At first they would not hear of this, and could not understand why their Jesus would leave them. Other sheep I have, I told them, that are not of this fold. Having spent the winter in converse with them and reading an old tattered copy of their Bible, I had become conversant in matters of faith, and though I never did feel a temptation to give myself over to it, I did know how best to employ it for my purposes. When even this statement did not seem sufficient for the most stubborn among them, who still threatened to accompany me, I told them, Go and spread my teachings.
By this I meant what I had taught them of farming and clothing themselves and hunting but, just as with Barton, it would have served me well to be more specific. Indeed, this knowledge did spread, but with it came a ritual of the eating of human flesh throughout the winter months, a ritual I had not encouraged and had resorted to only in direst emergency. This they supported not only with glosses from the Bible, but with words from a new Holy Book they had written on birchbark, in which I recognized a twisted rendering of my own words.
It was not until I had been discovered by my former compatriots and imprisoned briefly under suspicion and then returned to my own campsite that I heard any hint of this lamentable practice. It was inquired of me whether I had seen any such thing in my travels in the Midwest. Perhaps it was wrong of me to feign ignorance. And I had long returned to my duties, despite the hard questions concerning dog and dogcart and provisions that I had been unable to answer, before there were rumors that the practice had begun, like a contagion, to spread, and had even crossed from the Midwest into our own territories. I had indeed lost nearly all sense of my days as a Midwestern Jesus before the authorities discovered my name circulating in Midwestern mouths, inscribed in their Holy Books. If when I was again apprehended I was indeed preparing to flee — and I do not admit to such — it is only because of a fear of becoming a scapegoat, a fear that is in the process of being realized.
If I had intended to create this cult around my own figure, why then would I have ever left the Midwest? What purpose would I have had in abandoning a world in which I could have been a god? The insinuations that I have been spreading my own cult in our own territories are spurious. There is absolutely no proof.
There is one other thing I shall say in my defense: what takes place beyond the borders of the known world is not to be judged against the standards of this world. Then, you may well inquire, what standard of judgment should be applied? I do not know the answer to this question. Unless the answer be no standard of judgment at all.
I was ordered to write an honest accounting of how I became a Midwestern Jesus, and to the best of my ability I have done so. I regret to say that at the conclusion of my task I now for the first time see my actions in a cold light. I have no faith in the clemency of my judges, nor faith that any regret for those events I unintentionally set in motion will lead to a pardon. I have no illusions: I shall be executed.
Yet I have one last request. After my death, I ask that my body be torn asunder and given in pieces to my followers. Though I remain a heretic, I see no way of bringing my cult to an end otherwise. Let those who want to partake of me partake, and then I will at least have rounded the circle, my skull joining a pile of skulls in the Midwest, my bones shattered and sucked free of marrow and left to bleach upon the plain. And then, if I do not arise from the dead, if I do not appear to them in a garment of white, Finger beside, then perhaps it all will end.
And if I do arise, stripping the lineaments of death away to reveal renewed the raiment of the living? Permit me to say, then, that it is already too late for all of you, for I come not with an olive branch but with a sword. He smiteth, and when he smiteth, ye shall surely die.
Desire with Digressions
In the end, suffering and not knowing what else to do, I left her abruptly and without warning, taking only the clothes on my back. She was out behind the isolated house, near the meadow, the creek just beginning to rise as it did every year, and I went out and looked at her a final time as she sat in the grass, looking at the creek, facing away from me.
Watching her, after all she had said to me, I felt that if her head were to turn toward me then I would see not her face but an unfeatured facelessness, as inhuman and smooth as a plate. And then, standing there, I realized I could not even imagine what her face looked like, nor recall ever having seen it at all, and this feeling grew until it became a form of panic. In the end, not knowing what else to do, not daring to risk seeing her face, I turned and walked back through the house and out the front door and was gone.
Do you love me? her voice was saying in my head as I walked up the dirt road and then up the gravel road and then down the paved road until I found a car I could steal. Do you love me? it was saying as I drove quickly away, not knowing where I was going. But even in my head I could not bring myself to answer her, and when, finally, to stop her voice from saying it, I finally said Yes, I could not even in imagination lift my eyes to meet her unimaginable face.
So began what proved to be days in orbit, with myself both afraid to go back and afraid to get too far away from her. I knew what I had felt about her face could not be natural, could not have anything to do with any reality connected to her. I could rationalize my fear away, and yet I still could not bring myself to return and look her in the face. I drove, I stole for food and gas, drove some more. Each time I seemed about to go far enough that I would no longer be able to think of going back, I found the car coaxed by my hands into a slow arc, an orbit with her at its center. Why not simply go back? I asked myself, at night, sleeping on the ground beside a guttering fire or sleeping curled in the car’s backseat. And I would tell myself, Yes, I will go back. But when morning came, the sun a blank and burning round such as I feared her face to be, I could only continue my dim and erratic orbit.
Until at last I was forced to abandon the car, engine smoking and radiator stuttering, at the height of a mountain pass and to continue forward alone and on foot, shivering my way over the summit and plodding down the other side. I tried to thumb a ride, but cars were few and none stopped, and in the slow and beautiful descent from mountain to valley I began, ignored again and again, to think of myself as a ghost. What was it she had said to me, that day before she had abandoned me to sit beside the creek and grow strange? And how had I responded? Why could I not recall?
Midway downslope into the high valley was a graveled pullout and a small tavern, little more than a shack, fallen into poor repair. The door was sticky at first, and I thought for a moment in forcing it that it was locked, but then suddenly it gave way and I tumbled in. It was a dim place, lit by little more than the evening light streaming through its single window. It seemed nearly as cold inside as outside, the wind whistling through the walls. There was a small bar, nothing behind it but two bottles of cheap scotch and a weathered keg of beer. A grizzled and poorly toothed barmaid merely stared at me as I approached.
“What you want?” she finally asked.
Nothing, I claimed, only to get out of the cold for a moment and warm up before—
“We got beer, whiskey,” she said. “Which suits?”
Both suited, I told her, but I was at the moment fallen in the cracks of life and a little short on funds.