by John Gardner
She pretends to be amused. I’m embarrassed for an instant. She tamps out the cigarette and gets up, graceful. “Gotta run, Gene. It’s always great to see you.”
“Come any time,” I say, and get up to walk to the door with her. With my hand on the knob I say lightly, “Say, Marilyn, what ever happened to Levelsmacher? He hasn’t been in church for a month or more.”
“Levelsmacher who?” she says quickly, and looks at my forehead. Her whole face bursts into a blush.
I am sick, not because I’ve found her out; sick because I’ve frightened her, meddled with her life.
She puts her fingertips on my chest, lightly, and looks at them, mind racing. She decides to smile brightly and say, “Oh, you mean Bill!” She shrugs. “I never see him.”
“I keep a sharp eye on attendance,” I say, and pat her arm.
She laughs, then goes, remembering to say goodbye to Janice. When Marilyn is gone, Janice steals a quick glance at me over her typewriter. She knows the whole thing. I step back into my office and close the door.
6
He sits unmoving, calm as the center of one of our southern Illinois tornadoes. His bearded face is expressionless, even the huge, skyblue eyes that stare at me and never blink. His voice is gentle, neither friendly nor unfriendly, merely there—somehow unnaturally there, as if removed from time and space.
“Your sermon really blew my mind,” he says. There is no smile, no ironic apology for the ridiculous language. I cannot tell whether he stares at me admiringly or in order to penetrate to the depths of my soul, discover what use he can make of me. I think of the words of the half-cracked Baptist, “I am the voice of one crying in the wilderness, ‘Make straight the way of the Lord.’ ” Not a man; a disembodied voice, a once-flesh heart consumed by message. I cannot tell whether I’m afraid of him or eager to speak with him, perhaps argue points of theology.
“It was wonderful to have you with us,” I say. He grants me neither smile nor gesture, merely stares at me. If he knows my words are hypocrisy he dismisses it. What are merely human faults to him? I know well enough what my emotion is now. I’m afraid, full of superstitious dread. His gentle, absolutely open gaze has eerie power. He’s like a Renaissance painting absurdly, ominously superimposed on THE CHURCHES OF CARBONDALE WELCOME YOU. I have no way of guessing his origins, no way of placing him. Is he Jewish? Polish? Italian? Was his father wealthy—some Chicago doctor or lawyer, say? Was his father a mechanic? Whatever accent he may once have had has been swallowed up in the indifferent vortex, reduced to the language of the Children of Albion. Whatever his distinctive style of dress in former years, it is lost in the swampgreen of Army fatigues, a peace sign sewed where the stripes should be.
“I’m Reverend Pick,” I say, suddenly remembering I forgot to tell him that earlier, when I found him this morning waiting with infinite patience by the church office door. “I don’t believe—”
He stares at me and at last understands what I’m asking him, trivial-minded as I am. “I’m called Dow,” he says.
“Tao?”
He does not smile or show interest. “Dow Chemical Company.”
I laugh, for lack of something better to do. It does not seem to surprise him that I laugh. He even smiles slightly, to put me at ease.
“You’re a student at the university?” I ask. I’m feeling better now. I have something to call him. I line up my pencils and pens on the glass of my desktop.
He answers gently: “I used to be a student. But I went over to Nam—they drafted me, like. So lately I’m into revolution. I bomb things.” He smiles, the barest flicker, apologetic.
I don’t believe him. He’d have to be crazy to say such a thing if it were true, and though he’s strange, uncanny, I can’t believe he’s crazy. I’m overwhelmed, suddenly, by déjà vu. We’ve been through this whole conversation before, I know exactly what he’s going to say next, but I can’t remember how it comes out, what it means. I move cautiously, as though, despite my conviction, I believe he’s dangerous.
“You really bomb things?”
He nods. “Not people. Things.”
“Of course.” I nod. I squint at him. I cannot seem to make the room come real, and I remember Carol Ann Watson’s remark that that was how she felt the first time she found herself in bed with another man. It wasn’t possible, yet here she was. It wasn’t possible. She felt no guilt, no trace of fear. How could it be? I imagine Miss Ellis, bent over, wide-eyed, at the outer office door, all color drained from the rouged and powdered cheeks. A communist anarchist talking with the Reverend, and the Reverend going on as he would with a deacon he’d happened to meet at the Post Office. Lost again in a senseless, mindless universe.
