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The Eighth Sacrament

  Mary Kitt-Neel

  © 2010 Mary Kitt-Neel

  License Notes

  ***

  The Eighth Sacrament

  March, 1985. It was the end of Spring Break, the day before Elijah Crowe was to return to Mawne University in Tennessee to finish out his junior year as a philosophy major. He was about to carry out a box of record albums to his battered Toyota pickup truck, but he decided to leave it where it was. Just leave it all right there in his room in his house out there in the hills of southwestern Virginia.

  He decided to call up his academic advisor and explain that he was going to have to miss Spring quarter. He wouldn't explain about his parents separating and getting back together, nor about breaking up with Irene, nor about the fact that he suspected he was addicted to Dilaudid from a shoulder injury some two years prior. Just that he was unable to come back now. That he would come in the summer and make up the classes and get ready to take the LSAT. Nothing more could be said. He knew that the words simply would not form.

  He had been stupid enough to let himself become beholden to a young, visiting teenage cousin with a mean streak, who had caught him smoking weed behind a neighbor's horse barn the summer before.

  He figured if he couldn't stand up to the juvenile blackmail of Sarah, the little twit, he couldn't possibly face the rigors of a tough academic schedule, shadowed by the very real possibility of running into Irene, and of not being able to get his hands on the painkillers he thought he depended on every night after supper.

  He lay back on his bedspread and stared at a poster of Jimi Hendrix on his ceiling until he fell asleep. At ten-thirty his mother stood in the doorway smoking a cigarette, and knocked on the open door. He sat up, still fuddled enough from sleep not to have formed any responses to any questions she might ask.

  "Are you staying for lunch?" asked his mother. "I thought you wanted to get an early start." Her maternal radar was beeping.

  "I can't go back. Not now. Not till summer. At least not till summer," he said, rubbing his eyes with his fists, like a little boy.

  "Because of Irene?"

  "No. Yes."

  Carolyn took a drag on her cigarette. "Because of the pills, then?"

  Carolyn Crowe was forty-seven years old, very beautiful, with black curls that fell to her shoulders, and eyes black and opaque enough to hold heaven and hell. Elijah in all his twenty-year-old doped-up delusion, had no idea anyone knew, least of all his mother, so wrapped up, it seemed, in her own problems, she hardly took notice of him the past two weeks. Not that he would have volunteered anything. He didn't want to tell her or anyone else that he was dancing with demons every hour of every day.

  "No," he said without a hint of conviction.

  "What do you expect to accomplish by being here for three months instead of in school?" This was not said rhetorically, but genuinely. Elijah was able to recognize it as an offer of help.

  "I've got to stop taking this stuff. I'm broke and tired, and I don't know what will happen ifI don't."

  She blew out her breath and considered the situation with as much detachment as she could conjure. She knew he was hooked on painkillers. She ached to tell him, to beg him to quit, but she knew that, imposed from without, a mandate to quit drugs was an exercise in futility. Now she could offer him something, though she knew not what, and it just might mean that her one and only child would make it.

  "OK, Elijah. I'll take you at your word that you want to stop taking that shit. I'm just thankful that you made the decision for yourself. You sure as hell wouldn't have listened to anyone else. I am on your side. In fact, I will not send you back to school in the summer if you're not clean. You're an adult, but you're still my son, and I'm the one who gives you money for your tuition. You know you belong in college, and I know it too. Your getting well is not an option. It's the only thing there is. You have to understand that.

  "Will you tell Dad for me?"

  "Hell no. You honestly didn't think I would, did you?" Elijah shook his head.

  "I'm going into town for milk. I'll take you to see Dad then."

  "OK."

  ***

  Carolyn called her sister in Maine and explained that she would not be spending the month of April with her after all. If she were clueless about putting her marriage back together, she was clear on her duty to get her son well. In many ways, he was all she had.

