The Paper Shepherd Read online

  3

  Winter came hard in Hectortown, as it always did, with the faint smell of wood burning stoves hanging ubiquitously in the air. Time passed quickly with free ice skating on frozen lakes and weekends full of sledding. In the spring, Tiar, clad in a Jen Caponata’s hand me down first communion dress, was confirmed as an adult in the Catholic Church. The Bishop had welcomed her into the church as Tiar Renee Alfred, a solution that Father Neman, always pragmatic, thought was simplest under the unusual circumstances. A month later, the school year came to an end. Tiar started working at the town’s animal shelter, at first cleaning cages and hauling around 20 pound bags of food and cat litter. A few weeks into summer, she was trusted with more skilled tasks. Max had gotten a job at a local plant nursery to save up money for college. After work they would meet at the Franklins’ house to play basketball or watch movies. On Saturdays, Max and Tiar would pile into his car with brown bag picnic lunches and head out to the tiny museums that dotted the surrounding counties from the National Cutlery Museum to the Niagara Frontier Railroad Museum. On Sundays, Max worked diligently on essays for his college applications. He would sit on his front porch swing for hours with a steno notebook on his lap, Tiar a few feet away on the floor with her legs crossed, reading from a dusty, yellowing thesaurus. Max would agonize for hours over the choice between enthusiastic and ecstatic, course of study verses vocation. After several weeks, Tiar said he owed her an ice cream Sundae for every one of her suggestions he rejected. Life was calm in the shadow of their next great change, Max’s graduation.

  Summer eventually faded, and a new school year began. One warm day in late September, Tiar walked uncharacteristically quietly, her head down, deep in thought. Finally, Max elbowed her playfully.

  “What’s on your mind?” he asked. Tiar looked up at him.

  “Just something I’ve been wondering about since church on Sunday.”

  “What’s that?” Max probed.

  “When did Jesus get his body back?” Tiar asked. Max narrowed his eyes at her, almost embarrassed by the elementary nature of her question.

  “Easter,” he said simply. “You know that, Bird. We’ve been over all that.”

  “That’s when the disciples first noticed his body was missing,” she clarified. “But, that’s just because he was buried on a Friday and Saturday was the Jewish Sabbath, so they weren’t allowed to go check. But, does that mean his body was still there on Saturday?” Max cocked his head to one side.

  “It had to be,” Max stated trying to sound more sure then he was. “It says in the Nicene Creed ‘On the third day, he rose again.’ The third day, Sunday.”

  “So, it took the whole time to rise from the dead?” Tiar pressed on. “He didn’t reanimate his body on Friday and then run errands for two days waiting to be discovered.”

  “No,” Max said with certainty. Then his confidence waivered. “No… I mean… I think. No.”

  “What about the process takes three days?” Tiar asked.

  “We don’t know. No one was watching,” Max pointed out. “It was a miracle. Miracles don’t have to follow the rules of physics.”

  “Then why aren’t they instantaneous?” she asked pointedly.

  “It doesn’t matter. What matters is that He died and traveled to God’s kingdom and came back to save us, not how long it took to do it.”

  “But, it does matter,” Tiar insisted. “If it takes forty eight hours to rise from the dead, what if Jesus had been crucified on a Thursday? Then, his friends would have come by to embalm him the next day and He still would have been there. Can you rise from the dead if you are already embalmed?” Tiar said, seemingly worried. “Or, can God speed up the process if He wants to? And, if He could speed up the process of going to Hell and then Heaven and then coming back, and He didn’t, isn’t that mean? To make His son have to be dead for longer then He had to?” Max shared Tiar’s worry for a moment. But, this worry resolved into calm clarity.

  “Look,” Max said to her. “God planned it all, right? So, He made sure it happened the way it had to happen. He didn’t just pick Friday to get crucified because there was nothing good on TV that night.” Tiar had a look of genuine consternation on her face. “If the trip took seven days,” Max added reassuringly, “God would have planned it so no one looked in the tomb for seven days. He made us. He knows how we think, and what we do and He arranged Jesus’ whole life so that we could believe in Him.” Tiar mulled this over for a moment.

  “You mean, like the apple trees,” she said flatly.

  “What apple trees, Bird?”

  “Don’t you remember, silly?” she asked. “I asked you if there were apple trees on other planets and if there are whether they’re the symbol of evil or not. You launched into this long argument about how the bible on other planets would just name what ever appropriate plant was evil on that planet and how Jesus can appear in any form he wants. So, if life on other planets has three heads and five legs, He will too so they can accept Him as a savior.” Max was staring at her, dumbfounded. Finally, there was a glimmer of recognition and he started laughing.

  “Little Bird,” he said. “You dreamt that whole thing.”

  “Really?” she asked in disbelief.

  “All except the part about are their apple trees on other planets. I believe my answer was ‘it’s late, go to sleep.’” Tiar considered this for a moment.

  “Too bad,” she said. “It was a great argument you made. See, that should be the official policy.”

  “You think so?” Max asked, still smiling,

  “Yes,” Tiar said definitively. “When you’re in charge, you’ll make that the official policy, right Max?” Max put his arm around his friend.

