Spite by Alex Sinclair

The congregation came to him in the merest tendrils of the dawn’s earliest and sickest light, the sky’s face the same faded blue of an overdose.

They came to him like faces in a fever dream, seeking answers as they always did. The preacher didn’t have them. He was looking for answers of his own. He was dope-sick after all, the slow crawl of heroin fidgeting in his collapsing veins as it made its retreat, making the marrow of his bones ache. His body was already begging for more liquid forgiveness, and there was the other issue that he needed to attend to, the issue that made his need all the more desperate, the issue that had marooned the preacher in the sleepless raft of his stiff bed with nothing but his anxious thoughts to sustain him.

“What’s the commotion?” he asked, his voice hoarse. They seemed startled, their mouths an assortment of O’s frozen in pantomime displays of shock. He was in no fit state for this charade and the acting that was required of him to navigate his way through it.

The sickness was on its way, slowly filling up his existence with pieces of hell. His connect was out of town, and wouldn’t be back across the border with a fresh batch of black for a few weeks. The preacher felt a sheen of greyish green flood his face as he thought of a smackless fortnight, a face which the black tar heroin had already stripped clean of most of its flesh. He doubted he looked much like a preacher, and was thankful for the dull light’s inability to illuminate him. A few of the flock had already expressed concern at his appearance.

“Lookit,” they’d say. “He’s bearing the signs of stigmata on his forearms..”

“What’s the commotion?” he repeated, and they answered him, but not with words. They stepped aside, and some of them dragged someone forward to him.

It was the girl.

“She ain’t breathing,” someone said.

It was obvious from just one glance that she was dead. Dead or in the throes of dying at the very least. Oh my god, he thought as someone in the huddle let out an anguished wail, oh my god my problem is solved.

He was glad for the murk, glad it hid the smile forming on his face.

Now there would be no baby, no shame, no child born in sin.

He had argued with her about the child. She had wanted him to marry her, but in truth he had been contemplating killing her and dumping her in the river with rocks around her neck.

It had been a one-eared conman in the joint named Johnny Van Gogh who had turned him on to the preacher gig. He had told the preacher that going to some shitpoke town out in the sticks and impersonating a holy man was the easiest money and pussy he’d ever scored in his life.

“Ain’t nothing easier money,” Van Gogh had told him. “Not running whores or even dope. As long as you’re wearing a minister’s collar and holding your bible, those yokels will believe anything you say, so long as you say Jesus done said it first.”

Van Gogh hadn’t been lying. The preacher had the entire citizenship of the good town Spite eating from the palm of his hands within minutes of his miraculous arrival, and he’d had the girl suckling the holy milk from his crotch the following night.

“Help her reverend,” someone said, as the wailing grew louder, threatening his headache.

She must’ve overdosed on the good Mexican dope he had introduced to her. She had a taste for it immediately, a greed for it. He looked down at her, thinking what a waste, what a lovely waste. Christ she had been beautiful, a rare breed in this region of related newlyweds and donkey fuckers. She was a looker even in death. Part of him had loved her, but then again he had also indiscriminately loved a legion of cocktail waitresses and lonely housewives that had taken communion with him in truck stop toilets and the backseats of their husband’s cars. He had also loved the cadaverous streetwalkers who were afflicted with the same stigmata that marred his weeping forearms as they kneeled for him in the back alley gutters.

“Help her! For the love of god help her!”

“Save her reverend!”

He stared at them and tried to ape the masks of horror that he saw. He tried to mimic their theatrics. He looked into their dull eyes the same way he had done a thousand times, eyes he had watched light up with every manufactured miracle he had given them. The wonder he could elicit in them with a mouthful of cheap bullshit both tantalised and sickened him. It was the same cheap wonder that a drunken department store Santa could elicit from a crowd of fools, and when he saw it for the first time he had known in his heart that the morphine that mainlined his veins was no match for the opiate of delusion that numbed the citizens of Spite. It made him want to shoot them all dead. The money they brought to him though, the money earned in the fields and stained with their blood and toil made the grossness of their gullibility easier to swallow. The money and the gifts. They would sooner see their scrawny children starve to death than see their preacher go without.

“Help us, lord help us,” someone said, the wailing in the church growing to unbearable levels.

Already some of them were on their knees with their eyes closed, their mouths a blur of insistent murmurs.

