Ponder slides one from the dinner table and places it near the pullout but doesn’t sit down. He hikes up a foot on the seat and sets his elbow on his knee, giving Greuel full view of loose dress socks gathered around the ankle, the shin pale and hairless, the bottom curve of a dark green tattoo snaking up under the cuff. Ponder’s hands knead one another and he stares at Greuel with a strange swirling mixture of outrage and empathy, the battle of emotions apparent on his face.
“What brings the good man of faith into such a den of iniquity, Preacher? It’s too late in the game to discuss the future of my soul,” he laughs. “I got this Indonesian nurse comes in, she tells me I’m half to hell already. Like it’s some kind of joke. Laughs like it’s the funniest thing ever she heard. What you think of that?”
Ponder opens his mouth but no sound escapes. Lyda announces she’ll get the water and does Ponder want some. He waves her off without looking. His eyebrows raise, hover, and then settle. The mouth stays open.
“You come to see for yourself?”
“I didn’t expect to see,” and he hesitates, tucks his chin into his neck as though to swallow the words before they got away from him. Yet words come. “I didn’t realize you were this ill.” His eyes scan the hospice equipment of IV towers and myriad prescriptions, the dialysis machine, settling finally on Greuel’s naked skin as yellow as a dry gourd. His discomfort fills Greuel with a perverse pride.
“Would’ve thought you’d be used to sights like me, in your line of work. Don’t nobody die in your church?”
“We have matters to straighten out,” Ponder says. “I’m sorry to
find you like this. I am. But there are matters here. We need to renegotiate our deal.”
“Renegotiate.”
“Can we talk frankly?”
Lyda returns and Ponder straightens; he turns away, fiddling with his trouser leg so that the cuff falls correctly over his loafer. She has the bottled water and another tissue that she presses against Greuel’s seeping eye. She’s wearing full jeans now, and not so tight to her body—Greuel notices with a frown. She opens the bottle and hands him a single tablet and he tells her to double the dose. Grab a couple for yourself while you’re at it, he says, a small tip for the service. She thanks him and does, wily enough to not let him see how many she throws down.
In her chair near the window Lyda starts to flip through a magazine. Ponder stares at her, silent. Soon she begins to hum a melody.
“Things change,” Greuel says. “We’re friends again.”
“I can see.”
“You can talk frank as you want, this is my house.”
“I will. Listen, I appreciate your help in getting us a home for my ministry. I do. And we’re grateful for the land trust, don’t get me wrong, we fully understand—”
“You couldn’t have done it without us. You’d still be preaching how God wants us to prosper in a warehouse off some pea-gravel road without me. I know this. Why don’t you say it, too?”
“It’s a worthy message that needs to be heard.” He pauses. “I won’t lie, I knew who you were. You and that Arley Noe.”
“Everybody does. Why don’t you just say it once for me. I’d really like to hear it. From your mouth. Where would that church of yours be without me and my generous nature? I sold eight horses to make that deal go through. All I had.”
“I didn’t ask you to sell your horses.”
Greuel dismisses the thought with a gesture. “My son would’ve sold them anyway. Horses scare him, they have more sense than he does.”
Ponder slips both hands into his pockets and stares at the empty chair between them. It’s a worthless wooden chair, one of four Shaker
rip-offs Clara bought early in their marriage and for that reason alone he never had them replaced. The suit’s all right, not flashy like you find on silver-haired TV gospel cons, but still: a quality fabric. And yet there lingers that rat-running-off-the-street stink about the guy that Greuel cannot stand—he’s a user, a fiend, someone Greuel’s boys would sell to, once, and that stink never wears off. What fool gets a tattoo on his shin?
“Go on, man. Say it for the benefit of my dying ears.”
“Without your generosity we would still be holding services in an old warehouse. Satisfied?”
Greuel slaps his puffy palms together and falls back into the soft comfort of his pillows. He feels as alive as he has in months. Like the weeks of corticosteroids have only now begun to kick in. As he sighs in satisfaction, even the seagulls in his chest are silent. “Used to be an auction warehouse for tobacco, you know. My own daddy sold his whisky there while he negotiated prices for his bosses. Funny place to make into a freak-show church of God.”
