http://aaronbenjaminzacharias.blogspot.com/2014/06/the-thirteen-crucifixions.html
I am thinking lately about one of the key characters, a woman named Sheila Watson. When I was writing the novel, i was in my forties and she was in her sixties, but in many ways, she has become my older self in female form. In other words, I was forecasting through this character, the kind of person I would mature into now at 64. Here is a little it about her from chapter 45. By the way, Gentle Reader, my friend, Alonso in Colombia and I are reading the whole thing together on Skype as part of his English practice. He seems to be really enjoying it. Maybe you will too. anyway, just to make sure it's getting read, I will be serially reposting the novel on this and subsequent blog posts. I don't want advice of how to publicize it, by the way, so please keep your well-intentioned advice to yourself. Except if you know a publisher who is probably going to like it, then tell me please:
2001
Sheila sat alone in the darkened café gorging on a clubhouse sandwich and potato salad. She no longer felt safe, anywhere. It wasn’t just her recent encounters with Bill, nor the sudden change in living arrangements in her house, which now included Michael and Glen. It was that young bald headed gutter punk appearing as though out of the ether in her own back yard. He could only have done it by going in through the house. But the house was always securely locked at night. Maybe she ought to get an alarm system, but Sheila hated these concessions to modernity. She didn’t want to live in fear. She saw HIM again. He only seemed to appear whenever some kind of major change was about to happen. She had last seen him just before Frank openly admitted to having AIDS. Then, last week, he appeared again. Always in the back yard. Always under the apple tree. Ever since Frank had made that white bench, where she would sit, dozing in the sun. Whoever this was, he was always young, a boy of fifteen or so. Neither tall nor short. Slender. Wearing always a white shirt and blue jeans. A beautiful dark-haired boy with wide luminous green eyes and what Sheila could only describe as a quiet radiance encircling him. Usually he was silent. This time alone did he speak. This time alone did he approach her, put his hand on her hand. “Prepare”, was all that he said, when Sheila awoke, trembling. The house surely must be haunted. How else could she account for this?
She knew she must hurry up and paint the apple tree again. Soon, while the blossoms still held. She had been doing this for more than ten years. Spring, summer, and winter. Painting the apple tree three times annually: in spring when it blossomed, at the end of summer, when the golden fruit weighed down the old branches, and in the winter when the tree stood stark and desolate against the dark green cedar hedge. Ten years, thirty paintings. She had never bothered to review her work. One day she must take them all out and look at them and see what kind of progress, if any, she had made in her painting. Madge’s daughter, an accomplished artist herself, had lately been after Sheila to start showing her paintings. She balked about this. Sheila was sure that her work wasn’t good enough to be shown. She painted only for herself, and for herself alone. To which Madge’s daughter, Cynthia, retorted bollucks. Sheila was more than good enough, and no artist ever painted for herself alone.
Yesterday she saw something very odd under the apple tree. Tobias, her white cat, lay dozing in the shade. Sheila was picking red tulips for the living-room. Less than a foot from Tobias a bird stood in the grass, directly in front of him. A finch. A house finch, actually, with a bright red head. She knew these birds well, which sang so beautifully in the spring. The white cat opened his eyes, beheld the bird, who betrayed no fear. He closed his eyes again for more sleep. She stood there, watching, not knowing whether to intervene and rescue the house finch. Tobias made no move toward it, behaving as though he cared not a damn about him one way or the other. This was a cat who seemed never at a loss for something to kill. Tobias got up and like a white blue eyed panther stretched and yawned, and trotted over to Sheila meowing. The bird flew up into the apple tree and Sheila nearly ran inside the house screaming.
She felt tired, and badly needed to get home. She was putting it off. What was it that she was needing to face? Her legs, her knees still ached. Her feet were tired. She was not getting younger, and though her doctor had assured Sheila that she did not have arthritis, she still did not want to take her chances. She was rapidly becoming an old woman, and she knew it. People didn’t recognize her so easily now, especially since she’d cut and stopped colouring her hair. Which suited her fine, given how often she saw former clients of hers almost everywhere she went. They didn’t appear to know her. According to Madge it was equally true that people were not likely to easily recognize either one of them outside of their professional capacity. Throughout the eight years they had spent operating that drop-in centre they had become to many of the local marginalized professional friends and surrogate mothers. Until the funding was cut due to the governments’ renewed zeal to ‘reduce the deficit” by cutting back on social services spending, giving persons on welfare, street people and the psychologically disadvantaged one less haven to feel safe in. During this time Sheila had come to realize that very few of their regulars, if any, really seemed to know or want to know whom it was they were dealing with. They seemed only to see or respond to the mask that she wore on the job of “Nurturer”, or “Advisor” or “Wise Old Woman”. There must be some truth to this, for she and Madge both could often walk around in the neighbourhood when off duty, touching elbows with persons who had just told them their life stories, had wept openly in their presence, without being known or recognized.
This didn’t occur so much at the West Wind. She was probably more relaxed here. Not expected to perform. The café was really an extension of Sheila and her kitchen table. Sheila had always worked hard, ever since her youngest, Jason, was able to fend for himself. Before that she was in university, part-time, finishing her degree in social work. Before that, a house-wife and stay at home mom. She had always worked, always been needed, always felt necessary. She had never worked out of economic necessity alone. She had always had more than she needed, always having extra to share and to give. She had never conceived of a life that she could regard as livable that didn’t somehow involve giving and sharing. Contrary to the claims of the psychiatrist she had seen following Frank’s death Sheila could not accept that she gave out of a neurotic compulsion. To prove this, she opted to live for herself alone, during which time she, pursuing her own happiness, became involved with Leon, that young cocaine addict who cost her thousands of dollars and more. Even while trying to be selfish she ended up giving. In the worst way. She got rid of him in Europe. Two days after sharing a hotel room in London she slipped away. Leon, who was English, young, and criminally manipulative, was a failed rock singer who hoped that Sheila, temporarily rich with her widow’s inheritance, would bankroll his attempt at a comeback. In the meantime, he scammed from her hundreds upon hundreds of dollars—most of which went up his nose. A whiny, temperamental cry-baby. Almost as young as Michael. What had she been thinking? Had she been thinking at all? She found another hotel, in Notting Hill, near Holland Park, before which they had been staying in Hampstead, and left him a note stating that if he tried to find her she would immediately call the police. Now, more than six years later, she still hadn’t seen or heard of him. She had never known anyone so pathetic.
Sheila was no longer interested in seeking her own happiness. Perhaps she found it in giving. In the mornings she would wake, naturally, at five, often earlier. She would sit up in bed and meditate, passing through such chambers of deep repose that she couldn’t even describe to herself, much less to anyone else. This had been happening since shortly after she divorced Bill. She no longer sought her own happiness. She no longer needed to.
Tomorrow she would begin painting the apple tree.
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