Ben Soul

by Richard George

Ben wondered if God was as bored as he was. The funeral service in the bare white church with uncomfortable oak pews had seemed to stretch forever. The church had been too warm. Ben had struggled to stay awake. Now, in the cemetery’s cold air, Ben slid into a trance. He thought of Dickon, and Dickon’s body heat, and wished Dickon were here to wrap him up against the cold. So intriguing did he find the idea, he almost missed the minister’s final “Amen” and the disbanding of the mourners.

  The mourners, of course, would return to the church, this time to the basement, to share a feast of casseroles and gelatin salads. On the way back to the church, Enna and Laws were silent, each staring out the window of the family car at memories and thoughts only he or she could see. Ben concentrated on sending blood to his feet to warm his toes.

  The church basement was very warm. Ben wryly remembered his childhood winters had been alternations between frigid cold and over-active heat, depending on whether he was indoors or out. He hadn’t noticed the great contrast until he had lived on the Coast for some time. The winter temperature difference there was far smaller than it was in the snow country.

  Enna introduced Ben to the minister, Pastor Priam Peabody, and mentioned Ben lived on the Coast. The earnest young man in the black suit immediately began a long monologue on what vicissitudes must assail the Christian who had to live among the heathens on the Coast. He dwelt at length on the evils of divorce, moved on to the destructive horrors of pornography, and spent considerable energy on the seductive and sinful nature of the soft climate. Ben looked around for an escape route. No one came to rescue him. He attempted to interrupt Pastor Priam’s tirade two or three times without success. He wondered how rude it would be just to walk away while the preacher was in mid-sentence.

  Ben’s anger with the clergyman almost broke through his cloak of civility, but rescue came at last. Just as Pastor Priam was starting to rehearse the atrocities of the homosexuals who infested the Coastal cities, a stolid and stocky lady in a black dress, covered with a pink apron, and topped with a blue hairdo interrupted the minister to ask him to “return thanks.” Pastor Priam closed his eyes, bowed his head, clasped his hands, and bellowed a grace. During the prayer Ben quietly found a place at some distance from the clergy.

  When Enna, later asked his opinion of her pastor, Ben said, “Such a pious young man,” and let it go at that.

  Ben ate heartily of the childhood comfort food provided in the potluck. Macaroni and cheese, a tuna casserole, corn pudding (this made savory by the inclusion of mild chilies), and, wonder of wonders, a new kind of item, a spinach quiche. The ladies setting forth the feast had thoughtfully included a separate plate for the gelatin salads, lest the hot food melt them. There was also a three-bean salad, which Ben liked, and a carrot and raisin salad that he did not like. Several choices of cake and pie rounded out the dessert offerings.

  During the meal various middle-aged and older people, some balding and wrinkled, most gray-haired, and all paunchier than they had been forty years ago, came to where Ben sat with Enna and Laws. A flurry of names he had long ago put out of his mind fluttered down on him. He pretended to remember each one who claimed to have grown up with him, but most of the faces were far too ravaged by time to recall the youths and maidens who had schooled with him. From time to time Ben saw Laws let a small grin pass over his face, usually after an especially awkward performance of recognition on Ben’s part.

  When the meal was over, Enna did not linger. Her exhaustion showed. Laws and Ben went home with her. The house was so silent that the three of them spoke in hushed tones. That great emptiness that comes after the funeral settled in. For long minutes the three of them sat without comment. When one or another of them began a conversation, it sputtered out after two or three sentences, like a candle that would not stay lit. Laws finally excused himself and went to bed. Enna and Ben sat a while in silence.

  Enna spoke. “Thank you, Ben,” she said, “for keeping a low profile today.”

  “I don’t know what you mean, Enna.”

  “For not talking about your life in the City.” She frowned at the fire, now more a glow than a flame. “Folks around here wouldn’t approve.” She rubbed her sinuses with her thumb. “I don’t approve.”

  “I’d guessed you didn’t,” Ben said. “Neither you nor Hardin. When I wrote you that Len had died, you never responded.”

  “Maybe we seem callous to you, Ben,” Enna looked directly at him, “but we didn’t know what to say.”

