Afternoon

St. Matthew wrote that a city on a hill shall be the light of the world, that it would
be seen by all, that it could not hide. The city of B sat on not one but seven hills which
served as beacons to those who traveled by river, rail or road, a place that served
passersby who did just that, passed on by. For B was a place where few people came to
visit, where even fewer chose to stay. Despite the beauty of its hillside forests of
redcedar, ironwood and shagbark hickory, glens of silver maple and riverbed pawpaws,
its surrounding plains of wild grass and well-kept farmlands, the steadying presence of
the slow, heavy river, this town was honored by none other than its own citizens as being
as ugly and misshapen as an infestation of warts. History was not any kinder. A hundred
years earlier, people described B as a wicked fortress defended by ungodly souls who
wore guns as comfortably as slippers, drank themselves into stupors, a place that must
fall to the inevitable, gathering, ungathered armies of Christ.
Whenever the city of B was set forth in exposition, it was most often described for
what it was not instead of what it was. For instance, someone writing at the turn of the
century remarked that despite its many faults, it was not a place filled with ignorant, cold
blooded ruffians or plotting backwoodsmen, although presumably plenty of those species
abounded. Someone else said, in a way perhaps that could be interpreted to apply a small
charm, that it had no society, no amusements and wants none. How quaint. Even those
who were prone to crow about its natural bounty, its many wild animals waiting to be

shot, its flowering trees and its abundant soils for growing crops, even these
complimentary writers were quick to add that this was not a place for the timid as it was
afflicted by floods that covered most of downtown in the spring, that it was visited by
ruthless tornados that would rip off that beauty as if it were a thin mask, and for measure
that was followed by long relentless winters of ice, snow and wind that was so harsh all
life fled the plains. Some early travelers simply and perhaps honestly commented that
although the town of B had few real qualities to be desired, it was not that bad.
Some say that the town of B defined itself during these earlier times when the
civilized cities so many were fleeing were to its east and the allure of the frontier was
several murky horizons to its west. For the most part the town looked and smelled like a
neglected waystation, a polluted point of passage in the midpoint of an unfortunate
journey, the levee was a littered shambles of junk and garbage, streets were ankle deep in
night slop, horse dung, cow manure and hog dirt, alleys were piled with broken packing
cases, shattered crates, empty bottles, cast off bones from butcher shops, spoiled fruit,
rotting wheat, corn and mead from livery stables and grain dealers. For a while B was in
fact called Turd Town. Mainly by those who lived there of course.
News, religion and money found refuge here but only briefly. It was a time when
newspapers disappeared as quickly as the pages could be blown down to the river, when
churches appeared overnight in mushroom-like tents then vanished the next day as if
trampled by a crowd, when businesses opened and closed as fast as it took to take down
or hang a new sign, when soldiers marched into the bar district of Lowertown staying
barely long enough for a drink and to leave their infections in the laps of a few local gals,
when pigs and cattle loped through town only to drink from rainfilled ruts in the road and

pollute all public areas with manure, when a circus stopped only because its
hippopotamus fell from a bridge into the river. It was a time of paddlewheel steamboats
and gold rushes when profiteers stopped by to make a quick buck and then move on,
leaving B just a little bit poorer than when they had arrived.
Not to say the city of B had not had its chance, it in fact once boasted of promise,
it was after all on a major river, and in its city center three of the nations central railroads
once crossed; some thought the town could have grown to be as large and prosperous as
Cincinnati or Minneapolis, or even Chicago. But the fact is and history will always have
to deal with this in one way or another, that it did not. Life here was a weary treadmill
for most. And this pitiable nature of B would not change over the years and so would
continue to shape the very physicality of the town as well as the inner lives of its
inhabitants to this very day.
Festus Quinn was a man who, like many men of innate but poorly fostered
intelligence, believed that he had been condemned to walk the earth at the wrong time,
during the wrong epoch, that in the same way a child may be born with a club foot or
deafness, he had been unblessed by being dropped naked and helpless into a time that
was not correctly his. The Preacher liked to sit outside on the vestibule of his church
home where he could look out over the hills and valley and river plain and imagine a
landscape that looked much the same for Griffin Sykes. A man of uncertain origin, Sykes
came here around the turn of the century as a minister and an untrained mendicant, a not
unusual combination of talents, providing sermons for the soul and elixirs for any and all
illnesses, catering to the people who were not only too poor to die and be buried but far

too poor to become sick. He was their doctor, their healer, their savior and, more often
than not, their merciful executioner.
It was out of these dreary, forgotten times over a century ago that the stories of
one Griffin Sykes took substance. A casual remark from his Grandmother revealed to
Festus Quinn the notion of this mythical man, a tall and redbearded man who rode his
circuit through town to harangue crowds gathered for Gospel revivals, to broadcast his
Calvinistic message from a wooden crate to the hordes of the unwashed; the Preacher
imagined not without a little transference that this man was one of the brave, perhaps
foolhardy souls who with their voice sought to fill the empty corners of the frontier with
the word of Christ, who extolled the Bible as the sole rule of Faith and who of course
vilified whenever possible the Catholic Church. He was your great great grandfather, his
grandmother had said, or something akin to that. And so Sykes became something more
akin to Festus Quinn than a man lost to stories, in the way that Sykes offered more than
Gods grace and the miracle of salvation to his patients, for he was a man of medicine as
well as spirit.
Back in Sykes real time and Festus true time, the city of B was a way station not
only for the frontier travelers but for the diseases they brought with them: cholera,
typhoid fever, smallpox, and the deadly diphtheria, germs that would cause more deaths
than the battles with the Indians during these times. To profit from this misery, itinerant
medicine men arrived and worked under conditions as vague as the granular fog that
covered the river which brought them and carried them away. Like the others, Sykes had
no medical education but back then that did not matter, there were few alternatives for the
poor and what he had in the way of experience and street training so to speak made him

as competent as any university trained doctor and his devotion to the scriptures granted
him extra authority over the licensed physician armed only with pills and leeches. He
imagined this cowboy medicine man carrying in his satchels the recipes to make people
puke and purge, the vials of mercury for syphilis, laudanum for pain. In his pockets he
might have the scalpels, probes, scissors, small saw and catheters to perform any needed
surgery, and the needles of various sizes and linen thread to suture off his handiwork.
The Preacher nourished his image of this itinerant Gospel peddler hawking both
nostrum paters and nostrum remediums, salves and salvation from street corners with
well-honed and spellbinding talent. From his bag he imagined Sykes could offer a
plethora of remedies: Mug-Wumps Specific for venereal disease, Lydia Pinkhams Herb
Medicine, Kickapoo Indian Sagwa to provide relief in five minutes from dyspepsia,
gastritis and cancer, Dr. Kilmers Swamp Root for malaria, Dr. Batemans Pectoral
Drops, Dr. Williams Pink Pills for Pale People, Bonnores Electro Magnetic Bathing
Fluid for epilepsy and female complaints, Hamlins Wizard Oil, Shou Wu Chih to turn
gray hair black, the Vegetable Universal Pill for balance of blood humor and love, and Dr.
Sibleys Solar Tincture which was able to restore life in the event of sudden death, among
other marvels. He apparently also sold, on at least one occasion, Enzyte, a natural male
enhancement that claimed to be the only ointment made with the rare herb Suffragium
asotas, which the makers translated as better sex, but was ungrammatical Latin for
refuge of the dissipated.

