Jesus’ head rolled down the lawn, its momentum halted by the slight rise before the retaining wall. It came to rest looking up at the sky, the eyes lidless and sad, the lips parted as if searching for a lost word. The nose was a soft hollow of dust. The cement torso, which even now retained traces of its original white paint, lay farther up the slope still loosely attached to its base with twisted rods.

“Christ,” a man on the sidewalk whispered, a sound immediately consumed by the noise of the bulldozer.

An older woman, dressed in black, began to sob into her hands.

Under a winter sky the color of stone, parishioners had gathered to watch the leveling of their churchyard, not one daring to make eye contact with the other. A few men had their arms folded on the retaining wall, looking away. Flakes of ash fell from their cigarettes and stayed where they landed. With no wind, the smoke rose in thin pillars and hung in the air above them.

Elwin Cooke, the bulldozer operator, backed up to take another pass at the statue, pretending not to notice he’d just lost the head. Wasn’t it just like priests to leave their dirty work for some harmless boob like him? He’d been sent by the management company to prep the land around Holy Innocents, getting it ready for the developer and crew the next day. “Clear the slate,” his boss had said. “Everything into the dumpster.”

“Everything?” Elwin had asked, looking pointedly at the life-size statue of Christ.

His boss shrugged and made a motion across his throat. “The priests knew what would happen to anything left behind,” he said. “We’re just contracted to leave the site clean.”

The statue had seemed securely fastened to its base of granite, so Elwin had thought he could keep the whole mess intact. He was wrong. First he’d tried to gently pry the slab up with the edge of his blade, but it was firmly lodged in the frozen earth. He gave the rock one good shove to loosen it, and to his horror, the statue, arms reaching out to him, started tipping over. When he tried to break the fall with the blade, the head snapped off against the metal edge. Cheap piece of cement shit, he’d almost said out loud -- the guide rods hadn’t gone all the way to the top. The nose shattered on impact, so with nothing to act as a brake, the head bounced away, down the slope, down, down, down, practically bowling over the spectators. He was tempted to get off his machine to collect it, but then what? Throw it into the dumpster like a basketball? Toss it into the crowd? Was he expected to save that which was already abandoned?

He jammed the bulldozer into a lower gear. He was not a church-going man, and hadn’t been for years, but he still had his religious feelings. Which was more than what the priests seemed to have, who’d only bothered to find homes for certain items and not others. They’d gotten big bucks from a garden designer for the marble baptismal font, and a foreign wholesaler paid the priests cash for the church bell, organ, stained-glass, and pews. Even the crimson carpet had come to a decent end, salvaged by the moving company to line the insides of one of their vans. But the statue of Christ would have cost more to be saved than destroyed.

Elwin raised his blade, and with one push the body was completely severed from its base. He dug around to find an edge to the granite, but just as he gained a little leverage and had it up on end, the machine exhaled a long black cloud of diesel, blinding him. The rock slipped from his grasp, teetered, then landed on top of the decapitated Christ. Elwin cringed and smelled blood on his hands. Fearing that the stunned crowd might rise up and hang him, he quickly shoved the statue’s remains to the edge of the property, where sat the red dumpster, eternal resting place of the damned. He returned for the granite, but unencumbered now as it was from the statue, it was too valuable to discard. With considerable effort, he pushed it closer to the building in case the developer wanted to use it for a step or a wall, or something practical like that.

Bruce Martin, the old caretaker of Holy Innocents, sat in his van and watched from the street, with nothing left to care for. He sipped regularly from a bottle of fortified wine in his Carrhart jacket, and when the head of Christ had begun rolling he reflected upon it with a transcendent calm. Dissipation had given him the wisdom that his previous life of asceticism in the holy orders was supposed to give and hadn’t. Religious objects used to bleed with meaning around him, stalking his waking dreams with malicious intent, but now he saw things for what they were. When stripped of significance and superstition, what remained on the lawn was just an oddly-shaped chunk of fake stone.

