Pale Harvest. Braden Hepner
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and the more heroic the carrier. The stage must be set in the end for high drama. Bedlam. Carnage. Depravity. The devil’s reign of blood and horror at its zenith. And then, in the middle of it all, who is that coming from the clouds, heralded by trumpets and carried on a sunbeam, coming to us across the bloodsoaked sand of the desert? And does he carry in his hand salvation or doom?
—Evil, said Heber. It makes us gladder for his arrival. There is a plan, no doubt, but does this plan win your approval? And yet God keeps sending them down where they struggle and moan and gnash their teeth and fester toward their horrific end. That he may do his work, his strange work. Everything is part of the plan simply by virtue of the existence of God. It’s just a poor plan. Perhaps God is subject to some higher, natural law and is merely waiting for the terrible day of accounting over which he must preside. People pretend that such a god would not be worthy of worship, but God is God, and we have no other option. We’ll take what we can get, I suppose, in the end. He may be a god of order, but the world he’s created is not in order. He has set things in motion and has let them go on to what pandemonium must follow such a sophisticated and dangerous thing left to itself, and perhaps this is the way it must be. Perhaps he can only watch with great futility and some regret what we will do with ourselves. What we have done.
Heber paused to shake a cigarette out of the pack and put it in his lips. He lit the cigarette and inhaled and let smoke trail slowly from his nostrils.
—Jack knows, he said. He knows it’s best to keep away from the fire that would purify us as gold. We don’t need to be reminded. I give my demons rein. I give them rein. Most say too much rein, but if they only knew how I pull back. If I could change one thing about my life it would be to unshoulder this burden of truth. I weep sometimes when I’m alone and get to thinking about it. It’s when I can no longer believe that I need belief the most, but I cannot undo my unbelief, and I did not seek it out. And for this we pretend to want truth, but when truth comes to us we would murder it, would crush its terrible beauty under our heel like a purple flowered thistle. Truth kills mystery and requires action—two things that don’t agree with us. We want mystery, and we don’t want to be required to act, to change. When truth is realized it leads a man either to his salvation or his damnation, both terrifying prospects. We’ve all got demons, and it takes something marvelous to tame them, if they’re ever to be tamed at all. Jack may have found his remedy. The god he has shunned has not shunned him. You’ve got something special there and I hope you get what might as well be yours. It’s not good for man to be alone. What are you without a woman? I wash my sheets. Do you wash your sheets?
Jack thought of his holey gray sheets that used to be white and realized that he had not once washed them. It struck him like an idea newly given to humankind. His bedding was a set of torn, stained, fetid, ragged, grease-shined pieces of a fabric. He had bought sheets some years back in a weird splurge at Kmart and it was probably time for another set now.
—I wash my sheets, Heber went on. It’s proof of a civilized nature, of at least occasional female company through my days and nights. What would you be if you were alone in a house, either one of you? You’d get crazy. You’d wonder what you could get away with in whatever crude dwelling you called home. Your meager collection of dishes would clog the kitchen sink and counters because it could, and you’d half-assedly wash one at a time as you needed it, only to deposit it back in the sink dirty. The bathroom would fill with whiskers, nail clippings, little tumbleweeds of pubic hair. You’d start smelling the crotch of your pants crumpled in the corner to see if they were clean enough to wear. What couldn’t you do alone in that place? Satisfy any perverse craving, entertain any bizarre impulse. You might have something, John. How lucky you’d be to have something to lift you up. At the funeral we were waiting for you in my truck when she came up to you, and we watched while you both walked away. She took you to the wild grass and that was a beginning. But you shouldn’t talk to her about your feelings, if that’s what you’re thinking.
—I’m not thinking that.
—There was a serenity about her at the funeral that would lure a wretched man like you to spill everything, but it’s only rocks there and if you go in she will break you.
—How often do you see her? said Seth.
—She comes to get milk sometimes.
—I’ll bet she’s got some good milk, said Heber.
—Think she’s a virgin? said Seth.
—A question for all times and peoples, that one, said Heber. He settled down against the tree and said, But she’s not.
—The hell do you know about it? said Jack.
—None of us know her history. She’s a slow river. Who knows what’s beneath the surface? But clever girls are perceived how they wish to be perceived. I know it ain’t what you want to hear, but if she’s that type—then my god man, you’ve got your hands full.
—And that proves it, does it? said Jack.
—You get a feeling from girls, whether they are or not. They behave in certain ways that betray the state of their virtue. This is a girl with some experience. I watched her grow up. She had a slow-burning beauty, a grace you can’t teach, even then, and I said watch out. Watch out for that one. Girls like her can’t stay pure.
—Maybe you see what you want to see, said Jack.
—Maybe you do too, said Heber.
—I used to want a virgin, said Seth. Hell yes, I did.
—This purity, it’s not the only road of value. There’s reason to value also a girl with experience. To two virgins it’s a mystery—the kind you don’t want—and without drawing on the accumulated knowledge of millennia of collective effort, it may forever remain so. They are children smashing a hotdog and bun together. Imagine spending those precious first months, years, not having figured it out, this thing that drives the very will of mankind, this reckless thing that God has inserted within each of us and told us to use with care, but which he uses just as recklessly to populate his worlds. It’s no detriment to find a girl who has screwed around a little. Give me a warm tart over a frigid virgin any day.
—Is anyone even listening to this? said Seth. He raised his bottle to his face and examined its dregs.
—Regardless of all your theory and speculation, that doesn’t mean she ain’t, said Jack.
—Some part of us all wishes for that, said Heber. But have you ever considered that this virtue takes its very meaning from its loss?
—That sounds ass-backwards, said Seth.
—Some believe it can last in its rooted form indefinitely, but the greater tragedy than seeing it plucked is to see it wilt, to see its value fade until it is a nonfactor, nothing at all like it was and worst of all, forgotten. Tell me, Seth, do you feel the same for any girl’s virtue? Do you pine and mourn over every rushed undoing, or is it only for the beautiful ones? It seems that some girls are so desirable that there ought to be a national monument erected when they are deflowered, said Heber. And the fellow that did it properly ought to have a parade. And yet we’d gladly murder the fool who takes it from one of these selected before it is proper. But when it happens this latter way we are absolutely mystified. We brood about it, obsess over it. What is this element, this virtue, and can it replenish? Put it on the Periodic Table. What is this deep mystery that stirs both our loins and our spirits so profoundly? It is God at his most mysterious and abstruse. And when God is crucified afresh with each spoiled flower, we are deeply shaken. But we also lust with a regret deeper than our sorrow that we had been the spoiler.
—Hey, you all know a girl by the name of Erica Birch? said Seth. From Hansel?
—I knew her from school, said Jack.
—Not that I ultimately give a damn, but what do you think?
—Good looking, said Jack. Definitely no virgin.
—That’s just it. Girls that smoke are easy. She works at the Horseman. I see her there when I go in.
—Well, said Heber. That’s