THE FIRST MARTYR
Mosaic from the shrine of Pope St Pius IX in the basilica of San Lorenzo fuori le mura in Rome.
Dad had rules when it came to The Grateful Dead. At ten, I knew there was a right way to listen to his favourite band:
We scoffed at later-career shows with too many vocal solos from Donna or Bobby.
We always followed “Scarlet Begonias” with “Fire on the Mountain”
We only listened to “Saint Stephen” when we had a good enough reason.
Good enough reasons were few and far between. When I was ten, I remember sitting in the passenger seat of our black 1995 Mercury Villager on our way back from Midnight Mass, so sure that this time, he wouldn’t skip over the song. It had been years since I had heard it last. A kind of electric nausea plagued me, breath stopped at the inhale in anticipation, little fists clenched, excited and afraid, only to be extinguished by an instant SKIP no later than the first chord.
Dad and I had gone to St. Andrews on our own that night. We sat and stood and sat and stood and knelt and stood in a pew for the first and only time that year. We went up to the altar during the passing of the peace to see my Nana, radiant in her red choir cassock.
On our way home, we stopped outside a pub. I’ll be right back, he said, and he stepped out into the snow and shut the car door behind him. I used one of my mittens to wipe the fog from my window and watched him walk inside.
I could see my breath, and each time I exhaled, I pretended I had just taken a drag of a cigarette. Benson & Hedges—just like Dad. A few minutes passed. I looked out the window again, but Dad hadn’t come out yet.
A thought struck me then: all of Dad’s Grateful Dead tapes were here, in the center console of the Villager. I could play “Saint Stephen” on my own. He would never know.
Another check out the window. No sign of him. I lifted the lid of the center console and rummaged through the carefully organized CD stacks and hard plastic tape cases. Wrong tape. No. Neil Young. REM. Fleetwood Mac. The Police. No. No. It has to be here. It’s here. I know it’s here.
He’s going to be angry, a voice inside my head said.
I stopped. The words felt like mine—at least, they felt like they came from my own brain. From inside. But the voice wasn’t mine.
Hello? I said aloud.
I waited. There was about a minute of silence in my head before I heard the voice again. Lower than mine, but still a kid’s. Quiet. Formal in cadence.
Do you remember last Christmas? The coffee maker?
Last Christmas? Last Christmas. Last year. Christmas. Yes. The coffee maker. My mom and brother and I had bought my Dad a coffee maker from Canadian Tire. Red wrapping paper. Too much scotch tape. Shitty, compared to the gifts he got us, he said. Cheap. Slammed cupboard doors. I felt light-headed.
This isn’t like that, I said aloud. He’s in a good mood.
I’m going to need you to trust me, the voice said.
I thought back to Midnight Mass.
Are you God? I asked.
I don’t think so, the voice said. I think my name is Stephen.
Like the song?
Sort of.
I heard laughter from outside. Dad came out of the Judge & Jester and walked back towards the Villager. I slammed the center console shut.
Maybe don’t tell Mom where we went, he added suddenly. She’d overreact. You know how she is.
I know, Stephen said.
I know, I said aloud.
*
The anticipation I felt for hearing “Saint Stephen” matched that of Dead Heads across the globe, who scarcely heard the song live.
Appearing on the Dead’s third studio album Aoxomoxoa (1969), The Grateful Dead played “Saint Stephen” a total of 289 times in their career: first on May 24, 1968, at the National Guard Armory in St. Louis (DeadBase X), dropping it out of their repertoire completely in 1971, and including it in special performances from 1976-1979 and 1983 (David Dodd, Dead.Net). After Jerry Garcia’s death, his memorial service was held at Saint Stephen’s Episcopal Church in Belvedere, Marin County, California (David Dodd, Dead.Net).
Though Garcia is credited with writing most of the song’s music, with bandmate Phil Lesh composing for the coda, the lyrics were written by Robert Hunter, who—despite rumors to the contrary—insists that the song is exclusively about the first documented Christian martyr: St. Stephen.
