The Night Listener and Others (11 page)

These people are different. They are outsiders—or insiders, depending on your point of view. Most of them regard the natives as impossibly backward, even amusing. You see it most clearly when they are confronted by an Old Order Amishman. The two cultures are so far apart. One, it seems, belongs to God, and the other does not.

They have no time for religion. Oh, some make an effort for their children’s sakes perhaps, for this past year my church has welcomed four new families, all of whom were originally from the Philadelphia area. Now only three remain. They sit in the stern, wooden pews on Sunday morning, not even trying to hide the fact that they are bored. When my congregation—my
native
congregation—begins to lapse into that catatonic condition caused by a too-hot Sunday morning, they fix a look of placid contemplation on their broad, well-fed faces, some of them adding to it a gentle smile, if to say yes indeed, pastor, you are so right, I understand perfectly, so you and the Lord will forgive me if my mind wanders just a bit to cooler and less loquacious climes.

I understand, and I forgive, and sometimes I speed the sermon along, or try to make it a bit more dramatic in order to win them back again. But the Holts, and the three other families who still remain, were and are irretrievable. Sadly and, in the case of the Holts, tragically irretrievable.

There was a sense of wrongness about the Holts. I have read in several books recently of the uncomfortable and unmistakable feeling one gets when one is in the presence of people who are truly evil. This was the feeling I had when I first met the Holt family, at least the three older members. Kimberly, the six-year-old, seemed too young to be tainted by the bland corruption I smelled in the father, and the silky superiority worn by the mother, which, I feared, had blended together into a potent and heady malignance that simply exuded from every pore of fifteen-year-old Keith. His parents wore masks that were but feeble attempts to hide their true personalities, but the fact that they knew the masks were needed and thus recognized the evil in themselves said something for the possibility of their eventual return to normal humanity.

But the boy wore no mask at all. He smiled when I first set eyes on him from the pulpit, but it was a wolfish smile. With such a smile must Satan have tempted Christ to cast himself from the roof of the temple, a smile that said to Christ, there is pride in you, for what God cannot be proud? and in that pride will come your fall, as did mine.

In weeks to come, I began to see more in that smile. I began, to my horror, to see knowledge in it. I began, even as I continued to mouth the words of my sermon and to chant the litany of the well-known scriptures, to hear his thoughts. This is what he said, what he said with that smile—

You are an Eater of Man-Flesh.

I see you. I can see all the way inside you.

I can see the flesh inside your mouth.

That is what his smile cried to my guilty mind, my mind that, after so many years, retained no self-guilt, no guilt in the eyes of God, but still lived in fear of discovery by those who did not understand, by which I mean, of course, the world. Even now I do not know whether or not what his smile spoke to me was true or not. After all, he did not really find out until later. Still, all in all, he knew. In a way, somehow he knew. And I felt guilty.

I say that I have banished the guilt, and I have, except for every now and then, when the teachings of society come thundering into my brain and displace the teachings of God. It was much the same, I have no doubt, for Jimmy Swaggart. Though I have no sympathy for the unkind politics he espouses under the name of religion, I have nothing
but
sympathy for his weakness of the flesh that made him seek the company of prostitutes. Society has said for the past twenty years that sex is fine, sex is all right, sex is open and free and natural. Sex is sold in every movie, every novel, every advertisement that we and our children see in newspapers and magazines and on television. And finally it becomes too much and the man—a man of God—goes out and sins and sins and sins some more. Crimes? Only partially. But sins? Yes, most emphatically.

I know the pressures of society all too well, pressures that have a hundred times nearly made me stop my communion with God. But His law is the higher one, and it is in this way that He has allowed me to draw so near to Him and know His love.

It
is
His will, I believe, His guidance. For a long time I attempted to look for a human reason, to psychoanalyze myself, always a dangerous occupation. And if I am discovered, I am sure that someone else will try and do the same. It may be a combination of both God and man, for I do not claim full knowledge of how God works. I only know that what brought me into the ministry also brought me to the partaking of flesh—

My mother. Rather one should say the
absence
of my mother. That, and blisters.

