Good Sex, Great Prayers

by Brandon Tietz

  “You’re hurt?” the pastor asks.

  “Rusty,” she answers, switching on the turn signal as the Main Street sign draws closer. Madeline admits to the pastor, “I’m a little out of practice.”

  “You mean you’ve done that before?” he asks.

  “There were a lot of things I used to do, Johnstone. Not all of them were good.”

  Madeline turns at the intersection, getting back on the worn blacktop of Main and heads towards the town, back to Pratt where discontent awaits. Father Johnstone remembers their faces, the disgust. Public opinion dropped so low that he very nearly left, and so the return home is bittersweet. It’s familiar but not at all welcoming. He fears something worse may have happened to his home during this most recent absence, an even higher degree of vandalism or maybe arson, but he takes comfort in the fact that he has Mary and the Challenger. If worse came to worst, Father Johnstone could still escape from Pratt. He could still get out moderately unscathed, but Madeline won’t let it happen.

  “You’ve got that scared-bunny look in your eye again,” she observes. “Ready to take off at the first sign of trouble.” The Challenger cruises at an even 20mph, bystanders stopping and staring at the vehicle that Father Johnstone is notorious for hiding away in his garage.

  “It’s never been this bad before,” he says, staring out the window while Mary noses his chin, offering a few consoling licks. “Towns like this…when the people turn, it’s hard to get them back in your favor. Forgiveness isn’t their strong suit, no matter how much you preach it.”

  “Well, what if I told you this isn’t completely your fault?” Madeline offers. “Your recent behavior, I mean.”

  “You finally taking responsibility?” the pastor asks, leering at Madeline from his side of the car. “Is this where you tell me that you’ve been giving me something along the line of what you gave Mrs. Tiller?”

  “Actually, no,” she says. “And I thought you would have figured out by now that Magda’s silence is the only thing keeping this town from lynching you.”

  “You don’t find your methods unethical?” he asks.

  “It’s not so black and white. Sometimes a little wrong corrects a larger one.” She explains, “It’s called doing damage control.”

  “You can’t go around and play with people’s heads like that, Madeline. It’s not fair,” the pastor says, despite the part of himself that’s relieved by keeping his recent incident at the church under wraps. Madeline has a point: if the town knew, he’d probably be beaten to a pulp or worse by now.

  “I take it you’ve been having trouble sleeping, right? Nightmares? Mood swings?” Madeline says, taking a right at the intersection and heading back towards the pastor’s residence. “That sound familiar?”

  “You’re changing the subject again,” he says, “but yes, as a matter of fact, I have.”

  “Then I’d be more worried about someone playing with your mind,” she says.

  Madeline pushes the button of the garage door opener, easing the Challenger up the incline of the driveway. From what the pastor can tell, no new damage has been done to the house. Madeline pulls into the garage, placing the vehicle in park and killing the engine. She pushes the garage door opener again, and the three occupants sit and listen to the slates of door rolling shakily along the track, afternoon light steadily dimming on the power tools and spare auto parts. Then darkness, and Madeline says, “We’re gonna need a shovel.”

  She takes the keys out of the ignition, stowing them in her jacket pocket and heading inside the house. Father Johnstone does the same, dumping Mary to the ground once they pass the threshold. He comes to find Madeline standing before the fireplace in the living room, finger tapping thoughtfully to her lip. “And we’ll need some of this firewood, too. And lighter fluid, if you’ve got it.”

  “Wait a minute, what’s going on?” Father Johnstone asks.

  “Trust me, just go with it,” she says, walking out of the living room to the kitchen. She peels away the lace window curtain on the back door, yelling out over her shoulder, “And find us some matches or something.”

  “Honestly, considering what just happened out in the fields,” the pastor says, tailing Madeline to the kitchen, “I don’t know if I’m really inclined to ‘just go with it.’ Something bad always seems to happen.”

  Madeline turns, points. “Your nose.” She grabs a washcloth draped on the kitchen faucet, tossing it underhand to the pastor. He presses it to his nostrils, soaking up the blood and feeling the beginning splinters of a migraine behind his eyes. Madeline approaches him, explaining, “That keeps happening because there’s something here that’s not supposed to be, and the longer you’re around it, the worse it’s going to get. Understand?”

