Passing into Darkness

by Sister Coyote

“I don’t remember killing the cat. ‘Course, there’s lots of things I don’t remember.

“’S what comes of a lifetime of drinking, I guess.”

He’s relatively sober, each word dropping out of his mouth clear and distinct. The edges of his coat are threadbare, just like the bottoms of his pants. One hand grips a bottle in an oil-marked brown paper bag. The veins crawl up the back of his hand and over the bones beneath like roses up Mom’s trellis at home. He takes the bottle out of my view. I hear the sucking noise of him nursing at it, then see his hand drop to rest it on his thigh again. The effort makes him gasp for breath.

“The cat.” I’m laying on my back, staring up at a sky gone peach and lavender and amber through the black limbs of a tree. He’s slumped on the bench above me; I can only see his legs, part of his coat and the hand with the bottle. It feels like I’ve been here for days. Maybe I have been.

“Tabby.” It explodes out of him. An acorn falls from the oak above us and bounces off my forehead. I languidly pick it up and roll its smooth cylinder between my fingers. “Tabby cat. Fat, too; used to feed it trout guts from fishin’ trips. Used to take my boys fishin’. Used to love their dad.”

The cap of the acorn is too tightly affixed to pull off, so I stop picking at it before I destroy it. A sob bubbles out of the drunk on the bench, then another. I set the acorn over my heart and rest my hand there. It rises and falls in a double rhythm. Breath, and heartbeat.

“Usta be loved.”

Even if I could move I wouldn’t rise to comfort him. I never had a lot of use for drunks or the homeless. Shame on me, I know, but I still cringe away from those people. Away from myself, away from the consequences of my life.

He goes on blubbering, mumbling under his breath now about the unfairness of it all. I tune him out, resuming my study of the clouds. I could tell him that the world is not fair, just damn round, but I know he won’t hear me. I wouldn’t hear me, either.

I can see a breeze moving the tree above me, a little, though the limbs are starting to fade into the sky. Two more acorns fall next to me with soft plops. I think about getting up, going to the local drop-in center. Christ with dinner and a bed doesn’t appeal, though. True, a bowl of soup, a slice of bread and some milk would be a feast about now. But it’s only my body that’s starving, not my spirit. Christ’ll just drain me dry again.

The good child in me objects, so I amend the statement. Christianity’ll just drain me dry again.

“The cat.”

He grunts. “Don’ ‘member. Hadda name, y’know? Ferget so much. Died. She blamed me. Boys blamed me.”

The acorn against my chest has picked up my warmth, a tiny hard knot of it beneath a hand chilling with the fall of night. I wonder if it could sprout where it is, imagine it sending thickening roots down through me, binding me to the earth forever. Death is a journey. Just like life.

The drunk’s mumbling turns into a loud snore. I lay in the falling dark and tell myself parables. I start with the parable of the Prodigal Son, which is always good for a laugh. My father would not be so forgiving, and sent me away with nothing at all.

Then I move on to the parable of the sheep and the goats. It doesn’t help—it never helps, not really. How can it? I don’t treat anyone very well, let alone “the least of these.” Homeless, helpless, starving, probably criminal in some way, I’m still annoyed by the drunk daring to plop himself down so close to me. Angered by his curious ramblings. I know what he was seeking—a shoulder to cry on, someone to listen to him. Probably for the first time in his life. Absolution for an animal’s death. Things I cannot possibly give him.

My father made me the family scapegoat when I came out. On my shoulders the death of my mother, the runaway sister, the failed business, the poor investments. All of the dark and heavy things that lay around the house collecting dust and guilt and who knows what else. All made mine before I was sent out into the world with the clothes on my back and the money in my pocket. I haven't enough to get to the desert. I can’t eat.

Forgive me, Father, for I am sin.