Anthem of a Reluctant Prophet

by Joanne Proulx

  I just about went crazy then, threw myself inside and insisted he let me cut the grass today. I’d bring my own mower, I’d handtrim his monster of a lawn, edge the fucking sidewalk, whatever, but he had to let me do it. I think I scared him a bit, because he was clutching at his robe like he thought I might try to rip it off, and he started pushing me toward the door and saying something like, “Okay, okay, you crazy keed. You cut the grazz, but I watch you. And not today. I cut it yesterday.”

  “You cut the grass yesterday?” My mouth a mile wide.

  “Yes. Yes. You blind or what? Look, look.” He pointed out the front door and I turned around and, sure enough, the lawn was completely shorn. I could have laughed out loud. “You come next week, okay? You come Tuesday. Always Tuesday, I cut the grazz. Today Wed-nes-day.”

  I jumped off the porch, landed right on the grass, the beautiful, pubic-short grass. I flipped the bird at the van as I went by, didn’t give a shit if the roving-eye team got a good look at The Prophet, because it was Wednesday, and Tuesday was the day, man, Tuesday was the day.

  My parents let me stay home, although they both headed to work. I basically hung out in my room, listening to tunes and trying to catch some zees after the four A.M. wake-up call. I finally drifted off after lunch, woke up around three o’clock feeling like shit. I headed to the bathroom, started getting dizzy in the shower.

  I rested my cheek against the wet tile, fiddled with the tap to cool down the water. From that weird angle, through the gap between the wall and the shower curtain, I could see a slice of our backyard out the little window over the toilet. The sky was gray and I could tell the wind had picked up by the way the branches of the oak tree next door were jumping. Then I saw the wheel. Hanging dark and steady against the green of the Bernoffskis’ cedar hedge. An evil black moon rising from the undercarriage of a toppled riding mower.

  I was still pressed against the wall, staring out the window, when I felt him pass through me. It was different than it had been with Stan; it wasn’t as clean somehow, and it lasted longer. I closed my eyes and felt the hardness and the happiness of my neighbor shivering through me. Power chords of love dropped me to my knees, spiraled into rhythm and melody, exploded in a fearless white crescendo. Then it was all over for Mr. Bernoffski, and I was left kneeling, naked, under a stream of water that was slowly running cold.

  BACK IN MY ROOM, it went something like this. I couldn’t sit down. I couldn’t relax. My fists were rock. I picked up my toes-tothe-carpet shoes and hurled them at the window. A crack split the glass. I tossed my chair across the room, took a swing at my fern. I ripped the concert posters off the wall, kicked the bedside table over, trampled the light, smashed the shade, pulverized the bulb pretending it was Mr. Bernoffski’s head—Mr. Bernoffski the fucking liar who didn’t cut his whole lawn on Tuesday, oh no, he liked to cut the steep part at the back on Wednesday. The fucking stupid immigrant fucking liar. Now he was dead and I was fucked because I’d been too stupid, too lazy, to take a look over his fucking back fence. What the fuck was he thinking with his only-Tuesday bullshit? FUCK. I jammed my face into my pillow and screamed and screamed and screamed.

  IT STARTED GETTING DARK around 4:30, started to frigging pour at 4:45, and I just lay there in my warm, dry room trying to ignore the glass in my feet and the thunder outside and the images flashing through my brain. Mr. Bernoffski, his lungs flattened, his cold white body pinned to his freshly cut lawn. Mr. Bernoffski in his shabby bathrobe. “Jesus Chrrist, you tink I’m stupid?” Stan, head split wide, puddle of red, sky of blue. Stan in the La-Z-Boy. “Oooh, you’re really freaking me out, Luke.”

  Yeah. Freaking me out. Really.

  FOUR

  I sat in the back seat on the way to my friend’s funeral, staring out the window as if I’d never seen the streets of Stokum before. All the town’s east-west roads dead-ended into Erie, and that day I glanced down every one to watch the lake spit chunks of dirty foam onto the beach like some angry, stalking beast. Even behind glass, I could hear the water roar.