He believed in his grandmothers stories that described

Sykes not as a charlatan or flimflam man, but as a respected minister of souls and flesh
who preached on the levee and laid down the law to the sinners of the lower reaches of
this lowly reaching town. He was, the Preacher was told, so well respected that when he

spoke on Sunday, the saloonkeepers closed their doors to show respect and to allow good
attention to be paid.
This man, Griffin Sykes, was too gifted to stay a peddler long. He rose in stature
with his street knowledge of medicine, his deft, steady hands, his clear eyes, his swift
tongue and most importantly his deep understanding of the Gospel. He went on to
become one of the most respected medical practitioners in the city, making more than
most doctors. The Preachers grandmother gave him one of Sykes daily ledgers, a small
notebook smeared with dirt and who knows what kinds of secretions in which he
recorded the surgeries and preparations that he provided along with the prices that his
patients paid. In that book, deciphering the crude but surprisingly coherent handwriting,
the Preacher learned that Sykes charged one lady three dollars for treating her cholera,
dressing a bullet wound cost five dollars, child birth was ten. In one passage he noted
that he would not treat a man for syphilis unless the man paid him thirty dollars in
advance. It is assumed that the man did not pay and so received no treatment.
But what was most compelling to the Preacher about this fascinating, driven and
ultimately very successful man, was that he gathered this wealth to fuel a vision. When
he was ready, he quit his medical practice and started a church where he administered to
the poor for free. The parallels between this man and the Preachers life were uncanny, as
if the spiritual drive that guided this man Sykes had been embedded into the Preacher
through a process of metempsychosis, perhaps only to be squandered there, as life was
often squandered in B.
If nothing else, the Preacher, a man who, perhaps guided by this transplanted
spirit, had begun early to take on life as a purposeful journey, a journey that was winding

down now, these being the twilight years of anyones time on this planet, a time best used
to collect what disparate bits and pieces of experience, knowledge, and yes even wisdom
one had either ignored or simply neglected, winding the years into tight balls like string
or secure within jars, covered with wax, caps screwed down snug. If nothing else, he
wondered how he had in fact made it to this place, how he had come this far, how he had
traveled in what could only be a circle as he was, as far as he could tell, right back where
he had started any number of years ago.
Festus Quinn was a Lutheran priest who took to the pulpit every Saturday night
and twice on Sunday to deliver a sermon to his flocks, that thinning audience of
shuffling, bent and otherwise less than enthusiastic parishioners who supported him, or,
as he would say, kept him alive beyond his own wishes.
His church was in fact architecturally a cathedral with its two spans of the cross;
entering from the front door into the narthex, the view of the altar was unobstructed.
Built in 1849, it was patterned off the original church of Luther. The nave with its central
aisle led to the chancel and focused the attention upon the altar. The chancel was
symbolic of the head of Christ and the nave, His body. The vine in the cornice of the nave
was the symbol of the Savior and was based upon John 15:1 I am the True Vine. Over
the front door the vine appears again, along with the shield of the Holy Trinity. The nave
was a near endless ninety nine feet in length, the exact length as Martin Luthers church
in Germany. However, the Preacher measured it one day and discovered it was 96 feet,
not 99, a difference of three feet probably due to some architects or contractors
ideological priority of waste-note-want-not over formal beauty, numeric-spiritual
congruity and historical integrity, and so the guy redesigned it so that it would use exactly

twelve 8-foot sections of studs, posts, plywood and no more, which back then, the
Preacher begrudgingly admitted, may have mattered. He didnt really know. As in
Luthers original church, here each pew has a carved symbol in the wooden panel telling
its own story. Where three petals are carved in the form of a fleur de lis recalls the belief
in the Triune God, the acceptance of the virgin birth of the Savior. Where four main
divisions are shown, these are the four major prophets, four gospel writers and Jesus
command to carry the message of love to the four corners of the earth. Where six
divisions are noted, this is significant of the six days of creation, of the six hours Jesus
spent on the cross and of the six attributes of God, namely: power, majesty, wisdom, love,
mercy and justice.
The exterior of the church was constructed from large bricks cut from white
flagstone, the steeple covered in green oxidized copper and on top of that the burnished
steel crucifix Walker had welded into place that stormy night years ago. The home they
gave him was a modest, red brick structure next to the church proper, although on the
corner closest to the church, builders had grafted the same white flagstone into portions
of the walls, as if the small home had contracted a kind of psoriasis or other surface
affliction from the larger white house of God.
In any case, at ninety nine or ninety six feet the nave provided a capacity to seat
more than two hundred worshippers, but never had he seen even half that number at any
one time, a number that had in fact dwindled further over the last few decades, dwindled
on account of the attrition in this town overall, the youth leaving this dead and desiccated
town for a place that would support the living, and dwindling because only the hard of
hearing, he often good naturedly joked, could bear to hear his sermons. These Sundays,

if he had a few dozen at any given sermon, he had a good crowd. That ninety six feet
was a long distance to walk, a lot of room to fill, it made for empty funeral gatherings, it
made people feel as if they had fewer friends than they thought, it seemed wasteful, it
made one feel the ship was never going to leave port, not with so many empty seats, so
many unpaid tickets. This church was now more a bingo parlor than a place of worship, a
waiting room for the aged, the shuffling goutsmitten masses, at times he found himself
hallucinating that he was in fact in a bus station, speaking wordlessly to an audience too
tired, to uprooted, too unsure of where they were headed to pay him any heed.
For each sermon his flock would gather not by spreading themselves out evenly
through the pews, but clustering in small familiar knots, forming tribes within this tribe.
A few would arrive thirty minutes or so before the start of service, sit quietly in the
silence with heads bowed in prayer, in sleep perhaps, until the others who had gathered to
chat in the parking lot or the lobby would shuffle in and take their seats, their chattering
and wheezes of polite laughter rising in volume. The same people for the past ten years
or more. Dorothy who sat by herself, bent over by her ninety long years, her head
covered in a broad colorful hat hung heavy off her neck like a wilted sunflower, she took
communion with the same eager smile and wet eyed thank you as if taking her last.
Herman Breugler who always wore a navy jacket, crisp white shirt with gold links, and a
shudder-inducing rug on his bald head, always smiling, making jokes with neighbors in
the pews during all times of the service, the most ready and eager of the ushers when it
came to passing round the collection baskets. The overweight Angie Bickerstaff whose
dresses of the most cheerful patterns covered the abdominal dewlap that swung to her
knees, she was an ardent supporter of the proposed but never instituted church choir and

