Snakes in The Garden by Gerald Coleman

“Killing a snake is the same as having a snake”

– Joan Didion

A large, clay and plaster likeness of Saint Patrick, holding a crook and pointing at writhing snakes on the statue’s base, dominated the right side of our church. He was wheeled in face up on a donkey-cart, wenched upright by strong men when St. Patrick’s Church on Ninety-Fifth Street in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, was built in 1847. “Black Forty-Seven” my dad called it.

Patrick looked over our heads into the adjacent wall ever since. 

Once installed, he never once moved. But the right appetite in the right person, paired with perfect atmospheric conditions, might move those eyes to look into yours, perhaps a toke across the near-infrared window at the border of human perception or into the ultraviolet range of the soul. It had been known to happen. Once, twice, a hundred times. If only for a twinkling, a Holy Saint might enter your soul through the magic of each other’s eyes. 

I was nearing my thirteenth year in good standing. John XXIII was just hired Pope. I did not expect the road to apostasy to be lit so brightly.

From an early age, I could sum up religion as one titanic struggle. The forces of Hell, Satan, assistant Devils, Snakes, Sin, and Death were arrayed against Heaven, The Church Militant, The Churches Suffering and Triumphant, Jesus, God The Father, and The Holy Ghost, all of the Saints, and The Virgin Mother. You wouldn’t think it would turn out to be much of a battle, considering the resources available and the advantage of having The Word on your side, but believe me, it was.

It was Saturday afternoon. Confession Saturday. Like every Saturday afternoon since the Counsel of Nicaea in 325 AD. It was late autumn, when the sunlight was most bright and the clouds most dark, when rolling cascades of light created when the sun, immerging from behind a speeding storm cloud, would terrace the pews quicksilver one after the other, then everything flashed back to shadow as a new cloud eclipsed the sun. Joseph, Patrick, and other celebrity saints looked ready to leap from their pedestals, dancers caught between strobes—the paint and plaster of our faith.  Except Our Lady, Mary. 

Mary looked down, the bleeding soul and simple heart of the tempestuous, elliptical Godhead. Her arms and hands arched, invitingly. Beneath Her feet, a serpent with an apple in its mouth looked up. The snake was thick and wildly unsure. It frightened little children. It would scare anyone, which was the point.

When the next in line entered Father Smith’s confessional, the rest of us in the pew swung over our hands or hopped sideways a moment or two behind the previous penitent to assume the open spot, like a very large, sluggish caterpillar moved in rolling sections, or the wave at a ballgame. 

An hour into the afternoon, with the full electromagnetic spectrum piercing the Church, Father Lynch sat alone in his confessional. After several minutes, he came out to see the wave rolling across the pews to be absolved by Father Smith. He worked his tongue against his teeth down the aisle.

“This pew, come with me

I was the last kid in the pew of penitents ushered away towards Lynch’s empty confessional, like cattle mooing into the executioner’s butcher-stall. Because I was last out, I was first in and had only a moment to refine my guilty plea.

We were inclined to squeeze between the poles of truth and falsehood in halves and almosts, but it was impossible to fudge by Father Lynch

I got the low down on Lynch from my father.

One Saturday, he puts on his hat and overcoat and announces at the kitchen table he is off to confession. I’m off to the park to play roller hockey when I see the man himself sitting on a park bench feeding the pigeons, reading The Daily News backwards through the sports section. I’m on skates, so he hears me grinding across the concrete pathway before I’m halfway to him. He continues doing what he’s doing until I’m standing in front of him. He is surprised to see me.

“Son? What about ya?” he says.

 “Dad,” I thought

He says, “I’m confessing to the birds, as ya plainly see”

Not a wink. No giving me the hooded left eye with the sideways nod. He’s matter of fact about it. He goes on to impress upon me the religious significance of what he’s doing, that he has moved up in sanctitude to the point where he can communicate his intimate intentions and sins to the pigeons, who are, despite their reputation, among the select species of “blessed creatures” he calls them the moral equivalent of the elephant or the lamb.

 “Besides, Mickey, I’m cutting down on my church time,” he says. “Did ya ever see a place where more snakes slithered about?”

 I am not an overtly skeptical kid. He is serious. He is my father. So, I give him full benefit of the fact. I reckon he has his pigeons and doves reversed.

What follows was as close to a direct passing of wisdom as I ever got from him.

“Animals are the purest form concocted by Himself in Heaven. They’re as is to begin with. No fussing around about them,” he says. 

I’m leaning on my hockey stick, thinking what I could possibly say.

“Total absent of sin,’ he says. “Which is the plague of the human endeavor. Themselves, the birds, are incapable of it. Have ya not seen Baby Jesus with the wee bird on His finger looking at it like it’s the flying prophet of truth itself?”