  Closer to the car, houses floated in the middle of soggy lawns, trees had been stripped, there were branches down everywhere. We passed an Olds, its roof crumpled beneath an uprooted tree. I figured the car had been empty when the tree hit, because seriously, I probably would have been in the loop if someone had bitten it inside. As far as I knew, there’d only been the one in-town casualty the night before.

  It had taken a while for someone to notice the dead man under the mower. When the hammering on the back door finally started up, we’d just finished dinner. Which had been painful. First off, my parents and I had sat around the table acting like we were on the set of That ’70s Show or something, and we didn’t want to disappoint, we had to keep it light. Our shiny retro kitchen turned into some sick joke, with Mom and Dad jabbering about the weather, how the sewers had backed up, how the cars were shooting speedboat-sized wakes onto the sidewalks along Main Street. The branches of our birch tree were bashing the window, clawing to get in, the rain was hitting the glass like buckshot, the lights were flickering, and it felt like the wind was trying to suck the house into fucking Kansas, man. But my parents just kept talking and I just kept choking down my spaghetti, pretending to be enthralled by the storm chatter, pretending my room wasn’t completely trashed, pretending my feet weren’t cut to shit, pretending my legs weren’t jittering under the table like some ADD kid high on Big Gulp, pretending no Polish neighbor of mine was getting all crunchy under his old John Deere two doors down.

  Pretending I didn’t have a clue why Mr. Connelly, the guy who lives beside us, was pounding on our door, all soaking wet and madman frantic.

  Apparently he’d been watching the storm when, in a burst of lightning, he’d seen the overturned tractor. He’d rushed right over, but couldn’t budge the mower. He wanted my dad to come and help him lift it. Connelly must have been in shock or something, because I don’t think he even realized Mr. Bernoffski was, like, way dead. He and my dad hauled ass out of our place like two puffedup rescue heroes, armed with a Swiss Army knife and a Maglite they scrambled out of a cluttered kitchen drawer. My mom called 911 while I sat there trying to look surprised about the whole thing, feeling like a cowardly loser for having let it happen.

  They didn’t have much luck with Mr. Bernoffski, who’d already started to stiffen up, but they had no problem tracking down the missus—they simply hit the redial button on the kitchen phone and voilà, Mrs. Bernoffski was back from her sister-in-law’s before the body had been bagged. My mom had gone down to stay with her for a while and I’d hobbled upstairs and tried to soak the shards of light bulb out of my feet in the tub. I ended up having to use my mom’s tweezers and I got most of it out, but I’m not that flexible and a couple pieces still stabbed into the soles of my feet as I headed to my room.

  I forgot the glass when I saw my bedroom door swung wide open. I’d definitely left it shut. I pictured my dad pacing inside, repair estimate in hand, but it wasn’t like that. The room was empty. The furniture, upright. Transparent packing tape snaked along the crack in the window. The fern was back on my desk, its broken stem topped with a healing blob of sap. The Chili Peppers and the White Stripes had been returned to the wall, pretty much intact, but Papa Roach was beyond repair. He lay crumpled in the garbage can with what was left of the lamp.

  And that morning at breakfast, no one had said anything about the damage, which was pretty cool. What wasn’t cool was picking Fang up on the way to the funeral. After his big prime-time television appearance, I wasn’t in the mood for him, or any of the boys from the basement for that matter. Regardless, my dad pulled up in front of Delaney’s and gave the horn a blast. I figured it was my mom who’d offered him a lift, knowing there was no way his own mother would crawl out of her boozy swamp just to take her son to some kid’s funeral.

  Fang slid into the back seat and gave me a careful nod that I didn’t return. I just narrowed my eyes and stared out my window, trying to figure out w
hy someone with so little to offer was sitting in my car while Stan, who’d had it all, was stuffed inside some box. To be honest, at that moment, I couldn’t have said why Fang and I were even friends. Lack of worthy alternatives probably had a lot to do with it. And habit, I guess, one that started back in kindergarten.

