The Night Listener and Others (13 page)

For some reason that I know now to be the effects of the alcohol, I felt no urge to disengage myself from her sisterly embrace, and put my own arm (the one not holding a cup of punch) around her as well. In another few moments she kissed me and I reciprocated, feeling her tongue lick my lips, part them, and slip into my mouth, I felt a sexual stirring, as who would not, and when the kiss broke, Sally smiled and said that we should go upstairs, that one of the students who lived there had a great record collection in his bedroom.

I followed willingly, knowing what would happen and wanting it all the same, the vodka lowering my defenses to such sinful snares, telling me that this might be my only chance for such a sudden and clandestine affair, one which I really
should
have before I entered the seminary and such joys were closed to me save in marriage, to which, for my wife’s sake, I really should not come without some knowledge of carnal things. So my drunken mind rationalized (at the time, I felt) brilliantly, as Sally’s hand—and my semi-erect organ—led the way up the steps.

In the bedroom, she closed the door, embraced me, kissed me, rubbed her lips against mine, and we toppled onto the bed. When my body reached the horizontal position, I knew the whole thing was a tremendous mistake. My head started to swim, and the room began to whirl. Sally told me to close my eyes, which I did gladly. Then I felt her hands unbuttoning my shirt, undoing my khakis, tugging my clothes down and off my body. Still I kept my eyes shut tightly, hoping that the sickness rising in me would subside.

When I next opened my eyes, it was because I felt Sally’s hand on my organ. I should write
penis
, I suppose—in the context of a pastor and a church,
organ
has too amusing a connotation. My penis, then, was only partly erect, its hesitancy due not at all to Sally’s deft ministrations, which, in due course, brought it to a degree of tumescence firm enough for her to straddle me and press it within her.

She rode atop me for a while, but I confess I felt little sensation beyond the pure visual excitement of seeing a naked woman perched over me. At some point I decided that I should be the aggressor (or that I could bear her weight on my sickly stomach no longer), and, being careful to remain within her, rolled over so that she was next to me. She completed the action by moving beneath me and grasping my hips, sliding me back and forth so as to put more pressure on her mons.

The motion did nothing to stimulate me, as it was now my pubic bone rather than my penis that was receiving the friction, a fact that did nothing to quell my rising nausea, and I slowly felt my penis losing whatever firmness it had acquired. In embarrassment at my oncoming impotence, and in the fear that my expression must appear ghastly to the grunting girl under me, I hid my face by burying it in the fleshy pouch between her neck and shoulder, and, in so doing, my lips were forced against the jutting, curved section of her clavicle, and my tongue was pressed against the soft, warm salt of her skin.

Had I been sober I never should have done it. Had I been sober, of course, I never should have been in that position in the first place. But I was not sober, and when I tasted her skin—the first skin except my own that my tongue (o wondrous organ of sense) had ever come in contact with—I felt as though my body was no longer in that place, that soiled, rutting bed, but that I was somewhere above and beyond, where the angels sang and where Christ sat in glory, and I
wanted
that flesh, wanted to make it part of me, to consume it and so be consumed by my God.

And I bit down.

My teeth tore through her skin, and for an instant, before her blood entered my mouth, there was total clarity, absence of alcoholic haze and nausea, and in that infinitesimal space of time I felt the love of Christ and saw his face as clearly as if peering through the purest water of the most holy font in the City of God.

But then the water of the font grew dark, as crimson as her sour, salty blood, and the music of the spheres was obliterated by her scream, a sound as harsh and shocking as the feeling in my teeth when they scraped against her bone. The sound and the blood taste were too much for me, and I threw myself off of her with the little strength I had left, so that I rolled off the bed, onto the floor, and immediately vomited up a copious quantity of fluid mixed with bile. The girl screamed once more, but it seemed less shrill, covered as it was by the sounds of my own violent retching.

When at last I got up from my hands and knees, I saw Sally in the bed, her right hand pressed against her left shoulder. Blood was oozing through the spaces between her fingers. She was panting raggedly, and looking at me as if I were a monster, and I suppose she was right. The beast in me had escaped, and I decided in that moment that it never would again, that never again would I sink my teeth into living flesh. And I never have.

