The Relic and a Bit of Russian History

So, at first, I’d thought the Reverend Father Alabaster Fudge had said the sacred horn of St. Anvil.  I don’t know.  There’s plenty of artwork out there depicting angels blowing trumpets and such, so I figured this was related somehow, that perhaps this St. Anvil fellow had a thing for brass instruments, that the thing in the box was the shard of a trumpet, or a trombone, or, hell, maybe even a tuba.  It was tiny and a rusty yellowish, like a raw kernel of corn, or the decayed incisor of some long-dead neanderthal.  Honestly, though—and I wasn’t sure how or why this image had gotten stuck in my head—but what it really looked like was the head of a Lego man, at least one that had been chewed, swallowed, and shat out by a dog, perhaps an ultra-rare piece to some niche, religious Lego set, which is a thing, believe it or not.  But no, Al had confirmed that inside the box was the sacral horn of St. Anvil of Severny Island.  Let me explain.

Firstly, the sacral horns are tiny, bony protuberances on either side of the sacrum that project downward and connect with the corresponding coccygeal horns of the coccyx.  Whatever the hell that means; I got that from the internet.  Long story short, it’s a bone near the tailbone.  Secondly, St. Anvil was a priest in late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth-century Russia, notably during the Time of Troubles, a period of instability and political crisis following the death of the heirless and potentially mentally retarded Tsar Feodor I, who only found himself in that position and with that title because his father and the then current tsar, Ivan the Terrible, in a fit of rage had murdered his firstborn son and the heir apparent, Ivan Ivanovich, leaving poor Feodor as the new heir apparent.  Then, once Feodor had ascended the throne, his younger half-brother and the newest heir apparent, Dmitry, was exiled and died at the age of 8 under, let us say, mysterious circumstances, his death itself then followed by the attempted usurpations of at least three separate “False Dmitrys,” impostors claiming to have somehow escaped the assassination attempt on the real Dmitry.  My God, monarchies, am I right?  No wonder Sam Adams and his fellow patriots tossed that tea and gave the ole revolutionary boot to King George, that chubby and puffy-lipped fucker. 

Anyway, following Feodor’s death, St. Anvil did his best to effectuate law out of the lawlessness, order out of the chaos, healing out of the strife, as he continued to hold daily mass, feed the hungry, tend to the sick, all while loudly protesting against the rampant political violence.  Well, whichever Russian lunatic who was in power at the time had had enough and deported St. Anvil, along with dozens of other “criminals,” hard and soft, to Severny Island, the third largest uninhabited island in the world, an Arctic wasteland of harsh weather and unforgiving tundra, with only a few dinghies’ worth of supplies, their obvious exile presented to the angry plebs and mobs of St. Anvil’s followers under the guise of a colonization experiment (read: penal colonization experiment).  Yes, good ole Anvil, willing and able, doing what he can to expand the empire!  Yet, surprisingly, he and the others had apparently lasted longer than anyone had thought possible.  In the early 1900s, a research expedition commissioned by Nicholas II, the last tsar of Russia (who, himself, along with his family and servants, were murdered by the Bolsheviks after his abdication—are you sensing a common theme here?), was sent to the island to study the walrus population.  There, the researchers stumbled across several crude shacks and other testaments to a makeshift and long-ago abandoned settlement, and, clearly having not been apprised of this possibility before their departure, radioed back to the mainland for further instruction.  The Russian Empire had clearly forgotten about its banishing of St. Anvil and the others—sure, the archival process in those ensuing 300 years was shoddy at best, and who cared about accurate recordkeeping when the only thing you were worried about was getting your head chopped off?—and it misconstrued the radioed message as evidence that the blasted Brits or Germans had set up shop inside Russian territory and were planning an imminent attack!  To make another long story short, Nicholas II dispatched a second expedition to the island, this one more militaristic in nature than academic (yo, fuck them walruses!), and, while digging the trenches for a new outpost, it unearthed multiple mounds of preserved polar bear scat in the frozen crust, one such pile containing a fully intact rosary and several shards of human bones, among them the sacral horn of St. Anvil.  Supposedly. 