  I haven’t got the greatest memory, don’t remember a whole hell of a lot from when I was little, but I do remember the first time I saw Fang. Standing on the top rung of the purple elephant jungle gym at school, all stretched up on his toes, hands over his head, a fearless smile plastered across his face—this in the days before he grew the tusks. For a kid in kindergarten, that top rung was braindamage high, and he’d been jerked down pretty fast when our teacher, Mrs. Spielman—the one with the blue mole on her chin—caught sight of him. It was right afterwards that I got my mom to call up his mom to invite him over, and pretty soon Fang was at my place every day after school. His mom would pick him up on her way home from work, and back then she wasn’t so bad, just kind of skinny and quiet and pale and always being extrapolite because my dad was her boss at Kalbro.

  I know we probably watched TV and played Hot Wheels and Lego, probably battled over Pokémon cards, but the purple elephant escapade wasn’t a one-time deal. Because what Fang really liked doing was climbing. For a while I tried to keep up. We started in the backyard with the fence and the trees, then moved on to the drainpipe that ran up the side of the house. I could never make it more than a quarter of the way up, but it didn’t take long before Fang could shimmy to the top. When we got older, we’d bike around Stokum looking for stuff to climb—the fifty-foot maple behind the library, the water tower (he didn’t take the stairs), the flagpole at City Hall, City Hall itself. Fang was so good, I tried to convince him to set up some stunt to get into The Guinness Book of World Records, but he was super-shy around other people and he threatened to quit climbing altogether if I didn’t stop bugging him about it. I remember he got all pissed off and kept saying that it had to be just the two of us, it was something only we did, that the whole thing would be wrecked if anyone else even knew about it. So I quit with the record thing and Fang got what he wanted—an audience of one.

  Fang was always completely stoked after a climb. We both were. We’d jump around, talking right over each other about how high he’d gone, how awesome it was, how hyper-human he was. Fang would goof around, flexing his muscles and shit, posing so I could take his picture with the Polaroid camera I always brought along. I’d put the date at the bottom and the estimated height of the climb, but when I showed Fang the pictures afterwards, he’d be all pissed off. He was usually smiling, full out, and he thought his teeth ruined the shot. We’d get into this big charade, with him threatening to rip the thing up and me convincing him not to. I’d tell him how good he looked—“Seriously, man, it’s an awesome picture, you’re totally cut”—and he’d get this weird smile on his face that he always tried to hide.

  He never did trash the pictures. He kept them in a Converse shoe box under his bed along with a list of scalable targets around Stokum that we planned to hit once one of us had a license and some wheels. We made the list when we were, like, thirteen, but almost right away Fang lost interest. At first I just ignored his lame attitude and I kept dragging him out to all the high shit in town so I could get one more glimpse of his fearlessness. And he’d still climb, he wasn’t nervous or anything, it just seemed like all of a sudden I was way more into it than him. Until he started to jump, at least. The jumping was something else altogether, and it was just one more dark, crazy thing I tried not to think about as we wound our way toward the New Life in Christ Church where Stan’s funeral was being held.

  None of us had ever heard of the place and we got lost on the way there. When we finally found it, we were late and there were no spots left in the parking lot. I got jittery as hell, circling around the block, watching the other latecomers filing through the doors of the crappy little whitewashed box, which had practically no windows at all. We finally left the car in front of the fire hydrant right across from the church. As I crossed the street, I had to curl my toes and walk on the edges of my feet, courtesy of a couple stubborn slivers of glass. I did my best not to look too much like a hunchback; still, I was definitely moving slowly, and my mom and dad, confusing pain for dread or despair, flanked me up the stairs, which I thought was a bit much. But I tell you, I was happy I had a parent either side once we stepped inside.

  The church had one of those low, dropped ceilings with the fluorescent lights, which made the room feel instantly tight and obscenely bright. There were only two windows topping each sidewall, narrow rectangles of pebbled blue plastic that gave a bit of a death-glow pallor to the faces around me. And there were a lot of faces.

  Although it was a nice tribute to Stan, we had zero hope of slipping into a back pew unnoticed. It didn’t take long for a black-suited usher to latch on to Fang. Another one hooked my mom, and we were forced up the aisle, funneled toward the flowerstacked coffin at the front of the church.

