Saint Judas

On any given boring Saturday he might decide to go to Home Depot. He had tried another garden shop there locally in Newport News with no success. They only sold flowers. So much for him trying to support local businesses. Grant had no time for flowers. They were a waste to him of what pathetic potential my backyard could offer. Flowers were no good to eat unless they were Nasturtium--a favorite of Grant’s for its radishy heat and less for its orange blossom. Vegetables just made sense. He cooked for just about every meal and had half-hearted aspirations to be more plant-based.

To walk that walk he strove to make something of his plot. Realistically, he was just trying to pass the time in some way that could check three boxes: a garden was practical, it might be fun, and might ward off mortifications.

Watching squirrels gobble down his tomatoes wasn’t enough for Grant to feel attuned to the natural world, apparently.

He laughed about the green metal stakes he would bash a foot deep into the ground—they were the only thing that stayed verdant but rust still eventually sprouted on their ribbed edges.

He laughed at the rabbit wire around the yard, at the graying mush of snow lingering onto the earth there under the shade of the pin oaks.

Grant laughed at the money spent and the effort exerted for naught and the mud that caked itself into his shoes never really came out of them. The academic dean might see the stain and shake his head.

He had stepped in a briny puddle of the funeral home parking lot. He winced at the amount of money end of life expenses amounted to. They arrived for bereavement counseling before the mortician’s sales pitch.

The foyer was quiet the place surrendered here in there to the sound of a secretary answering questions on her phone.

Grant had pulled out his own phone. The Wi-Fi required a password. He guessed that a cheesy tagline about hope and got lucky. A text buzzed. The mortician was on his way over.

Grant remembered it colder inside than out. He looked above his smudged screen to see newspapers pinned to a corkboard on the wall. They had lost their crispness and their margins were tattered. They were all obituaries. Each issue was published months ago at the earliest. The news was old and outdated as the medium that carried it. Grant refrained from making some comments about history.

There were armchairs at Holloway not unlike the ones at WU’s library. They were brownish-green, upholstered with patterns of vines. The vines had red tendrils outlined with pastel pink. They look like the rhubarb southerners would sugar into edibility. The garden theme was also sewn into the carpet fabric. It was blue and gold in the hallway leading to the mortician’s office. Grant’s shoes tread on textile leaves and a voice greeted him. The mortician called himself a “funeral home director.” He shook Grant’s hand trying to keep things practical. He shook Susanne’s tenderly.

It was all part of the man’s character. The man from Holloway was like any other pastor Grant imagined. He wasn’t clergy per se but he employed all the same cunning.

The mortician stuck to what he was confident in. They would honor Clay. God is still good. He said that the Lord sends the snow down that waters the earth and causes it to bud and flourish so that cotton plumes can fluff and the cherry tomatoes can ripen. There's enough for us here so that we can gain nourishment while also stockpiling seeds for next season.

Why was he preaching a sermon to the dead preacher’s wife? In more or less polite terms, Grant told the man to shove it.

Grant was neither sower nor the reaper. He couldn’t be trusted to provide for himself. Produce sections in grocery stores were the closest he got to the farm. He would be shrewd though, that would be his gift to Susanne. He wouldn’t let his emotions be manipulated. Grant suggested cremation.

Susanne said no and paid for whatever the man from Holloway funeral home told her.

The melted snow evaporated off the parking lot and returned to the heavens for the cycle to repeat. Grant was so angry his footsteps made it melt faster.

He wanted to burn down that crooked establishment starting with the repulsive rhubarb armchairs. He wanted to douse the vined carpet with gasoline. No amount of moisture he had tracked in would quench the blaze he fantasied about. It would be incandescent justice.

______________

Grant and his sister were together in person in their parents’ attic, brought upstairs out of love for their aging mother and a yearning for closure. Grant saw in his sister that look of righteous anger he had at Holloway. Was she mad at her brother for what he said? Was she fed up with the musty odor? Perhaps she raged against the cruelty of their father’s disease? Yes, something in the box had catalyzed a tranquil lividness. Ryleigh was fuming but still.

“What’s got you so upset?” Grant asked putting his hand on her shoulder—a tacit motion for solidarity.

She put her hand over her mouth like she was shocked. Her eyes sealed tight and the wrinkles of her crow’s feet ruffled.

Ryleigh’s voice faltered. She told her brother to look at the box. He rubbed her upper back and reached inside to take a page out. It was an eight and a half by eleven sheets. From the looks of things, there were more than twelve reams worth inside the box.

