The Night Listener and Others (12 page)

The crematory’s external design is similar to that of the church, though the whitewashing of the smaller building occurs far more frequently, since even the hint of soot is disquieting when one is aware of the building’s purpose. Fortunately the system is arranged so that the smoke is recirculated through heat chambers, so that hardly any is visible coming from the chimney. The building is surprisingly small, but it needs to be no larger. Within is a tiny chapel capable of seating only twenty people, for crowds are never great at cremations. In fact, most of the time none of the bereaved are there at all. There are only Jim Meinhart, the funeral director, and the witness appointed by the family, generally me, which makes it very convenient.

Jim is an excellent funeral director, one of the many with whom I have come into contact who takes his job very seriously. I have always felt that death really does sadden Jim, that he sees every one of his charges as a rose cut down in the prime of youth, be they two weeks or ninety years old. Some funeral directors wear a mask of piety around me, but I can see through it easily enough. If their look could speak it would say, “Enough meditating, pastor, let’s shut that lid and get on with it.” But not Jim Meinhart. I think that’s why he does such a good business—people believe him.

He does, however, find cremation somewhat distasteful. It springs not from religious beliefs, however, but from an aesthetic sense. For all his piety, Jim takes great satisfaction in a cosmetic job well done. He loves to create what funeral directors call a memory portrait, which is simply putting the best face possible on the deceased. Cremations are done most often as not with closed caskets, which gives Jim no possible opportunity for his makeup miracles, and, even in the few cases where the body is viewed beforehand, his handiwork is reduced to ash before the day is through. For Jim, who takes deep delight in knowing that his work will last, unseen, for many years, this is as hard as a child watching the sand castle that has taken all day to build be destroyed by the tide in minutes.

That image makes me think of him again, of Keith Holt, that child who was not a child, but something older than even Amos Goss, who sits in the back row every early service, singing or not depending on whether he remembered to put in his teeth that morning. Keith Holt, older even than Christ. But not older than God. And certainly not stronger.

I began to truly realize what Keith Holt was that first Sunday evening when he came to Youth Fellowship in the social hall beneath the church. I don’t usually attend YF, leaving that to Randy Kornhauser, the director of Youth Ministries, but it was September, the beginning of the school year, and I knew that there would be a number of first-timers there that evening, sons and daughters of some of the new people who had as yet made no new church affiliation, and some, like Keith Holt, who had attended services with his parents for several weeks, and I thought my presence might warm even further the welcome they were sure to get from Randy and the other students.

After the opening prayer. Randy started a discussion with the previous attendees, while I took the six new children into a corner, told them a little bit about the church, and asked if they had any questions before they rejoined the group. As is the way of teenagers, they shrugged or shook their heads gently, except for Keith Holt, who narrowed his reptilian eyes, and asked me, “And what’s the church’s position on cults?”

“Cults?” I said. “What kind? There are a lot of them”

The boy shrugged. “How about Satanism, for instance?”

What I should have done was answered politely, reasonably, gone off on a speech about the church’s disapproval of anything that detracted from or stood in opposition to God and his works, talked about youthful follies and the importance of returning to the company of believers when questing indiscretions had ended. But I did not. I felt something from the boy, something evil, and I looked at him sharply, as an Inquisition judge would no doubt have eyed an heretic, and said, “What do you think?”

He looked back with undisguised hatred. “I think the church is probably as narrowminded when it comes to that as it is to everything else.”

The reaction from the other students was not unexpected. It was one of embarrassed amusement, as if they were pleased to see the quaint country parson squelched, but were afraid to laugh out loud at him.

“You believe the church is narrowminded then?” I asked, trying to keep the anger buried. It was not that I objected to difficult questions, for I have been answering them ever since I entered the seminary (indeed, the theological questions that I proposed to myself were far more perplexing than any asked by my parishioners). It was rather the boy’s attitude of smug superiority, the feeling that whatever I might reply, even to the point of giving actual physical proof of the existence of God and the divinity of Christ, his words and looks would mock me—and God, and Christ—just the same. And in that moment, and long after, I hated him with a fiery and implacable hate that I prayed the Lord to banish from my soul, but to no avail.

