Christmas on Red Hill
On the birth of misotheism
Shortly after the publication of Look Homeward, Angel, Thomas Wolfe traveled to York Springs, a village in Pennsylvania, to visit with his deceased father’s kin. W.O. Gant, the father of the novel’s protagonist, was modeled by Wolfe on his own father William Oliver Wolfe. In a letter to his mother in North Carolina, Wolfe recounted his look homeward to the litter of hinterland villages and hamlets where his father had farmed. The pastoral prettiness of the region stirred him to extoll the “great fields and mighty stone barns, the richest, fattest farming county you ever looked at.” A second letter, composed in New York City, mused on the character of the English, Scot-Irish, and Germans pioneers who had debarked in Philadelphia in the eighteenth century and hacked their way through the forests. “As I walk through the crowded and noisy streets of this immense city, and look at the dark swarthy faces of Jews, Italians, Greeks,” Wolfe wrote, “I realize more keenly than ever that I come from the old Americans—the people who settled the country, who fought in its wars, who pushed westward.”
No writer has repeated Thomas Wolfe’s lyrical infatuation with Adams County, the place that bore and bred me. After I left this borderland along the Mason-Dixon Line for Cambridge, Massachusetts, which might as well be a different country, I searched the national culture for traces of the filtered deposits of the ruddy farmers and rural bourgeoisie who raised me. Of my old Americans, however, contemporary letters evokes only dark political innuendos, such as when Charles Lindbergh circumnavigates the region’s lush valleys and corrugated ridges, surveying his blood-and-soil partisans, in Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America. But when I separate the years since I left, turning them over one by one, I inhabit the psychic interior of Adams County’s commoners, a guarded, undemonstrative people who go to work, try to honor the Commandments, and return home to their families. In the theater of modern volatilities, the desiccated faith of such mainline Protestants has been shunted off stage, as though nothing poetic or vital ever happens behind the veil.
The story that is about to unfold is a metaphysical high drama. The central event, told to me in the flat intonations of a country teacher’s voice, imbued my spiritual inheritance not long after my father cracked up and left our family, having been “Magnificently unprepared / For the long littleness of life.” Revisiting the story of Christmas on Red Hill, I find myself a stranger roaming in a landscape I know intimately, as though seeing the event that shaped me through a picture window whose frame I cannot breach.
Belinda always began her story with a memory of the black-haired sophomore who crowded into a seat beside hers in college. When the class ended, her eye followed him as he stood and strode toward the door. He looked even taller than her. A shade darker, he wore heavy eyebrows that made him look older than twenty.
On their first date, Carmen Monterossi said he grew up in Sharpsburg, an hour’s drive south from campus, outside Pittsburgh. Belinda said she grew up in Hanover, four hours southeast across the Alleghenies. His father, like hers, made a living in the construction trades. Carmen’s welded on Pittsburgh’s bridges.
Belinda and Carmen held hands at the parties thrown by her sorority and his fraternity. They played tennis on campus and swam in Lake Arthur, and they studied cheek by jowl toward their shared ambition for a career in special education. Classes at Slippery Rock let out for the summer. One weekend, she took a plane to Pittsburgh to see him. She laughed when a giddy teenage girl stole in close and pinched Carmen’s buttocks on a downtown street, squealing as she crept away that she just touched the Steelers’ famous running back. In his beard, Carmen did look a dead-ringer for Franco Harris. She herself had large hands and feet, long thin legs, a plain, narrow face, and a body built like a licorice stick. She was a cheerleader in high school, hanging out with the jocks.
She cried hard when she broke up with him. In high school, she had read a sentimental fiction about star-crossed lovers just like them. After saying goodnight to her mother and father in Hanover, she thumbed the novel by a small light behind the closed door of her bedroom. In the mornings, she hid the novel under her bed, lest her parents discover her curiosity about forbidden men. When she first arrived at Slippery Rock and measured the footloose spirit of rebellion seizing some of the students, however, she realized that her secret cigarette habit would mark the limits of her disobedience. She was no dreamer.
Her mother was a Zartman, her father a Stonesifer. The Zartman and Stonesifer lines went far back in Hanover’s German Lutheran community. Buck and Sis, as everyone called her parents, belonged to St. Paul’s. They baptized and raised her and her younger sister in the church. Buck had been an altar boy. Carmen, however, had graduated from North Catholic High School in Pittsburgh. His father and mother were Italian immigrants and Roman Catholics. She thought of his parents as transplants from the old world.
Carmen, at length, persuaded her to consider a way out of their predicament. He wagered the knowledge they might gain together from a night class on mixed marriages. No, she felt after the final session, she could not bring herself to convert. The sacrament of confession positively offended her. But she did summon the terms of a compromise. She could agree to raise any children with Carmen in the Catholic Church. As soon as she heard herself make the pledge, a vision of the future crystallized in her imagination. Yes, she would marry Carmen after they graduated from Slippery Rock. She would teach special education for three years. After she completed her master’s degree, she would give birth to two children, and then she would resume her teaching career. That was her plan.
On August 21, 1971, she married her college sweetheart at St. Paul’s in Hanover. The wedding was traditional, the altar set with white mums, daisies, gladiolus, and palms, Belinda bedecked in a full-length gown of embroidered silk organza styled with an empire waistline, a softly gathered skirt, and billowing sleeves. Her sister, Sue Ann, served as her maid of honor. Belinda’s sorority sisters and Carmen’s fraternity brothers filled out the party. Reverend Don Stonesifer, her fire-and-brimstone uncle, came up to Hanover from his horse ranch in Virginia to officiate. A priest assisted. Carmen’s parents insisted.
