Genre: Letter
Setting: Religious Place
Required Scene: Revenge
Father J,
I have often written to you on days like this. From time to time, during the busier seasons especially, when I find myself entrenched in the belly of my study, the mahogany walls and bookshelves I’ve built for myself start to feel like a fortress. There are days when honey silk finishing and the smell of birch feel more reminiscent of cobblestone, gravel, and salt. I sit in the center, and I imagine that there isn’t a single creature living or in history, on legs or on wheels, clawed, fanged, bulky, slippery, barking or biding, that could ever reach this place. As if I have reached the very very bottom of the ocean, where the thought of waves crashing against a shimmering sky seems as far apart as Heaven is from our old farm in the midwest. And then, as if our good Lord has read my thoughts, of fortresses and impenetrable walls crafted of groaning stone and muscle fiber, something reaches me.
Like tender wingbeats, or wafts of dust perceptible only where the light shines, or the clicking of scavenging legs at the bottom of the ocean floor, I hear the rain tapping at my living room window.
Tap tap tap. Tap tap tap.
Tapping and crooning, not for attention but out of instinct. I’ll sit still as the tapping breaches this hole. I’ll let its timbre and tones echo and paint over every surface until it streaks down panels and planks, runs along the grain and drips off corners and cliffs. I imagine little beads of rain still learning to trickle, racing down doorknobs and desktops, just as it must for the caverns and slopes living in the mountains that we used to walk. Our Holy Ground.
After a moment, I’ll stand, let myself out into the living room and look out the window to see who the Lord has sent to reach me. While the clouds growl and raise their hackles, the sunlight will make them heel. It rains, and it shines. I watch as the sun guides the boiling clouds forward, lightly gripping their leash, and occasionally hissing at them when the rain falls too harsh. The branches will sway in the wind as the rain taps against their fingers. The mountains will look magnificent against the fog in the distance, just as I had always imagined. I wonder if I would even notice the rumble and roil surrounding the light if I stood directly below it. If I were at the center of that storm, lifting my eyes, would I still feel the raindrops kissing my cheeks? Will it be like staring out from the Belly of the whale, when it opens its mouth to the living sky? I’ll wonder, and I’ll watch the branches sway and I’ll think of our family. Then I’ll sit down and write to you as I do now.
I tell you in almost every letter I write, but I’ve met so many who came from the same good midwest as we did. Kinfolk and kind folk. Farm boys and mountain men. So many of them say they would never go back. Whether its the allure of city lights, the bustle of progress, maybe it’s the ease and “accessibility” that everyone seems to obsess over these days, none of them seem to find the same comfort in the grass ocean, corn fields, and the dead trees that seem to be lost alone within the wide expanse of prairie and plain.
Would you ever want to see the city? Would you ever want to step out of the simple pleasures that I’ve made sure you’re allowed? Would you even know what to do with an Oxford boot? No, you would probably toss it aside and keep your hogs to the Earth as you’d tell me to do when I complained about my feet aching. How about some lobster ceviche sliced to perfectly symmetrical bites by a Michelin Star Chef? No, you would think I was cursing you if I ever said those words aloud. I bet your hogs are aching right now, and that your culinary palette is just as dull as the day that I left. You’re a stubborn man after all.
Nina always had a fixation on the city, the finer things, maybe getting away from the reeds and thickets of our little covenant. I’ll remember that Nina would whisper to me before we fell asleep, “I’m not s’posed to be here. This ain’t where I’m s’posed to be,” and sometimes you’d hear us and hush us up because our mornings would start early. Even if you’d kept one of us up the night before, none of us would ever ask for a morning in. We knew what you’d do. The whale stays hungry, and Nineveh stays calling.
You know, ever since I left you out there, I’ve found there is so much more inside that big old book that you love to quote. The first motel I found myself at, there it was on my bedside table. I didn’t know it at the time, but this was the book you had been stealing all your words from. If you’ll recall, you never taught us how to read. I didn’t know a ‘B’ from a ‘E.’ When I was younger, I felt in my heart of hearts that you were touched by God, so imagine my disappointment when I found out that all you’d been preaching was plagiarized. And I know you know what plagiarizing means, because despite never teaching us to read, I realize now that what I saw hung up in your chambers next to animal hides and old photographs, was what people out here call a “diploma.” You’re a very learned man. I know you need a lot of time to think. I hope you understand that’s why I left you there with a lot of time to do just that.
The rain started falling a little bit harder just now. My mind’s going back to those mountain streams. How they’d swell up when the season was right, and the rain would fall just like today. I remember the day we lost Moe. One wrong step was all it took to fall in. One second his head was spinning and bobbing down the rapids like a lily pad. The next second, the moonlight was staring down at us as we fished his broken body out of the river. He looked like he’d been mauled by a monster. I had never felt something like that before. It was the first time I had touched a human being, and my fingers told my brain I was squeezing meat, but it was Moe. I don’t know how long it took for that feeling to leave me. Sometimes, I still don’t know if it has. But every single night that you took me up to your room after Moe, that’s all I felt.
