No matter where I saw him, and there were at least a dozen different sightings that winter, the Saint pressed a butterscotch candy into my hand. The first few times it was the closest to magic I had ever been. I was singing a hymn in the church pew, or buying a package of nails at the hardware store with my father, when suddenly I felt the warmness in the center of my palm, like Jesus himself had been crucified there. I never cared for butterscotches, but now I was overwhelmed by the taste of a secret. I held it there on my tongue until the flavor dissolved. Maybe the third or fourth time after it happened my father, who was usually oblivious to such things, leaned close and whispered in my ear: “It was the Saint.” I looked around but never saw any saint until one afternoon in January when we went out to Knob Hill to take photographs of the sun.
We climbed up a slope of dead grass, slipping on the half-melted ice, and stood with a few dozen other peepers whose heads twisted and craned to stare at that enormous egg yolk suspended in the sky. Dozens of cameras whirred. People huddled around photographs. Others stumbling with gauze pads taped to their eyes. Sun scramblers, Mother called them. People searching for something that wasn’t there. Who the hell wastes a perfectly good Saturday like this? she muttered. My father ignored her, snapping a few pictures with a Polaroid. He gave one to my sister and one to me. “Be careful,” he warned. “You can see too much with too much light.”
Mother stood with her arms folded across her chest, her eyes hidden behind oversized sunglasses. “Who talks like that?” she sneered.
“The Saint,” father said without blinking.
Once the photo developed, my father asked if we could see it. See what? We were supposed to be looking? All I could see were blurs and smears of light. He pointed to the bands of radiating light. “There. It’s a stairwell,” he said.
I looked harder. Nope. It was a smear of light. I was wondering how many calluses I might need to walk up those stairs when I felt a tingling in my hand. A butterscotch. My body twisted left and right. The Saint was slipping through the crowd but paused to look at me looking. We stood there, unblinking, like when people stare at animals at the zoo and the animals stare back. He never spoke a word. Just tipped his old-fashioned hat with a sly grin and locked his eyes with mine as if to say, I’ll be watching. And my eyes staring back and saying, That’s it?
My father never thought of the Saint in any other way. “Sorry I’m late, the Saint needed some help fixing his fence,” he would say. Or: “The Saint dropped by the office today.” And: “You’ll never believe what the Saint said tonight.” It had been this way for years.
He was not a real Saint. Not the kind boiled in a vat of oil or flayed alive or fed to lions and somehow still wandering this good earth. One of his arms was withered but that was from a machinery accident. My father was aware of this, of course, but I think the distinction was lost on him. We knew very little about the Saint, other than what we heard in bits and pieces. He had plenty of money, fought in the war, wrote a book about Agatha of Sicily, and spent all his time caring for a sick wife.
It was the Saint who had inspired my father’s curiosity in collecting. During the past year my father had amassed an entire closet full of junk. Nostalgic crap, my mother called it. Once or twice when he drove up the coast to see his brother or left for a weekend fishing trip—which my mother said was really an excuse to look for traces of God in bear shit—she would organize a yard sale. We took the money and bought greasy hamburgers which my father hated and said would give us heart disease. To heart disease! my mother cheered, toasting our plastic cups of soda.
A few days after returning from his excursions, gaunt and pale but optimistically dazed, my father hunted down his junk from neighbors and pawnshops and stored it safely in the closet until the next purge. The belief in the Saint was just one more thing my father couldn’t bear to let go.
“Let’s go see the Saint,” my father said one night.
In the kitchen my mother broke a glass jar of pickled vegetables. That woman heard things not even owls could hear. I hesitated on the couch, listening to her sweep it up while my father stood near the front door holding a ceramic serving dish covered in tinfoil. Leftover pasta and meatballs. The Saint’s favorite. His wife had been dying off and on for years and my father insisted on bringing a meal once a week. He needs us, he often told my mother. The Saint’s wife had officially died the week before.
Mother helped with my scarf. She talked about the Saint being a fraud. Wackadoodle. Pervert. Words I couldn’t repeat. To us he was and forever will be the Saint, but to her he was Roland Denny who lived in a loft above his shop that sold nothing but relics. In the encyclopedia next to the word weird she assured us we would find a picture of Roland Denny. “He believes everything,” she warned.
We followed a country road into Old Town, crossing bridges into a thicket of trees whose greenness was almost black. The road snaked back and forth. During the drive my father explained how the Saint’s wife had suffered from a terrible illness for almost two decades. Not even he could pronounce it. Now that she was dead it was likely the Saint would sell the shop and move elsewhere, maybe back east where he had been born. We might never see him again.