was the one voice that God could never fail to hear. Patrick Turner, the organist, who was
a pharmacist who put uninterruptible attention and focus into anything he did whether
filling a pill bottle or playing a Bach partita, he was always accompanied by his lithe,
plain faced and ordinary to the point of unattractive, young wife, Linda, who sang and
yawned while religiously watching her husband play the hymns and marches. With a
distant sadness, the Preacher knew that Linda was having an affair with a feed salesman
from Illinois and so he watched her watch her husband intently as if afraid to remove her
eyes from him and so allow her thoughts stray into licentious fields. Stanley Wagner, as
thin and awkward as a scarecrow, who was the owner of a hardware store, and a drunk.
Elizabeth Kastovich, a widow of a banker, who headed up the churchs charity for
victims of domestic violence. There was the perennially happy couple, Fred and Dorothy
Cummins, who held hands in service and kissed each other openly when it was time to
wish peace to our neighbors, this they had done for more than twelve years. Douglas
Hindermann, a greying anthropomorphic bachelor, who was unemployed other than as
the little league coach, and some said he liked little boys a little too much for most
peoples comfort. How had these people chosen his church, how had they chosen him to
lead them, how had this tribe of elders come to be his flock? He could not guess. There
was Duncan Newberry, who was an army colonel who shot his own son accidently one
day by firing a shotgun through the side of his barn, his son masturbating in the hay on
the other side of the wall. Was there really redemption for each and every one of these
wretched living? There was Sonya Hoftstaader, who had married five times before her
last husband died of a stroke leaving her with a hidden trove of debt that wiped out all she
had worked so hard to collect from her previous nuptials. He was thankful that he rarely

had to perform marriages or baptisms as he felt that his fingers did not bring blessings but
the curse of age. Cyrus Abernathy whose face was dried and flattened by the sun, a
hardworking farmer, a truck driver, a man who still had a body of muscle and sinew
beneath pants and suit coat larger and baggier than they were in the past, his twenty six
year old daughter, the only kin he had left, who left her husband on their honeymoon, ran
off with a new man she had known for all of a few hours, ran off with him to Alaska,
where she contracted a disease and was left barren while her boyfriend fell into the
freezing waters off the side of a fishing boat, now lives on oxygen, an invalid with a brain
no more useful than the bowl of Thanksgiving ambrosia. The Preacher put them to earth,
as many as four a month now, almost once a week, often more than one on any given
Sunday, his primary vocation was to bury, to toss dirt, sprinkle ash. There was Frank
Delaney, a professor from the university who lost his testicles to cancer, Claris Mueller
who was waiting for a bone marrow transplant, Doug Clinger who needed a heart, and
Patty Smithers who had only days left on her sick liver. Every Sunday, the list of
requests for prayers to help the sick, the dying, the should be dead grew longer. Why do
they embalm the folks who are eighty, ninety years of age, what are they preserving, no
one wants to be forever remembered at that age? A racket it was. Money that could be
better spent on day care for the kids or the gambling boats for that matter. Mabel Skjey
was preserved even though she had lost her lower jaw and most of her neck to cancer.
Dick Stroheim was embalmed with a fake eye and a nose reconstructed from putty, both
of which he lost in a fatal tractor accident. Why? Doris Kzowlaskis grey and pocked
face was painted white and smooth to hide the decades of effects that the pesticide factory
had had on her. Why? Why? Finally, and how could he forget, last but not least, of

course, yes, there was the faithful and devoted Mrs. Klempton, a fifty-something widow
who had kept her figure well, whose face had been treated with time rather kindly, who
sat as near to him as she could without being any more obvious than she was when she
gave him cookies or brownies after the sermon. A plate wrapped in gay green cellophane
sat patiently in her lap.
He was less than memorable at giving sermons, hardly inspiring, downright
boring. It didnt help that he usually took his weekly message from a book of canned
talks offered to the Lutheran brotherhood on the Internet, a depository of speeches
watered down from the Catechisms that he perfected in their mediocrity through pallid
and lifeless regurgitation from the pulpit. He was simply uninspired and uninspiring. He
also lacked the one requirement of a Lutheran minister, a guiding sonorous voice, as song
was more vital than the word, and his voice was flat, throaty and guttural except for the
few times when he lifted his face and sang to the arches above him, drowning out the
weak lunged voices of his congregation at the end of a psalm.
If you are a Lutheran minister, isnt that what is required most of all, to give some
heartfelt, spirit-filled interpretation of Gods word? Wasnt that what Luther, that crude,
rude lunatic of a reformist, cried out for to begin with? An honest, not intelligent, a clear
and deeply felt, not interpretative, interpretation of the gospels in a language that
everyone could understand, in terms that everyone could comprehend, in emotions that
everyone could feel? No, not the feel good emotion of the Baptists, but the deeply felt
pain and clarity that came with embracing a truth that was in fact felt, not known, that
resonated within, but did not bring feet to tap or legs to jiggle or arms to wave. Hallelujah
hell no!

No. He had no chorus to sing of redemption, although behind the billowing

abdomen of Angie Bickerstaff they came to him volunteering to form a choir, but, and he
was practical, when he calculated how long it would take them, walkers and canes and
all, to get up from their pews and assemble in front of the altar to sing, then, when done,
to get up and return to their seats, a choir was not possible, practically speaking. So, he
had no musicians to sway his flock into an orgiastic frenzy, he had no voice by which to
elevate his toneless sermon into a call to freedom, a call to hope, a call to a new life. He
had but Patrick, his solid and adequate organ player to accompany the hymns, to provide
the somber music preluding his entrance, to cover the seemingly endless minutes of the
sacrament, and the achingly endless minutes more required for the parishioners to get to
their feet, crabwalk across the pews, turn towards the door, and shuffle back outside
where he stood after every sermon to smile and shake their hands while in his mind he
was whisking them away, back to their lazy boy chairs, back to their television sets, back
home to take a nap, to sit on a porch, to take their medications, back to their assisted
living facility, to their long term care center, back home to a place that probably was not
like home at all, that was more like a coffin than a coffin. Yes, he could feel sad, he could
feel remorse even, for what he did not do, what he could have done and didnt, what he
allowed to never be done, the small things, the simplest things, the whisper in an ear that
someone looks beautiful, remembering a birthday, bringing flowers to the hospital,
dropping by with a copy of prayers if that person was unable to make it to church one
weekend. He did and he didnt.
He wondered how the youth had disappeared from this nave, vanished over time
as if slowly erased without his noticing, not until they were gone.