“The Lord is with us,” he began weakly as he looked upward, trying to recall a scrap of scripture that he could recite. “Do not be afraid because he is here with all of you. He stands next to each of you, with his everloving mercy. But what this child needs is an ambulance, doctors, and the care of the lord in the form of a hospital.”

“The doctor already said she’s gone,” someone said.

“There’s something else reverend,” someone else said.

“The doctor said the girl had a baby growing inside of her, which means someone in this church is a base defiler.”

The preacher tried to work up some spit but none would come. Discovery was only inches away, a discovery that could seal his fate should he tread a careless step. One wrong move and his fate would be sealed.

“Is this true, doctor?” He managed.

The fat physician waddled forward, dabbing at the sweat on his face with a handkerchief. The red rolls of flab at his neck wobbled as he spoke. “I can confirm it is. I don’t know how far gone, but the girl was to be a mother.”

One of the men holding the girl dragged her closer and her head lolled forward to meet the light creeping in through the window which is when the preacher saw her face and knew he was done for if he wasn’t careful. The slyness. The slyness that his father had warned him about was sitting there in her dead grin and he knew then that she had done it on purpose. She had used her own death as a weapon. Every smile on a corpse’s face was a slyness, a slur on god his daddy had told him. “You think yer smug with that stupid grin, but you ain’t nothing,” he’d say, the whisky running down his chin.

“This is the only saviour, the only salvation,” his father had told the preacher, pulling out that big .45, an apron of ash from a hundred cigarettes coating his chest hairs. The barrel had been cold against the preacher’s forehead, cold and hard as a gravestone with his name on it. Pray his father had commanded. Pray to god. The tears had come as hard as the gun barrel, each drop a shard of glass, the words sliding from his pleading tongue in a slurry of fitful gibberish. He’d had no idea there was so much religion in him. It had all seemed so silly, so ridiculous. Angels, he’d ask. Up there? The gun did what the Bible couldn’t and made a believer out of him. When it finally went off after two eternity-slow minutes of fearful devotion he had been born again as an atheist when he had opened his eyes and saw his father’s brains painting their tar paper shack. The joke shop smile of teeth that remained on the sly mess that was left told the preacher that he had been right all along. There was no god. The preacher felt the traces of his grin dissipate in the dying dark of the church and felt the cold dread from his father’s gun barrel fill his legs.

The problem wasn’t solved, the preacher thought. It was only just beginning. He had allowed a wire trap of his own sinful design to ensnare him and now it was beginning to tighten around his neck.

“Oh my god,” he said aloud. “Hospital. This child needs a hospital. There might still be time.”

“No,” someone replied.

“She needs the lord. She’s already dead.”

“She needs you.”

“Raise her up, reverend.”

“Yeah raise her.”

“Raise her! You said you could raise the dead!”

He had said many things to his flock in the heat of a speed-fuelled sermon. Crazed on the power they had handed to him as Spite’s very own personification of god, he had claimed clairvoyance and the ability to commune with the angels, and to the girl lying dead in front of him with his bastard blooming within her cold womb he had suggested that his seed was a salve for a sin-blighted soul. He hadn’t been able to help it. His tongue had turned into a wild beast, drunk on the dominion it held over the mob of idiots at his disposal.

“No,” he protested weakly, the sickness coming on quickly.

“I can’t do that. It wouldn’t be right in the eyes of the master.”

“You told us you could raise the dead. Raise her up and bring her back.”

I can’t raise the dead you dumb sons of bitches he thought. You crazy bastards.

“No, I didn’t. I can’t,” he stammered, annoyed with the insistence of their ignorance.

“It was a metaphor for the power of the lord. I can’t …no one can…”

“Maybe he can’t do it,” someone said.

“Maybe he’s a phoney.”

His powers were being put to the test.

He was facing judgement and in their own way, they were already calling him a liar. If they proved him to be one they would demand retribution. He looked up to the heavy beams above and understood there was a chance he could be hanging from them by his neck before the day was dead if he didn’t pull off a minor miracle.

He stood over the girl as the cold sweats came upon him, his eyes unable to meet the slyness in her face. He made a gesture with one hand and then the other, shifting from foot to foot. Unbelievably he could hear a voice in his head willing her back to life. The congregation’s ignorant need to believe in impossibilities had somehow infected his common sense.