  Father Johnstone maintains the pressure of the washcloth, giving Madeline a nod. “You know what’s doing this to me, then?” he asks, the question slightly muffled by the contents wet rag curtaining his mouth.

  Madeline takes the cloth away from him, damp with blood and old water. She whistles out towards the living room and the two of them can hear Mary’s little paws running towards them, nails clicking on the linoleum of the kitchen. Madeline kneels down, offering the washcloth to Mary for inspection, saying, “Find that for me.” She stands up and gives the cloth back to the pastor, then opens the back door where Mary bolts out and begins circling the yard, little coal nose flexing just above the ground. Madeline says, “You think you’re sick but you’re not. Not in a traditional sense, anyway. That’s why Dr. Keller can’t find anything wrong with you.” Madeline goes over to the kitchen counter where a stack of old napkins is sitting. She picks them up and hands them to the pastor, which he puts to his face to stifle the blood flow. “That’s the beauty of it. If you can’t diagnose something, you can’t cure it.” She motions to the backyard, at the rusted tin shed in the shaded back corner, asking, “Shovel?”

  Father Johnstone nods, another wave of migraine flushing to the front of his skull, boiling behind his eyes. He follows Madeline out to the yard where Mary is standing still, legs quivering slightly with her nose to the ground. She barks and circles the spot, seemingly having found whatever she was supposed to look for.

  Madeline walks out to Mary, squatting down and giving her a little pat on the head for her efforts. She tells the pastor, “C’mere and look at this.”

  Father Johnstone stands over it, a circular area in the grass that’s about the size of a frisbee in diameter. He kneels down to make a closer observation, the headache spiking, pounding enough to get his teeth to grit. “It’s…yellow,” he says, remarking on the color of the blades of grass. There’s so many dead spots in the yard, wilted patches that have shriveled under Mary’s urine, that Father Johnstone has made a habit of turning a blind eye to his shoddy landscaping. He hardly notices them anymore, writing it off to collateral damage of owning a dog.

  Madeline takes a fistful of the grass, ripping it out and presenting it to the pastor’s nose. “Smell this,” she says. Father Johnstone tentatively removes the bloody napkins away from his face, taking a couple test snorts to see if the bleeding has ceased. He inadvertently inhales the scent, the stench. It’s sulfuric, like wet rot. Another spike of migraine erupts and the pastor turns his face away, pressing the napkins against his nostrils again, breathing blood and old French fry grease. Madeline says, “Get the stuff to make a fire. I’ll get the shovel and start digging.”

  “The shed’s locked. You’ll need the key.”

  Madeline waves him off. “I’m pretty good with locks. Go ahead.”

  The two go their separate ways: Madeline to the rear corner of the yard where the shed is, the pastor heads back inside. He trashes the soiled napkins, splashing some water on his face from the sink to wash off the blood, snorting again. The flow seems to have stopped for the time being. Father Johnstone gets the items Madeline requested: a few wedges of mesquite from the stack near the fireplace, and then he pockets the box of wood matches off the mantle. Another
wave of headache blisters beyond his eyes and inside his eardrums, causing him to clutch the wall, but only for a moment. He knows he has to fight through it. Be strong. It’s his best shot at feeling normal again, if what Madeline is saying is true. He makes his way back to the kitchen, opening a cabinet on the bottom that contains a handle of lighter fluid, bundling everything in his arms like he’s carrying an infant. Father Johnstone heads back out into the yard to find Madeline already splitting earth with the spade, breaking the relatively thin seal that maintained the stench. The yard reeks now.

  “Should have had you gotten me a painter’s mask,” she says. “Smells like rotten shit over here.”

  The pastor lays the items down a few feet away from the dig site, noticing the color of dirt underneath the grass is a very dark brown, almost black. It looks like granulated coal, the stink intensifying as Madeline shovels. He leans over a bit, squinting, and there appears to be some kind of fluid rising through the soil, bubbling slightly. “What is it?” he asks.