“This is a first-class relic,” Al said, “authenticated by the archbishop”—the archbishop meaning Archbishop Mologna, born Cian Moloney, who, after returning from his first of the required quinquennial ad limina visits to the Vatican, had been so infatuated and overwhelmed by the grandeur of it all that he’d changed the spelling of his Irish surname to look a bit more Italian—“and it’s to be stationed here for a few weeks for the nationwide relic tour.”  Ah, well, yeah, I’m no expert on relics, but it looks like you got yourself a mighty fine one there, Al, I’m real happy for you and the congregation and the archbishop, but just a quick question: why the hell are you telling me this, like, why are you showing me St. Anvil’s sacral horn, because I’ll be honest, I thought you’d called me down here to confess, to apologize—you know, for being a prick this past week—and I don’t even need, don’t want, the dramatics, either, just a simple I was a prick would suffice, yeah?

But I didn’t say any of that.  I just stood there, looking like an idiot, I guess, because Al began to extrapolate.  “St. Anvil is one of the lesser-known patron saints of the blind,” he said, clearly a bit frustrated by my lack of veneration.  “Specifically, the near-blind, while St. Lucy is for the purblind, and St. Ross the colorblind.”  Oh, of course, one must be careful, can’t be praying to the wrong guy or gal, like, hello, yes, is this St. Alexius of Rome, I’d like to file a formal prayer in regards to the church’s new bell? ah, no, see, you’re in the wrong department, I’m the patron saint of belt makers, and you’re looking for St. Agatha of Sicily, patron saint of bell makers, but she’s just down the hall and to the right, you can’t miss her.  Like, why have a single patron saint for paralysis when you can one each for monoplegia, hemiplegia, paraplegia, and quadriplegia?  Anyway, I asked Rev. Al if Anvil himself was blind, because that could help explain how he’d managed to get himself eaten by a polar bear, which then begged the follow-up question of whether he was also the patron saint of polar bears?  There is no patron saint of polar bears, Al said, but he did confirm that there is one for the Ursidae family in general (one by the name of St. Corbinian, a Frankish bishop and the Cesar Millan of bears apparently, who, after one such creature had mauled to death his mule while on a pilgrimage to Rome, had conscripted the beast into his service as his new pack animal, his ursine slave condemned to lug around his episcopal effects and baggage).  As to the first question, though, Al told me that such an inquiry was irrelevant because St. Anvil’s patronage was owed to the miracles associated with his bodily remains, not whether or not he was blind himself.  According to Al, there had been countless instances of folks being cured of their near-blindness.  How, you ask?  Well, by having St. Anvil’s sacral horn temporarily placed on the tongue like a Communion wafer.  “But the one caveat,” Al noted, “is that you must receive it from another, which is why I’ve called you down here.” 

Ah, at last, we’d reached the meat of it.  Rev. Al had called me down to the church because he wanted me to place some 400-plus-year-old bone on his tongue—a bone, mind you, that had been chewed up and shat out by a polar bear.  And look, I’m not fully out on miracles, either.  Remember, I’ve already told you about the time I’d royally fucked my ankle on that water slide, only to have it suddenly and completely healed, in this same church, too, by a healthy dollop of vanilla yogurt—slathered on by whom, though, is still a mystery, the miracle-worker’s identity ranging anywhere from the divine (the Virgin Mother herself) to the temporal (Ms. Spigot).  So, all that to say, I wasn’t as disgusted by the idea as I probably should’ve been.  Besides my own experience, I think the other part of it was that I’d figured this was the next best thing.  Meaning, if Al wasn’t going to apologize, I’d allow and accept as substitution his supplication, his kneeling down in front of me, awaiting my administration of the sacral horn of St. Anvil.  I’d started to lose my nerve, though, as Al began preparing himself for some bone-on-tongue action, but before I could withdraw myself from the undertaking, he looked up at me all nutty but serene like and said, “I’m ready, Sterling.”

It was too late, I was locked in.  Well, alrighty then, I thought, open wide because In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus and the what-have-you, here goes!