Belinda and Carmen soon found teaching jobs and bought a townhouse in Carlisle, a short half-hour north of Hanover. They immersed themselves in St. Patrick’s Catholic Church. He coached the parish football team and won election to the presidency of the athletic association. She joined the Junior Civic Club. But Slippery Rock had not fully prepared them for the politics of special education. Carlisle’s superintendent segregated her students. She had to rig up a classroom in the windowless, pie-shaped cement basement of the Lutheran church. She gravitated to the kids with learning disabilities, fascinated as she was by dyslexia. Privately, she concluded, she did not have enough patience to contend with the more severely afflicted.
Those students, the ones with emotional disturbances, Carmen sought out. His superintendent admired the gentle manner he displayed with the angry children of the world, so surprising for such a big man. Well liked and widely respected, he won promotion to a role in the school district’s administration. Sometimes, when defendants in the juvenile court claimed a disability to mitigate their offenses, he testified as an expert witness for the state. “I think they ought to quit giving these kids so many chances,” he said to the Carlisle Sentinel. “Leniency is not doing justice to kids or society.”
On issues of public morality Carmen and Belinda concurred. They blamed the hippies and the kooks for unraveling America’s fabric. In Hanover and Sharpsburg, the Stonesifers’ and Monterossis’ alike nodded toward their respective television screens when President Nixon came on and appealed to “the great silent majority” against the antiwar protestors.
Belinda’s plan unfolded like a private charm. One month after she ceased taking her birth-control pill, she became pregnant. Two months after she completed her master’s degree, she gave birth to Jason. A second child, Nicholas, arrived on her calendar three years later. Jason and Nicholas bore Carmen’s dark brown eyes and her blond bangs. A priest at St. Patrick’s performed the baptisms.
On the rare occasions that Carmen and Belinda argued, their bickering revolved around her bird-like panics of possessiveness. She continually found reasons to keep her loyal discharge of daughterly duties conspicuous to Buck and Sis. She felt intensely jealous of Sue Ann, who also married a special education teacher in Carlisle. Two Saturdays every month, Belinda left Carmen in the townhouse and stayed overnight at her childhood home in Hanover with Jason and Nicholas. On those evenings, Buck and Sis minded the boys while she played bridge with her high-school girlfriends. The next morning, the Stonesifers’ attended Sunday worship at St. Paul’s and lunched at The Greenskeeper, a clubhouse restaurant run by her Aunt Linda and Uncle Larry.
The spirit of compromise that had made the marriage possible in the first place held for eight years. Every other Thanksgiving and every other Christmas, Belinda and Carmen and Jason and Nicholas packed into their Ford LTD sedan and motored across the Alleghenies to Sharpsburg, where they attended holiday Mass with the Monterossi family. Jason remembered without fail which elevator button would lift them to the dinosaur exhibition in the science museum at Carnegie-Mellon University. Nicholas adored the animals in the Pittsburgh zoo.
In 1971, when the action of this story begins, she forced a change. That Thanksgiving she insisted on spending with her clan in Hanover. Her Aunt Beverly in California promised to make a rare visit. Carmen’s father, wounded by the betrayal, stopped talking to his son. She thought her father-in-law was an Italian hothead with a short-man’s complex.
On the twenty-third of that December, Belinda awoke at daybreak, donned her apron, and planted her feet in the kitchen. She cooked her homemade applesauce, her jellies, and her chicken corn soup. She baked a fresh loaf of bread, and when she finished her traditional contributions to the Stonesifers’ Christmas repast, she placed the fixings in three baskets each ringed with fresh apples. Two baskets she designated for her grandmothers. The third she put aside for her Aunt Ruth. Satisfied with her labors, she decided on the spur of the moment to deliver the provisions to her mother’s refrigerator in Hanover that very afternoon.
“Can’t we just stay home and take this stuff with us on Christmas Day?” Carmen grumbled. He was not his cheerful self. She pursed her lips. “No, I’ve got to get all these gifts to Hanover today. I need to take all this stuff down, so it’s not so crazy packing and all that on Christmas morning.” The day after Christmas, she reminded him, they would drive to Sharpsburg. “It’ll be too much. We’ve got to pack our suitcases on top of everything else.”
“But I hate that road,” Carmen remonstrated. “Let’s just stay home and relax.” The road to Hanover, a two-lane turnpike, crossed a belt of the orchard land below South Mountain, which broke into innumerable spurs and foothills. The sloping land pushed cold air down into valleys, protecting sensitive fruit trees from frost bite. The orchards yielded some of the most succulent cherries, peaches, and apples in America.
The harvest season had ended in October. Carmen, at the wheel, probably would not butt up against one of the cannery trucks that relied on the turnpike to convey crated fruit south past Hanover to the harbor in Baltimore. Even so, he could expect to trail one of the sixteen-wheelers carrying new cars to the dealership in Hanover, or one of the cement trucks that spewed rocks from its cylinder on the way from the quarry. A tractor would emerge from an unmarked access road and eke along interminably. The narrow contours had not changed since Belinda’s forebears had laid a wagon trail in 1736. How many rabbits, skunk, deer, and possum had met a violent demise on that road? During the growing season the warm scent of mellowing apples perfumed the drive through the orchards. Today the rancid smell of rotting animal flesh was sure to aggravate the queasy feeling induced by crossing twenty miles of hills like a slow-motion rollercoaster. They would have to swallow the rising bile of carsickness.
Belinda would not countenance Carmen’s objections. She would shuttle the boys to Hanover herself. After eight years of marriage, Carmen grokked the determination in her tone. “You’re not going to give me any peace until we take all this stuff, are you?,” he sighed. He buckled Jason and Nicholas into the Chevette, a subcompact they had just purchased. The best- selling car in America, manufactured in response to the energy crisis, the Chevette would zip to Hanover more easily than the lumbering Ford sedan in the garage. The warm air, moist from an overnight rain, prompted Carmen to remark that that day felt like an Indian Summer.
