Chapter 23.
On the way to the church, Ethan leaned his chin on his palm. Nothing to say, he watched telephone poles and the white line of the road. Rosanne Cash sang on the crackly AM radio, Tennessee Flat-Top Box. Clouds started to thin in the sky, the sun punching through. A tractor crawled in the fields of a mumbling farmer named John Barker. Behind the tractor, a manure spreader flung its payload into the autumn wind.
At church, several cars were sitting in the parking lot with their trunks open. Kids in costumes moved from vehicle to vehicle, collecting candy, part of an event called Harvest Halloween, one of Father Packard's imports to Immaculate, with the aim of making trick-or-treating less secular. Few took part in this initial year of trunk-or-treating. The priest wandered the parking lot, chatting with different children and their parents who stood beside cars handing out candy. The thin priest wore his black shirt and black pants, but on his head he wore a strange stocking cap with braids that twizzled past his ears, a fashion that Ray eyed with suspicion.
"Father," said Ray.
"Ray," said the priest, "Thanks for coming."
"Oh, I'm not here for the..." Ray said, waving his hand at the parents, but unable to think of the term, "...whatever it's called. I'm here for a confession, Father. I need you to hear a couple of them. It'll take five minutes."
"I have the schedule posted for when I take confessions," Father Packard replied in a gentle tone, his accent from the suburbs. "If you come back in a few hours, Ray, I'll be in the Sacristy."
"No," said Ray, uneasy about the braids on the priest's stocking cap, barely able to withhold his temper. "Now would be better. The boys, buck-wild today, they got something to confess. I can help out here, supervise while you go inside." Ray could not hide his aversion for the young priest. Mostly, he disliked the new priest because he was not Father Dimer, who would have dropped everything to hear a confession at once, and doing so, would somehow make sense of the world.
"In a few hours, Ray…"
"Get in the damn Sacristy," Ray blurted, pointing at the doors of the church and the stone-carved words: Annunciation – Conception – Assumption.
Father Packard drew back fearfully from his largest parishioner.
"If you would, Father please, get in the Sacristy, before I blow a gasket." He added, "You can hear my confession right after these two, but I'm not a patient man today."
"I can see that," said Father Packard. "I do not appreciate the language. But if it's that important, please send one in at a time. However, I will only listen to you if you settle down. Really, Ray, it's not appropriate."
"I'll see what I can do about that," said Ray. "Jacob, go inside with Father. And Father – if Jacob has trouble getting started, just ask him about his brother's girlfriend. That should grease the bearings of conversation."
Through the church doors, Ray dabbed his fingers in the holy water and made the Sign of the Cross. Ethan sat down in the rear pew, while his agitated father hobbled back and forth in the aisle.
From the back of the church, Ethan observed the markings around the altar, the candles, recalling the striking moment he had experienced during a Sunday Mass at the age of ten, not long after he learned about Josh Werther being his real father. Early one spring morning before church, Ethan walked through the fields behind the Marak farm, alone, checking his gopher traps, shoving dirt around with his hands, occasionally finding one of the traps tripped, with a glass-eyed gopher locked inside, its spine busted. Seedlings of corn and soybeans sprouted, reaching out of the earth. With his knife he dug up a corn plant, imitating his father, to inspect the roots, not entirely sure what to look for, but knowing that seeing and touching a sprouted root gave his father great relief each spring. After he checked and reset all of his traps, he ventured into the woods and sat on a stump above the pond to clip the paws off the dead rodents. Each paw was redeemable for a small amount of cash, paid out by farmers who desired to rid the earth of gopher mounds that damaged expensive machinery. Trapping had earned Ethan several hundred dollars, money that he had to share with Jacob, who rarely, if ever, walked the traps.
The snap of the pincers on the gophers' wrists made a quiet, dull noise in the woods. The curled paws fell into Ethan's waiting hand, and he snipped several paws but stopped when he heard a soft noise behind him in a thicket of spring weeds, not yet knee-high. With the pincers in hand, held at the ready, he stepped lightly toward the thicket, expecting to chase out a raccoon, but instead found a fawn prone on the ground, staring up at him. To his amazement, the fawn did not run but lay still. Tempted to touch it, Ethan stopped his hand, worrying that his scent would cause the mother to abandon the fawn, if the mother had not already done just that. But he stared for some time into the animal's serene face and felt a spiritual calm overcome him. A brief sensation, but an unnatural calm, an awe of sorts. A snort in the woods interrupted this calm. Ethan backed away from the fawn, to crouch behind the stump near his pail of gophers and paws.
A group of deer emerged, with a large buck in the rear. They stole through the valley toward the pond, dipping their noses into the water, unaware of Ethan's presence. Having spent hundreds of days in the fields and woods, and having seen many deer, the event might have passed as merely picturesque, but after drinking from the pond, the deer traveled up the hill to collect the fawn, doing so right under Ethan's watch from behind the stump, which, he assumed, by pure luck was positioned upwind from the keen noses of the deer. The herd moved on, with the fawn following in uneven steps. The whole event took no more than a minute, but moved Ethan long afterward, stirring a sensation of interconnectedness between nature and possibly heaven, or a spirit of the earth – he did not know which direction the feeling came from – heaven, or earth. But the extraordinary event created wonder and confusion in an otherwise methodical mind.
