Good Sex, Great Prayers

by Brandon Tietz

  “I prayed the Lord restore my health and nothing came,” Father Johnstone concedes. “Dr. Keller was no help, either.”

  Madeline removes a baking tin from one of the lower cabinets, placing it on the counter with a clang that stirs Mary who was napping on the living room couch. “Your point?” she asks.

  “It would make me a hypocrite to turn my back on you or deny you empathy. And leaving town would make me a deserter and a coward.”

  “Even though your so-called flock has deserted you first?” she crosses.

  “Especially then,” he replies with a nod.

  “You’ve become quite pious since we knocked that curse out of you,” Madeline observes. She greases the indentations of the baking pan, applying a coating of what looks like fat or lard to the surface with a small spatula. “Forgiving the sheriff and cutting him loose, defending the flock that turned against you. You sure this is how you wanna play it?”

  “It feels right.”

  “But you’ll compromise by the end of this. Eventually,” Madeline says. “You can’t play by the rules forever when the other side isn’t.”

  Then Madeline picks up the canister, a stainless-steel Thermos that she took from Father Johnstone’s kitchen. He traditionally used it to transport cocoa or hot cider with him from his home to the church, mostly to keep warm on brisk days. Or he’d bring some to share with Mrs. Tiller while she mulled over paperwork. Now it holds something else, the curse fluid, still warm from the pastor’s interior. It fumes of rot and sulfur. Madeline begins pouring it into the cake batter, a spaghetti-thin stream that she applies over the top. It rests on the surface, bubbling and alive, dissolving into the mixture as she stirs it with the whisk again. She screws the Thermos top back on and the smell tapers off, overpowered by aromas of cinnamon and coffee.

  “I used to travel with a faith healer,” Madeline says. “Now, the thing you need to know about faith healers is that most of them are complete frauds. They move from town to town, put on a little show, and leave with their pockets full of cash. A decent racket, if you know how to play it.” She turns a page in her book, takes a moment to review the instructions and continues on, saying, “So this guy, Pastor Terry Bradford—who’s a total bullshit artist, by the way—he and I go on the road together. It’s a good situation. I’m going from town to town healing cancer, healing bone disease, curing cripples. People are getting out of their wheelchairs and walking. We’re doing this all over the country. Pastor Bradford shows up and puts on his little show, just like normal—the difference being that we’re now doing what he was only pretending to do.”

  “And what did he think of that?” Father Johnstone interrupts, curious as to how his reaction compared to his own.

  “He said he didn’t need to know the Colonel’s recipe as long as he kept getting the chicken,” she recalls. “I suspect he felt better not knowing.”

  “Ignorance is bliss.”

  “Exactly,” Madeline says. “So one day we end up in this town called Grandfield in Oklahoma. Probably not even 1,000 people there. Total shithole. Pastor Bradford keeps saying how we’re going to retire millionaires if we keep this up.” Madeline pauses, sighs. “Only problem was that he had been to Grandfield before. Years ago before I signed on. They remembered how this guy swindled them and they were pissed…surrounded us with their shotguns and whatnot. So what do you think Pastor Bradford did?”

  Father Johnstone shrugs.

  “No guesses?” she asks.

  “I don’t know. Apologized?”

  “Pastor Bradford pulled out a pistol from his coat, put it to my head and told them that he was going to put a bullet in my brain if they didn’t back off. He didn’t offer up the thousands of dollars we had or anything like that. He offered me up to save his own skin.” Madeline gives the mixture a final whisk and begins pouring globs of cake batter into the pan, using the wooden spoon to aid it. “A man of God using a young girl as a bullet shield. That’s a compromise, Johnstone. That’s the kind of thing that happens when you get backed into a corner.”

  “I wouldn’t do that,” the pastor says. “I couldn’t.”

  “Y’know, I thought that about Pastor Bradford, too, but like I told you…I can feel the intangibles. I know the difference between a man bluffing his way out of a sticky situation and someone so afraid they’ll kill if they need to,” she says. “His greed outweighed my life.”