He distinctly

remembered how this nave, constructed more than one hundred year ago to carry a
congregation on a voyage with Gods word, had once been filled with families, restless
bratty kids, no he did not miss them, those gangly sleepy pimple faced teens, sitting
awkwardly next to parents in their Sunday best, men with hair slicked down and women
bearing spun sugar dos. He still had on display in the historical society room a picture of
the Rev Hummerbund at the helm, standing at the pulpit like the true captain of a ship.
Hummerbund had a voice that would shake your timbers, would wake your soul, would
terrify and satisfy you.
Aside from the church, his flock and his fantasies of the past, his life, these days
and nights of monotony, these weeks of watching decay assume its final stage just before
all collapsed, these months and years that seemed the same, the time passed by that
quickly, his life was entering a period where all he could do was revisit the observations
that had piled up inside of him like notes in a diary, like poisons in his blood.
Like how the body is a unit, though it is made up of many parts; and though all its
parts are many, they form one body.
How the simplest act of volition touches upon all we know or ever have known.
How love vanishes once touched, once held. How death comes in shades of grey. How
time is not captured or reified in this moment, nor at all.
How he was always a coward, since he was a child. Afraid of men, of boys.
Never beaten but always afraid of being beaten. Teachers called him cry baby as he
would burst in tears if reprimanded. Kids called him little girl because he cried if he fell
and scraped an elbow or knee.

How he loved animals more than people knowing from a young age that animals
and people were of the same basic stuff, the same flesh and blood, with differences like
hooves instead of feet and fangs for teeth and tails and thick hair but all the same all was
basically the same, terribly the same actually, as eyes were eyes and mouths had teeth and
legs had three bones and arms had three bones and ribs held lungs and hearts and
stomachs emptied into piles of intestines and as things ate they shat and as things
breathed they needed water to drink and as things had eyes they looked into his eyes, and
so this early perception of similitude was the germ that created the inextinguishable
thought that there was a beast within him, below the surface, capable of expression, or
eruption, of a slight reorganization of things here and there and with that would appear,
could appear.
How he had wanted to be a doctor ever since witnessing the terrible electrocution
of Bobby Staples, who was swinging a golf club near an electrical transformer and out of
the big gray box a bolt of electricity zapped his club sending the young boy into
prolonged and teeth shattering convulsions, an event that stirred most in him a fascination
with the body, its compliance under another force, not one of God but a force of man, an
electrical current. How true control was achieved through physical not spiritual means,
and so began his fascination with the flesh and how he could manipulate it, move it, fix it,
cure it.
How his parents were of common stock and uncertain ambition, both born to
alcoholic families, both the first to rise above their middling means, and yet in their
dissatisfaction of their plight they sought to see him, their son, ascend even higher. How
he was born to the son of a railway man, the first of the family to work through college,

to get a degree and begin work in a white shirt and tie, a cold man with a ferocious
temper, who terrorized his workers at the plant that made vacuum tubes as well as
terrorized his family until he had quaffed enough martinis to slide into a quiet, distant
oblivion.
How he could barely remember his father, well he could remember his father
quite well from times late in his fathers life, but he could not remember his father from
the earlier parts of his life, as if his father had never really been there in the house, had
never really sat at the kitchen table for dinner, had never mowed the grass or washed the
car in the driveway, how his father had never been to one of his baseball games, how his
father had never been there to hug or kiss his mother, had never been in the living room
reading the paper, had never filled a room with pipe smoke, had never made a work
bench in the garage and here constructed a television set from all these little bulbs and
electronic things, had never spanked him, had never called him in from playing outside,
had never tucked him in, had never sang happy birthday as if he had made all these
things up.
How his mother had been an adequate but uninspired mother, an adequate but
unfulfilled wife, adequate at all things that she set herself to do including working in a
police precinct, at an veterinary office, as a real estate agent, as the personal assistant to
the city mayor, but still she remained a woman who was dissatisfied with most things, a
dissatisfaction that he eventually wore as well and carried with him as a burden that he
could not shed.
How he went to medical school, thinking that doctors and priests share the same
compassion for human beings, that doctors and priests each have a hand in salvation, that

doctors and priests each carry an oath to serve mankind, and that doctors actually help
people get better, while priests do little more than try to comfort ones getting worse.
How he believed that doctors were trained to think of humans as organs and processes.
Doctors could not avoid taking hold of a penis, looking inside a vagina, there could be no
complicity with thoughts of sin or evil when doing ones job, priests taught to avoid the
carnal and seek a connection with the spiritual.
How his years at medical school were as close as he came to believing in
purgatory and hell, the long hours of learning by rote the bits of anatomy, the names for
chemical reactions, the collections of symptoms, it was brain numbing, mind-numbing,
forcing them all to wash down what they learned with beer to make room for more facts
and names the following day. He felt he was being fattened with facts, he was becoming
bloated with useless garbage, his being stuffed with nonsense until he was ready to be
skewered and roasted on a spit, cooked on a fire and then served to his patients.
How he left his studies in medicine not because of the pain and discomfort it
caused him but because he could not submerge his faith. How digging and cutting
through a cadaver was not the way to find anything. How there was nothing dissimilar
pulling apart grey lifeless muscles or veins in a putrefied human cadaver and working in
the slaughterhouse, whereas in the latter he had the chance to feel the last ebbs of life
flitter and jerk in his hands, it had no meaning, no impact and felt no less carnal than
holding the grey, cold and formaldehyde soaked tissue of his cadaver.
How he blamed medical school, the long days and even longer nights of studying,
of staying awake for days on end, drinking coffee and taking amphetamines to stay awake
until you hallucinate and see every page word for word before your eyes, a skill which of

course vanishes right before the exam, then the binges of drinking and the falling asleep
on bathroom floors, in hallways, outside in the cold. He became sickly and never
recovered.
How priests were the only ones that held him when he cried despite the face of
Luther whose fiery eyes and ugly face heaped scorn on his own wimpy ways. But even
they lost compassion for him, they no longer cared when he wailed in terror at night, or
suddenly fell prostrate to the ground weeping to the earth.