It sounds quite absurd, and it is funny when you come to think of it. I can just see myself on Phil Donahue—

And what turned you into a slavering ghoul, Pastor St. James? (for ghoul is what I would surely be called)

Oh, I suppose it must have been nibbling blisters, Phil. (and Phil says)

And we’ll be back with Pastor Brandon St. James, the Ghoul of Dunbarton Church, right after these words from Chapstick.

Morton Downey Jr. would be even less kind.

But in truth it was blisters, the blisters that sprouted on the palms of my hands just below the finger joints when I was eleven years old and began to mow the lawn for the first time. We had a push mower, for our yard was small and my family far from being wealthy enough to afford a power mower. And that spring night, when I lay in bed waiting for sleep, I rubbed my fingertips over those blisters and began to pick at the dead flesh that covered them, and slowly they came off, one by one.

I held them for a long time, marveling at the whole idea of it—this was my
skin,
my actual flesh. It was almost as though I was a soldier wounded in battle, and these thin strips—not strips, really, more like soft, tiny coins— were evidence of my courage under fire. Then I examined them in the dim light of the luminously painted ceramic moon over my bed. It glowed for hours after the bulb was turned off, and gave just enough radiance so that I could look through the epidermal discs and see the lines that the motion of my hands over the years had impressed in my flesh. I sniffed at the pieces, but they gave off no smell but the scent of the soap I had used to wash with that evening. Then I put one of the tiny fragments on my tongue.

At first it was tasteless, but slowly I became aware of the most delicate flavor I had ever known, a sweetness that was almost not to be borne. It was then that I had my first erection, and it so alarmed me that I pressed down on it immediately, and spat the piece of flesh from my mouth into the darkness.

I lay there trembling for a long time as the tumescence subsided, and finally felt over the sheets for the two other bits of skin that had been lost when I panicked in my prepubescent terror. In a few moments I located them both. The temptation was strong to taste them as well, but instead I rose from my bed, tiptoed to the other side of the room, brushed them off my sweating fingers into the waste basket, and returned to bed, where, that night, I had my first nocturnal emission, the result of a dream, which I remember even today, about my mother’s breasts.

That was the beginning, and even then I felt the presence of something holy in the partaking of flesh. Perhaps I equated it with the communion service in which my parents would not allow me to share. The grape juice was never what tempted me in those services. It was rather the bits of bread that were chewed so slowly and solemnly. The body of Jesus! How I wanted to taste that bread! When I learned, a few years before my experience with the blisters, that it was nothing but white Holsum Bread, the same kind we ate at home, I immediately cut a slice into squares, and placed the pieces, one at a time, in my mouth, whispering
Take, eat, this is my body.
It was a huge disappointment. There was no sense of spiritual fulfillment, none of the sacred sense of purpose I always saw in the gently masticating jaws of the recipients of communion. It was nothing but Holsum Bread in cubes, the same as Aunt Lily used in her Christmas stuffing, but without the added gustatory inducements of saffron and celery. I did not play at communion again.

It was that desire, however, to share in communion that first made me think of life in religious service, and that sensation of exaltation upon tasting my own flesh that night in my room that gave me the idea that man could, in some distant and unfathomable way, commune with God. On such small things are our futures determined. On such things was forged my link to God.

I wonder, and have wondered long, on what things was Keith Holt’s link forged to that other.

He was the one who chose my church, I think, probably because it was old, it was isolated, and it had a graveyard. The crematory, I believe, had little or nothing to do with his choice. It was not ashes he was after. When did his obsession with darkness begin? At the same age as my own with light? Or before? Did he, as a mere toddler, ignorant of speech, read the evil in his father’s words, his mother’s glances? And did he let them fester inside of him, grow into that malignancy with which he hoped to blight everyone he met?

Perhaps I imagine too much. It may be that he was merely a thrill-seeking child who went too far. It
may
be that, but I think not. How could anyone with any amount of goodness in them do what Keith Holt did? And at Dunbarton Church,
that
was the worm that gnawed as much as anything. It was selfish, I know, but I cannot help but admit that a great deal of my initial wrath came from the defilement of what I think of, with hubris of which I am ashamed even as I am powerless to dismiss it, as
my
church.

