Carole Lanham
Originally published in Issue XVII of Vulgata, October 2007.
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The
Weeder in God's Garden
Carole Lanham Originally published in Issue XVII of Vulgata, October 2007.
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- Matthew 13:24
Some men eat black-eyed peas on New Years or hammer horseshoes over their front door. Ezra Morley was partial to a different sort of good luck charm. He liked to stand under the Teaching Window before giving a sermon and drench himself in the cobalt glow of Samuel’s stained glass gaze.
If one was paying close attention (and Ezra always was), you could watch the light from those glass iris’ sweep from the choir loft to the angel font to the ribcage ceiling, painting every nook and stone a new electrifying color. Samuel’s calling was one of Ezra’s favorite Bible stories and he didn’t even mind the glint of judgment the glazier had enameled in the middle of the blue. In fact, nothing gave him more pleasure than to look out during nine o’clock sermon and see row upon row of smiling faces spangled in blue judgment. Without this extra bit of encouragement from Heaven, a timid man could never stand before the masses and wrap his tongue around God’s word.
At eight-twenty a.m. on Pentecost Sunday, Samuel was discovered to have bird doot in his eyes. Ezra dragged a ladder across the church yard and climbed up to scrub it off. He was chipping with his fingernail when his ladder gave a lurch.
“I’ve put together another box of Burn Books for you,” old Comstock announced, his big hairy fist gripping the rung by Ezra’s shoe and rattling it once for every word he spoke. Comstock was Ezra’s future father-in-law and Ezra always did as the old man said. “Incinerate rattle them rattle today rattle rattle.”
Rattled though he was, Ezra promised to incinerate the Burn Books after service.
But Anthony Comstock was not one to leave things with a simple book burning. “I’ll thank you to have a word with that Clayton woman too.”
“Clayton woman?”
“Myra Clayton. Myra the Mouth she’s called on Mercer Street, if you catch my meaning?”
Ezra struggled to keep a clear head even as he fought to keep his balance. Surely the old man wasn’t suggesting he begin incinerating women now too?
Comstock released the ladder. “I won’t sit next to her one more Sunday, do you hear? A woman like that has no business in God’s House.”
Ezra assured Comstock he’d take care of Myra Clayton too. Then he checked his watch. If he hurried, there might yet be a minute or two to compose himself at the window before the early birds arrived.
Ezra couldn’t say for sure, but he was pretty certain it was a vanity to congratulate one’s self on giving a good sermon. He congratulated himself all the same, reliving every compliment he’d been paid in the hand-shaking line, and recalling again and again how Adele had smiled and waved at him all throughout his message. He’d bumbled the first part, as he often did, saying, “Their weight shall slide and they shall be left to fall by their own foot,” which, as a matter of doctrine, was rather different than a foot sliding and someone falling by their own weight, but no matter. Adele’s little waves put him back on course. On the way down to the furnace, he replayed the soul-uplifting flutter of those fingers over and over again in his head.
There was only one man Anthony Comstock trusted when it came to feeding evil books to the flames and that was Ezra Morley. Ezra had been known to ignore the likes of A Peep through the Peep Hole and a year’s subscription of 'La Fiancée' Corset Catalogs. Once, he’d dropped a deck of French playing cards all over his feet and managed to pick them up without turning a single one face up. This was not for lack of temptation but rather, because Ezra liked things orderly and peeping through a peep hole was certain to disorder him.
He was whistling Send the Fire when he reached for the first book and tossed it in the flames. Hiss, sizzle, pop! The evil was gone. The destruction of evil smelled like the smoky penance of a Lent candle to Ezra, with just a hint of burnt popcorn. He picked up the next book and whistled another verse. Adele waved at him inside his head. Hiss, sizzle, pop!
The third book was amiable enough. The fourth drew blood.
It was the upper brass corner that cut him, its loose edge sticking out like a dagger. The book was very old and cornered in tarnished quarter-moons that were lovely, if not menacing. “Prepared to fight, are you?” Ezra joked, sucking on his wound. A drop of blood seeped into the title, Jessamine’s Harvest, turning Jessamine into a brighter, redder thing than the flames crackling near his face.
Without thinking, he blew off the book, and this was the start of it. The dust parted like Sahara sand to unveil a paradise too tender for the searing heat of the world. One blow, and Ezra Morley found himself in the grip of Eden. Gethsemane. Babylon’s hanging gardens! Moonlight from a hundred thousand different nights shone in the eyes of the woman on the cover. The woman was Jessamine.
In that instant, Jessamine looked as beautiful as God.
