The Snake Oil Wars

by Parke Godwin

  “The brides and grooms looked very much like the new-married poor anywhere: stiff and formal, shy, eager, a little foolish. Stunned by being important for a moment, wearing their garlands as if these colors and fragrances would be with them always. Most never wore flowers again. Like your own poor, they worked themselves to death and died too young though they no longer looked it. But for that one day they all got a little drunk, made love in the spill from the bride’s joy, and I could see in their eyes that one day’s respite like a victory from all the grinding days to come, none of them brighter than yesterday.

  “Such lives are not poetry, Mr. Helm, but for that one day at least they found all the rhyme they could ever keep for themselves and knew all of God they could ever understand, and that enough. They believed in the goddess because they could touch her. She blessed their unions and a lucky few men loved her in glory for a night before working themselves into the grave.

  “Then the priests of the new religion came, as they always do, and told them God was never a woman but a stern, punishing father; that their guilt was obvious and their joy unclean. All so predictable, Mr. Helm. I may be frivolous, but somewhere in an unguarded century I came to love them, and I carried that love away with me. I hope this answers your question about the purview of goddesses.”

  “Most moving,” Helm said with a glance at his audience.

  They were attentive and still, impressed though he could not gauge how. “The Devil himself could not have put it more convincingly. I have only one or two more questions for Lua-lat. Obviously you and Coyul are scholars. Would that learning be inconsistent with diabolical intent?”

  “Objection!”

  “Oh Speed, desist,” Aurelius squelched him wearily. “This has been a trying session and I’m heartily sick of you both. Defense will get on with it and make an end, I hope.”

  “Please the court I will do so,” Helm promised, “and even rephrase. Since Purji is conversant with our religious history, she will recall the lucid explanation by Tertullian of pagan beliefs: that these rites, however gross and imperfect, were practical exercises designed by God to bring men gradually to the true faith.”

  Purji was familiar with the facile explanation and the author should have blushed. “That’s like a milliner saying that heads were clearly designed for the wearing of hats, as your Voltaic remarked.”

  “To mention facile arguments,” Helm parried. “Voltaire is a supremely entertaining atheist. One final question then: if you could succumb to the lure of godhead, for all your ages and superior intellect, is it not possible that Coyul, by whatever name, could be so moved to indulge himself?”

  “I’ve already told you —”

  “I know that, but I ask is it possible? In the early eras of this world, could he not have been tempted to let mortals think of him as a deity?”

  “No.”

  “Not possible when you indulged yourself? Appearing at will in a blaze of light, enjoying worship. Not possible?”

  “That isn’t in him.”

  “Will the court instruct the witness to answer? I am querying possibility, not disposition.”

  “Witness will answer.”

  “Is it not possible for him when it was clearly possible for another member of his alleged kind? Regardless of his statements?”

  “Yes,” Purji was forced to admit.

  “Thank you.” Helm spun on his toes and walked away with a dismissive gesture.

  “I have no more questions for this erstwhile goddess.”

  “Witness is excused.”

  All eyes were on Purji as she walked to the nearest exit, only one voice broke the silence, the piping curiosity of a small child. “Mommy? Is the whore-lady going home?”

  Helm waited out the resultant laughter, then observed, “Out of the mouths of babes.”

  “If Helm weren’t so passionate a man,” Speed grated, “I could easily despise him.” Helm controlled the spectators, not himself – that was clear. A quick jab under his guard was needed; hit him where he ain’t.

  Aurelius inquired, “Does Counsel for Plaintiff plan to call other witnesses today?”

  “If Your Honor please, a moment.” Speed murmured to Coyul. “Right now we need heavy artillery. I’ve had a notion from the start and Helm has just told me how right I was – for once. Trust me.” Speed half rose to address the bench. “Your Honor, since my next witness will require some time to appear, Plaintiff requests recess until tomorrow.”

  Helm appeared suspicious but could put forth no material objection, and Aurelius was clearly relieved. Court recessed.

  “Josh?” Coyul asked “Who are you going to call?”