They no longer asked him

what was wrong as he walked around with a mask of discomfort on his face, his innards
wrapped into a painful knot. He became the one who suffered alone.
How he never found in any woman the passage to free him from his doubts about
this that, life, himself, and how could any woman be expected to carry out that task, and
so when it came to women, the Preacher could only open the gift and see what it was
from the outside, could never fully unwrap it and make it his and see what was hidden,
what existed for him ad what could have been his but not his and what could have been
fulfilled not only promised, what could have been real not simply drunkenly imagined,
what could have been created and not ignorantly believed to be fully inexistence like
some ripened fruit.
How he had never married and often wondered if it was his size that stopped his
desire, he was of course inordinately tall, more than six feet eight when he lifted his head
and straightened his spine, but still he was small, diminutive compared to most of the
men here, he was not broad shoulder, barrel chested, large bellied like them, he did not
have the thick blubbery thighs or the knotted calves revealed on hot summer days. His
arms were lithe, his hands small and delicate. His neck was thin, like a cats. Even

Luther himself had been a large man, his body suggesting that he tasted the flesh and
when he did he feasted on it savagely. Luther had smuggled his wife out of a convent as
if she were food, put her in a herring barrel, fish fit for a man. As Luther were these other
men in B, without grace perhaps but with a mighty appetite they had for food and for
their women. He, on the other hand, lacked not only the appetite but the cutlery.
How foolish it was to compare oneself to greatness, even if one could find
rhythmic parallels between ones small insignificant life and the larger lives of those who
changed the world.
How he took to heart Luthers words that we are not to encourage world-flight,
but to service the neighbor in the common daily vocations of this perishing world.
How he knew the history of this town and its origin on the river and the plans by
so many to build it into the major city and it had as much if not more than those cities at
least at the beginning, as it had the river and a good, protective harbor, as it had the gentle
but significant hills on which a city would build above floods, and as it had vast orchards
of wild fruit trees and all kinds of game and planet of wood for building and stone that
went into the many original buildings, as it had a strategic position where soldiers could
safely regroup, which meant drink and fornicate, before facing the hostile territories of
the west, north and south, as it had an innate and palpable consignment with god, a
fateful relationship that was born in all things natured and all things of mans symbolic
importance.
How he loved the people here, yet the recognition that they are nothing in the
scheme of things, that they are bits of dust still blowing about the heart of the heart of the
country, that they will never be missed, they will never be needed. How much like the

pigs bred here they are, how much like livestock, herded about from manufacturing plant
to factory, from assembly line to call center, herded from hospitals to give birth back then
to hospitals to die, herded into care facilities, herded into low income housing, herded
into dilapidated neighborhoods, trailer parks.
How he had no real drive in life, nothing that he could say was the reason he did
what he did, no raison detre, no passion, no enthusiasm bridled or un, but he did have
one thing that spurred him on in some direction, that banged at his ribs, gouged his
kidneys and sucked his breath away at certain moments unpredictable and undesired, and
this was that the constant challenge he felt from Walker, not a challenge directly from the
man himself, but what the man stood for, not for others but for him, the Preacher, what
Walker stood for in the Preachers mind, what the man was in his essence, in the aura that
he created, in the mystery of his appearance, his being, his success, his failures, all were
far more and far outreaching the abilities and capabilities of the normal man, and the
Preacher knew this and knew more about Walker than anyone.
And how much was Walker responsible for this? For him?

Did his inner

conviction to the gospel even exist before he saw Walker take the hand of Alicia and
vanish into the house he built on the widows hill? How much had Walker to do with his
decision to quit medical school? To leave behind a scholarship and a career? To begin
following this murky and obstacle cluttered path that he was on now, one that had no end,
no goal, no resolution?
And how much did Walker have to do with his failings here in his church? With
his doubts? With his indecision, his inability to accept what he once accepted with
purpose? With this lack of confidence, his wavering commitment, with the feeling of

emptiness that filled his chest, with the feeling of betrayal that he felt towards his flock as
if he were leading them nowhere, for this overall feeling that life was without substance
and that there was nothing that could permit him to see bliss, joy or hope anywhere in
anything?
How until Walker, the Preacher had never truly contemplated the limitations of
man, not the measly limitations we all find within ourselves, such as how far or how fast
we can throw a baseball, how quickly we can learn arithmetic, or how close are we
willing to get to an accident on the highway. No the limitations that he learned about
from his experiences with Walker were deeper than that, more existential, as if he were
touching the once untouchable elements that restricted all our thoughts, the very nature of
our beings, as if through Walker he was forced to blindly and grotesquely feel the inner
limitations that gave meaning but were not meaningful in themselves.
And how until Walker, the preacher had had no real notion of evil, aside from the
notions learned by rote and habit, had no means to understand evil, to address it, to even
recognize it, no means by which to peg a layer of thought, to weave a dissertation, no
manner by which to have any confidence that he had the mental faculties to tackle the
subject, to know that there was a subject to be talked about, to even know why he would
even bother to waste any of these so called faculties on this so called subject.
How you might suspect that here was a man who would have been crippled in
some way by his inability to rise to a level of faith or understanding, and that this would
in fact have been his weakness, his Achilles heel, his fatal flaw, but in fact, it was his
inability to understand that led him to faith in the first place and so it is our mistake to
assume that from understanding comes faith when in fact it is the opposite, that faith

precedes understanding and in some cases can be said to annihilate any future attempts to
understanding, which is to say that faith when accepted wholly and embraced as such can
be a very powerful and gifted experience. Walker taught him that faith was in fact not a
solution, but simply opened another fault in his already shallow inner being.
How the lack of adornment within the church was troubling, as it always asked for
conversation over silent awe. He could not keep still in his church, he was forced to keep
moving so as to avoid the blank walls, the empty space, the austere invitation to speak to
God. How he had no desire to weep any more. How God was a catalyst for wracking
tears, not for any enlightenment, or engaging conversation.
How his church had but two points of amazement left for him, one old and one
new, one inside and one outside. The old point of amazement was the rood beam, the
wooden beam often overlooked, but runs across the center of the nave, and standing
below the steps of the chancel and looking heavenward, he could see in the timber
structure that was the architects way of saying Jesus is the center of worship, for He is
the Rood Beam of this edifice.
How the new point of amazement was the steel cross on the steeple, put up there
only last year by a man who may have condemned this church forever.
How he remembers the stormy night when Walker climbed to install the metal
crucifix on the church steeple, the steel crucifix that Walker had made as an approximate
replica of the one that had originally adorned the steeple, which had fallen or was
removed without making it into anyones written history, without a remark in the churchs
daily logs of Rev Hammerbund, who must have dismissed it as a trivial event not so
worthy of remark, after all it was only the toppling of a seven foot iron crucifix, the one

