Charles taught the fourth grade. My little sisters the birds, you owe much to God and ought to sing his praises because God feeds you even though you neither reap nor sow. Stretch your wings and sing. Mary Clare says it out loud five times and then listens for the birds, but doesn’t hear anything.

The house is quiet until the front door opens and slams shut.

Trembling, Mary Clare throws off her covers, and stands on her bed. She spreads her feet for balance, stretches her arms out, and raises her eyes to heaven. Her room is mostly dark. Light angles in from the hall and slivers through her bedroom curtains. She closes her eyes and tries to keep from rocking side to side. After only a few minutes, her calves feel the strain of keeping her balance on her thin mattress. Her head feels floaty, her breathing gets shallow and fast as her arms drifts higher upward.

The words of the St. Francis prayer escape her throat uncontrolled and drifts past the ragged area near the fence where the foxes and rabbits live, and on past the waving green Zuiderzee. It sails up the Fresh Kills River, around past the Jersey shore’s tank farms, and into the Kill Von Kull, on route to Assisi.

Mary Clare’s arms shoot straight up as she hurtles over the shack, clears the fence, and propels into the deep starlit sky. Chasing after her prayer, she catches it on the rocky dirt road that leads into Assisi. The lepers bells ring a warning but she keeps on, unafraid. Beggars appear on the road wearing odd pieces of heavy cloth that once belonged to a nobleman. They don’t seem surprised to find her there. From a shining meadow of towering sunflowers, a figure emerges. Birds weave luminous strings of light around his head and rabbits hold the tattered hem of his dusty brown garment in their tiny paws. He comes no further, but motions for her to step closer. Holding out his hands, he smiles with eyes soft and gray. Tiny pearls of blood form in his palms and spill to the ground at Mary Clare’s feet.

A car squeals away and heart pounding, Mary Clare ceases to breathe. She collapses on the bed.

“Mary Clare?” Grams calls out.

Just then, the front door opens and slams shut. Bridget runs up the stairs and into the bathroom. Mary Clare draws air in greedy sobs.

“Bridget?” Grams calls. “Mary Clare.”

Neither Mary Clare nor Bridget answers, connected in their silence. Except for the sound of bath water running, the house gets quiet again.

Listening to the bath run in the darkness of her room, Mary Clare feels herself drifting into sleep, and wonders if Grams is still pushing the saints into their places with her old bent fingers.