The Off Season Read online

  Finally, we feel the force of rain. Point Vestal sits north and west of Puget Sound. A little farther west lies rainforest. East lie the San Juan Islands.

  This is the land of sea and fog and rain a Greek liar carrying the Spanish name of Juan de Fuca claimed to discover back in 1592; the land explored by George Vancouver and a raft of others through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Explorers figured nobody could live here except Indians, who seemed half sea otter, half human. To be blunt, this place is gray and wet and haunted. And windy. Always has been.

  Chapter 3

  Jerome says we have one last task before telling about Kune and August Starling and Joel-Andrew and The Parsonage. Jerome points out that in Point Vestal everybody knows about Victorians and about Queen Victoria. We are so smug in our knowledge we might miss telling the reader about Victorians. We know all about Victorians, so we naturally assume everyone else does.

  Queen Victoria ruled England from 1837 to 1901. According to the encyclopedia at the library, she was a good queen. Of course, the encyclopedia is a Britannica, so you can assume a Brit wrote it.

  Queen Victoria set an elegant style with roots in what Englishers and English teachers call “the Romantic period.” When Victoria ran England, the Romantic period changed into the Victorian. In the United States, people settled the frontier and had a Civil War, so heaps paid no attention. In Point Vestal, though, the Victorian period played to a full house.

  Victorians carried style, and not the cheap kind bought at a blue jeans store. They believed in duty. In 1854, for instance, the charge of the Light Brigade happened in the Crimean War. Six hundred and seventy three horsemen charged through a valley toward Russian cannon, with Russian cannon enfilading from both hillsides. Fewer than 200 survived, fewer horses.

  “Just remember,” Collette cautions, “Victorians sometimes defined duty in narrow and selfish ways. They were authors of a lot of human misery.”

  “They built railroads,” Frank reminds her.

  Younger people in Point Vestal—kids at the high school—complain that Victorians were starchy. Our young people believe sex wasn’t important to Victorians. Our young people are wrong. Young people often are.

  We must be tolerant, Bev kindly points out, because after you’ve been doing it for forty-five years, you gain perspective. You forget a nineteen-year-old is most likely interested in being more liberal. Around here, “liberal” means Edwardian.

  Sex talk shocks Frank, a man given to wearing morning coat and spats. Frank is so proper, he rarely gets crumbs on his Ruskinish beard when he eats doughnuts.

  The Victorians were more than simply interested in sex, they were obsessed. Their obsession ran so deep, they managed to conceal it from themselves. A proper Victorian figured sex was—more or less—the unpleasant (and occasional) physical duty accompanying great and romantic love. A joke current in this town, after a hundred years, describes a Victorian gentleman the morning after his wedding night. He tells his wife: “I do hope you are with child, my dear. One would hate to think of going through that again.”

  Collette tells the joke best, since she runs the antique store and has time to study history. Collette claims not to be repressed, and she says Victorians repressed sex so much that they found other outlets. They found fascinations with romance and death and progress.

  To which the literary Jerome adds: “Look at their writers. Look at Edgar Allan Poe.” Jerome explains that nothing moved Poe to greater ecstasy than the death of a beautiful but consumptive virgin. “Because,” Jerome explains, “Poe had to make a living, and that’s the sort of thing everybody was reading.”

  To which the cultured Frank adds: “Look at their lace, their gimcracks, their sugar-candy facades on houses. Look at decorations swirling around like convoluted valentines. Look at sculptors like Rodin; romance on the hoof.” Frank pauses, adds dreamily: “If they were stylistic, is that so bad? It is certainly no worse than those magazines under the counter at the drugstore.”

  Collette giggles. She had no idea Frank even knew about those magazines at the drugstore.

  To which Bev adds sensibly, “Victorians were more complicated than you let on. Some were foolish and stupid; some were intelligent and great. They prided themselves on preparedness. They were usually overprepared. For almost anything.”

  “They believed in progress,” Frank says. “Never forget that. It was their best feature.”

  “They liked windswept moors and heaths,” Samuel says, and brushes his ministerial broadcloth. “They liked stormy beaches. They especially liked beaches where ships had wrecked.” Samuel sighs. “It was a difficult time for Methodists. Methodists are realists.”

  Chapter 4

  Jerome says we have done pretty well introducing our history. It is time to tell the story. We start with 1973 (the year Joel-Andrew came to town) and 1893 (the year August Starling was released from the madhouse), because that is the logical year(s) to start.

