The House Of Mr Christus

Chapter Five - Samuel

The funeral was neither large nor small. It exactly mirrored Mr Christus's place in the community, for although he had been well known, he had not been well thought of. Mrs Christus headed the procession with the week old infant in her arms, her friend, beside her, shading the two with a large, black umbrella. Angelita had not protested when her mistress came and took her baby from her. She had washed her hands of him that first moment when she had seen his face. She felt she had been tricked and that the child was not the one she had been nurturing inside of her. On the day following Mr Christus's death, when the news had been broken to her, she knew that something very strange had transpired and refused to even suckle the child, so intense was her distaste, whereupon Mrs Christus took complete control.

Mrs Christus noticed the stares from the verandas as people come out to look at the funeral procession. She knew they were talking about her. Gossip spread like fire and she hoped the words burnt their tongues. That the maid was pregnant, and that perhaps Mr Christus was the father, was old hat but now his sudden death, well, it was just reward. They were sorry for Mrs Christus and saw her action of taking the child as the sign of a very good heart.

When, some weeks later, Mrs Christus heard the favorable turn the wagging tongues had taken, she was pleasantly surprised, having never seen herself in a good light and decided that perhaps she did have a good heart. She took to the infant because he reminded her of a suffering old man but more because he stared at her with the eyes of her deceased husband. Her pet name for him was little, old man, which turned into old man Christus, then Christus, and finally, accepting that the baby needed a name, she settled on the name Samuel. It was the name her husband had wanted to give to their son, but she had protested saying that no one in her family had ever been called Samuel. Eventually, she had won the battle and their son had been named after her maternal grandfather, Lazario.  

For the first few hours, Samuel had writhed about, kicking his legs and hands, looking for all the world like a beetle turned on its back. Deposited on a sea of sheets, in the middle of the bed that moments before had been occupied by the body of Mr Christus, the child continued wailing. Nothing, not even the warm smell of his mother, the surge of milk down his throat, could solace him for having been born. The sight of the child already fighting with its life did not endear him further with Angelita. It was not normal for a thing so small, so new, to be at once distraught and angry with the world. It did not bode well for the future, and already she assigned to him a troublesome nature.

When she handed him over, on the day of the funeral, Mrs Christus had broken into song. Angelita heard the sweetened notes accompanied by the wail of the child trailing through the house. She allowed herself no time to sit and idle away hours, no time to let painful thoughts seed themselves and within a week was attending to the daily chores, feeling none of the care and tired worry of a new mother. She felt that she had not given birth and that still within her protruding stomach has a child, one which would never be born. The sensation of something growing in her womb that was in no way separate to herself gave such immense satisfaction that her whole body became tinged with an iridescent bloom.

Angelita had made an exchange with her Mistress and that, perhaps, was the prime source of her contentment. In the same mute way they had previously engaged in battle, they had now enacted a truce. Mrs Christus would have the child, and she would have the house. Angelita was elated by the turn of events and attacked the bedroom, in which Mr Christus had died, with such vigor that within an afternoon she had it aired and entirely free of the lingering odors of the past months. 

Mrs Christus, too, was happy with the turn of events, feeling for the first time that something was entirely hers. Her own child had grown up, in a sense, motherless, as she had felt an absence of natural feeling during his bringing up, and, looking back on those years, she realized that she had been there in body but in nothing else. Her son had been nurtured by a person looking in every way like a woman but really nothing more than a shell. The fear of having to be a mother, of having to be a fit wife, had long left her, and she approached the infant fearless. He just somehow happened to be hers. The first tender tendrils of love wove themselves about her heart leaving her bruised and vulnerable.