Seeing the Grey

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I lie down on the front pew of the first Baptist Church of Hissop, my head in my grandmother’s lap, my legs pulled up and missing one shoe. The windows are open and the choir finishes up the first verse of their last song of the morning. Crows cough politely from nearby pines.

          My grandmother always sits on the front pew, and if I sit with her I usually am weary by the time the preacher starts in on his sermon. 11:30 a.m.  My large, blonde crew-cut head collapses toward my grandmother’s side and thence eventually into her lap, not asleep but not awake. I stare out the window for a short time, light glittering on my eyeballs. The pianist sometimes peeks over at me.

Odors: a composite of the sunshine that dried her flowery dresses, old-person perfumes, and bacon grease from where she’d cooked breakfast that Sunday morning, and a further, indefinable scent. I am at that age where I will not be able to do this – crash in church – for much longer. I know this and thus savor it. My grandfather, her husband, sits in bland contentment at home on the front porch, ensconced in his old age, unaffected by all church matters. My father, too, is at home doing something important to his work. My mother is sick.    

I sigh a few times.

The fan my grandmother uses is shaped like a small television screen, a square with rounded edges, its handle a thick piece of balsa wood. On both sides of it are colorful images depicting important moments in the life of Jesus. It might be “suffer the little children” or a grisly depiction of the crucifixion. The air from the fan feels wonderful, but when she pauses, the stultifying, brain-draining heat of mid-day slips in.

Perhaps that was what hell was like, I think desultorily, keeping a careful watch on the red wasps that had slipped in through open windows and were exploring the light fixtures and ceiling tile. It’s when you’ve been cooled off and then something hot comes. Or when you are about to go to sleep and a wasp lands and bites you.

          I have an eye game I like to play with the ceiling tile.

          There are tiny holes punched in them, just as many down one side as the other, and my game is to try to count the number of holes down one side, and so to figure the exact number of holes in each tile. 

           I can never win this game, because I can never accurately count the number of holes. I am perhaps too far away, or my eyes are too weak. By the time I get toward the end of one line of holes, I lose eye-count and can really only make a guess as to the actual number of holes: 169, or 13 x 13. Often, the strain causes me to drift into sleep.

          As I watch the wasps, I become worried, because one or two may move down from the poles which hang from the top-shaped light fixtures, down toward the people in the congregation, down toward me. Once stung in the side of my neck by a wasp, I was sore afraid of them.

          “You just don’t know,” thunders the preacher. A certain tense quiver goes through my grandmother, and I sit up abruptly. He had been speaking quietly up until that point. Perhaps he woke my grandmother a little also.

          “You have no idea,” he intones, “when that time will come for you.”

          “What time?” I whisper up toward my grandmother’s ear ring. She hushed me with a wrinkle-brow look.

          “O my brethren and sistren, you do not know when that time will come . . . none of us is given to know the hour of his or her demise. If we knew,” his grin a grimace, “well, then, we’d be sure to set our affairs in order and get right with the Lord, wouldn’t we?”

The preacher is a nondescript man who balances his smiles with the absence of humor, who balances the enhanced volume of some of his avowals with others which come in a light whisper. He could be anyone’s father, anyone’s grandfather, any woman’s husband or brother. There is nothing remarkable about him.
          “Let me tell you a story, my friends. It is not a happy story, but you should hear it. I know we are running a bit late this morning, and perhaps you want to have that good chicken dinner down at Starla’s after church – perhaps you are anxious to watch that first game of the NFL season – but let us take this little bit of time to hear my story, for it may be the most important one you ever hear. Let your soul be patient a moment, and listen. It could make all the difference to your present life and the one to come….

          “Several years ago, I was preaching a week-long revival service down in Maylene, Alabama, at the First Baptist church there. There was a fellow who came on Monday and seemed to be listening very intently; I noticed that he was with his wife and little daughter. This tall red-haired man, I came to believe, was being called to give his life to the Lord and accept Jesus, but he was holding back. He was afraid. Perhaps he felt he had plenty of time ‘I’ll wait until next week when the regular preacher is back,’ or: ‘I’ll wait until the last service of the revival.’ We can’t know what was going on in this man’s mind – the mind of man is dark and unknowable, my friends.

          “Well – and let’s have the choir begin to gently hum the first verse of  number 192, ‘Just As I Am’ – well, as I made the call at the end of each service that week, I practically begged that fellow to come down the aisle, to surrender his heart to the Lord and accept Jesus as his savior. I felt as though I were preaching directly to him, and no one else; that only he and I were in that small cinder-block church.

          “Yet each night the choir ended their singing, and I ended my plea standing in front of the pulpit, and this man had not moved, though he sang wonderfully. I thought I saw a tear slip out of the corner of his eye the night his little daughter came forward – she was hardly more than a toddler – but praise the Lord, she came to know Jesus that week.

          “Her baptism was scheduled for that final Sunday night, but we got word late Saturday that the entire family had been in a horrific car accident on their way home from that Friday night service – one of those large coal trucks we see all the time ran a stop sign and blindsided them, and every member of that family was killed.”

          My grandmother stares at the preacher, her mouth a bit open. The pianist almost stifles her moan. Some choir members cease their humming of “Just As I Am” and dab at their faces with handkerchiefs and tissues kept in their robe-pockets for just that purpose.

          “And you know,” he comes down from the pulpit and stand closer to us all, undoing his jacket and his tie, Bible folded by a hand under his left armpit, “I keep thinking if only he had given his heart to Jesus when it was called, he’d be in heaven today with his wife and daughter. But – ” he wipes away a tear with the hand holding the tasseled Bible – “but he did not do that, he chose to wait, for whatever ill-advised reasons . . . please, if there is anyone here today who feels the same call, I urge you, do not wait. No one is given to know that time at which their earthly existence ends. It may be next year. It may be next week. You may live to be a hundred and two. And it may be on the way home from this service, God forbid. So please, as we sing together, number 192 in your hymnals, please open your heart to Jesus and do as He asks….”

          Several people do move down the aisle toward the light yellow wood table before the pulpit, into which, in gothic letters, the words IN REMEMBRANCE OF ME has been carved.

          This morning it is mostly men who come down the aisle, either to make a profession of faith, renew their lapsed faith, or request their “letter” be moved from some other church to this one. A few begin to bawl and the preacher gets helpers to take them to first pew – I hope not near me, and no, they go over to the pew on the other side – while he continues his exhortations. I am wide awake now.

 

Later that week, there is an accident only a quarter mile from my home.

          My uncle F.D., whom I hate and who also hates me, is talking to my uncle and my father about what he saw at the intersection.

          “There was a shoe sittin’ there in the middle of the road,” he is saying. “Foot still in it. That’s how fast that Chevy was goin’ . . . what a you doin’ here, boy, get outa here. Hidin’ over there listening in to the grown-ups…”

My father says nothing; my uncle says nothing. They seem to be thinking about the wreck. They were not at church the Sunday before.

          I think about what the preacher said.

 

Sometimes, lying in my bed at night, I think about death: my own personal expiration. I realize how difficult it is to imagine oneself failing to exist. When I read in school the scene in Twain where Huck and Tom watch their own funeral, I feel an immense sense of kinship with them. It is not a funny scene to me.

 

Just before school starts back, my father and I begin to go fishing again. There is a singular spot below the dam at the local state park; we get up very early in the morning and drive slowly up what he calls “the valley road,” always stopping at the same itinerant worm-seller’s shack for the box of red worms, and thence another mile or two where we edge off the two lane and park. It’s a short walk, then, up the creek – sometimes I go up on one side and he goes up the other, each of us carrying our fishing stuff. I plan to learn how to use the fly rod this year. I am always aching to see the giant reddish-gold fish we saw once here, in a big slow-water pool – a massive, mythical sort of fish whose unusual presence my father explained simply: people buy goldfish and then take them here and let them go.

          And then one morning we drive up with our worms and tackle . . . but this morning there are county police cars and highway patrolmen everywhere, some beginning to tear up our trails with horses, many talking on walkie-talkies. Something big has happened. My father talks to the sheriff and we eventually drive back home – we would never fish again but would start playing golf in another season or two. I ask my father what’s up but he never gives a clear answer.

          In a day or two, on the front page of the paper, I see what happened.

          A middle-aged man is arrested. He is accused of abducting, molesting, and killing two young boys whose nude bodies were tossed off the bridge into the creek where my father and I fished. I do not at that age know what the word molest means but from the looks on the faces of the adults – who give us children odd glances while this big story goes on, and start keeping much closer track of our doings and goings – it is a terrible verb.

 

Along the first week of September, shortly after the beginning of the new school year (and during my favorite season), I go down the aisle at the Hissop Baptist Church and accept Jesus as my Lord and Savior, making a profession of faith. Today’s song of invitation is “Softly and Tenderly.”

 

                   Softly and tenderly, Jesus is calling

                        Calling for you and for me

                        Earnestly, tenderly, Jesus is calling

                        Calling, oh, sinner, come home

 

          I am weeping uncontrollably. Anyone taking a look at my face would not imagine that I am undergoing the most important spiritual transformation of my young life. Snot bubbles out of my nostrils and mingles with my tears, which drip disconcertingly toward the crotch of my tan slacks. The preacher has huddled with me for a moment to accept my profession of faith and tell me to sit down on the front row; he huddles with others who come down the aisle, but I can’t concern myself much with them. I feel utterly wrapped up in myself and blasted by many emotions. I should feel some relief, since I have at this moment rescued my everlasting soul from the heat and torture the preacher had been talking about just a few moments ago:

          “…the fire there never ends, my friends, it never goes away, it is everlasting torment, as though you had put your hand to a flame or to a hot stove and there was no way to pull it away…imagine the groans there, as each condemned soul realizes now their lost chances, the failure to make certain decisions . . . .”

          Why don’t I feel any better? Why am I still embarrassed when the preacher asks us to stand with him before the congregation as he explains what each of us has done? My face feels as though that eternal heat were burning from deep within the epidermis. I can’t look up. I keep my eyes on my penny loafers. And as the doxology is sung and people stream out of the church, I keep my eyes down except when my grandmother comes by and forces me with her shiny, bird-like eyes to look at her.

          “You’re a good boy, you know that don’t you?”

          “Yessum.”

          “You are.”

          “I know.”

          “We’ll be in the car.”

 

Thus began my religious life. I knew I would become a minister and I worked toward it through junior high and high school, eschewing the fleshly pleasures of my classmates, becoming thereby a young pariah. I had very few friends, and even when I participated in church events, I did it critically and in solitude. There is a group in the Baptist church called Royal Ambassadors, but when I saw that the initiation ceremony was a rip-off of the Masonic ritual (about which I had, in my wide readings, learned much), I dropped out. I asked my grandmother for the money to enroll in divinity school, and though she asked me a lot of questions about it and kept piercing me with her eyes – dimming now with advanced age – she let me have the money. My parents were uninterested in my ambitions and in my interests.