The parishioners, though, poor bastards. They were not nearly so evolved. They had neither mastered his serene detachment nor started drinking at 8 am. This was just more salt to the wounds. Not only had they lost their spiritual home, but now they were forced to watch its bumbled execution, and see their savior crushed under the weight of arrogance. What had they done to deserve this but love their building? For generations, families had come here to examine their souls, confess their sins, and accept forgiveness. They’d been splashed with holy water and soothed by sacred oils; they’d clutched palms and walked the streets marked with ashes. Their lungs once filled with the smoke of incense. And for this devotion, they were denied even the small animal comfort of a proper goodby. They were at the mercy of events beyond their understanding, events so poorly explained that the archdiocese might just as well have been speaking in tongues. Parish closings were part of the “reconfiguration process,” churches had to be “deconsecrated,” properties had to be “deaccessioned.” All to pay for the sins of the perverts. The perverts and the fools who protected them, blinded by fear to the mission of Christ. Instead of sending them to jail where they belonged, they had just moved them around, spreading the wealth. Reconfiguring. Suffer the little children.

But not everyone was submitting without a struggle. At other final masses around the state -- and there were many -- some parishioners had refused to leave. They’d camped out in the pews, staking a claim. But Father Flanagan, off in another city now conducting worship for strangers, would have none of that here under his watch. An expert at suppressing information, he locked up the place the night before the farewell mass and left in the pink light of dawn. It was how priests had survived throughout history, donning their riot gear on the way out of town, one step ahead of an irate mob. Flanagan hadn’t even the decency to nail a note to the door. The entire parish showed up to find an abandoned church. Even the organist was out in the cold. Conflict had been avoided because contact was avoided. All they found that day was him -- Bruce -- their careless caretaker, smelling of stale wine and tobacco and stripped of his keys. Not that locks mattered. The church held no secrets for him and he could enter it any number of ways. He could have led the flock down through a broken basement window and back up to the sanctuary, but for what? No red light glowed there anymore, and the tabernacle was empty. It was far too late for heroics.

On the third day after the aborted mass, Bruce found Flanagan sneaking back at dusk to grab a few forgotten things from the rectory. Bruce, sitting on the steps with his bottle, considered the patent falsehood of assuming everything of human form had a soul.

“You shouldn’t have lied to them, Flanagan,” Bruce called out from the dark. “You led them on.”

Father Flanagan turned slowly, with a warped smile on his face. “Well, Bruce, I’d have to have known the truth in order to lie,” he said, making a steeple with his gloved fingers. “I didn’t know when I planned the mass that the archdiocese would swoop in and lock up the building to prevent any more monkey-business. There was nothing I could do.”

Then he turned his back to indicate that the conversation was over and began fumbling with his keys, muttering strange curses. Bruce put his fists in his armpits and crowed.

Flanagan turned, his features mottled in the shadows. “Get out of here, you old drunk. I let you work here out of mercy, but you were never anything but a disgrace to the job, as you were to the friars. You trespass again, I’ll have you put behind bars where you belong.”

Bruce smiled. If only it were that easy to know where you belonged. For now though, it was clear. His job was to sit in his van and bear witness to the Holy Miracle of the Condo Conversion. And then he did what he’d been trained to do in the face of utter futility. He prayed. It was not enough to pray for those on the sidewalk here today either; he had to also pray that God’s love would comfort the new tenants, who would soon lay awake nights listening to the echo of a distant requiem, their days haunted by ancient confessions emanating from the linen closet. He prayed for them all -- us sinners -- bound together now by the frightful image of Jesus’ head rolling towards them to the blessed end of time.

“The closings, they say they’re to make the church ‘healthier.’ ” Eric O’Conner stared at the head. “Jesus don’t look too healthy right now, does He?”

Frank Ahearn stepped closer to the head, then stopped. “If this is what can happen to Him, no wonder the Catholic church is in the state it’s in.”

“What happened?” asked Annette Tarr, wiping away her tears. “Father promised all religious items would be ‘dispersed’ in a proper manner.”

“He promised a final mass too, didn’t he?” said Eric.

“The whole thing, from beginning to end, was done in bad faith,” said Annette’s husband, Malcolm, leaning on the wall. “That’s what bothers me.”

Frank looked up at the sky. “There’s no trust in the world if you can’t trust your own parish priest.”

“I can’t believe he knows what’s happening here today,” said Annette. “I can’t. It’s got to be a clerical mistake, is all.”