“I’m not a Jesus freak,” the young man says. For some reason it’s important to him that I understand. “Not like some, I mean. I don’t really care if there’s a God or Heaven, and like that. But I dig the third temptation.” Though he’s otherwise motionless, his long, thick fingers move on his leg, extending a three.
I consider. “I’m not sure I know what you mean.”
“Jesus in the desert.” All this time he hasn’t moved a muscle, except those fingers—he still has them raised like a weary blessing— and his lips. “The thing about coming to terms with world powers. I read a book about it, when I was over in Nam. And persecution.”
I shake my head, admitting bafflement.
“Like Osiris and Cybele and all those other goddesses and gods. But when Jesus’ religion hit Rome, they had to persecute. They were anarchists.”
I think about it and begin to understand, despite the problem of his pronouns.
He says, “And I dig what you said about the true church, and how God hates the feasts. I wanted you to know I been thinking about it. You blew my mind.”
I smile, slightly wincing.
“That’s all. I just wanted you to know. And also the part about the fig tree, whatever.” I try to think what, if anything, I said about a fig tree. Abruptly, gracefully, the young man stands up. “Far out,” he says like a parting benediction. With these words he backs toward the door, keeping his face to me. It crosses my mind that he thinks I may pull a gun on him. But I’m sure it isn’t that. Then he’s crazy, simply, as Marilyn said. But it isn’t that either. Still gazing at me, benign, inhuman, he backs away through the outer office. At the far door he gives me a peace sign and suddenly—amazingly—smiles. He has a beautiful smile. His eyes are like Brahma’s. He vanishes. I shake my head. I have told him nothing, I haven’t even contradicted him. The thing’s impossible. And now all at once I see perfectly clearly that every word he said was true. I jump up to follow him, but when I’ve passed through the outer office (my secretary frowns at me, cross), there is no one there but old Sylvester, bending down to the vacuum cleaner. He cautiously rolls his eyes at me.
7
The meeting goes dully, as usual. As usual, I hardly listen. The treasurer’s report goes on forever. We have a ditto we could read for ourselves if we wished, if my Elders weren’t mindless ritualists. Let God forgive them; myself, I’m too tired. I’ve been dragged into meetings every night this week—City Planning Commission, Boy Scouts, Urban League.… The secretary reads, and again I don’t listen. But something puzzles me. They’re nervous. There’s something going on at this meeting that I’m not in on. It’s not the reports.
When it’s over they do not stand around talking as they usually do. They button up their suitcoats, put on their hats, say goodnight to one another and, distantly, to me, and they walk, studiously casual, out into the warmth of the hushed fall evening, the smell of burning. I line up my pencils on the top of my desk, thinking, waiting for something, then snap out the office light. Someone clears his throat at the outer office door. I jump.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” he says quickly. It’s Dr. Grewy.
“You startled me,” I say, and smile. He too smiles; falsely. The church is dark now, except for the light above the glass double door and the wash of gray l
ight from the parking lot. Dead leaves blow past the arch, scrape dryly on the blacktop.
Dr. Grewy rubs his hands together as if to warm them. “Actually, Reverend—”
I study him. His distress is acute. He unhooks his glasses and clumsily unfolds his handkerchief to clean them.
“Can I take you home, Reverend?”
“I have my bicycle, John.”
“Mmm. Yes.” He continues cleaning his glasses. At last he looks up, takes a deep breath. “Reverend Pick, I hope you’ll forgive me for saying this. I think you know how I feel about you. That is, how we all—” He pauses again. Lies are bad for the digestion, he once told me. He puts his glasses on, looks at me sadly. “I wish you’d be a little more discreet,” he mumbles.
I wait. “About what?” I can’t tell whether to laugh or be frightened.
He sighs again. “The other day… that is …”
“Come out with it, John.”
He nods. He feels as stupid as I do. “That young man you were talking to, Gene, that bearded one … in your office.” Again he finds it difficult to speak. “We’re not prejudiced against beards in this congregation. You’re proof of that. But for the sake of all of us—” Again he clears his throat. “Certain people overheard your conversation.”