Meat.
I remember some of the younger ones talking amongst themselves after what happened. How you must really truthfully care for us, the way you had us looking through the night, unable to keep yourself together.
“I ain’t ne’er seen Father J’s eyes poppin’ like that.”
“He was hollerin’ at us all day and all night, he needed to find Moe so bad,”
“‘Find the body, find the body,’ thas’ what he kep’ sayin’, hand to my heart. He woulda put allus in the Belly fore a week if we hadn’ found’m.”
I remember thinking the same thing. In my mind, you were already stringing me up down there, telling me how when God calls Jonah, Jonah has to respond. How when God gives you time to think in the Belly, you better get to thinking. In my mind, I was already looking up to the opening of that cave, knee-deep in rain water, praying for anything, anything in the world to reach me.
But we found him. Your heart settled down.
I remember wondering what Moe might have been thinking in his last moments, if he had had any time to process what was happening or if the good Lord closed Moe’s eyes and held his hand softly, guiding his way up to those pearly gates. I remember thinking that you hadn’t even raised your voice when Sheppard got strung. You hadn’t blinked when Julius couldn’t recover from pneumonia. We covered and buried them like we did the livestock, no graves, no mess. “Find the body,” you’d said. I wonder to this day what would have happened to you if we hadn’t.
I bet you hadn’t felt fright like that in quite a while. I’ve heard a bit of excitement is good for the heart every now and then. I bet Moe gave your old heart a month’s worth, and while it’s not my place to judge or impose, a part of me feels like God might have been telling Jonah to slow down and think about his decisions for a little bit. But you didn’t. It didn’t reach you. You said there wasn’t any place on Earth closer to God than our little farm. We lived, we buried and we were kept there for that reason, you told us. But it seems no matter how close we were to the Almighty, sometimes you do need a little bit of help to hear the call.
The rain’s calming down now, and I feel like I’m running out of things to talk about. I’ve written so many of these letters after all. There’s only so much I can reminisce about without repeating myself. I’m looking out the window now and the storm is just lightly grazing the body of that mountain. I bet if any hikers are out there, looking up at that sunlight from the center, it must feel like heaven’s giving them a kiss.
Do you remember the first time you put me in the Belly? I thought it was over for me. I don’t remember why you put me there. Maybe I’d fought back when you took me for the night. Maybe you’d caught me running. My feet were cut up from the roots and rocks as we sunk deeper into the cave. We’d heard about it from the older kids, how you’d carved this out of the mountain with your own hands. How you’d found God’s fingerprints on the stones and the leaves and found this chapel at the bottom of the world.
“This is holy ground,” you told me as you read the verses.
The ropes cut into my skin but you just kept on tightening them.
“‘Pick me up and throw me into the sea,” he replied, “and it will become calm. I know that it is my fault that this great storm has come upon you.’”
You looked me in the eyes when you said that.
You had finished tying up the knots as if you were one of the sailors from your verses, preparing for the storm and clinging to the mast. I longed for the smell of pine trees or the feel of grass as the rain fell and you walked away. The rain smothered me and started to crawl up my legs, until I had to hold my head to the sky to breath. Small branches and speckles of grime and sediment brushed against my face as they floated by, and I prayed and prayed as I felt the mouth of the whale close. I grimaced at the groan of its hinges and found myself in darkness that no starlight can pierce, where no creature living or in history, on legs or on wheels, clawed, fanged, bulky, slippery, barking or biding, could ever reach.
But as always, the Lord did.
I write this all to you now, not to discourage you, not to sound righteous or to seek retribution. I send this to you now, Father, so you do not lose faith. I promise you, even to this day, from all these miles and decades apart, I have found no peace more lovely than when the whale opens its mouth, and the sunlight pours into the cave to reveal the world to you again.
I made sure your hogs are out just as you like, and you will never ever have to worry about tasting anything other than the spoils of the Earth that you tend to. Here you will stay, alive I’ve made sure, until the Lord can reach you.
Why sometimes, I even find myself believing that the storm that calls me from my office is the same one that you look up to for comfort from the very bottom of the ocean in the Belly of the whale. Isn’t it nice to think that in our long dark nights, your teachings are what help us keep each other company, even after all these years?
Do not falter. Do not fear, and I hope you never forget what you always used to tell me when I needed to be reached.
“I worship the Lord, the God of heaven, who made the sea and the dry land.”
Your Child.
Author: ozpinhead
Oz
