by Jack Cady
“You want something,” Mac told him. “What?”
“We’ll get to it,” Jeremiah said, “and for your own good I will shortly get to you.” He slowly turned to look over the bar. “It will be a quiet afternoon.” Beyond the windows a beat-up pickup pulled away from the post office. Across the road Hell-Fer-Certain Church stood in faded psychedelic colors.
“I believe in evolution,” Debbie said, her interest suddenly piqued.
“Who doesn’t,” Jeremiah told her, “except that it didn’t produce humans. It only produced Charles Darwin. You may wish to think about that.”
Debbie, thoroughly confused, now found herself thoroughly fascinated. She tried to think.
Mac, on the other hand, was not confused. After all, Mac is a bartender. “You talk like a man who is sane,” he told Jeremiah, “so what’s your hustle?” Mac looked through the front windows at the church. He seemed remembering the loud prophecy, the dogmatic hollering, the Sunday nights of wind and truck engines and sermons. “You don’t talk the way you should.” Mac’s voice sounded lame.
It’s a problem preachers have,” Jeremiah told him. “The words we use are old, timeworn, water-smooth, and even, sometimes, decapitated. Our traditions are ancient, as are the symbols; crosses and lambs and towers of wrath. Plus, in today’s world the volume on everything has been cranked higher. Would you pay attention to a quietly delivered message?”
Mac hesitated, wiped the counter with a bar rag, and seemed to remember younger days, days when people actually thought that they were thinking. “You just busted your own argument,” Mac said. “I never paid attention before, but I’m hearing you now.”
“In that case,” Jeremiah told him, “we may proceed with your salvation, and possibly my own.” His voice sounded firm, advisory, nearly scolding.
Medieval hells of fire and brimstone, according to Jeremiah, were problematic (“I honor the tradition.”) but Hell, itself, was certain, either in this world or the next. “All versions of hell get boring, because even anguish wears out sooner or later. I care nothing for it.”
Debbie looked at her small glass of chablis, pushed it two or three inches away from her, and sat more sad than confused. Debbie is not a bad artist, and she might have been great. These days she paints cute pictures for sale to tourists. Things happen. Life happens.
“Don’t get me started talkin’.” Mac’s tone of voice said the opposite of his words. Mac used to be a thinker, but few abstractions ever make it to a bar. Bartending causes rust on the brain.
“Which is why my main interest is atonement, thus redemption.” Jeremiah sipped at his soft drink, looked at the label on the can, and gave an honest but crooked grin from his sagging mouth. “This stuff is not exactly sacramental.”
“It’s such a pretty day,” Debbie said, “it’s such a pretty day.” She retrieved her small purse from the bar, walked to the doorway and stood framed in sunlight. Then she stepped into sunlight. She walked away, not briskly, but like one enchanted by a stroll in the sun.
“Handsome woman,” said Jeremiah.
“Lost customer,” said Mac.
“We’ll speak again, and soon,” Jeremiah promised. “Between then and now you may wish to ponder a question. How many differences, if any, are there between a preacher and a bartender.” He stood, gave a backward wave as he walked to the doorway, and stepped into sunlight. His shabby suit and clodhopper shoes made him look like a distinguished bum, or an itinerant living on the bare edge of respectability.
……
The fabulous weather did not last. Mist rolled in from the coast. It was followed by rain. Hides of cattle turned glossy, and rain puddled in the churchyard of Hell-Fer-Certain. On next Sunday night, as trucks rolled in, Jeremiah performed like a champion, but with a different message. Anyone who paid the least attention understood that new images entered his calls for atonement. Instead of talking about lambs, he spoke of cattle. When speaking of heaven he no longer pictured streets of gold, but streets of opportunity. The image of the cross gave way to an image of the morning star. Hardly anyone gave two snips about images, but later on we would figure Jeremiah made changes in order to get Mac’s attention.
And through the week, and through the next, it was Mac who changed the most, because (though no one knew it at the time) Mac tried to answer Jeremiah’s question.
