Up the Steps
by F. Brett Cox
28. You stand at the bottom of the steps, each worn smooth by over a century of devotion. God's love is manifest in all things; so you were taught and so you believe. Yet the steps rise before you in seeming indifference. They do not care how, or if, you get to the top. Neither are they concerned about the wash of malevolent noise that lies behind you, barely within hearing. Consciousness and purpose lie solely within your head and heart. You lower yourself to your knees on the bottom step, bracing yourself with your hands three steps above. The almost frictionless surface feels more like stone than wood. You begin your crawl to the top.
27. On the second step you already hurt. You wish you had knee pads, shin guards. That would of course defeat the purpose of the ritual. And where, now, would you get such equipment? Still. It hurts.
26. You decided to come to this place to enact this ritual, undergo this penance, almost unconsciously as you fled the collapse of Quebec City, whose inhabitants mistakenly thought a retreat to the Old City, its fortifications intact, would save them. It did not. As the edge of the step presses into your shins like a dull knife, you remember the rendered bodies, the geysers of blood, the shrieks of the fallen. The despair of the final few who huddled uselessly within the Citadelle. The noise of the swarm as it overran the ramparts and covered the ancient fort like a stinking quilt.
25. The noise is now just a little closer as you push up to the next step. You chose before the catastrophe to return to the province of your birth. If anyone were left to question this decision, you would have no answer. You could have gone someplace else. But you didn't.
24. The first miracle was getting out of the city alive. The second was finding a car with the key nudging out, barely visible, from under the driver's seat, and just enough gas to get you to within a long trudge to Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupre. During your approach there was no sign of the hordes, and for a blessed interval, the world was silent. Then the noise, all the more horrible for being barely audible, and you quickened your pace as best you could, past the basilica towards the steps.
23. You wanted to enter the basilica and pay final tribute to its splendors, but there was no time. The steps were all.
22. It was your great-aunt Abrielle who convinced you. She asked each year to come to this Scala Santa--she would never make it to Rome; she would not fly and grew seasick confronted with the motion of a public pool--and go up the steps. As she grew older, the requests became demands. Your parents, more indulgent than her own children, brought her, and your two sisters, and you. But mostly her. Her wheezing progress up the steps its own miracle, her body audibly slapping the wood, your own eyes in later years focused on her sensible shoes as you tried desperately not to look at her buttocks shifting back and forth as she made her way to forgiveness.
21. The fronts of your trouser legs are damp; your scraped legs are starting to bleed. The noise is closer, now fully audible. You are less than halfway to the top.
20. The first time you witnessed Abrielle's penance, you were young enough to think it a game, a race, and your parents quickly grabbed you when you tried to follow her up the stairs. When she reached the top, you applauded. Your sisters laughed at you all the way from the basilica north to the ski resort that was for them the only destination that mattered.
19. Your parents never refused to make the stop during the family vacation to let your great-aunt affirm her faith. Over the years, their support grew more grudging; as your sisters grew older they increasingly applied themselves to their phones and eventually could not be bothered to comment one way or the other. You never applauded again. But your admiration and awe were renewed annually.
18. The noise behind you grows louder, but you have to pause, if only for a second. Your arms tremble as you try to take some weight off your knees. Tentatively, you put your weight back on your knees, stretch your inflamed back, reach your hands out. You teeter and for one panicked moment think you're falling backwards. But you don't.
