Peace Be With You / And Also With You. The elite church people love this part of the mass. The who-knows-who part.
My mother reached around a second-pew person to shove her hand into that of Alice Bilder. “Peace be with you!”
“And al-so with you!” shouted Alice. Wilton was shaking my dad’s hand right off the wrist, deliberate over-firm handshakes all around. The Bilders were the people that sat in the Front Row. Every church has them.
Wilton and Alice were the power couple at our church, boasting six beautiful children — three boys, three girls — all factually perfect. Wilton, with his lumberjack’s build and silver hair, the same silver hair that coated his forearms and chest, stood like a tribute to virility, holding his huge arms high in the air as he prayed. He was the JFK Jr. of our Church, everyone wanted to be near him. His voice boomed the Apostles’ Creed like nobody’s business, loud and in charge, enunciating “We believe in One God, The Father, The Allll-mighty, maker of Heaven and Earth,” on and on. It’s a long prayer.
Every week, more eyes were on Wilton than were on the priest, who sat glowering from behind the wooden pulpit. Wilton made the pulpit for the church out of rosewood, sawing away shirtless in his driveway. Wilton was a real dick.
Alice Bilder, Wilton’s wife, worked a puritanical blue twin set with black flats, a crinkly blouse choking her at the neck with a tight crucifix crushing the collar. Her ginger curls were a bit too tight, never brushed out enough, forming a round puff of dirty-penny crunch around her skull. I wanted to grab the hairbrush that my sister kept in her back pocket and go to town on Alice’s head. Everybody wanted to.
My family started hanging out at the Bilders a lot. They lived in a two story/one-family country house on the corner. White, with white shutters, it was huge with a backyard barn and double garage. A compound, cut off from the street by a seven-foot white picket fence. A cartoon of a fence, it looked so tall to me as a kid. The slats were too close together so it seemed like a solid fence when you played inside it.
Wilton was forming a new group, a group of Church Families Who Sat in the Front (there were seven in all), who wanted something more. Saint Agatha’s is a great church, Wilton said, but more was happening. He wanted to connect outside of church, to grow as families and foster ideas, to celebrate the Lord with abandon, unrestricted by the confines of a Sunday Mass.
Seduced by the strumming hands of the Hippie Jesus Movement, my parents traded in their rosaries for a tambourine and a belt-making kit. Copper buckles were shined and attached with rivets, holes were punched and within days all of us sported wide leather belts that said “Jesus Loves You” or “Jesus Is Lord” in block script, the individual letters burned in with an alphabet of branding irons by Wilton and The hideous Men. It was settled: we were in a cult.
The blood hit my sneakers in crimson hailstorm, loud plops of clotted tissue smacking down like hot cherry cordials onto the white leather of my new Nike Cortez. Joshua Bilder’s friend stood in front of me yelping, a coat hanger stuck up his left nostril. All the way up and hooked onto the other side.
The taste of copper wire and blood filled his stomach as the Adults converged in a tight circle, throwing their hands and bodies onto him. The Men bound his arms from pulling at the coat hanger, keeping him from reacting, pulling down hard and making everything worse.
The women prayed. That’s what they did, The Community. They prayed. Prayed as they removed the bent hanger from the boy’s nose. Prayed as they ripped the wire out, leaving shredded sinuses and bloody nasal passages in its jagged metal wake. The Adults spoke in unknown languages, praying and mopping up blood as the boy’s mother spun panic circles at the perimeter of the bloodbath.
Lu was the resident Church Lez at Saint Agatha’s. Deep lez, complete with shag and Wranglers bearing the biggest key ring in New England, she was official. Nothing could pull Lu from her closet. “Satan, get behind this child! Remove the hanger and leave the boy… in Je-sus name, in Je-sus name, in Je-sus name…” she said, her voice joining the other peons, forming a choir chanting demands on The Lord.
Part exorcism, part medical emergency, the chanting ritual in the driveway pulled gawkers out onto their front porches, front row seats to the show. The Bilders always performed their Holy Acts as close to the street as possible. Wilton explained that exhibiting the miracles of Christ publicly, as Christ himself did, would draw more followers to the Community.
Shocked by the penitence of the Bilders and their small camp of followers, the neighbors gossiped, sometimes calling police when things got too bloody. When they could hear the snap of a whip coming from the garage, or the scream of demons escaping as finishing nails were driven in with a hammer, what else could they do but call 9-1-1?
The blood flow unstoppable despite several attempts at healing through The Power of The Lord, the boy’s mother’s instinct kicked in hard and she loaded her son into the back of her Volkswagen Rabbit to take him to the emergency room. Stitches, antibiotics, and a saline nasal spray to flush out the blood clots hourly.
The Community surrounded the car like zombies as she rolled up her window, her hand not turning the crank fast enough before they could cram their dead white fingers through the crack. She screeched off and never came back.
The Bilders lived close to my family. Two, three houses up on the right. I walked home alone, confused and wondering if the boy would die and what would become of me should I ever jam a wire hanger up my nose. Would I have enough faith to make it through? I doubted it.
I saw the kid at school the next week. He was in first grade, I was in fourth. Passing in the cafeteria, I’d crane my neck searching for visible scarring from the hanger but there was nothing. Wow, kids are resilient, I thought. Having heard it said about me so many times I knew it to be true. If you woulda been one inch closer to the corner of that table you’d be dead. Dead. Since there was no disfigurement I figured the kid was alright in the end. No prosthetic nose or difficulty breathing, at least none that I could pick up on when I passed. I counted the cracks in the sidewalk with a stick, vowing to never try anything with a hanger. My head was held low with thoughts of the boy as I walked up the stairs to the screen door. I didn’t see her till I was on top of her and I backed up fast.
“This your cat?” A sixth-grader was standing on my front steps, holding a heap of teeth and blood clots matted in fur. Tigger’s tag and blue collar were in the street.
The girl stared off, Tigger flattened dead in her arms. She was a big girl, tall and boney, and she clearly had a reputation, snapping her chewing gum the way she did. They must’ve held her back a grade or two; she was an absolute monster of a sixth-grader.
Her mom’s car tire had Tigger’s head pretty well smashed, almost to the point of full decapitation, but the girl kept holding on to him, her meaty hands waiting for some exchange, some impossible reward for the return of a mutilated cat. My mom took Tigger out of the girl’s arms and said, “Thanks, hon,” pretending she just received a box of Thin Mints and not a dead cat.
The killer was sitting in the car smoking, pretending she didn’t just murder my cat. As for the girl, she wasn’t moving from the top step. She blocked my exit with an I Could Kick The Shit Out Of You Right Now facial expression, like someone who’d been blocking exits their whole life. She was about to get real tough with me until wails of mourning launched from the back of the house. My sister, an eighth-grader, let the early stages of grief rip as my mom got the shovel out of the shed.
“Mom says Wilton said that you get your rewards in heaven so you better beat it. Especially before my sister gets out here,” I told her. “If my mom comes back she’ll try to make you go to church, you and your mother. You been baptized?”
“Of