Jesus would be nailed to, which must have landed with some impact upon either the
grounds or the church itself and yet there was no mention of any repairs, not a word about
the need to replace it, no suggestion that parishioners donate even more than the pittance
they already gave so that a new one could be re-erected, and this begs the questions as to
where did the crucifix disappear, and perhaps opens the question that maybe the crucifix
did not fall by accident or grace of God but was removed, perhaps to be smelted down
and recycled as they might do in those days, or that someone may have stolen it and used
to as the frame for a tractor trailer or to hold up the backbone of a sagging barn, how
Walker had lifted the new two hundred pound steel sculpture he had designed and welded
in his barn, lifted if to the steeple with a set of pulleys and the winch off the front of his
truck, and that one third of its height was a steel beam that would slide into a hole at the
very pinnacle of the steeple to be attached and secured with long steel bolts hidden
beneath the wooden ceiling, and how he had the crucifix in place, positioned in the hole,
the arms turned exactly in position, Walker hanging from the steep copper sides of the
steeple with a leather belt that was looped around the pinnacle, a harness on which he
could spin around in three hundred and sixty degrees, dancing with his feet against the
roof, as he examined the crucifix from every side and inserted the shims that would
steady it until he could climb off the roof and climb back into the inside of the steeple and
there bolt the crucifix in place forever, but as he was finishing his shim work the weather
turned, the winds burst across the hilltops and clouds rolled in dark and angry, thundered
rumbled across the ways, and the shims he had inserted were not enough to hold the
crucifix in place, it teetered ever so slightly but the imperfection had to be corrected
before it was locked into place, and how Walker continued to dance in circles around the

cross, driving in more shims but the wind would come again as if purposefully from
another direction to catch him off guard, to knock him off his feet and send him spinning
about and tumbling down the side of the steeple and how a light rain had wetted the
copper plating and it grew too slick for his boots, and the wind came with greater force
and rain began to pelt him and how the cross now tottered back and forth in its
unfastened state and darkness descended and across the hills lightening began to crack
and the preacher called for Walker to get down and Walker shouted back he was just
about done, but the preacher could see the massive steel structure swaying in the wind
and Walker slipping off the metal roofing, the dark clouds filling the sky like ink spilling
into a water glass, the wind now playing with him, tossing him about, smacking him
across the steeply inclined roof, his black hair wet and hanging down into his face, his
feet struggling vainly to keep a position, grappling with his hand to gain some purchase
until he could drive in another shim but the wind and the rain would have none of it and
at one time he was knocked clear off the roof and spun around like a toy on the end of a
string until he hit the side of the steeple with a loud thud and the crucifix began to
shudder as if it were being shaken free of this holster, and how the lighting now struck
within a few seconds count before the thunder rolled down on them like the very shouts
from heaven, and for the first time the Preacher not only wondered if there was a clear
but unrecognized reason that the old crucifix had been removed from this roof, if there
was an unspoken horror that had never been recorded, how he, a man of the cloth who
did not believe in signs, now wondered if he was indeed receiving such an unmistakable
sign, and he was so overwhelmed by this that he forgot that there was a man on the
steeple, how he forgot that a mans mortal life was in peril, the Preacher in his rain and

sweat soaked ecstasy beneath the spectacle and the angry clouds was ready to sacrifice
that, to allow that man whose name suddenly no longer mattered to be sacrificed, if only
he could finally receive this sign, this direct communication from the Lord himself, not
one man, not two men, not any number of men mattered, all and any number were worthy
of sacrifice to witness this event, to receive this message and he suddenly knew how the
cruel elders of churches came to be so ruthless, smiled while being so cruel, allowed so
many to die, how they killed and maimed and tortured so many men and women, here
was the reason, here was the power, the only time when you understood and could
witness the wrath, the fury, feel the hand of a God, and how that hand would soon do
away with this man, this beast, this archangel, Walker.
How Walker then somehow gathered himself against the forces of wind and rain,
found the point to plant the last shim, sent it into place with his hammer, wiped his brow
and stood looking up at the crucifix now perfectly in place, held the leather strap of his
harness and slicked back the hair from his eyes as the rain pelted him and his face
showed no signs of fear, but he arched his back and opened his mouth as if about to shout
out his final victory, instead simply held his mouth open to the sky and took in the rain
drops and never flinched as the last lightning bolt of the storm crackled into the ground
on one of the hills to the west and the Preacher realized not with any relief that the battle
had been won and it was not a victory for God, it was not a victory for faith, but a victory
won by a single man, a single mortal man, and that this was not the first time this man
had snatched providence from him, that this would not be the last time this man would
steal his faith, that this is what he would have to live with and this is where he would
have to stay for there was no running from a man like this, this was destiny.

How life would be bearable if not for Walker.

How life would be unbearable without Walker. For it was Walker who created a
position in time, a place on earth that cannot be ignored, that must be confronted. The
fear of that confrontation becomes the all-consuming moment of being. Day in and night
out, the fearful need to stand before that man, the terrifying compulsion to look into that
face, to found him and hold him down and see what swims in these eyes, to see what
darts about in that mouth, what ripples in those arms, what ventures forth from that body,
what struggles in that mind.
How the young men who came to him asking for advice, the married women who
had been betrayed, who would betray, the kids who thought bad things of their teachers,
the old men who had done something horrible in their lives and need to remove it like a
cancer, like a tumor. He could not help them.
How the people who came to him asking for help in finding a lost son, in having
the Lord cure their spreading skin lesions, who only wanted to win the lottery, who came
to him and asked him to bless their friend who was sick, to help a neighbor find
happiness with a new wife, to help a cat recover from being hit on the road
shamelessly he had come to recognize these as pleas not for the warfare or beneficiary,
but ways in which people gained favor for themselves by asking for help to others.
How he was not truly skeptical, he was a practitioner of life as it was, everyone
was weak, everyone had flaws and everyone would suffer mightily from those flaws, and
that we know those flaws and we harbor them from others and most of all from ourselves,
we hide them beneath clothing, we hid them deep in our minds, we hide them by putting
on displays for other to see that espouse nothing but the exact opposite, such as if we

