Michael O’Brien
Mar. 29, 2007
Lepidoptera
My father died at 4:30 in the morning on Ash Wednesday, 2006. From the
hospital bed where he lay, eyes half-closed, he could see where he went to high school,
the Catholic school he gave four years of his life to, genuflecting to the skeletal monarch
cast in lifeless bronze and pinned to the cross. My grandmother called it “a good
Christian death,” but neglected to acknowledge his refusal of the Last Rites. He was not
a religious man.
He never went to church. But every Sunday, my mother and I went. First me to
catechism class alone as she sat in the church basement with the other mothers, sipping
coffee and filling out crossword puzzles. And then hand in hand we walked to Mass,
people packed tight into row after row of long black benches like the tiny candles in the
front of the church lit for a nickel a prayer. And my legs itchy and sweating in wool
pants, and the pews hard and unforgiving, and the inoculating scent of cheap perfume
leaking from the head of every old woman.
The priest was Jamaican; he led the prayers in an accent I couldn’t interpret nor
distinguish from the din of a thousand other Catholic drones spitting out Hail Marys
without feeling anything beyond the fatigue of too little sleep. By the time I was thirteen,
I knew I wanted out.
And by then, my father was gone, too. He was living in Erie, Pennsylvania,
homeless, sleeping in the woods behind the town zoo. He wrote me a letter on my
birthday once, said he could hear the chimpanzees fucking and screaming all night long,
and he was sorry he couldn’t remember how old I was. That was the winter he tumbled
head-first down a hillside covered in ivy—fell down and out of society as we know it,
© 2007 Queer Foundation. All Rights Reserved.
Michael O’Brien
2
broke his leg in six places. He couldn’t walk for six months, lay on park benches all day
blowing smoke rings into the sun and trying to forget the pain. In the spring, he could
walk again, a steel rod pinned to the bone. It was his own crucifixion; he never really got
better.
That same spring, I received the sacrament of confirmation, the olive oil cross
inscribed in my forehead like a cattle brand. To embrace this sacrament is to become one
of the flock; The Lord is my shepherd. For Bible class, they would sit us in a circle of
folding chairs in the glass enclosed balcony of the church, the walls lined with portraits of
blind martyrs, their eyes plucked out like fat, overripe grapes. That’s what devotion
bought you. And the empty sockets stared down at us, burning like fireflies, and no one
spoke as the deacon lectured, his voice heavy with lingering cigar smoke, and we are all
Sinners in the Hand of an Angry God.
He spoke often of perversion, quoted Leviticus, and described in vague whispers
what a man and another man could do in the dark and what awaited them in hell. And it
was those moments that made every muscle in my body contract in solitary pain, because
I wanted what those men had, at least what they had in life. Not what came after life. I
wanted to know what it felt like to be touched, to be loved, and I knew it was wrong, but
I wanted it anyway. I had become their bane, their lost sheep. But I wouldn’t be found.
The morning of my Confirmation was the last time; I never went back to church.
For most of my adolescence, I never saw my father. I knew he was somewhere
near, but he couldn’t be part of my life. We were worlds away. I only heard stories—the
broken leg, and my mother’s late night conversations. He’d call her, needing money.
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Michael O’Brien
3
She couldn’t hang up, didn’t have the heart to hurt the man she’d already cast out of her
life once. And he’d only call again. He was society’s burden, the wino, the bum.
I started to forget what the man looked like, began to assemble spare and fading
memories lodged in the back of my head into a composite drawing, filling in the gaps
with my imagination. He would be fat, bald but with a bushy unkempt beard, and he
would wear a thick winter coat all year long, a massive wool thing, moth-holed and
reeking of urine, knitted socks from the Salvation Army, and in his pocket, a small bag of
salvageable cigarette butts peeled off the street, in his hand a bottle of vodka wrapped in
paper. I didn’t want to know this man.
The next time I saw him, he was in the hospital. I was sixteen, he was fifty. And
he looked nothing like I had thought.
The cancer started in his mouth. They took out all his teeth. And then the liver,
the lungs. Each breath he took as he lay in the hospice bed inflated his chest like a pale
yellow balloon. No hair on his legs, his arms. He looked like a child. So weak, almost
asleep even as he spoke, but he always kept one leg bent, the sharp knee bone jutting up
to the ceiling.
He was not the fat man I pictured. Not the stumbling drunk I remember from my
childhood, lying cold and stiff on the front porch moaning, his knuckles bleeding from a
fight with the front door he wouldn’t remember the next day. He was the shell of a man,
his body the sallow, shrunken cocoon of the caterpillar.
© 2007 Queer Foundation. All Rights Reserved.
Michael O’Brien
4
And when that cocoon is split, what happens to the spirit within? Christ pinned to
the cross like a butterfly. My father knew no god. He would not ascend slowly,
flittering, flapping imaginary wings towards the cloudy kingdom above.
At 4:00 A.M., Ash Wednesday, 2006, I lay in bed, silent, not yet asleep. My
mother opens the door, whispers my name, says, “Michael, he’s dead.” And for a
moment, I do nothing. And then, stand, dress, and silently my mother and I get into the
car, drive to the hospice.
His body’s still warm. The lights are too bright. I turn them off, and from the
window drifts the amber glow of street lights. I kiss his forehead. Wherever this man’s
body lies, wherever his spirit will go, he will come through me. I know then that we are
no different. We all carry our crosses with us: Christ, his body nailed to the frame,
carries his in the name of redemption. My father carried the cross of depression and
alcoholism, the misery of sadness and disease. And I carry my secret with me; I am
burdened by the weight of ignorance and hate. And together, my father and I walk
against the church. We share the cross, and we fly together. Aimless, to wherever a
butterfly goes.
© 2007 Queer Foundation. All Rights Reserved.