The page was filled margin to margin with Clay’s handwriting. Grant set that one down and picked up another, then a thin deck of them. They were all uniform notes. Each continued where the last left off. Clay put page numbers in the top right of the header.

Susanne had told her children they might find Clay’s undertaking. The stockpile of words didn’t comprise a mere journal—no. All of these entries composed something much grander. Clay had hand-copied his own version of the Bible dozens of times over.

Granted wanted to diffuse the situation by making a crack about carpel tunnel syndrome but refrained given his previous ineptness.

He just said, “Whoa.”

“Do you think he just copied off of translations or did he do this from memory?” Grant asked Ryleigh.

“He probably could have done it by heart. The man preached it so much. There were bunches of lexicons and grammar books in one of those boxes, I wouldn’t doubt he could also translate from the original Greek and Hebrew.” She said, wiping tears from her eyes.

Watching her do this made his eyes itch worse. The fifteen minutes were almost up.

Could he last?

“When mom told me that he had been doing this I didn’t expect he’d keep at it so long.”

“Yeah.” Ryleigh said, “he pretty much made one copy for every year before he went away.”

“I admire his dedication.” Grant added, “I can’t imagine finishing this project then jumpstarting back into all those genealogies and psalms.”

“Well, when you actually believe in something it makes it worth it.”

Grant didn’t appreciate the way she said “well” and “actually.” He felt targeted by then like they were ill-timed potshots. Grant chose to ignore them

He scanned over a section from what must have been Clay’s third inscription of the Book of Daniel. It was an absurd story Grant recalled from one summer at Vacation Bible School. Clay copied from the Old Testament book,

All this came upon King Nebuchadnezzar. At the end of twelve months he was walking on the roof of the royal palace of Babylon, and the king answered and said, “Is not this great Babylon, which I have built by my mighty power as a royal residence and for the glory of my majesty?” While the words were still in the king’s mouth, there fell a voice from heaven, “O King Nebuchadnezzar, to you it is spoken: The kingdom has departed from you, and you shall be driven from among men, and your dwelling shall be with the beasts of the field. And you shall be made to eat grass like an ox, and seven periods of time shall pass over you, until you know that the Most High rules the kingdom of men and gives it to whom he will.” Immediately the word was fulfilled against Nebuchadnezzar.

He was driven from among men and ate grass like an ox, and his body was wet with the dew of heaven till his hair grew as long as eagles’ feathers, and his nails were like birds’ claws.

The exiled Israelite, Daniel, had interpreted a dream for the Babylonian king that came true. He went insane until his plight was up. Nebuchadnezzar then humbled himself and paid homage to Yahweh.

Although Grant would scoff at the riddling of historical inaccuracies throughout Daniel, he thought highly of Clay’s resolve to write those verses even though neurologically speaking, Clay was facing a doom not dissimilar to the heathen despot.

Grant’s admiration turned sour when he flipped to the New Testament copies with Ryleigh. He remembered the emails Clay sent with references to Romans 1 and 1 Corinthians 5.

Posthumous retribution got the better of him in the attic’s heat. Grant didn’t tell Ryleigh what he was doing but she would decipher it soon enough. Grant separated the reams into completed works from Genesis to Revelation. It was easy given the aforementioned page numbers as well as the fact that each finished Bible was stacked in opposite orientation to the one beneath it.

Grant fished out the page with Romans 1:18-25 and the page with 1 Corinthians 5:11-13 respectively. He read the first copy that Clay had used a red pen for.

“How fitting,” Grant sucked his teeth.

For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse. For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things. Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen.

Grant shook his head at what Saint Paul considered “plain evidence.” The ubiquitous proof for Darwin’s theories begged to differ for him.

The pericope vaunted the same consternation Grant remembered from Clay’s fiery sermons on total depravity. “We are all wretches without a hope in the world save for God’s grace.” Clay would espouse. But what kind of father would use this as ammo against his own son? Grant’s heart rate increases. He scratched at his lips from a rash forming but something kept him there. Something bitter.

Grant went to the next passage from the epistle to the Corinthian church. Clay wrote down Paul’s words again:

But now I am writing to you not to associate with anyone who bears the name of brother if he is guilty of sexual immorality or greed, or is an idolater, reviler, drunkard, or swindler—not even to eat with such a one. For what have I to do with judging outsiders? Is it not those inside the church whom you are to judge? God judges those outside. “Purge the evil person from among you.”

A little earlier in this segment, Clay included the bit where Paul says, “deliver this man to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, so that his spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord.”

That’s what Clay had once wished upon his own child.