After the incident, in the house, Ethan put on his best church clothes – his only church clothes – and did not tell anyone about the fawn, but he continued to think on the fawn until he reached the church, where people cried and hugged one another in the parking lot. By the time the Marak family reached the front steps, the source of sorrow became known to them. One of Ethan's classmates, Joey Shara, had died during the night, in a car accident, on a soft shoulder of a gravel road. The boy's locker at school was two doors down from Ethan's. The road had not yet been graded since winter's thaw. The wheel of the car caught the ditch bank and tumbled upside down.
Distraught by the news, Renee took her sons to the front of the church to light a candle for Ethan's friend. Ethan lit the match and the candle flame flickered in front of him while he said a prayer. They took their seats. The Mass was dedicated to the boy, who was something of a class clown, full of mischief of the innocent variety. Sadness overwhelmed the parish – the Sunday became a funeral before the funeral. But rather than listen to Father Dimer, Ethan watched his candle flicker and thought of the mysterious event with the fawn that morning, deciding during the Eucharist that something about the fawn's face made him feel close to his friend, a rich feeling unknown to him before that morning. A coincidence, or a sign, all too strange, and it was the only angelic or spirited experience of his life. Most odd, the feeling in the woods occurred prior to his knowing about the car accident – and the possibility of foreknowledge caused an increase of faith in him, since he could not connect the dots any other way.
From that day onward, Ethan became a careful reader of his children's Bible, reading the entire book, before moving on to his mother's Bible. This frequent reading of scripture led to speculation among family and friends that Ethan Marak would go on to become the fourth priest to originate from the town of Immaculate.
But five years after the experience, his careful reading began to cause problems of its own. From age ten to fifteen, starting from the day in the woods, his faith doubled. But erosion happened from age fifteen to twenty, quickening after Confirmati
on, as he wondered how to believe that Joshua shouted at the sun and stopped it from progressing across the sky. Or how Elijah's flaming chariot took to the air. These and other passages and footnotes in his Confirmation Bible made him pause, since he took a literal interpretation of the miracles and mysteries. Small misgivings began to snowball. The yoke of Immaculate kept his thoughts between certain lines. But leaving home for college, doubt approached critical mass. How ideas can change. The world was once flat. An entire cosmology eroding, causing much anxiety in him, between warring thoughts of the heart and the head.
Still pacing back and forth, Ray heard footsteps coming up the stairs in the rear of the church and waited to see who ascended.
Josh Werther emerged with his children in tow, none of them in their Halloween costumes.
"Werther," said Ray, surprised. "What are you doing here? Your kids were just at my house not more than an hour ago. Where were you?"
"Busy," Josh said.
Rhea grabbed Ray's leg and touched the boot that housed his bad ankle. She said, "I'm sorry," and peered up at him.
"Enough with the apologies, little girl, I'm the one who's sorry. Forget about all that." Dawn and Bryce played tag in church pews, their squeals echoing in the rounded ceiling, but Rhea kneeled in the pew next to Ethan and whispered her bedtime prayers. The girl drew a smile from Ethan and he tousled her hair while she prayed, but she continued praying, undistracted, eager to show her piety. "You're a regular Laura Ingalls."
Rhea turned to him and beamed, "You think so?"
Ethan nodded, smiling at her, since no other girl that he knew would find a comparison to Laura Ingalls a compliment, not in 1992.
Josh said to Ray, "I volunteered to help set up the pumpkin display in the basement of the church, for tomorrow, for the pie-bake. I had to bring the little ones with me, since Kathy," he paused, having put his wife out of mind, "Kathy, she had some errands to run." Josh waved at Ethan, who nodded but did not move from the pew.
"Ray, my apologies about the girls in the field. I'll pay damages for the downed corn."
"No you won't. It's all done now. As long as that girl didn't get hurt, that's all that matters. No more on it."
"Sure, sure. Appreciate that, Ray, I won't bring it up again, what's done is done. What brings you out here? Aren't the boys a little old for Halloween."
"Not too old to act like monsters. Kids today, I tell you what, not like it used to be. You all right, Josh?" Ray looked at the banker's face, languid and pale. "You got the wasting disease? You don't look right."
"I'm in my own mood," said Josh, calmly switching the subject, burying his problems as the local norm mandated. "Something going around today. Say, I never said congratulations to you on making that last payment."
Ray inhaled. "I'm not under your thumb, after twenty-two years. Now I can enjoy the good life of no payments."
"Heard that one before," said Josh, thinking of how no one stayed out of debt for long. "It seems the good life can always be better with new equipment."
"I suppose so. Just glad I managed it, made it through those lean years. Didn't go buying every new piece of machinery with green paint, like some guys."