Memo: Fire Janice.
Memo: Also Sylvester.
“You want me to lock the door on him?” My anger’s absurd; I realize it even as the anger flames up. I do not fool myself that it’s righteous indignation. They are telling me what I can do and can’t, and like any hot-headed, undisciplined child, I demand my egoistic will. But I turn it into righteous indignation, protecting my freedom with grandiose noise and smoke. “Is he not human, John? Is he not as good as a leper, a beggar, a woman taken in adultery?”
He’s more miserable than ever. Even he knows my tactic is vulgar and unfair. “It’s not what I think,” he begins.
I touch his arm. “All right, John. Thank you. Sorry I blew up.” We walk toward the door and through it. I lock it behind us.
“I really am sorry.” He is shaping his hat now, sick at heart.
“It’s all right,” I say, and smile.
I am angrier than hell, beginning work already on my sermon.
8
My gaze sweeps the congregation. They sit docile and expectant, as usual. Not universally fond of me (here and there I see a friendly face, here and there a hostile one) but willing to be lectured, willing to permit me the license the pulpit between us grants. I hesitate longer than usual, I’m not sure why. It dawns on me that I’m looking for the stranger, the wild man who’s “into revolution.” I don’t find him, and for reasons I don’t take time to analyze, I’m relieved. I lean forward, precariously balanced on my stool. My voice trembles. It’s not the tamest of sermons. There will be some—I have no idea how many— who will want to see me hanged for it.
I tell them:
“It’s Passion time. Jesus has been saying he’s going to be killed. He and his disciples have come up to the city—to Jerusalem—for the feast. They’ve been spending nights with friends out in the suburbs, partly as a security precaution and partly because it’s cheaper. They are coming back to the city in the morning. It’s early. Still cold. Jesus is hungry. He spots a fig tree by its leaves. He jogs ahead of his disciples to see if there’s fruit. There is nothing. He curses the tree: ‘Be barren forever!’ By evening the tree is dead.
“It’s a strange incident. Most Biblical scholars doubt that it ever happened, though both Matthew and Mark record it. Some treat it as an acted parable. But a parable of what? Proof that Jesus suffered psychological pressure like an ordinary man? Proof to the disciples of the power of faith? So Matthew reads it. But Matthew came late and was probably quoting Mark and trying to rationalize the grizzly story.
“Consider the story from the point of view of the fig tree. Wasn’t the curse unfair?
“First, it wasn’t the season for figs. It was almost certainly Mark himself, not some later reviser, who wrote —‘for it was not yet the time for figs.’ It was remarkable, in fact, that the tree even had leaves on it. Wasn’t it unfair to expect it to have fruit as well? And even if it were the right season for figs, the tree grew beside a public highway. Thousands of people passed every day. Jesus was surely not the first who spotted the tree and investigated to see if it had fruit. Perhaps the tree was remarkably fruitful but had generously given away all it had. And even if it was the season for figs and the tree produced none, even if the tree was barren, wasn’t it unfair not to give the tree another chance? Maybe next year would have been better. Maybe somehow it would get fertilization, or someone would give it proper care. Knowing its unrealized potential, wasn’t it terribly unfair not to give the tree one more chance? What kind of parable is this? The curse is outrageous—and final.
“The Bible is full of symbolic trees. For instance the Psalmist’s symbol of the righteous—like a tree planted by the rivers of water, that brings forth its fruit in its season. Or there’s Jeremiah’s symbol of Judah: ‘God once said you are a green olive tree, fair, with good fruit.’ But the situation has changed, the prophet says. The tree has turned brown; the fruit, if there is any, is inedible. God will blow his breath on the tree, there will be a roar like a tornado as the dry branches burst into flames, and the tree will be consumed. Outrageous. Final.
“Think about it. The prophet’s tree of Judah started well. It was valuable and healthy and produced excellent fruit. Only with time did it lose vitality and purpose. That happens, you know, with human institutions. Judah is not the only nation that went wrong. Any institution, life-style, program, can be vital at its inception but become, in time, an obstacle, a sickness. The tree of Judah has become, according to Jeremiah, ‘unredeemable.’ Like an elm with dutch-elm disease, there is nothing that can be done for it; it can only be destroyed with the hope that its destruction will keep the disease from spreading.
