Jeremy once clutched a beaded rosary, and what the priest promised him was: too many things. Too many things whispered at the same time; also too many averted eyes. Pray, God commands him. What is the Lord’s will? What does he ask of me, if not to obey? Submit.
Eventually Jeremy left a note that was about his priest raping boys, and the parish feigned to be concerned for him. Jeremy himself was convinced that life was a bad dream. He picked a long feather of all the mess that had been strewn around and leafed its threads as an homage to the bird. The other boys teased that he thought too much, of God and of the promises, and that they were leaving him out.
The church was not a total loss, because Jeremy and the Lord made a truce together. They won’t exist together, in heaven, on a bed. They condemn sinners, and pluck a spotless apple. When Jeremy can drive the Peugeot, he flies to Alaska to tramp its vastness. This fall Saturday he has forded the Teklanika River across to Stampede Trail, where he plans to begin. He did this on an impulse that he doesn’t really regard, and by spring, when he marches up the ridge of the splendid Mount Drum where he used to imagine heaven, he has already been consumed by some fairly bitter ghosts.
When he cursed God, he wasn’t sure that angels would follow him to the wild. He wasn’t sure that God even wanted to go there. He had no notion of how liberated he could be. But Jeremy lifts the veil before he can close his eyes, and light whips him around the horizon and spreads his spirit (surely he didn’t use to breath crystals?) and flushes his past, doctrine. He shouts he has emptied himself what great disciples they were, Jeremy and Priest and children and nuns. Great disciples.
Jeremy is free. Priest and church are long forgiven.
He breathes to live in what spirits used to chase, with a certain flat gnawing, “the present moment.”