Raise up you bitch, he thought. Raise up and get me out of this mess, this jam you put me in.

The walls of the church were closing in, and he felt the mob around him hold their collective breath as the sweat beaded on his face.

They grew hushed as he stared at her, the snake hiss of murmurs around him harsh and urgent. He didn’t dare raise his head to look into their faces, but he knew their eyes would all be burning bright with that dumb wonderment that he so hated to see, a wonderment that would soon turn to a scorned rage should they be disappointed. They were like children, and if they didn’t see the magic that they so craved then they would explode into a tantrum. He stared down at her and considered slapping her.

“My god, can’t he do it?”

Just then, in his moment of doubt, the lord nearly made a believer out of the preacher by sending a miracle into his midst. The church door groaned open and someone scurried up the aisle with a notebook held in front of them.

“I got her diary,” the messenger proclaimed.

“If she was with child then surely it will be in here!”

He felt once again their eyes on him, pleading for answers that he couldn’t give.

“Reverend, you better read this,” said the panting messenger, handing over the notebook.

He was so stunned he couldn’t speak. Trust his luck to fertilise Spite’s solitary novelist. If only her kinfolk bore the capacity to read the words she wrote she might reap a posthumous revenge on him.

The preacher took the book in his shaking hand and prised it from the messenger’s reluctant grip.

With this book he could decide his own fate.

“Hand it to me son,” the preacher said. “Let me see.”

The messenger nodded.

“Here,” he said. “Read this part. I tried to read it my own self but I couldn’t make sense of the words. We know you are a man of letters reverend. Perhaps you can make better sense of it.”

The preacher licked his lips as his eyes crawled over the pages, his heartbeat in a fervour.

Lord knows I love him so and I carry his baby in my belly. But he doesn’t want the child which means he doesn’t want me. I asked him to marry me and he just laughed like I was a jackass. I think I’ll kill myself to save myself from the shame. I’ll kill myself with the dope that he loves so dearly. I’ll kill myself so me and my baby can be happy and free in heaven, with Jesus and all his angels.

The preacher looked up from the book. They were rapt, every pair of eyes fixed in his direction. The preacher’s heart swelled. He had managed to wrestle back his control over them. He was in the driver’s seat once again and their attention was his and his alone. He let the tension build and build as he scanned the crowd for a suitable scapegoat, warm with the knowledge that he could target whomever he wished.

“Who is it, reverend?”

“Is there a name?”

“Read to us, reverend.”

“Who is the father reverend? Who is it?” they said, a regular congregation of owls.

There you are he thought as his eyes settled on the rabbit teeth and straw-coloured hair that had followed the girl around like a love-wounded dog since the preacher had arrived in Spite. There you are, my sweet bullet catcher. The preacher wiped his nose and began.

“Lester doesn’t want me,” he said, to an onslaught of gasps.

“He doesn’t want the baby. He just wants my body. My body and the dope. I want you all to know that it is Lester’s lack of love that has killed me. Lester did this.”

The preacher snapped the diary shut and clutched it tight and safe to his breast, although he doubted now their ability to sniff him out. He had teased the dark ribbon of violence that ran through each of them like a seam in a coalface and he had given them an outlet for it, a conduit that would draw them away from reason. Besides, barely any of them could read much more than their own rotten names.

There came a guttural moan of agony and Lester the blacksmith’s son staggered forth clutching his belly as if he’d been freshly gutshot. His face was screwed up in pain.

“It’s not true,” he moaned.

”I loved her but I didn’t kill her with no dope! I loved her. By god I loved her. I wanted to be with her.”

Silence fell down upon them. The preacher nearly wept with relief as his scapegoat drew a target upon his own back.

“The boys been sweet on her for months,” someone chimed in.

“I seen it! I seen em going at it like a pair of goats in old man Brannigan’s barn.”

“I seen em down by the creek. They was naked.”

“No,” stammered Lester wetly, the tears coating his face. He was shaking his head.

“It’s not true. Those are lies. I never even touched her. She was sweet on someone else.”

“Who son?” said the preacher. “Tell us what you know.”

Lester wiped his face and looked at the preacher with hate in his eyes.

