Smooth pebbles tried to slip under the sand at the man's feet, hairy feet in sandals, with thick yellow nails warping and cracking. Perfect little stones, shot through with grains of crystal quartz, sparkling like gumdrops--they made her almost want to cry. Little plants grew low, scattered here and there around the feet, where they trembled and swayed. She held her breath.
Christine's fingers liked to fret at her rosary when she was nervous. Now, though, it was the wrong rosary and it made her more nervous. Instead of blue, the little blue wooden rosary of a Protestant, she was caressing dark and faceted Catholic beads. Far too gratifying, an immodest ostentation shimmering reddishly and floating around her hand, full of grace, complete with an exquisitely sculpted Savior riveted to his tiny steel cross. Idolatry.
A fish came to hover in front of her like a hummingbird, holding its lusterless lifeless flat eye before hers, considering her and her meaning, careful of her reaching hair.
Christine frowned down at the flowing white of her Confirmation dress. It was hard not to love a row of choirboys with tapers, the stifling ornate security of the confessional, the conference-room crowd of the saints. It was hard not to yearn for the drone of mystic hypnotic Latin and the walls of a spare and simple convent. It was hard to forget that once there was one church only, the heir of Rome, in the days of the Crusades. An ancient church that still spoke with the sage authority of a world's ruler, and that could claim the motherhood of all Christian churches.
But this was not for her. She was a thinking believer, and free; she read her own Bible.
No Catholic had made the passage she made now, her heart straining, her eyes blurred and dimming. A Catholic is baptized with a sprinkle, not enough to wet the hair, but Christ himself had been baptized by full immersion: the crisis and transformation of the spirit seethe in that strange and private place, the alien world beneath the surface, where the pilgrim is drowned and rises new-born. Here the long and gnarled arms of John the Baptist himself held the faithful in their inexorable grip, one hand spanning the small of her back, the other with fingers like wrapping roots around the base of her skull, and here they locked her with the fishes, not to be denied, once she ventured within their reach, that she remain until she drowned, and died, and rose again to walk in the footsteps of their God.
Christine, Dreaming