How’s the not smoking thing working out for you? he asked Poole, deflecting him. Poole conceded and shook his head. I’ve thought about ‘em for a few days. They’re like snakes, right? the temptations? Yeah, they…, Poole made a snaking motion with his hand. Did you know that the Gnostics believed that the snake in the garden was actually Jesus? Well, that explains a lot.
For all the poetic reasons and all the political reasons and all the pregnancy in the promise of robbing an institution built on a swindle, the idea stuck in his head, painted with pure fantasy. It screamed improbability. But it wouldn’t stop parading around like a feline in estrus with an unforgiving need for release. The notion could be at its most influential during the photography expeditions and the long silent runs in the dusk.
A quartet of his cousins had grown up in the Calvary Fellowship Church. Hatchet remembered visiting his aunt and uncle during some time consuming excursion his parents would’ve taken to one of the coasts. The instant this charismatic movement materialized in the building down the street, his aunt and uncle dove in head first like oafish children into the shallow end of a pool. The elders of the Calvary Church had hired a man named Brody Lassiter to entice new members, younger members. Lassiter was a newlywed, fresh from a southern Texas seminary and even fresher from missionary work in the Caribbean. His was the doctrine of speaking in tongues and the laying on of hands and tears and gyrations in the aisles and mantras unraveled in ribbons of amens and the bloody miracle of vicarious redemption through the spinning light emergency of Jesus Christ.
A sobbing Brody Lassiter was a well-respected, trusted, well paid Brody Lassiter. In public, removed from the pulpit, Brody Lassiter shut his huge mouth and listened to his flock, endearing him even further. His near silent absorption of their insecurities granted them a suggestion of his direct connection with the Trinity and the hope that he could negotiate their healing, healing they needed to fill the hollow tanks in their chests where the NFL or the cable TV or the cocaine had failed. Rumors and the random interview suggested Lassiter might have possessed an unstable temper in his private life.
Hatchet remembered fighting back the urge to laugh more than the urge to surrender. Sim sala bim! he would yell at his cousins who would be grinning stupidly, bobbing their heads to the disastrous soft-rock five-piece band. In the closing moments of these services, the only power that struck him was pity for the heaving torsos and handkerchief dabbed faces as Brody Lassiter slowed the hands of time and his sermons sank into a dimension where suffering them had become eternal and they prayed for someone to make it stop, giving animation to Marcus’ hope that something higher might actually reach down and remove the preacher’s mouth.
He remembered the fissure this divine charisma had torn through the fabric of the extended family. Ridicule arose in secret confabs over how his aunt and uncle spoke of black magic. The family scoffed at them behind their backs for believing in the Rapture. His grandfather and his uncle played Holmes and Moriarty over the carnage of a Christmas dinner table after all the other participants had moved on to other holiday traditions like yard darts or mumble-peg. Just one of many comedy teams yelling at one another over Jesus' awkward semantics when he was speaking about slaves or empty lamps or fiery lakes.
Hatchet never bought it. He never felt the compulsion to buy it or at least he didn’t remember ever feeling the need to escape it or rebel against it thus rendering him free of the possibility of its clutches. Nevertheless, his aunt and uncle bought it, handing Brody Lassiter cash in public, under bright cathedral lighting. And the next guy in the pew did the same thing. Reminiscing, he sometimes wondered if money had somehow become the proverbial little black dog that had revealed religion’s man-behind-the-curtain. It revealed all. Even at a young age, Hatchet knew the power of money. B.Traven’s Treasure of the Sierra Madre emerged the favorite book of his young adulthood. Money has a way of making people believe in strange things.
And now years later, after Brody Lassiter had helmed Calvary Fellowship through the 80’s and 90’s to emerge the captain of another mega church on the prairies of the new millennium, during the drug and booze addled days following his outburst in Allison’s parents’ house, beset to marshal his endeavors into another purgatory, Hatchet couldn’t keep his mind from his own brand of strange idea
For all the poetic reasons and all the political reasons and all the pregnancy in the promise of robbing an institution built on a swindle, the idea stuck in his head, painted with pure fantasy. It screamed improbability. But it wouldn’t stop parading around like a feline in estrus with an unforgiving need for release. The notion could be at its most influential during the photography expeditions and the long silent runs in the dusk.
A quartet of his cousins had grown up in the Calvary Fellowship Church. Hatchet remembered visiting his aunt and uncle during some time consuming excursion his parents would’ve taken to one of the coasts. The instant this charismatic movement materialized in the building down the street, his aunt and uncle dove in head first like oafish children into the shallow end of a pool. The elders of the Calvary Church had hired a man named Brody Lassiter to entice new members, younger members. Lassiter was a newlywed, fresh from a southern Texas seminary and even fresher from missionary work in the Caribbean. His was the doctrine of speaking in tongues and the laying on of hands and tears and gyrations in the aisles and mantras unraveled in ribbons of amens and the bloody miracle of vicarious redemption through the spinning light emergency of Jesus Christ.
A sobbing Brody Lassiter was a well-respected, trusted, well paid Brody Lassiter. In public, removed from the pulpit, Brody Lassiter shut his huge mouth and listened to his flock, endearing him even further. His near silent absorption of their insecurities granted them a suggestion of his direct connection with the Trinity and the hope that he could negotiate their healing, healing they needed to fill the hollow tanks in their chests where the NFL or the cable TV or the cocaine had failed. Rumors and the random interview suggested Lassiter might have possessed an unstable temper in his private life.
Hatchet remembered fighting back the urge to laugh more than the urge to surrender. Sim sala bim! he would yell at his cousins who would be grinning stupidly, bobbing their heads to the disastrous soft-rock five-piece band. In the closing moments of these services, the only power that struck him was pity for the heaving torsos and handkerchief dabbed faces as Brody Lassiter slowed the hands of time and his sermons sank into a dimension where suffering them had become eternal and they prayed for someone to make it stop, giving animation to Marcus’ hope that something higher might actually reach down and remove the preacher’s mouth.
He remembered the fissure this divine charisma had torn through the fabric of the extended family. Ridicule arose in secret confabs over how his aunt and uncle spoke of black magic. The family scoffed at them behind their backs for believing in the Rapture. His grandfather and his uncle played Holmes and Moriarty over the carnage of a Christmas dinner table after all the other participants had moved on to other holiday traditions like yard darts or mumble-peg. Just one of many comedy teams yelling at one another over Jesus' awkward semantics when he was speaking about slaves or empty lamps or fiery lakes.
Hatchet never bought it. He never felt the compulsion to buy it or at least he didn’t remember ever feeling the need to escape it or rebel against it thus rendering him free of the possibility of its clutches. Nevertheless, his aunt and uncle bought it, handing Brody Lassiter cash in public, under bright cathedral lighting. And the next guy in the pew did the same thing. Reminiscing, he sometimes wondered if money had somehow become the proverbial little black dog that had revealed religion’s man-behind-the-curtain. It revealed all. Even at a young age, Hatchet knew the power of money. B.Traven’s Treasure of the Sierra Madre emerged the favorite book of his young adulthood. Money has a way of making people believe in strange things.
And now years later, after Brody Lassiter had helmed Calvary Fellowship through the 80’s and 90’s to emerge the captain of another mega church on the prairies of the new millennium, during the drug and booze addled days following his outburst in Allison’s parents’ house, beset to marshal his endeavors into another purgatory, Hatchet couldn’t keep his mind from his own brand of strange idea
Edit 11.6.2018