“There’s nothing freak show about it, it’s a legitimate place of worship. Any place people gather to worship is legitimate.”
“Wouldn’t be legitimate in this house, I bet.”
“Listen, my ministry is not the issue. We help people, we do good work. You are undermining this, you know you are. You mock our efforts. I’m sure you know what I’ve had to overcome. Many of my parishioners are fighting the same battle. It’s a big part of our outreach. So imagine my feelings when I learn my church is selling the same shit I’m counseling people to relinquish.” As Ponder speaks his face reveals the difficulty he is having in fathoming such information, no less an impossibility than if Christ had returned to inform him that he was going about his faith and service all wrong, that Christ was here to tell Gil Ponder that He had never known him.
“Nobody’s selling my drugs at your church. Nobody I know of. I’d know.”
“Our vans are used for
youth group
activities. We pick up seniors to bring them to Sunday worship. Deliver books to rural schools. Our softball teams use these vans for away games. They are not for hauling contraband all over the state.”
“I thought you were into community outreach.”
“Larry, please.”
“Ah, that’s still Mister Greuel to you. Listen. Sounds to me like you have some kind of internal trouble in that congregation of yours. What do you think I can do? Look at me. So much of me’s seeped into this couch they’ll have to burn it along with my body.”
“I came here to talk this out. You want to make it a game, fine. What’s keeping me from going to the police then? Is that what you want?”
“What I want is to breathe easy and get up and piss on my own, that’s what I want. What you
don’t
want is to be forever known as the ex-junkie preacher who financed his fine car and mortgage and big church complex on reefer and pills. Am I right? I’ve got this certainty, see, sick as I am, that this isn’t what you’re gonna do. ‘Christ World Emergent Hauls Weed for Jesus.’ I can see the headline perfect in my head.”
Ponder spins to check on Lyda, to gauge her degree of attention to their discussion. Greuel smiles to see her sitting upright but with her head back, dimpling the curtain, her eyes closed. “You still with us Lyda?” he asks.
She doesn’t move her head from the curtain. She has a lovely throat, he thinks.
“I’m right here, singing in the sunshine.”
He reassigns his smile to Ponder. “That sinking feeling you have in your belly is what people in trade call ‘buyer’s remorse.’ I believe the gentleman you want to speak to is Arley Noe. But good luck talking to him. He can be difficult to find.”
“I’ll find him.” His voice dies away on a grave inflection, earnest certainty giving way to speculation, and then unease, all on three syllables spoken.
“Sure you will. I’ll even help you. So you’ll remember me kindly after I’m gone.” He indicates the address book on the table, has Ponder bring it to him. He flips through the pages and pockets. “One last little tittie-twist from beyond the grave. Blue Note’ll appreciate that.” Greuel asks for a pen and tears out a scrap of paper that he hands to the preacher. “Make sure you get to him in a lot of public. I
know Arley like I know the sick in my own body. Heaven may await you, preacher, but I doubt you’re in any hurry to get there yourself.”
Ponder’s eyes sweep the paper; he slips it into his inside breast pocket and then straightens his jacket. His mouth moves from a grim tight line to lips curling as he sucks his teeth.
“We’re finished here, I’m guessing. Can I do anything for you?”
“I’m past help. You’re not one of them healer types, are you? Not your gig.”
“I was thinking more of a prayer,” Ponder says, looking over Lyda, his head bent awkward in observation. She has not quite nodded off, yet she’s not quite
there
—again her eyes have closed; her lips pucker and relax, then pucker and relax again. “A blessing, that kind of thing.”
“I got the TV for entertainment. More than five hundred channels there.”
“You could use some mercy. If ever I saw a man who needed the gift of grace and mercy.”
But still he is not looking at Greuel; evidently he is waiting for Lyda to notice him. His gaze personifies soulful concern, a gaze Greuel imagines the man practices in a mirror—as though Ponder believes if he stares long enough she’ll feel it, or else will notice the conversation has died; but many minutes pass, and Lyda shows no interest. Her lips pucker, and then a brief grin forms beneath her closed eyes.