“Shouldn’t we cover it up?” Malcolm asked. “It’s so, so ...”

“Isn’t it like the American flag, don’t you have to burn it when you’re done with it?” asked Frank, who had been an Eagle Scout in his youth.

“If the kids see one of us climb the wall, they’ll get the wrong idea and follow,” said Maureen Evans. “Let’s wait until the bulldozer’s off so no one gets hurt.”

“Hurt!” Esther O’Maley sniffed and tightened her coat around her. “What’s being run over by a bulldozer after what they’ve done?”

“Isn’t that the truth?” said Annette. “I ache all over.”

Sheila Murphy, thirty year veteran of the Flower Guild, snorted and ground out her cigarette with the tip of her rubber boot. “Don’t you know we’re supposed to start ‘healing’ over at Our Lady?”

Andy Ramos put down a cardboard tray of steaming Dunkin’ Donut containers on the retaining wall. “I don’t want to heal there, with a bunch of strangers,” he said. “I want to be a suppurating wound here.”

Eric reached for a coffee and pried off a corner of the plastic lid. “Keep the faith and change the church, is what my wife says, but at this point I just say fuck it.”

Sheila nudged Eric and pointed to the children playing near the curb. “Sorry,” Eric mouthed.

Annette took off her gloves and held her hands over the meager warmth of the coffee tray. “She must be talking to that group what's demanding structural change in the church,” -- she waved at the gutted building -- “and they don’t mean this.”

Esther sighed. “Oh well. We’ll still have our memories.”

“My memories are poisoned,” said Eric. “Betrayal’s warped the past.”

“I refuse to believe Father would do this to us,” said Esther, blowing her nose.

“No one’s even talked to him since he left, as far as I know,” Sheila said. “Like we were nothing.”

Brendan Murphy, who’d been baptized and married at Holy Innocents, but would never see his funeral there, opened the bag of donuts and examined them closely. “I don’t know why you’re so surprised to see them act like what we know they are.”

“Sssh! Don’t be disrespectful.” Esther shook her head and refused a cruller. “Father was just doing his job, I’m sure. He has to answer to his boss, just like any of us.”

With nowhere to go and nothing to do, Bruce stayed and watched the peaked shadow of the church move across the yard as the reconfiguring of the land went on, with neither rest nor reprieve. Three widows, covered in black down to their heavy stockings, were standing apart from the crowd, their heads bowed together in a circle, saying the rosary. They were old regulars at daily mass. Where would they carry their precious flame now? Our Lady? It was a long walk and he doubted if any of them drove. They would have to ask rides from their grown children, and the thought of them reduced to begging made him sick. Maybe they would continue to come here and worship out on the sidewalk, as the residents inside the deconsecrated building took showers and made coffee, performing a new sequence of morning rituals instead of mass.

Bruce cracked the window and listened. The widows wept as they prayed, and he wanted to collect their tears in reliquary vials. He wanted to build shrines in honor of their sorrow and light votive candles to their memory of their faith. He wanted to worship them for the purity of their emotions.

Instead, he rolled up the window and turned to watch the bulldozer. With a great grinding of gears, it was backing up to remove more of the overgrown cedars that were pressing against the side of the building. Even brick will rot in time with that sort of abuse, he thought. But no matter the condition, the developer was keeping the shell because the cost of demolition would drain all the profit from it, and anyway, people liked living in old churches. It had been done so many times that now there were architects who specialized in conversions, neatly mapping off a studio there, a one-bedroom there, a deluxe two-bedroom up top with the cathedral ceilings and view of the train station. Two units in the rectory, and a whole new structure in the outsized parking lot. Zoning law dictated the developer only had to supply one parking spot per condo unit, and Lord, there had been hundreds of spots available for the faithful. But it was just so much empty space now.

The basement was being sacrificed for the mandated affordable housing unit. Decades of youth groups and AA meetings had convened in that dank space. The kids had probably gone back to streets where they came from, but Bruce doubted if the drunks had found another home. He worried about them. They’d given themselves over to a higher power in that basement; it had been their religion. Would they continue to come by three nights a week looking for support? Would the affordable housing tenant open his heart and let them in, with an offer to make the coffee? The thought of which made Bruce wonder where the old urn ended up. There had been so much that had to be discarded, so many new homes to be found for things. The congregation never had a prayer.