“Take another tree. The editor of the book of Jeremiah put together two pieces written by Jeremiah that have no relationship except that each uses a tree figuratively. One refers, as we have seen, to Judah. The other refers to Jeremiah himself. He is the ethical man trying to be right in an unrighteous society, trying to do what he can to redeem his culture—but his contemporaries, even his own family, hate him and plot against him, saying, ‘Let us kill him and the world will forget him; let us destroy the tree with its fruit.’ Again, outrageous. Not only is there no hope for the sick society, there’s no hope for the righteous individual within it! The Psalmist, it seems, was overly optimistic. The righteous too are ‘like the chaff which the wind drives away.’
“Whether or not Jesus actually cursed the fig tree, as Matthew and Mark report, the early church accepted the parable; and I think you can see how early churchmen understood it. Jesus began inside the church of his fathers. Though John the Baptist objected, Jesus demanded baptism of him, because John was, he knew, the last of the prophets, the last green leaf on the withered tree of Judah. Throughout the gospels we read of Jesus’ grief at Israel’s failure to catch up, recognize that the wait was fulfilled, the time was now. And if you still doubt that the fig tree represents dead, sham religion, authority grown sick, look at the context of the fig tree story.
“Immediately afterward in the gospel of Mark comes the story of Jesus’ cleansing of the temple. Then come the lessons drawn from the story of the withered fig tree—the fundamental laws of the new religion: Have faith in God; do not pray if you cannot forgive. In other words, love God and man. Then comes the story of the wicked husbandmen, the men who betrayed their lord, stealing and wasting his vineyard, and were therefore executed. After that comes the question of tribute to Caesar. ‘Whose image is on this coin?’ (In Greek the word is ikon, implying holy image.) ‘Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s,’ Jesus says. If you have accepted something from worldly powers, confess the debt and repay it. But the saying admits of a more radical interpretation: If Caesar usurps the rule of God, d
ecrees that immorality is moral, then resist him; blow up the Pentagon.
“You have heard before today that the early church was a trifle anarchistic. If one of those wild-bearded, fiery-eyed men were to enter our church this morning, we’d have considerable difficulty welcoming him. Unwashed, obstinate, indifferent to all we take comfort in. And perhaps we’d be right to hope he’d go away. But let us be careful about turning in righteous indignation on fiery-eyed radicals, resisters of government, blasters of fig trees.
“By the fruit we bear—if any—men shall know us.
“The barren fig tree, the vineyard stolen and wasted, brings a sentence of death.—Outrageous or not.”
I pause, look solemn.
“Let us pray.”
In the middle of my prayer I glance out over the congregation. My spine goes cold. The boy with the beard, the staring eyes, is watching from the vestibule doorway. I know pretty well how long he’s been there, just out of sight, listening.
9
I do not claim that what I’m doing makes sense. For every move I make I can give two explanations, one more or less reasonable, one sick: I have fled to the wilderness to confront the Devil, think out what’s right; or I have fled my responsibility. Outside the train window, the Amish farms of Ohio flash by: barns red as blood; ancient thrashing machines; gangs of workers—communists, pacifists—throwing antique shocks of wheat with handmade forks, talking together in the old-fashioned silence of steam. In the seat across the aisle from me an old Negro woman sits sleeping, indifferent to Eugene Carson Blake and his militants, indifferent to demands for reparations from the Presbyterian Church. In the front of the car a soldier, no more than eighteen at most, sings drunkenly of bottles of beer on the wall—ninety-nine tragic particulars in the vast array of emblems: Even pleasure, oblivion must pass, casually, senselessly fall in the endless chain of chance destructions.
The Carbondale newspaper lies on the seat beside me. BOMB DAMAGES POLICE STATION. I have no way of knowing whether or not the bomber was my admirer. Neither have the police; but the smaller headline reads: Bomber linked to local minister. I’d already seen it when I got Janice’s note, “Call Mr. Leffler, Security Police.” I did not make the call. How could I have helped them? I have no way of knowing where he lives, and neither does Marilyn—I know because I asked. And what could I have told them? His description, perhaps. Do I want them to have his description? How strongly do I disapprove of him? Or to put it another way, how sick is the tree of Judah?