  “So what’d you do?” the pastor asks.

  “I handled the situation,” Madeline says gravely, pouring the remainder of the batter into the muffin tin. She takes it and places it on the middle rack of the oven, setting a nearby egg timer for fifteen minutes. It ticks quietly as Madeline puts away the baking materials, capping the sugar and flour. The salt and espresso powder are returned to their rightful cabinet. She says, “If your faith fails…if Sheriff Morgan comes back and puts a gun to my head—or worse, tries to hike up my skirt so he can use me as a holster…what then? What are you going to do? Because it’s more than just the two of us at stake here,” she reminds him. “And this town is getting closer to finding out what’s really happening.”

  At first Father Johnstone thinks she’s referring to what’s been going on with him lately: the curse and all the symptoms that came with it. His behavior has been out of the ordinary, and that’s exactly the kind of thing that gets the rumor mill churning in a place like Pratt. People talk, they speculate. Most of those speculations turn out to be false, but that doesn’t matter. It adds up to a bad reputation and being put under the microscope. Word starts going around that the resident voice of God in town has been turned, which isn’t exactly untrue. This is when Madeline hands over yesterday’s edition of The Pratt Tribune.

  “Seen this yet?” she asks.

  Father Johnstone has been so distracted by everything going on that he ceased reading the paper some days ago. He would skim the front page headline and occasionally check the local announcements for upcoming weddings and the obituaries, more out of habit than anything. Beyond that, he has paid the local news very little mind, and even discontinued his attempts at the daily crossword puzzle. To even try it, he thought, would frustrate him further, what with his uneven temperament and all.

  The article Madeline points out is headlined: Pesticide Has Odd Effect on Insect Life

  Beneath it is a picture of a grasshopper in the palm of someone’s hand. Its top section is normal. The tip of its abdomen, however, is broken off in a familiar way. Cracked, as if the insect was completely dehydrated of any bodily fluid. Ash dusts the farmer’s hand, streaking his palm with powder and shell fragments.

  “They think it was chemically induced,” Madeline says. “You remember the daisy hill, yes? The bees?” The pastor nods. He reads the article, skimming and seeing words like ‘unexplained’ and ‘phenomena.’ The journalist reports that specimens are being sent off for testing, that Pratt will be reaching out to other farm communities that are using the same pesticide strain.

  “You said this was going to happen to the entire town,” the pastor recalls. “What is it exactly?”

  “A curse,” Madeline says. “The kind we can’t just dig up and incinerate, unfortunately.”

  “Then how do we stop it?”

  “We find the person responsible. The other one,” she says. “The problem with that though is this person isn’t going to stroll down the street High Noon style and expose themselves,” she explains. “We’ve been trained all our lives to stay under the radar, so it’s a different kind of warfare. It’s sneakier.”

  “So you’re saying we have to draw this person out?” Father Johnstone asks, uneasy about the idea of instigating a fight.

  “Normally, yes, but that would be unwise at this point.”

  “Why’s that?”

  Madeline frowns. “Simply put: we’re not ready. You’re just coming to grips with all this and I’m out of practice.”

  Father Johnstone notices Madeline flex her left hand again, rubbing the tips of her
fingers over the circular burn mark on her palm that she acquired this morning. She’s doubting herself, her ability, and for the first time since she’s moved to Pratt she looks legitimately afraid. That confident young woman from the big city has regressed to something else, a state of apprehension. Father Johnstone watches her flip through the black book, leafing through so fast that the smell of mold radiates off the pages. The pastor sees numerals, measurements, ingredients in a multitude of languages: German, Romanian, and Chinese. Another one in Spanish. Most of the pages are ancient-looking, brown and chapped at the edges. Some are burnt or have odd stains which have caused the ink to bleed, smearing the lettering until it’s almost illegible.