  Samuel says Joel-Andrew arrived in the clerical collar of an Episcopalian, while wearing the heart of a Baptist, and spouting the theology of a Moravian; which is not exactly correct—but—no one understood that at the time. As the tale begins, it is both 1893 and 1973, the month of October. Joel-Andrew is on his way to Point Vestal. He’s been coming in this direction for quite some little while.

  The road from San Francisco was long and worth celebrating. It ran through farmland, through hilly country where rivers flowed as rivulets in the sun-seared autumn. It ran beneath giant sequoia trees, so the clarion sun was pushed farther back in the sky. North of the Oregon border, rains coasted from the Pacific on a weather system gray-bearded and timeless. Dark greens of cedar, fir and hemlock contrasted with yellowing leaves of alder and the psychedelic red bark of madrona.

  Joel-Andrew celebrated each step reverently, and took his ministry to each town or city along the route. He was small, lightly built with sandy hair going gray, sandy beard, and musician’s fingers. He carried a violin case on a strap over his shoulder. When he played his hands looked like clever spiders, and even secular music sounded reverent. When he saved souls, his face glowed tranquil with gratitude to the Lord. He had an Episcopal nose, an Episcopal collar, faded jeans, sandals, plus well-groomed nails and gray-green eyes. In San Francisco freaks thought he looked suspiciously healthy.

  From San Francisco to Point Vestal was a thousand miles give or take. Joel-Andrew had been walking four years. He sometimes caught a ride, but the trip took a long time because he occasionally got busted. Busts were for vagrancy, for violin playing, for impersonating a priest, for celebrating the Eucharist on street corners, and for being a fruitcake.

  Each bust was an opportunity. In Mendocino his cellmate was a realtor who repented. In Arcata an attorney became so swayed by the Word of the Lord he promised to quit fighting disbarment and run for public office. In Yreka an automobile dealer was overcome and honored a warranty. If, early in August, Joel-Andrew had not been busted along the Rogue River in Oregon, he might never have heard about Point Vestal. The Lord works in mysterious ways, but the bust on Rogue River was obvious, the kind of straightforward message a prophet expects.

  “He’s clean,” a skinny cop explained to the desk sergeant when he hauled Joel-Andrew into the police station, “but he smells like a freak, he looks like a freak, and he’s higher than a nineteen-foot sunflower.” The skinny cop seemed awfully young to Joel-Andrew. The cop looked like he belonged in a high school band, like he should be chasing behind a clarinet and being chased by a tuba. The desk sergeant looked like a tuba. Joel-Andrew breathed a silent prayer, one that was kindly.

  The desk sergeant blinked clear blue eyes, curled fat fingers, and carried the sincere gaze of a sociologist. “What are you on?”

  “George Gershwin,” Joel-Andrew said. “William James. Slim Pickens. Tallulah Bankhead. Mother Macree. The Founding Fathers and the Living God.”

  “That ain’t acid talking,” the young cop said. “That’s magic mushrooms.�
��

  The police desk sat in a room barely three-dimensional. Brick walls were like untextured linoleum. Paint clung flat to the ceiling like it was afraid to peel. The young cop seemed daubed into his uniform. The blue-eyed sergeant looked like a third-grader’s sketch of her father: flat circles with hair.

  “Flood,” Joel-Andrew said unhappily. “Swine and cattle, barns, houses—Jeep pickups and chain saws. The Rogue River will run torrentially. Devastation. This I must prophesy.”

  “It floods every spring,” the sociologist cop said. “We deal with it.” He looked at the clarinet cop. “Print him, run him. Find a cell until he comes off the high.” To Joel-Andrew, he said, “I’m writing a paper on acidheads for a scholarly journal. Otherwise, we’d use brutality.”

  “I understand,” Joel-Andrew said. “It would skew your observations. It would also be unkind.”

  “I am an educated man, gone to fat in a small town.”

  “Not a sparrow falls,” Joel-Andrew pointed out.

  “Around here we got Oregon juncos,” the clarinet cop said, “Plus a select group of freaks from San Francisco.”

  For the next three days Joel-Andrew did missionary work in the holdover. He had done so much missionarying through the years that the tasks were simple. He played the violin, his spidery and clever fingers peopling the cells with music, with grace, with reverence. His slight form stood above other inhabitants of the cells, while his soul and heart reached toward his brethren.