"That makes you a dying breed. But you get credit for it. Now you can buy those things. Can write you just about any check now for staying out of the candy store all those years. In fact," Josh said, leaning toward Ray and taking a suggestive tone, "if you want to grow, there's a place for sale that needs a good steward. Boskie. I could get you a good rate, for a preferred customer, of course."
"I ain't ready to go into debt again. Not just yet. And I'd like to think I earned my way, that maybe I managed things right and got a blessing from above."
Josh continued his pitch. "Boskie's farm would be no financial burden to you, since you can produce nearly two hundred bushels per acre on that soil. Best land in the county. People drive by just to see the corn on that acreage. That's not a burden, it's a sail." Josh laughed. "And Ray, you may have been blessed, but that would mean someone up above didn't bless guys like Henry McSorley and Tad Swenson. And I think those two logged more hours on kneelers than anyone. Even more than you, Ray."
Josh continued with a straight face, seeing Ray short on humor, and by continuing on the subject lost his other point of finding another buyer for the Boskie farm. "Tad Swenson, his seeds didn't sprout in '83, and Henry, well, he just didn't have the right insurance policy when the winds came. That's all that made him move to town. One addendum to his policy, he'd have stayed farming. Those two ran square operations and they still ended up selling to the Yaren boys."
"I don't know," said Ray, adjusting his belt, looking to the front of the church for Jacob, hoping Packard would hurry up and absolve the little lecher. "Did you have to bring up Henry and Tad and put damn flies in my soup? Hard to enjoy something when you take one load off my shoulders and saddle me with a new one."
"Call it a blessing or what you like, Ray, a lot of fellows can't say the same."
"I feel for 'em," said Ray, half-heartedly. "But I had to scrimp and save to make payments. Makes a man into a bitter thing, squeaking by all the time."
Josh smiled. "Well, perhaps the Lord has his motives. I don't know."
"Don't you have some pumpkins to stack?"
Josh laughed. "See you later, Ray. Think about that farm. It could be yours, with a special interest rate." Josh leaned over the rear pew to speak to his son, Ethan. "Stop out and say hello if you have time this weekend."
Ethan nodded and said, "I'll try," keeping his head facing the front of the church, uncomfortable in facing both of his fathers at the same time.
Josh said, "Rhea, let's go get another pumpkin." Then Josh raised his voice. "Girls! Bryce! Bryce, don't tear a page out of that book. Come here, now. Don't make me count to three." The toddler ran to Josh with his arms raised, to be held, but when Josh lifted him, the boy lunged backward immediately, causing Josh to react and pull him tight. "No more of that, Bryce." Walking away with the smiling boy, Josh added, "One of these days I won't catch you in time. Then you'll be sorry."
Ray watched Josh moving toward the staircase that led to the basement, churling at the mention of Tad and Henry.
Josh did not go five steps before he ran into a woman, Ms. Thornton. She met Josh at the top of the stairs, accosting him and his children. Her long gray hair rested on her shoulders, along with the string from her reading glasses.
"Mr. Werther," she said. "Aren't your children taking part in the trunk-or-treating?"
Josh said, "No, Ms. Thornton. The girls will be going out later tonight."
"I see," said the woman. "And what are you going to dress up as this year? Dawn? Rhea?"
"I'm going to be a spider." Wendy smiled, exposing her gapped and uneven mix of baby teeth and adult teeth.
"And I'm a witch!" Rhea said, excited about her costume again, until the gaze of Ms. Thornton scared her enough that she averted her eyes to the floor.
"Mr. Werther," said the woman, "are you aware of what the occult is, and what you are allowing in your house?"
"Excuse me?" said Josh, taken aback at the implication.
The woman said, "Allowing a girl to play witch, celebrating what's evil and letting Halloween usurp the celebration of the Harvest…"
"Girls, go downstairs," said Josh. "Take those pumpkins down the steps."
Dawn said, "What's she talking about?"
"Go," said Josh, and commanded them downward, waiting until their footsteps faded. Holding Bryce by the wrist, Josh said to the woman, "Were it not for you, Ms. Thornton, I would never have heard of the occult, or pagan rituals, or anything Satanic at all. Of all the crazy things you worry about – I would be blissfully unaware of the evils you tell around here. Where do you think the Rogers' kids even got the idea to burn a pentagram in that hayfield, if not from you?"
"Would
you prefer to carry out evil without knowing about it? Children are sheep amidst the devil's wolves, Mr. Werther, with people trying to make a dollar selling polyester witchcraft and..."
Josh interrupted her. "If evil, Ms. Thornton, is little kids dressing up in costumes for one night in a year, so that they can get some chocolate and stay up late – if that's evil, then yes, I will gladly carry it out."
"Josh Werther," she said, holding up her hand, closing her eyes, "may you see the light…"
He raised his hand to match her, chanting, "Yes, I will abandon the evil ways of the carameled apples and popcorn balls." Stepping past the woman, he whispering in her ear, "Happy Halloween, you nut."
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