Thu, 19 May 2005

Rv. Emersohn, Brought Low Like A Dog
You count half a dozen mile markers on the way to the farm, but you’re sure you missed a few, hidden in the cattails. There’s a witch who lives in a shack just up from the emptied graveyard, where the Williams kid used to drink away his undertaker’s pay until that second coronary, only she’s not really a witch, and you don’t even know where you got the idea. There’s a station from Ithaca you can get in when you’re not under the trees, where an elderly man has spent the past fifty years warning his listeners of the imminent apocalypse. There are thin gossamer tethers coming down out of the clouds, the ends of which bind lures which trap the ignorant and the wicked, pulling them upwards, never to be seen again. People constantly disappear in the world, and there is no time to notice, you think, and no one will notice when you leave this world forever. You pretend to count the rocks in the road, or the leaves on the trees, or the dust in the sky, so maybe people will think your inability to pay attention is undercut by hidden skills. There is a dead crow at the side of the road, but it doesn’t mean anything.

All night we heard nothing but the creaking of the ceiling and the bend of the branches out in the orchard. Not one sound of a carriage passing by, not one sound of aeromachines caught in the nets strung between the windmills, no ghost nor speaking owl disturbed our wake, gathered in candlelight until sunrise to keep watch o’er the body of the good Reverend Emersohn, whose eyes, replaced now with cold black opal, devoured what little light we had to share. Jakob had nailed shut the doors and windows, both to keep us in and to keep the dark night out, so that while the widows and boys danced at the promenade, we made certain that none of the good Reverend’s proclamations as to a return from the land of the dead were realized. In our village, we have had only one revisiting spirit, yet even in the days before the body decomposed enough to allow us to rebury it, the rerisen Captain Nonpareil poisoned the livestock and chopped holes in the foundation of the alderman’s house, which collapsed half a year later. It’s been a frigid winter, and this is our sixth funeral in as many weeks, and the grain we’ve buried in the root cellar hsd been contaminated with the yellow spores. We cannot afford a walking corpse during such conditions.

Upon his first stir, Daniel began shaking the bell he held in his left hand, the hand not holding the butcher’s blade. “He is risen,” Daniel whispered, as the ringing stopped, and we all turned from our whisky and pipes to face the rerisen Reverend Emersohn, his head slowly turning away, his hands nailed to the floor.

“I am struck blind! Glorious heaven! The light of my Father exceeds the wavelengths of grace and providence!” he mumbled, through his sewn lips.

“Emersohn,” I said, “you are not meant to return to this world.”

“I…this is not heaven?”

“No. Your body is bound to a table in Ez’s workshed.”

“I’ve come back. You’ve taken out my eyes.”

“Yes.”

“I don’t want to come back. I don’t want to be here.”

“You have to leave this place, Emersohn.”

“I never meant those things I said. I never meant to return. That was just a threat, just foul words I cast at the sisters.”

“We can’t let you come back. You can’t be here.”

For half an hour the good Reverend Emersohn pretended to be dead, trying not to move, until finally we had to pour the kerosene onto his body, and he began screaming.

Outside, beneath the trees where the alchemists were hung for attempting to incite revolution by undermining the gold standard, a hole was dug, into which the second-spend form of Rv. Emersohn was set face-down, so that if his spirit should return again he would think to dig down and not up.
(12:07.05.19.2005) [/alpha] #