Sis and Buck received them warmly on McKinley Avenue. The family was at the very core and ripeness of its life together, the voluptuous energy of its conventions focused on the ritual feast of turkey and country ham to come. The festive patter of Belinda’s grandmothers seasoned the occasion with a snug sense of sufficiency. Her haven remained intact, her parents’ marital idyll steady against the torrent of divorces elsewhere in the country. Sis and Buck had graduated from Eichelberger High School. After the war, they had purchased a tract of open acreage in the tony Clearview section of Hanover, directly across from a Lutheran parsonage. The two-story house they built expressed a vernacular rhetoric of gentility, boasting a carport, flagstone steps, dormer windows, and immaculately groomed gardens, shrubs, and lawns. Buck designed and laid every inch of the structure himself, hauling the bricks from Alwine’s, the oldest manufacturer in America.
Sis furnished the domestic interior with varnished walnut tables and chairs. In the formal dining room, a Swiss clock presided over a hutch that held porcelain crockery and assorted candies and nuts. A parlor opened into a patioed backyard under a canopy of maples and elms. The plummy tone of order and satisfaction, a matured décor of religion and taste, forged the family’s claim to belong to the better sorts of people in town. The neighbors were doctors and pharmacists, accountants and bank managers.
That afternoon, Belinda and Sis took Jason and Nicholas for a meal with Aunt Linda and Uncle Larry at The Greenskeeper. The boys rolled down their windows and piped Jingle Bells at the top of their voices. After lunch, they soaked up the dazzling sight of the Christmas tree. Carmen stayed behind with Buck and watched television in the living room. When the boys burst through the door and presented their grandfather with stain-glass ornaments, he pretended to believe their own tiny fingers had crafted them.
As twilight descended, Jason started in on his brother, poking and prodding. He had reached that age. “No TV tonight!” Belinda scolded him. Carmen scooped up Nicholas and cradled him in the crooks of his lean, hairy arms. In the carport, Sis leaned through the window and dropped a couple of bags of Christmas cookies on the boys’ laps, steadying their trembling chins and wiping away their frowns. A few minutes after seven o’clock, Carmen switched on the headlamps, turned left onto McKinley Avenue, and wheeled back toward the turnpike.
As the town petered out, the landmarks notching their northward progress home loomed across the map of Belinda’s childhood memory. The quarry passed on the left. She anticipated how, after the Chevette’s engine labored over the fifth hill and reached a mile-long flatland, a corridor fringed by pine trees and tangled underbrush would darken the road. Off to the right appeared The Tropical Treat, the drive-in restaurant where she spooned down banana splits after drive-in movies with her girlfriends. Cornfields now stretched out on both sides of the road. The corners of her eyes reflected red and green colors flickering like fireflies inside the farmhouses.
Up ahead was Red Hill, the steepest on the road. Carmen prepared to round the blind spot at the crest when a yellow blaze of sodium light flashed into Belinda’s eyes. She raised her right arm above her forehead and swiveled her head toward Carmen. His face was illuminated in a bizarre clarity. She thought an airplane must be landing on top of their car.
She woke up on a gurney in the emergency ward at Hanover Hospital. She recognized Koby Klunk, a friend from high school, as the nurse standing over her. She had been in a car accident, Koby informed her. She had a broken forearm and some cracked ribs. The doctor, concerned about blood pooling around her heart, had ordered an ambulance to transport her to York Hospital, the nearest larger facility, in case she needed surgery.
Belinda caught sight of Sis exchanging inaudible words with a man who looked to be a Pennsylvania State Trooper. She lifted her uninjured arm and motioned her mother over. Carmen, Jason, and Nicholas would need to stay overnight in Hanover until her release. Her thoughts abruptly shifted when she observed her mother shrieking and pounding her fists against the trooper’s barrel chest. Sis, hysterical, came beside the gurney and looked down at her daughter.
“Mom, are they not okay?”
“No, he’s dead.”
“Are the boys okay?”
“No, they’re all gone.”
She turned to Koby and denied permission to transport her to York Hospital. Saying so, she relapsed into unconsciousness for the next day and a half.
Until this moment, a particular sense of time had held her and molded her. She had grown up in the mores of the old Protestants. Methodical and industrious, her people had taught her how to save time, to organize time, to forestall the element of chance by the habit of preparation. Her habits stemmed from a tempo of life essentially unchanged since the brickwork farmhouses and churches were wrought out of the abundant clay deposits in the soil. Great revolutions in agriculture, industry, and science had accelerated the pace of change in the big cities. Even the modern theological conflicts that divided Lutheran synods, however, had passed lightly over congregations that clung to a past older than the country itself. No spiritual awakenings had swept through these parts. No hurricanes, earthquakes, or tornados had bewildered existence. Time moved in cycles, its rhythms marked by the four seasons and the liturgical calendar as surely as day followed night.
At the limits of her imagination of novelty and contingency, Belinda had been able to picture Jason or Nicholas afflicted by some awful disease. One evening earlier in December, she had caught a television show that chronicled a girl’s suffering from leukemia and her mother’s struggle to save her. Belinda, distraught, had rushed up the stairs in tears and rustled Jason and Nicholas awake to hug them. If that manner of calamity had befallen them, she would have sought spiritual direction from Reinhold Niebuhr’s Serenity Prayer: “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.” But what transpired on Red Hill had not announced itself with a future expiration date. The collision had come on like the Apocalypse.
Ted Kotula, the Pennsylvania State Trooper in the hospital that evening, had just left a scene that resembled an execution. Under the revolving lights of ambulances, trucks, and cruisers, the firemen and paramedics saw a Mercury sedan on its roof. Two men, pinioned inside, writhed and moaned in Spanish. The driver of the sedan was dead beneath a guardrail. Half his face was torn away.