God’s, of course. First and always God’s. But mine as well. It was mine from the moment I lay eyes on it. I have been here for many years and hope to remain for many more. It was my first church and will be, I trust, my last. So many young pastors see a rural church as merely a stepping stone to some massive pink-bricked suburban edifice, or a wealthy and imposing Gothic church in the city, but for me Dunbarton United Methodist was perfect. I realized that from the first, but could not know at the time just
how
perfect it would prove to be.

The nearest village, Hempstead, is two miles to the east. Dunbarton Church, founded in 1829, sits in its own verdant grove, an oasis of green amidst the farms. The grounds comprise four acres, an eighth of that occupied by the cemetery. The church itself stands, as it has for over a century and a half, on the long north side of the cemetery wall. The exterior is plaster, and always bears a fresh coat of whitewash. It is not a large church. The sanctuary, which might seat five hundred parishioners should all choose to come at once, naturally takes up the greater part of the building. It is painted white, with dark brown trim on the timbers and the ornaments and hard wooden seats of the pews. The windows are white and translucent, with borders of colored glass around the edges. Pulpits stand on either side of the altar, all as old as the church itself. Two pews are behind the righthand pulpit, for the choir to occupy, and the organ is behind the lefthand pulpit. The ceiling is lower than that in most modern churches, and there is no balcony nor choir loft. A small wing adjacent to the sanctuary holds the pastor’s office, two Sunday school rooms, rest rooms, and robing rooms for the choir. A social hall and kitchen were added in the 1930s by excavating underneath the sanctuary. A horse’s skull was discovered buried there. No explanation was ever found, and it was reinterred beneath the basement floor.

The thing that impresses visitors most about Dunbarton Methodist is its cleanliness. The whiteness of its spartan and colonial interior makes it appear Bauhausian, and it is always a pleasant and fresh surprise for those used to dark, Gothic arches, or the soft pastels of surburban churches.

This lightness, however, is undercut by the presence of the cemetery, although adjoining cemeteries are quite common, indeed the norm, in churches of this area. The cemetery is noted more for its history than its practicality, for the last interment took place here several years before my tenure began. The family plots are all filled, and no new burials will occur, due to lack of space.

But what people find more oppressive than the cemetery is the small crematory that crouches at the cemetery’s western wall. Needless to say, crematories are
not
the norm in this area. The crematory was built in 1912, when Pastor Fletcher came into residence. He was British, part of an exchange program between the American Methodists and the Brits. Cremation was all the rage in England just then, and Fletcher brought this pet to America, persuaded the congregation that the church should have its own crematory (a motion that passed by the narrowest of margins, some say due to the hypnotic effect the young, single, and goodlooking Fletcher had over the distaff members of the congregation), and supervised the building himself. A local undertaker, who was also a member of the congregation, was trained to run the operation along with his more cosmetic duties in Hempstead, a state of affairs that still exists today, though the undertaker is now known as the funeral director.

There were several dozen cremations from 1912 through 1915, a tribute to Pastor Fletcher’s persuasive powers. But when he returned to England at the advent of the Great War, the craze died down and the crematory went totally unused for forty years. From time to time the suggestion was made by the lay committee to dismantle the building (for no one wanted to renovate it into a meeting place), but, since no profit nor good could come of its razing, it remained, a monument to Pastor Fletcher, who had died a chaplain at Mons. Then, in the late 60’s, cremation once more became a viable and rather trendy method of disposal, and the Dunbarton Methodist crematory began to hum once more. Th unattractive and conspicuous oil tank at the side of the building was removed, and the furnace was converted to electricity. As the only crematory at that time in the county, it got a great deal of use, and until another and larger crematory was finally built in 1974 at the Peace Haven Memorial Park in the southern end of the county, scarcely a week went by without a cremation. At present, our crematory averages from six to eight cremations a year. It is enough.