The further conversation was chilling to me. He said that yes, he thought the church,
most
churches, were narrowminded, and that do what you want to should be everyone’s creed. To which I added, as long as you don’t hurt anyone else, thinking of that tired old humanist saw. But he said not necessarily, and that made me think of Crowley, that pitiful, fraudulent, English wizard, and I said, recalling the words from a workshop on cults I had participated in, Do what thou wilt, that shall be the whole of the law. Is that what you mean?

From the smile of recognition he gave, I knew that he was no stranger to the quotation, and I remember thinking, Oh God (asking Him, not giving an oath), what kind of world is this in which children read and accept the work of self-deluded devil-worshippers rather than the Scriptures? But God did not answer me. Not then.

Keith Holt answered, though. He said yes, that the world in which we live today is not the world of desert-wandering tribes nor Galilean shepherds and fishermen. And carpenters, he added dryly. And that the first law of Satanism—do what thou wilt—made much more sense for this world and this time. “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” the boy went on, “is only going to get you f…” The foul word was nearly out of his mouth, but he pulled it back in time, in counterfeited consideration of his surroundings. “… messed over,” he finished. “Today’s world is built on greed, Reverend. You know the saying about the guy who has the most stuff when he dies wins? That’s all there is to it.”

“That’s what you
think,”
I said. “But you may not always think that way. There’s more to life than money.”

“Sure there is. Power’s nice too.”

“Power,” I said, trying to smile. “How old are you, Keith?”

“Fifteen.”

“And what would a fifteen-year-old young man want with power?”

“The same thing anyone else would. Reverend. It’s a rush. It makes you feel good. Feel strong.”

“There are other ways to feel good.”

“What, you mean sex?” One of the boys snickered, and the sole girl giggled, averting her eyes. “Or drugs?”

“I mean by
doing
good.”

“That’s just
your way
of getting off. Hey, the only reason people do good things is that it makes them feel good, you just said so yourself. But most of the time they won’t admit that’s why they do it. And that’s hypocritical. At least satanists are honest about what they want.”

“Honest? Then why is Satan called the Father of Lies?”

“Don’t ask me—I never called him that. That’s the name the Christians give him.” He said
Christians
as though he was saying
cockroaches.

Now when most children ask questions like these, it is born out of natural curiosity, the desire to question authority. I have answered, time and again, such queries as where did Cain’s wife come from, and how did the sun stand still in the heavens without wrecking the earth, and isn’t it possible that Jesus wasn’t
really
dead when they took him off of the cross, and dozens more. But Keith did not have the almost apologetic tone the others had, the sense of, “Gee, Pastor, I’m sorry to destroy the faith you’ve followed for so many years, but did you ever realize that…” He was savage. He wanted to destroy not only my faith, but me personally.

I won’t go on any further. I think that anyone can see by reading this that Keith Holt was sick, troubled, even evil. I had met his parents, so I wasn’t surprised. I think the only thing that would have saved the boy is if he had been taken away from his parents when he was his sister Kimberly’s age, or perhaps even earlier. This is terribly ironic coming from me, for all my life I have endeavored to keep families together. Indeed, that was one of my prime motivations in entering the ministry—to keep families together.

It was the breakup of my own family, I suppose, that caused my concern with the families of others. I saw what it did to my father, and of course I know firsthand the effects it had on me, being a bachelor to this day, and being something even more—what word shall I use? Alien? Enigmatic? Diff rent? All of those, certainly. Ghoulish? Fiendish? Bestial? I most assuredly pray not, for I do not feel as if I am those things, and after I explain all, I pray that whoever reads this will no longer feel that way as well.

