Chapter Text
Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.
Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls.
For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.
Matthew 11:28-30
She gets in line when it’s six-thirty in the morning and raining, thinking the wait might be shorter, then.
She’s wrong. The Faithful crowd under umbrellas, following the zigzagged lines laid out with yellow caution tape. She sees a couple police officers, nominally responsible for keeping the peace, but there’s no need. The Faithful wait patiently. Some whisper to each other. Others read the Bible, careful to keep the delicate pages safe under their umbrellas. Most scroll through their phones.
She takes notes. Tries to count the number of Faithful, identify patterns. More women than men. Lots of children too, and babies bundled in blankets. More clothes from Walmart than malls. The line moves slowly, but The Faithful are patient. They know he takes his time. They trust he’ll take his time with them.
The Faithful leave through the back of the tiny Church, so she can’t see their exultant expressions: tears flowing down their cheeks and blood streaking their faces and hair. That’s the part she looks forward to the least. She doesn’t want anyone’s blood on her. Not even a saint’s.
It’s a little after two when she finally makes it inside the tiny chapel, where she takes a number from a ticket stand, like at a deli and squeezes in one of the pews. She’d give anything for a sandwich, but at least she can sit.
Every few minutes, a man in a ridiculous trench coat calls a number and waits for the person with the ticket to stand and follow him. Often, they’ve already started trembling or crying. They say if you enter crying, you leaving laughing. If you enter laughing, you leave crying.
If she enters hungry, does that mean she’ll leave with a sandwich?
“186,” the man calls, and a mother surrounded with children stands, shepherding the children ahead of her.
She looks back down at her ticket—203—as if staring at it enough will make the number smaller.
It seems like 202—an enormous man with tattoos crawling up his arms—takes longer than 195 to 200 combined. Then, finally, the trench-coated man reemerges.
“203.”
“Thank God,” she says without any reverence. A few people glare at her, but the trench-coated man quirks his eyebrows as if he were amused.
“Sam would like to spend a great deal of time with every one of you,” the trench-coated man says as he leads her down a narrow hallway. The wooden sign on the door in front of them says, “Sanctuary.”
“Sam?”
“We don’t all call him The Stigmatic. He can spend five minutes with you. Dean will be keeping time.”
Dean, the mysterious, frightening figure that always stands at the Stigmatic’s side. Many people believe they’re brothers. She bets they’re lovers.
The trench-coated man takes her phone with a promise to give it back to her when she leaves then puts his hand on the doorknob, “Do you faint at the sight of blood?”
“Why would I come here if I did?”
“All sorts of people come here. Usually those who faint don’t do so with him, but we still like to check.”
He doesn’t say anything else, just pulls the door open and ushers her inside. She barely notices it shut behind her.
She had no idea how to a picture a man who bleeds like Jesus and spends his days comforting the faithful or, increasingly, the unfaithful, but she hadn’t expected sweatpants.
That seems to be all The Stigmatic’s wearing. He sits on a small, vinyl-covered cushion. The floor is covered in a clear, plastic tarp. The walls are white, and whatever icons or alters might have been there before are gone now, with the exception of a large wooden cross that hangs on the wall behind The Stigmatic. Just in case anyone had waited all day to see this guy but didn’t know what the wounds represented. A man stands behind and slightly to the left of The Stigmatic. He’s dressed in jeans and flannel, like a farmer or a rancher, and his arms are crossed tight across his chest. He glares at her, as if he kind of wishes she were dead.
She forces herself to look at The Stigmatic.
Her first thought is that if God really did this to him, then He’s a dick. Blood drips sluggishly from his hands and feet and gathers in tiny pools on the tarp, like water from a leaking pipe. There’s a dark, ugly gash under the left side of his ribs, and tiny red pinpricks dot his brow. He even has long hair, but thankfully no beard.
The room doesn’t smell of blood. It smells of wine and roses.
“Hello,” The Stigmatic smiles, and her breath catches.
He smiles exactly like her grandpa did when he could lift her onto his shoulders and sneak her M&Ms from the tallest shelf on his bookcase. It’s wide and kind, and her first instinct is to wrap her arms around him and bury her face in his shoulder, like she had so often with Grandpa.
“You can sit, if you want,” he says, gesturing with one bloody palm to a vinyl cushion just outside the furthest of the blood puddles.
She does and finds herself smiling back at him. It doesn’t seem strange anymore to sit in a tiny room in a tiny Church in nowhere, Kansas talking to a man who bleeds like Christ.
“What’s your name?” he asks.
“Maddie.”
He nods, “Hi Maddie. I’m Sam, and you have some questions for me.”
“What kind of questions,” Dean says. She jumps. She’d forgotten he was there.
“She’s a reporter from Cloud County Community College’s school paper.”
“No reporters!” Dean glares at her again, and this time Maddie’s sure he wants to kill her, “That’s the one rule, Sam.”
“Dean. It’s Cloud County Community College.”
“Not if she sells it to CNN or something.”
“CNN won’t buy the story from her. They’ll think she made it up. Sorry,” he adds, looking back at her, “That’s the truth, though.”
“How do you know what college I go to?”
“It’s either through trickery or divine intervention, whichever you prefer.”
“That’s not how the truth works.”
The Stigmatic shrugs, “Maybe. I'm happy to discuss the philosophical meaning of Truth, if that's what you want.”
It’s not. There’s a list of questions she’s memorized, carefully designed to give her as much information as possible without revealing herself as a reporter.
So much for that.
“Why do you do this?” she asks, gesturing at the door behind her, “For hours and hours every day.”
The Stigmatic smiles again, and she can smell her grandpa’s house, can nearly hear his off-tune singing and playful banter with his dog.
“It comforts people. I don’t think much about how it works.”
“Like how you’re reminding me of my grandpa.”
The Stigmatic nods, “Like that.”
“I haven’t talked about him in years,” and this is not what she came here to say, but she can’t stop herself, “He died when I was fifteen, but my Mom left long before that, and my Dad was either at work or at the bar, so it was always just me and Grandpa. He taught me to read and to ride my bike and how to eat sweet corn straight of the cob and I . . .” she swallows a sob, “I miss him.”
“You love him very much,” The Stigmatic says, “And he loves you. That will stay with you forever.”
She usually hates it when people say sappy shit like that, but this time she smiles, “Are you sure?”
“I’m sure,” The Stigmatic raises his hands, “Do you want me to bless you?”
“I don’t believe in God.”
The Stigmatic laughs, and damn if that doesn’t remind her of Grandpa laughing as she dances in the kitchen.
“This isn’t about God, it’s about comfort. Will a blessing comfort you?”
“Yes,” she says, even though she’s pretty sure that means she’s crazy.
“Bow your head,” he says. She does, and he rests his hands on her head and begins speaking in a language she doesn’t recognize.
She spends half a second trying to figure out what language he’s using, but then it doesn’t matter anymore because she’s in heaven. She’s in heaven and Grandpa’s there: spinning her in circles, kissing her scrapped knees, dishing her ice cream for breakfast, sitting on the big swing in the lawn as she worried about school, Dad, Mom, acne, not liking boys, liking girls, and oh God what was Dad going to say to that? He would kiss her forehead and tell her not to worry because she had him, and they’d figure it all out.
The Stigmatic lifts his hands, and she looks up at him with tear-filled eyes.
“Be at peace,” he says, “Your Grandpa’s still with you. Now go write your newspaper article.”
The trench-coat man opens the door and points her to the exit. She gives him a huge smile, which he returns with a nod.
She never cared about religion, thought praying pretty much meant talking to yourself, but she couldn’t deny it now.
She’d met a man touched by God.