“There’s an auditorium in one wing of the building … You have to visit it.”
One of the boys was different. Hunting raccoons and skinning seemed pointless to him. People used to go to football games in raccoon coats. No more. Hunters in the Wild West used to make themselves raccoon caps. No more. Once upon a time, there were men here, real men. You had to be a real man to hunt what there used to be in Iowa. Buffalo, nothing less.
“He gave me a nickel with a buffalo on one side and an Indian on the other. I still have it. He told me to take care of it, it was rare. First the buffalo disappeared, then the Indians, and then the coin with their picture. Now on one side there is a distinguished gentleman, the untouchable American saint Thomas Jefferson, and on the other his house, Monticello.”
Who killed the last buffalo? that boy asked Diana. This land was full of buffalo. Who, who killed the last one …?
In the United States, telephone poles are now metal. Here, they are still made from trees. It’s as if the wires couldn’t speak without the voices of the forest. The night I spent in Diana’s town thinking about her was a dark night, and in my hotel room with the window open, I felt like one of those blind hunting dogs, blinded by the darkness; but even if I had no sense of smell, I did have my ears at the ready to hear what the silence was saying beyond the darkness. Would they talk about her? Would they remember how one day her father took her to the plane for Los Angeles, a seventeen-year-old girl with long chestnut hair, and how she came back one day in a Cadillac convertible, wrapped in a mink but with her hair cut short like an army recruit’s, as blond as a … star? That’s how they showed her off on Main Street, between the drugstore and the shoe store, the courthouse and the high school.
“Come to the auditorium. Wait till the moon comes up. Let’s wait a while. You’re going to lift my skirt. You’re going to caress my mound. You’re going to take off my panties. When the moon comes up, you’re going to take my virginity.”
She was the girl next door, same as the others except for those unique, incomparable gray eyes (or were they blue?). I don’t know if those eyes of Diana’s could live forever looking at themselves in the blue eyes of her parents, relatives, and friends. I looked at the eyes of the old people in Iowa, and once again I was surprised at the simplicity, the goodness, the recaptured, eternal childhood of those eyes, even when the hair above was white as Christmas and the faces as wrinkled as the map where the buffalo once roamed. Were these men, white and soft as marshmallows, the same cruel, insensitive boys who went out on Saturdays to hunt raccoons? Were they the same men who, full of blood lust and unsatisfied violence, went out to kill the last buffalo?
“Now, screw me now, when the moonlight comes through the skylight, screw me, Luke, screw me like the first time, give me the same pleasure, make me tremble the same way, my love, my love …”
When the moon came up that night in Iowa and I saw it from the window of the Howard Johnson’s, I was convinced that Luke, wherever he was and whoever he was now, had cut it out and ordered it hung in the sky. In her honor. It was her paper moon.
The sun rose on the Sunday when I was to leave, and I remembered that she’d told me, Don’t miss going to church and listening to the sermon.
Whenever I go to a Protestant church, I’m a bit afraid. It’s not mine, and the absence of decoration makes me fear an essential hypocrisy that deprives God of His baroque glory and keeps the faithful from sharing it, all in exchange for a white Puritanism that is only painted white, like the sepulchers of the Pharisees, rendered white the better to cast the sins of the world on the rest, those who are different, the others.
The pastor ascended the pulpit, and I stupidly tried to give that role to a famous actor — Orson Welles in Moby-Dick, Spencer Tracy in San Francisco, Bing Crosby in The Bells of Saint Mary’s, or Frank Sinatra in The Miracle of the Bells. I surprised myself by laughing softly as I remembered Hollywood’s extravagant imagination in creating priests who were boxers, singers, or Falstaff types … No. This little man with white hair and a hatchet face was almost a human Host, colorless, as white as celestial flour.
It took me some time to perceive the carbonic heat of his eyes, like black marbles. And his voice did not seem to emanate from him; fascinated, I began to think his voice was only a conduit for another voice, distant, eternal, that described the Lutheran faith, that let us have radical confidence in God because God justifies man, God accepts man because man accepts that he is accepted despite his being unacceptable. How can man have faith in God’s acceptance of all the sins that all individuals, even the cleanest, hide in their heart of hearts and excrete into the material world? Man, in faith, believes he is received by the grace of God and that his crimes are pardoned in the name of Christ, who with His death paid for all our sins. The price the church puts on such a faith is that of obeying within and without the will of God. That requires faith, not reason, because reason leads to despair. It’s hard to conceive rationally that God justifies the unjust. The believer embraces the Gospel in order to understand that gospel means that God justifies believers in the name of Christ, not in the name of their merits. That is what you should understand perfectly this Sunday. You should believe that God pardons because He is just, not because you are. You will never be able to accumulate enough merit to be pardoned for torturing a fly or disdainfully stepping on an ant. You erroneously think God is just.
No, justice is not what God is but what God gives. What God grants. What you can never give to yourself or anyone else. Even if you are just, you cannot give justice to anyone except through God. Blasphemous people: imagine a God as unjust as you or as just as you would like to be. It doesn’t matter — nothing matters, nothing, nothing. Only God can dispense justice, not you. Only God can impart the law, even if He himself violates it by creating you. Live with that, beloved flock, try to live with that conviction. Have the courage but also the anguish of knowing the truth about God: we receive justice; we do not have justice; justice is not given, justice is not deserved, justice is something that God gives us when He decides, because not even God Himself is just, God only has power, the power to pardon even though He himself deserves no pardon. How can He deserve it when He committed the error of creating the lustful, criminal, ungrateful, stupid, self-destructive beings that we all are, the creatures of a guilty God? Live with this, brothers and sisters. Have the strength to live with our impossible and demanding faith. Think about a God who deserves no forgiveness but who has the power to pardon us. Do not fall into despair. Hope, and be confident.
He finished. He smiled. He gave a laugh; he stifled it with a hand over his mouth.
After the service, I walked the streets of Jeffersontown, where Diana Soren was born and grew up. On the porches the old people rocked, with white hair and blue, innocent, always innocent eyes, so distant from geography and history, so innocent they didn’t want to know what their leaders were doing in those unknown places full of spicks, dagos, niggers, and especially Communists. At nightfall the eyes of innocence look at a paper moon over a tiny town in Iowa and give free rein to Thomas Jefferson because he’s white and elegant even if he has slaves. He’s more intelligent than all of them together — that’s why they elected him. We have only one president at a time; you’ve got to believe in him, put his profile on the mountains and the coins, toss the Indian-and-buffalo coins in the air: let’s see where they fall. The earth is immense, black as a slave, rotten as a Communist, wet as a Mexican’s back; the earth goes on growing, fructifying, because the earth’s been putrefying for millions of years.