          I understood, as puberty came and went, the truth of original sin: how evil was this body – how evil its urges! I resisted. Later, in our studies of other faiths (we would not call it Comparative Religion, since there was no faith that could compare, even in intellectual study, with Christianity), I read that, according to some non-Christian sources, the retention of semen builds up a quantum of spiritual power in an individual and improves his potential for spiritual growth. I liked the thought of that happening. The curved bodies and red smiles of girls seemed demonic to me – if they stirred my flesh, it was evidence, wasn’t it, that that first Temptress was as alive today as she was in the Garden with Adam. I resisted. I avoided contact with that sex as much as possible. Even my mother, though old and quite sick by now – of course I loved her dearly – was a representative of that source of corruption. When I read somewhere, in one of the books on philosophy that I loved, that “life was something that should not have been,” I said Yes!! far down in my being.

          Sometimes I had teachers who argued with me, who felt I went too far, who pointed out the beauties of being incarnated in a body, who said, in effect, “Learn to love life.” But I could refute them so easily.

          “Life – where innocents die by the hundreds of thousands, through no fault of their own? Love that? Where man, through his knowledge of the tree of good and evil, has developed weapons of such destructive power that his ability to tame them and use them is nil? Love that science, love that knowledge? That sort of humanity?”

          (Actually, I had become a gnostic of a certain type – those who believed that all creation was a drastic fall, that the Creator was a demonic Demiurge. That matter – and thus the bodies our spirits inhabit – is irredeemable.)

          My teachers, encouraged by my grades and my love of God, did not discourage me from the direction I was taking. I lived in my mind. The body was just a grossly-formed instrument, a carriage for my head and its thoughts; it had to be fed, clothed, and tamed. You gave it rest so as to make it through the day without falling down. One couldn’t get around it. Yet one need not give in to it. I graduated from divinity school with honors and sought out my first congregation shortly after.

          My father said he was proud of me, though he was not a religious man himself. My mother was afraid I was a homosexual, since I had been out on absolutely no dates and never mentioned girlfriends. I saw questions furrow her brow from time to time, but she seemed afraid to voice them. My grandmother, now nearing 100, could not recognize me when I went to visit her. She thought I was her younger brother, and that she was living in Georgia.

         

 

You may discern, if you are a careful reader, that the person writing this account is not the same person about whom the account is written. This is the story I would like to tell: how I arrived at the place where I now, metaphysically speaking, reside. If I wander and take too much time in certain spots, you will know that it is my natural reticence seeping into the text. I will try to open up as much as I can. I’ve only been open for a few years now; so much is still filled with pains minor and major. I often feel a deep sense of wonder that such drastic changes have happened in my life, when it seemed so steadfast and certain at first. I saw my path and went down it, unhesitatingly, but we never know where they will lead us, do we?

          My name is Harold J. Wienkle. You may find that name oddly familiar, if you are a person who keeps up with current events. I myself do not keep up with current events, and popular culture is a phrase that means very little to me.

          Sometimes I write in the present tense about events of the past. This is because I feel confined by my present circumstances.

          I cannot tell you, good reader, everything at once, or you’d stop reading.

 

 

So. I was a young man, unmarried and intending never to marry, fervent in my faith and my conviction that the way the Bible laid out for mankind was the way I was going. It was just a matter of learning more and more about how to stay on the Road and developing a preaching style. I stayed at home with my parents those first few months after I received my Doctor of Divinity degree and sent out letters searching for a church.

It was difficult. My parents seemed to be utterly caught in the world, sitting at TV trays in their small living room every evening watching television game shows while they ate dinner. My father, I thought one evening as I watched them from my little study place across the hall, is a lost man. He seemed happy enough there as he paused with some mashed potatoes on his fork, glancing at his wife as they giggled at something on the screen – and there would come a gust of self-conscious laughter from the studio audience – but deep down, beneath his tan and sparrow-colored toupee (like everyone else, he sought to hide and hide from the Spirit), he was unhappy and his soul destined to spend eternity in the domain of Satan. Perhaps this was true also of my mother, but I could not bring myself to consider this just yet.

          I typed out letters to various churches in the area, but often heard back nothing.

          I expanded my search to the churches in the nearby counties. Nothing. I sought help from the seminary; a professor of medieval theology who seemed to like me promised to “keep an ear to the ground.” He urged a saintly patience, and told me I ought to think about getting a job in the meanwhile. I hung up the phone with a stunned feeling: get a job? Enter into the belly of that beast?  My parents also felt I should find something more to do than sit reading in my room.

          “I pray also,” I told them. “I do not just ‘sit and read.’ ”

          “Son.”

          “Is it money? Would you like rent from me??”

          “No, son, no. Never mind. Pretend it wasn’t mentioned.”

 

I did take a job as I waited for my first church, evening shift at the local Krispy Kreme. My job was putting the doughnuts on the conveyor belts before they were cooked, and taking them off afterwards. The smell was wonderful at first but became sickening after a week or two. I cannot eat doughnuts to this day, and might get sick if I even see one.

This time period seemed interminable. I think I aged quite a bit during this time. It was incomprehensible to me that none of my letters brought success, and why none of my connections at school could find a congregation for me. Studying was okay – I figured I’d be doing that all my life – but I felt the need to change lives. I wrote sermons of great timeliness and verve, practiced them with a little reel-to-reel tape recorder, perfected them.

I was given to understand that the problem with finding a church was twofold: my age and my wifelessness. Mr. Simperson, an advisor with whom I sometimes talked while at school, told me why.

          “Harold, congregations are afraid of youth and of youth’s unsettled nature.

          I remonstrated with him, pointing out my devotion, my love of the gospel, my intention to imitate Christ in all things. I was thinking of Christ’s wifelessness.

          “Harold.” My advisor shot the cuffs of his nice dark brown suit, leaned forward over his fine mahogany desk. “Protestants don’t have monks. We don’t have nuns.” Was he suggesting I join the Mary-worshippers? Surely not. “In all your time going to church as a boy, do you remember a minister who was not married?”

          I named one.

          “But he was a widower, Harold, and an old man . . . far removed from any possibility of carnal enticement.”

          What was he suggesting I do? Buy a wife from overseas? I hate women. But I did not say that to him.

          “Don’t look so baleful. God provides. I know of a church . . . .”

         

And it was this church, with Mr. Simperson’s recommendation that became my first congregation. Oddly enough, it was also where I discovered my first wife, Elise. And thus began my descent. At the moment I saw Elise and talked to her in my office, at that instant the path toward this confined place began. I said descent but perhaps that is the wrong direction. I don’t really know anymore.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Saint Anthony of Padua saw a lot of value in flagellation as a form of penance. Ancient Egyptians customarily beat up on themselves during the annual Isis festival. It seems almost commonplace and quite widespread in ancient times, but what many do not know is that it exists today also. I am not speaking of symbolic self-abasement, but of people who wish to do penance in this way. A cardinal in the 11^th century advocated the substitution of flagellation for the recitation of the penitential psalms, and developed a scale whereby such-and-such a number of strokes were equivalent to such-and-such number of psalms – up to 15,000 for the entire Psalter.  [from Herodotus, Histories ii.40.61]

 

 

 

 

 

Things started out pretty good. It was a very small church, far out in the country, and I was offered a small brick parsonage. My mother went with me to get me all moved in. “It’s rather barren,” she said. She carried my clothes and I carried by books. The little church was made of the same plain red brick as the two-bedroom cottage next to it, seemed in fact to be a part of it – Sunday school rooms, administrative offices – but there were only a couple of those in the church and I soon discovered that all the administrative tasks would fall to me. I will not give the name of the church, for obvious reasons, but I can let you know that it was at the intersection of two country roads quite a distance between the two largest cities in this very rural, but not Primitive state.

          I must admit that I felt quite superior to them; but I must also note that I did not express this superiority in any overt way. My superiority was both spiritual and intellectual, but at the time I felt it enabled me to help them. 

          The congregation was composed of several families, their extended aunts, uncles and grandparents. Many people had the same last name and resembled one another – like me, they had the large noses and oversized heads that come from Scotch-Irish ancestry when it gets mixed in with Creek or Cherokee Indian blood – thus it was difficult at first for me to distinguish between a man and his brother, or a sister and an aunt. Most of the older members had been attending this church for decades. Sunday School teachers – there were only a few classes – were all well entrenched, ladies with pale silverish blue hair, men with horn-rimmed glasses going bald. My right hand man was the Music Minister, Ralph, who also led the choir. The choir was terrible, and Ralph appeared to have learned music from screech owls, but they sang the same songs I had known as a child, and that was a comforting familiarity.

          “Marching to Zion.” “Just As I Am.” “No, Never Alone.” “I Surrender All.”

          For many weeks, I gave my sermons, administered as best I could, and it seemed to me that I had truly found a home. Ordinarily my sermons were admonitory, since I could see into peoples’ evil nature much more clearly than I could discern their graces, their goodness (you see, even then, I was learning something about myself in the process of becoming that self). I sought to scare them and to deliver, in my quiet tone, memento mori messages that would pull them out of their complacency and aggravate their lethargy.

          Not unlike the by-now-legendary preacher who had stung me out of mine, years ago.

          It is generally accepted that local pastors will visit the homes of the sick and infirm, but I would not visit unless asked to do so by a family member, and this happened fairly frequently. Also tacit is the agreement to officiate over funerals for church members, but this duty I felt I could ignore (in the first few months) since I did not know the families well. I assumed they’d have other ministers they’d want to help bury their grandparents and parents, and this turned out to be a particularly egregious blunder. I did try to train the younger boys of the church in football.

 

Things drifted along rather quietly. I had people come up after my sermons, while the choir hummed and I gently but firmly prodded their consciences, for several reasons. Some were returning their membership “letter” after being away. Others came up to “re-dedicate” their lives to Jesus, having gotten slack and perhaps (the great bane of Southern Baptists) backslid into sinful patterns of behavior. I think most of these behaviors were sexual and alcoholic in nature. Touchingly, boys who’d been away in the war came down the aisle and confessed to me all manner of behaviors, wondering if they’d still be able to make it into heaven, which of course I assured them was possible as long as they supported the church and stayed away from evil women, alcohol, strange gods and ways inappropriate from young Southern Christian gentlemen.  

 

 

 

Elise Trambles walks into the church on a particularly windy autumn day in 1972. The front door is open to the alcove and a few leaves have managed to slip in and stick to the carpet. I pick them up and take them outside. People are coming up from their Sunday School classes, women try to straighten their hair, men use combs.

She wears a long, loose gingham dress patterned in blue and white. Purity and loyalty. Her face is flecked lightly with freckles. “Hello, Brother Wienkle, I’m glad to meet you I’ve heard so much about you isn’t it a lovely lovely day Brother Wienkle?” She blends her words together and her pale, pudgy hands (which do not fit her rather tall and slender frame) keep toying with her dark auburn hair. I note that she seems unable to keep her fingers still. Pale green-iris eyes and pupils seem to be dilated but not glassy. I detect no overt intoxication.

          “Glad to meet you Miss Trambles, your parents are such great supporters of the ministry. Have you donated your portion to the Lottie Moon Overseas Ministry this year?”

