They streamed into the tavern in anticipation of joining something unpredictable, tribal. They bought their first drinks, clustered in small groups, and waited for the room to fill with smoke, throbbing music, and jostling spontaneity, carrying them to a mental state they could not reach alone. Some, the watchers, found their places along the walls, from where they would not budge the entire night. Others, the talkers, sat closer to the bar. The dancers, not caring where they sat, found themselves sitting at the big round tables near the open floor.
Gail went out to the van and strapped a pair of red leather chaps over her white jeans, stuffed her feet into snakeskin boots that came up to her knees, and tugged at the shoulders of her red silk shirt. She tied the braided strings of the Stetson beneath her chin and told Brad and Buzz it was time to play.
TESTIMONY
A
FTER HER EPIPHANY AT THE CREEK, AN URGENT NEED HAUNTED Winifred Smith. A largeness had entered her life that did not wish to be contained. Not only had she come face-to-face with the universal source of all goodness, she had sat beside someone on a creek bank—right beside him, almost touching—and participateda creek bank-right beside him, almost touching-and participated in a genuine conversation about heartfelt concerns that really mattered. Neither of these things had ever happened to her before, and it seemed as though she had entered a new civilization whose rules were being established along a different order. When she closed her eyes she could still remember both the Light Within and the weight and smell of the warm old coat that the man on the bank had put over her shoulders.
Returning to the parsonage that evening, she put her groceries away, straightened up the kitchen, and tried to read a book but could not be contained within the pages. As soon as she read one sentence, the memory of it leaped out of her head, leaving her with no historical context to begin the next. A huge, nearly humming quiet surrounded the bed she was sitting on.
She had to talk to someone. She put on her jacket, walked briskly through Words, and knocked on the Brasso sisters’ front door. Violet’s car was not in the driveway and Winnie listened as a progression of collisions announced Olivia’s advance inside. Finally, the knob turned and the door opened a crack.
“Come in,” said Olivia, in her wheelchair.
“Thank you,” said Winnie. “I hoped I’d find you here.”
“Sit down,” said Olivia, backing out of the way and colliding with an old credenza. “Take your coat off. Violet’s gone into town.”
Winnie seated herself on a wooden chair with sculptured arms
and a crocheted cushion cover. Olivia parked across from her and asked if she wanted something to drink.
“No thank you,” said Winnie. “Do you know someone named July Montgomery?”
“I don’t really know him but I understand he lives out of town on a small farm,” said Olivia. She folded her hands and regarded Winnie with some caution; the preacher’s deep breathing and excited, glowing cheeks seemed to portend something not yet evident.
“He is such a nice man,” Winnie informed her, as though she and July were old friends.
“Many think so,” said Olivia, “though no one knows very much about him. He lives alone.”
“He mentioned being married.”
“I think he was at one time.”
Both sat for a short time in silence, listening to the distant, crackling sounds of the police scanner in another part of the house.
Then Winnie told Olivia everything, beginning with when she left the nursing home and how the blue sky had arrested her. The tiny woman listened with her hands clamped together to keep them still, her nearly useless legs hanging like matched clock weights out of her organdy dress.
Winnie grew more and more animated as she talked. Her fingers, hands, and arms never stopped gesturing. She shifted positions, leaned forward and back, tossed her long hair, and altered the expressions on her face. She changed the level of her voice, sat on the edge of her chair, and from time to time sprang to her full height to emphasize how Pure Spirit—which was not a metaphor—had caused her to become part of everything, everywhere. She took off her shoes and socks to show how her feet, ankles, and calves had been red and blotched white from the cold water, declaring, “I didn’t feel anything but the love of all creation.” She held her hands in front of her face to demonstrate how obvious the unadulterated truth could be.