He waves his hand as he speaks and the birds before us juke into the air momentarily to settle back to rummage among the peanut shells.          

“But Dad,” I say. “Feeding the birds isn’t confession. It’s feeding the birds.”

 “Look about ya,” he says. “The priests in Saint Pat’s are all here, in their purer, holier forms,” he tells me. “In a higher condition of spirit, being created on Day Five, closer to God’s initial plan by a day to humans in Genesis—their communications being more natural and direct.”

 It’s ridiculous, but I can almost believe he’s serious. When I was a child he confided how our family “back home” were intimate with the Pookas of the rocks and shorelands for hundreds, maybe thousands of years. “Yer Great Uncle John had a tail,” he told me. “There was Aunt Nuala’s giant donkey ears no man would go near without a whip.”

 It’s a perfect day for a hockey game which is starting without me. It’s cold; it’s cloudy; the trees are whistling without leaves. He is careful to point out the characteristics of the “priests of the air” as we track the flock’s landings and departures. “Monsignor Signorelli—in his unalloyed being—is over there by himself on top of the garbage can with his head bobbin, givin’ his blessings to the flock,” he says. “He doesn’t eat until everyone is done. A saint himself.”

Next, he says, “Over there’s Father Smith’s better incarnation, hammerin’ nuts into his beak so he can fly off about his rackets and schemes, which is any minute. Now he’s the bird to confess to, if you can catch his attention, because he’ll not dig too deep into yer secret self. A simple exchange of words and you’re out’a there with a few Hail Marys.”

Meanwhile, “Father Smith” is modeling his iridescent purple chest feathers for the benefit of whomever, spinning around himself.

My father tells me the Rangers lost to the Bruins the previous night, as large tankers are leaving and entering New York Harbor.

“Ah,” he says. “There’s the crux of Father Lynch himself. In the center of the rumpus.”

He points to a common gray and white street pigeon who is giving the other birds the nip and scatter. My father says, “He’s got his spies and stool pigeons reporting to him. Nobody cares more about the poor critters than Lynch. Lynch is the bird if yer in need of a heart-to-heart examination of conscience—if ya can put up with his clatterin’.”

“But Dad, they’re pigeons. They only care about peanuts.”

 “I can see that be my own eyes. I’m not deef,” he says. “There’s no denying that. There’s the challenge confessing to the birds, yes, but there’s the beauty of it, too. Less blathering in Latin and Bless Me Fathering and fuss over which Commandment is which regarding which sin,” he says and he’s proud of himself for thinking of it, tucking himself farther into his overcoat as it starts to flurry.

 He returns to reading backwards towards the page concerning the horses at Belmont Park. I look back at him sitting on the bench after skating a few hundred feet back to my hockey game. He is straining over his bifocals to keep me in sight. I give him a one-handed salute with my hockey stick, but he doesn’t see me.

Needless to say, Father Lynch’s confessional was not my Saturday destination of choice.  I did a hasty examination of conscience crossing the aisle into his confessional. I was guilty. We were all guilty. It was with us since inception and before that it was inherited from Adam and Eve, which seemed a stretch, but was a painful truth. We crossed the portal inherent sinners and left in the State of Grace, or with the stain on our souls of lying to a priest, which meant through the chain of command—Lying to God.

Yes, we were all guilty. And we were sorry. And we’ll never again, until next month when we might look for a different confessor priest or find new ways to confound the matter through ambiguity of word or bilious blot of memory. 

My sins were minimal. Infantile. An average priest behind the screen would have difficulty restraining a chuckle. Lynch slapped back the screen. His profiled, chiseled-head, huge in the aperture, focused my eyes. And since I was the first of the cohort of souls who spurned his line for Smith’s, he was prepared. He adjusted his face and nodded to the wall in front of him for me to begin.

“Bless me Father for I have sinned,”  I said. “I disobeyed my father, Father, four times.”

 I was a little nervous, so I got right into my first sin. Standard stuff. Even a future saint disobeyed his father once a week. I would have confessed it even if I didn’t do it. I also missed my morning and evening prayers X many times, appropriate for the time interval. I cursed three times, only about hockey and baseball, never taking The Lord’s name in vain. I confessed to two lies. That was it. A sticky, glottal sound came from Lynch’s tongue as it pulled away from his hard palate.

 “Yes, my Son. Lied about what”

I froze. After a few moments of silence, with his head still parallel, he asked more questions. No priest in my life ever probed beyond what I told him. Lied about what? I forgot. To what end? I didn’t know. What were my intentions going forward? No. Never again. I was about to pronounce the words to pull the curtain down on the whole performance once and for all—”For these and for all my sins I am truly sorry”—and force my penance and exit when he asked, “Is there anything else one wishes to confess today, my Son?”

