ST. ROCH'S DOG — DEVIN THOMAS O'SHEA
/In the 1300s St. Roch journeyed from Montpellier to care for Rome’s sick during an outbreak of plague. When he became ill, our hero was banished to live in the cork oak woods alone, a leper. God’s intervention came through the brambles on four legs; a dog who brought two gifts to the dying saint: Bread, and the dog’s owner who became St. Roch’s first disciple.
When I was in elementary school, every rival sixth-grade team called us the Saint Roaches. “Actually, it’s pronounced Saint Rock”—okay, kid. Roch looks like Roach, roaches are vermin, that’s good enough.
Every Friday, his likeness stood before us at all-school mass. Just like a medieval peasant, I scanned the stained-glass images wondering what the symbols meant. There were goats, and sheep, and hearts pierced with swords; shepherds with crooks, and saints who tamed lions. Then, inside the tabernacle off the altar to the right, standing on a gold box which was said to contain a small piece of St. Roch’s bone, there was our weird patron saint sculpted in a posture flashing the congregation; pulling back his cloak to reveal a fat baubon on the inside of his calf; showing off his purple blister just as Jesus showed off the nail holes in his palms; proving sainthood to the skeptics who don’t believe he contracted the virus. Beside St. Rocco’s knee, the sculptor included a dog with a loaf of bread in its mouth.
After his death, St. Roch enjoyed mild popularity since every unknown ailment of his time was “the plague.” It wasn’t until the Black Death swept through the church that our c-list saint became a household idol.
The Bourbonic Plague forced many to doubt God’s existence, but the faithful took up St. Roch as a household touchstone which bends the distribution of God's mercy. His idol is a compromise with the cosmic deity who caused the ill to spit blood and writhe before striking them cold. One-in-three Europeans were stacked in the fields like awful lumber. Later, nine-in-ten Native Americans would succumb to pestilence brought from Europe. St. Roch “welcomed his disease as a divinely sent opportunity to imitate the sufferings of Christ… [his] patient endurance [of the physical suffering was] a form of martyrdom.”
This is my prayer: Fuck you, Saint Roch.
The dog is the real saint who ran the hedges, leaped the cricks, and begged for bread for the hungry. We shouldn’t listen to the fevered babbling of St. Roch seeing shadows on his eyelids which convince him death and suffering are the divine order of things. He couldn’t see that it’s only You, and I, and Nature out here in the cosmos; the new tripartite; each inextricable and divine.
May we conspire for tomorrow and build something new, balanced upon the understanding that human and animal, plant and insect, germ and earth are One. Amen.
Devin’s writing is in Boulevard, The New Territory, Paterson Literary Review, Midwestern Gothic, The St. Louis Anthology, and elsewhere. Chapter one of his manuscript, Veiled Prophet, is published in Embark Literary Journal. He graduated Northwestern’s MFA program in 2018.