“Such a brilliant man,” my father sighed.
I said nothing. I didn’t feel old enough to be joining him, much less learning about any of this. Just nodded my head with a mixture of fascination and disbelief.
The dim lights of Old Town lay ahead. There were still a few shops on Main Street, but otherwise this part of town had been abandoned. At one time it was the center of life in our city, but now it was just sad. Things die and nothing takes their place.
A few years earlier a girl had gone missing in Old Town. We all worried it was the Coal Creek Killer again. Teams of specialists with dogs searched the nearby woods. There were vigils. Her face was on the news. The girl’s parents prayed for her safe return. One morning they found a liver wrapped in a sweatshirt nailed to a tree. There was a note scribbled in blood. Then about ten feet of tripe washed up in a nearby creek. My sister and I were not allowed to walk to school by ourselves. My parents wouldn’t even let us leave the window open at night. Then the girl just walked out of the woods one day. It was all a hoax. She had run away with her boyfriend and the two of them stole some pig guts from the high school biology lab as a joke. A lot of people were upset, but I couldn’t tell if it was because they were disappointed the girl wasn’t dead or if for the first time they realized how easy they could be played for fools.
In a strange way my father’s invitation felt like a hoax. Like he was trying to make it more magical and ominous than it really was so years from now we could recall it with a certain fondness. “Remember that night when we saw the Saint?” he would say. That kind of fatherly crap.
The car stopped in front of a shop on Main Street. Darkened display windows gazed back like empty eye sockets. We sat there with the engine idling.
“This is it,” my father said.
Disappointment swelled, compressing my heart like a sponge. It was an old brick building sandwiched between dozens of other old brick buildings. It did not appear like the house of a Saint. I’m not sure what I was expecting, but I wanted it to look different. I wanted the Saint’s shop to be strange or frightening with a certain look of ruin. Standing in the street it felt like any other aged shop in an aging part of the world.
It was only coming closer that I felt differently. I could not imagine why any decent human being would want to live here. It was cold. It was quiet. The road behind us now seemed far away. A dense web of trees and vegetation loomed behind the buildings, all of it covered in a silvery shade of frost. Something was in those trees, something that sensed a disruption in the natural rhythms of this place, but I had no idea what. I had spent all last summer standing by the wood near our house, disappointed I never saw a coyote. “Just because you didn’t see it,” my father said, “doesn’t mean it didn’t see you.” That’s how I felt walking toward the Saint’s shop. Coyote eyes drinking us up.
“It’s lovely, isn’t it?” my father said, breathing deeply as if the air was somehow purer than what he breathed in every night in our yard. “Wouldn’t you like a place like this to call home? A place all to yourself.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“He likes his privacy. He’s not used to visitors,” my father said. “Strangers bother him.”
“What about you?”
“I’m not a stranger.”
“I guess.”
We stood there waiting.
“Try not to ask too many questions. And don’t touch anything.”
“Why not?”
My father shrugged and his face twisted.
When I had seen the Saint in the crowd of sunlight peepers on Knob Hill I had not really seen him. It was only a glimpse. There had been something angelic about how he moved through the crowd, almost like he could move without being seen. Then before I had time to think about it he was gone. It was the same Saint standing behind the glass display case, but not what I was expecting. I had never realized how much older he was than my father, his hair more gray and frazzled than I remembered. His shoes were too big. He fidgeted with the ring on his finger, taking it off and on. Looped around his belt was a thick lock of braided hair, maybe taken from a wild animal. I kept looking for that mischievous expression, or any gesture of affection, but he was more somber now. Nothing about him shied away from the pain he was feeling.
I don’t remember what kind of shop it was exactly. Rare books, antiques, maybe. I’m probably remembering this all wrong and the man was just a pawnbroker.
The Saint accepted the ceramic dish of meatballs and set it on the display counter. He pushed a glass of water into my hand and poured a shot of liquor for my father. My father accepted this graciously but did not drink. The metallic taste of the water tickled the insides of my ears with each swallow.
All of a sudden the Saint clapped his hands and rushed through a curtain into a back room. We followed through a narrow hallway until we were standing in a small library. Bookshelves stretched from floor to ceiling. Such an over-whelming musty stench. Admiring the books, I almost tripped on the assortment of floor rugs. My head spun trying to follow the arabesque pattern of one, and my body felt warm and silly gazing at another with its grotesque figurines of naked men and women conjoined together. My father stood over one of the figures, covering up as much of the scene as possible with his feet, his face flushed with embarrassment as the Saint handed him a book and continued his previous conversation in a low voice. It didn’t concern me, the whispers of one old man to an even older man, each with one foot in the grave of the past.