When Ponder steps out the door a warm breeze sweeps in and over Greuel huddled on the hideaway bed, country air sifting the oily strands of hair on his head and bringing a fresh smell of grass and brisk spring evening that briefly overcomes the odors of his own decay. He inhales it with the avidity of the fiend in full jones and feels an exhilarating jolt of life. The sensation does not linger. The door clacking shut nudges Lyda from her reveries and she looks toward the sound, and then, blinking, smiles at Greuel.
“How many did you take?”
“Of what?” Lyda asks, honestly curious to know.
Greuel cackles. “Goddamn but that was fun. I am really going to miss this.”
On the road Ponder thrashes his palms against the steering wheel as though the wheel were hot enough to forge into some new and as-yet-to-be-envisioned form. He shifts and misses the next gear and the engine roars in neutral—and he then blesses the stick with the same violence, batting and thrusting it about until he finds a gear and the Acura lurches with a screech. The rubber catching the road nearly throws him past the curb and he composes himself for a few silent seconds. Then rage and the familiar frustration at his own gullible stupidity and arrogance and ungraspable fate get him pounding the wheel again, the dashboard, stomping against the footrest and swerving into the next empty lane. He corrects the car and drives, the pitted terrain twitching his headlights over the verdant farm hills, and launches a scream that he pushes farther than his lungs can allow, gawing until his throat feels about to herniate.
The road before him swims up a stream. He swallows air, blinks; his breathing slows to normal. Tears burn his eyes. He’s in no condition to be operating this fine machine. It calms him to realize he is together enough to acknowledge as much. To damage this machine in any way, alone on a spring night, would bring yet more board scrutiny. Already he’s got elders questioning his judgment with the ministry’s growth and finances and general shepherding. “It’s important to me that we act as careful stewards of the future of this church,” he heard at the last meeting. “We cannot betray the generosity of our congregants.
We won’t have Brother Gil forever.” The main worship center isn’t close to finished yet and already Ponder can feel the shifts, everyone jockeying for position. He’s heard open whispers that on the cusp of forty their leader has never married, never fathered children. As if that’s his fault?!
Ponder’s initial impulse had been to lease the drool-inducing Acura NSX. The idea had thrown him into a real interior wrestling match, debating with himself the pros and cons of the message an evangelical driving that wild ride might encourage. He wanted to attract youth to CWE, especially boys—who require a
great influence
to master themselves—and boys in this corner of Kentucky love fast cars. But his accountant responded with perplexity and confessed it was difficult already to guarantee the ministry’s tax-exempt status, and Brother Gil went the practical route, settling for the two-door coupe. A solid decision he credited to the Man upstairs, who tested his flock with their weaknesses but showed the way out, too, if you paid attention. And even still: the coupe has a twenty-four valve V6 engine that can surge to sixty under eight seconds, so the horses had balls beneath the sensible elegance. A decision to be proud of, thus. A reminder that he has made, in the past and therefore giving no reason to doubt his ability to continue into the future, sound decisions.
But he feels like testing factory claims that a 145-mph top speed can be reached by the time he locates a conveniently sturdy wall. He knows this is impulse; knows too that impulse is the domain of the demonic creature that enjoys dominion over this world—it had been precisely this revelation, connecting such impulses to the Gospel’s demonic rulers, that had started him on his redemptive journey.
Impulse
is in the body; it seduces with its suggestion that one is not responsible for its origin: impulse comes, the body acts. That’s the power of Paul’s Evil One, “the god of this age.” It’s the powerlessness before such impulse that one gives up to Christ, to God, to manage.
Consideration
of what impulse demands sucks away its power, hinders its intensity, and in that distancing instant a soul’s bodily mind can turn from the seduction of self-harm to grace.
Ponder had discovered this path—received it—while lying on a steep grass bank above an open drainage ditch, hidden from the road
by cornering himself against nineteenth-century culvert limestones. It was morning, early enough that dew clung to his neck, the summer sun bright enough to erase the treetops from his eyes. He was coming down from what would turn out to be his third-to-last spike when a calm, resolute voice inside him asked:
Why are you hiding?