Junkyard Gods

Louise glues her late mother’s statues up on the ugly streetside wall, praying diverse intentions for every placement of the Shivas, the buddhas, the Jesuses, the apostles, saints and martyrs galore. There are the unholy and profane, too: garishly painted naked ladies, Grecian goddesses, satyrs, nymphs, cherubs holding horns of plenty, one or two putti holding themselves or peeing. The discarded hoard becomes a pantheon above the heaps of moldy stuff in the family’s dirty front yard; all the plaster citizens glued atop the cinderblock fence, staring at passersby. Neighbors and strangers who look feel the urge to look again.

Freed from the curio cabinets, the bookshelves, and the wormy ground, each god silently dares each viewer to do a right thing. Shiva wants destruction, Jesus wants unconditional love, and the demigods cry out a hundred different things as the cherubs espouse free love and free dress. Only Buddha stays silent.

40 days after her mother’s death, Louise completes god-scaping the entire front wall. As she locks a small statue of St. Jude onto the final perch with a tiny prayer for her mother’s soul, a flutter of wings erupts all around her and she thinks damn pigeons again – don’t you dare — but when she turns around she sees that the statues behind her are shaking off the shackles of statuehood and rising above their plinths, coruscating with golden auras or shiny halos. The light from them pours over the grimy sidewalk and scours it clean.

Our Lady of Guadalupe scatters roses from her robe as she walks in the air. Ganesh is wandering out into the busy street amid a cacophony of horns and shouts, while a blue nymph hops up on the back of a motorcycle behind a Hell’s Angel. St. Sebastian throws arrows high over the street.

Louise climbs down the ladder, shaky, hoping that her brain is not exploding like her mother’s did, hoping that things will settle down, but no, in every inch of the space around her the saints and apostles are linking arms and nymphs are shaking their breasts at the satyrs. All but St. Jude are life-size now, and most have joined Louise on the sidewalk in joyous family reunion.

Louise creeps up the ladder again and looks at St. Jude who views the entire scene with resignation. Still affixed to the cinderblock, he tells Louise: “I’m the patron saint of impossible causes, you know,” but she knows her mother’s favorite saint well. “So why are you still here?” she asks him. St. Jude sighs, raises and lowers his painted-on eyebrows, black and thin. “It’s a mystery?” he offers with a shrug for the obtuse catechism. “Don’t think about it too much.” He places a tiny plaster hand, cold and smooth, on her cheek and then blesses her.

All the other gods have danced down the street, alarming or delighting people and dogs. Those who fly are flying, some low, some high, all free now. She watches them go.