  A contented grin threatened Speed’s outsized ears. “Helm’s got the crowd on his side. Time I complicated his life a little. He said let Christ be his witness. All right, I will.”

  13

  Mister Godot won’t come today

  “How are we doing? I mean honestly?” Lance asked after they’d taken their places at the defense table.

  Helm didn’t look up from his notes, small, precise jottings on tiny cards. “We have the people with us. If they are indicative of the jury, we’ve already won.”

  Lance didn’t feel much better. Asking assurance of Helm was like warming your hands over a block of ice.

  Helm would not share his deeper thoughts with Lance anymore than he would converse with a house cat. He had told a part of the truth. The rest was that Speed worried him. He hadn’t expected yesterday’s resistance, nor did he believe for an instant Speed’s theatrics were any less calculated than his. Purji had gone defensive; no one in the audience but knew what she was. Speed’s ploy and his incessant objections were meant to delay and obfuscate. But surprising. Helm would not have credited him with so much fire.

  Helm had tentatively decided on a few witnesses of his own but discarded the notion after seeing his fil d’un chien of an opponent at work. The American term was more puissant: Speed was a though son of a bitch. Amazing that such a quality should have been overlooked in a man who was derided in his own time as a buffoon.

  Helm thought of Augustine as a witness: a gutter fighter in debate, but Speed was no complacent Pelagius to be laughed out of contention. Erasmus was too much of a humanist to suit Helm, Thomas More too Catholic and above all as English as the jury foreman, Matthew Wycherley. French-born, Helm had always considered “English” and “enemy” synonymous and distrusted them from pure instinct.

  Spiritually treacherous bastards. I never understood them. Who could? Exactly three hundred years after me comes Speed, American but windblown from the same English weed, poisoned with secularity. God himself would not trust them. Did not Henry Taylor, in my own lifetime, make himself Supreme Head of the so-called Church of England? If Speed presses to hard, I will unmask him. That is my weapon.

  Helm would have called God to the stand but didn’t delude himself about the possibility, though he had thought to summon Christ – another maddeningly elusive figure difficult to find as an honest lawyer. No, the popular support he leaned on wanted spectacle, not rarefied debate. He would let Speed select witnesses and then demolish them as he had Purji. As for Candor, he already had the sympathy of the crowd and could be tutored for the stand.

  All rose when Aurelius entered and settled himself on the dais. “Is Counsel for Plaintiff ready to proceed?”

  “Yes, Your Honor.”

  “Again I caution both counsels that this court will tolerate no more outbursts such as we were subjected to yesterday.”

  “Your Honor, I stand reproved.” Speed’s lanky frame unfolded joint by joint from the chair. He rummaged his pockets for a crumpled note, smoothed it out them lurched across the open space between his desk and the jury. Before he spoke, Speed let his deep-set eyes rove over the expectant audience. In the press box, Cataton nudged her board man, Benny.

  “Who does Speed remind you of?”

  “Henry Fonda.”

  “Get serious. Fonda’s a hunk.”


  “I am serious. Henry Fonda.”

  “What are you doing in television, Benny? You can’t see a damned thing.” She turned to catch Nancy Noncommit bumming one of her Virginia Slims. “Hey, Noncommit?”

  “Hey what? You’re always smoking mine.”

  “Look at Speed. Doesn’t he remind you of someone famous?”

  “Yeah, An ugly Henry Fonda.”

  “Forget it.”

  “Perhaps I should apologize to the jury for my part in yesterday’s display of temper,” Speed began. “During that outburst, my colleague said, ‘Let Christ be my witness.’ Very well. My next witness has known the Plaintiff for two thousand years. I call Yeshua of Nazareth to the stand.”

  The name meant nothing to most hearers for an instant until they made the connection. The audience gasped as one person, strained forward, many rising to see or twisting around toward the nearest monitor. No one appeared in the usual entrance or simply materialized as Purji had. A slender young man, casual in an old sweater and slacks, simply rose from the first row of seats and walked to the witness stand.

  “My God.” Cataton studied the closeup on her monitor. “He looks like a Pakistani cab driver on Third Avenue.”