“If only I could explain it to you!” she cried. “My name was spoken, clearly, out loud. If only I could show you what it all means. If only you could believe me when I say it’s true! There is no way out of this world, but there’s a way in. She or He or whatever we must
call this perpetually sustaining force is inside everything—only that’s not right either because this is everything. Our separation is one not of distance but of closeness. Nothing could be so near. Our isolation comes from constantly wanting to be with, when in fact we are in. So many of the old ways of thinking are simply wrong, wrong, wrong.”
Olivia listened. There were many reasons to be suspicious. Everyone—especially the faithful—needed to maintain a robust skepticism. In this age of profiteering, all a person had to do was watch a half-hour of television to understand how life’s most treasured moments could be ransomed to sell underwear.
Olivia had heard many accounts of divine intervention and answered prayer—declarations by people whose health or circumstances had suddenly improved, their habits reformed and characters changed. She had heard that God interceded in business deals, final exams, wars, baseball games, and wallpapering projects. And she had listened to hundreds of sermons on “obeying God.” But this was the first time someone actually claimed to have heard the Divine Voice.
God spoke to people in the Bible, Olivia knew, and for that reason the Christian vocabulary was replete with words like “listening to,” “hearing,” and “speaking.” But it was generally assumed, though seldom commented upon, that following the destruction of King Herod’s temple in the year 70 the Divine Voice had generally discontinued talking out loud. People now “heard” God through a particular flavor of their own thought and “listened” by reading Scripture passages over and over. Sensory hearing had mostly been left to those as likely to see Elvis as to hear Christ.
As for visions, in a similar manner this phenomenon had been relegated to less-advanced countries with fewer institutions into which visionaries could be suspected of finding a happy home among others needing professional care.
Christians, of course, talked all the time about having “personal relationships” with Christ, but these relationships, Olivia understood, involved feelings, moods, motivations, intuitions, and inspirations. They were relational qualities, not experienced in an objective sense, and the word
spiritual
had pretty much been invented to refer
to them. In fact, as more than one modern thinker had noted, the nature of the divine was uniquely subjective. Spirit had no objective manifestation, and as much as people wished to come face-to-face with Everlasting Beneficence, they had to be content with less.
Yet the longing for something else, something better and more satisfying, had not diminished, only the areas in which people felt they could legitimately look. Even the most ardent believers were now compelled to confine their religious urges to narrowly circumscribed venues—church and prayer. They did not cease to desire ecstatic experiences, but often felt resigned to postponing them until the afterlife, when natural laws would be less strictly enforced. They thought it prudent to delay supernal gratification until a time when they would not be interrupted by a scientific culture that didn’t approve.
Needless to say, Olivia knew more than a little about epiphanic experience. Her study of Christianity included many books written by mystics and the even more numerous books written about them. She knew the difference between transcendent and immanent revelations. In the former, individuals encountered a preternatural personality, in the latter the symbiosis of life. Winifred Smith had apparently experienced both.
Olivia also knew that such revelations were the Holy Grail, the Pearl of Great Price, the highest value in the economy of faith. True communion was not only an important room in the universal church; it provided the foundation. Epiphany was the holy ingredient around which the church fitted all its theological clothes—the genie in the bottle.
“Did you smell something like sweet almond?” she asked, knowing a sense of smell should never figure into an authentic, numinous experience.
“I cared nothing for sensations,” said Winnie.
“How did you know this was not an illusion?”
“Compared to it I was an illusion myself.”
“How did you know it was God and not some lesser principality?”
“I do not know how, but I could not keep from knowing.”
Winnie exhibited all the genuine signs: lack of hubris, sense of
awe, frustration over the limitations of language, and the contradiction between her exaggerated mannerisms and the purported peacefulness she attempted to describe. There was also a profound melancholy—a cloud of despondency over having to return to the normal world, the gloom of exile. At one point she wept into her hands, exclaiming, “I can still feel the feeling leaving.”
There was no doubt. Winifred Smith had stumbled upon the Presence of God. She had been chosen.
“You must be very careful in what you say,” said Olivia, interrupting Winnie as she told about July Montgomery, the farmer who had sat beside her on the creek bank and touched her soul. “You must guard your words like a dragon guarding her cave. There is no telling the damage you can do with a loose tongue.”
