wanted to tear free.
While one of the male members of the church collected the rattlesnake and put it back in its cage, the other members of the church formed a circle around the minister, who was now flat on his back on the platform, arching up every few seconds to allow his entire body to jerk and twist and convulse. We were part of the circle.
Prayers went up like flares; sobs
exploded. A lone woman
hurried-pushed-paddled the children out the door.
An older man in a T-shirt with a Dixie flag on it knelt next to Muldaur saying the same thing over and over, “You’re receiving the spirit of the Lord, Reverend, and you shouldn’t be afraid.”
Some spirit. Some Lord.
“Is there a phone in here?” Kylie asked.
“A phone in the house of the Lord?” a woman snapped back.
“There’s a pay phone down the road,” one of the more sensible women said.
“He’s receiving the Lord,” said the man in
the Dixie flag T-shirt, calmly.
“He’ll be fine in a minute.”
But Muldaur wouldn’t be fine in a minute.
His attempts at breathing were loud and frightening.
I’d visited my granddad, a “lunger,” on a Va ward one time. He’d never recovered from the various lung ailments he’d picked up from various poison gases in Ww I. He was like a sea creature writhing on a beach beneath a pitiless sun. My mom always cried for days after seeing him like that.
Muldaur’s death—I had no doubt he was passing over—was far noisier and gaudier.
He was bug-eyed, flailing tongue, wriggling eyebrows. He was spit, snot, urine, feces. He was crying, cursing, keening. He was dancing, heaving, pounding.
“The Lord comes to us in many strange ways,” said the Dixie T-shirt man. He was as beatific as ever.
“Marv, you’ve got a motorcycle,” the man who’d recovered the baby rattler said. “Run down and call for an ambulance.”
Marv trotted out the door.
There are significant moments that you can’t quite deal with completely—they’d explode your mind if you gave yourself to them completely—s a portion of your brain observes you observing the moment. It was like that the first time I ever had sex. I was enjoying it all so much I was afraid I’d start acting real immature and yell stuff or act unlike the sophisticated, jaded sixteen-year-old I was. So a sliver of my mind detached and took an overview of everything. While my body was completely given over to trying to last at least three minutes, my mind was congratulating my body. You’re a man now, young McCain. A worldly gadabout-philosopher stuck in a town where the new co-op grain silo is still a newsworthy event. You, McCain, are a Hemingway sort of guy.
I was hoping a portion of my mind would detach now and watch me watch Muldaur die. But it didn’t. And so all I could do was stand there and hope that there was a life afterward because if this kind of suffering had no meaning—six million Jews in the concentration camps; millions who could be snuffed out with a brief exchange of atomic bombs—then none of the words our religions spoke were anything more than ways of hiding
the meaninglessness of everything. And frankly, cosmic meaninglessness scares the shit out of me the way nothing else comes close to. I should never have taken those philosophy courses as an undergrad.
And then I realized something.
The only thing more terrifying than watching Muldaur throwing himself voodoo-crazed all over the floor of the platform was watching him lie there absolutely still.
Which is what he was doing now.
And it didn’t take me long, worldly gadabout-philosopher and Hemingway sort of guy that I am, to realize what this meant.
Muldaur was dead.
“What’d he do? Crap his pants? God, that smell is awful. I knew those damn snakes would kill somebody eventually.” We were still inside the church. Sykes’d shooed a lot of the worshipers outside.
With his usual dignity and professionalism, Cliffie Sykes, Jr., hitched up his
holstered Colt .45,
While one of the male members of the church collected the rattlesnake and put it back in its cage, the other members of the church formed a circle around the minister, who was now flat on his back on the platform, arching up every few seconds to allow his entire body to jerk and twist and convulse. We were part of the circle.
Prayers went up like flares; sobs
exploded. A lone woman
hurried-pushed-paddled the children out the door.
An older man in a T-shirt with a Dixie flag on it knelt next to Muldaur saying the same thing over and over, “You’re receiving the spirit of the Lord, Reverend, and you shouldn’t be afraid.”
Some spirit. Some Lord.
“Is there a phone in here?” Kylie asked.
“A phone in the house of the Lord?” a woman snapped back.
“There’s a pay phone down the road,” one of the more sensible women said.
“He’s receiving the Lord,” said the man in
the Dixie flag T-shirt, calmly.
“He’ll be fine in a minute.”
But Muldaur wouldn’t be fine in a minute.
His attempts at breathing were loud and frightening.
I’d visited my granddad, a “lunger,” on a Va ward one time. He’d never recovered from the various lung ailments he’d picked up from various poison gases in Ww I. He was like a sea creature writhing on a beach beneath a pitiless sun. My mom always cried for days after seeing him like that.
Muldaur’s death—I had no doubt he was passing over—was far noisier and gaudier.
He was bug-eyed, flailing tongue, wriggling eyebrows. He was spit, snot, urine, feces. He was crying, cursing, keening. He was dancing, heaving, pounding.
“The Lord comes to us in many strange ways,” said the Dixie T-shirt man. He was as beatific as ever.
“Marv, you’ve got a motorcycle,” the man who’d recovered the baby rattler said. “Run down and call for an ambulance.”
Marv trotted out the door.
There are significant moments that you can’t quite deal with completely—they’d explode your mind if you gave yourself to them completely—s a portion of your brain observes you observing the moment. It was like that the first time I ever had sex. I was enjoying it all so much I was afraid I’d start acting real immature and yell stuff or act unlike the sophisticated, jaded sixteen-year-old I was. So a sliver of my mind detached and took an overview of everything. While my body was completely given over to trying to last at least three minutes, my mind was congratulating my body. You’re a man now, young McCain. A worldly gadabout-philosopher stuck in a town where the new co-op grain silo is still a newsworthy event. You, McCain, are a Hemingway sort of guy.
I was hoping a portion of my mind would detach now and watch me watch Muldaur die. But it didn’t. And so all I could do was stand there and hope that there was a life afterward because if this kind of suffering had no meaning—six million Jews in the concentration camps; millions who could be snuffed out with a brief exchange of atomic bombs—then none of the words our religions spoke were anything more than ways of hiding
the meaninglessness of everything. And frankly, cosmic meaninglessness scares the shit out of me the way nothing else comes close to. I should never have taken those philosophy courses as an undergrad.
And then I realized something.
The only thing more terrifying than watching Muldaur throwing himself voodoo-crazed all over the floor of the platform was watching him lie there absolutely still.
Which is what he was doing now.
And it didn’t take me long, worldly gadabout-philosopher and Hemingway sort of guy that I am, to realize what this meant.
Muldaur was dead.
“What’d he do? Crap his pants? God, that smell is awful. I knew those damn snakes would kill somebody eventually.” We were still inside the church. Sykes’d shooed a lot of the worshipers outside.
With his usual dignity and professionalism, Cliffie Sykes, Jr., hitched up his
holstered Colt .45,
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