A thin young woman stood alone, rigid and grave, at the corner of the property, and she grew stonier as the day went on. Her legs were bare under her long dress, and she wore sneakers instead of boots. The jacket was too thin for the season, but she seemed oblivious to the cold as she watched every movement of the bulldozer, counted each tawny shred of grass ripped up from the earth. She punctuated her stare with furtive looks at Christ’s head, still lying on the lawn some distance away.

“She’s an odd one,” Frank said, pointing his nose at Martha.

“What will the poor girl do now?” asked Esther. “She was here every morning, sitting in the back like the toad in the corner. I don’t think she had much of a life besides that and taking care of her mom. Now the old woman’s passed on, what’ll become of her?”

“That was the last funeral we did here,” said Shirley. “Who knew at the time?”

“What do you think they’ve done with all the stained glass?” asked Annette, whose mouth had turned ashen in the cold. “Who bought them, you think, with all their religious figures and memorial names?”

“Who wants them?” Eric coughed out his words. “Grim old saints in murky colors.”

“Sold overseas.” A frown puckered on Shirley’s lips. “Places like China, Indonesia, where the church is really catching on.”

“Maybe that’s where they’ll start sending the perverts,” Eric said, and no one laughed.

“They kept the non-religious glass, you’ll notice,” said Frank. “The round red things up top. Someone’s going to have quite the warm glow in their bedroom.”

“You know what my Celia said,” said Esther, whose daughter was studying to be an architect. “She told me that rose windows are ...” and then she bent forward in a whisper. The women laughed in shrieks.

“Vaginal symbols!” shouted Annette, just at the moment when Elwin paused in his labors, so that the words echoed down the street.

“That’s it. Time to go,” said Shirley, with her first smile of the day. “I’ve got to do Stop & Shop before I get the kids.”

“Me too,” said Esther. “I promised Greg I’d pick up a new garbage can. We had ours stolen again.”

“Again?” asked Shirley. “What’s the world coming to?”

“We’ll stay and hold down the fort,” said Eric. “Might as well see it to the end now.”

The two women turned and looked at the church and shook their heads.

“There’s no end in sight, from what I can tell,” said Annette, and then she left on her mission.

Elwin let the bulldozer idle for a few minutes while he rubbed his hands together to warm up. Even with insulated gloves, his fingers always got numb. He looked around, and arranged a smile on his face, but dared not give them a Papal wave. The crowd was thinner, but there were still enough of them that if they wanted to they could take him on. He heard the swishing of wings above, and looked up to see a massive flock of pigeons darkening the sky. It was quite the sight. But while his attention was above, a woman darted across the lawn and swept up Christ’s head in both hands and kept on going, speeding lightly across the scraped earth. He opened his mouth to shout at her, but didn’t know what to say. She wasn’t doing anything wrong except that she was running away, which implied some sort of guilt. She had the head held securely under one arm like a football, and her knees were raised in flight, lifting her skirt. The afternoon sun had broken through the cloud cover and the light shone through her yellow hair that splayed out from under a wool cap. She rounded the corner of the church and disappeared.

The parishioners looked at one another. A mother helped her son climb up on the wall and other children followed. The widows put their beads to their lips. When the woman reappeared on the other side of the building, a man set his coffee down and clapped his hands. His fellow congregants joined in, slowly at first, then with mounting enthusiasm.

Martha moved swiftly in her Nikes, sneaker of the gods, and as she passed the crowd, she held the head out in front of her with both hands, and they cheered. Two of the children escaped their mothers’ grasp and followed her. When she came back around, panting but not slowing, a man climbed the wall and joined in, then a woman a few steps back. The widows cried out in wonder. Cars stopped. The third time around, Martha held it over her head and more people joined her, a group of twenty faithful altogether now, running and leaping over the scarred battlefield of boulders and debris that surrounded their old church, its eyes blacked out with plywood, its yard raw and unrecognizable to everyone but them, who could finally see. Bruce leaned on his horn and let it rip, for the trumpet shall sound and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall all be changed.