“What do you mean?”
“You must prove worthy of the trust placed in you.”
“I can try,” said Winnie.
“You must always explain your experience in terms familiar to the church and the traditions of the church. You can’t be talking about God and Christ outside those limits.”
“But those are old and this is new!” complained Winnie.
“Foolishness,” said Olivia. “New is only old rearranged. Now heat some hot water and we will discuss this further. Violet keeps the tea in the high cupboard; the cups are to the left and the pot is under the sink. We must decide when to tell the others. A small setting is best, perhaps at midweek Bible study. I’ll make sure Violet can have me ready so you won’t be alone. You must not make the poor word choices you’ve made here tonight. Others won’t be as forgiving. They’ll think you’re a prideful heretic. And before you do anything else, put your socks and shoes back on. I’m uncomfortable with nudity and informality of all kinds.”
As it turned out, however, the little group gathered at the Words Friends of Jesus Church for prayer and Bible study on Wednesday night was not critical at all. The usual eight attendees sat in the middle pews twenty minutes early, catching up on local news.
Violet pushed Olivia inside and parked her in the center aisle. Because Olivia’s health seldom allowed her to attend services other
than on Sunday morning, and then only sporadically, her presence caused a heightened sense of expectation. And due to Olivia’s inclination to speak at great length on any subject, the group expressed their worried anticipation by constantly shifting postures and re-crossing legs.
Winnie, her face glowing, walked to the front. “I have something to tell you,” she said, standing in a long green skirt, a white blouse buttoned tightly around her neck. With her eyes darting from one old face to the next, she began to describe her experience.
Soon, April Wilson asked where, exactly, this had taken place—a stream, creek, or river?
Lyle Fry asked what stream it was.
Winnie said it was down the road from Don Woolever’s house.
“Which way?” asked Lyle.
“South,” said Winnie.
“Oh, I know where you mean,” said Lyle.
“That’s Mule Creek,” said Ardith Stanley. “At least that’s what we called it. People fish there.”
“My husband, Floyd, used to fish there,” said Norma Hinkley. “It used to be a good trout stream. A lot of suckers, though.”
“You can eat suckers,” said April. “I can remember Mother cooking them. The whole house would smell, but we didn’t mind. We were so hungry we could eat anything.”
“It wasn’t like it is now,” said Ester Thrit. “Just having some kind of dessert was a treat. At Christmas the folks used to go into town and come back with nothing but a box of oranges. Those oranges tasted so good. Not like the oranges they have today.”
“They’re the same oranges,” said Pauline Evans. “They have to be. It’s genetic.”
“All the same, they’re not the same. They put dye in them now to make them orange. But they’re not as sweet.”
“I tried to grow oranges once,” said Lyle. “The tree grew, but fruit wouldn’t set on.”
“If all of you don’t be quiet, Pastor Winnie won’t be able to have our Bible lesson,” said Margaret Holdsung.
They stopped talking and patiently waited for Winnie to begin the Bible lesson for the night—a continuation of last week’s discussion of Second Timothy.
Winnie and Olivia looked at each other. Olivia smiled an assurance that she knew the importance of what had happened, and Winnie began the Bible lesson.
A PRIVATE HEAVEN
B
Y 1:00 A.M. SIXTY PICKUPS, CARS, AND VANS WERE CROWDED HAPHAZARDLY into the Horned Owl’s parking lot and along the road in front of the cornfield. As some departed, more arrived. Despite the cool autumn air, six men and three women in shirtsleeves drank beer around the raised hood of a bright green custom car, the engine bucking, roaring, and sucking air. The tattooed youth behind the wheel smiled knowingly, his shirt rolled up to his shoulders. Three men urinated into the rows of corn as two middle-aged women took turns riding around the building on a Harley-Davidson motorcycle. A couple argued loudly next to the front door, where light, noise, smoke, and heat rolled into the night.