  “O, Lord,” Joel-Andrew prayed, “may thy servant once more be the instrument of thy power.” He felt the familiar energy, vast and loving, wash through him. He turned to the freaks.

  There were three cells in the jail: one for holdover, one for women, and one for drunks. In the cell with Joel-Andrew were three freaks. One was huge and redheaded. He rolled around and screamed. One was skinny and he hummed. He held one hand in the air so butterflies would have a place to rest. The third was a tubby black dude stoned beyond recognition. Joel-Andrew touched the screaming man’s hand. “You are well,” Joel-Andrew said. “You’ve been visiting infinity, but now you are well.” The power of the Lord surged in Joel-Andrew.

  The screaming man stopped rolling around. He lay curled up, confused.

  “Sheee-it,” the black dude muttered.

  The curled-up man’s eyes closed, opened. Fear and paranoia, which had made his eyes like saucers, disappeared. “Man,” he said, “like, wow.”

  “Lie there and think about it,” Joel-Andrew said. “The Lord did that.”

  It was always like this with Joel-Andrew. He worked among freaks, among kids who dispossessed themselves so they could complain of dispossession. He worked with the ill, the ungainly, the addicts. At some point in his ministry, people began calling him the “hippie priest.” At that point, the Episcopal church kicked him out. Gone was ritual, the celebrating pipe organs, the pomp, the robes. Gone were silent-gleaming and polished pews, sunlight through stained glass windows, and devout parishioners with sanitary smiles. Gone the respect given a man of the cloth. Joel-Andrew became a defrocked priest walking in the echo of St. Francis.

  “Sheee-it,” the black dude said again.

  “Possess my body,” a girl’s voice moaned from the women’s cage. “Like, I never seen nothin’ like that before.”

  It was always this way. Always. He asked them to love each other, and all they could do with the information was hop in the sack with more frequency and less skill than rabbits. Joel-Andrew sighed, persisted, and the Lord renewed his strength.

  During three days in the cell, Joel-Andrew took care of five bad trips, one bleeding ulcer, three cases of clap, one broken finger, various sores, a rampant case of d.t.’s, one Oedipal complex, and he also acquired an aging cat named Obed. None of the freaks turned to the Lord, but the black dude (whose name turned out to be Princeton) said he’d think about it. Joel-Andrew also had four interviews with the desk sergeant.

  “You’ve been walking from San Francisco for four years,” the desk sergeant said. “Interesting.” He leaned back in his creaky chair. Waiting.

  Joel-Andrew admitted nothing. A skinny cat hopped onto the desk. The cat was dark gray, nearly black, with golden eyes and a white tail. A cat so skinny could not be in good health. Joel-Andrew cured it of worms. The cat looked surprised. It curled on the desk and contemplated Joel-Andrew.

  “And,” the sergeant said, “you’ve turned those cells into the Peaceable Kingdom. I don’t know what you’re doing, but the freaks are coherent.” The sergeant leaned forward, fiddled with a pencil. “Interesting. “

  “You have a lovely jail,” Joel-Andrew said without rancor. “Few better this side of Mexico.”

  “But your violin playing is marginal. With the pressures of your ministry, I suppose you have little time to practice.” The sergeant leaned back, waiting.

  Joel-Andrew admired the ploy. “Prepare for a storm,” he said sadly. “It will rain buckets, and soon. This I prophesy.”

  “This is Oregon,” the sergeant said. “It always rains buckets.”

  During the last interview, the one before the cops put him back on the street, Joel-Andrew relented.

  “A prophet experiences things differently,” Joel-Andrew said. “I was not high when you picked me up. I’m that way all the time.”

  The sergeant stopped leaning back and he stopped leaning forward. He made worry-noises. He took notes.

  “I became tired,” Joel-Andrew admitted. “The Lord set me on this wandering path for some purpose. I am not tired from a state of grace, but tired from too wide a ministry. Do sociologists ever study fatigue?”

  “They study stress,” the sergeant said. “They study group illness, pop culture, relationships, advertising, sentiment, war, mores. They study Marilyn Monroe, jazz, inner cities, mobs.”

  “Because,” Joel-Andrew said, “I’m supposed to be a prophet, but the demands on me are medical.”

  “They study homosexuals,” the sergeant said. “They study market trends, busted families, corrupt politicians, folk music in Appalachia, kinship systems among Indians.”