  “Sure, Little Bird,” he said reassuringly. “When I’m in charge.”

  That night, the two teens went to a party at the Caponata’s’ beach house. The buzz around school was that Jen had planned the party of a century. When Tiar and Max arrived, it was even more packed than usual. Foreign music emanated from the open windows of the house. Every pane of glass seemed to vibrate with the strong beat. Boom boom, chuck-a-chuck, boom, chuck-a-chuck. Tiar liked it immediately. She was barely in the door before she shed her jacket to join everyone else in the living room.

  “Where the heck did you get this?” she shouted to Jen above the music.

  “Kinda cool, isn’t it?” she asked. “I found it in the discount bin. It’s called ‘Cairo Disco Fever.’”

  Tiar danced on, truly in her element as the party raged around her. As the girls got older, the average age of the people Jen invited to her house was going up as well. This time, for the first time, someone had managed to get a keg of beer and had planted it in the middle of the kitchen. Boom boom, chuck-a-chuck, boom, chuck-a-chuck. Max, parked in a lonely chair in an isolated corner as he usually was, saw a small plastic bag of pills being handed around among some of the guests. Must be aspirin, he lied to himself. He didn’t want to tacitly condone the use of whatever illegal substance it probably was; still, he didn’t want to punish Tiar for her friends’ misdeeds by insisting they go home.

  For reasons far subtler then the volume of beer or the presence of other drugs, the night seemed indisputably different then any other they had spent on Lake Eerie. The air was rife with youth, energy, and animal lust. Max felt overwhelmed with the task of keeping Tiar away from temptation. He wanted to ask her to leave, but the smile on her face stopped him. He would let her dance as long as she wanted and take her home. Chuck-a boom boom chuck-a-chuck boom chuck-a-chuck. Within a few songs, it became clear to Max the only way he could keep everyone else’s hands off of Tiar was to dance with her himself. He got up from his usual chair and approached her, trying hard to look natural by her side.

  Never a very enthusiastic dancer, Max felt conspicuous at first. Then, realizing everyone around him was so drunk they would remember nothing in the morning, he tried to relax and enjoy the music. Boom boom chuck-a-chuck. Tiar seemed delighted at the novel
ty of his company and sought to put his rigid body at ease on the dance floor. She put her hands on his hips. Boom chuck-a-chuck. She must have touched him a thousand times over the course of the six years they had been friends, but this felt different… different and wrong and exhilarating. It was to Max as if he had crossed some invisible velvet rope at a museum and put his finger prints all over a priceless artifact. Tiar just smiled back and seemed unaffected.

  “Just follow my lead,” she whispered in his ear, her warm breath tickling him. The warmth spread through his body. He felt flushed. Tiar was swinging his hips gently back and forth, smiling at him from less than a foot away. Her eyes twinkled in the near pitch darkness of the room. Boom-boom. It was warm. Boom-boom. Max took off his jacket. A voice in the back of his head told him to be careful. It was drowned out by the music. Boom-boom chuck-a-chuck. It soon felt comfortable, almost natural, to dance with her. It was impossible to be that close to her and not feel at once one with her and the music. Chuck-a boom boom chuck-a-chuck boom chuck-a-chuck.

  “Surrender,” she whispered in his ear. Boom boom

  “What?” he asked, his voice almost cracking. Chuck-a-chuck.

  “Surrender to the beat.” Boom-boom.

  Max heard a rustling of leaves as the early autumn breeze blew through his back yard. He breathed in deeply the scent of flowers. He struggled to keeps his eyes closed as long as possible, enjoying this warm sense of well being, wanting it never to end. A tickling sensation on his nose caused him to open his eyes. It was Tiar’s hair, and the flowers he had smelled, her shampoo.

  In the night, Tiar had rolled up against him. She lay there like a beautiful mummy, her hands crossed on her chest. Even through his sleeping bag, her body felt warm against his. Her sleeping bag had come unzipped during the night and had fallen off of her. There was a small section of her back showing between her T-shirt and the top of her jeans. Max stared transfixed at it, the steep sloping where her hips gave way to a thin waist, the deep valley along her spine defined by her strong back muscles. Suddenly, Max was seized by a sensation that made him very uncomfortable. He reached toward her to pull her T-shirt down over her back, hoping this would return everything to normal. But his hand lingered an inch away from her, refusing to complete its mission. It hovered there, not only because it seemed hopeless that this small amount of fabric would stretch to bridge the distance, but because he did not want the triangle of her white skin to disappear. He wanted to touch it with his eyes and his hands and his lips. He wanted to touch her skin with parts of his body he dared not think of in anything other then a utilitarian way. He screwed his eyes shut. No, no, he chastised himself. You can’t. It’s a sin… It’s an abomination.

