Good Sex, Great Prayers

by Brandon Tietz

  Although a bit sore in the palm, his once-broken hand was fully functional. Cartilage of the knee reassembled, allowing fluid, painless motion. The tibia that Dr. Keller set the previous night had fully mended, leaving nothing more than a faint scar where the bone had punctured the skin. This wasn’t another miracle. Father Johnstone was in the gray area, the fringe, that place where almost anything is possible.

  “I guess I shouldn’t be surprised you’re up walking around already,” Dr. Keller said upon seeing the pastor sneaking about the halls of Pratt Medical. Father Johnstone was still wearing his hospital gown, ready to make a break for it just like Mrs. Deebs did all those years ago: naked ass hanging out the back and barefoot. He didn’t care by that point. He wanted to get out, wanted to see how Mary was doing. He said many prayers in her name, but the effects needed to be seen with his own eyes.

  The pastor was given back his civilian attire, his dress shirt, black slacks, and cowboy boots. Although everything had been run through the hospital wash, faint blood stains and light brown discoloration from dead mud remained. A large rip blemished the pant leg from where the bone poked through.

  “Are they here?” the pastor asked.

  “The morgue,” Dr. Keller said. “All three.”

  “And the book?”

  “In my safe,” he said. “At home.” Dr. Keller watched as the pastor shrugged on the crumpled white shirt, buttoning and tucking it into his pants. “Do you want to see her?”

  Midway through pulling on a boot, the pastor paused to think about it. He had grown accustomed to death over the years by vocation, but this was the first time the loss directly impacted him. Hurt him in a way that made his heart bruise. Madeline’s last moments were fuzzy. Hair wet, bloody, screwdriver punched in her side and lung collapsing, but brave. Then the fire, he remembers. White fire, so bright it made the pastor’s eyes tinge in pain, burning, boiling the mud beneath her feet. She held onto Pollux until they were both charred to death.

  “No,” the pastor answered, pulling on his boot the rest of the way. He didn’t want to see the damage, the life drained from her face. Madeline Paige will always be best preserved in his memory: the campfire smile, and the eyes just as warm. He preferred that memory compared to what lay in wait inside those cold steel basement containers.

  “Understandable,” Dr. Keller said.

  She’s dead, and the pastor is still coming to terms with that.

  Pratt, on the other hand, is lively in its optimism. Pillars aside, the rest of the town has no idea of Mason Hollis’s return and the hell he brought with him. Eye-witnesses were scarce. It’s this blissful ignorance that allows residents to focus on the rebuilding effort and the promise of happier times now that the worst has passed. Speculation runs rampant, of course. The pastor will often hear bits and pieces pertaining to levitating vehicles and lightning storms. People are still scratching their heads over how the hardware store was completely emptied into the street and why Mr. Hudson’s truck was found parked underneath all the rubble. His wife and two children are especially distraught over this.

  “I just don’t understand it,” Mrs. Hudson said through sniffles. “All he was doing was trying to fetch us some food and supplies. How the hell does he wind up buried under a building? I don’t get it.”

  She’s not alone in her bewilderment. Some are simply hiding it better than others.

  Father Johnstone strolls through the central portion of Pratt where the market is usually selling honeydew melon and half-gallon jugs of spring cider. Gone are the carts containing produce, floral arrangements, and herbs picked from gardens. Reflecting back on it, Madeline more than likely procured her fair share of ingredients from this very place. It’s now spotted in multicolored balloons and booths decorated in streamers and loud patterns. Pies and cobblers everywhere. Piles of oatmeal and peanut butter cookies. Their aromas take over the air, a welcome replacement to the bitter fumes that made breathing a gag-inducing chore.

  “You make sure you come by our table at some point, Pastor,” Mrs. Whitley says from her station. “I got some rum cake with your name on it.”

