Moon leaned back, resting both elbows behind him on his desk, then crossed his legs and craned his neck to stare hard at his curled toes. And then ignored me.
“I mean, I can live with Delbert, if that’s God’s will, but my parents weren’t Christians. Certainly not when they named me, anyway.” He flashed a brittle smile. “My father was a drunkard and a complete whoremonger. Don’t be shocked; I choose my words prayerfully. He was in Vietnam when I was born. A Canadian volunteer. Heard about them? Not many have. I don’t grudge him his war. I’m still proud of whatever it was he did over there. It’s just I wish he’d never come home.” He took a deep breath and raised his eyes, briefly meeting mine. “Mom’s a believer now, praise Cod. Only a couple of years old in the Lord. Only since Dad died. I know it sounds terrible, but it was the best thing that could have happened to her. Whether it was the best thing for him, I can’t say. I just hope that he called on Christ before he lost consciousness.” Moon took another deep breath and shrugged, then flashed me a strange, soft frown. “Maybe I shouldn’t be telling you all this but it feels right to, and ‘if our heart condemn us not, then we have confidence toward God.’ Right?” I nodded, but he didn’t wait for it. “Where you from, brother?”
“Toronto.”
“Right, right. I remember from the other night.” He shifted in his chair, raising one buttock and then the other just enough to sit on his hands, palms up. His thumbs poked out and occasionally drummed on his cheeks. “I was there once. I used to subscribe to Maclean’s.”
The static crackle of the loudspeaker interrupted Delbert. The Dean cleared a throat jagged with feedback, then informed us of an opening for the Sunday crusade team to Drumheller prison (worth 10 Christian service points), and confirmed that, henceforth, ties would not be required in the library on Saturdays after tour p.m.
“Sodom,” Moon sighed. “Toronto, I mean. Sorry, I know it’s your home — it’s just all those prostitutes, drugs and theatres everywhere. Man, it must take as much grace to live a godly life there as it did in pagan Rome — or like it still does in Rome, for that matter, what with the Pope and dirty Italian movies and all. It’s a real fiery furnace, eh?”
“Oh, I wouldn’t say —”
“I’m from Shadrach, up Peace River country? I couldn’t even find it on a map, so don’t feel bad. You’d think we’d know about fiery furnaces, but we got, like, six churches for 300 people and just one of them Catholic. Nobody blinks at a six-day creation, Noah’s Ark, the whole biblical ball of wax. It’s not right. There’s no scandal to the Cross. Some people like that, but not me.”
“Why?”
“When everyone’s sanctified and set apart it’s easy to forget how freakish we must seem — should seem — to the world. And I’m not just talking about folks out in Toronto, but to the liberals and papists in Edmonton and Peace River. It reminds me of something I heard the Keaton twins say… I can’t remember exactly right now, but it was good. You ever heard the Keatons preach?”
“I don’t think so, no.”
“No? You don’t know what you’re missing, brother. Siamese twins out of the Amazon jungle, totally on fire for Jesus. It’s really something to hear them preach the Word. My, my, my …” He shook his head and snorted. “I think freakishness, if you want to call it that, is a spiritual gift. We should stick out like sore thumbs.” Moon drew his breath sharply, then twisted his neck to stare vacantly out the window at a queue of jaded grain elevators. “No; we ought to be healthy thumbs. Christians ought to stick out like healthy thumbs on the mangled hands of the world.”
Mentally, I was practising excuses for leaving when he said, “You must be wondering what I wanted to show you, right?”
“Sure,” I shrugged. “Lay it on me.”
“It’s really just a little thing. Actually, it’s got something to do with our conversation in the washroom. Remember? Just remember for a second.” He leaned towards me slowly and dropped his voice like it was the other shoe. “Feeling embarrassed?”
“Embarrassed?”
“Ashamed I should say. Convicted, maybe?”
“No,” I drawled slowly. “I can’t think of anything.”
“Hmmm.” Moon took a deep breath but gave up just a tiny sigh. He arched his eyebrows and drooped his shoulders, and I felt as though I’d punctured him. “Okay. No problem; don’t worry about it. It’s not as though you’re very old in the Lord — no offence. I have something you might find interesting.”
Moon gave his desk’s top drawer a couple of firm tugs. “A little stuck,” he mumbled, curling a corner of his lip into an apologetic smile. Then he twisted in his chair and pulled harder.
The drawer, when it finally opened, was crammed with creased and mangled papers, at least a dozen pens (a good half of which, I assumed, must be dry), two Bible highlighters, a set of precision screwdrivers, a rusty garden trowel and maybe three bucks in pennies. As he strained to stretch his slender forearm towards the back of the drawer, I heard a muffled jangle which sounded like several vials of pills.
“Ah ha!” He took out a stained and dog-eared red pamphlet, closed the drawer with his elbow and pressed it into my palm.
“Heck No! The Secret Sin of Minced Oaths,” I read. “Hmm. Minced oaths? Sounds interesting.” He frowned. “Interesting but, you know, like, sinful. So, what are they?”
“I didn’t think you’d know,” Moon beamed. “When you weren’t embarrassed, I was hoping for your sake. They aren’t things that worry most people, even Christians, but — well, let me tell you about them and you can decide for yourself. Now you take a word like ’.heck’. Say, for instance, I show up for Mr Gurney’s Doctrine class and he’s got a pop quiz on soteriology. If I groan ‘Oh, heck’, there’s not many around that would consider that foul language, even though we all know what ‘heck’ stands for, don’t we?”
Delbert folded his hands behind his head, staring at me as though he didn’t know a rhetorical question when he’d asked one.
“It stands for ‘hell’, doesn’t it, Gideon?” I nodded, just to let him know it had sunk in. “Worse than heck, though, are words like ‘golly’ — a contraction of ‘God is holy’ — ‘gee’ for ‘Jesus’ and ‘goshdarn’ for … well, I just don’t want to say what, but you can imagine, I’m sure. And that’s precisely the problem: you can imagine!”
“Oh,” I said. But what I’d meant to say was, Oh?
“The best you can say about a minced oath is that its a loophole: a way to swear without saying bad words. But how do you think the Lord feels — believe me, I don’t mean to preach at you, brother; every time I point a finger I’ve got three pointing back at me — when we twist his name to make it foolish, just to comfort ourselves that we haven’t actually blasphemed? Why not curse and be honest about it? Better yet, why not acknowledge we’ll be asked to account for every idle word? The hateful thing about minced oaths is that they follow the letter of the law, not the spirit, and ‘the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life.’ I’m not making this up. It’s all right there,” he said, pointing at the pamphlet, “and there,” pointing to the Bible.
“Pretty heavy stuff,” I sighed after a moment’s silence. Could he be right? He could be crazy, but I’d read enough Bible to believe he could be right and crazy. “I don’t remember what I said.”
“‘Gee’, if I recall correctly.”
“Oh.” Worse than ‘heck’, though no gosh darn’. I felt like shit. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to offend you.”
“Don’t worry about it. Don’t be hard on yourself.” Moon knitted his brow and smiled grimly as he slowly, gracefully