  Hardboiled for all her convent training, she found the image on the stand difficult to meld with lifetime habit. True, the thirtyish young man was taller than most Middle Eastern types but the main problem for her, and most of the other watchers, was generations of bad religious art that romanticized the features, moving their cast steadily northwest of Judea to something comfortably Anglo-Saxon.

  “I’ve seen him around for years up here,” she realized. “Never paid much attention. Talk about low profile.”

  “That’s him,” Nancy maintained from more recent acquaintance Below Stairs.

  Cathy Cataton was shaken out of her natural rivalry with Noncommit. “Jesus, why didn’t he say?”

  “Say what?” Nancy crushed out her cigarette and checked the polish on her nails. “Look, you’re the nominee at the Republican Convention. The people’s choice, great white hype, the whole nine yards. You gonna get up and tell them to forget it, you’re really a Democrat?” She turned away with a smirk. “Camera three, pan the house. This ought to be good.”

  “The fantasies I’ve had about him, “Cataton told her assistant through the headset. “When I was a novice with the Sisters of Perpetual Agony.”

  “Was that their real name?”

  “Should’ve been. Number three, get off Candor. Get the house. Find some sweet old lady with tears and make her a star.”

  “Object, Your Honor.”

  “Alas, Mr. Helm, whatever for?”

  “This witness is obviously a fraud and a blasphemous one at that.”

  Marcus Aurelius passed a hand over his brow. “We had a difficult time yesterday. Let’s start at least in cool blood. You’ll have your chance.”

  “State your name for the jury,” Speed began.

  “Yeshua of Nazareth.”

  “Known to Christians as Jesus?”

  “In Greek and Latin texts, yes.”

  In close-up on the monitors, the young man did not look at all godlike. The eyes dashed with intelligence and there was more than a hint of strength in his stillness. Beyond that he might have been a member of the Hagganah or indeed driven a cab in New York.

  “To be specific, you are the person called the Christ?”

  “Another Greek word,” Yeshua defined. “I am the person they thought of as the Christ after my death.”

  “How long have you known the Plaintiff Coyul?”

  “Since before I died.”

  “Would you explain that please?”

  “Coyul came to me twice in my life, once when I began to speak as a rabbi. I didn’t understand what he said to me, but told my fellows about it. They misconstrued that as they did so much of what I said, then and afterward. He came again at Gethsemane.” The quality in the compelling voice was not bitterness but its white ashes. “Far too late then.”

  Speed moved closer to the jury. They and the audience were unusually still. He couldn’t tell if they were stunned, reverent or about to attack. “Did Coyul or Barion ever represent themselves as gods?”

  “Never,” Yeshua responded with a slight shaking of his head. “They became the best friends I had in post life, maybe the only ones.”

  “That surprises me, sir.”

  “Why should it? They were all disappointed in me. I could see it in their eyes. Saul, Augustine, even men who went to the block in my name, like Thomas More. Mrs. Eddy called once but left after ten minutes. Joseph Smith... he should have written fiction. What an imagination. A few Catholics took me up gingerly, then dropped me like something too hot. The Christ meant certain things to them, a certain image. Not me, Barion and Coyul were a comfort. So old. Seen so much of it before.”

  What did the Plaintiff tell the witness concerning his own origins?

  “That they were left here through a prank that grew into a condition. That’s true; only a little while ago they took Barion back. He tried to keep things efficient, so did Coyul. Neither of them had much sense of organization, Pilate would have made a better god figure.”

  To himself, Coyul ruefully admitted that truth.

  “Let me ask directly, then.” Speed addressed the question as much to the jury as to Yeshua to measure their reaction. “Did you consciously establish a new religion?”

  Yeshua thought about his answer. “No. How do you create a faith when you build with human spirit and its memory? These are always more conventional than visionary.”

  Speed examined the faces of the jury. The stockbroker seemed troubled, both women shocked, Wycherley attentive but skeptical. The Italian was dozing.

