J. NEIL C. GARCIA
PARDON
Candles humming at the altar of my Lola’s
Lord of Pardon, a dim bottle of coconut
oil
below the stool on which the bleeding
Jesus sat,
his dark and heavy head crowned by metal
thorns
and tilting slightly left and down, his
sad face
lit with huge and glassy eyes, teeth
showing through the parted lips,
right cheek broken pink and black and
trickling quietly, like the rest of him,
with thickly painted blood. I was seven
and
loved my Lola. She murmured her beads
in quick
and purling words every evening at the
Lord
who pardoned even those who hit him,
scourged him, spat at him, turned him
into
this kind and life-size statue of himself,
Lord of a Hundred Wounds, arms resting
in his bruised lap, his back straight
and unmoving,
its skin whiplashed all over with streaks
of mud
about to dry. Crossing herself, my Lola
touched his feet,
and I sat beside her as she prayed to
him,
who could make a person well if she bore
her suffering in silence for his sake,
and rubbed
her sickness away with oil turned special
by his tired and holy weight. Following
her hand,
I rubbed it on my Lola’s stomach which
was sick,
and which made her sick, its nameless
pain swelling
her legs and turning her eyes and wrinkled
skin
a pale and waxy yellow. Away at the hospital,
she lay
asleep for a week, and I came to the Lord
of Pardon
in the night, and slipped her beads between
my fingers,
and there in the darkness stood Tito Jun,
whom Nanay left to watch over me while
she
and Ate fluttered around Lola’s sleep
and shallow breathing.Tito Jun looked
at me,
his eyes burning soft with candle-light,
he said, Come here Joaquin, I’ll show
you
something good, and so I went. Shy and
full
of prayer inside my tightened mouth I
walked to him
and I could see him holding something
black
and hard inside his hand, black and hard
and sticking
out of him through his rough and unzipped
pants.
Before I could turn away, his hands took
me by my shoulders and twisted me
around to face the altar, he pushed me
closer
to the Lord and reached out under him
for the oil,
for my Lola’s almost empty bottle, uncapped
it,
and then he pulled my shorts down to my
knees,
and pressed the weight of an arm down
my back, till I
was bent over and forward. I looked up
at him,
my Lola’s bleeding Jesus as well as mine,
as the pain
of a nail or stick hammered deep into
me, as a hand
kept my mouth from saying nothing, for
this was how,
I knew, it was to suffer and to pardon,
how to make my Lola well. His big and
lovely eyes
looked down at me, as Tito Jun’s breath
pitched and
dug behind my self, and my eyes were wet
and my back
turned stiff with every sharp and piercing
throb.
All around me the air sweetened and hummed
with
coconut-smell, cooking to a slow and sticky
brown,
the way my fingers and my Lola’s skin
would smell
every time I rubbed upon it drops
of the forgiving Lord’s warm and gleaming
love.
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