  Sweet, beautiful Elijah. Whose father's coarse, Mediterranean features had been softened and refined by her own DNA and expressed in this wonderful creature, earthy and otherworldly all at the same time, possessed of a brilliant and sensitive mind and a sweetness of soul that cleaved Carolyn's world together or split it apart, or sometimes seemed to do both at the same time.

  Nothing had been right since last summer. He had brought Irene up for a week in June, long enough for the rest of the family to fall in love with her, too. Irene looked more like Carolyn than her own daughter ever would have, and this made Carolyn feel all the more guilty, as if she were both the inspiration and the reminder of all the heartbreak Elijah was going through.

  When Irene went back home, the two were still madly in love, but by the end of the summer, Elijah had changed. One afternoon, he had taken his little cousin Sarah to a neighbor's horse farm to go riding, and the two came home barely speaking to each other. It was almost time for the girl to return home to her father in North Carolina anyway, and everyone seemed visibly relieved when she left, but some kind of lasting damage had been done.

  His junior year had not gone well, and went totally to hell in February, when he told a bewildered Irene that he didn't want to be with her anymore.

  As sorry as Carolyn was for Irene, she couldn't help but think of the girl in terms of collateral damage, crushed when something inside Elijah collapsed. The girl would eventually be OK, Carolyn knew. Irene was almost pathologically together, with a simplicity and integrity that bordered on gullibility, as if the universe had no reason to tell her anything other than the truth. But right now Elijah was giving Carolyn something she desperately needed at her stage in life: a project. She would get him well, or die trying. It was all the same to her.

  ***

  By the end of the following week, Elijah was going to all the Narcotics Anonymous meetings he could, and his skin had lost some of the frightened pallor that had waxed over his face in recent weeks. Easter was only two weeks away, and with Carolyn's soft, but totally unyielding prodding, he was attending Holy Communion every morning in the nearby town of Wytheville.

  On a Thursday night, Maundy Thursday, in fact, his friend Rod called. Rod was Elijah's roommate when Elijah was a freshman and Rod was a sophomore. By attending during summers and testing out of a number of required courses, Rod had already graduated, and was working as an instructor of piano theory in Mawne's music department.

  "Where are you, man?" he asked when Elijah picked up the phone.

  "I'm staying in Virginia until summer."

  "You OK?"

  "Yeah."

  "What did Irene do to you? She won't talk about it."

  "You talked to her?" Elijah could feel his face burn and his intestines coil.

  "Not on purpose. She had to get a form stamped at the conservatory one day."

  "We split up."

  "No kidding."

  "I've got some other stuff going on, too."

  "You've got to stop taking those pills, man."

  Elijah was quiet, then sighed. "I'm working on it."

  "I didn't want anything. Just to see if you're OK. I heard you dropped out, that you got in an accident. Like I said, Irene wouldn't say anything."

  "Could you maybe not talk about Irene? Everything's going to be fine. I can catch up on my classe
s in the summer. I'm still going to graduate on time."

  "Well, it's good to hear. I was worried about you."

  "Thanks. You still at the same phone number?"

  "Yeah. I'm gone during the day."

  "I'll call you when I get back."

  "Take care, man."

  "Bye."

  Elijah opened a window to let the cool spring breeze get the burning out of his face. He lay back on his pillows and tried to trace each root of what had overtaken him. Irene hadn't done anything other than be perfect: perfectly transparent, perfectly trustworthy, perfectly willing to believe that he had no drug problem, that he was cool with his parents separating, that he didn't love her because she looked just like his mother. The pills didn't have to do anything except sit there and wait for him to take them, then silently take possession of his soul. And then there was that damn Sarah.

  Sarah was his father's brother's child, the product of a drunken shrew of a woman who slept with anything with a valid y chromosome. Pathetic, unwanted Sarah was thirteen, and had been bratty as hell when she came to spend last summer with them. Sarah's mother couldn't stand her, and her father didn't know how to say no to her, and she'd ended up at their place, fishing, watching TV, listening to records, latching onto Irene for dear life during the short week Irene was there. And after that she tagged along with Elijah everywhere, every blessed minute of the day, talking about Irene.