……
A good bartender is a precious sight, and Mac was always good. His instincts were quick, accurate, nearly catlike. He knew when to be smart-mouthed, when to be glib, and when to be thoughtful. He never lost control of the bar, but now he went beyond control and even directed entertainment.
If bar talk slowed, or the pool tables stood empty, Mac resembled a school teacher introducing new subjects. Instead of baseball, used truck parts, and cattle, we found ourselves cussing and discussing local Indian legends. We talked about the fall of empires, Roman and American. We quibbled over histories of Franklin Roosevelt and Henry Ford. In only two little weeks Mac’s Bar turned into an interesting place to congregate, and not simply a place to get stewed.
Conversation improved but beer-drinking slowed. Mac ran a highly enhanced bar, but made less money. For those who know him well, Mac seemed slightly confused but almost happy. Since no one around here has been really happy for a long, long time, we were confused as well.
Meanwhile, gray day followed gray day and life went on as usual. On the coast, mist cloaked the broken wharves, warehouses. and abandoned fish cannery. Ghosts whispered through mist, nearly indistinguishable from mist; we thought them ghosts of fishermen lost at sea, ghosts of fishing boats long drowned. Thus, from the coast to the fields, memories of work and order and dreams lay as sprawled as wreckage.
Those ghosts of the land, the abandoned houses, leaned before wind and seemed ready not to shriek, but groan. Cattle lined the fences beside the road. As they appeared through mist, the cattle looked ghostly; silvered black hides, pale white faces, bovine stares toward us, and toward the road that would shortly carry them to slaughter.
Then, on a Saturday afternoon when baseball should have been the topic, Mac looked across the bar, across to Hell-Fer-Certain, and said “What does he mean by atonement?”
“It’s being sorry for screw-ups.” Pop, our local hustler, leaned against the end of the bar nearest the pool tables. As afternoon progressed, and as beer built confidence among customers, one or another booze-hound would challenge Pop to dollar-a-game. Pop would clean the guy’s clock, and his wallet. For the moment, though, Pop was free to talk. He is a short, graying man, usually taciturn.
“It’s more than that,” Debbie said. “I can feel sorry for screw-ups any old time I want.” She sipped at her wine. Her eyes squinched a little, and sorrow entered her voice. “Come to think of it, I usually want. Sorry most days….” She realized she was saying too much. She saw her reflection in the bar mirror, smoothed her hair with one hand, smoothed wrinkles on the sleeve of her blouse with the other.
“It’s recognizing that you’re out of sync with the universe.” Sarah, granny-skirts and all, attends Mac’s Bar on Saturday afternoons. She would be happier in a sewing circle or a book discussion group, but she doesn’t own a sewing machine and we don’t have a library.
“Ninety days for drunk-and-disorderly. That’s atonement.” Pop looked down the bar where sat at least three customers who knew all about doing ninety days. “I rest my case.”
“That’s only punishment,” Debbie whispered. Almost no one heard her.
……
Jeremiah next appeared at ten a.m. on a rainy Monday. Truck engines roared as truckers slowed for the intersection of roads, then caught a gear and started building revs. The possum-belly trailers were crowded with living beef standing silent as ghosts, the animals packed together and intimidated; the trucks rolling purgatories for beasts.
Mac and Sarah and Debbie opened the bar. Or rather, Mac opened the bar while Sarah made morning coffee and Debbie loafed. Mac brushed pool tables a
nd cleaned rest rooms. Sarah drank coffee and watched the road. Sarah, who is nobody’s mother, looks like she would do for the sainted mother of us all. Her face is sweet, her hair hangs in long braids, her figure is slightly dumpy. Her hands are workworn because she lives by cleaning houses of corporation people. If Sarah has a problem, and Sarah does, it’s because she’s a sucker for any new trend. She keeps ideas the way other people keep goldfish. Like goldfish, the ideas swim in all directions.
When Jeremiah entered the bar, rain glistened on his black suit and dripped from ends of his white hair. Wrinkles in his face looked like channels for rain. He sniffed the morning smells of the bar, stale tobacco, the stench of disinfectant. The smell of fresh coffee seemed to draw Jeremiah. He sat beside Sarah who was, at least for the moment, one of his parishioners.
