“Look in there.” Madeline brings the Challenger to a stop and puts it in park. She points to Father Johnstone’s left, through the passenger-side window to the little blue house. The shades of 324 Berry St. are drawn shut so that all the pastor can see are two silhouettes embracing in the living room, familiar outlines he’s seen many times before.
The pastor turns to Madeline. “This is the Fairfax’s place,” he says. His eyes shift back to their home, one shadow holding another.
RF + JS, he remembers. Before Jean was Mrs. Fairfax, the unhappiest woman in Pratt, her last name was Selwyn. It was before Father Johnstone had officially assumed his role as leader of the flock. Richard and Jean were one of those young couples that wasted their days lounging upon the grass banks of Larpe’s Pond, back when their love and passion was at its apex.
“They’re in that moment right now, Johnstone. Pure bliss,” she says. “Just enjoying each other. Sometimes we forget how to do that. We get caught up in the petty little everyday things like leaving the toilet seat up or not bringing the car back with a full tank of gas in it.”
These trivial arguments are what brought the Fairfax’s to a constant state of being at odds, either bickering or outright screaming at each other. Didn’t matter what; Father Johnstone has heard reports on a wide range of disputes, from tracking mud into the house to not tipping enough on breakfast at the Presto. These small predicaments clouded the larger nature of their marriage, ultimately, tarnishing it.
“And now at look them,” Madeline says. “Not a care in the world. No animosity. No tension. It’s like when they first met all over again. They haven’t the slightest concern for the ground rotting beneath their feet, no regard for their town being on its deathbed.” Father Johnstone turns back to Madeline, a startled look flashing through his new brown eyes. “Don’t worry,” she amends. “What we’ve done here will pay its dividends later on.”
“Because they have sex,” the pastor says. “Tribute or no, the act seems self-indulgent.”
“Because they love,” she corrects him. “It’s not really about what they’re doing, but why. The intent,” Madeline says, starting the engine of the Challenger. “In the end, the intent is everything.”
It is intent, Father Johnstone muses, that brings about the flock. They file into the pews, get down on the prayer bars when told, rise when told, repeat the passages he commands they repeat. Every Sunday, the pastor watches the residents of Pratt come before him and go through the motions, but not always with the same motivations. Any one prayer can be recited with a multitude of reasons, either inspired by their love of God or their fear of eternal damnation. They pray to fit into the social structure that is Pratt’s religious mold. As Madeline said, intent defines action.
This is when he notices the red ribbon tied around the mailbox post of the widow Wright, the signal indicating she’s in need of his help. He sees this, and by extension, Madeline sees it too. She hits the brakes on the Challenger, slamming him forward so hard the seatbelt cuts into this collarbone.
“You all right?” she asks. “You’re spiking again.”
Father Johnstone takes a beat, rubbing his shoulder and remembering his last encounter with Helena Wright. It was a blatant misstep to say the least, but he knows it wasn’t purely his fault. Under the resolve of Pollux, a sliver of lust manifested in the worst way possible. He indulged in a member of his congregation, or perhaps it was the other way around.
“You’re a shame storm right now. What the hell is wrong with you?” Madeline asks. “Does that ribbon mean something?”
“An invite,” he says. “But after my last visit, I’m not so sure I trust myself. Or her.”
“It takes two to tango, Johnstone,” Madeline says. She puts the Challenger in park, killing the headlights and the engine. “No worries, though. You and I both know you weren’t completely behind the wheel last time you saw her.”
“Mad, you’ve gotta cut that out.” Father Johnstone shakes his head.
“Can’t help it,” she says. “What’s funny is that you’ve been brought up believing that God has more or less the same unfettered access…but you probably never batted an eye over it, huh?”
“It’s different when it’s a person,” he says. “People shouldn’t be able to do that.”
“Then tell me more about the ribbon…in your own words,” she says. “Communicate with me.”
“Helena—Mrs. Wright, I should say…she does that when she needs me. To talk about her husband,” Father Johnstone says. “At least, up until recently, that’s how it was. Now I don’t know.”