On the far side of the room, spread against a wall adjacent to the only window in the room, was an enormous map of the world. Thumb-tacked to this map were photographs and little drawings. Different colored strings connected the tack on one city or country to another, creating an elaborate web.
“What’s this?”
“These are things I know exist but have not yet seen,” the Saint said.
There was a sketch of a unicorn on a napkin. A photograph of a UFO. A woman blowing out the candles of a birthday cake. A single flower growing on a cliff overlooking the ocean.
“Come,” the Saint said with a smile, “I’ll show you something even better.”
A light flickered on in the hallway and we squeezed past a towering stack of dehydrated apples in tin drums. Even though the hallway appeared to be level I could feel the walls on either side closing in and narrowing to a point that seemed farther and farther out of reach. I couldn’t believe this was all part of the same building. My chest was tight. I kept glancing behind me at my father, wondering if he would put an end to this derangement, but he smiled weakly in affirmation that we were safe. At least for now.
The Saint walked beside me. The only Saint I’d ever seen before was in paintings in school books or sculptures in a cathedral. Those saints had agonized faces and loose, flowing robes. Halos or something. They were men with beards. I remember seeing postcards of my parents’ trip to Italy one summer. There was a sculpture of Saint Bartholomew who had been flayed alive. He wore his skin draped around his neck and shoulders like a fashion accessory. My father spent hours explaining every detail of the sculpture and how the man who carved it had robbed graves and dissected the bodies. What amazed me most in the sculpture was the chiseled abs. In a creepy way it made you wish you could lose your skin because then God would transform you into a superhero.
The Saint was nothing like this. He was flabby. He did not wear a robe. He did not have a golden halo floating above his head. He lacked celestial charm. In fact, the sight of him was downright ugly. For the first time I saw the hand withered from the machinery accident, suddenly disappointed it was not more mangled. His nose was a fat, bulbous pickle at the end of his face, tinted slightly purple with veins. He looked like a clown.
We moved slowly down stairs and into a cellar. A womb of darkness pulsated around us. It smelled earthy. The air was chilly, or at least I allowed myself to imagine it was. A hand clamped down on my shoulder in the darkness. I let out a small yelp, but then the fingers on the hand pinched my shoulder gently and I knew it was my father.
A single halogen bulb illuminated a small corner in the room. We watched as the Saint slipped away from under the bulb and shuffled into the darkness. Above us, the ceiling was unfinished, exposing a network of pipes and wires and beams. A single drop of water splashed on my cheek. Another halogen bulb flickered on ten feet away. Again, the Saint disappeared into the darkness. Coming down the stairs I had believed we were in a tiny cellar but with each successive halogen bulb I realized the error of my thinking. It took the Saint a full minute to walk across the concrete slab back to us.
My eyes adjusted to the light. Now that I wasn’t squinting I saw along the walls of the cellar a series of cabinets with glass doors. The Saint led me forward. Through one glass pane I saw a leather strap with a rusted buckle. Between the buckle was a double-pronged fork. A heretic fork, the Saint explained. He removed it from the cabinet and displayed how the fork would be adjusted just under the chin so that any movement would cause the sharpened prongs to pierce the skin. My fingertip pressed the fork tip. It was like clasping hands with the past.
The Saint gave me a detailed history lesson on every item in his collection. There was an assortment of thumbscrews. A long claw heated and clamped to a woman’s breast. The Spanish Spider, the Saint said with a wheezing chuckle. There were more common items—an ax, a doubled-handed saw—but the Saint seemed to relish the more bizarre instruments of torture whose descriptions rolled off his tongue like poetry. Intestinal crank (“Somewhere between nine and thirteen feet of small intestine could be removed before the victim perished.”). Crocodile shears (“For snipping and tearing, or simple mutilation.”). Vials of oil mixed with beef tallow that had hardened into a kind of soap (“Remains of Margaret Davy. Boiled. 1542.”). Some frayed rope (“Anne Askew. The rack. 1546.”). A set of rusted iron rings with chain links connecting to metal bracelets.
“I have yet to associate a name with this artifact,” the Saint said, obviously troubled. He cleared his throat. “The victim would have been fastened to the chains and the chains fastened to horses that pulled in different directions. Sixteenth century, I believe.”
The Saint placed in my hands another contraption shaped like a metallic pear. When he turned a key-handle the four leaves of the device slowly opened. The Saint opened and closed the instrument several times. Flakes of metal danced to the floor.
