Broken Glass
by Catherine Maven
Copyright
© 2000
completed May 2009
She missed the road and had to retrace her route three times before she spotted the twin lines of broken pavement among the weeds off to the right of the highway. She pulled the car over onto the scanty shoulder, turned it off, cranked the parking brake, got out and climbed clumsily over the guardrail, sliding down the slight embankment in her city shoes. Stupid, she thought. I should have worn runners.
Except who'd have guessed they'd have moved the actual road, leaving the street that led to the church to be consumed by weeds and wildflowers? It wasn't too surprising, though, when you thought about it. It had been a long time since a church had been a reason to divert a highway.
She followed the crumbling street, hardly noticing the warm summer sun on her shoulders or the breeze lifting her hair just enough to cool her neck. She was preoccupied with thoughts and memories. This was a journey back in time ... back to a place as central to her childhood as it was alien to her newly adult life. When had they stopped going to church?
Looking around as she tread awkwardly in her high heels over shards of broken pavement, she realized the other reason she'd missed the street were the trees which had grown to block the ruins of the church from the sight of drivers hurrying by on the new road. Tree roots thrust inevitably up through the pavement. In another twenty years, nothing would be left of this road at all.
Pushing through the tangle of scrub that marked the edge of what had been the parking lot, she finally saw her destination – or rather, what was left of it. Fire, she'd heard from a friend of a friend of one of the few classmates who'd actually stayed in their small, unfamous town, had gutted the building last winter. From what she’d heard, the few remaining members of the congregation had simply joined the church the next village over. Her childhood church had been abandoned. No one had even considered the site worth cleaning up.
The boxy shape remained, but the white clapboard was grayed with smoke and the once-brilliant windows gaped like eyeless sockets. The simple white steeple was gone entirely.
She stood for a long time, arms crossed across her chest, and gazed at the building. She could clearly remember some of what must have been hundreds of visits to this building, although it all seemed so very long ago that the memories felt as though they belonged to an entirely separate life.
She didn’t see what she was looking for, however, until she clambered awkwardly on top of what was left of the fence which had once separated the church from the parking lot. From this slight vantage, she could finally see them—shards of broken glass glinting in the sunlight among the weeds beside the building.
The glass, some still brightly colored despite smoke damage, brought sudden vivid memories. She remembered sitting in a pew beneath a certain window every Sunday morning. The warmth of the sun as it shone through the glass. How the light colored her hymnal, her hands, the pew, the floor, the head and shoulders of the elderly couple who always sat in the next row up. Even the subject of the window—Jesus with little children (like her) gathered around his knee. A man (unlike her father) who she knew loved kids (because the Bible tells us so).
She remembered how safe that window had made her feel, how special and beloved. She remembered (embarrassed) how the colored light shining through the window felt as though it was coming from Him Himself; how the warmth felt like an embrace. How the beams of light shining on the heads of her neighbours made her feel as if they were all somehow connected.
Of the many sermons she must have listened to, she remembered nothing. She didn’t even believe in God or Jesus any more. She had rejected religion. She was scientific. She had no explanation for her need to come here.
Standing on the wobbly fence, afraid it would collapse beneath her, she suddenly understood what had drawn her here (though she had resisted). Although she knew nothing about stained glass windows (beyond a vague idea they had some kind of metal holding the separate pieces of glass together), she knew she must take the glass and re-create the window. She must recover what had been lost. She must make whole what had been shattered.
In spite of twisting her ankle returning to her car for the cardboard boxes stacked in the trunk (had she unconsciously planned this all along?), she spent the rest of the afternoon carefully recovering all the usable broken shards and putting them into boxes. As careful as she could possibly be, picking up the pieces of glass with tissues from the box in the car, she nevertheless cut her hands again and again. She didn’t bother to wipe away the blood on the glass. She should go get some gloves – but she knew, if she left, she would never return here.
She wondered if she should be recording which piece went where, but none of them were recognizable; none looked like a piece of Jesus’s face, or a child’s golden hair, or a lamb’s curls. It was obviously a fool’s quest—she could not even tell where the fragments from ‘her’ window ended and those from the next window (what had it been?) began. She decided enough fragments had probably been destroyed or lost that she might need all of the glass anyway, and so she gathered every shard she could find.
As the light was fading, she lugged the boxes (incredibly heavy!) back to her car. She was exhausted. Was worried that she was going crazy. Was bleeding and on the verge of tears. Obviously the window hadn’t meant much, even to the minister of the church or its congregation. What in God’s name (ha ha) made her think she could recreate the window? Living far away, in a strange city, with a new name, a new job, and no friends meant she was safe. He could never find her here. Why wasn’t that enough?
Then stubborn determination kicked in, and she put the car into gear. She briefly considered trying the contact the minister (she had absolutely no memory of his name–then suddenly, she did – Penrose) to get a photo (if he had ever bothered to take one) to work from, but she knew she wouldn’t.