  Max didn’t believe his seventh grade health teacher’s prediction that he would go blind if he tried to gratify these feelings—the sweet warm aching he felt between his legs. But, even if no bodily harm would come to him, he still knew it was wrong. He opened his eyes again, hoping the feeling had passed. But instead, he saw his hand still just an inch away from Tiar’s bare flesh, trembling. His hand looked large and clumsy, his bony knuckles too awkward and prominent, his rough skin callused on every fingertip. Juxtaposed against Tiar’s back, his fingers looked monstrous. There was no conceivable way he could touch such a perfect creature and bring her anything but pain.

  Max lay on his side paralyzed, calculating whether he could remain motionless until Tiar awoke. Awake, she was fearless. She was a force, like a storm—ageless, infinite, unbreakable. But, sleeping curled up on her side, she looked so small and defenseless. That giant, tanned, five-fingered beast could crush her bones effortlessly. Yet, she so trusted him, she lay next to him without reservation, oblivious to the threat he posed. So tiny, he sighed, his brow furrowed. So young. She seemed to have barely aged since he met her as a frightened nine-year-old girl. Max pulled his hand toward him and held it against his chest where it could do no harm. In her sleep, Tiar mumbled something and rolled toward him another inch. One of her firm breasts brushed past the back of his hand, her nipple poking and taunting him. No, no, no! Max protested silently. Not this. Please, not this. He should get up and leave the tent, he told himself. He bit his tongue hard to punish himself for the longing he felt.

  “Hold me, Max,” Tiar said, still half asleep. “I’m cold.” Max squeezed his eyes shut and thought of what to do. He wanted to obey her command, to wrap his arms around and her and warm her with the heat from his own body. She didn’t realize what she was asking, or what it would make him want to do. Finally, he managed to sit up.

  “I’ll go make you some tea,” he said, unzipping his sleeping bag and getting out of the tent. After retreating into the crisp morning air, Max felt as though he had managed to avoid a catastrophic event, one that was isolated in time. Yet, later that day, he began to fear that the problem was more pervasive than he had first imagined. It had been a sage voice that had cautioned him from dancing with Tiar all these years. He had blindly succumbed to the inevitable march of biology—Tiar’s hip bones gradually realigning so she swayed just slightly when she walked, his own hormones playing havoc with his brain until his eyes could focus on nothing but her ever rounding breasts. Max knew other men looked at Tiar this way, their eyes hungry. But, he knew he was not supposed to be one of them.

  Days later, sitting in his room staring out the window while he was trying to study, Max heard his father’s commanding footsteps down stairs and wished he could talk to his father about what he was struggling with. Surely his father could help. His whole life was about how to stop bad people from doing bad things. Wouldn’t he have a wise solution to Max’s dilemma? No. Jack would say it was normal for a seventeen year old boy to have these feelings. Jack would probably call him a freak for not having gone through this already. You mean, you never had a boner before? He could hear his father’s voice in his head using the juvenile words of his twenty-something protégés to abdicate his paternal duty to educate his son on such important matters. Of course, I’ve had an… erection before, Max thought out his timid, embarrassed reply. Even in the privacy of his own mind he was aghast at having to give such horrors a name and felt compelled to used technical language to make it seem like a medical problem. Of course, I’ve had corpora cavernosal engorgement if I had a really full bladder… or looking at a pretty girl in a movie or TV… I’ve experienced spontaneous penile tumescence… Seeing people I don’t know, who don’t matter because they don’t really exist.

  Maybe his father would understand that this was different because this wasn’t some theoretical woman. This was a woman close enough to touch and a feeling so strong, it pained him to not touch her. No. Jack would laugh if Max tried to explain that this was not normal, not for him. He would criticize Max for being too shy… he’d call me a pussy. Max could hear it all in his head. He would get entrapped into defending himself by explaining to his father that it was more than just shyness that kept him away from girls. It was an implicit conviction that this was not supposed to be part of his life. Growing up, listening to his peers bragging over long, Formica cafeteria tables, Max heard all of their plans for their future lives. They dreamed of exciting careers as rock stars or baseball players. They were married to supermodels, living in big houses and wearing the most expensive clothes. Max never shared his own aspirations, knowing that his fellow adolescent boys would not approve of him wanting to be an archeologist, living out of duffel bags on insufficient grant money wearing the same pair of utilitarian cargo pants and sturdy hiking boots. He was alone in his dreams and with his dreams. He imagined he always would be. Alone. That was how he liked things. In his daydreams, he was hunting down religious relics in the chaos of markets in third world countries, digging through foreign sands for some immortal truth, forsaking material wealth for something more infinite.

  When Tiar showed up, Max had to make space in his life for the idea of a side kick. By the time she joined him in high school, he had accommodated her as a best friend. Still, he ne
ver imagined himself dating, as most of his classmates already were. He never before conceived of himself having sex or getting married. It wasn’t something he aspired to do. After seventeen years of thinking he was immune to sexual desire, to now feel this way about an orphan who was all but his sister… My sister. There was no question of Jack’s response. Jack would knock Max’s head off his shoulders. You monster, he would scream. She trusts you. How could you do this? But I didn’t do anything! Max fought back in his mind. I didn’t touch her. Not like that. Not yet. Not yet. No. He could not tell Jack any of this. He would find a way to handle it on his own.