          Thin pale lips wearing no make up smile only the vaguest sort of smile. Her face widens somehow under the smile, stretches.

          “You may call me Elise, Brother Wienkle.” I give her plump hand back to her.

          I look down at her and something very odd happens to me. I feel a bit of sweat pop up under my white Arrow shirt. I feel angry at what is happening further down, behind my zipper. My forehead feels moist too. This was never supposed to happen to me.

          On the short walk I take after the exertions of Sunday morning, I see old Frank walking down the county road pushing his grocery cart. He’s picking up soft-drink bottles, which he cashes in for money at a grocery store – or so I have been told. I do not stop and talk to old Frank, I walk right past him without even nodding or waving or muttering a desultory greeting. Frank is black, with long grey sideburns that stick out in a fuzzy way from the ratty old woolen skull-cap he wears. He pretends to ignore me, too. Only the dogs see us both, and they bark madly at us. We are almost always going in opposite directions. The black church is about two miles down the road from my church.

 

         

Elise asked for a conference with me a few weeks after that. There was a part of my home that I had converted into a sort of office, with pictures of Billy Graham and Nixon on the wall, woven messages in frames (my mother made them unceasingly), and comfortable chairs for both myself and whoever might be sitting across the desk from me. I kept the desk-top completely clear. A bit of light sprang in from a window high on the back wall, acute autumn light that particular evening. Children were at the church working on a hell house.

          She came quickly to her point. Despite her youthful appearance, she was old enough to be a widow. The first love of her life had talked her into getting married before he joined the Army and went to Vietnam. He did not come back. Now, she said, she just could not get over his absence from her life. She had pictures of him, which she pulled from her purse and turned toward me. An earnest young man in green looked back at me.

          “Brother Wienkle,” twisting a napkin in her knuckly fists, “there is just this large Ralph-shaped hole in my life.”

          I nodded.

          “I am at the point now where I don’t cry as much as I used to, which I guess is progress, but I – it seems I spend all my time thinking about him and at night I dream he’s in the bed with me.”

          I look blankly at her; this is my way of encouraging her to talk. I have no idea how to help her; I want to be brusque and commanding, I wish I had a phrase that would make her go Of course you’re right why did I never think of that? I can only listen. Her face begins to captivate me a little, the freckles in particular. I don’t know why and that bothers me too. I was never supposed to feel anything like this. My chest seems to restrict my breathing.

          “I just don’t know what I can do now, Brother Wienkle.”

          “Have you ever heard of the stages of grief, Elise?”

          “No . . . .”

 

And so begins a relationship. It did not help that I was getting this gentle pressure from the congregation to become a married minister. I could not help but notice that more and more parents brought their older daughters up to meet me after church. My advisors said it would be a very good thing for my career, should (to my mind, the should was a when) I moved on to perhaps a larger church in a more cosmopolitan area. I tried to overcome my dislike for women in general – sought to soften my way of looking at them – and I think Elise helped me do that, for I grew to know her very well and, aside from her inability to get over widowhood, could find nothing ungodly about her. She did not have large obtrusive breasts, she dressed calmly, her eyes had none of that disconcerting piquancy I sometimes saw in the more knowledgeable girls and young women, and I found I could talk with her.

 

 

 

 

 

 

I am told now that, due to some pending litigation, I should not divulge too much of what happened during my marriage to Elise.

          “Speak, if you must,” says my lawyer, “in generalities.”

          Yet so much truth is lost when we speak generally.

          I was deeply involved in my continuing studies of those Gnostics considered heretics, and I was also studying the early martyrs of the church.

          I was developing a pain-pleasure theology, which involves curing human flaws and faults through the infliction of pain in an orderly, Christ-centric way. Is there not pain in our holy images of Jesus on the cross? Is not agony a vivid part of our religion? What purgative does not involve pain? What religion doesn’t deal with suffering? The phrase growing pains might be applied to spiritual evolution, I thought, and it turned out that the woman I had taken as my wife was the perfect lab partner for my explorations. She could not get over her first husband, could not let go of him until, together, in the perfect and inviolable privacy of our home, I helped her do so. We often lay in bed, expunged, and read Fox’s Book of Martyrs to one another before sleep.

          Elise hated sex almost as much as I did. I quickly convinced her of my belief that it was quite a terrible sin to create human life through procreation. Perhaps this is how we managed to funnel so much energy into the other directions. She had once been a member of one of those many sects whose eschatological vision sees only a very few people – the elect – managing to survive the impending Apocalypse. She had returned to the more mainstream and increasingly political Southern Baptist fold only a few months before we met; most of my pseudo-Gnostic ideas were not completely new to her.

          It was not that we disliked human touch. She and I held hands quite often; we took walks behind the church and were indistinguishable from any other couple who strolled, of a Saturday morning, the streets of the nearest large city. No one would ever have known our sacred secret were it not for Robert Fingerwood, the luckless obese man who wandered sort of by accident into the newly-built sanctuary (further from my brick home of some years now), who stood on the front steps of the church calmly smoking a marijuana cigarette as he got a direction to me from someone else. He threw the cigarette down but I clearly smelled the raw, unusual odor.

          I noted the piggish red eyes as he neared me. Why was I unafraid? I still do not know.

          “Bobby Fingerwood, and how are you?” We shook hands.  “Are you saved? You mistrust my smell, right reverend sir? You needn’t do that. Do you have a guitar? Of course you’re saved, you’re the minister here, eh?”

With the feverish energy of the overweight, he began to rummage about in the alcove among the jackets and coats. “No guitar!” It was a cool time of some year close to the time of Iranian Hostage crisis, not long after Jonestown. He moved inside and placed his corpulent frame in a seat near the rear, glittery eyes shifting about to take in members of the congregation who were filing in. His jeans had a large hole in the crotch, about which he seemed unconcerned. The sides of his head contain a grizzled batch of salt-n-pepper hair blended into a tanned crowfoot brow. Lyle Lovett hair, we’d say today. I see that he has hung his hat on one of the racks, a feathery colorful apparatus attached to a nondescript Midwest cowboy hat –

          “No guitar? Do you, minister, have Jesus in your heart?”

          I nodded lightly. I didn’t want there to be a scene, but there was no need for worry. He never obtruded too much upon people, no, Fingerwood would never make a problem with anyone about anything, and he never drank anything stronger than the very occasional beer. He smiled too much for most people. He seemed to relish life, did Bob, and was never ready to stop, to quit, to crash or ease into mellowness on a porch in the dusk; rational discourse was not his forte, but he did like to argue religious points and to speak of his own pet theories, bricolage mostly. He was very prepossessing, when he got fired up. I began to like him, as people like their opposite numbers. He became one of my favorite members.

           

 

 

 

 

  

The kid wakes up. It is a Saturday morning. No school: sigh of relief. There’s a slight chill in the air of his room, and a breathy, dull groaning sound; his dad forgot to turn the furnace on last night, and his brother – mouth wide open, crooked teeth jutting out – snores vociferously. The kid gets up, sock-footed, and finds his jeans, finds a long-sleeved shirt, puts them on, goes to the bathroom and stared through the gauzy curtains as he pees. A very few cars glint by on the highway in front of their house. It’s no more than that: just a glint of chrome and glass as they zip past, splashes of white thrown against the wall of his room. Not all the grass of the front lawn is dead yet, and it appears that dew has made a sheen across parts of it. On weekdays, at this time, he would be sitting on the front step with his schoolbooks, awaiting the arrival of the bus. For this one morning – it the only morning in the world – he is free.

In the living room his dog Yogi wakes and greets him with a thumping tail and a unique canine smile. Yogi smells pretty rank, being generally an outside dog who’s rarely bathed but often rained upon, but the kid likes the way he smells and will sometimes press his befreckled nose up into the dog’s fur for a deep whiff. He is, of course, named after the famous cartoon character.

And just when other kids are turning on their TVs, new color sets only recently purchased, this kid has munched some toast and is filling his jacket pocket with soda crackers, preparing for a jaunt in the woods. The dog senses this and is beginning to grow paroxysmal with happiness, twisting, mumbling half-yelps, the tail thumping ever more wildly as the kid finally reaches for the back door and edges out into the brisk autumn air. Moving across the yard, he leaves little dew footprints that are connected by the dragging edge of his pants. Yogi is now as ecstatic as a hound can be, twisting, running ahead into the chalky road, running back to leap up on his back legs and paw the air in front of his boy.

He doesn’t think of the cartoons he is missing by making this trip into the woods. His mind is empty of all except, right about the time he’s too far from the house to return, the fact that he’s forgotten his favorite cap, the New York Yankees cap his aunt bought him. He strides along, not fast, not slow, angling away from the sun, morning senses (sans caffeine, at this age) wide open to the arc of thin cloud overhead that looks like the shapes made in metal by the grinding tool his grandfather uses. Aware of every bird-call and the rustle of small animals. He wishes his parents would buy him a gun, but of course they won’t. From the far distance he hears the echo of a shotgun – men hunting squirrels in the woods. He has never run across them. They are like morning archetypes. He knows they exist but he has never seen them.

 

What does he think about? Nothing: his brain is fired by All: the whole Field, the walking, the movement further and further from the house, the known, the domestic, the resinous smell of pine, the gradual autumnal flow of time. By the air, he can tell how warm the afternoon will become. Are there college football games today? Perhaps he’ll listen with his uncle and new brother-in-law. It’s a long time off at this point, and he can no more get lost in the future than he can in what happened last night.

Natural mindfulness.

He identifies every bird by call or flight pattern. This is something they have been studying in school. The boy tries to keep his vision keen, ready for a glimpse of deer, ground-rattler, or bobcat, though he realizes his imagination might be at work if he does see anything besides the white tail of a rabbit fleeing the advance of the dog.

And so they move on down the rough trail made decades ago by men hauling coal from the mines. A sere rain of sycamore leaves drifts past. Crows, half-seen like crackling ebony bits of lightning, move through the tops of the loblollies. Another shotgun blast, then the echo. Shoes crunching the leaves; dog-rustle far ahead. He pauses and slips off the path and into the dry broomgrass weeds to play his usual joke on the dog, snickering a little, wondering if this time the dog might fail to find him. He hunches down close to the earth and holds his breath without thinking. In just a moment or two he hears the bear-colored hound racing back toward him, snuffing out his scent, finding the hiding place. It’s nice to know you’re missed, that the dog is his companion on this morning, that this beast would be disturbed if he could not find his boy. When he discovers him in the weeds, the boy laughs, hugs the dog a second, scratches his ears and tells him Good boy good boy let’s go get a squirrel boy.

The boy recognizes the foothill he can now see just ahead of him – it’s the same slope the school bus passes on the way down the highway. He wonders if, on one of these mornings, he might try walking all the way down there. But he’d probably get lost, or have to creep up into someone’s back yard, or have to cross the creek. He sees something bright yellow ahead and wonders what it is.

