Gloria, In Excelsis Deo Home for the Aged | The Word for Pepper

Gloria, in Excelsis Deo Home for the Aged

‘Domine Deus,’ (Lord God) she says, her
lips quivering, as they did. It didn’t
seem sadness or fear. They always quivered,
as long as I knew her, but maybe it
was always sadness and fear. ‘Domine
Deus.’
(Lord God) ‘What are you saying?’ I
ask her, but she glares at me with pale blue
eyes—
‘Agnes Dei.’ (Lamb of God)—annoyed at
my interruption—or my ignorance—
and doesn’t answer. Am I a heathen?
Why don’t I know Latin? Or maybe she
doesn’t remember me, her favorite
grandchild. A fact, but now, who am I to
ask? ‘Filius Patrus’ (Son of the Father)
She seems mad I have a toddler, though she
came to my wedding. ‘Qui tollis peccata mundi’
(Who Takes Away the Sins of the World).
Perhaps she can’t remember what she says,
but falls into it—the deepest grooves
in her memory— ‘Miserere nobis’
(Have Mercy on Us) like dogs that find their
way out of the wilderness to their homes
five hundred miles away. ‘Suscipe
deprecationem nostram’ (Hear Our Prayer)
She is far from the home of her childhood,
far from the town where her ancestors lived
and built ships and the church and bridges and
sailed away to the edge of the world. Far
from her mother, who tried to choke her.
Far from her father, who sent her away.
‘Qui sedes ad dexteram Patris’ (Who
Sits at the Right Hand of the Father) She
sneers at two white-haired women in wheelchairs,
embracing across the awkwardness, one
comforting the other, who is crying
for her father. ‘I hope something happens
to me before I get to be like that.’
‘Like what?’ I ask. ‘An old lady,’ she answers,
with a wave of dismissal. ‘miserere
nobis.’ (Have Mercy on Us). ‘I see,’ I
say. and I do. Amen.

---

The Word for Pepper

He forgot things, the old man,
like what a pepper is called, and how to get home from
the store.
And your name.
And he forgot—the suicide daughter, maybe.
And the two wives who died,
but not the third. Maybe.
He whistled all the time, shedding the past
like the word for pepper,
and his living daughters
left the room to cry.
Bent over by arthritis and time,
he spied the lint on the floor and couldn’t resist it, and
he fell, and fell again, for a scrap of paper, for nothing.
He knew he loved you still.
You were his communist son, his hobo Charlie Chaplin.
Long ago, on the shore of an island in the Pacific,
he saw a water-buffalo for the first time—
young kid from Alabama with no Wild Kingdom—
standing over him.

Wendy Barry is a Connecticut Yankee living in South Carolina. She is the co-editor of The Annotated Anne of Green Gables from Oxford University Press. She is a poet, gardener, jewelry-maker, painter, teacher, and friend to dogs.