“They called it the Pear of Anguish. This would be inserted into the victim before application.”
I did not ask where the device would be inserted. I’m not sure I wanted to know.
We kept moving slowly to the other end of the cellar.
I tried to remember every item, every minute detail, not so much to catch him in a mistake, or tell my friends later, as to wait for a chance to ask the question eating a hole in my mind: are you really a Saint? I didn’t want to play the part of heretic. Not here. Then other questions suspended in the jelly of my mind: is this what saints do? With every torture device pressed in my hands I couldn’t tell if the Saint was being serious or indulging my imagination. It seemed impossible for anybody to know so much about such odd things. There were just things. Old things. But somehow they felt more alive than us. Waiting. Full of anticipation. Once or twice I glanced behind at my father who stood with his eyes closed as the Saint discussed a tongue suspended in a jar of formaldehyde, nodding gently as if he had heard the Saint recite this sermon a hundred times before.
It was easy to see the Saint frequented this cellar often. He was very comfortable here. His voice was different. Everything had been expertly arranged, the glass neatly polished for our arrival. What I could not decide was why this place existed. Was it a kind of self-inflicted punishment? Or did it please him? Was he a monster? Or perhaps it was something else. Maybe thinking about the pain brought him closer to God. Maybe the Saint was still trying to figure out why any of this existed, why we would exist to make such things, and someday, maybe, after enough living in its presence he would have the answer.
In a far corner, away from the other relics, was the inquisitor’s chair. The jagged spikes had been expertly polished. Without saying a word the Saint nudged me to take a seat. He grinned. I looked back at my father who shrugged and chewed the insides of his cheeks, his mouth twisting into a playful smile. Without warning, the Saint lifted me onto the chair. Immediately, I felt the spikes press against my skin through my clothes. It pinched. I swallowed hard. The Saint explained that witches were clamped into the chair with iron braces which could be tightened to further compress the victim into the iron spikes.
“There’s no such thing as witches,” I said quietly.
The Saint pretended not to hear me. He was assuring my father all these relics had been authenticated. Nothing was fake.
“How can you tell the difference?”
The Saint let out a long breath. He knew the answer to this, probably rehearsed it for everybody he brought down into this private hell, but was reluctant to say or merely searching for the right words.
“There are ways to trace ownership,” he lectured. “Documents and such. And more scientific methods. But, the only real way to know is to use them.”
We climbed the stairs. I felt very heavy, almost as if I was wearing old-fashioned diving gear with weighted boots. Thoughts danced wildly in my head as we left behind the Saint’s little underground museum. What would be most painful: being sawed in half, having a rat burrow into your chest, or slowly disemboweled? I would not want to be flayed alive. That took time and imagination. Maybe there was something worse, something not yet imagined. I didn’t think it was possible people still invented this kind of stuff, but I guess as long as there were people we would need the things in the Saint’s collection. By the time I reached the top of the stairs I had changed my mind. I looked at my fingernails. I liked to chew on them. They were always bleeding. The whole time we were in the cellar I had gnawed on them unwittingly. I tried to remember what the Saint had said when he pointed out a pair of pliers. Sometimes the nails were peeled away, slowly, while other times a splinter or iron wedge was pressed under the nail, slowly, then expertly driven with a mallet to crumble the joints.
“The smallest things yield the worst agonies,” the Saint had said.
Instead of turning left down the hallway with the tins of dehydrated apples back towards the main room of the shop, we took another staircase leading to the loft.
“Roland,” my father said quietly. It was the first time I had ever heard him speak the Saint’s name. “Roland, please.”
But the Saint did not listen. Passing through the loft we reached another door. The Saint removed a set of keys from his pocket. “This is my wife’s bedroom,” he said.
Things die. Old things. Young things. Something dies every day. A woman down the street put her head in the oven. A father blew up too many balloons for a birthday party and dropped dead of a heart attack. The neighbor with the pet snake was strangled in the night when it escaped the cage. A Ferris wheel at the county fair toppled, killing seven. During a sandstorm, a couple married for fifty-two years suffocated on the air they were breathing. Just last week when I left for school I saw a pigeon fly right into the upstairs window. It just lay there in the broken glass until my father scooped it up with the shovel. After school I looked in the trash can. The pigeon was still there, teeming with flies. I knew this. But nothing prepares you for stepping into a room where a real person died.
It was poorly lit. There was a dresser and antique writing desk. Along the edges of the floor, pressed close to the wall, were unlit candles. Exquisite care had been taken to make the bed. Unwrinkled sheets. Fluffed pillows. Beside the bed, on the other side of the nightstand, was an armchair. I could see the imprint of the Saint’s butt on the cushion. That’s the Saint’s butt, I thought. A holy, menacing butt.