It might well be a harbinger, but not quite like the yellow butterflies that presage autumn: what it is, is a big Caterpillar earthmoving machine, shut down for the weekend. He notes the path the machine has made: probably it will be a subdivision, or so he has heard, with bunches of houses on both sides, pavement eventually, gutters, and a mass of homes which will mean an end to his adventures. He looks at the machine’s glass doors, considers why it’s there, and then he reaches down into the clayey soil to pull out the largest rock he can.

Without the slightest compunction, he throws it as hard as he can into the glass doors.

Nothing happens. The rock breaks up a little – much of it was dirt. He picks it up again, mutters the only curse he can at this age, Shit on you! and again throws it, with the same result.  

The dog stands nearby, his pink tongue lolling a drop of slobbery dog sweat, indifferent.

Hey boy whachew doin’?

 

 

 

 

I was that kid. I was at first reluctant to drift back to happier times. I’m not sure I deserve them. But then I read of an incident in the life of the Buddha, quite famous I understand, where he thought back to moments in his past when he had been calm and blissful, and as I lay here (what else is there to do?) I  began to sift through the memories until I found that one. You are surprised that a former fundamentalist Southern Baptist preacher is reading a biography of the Buddha? Yes, there’s no doubt this is unusual. I once heard a televangelist heap righteous contumely upon a young girl who was teaching yoga at a gym not far from his large, rural church. “Yoga is all about worship of the Buddha,” he said, “and cannot, for any reasons, be a part of a devout person’s behavior and life.” Even back then, I knew that the origins of yoga lay in pre-Buddhist times (our studies of other religions in seminary were not utterly pointless, nor chock full of lies).

          Perhaps I remember and recount this story to let the reader know that, like humankind, there was a prehistory for me where I saw the world in a smoother, less fearful and certainly less Manichaean light. I suppose my former colleagues would say it was my personal Eden, and that on the day I’d realized my sinful state – thanks to the voluble preacher – there was a Fall, a descent from innocent grace. These same men and women would, of course, look at a newborn infant and see another creature infused with sin, if you argued with them away from the parents and kinfolks and nurses. Around them, of course, there would be no talk of that: there would be the usual giggles and chucks under the chin, the smiling, the rocking  . . .  everyone loves a baby, and there is never any talk of original sin in a nursery.

         

Old Frank came into the church one Sunday morning. I don’t know why. One of the deacons asked him, politely, if he was in the right church, and Frank (I was told) said nothing at all. He stood next to the chairs in the back where the deacons sat, looking about, and then he walked out. Fingerwood heard about this, and asked me in a pointed manner if I would let him in the next time it happened.

          “I don’t know,” I said. “It might upset people.”

          Bob often came by after church, and also at other times. “I’m your gadfly,” he said. “Your thorn.” I felt sure he had seen some of the things in the house that Elise and I usually kept put away – I ordered leather items now via a company in Santa Cruz, California – and thus a mild tension developed between us. Elise did not like him (“he smells”) and would do anything to get out of the house whenever he came by. So we usually just set up a chessboard on the back porch and Bob would roll up his marijuana and smoke.

          “You know that stuff is of the devil, don’t you Bob?”

          “Why do you say that, Harry? Why would anything made by the Lord be so evil?”

          “Look at the scourge it has brought upon the young people today, though, Bob. I don’t see how you, who call yourself a man of God, can still have these sorts of habits.”

          “Have you ever heard of Bob Marley?” He wore that puzzled smile, as if he were amused at something. wondered about. Occasionally he’d take one of big paws and rake it across his head.

          “A musician, isn’t he?”

          “A Rastafarian, Harry. They’re religious. They believe this stuff – ” holding up his smoldering roach – “is a sacrament, a way to grow closer to God.”

          I waved my hand, a pishposh gesture.

          “I think they’re right. You need to loosen up, Harry. Maybe this stuff would do you some good. You’re a very up-tight sort of guy, you know?”

          “I’ve been told that. But I don’t think you know me as well as you think.”

          “Hmm.”

 

Around this time things started happening. I haven’t described much of my life because I assume most of you know what the life of a Baptist minister consists of: sermons, funerals, deathbeds, sick calls. I suppose I was best at the sermons and least good at the sick calls, but I did visit members of the congregation when they fell sick. Not the contagious ones, of course, but all the others. Did I grow close to any members of the congregation? If one grows close to the family of a man who’s dying, yes. I would hug the women, shake hands with the men. So good to see you here Brother Wienkle, we ‘preciate ye comin’ by.

          Elise, first of all, began to change.

          Elise announced one evening that she had gotten over her husband’s death.

          “I think you finally beat it out of me, dear.”

          I nodded, thinking I detected something unusual in her voice and her manner. Irony? Sarcasm? I told her I was glad. She seemed a bit more beautiful after that, and I suppose our relationship began to change as I changed and began to develop a sense of lust. Where did that come from? It had lain nascent down in the gullies of my soul, I suppose, and when our relationship changed, that changed also. I tried sometimes to explain this to her, but I was not yet at the point of asking her to sexualize our marriage, since there was that in-beaten tendency to consider all matters of the flesh as matters of sin. I knew other Christian couples made love day-in and day-out – witness the offspring of their coupling – but I had always felt that as a man of God I should not get involved. Perhaps I should’ve been a priest? Joined what Protestants sometimes called the Mary-worshippers. Too late now for these speculations.

         

One night, driving home a bit too fast from a trip to the church supply store, as a storm was crashing down on us – it was in the autumn tornado season – I was barely able to see anything and I was thinking about my father, who had recently died of congestive heart failure – wondering actually where he might be in the post-life world or worlds – was he saved – I was not mindful of what I was doing, and I hit something.

          We’re never able to conceive of something horrific by merely reading about it, are we? Wars may list 61 dead as battle rages but our eyes flit only briefly over these words, don’t they? If the blasted faces of the dead were pushed in front of our eyes, the weeping of their families – would it make any difference? Would our eyes dance past them to the next story, the Arts section, the Sports, the Comics?

It takes an image.

My mother used to change the channel when the fly-tickled faces of starving children were shown, in infomercials asking the wealthy to “adopt” third-world unfortunates. A dismal wrinkle would slide across her brow: I can’t stand to see that, she’d say. I just can’t stand it.                                                                         

I never saw any images of Frank that included blood, broken bones jutting whitely, eyes staring up into the rain; nor were there any poetic touches like the grocery cart careening down the hill behind me.

I hit something. At the very moment, it seemed possible that it was a large dog, perhaps one of those equivalent in size to a small deer. I felt bad about it, but I felt worse about the big dent I’d have in the front right of my car. If I were prone to cursing, it was a moment when one mutters something profane beneath one’s breath.

As often happens, I think, the moment that alters one’s life deeply is not seen at that moment for what it is. Seems like life is still enjoying its mereness. Nothing unusual going on. A dead dog, a bent fender.

The next day I heard, from old Pleak, the janitor for us at the church, about how a hit and run driver had taken old Frank out –

“They’re still lookin’ fer whoever done it. But old Frank was pretty old anyway, wadn’t he? He pushed that cart down the middle of the road sometimes, I know that.”

Frightened, my heart iced; a cold feeling spread out treelike through my limbs. I asked where it had happened.

“Down there on Seminary Road, they say probably during that storm. Said whoever done it might not even’ve known they hit anything. Poor aul Frank.” With a perverse fondness in his voice, he called him a name, which I cannot allow myself to repeat, the old segregation phrase for African Americans.

They have any idea who did it?

“Ah, my cousin knows the sheriff and he said there wasn’t any clues to speak of. You never know, do you, when your time’s a comin’, do ye Brother Wienkle?”

 

 

                              

 

 

 

Never told the story of my baptism, did I? It was an evening church service, very unusual to even be inside the church at this late time of night, 7:30 p.m. On school nights it was very near my bedtime. We who were to be put under water were told to report early for practice baptizing, yes, and that’s exactly what we did right up til the time we four lined up, Mary Jane Fortenberry, myself, the young Fortner boy I could never remember that well, and Mr. Wilson, who it was rumored had been in jail for many years, but no one knew that for sure. We lined up and practiced getting baptized first without the water and then with the surface of the water right behind us on the top step, where Brother Johnson stood – the main preacher of a congregation being the person who baptized you, whether it was that preacher who brought you to the Lord or not – and I went out to go to the bathroom for a moment before it was my turn and I paused to look out a window and thus saw a few guys playing baseball in the park behind the church – deep right field being part of the church parking lot, in fact. One guy hitting grounders to the others, who threw to another guy with the first guy. It seemed to be getting very dark as I made my way back and it surprised me how thin the church attendance was for night services. It was a full church every morning and also at night during the revival periods, which were a whole different matter entirely; I had been through them before, urged to attend by zealous aunts and grandmothers. So where was everybody? Summertime was busy.

          We could hear them from behind the big thick damask curtains that hid the baptismal tank. The water seemed to make a loud noise in its stolid, mass-like quality; it would when we and the preacher sloshed in and we allowed him catch our heads and upper bodies as we fell back – it was almost a form of watsu, I think today, remembering the whole thing. Watsu is a form of water massage therapy.

          There were some words. Part of them included the phrase “I baptize you in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Ghost.”  That was supposed to be the most important thing.

          Death seemed imminent to me back then. I recall the winter before seeing – in the ditch right in from of the church entrance – an icy dead cat head with part of the body frozen into the wisps of frost and snow and ice, having already become part of the inorganic world. It iced me out, for sure. A lack of security: it could happen anytime, even to a child, even to children who were told by their parents that there was nothing you ever had to worry about – “we will take care of everything pertaining to you children.” It was gone. But baptism had brought it back.

          One by one, at a special moment in the evening service, after a few songs but before the passing of the tithe plate, we were each baptized by the preacher, who had special clothes, fishermans’ attire, adapted for his use. Grim, important music playing or maybe not playing. I get a glimpse of the small number of people scattered through the pews that night. Out a distant window, as my head goes back to meet the pool’s surface, I see the light of the baseball field shining on a close cloud or puff of smoke.

          And you walk out the steps on the other side, out of sight of all but perhaps the pianist, soaking wet. You have a new batch of dry clothes to get into there in the antechamber while you listen to the splashing of the next candidate for permanent bliss.

          But in the Morning – a figurative morning, coming months or perhaps many years later – after this life-altering event, one realizes so very little had actually changed, and this sorely disappointed my particular expectation of how things would thenceforth be. I got over it, and I always felt saved no matter how bad my action or thought. 

 

 

                  

 

 

It was then very important that I do something quick, and I, like many another human, took the easier choice. It must be the sharp edge of Occam’s razor, this fact that taking the easy way always hurts most in the longer run of things. The clearest and simplest explanation, the easiest one to contrive, is also the most pain-filled explanation. Avoidance of close by privation nearly always entails suffering undergone later on, when the avoided thing comes back, bubbles forth, expands accordion-wise out of a fold in your personal history tale. I knew Bob Fingerwood might be the person to talk to about all this, and so I drove down to see him. I showed him the dent in the car, I wept as I mentioned the old man, and Bob just got up and lit a cigarette and motioned me to pull my car on up into the shabby garage. I doubted it would fit, but it did.