  “This isn’t the first time I’ve been asked,” Yeshua told Speed, “I’m a Jew. I have my people’s passion for a personal God, and that was what I was trying to find again. The faith of my people had become as sterile as yours is now. Rome wasn’t our worst enemy, we were. From a people defined by holy law, we had become one crippled by it. The letter of the law crushed out its spirit. As for messiahs” — old agonies passed like a cloud over the contained passion in that face —” they came out of the desert every month, crying for one solution or the other, usually a return to the old ways, much like America today. The old ways weren’t gone, but there, smothering Judea. I spoke in their terms to their need and passion for God. It was Saul who took it to the Gentiles, that garment so ill-fitted and piecemeal that they’ve been tailoring ever since. There’s more Greek thought and Roman politics in Catholicism than there is of me; more German deliberation in the Lutherans, more uncomfortable compromise in the Anglicans. Now and then someone sensed the truth behind the dogma and got crucified for it.

  “Do you understand? Under the dust of dogma settled on my own faith, I tried to find the direct, personal covenant between God and men. They asked me then and for years after Golgotha: was I the Messiah?”

  Speed put the question quietly. “Were you in fact?”

  “I was one of them,” Yeshua answered simply. “Not born of a virgin or a miracle, but —”

  He had to wait until the sudden restless reaction in the Megachurch abated.

  “What is a miracle, Mr. Speed? Any of you; what do you think of as miracles? Perhaps it’s a miracle that a child can come bloody and squalling from his mother, unable to speak or think beyond feeding, yet grow tall enough to conceive and challenge the infinite. Isn’t that a miracle? My conception of God was no better than my human sight. But I still believe. It’s like that play Sam Beckett wrote, Waiting for Godot. The world waits as it can, with patience or without it. Despairs, threatens to give up and leave, yet waits on. And every day we’re told that Mr. Godot won’t come today but surely tomorrow. And believing it or not, we wait.”

  Watching Yeshua with vast admiration and love, Coyul remembered what Nietzsche had once written, that the struggle for freedom must be fought not only without fe
ar but without hope. Some perverse electron in his makeup kept hoping the German was wrong. His glance flicked idly to Lance Candor; a very atypical expression for that naive young man, not so much intelligence as complacency disturbed and unable to rearrange itself.

  “So I have kept to myself,” Yeshua concluded, “and gone on waiting.”

  “No further questions, sir. Thank you for coming, Your witness, Mr. Helm.”

  Before Helm could rise, the nasal insult came out of the crowd like a handful of garbage hurled at Yeshua. “Sheeny! What you tryin’ to sell us? You ain’t Jesus!”

  The burst of laughter was more released tension than humor, but Yeshua didn’t even blink as he looked up at the hostile sea of faces. “I wouldn’t try to sell you anything, mister. You already chose Barabbas.”

  When Helm approached the witness box, there seemed to Coyul more deliberateness in the lawyer’s manner, a slower tempo of movement and thought. Failing to find any record of “Peter Helm” anywhere, Felim had collated available parameters from Helm’s statements in the trial record. Being a Moslem, Felim was totally objective, even casual, about Christian matters. Coyul had in his pocket a sheet of paper much like that furnished Helm by the diligent Senator from Wisconsin, but more detailed.

  ASSUMING HELM STATEMENTS TRULY REFLECT MINDSET, COULD NOT HAVE FLOURISHED BEFORE CA. 1450 OR LATER THAN 1700. BETTER ODDS PROTESTANT THAN CATHOLIC.

  Followed by a roster of names encompassing the entire thrust of the Protestant Reformation. Zwingli was first on the list, followed by Luther, Melancthon, Erasmus and others. Fehm had circled Zwingli’s name as best bet. The zealous son of Islam had done some unsolicited plumbing on his own. At the bottom of the printout was a confidential message to Coyul in Arabic —

  DRANK WITH MARK TWAIN LAST NIGHT. CERTAIN IDLE STATEMENTS REGARDING ARTEMUS WARD CONFIRM YOUR THEORY IDENT “JOSHUA SPEED.”

  “I know,” Coyul told Felim privately. “I’ve remembered him now. And you’ll forget.”

  “Except that proof would entail a trial in itself, I would challenge your alleged identity.” Helm stated flatly to Yeshua. “I do challenge it. I must.”