It would do no good to chronicle in detail what happened next—her revulsion, her threats, my attempts to calm her, my early departure from the party. She told no one about the details of what happened in that bedroom, as far I could ascertain, except to suggest that, as one of my friends later told me, I was a whole lot kinkier, as she had put it, than I let on. Such a rumor was galling to me, as everyone who knew me knew of my aspirations to the ministry, but she could have said far worse.

Fighting the urge toward self-analysis, I still must voice my suspicion that my attack on that poor girl had something to do with the absence of my mother, as if by actually ingesting part of a woman for whom I felt love (or in Sally’s case, I blush to admit, lust), I would be able to keep her with me always, and so retain my mother’s love. I am not a Freudian, but there may be more than a grain of truth in this theory.

At any rate, from that day to this I have never permitted myself to become involved with any woman, except for a few social dates, and I am a teetotaler, save for an occasional glass of wine at a more formal dinner, when to refuse would be impolite. I fear that, even if I were married, the presence in my bed of a fellow creature with flesh might arouse me to the point that it did with that young woman back in college, and I would not want that for the world. So, although I have been sexually drawn toward women, I tell anyone who is curious enough to ask (suspecting, perhaps, that I am a latent homosexual) that, although I am a great admirer of the fairer sex, my work keeps me too busy for a wife and family. It is a response that has put me in the uncomfortable position of celibate priest to some members of my congregation, and some of the single or widowed women seem to look on it as a challenge. As a result of these unwanted attentions, I have had to develop a self-effacing and humorous manner to ward off light flirtations before they can proceed to the point where real insult might be felt by my necessary rejections.

It is ironic that I, who have such a deep respect for the sanctity of family, cannot have one of my own. Still, it is a sacrifice I gladly make. And Mrs. Bunn is enough of a family for me, I suppose. She is my housekeeper, an extraordinarily gifted cook, kind to a fault, black as night, with more jokes than one can laugh at in an entire evening. Where she gets them from I shall never know, although she receives at least two letters a day from relatives in Baltimore, her hometown. Perhaps one of them subscribes to one of the joke services whose flyers we ministers are constantly receiving, as though religion is a thing best made palatable by as much humor as possible.

Mrs. Bunn takes splendid care of both me and the parsonage, a small building across the cemetery from the church. The house was built not long after the church itself, and is similarly plaster on brick. The downstairs consists of an entry, living room, library, dining room, and kitchen (in that order from west to east), while the upstairs contains my bedroom and bath, a bed, bath, and sitting room for Mrs. Bunn, and a guest bedroom. There is also a cellar, used for storage, Mrs. Bunn hardly ever goes down there.

When her hearing aid is removed, Mrs. Bunn is as deaf as the dead that sleep in the cemetery overlooked by her sitting room window. This handicap of hers has proven to be of great convenience to me on those nights when I wish to work alone and unobserved, and I am sure that not seeing what took place in Dunbarton Church Cemetery has saved Mrs. Bunn a great deal of anguish over the past few months.

The first episode came on the Wednesday night after the Youth Fellowship meeting of which I have written. I was sleeping only fitfully that night, having stayed up past midnight working on a brief tribute to a member of the church who was celebrating his one hundredth birthday. The difficulty was that there was very little of a positive nature to say about the man. A party in his honor was being given by his grandson, whose respect for his grandfather’s life well lived was purely delusional. The man had worked two wives to death, had browbeaten his children mercilessly, and had been a brutal drunk until the age of seventy-eight, when, under the influence, he fell down a flight of stairs and was placed in a rest home, where he suffered several weeks’ worth of delirium tremors. He then fooled everyone by living twenty-two years as an embittered resident, given to soiling his bed at every opportunity (on purpose, it was felt). I had finally come up with some feeble musings on longevity and the Lord working in mysterious ways, comments that would let me walk that fine line between hypocrisy and honesty without offending those few people who still might harbor good thoughts toward the old sinner, and lay wearily down.