          “What do you think, Bob? What do I do?”

          “You don’t wanta go to jail, do you pastor?” Bob’s grey eyes were utterly honest. “He’s not dead, you know. They have him at the Green hospital.”

          I shook my head.

          “My teacher always had this cartoon – which I forget – pasted up on his door when he was at college. It said something about coincidence being the universe’s way of getting personal. But when something bad happens we call it an accident, don’t we? If it’s good it’s a beneficent coincidence, if bad, a terrible mishap.”

          “Are we leaving town?” I asked Bob, a small light of insight opening in my head.

          “You are correct, Brother Wienkle, in your assumption.”

         

 

 

 

 

 

Harry [waking up in the car]:

 

Where are we?

 

          Bob:

 

Louisiana.

 

          Harry:

 

Where?

 

          Bob:

 

On I-20.Which [glancing over at Harry] is all ye know and all ye need to know.

 

          Harry:

 

I can’t believe I’ve done this, Bob.

 

          Bob:

 

I can. I left my wife once for several months. But I was working a dredger in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia at the time. I had really left her in my mind, but she didn’t know that.

 

          Harry:

 

You sent her money back and everything, right?

 

          Bob:

 

Sure. Plenty. I thought I’d never be taxed on that income.

 

          Harry:

 

I didn’t know you’d been married.

 

          Bob:

 

Sure, man.

 

          Harry:

 

I should never have gotten married. Probably should never have been born. All my life I’ve exhorted people to keep God’s Commandments and now I’ve gone and –

 

          Bob [taps Harry as he interrupts]:

 

You don’t know you’ve killed anyone, man. You think you have.

 

          Harry:

 

Maybe we should call back and find out. Maybe you could –

 

          Bob:

 

C’mon Harry, surely it has occurred to a few people that we both vanished at the same time. Some probably think we’re a gay couple.

 

[Harry stares at Bob a moment]

 

          Bob:

 

Harry, I’m kidding! You have to be one of the most humorless people I’ve ever run across. Have you ever told a joke?

 

Harry:

 

          I’m thinking about my dreams, Bob. I don’t sleep well.

 

 

 

11

 

I stand near the front a Wal-mart just outside Oakmulgee, near the entrance to the tire shop. A Sunday morning: I’d be giving my sermon, were I back at my church. But this morning it is Bob who is giving the sermon, standing in the back of his pickup, his Bible open in his meaty left hand, his right hand flailing in that ministerial gesture of exhortation. . . but no one has gathered. Bob preaches to almost empty pavement. Frightened elderly couples move past, giving him a wide berth. I can hear few phrases bouncing my way:

          “ – member, the kingdom of heaven – ”

“ –  spread out upon the – ”

“ . . . humans do not see  – ”

Why he is doing this I have no idea. He’s preaching to himself, or to the few pigeons that cling to the abandoned shopping carts, the ragged cheeping sparrows nibbling bread crusts – or to me. There’s little point in me going up to listen more closely; I know all Bob’s theories and theological modes by now. He gets high, he says, and preaches spontaneously from that high place. He does not drink.

“God made cannabis, man made beer. Which would you choose?” he laughs.

I cannot quite get over the fact that I may have caused another person’s death. Frank’s face visits my mind again and again. I realize I know his face quite well from having not seen it again and again over all those weeks – amazing, isn’t it, that while we think we’re paying attention to one thing, we’re really soaking in much more than we imagine? I had never given him much thought, aside from the time he entered the church; he was like a fixture you see during a routine trip, recalled later in more detail than you ever thought possible. I dreamed a peculiar dream almost one night after another, during those weeks on the Fingerwood Walmart Revival Tour, and here is how it went: Elise tells me we need to dig a new septic tank, but I refuse to dig it. I don’t know why, I just refuse. She begs and begs and later in the dream, when I find her (in nightgown and slippers) pushing on a shovel in the back yard, I acquiesce and start to dig. A few feet down I run into something shiny and clanky. I get down on my hands and knees, trying to examine it, and when I realize what it is, I frantically start shoveling dirt back into the hole, looking around all the while to make sure no one sees what I am doing. a shopping cart. Later in the dream, there is a discussion about selling our home and the church too to a developer. Will you be tearing up the earth around the house? I ask. Most certainly. Then we cannot sell to you. Why not? the developer asks. He looks a lot like the sheriff. We cannot sell. I worry that my actions betray my guilt. The sheriff is looking through the back window toward the fresh earth. Who’s been digging back there? A dog, I don’t know. Elise looks at me; the sheriff looks at me. With shock and horror I realize: they know.

This same dream, or variations upon it, occur about every other night during the time Fingerwood and I are gone. Bob says he will find some sleep aid for me.

I call Elise.

“Harry, where are you?”

“I can’t tell you.”

“Why not?” she asks, sensibly enough.

“I just can’t tell you.”

A sigh. “Why did you leave? Don’t you love me anymore?”

I never loved you. “Something happened, Elise . . . ” I stop there. The phone sounds funny. “Has the sheriff been around? State troopers?”

I almost see her brow furrow, the thick eyebrows squeezing toward one another.

“Well – I got your note so I didn’t report you as missing – but – ”

“But what?” The metallic cord wraps around my wrist. Handcuffs would feel like that: icy, biting, tight. If I ask about Frank, she’ll know more than I want her to know.

“Harry, I’m going to go back and stay with my mother.”

“That’s a very good idea. Just turn off all the electricity and lock everything up. When I get back, I’ll look for you there. I’ll call you there, before much longer.”

The silence on the other end reminds me of her magnificent blandness, and, with a bit of a heart-nag – I glance up at the bright winter sun, blinded – I realize people have treated Elise like this for her whole life: her father, her mother, her husband who died, me. She’s always given in to what others wanted for her; self-assertion is not a concept in her brain.

“Bye.”

“Bye.”

                             I sit down on the small curb. The Walmart is getting busier. I know I look a bit strange. My shirt-tail’s out even though I have on my nicest suit-coat. I want to weep but cannot; I feel very sere inside. My birthday is coming up soon. Bob’s waving a come on at me from beside his truck. I think one of the managers is walking away from him – they’ve probably told him he has to leave. I walk over.

                             “People don’t want the gospel around here. Time to go. What’s the matter, Harry? You look worse than usual today.”

                             In the truck, I ask, “Mind letting me try that cannabis?”

                             His jowls spread out in to a grin so large his ears move. For the first time ever, I notice how white Bob’s teeth are.

                             “There you go.” He hands me a pink-papered cigarette. I inhale deeply, holding it like he tells me, changing my breathing. It occurs to me that I have just come into contact with Bob Fingerwood’s saliva, at the tip of the cigarette.

                             I choke on it, and cough.

                             Bob is still smiling. “I suppose,” he says as we pull out onto Highway 431, “I should let a novice smoke some of the best stuff. Throw that skanky joint out the window, Harry. I’ll fix you up with some good stuff here in a minute.”

                             “This tastes pretty bad.”

                             He drives out of town, past the budding strip-malls, and pulls over alongside a dairy. We both get out and sit on the tailgate. Bob insists.

                             “Harry,” as he rolls up something from another baggie, “I often wonder about you.”

                             “I wonder about you, too, my large friend.”

                             He’s done, but as he forms a wind-refuge with one big hand I stop him. “Car’s coming.”

                             “Oh, Harry, we can’t live our lives in fear.”

                             It’s either a police car or one with a flat luggage rack.

                             “Bob.”

                             He lights the cigarette. This one certainly smells bit nicer, less rank. I inhale just a little, but the smoke seems to expand in my lungs. It reminds me of both a skunk and burning sugar. When had I ever smelled burning sugar? I inhale again, just as the police-car shoots past. The passenger cop waves.

                             “Did you ever try to play a musical instrument, Harry?”

                             “Never. I was destined to be a preacher from the very beginning.”

                             “Maybe you picked the wrong thing to be,” Bob suggests.

                             “I don’t know,” I allow.

                             Time seems to be a bit relaxed. The light on the grass of the cowfield is quite luxurious.

                             After a bit, as we pass the cigarette back and forth (I am unworried about diseases from Bob’s saliva now), he says, staring up at the crispy lapis lazuli sky, “Playing music helps me not think so much. Sometimes when I don’t think very much, emotional things come rolling in to fill the void. But when I play guitar – and it don’t matter a bit if anyone is around or not, or even how good I’m playing – it’s like the emotions find a way through me into my fingers and the chords. And I stop thinking almost completely.”

                             “The cognitive idiot shuts up,” I blurt from nowhere.

                             “Huh?”

                             “The yammering thoughts subside.”

                             Bob was not smiling. “Yeah…..

                             “So,” he continued in a second or two, “are your thoughts easing? Are your worries dimming, Harry?”

                             I pulled a very straight face. He showed me how to smoke the very last little bit of the cigarette without burning my fingers.

                             Maybe it did help. For at least the next hour or two, anyway. Might’ve been an escape. I didn’t bother too much about examining it. I just rode and enjoyed the silence. I realized I was taking Bob Fingerwood for granted.

                             We drove on, and Bob let me smoke a bit more of his skunky-smelling pot. When I got paranoid, he explained why it was happening, which helped me only a little.

                             “You body is responding to the THC; there’s the fight-or-flight reaction, y’know, heart speeding up, palpations, sweaty hands, dry mouth – ” he hands me the cigarette, “ – but your mind doesn’t know why the physiological happenings are comin’ down, so it makes up something – police are busting down the door,  you’re about to wreck, or the pieces of tire on the edge of the road are actually alligators – do y’ see, Harry? Does that…no, I can see that’s not helping you at all.”

                             “Uh, yeah, sure it does. And thanks Bob.”

“For the smoke, oh, hey, that’s – ”

“I meant: thanks for telling me about the alligators.”

 

 

 

 

I’ve tried to figure out exactly how long Bob and I wandered about. I thanked him from time to time with money I took out of my account at the church. The dreams continued, and from time to time we’d try to figure out a way to find out more about Frank’s fate, but they all came to nothing. Neither of us knew his last name, so we couldn’t ask at mortuaries or hospitals. Bob said he wished I could “find some closure,” but I said I did not like that phrase.

          “Nothing has closure,” I told Bob. “You can’t get it from anywhere. Death is the true closure, and none of us know anything about that, do we?”

          “Sounds pretty feisty for a seminary boy.”

          We sat over cheap breakfasts at a local Huddle House; the next Wal-mart was, he figured, some 40 mines away, in Iuka, near the Tennessee-Alabama-Mississippi line. Snow was predicted for the week of Christmas, but of course we knew it would never happen.

          “No,” Bob dismissed it with a flick of his butter knife. “That White Christmas thing is never gonna happen to us, Harry, just get it out of your head. You’ll have to travel to them yankee lands for that.”

          I was feeling a big looser than usual, but didn’t know why. “It could happen. None of us know God’s will.”

          “That’s what the Muslims say all the time. Or so I’ve read.”

          “What?”

          “They say, ‘I’m going to work today, in’sha’allah.’ Meaning, if it’s God’s will that I make it to work, I will make it to work today.”