“Because of what happened the last time,” Madeline says. “The dynamic has changed. I get it.”
Father Johnstone shrugs sheepishly, mildly embarrassed he’s even having this discussion. He remembers what the widow Wright accused him of saying, that he referred to her not as Helena, but as Madeline. It makes sense considering it was Pollux that prompted that moment of weakness. It makes sense, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the truth.
“We should check on her,” Madeline suggests.
“I don’t think it’s a good idea if you come with me. I think it’d upset her,” the pastor says.
Madeline shakes her head. “No, she’s not okay.” She looks at the house, back to the pastor. “Something’s wrong in there.”
“This is Mrs. Wright we’re talking about. There’s always something wrong in there,” Father Johnstone says, immediately realizing how insensitive this sounds. “She never really got over losing her husband is all. Never learned how to be alone.”
“No, I mean she’s hurt,” Madeline says. This time though, she doesn’t wait for the pastor to respond. She disembarks from the Challenger, slamming the door behind her using magnetism instead of her hand. Madeline approaches the Wright household almost jogging, and Father Johnstone is right behind her, that feeling of paranoia coming right back. He checks left, checks right as the two of them cross the yard of dead dirt and yellowed grass. Father Johnstone checks the stark bushes and naked trees, seeing nothing but twisted frames and shadowy fingers of deceased wood.
“Mad, we can’t just go barging in there,” he hisses.
She doesn’t listen. Madeline doesn’t even feign the courtesy of polite entry, opting to open the front door of the Wright home in her own fashion. Her right hand draws upon the deadbolt before she pulls her arm sharply back, ripping it from the wood of the frame and creating a gaping hole in entryway. Metal trimmed with splinters hover, held mid-air by Madeline. Her hand makes a little sweeping motion, tossing the deadbolt over to what used to be Mrs. Wright’s flower garden of begonias and hydrangeas.
“It’s like I’m in one of those hotel rooms again.” Madeline walks into the home of Helena Wright at a brisk pace, passing the empty living room of wilting candles and charred incense. Father Johnstone follows her, taking note of the sickly sweet aroma in the air like burnt sugar. “The air,” she says. “There’s anguish in it. You could tell these girls had never been more scared of anything in their life.”
On the kitchen counter right next to the ceramic salt-and-pepper shakers, the pastor sees a small plate. The plate holds the remaining crumbs of a dessert and its baking paper. Madeline notices it too, bringing her nose to it, sniffing.
“Cocoa, cinnamon,” she says. “Sulfur.”
Madeline takes a left into a small hallway and now they can hear something, the sound of whining. A series of cold whimpers. They move closer to it, following the audio down the small hallway that leads to Mrs. Wright’s bedroom, the door slightly cracked. Lights off.
“I’m warning you now,” Madeline whispers, turning to look at the pastor over her shoulder. Every hair on her neck and arms is standing at full attention. “When I open that door,” she says, “you’re not going to like what you see in there.”
She takes the pastor’s hand, interlocking her fingers with his. Madeline pushes the door open slowly, the creak of the hinges overlapping the sobs. It
becomes clear that they were supposed to see this.
Pollux’s name is all over it.