The Chevette sat higher on the gradient. The roof had been sheared off, giving a clear view of an unconscious Belinda in the passenger’s seat. Her right ear was nearly split in half. Her right leg bore a gash where the door of the glove compartment speared her. Blood seeped around shards of glass that lodged in her face and arms. Beside her, Carmen’s body reposed in the driver’s seat. The firemen shined their flashlights deeper into the Chevette. The entire back seat was missing, having popped off the chassis.
One of the firemen vomited on the macadam where he found Carmen’s head. Others dropped to their knees upon discovering Jason and Nicholas’s entrails and limbs. The father of the fire chief fell over with a heart attack. An ambulance took him away to the coronary care unit. A driver crawling through the traffic bottleneck craned her neck toward the carnage, fumbled the wheel in distress, and struck another fireman, sending him to the hospital in yet another ambulance. The atmosphere felt permeated by a sulfurous mist.
None of the three men in the Mercury carried a driver’s license, automobile insurance, or immigration papers. Trooper Katula telephoned Pappy Bross, the owner of a large turkey farm in East Berlin and one of only two businesses in the vicinity known to employ foreigners. Bross arrived at the morgue to look at the driver. An old family friend of the Stonesifer’s, he breathed a sigh of relief when he disclaimed knowledge of the man.
Trooper Katula summoned Pastor Hector Ramos from the Assembly of Pentecostal Church of Jesus. One of the surviving passengers, detained in the emergency room with a broken jaw, spoke no English. Ramos often fielded such emergency calls from the state police. Every year, several thousand Mexicans migrated northward to South Mountain’s fruit belt to work in the orchards. The phenomenon had begun during Belinda’s younger years, when teenagers began reallocating their leisure time from the family orchard to high school sports. Agricultural corporations stepped in and consolidated the land, constructing canneries where cider houses, elevated water tanks, and spray sheds had dotted the land for a century.
Pastor Ramos sang and prayed with the migrants at their camps and conducted Catholic services for them at his church. He admired their work ethic. When they finished their labors, however, they had little to do with their time. Segregated from the white community, they passed their leisure in drink. They often began drinking on Saturday mornings and then continued through Sunday evenings.
The injured man gave Ramos his name: Domingo Azuel-Najero. He was twenty-three. Ramos’s heart sank when he heard Azuel-Najero break into a giggle. He was still drunk. Azuel-Najero asked about his friend at the wheel. “You tell him his friend is dead,” Katula snapped, “and by the way, you tell him the woman he hears screaming is the only survivor from the other car.”
Azuel-Najero stopped laughing. He said nothing more, refusing to disclose how the men knew one another. Most of the migrant workers left at the end of the harvest season in October. The three men might have been working on a skeleton crew. If so, they might have picked the very apples that Belinda ringed around her Christmas baskets.
Belinda opened her eyes in the stillness of Christmas morning. The clock on the wall read three o’clock. She tapped the cast on her arm. Realizing she was alone in York Hospital, her memories began to coagulate: who she was, where she was, what her mother had said. A chill crept over her, and then the abscess burst. She heard herself howling. A nurse appeared and took her trembling hand.
“Shall I phone for a minister to come?”
“Yes, please hurry.”
The moment the door closed, a warm light poured into the room and chased away the shadows bunching in the corners. God’s caress evened her breathing. Her heart ceased hammering. The minister arrived an hour later. She was calm, savoring the stillness. He was unshaven, exhausted. She thought he looked disheveled.
At midday, a man’s silhouette drew into focus through her fogginess. Tall and square-jawed, his fists were buried in his pockets. “It’s time to go home,” Buck said in his soft-spoken manner. A high wind blew scuds of rain against the car and steamed the windows on the drive to McKinley Avenue. Buck fixed his gaze on the road ahead. She heard a husky whisper slip past his clenched jaw. He would shoot the two surviving Mexicans.
That evening, as Christmas Day drew to a mournful close, her thoughts drifted to the time at Slippery Rock when Carmen had broken up with her. He had caught her smoking. Now, as she maneuvered her battered body down into a wing chair in her mother’s living room, she ended her nine-year remission and lit a cigarette.
“I can’t live without them,” she declared to her mother. As she said so, a floor lamp beside her chair went dark. Her mother, rising, checked the bulb and rattled the stem. Ten minutes later, when Belinda regained confidence and said, “I can make it,” the lamp flickered on.
“What is wrong with that lamp?”
“Nothing is wrong with the lamp,” her mother insisted.
Six more times that evening, the lamp switched on and off by itself in concert with her will to live and her wish to die.
Mr. Kenworthy, the funeral director, visited the next day to take her instructions. She had not planned a funeral before. She asked for Carmen’s cornu. She had given the necklace to him for his birthday to replace his crucifix. “It’s an Italian talisman, a good luck charm. It looks like a horn.” Mr. Kenworthy lowered his eyes and said nothing.
Three days later, St. Patrick’s conducted a Mass of Christian Burial in Carlisle. She stepped haltingly through the front doors wearing her arm cast, a neck brace, and two black eyes. The moment her eye alighted on the three white caskets, she fainted.
After the funeral, Sis escorted her to the townhouse to pack some belongings. If she stayed in this place, the shadow of memory would suffocate her. She did not recognize her feelings as grief. To grieve would be to accept what was contrary to history and biology. Closeness to children constituted her character and occupation. She observed herself opening the door to the toolshed and reaching for an axe. On the drive to McKinley Avenue, her mother reported that she had climbed the stairs to Nicholas’s room and swung the axe against his crib until it lay in matchstick pieces.