“You,” he said. “I seen you with her. I seen you with yer needles. That ain’t no stigmata on your arms and you ain’t no preacher. I don’t know who you are but you ain’t no preacher.”

Someone stepped forward and blasted a fist into Lester’s face. The preacher heard a crunch and saw the boy’s rabbit teeth skip like tossed dominoes across the floor.

“Shut yer mouth,” someone said.

Lester slumped between the thickset men on both of his arms, moaning through a thick mouthful of blood.

“What shall we do with him, reverend?”

“String him up,” someone said.

“Yeah, we should hang this bastard.”

“Not before we take his nuts,” someone called from the back.

The preacher realised that the god they worshipped needed enemies to destroy so it could prove its existence. It had always needed blood to sustain itself. It was a jealous god and its followers were cast in its image. The preacher knew if he didn’t concede to their demands and give them a sacrificial lamb upon a platter then they would boil into a frenzy and destroy him for daring to refuse their rage. Parasites had to placate their hosts lest they be expelled. “String him up,” the preacher said.

They didn’t have to be told twice. The preacher stood back and watched mute as the congregation transformed before his eyes into a single-minded mass hellbent on one purpose. They seemed as fixed and stupid as some clockwork mechanism, utterly immune to reason. He watched as they tore off Lester’s clothes and hauled him up by his neck with a rope, his legs pumping as he swung from beneath the groaning beam, his face the angry purple of an incoming heart attack. He watched the first rope snap and watched Lester crash down to earth like some kind of aborted angel, the dust devils of the seldom swept floor swarming up around his pretzeled limbs. He watched Lester’s neck fail to break as they pulled him up for the second time with a thicker coil of cord, and realised as someone hacked away Lester’s balls with a pearl-handled straight razor that they were worse than him. The preacher may have been a liar and a crook, but the stupid spite of their farm animal ignorance made them true monsters. He watched them bathe in the happy frenzy of their invisible creator, dancing to the cruel tune of his unreasonable demands. How could they believe in a loving father when this was how they placated him? The preacher was beyond himself. He saw creative design in the world, but no love, no beauty.

When it was done, The preacher commanded them to pray. Their bloodlust quenched, they obeyed, as satisfied as spent lovers. They took up their places in the pews with their heads bowed as Lester swayed in front of them like some gruesome chandelier.

The preacher looked up at Lester’s face and considered locking them in the church and burning them all alive, but he quickly knew it to be a cheap revenge and revenge on what he wasn’t exactly sure. He would bide his time, he thought. He would wait until the time was right and he would give the citizens of Spite what they had wanted so desperately. He would give them an honest-to-goodness miracle and rescue them from the drabness of their lives. He had told them he could raise the dead. So he would go ahead and raise it.

#

The preacher waited for a week until the frenzy had ebbed away and the girl was cold in the ground.

It took him most of a moonlit night and half a jar of Dexedrine to dig her up.

The tablets left his mouth coated with a sheen of fur and his eyeballs vibrating in their sockets. The digging left his hands in bloody tatters, and when he reached the coffin, he knocked on its lid with his knuckles and laughed to himself as the slimy moonlight crawled down his face. The preacher could hear his father in his laugh. He didn’t know whether it was the drugs or the sleeplessness, but somehow his father’s buzzsaw cackle came climbing out of his throat, letting him know what a slyness it all was.

He pried open the lid and looked down at her.

She had only been a slight girl, but death had made her heavy. The preacher didn’t worry. The speed had made him strong.

If death was the absence of life and life was the greatest of all things thought the preacher, how could something so empty be so heavy? “Who’s smiling now,” he said to her as he hauled her up out of the ditch, thinking here you go you crazy bastards, here’s your freshly raised dead. He dragged her into the church, breathing through his mouth to avoid her smell and then he propped her up in the first pew ready for Sunday service.

He clasped her hands together as if in prayer and bound them in place with wire.

“There ain’t no god you crazy bastards,” he laughed.

He left town on foot before dawn, his hands still bleeding, the speed urging him on.

“Take a good look around,” he said to the barren wastelands around him. “There ain’t no god out here.”

He paused in front of the solitary road sign that simply announced ‘Spite’ to the world just long enough to spit on it and then he continued.

Alex Sinclair

Image by aiperfectportraits aiperfectportraits from Pixabay – Priests collar on a scrawny old mans neck with stained glass windows in the background.