My ten-year-old fingers shove a nail into the feet a Christ I have drawn upon some discarded wood laid across the workbench in my dad’s shop. Tink, tink, tink. I pick up another nail, this one for the right hand. Tink, tink, smash!  I hit my thumb! Blood spurts across the two-dimensional face.

          When you were young, you walked where you would. Later, you will be led you where you would rather not go. (cf. John 21:18)

            “Over there.” The woman pauses. “That’s where it happened.” She points across the yard. Her words, her face, tangled as a rope.

            We are outside, the evening sun flitters through the branches of a tree behind us. Metal sparrows perch atop a rod-iron fence, their rusted wings sing a shrill whistle in the wind. The sun disappears behind a cloud, casting a shadow across the yard.

            “Every time I close my eyes…so much blood.” She wrings her hands. “I can’t stop seeing it.”

            She has asked me to pray in a place—a workshop—where a murder took place.

When you were young…

            I pick up a permanent marker to draw the crown of thorns on the Savior’s head. Blood from my thumb reddens the brow. I set the marker down. My thumb throbs in pain. It is nothing, I tell myself, nothing compared to his.

I smear blood across the hands and feet of the image of the Crucified.

When you are old…

On my way to the shed where the murder took place, I pass old farm implements stabbed into the earth. Aside the garage, an assortment of garden tools rest against a cinder block wall. Beyond the fence, a junkyard. The grass turns into a dirt lot littered with car parts. I stand at the door of the workshop and peer inside.

Hammers and wrenches lay scattered across the floor like abandoned toys in a playroom. An unfinished project is sprawled across the workbench.

…later, you will be led where you would rather not go.

I ease my way inside. To my right, from a cage of rotted wood, stare beady, red eyes of Albino rabbits. Rats scatter. Beneath my feet, the floor is caked in blood.

In the distance, I hear the woman moaning: “He killed him! He killed him!”

Your brother’s blood cries out!

            My eyes come to rest on the workbench. I recall my blood soaking into the image of His face, his hands, his feet. 

Can you drink of the chalice of which I am to drink?

I glance down at my thumb trembling against the background of blood-soaked dirt. I raise it to my forehead, pause a moment, then make the Sign of the Cross.
 

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