Every night that first week, Buck eased her into her childhood bed as she negotiated the pain in her ribs. She entered sleep pining for a way back to her husband and children. Her nights, clammy and dreamless, denied her access. During the short winter days, Sis and Buck, Sue Ann, Uncle Larry and Aunt Linda, and her grandmothers took turns sitting with her, patting her hand, listening to her reveries of mothering. “Such an easy child Nicholas was, a young two, still a babe,” she simpered. “Jason! Why did I have to scold him?” Carmen was a good man, her best friend. They had a honeymoon in Colonial Williamsburg and enjoyed five years together before the children came. She talked like this incessantly, compulsively. She talked to rub over the pain. She talked to fill the time. She feared that if she stopped talking, she might forget them.
The fire chief rang the doorbell. He brought findings from Trooper Kotula’s investigation. Three young Mexican men had spent the afternoon guzzling liquor inside My Ladies, a roadside bar on the edge of New Oxford, two miles north of Red Hill. A witness had spotted them stumbling in the parking lot. They had climbed into the Mercury sedan and headed south toward Hanover. The driver had crossed the center line going ninety miles per hour, more than twice the speed limit. Trooper Kotula surmised that he had passed out at the wheel with his foot on the accelerator.
The extraordinary speed had lifted the car airborne over the crest of Red Hill. The sodium light she had perceived in the moment before losing consciousness shone from the Mercury’s headlamps on its downward plunge into their windshield. Hitting head-on at a forty-five degree angle, the two-ton Mercury flipped tail over head and ripped the Chevette apart. The sedan proceeded to skid on its roof two hundred and ten feet down the hill. The weight, angle, and velocity generated a force of impact that could not have dealt Carmen, Jason, and Nicholas any pain.
That Friday, Belinda stepped gingerly into the office of the Carlisle Sentinel with photographs of Carmen, Jason, and Nicholas smiling beatifically. “This didn’t have to happen,” the reporter warned revelers in a front-page story on New Year’s Eve. Half the number of all Americans who had died in Vietnam perished every year in drunk driving crashes. The roadway pandemic was the nation’s leading cause of death in people under thirty-four. On the roads running around Hanover alone forty-three people had died this year in such crashes, another record toll.
Public health advocates urged a prevention model, blaming the alcohol industry. The previous year, the Pennsylvania State Supreme Court had rescinded the Blue Laws at the behest of business interests. The Blue Laws had banned the sale of liquor on the Sabbath since William Penn’s Quakers had put the prohibition in place in1682. An alternative model, espoused by conservatives, called for longer jail sentences to deter and punish individual offenders. Belinda sided with the law-and-order conservatives. She herself drank regularly, copiously.
That same Friday, Pastor Hector Ramos conducted the funeral of Armando Merino, the twenty-three-year-old drunk driver. Just one person, a white woman, attended. She did not introduce herself. Addressing the funeral director, she asked him to open the casket. When he resisted, she insisted. Peering in, she gasped, turned on her heels, and walked out.
January brought Belinda’s thirtieth birthday. She longed to grasp a cause beyond the mechanics of the collision. The enormity overbore the word accident. A mishap implied an unforeseen contingency, inimical to her ingrained habits of thought and feeling. If the Blue Laws had been in place, no bar would have served the men that Sunday. Then again, Carmen had implored her to stay home. And she had elected to take the Chevette, the lightest car in America, rather than their gas-guzzling sedan. The dark-brown Ford they left in the garage, equal in size and weight to the Mercury, had four doors and a hardtop roof.
Stop it, Sis interceded: “We don’t do guilt. That will get you nowhere.” Her mother had been warning against guilt since she was a young girl. Guilt was a stupid emotion, a handmaiden of Catholic melodrama.
Reverend Glenn Ludwig visited from St. Paul’s. Belinda knew him from the services she attended twice a month on the mornings following her Saturday evening card club. Reverend Ludwig had honored Sis’s call to assist with the funeral Mass at St. Patrick’s in Carlisle. Now he unbuttoned his coat and jacket and sat on the edge of the sofa. He asked Belinda and Sid to dab their eyes. They bowed their heads in prayer.
If God gave sight to the blind and commanded the lame to walk, Belinda said sharply, then why had God taken her family away from her? “God did not make this happen,” Reverend Ludwig maintained. “It was an accident, a purely physical event. Two pieces of matter were at the same place at the same time, and they couldn’t be.” A look of umbrage passed between her and her mother. They were not fooled by the reverend’s attempt to provide God with an alibi. If the collision was indeed an accident, then why had God failed to intervene and prevent it? And why had God humiliated her, forcing her to live?
Nobody could explain to her why the Mercury destroyed every part of the Chevette except the one pocket of space where the firemen had discovered her with her seat belt still fastened. What were the odds? A thousand to one? A million? When she had quizzed the fire chief, he threw up his hands and declaimed what Reverend Ludwig declined to affirm: “It was a miracle.”
An awkward silence fell between them. She glared at the reverend, unappeased, until the storm inside her broke. She spat on the carpet. “That is what you could do with your God,” she cursed.
Sis invoked the spiritual counsel of a fellow parishioner at St. Paul’s, a woman with bespoke gifts not possessed by the likes of Reverend Ludwig. Hanover’s churches and business clubs frequently opened their anterooms and auditoriums to visiting astrologers and clairvoyants. Downtown, inside lavender-scented warrens honeycombing cindered alleyways, freelance mediums propitiated crystal balls, Ouija boards, and Tarot cards.
At the séance, the medium wrinkled her nose, shuddered her shoulders, and tossed her head from side to side until she finally made contact with Carmen, Jason, and Nicholas. None of Belinda’s decisions could have changed the outcome, the medium opened her quivering eyes and avowed. If Belinda had elected to stay home in their Carlisle townhouse that day, the gas furnace would have exploded.
The medium elaborated the spiritual writ behind her reading during a visit to McKinley Avenue. Belinda learned that God encoded every baptized soul with the precise date of its body’s death. When the body reached the end of its earthly tether, a new body reincarnated its soul.