  On the day he took her to the stables, the owners' college-aged daughter was home and offered to take Sarah riding, to Elijah's infinite relief. She also sold him some weed and told him he needed to relax. She took Sarah on a trail ride, then left her in a riding ring with one of the grooms and found Elijah behind the barn, so stoned he almost appeared blurry to the outside observer. She took a few hits of her own and had most of Elijah's clothes off by the time they realized that Sarah had returned from the riding ring, and had been watching them for a good five minutes.

  The expression on the child's face was an amalgam of all the hatred she had for her mother, all the disappointment she had in her father, all the hero-worship she had for Irene, and all the faith she used to have in Elijah. She ran and he chased her out to the long driveway, dressing as he went, then he hopped in the truck and followed her most of the way out to the main road.

  "Get in Sarah, for God's sake."

  "I hate you! I have Irene's address and phone number. I'm calling her the minute we get back."

  "Get in, goddammit!"

  "You want to make me?" She stood defiantly rooted to the edge of the driveway.

  He stopped the truck, slammed the door, walked around to her and picked her up, shoving her into the truck as she hit him with her fists. She started crying once he got back in.

  "Do any of you people ever do what's right? What's wrong with you?" she screamed."I don't know. Maybe the fact that you're two steps behind me all the damn time." He shifted violently into third gear and sped toward town.

  "Your mother's going to kill you when I tell her you were smoking pot." "You're not telling anybody anything."

  "And how are you going to stop me?"

  Elijah was quiet, then he pulled over into a church parking lot and killed the engine. He lay his head against the steering wheel and thought hard about something that had happened during Irene's visit. He remembered somehow managing to shake off Sarah for a couple of hours, and running Irene into town to pick out a gift for her best friend Glynnis. They had gone to a small arts and crafts gallery and Irene had picked out a blue cashmere scarf, but had discovered when it was time to pay that she was twenty dollars short.

  "I counted it yesterday. I know I had fifty ... I think," she had said uncertainly.

  ***

  Elijah lifted his head and took the gamble.

  "I know you stole money from Irene's purse. She thinks it fell out when she took out her hairbrush. I think it's time she knew the truth."

  Sarah started crying again.

  "Or we could both keep our mouths shut," he continued.

  When the paroxysm was spent, Sarah gave a mighty sniff, then said, "Fine." Elijah drove on to a drugstore and sealed the deal over Cokes.

  And then Sarah went home to her father and Elijah spent the next six months at school waiting for Sarah to call Irene anyway, until finally he told her himself.

  "If you say nothing happened, I believe you," Irene had said. "Promise me you won't smoke weed anymore," she said, searching him with her big dark eyes.

  That was an easy promise to keep, being that narcotics were his drugs of choice, but he got to where he wished she'd be a little suspicious, a little less trusting when he told her he was just too tired to go out when, in fact, he was sweating, turning white waiting for his dealer to call.

  ***

  Carolyn tried to keep the days going in as steady a routine as was possible. After Easter, it was often warm enough to have lunch on the back porch, and it was gratifying to her to see Elijah's face take on some color and his features become the slightest bit animated.

  It was during one of these balmy, blissful noon hours that Carolyn picked up the ringing phone to discover Irene at the other end. Elijah was outside setting the table, and Carolyn, deciding that Elijah was not ready to talk to her, inquired after her and promised to tell Elijah that she called. Which she fully intended to do, once she decided that the time was right.

  She had only raised a daughter for ten years, but in that short span of time, she fully recognized the potential for all-encompassing magnetism in some of them. She had nothing against Irene, could have featured her own daughter growing up to be like her, but her mothering circuitry was fully engaged in protecting Elijah and getting him back on his feet. She would simply have to hope that Irene would come out of it with minimal damage.

  "Prater says he can use me early this year," said Elijah, pouring himself a gigantic tumbler of lemonade.

  "How soon?" asked Carolyn, worried that the work would interfere with his NA meetings.