“Praise the Lord,” said Sarah.
“You got that right.” Jeremiah gave a couple of sniffs and asked for coffee. He hunched above his coffee cup. His black suit made him look like a raven regarding road-kill. “Although,” he said to Sarah, “if we must unceasingly praise the Lord, does that mean the Lord has an inferiority complex? If the Lord needs constant praise we may be dealing with a major case of insecurity.”
Mac used a narrow broom to sweep between bar and barstools. Jeremiah’s question stopped him. He shook his head. “I got to wonder whose side you’re on?”
“I like you more positive.” Sarah’s voice did not tremble, but she seemed alarmed. “The Lord is supposed to let people feel safe, and stuff… like, no mystery stuff.”
“Thank God for mysteries.” Jeremiah’s voice sounded nebulous as mist, although his words did not. “Life without mystery would be life without dreams. The universe would be dull indeed.” Outside, at the intersection of roads, a truck engine roared as its driver revved, then caught a higher gear.
“For instance,” and Jeremiah looked at Mac, not Sarah or Debbie, “do cattle dream? Does a young heifer or steer muse beyond that next mouthful of grass? Are there great cattle-questions? Better yet, are there herd dreams? Does the herd graze according to music tuned only to bovine ears?” Jeremiah’s voice seemed not exactly sad, but he certainly was not joking.
“And do ghosts dream? Jeremiah looked into mist, at the road that leads down to the sea. “A ghost may actually be a dream. After someone dies, maybe a leftover dream stands up and walks.”
“Quit scaring me,” Sarah whispered. She raised work-worn hands to cover her ears.
“I hope to scare you, because faith may not be as productive as doubt. Doubt asks questions and faith does not.” Jeremiah’s voice was not kind. He paused. “Is there some dread realm where human dreams and the dreams of cattle are appreciably the same?” He looked across the road at Hell-Fer-Certain. “If so, what does that say about all of us?”
At the time Sarah didn’t get it, and Mac didn’t either. Knowing Mac, though, it was a lead-pipe cinch he’d catch on sooner or later. He leaned against the bar. “Bartenders and preachers have a lot going,” he told Jeremiah. “Both have something to sell, both exercise control over others, both serve as handy ears for the confessions of sinners.” Mac grinned like a naughty three-year-old. “Both flip a certain amount of bull, and what they sell wears off after a good night’s sleep.”
“I’d fault your logic if it was worth my time.” Jeremiah pushed his coffee away. “Also, I asked about difference, not similarity.”
“My mistake.” Mac sounded like a ten-year-old kid caught stealing nickels.
“Meanwhile, suppose a ghost really is a leftover dream?” Jeremiah stood, stretched, looked through the windows at mist and rain. Then he looked at Mac with distaste, like a man regarding a favorite nephew arrested on a burglary rap. “You can think more clearly than you have.”
“You know it,” Mac said, “and I know it.”
“When I was young,” Jeremiah told him, “I wanted to change the world… wanted to make things better… figured to find a cure for common hatreds, ignorance, wanted to defeat war… prejudice….” He seemed as puzzled as Mac. He looked across the road at the fading colors of Hell-Fer-Certain. When he left the bar he walked slower than usual.
……
Atonement became the name of our game. Redemption became more than a word in a sermon. Our problem came because we didn’t know what needed atoning. If anybody needed redemption it couldn’t happen until we figured out our original foul-up.
But anyone with brains could see that Jeremiah made a bold if harsh play for the heart and soul of one man, Mac. Jeremiah seemed old as king Solomon, at least in experience, and maybe as wise. Being old, he knew he had little time left. What he’d said about wanting to change the world told us he wasn’t fooling when he talked about dreams. We supposed if he couldn’t change the world, he figured to change one man.
And, if Mac made less money, our local hustler, Pop, made more. As the bar became a place for interesting topics, guys stayed sober, longer. Pop enjoyed a surge of prosperity because a good hustle depends on the full attention of the guy being hustled. Sober guys have longer attention spans. It was during a lull in sober conversation that an awful thing happened.