  It’s not like the typical bake-off that Pratt’s known for. Not once has the pastor overheard any trash talk or ladies conspiring to steal a recipe. The women and wives of the town have grown, evolved, soliciting funnel cakes and sampler bowls of turkey chili for the sake of something bigger than their own pride. Now that the air of competition and threat of judgment have been removed, they’ve rediscovered the joy of cooking. Locally famous dishes and desserts are served to the out-of-town workers: blueberry cheesecake and Mrs. Fran’s buffalo hot wings. Between projects, the volunteers will take in a glass of sweet tea with BBQ ham on white or hot dogs off the grill. Already, they’re attempting to pretend nothing ever happened.

  ‘Your town may slip back into its old ways,’ Madeline wrote. ‘You, however, will be forever changed. You’ll be capable of more than they realize, so you’ll need to act accordingly.’

  Hiding in plain sight.

  During the day, Father Johnstone acts as he normally would: he consoles residents of the town and offers reassurance that they are on the Lord’s path, he prays with them, guides the flock. He buries their dead, watches over the living. In the absence of prying eyes, he tests the extent of the capabilities Madeline referred to in her letter. The pastor wasn’t aware of it until the morning he left the hospital, a distinct change in which he perceived his surroundings. Air and earth had a personality, a varying compendium of moods and gestures that he could read, interpret. He could feel this in the trees that had grown decrepit with rot, the water that had soured at Larpe’s Pond. They spoke their own language, and Father Johnstone could finally understand it.

  ‘You will see the world as I saw it,’ Madeline wrote. ‘You’ll feel it in a way that few have.’

  The intangibles: a sort of hyper-awareness to one’s surroundings, an ability to feel that which normally cannot be felt. Within twenty-four hours of Pollux dying, Father Johnstone could sense the contaminants leaving the air, the sickness passing from all the squirrels and birds on their final breaths. Although the curse had been broken, recovery was going to be markedly slow.

  As Madeline once said, “It always takes longer to create something than to destroy it.”

  So Father Johnstone has been experimenting with these gifts, usually at night once the town has succumbed to the exhaustion of a hard day’s work paired with a long night of drinking and socializing. He walks those once-golden fields of wheat, now relegated to acre upon acre of brittle strands and petrified soil. Miles of granulated death. Father Johnstone consults with the Lord, speaks to the earth, and conjures new life in the form of lush stalks of crop. Seeds sink into the womb of the soil, gestate, and sprout from the ground.

  The morning after as the pastor takes his morning constitutional, he’ll hear all sorts of commotion about how a new crop of corn just spouted in the eastern fields. “Looks like our prayers are being answered,” they’ll say.

  Father Johnstone nurtures the trees and heals the waters of Larpe’s Pond. He creates trout and rainbow fish from eggs, then proceeds to multiply them, not unlike Christ and ‘The Feeding of 5,000’ reading. While the rest of Pratt sleeps, the pastor walks about restoring plant and animal life, bringing the sick and wounded back to a full state of vitality. It’s the least he can do for all of Dr. Keller’s assistance during his time of need. He’s the reason that Mary was returned safely to his arms, and he’ll be forever grateful for that.

  ‘You’ve always watched over the flock,’ Madeline wrote. ‘Now you’ll have the ability to protect them, influence them in ways you never could before. All the materials are there; the decision to use them is up to you.’

  Unbeknownst to the good doctor, Father Johnstone has been providing medical aid to those too frail or elderly to recover on their own. Over the past many weeks, he’s been making private visits to those still hacking up blood or struggling to breathe in their sleep.
He asks the Lord to guide him to those that require him most, to help him find those in need of his Divine blessing, whether that be in mind, body, or spirit.

  “I’ve had eleven patients with stage IV lung cancer, another fourteen with blood parasites, countless others with walking pneumonia and typhoid,” Dr. Keller said to the pastor the other day. “They came in practically on their deathbeds. Then, before I could even fully administer treatment—got better.”

  “The Lord works in mysterious ways, David,” Father Johnstone said, deflecting the credit that was so obviously being given to him.

  “Well, if you see the Lord, tell Him Mrs. Leininger has a nasty kidney infection that could use some fighting off,” Dr. Keller said. “She’s in room 108, at the moment…y’know…just in case He’d like to stop by.”

  Father Johnstone cured her that very evening.