I heard a distinct italic cast to one word that implied I was holding back a critical matter of conscience. I had a moment leaning over the abyss that would change my trust in Jesus Christ here and above, and how I viewed myself, the world, and everything in it for a very long time

I told him about Rosie. How I felt was hard to explain. I was just thirteen. I told him I wanted to share existence with her. I forget the exact, unfortunate words. I told him I desired to live in her hair, inside her chocolate eyes with the orange, radiating galaxies, and entwine my legs together with hers.

I leaned back from the screen, stunned by what I had said. I knew I did something to be guilty of, but my desires were little more than daydreams. My own father would have pulled out a tale from his bag of characters. How the Great Lefty took a punch in the nuts for testing Missy Mulligan’s virtue or how Bicycle Charlie lived with pirates for twenty years after being warped by love at my age. Good for a laugh, but I’d get the point. Lynch’s head rotated my way as he planned his next inquiry in the dark.

“Did one have inappropriate or sinful thoughts with regards this girl, my Son?”

 I must have made a sound because he spoke to me again.

 “Did one, my Son, touch her inappropriately, here or there, or in an impure manner?”

I would touch her here or there or anywhere she wanted me to, if that were possible.

 “No Father.” But that was only the set-up. He knew his demographic.

“That being said, did one excite oneself in the, so called, genital area, my Son?”

 I shook my head. I nodded. I said things I don’t remember. He boxed my easily tractable mind into corners, danced verbal jabs, hooks, and crosses. I would have confessed to murder for him to stop. Then I said it. I said it in a split instant the way a person jumps for no reason off a bridge or into eternity down an elevator shaft.

“Once Father, I touched myself watching her skip rope with her girlfriend across the street

In Heaven God lifted an enormous eyebrow

“Where did one touch oneself

 “Near my bedroom window, Father

 “No. No. Where on one’s body did one touch oneself?”

 I lapsed into a kind of aphasia that seized my will to speak. Mercifully, I didn’t have to, because he was now on about The Occasions of Sin, which included looking out my window, newspaper ads for women’s underwear, and Elizabeth Taylor movies.

 I touched myself, yes. It made her more an Angel than she already was. My eyes filled. She softened. I said her name into the window. “Rosemarie,” I said. I shut my eyes. “Oh, Rosie.”        

 “What is it don’t you understand.

I understood nothing, but he was off on another hissing exegesis, this time about how each sperm was a potential child like the Baby Jesus. How the seeds of humanity by the billions died in the mountains, plains, and valleys of our underpants or were flushed in tissues down toilet bowls. I was a spawning salmon squirting its seed into a shallow, eggless shoal.

He said when I did my penance, I should do so at Our Lady’s statue. I should contemplate the Serpent under Her feet with the Apple of temptation in its mouth. I said something about never again and for these and for all my sins and left the confessional purged of all sinfulness and self-respect. I held the curtain open for another Child of God to take my place. Most of the penitents Lynch had rounded up from Father Smith’s line had snuck back down the aisle or scattered away to the ball fields and local bars.

Sunlight slanted through the reds and yellows and blues of the stained-glass windows in shafts of dust and sheets of photons. The only sounds were the random squeal of a sneaker, the rifle shot of a falling knee rest, a solitary cough rasping a throat. My standing in reality was disturbingly queer. My feet lifted and lowered as the marble floor moved down the aisle, where rows of statues passed one by one with contingent faces frozen heavenward. A few referred their hands to exposed red, stucco hearts.

At the front, a sacred relic of Saint Patrick resided in the altar stone—a slice of bone, an eyeball, or wedge of his old crook. It wasn’t discussed. To the left of the altar, scores of candles burned in red glass cups under Our Lady. Want a date? You’re mom’s sick? For 10 cents you could borrow a flame with a wick. The new flame pulled away without diminishing the original, then fired another as bright as the first. This was between you and Mary. The single flame, the pre-genital mother of all these flames, spread the light this way since 1847. There was no scorecard of the effects of the coins and the eternal flame on the world, but a dime was enough to keep the flame alive.

 I knelt. Both the Snake under her feet and I looked up at Her gentle, compassionate face.

 “Couldn’t you maybe please step back Mother, if only an inch? Let it free. It’s only an apple. Let it slither where nobody can see it’s suffering as much as everyone else around here.”

There was a bunch of people staring up with me. I must have been talking out loud. I lit a candle, dropped a dime in the slot, and walked back up the side aisle past Lynch’s confessional out the door, where I tossed my rosary onto the lawn surrounding the concrete statue of the Patron Saint in front. It sank into the ivy.

I hoped my dad was in the park today with the paper and his pigeons. Either way, I had a confession to make.

Gerald Coleman

Image: Confessional box inside a church by Pixabay.com. A dark wooden cubical with two doors and a curtained aperture in between. Blond wood seats and pews and pale stone walls with a large memorial plaque on the wall opposite the confessional