  “The other one out there,” Madeline says, “I’m not going to lie—they know what they’re doing.”

  “You do too, though,” Father Johnstone says, and although he has no frame of reference as to what he’s talking about, he hopes Madeline is simply being modest in regards to her own abilities. She’s the same way with her cooking, he recalls. Always in need of encouragement.

  “I still make mistakes,” she says, raising her palm so the pastor can see it. The burn is pink, wet-looking, with black scorch marks peppering the fringe of it. Heart and life-lines that would normally streak across her palm have been flash-fried, erased smooth. Madeline says, “This is what happens when you lose focus. You remember what I said about prayer? How all the parts had to be there?”

  He nods. “Like the car,” the pastor says.

  “Well, I was missing something…and I paid for it,” she says.

  “Missing what?” he asks.

  “It’s the same thing as praying for something you don’t really want,” she says. “It’s not going to go right. It can backfire.” Madeline sighs. “I never wanted to see Mary hurt.”

  “Then why do it?”

  “Because you needed to see it,” she says. “Because real prayer is benevolent and raw, and you needed to know what that felt like…even though it meant taking the thing you love most away.” She looks at Mary, curled up on the couch and snoring softly. “I just hope you feel the same about this town, because that’s what’s at stake.”

  “Sheriff Morgan and a few other bad apples notwithstanding, there are good people here,” the pastor says, hoping that Madeline can at least somewhat agree with this point after the time she’s spent here. “But the flock is fickle, as you know,” he adds. “They panic easily.”

  Father Johnstone can’t help but think about the murmurs probably already circulating around Pratt regarding the insects. People will swap opinions in the local bars like Lou’s or the Tap Room over on 3rd, trying to remain optimistic at first, but that’ll quickly decline. When they can’t find any explanation for how a grasshopper turns to dust and ash, they’ll begin to stir. Anxiety will set in. They’ll say this is the first sign of things to come, the beginning of something much worse. An event they can’t control. A plague, spreading upon the town and its people until they fold.

  “You need to regain their trust,” Madeline says. “Lead them again.”

  “Why me?” With his public approval having drastically declined, this idea sounds impossible to the pastor. He certainly couldn’t reveal that he was cursed; it would get him lynched for sure, and they wouldn’t even need Sheriff Morgan to do it.

  “You’re honestly not getting it?” Madeline asks.

  “Getting what?”

  “You’re a pillar, Johnstone. You’ve been the shepherd of Pratt for over thirty years,” she reminds him. “It only makes sense that they’d go after the person with the most influence.”

  “I think you’re mistaken,” the pastor says.

  “It’s exactly what I’d do,” Madeline says. “If it were me, and if I was trying to hurt this place, you’d be the first person I’d compromise.”

  “And why not someone like Sheriff Morgan?” the pastor asks. “Someone with real power? The gun and the badge and all that.”

  “Because there’s a difference between respecting someone out of obligation and doing so genuinely,” she says. “The town doesn’t love him; they’re afraid of him. And for good reason, he’s a sick asshole. You don’t even want to know what I felt when I held that gun of his.”

  “The intangibles?” the pastor asks, still unsure how this part of Madeline’s talents operate. “Maybe I should know.”

  “You really don’t.”

  “I can take it,” he presses, looking to Mary, still asleep. Calm. Alive. She breathes, torso expanding…contracting. “I’ve seen worse,” he says.

  “All the threats…what he’d do to us—to me, all that…he’s done it before. Use your imagination on that one,” she says, frowning in disgust. “Sending him away only delayed a very big problem. He’ll come back, and he’ll come back knowing what I did to him. We should have kept him.”

  “I refuse to hold hostages, Madeline. I won’t compromise. Not like that,” the pastor says. “I don’t doubt that Sheriff Morgan has more than his fair share of misdeeds, but it’s my job to offer second chances. He is a man of Pratt. It’s my belief that if it comes down to settling the score with me and doing what’s right for the town, he’ll come through.”

