“I can’t understand him,” Steve tells his mama one Sunday, when he realizes it. The priest is still half-speak half-singing the Word of God and Steve doesn’t understand him, never has.
“It’s okay sweetheart,” his mama whispers back to him, “your soul will understand for you.”
Steve nods once, because if his soul is trying to listen it’s mighty rude not to let it. He stays quiet and turns his attention back to the stained glass and the saints. There’s only two saints here, the paint on them is chipped but they stand twice Steve’s height; St. Michael Archangel and St. Sebastian. He has always wondered why they are far from each other, one looming over the left pews and one over the right. Why was St. Michael who is strong and large and ready for battle, so far from St. Sebastian who is brought down by arrows? Why does St. Michael’s shield not protect him if they are both saints, aren’t they brothers?
But he doesn’t ask his mama, he stays quiet for his soul to hear the words his ears don’t understand.
-
In the last year he can spend in school without spending more time in the hospital, he doesn’t learn a thing. It’s not that Steve was ever stellar at school, not the way Bucky is at math or anything, but he always tried. This year he doesn’t, he spends half of it with his mind on the cigarettes under Bucky’s bed and the other half on the sketches under his hands.
Steve does not have a lot of good sense, his mama and Bucky always tell him that. But he has the good sense not to draw the things he wants to, like his mama’s tired hands after work or Bucky’s eyes when he’s up to something bad. He draws saints instead and, at times, angels.
His teacher can’t help but smile like he’s done something right when she examines his notebook – empty of notes but full of the Blessed. It’s nothing compared to Bucky’s vicious grin as he tackles him when he finds the holy images Steve’s replaced those cigarettes with.
-
Bucky, shoulders broadening more each day, frowns down at his sketch and opens and closes his mouth a few times before he hands it back. Steve has been thinking of a hundred different ways to ask Bucky to pose for him, but it all gets stuck in his throat and Steve gets stuck to his copies of old masters’ works.
“It’s nice Stevie but it don’t look nothin’ like Jesus.”
“That’s cause it ain’t Jesus, Buck,” Steve laughs, breathing back a rattling cough as he goes back to shading. “It’s St. Sebastian.”
Bucky’s eyebrows go up and then he nods, twiddling with his own hands as if unsure what to do with his when Steve’s are so well occupied. He nods at the page.
“So what’d he do then?”
Steve sets the page down, satisfied for the moment. “He was martyred –“
“By arrows,” Bucky says, with a dark smirk.
“Nah, he lived through this,” Steve says as he motions at his drawing of the young lithe man tied to a post, punctured by arrows, “and they beat him to death for it.”
“Like that kid Gilecki,” Bucky says, tugging a cigarette out of his pocket and walking over to the window to throw it open. Steve loves the way the smoke smells on Bucky, but it makes him cough like the world’s coming down – like God reminding him about right and wrong.
The Gilecki boy was younger than them by just a year or two and he’d been killed on the next street outside a bar with a certain reputation. Steve couldn’t help but think as he passed the spot every morning when he was well enough to work, couldn’t help but wonder if he’d happened to be there, if there was something he could’ve done.
“Not sure it was the same,” he says carefully.
“Why not?” Bucky asks, a bit sharp as he lights up. “Why’d your boy Sebastian die?”
“For love of Christ,” Steve says, straight from Father Ronan’s lips and out of his.
Bucky makes a gesture like there-you-go, “Figure that’s what killed Gilecki.”
Steve raises both eyebrows. “His love for Jesus?”
“Love,” Bucky says as he takes a drag and blows it out the window, “period end of sentence.”
-
Steve draws other things now, lots of buildings with their shape and symmetry – lots of shoes though he can’t understand himself when he does it. He still draws the images he grew up with though, the ones his mother whispered about at the pews. He draws St. Michael Archangel victorious over Lucifer. He draws St. Michael proud and alone. He draws St. Michael with his eyes downcast and longing and he can’t understand himself when he does it.
-
Steve draws Bucky – at last. Not posing, not really, but his legs hanging out the fire escape and his shoulders hunched like it’s weighed down by the world, like Atlas. He draws the slopes of Bucky’s muscles, though they are lean, and the stray hairs that escape the gunk he puts in it in the summer heat. He draws his eyes, the way they look at him, in the corner of their apartment where no windows can peek and where no one can see. He draws his lips and – though he can’t draw the way they taste of cigarettes and something as sweet as soda pop – they are the most vivid part of him he can put down on a page.
He draws Bucky, at last, and only in soft nearly undetectable lines he draws wings heavy on his back, like the weight of the world.
-
He draws for money now and again, round the places where people date. Girls will always tug at their fella’s arm and point at him, hunched over his materials as he is. They’ll pose proud and he tries to be quick and with the money he earns he goes from town to town and lies on official government forms and knows that somewhere, in some town, there’s his chance. One time – it’s all it’ll take – one time for them to let him through and let him take his place.
Cause Steve could sit by and watch girls and fellas pose for him and smile till the docks closed if it weren’t for St. Sebastian hanging over the left pews, brought down by arrows and alone, cause someone thought it fit to put St. Michael and his righteous anger and his big old shield where they thought was best. He thinks of all those people suffering under the tyranny because everyone else took their own sweet time coming to cover them. He thinks to himself if he thinks of them long enough, it’ll be the true reason he’s mad with desperation to enlist.
He comes home to find Bucky, too drunk and rumpled draft letter always nearby and he knows. There aren’t left pews and right pews in war, only brothers that ought to look after one another.
He runs his hand through Bucky’s hair and prays, but he doesn’t know what for or for how long.
-
Steve could die tomorrow. It’s all new and strange, dangerous and experimental. This could be his chance, it’s true, but only if. He lays there and thinks of being a child, of hearing mass in Latin and not understanding just as he doesn't understand how he could be here, how this could be happening. But he hears his mother's voice whispering out to him, that it's okay Stevie because your soul will understand for you.
He lays in bed feeling small and frail as God made him and he thinks, he could die tomorrow; not for love of Christ or love of country, but for love. Period. End of sentence.