The word omen crossed her mind. Two days before the catastrophe, she remembered, she had taken Jason on an errand to the butcher. She had intended to cook and freeze meatballs in advance of the New Year’s Eve party that she planned to throw at the townhouse.
“Mommy,” Jason had said when she stopped at a red light, “I’m going to smoke when I grow up.”
“You shouldn’t, smoking hurts your health, and it can make you die.”
“Well, I am going to die.”
“Yes, dear, we are all going to die one day.”
“No, you don’t understand. God knows that I’m going to die, and he could keep me from dying.”
Buck had some misgivings about the medium’s epiphanies, astonished by her claim that he had been Sis’s son in their former lives. Like Carmen, Buck had a doppelganger. He looked like Charlton Heston. (At the mall once, he posed for a photograph as if he were the actor in the flesh.) Still, the construction sites he superintended kept his feet planted firmly in the material world. Three years on the front lines in France, Belgium, and Germany ducking into foxholes, dodging the Luftwaffe’s bombs and bullets, also instilled in him a sense of death’s caprice. What he had done to survive had not escaped the vault of his private memory. Nobody talked about the violence of war.
Buck turned to his brother Don, the Lutheran pastor who had solemnized the marriage of Carmen and Belinda. Don had served as an army chaplain in the war. The Nazis had taken him prisoner in the Battle of the Bulge. Don objected to the medium’s claims: Predestination was a heresy against free will. He challenged his brother: “Why not walk in front of a moving bus then?”
“Dad,” Belinda countered, “the thing is, you can walk in front of that bus if you want to tempt destiny, but if it’s not your time to die, that that bus will hit you, and then you’ll live the rest of your life as a cripple because you’re not meant to die yet.”
Her Catholic friends were bogged down in grief, still clinging to conventions honoring those who perish before their time. The eleventh of February would have marked Jason’s fifth birthday. On that day, the public library in Carlisle received honorary donations of books. The J.C. Penny Department Store sponsored a ten-thousand-meter footrace to benefit a memorial fund. “Many of the children really don’t understand what’s happened to Jason,” the director of the YMCA’s Tiny Tot program sighed to the newspaper.
In March, Belinda squirmed in a front pew at a special Mass in St. Bonaventure’s Catholic Church, the Monterrosi family parish in Sharpsburg. After the Mass in Carlisle, Carmen’s father had asked to view the Chevette. Uncle Larry had escorted him to the lot in Hanover. Peering inside the crumpled vehicle and noting the absence of blood, he stood back and shook his head. How could Belinda have survived this? Carmen must have swerved at the last moment to save her life. Now she listened to the priest in Sharpsburg repeat the lie and pronounce Carmen a martyr.
God had sacrificed Carmen for our sins, the priest intoned, just as God had sacrificed his only son. She boiled at the lugubrious incantations. She was further inflamed when she learned that Carmen’s father had been buttonholing neighbors with word of his tragedy. He had not picked up the phone to reconcile with his son after the Thanksgiving betrayal. She regarded her father-in-law’s passion play as contemptible.
A practical question, even more delicate, remained between them. Would she please exhume the bodies, so that the Monterossis’ could rebury them in the Catholic cemetery in Sharpsburg? She refused. Obsessing over the bodies was pointless, immaterial.
Their deaths were predestined. Their deaths were also illusory, the dismembered bodies of Carmen, Jason, and Nicholas insubstantial vessels for souls bound to shine again in the faces of new people. No miracle had spared her life. Her expiration date had not arrived. That was all. She had not fulfilled her purpose. God signaled as much to her on Christmas morning in her room at York Hospital, and then again that evening through the floor lamp at home. The medium feathered the metaphysical hole the Mexicans had torn in the Lutheran theodicy. The esoteric character of the claims befit the perverse extremity of the disaster.
The plan she had envisioned upon falling in love with Carmen at Slippery Rock College had come true. She had married him, taught special education for three years, earned her master’s degree, birthed two children, and returned to work. Yet God’s plan was always going to truncate hers two days before Christmas in the year nineteen seventy-nine. There was no need for her to blaspheme God or to repent her sin of hubris. The restoration of her trust in time on the astral continuum scabbed the wound. Her heart fundamentally unchanged, she cocked her ear for the quaking of her lost souls as they migrated to new bodies. To exit the liminal space she occupied, she simply needed a new plan.
The story of Christmas on Red Hill streaked across the region’s newspapers and television stations for a few days. It marked the kind of senseless tragedy that elicited tears from Oprah Winfrey, the emotional young anchor at Baltimore’s WJZ-TV. The event cast a pall over whispered conversations at Adams County’s bridge clubs and church socials, hair salons and Sunday brunches, bringing the nightmare of the 1970s to a grim apotheosis. Throughout the decade of decline, amid the slaughter on the county’s roadways, hundreds of its young sons had trickled home from fighting in Vietnam, many of them privately shattered. The paramedics and firemen on Red Hill that evening counted among the veterans.
So did my father, a former U.S. Marine who witnessed and inflicted unspeakable carnage. In August 1971, the same month that Belinda and Carmen got married at St. Paul’s, my father returned from his trip halfway around the world a basket of nerves. His war demons soon chased him out of our family. He read about her disaster over the breakfast table in his childhood home in New Oxford, where my grandfather and grandmother tried without much success to rehabilitate his moral collapse.
The story of Christmas on Red Hill brushed past my own life on the first Friday. I stood beside my mother inside our empty brick home in New Oxford looking through our double-paned front windows toward the street. A long car with a purple flag rolled toward the cemetery next door. “There goes the man who killed Belinda’s family,” my mother mused. They went to high school together.