But sleep came hard, and I was awakened out of whatever light slumber I had attained by the sound of a car engine starting, and tires chattering on the loose stones of the church parking lot. I got up and looked out the side window, only to see a pair of red taillights fading away toward the road. What, I wondered, would young people be doing back here at this hour? If they wanted to park, it could have been done much more easily nearer the road, rather than driving the full quarter mile down the lane to the church. Unless, the thought occurred to me, they were doing something that could be done only
at
the church.

I pulled on trousers and a shirt, slipped on some shoes, and went outside. The moon was bright, so I needed no flashlight to see if the church had been broken into. It had not. All the windows and doors were secured. I then checked the door of the crematory, which was locked (it has no windows), and finally I examined the cemetery, though I expected to find nothing amiss, since the last case of vandalism had taken place long before my arrival at Dunbarton Methodist.

It is easy to forget the original purpose of a picturesque old cemetery, steeped in tradition. I was brutally reminded of it by the open grave only a few feet away from me, just inside the cemetery’s western wall. What was left of the coffin was sitting next to the hole. The corpse, nothing but a skeleton that appeared dull gray in the moonlight, was lying half in, half out of the split and rotted casket. Its clothes had long since deteriorated, so that only a few scraps clung to the bones. The skull was nowhere to be seen.

I must confess that my first thought, once I had quelled the horror the act produced in my mind, was to rebury the mortal debris in an attempt to forestall the inevitable questions and consternation that would ensue. As I have mentioned, I fear the judgment of the police far more than the judgment of God, for God is more merciful. A moment’s contemplation, however, told me that any such cover-up would be impossible. People would surely notice that the sod had been broken, the ground had been disturbed. Better then to call the police and cooperate in every way possible. After all, I wanted to find the perpetrators of this deed as much as they.

I went into the parsonage and made the call, and a police car arrived in less than a half hour with two officers inside it, neither of whom I knew. They were young, scarcely more than teenagers themselves, but they were pleasant and efficient, taking photographs and samples of this and that, and looking at things that had made no impression on me. After they were finished, they helped me reinter the body and pieces of coffin, and bade me goodnight. When I went back into the parsonage at 5:30 in the morning, I discovered that Mrs. Bunn, the good soul, had slept through the entire incident, and I was glad of it.

I must confess myself rather nervous when the two young policemen were there, as I could not help but imagine their presence under quite different circumstances, questioning me about certain matters—

And did you see anyone else in the vicinity who might have disfigured the body?…

Do you mean to say that no one was in the crematory in that period of time except for you?…

What is that box that we found in your cellar. Pastor St. James?…How long have you been a ghoul…

—I can barely bring myself to write that particular word in such a serious context. Its connotations are so far divorced from the things that I do that it is not only cruel, but inaccurate. The fear remains, however, the fear of exposure, of prison, of worse, and I cannot banish it even now,
especially
now, knowing what I must do.

A smile has just come to my face at a bizarre juxtaposition. I recall a recent law that states that whatever is put out in a person’s garbage is no longer theirs if someone else wishes to take it. I wonder if that could apply to my case if it were ever to be tried. For indeed, what is done to garbage? It is either used for land fill, or it is burned. And is that not what we do to our dead? They are discarded, useless shells wherein the spirit once dwelt, and now we either bury them (landfill) or cremate them (burning). The one method is a reduction to ash, the other a reduction to something quite unspeakable. Who would begrudge, then, a scavenger of human offal?

It sounds logical on the page, but they would laugh me out of court. I hope they will not laugh so hard after they read this (if indeed they ever do).

I must now tell of the first time, for it set the pattern for the others. I have said before how my mother left my father and me. My father died of a massive coronary while I was in my third and final year of seminary. He had never again heard from my mother after their divorce was final, but I received a letter from her every Easter and every Christmas. Her second husband was killed in a plane crash during the first year of my pastorate at Dunbarton Methodist, and the following year I received a telephone call from a hospital in Philadelphia informing me that my mother had died during exploratory surgery. Cancer had been devouring her for years, but her irrational fear of doctors (that I still remembered from my childhood) had prevented her from seeking help until it was far too late, and when she was opened up, the tissues were found to be in such a degenerative state that there was no way to put (and no point in putting) her back together again.