In these months of pandemic, is it the time to petition a saint or two? Perhaps St. Roch, called upon during the plague? Or Ste. Thérèse of Lisieux, asked for in periods of illness? Thinking of all the cities in which so many have become ill, where doctors, nurses, and medical staff are overwhelmed and without desperately needed supplies, New Orleans among these cities.
“In the Great Wide,” a New Orleans story of floods and faith and finding one’s way, petitions a number of saints and recognizes a series of miracles. Published in Spring 2020 issue of The Massachusetts Review, the story is just a story, only fiction, somewhat on the speculative side, with a metaphor that is working overtime. In our world right now, it is only a distraction. Still, I’m taking the publication of this story at just this time as a sign that we all need a miracle.
And so the narrator Antoinette begins…
On a warm day in May, some years ago, Mary’s uncle set up a crawfish boil for his family of twenty-five and ended up feeding the five hundred members of St. John’s Cathedral. Hard red crawdad shells piled up on the newspaper-covered picnic tables and the altar boys swore the ice-cold beer never ran out. Across town that same spring, in the churchyard where my parents’ graves had already shifted in the soft soil, swarms of cream-colored roses grew, though no one had planted them. In late summer, a hurricane’s eye rested over the delta while the outer storm stalled and eventually gave up. The winds changed to light breezes, and the sideways rain became a calm sighing mist. That autumn a rumor floated through the neighborhood that the dying old woman one street over had woken up twenty years younger. By evening she was an infant in her daughter’s arms, and before the moon rose, she had disappeared.
And then there was the Saturday afternoon I came home with my friend Mary from the winter sales down on Canal Street. We were breathless from walking all those blocks from the streetcar stop, the day’s gray cast and our thin-handled shopping bags weighing us down. As we neared the corner, a bloom caught in a crack in the sidewalk made us both pause. A fist of tiny white roses reached up, the same kind we had read of in Catechism class, the ones associated with Ste. Thérèse of France. Mary crossed herself and whispered, “Another miracle.” We didn’t even think of plucking them from the crevice and walked on. Miracles kept crowding in, taking up space. I preferred to think of my own miracle, baby Daphne, nearly a year old, growing in a new way.
Here is a link to The Massachusetts Review, Volume 61, Issue 1, if you’d like to buy a copy and read more. Gratitude, stay well, and keep the faith!