St. Stephen was a Christian deacon in Jerusalem. He appears in chapters six and seven of the book of the Acts of the Apostles, making a rousing speech in defense of his faith before the rabbinic court and enraging his Jewish audience, who, subsequently, carry him out of the city and stone him to death. Most notably, his final moments of life echo that of Jesus on the Cross: “While they were stoning him, Stephen prayed, ‘Lord Jesus, receive my spirit,’ Then he fell on his knees and cried out, ‘Lord, do not hold this sin against them.’ When he had said this, he fell asleep.” (Acts 7:59-60, NIV).
St. Stephen’s speech in Acts 7 is a heavily contested passage of scripture. Theologians haven’t come to a consensus as to why his version of oral biblical history doesn’t quite line up with the historical order of those same events in the Old Testament.
I experienced something similar with the Stephen in my head. We spent the early hours of that Christmas Morning laying awake in my twin bed, comparing what memories we shared, and what memories we didn’t. We tried to piece together the picture of a life.
Do you remember when we lived above the pizzeria? And we all shared a pullout couch as a bed?
Yes. Dad cracked the apartment door. And the woman with the clipboard gave us a set of plastic farm animals. There were ten piglets. And a sow.
I don’t remember that. Do you remember playing on the softball team sponsored by the Royal Le Page? With the red jerseys? Bright red like fire trucks?
A little. Like I had a dream about it. I’m not very fond of softball.
The contradiction confused me as a kid: how could I have someone living in my head who remembered things I couldn’t remember? Who understood my life in a way that I couldn’t? Stephen and I were undeniably connected, but also separate. The same, but different.
My life at ten had a lot of these contradictions. We were Anglican, and we only went to church once or twice a year. While at St. Andrews, we prayed and communed and publicly pronounced a life of faith; while at home, we never spoke about church or God. When Dad was happy, he bought my brother and I toys and put thought and care into elaborate action figure setups for us to play with; when he was angry, the toys were held over us as another favor we could never pay back. I loved my father more than anyone on earth, and I feared him more than anyone on earth. We loved “Saint Stephen”, and we couldn’t let ourselves listen to it. All these things were true.
*
I woke to my parents arguing while it was still dark on Christmas morning. In the four years we lived in that house, they did most of their fighting in our library—an octagon-shaped space bordered with dark wood bookcases high enough that the tops of the paperbacks touched the popcorn ceiling.
Don’t get involved, Stephen whispered from the back of my brain.
I didn’t listen. I remember screaming, and a petrified look on Dad’s face, the neighbours will hear you and suddenly, I was on the hardwood floor, strong hands clamped tight over my mouth and nose, until my vision tunneled, and instead of the spines on the shelves above, I saw supernovas. Just when I thought I might like to sleep or die, I blinked
and I was separate from myself. I was up high, atop one of the bookcases, and Stephen was in my body below. Stephen did not fight like me. He was a better me than I was.
My body didn’t feel like my body from up high, and in that moment, Stephen didn’t feel like part of me. I was terrified, and I was relieved.
*
Later, I sat on the front porch rocking chair in my pink robe and slippers. Dad sat in a chair beside me smoking Benson & Hedges cigarettes, his bulky silver laptop balanced on his lap. The orange early morning sun was slowly waking, not yet round or high in the sky.
He smiled at me like we had both gotten a full night’s sleep, eager and ready for the day, even though we both had darkened circles around our tired eyes.
Don't hold it against him, Stephen said.
I smiled back. Pretending that things were okay wasn’t the same as them being okay, but sometimes, it was enough.
He clicked around on his laptop until he reached Archive.com. The built-in speaker was choppy, coughing out sound with difficulty, but I could still recognize the opening notes to “Saint Stephen”.
*
I held all these truths in my heart last year, sitting in the pews of my Anglican Church on December 26th—Boxing Day to me for most of my life, until I learned it was the Feast Day of St. Stephen.
There are others in my head now—separate parts of me with different ages and names. None of them enjoy church as much as Stephen. Something about the smell of incense and wood and wine. The clear ring of bells and the rustle of hands through thick paper leaflets, trying to find what page the Vicar is on. Moments where we lower our knees to the foldout kneelers upholstered with red cushions, head down, hands clasped, ribs pried open to expose our beating heart, every thought, word, and deed in the open air for all to see.
I say the prayers aloud. Stephen says them in our head, completing my sentences when I forget.
And when the congregation stands for the communion hymn, we wait in silence for the organist to begin, half-expecting to hear The Dead.