  At some point, he’ll take Dr. Keller up on his offer and have ‘the talk,’ as he put it. Intangibly-speaking, the man is in a constant state of disquiet. Mason Hollis was the last person he ever expected to wind up on his table, and the strange circumstances of Madeline’s demise along with her ex-lover only added to the turmoil. These events piled to all those questions that never got answered while new ones steadily generated. On a daily basis, cancer dissolves and disease disappears. Life-threat- ening illnesses regress to common colds or minor headaches. He’s starting to be regarded less a medical authority and more of an unreliable weatherman of science.

  “Heart failure or something like that. Ol’ Doc Keller said I had less than a week to live,” Mr. Lucas was overhead saying recently. “Was fit as a fiddle the next day. Haven’t felt this good in twenty years.”

  The effects of the plague disrupted by the Divine.

  When it comes right down to it though, the pastor knows that Dr. Keller is willing to have his reputation slightly tarnished if it means he doesn’t have to see another body buried. So many have already perished, either from illness that had pushed them past the threshold or random accident involving collapsing buildings or unexpected fault lines in the earth. It was fortunate that Father Johnstone had recovered as quickly as he did, if only so he could oversee the process of conducting the funerals and counseling the bereaved.

  Including Mr. Hudson, over twenty bodies had to be excavated from some kind of wreckage—usually a house that couldn’t hold the roof anymore. It’s why Pratt has such a high demand for quality lumber and the hardware to piece it together. Most of the homes were rotted out, and not one time has the word ‘termite’ been mentioned. Any man in this town can tell the difference between standard wood rot, a bug infestation, and something else.

  “You can ask questions until you’re blue in the face,” Mr. Conley said. “Or you can get off your keester and hammer a nail or two.”

  Rumors and speculation can wait. There’s been too much to do, too many homes to build and roads to bridge. Too many bodies to bury and mourn. That’s been the attitude for the past few weeks, and it’s this hectic nature that’s allowed Father Johnstone to operate in relative secrecy while he works. Today’s function is the first time in a while that Pratt has begun to slip back into its normal tone and temperament. Like Madeline said, they’ll eventually regress to their former selves, and a bake-off is a conducive environment for that. Twice the pastor has overheard musings of the late Kurt Clevenger.

  “Bless the man who buries and prays for the one who attempted to take his life,” Mrs. Pitt said. “I daresay we just leave that sorry excuse for a house in ashes. Let the town take back the lot.”

  “I agree,” Mrs. Wyatt responded with a sneer. “And speaking of properties, what’s going on with ol’ Maddy Paige’s place by the daisy hill? Is that going back on the market?”

  Madeline’s Will and the transfer of the deed haven’t been made public knowledge yet. Occasionally, the pastor hears murmurs showing interest in acquiring it, but it’s mostly just talk. Economically-speaking, the town has bottomed out. No one is in any position to make any major purchases or take out a mortgage since the grain plant has suspended work and the town is in recovery mode. Even if that wasn’t the case, Father Johnstone wouldn’t sell.

  ‘Hold on to that house for me, if you would,’ Madeline wrote. ‘It’s not just people that hide in plain sight.’

  The many volumes of books have since been stored safely in the basement, hidden behind the old television sets and fans that have long since spun their final revolution. Most of the downstairs content is old bits of junk along with a few normal things like photograph albums and holiday decorations. Josephine Paige, as it turns out, was a bit of a hoarder. She never got rid of anything. Stacks of The Pratt Tribune are piled in the corner, warped from age and the recent water damage. At some point, Father Johnstone will have to sort through it all, but a part of him is afraid of what he’ll find. Secrets lurk within the home, and he’s just not sure he’s ready to discover them.

  His fingerprints remain abnormally wavy.

  His eyes haven’t returned to their normal blue.

