SACRAMENT

SACRAMENT

BY JOHN TUFT

Merty comes into the McDonald’s every morning at precisely 6:38. It is located on the corner of Victory Blvd. and Kester Avenue in Van Nuys, California, where Merty lives on the streets. Every morning it is the same ritual for Merty. She orders coffee, black with five sugars, an oatmeal with raisins and cranberries and apples, and two hash browns. She asks that they be put into separate bags, so that she has three bags precisely. Which, in California, adds thirty cents to the total, ten cents per bag. She does this every morning, rain or shine, so that all the workers now know that all Merty has to say is, “I want the Holy Trinity” and they know what she means. Merty then takes the bags to a table and arranges them in front of her, like a wall, a shield against the encroaching ordinary of the profane into her sacred space.

I watch her, morning after morning, as she bows her head and mumbles something before completing the ritual. I finally move close enough to hear what she is saying. “Preachy, preachy, Don Ameche, chicken in the bread pan picking out dough, you and me Jesus, baby let’s go. Amen.” After the elements have been thusly blessed, she withdraws the cup of coffee and meticulously opens each of the five packs of sugar, dumps four into the coffee, then dumps the fifth one over her left shoulder, saying, “Four on the floor, that’s yours Lord.” She catches me watching and loudly proclaims, “All are welcome here at my table, come unto me.” So, I move into the seat across from her at the table, on the profane side of her bag border, nor certain if I am a supplicant or a sucker. The universal conundrum of the holy.

Up close I see the dirt under her chewed off fingernails, the burn scars on her face from the flareups of a crack pipe, and green eyes that have known more sorrow than hope. “Don’t come to this table wanting nothing,” she says to the questions in my own eyes. “Don’t want nothing, don’t need nothing. The rules of this table.” She wears support hose rolled down to here ankles, beneath a flowered dress that is coated with grime and stink. The toes are cut out of the Skechers she dug out of a dumpster down towards Sherman Oaks. She sticks one foot from beneath the table and wiggles her toes at me in a sacred unction for all of us, the humble masses longing for consecration. “My bunions,” she offers as way of explanation. “Know your weaknesses, Preacher Boy.”

Merty takes a sip of the scalding coffee, then offers the cup to me to partake. I accept and the burning sensation on my tongue is a reminder of just how holy is the ground I am on in this moment. Then she takes out the oatmeal and lifts the small container high, “You and me, Jesus, baby let’s go.” With great solemnity, she opens the packages of the flavoring for the oatmeal. “The sacred is sublime,” she says as she stirs them into the gruel. “Yet it stinks to high heaven. Right?” Not knowing the words of this sacramental ritual, I can only nod. She takes a spoonful of oatmeal with chunks of the accoutrements and offers it to me. “All are guests at this table,” she intones. Before she imbibes, she removes the scarf wrapped around the crown of braided hair and drapes it across her shoulders, a stole or a prayer shawl, and whispers, “I am the truth.” The words hang there between us, crossing the brown paper bag border that separates the sacred and profane.

“Why are you here at this table?” she asks while shoveling the concoction into her mouth. “I want to know what cannot be known,” I answer truthfully. Merty fixes those sad eyes on me for a full minute. She laughs finally and shakes her head. “No, really,” she offers. She removes the hash browns from the third bag and lifts them high. Jesus, baby, is beseeched once more. “Why are you here at this table?” I ask this ordinand of the ordinary. She looks bemused. “To feed you.” She breaks one of the hash browns in half and offers it to me. I partake of this, the body of Merty. She hands me the other hash brown. “Now, go, feed the world,” she says, and I find that there are tears brimming in my eyes. Just then the nearby door opens, and a great gust of wind scatters the thirty cents worth of brown paper bags to the four corners.

Later in my room, it is eventide, and before me is set a peanut butter and pimento pepper jack cheese spread sandwich, a bottle of Coke and a bag of M&Ms. I think of Merty and the sacrament she shared with me. I take up the Pittsburgh Steelers Terrible Towel and drape it across my shoulders. “Preachy, preachy, Don Ameche, chickens in the bread pan picking out dough, you and me Jesus, baby, let’s go,” I offer in her memory. The package of hash browns sitting across from me is the amen to my sacrament.

Words are magic and writers are wizards.