  "He said he could use me starting May first, in the mornings. Faye's going out to her sister's in Oklahoma. They've gotten all fired up over the idea of training cutting horses. Buck thinks they've lost their minds."

  "Why cutting horses? They've never worked cattle in their lives."

  "Beats me. Bored, probably. The work's all in the mornings. I can still go to the meetings.

  That was Irene on the phone, wasn't it?"

  "Yes."

  "If she calls again, let me talk to her, OK?"

  Carolyn examined her fingernails minutely, raised her eyebrows. Something in his tone of voice was different. Something inside Elijah had decided to turn toward the sun and grow. Something in him was choosing life. "OK." She was silent for a moment. "You're always going to love her." She said this as much to herself as to Elijah.

  It wasn't really news to Elijah. He knew he would always love Irene from the moment he clapped eyes on her. Now he supposed it was something he'd have to live with, rather like a bum knee, or a heart murmur.

  "When will you start back to school?" asked Carolyn, returning to her usual brisk manner.

  "Summer quarter starts something like June 15th. That'll give me six weeks at Prater's." He was silent for a moment. "There're NA meetings on-campus. I already found out about it. Rod says I can stay with him until Fall quarter."

  "Sounds like you've got it all worked out," said Carolyn, relieved and worried in turns. "I need to get back and get caught up. I need to graduate on time."

  Carolyn cocked her head on one side and surveyed her son critically. He was smart; capable enough to do anything. But both of his greatest weaknesses had been prodded painfully over the past miserable year: both his overwhelming weakness for Irene, and his need to medicate the ghastly pain that had ripped the family apart when Jen died. The shoulder injury had been nothing more than a catalyst, a doorway through which marched the lovely, lulling narcotics, with their deadly magic.

  Carolyn thought dispassionately that she'd a
lready paid the price for her daughter's death so many times over that her life was, for the most part, over too. Her marriage was dead and buried, even though her husband came home every night and ate dinner with her and sat and read with her, and even slept in the same room with her. But she decided that she would take ever how many blows life wanted to deal her if she could just get Elijah happy and functioning again. As her only living child, he was the only tangible, breathing link to eternity she had.

  ***

  Once the work started at Prater's farm, Elijah found he could make it until ten or eleven in the morning without thinking of either Irene or dope. But there was still a thick layer of numbness encasing him. Of this he was aware, but he found he could do the work well enough in spite of it. The farm work, varied and physically demanding, yet mostly unchallenging mentally, nevertheless flaked away at the rust that had set in during the six weeks or so of relative catatonia he'd just been through.

  Prater himself seemed to know not to try and draw Elijah out. He'd heard about Elijah's drug problem via the mysterious rural bush telegraph, the legendary ether that seems to carry everyone's business to everyone around. His own son sure as hell hadn't been perfect, he remembered, yet he'd straightened right out after a hitch in the military.

  He figured Elijah just needed a couple of more years of growing up, and he'd be OK. His crazy wife riding training horses out in Oklahoma, though, that was another story altogether.

  When the six weeks were almost up, Prater grew sad at the thought of the boy leaving. Plus, he knew his wife was due to return soon, probably with her head swimming full of ideas about training her own cutting horses. Women! he thought, then spat a flashing arc of tobacco angrily on the dirt at his feet before summoning Elijah to come help him feed the hogs.

  ***

  As June ripened into its full summer splendor, Elijah began to pack a few things in readiness for his return to Mawne. He talked to Rod almost every day to work out some practical detail or other, and Rod, true to his good friend, never mentioned Irene.

  Neither did he mention the interesting phone conversation he'd had with Carolyn concerning Elijah's future behavior.

  "Rod, you have to understand this," she'd pleaded one evening while Elijah was at NA, as she stood drawing deeply on an unfiltered cigarette between words, "He is all I have. I have buried one child and one marriage. Elijah is the only person in this family who has any future whatsoever. If you ever even dream he's taking pills again, or drinking, or hurting himself in any way, you have to call me. I'm sorry if it feels disloyal to Elijah, but he is all I have in this world."