On a fog-bound afternoon when headlights on the road appeared as silver discs, and as fog muffled the sound of engines, Mac absent-mindedly drew a beer. He set it before a customer, and muttered to himself, “He’s trying to figure out what happens when dreams fizzle…the death of dreams….”
Only Pop and Debbie heard. Debbie touched her wine glass, gave a dry little sob, and sat silent. Pop looked at Debbie, then at Mac. “You’d better not lay that one on the table,” he whispered. “It will empty out the joint.”
Mac emptied the bar, anyway. During the next hour he grew completely silent, then surly. If he was angry at himself and taking it out on customers, or his bar, or the universe, or on Jeremiah, no one could say. All we knew is that Mac was not jolly. As afternoon misted toward evening, customers stepped through the doorway into mist. By happy hour only Pop and Debbie remained. Bar neon glowed through mist like a token of sorrow, or like the subdued symbol of a small and unimportant corner of Hell.
“Everybody had big plans at one time or other.” Pop murmured this, more to himself than to Debbie or Mac. “Time was when I didn’t make a living with a pool cue.” He looked at Mac in a kindly way, a way no one expects to see in a pool hustler. “We’re gettin’ old,” Pop told Mac. “I guess we expected more….” He looked around the bar, at twirly beer lights and the green felt of pool tables. “…didn’t expect more of the world, maybe. Expected more of ourselves.”
“I’m headed home,” Debbie whispered. “Art is not an illusion. I used to know that.” She shrugged into her jacket and looked at the men. “Pay no attention. I don’t understand it, either.”
……
Fire struck our land during early morning hours. It drank deeply of wind, flared and flamed through mist like a maddened imp squalling in the middle of fields. It blasted the farmhouse of Indian Hill Farm.
Indian Hill’s house stood ramshackle and wrecked a thousand yards from the road. As the first touch of dawn moved grayly above fields, fire towered and blew sideways, tongues of flame lapping at mist. Mist blew into the flames, mixed with flames, and steam exhaled from the very mouth of fire. Wind carried the fire, and fire flamed ascendent above wet fields. By full dawn, Indian Hill farmhouse lay as embers beneath a steady morning rain.
That first fire saddened us. Bar talk remembered people who once owned Indian Hill, their sons, daughters, cousins; even the name of their collie-shepherd mix, once known as the best cattle-herding dog in the valley. Bar talk remembered August days of cutting or baling hay, or of trucks pulling silver-colored tank trailers, making milk pick-ups at each valley farm. A drunk wrote “I miss you so goodam much,” on the wall of the men’s can, but Mac painted it over right away.
The cattle corporation uses the old barns to store equipment, even though the farmhouses are abandoned. The corporation brought in a bulldozer,
cleaned up the burn site, and seeded it with grass. The bulldozer knocked down outbuildings. The old barn stood solitary in the middle of fields. It seemed a testament to memories.
The second fire took the house of Valley View Farm which stood behind a stubby lane, and up a little rise. That house had become a fearful thing. Because of the short lane, and the rise, the house brooded above the road like a specter. It was larger than most farmhouses, and two fanlights had once looked toward the road like colorful eyes. With abandonment the glass had been broken. The eyes stared toward the road, hollow as eyes of the blind.
This second fire was hard for us to talk away, think away, or drink away. It continued to flame in the minds of those who saw it (and most everyone did) long after rain washed ashes down the rise. The fire began just after nightfall on a Tuesday when the valley stood empty of tractor-trailers, of truckers, and reduced by some few hundred cattle. As fire towered above the road, pickups pulled to the side, parked, and people talked or stared. Mist once more blew into flames, turned to steam, and steam blew across the road and into our faces. The stench of burning carried in the mist, but something worse walked to us.
Cattle were in the fields. Against all nature, the cattle drifted toward the fire. The herd formed a semi-circle in the wind-blown mist. White faces of cattle stared through mist, were reddened by reflections from the fire. The cattle stared not at fire, but stared in ghostly illumination at the road where we stood helpless to affect events, and watched; where we spoke excitedly, or with sadness, or, with but a murmur. The cattle seemed to stand as witness to our lives, their eyes blank as the blind eyes of the dying house.