The Fifteenth Station

The Fifteenth Station

When Lukas took the fourteenth candle out of the niche, the man in the stone was still blind.

He tilted the candle to keep the warm wax from running over his fingers and took a closer look. The man stood at the foot of the tomb. He wore a long robe, had a back like a sack of potatoes, and held the dead Jesus by the legs. Where his face should have been, there was a shallow, pale hollow.

Lukas knew the relief. He knew all fourteen.

On the way up, he had stopped here to tie his right shoe. Last year, during the final prayer, he had watched an ant crawl across this man’s mouth. He remembered because it had carried something white away in its mandibles, and he hadn’t known whether it was a crumb or an egg.

Back then, the man had had a mouth.

Now there was nothing.

A car door slammed behind Lukas. Voices drifted across the chapel forecourt. Someone coughed so hard that a woman told him he really needed to see a doctor.

“Mr. Wimmer?”

The sacristan came around the pillar. He had locked the chapel door and still held the ring of keys.

“What?”

“His face is gone.”

Wimmer didn’t look right away. First he studied Lukas, then the candle, then the stone.

“Frost.”

“It was there before.”

“Frost cracks the sandstone. Happens every year.”

Lukas stepped aside to show him the hollow. It didn’t look as though anything had broken off. The edges were soft, as if someone had pressed a thumb into wet clay.

Wimmer took the candle out of his hand.

“The others, too.”

Lukas gave him the three candle stubs from his jacket pocket. The smallest was still warm. Some of the wax had gotten under his fingernail.

From the forecourt, Mrs. Schober called out to ask whether anyone else wanted a ride down to the village.

“I’m going the lower way,” Lukas said.

Wimmer slipped the candles into a linen bag. His fingers were thick and dark red from the cold.

“Take the access road.”

“I’m taking the shortcut.”

The sacristan raised his head.

Lukas waited. It was the kind of pause adults usually took while searching for a reason something wasn’t allowed.

“Your mother knows you’re coming?”

“Yes.”

“Then go.”

Wimmer said it quietly.

Lukas zipped his jacket over his altar-server robe. The white fabric showed beneath it, almost reaching his knees. He could have changed in the sacristy, but the other boys had been there, and Simon had asked again whether his father had a new family now.

Three times.

The third time, Lukas had told him to shut up.

Now he just wanted to go home.

He walked between the last two shrines toward the forest. At the first spruce, he stopped to shake wax off his finger.

Wimmer was still standing by the fourteenth station.

From there, he couldn’t see Lukas.

Even so, he said, “If you hear someone, stay on the path.”

Lukas thought he must have misheard.

Then a branch snapped under his shoe, and the last car pulled out of the parking lot.