  “Probably a lot of things,” she says, taking another scoop of dirt and dumping it off to the side, forming a small pile. “The ingredients aren’t going to mean anything to you, but this is a very nasty version of what you’ve already seen with Mrs. Tiller. Slower, but more potent.” Madeline quickly adds, “And before you even ask—no, I didn’t put this here.”

  Another wave of migraine sweeps, a churn of nausea—it’s either from the smell, or his regular symptoms are back in force. Father Johnstone covers his mouth, breathing consciously through his mouth and his mouth alone, attempting not to taunt his gag reflex. He can still taste it, the rot in the air, but he manages to ask Madeline, “Whatever you’re digging up—you’re saying that’s what has been making me feel this way?”

  “Yep.” She dumps another shovel’s worth of mud off to the side, a light sheen of perspiration building on her forehead. She says, “And you’re not technically sick, Johnstone. You’re cursed.” Another scoop gets added to the pile and Father Johnstone stares at her, hand still tightly cupped over his nasal passages. He doesn’t know what to make of the diagnosis, and Madeline picks up on this, venturing, “I take it by the furrowed brow you’re confused by what I just said.”

  He nods, migraine turning to hot fever, sweating profusely. Despite doing nothing more than standing in one place, the pastor is perspiring even harder than Madeline, who appears to have finally struck something in the earth, something dead and corroded. Something meant specifically for him.

  Madeline waves the pastor over with a finger, saying, “A curse is like poison, composed of many ingredients. It kills the grass and deadens any soil surrounding it, turning it to this stuff,” she motions to the pile of black muck. “It festers and rots, and then it spreads like cancer to whatever is in the vicinity. And guess who sleeps less than twenty feet away from here,” she says, referring to the main bedroom on the rear of the house. Father Johnstone, however, is still hung up on the terminology.

  How odd, the pastor thinks, that Madeline would use the word ‘curse,’ as if anything so archaic could realistically exist, not to mention in his own backyard. And how strange that Madeline refers to this bundle of dead meat, this rotting mammal corpse buried in his backyard as ‘ingredients.’ All he can see is what may or may not be the top portion of a possum, half-submerged in muck. Sunken eyes and not a thread of fur left. Mud and fluids coat the muscle tissue, stain its teeth.

  “If left unchecked, this thing gets inside of you,” Madeline says. “Makes you think the way it wants you to think. You can try and resist it, but it always wins eventually.” She grabs the wedges of mesquite and begins sticking them in the hole, taking care not to touch the mammal corpse or the muddy walls surrounding it. The logs are pushed down so they’re making a point, almost like the framework of a teepee. Madeline says, “I knew what was going on with you at the bake-off because I had seen it before.”

  The pastor remembers those words: “See you on the other side, Johnstone.”

  “And I knew it wouldn’t kill you because it’s not meant to do that,” she says, pressing down on the wood wedges so they’re firmly in place, making a canopy.

  Madeline takes the canister of lighter fluid, pops the cap, and gives the wedges a liberal soaking. It does little to combat the sulfur and corpse smell, and Father Johnstone also suspects that wood and generic lighter fluid won’t be enough to stay lit in a pit of muck and animal remains.

  He asks, “What is it meant to do?”

  “Control you.” Madeline squirts a couple more torrents of lighter fluid on the logs, explaining, “You are the leader of the flock. If the shepherd is compromised, you compromise all that he has authority over.” A hand slides down into her jacket pocket, removing a coil of white twine about ten feet long. She bunches it in her palm, soaking it in the remainder of the lighter fluid. Madeline cups her hand, containing the twine and fluid to a small pool. She says, “Word has it you’ve been out of sorts lately…been losing your temper and giving careless advice. But that’s only a precursor to what Mrs. Tiller saw you doing in the church.” Madeline places one end of the twine at the top of the log wedges, pinching it in the teepee’s apex. She starts to uncoil the twine, backing away from the muck pit, almost like she’s unraveling a fuse while the pastor watches her. The flush of shame almost overwhelms the migraine and the fever burning his brow. Almost.

