Later I asked my mother why the house needed a blessing.
“To ward off evil,” she said.
“Really?”
“To keep us safe and sound.”
I had always assumed the incursion of evil was foiled by the crucifix that hung above the front door in our old house and now hung above the front door in this new house. It was silver with a dark residue lining the creases in Jesus’ tunic, his hair, and the notches where his feet and hands were nailed to the cross. Although I took great comfort in its presence, upon close inspection it was, like all crucifixes, a grotesque spectacle: I could hardly ever hold my gaze on him without wincing.
It is important to note that I was an anxious child given to obsessive thoughts and paranoia. For years my first sensation upon waking was the familiar cauldron of tension that I proceeded to carry around deep in my gut throughout the day. Sleep would come late at night only when I reached a certain depth of exhaustion. One of the most terrifying recurring thoughts throughout my childhood was the fear, or paranoia, that the apparently safe world of people and nature were transformed whenever I looked away; people, including my family, into ghoulish monsters whose flesh dripped off their faces, and nature into a tentacled menace in whose gangly clutches I would likely suffocate.
Fortunately, however, my predisposition toward belief in mysterious powers tipped the other way, and I found solace in the abiding shelter of God, the church, the communion of saints—and the silver crucifix that hung above the front door.
“When is Father Calise coming back?” I asked my mother.
“Soon, I hope.”
If it was true that the house was insufficiently protected against evil by our crucifix, I wondered how my parents could accept Father Calise’s blunder without dread or panic. Should evil be offered this opportunity?
Evil was nothing I knew by sight, sound, smell, touch, or taste. It was deceitful and unknowable, and that was why it was evil. I had once heard that of the two types of mosquitoes, ones that buzzed and ones that were silent, only silent mosquitoes fed on human blood. Whether or not this was true was irrelevant—I believed it was true. If all was dark and silent as I lay in bed on a summer night, the room might be swarming with silent mosquitoes ready to strike. This was the way of evil.
For reasons unknown to me, Father Calise never returned. (Within the year he would unceremoniously leave our church and enter a community for retired priests). Several weeks later, another priest blessed our house. He tossed droplets of holy water with the wave of a juniper bough into each corner while reading prayers from a book. He celebrated mass in our living room. After he left I expected the house to feel changed in some way, but it felt just the same. It was impossible to know whether or not evil had seized on the opportunity provided by Father Calise’s forgetfulness. And what about those days before Father Calise’s visit? What if evil had already beat my parents to the quick? I suffered nightly the nebulous pain of not knowing.