          “A rather tenuous arrangement. Contingency.”

          “Whatever,” said Bob. “Drink up, we have souls to save.”

          “Bob,” I have to ask him this, and can now that we’ve become such good friends. “You do know that preaching the gospel from the back of a pickup truck at Walmarts – ”

          “Every Walmart in a three state area.”

          “ – but, Bob, you have to realize not too many people are stopping to listen. You’re lucky you don’t get store managers hauling you into jail, but I am supposing they don’t want the bad publicity.”

          “Can’t seen where that stopped John the Baptist. Or Al-Hajj. You heard of him?”

          “Yes, yes, but your results, Bob! Is it that hard to see that your efforts are all out of proportion to what the efforts are bringing in?”

          Bob was not dissuaded, but he had ordered a refill on his coffee. A rare winter fly appeared at our table, shooed, but undeterred, by the waitress.

          “Harry.” He aimed that direct, grey-eyed-deposit-of-truth-and-reason look at me. I had seen other people crumple beneath it, but I had learned how to maneuver it.

          “Bob.”

          “Harry: were your years of preaching any more successful than these first few weeks of mine? Didn’t you tell me you were brought to the Lord by a revivalist preacher?”

          “Yeah, but he was the father of the regular preacher, and he really,” thinking back, “he really just scared me to death.”

          “I don’t go for that way. I doubt you’re even listening to me, since you usually get as far away from the truck as you can.” He gulped down the last of his coffee, gave me a Ready to go glance. “But I don’t do a lot of preaching on hell and damnation and the mercy of God. I’m much more a Gnostic.”

          “A heretic, then. It fits you pretty well.”

          “These particular heretics didn’t get caught up in that original sin miasma, at least. Didn’t leave everybody splattered with grief. I could be considered a Pelasgian. I am probably guilty of several heretical beliefs, Harry. But what difference does it make? I try to say things that make people feel better. If they don’t turn up to listen, I can’t conclude that the fault is mine, but rather than it’s just that in that particular area, there is not one prepared to hear the truth I speak about.”

          All I can do is shrug. I make a mental sticky note to stop and listen closer to him the next time he is standing up in the back of the pickup.

         

 

 

 

I had never really understood how poor people were here in this part of the world. My little church – and how far away it all seemed, except at night when I was asleep – was in a relatively prosperous rural area. I had grown up in a similar area; I suppose I had never really thought about these people much, but here they were: shoppers at the Dollar stores, the small corner groceries, people who had enough money only for beer and food – they were not the starving poor, as might have once been the case in Appalachia – and they were not the shabby, penniless type of poor person…it was a different type of poverty, something closer to the bone. They eyes seemed to shine only when they were walking towards the Wal Marts; but I noticed a physical disenchantment in those who wheeled carts to their cars, the post-consumer you might say. They seemed already uncomfortable with what they had. The 20-inch television would, eventually, wear out. The new clothes would get tight if you fattened up, or fall out of fashion, or go threadbare. They did not seem worried about war, though it was certainly their children, their sons and daughters, who were dying there.

          The areas we wandered in were far from the cities, but Bob informed me that we would have to make a pass back towards the places “where we are known.” (I almost envisioned pictures posted in the P.O., wanted for vagrancy, abandonment, and falling from grace, with Bob looking as smooth as a movie actor and I looking a big grubby, my hair greasier than it had ever been from lack of shampoo, my eyes captured by the law enforcement camera as I glanced to the side. Richard Kimball got nothin’ on me. He was one of my favorite TV characters as I was growing up.)

          “Need to visit the family,” Bob said. Fingerwood had a dual setting: either he was speaking non-stop or he wasn’t speaking at all. I was comfortable either way.

 

I had never seen unclean rooms until I started hanging out with Bob all those months. The motel rooms were invariable in their cheapness and their sadness. Bad colors, nasty pictures, stains on the carpet – yet they kept us sleeping at nights. Bob seemed always capable of finding the cheapest place to stay a few days and nights. “One oh eight for one room, for one week?”

          Often I would use my only credit card to pay for these stays. I had no idea what it was up to.

          I finally figured out that he was using the Gnostic Gospel attributed to Thomas in his sermons, and I tried to give him grief about it, but he would not let me and defended the writer of the Thomas gospel extravagantly. I won’t bore the reader with our arguments, but I suppose I should say that today I can read this text and appreciate what is said. As in, for instance, the text Bob told me about one night, number forty-two.

          “It’s really only two words. ‘Become passers-by.’ ”

          It was a fairly radical religious statement. I ventured a guess: “Means we should maintain a serious objectivity toward the world, as does the person passing by, who the dogs bark at, and at whom the law looks askance . . .”

          Bob played a chord on his guitar, a murky, mystery-filled major A chord. Played well for a man with fingers like sausages. He kept working back to this chord as he played some other stuff, and then there came a deep base thumping on the wall of the motel room. I tried to remember the chord. I always think of it as the Fingerwood chord.

 

Sometimes we’d pass through a city where he seemed to be well known – he’d drop by the houses (or trailers) of friends, just wander up late in the evening (“after they’re home from their jobs”), knock on the door and throw yourself pretty much at their mercy. People are nice when you depend on them and they feel they can help.

          I had some comfortable couches to sleep on, during this time, with only the wandering cat or inquisitive hound to wake me in the middle of the extremely long nights. I liked to stare out at the sky late in the evening just before dark, when everything is a colorless mass of silhouette and dim light, sharp lines splay out across the sky. Moments before utter dark…a few moments after four. Sit out on the porch and watch the light. If it got cold, I’d put on a sweater.

          The holiday season passed.

          Disliking preaching in the chill of lower than 32 degrees, Bob started driving further and further south, through Mississippi and then back, staying with the small, rural counties that had no large cities in them – of which this region is quite distended. So we passed through little towns like Opp, Alabama – monuments to the survival of tornadoes in cities like Enterprise and Red Level – but they had no Wal-marts that stayed open at all. Since the Christmas and after-Christmas rushes were over; the store lots almost empty each work-day.

          I saw Bob on a phone one day. Later asked who it was.

          “Marie,” he said. “Tax people are bearing down on her, she thinks we need to get together and work out the problems.” Bob scratches his head. “I guess she’s right.”

          “So, where’s that, where is she?”

          “Panhandle Florida. Redneck Riviera. ”

 

Become passersby. What can that possibly mean? Become passersby. Walk on by. Pay no attention? Act as though that which you are passing by had no meaning? Become passersby. Perhaps it’s in the attitude: observe the world as though you were merely passing through – as though you were nothing but a poor wayfaring stranger, passing through this world alone. Detach? Care not? Fear not? I don’t think so. This is the topic for Bob’s next sermon; I have found his notes. He has the phrase in quotes. A number. “42. Become passersby.” I began to watch people, outside the pickup, who had become passersby for me. Tired old couples awaiting death; teenybopper lovers; mid-lifers hanging on by sheer cash; stoned twentyish couple of guys giggling, looking around tentatively as they move toward the front door.  They seem sadder this morning than many other mornings, however. It’s almost as though I can see the rudiments of their mortality. The eyes of the old man; the reluctant puff off the cigarette; the taut weary fear of the teenagers . . . all of it spread out here just a few days past the end of the year, Christmas over, New Years gone. One single woman walks up from the farther edge of the parking lot and there is something so sweet and lush about the way she walks. As she nears, I see dark red hair under a kerchief and tall dark boots. For one of the few times in my life, I can honestly say, I feel a spark of lust, but it comes from a pure place inside me, one that makes me want to walk over and say hello to her before she enters the store. But I know I can’t do that. So I keep sitting. Become passersby.

 

 

 

 

 

 

We pulled into the little duplex home’s garage around 3 a.m., I think, somewhere west of Niceville, Florida. You could smell the Gulf. Weird vegetation all around, sticky and dangerous to bump into. The kids, Jon and David, come piling out to see their wayward dad, and I have to wonder how often he’s here. It’s impossible to tell from the greeting given him by his wife, a plump but subdued woman, very pretty, in her mid-30s with two kids to raise (mostly alone, it appears as we sit and Bob goes and pours out some coffee). He’s propped the guitar up in the living room, open and ready to grab. It’s a twelve-string Alvarez which has been through some tough times but still plays well, especially with only six strings on it.

          “Excuse us, Harry.”

          “Who are you exactly, Harry?” Marie asked politely, pulling on a menthol cigarette, blowing the smoke cloud away from me.

          “I – ”

          “He’s a preacher friend, Marie, let him alone.”

          As she moved into the kitchen with him, something about her raised eyebrows bothered me. In a moment, Bob was back with a large hardback book. “Thomas,” he says. “Check it out. Near the back.”

          The book was wearing a silky covering, something I’d never known existed. Clothes for books.

 

(42) Jesus said, "Be passersby."

 

(70) Jesus said, "If you (plur.) produce what is in you, what you have will save you. If you do not have what is in you, what you do not have will kill you."

 

(113) His disciples said to him, "When is the kingdom going to come?" Jesus said, "It is not by being waited for that it is going to come. They are not going to say, 'Here it is' or 'There it is.' Rather, the kingdom of the father is spread out over the earth, and people do not see it."

 

I sat flipping through the book. There were Big Wheels and other kid toys scattered around the living room, Popeye Fishing Poles, a few Christmas presents still unopened (why?) and also some clothes that looked like they needed folding. For a moment I considered going over and folding the clothes, but I held up. A rumble of loud voices came the kitchen, then quiet again. Then another. A metal kitchen utensil clattered. I felt watched, and examined the room a little closer. Velvet paintings on the wall. One might have been Jesus, but it was hard to tell. There were some photographs framed and placed on the mantel: two little boys on either side of Marie, a wan smile on her face. They touched me somehow; it crossed my mind that I might become a father some day. Not with Elise, of course. What about Elise? Where was she now? I though of my parents. People who had loved me as best they could, whom I had never really shown much affection. I hadn’t been mean to them, but neither had I been loving.

          I took a very deep breath, went back to the chair, opened the book again.

          Perhaps it was too quiet in there? Should I say something?

          I smelt the odor of pot being burned. So they were having a smoke together; good. A siren howled off in the distance; a neighbor’s dog howled an accompaniment.

          Loneliness seemed to seep into me like sweat into dry clothes. I suppose we all have moments when we feel the peculiar isolation which goes with being a human being – indeed, I had preached on this very topic, and advised my congregation that accepting Jesus as their Savior would keep them from feeling isolated, even if they lived alone, as did several widows and widowers. The hymn “Never Alone” was always a part of this sermon. Had I ever had had a truly close friend? Just Fingerwood, huh? And he was probably crazy. Elise and I had only played at making a household. What about Jesus, was He in my soul?

          I glanced up at the velvet Jesus on the wall.

          The kitchen door swung open and Bob and his wife came out smiling. High, I suppose.

          “We’ll be staying here a few days, Harry, do you mind?”

          I shook my head. “Not if you don’t.”

