About Crows

The Madonna and Child with St. Anne

50 T h e M a d o n n a a n d Ch i l d w it h S t. A n n e The original hangs in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, Italy. But I’ve never been there, and neither has my grandfather. There’s a reproduction at the entrance of the outdoor shrine where we walk the Stations of the Cross. Where a brown recluse hangs from a henchman’s club. Where fire ants race across the freshly lacquered legs of martyrs. “He suffered,” my grandfather says. With empty lungs: “Oh, how they made him suffer.” Jesus looks like a murderballer—his neck sunk into a muscle-bound torso, legs shriveled like they’ve been confined to a wheelchair for thirty-three years. “Beautiful,” he says. “That man was beautiful.” During the plague, orphans ran circles around Masaccio’s house, shaking the tibia of a dog yanked to pieces in the gutter. Past the X’ed-out sign of the cobbler, past the pile of hearts and guts the butcher left simmering in the sun. All day the kids roll dice against the worn street curb, talking shit about God. At Station 6 my grandfather wipes cobwebs off Veronica wiping sweat off the face of Jesus. He offers me the prayer book he can no longer read if we hurry, if I take him home immediately. He thinks his grandson—my cousin—is sleeping with his wife. Men arrive at Masaccio’s studio dressed as crows. Men swing open heavy curtains and closed shutters, their hollow beaks stuffed with sun-dried juniper and cloves. Sunlight pools on bloody vomit and a body of boils blooming outward from below the balls. Purple peonies float like bruises around Station 14. 51 “The Tomb,” my grandfather says to fallen linen. “Let’s go.” Past the Magic Lantern strip club on the drive home, he repeats those stories as if from rote memory. Folks down from Maine fifty years ago, and this one girl puts her hairless touchhole right in his face and makes it pucker. He demonstrates the contraction with index finger and thumb as if it were yesterday. The wood panel of the Virgin hasn’t always been in a museum. The story goes, “The Madonna and Child with St. Anne” hung in the nuns’ parlor at St. Ambrogio Church in Florence. Then the story ends. I think the stripper must be dead by now. No one knows how it got from there to the Uffizi Gallery, or all the places it might have gone in between. His oldest daughter pulled to the side of a country road once and made a pass at him, he tells me as we wait in the Burger King drive-thru. “I don’t know. Years ago.” He swears it’s true. With a nosegay in a death-grip, Masaccio is removed from his studio by men in the black robes of crows. He thinks they want him to die so they can videotape their orgies. It’s only me and the ghosts in the basement that are on his side, “Right?” The kids shout for “just a twig” of the dead man’s flowers. I’m surprised “pucker” is still in his vocabulary, but not a bit by “touchhole.” Action verbs are the first to go, but no one notices with how we talk around them. “Pick it up,” the old man says while balancing fries in his lap. Roman sandals are only obstacles to be crossed over. The cupped hands of a savior are only a chamber to soothe, or further terrify, a nervous bird heart. The orphans’ dice are carved from the bones of road kill. 52 The tibia from an abandoned dog is the same length as an angel’s spine. He hides the keys before bed now and holds his sleeping pill under his tongue. “Faster,” he says. When pine needles brown and fall around the Stations of the Cross. When hoarfrost forms on bent knees. When snow piles on Pilate’s head like a skullcap. We won’t be there to see it. One of the orphans rolls snake eyes. They say he was the first painter to depict natural light. We roll through the last three stop signs. I’m on your side, I say. ...