Authors: Jon Bassoff
The church wasn’t too far of a walk and I didn’t go there much and it was a little brown church in the vale and there were crows roosting on the steeple. Pastor Rucker greeted me at the door of the church and tried embracing me, but I ducked out of the way, and then an old woman tried hugging me too, but I wouldn’t let her either saying you think you can turn my father into a pariah and she wore an ankle-length black dress and Benjamin Franklin spectacles and her silver hair was strangled in a bun.
There weren’t hardly any people there at all but the ones who were there were staring at me and whispering from behind their hands, and little Peggy Weiss with the Shirley Temple curls tugged at my sleeve and said, gee Benton I sure am sorry about your mother, and I patted her head and said don’t worry about me but then when nobody was looking, I leaned down and whispered in her ear: I’m afraid the poor lady had no use for Jesus our savior so now she’s burning in the fiery furnaces of hell, and that got little Peggy good and nervous and she drifted back to her seat and I was all alone.
Well, I wasn’t sure where to sit so I sat in the back row. An old gentleman wearing suspenders and a bolo tie and an eye patch said boy ya ought to show your respect and sit by the coffin but I figured corpses have no use for manners so I stayed right where I was and outside the lightning was flashing and the thunder was rolling and if you were a true believer, you might have thought God was thumping his chest a bit.
Pastor Rucker waited for a while, hoping more would show up, but they never did, so he stood at the lectern and raised his hands to the heavens and said in a booming voice: We are here to honor the life of Catherine Faulk and give thanks to the eternal life that awaits her. Yes, it is true. Catherine has returned home. Yes, it is true. By dying, Christ vanquished death. By rising, Christ restored our life. Please understand: the death of a Christian should not be a time for mourning. You see, the death of a Christian is a wonderful thing. Why then do we cry? Why then do we gnash our teeth? Why then do we think of death as an enemy? Suppose you were a prisoner of war and you were tortured every day, you were whipped with strips cut from rubber tires until the skin on your back hung in shreds. Then suppose a soldier busted down that door and vanquished the persecutors and rescued you from that agony and took you to a place of slumber and fine food and joy. Wouldn’t you consider this rescuer as a good friend? Then why not death? Why not Christ?
And the ladies who were there pulled out their handkerchiefs and dabbed their eyes and said: Amen! Yes, death is a good friend! Yes, Jesus is a good friend! He cares for us, yes he does!
And the pastor kept right on talking, face beet-red, fists pounding on the lectern. Yes, my brethren, in life we only have an incomplete enjoyment of God, in death we have a perfect enjoyment of him! The glorious things of heaven are so many that they exceed estimation, so great that they exceed measure! Here in this present world, we receive grace, but in heaven we receive glory. He who tries to see God here on earth sees only a silhouette, but through death we see his face, a jewel of splendor! Death is another Moses, delivering us out of bondage and persecution. Death is the Christian’s wedding day, a rest from sin, from sadness, from temptations, from illness! A Christian’s last day is, my friends, her best day, a day of triumph and exaltation, a day of freedom and consolation, a day of rest and satisfaction! And bowing his head, softening his voice, the Pastor said: And now let us pray.
And I bowed my head, just like everybody else, but I didn’t pray for even a second. Instead I thought about what a load of crap it all was, every last word of it, and I wished they could just face the facts, I wished they could just face the reality. And that was this: Death was no friend of Dad’s. Death was no friend of mine. And Death was no friend of Mother’s.
So the church was quiet and Mother’s casket was at the front and I wondered what her body looked like now. Had they preserved her, sutured her face together, filled her eye sockets with cotton balls, pumped embalming fluid in her arteries? Or had they let her decay naturally, a mountain of putrefaction?
Yes, the church was quiet. But then the wooden door swung open and everybody looked up, whiskey drinkers in a B-Western saloon. My father stood in the doorway, wearing his lab coat and pajama bottoms, holding an oversized cage in each hand. And stuffed inside those cages, with hardly room to move, gnawing at each other’s limbs, screeching and hollering, ready to attack, were a million and one disease-infested rats.