This quest was personal; she didn’t want to risk someone claiming a right to the abandoned glass. And besides, her memory of the window was quite vivid – at least the bottom half was. She suspected that when her family had moved away (that was probably when they had given up going to church), she had not yet been mature enough (or tall enough?) to look at the window as a whole. The little children, the lambs, and the warmth of His face were all that were clearly imprinted in her memory.
The correctness of the window didn’t really matter, anyway. What mattered was to put together whatever pieces she had, to reclaim as much of her memory of the window as she could. She barely glanced at the other homes and byways of her childhood as she drove past them. Already she was picturing her hands as they (did something–whatever it was one did with stained glass?)
***
She began by carefully scrubbing all of the pieces to remove the smoke and dirt—and blood, then spread them out on the carpet in the nearly-empty apartment she’d moved into after graduation. It turned out that not having been able to afford to furnish the apartment was a good thing, because the assembled pieces (with small spaces between them) took up almost ten feet by three feet of floor space.
She had arranged the pieces in no particular order, simply to determine how much glass she had to work with. But when she stood on her solitary kitchen chair and looked down at the gathered pieces from that height, the pattern on colors, light and dark, was appealing in itself. It would make an interesting abstract composition, she thought as she gazed at the collection. But she wouldn’t allow herself to cheat in this way.
Somewhere in there is meaning and order, not chaos. Somewhere in there is that feeling of safety and connection, she thought.
First, she went to YouTube and watched a few dozen videos about how to put pieces of stained glass together. Then she found a supplier and bought the U-channel and H-channel leading she would need, as well as solder, a glass etcher, glass paint, and a few other ‘absolutely necessary tools ‘ (the saleswoman’s words). She put it on her plastic. It cost her a month’s salary, and meant not only no furniture, but also more KD than takeout for the foreseeable future.
She also bought a roll of blank paper from a party-supply place, and drew the window upon it, following the recommendations of the stained-glass-art book she’s borrowed from the local library. When she was done, she taped the drawing up on a wall and stood back to look at it. A small shock ran through her and her temperature rose. The broken lines looked like x-rays, like the … she brushed the thought away. It was a drawing. Just a drawing.
Finally, she was ready to begin the work. She didn’t have a table, let alone a table long enough, so she bought some cheap chipboard to lay on the floor to work on. It meant she was always on her knees, leaning over, and her back ached constantly. Worse, she discovered that working with stained glass was painstaking and even more hazardous than collecting the glass had been. Her coworkers at the graphic-design shop where she worked began to call her Accident in honor of the number of bandaids she sported daily. That was okay. Pain was an old friend. She refused to tell anyone what she was working on. Sometimes, she would have a dozen pieces of glass together, and then mess up so badly she would have to take the whole thing apart and start over.
As she improved,
however, she found her hands could do the work and her mind was free to wander.
The colors seemed to trigger memories, and not just of church. Surprisingly, it
was the happy memories that came back to her. The greens took her back to
A year went by. She didn’t have time to make friends. Nearly two years. When she was done, the piece was three feet wide by eight feet long. There was a strong sense of satisfaction in finishing it, but what was she supposed to do with it? She certainly didn’t own a window she could put it in. It was still lying on the chipboard (painted white), so lifting and moving it was possible, but where could it go?
She took a picture, and contacted all of the churches in town, receiving puzzled and sometimes impatient rejections of her gift. No, they weren’t looking for a new window for their church. It wasn’t the right size. It was too traditional. No thank you, no thank you, no thank you.
Getting a bit desperate – she really should get some furniture, and get on with her life! – she contacted the church in the village beside her old one, trying to find Mr. Penrose. He had been dead for more than ten years. The new minister, Dorothy Lee, said they had no stained glass in their church other than simple rectangles around the edges of the windows.
She listed the window on Craigslist, and Kijiji, offering it as a gift to any church or religious organization that wanted it. She didn’t think it was right to sell it. She got no responses at all. She contacted a local art gallery – but they “didn’t do” religious art. Even the Catholics weren’t interested.
One morning, though, she woke up and understood there was only one place for the panel. It seemed ridiculous, and meant more expense. Well, I can live without living room furniture for a few more months, she thought. It’s not like I have friends who are coming to visit.
So she hired a carpenter, and he measured her creation, made a frame for it, and helped her carry the panel out to his van. They rode for several hours together in comfortable silence to reach the site. If he thought she was nuts to put a stained glass window into a burned-out church, he was smart enough not to say so. She handed him nails and held the ladder steady while he worked.
When they were done, the sun was sinking. The window was back where it had always been, in what was left of the east-facing wall at the rear of the church. The carpenter said he’d wait in the van, and left her to stare at her creation from just outside the ruins.
With sunlight shining incongruously through from inside the church, she was astonished to discover that the faces she had painted were her brothers and her own. Jesus looked remarkably like her own father, though she knew they had never been grouped around his knees as these children were. It would have been embarrassing had there been anyone to know that she had unconsciously created this impossible, idealized family group. She laughed out loud at herself.
As she climbed the broken fence to get back to the van, she turned one last time to look at her window. Even from a hundred yards, the light streaming through the window lit her heart. She was going to be okay, after all.
***
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