Forehead lowered over the Bible, he placed his head between his fists to hear no more of the world’s noises. Meditating on a sermon the night before delivering it was a respite for him, a break from his prosaic duty, which was either to entertain a mass of dolts and simpletons or to frighten children. A single ray of true light in these narrow minds could do more harm than a loaded revolver. How to grant them glimpses of the Lord’s ways? Since Luther, the Moravians, and the Holy Club, there was no other way to announce the Good News than by making the church thunder with horrors and curses. Outside or in the coalmines, mortals understand only the thunder of God, all of them blind to his lightning. Back in the day, John Wesley, founder of the Church, ran like Attila through the moors of England, reading and writing his sermons on horseback, the conquest of souls his exclusive ambition. In the haunted high plains of America, it was better to have to deal with masses of unbelievers or papists in favor of slavery than with a single necromancer.
Reverend Gascoigne leafed through his Bible. With the dexterity of a Monte card player, he flipped from the Pentateuch to the Book of Nahum, from Leviticus to the Proverbs. His finger rested without hesitation on the useful verse, echoing from countless homilies. And so the Eternal God said to Moses: “Regard not them that have familiar spirits, neither seek after wizards, to be defiled by them.” And so the king of Manasseh offending the Eternal God placed Baal and Astarte in the Temple and immolated his own son; like the Philistines, he surrounded himself with sorcerers and false prophets.
“O house of Jacob, come you, and let us walk in the light of the Lord!” the pastor whispered.
Then, without reading anything more than folds of his memory:
“May you never find among you anyone who would put his son or daughter in the fire, no one who exercises the trade of diviner, astrologer, augur, magician . . . Enter into the rocks, and hide thee in the dust, so as to avoid God’s terror and the brightness of his majesty.”
Abruptly stopped short, he told himself that if the Prophets, great and minor, were all firmly diverted away from this funereal form of prostitution, it must be because they thought the gift of prophecy was wrong. Ending his arbitration, he exclaimed:
“And the soul that turneth after such as have familiar spirits and after wizards, to go a whoring with them, I will set my face against that soul, and will cut him off from among his people.”
But what persons, falling into weakness, could be so demonic to have at heart the desire to rekindle the flames of hell? Closing his eyes, he took on a more assured voice:
“Rejoice in being alive and without sin, give to the Lord all authority and power over impure spirits!”
The reverend remembered King Saul in quest of a necromancer capable of intervening in God’s fierce deafness toward him. His servants found him a woman in Endor. In disguise, the king went to visit her and commanded: “Conjure someone from the dead in order to tell me the future.” The woman replied that it would be risking her life, for a royal decree forbade it, but Saul swore to protect her if she obeyed and asked her to make Samuel, the last Judge, come up from the kingdom of the dead. And the terrified woman said that she recognized Saul as her king, then: “I see a divine being, he comes back up from the earth!” But the old man wrapped in a cloak, the very man who during his life put Saul on the throne, did not want to respond to the king’s distress. Why wouldn’t a prophet no longer prophesize once deceased?
In a voice vibrant with indignation, the reverend exclaimed: “The horseman lifteth up both the bright sword and the glittering spear: and there is a multitude of slain, and a great number of carcasses; and there is no end of their corpses; they stumble upon their corpses . . .”
Then, more quietly, coming out of a daze: “No, the dead never answer the pleas of the living, except to announce the destruction of their kingdom! The dead are without memory and without love . . .”
The reverend lowered his voice again, confused. Orating up to this point in the Tower of Babel of his own thoughts, mingling Kings and Prophets, he now turned back on himself in vain exhortation, against his loneliness as a dried up widower, these verses of Ecclesiastes:
“Also their love, and their hatred, and their envy, is now perished; neither have they any more a portion for ever in anything that is done under the sun.”
If You Forget Me in the Desert
On Long Road since dawn, William Pill suspected that he’d crossed the Monroe County limits without there being anything yet to recognize: fields of wheat and other fodder for animals or humans frequently extended to where prairie grass once had alternated with lakes and forests. Those last few days in Ohio, then in Pennsylvania, leisurely riding toward an idea, he’d had the time to turn his memory in every direction. He had a few dollars left of his severance pay to which was added a sterling silver watch won through poker in Cleveland. Not far from Philadelphia, on the banks of the Delaware River, the Appaloosa had started grumbling awfully while the Spanish Barb, encouraged toward mutiny, had decided to lie down like a cow at the slightest halt.
And so at great cost he would have to change horses, for his own, having lost all stamina, would bring him nothing but the price of their carcasses. With most of his luggage piled on his solid new Quarter Horse, 1.6 meters tall at its withers, bought from a wheelchair-bound cowboy who claimed he’d broken his back in a rodeo—which he pretended to believe as much as that the queenly mare appeared to be easy-going—Pill started back up again on Long Road, reassured by his star and at the end of both a war and perilous journey. Despite some fickle Iroquois tribes and some bloody disputes between clans of breeders and families of farmers, New York State was a haven of peace in comparison to the West and the Great Plains at the borders of the Colorado River and the Rocky Mountains. His shoulder healed, the Mexican bullet in his pocket as a good luck charm, he owned nothing, aside from his double-cased pocket watch engraved with an eagle, a Springfield rifle, and the old Bible of his late friend Edward Blair—no inheritance, no family, not even a close friend. The only thing he had was the future, which belongs to no one.
In the late afternoon, still at a light trot on Her Highness, his boisterous mare with a flaming mane, he finally seemed able to recognize, like a face coming closer, the panorama of landscape. He had no more doubts when, on the left, mists parted to reveal the dense hills of the Iroquois, with their steep rocks here and there, markers between the cultivated plains and the break of high valleys where herdsmen lead their flocks on sunny days. Dividing these two was a river whose appearances varied, sometimes impetuous, sometimes sinuous and calm. Massive expanses of aspens and conifers with huge trunks brought a sort of meditative interiority to the landscape, a shiver of worry populated by bird song and indefinable echoes, as if silence itself were breathing. Two eagles circled in flight, high up, in the bruise of the setting sun.
Once again, with such an insidious fire in the heaths, the river sparkled at the bend of a shadowy valley. Pill finally caught sight of the big windmill-like reservoir and, posted on the lower side, a signboard with the inscription HYDESVILLE painted in black. A little farther off, in the middle of a pasture surrounded by low chalk cliffs where the black roots of pines burst up in places like the crooked fingers of the devil, stood one monumental tree, solitary, dans son immensité d’ombre. He recognized the Grand Meadow oak, which, by chance of a random fallen seed, had taken over a third of the sky with its branches, and with its roots doubtlessly explored the depths of Hell. From its low boughs was once hung high and taut, after many other summary executions, a certain Joe Charlie-Joe, son of a slave made white as snow before the Lord by the Mansfield ranchers because of a stolen kiss with the beautiful Emily, the sole heiress of her clan. This fifteen-year-old story had been repeatedly told to him at the saloon. The one who had denounced the unfortunate boy, a mother now with a necklace of the Virgin hanging above her admirable breasts, had been from