CHAPTER 19
The old man kneeled down and he had a big sideways grin on his face, and he opened the cages, and for a few moments nothing happened—the rats must have been suspicious of being granted freedom, thought it was too good to be true—but Dad nudged a couple of them, and pretty soon they started marching in unison, the Rats Liberation Army, and their noses were twitching, and then they left their posts and began scurrying up toward the altar, attracted maybe to the familiar odor of Mother’s rotted flesh. For a long while there was no reaction from the congregation—it must have taken a few moments for all the synapses to connect, for people to make sense of what was happening—then there were a few gasps and a few murmurs and finally a blood-curdling scream from Donna Gallegos, that ugly hag with the wart-infested cheek, and that was the start of holy pandemonium, the likes of which I had not seen for some time.
Rats! Rats! they all screamed and pretty soon everybody was out of their seats tap-dancing and hollering, acting like this was Eleventh Plague of Egypt, and the pastor kept right on preaching, saying what a friend we have in Jesus, all our sins and griefs to bear, what a privilege to carry everything to God in prayer, but nobody was listening, they were pushing and shoving, trying to escape the century-old church, and pretty soon there were people on the ground, children, the elderly, and they were being trampled over, and my old man was laughing and slapping his thigh in delight, and then he motioned to me and said: March onward, Christian soldier! but my ligaments and tendons were all ruptured so I couldn’t move even an inch. In frustration, he moved next to me, grabbed my arm, squeezing tight, and started pulling. C’mon, boy, he said, it’s time for phase two!
And everybody was going one way and we were going the other way and only Pastor Rucker and a few other stalwarts remained to protect the corpse and possibly the bodily resurrection of my mother, a woman who never prayed, a woman who enjoyed sin as much as grace, and my father said, okay boy you take one end and I’ll take the other, and everything was a blur, but soon we were carrying the coffin, thieves in the House of the Lord, and it was heavier than you might think, and then a couple of men were grabbing at Dad, and a couple more were grabbing at me, and the coffin fell to the ground, and it opened, and Mom was still dead, still rotting, still hideous, and they took Dad away, took Dad far away, walking with him slowly down the corridor, arm-in-arm-in-arm, shoving him into a white padded room with only a mattress and a Bible and a flickering fluorescent light and the rats scampered through the pipes, and Dad’s eyes were empty, and he rocked back and forth, yanked out clumps of hair, scratched at the floors, bit through his lip, screamed at the top of his lungs, gibberish all, swatted at imaginary flies, laughed the laughter of a lunatic, and he was in the Castle.
* * *
I was still a year away from being able to live on my own, so they placed me with Uncle Horace and Aunt Rose and for a long time I wouldn’t talk to them, I would just sit in my bedroom and read about the Soldier and bite the skin off my knuckles. Uncle Horace did his best, sitting me down and saying, this is your home now. I know you’ve been through a lot, but you’re safe here with Aunt Rose and me. And after a while I started talking again, but I never talked about Dad or Mom and soon it was like they’d never been here at all.
Things were sure different at my uncle and aunt’s house. We said grace before meals and couldn’t wear hats inside the house, and they wanted me to pray and accept Jesus into my heart and I told them that I would, I told them that I believed that Jesus was the Savior and that he would save me from my sins and both Uncle Horace and Aunt Rose were so happy, Aunt Rose even cried good long tears, and I was thankful to have a nice house to live in, and there were no rats and no odors.
Due to my aunt’s nagging, I went back to school some of the time and throughout all of these ups and downs I didn’t hardly think about Constance the Waitress at all, but then I saw her walking out in the mountains by herself, wearing blue jeans and a flannel jacket, her red hair falling to her waist. She was an Angel of Mercy, a Liberator of Souls, a Messiah of the Heart, and I figured that redemption was a possibility.