dont have money, we buy an expensive car, or if deep down we dont like blacks, we
foster a child in Africa, or if we hit our wife, we take her to Sunday brunch at the Golden
Corral, dark sunglasses and all, or if we have a cancerous testicle, we wear baggier pants,
and if we killed someone long ago, we keep the hunt for the killer alive with a maniacal
level of commitment and zeal.
How he has watched the boys and girls escape, the ones who leave and never
come back, who never even come to visit for holidays.
How the children grew up understanding that the earth was a place that with
knowing cruelty turned to mud if you had to suddenly outrun a bull, it was a place that
pelted you with cold rain, with stinging sleet and sometimes with killing balls of ice, it
was a place that dried up when you needed water, it was a place that flooded when you
had simply asked for rain, it was a place that nurtured plants but broke your bones, that
beauty hid danger, that animals were things that grew up to be slaughtered, that survival
was all that mattered, mattered more than talk, mattered more than love, mattered more
than caring how the world would change if the only if was the if of living. The only if
was the if of having food this winter. The only if was the if of waking to see another day.
And so the is what they worked to achieve. Another day. That is what they strove to
accomplish. Another day. That is what they dreamed of. Another day. That is what they
wrote about in little padlocked diaries. Another day.
How aside from hard work, what did one learn about life here? You learned here
not was life was but what it was not. That life is good? No, life was not good. That nature
is bountiful? No nature takes before it gives. That knowledge is worth having? That man
is a moral being? No. none of that. One learned that life is work and the good life

comes from hard work even if you can never work hard enough to attain it, even if you
work so hard you can never enjoy it. Life is not to be enjoyed, for Christs sake! Life
gives us the ability to use our muscles, to use our hands and feet, our shoulders and legs
to work. Work is what life is, it is an endless expiration, it is an never ending set of tasks,
it is the routine of work from day to day and night to night. It is the only pattern that has
meaning, it is the meaning, it is the pattern. It is Gods way. Work is God.
How he had seen the transformation in Alicia as they all had, the first
transformation that came with her marriage to Walker, the second transformation that
came with the birth of her son. Then the break. The return. Now she is seeking a
different path. Searching the heavens, looking to the unknown to cure what she fears of
the known.
How he alone knew what ailed the Sheriff, for he had the knowledge to
understand that unlike most human beings, the Sheriff had bones that did not know to
stop growing, that as he aged his bones continued to grow, thicken, fatten, the bones of
his arms, his legs, and most noticeably the bones of his face. What had once been a
handsome young man had evolved into a squarish ogre of deformity, his forehead had
swelled far out over his eyes, his cheeks broadening so that his eyes fell deep into their
sockets. His jaw bone was growing outward and pushing his lower teeth far in front of
the upper ones that were being pushed downward into the gaping maw. His nose had
arched and spread out the nostrils giving him a neanderthalic set of features, as if he had
indeed devolved while ankles grew into large nodules, knees round as basketballs, and
that he seemed to be sprouting wings from his shoulder blades, visible protrusion pushing
up through his shirt and jacket. How he had Pagets Disease, a disfiguring ailment that

transformed the skulls and faces of its victims into the lumpen, misshapen skulls found of
ancient Norse sailors or even Neanderthal fossils.
How for the preacher, the transmogrification taking place in the Sherriff was itself
more evidence of the beast within. How the people of this city were numbed by the rapes
they had endured. How life was nothing if no greatness could ever be known.
How he was the first in his tribe to live a life that was not afloat in alcohol, how
he was the first not to have made a burning swathe of wreckage through life, leaving
behind battered women, crippled children, debts, a foreclosed farm, warrants for his
arrest.
How his love for a woman who was now a frail and formless old woman could
have shaped his life so thoroughly and so permanently.
How the man who took this woman into his concubinage, who took her away off
the web of his sick soul, who bound here and fed off her, keeping her alive for all those
decades while he, the preacher could only watch and whine like a dog on the end of a
chain.
How he loved this woman loved her as what? As a mother? An aunt? A sister?
A member of his tribe? As a person that had accompanied him for all time through history
and was destined to be with him for time immemorial? What had occurred to bind him to
her? What had happened in the passing of events, the trivialities of life, the simple sights,
the barely remembered sounds, the lost events, the forgotten moments, days and years to
have created this bond? It was a bond, it was nothing less, it held and raptured him, it
tied and limited him, it cut into him, it stunted growth, it limited the future, it made no
sense.

How only he knew that her condition was one of a brain that had seized upon
itself, had taken identity and consciousness hostage, turned reality into a Berkelian
shadow play, no longer tied to the physical world of sound and light, color and shape, but
created on unrestricted neurons which were to their fancy and not guided by any logic
that the world might impose. All of her faculties were enslaved in the terrible dance that
this internal disfigurement rent upon her soul, she was caught in a vortex of images and
conversation, battles and emotions that would never be known to anyone but her. Who
knew what terrors she witnessed, what loneliness entailed, whatever present danger she
felt lurked by her at every moment. She was worn down by these phantoms, these devils,
she was ground down into far less of the woman that she had been most of her life, she
was beaten and rent and shaken until like a rag doll cant be shaken any more, form is
lost, stitching unstitch and contents begin to spill forth. She oozed and shed what human
traits were bond inside and finally found herself shaking and desperate like a capture wild
animal, she was tied to a bed and shocked through scalp with electricity, injected with
one of many drugs that would be tried until finally she was rendered fit to leave.
How his flock never knew, never looked into his eyes wondering if there was any
internal pain dwelling there. How he wished he had the guts to be an artist and to find a
sword by which to throw himself on with flair. How he worried that no cancer would ever
swell his pancreas, soften his bones or blackened his brain, how he would be spared and
to his horror would discover that he was the only one of any person in this town who
wanted to be eaten, to be rotted, to be rendered into a less than human mass. How he
wished he could transform himself to words or song and so transcend this waste defiled
pit of earthly existence. How he loathed laughter. How science will only enliven

understanding when it becomes itself poetic. How money is the blood of the new homo
materialis. How Heidegger was right, how Rilke was right, how Carnap was right, how
the Germans were so right and so desperately wrong. How we know what we know
before we know it. How chance only describes what we dont understand, and how we
will never understand. How the mind is only definable within a community or minds.
How evolution is just another revelation of how simple minded we really are. How he
could care so deeply for so many people and deliver so little to ensure their constant
happiness.
How he never had anything of real meaning to say at funerals or burials; how the
words could have been the thumping of a drum, the beating of fingertips on a table, the
tapping of a shoe beneath the table, the sounds that perhaps came before there were
words not because we were seeking to communicate but because we feared the silence.
How he wished Alicia would finally take her turn, finally bow out, what was she
in God's sake waiting for, what purpose did it serve to linger on, to be here, to cast that
shadow in her living room windows, to walk the gardens like some wind tossed piece of
cloth torn from the drying lines.
How he wished the winds would tear everything out by the roots and pile this
wreckage of a town up in mountains far from here.
How he wished the aliens who impregnated us with this curse of intelligence
would come back and bury their stupid experiments.
How he wished he could have left, but now it was too late.