He wanted him to suffer enough to repent.

Grant was nineteen when Clay agreed his baptism was a sham, “it’s like you never were saved.” The minister said, furious that Grant had gotten written up for not only getting high in his residence hall but also for voting for Al Gore in the 2000 election.

Grant compared Clay’s tactics to those Amish isolationists who not only separated from “English” society but also even created micro-separations within their communities to shun rule-breakers. Grant allowed a bitter snicker when he realized how Reverend Welling, Saint Paul, and pop stars agreed on something. They all said, “Only God can judge.” They, of course, had diametrically opposed goals in saying so. Pop stars wanted the license to wild out, not that Grant followed their shenanigans. Saint Paul wanted God’s judgment to strike fear into the holy ones lest they too fall astray. He assumed that Clay wanted God’s judgment on his youngest so that he could be free of the guilt he bore for raising such a letdown.

Grant’s emotional safeguards for the last decades of father-son tension and grief were a bursting dam. He turned to Clay’s last entries of these passages copied shortly before his death. Grant wanted to see his dad’s demented humiliation. It was horrible of him, but it felt justified.

Ryleigh moved to stop Grant from reading more. It was why she had cried, to begin with. She knew what monsters lurked at the bottom of these stacks. She reached for the pages but he swatted her away. He wanted to see what was there. He needed to keep reading.

Grant was mouth breathing.

The Roman’s passage was a raving scrawl of smudged ink barely legible. Clay must have spilled something on the text the wiped it with a rag. It looked like something a four-year-old would scribble, or like a blind person jotting down what she thought letters looked like.

Grant could make out half of it. He stood up to read while Ryleigh protested, “stop, Grant, stop.”

There was Clay’s tenth copy of the first chapter of Romans.

The invincible, untouchable, unstoppable God. Everyone knows him. Everyone. Lesbians, Pagans, Catholics, Doctors. They know but they don’t believe. They don’t know anything.

The characters were grotesque shades of what once was Clay’s adroit cursive. Grant asked if Ryleigh wanted to see it too.

“Of course, I don’t! Grant, you’re being such a hypocrite. You’re getting on me and mom for caring about dad’s stuff but now you’re the one obsessing. Don’t think that I don’t know why.”

Grant put up a finger to his sister that made her boil. It was the shushing signal he gave to chatty students in his classroom. Grant read the last 1 Corinthians passage like it was his divine right. It was only one word misspelled over and over again.

PURGE. PURGE. PURGE. PURGE. PURGE.

Then Ryleigh lost it with her face scarlet. She tugged the scarf off Grant’s neck.

“You’re enjoying this! Aren’t you?” She struck.

“Enjoying it? Why don’t you tell me how you really feel! Huh?!”

Grant wanted to slap her like he did when they were five and six. He wanted to scream in her face. He wanted to smash glass and punch the wall even if the roof nails impaled his fists and he got a disease that left him like that skeleton-man in the hospice wing long ago.

“Don’t pretend to understand me, Ryleigh you don’t have a clue about me.”

“Oh is that right? Well, how could I? I barely know you. Eli and Benny get your name wrong all the time because they barely see you.”

“Uncle Grant’s not a hard name to remember, Ry. But I guess it’s not in the Bible so why should they know it right? Blame mom and dad for that one but it’s not my fault you and Paul are raising dumb kids!”

“You’re such a prick!” Ryleigh spat.

“And you’re a bunch of GODDAMN SHEEP! All of you are!” He was looking at Ryleigh but he wasn’t talking to her anymore. He was talking to his dad vicariously through her. Grant was engaged in that one last debate he never got with Clay—that one last argument he now wished more than anything he could have had—at least to head Clay’s voice again. He didn’t even need to apologize. He didn’t need to say he was proud of the man he had become. Him just talking to Grant would be enough.

“Y’all?”

Another voice stepped between the pair. It was Susanne stooping meekly up to the attic. Her grown children quelled their attacks in a united front to help mom with the stairs. They wished she hadn’t come up but she heard the commotion and wanted to see if anyone wanted sweet tea. She was so appreciative of their hard work.

Ryleigh said she would take something to drink. She would stay for the next few hours sorting things.

But Grant left.

He told Susanne it was his allergies but it wasn’t. He had to get away from those thousands of pages. He had to get away from the attic and that house. Grant cried for the first five minutes of the hour and a half drive home from Basin City to Newport News.

But then the tears dried.

He distracted himself with another podcast. It took him to a sacred space.

The cruel memories were gone as long as there was some other voice to occupy the emptiness.