  “Because,” Joel-Andrew said, “I’m wandering in a wilderness of the spirit. I privately long for a small haven of rest.”

  “I know the place,” the sergeant said. “Just the place. If,” he added, “you can put up with a preoccupation for tourists.”

  “Because it’s all beginning to float,” Joel-Andrew said. “A place of stability to restore the soul. Then I can return to these, my beloved . . .” He gestured toward the quiet cells.

  “My hometown,” the sergeant said. “I left there twenty years ago. Tourists drove me nuts. Let me tell you about Point Vestal.”

  “It must have changed in twenty years,” Joel-Andrew said unhappily. “We are in a season of float—of flux—the center will not hold.”

  “That,” said the desk sergeant, “is a bunch of horse pocky. It shows you’ve never been to Point Vestal.”

  It took the rest of August and all of September to reach Point Vestal. Obed, the dark gray cat with the golden eyes and white tail, loved the trip. Obed ate what Joel-Andrew ate: cheese and peanut butter and carrot cake. When darkness came and Joel-Andrew huddled sleeping in barns, Obed knocked the living stuffings out of God’s creatures, mice, baby rabbits, shrews and varmints. During the whole trip he had only a few bad moments, and those came when he tried to mate with a raccoon. By the time Joel-Andrew reached the turnoff to Point Vestal, Obed weighed thirteen pounds and had learned to dance on his hind legs when Joel-Andrew played the violin.

  The two stepped from a modern highway onto a road that ran in layers. A small wooden sign held an arrow pointing down a narrow dirt track. The sign said “Point Vestal.” A modern highway sign said:

  POINT VESTAL—18 MILES

  A RADIANT FUTURE

  WITH PRIDE IN HERITAGE

  A scraggly-looking macadam two-lane ran beside the dirt track. Sometimes the two roads crossed. When they crossed Joel-Andrew heard a low cac
ophony of sound.

  Joel-Andrew experimented. When he walked the dirt track, more noises came from the surrounding forest; the grunts of bear, the faraway cry of cougars, the drip-drip-dripping of water from the tops of giant trees. When he walked the macadam, the forest sported third-growth trees, and he heard far-off engines. The dirt track was muddy from constant rain, but air smelled sweeter. In boggy places the road was corduroy: logs laid end to end and sideways. It was shortly after crossing one of those bogs that Joel-Andrew heard the steady clop-clop of a horse behind him. Joel-Andrew turned. The horse clopped black and shiny in misting rain.

  The man driving had the same slight build as Joel-Andrew. He wore an old-fashioned wool suit and vest, and his dark eyes glowed with romantic fervor. He wore a fine beaver hat, and a light cape. A fancy whip stood in the whip socket of the small buggy. The buggy gleamed glossy black with elaborate gold ornamentation. Black tassels hung along the sides. Joel-Andrew thought the high-wheeled buggy looked like a little square merry-go-round with a roof. The dark-haired man broadcast fervor like a dandelion broadcasts seeds. Joel-Andrew thought the man looked like a Missouri Synod preacher trying to pass at a party run by the Knights of Columbus. Joel-Andrew also figured the man was hitting dexedrine, but Joel-Andrew immediately loved him.

  The man whoa-a-a-ed the buggy.

  “By heaven,” he said, “is it the elder Dick Whittington and his celebrated cat? Or,” he added, “a wandering minstrel?”

  “It’s a wet prophet on a wet road,” Joel-Andrew answered. “It is the celebrated minister of music, healer of souls; and it is the equally celebrated cat Obed who can purr seven languages including ancient Hebrew.”

  “Climb up,” the stranger said. “Can your cat purr in French? The language of love.” When the stranger smiled, he looked like a little kid figuring it was about to get spanked.

  “French is the language of fornication,” Joel-Andrew said. “Let’s not get confused.”

  Eighteen miles on a mud track in a horse and buggy took slightly over five hours. The black hide of the horse shone in the gloom, seemed brilliant when the rig occasionally passed from tall trees into unobstructed daylight. Joel-Andrew viewed the buggy and its contents, impressed by the man’s preparations. A wicker picnic basket held wine, food, tablecloth, and napkins. There was spare oil for the little carriage lamps. An old-fashioned carbine nestled behind a kit of tools for repairing harnesses. There were lap robes, plus binoculars, a shooting stick, matches in a waxed tube, some patent medicine, a small kit of personal items, extra clothing, and a book of poetry.