Suffering

Thomas White

Three weeks after my sixteenth birthday, the station wagon I am driving fishtails as I round a curve on an ice-covered country road leading to my friend's house. Panicked, I spin the wheel sharply toward the path of the sliding rear tires, as I have been taught, but it is no use. The front tires slide sideways and the car, completely out of my control, rotates 180 degrees in the opposite direction, skips a tar curb and slams into a wooden utility pole. The point of impact is me: the driver-side door collapses all the way to the center console, where the radio and heat controls used to be. The vinyl dashboard has buckled up through the spider-cracked windshield like a clenched knuckle punched through a thick layer of ice. Tossed against the passenger-side door, I climb through the blown-out window and tumble onto the street, where the pebbly glass has scattered in the snow and slush. The car ticks and hisses and emits a noxious scent of burning oil. Because this is what you see in movies, I am terrified the car will explode in a great fireball that will turn me into a cloud of vapor rising into the whirl of snowflakes and the blackness beyond. The wrecked car’s headlights illuminate a tangle of roadside vines, thin bending stems clumped over with snow. Having crashed in front of the only house within sight, I limp up the incline of the front lawn and onto the stoop. The door swings open before I knock. An elderly couple stands in the doorway, the husband positioned over the right shoulder of his wife as if posing for a portrait. The husband asks if I’m all right. I tell him I think so. They show me the hall phone and I call my father.

By the time my father arrives, an ambulance and several police cars are at the scene. Blinking blue lights cast a fluttering blue bubble all around. Although this panorama of blue light on a snowy night is like nothing I have ever seen, suddenly everything seems real. A blanket is draped over my shoulders as I sit on the rear bumper of the ambulance, bestowing an odd notion of nobility. I have shed no blood, so the EMt’s ask questions about location and type of pain. Mainly my left thigh throbs. My left hand will not stop shaking in my lap. My father walks past me, his face impossible to read in the reflection of light, and talks to a police officer alongside the ambulance. Although his face is impossible to read, I know that a commotion of fear and sadness must consume his heart: anyone can see by the way the car clings to the utility pole like a wind-whipped plastic bag to a branch that I have sidestepped death.

Despite the medical personnel’s persistence, I refuse to ride in the ambulance. My father signs a form stating he will deliver me to the hospital.

Unable to bend my knee in the car, I press myself into the wedge where the door and seat back nearly touch, my left leg extended under the dashboard. I am certain the leg is broken. This certainty is due as much to the pain as to the condition of the car we have left behind for the tow truck to extract from the pole. My father drives slowly, wipers squeaking mournfully, slush thudding in the wheel wells. He does not ask how I feel or what hurts. Was I driving recklessly? Did I take my eyes off the road? He does not say a word. He drives. At the intersection where he is supposed to turn right for the hospital, he turns left. The pain was nearly enough to make me cry out, and now that we are driving away from the hospital the pain rises to another level. I say nothing. Although the road conditions are at least life-threatening – I have proved as much – he drives much too slow, rolling along without touching the gas pedal, and a car overtakes us. Through the wet windshield its taillights are two red kaleidoscopes dissolving in the distance into single red specks that disappear.

A few minutes later he turns into the parking lot of Saint Joan of Arc Catholic Church, our parish, and glides to a stop where a space is estimated to be outlined beneath the snow. The glass front doors of the church are backlit in soft yellow. There are no tracks leading up the steps. The sharp edges of the cross perched on the high center gable, barely illuminated by a distant yellow floodlight, are softened by the piling snow, and a thick wedge of snow has formed on the left hand of the cross, where post meets beam. My father, still without speaking, leaves the car and walks toward the church. This is not about me. This is about him and his God. I swing my leg out of the car and follow. Twenty feet from the front steps, I stop and rest my leg. I want to stand here, outside the church, the sleet ticking off my coat while my father says what he has to say, prays what he has to pray, and hopefully exits a happier man, but I suspect that he expects me to follow and this is no time to further disappoint him.

The vast dark church is warm. It smells of musty incense and lacquered pine. Above the altar the gold crucifix is aglow. About a quarter of the way down the nave my father is kneeling, hunched over the back of a pew. I dip my hand in the font and cross myself. Unable to kneel, I sit on the edge of the pew beside my father and once again cross myself. Prayer is impossible; my mind is flooded with X-ray images of fractured bone. I know my father is a devoted believer in suffering, both physical and emotional, from a shaving nick to emotional torment, and he will say as much over dinner in a few years, during the height of one of his many physical ailments, a couple months before he will die. Christianity is a religion that unabashedly glorifies suffering – we need only observe its central symbol, the crucifix, commonly replete with blood running from Christ’s ribcage. We will suffer, says the Catholic, until we reach eternal life, whose location and nature remain a mystery, but where, we can be certain, there is no suffering. My father believes that God chooses the strongest among us to suffer and that by suffering in faith we prove our faith to God and others. This is a theology that can easily collapse into self-destructive pathology, and yet it is one that I will wholeheartedly implement in my own life in the coming years, to the point, predictably, of near emotional breakdown. But on this night, when I am sixteen, I have a vague understanding that suffering is virtue: it does not occur to me to think otherwise. And so it is expected that my father will not hasten his prayers for his son who sits beside him with what we assume is a broken leg, and I am not angry. After lengthy prayer he crosses himself and rises. As we exit the church and make our way to the car, my father walks beside me. Because he had left behind me in the car, his measured steps alongside my limp are as meaningful as an embrace.

At the hospital I learn my index finger is broken in two places, but that my thigh, grotesquely swollen, blue and purple and hard to the touch, is diagnosed with a deep contusion. I ask the doctor if he is certain about my thigh.

"Positive,” he says.

“Because it feels broken,” I say.

"I’m not surprised,” he says.

At home, my mother, spent from crying, hugs me tightly at the door. Her mascara is smudged into gluey lines. She backs away, presses her hands against my cheeks, and then hugs me again, crying.

"I’m fine,” I say. “I’m sorry.”

My mother never drinks alcohol; her intense lifelong disdain for the stuff bespeaks a sort of phobia. “Do you want a glass of brandy?” she asks. “It will calm you down.” I feel I am much calmer than she and tell her no thank you.

“Where’s your father?”

"I think he’s outside.”

A few minutes later, having dragged a dining-room chair over to the front window, I sit quietly and gaze out at the night that nearly took my life, the sleet, the darkness, the cold, the cruelty of it all. I have never been so happy to be home.

Noticing a plume of breath over near the garage, I lean forward. There is my father, undeterred by the snow and sleet, standing in the driveway. Like me, he simply looks out toward the dark line of trees stretching between our house and the road. I know that he is giving thanks to God. And I know that the snow and sleet are nothing compared to the depth of suffering he is willing to endure to show his gratitude to God for the gift of my life.

This feature: White, T. Suffering. Paradigm, the Mitchell Issue.