  He can only assume this is part of what Madeline referred to when she said he’d be forever changed, that he’d be permanently locked in the fringe, the gray area where simple prayer becomes reality. It resonates every time he grows a field of wheat or cures a cancer patient. He can communicate with the environment—with Mary, even. Like Madeline explained, the exchange isn’t verbal, but a heightened ability to interpret gestures and signals. Whereas before when Mary would whine for something, that could have meant any number of things, ranging from hunger to the need to relieve herself to mild terror due to an ongoing thunderstorm. Understanding the intangibles takes the guesswork out of it. The day of Madeline’s funeral was especially hard for her. Mary spent hours slumped on the dirt of Madeline’s plot, crying softly. One of the few people that understood her was gone now, and it tore the pastor apart knowing just how much that loss affected her. More so than the countless friends and family members of the pastor has counseled through the grieving process. Not only did he share Mary’s pain, but he could feel it transpiring inside her, an ache that would linger. Remorse for not having done more to prevent it.

  ‘Take care of Mary,’ Madeline wrote. ‘Like you, she’s seen things that can’t be unseen. She’s been pushed past the threshold and felt what’s on the other side. Other animals will find her too complex and no human will ever understand her like you can.’

  Mary experienced death, disease, and the loss of a friend. Naturally, there have been many periods in which the two of them openly commiserate their recent trials, usually balled up on the couch with the television displaying glimpses of sports highlights between periods of snow. To convey strength and a steady hand, the pastor has not publicly mourned, reserving those moments of vulnerability for the confines of his own household. Mary will crawl into the crook of the pastor’s arm, sigh, and attempt to drift off into dreamless sleep. Father Johnstone, unfortunately, can feel it every time she has a nightmare. She feels fear, guilt. In her dreams she’s never running as fast as she needs to, never barking loud enough for her master and Madeline to hear.

  For Mary, he prays the Lord reward her bravery and let her be at peace. He prays she be allowed happiness and joy again. Unlike the various illnesses the pastor has remedied, Mary’s wounds are largely emotional, and therefore, slow to heal. She shows progress, an occasional interaction with a dog her size or a small child, but every other resident of Pratt is regarded with caution, especially men. Her loyalty is to that of Father Johnstone and him alone; everyone else is a potential liability. That goes double for Sheriff Morgan.

  “I ain’t gonna fuck with you no more…not unless you give me cause to,” he said. It was the first interaction Father Johnstone had had with him since he witnessed a bullet rip through Mason Hollis’s forehead. The sheriff showed up on civilian clothing: cowboy boots, jeans, and a white T-shirt. Shelby, of course, was strapped tight against his hip, as per usual.

  “I left a mess. I’m man e
nough to admit that,” Sheriff Morgan said, nervously fondling the handle of his pistol, avoiding eye-contact. He’s never been one to accept responsibility and it made him uncomfortable. Mary, meanwhile, snarled low from behind one of the pastor’s legs in the doorframe. “I guess I never thought he’d be dumb enough to come back,” he said. “Fuck me for trying to be a nice guy, right?”

  “Kip, I don’t believe for a second you letting him go was an act of kindness…and I know you don’t believe it either,” the pastor said, more candid than usual. “You beat this man, you broke him, convinced Travis Durphy to burn him, and then you let him crawl away—not out of mercy—but because you wanted his torment to continue beyond Pratt lines. You liked the idea that he’d be out there suffering. Let’s not pretend you did the man any favors.”

  “So you know about the Durphy boy, then?” the sheriff said, intrigued that Father Johnstone had somehow discovered this information.

  “And Tuck Graybel, too,” the pastor said. He felt inquiry building up in the sheriff and decided to cut him off, just like Madeline would. “Doesn’t matter how I know that.”

  “But you do—”

  “Yes, I realize he deserved to be punished,” the pastor cut him off again. “But you let the villain go…let him crawl away angry and full of hate. You let him regain his strength and formulate a plan. Only a matter of time, right?” he recites the sheriff’s words.

  “Fair enough.” Sheriff Morgan fondled the gun at his hip, attempting to find comfort in his old friend. Instead, it brought back a lot of bad memories: Shelby whipping Mason across the face, Shelby leveling to his body, threatening to emit a bullet. Kip regrets not pulling the trigger, and to a degree, so does the pastor. Without a Secondary, Pollux may have refrained from his attack, there never would have been a plague. No death, no burials. Life would have gone on just like normal.

  Sheriff Morgan cleared his throat, saying, “It would be best if—”