  “I suppose a simple condolence was too complicated.”

  “We didn’t want to seem to approve, Ben. We didn’t know what else to say.” She looked away at the frosted window again. Night was settling in.

  Evening filled the room with cotton silence. Ben stirred the fire once, added a log. He spoke, after long wordlessness. “I’ll be going in the morning,” he said.

  “That’s best,” Enna said. “There’s not much more to do here but go on without Hardin. That I’ll have to do by myself.” She wouldn’t look at Ben.

  Ben rose. “I’m going to bed now, Enna. Good luck with your going on.” Ben realized he, too, had to go on, and that he had gone on long ago from this chapter of his life. A kind of relief swept through him when he realized it.

  “Thank you, Ben, for coming. It meant a lot to Hardin. Good luck to you, too.”

  In the morning, Ben got on the road to Denver without breakfast. He left Enna and Laws a brief note, thanking them for their hospitality. As he drove south to the airport he left a dried husk of life behind him. He pictured it fluttering in the High Plains winds.

  Homeward Bound

  Ben drove the interstate back to Denver. Traffic was light, and moved smoothly; the recent snows had been plowed into piles along the highway. Brown earth speckled with gray wheat stubble showed wherever the winds had pushed the field snow into drifts. The sky was brittle white at daybreak, turning rose for a brief moment, before the hard blue of a winter sky took over. The mountains to the west glittered like shards of blue willowware pottery.

  Near Denver and the suburbs tangled in its skirts, the snow’s whiteness diminished into sooty gray, and the clear air turned saffron with trapped pollutants. Ben’s eyes began to water, and his nose began to clog. Gratefully he followed the interstate’s swing east to the airport, because the road took him up from the Denver basin onto the high plains near the airport.

  His flight left on time, despite an icing problem on the wings. The plane swung north parallel to the Front Range, and then turned west north of Long’s Peak. Far off to the right of the plane, Ben could see long unbroken slopes of white trending down into Wyoming. To the left, peaks prodded the blue sky with ice-covered points. Ben drifted to sleep somewhere before the deserts of the Great Basin.

  Ben flew a long slow spiral toward the ground. Layered yellow and dark red rock over a layer of pale green shale topped the mesa. On its canyon-scored surface, Ben could follow the lines of the watercourses by following the paler green of willows and alders through the piñon forests scattered on the higher ground. Downward his spiral flight took him, until individual trees and the sparse grass between them became visible. Ben landed. He looked down at his body, unfamiliarly slender and muscled, more like it had been when he was young.

  He took a deep breath of the piñon-laden air. He began to walk with long and easy strides along a narrow trail that led to the mesa’s rim above an interior canyon. As he rounded the turn at the top that led to the stairway carved in the dark red rimrock, voices drifted up to him, the voices of children and women going about household tasks.

  Softly he crept down the trail. These were not the people of his tribe. He wished only to pass their dwelling quietly and peacefully to get to the water he could see in a silver ribbon between the alders and willows below. He was a being of power, and had the ability to blend into the scenery so that people did not know he was passing by. He softly sang the spell to
himself and his totems, and proceeded on his way past the village.

  It was a sturdy town built in an open place in the green shale. The people had built walls of crudely cut yellow rock. Then, with iron-like red adobe clay, they mortared the rocks in place. Since the cliff’s overhang kept most rain and snow from the walls, the mortar held through many generations.

  One villager was not deceived. Ben’s magic could not blind a young dog only recently weaned. It was a curious pup. Yellow, almost the color of the walls, with one blue eye and one brown one, and a black streak that ran from a point between its ears down to its nose, it was an unlovely sight. At least the people there did not care for it. They preferred their dogs to be brindle or black, distrusting the spirits infused into an odd yellow animal. No one noticed the pup’s going to follow Ben down the trail. No one missed it, not even at the evening meal, when the village dogs waited whining and pleading, for scraps to fill their stomachs. Even the dog’s dam did not miss it.

  Ben managed to reach the creek un-noticed by even the farmers hoeing weeds among their corn, squashes, and beans. They bent to their tasks under the morning sun, for their labor provided most of the food that would feed the people through the winter. Ben reached