Belinda’s new plan entered my life seven months later. On the morning of July 19, 1980, I buttoned into a light blue tuxedo. Deposited at The Greenskeeper, the restaurant run by Uncle Larry and Aunt Linda, I shook hands with Buck and Sis, Sue Ann and Uncle Don. Reverend Glenn Ludwig greeted thirty-five guests on the lawn. He said the benediction, led the Lord’s Prayer, and pronounced my father and Belinda man and wife. I was nine.
Carmen’s mother and father had begged her to wait. But Belinda accepted his proposal less than three months after bumping into him, a protective cast still wrapped around her right forearm. She sold her townhouse in Carlisle and cut ties with her friends. In Abbottstown, a few miles from Hanover, she and my father built a new house atop a hill overlooking eleven acres. Reachable by gravel road, the isolated farmstead echoed with the sounds of barking dogs, tractor wheels crunching and grinding, deer hunters firing their rifles, and, overhead, an occasional medevac helicopter whisking a car crash victim to York Hospital.
That first autumn, they planted seven hundred white pines along the meadow. The interior of their Yankee Barn-style house she festooned with images of child angels embroidered on pillows and cushions. One entire wall in the living room she plastered with photographs of Jason and Nicholas. At Christmas, she brought out her German smokers and placed them on the mantle, next to Santa Claus and his retinue of elves and fairies.
The prestige of marriage restored her. The mood of the country brightened, inspired by a first lady who appealed to astrology and a president who signed the nation’s first drunk-driving legislation. “It’s morning again in America,” President Reagan intoned. Belinda gave birth to Adam eleven months after the wedding. A second son, Sheanon, arrived on her calendar eighteen months later. Adam and Sheanon bore my father’s eyes and my stepmother’s blond bangs. Visitors remarked on their uncanny resemblances to the children portrayed in the photographs. Adam and Jason and Sheanon and Nicholas even shared respective personality traits. In my half-brothers, Belinda saw the gleaming reincarnations of her deceased children.
She soon stopped taking the long route between Abbottstown and Hanover. She went right over Red Hill. She returned to work in a special education classroom in New Oxford. She never visited the three graves in Carlisle. Instead, she participated in prayer chains and stoked the glow of her celestial faith. “I can’t tell you how many times in school,” she often remarked, “that I said to my aide at the end of the day, ‘I’ve got to check the calendar, it’s got to be a full moon.’ Because when full moons hit, it’s just pandemonium. The jails and hospitals fill up too.” She continued to consult mediums, now backed by my father’s sympathetic credulity. On the third anniversary of the collision, he opened his eyes and claimed to see an apparition of a little girl staring at him from their bedroom closet. He said she wore a white dressing gown. A medium in Hanover told Belinda the girl had been her daughter in a former life. “She’s right there with you now,” the medium exclaimed.
Every twenty-third of December, Buck descended into the basement on McKinley Avenue and flipped through a file of newspaper clippings stored in beneath his work bench. Sis venerated divine emanations. On vacation at the Jersey shore, she used to get up early with Jason and stroll along the surf. The summer before the collision, Jason had waded with delight toward a school of starfish he spied in the low tide. The summer after, a starfish washed up at Sis’s feet. She pinched it out of the silt and took it home.
The sixth anniversary of the collision vindicated Belinda’s metaphysical conviction. She drove Adam home from his nursery school. “Mommy,” he blurted out from the back seat, “do you remember that time Jesus picked me up and put me in your arms?” A surge of exultation passed through her. She had repossessed the souls of Jason and Nicholas.
The child in me esteemed Belinda’s healthy-minded resilience. I admired how she resisted the flattened identity of the trauma plot. After moving to the city and finding a second home in the language of modernity, however, I bucked the sentimental view of time and circumstance prevailing on my native ground. William James, philosopher of the “multiverse,” would have recognized the old Americans of Adams County as believers in “the block universe.” In this psychic constitution, James wrote, “the frame of things is an absolute unit,” the horizon of novel possibility terminally recessive. After my fall into modernity’s self-consciousness, I realized that the block universe had enlisted me as an extra in a spiritual drama whose prewritten script floated above history’s nest of thorns, a netherworld in which “all time is simultaneously present,” as James wrote.
To my father, Belinda’s tragedy must have felt more authentic than his own. To me, the magic circle they improvised came to seem like a mutual confidence trick, a bathetic move from the sublime to the fantastic that divorced time from history and bore no more reality than the masquerade of men who converge in nearby Gettysburg every July to reenact battle scenes of mass death. “It is what it is,” my father often avowed, burying the elements of volition and chance in quicksand triggered by my questions. Death arrived, he said, “when your number comes up.” About the deaths of children in Vietnam, the precipitating cause of his crackup, he never opined. Yet the shame he tried to sublimate in Belinda’s story erupted in beastly rages. A sentence in W.G. Sebald’s The Natural History of Destruction articulated a fragile suspicion that I eventually embraced as my own. “I had grown up,” Sebald wrote, “with the feeling that something was being kept from me: at home, at school, and by the German writers whose books I read hoping to glean information about the monstrous events in the background of my own life.”
Thirty-five years after Christmas on Red Hill, after my father’s “number came up,” I drove to the Lutheran Theological Seminary in Gettysburg to reintroduce myself to Reverend Glenn Ludwig. A boyhood spell of brooding over souls and demons had broken during an adolescence spent crossing and recrossing my restless legs in the pews. The clangor of church bells now fallen silent, my rabbit’s foot discarded, my fear of ghosts banished, I was left to reckon with the poetic fictions that opened up the abyss in my life. I saw a father and stepmother who swaddled the past in blindfolds and hallucinated the forwarding hand of spirits. Maybe a conversation with Reverend Ludwig could jog loose some piece of the origin story I sought.