On the Road with Billy Burke, Truck
Stop Preacher
“The Lord’s prayer can be aggressive…even hateful. If you’ve got hate in your heart, that’s fine. Let that hate out. Best to let it out to the Lord than on your wife or someone you care about in a moment of weakness. Ol’ Billy Burke has done more than his fair share of hate-prayin’. Oh yeah, I’ve wished pain and anguish upon those who’ve wronged me. And it ain’t about wrath. It’s about what’s right…what’s fair. I see a few of you that don’t look too sure about what ol’ Billy is saying. Seems a bit mean-spirited, don’t it? A preacher down on his knees wishin’ disease and cancer on his enemies. Praying for a slow death. Not exactly pious behavior, is it? Well let ol’ Billy put it to you this way…the Lord supports your ill will towards the Devil, and the Devil is who I pray against. I’m not talking your run-of-the-mill lot lizards and meth hookers. I’m talking about these young men that are shooting up elementary schools and movie theaters…killin’ just cos they can. Killing kids, killing families. They get a gun and start pumping rounds into anything that moves because someone called them a faggot one too many times. Then these shits get to sit in a little box as their punishment while your tax dollars keep them warm and fed. That sound right to you? No sir…don’t sound right to ol’ Billy, either. It’s shit is what it sounds like. So I consult with the Man upstairs about these men…tellin’ the Lord, ‘Make them hurt. Make them suffer. Let them be raped and beaten and broke for the rest of their shit lives. Let cancer eat their peckers right off. Take my anger and the anger of this country, and funnel it right into their shitters, Lord. Then toss ’em on down to Hell where they can burn for eternity.’ It’s okay to have anger, gentlemen. We all have it. And with the help of the Lord, ol’ Billy Burke is going to help you do something constructive with it.”
The House Call
Blood.
Blood everywhere.
While Father Johnstone tends to Mrs. Wright, Madeline is walking the perimeter of the bedroom and reading the walls. Symbols that look neither Latin nor Greek nor Arabic. Madeline studies them, her lips moving as if she’s dictating the words to herself. Meanwhile, Mrs. Wright is shivering, quaking, fists balled tight and clutching the hem of her slip. What’s left of it, anyway. She’s covered in blood and shredded silk, eyes wide but not looking at anything in particular. Irises ticking left-right-left-right.
Father Johnstone snaps his fingers once, twice. He says, “Helena,” waving a hand in front of her sightline. He says, “Are you okay?” and Madeline turns away from the wall, shooting him a look like: Does she look okay? Does any of this look okay?
On the walls, the symbols are finger-painted on top of old floral print paper that’s peeling at certain places along the ceiling and baseboards. Blood arcs and glyphs, blood passages that are thin at some points and littered with chunky clots at others. Madeline attempts to read these, moving from one wall to the next, tracking them with an index finger.
She turns to Father Johnstone after a moment, looking over to where he’s sitting on the bed next to Mrs. Wright. “Not good,” she says vaguely.
“Mad, she needs help. Look at her.” Yet again, Father Johnstone tries to elicit a response, snapping his fingers next to Helen’s ears this time. Ears crusted over with splashes of blood. He asks, “Can you do anything?”
“I have no soil. No flora nor any herbs or fruit seeds,” she says. “I have no animal horn or a single drop of fresh spring water. There’s no ingredients left to work with,” Madeline reminds him. “The land is dead. Dead land means no Craft.”
“I’ve seen you cure cancer with nothing,” the pastor says.
“She doesn’t have cancer. She’s not blind or crippled or suffering from spinal injury, Johnstone. She’s not ‘normal person’ sick. I mean, what do you think all this shit is?” Madeline motions around the room, the symbols. Characters drawn in blood that are neither Japanese nor Russian nor French. All four walls are covered in them, the inside of bedroom door and the mahogany nightstand.
“What is all that?” he asks.
“Not really sure. It reads like gibberish.” Madeline looks at the walls again, trying to find a pattern or some clue to decipher the blood script. One symbol looks like a pitchfork with a halo around it; another symbol looks like the number ‘8’ overlapping a plus sign. “I assume it’s a curse of some sort. That’s the vibe I’m getting,” she says.
Mrs. Wright continues to shiver, tremble. Tears well up and spill down the side of her face, carving a path through the sticky red splashed onto her temples. Blood gives the room a stale meat odor, and that mingles with the stench of urine coming from the mattress. Father Johnstone touches Mrs. Wright, palm to forehead—she’s freezing. From head to toe, her skin is milk pale and goose-pimpled. Father Johnstone finds himself looking at her body, her neck, shoulders, and extremities. There’s not a scratch on her.