How had it not been for Walker, he, the preacher, would have been able to leave as
well.
How long?
How he knew that Walker was the father of both the young Walker and Flint of
the same age, how both of them had come into being in the very same year, only a month
apart, how both mothers gave birth alone without a husband aside them, how both
mothers struggled with the delivery, how both mothers were plunged into a dark
depression post-partum ,and how their lives now were defined by the birth of this child,
and defined by the father of their children, the same man for both, and the disfigurements
that occurred thereafter.
How he had watched the young Walker and Flint grow up not knowing what
tethered them, unaware of what they shared, despite the obvious features in common,
despite the startlingly similar behaviors, the Walkerisms that they both employed from an
early age.
How he embraced chastity not for his Lord but for Alicia, how he swore to never
engage carnally with any woman other than Alicia and then when she and Walker became
conjoined his commitment to his virginity immediately became more general and he
embraced it in the abstract although not without the concrete image of Alicia always there
to remind him of his commitment.
How he slammed his finger with a sledge hammer and removed the tip of that
pinky so that the nail grew back like a claw as if he had peeled back his ancestry on that
one hand and revealed a beast within.

How he fell in love with the church when he was very young, maybe as young as
five or six, and how he sought to recreate the altar and the basin in his mothers
washroom using plastic hampers and buckets, how at a young age he felt the piety of
poverty and relished the poverty of his church, how he draped his mothers lingerie
around his neck and there he would kneel and with folded hands there he would pray and
as they did not have a Bible in the house he at first tried to use a dictionary which had
thin pages and columns of words but that would not suffice and so he set to making his
own bible and he took Kleenex and tissue paper and melted them in water, he then took
that paste and spread it out on a screen and with a piecrust roller he pressed the pulp dry
and then let it further dry in the sun, and when finished he removed a square of rough and
lumpy paper on which he scribbled symbols of God with black ink and folded and set
before him as his divine instrument to conduct his private church and ceremony.
How one day he walked into the nave and was given the miracle of being able to
see with a childs eyes and for the first time saw the missiles in the windows, the center
sections of each colored glass window contained a symbol, the angus dei, for example,
the pomegranate, the crucifix, the chalice of St. John holding the green serpent, the flint
knives of Gilgal and others, and there were twelve of these windows, six on the north side
and six on the south side, and this dominating center section of each was suddenly,
unmistakingly in the shape of a missile, long and slender with a narrowing cap on the top,
surrounding the cap had once been roses but now were most clearly atoms, nuclear atoms
surrounding the cap of each missile like orbiting bees, the projectiles ready to take the
symbols of Christ to war, loaded with energy, ready for destruction.
How he regretted many things and yet did not know how to forget.

How much longer?

How he had nothing to leave behind should he leave this life behind, no offspring,
no home, certainly no money, no memoirs, no cracker crumbs or lint balls of ideas either
written in books, journals or letters, nothing painted, sculpted, or otherwise framed by the
tools evolution had given this humans, his life was a wisp of smoke such as unfurled
from his nostrils and seeped into the wind, his life was a series of cartooned speeches
indistinguishable from the thousands of others shared by pastors from Bellingham to
Andover, his life was an endless river of limp handshakes from people who could not
look him in the eye when they thanked him after his Sunday sermon, his life was an
endless flushing of dead bodies into the septic tank of the earth, he could hear the flush as
each casket was plopped into the hole.
How he walked through the town, down its main corridors, past the storefronts
which had changed so many times but now had settled into the state of abandoned decay
and forlorn neglect, the clothing shops had been the first to go, the mens haberdashery,
the womens fashions and then finally the kids second hand stores, all gone, just as the
jewelry stores closed up, and the appliance and repair shop bolted and chained its doors
upon some remaining but apparently worthless inventory of stoves and refrigerators, and
then the record store, the shoe repair, the news and cigarette store was the last to go, but it
too dissolved into the faded movies posters and graffiti that now covered its window front
where the Marlboro man used to rein.
How this town has not been touched by greatness, how it has never experienced
the magnitude of the human intellect, the human soul. How it quagmires in the mundane,
is fossilized in the mediocre, becomes a statue of the lessor of life. How so many of its

towns, softened old Indian names, Owasa and Ames and Otumma and Selma and Otley
and Wapello, towns named after the long forgotten Sheldons and Websters and Spencers
and Coopers, gutless names, names no one wants to remember. How death must be
preceded by a life, a life that must have some weight, must have left some dent in the
earth, before it can enter a grave with any meaning. These people who are more horrified
of death from a shotgun than from exploding lungs and hardened hearts. How history will
never be written off the legs and backs of these people, how these people did not dream
but they saw without blinking, ate dust without choking.
How he hates the people here. This hatred betrayed by the pure love he shares
with them.
How long, how long?
How Alicia had been first consumed by her own pride, then consumed by her love
for a man who would consume her with his terrible ways, and then how she was
consumed by her hatred, consumed by the machines that turned the soft guts of workers
to hardened entrails, how she was then consumed by her burning visions, her incessant
thoughts, how she was finally consumed by the ants, the beetles, deerflies, horseflies,
mosquitoes, wasps, bees, spiders, earwigs and other insects that spun, bit, sucked and
desiccated her.
How long?
How he believed there was within each and every one of us an event of our
making, an irreversible and irreparable act that defined us even if that event was simply
something we avoided thinking about, addressing, for the rest of our lives. An historical
act that could never be undone by a new, a future act.

How long?
How he knew the actual truth, if indeed there were actually such a thing, whereas
probably no one else in the town had an inkling of what even resembled the truth, and
that he alone was so empowered and so alone he was the one who could have been the
arbiter and yet he was in no position or in no station by which he could formally wield
the power of arbitration, his station being designed around the limitations to accept
confession in private and to bless and forever keep the silent musings of the dead.
How it occurred to him that this why he was brought to the church, he was not
brought here to feed a congregation, to be a moral compass, to hear confessions, to marry
future divorcees, or to bury sinners out of sight and out of mind, but instead that he was
and had been brought here for this one event, this one hour.
Yes, now. The sun had set west of the seven hills of B, shadows now covered the
slow, muddy spill of the river and the Preacher knew it was time to go.