I didn’t want to scare her and I didn’t want to hurt her, but I followed her tracks, the snow crunching beneath my feet. She didn’t turn back, deep in thought, maybe. She marched up the mountain path, lodgepoles towering, and I stayed back a ways, careful as always. And Constance continued hiking upward, and the air was getting cooler, and there were rows of boulders and log walls, and there were collapsed mines scattered across the floor like pickup sticks, rotted by centuries of storms.
And after another twenty minutes or more, she stopped, stood there for a few moments, then took to resting on a rock. She pulled out a bottle of water and placed it to her lips, and I stood there hidden in the shadows, watching her, and I got to thinking how the mountain was full of death and snow and ghosts and how I sure would like get off the mountain someday, and how maybe Constance would go with me, how we were both as lonely as any of these abandoned mines dotting the mountainside.
And then I was humming “Teddy Bear” by Red Sovine and walking toward where Constance was sitting, and I never meant to frighten her, but I was standing right behind her, and she thought she was alone, and when she looked back, she gasped and rose to her feet. I said, don’t worry, it’s just me, Benton Faulk from the diner, and she still looked scared and said, what are you doing here?
Just taking a hike, I said, I hike this way sometimes when I want to clear my head. And she just nodded, but her face was pale and her eyes were wild like a wounded mule deer, and I was angry with myself for sneaking up on her like that, especially here high in the mountains where nobody could hear her scream.
I said, did you hear about the latest with my mother, nasty situation, and she nodded and said that yes she’d heard. My father didn’t hurt her, I said, he was trying to save her, and he almost succeeded with the Christ Rat, but then the Christ Rat died, and nobody else cared if she lived or died, they all thought that she was mountain trash, but she wasn’t, her great-grandfather made a fortune in silver, owned a dozen or more mines. And once Mom and me walked together to the top of Pewter Hill and the night was cold, and the snow was falling, and the world was quiet, and she took hold of my hand and pointed all around us and said, this is heaven, Benton, don’t you ever forget it, and we stood there for a long time, me and my mother, just watching and touching and feeling. And those memories are mine…
And then I was out of words and Constance said that she’d better start heading back down the mountain, and I said, wait a minute, do you want me to show you something, an old abandoned mining cabin, I use it as my hideaway, and nobody else knows about it, but I’ll show you, and she said no, that she really needed to be making her way back. So I nodded and told her to be alert, that there were mountain lions and collapsed mines out this way and you had to be careful of such things, that life could end at any moment, a bullet to the heart, a knife to the throat, a club to the head.
I stood in the shadows of the swaying trees and watched her walk back down the path, and she was walking much quicker now, and she looked back a few times, and she didn’t smile, and her eyes were still scared, and the snow started falling, and I knew my aunt and uncle would be wondering where I was, but I decided to go to the mining cabin and read about the Soldier and think about my plans for the near future.
CHAPTER 20
Sitting at the dinner table, eating elk stew, Aunt Rose eyeing me suspiciously, Uncle Horace slurping loudly. I didn’t speak much when I was with them because there was nothing I could possibly say to them and when they asked me questions, I could always nod my head or shake my head or not respond at all. But I could tell that Rose had something on her mind because she hadn’t touched her stew and usually she had three or four portions at least, which went a long ways to explaining her chubby cheeks and enormous bottom. Well, it wasn’t until I was getting up, ready to bring my dish to the kitchen sink that she said go on and sit down, Benton, and it took me a few moments because I didn’t like the tone of her voice, but then I sat down and waited to hear what she had to say.
Her voice was all full of anxiety and disappointment. She told me that a woman had stopped by just this morning asking to see me, and when she’d asked what this was all about, the woman said that I’d been making her feel uncomfortable, what with the way I’d been talking to her and watching her and so forth. Do you know who this Constance Durban is, Aunt Rose asked. No, ma’am, I said and started to get up because I didn’t like where this conversation was headed and I just wanted to read the latest edition of
Fight to the Finish
where the Soldier is caught between a rock and a hard place. But Rose wouldn’t let me be. This woman, she said, seemed awfully serious. And she’s prepared to call the proper authorities if you keep bothering her. You sure you don’t know who Constance Durban is?