Memory beads

His latest set of rosary beads looked like marbles save for their chocolate brown color. Their maker had strung together each bead, about a third of an inch in diameter, using a length of black string knotted up like a lasso with a crucifix at the tail end. Bruno, their bachelor owner often kept the beads in his pocket. When he prayed on the move, he fished them out with his right hand, and to punctuate his mental Amens, drew them one by one between thumb and forefinger down the string.

These beads are powerful weapons. Bruno learned this from the yellowed pages of a book that he and his cousin Faith read together in the ’80s when they were kids. Faith and her family kept a set of beads, too; pink ones that her mother sprayed with rose scented perfume. “Let’s use them,” Bruno’s cousin had told him, almost whispering. He had nodded, though he did not quite know how to wield the beads in battle or whether or not war raged.

A hundred meters from his grade school yard there had been an acacia tree that shaded an empty ant hill. Bruno and his classmates used to eat lunch and play in the shade, running up and down the incline the ants made. When tag or cops and robbers got tiresome they wandered about the knee-high brush and talked about everything from ghosts to apparitions of the Blessed Mother. Their conversations sometimes gave Bruno goosebumps. But he did not run away. He felt amply armed to ward off a specter should any appear. The Blessed Mother would help him. He had a set of green beads that glowed in the dark.

As the years went by, Bruno learned by heart the prayers attached to the beads. He and his family offered them at home. His Mama’s beads were cream, his sister’s yellow. After much repetition he memorized the kinds of mysteries, episodes from the life of the Holy Family and the days they should be commemorated. Joyful ones were for Mondays and Thursdays, sorrowful ones for Tuesdays and Fridays and glorious ones for Wednesdays, Saturdays and Sundays. He realized he liked the oratios, even when he grew old enough to question the existence of ghoulish foes. The family moved frequently. He transferred schools and found new and lost touch with some old friends. But he always felt an inner peace whenever he prayed with the beads.

Bruno was not a lone rosary beneficiary, in history or in his day. Once he had read that nearly 800 years ago in France, Saint Dominic de Guzman, founder of the Order of Preachers, found in the prayers of the beads serenity in converting the Albigensians, who glorified adultery, fornication and suicide. In the early 2000s, James, a friend of Bruno’s told him that he used to be an atheist who dabbled in the occult until he learned to pray the rosary.

“One day, the summer after my sophomore year of high school, I bought a rosary, no reason at all, I just did. I just thought it was a cool necklace,” James said.

“Then one beautiful summer night, up here in northern Indiana, the moon was real bright, the grass real green, the perfect night for any occult master. I said my occult incantations, then said the ‘Our Father’ and ‘Hail Mary’ real slowly, then I walked into my house with the rosary around my neck. When I shut my door, the rosary fell off my neck in pieces. This was a hematite bead, reinforced steel chain. As strong as I am, I couldn’t pull it apart. But there it was before my eyes in pieces. And then I heard a voice saying ‘Stop.’ I figured this meant stop everything you are doing in this lifestyle of debauchery, and these deities which I now knew were completely false, were not speaking to me. It was Jesus, the One, True, Most High God.”

Bruno’s experiences of the rosary were not as dramatic as Saint Dominic’s or James’, but he was content with them. Whenever he prayed fingering the beads, his mind’s eye beheld gospel scenes, more like memories than imaginings. Perhaps, he mused, the Blessed Mother, who more than anyone else pondered the life and times of her Divine Son, lent pray-ers her remembrances each time they took up the beads. Then in meditation they would know the feel of swaddling clothes and of Christmas hay, of the Good Friday eclipse and of Easter’s rays, and grow in the certainty that the evangelists wrote no fiction.