My mother then. Back to my mother, back to my family, back to the communion of flesh. I should have explained this all before, pages back when I talked about the blisters on my hands. But one thing leads into another, and I stray. That is a major flaw of my sermons, I fear. I have my outline, rigorously gone over several times before Sunday morning, but once I begin to speak, to actually address my congregation, I think of other things that I must tell them, that are
essential
for them to know, and I extrapolate, expound, until I have wandered so far from my starting place that I must strike some sort of verbal bell, be it gold or brass, and hope for the resonances to vibrate long enough to let me retrace my steps, lead myself, blindered, down my previous path, and finally race ahead on it so that my listeners may arrive home before their roasts and chickens burn.

And I have done it again. From my mother and the flesh to my sermons and the succulent flesh of Sunday dinners. I must concentrate on the subject at hand and not digress.

My mother then. She was a large-boned but soft woman, nice for a little boy to hug. She always smelled of flowers (her perfume, I suppose), and she left our house when I was twelve, a year after I first devoured my own dead skin. I blamed myself for her departure, as children will, but finally understood that it was not my fault that she had run away with one of my father’s friends, a man with whom my father and I used to drive to Philadelphia to see the Phillies play once or twice a year. He had a son too. I don’t know if he ever saw his son again after he went away with my mother. I know I only saw my mother one time after that, and that was after she died.

It sounds like an old story, but my father began to drink after my mother left. Not much, though. I don’t think he was really what one would call an alcoholic, though my memory may be wrong, and I know I wanted to imagine him less drunk than he many times was. He retained his job, he never abused me, and he was supportive when I told him, in my senior year of high school, that I wanted to study for the ministry.

He had been farsighted enough to save some money for my college education, and that, combined with my part-time job in the college dining hall, was enough to enable me to graduate with a liberal arts degree from a small, state-owned university. I purposely chose to study for that degree, since I wanted to get as wide a background as possible, feeling that if four years of liberal arts could not dissuade me from my goal of service to God, then nothing could. Once I entered a seminary there would be three long years to concentrate on religion.

My broken home and my father’s drinking and loneliness combined to create in me that desire which I have previously expressed—to help to hold families together through the countless emotional storms with which they can be rocked. So as an undergraduate I took a number of courses in psychology, and later, in seminary, concentrated on social services.

It was in my senior year of college that I rediscovered the penchant for flesh that had intrigued me years before as a boy. This is a section of my confessions that I am most loathe to write, for it was not only crime but sin that I committed, the sin of assault.

At college I had a small circle of friends. Some were music majors, there were a few English majors, and the majority majored in psychology, with an eye to guidance in schools. Although I had my share of dates, I remained a virgin, due to my feeling that religious service demanded purity in thought and deed, a tenet to which I still hold. I did drink before I was of the proper age, but only infrequently. When I became twenty-one in the spring of my senior year, I imbibed without guilt, though never to excess. The week before graduation, however, I attended a party at a house which several students (all of them now seniors) rented. It was proposed to be the biggest party of the year, celebrating the fact that we had all made it through the four years. There were two kegs of beer to quench the thirsts of the nearly one hundred people there, as well as punch bowls filled with some crimson and questionable fluids. I drank beer until I felt slightly woozy, then decided that the time was ripe to switch to something non-alcoholic, and asked one of the hosts if there was any unspiked punch. He pointed to one of the bowls, from which I began to drink cupful after cupful. It was only much later I found out that particular punch was laced quite strongly with devastating and tasteless vodka.

I felt no effect for some time, during which I fell into a conversation with a sophomore music major named Sally. I had gone out with Sally twice, but when she had become too aggressive in her movements in the back seat of a friend’s car, I had not asked her out again. This particular evening she seemed merely friendly, talking about professors and classes and the future that awaited me after graduation. When I told her I had been accepted in seminary, her interest seemed to be piqued, and she put her arm around my waist.