The Saint said his wife had spent the last fourteen years of her life in this room. Right there, on that bed, he whispered. This is where she wanted to be.
“Fourteen years,” he said, his voice crackling.
I tried to picture the Saint’s wife in that bed. I doubt she ever left it. She couldn’t have. She must have known about the cellar. She probably helped him collect all that stuff. I mean, she was his wife. How else do you stay married unless you really know somebody? Maybe her illness came from this place, those things lingering beneath her the way an iceberg hides beneath the water. Knowing that museum existed but not knowing why it existed, not knowing what she had married thirty-seven years before. Man. Fourteen years in that bed. She had all the torture she needed right here. It’s impossible to really know anybody.
Reaching into the nightstand the Saint handed me several photographs. I recognized them. They were photographs of the sun. He mentioned how during the winter his wife liked to stare at these for hours and in the summer she would open the blinds and stare at the sun until her eyes throbbed. Next he handed me a glass jar with what looked like an oversized bean. This was the toe of the missionary Andrzej Bobola, bitten off from the corpse after his torture by a devout follower. He had other relics. A rose petal transfigured from the corpse of Catherine of Siena, and a vial of breast milk from Saint Agatha.
“Preservatives,” the Saint said.
Nothing else worked. Not the herbal diets, the pills, the oils, the balms—not the radiations, the operations, the experimental drug trials. No, the Saint said, his voice now in a dream, those were a lost cause. It was these, he said, motioning to the relics. He had kept these close to his dying wife, sometimes hiding them under the pillow or putting it in her hand while she slept. It was the relics, the Saint said, that had sustained her, preserved her, through fourteen years of suffering.
“She was a saint,” the Saint said. His fingers rubbed the lock of braided hair looped around his belt. “You should have seen her when it happened.”
Before leaving, the Saint showed us one last glass container. The object inside looked like a shriveled banana peel. He called it the Holy Prepuce. Jesus’s foreskin. The only thing that did not ascend with the savior of the world into heaven, although the Saint suggested that some early theologians believed the foreskin was taken from this earth to form the rings of Saturn.
“Had it touched my wife’s lips this would have healed her,” the Saint said.
“Too bad you didn’t have it before she died,” I said.
“Simon!” my father hissed.
“No, I did,” the Saint said with an uneasy smile. “I’ve had it for years.”
I held the relics. I held that holiness. I wish I could say they felt different from the pliers or the pear of anguish, but that’s not the way I remember it.
Using the Polaroid, my father took a picture of me with the Saint outside the shop. Then we shook hands. His touch was strange. Like I could grasp his soul but not the body. Touch without touch. It was weird. My father handed the photograph to me as we walked back to the car. I stuffed it in my pocket. Behind us, the Saint waved.
“You shouldn’t believe everything he says,” my father whispered. It felt like he was floating away and somehow I was keeping him tethered to the ground.
“It’s fake? All that stuff is fake?”
The car backed into the street, the brakes screeching like two banshees in a secret conversation.
“No. No, it’s real,” my father said with a measured hesitancy, “it just isn’t true.”
He said this twice. Almost like he wasn’t sure whether the words were actually his own. I felt in my pocket for the photograph but instead discovered a butterscotch candy. It looked like a lost orb of sunlight. I put it in my mouth so I didn’t have to say anything else.
As we helped set the table I told my mom and sister all the things I had seen. My sister didn’t believe me. My mother was very quiet until I came to the part about the Saint’s dead wife and the Holy Prepuce and my mother said she could only imagine the misery and torture the Saint had inflicted on that poor woman, keeping her alive all those years for a miracle cure that never came.
“I would do nothing less for you,” my father said. “I love you too.”
We ate leftover pickled cabbage. Mother kept her eyes open during the prayer. Big coyote eyes. Inquisitive. Elsewhere. Staring out the window. Scrambling for the sun in all that night. My father’s words had knocked the wind out of her. The color had drained from her face, too. She would look at him like that for years to come, much quieter than before, as if curiosity had a strangle on her. I closed my eyes and imagined all the relics I would touch next time I went to see the Saint, praying they would wait for me and not forget my touch. My father kept praying and thanking God for all the creeping things in the world, and I suppose that meant the Saint and his dead wife, and all the people and saints who had gone before us who made it possible we could have thumbscrews and intestinal cranks and foreskins, and all the other things real and not true that leave us aching with imagination.