  “But just in case that fails—and I very much think it will,” Madeline says, “you need to get the flock back. That’ll be your job at the sermon tomorrow.”

  Father Johnstone still can’t recall the exactitudes of his last sermon, the one in which he openly questioned Christ and his miracles: ‘The Feeding of 5,000.’ The curse has all but stricken it from his memory, but he can still remember their faces. He remembers that moment on the church lawn, burning of fever and bleeding, the people crowding around him—not out of concern, but horror. Fear of him and disease and the Devil. A fear that has multiplied through the course of whisper and gossip. Although he has since recovered, it won’t matter to them. Pratt still very much believes him to be compromised and unfit to lead.

  “They won’t come,” he says.

  “No, they will,” Madeline says. “But only to see if you fail. They want to confirm the rumors.”

  “Hmm, well that’s comforting.”

  “You won’t fail,” Madeline says, sliding her left hand across the kitchen counter. She places it on Father Johnstone’s, gently patting it. “I guarantee you won’t.”

  “How? Got enough of these to feed the whole town?” the pastor asks, motioning towards the oven, the cupcakes laced with curse fluid. “Were you just going to hand them out as people filed into the pews? Convince them to like me again?”

  “No,” she says. “It has to be under their own accord. Genuine and not temporary.” Madeline smirks, mischief flashing across her eyes again. “Funny thing about what people choose to believe and not believe, though…all it takes is a little proof and you’ve got them in the palm of your hand. So that’s what we’ll do, Johnstone. We’ll give them proof.”

  “And what kind of proof will I be providing at this sermon?” Father Johnstone asks, with a hint of skepticism.

  “I was thinking something along the lines of a miracle,” she says.

  “You mean a spell, right?” he tries to correct her. “More witch-craft?”

  “There’s a fine line between the two, Johnstone, and I think it’s time you learned the difference,” Madeline says. “And I’ll apologize to you in advance.”

  “For what?” the pastor asks.

  “I’ve been going through my aunt’s books since I got here, brushing up on my skills.” She taps the black book with her forefinger. “Your episode at the bake-off…that might have been partly my fault.”

  Procédé IV: L’empoisonnement de Rêve

  The female will require a tall mirror (miroir), preferably propped against a wall for logistical purposes, and one elongated vegetable (légume). For best results, use a zucchini, squash, or cucumber. A banana or plantain for instance may be used due to their organic nature (caractère), however, is not practical as they tend to break and split. The m
aterial (matériaux) should be pliable yet firm, and washed of all earthly matter to avoid impurities entering the body. Coat the reflective surface of the mirror with the blood (sang) of the male. Application should be done using a brush composed of horse or goat hair and tree wood. There is no need to kill the animal for the harvesting of this particular material, however, the brush should be hand-forged by the female (reference: forging of tools). A store-bought or previously-owned brush will not yield the same effects and could contaminate the process. Once the mirror has been appropriately coated, the female may position herself in front of it on a bed of dry hay (foins). The female should then proceed to pleasure herself in front of the mirror using the vegetable. If done correctly, the labia will begin to flush and thicken with blood and she’ll experience a tingling sensation in her genitalia (organes génitaux). During this part of the process, the female should envision only the male in question; doing otherwise may result harmful consequences for either or both parties. Insertion of the vegetable is recommended, although not necessary as long as full climax (point culminant) takes place in that of the female. It’s possible that upon climax that the female will ejaculate a clear, water-like fluid. In the event that this happens, the female should attempt to bottle and store this fluid for later use (reference: storage methods). After climax, the female must say the Divine Prayer while looking into the mirror. Half the vegetable must be immediately ingested (ingéré) by the female; the other half should be placed in the center of the pile of hay. Set the pile of hay aflame, taking care not to prematurely extinguish (anéantir) it. Once the fire has died out, the female should take the charred half of the vegetable and add it to either a stew or other hearty dish for the male to consume.

  The Craft