          “We have to hash this tax stuff out. I worked overseas a few years ago, running a dredger, and the people I worked for apparently didn’t handle the taxes right.”

          “Ah.”

          There was an uncomfortable bit of silence.

          Marie said she’d show me where I’d be sleeping. “If it smells like old ladies, it’s because my mom stayed here for a while last summer.”

          It was a plain little room, clean, and it did smell of old ladies: powdery, stringent, having to do with hair. “The smell reminds me of my grandmother from a zillion years ago,” I said.

          “I’ll yell at you for breakfast in the morning. Or knock. Or something.”

          “I appreciate your hospitality, Marie.”

          “No problem.” And she closed the door, to reopen it a moment later. “If Jon or David come creeping in here in the morning, just run them out, okay? They’re good kids but they’re curious about guys, since they rarely see their dad or any other men.”

          I nodded.

 

A couple of days later there was a sort of party – perhaps it was just a gathering of people. Bob told me he’d invited a few people by – “folks I haven’t seen in a while” – for beer and a bit of smoke. I surmised also that his dope connection would be there, and that Bob was replenishing his stash. Though I tried to stay in my room, reading more of the Gnostic Gospels, he wouldn’t allow it.

          “Come on, be sociable, Hare!” He had taken to calling me Hare.

          “I’m pretty much a misanthrope, Bob, if you hadn’t figured that out by now.”

          “These are good people, you’ll like them. Come on. Good smoke, too. I guess you never drank in your former incarnation as a minister, did you?”

          I shook my head.

          The big Fingerwood smile again, that locking in of the silvery eyes. “You have never lived, Hare. You have existed, but you haven’t lived.”

          I promised I’d come out and say hello, and that satisfied him. I think Marie had taken the kids somewhere else that night – I didn’t pry.

          “There’s Harry,” he exclaimed, handing me a large glass pipe when I wandered out. I handed the pipe back, having decided recently to cease what had become a habit. “Harry Wienkle, come say hello to . . . . ” He gave their names but I immediately forgot them – I’m not good with names. Long-haired guys with beards, skinny girls with straight hair, wide hips, visible navels. They looked nothing like Bob, but all seemed to love him.

          “How many souls have you saved lately, Bob?” asked a guy in the corner.

          “Hush, Sam,” whispered a girl next to him.

          “Nah, that’s okay,” said Bob, handing the pipe to someone else. Loud, squeaky electric guitar music was playing. “I’ve saved a few. It doesn’t matter, you know, I just do what I can. I don’t notch my Bible or anything.”

          General laughter.

          “Harry here was a minister at a Baptist church.” Why did he say that? Was he trying to blow my cover? I just sat there feeling stupid.

          “Was?” someone asked.

          “I – uh – moved on,” I got out. This time I decided to share the pipe when it came my way. Bob was filling it again and again.

          “Why?” asked a thin-faced girl sitting akimbo on the floor, playing with her hair. Red hair, revealing shorts. Freckles. Probably older than she looked; I felt old.

          “Ah. Things happened to – to – ”

          Bob broke up this uncomfortable scenario with a booming laugh. “Leave him alone, Maura.”

          “I’m sorry.” She was looking directly at me. “I was just curious as to what could cause a person to stop being a preacher.”

          “Lot of us wish Bob had never decided to enter into his own idiosyncratic ‘ministry,’ ” one of the long-hairs said. “I recall you tried again and again to get me to accept Jesus. Plied me with strong marijuana.”

          Bob’s smile did not seem all that pleasant as he listened to this.

          “ – didn’t work.”

          The smile was almost a vague grin by now. He seemed to be forcing a good humor upon himself. Maybe Fingerwood was actually angry!

          “Just trying to get you to see the Kingdom all around you.”

          “You’d ask me if I believed Jesus died for my sins and I’d say you had no right to ask me that question.”

          As this little dialogue developed, I went through the kitchen, got a glass of tap water, slipped out the back door and sat down in a plastic chair; part of my butt slipped through some broken straps in the chair.

          “…the kingdom of the father is spread out over the earth, and people do not see it…”

          Maybe this meant the same thing as “samsara is nirvana”? This always seemed an odd phrase to me – I think I read it in Joseph Campbell somewhere. (You are surprised that I read these works? I was always a voracious reader, even if – at the time – I was neither understanding nor in agreement. I dabbled in some of the works of Thomas Merton. I wanted to learn about other religious ways of thought, but mostly (then) to use their errors as a way of pointing out the superiority of the Christian faith.)

          If the kingdom of the father were here and now and not in the future, then -- ? Everything I’d studied, worked toward and preached was for naught. Which, seeing as I had transgressed several of the Ten Commandments at this point in my life, should neither have surprised nor dismayed me. I felt very confused and placed my forehead in my palms, leaned over…

          “Are you sick?” A hand touched my back. It was the thin-faced girl from inside.

          “Yeah,” I said. “Kind of.”

          “My name is Maura.Were you uh really a preacher?”

          She had a sweet clear, alto voice. I did not look at her, just looked down at my feet and at her feet. My shoes were ratty and muddy. I saw the edges of my pants as frayed and tattered. They may not have been; I just saw them that way. She had slender bare feet in huaraches, and a ring on her left little toe.

          “Yes.”

          “Why did you – are you not a preacher any longer?”

          “No.”

          Crickets; a far away woofing of some hound.

          “Why not? Am I prying?”

          “No. I hit an old black man and ran away.”

          “Hit him with your fist? Do you dislike black people?”

          I shook my head. “No, I mean . . . he was pushing his grocery cart along the road, he collected bottles, and I hit him with my car.”

          “Ah, and then ran away.”

          “Yes.”

          “Is he dead?”

          “I don’t know,” I answered honestly.

          “Are you, like, a fugitive?”

          Only from myself, I thought. And answered, “I don’t know. I just took off, I was afraid I’d killed him. I don’t know. I had a wife, but she – ” I started weeping at this point, unable to speak.

          She leaned down and hugged me gently, wrapping an arm around my neck. I smelled a fruity odor I recalled later as patchouli.

          “It’ll be okay. You’re not a bad guy.”

          How did she know?

          “I can tell. Your heart is good. It’s a certain glow I see around people.”

          I said nothing. A small idea began to form in my brain.

          “And also, you can tell from how people treat animals,” she added.

          I nodded. Some clouds dispersed off toward the north, and for a little while one could see a few sprinkles of stars or whatever, not enough of them visible to figure out the constellation.

          “I’m sorry to be so quiet, I don’t mean to be impolite,” I stuttered.

          “No problem. I’m pretty diffident myself.”

          “That’s a nice word, diffident.”

          “It is,” she agreed blandly. “And syzygy.”

          “Hm, what does that mean?”

          “Three things lined up in a row, like the moon, the sun and the earth during an eclipse.”

          We talked for a while longer. She seemed to think I should go back and un-tie the whole gnarled up thing. I was worried about what would happen to me; would I go to jail, and for how long, etc.

          “Probably, but isn’t that better than walking around with it hanging over you, your whole life? You’d never have any freedom as long as you lived.”

          “I guess that’s true.” A marked man, I would be only as happy as my lack of memory would allow.

          She must have read my thoughts: “Did you ever read Greek mythology?”

          “Some.”

          She pursed her lips. “Did you read about the river Lethe, the river of forgetfulness?”

          “I think it flowed near the Elysian Fields, right. And not the one in New Orleans.”

          “Right,” she said. “I think it went like this: the dead people drank from it in order to lose their recollections of the incarnation they had just left.”

          “Which would ease the suffering. But I don’t have any Lethe water, and never will.”

          Maura stretched her arms up, went up on tip-toe, and I glimpsed the muscles of her tight abdomen. Lust again. But I was not prepared to fight it this time. I didn’t fight it at all, I just felt it. Something deep down in me relaxed, almost against my will. I slumped further over. She patted the side of my head calmly.

          “Let’s go back inside.”

          “Where do you live?”

          She named a city not far from where my church had been. “I’m just down here for a few days rest and relaxation before going back to school. I’m probably missing a few classes as it is.”

          Major? “Religious studies.”

         

I slept well that night, better than I had in a long while. At some point I dreamed of a large snake with fangs which would not bite me – I teased it, played with it, slipped it around my shoulders – it did not attack. It was not an aggressive serpent. Later in the dream, however – and this is about all I remember of it – the snake stretched out from a coiled position and struck at some other people. I woke with that image lashed into the back of my eyelids, but I could not recall who the other people were. It was almost as though the snake, about 7 or 8 feet long, were flying, fangs bared, toward these other people. My dream self was surprised that it was happening.

          I sat at the breakfast table with Bob, who held his youngest son, David, on his lap.

          “Want to play a game of chess, Harry?”

          “Sure, Bob.” It had been a long time, but he was my host. Marie was washing dishes; I could see her hair through the slightly-opened kitchen door. Of course Bob rolled up another joint, but I asked him not to smoke it with the boy in his arms. The kid looked a lot like Fingerwood, except with more hair and squinchy eyes. He smiled a lot without there being any reason that I could see. Bob bounced him on his knee as we set up the pieces.

          Outside the morning seemed cold, but it was hard to tell inside the duplex. Jets flew low over the house now and then as we made our first few moves and I remembered how to play; Eglin Air Force Base was just to the north.

          After a while, I’d make a move and Bob would jab me gently with those eyes of his.

          “Do you really want to move your queen there, Harry?”

          I examined the board, could find no reason to change my move. I’d taken my hand off the piece anyway.

          He took my queen, and quickly checkmated me afterwards. “Let’s play again.”

          The clouds outside began to break up; in intervals, the house would be filled with light from the morning sun angling in, and then it would darken again as the stratus came back together.

On the table next to his dad’s ashtray was a pin-cushion shaped like a tomato. I examined it carefully, remembering a similar pincushion my mother used to have. Memory pulled me back for a second. But then David reached over and pulled one of the pins from the pincushion, looked at it carefully – light bounced in and danced on the sides of it – before putting it into his mouth.

“Bob!” I almost screamed, pointing across the table at the boy. “He just put a pin in his mouth. Here David, give it to me!”

Bob looked down at his son. The pin was between the boy’s lips, and he was smiling. He held it like a cigarette there. The father did nothing.

I was aghast. I could see a rapid trip to an emergency room in our future, and pondered what damage swallowing a pin might do to a small child.

“Bob!”

“He’ll be all right,” said the father with preternatural calm. “You gonna move?”

I could not speak, nor think about the game of chess.

“Hey, if it sticks him, he has to learn about pain sooner or later, doesn’t he?”

David smiled, eyes twinkling, and flipped the pin about precisely as would a person with a cigarette in their mouth. He was playing with it. A faintness was coming over me; the word swoon entered my head.

“But Bob,” I was wondering how long our luck would hold here, “come on! It’s just too dangerous! Would you let him toss a knife into the air, or go crawling on a hot stove?”

Fingerwood just gave me another of those still, long looks, as though I were speaking a language beyond his ken – or perhaps he was beyond mine.

I reached over and took the pin out of the boy’s mouth; he immediately started to cry.