  “You have been compromised, Johnstone,” Madeline says, lying belly-down on the grass with one end of the fuse pinched between her fingers. She gives the spot next to her a little pat, indicating that Father Johnstone should follow in suit. He walks over, remembering the dream, the bed and the candles, and how Madeline would smooth her hand over the sheets. Beckoning for his company. She says, “The best way to hurt a man of God isn’t to destroy him, it’s destroying his credibility. Sour the flock against him. Kill their faith.”

  It’s certainly working, the pastor thinks. He’s witnessed this much in the way Pratt looks at him, the way it openly hates and vandalizes his home, and it’s only a matter of time before they take it that one final step. Violence, he thinks. This will all end in violence, a tale that will make the Mason Hollis affair look trivial by comparison. Father Johnstone is on the verge of learning firsthand just how far Pratt’s wrath can extend.

  The pastor lies next to Madeline in the grass, hand clamped over his nostrils like a gas mask. He feels Mary hop over his lower back, snuggling between their two bodies and using Madeline’s jacket for cover. Father Johnstone asks, “Why would someone want to do that?”

  “The same reason most people do anything,” she says. “Power.” Madeline presents the end tip of the wet twine, pinched between her thumb and forefinger. She says, “Light that for me.”

  Father Johnstone retrieves the box of wood matches from his pocket, curious as to if a fuse is even necessary. Madeline seems intent on keeping her distance and staying low to the ground though, holding the twine steady as the pastor strikes a match. A flame blooms, slowly creeping along the path of the line, snaking through the blades of grass. It inches towards the pit, leaving a trail of char in its wake.

  “Is there a reason we’re lying down in the grass like this?” the pastor asks.

  “Because I’m not exactly sure what’s going to happen,” Madeline says, eyeing the flame that’s about halfway between them and the pit. “I only know about curse-breaking in theory. I’ve never actually done it.”

  Again, the usage of the word ‘curse’ rings suspect to the pastor. ‘Curse’ as in: the opposite of prayer. An action in which you wish ill upon a person, either poor health or loss of crop or mortal peril. This is an ancient term that is only referred to in scriptures—not in the modern day. However, the pastor can’t turn a blind eye to recent events regarding his health and behavior. He can’t deny that he very much is exhibiting the symptoms of a man blighted by something nefarious and unnatural, a condition that not even Dr. Keller can detect. It’s exactly as Madeline said, “If you can�
��t diagnose something, you can’t cure it.”

  “How do you know about curses?” he asks.

  “Think about what you’ve seen.”

  A recipe in which the person who ingests it becomes subject to influence and suggestion; lightning without traditional source or warning; random death, and then death overturned. A man of the cloth who suddenly wanders off the Divine path after thirty-some-odd years of serving in the Lord’s favor, tempted and broken by lust. Then the flock sours, just as Madeline said because she’s seen this before. She understands power, the type of power that Father Johnstone has chosen not to recognize as a real threat due to its outlandish nature. Despite their presence in the scriptures, curses are an obsolete device not meant to be taken literally. They are story-fodder and scare tactic. They’re not real.

  “Curses are the anti-prayer,” Madeline says. “Just like you can request the gift of good health or fortune, there’s also a flipside to that.”

  The flame burns along the twine, less than a foot away from the pit of muck and wood and lighter fluid. Father Johnstone’s head pounds, nose clogged with hot blood and sweating so badly it encapsulates his eyes, stinging them. He burns with fever and flu, aches with hot sickness. It’s the Pratt bake-off all over again.

  “If you have the right ingredients, the right components,” Madeline says, “almost anything is possible.”

  With the flame crawling along the twine towards the mesquite wedges, it finally adds up. Ingredients, Madeline said. Components that are used to make miracles, manufacture curses. One who is condemned in the Good Book for casting spells and being a spiritist.

  ‘Anyone who does these things is detestable to the Lord,’ it says.

  “Witchcraft is what’s responsible for your condition, Johnstone,” Madeline reveals, eyes watching the flame crawl into the pit, nearing the mesquite wedges soaked in lighter fluid. “It’s the reason this town is in danger, and if you want to save it, you’re going to have to bend those beliefs of yours. You’re going to have to accept that it’s more than just God at work here.”