Person on the Page

One year a few weeks before Easter, we in the hills of Western Maryland received a sign. As the new light of a spring morning appeared over the mountains, a man trudged down Baltimore Street in Cumberland dragging an eight-foot log cross.  He shouldered the cross beam and leaned forward at an acute angle, pushing the weight toward the intersection of Baltimore and Liberty Streets. His hair, long and damp with sweat, hung over his eyes.

After that first appearance, the man was there every day, making a routine of his trek through the middle of town.  Attached to the foot of the cross were wheels that gradually worked themselves loose from rolling over the gravel parking lots and uneven sidewalks of downtown Cumberland. They wobbled miserably, uttering a human-sounding shriek, slowing the man as they added to, rather than eased, his struggle.  Every day he crossed the bridge over the Potomac River and heaved his load uphill toward the historic churches on Washington Street.

Something new doesn’t go unnoticed in Cumberland. Some of us who grew up and lived there all our lives yearned for an interruption to the dailiness, the predictability of life in a small town. During the decades leading up to the man’s arrival, many whose families had inhabited the town for generations left, seeking something new—opportunity, prosperity, a broader view than a life nestled in the mountains provides—out there in the world. Those of us who stayed carried on the lives that we had always known, in surroundings that, except for the gradual decay, never changed.  So when the man appeared, our curiosity awakened, and stories started to spread.   

Some said that the man was a local, that one evening he ventured into the Assembly of God church on Mechanic Street and had a religious experience that led him to enact this public display of his faith.  Others said he had appeared out of nowhere, and that he took up residence in a cave along the bank of the Potomac where he slept at night, his cross propped beside him.

 Some thought him a menace, like the woman who went to the police claiming that his cross should be considered a weapon.  Others said he must be wheeling it around town to atone for some sin he had committed.  All we knew for sure was that there he was, and those of us who ventured near him on his way could hear him saying quietly to himself, over and over, It is finished.  It is finished.  

The man’s appearance brought no significant changes to Cumberland.  No local evangelists reacted by holding tent revivals in the fields on the outskirts of town.  No churches reported increased interest in Christianity among the town’s unchurched.  Nor were there any protests of the man’s insertion of himself and his cross into the lives of Western Marylanders.  His presence brought only a feeling of unease among us. The unpleasant spectacle of self-imposed suffering, the painful moan of the wheels, the man’s sweat so noticeable as he pushed forward across town. A living image, a figure, a sign, surely, of something.  But what?  In the warming breeze of a typical spring in the mountains, something felt out of joint.  The scene the man created was metachronistic—an historical moment out of order, the image of a legendary figure in the wrong place at the wrong time.  Was that the reason we felt uneasy?

Or was the discomfort due simply to the fact that the man had taken literally what was meant to be understood figuratively? Did his act in reality bear no religious significance at all?  Was the unease that the man caused merely the result of inappropriately concrete thinking?  For the majority of Christians, Jesus’ words, If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow me, are understood metaphorically.  When these words were read in the churches of Western Maryland, no one felt obligated to build a wooden cross and carry it across town. People did not feel compelled to change their lives.  They continued to work, raise families, hunt and fish and knit and garden and follow their favorite sports teams.  They lived out the stories that had been written for them by the confluence of life in a mountain town.

After Good Friday that year, the man with his cross-on-wheels disappeared.  He was no longer seen heaving his burden up the hill from downtown Cumberland past the Episcopal and Presbyterian churches where the more prosperous members of our small community worshipped, to Prospect Square where City Hall stood.  Maybe he went back to his cave along the Potomac to await the Resurrection.  Or maybe he was just a regular work-a-day person who, after this anomolous performance, put on his work clothes and returned to his job.  In any case, when we no longer saw him, downtown Cumberland returned to normal.   By Sunday, he was all but forgotten. 

On Easter morning, those of us who were church-goers went to church as usual, untroubled by the previous week’s spectacle.  The meanng of the sign—if it was a sign—was lost.  That year, the sun attended church with us, lending its light to the pastel rainbow we created in our Sunday finery.  The only crosses we were urged to bear were the church’s hard pews and our stiff new hats and pinching shoes.