In came Marie: “What’s wrong?”

I looked at Bob. “Tell her, Bob. Tell her you let the boy play with a pin in his mouth.”

Marie reached down for the squalling youngster and pulled him from his father’s lap.

“We all have to learn about pain one way or another.”

“But not at the goddamned emergency room on a Sunday morning, you – you –  agh!” She went into the kitchen.

Bob looked again at me, angry now. “Thanks a lot, man!” He was already rolling another joint. “Now she’s mad at me for something else entirely.”

I thought of many things to say, but said none of them. Why haven’t you been here taking care of her instead of off on this quixotic preaching tour of yours? Why weren’t you here to be a father to these boys? And on and on. Instead, I leapt up and went to the little room I was staying in, shut the door, and started putting all my stuff into the one suitcase I had. After I’d done that, I slipped around through the bathroom to the kitchen and spoke to Bob’s wife a few moments, asking her if she knew Maura and perhaps where she was staying. She did.  I thanked her for her generosity in allowing me to stay these few days, refused a cup of coffee, told her I wished she and Bob well – she grimaced – but that I had some things I needed to do on my own.

“What are you planning to do?”

“Learn how to be a passer-by.”

         

 

         

 

Maura and I had a long conversation as we drove from the panhandle up to my old county. She assented to my request for a ride without a qualm. It felt good to be trusted so thoroughly; I suppose that’s why I was so quick to open up and tell her a lot about my past as we drove. She preferred not to travel the interstate any more than necessary, she said, and so we had a very scenic, sleepy, southern Alabama route. The cotton-fields looked like snowy pastures; some had brown weeds intermingled, and there were lots of fields where cows huddled together under trees.       

          “What you are saying sounds a lot like moral relativism,” I told her when she’d explained her beliefs about life, God, good, evil.

          “Not at all.” She was driving, had her hair pulled back now into a narrow ponytail. She said she was 30 years old, but I could hardly believe it.

          “But if you don’t have solid concepts, firm borders, for what is wrong and what is right…aren’t you more apt to slip into the mistake of considering an evil action a good action? Maybe this is what attracted me about the Christian lifestyle, now that I consider it. You know from the very first exactly what is wrong and exactly what is right. All you have to do then is follow the rules.”

          “Yeah,” she said. “You follow the rules well, you get your reward, you fail to follow them, you get your punishment. It’s just too simple, Harry! That’s the problem! Did you never read that quote, I think it’s from André Malraux: ‘Never understand anything too quickly’ ?”

          A sign said Opp City Limits.

          “They have a rattlesnake round up here, each year, I think,” I remembered.

          “Ah, there’s a good example!” she exclaimed. “Would you like some gum?”

          “No . . .what’s a good example?”

          “Snakes. Western culture considers serpents as symbols of bad stuff, you know? All because of the story in Genesis. Harry, tell me you are enough of an intellectual that you don’t consider that story literal.”

          “I am. I don’t.” It was true now.

          “But, like, in eastern cultures, and even in ancient Greece, the serpent is an indicator of wisdom, healing. It’s a helper rather than some devilish creature sent to corrupt.”

          “But still…don’t we need a sense of right and wrong to know how to treat our fellow humans?”

          “Perhaps a few guidelines are necessary. I’d like to think most of us know, deep down, the value of treating others with compassion. And that we don’t have to be forced to do so. But, now, there are always muddy areas, you know.”

          “Well…I guess.”

          “Think of war.” I liked this girl. “Plenty of them, right? Men sent to transgress one of God’s commandments – perhaps one of the most important one – ”

          I winced inside, and thought again of Frank. Was I worried about my eternal soul, or was I concerned about Frank and the family that would miss him if he were gone? If indeed I had caused his death – we’d know soon enough. What caused that inward biting in my guts?  Uncertainty?

          “ – and often they are told they are doing it for some greater good: democracy, or to maintain religious values somewhere. Are they doing wrong in order to create something good? If so, then some good actions might also have evil effects, right?”

          I shook my head. “Let me think a minute, okay? Let’s have a moment of silence.”

          The flatland of the coastal area, so boring to some of us, gave way to rolling hills; the highway had curves. Occasionally we’d pass a mephitic section near a pulpwood plant.

          “I just don’t believe in absolutes,” she said with a certain implausible finality.

          “I’ve believed in absolutes all my life,” I said.

          “Manichaeism.”

          “Yes, that’s what Saint Augustine suffered from before his conversion.”

          “I think we’ll be reading that City of God this upcoming semester, or so I heard.”

          “So, let me get this right,” I said after a while. “You think there’s a muddy edge to good and evil, or – or ”

          “I don’t think the two exist at all, separate from each other. It’s just too simplistic, Harry.”

          A great example bubbled into my mind. “Hey, okay, wait. What about this? Didn’t the Nazis blur the moral lines? Eichmann saying he’d just done his duty. Doing your duty is good; causing the death of millions is bad. The two blurred together for him, and he made his choice, amidst all that ethical uncertainty.”

          “People always use Hitler or the Nazis as their examples, Jeez. Did you know Eichmann was examined before trial and determined to be eminently sane?” One unpainted eyebrow twisted up as she asked me this.

          “I didn’t know that.”      

          “True.”

          “We could argue about this forever, don’t you think?”

          “Sure, but I don’t want to. I know I am not pure good nor pure evil inside – that in certain circumstances, I could and would probably do some very bad things. But if I am capable of doing great evil, I am equally capable of doing the opposite. The two poles are right here,” she pointed at her vest-covered T-shirt. “Both possibilities.”

          And by implication in me, too.

          We drove on, chatting about other subjects, northbound.

 

 

 

 

I got Maura to drop me off at a little coffee-shop in the middle of town – that small agglomeration of buildings closest to the church of my past – and I placed the address and phone number she gave me in my wallet. The weather began in on one of those heavy rains that presage drastic temperature declines; I’d predict an over-night drenching. I wasn’t quite sure what I was going to do at that point, but I sat my bag down and ordered a coffee. Pretty soon the late lunch customers were staring at me. I saw old Pleak, the church’s janitor, and he saw me also. He seemed to know everything that went on, so I invited him over.

          “Damn – I’m sorry, brother Wienkle, I didn’t mean – that is – ”

          “It’s okay, Pleak. I was just wondering what had been going on around town.”

          “Whur you been, preacher?” He backed off a bit from me. “You look kinda, ah, diff’ernt.”

          I managed to get out of him, in a few minutes, the information I wanted. Frank’s last name was Wilson, and he was not dead, at least as far as Pleak knew.

          “I heard they brung him home last week, and a feller I work with who knows his wife’s sister, Arlene, he said that she said he warn’t doin’ too good. He was real old anyway.”

          Did he know where they lived?

          “Out in the woods down highway 22 a ways, little place off the road.”

          Reckon he could give me a ride down that way?

          “Shore, but that ain’t the way I’m goin’.”

          I bought him some gas, and it was not a good sign that we rode in silence in his truck. The rain hammered the roof of his truck like someone knocking hard on metal.

          He pointed out the house, a small run-down place that had to be Frank’s considering the amount of flattened aluminum cans piles around the edges of the house. A wet blue-tick hound of middling age came out from under the house as I approached, my shoes slipping on sycamore balls, but he did not howl. In the driveway was an older-model Chevrolet Caprice, the roof a big worn. I knocked on the door.

          A lady who could have been Maya Angelou’s elder sister opened the door. “About time you got here,” she said. I been getting things ready.”

          “I – uh – ” What could I say? How could I approach this? I had no idea. I managed to get out one question: “Where’s Frank?”

          “He’s in the back. He had a fine passing, you know. Died in his sleep, quiet as a mouse.” She picked up a pan of water that smelled, to me, vaguely of root beer. In it floated two rags. “Come on back. I’d ‘preciate it if you’d help me.”

          In a back bedroom, where the blue-tick hound lay curled, tail thumping, was a big bed, and on it lay the earthly remains of the man whose death I had caused to come sooner than it would anyway. I stared.

          “How old was he?” The dark brown irises of his eyes looked straight up toward the ceiling. One almost looked up there too, to discover what he was looking at.

          “Almost seventy, my sister-in-law said.” She squeezed the water out of one of the rags and handed it to me, went to the other side of  the body and started unbuttoning the baby-blue pajama tops. It wasn’t easy, but she got if off and started gently wiping his stomach.

          I placed my cloth on his forehead. There were scars on his face and a small growth of silvery beard was trying to join up with the fuzzy grey sideburns.

          “Should I close the eyes?” I asked.

          “You can try. They may not close.”

          As I washed his eyes, I slipped the lids downward. He looked much more peaceful. The water no longer smelled like root beer but like something else, perhaps licorice. I could not tell you today what that odor was.

          When she turned him over, the body sighed.

          I must have looked startled. “Happens all the time,” she said. “Air pocket. Seen it before.”

          We washed in silence. Windblown rain slapped the window from time to time.

          The hound stood up and howled, pointing his nose up, tilting his head as dogs will.

          “Shut up, ye mangy mutt! Reckon what that dog’s riled up about?”

          Frank’s body felt like the body of a man who’d worked his whole life and who’d also walked many miles every day.

          “What did Frank do for a living,” I asked, “before…?” I couldn’t tell her I was the one responsible, though it crossed my mind. The lady had one of those faces that just ooze compassion.

          “Forty years in the mines, til they closed down, ‘n’ then he lived off his pension and social security these last few years. All his kids moved off. He lived pretty much alone, the last few years. Pushed the cart about mostly just for the exercise; he had been told to stay off the road.

          I heard what the dog had heard: a siren.

          She saw me cock my head to hear it, caught my change in expression. Looked outside to see no car of mine.

          “You that fella that hit him, I imagine.”

          I told her I was, and I appreciated what she’d done.

          “Sit down.”

          I dropped into a chair, possibly Frank’s chair, big and comfortable but not one of the type that leans back.

          “You’re right. I hope you aren’t worried.”

          “You don’t look either crazy or mean; we figured whoever did it would come back sooner or later.”

          I told her my plan, to give myself up and take whatever punishment was to come my way.

          “That’s all you can do. A person can’t roam around too long with a bad conscience followin’ ‘em.”

          The siren stopped as the car pulled up into her yard.

 

 

 

Epilogue

 

Mea culpa. You take your time (which was not as much as it could have been), and now I am doing the time at Faubus Correctional Institute, just southwest of Chattanooga. A grim set of buildings, towers, fences – institutionalization in a word.

I have about 13 more months, and if nothing happens, I’ll be out. Possibly to go back to school, I don’t know.

I call Maura occasionally, and she sends a letter from time to time. Will visit me next spring break, she says. Life is not too bad here, you’re just cut off from everything and the company is grouchy, food bearable. The prison is probably 200 miles from the places I call home, though I do not inhabit them. We work along the highway, picking up trash. Once they tried having us pick cotton, but it didn’t work out.

I think of these days and months of punishment as a very small price, compared to my actual crime.

Some days they cannot find work for us to do.

 

                   

 

 

 

© 2005, 2007 Thomas N. Dennis