“You have no idea how this feels.” Madeline looks around the room, shaking her head. Her cheeks flush and a tear falls from her eye that she immediately wipes away. “No idea. Poor woman would eat a bullet right now if that was an option.”
Helena fidgets, twitches. She curls her fingers into her own palm so tight the nails pierce the skin. Whimpering—sobbing continues. Mrs. Wright opens her mouth, tongue spilling over her lower lip, gagging. Fluid can be heard churning in her throat and she coughs up black mucus that spatters on cotton sheets. Sulfuric rot enters the air and Father Johnstone looks at the walls—unable to read the message or whatever it’s supposed to say—but he knows it’s wrong, knows it shouldn’t be there. He prays he could scour it from the surface, prays the Lord cleanse this home, and that’s when Madeline finally makes a suggestion.
“Grab her shoulders,” she says, moving to the foot of the bed. Madeline flinches when she makes contact with Helena’s skin, hissing, “Good God, this chick is freezing.” She bundles Mrs. Wright’s ankles under her armpit, clamping down and using her arms to support the weight of her lower half. Father Johnstone and Madeline go through the process of moving the body off the bed with no aid from Mrs. Wright, still shivering and convulsing, cold and bloody and crying. “The couch in the living room,” Madeline says. She struggles to keep up her end of the body, constantly having to readjust so Mrs. Wright’s ankles don’t slip. It’s like she’s carrying one too many logs of firewood—the kind that are slick with blood and won’t stop moving. Sometimes they kick.
They eventually make it to the couch and lay Mrs. Wright down as gently as possible, blanketing her with a nearby quilt. Neither expect this to do much in the way of keeping her warm. It’s more of a token response as is the pastor’s attempt to get some sort of reaction by snapping his fingers, asking if she can hear him. He asks Mrs. Wright, “Can you speak?”
She says nothing. Oil creeps out of her mouth and onto the couch cushions. Fluid leaks from her nose, her eyes. Moving her from the bed seems to have dislodged this in her system, and the pastor wonders if this was the right thing to do.
“You need to get Dr. Keller on the phone and have him meet us over at your place.” From the kitchen, Madeline takes the cordless off the charging cradle and hands it over to Father Johnstone. She briefly checks out Mrs. Wright who is still shivering, telling the pastor, “And he needs to be discreet.”
“What exactly am I supposed to say to him? That she’s cursed?” he asked. “Because I don’t see that going over well.”
“He’s like you, Johnstone,” she says. “If you say it’s a medical emergency he’ll come. He’s not going to try to think of an excuse to get out of it.”
“No, I get that part of it,” Father Johnstone says to Madeline who walks out of sight, into the bathroom. He can hear cabinets open and closing, pill bottles swan-diving from their respective ledges and banging around the sink beneath them. “The problem is I think he’s going to ask questions,” he says, voice r
aised so it carries to the bathroom. “Y’know, questions that are going to make this secret little thing we’ve got going on not so secret anymore.”
Madeline reenters the living room holding a candle and can of hair spray, telling the pastor, “There’s really no secret anymore. It’s all out there now, and people are going to start piecing it together.” On the coffee table, she sets down the can of Aqua Net and the candle, which has only been used a moderate amount. From her pocket, she takes out a Bic lighter and sets the candle aflame before telling the pastor, “Bless these, then call. Be snappy about it.” She checks on Mrs. Wright, still shivering under the quilt, mumbling nonsense, eyes wide and spilling tears. “Little lady over there doesn’t look too good.”
“Bless these?” Father Johnstone looks at the candle, the hairspray, back to Madeline.
“Yes,” she says. “Pretend her life depends on it if that helps you.”
The pastor looks at the candle again, the hairspray. He remembers the Holy pyre made out of his firewood in his back yard, ignited by matches, lighter fluid, and a string fuse. According to Madeline, these common items take on a different meaning when they belong to a man of the cloth. Their intangible nature is blessed in the eyes of God. As she said, it’s how juice and crackers become the body and blood of Christ.
Good Sex, Great Prayers Page 30