  There were no seats. None. We kept moving past row after row of Sunday best. I tried to remain calm, but every time we passed a pew there’d be a ripple of noise, a barely subdued wave of gawker excitement. People were covering their mouths and leaning over to whisper to their neighbors, before doing these close-chested little points at me. I stopped even looking for a seat. I kept my eyes fixed straight ahead, silently cursing my parents for stopping to pick up Fang, for getting lost on the way to the church, for being late, for putting me through this shit. Still, my mom held her head high and I knew I was probably the only one who noticed how her hand, the one not clasped around the funeral guy’s arm, trembled in the still air of the church.

  My dad put his hand on my shoulder and guided me forward, but by this time folks up front had been alerted to the fact that The Prophet was in the house, and pretty much everyone cranked around to stare. Except for the buzz of the tubular lights, the place went completely silent. I mean, it wasn’t like the church had been rocking before we showed up, but at least people had been breathing and shit. I can tell you, it was a long, painful, freaky walk up the aisle that ended right at the front, one notch behind Stan’s blasted parents.

  We nodded our condolences and the Millers nodded blindly back, sort of staring but you just knew they weren’t really seeing. I sat down, and right away someone tapped my shoulder. I had to swing around because, regardless of circumstances, it’s pretty much impossible to ignore a tap. It was Faith Taylor, as in the Faith Taylor, looking all weepy and gorgeous, the only mourner whose honeyed brown skin hadn’t paled under the harsh lights. She started to say something and, despite everything, I felt myself being drawn into her perfect pink lips like they were the only comfortable spot in town. But right then the organ wailed and Faith’s gaze flew over my shoulder to the front of the church.

  Behind the pulpit a big man in black robes gave the signal and everyone rose to sing “Amazing Grace,” which had apparently been one of Stan’s favorites. I stood up and pretended to follow along even though I didn’t know half the words.

  All I really remember about the funeral is the thick, sick smell of too many flowers lodged at the back of my throat, Faith’s soft, steady crying behind me and, of course, what happened when the electricity cut out near the end of the service. The church suddenly went dark and this collective whisper rolled through the congregation. There was a bit of blue light seeping in the windows and a red emergency exit thing going on by the doors, but what really powered the place were the previously subdued altar candles. Only the coffin and the first couple rows were hit by their yellow glow. Seeing how I was right up front, the candles went searchlight on me.

  As the rest of the church faded out, the Pastor seemed to double in size. With his oiled-back hair and his smooth preacher voice intact, he leaned in close to his bible and kept chugging along, completely unfazed by the power outage. Like I said before, I hadn’t exactly been taking notes, but all of a sud
den the atmosphere was supercharged and from here on in the sermon got fairly hard to forget. (In case anyone did, the Bible references were on the back of the funeral pamphlet that had been lying on our pew, and they came in handy when writing this out, so thanks for that, Pastor Ted.)

  “‘Believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they be of God; because many false prophets are gone out into the world.’” (1 John 4:1.) “The unrighteous speak evil of things they understand not and shall perish in their own corruption!” He never looked up, but his voice shot through the church and straight on into my dirty soul. “Only Jesus can show us the way. And only those who speak for Jesus can know that way. Remember, while we see not yet all things put under man, we see Jesus, who ‘by the grace of God, might taste death for every man.’” (Hebrews 2:9.)

  Right then, the lights flickered back on and the Pastor raised his arms in a showy V. I was starting to wonder if the janitor or some loyal churchgoer wasn’t playing God with the old fuse box, when the big bastard lifted his eyes from his bible and shouted, “Yes, it was Jesus and only Jesus who tasted death for every man, so that we might know eternal life, as our Lord himself confirmed in that most blessed of benedictions revealed to us in chapter 11, verses 25 and 26 of the Gospel According to John. ‘I am the resurrection and the life, he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live, and whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die.’” He paused and dropped his arms, then looked at the Millers and said softly, “Stan lives. Stan lives.”

  As if that wasn’t a-fucking-nuf, the Pastor cornered my parents outside the church for what looked like a super-uncomfortable, one-sided heart to heart. And Lance Winters, who’d kept his distance before the service, was on my ass, but I jumped into the car real quick, snapped the locks and put an end to him. When my parents, shadowed by Fang, finally ditched the preacher and piled into the car, they definitely looked a bit bent.