The aftermath of the collision came back to him vividly. At the Mass in Carlisle, he said, he had nearly lost his composure while standing over the two tiny white caskets on their trestles. He recalled several visits to McKinley Avenue. I asked if he had not fretted then over the medium who operated out of the anteroom of St. Paul’s. According to Deuteronomy 18: 10-11, “There shall not be found among you anyone who practices divination, a soothsayer, or an augur, or a sorcerer, or a charmer or a medium, or a wizard or a necromancer.” Satan could have been impersonating Carmen, Jason, and Nicholas during the séance. Reincarnation, I further observed, contradicted the church’s core doctrine of resurrection.
Reverend Ludwig was nonplussed. Reincarnation could stand as a parallel belief, he averred, a consolation that did not preclude resurrection so long as one did not push the theology too far. As he knew, the German Lutherans inhabiting Adams County did not care to be pushed. He had walked with Belinda through her valley of dry bones. He had assured her that Carmen, Jason, and Nicholas went to heaven. He had not risked tut-tutting over canonical doctrine. In a crisis, the congregants of St. Paul’s called on him for the purpose of saying as little as necessary. A verbose intercession over theological scruples would offend their stoicism, embarrass their rural modesty.
We discussed the spiritual bricolage in Grimm’s Fairy Tales, the timeless tales that my grandmother read to me at bedtime. They illustrated how salvation by faith, requiring no miracle of grace, invited Lutherans to turn to paganism for aesthetic solutions to existential anguish. The German tradesmen, artisans, and yeoman farmers who had settled the area must have carried pagan mysticism out of the Black Forest and into the Pennsylvania wilderness. “The Juniper Tree,” one of the fairy tales set down by the brothers Grimm, even told the grisly tale of a decapitated young boy’s metamorphosis to a reincarnated soul.
I asked Reverend Ludwig about the premarital counseling he conducted for Belinda and my father. Had he asked my father about his spiritual hangover from Vietnam? No, the reverend answered, he knew better than to broach the topic. His own father had left his faith at the Battle of Tarawa, one of the most horrific of World War II, and had returned home cold and distant. He never spoke about the war and scorned his son’s entry into the ministry.
As I departed, Reverend Ludwig mentioned a piece of news that gave me pause. The campus where we sat, the oldest Lutheran seminary in America, was scheduled to close permanently. I wondered to myself whether the church’s doctrinal reticence had not been a mistake. As Marylanders poured northward to escape their state’s income tax, Lutherans now counted half as many worshippers as Catholics in twice their number of congregations.
A final facet of December 23, 1979 nagged at me. All these years, the voices on the other side of Red Hill had remained mute. Belinda had often recounted the collision. The three strangers in the Mercury, however, she had let go, never inquiring about their identities or circumstances. Their foreignness had added social disgrace to her injuries. A respectable white Christian family snuffed out by three Mexicans was mortifying. She repeated just one symbolic detail. The men, she said erroneously, had ridden in a Cadillac.
My investigation suggested that Armando Merino, the agent of the atrocity, had left little trace in the vicinity. The Hanover police had once picked him up for disorderly conduct. A marriage certificate dated three months before the collision was signed by a justice of the peace. Merino’s father, according to the certificate, worked as a foreman in Guanajuato, Mexico, his own birthplace. The white woman who had appeared at his funeral must have been his betrothed, a local woman named Mary Ann Danner. Her mother was born in Germany. Mother and daughter worked side by side in a sewing factory in Hanover. Mary Ann’s cursive filled every part of the marriage application. Merino signed his name in block lettering.
I stopped by Feiser Funeral Home with my information and learned the name of the minister who had conducted Merino’s service. I took the turnpike into the apple orchards and turned onto a side road toward the Assembly of Pentecostal Church of Jesus. Pastor Hector Ramos said he often retold the story of the collision in his sermons. To this day, Ramos swore, he had never confronted an event so harrowing. He implored the migrants in his ministry to believe that Hispanics could become bank managers, lawyers, and doctors. “But when you hit the bottle, that changes everything,” he grimaced. “The bottle distorts all kinds of stuff. They just can’t get away from it.” Ramos himself, born in Puerto Rico, had nearly died from years of wanton consumption of beer, whisky, and vodka. When his met his wife, she introduced him to Jesus Christ. He converted from his Catholicism to her Pentecostalism and drank never more.
I asked Pastor Ramos if he entertained beliefs in predestination or reincarnation. He smiled and clapped together a palmful of air. “The reasoning is beyond us,” he said. “Trust God. God is sovereign. He has the right to do as he pleases with us. There’s a lot of whys, but it’s all in God’s hands. Our minds, our doings, are usually based on something else. God doesn’t have love. He is love. So, we just have to trust. Trust God. He knows best.”
The deaths of children prompted the most dangerous theological problems he allowed. When I pressed him, he did not turn ruminative, like Reverend Ludwig. He turned rock-ribbed and invoked the Book of Job.
I thanked Pastor Ramos and drove to the cemetery in New Oxford, pausing before my old brick house to remember the moment I had stood inside with my mother, looked out the window, and stared at the hearse conveying “the man who killed Belinda’s family” to his final destination.
I found headstones marking the graves of my father, grandfather, and grandmother above the banks of Conewago Creek. My search did not turn up Armando Merino’s plot. I knocked on the caretaker’s door. The temporary marker, he reported, was mowed over many years ago. Before me, nobody had asked about the spot. He directed me to a section where the bodies of such persons reposed in eternal anonymity.
I walked over and stood for awhile, gazing down at the grass. “Every moment is a window on all time,” Thomas Wolfe wrote in Look Homeward, Angel, channeling the sovereign spirit of Adams County. Yet Armando Merino never went home again, and my efforts to see past the palimpsest of memory were blocked by smudges and silences, the picture window between heaven and earth fated to remain opaque. Despite myself, I glanced skyward and wondered who possessed the man’s soul now.
[This essay first appeared in Liberties in 2025.]