As if there had never been a time before she existed, she appeared on the plate as a flushed young Eve; her head crowned in clusters of black and white grapes, her limbs cloaked in amaranth. Beneath one foot, a pomegranate burst and bled across her toes. Blackberries twined golden tendrils of hair and she pressed a bouquet to her heart.
Ezra was already trembling by the time he flipped to the first page:
I’ve been waiting for you, Jessamine whispered...
The lust that filled him made him laugh. He tossed the book back in the pile; the whole of his body burning more than the jagged cut on his finger. He grabbed another book without looking. He whistled a shaky whistle. Adele waved.
Ezra burned four more books before panic overcame him. Diving into the box once more, he felt suddenly sure he’d burned the book up already. But no. There she was, crescent moon dangling, Jessamine red with blood, toes dripping pomegranate juice. The pale arm that spread beneath his thumb felt softer than real skin. With a smile, Ezra peeled open the book.
Jessamine was still whispering on the first page:
If you take me home and keep me safe, I will unlock the mysteries of your soul and teach you about yourself.”
Precisely then, Ezra Morley found himself doing what all mortal souls are given to do when they’ve set their mind on something. He pulled a bit of saved-up reason from his pocket, smoothed it out flat, and hung it up to see it if it would fly.
Perhaps, Ezra reasoned, Jessamine’s Harvest found its way into the Burn Box by mistake. Yes. That must be it! As the duly elected secretary of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, it was his duty to take the book home and read it. It wouldn’t do to burn something of redeeming value.
The other books he turned to ash without a second thought, but Ezra took Jessamine home with him, pressing her to his heart like a bouquet.
Adele was waiting with tomato soup. “Something tells me the man I’m marrying is the sneakiest man alive,” she said, brushing past on her way in the house, smelling of thyme and bread. “You tell me you clam up when you get nervous and yet, you were magnificent today.”
Ezra hung back on the front step, trying to figure out what was so magnificent about dipping into a questionable book. Adele was highly intuitive. Whenever “something” told her something, it usually turned out to be right. Then he remembered about the sermon. “It was quite good, wasn’t it?”
The parsonage was mostly a one-room affair and Tingleton’s Library made up the bulk of it. The name came from the brass plate over the door. It read Tingleton’s Library and it was said that shortly after Reverend Tingleton left Holy Redeemer, the new man, Reverend Inglesby, had attempted to put up his own brass plate but couldn’t manage to pry Tingleton’s off the wall. Tingleton stuck by virtue of good nails.
Outside of the library, there was a small galley kitchen and a bedroom with a wooden cot and a warped highboy. While Adele filled bowls and washed two spoons in the kitchen, Ezra looked around Tingleton’s Library for a place to hide the book.
Hide?
It was research; that was all. Even so, his heart was charging as he rushed around, opening drawers and sizing up cubbies where he might store his “research”. By the time he remembered about the communion plate safe, Adele was bringing the tray.
“Father will be here at noon,” she reminded him, looking up to see the cabinet door standing open behind the book shelf. “What’s that?”
Ezra had cleared away a set of encyclopedias in order to get at the thing. He threw the Burn Book under the Cs and Ds of the Known World.
The parsonage was old enough to have been built before there was a bank in town and the cabinet behind the third shelf had once served to protect the silver plates donated by Herbert Gum in loving memory of his wife Louise, or so Ezra had been told. The plates had long since been sold off for ceiling repairs and the safe stood empty now.
“It’s a secret compartment,” he told Adele, rapping his knuckles on the little oak door as if he weren’t the least bit out of sorts. “What secrets shall we stow here?”
Ezra laughed at that. He had no secrets.
Adele didn’t care about Ezra’s compartment. “Mr. Moonie has brought me some of his delicious grapes,” she said, dangling a purple cluster under Ezra’s nose. She plucked off a particularly big juicy one and slid it between his lips.
“Mmm,” Ezra said, sucking her finger into his mouth along with Mr. Moonie’s grape.
Maybe it was the rousing success of his sermon. Maybe it was the book. Normally, Ezra did not suck on things.
With a slippery pop, Adele pulled out her finger and wiped it on her dress. “Your soup is getting cold.”
Comstock was regular as a clock, arriving promptly on the twelfth chime so as to fit in yet another discussion regarding the never-ending wedding preparations before the official start of the society’s May meeting. He was a man who liked to check things off his list, marking a check mark in the air and calling out Check! as he checked things off. “Is Mr. Franklin set to play Ave Maria? Check!” “Are we straight with that little Jew about the lamb mince? Check!” “Did you fit the Goodson-Goddards in at the Chadwick table? Check!” “Well then, I’d say we’re all set.”
Everything on the list having being checked off as it should, he clapped his hands and drew himself up to Ezra’s bookshelf. “Let’s move on to vice.”
Even before Ezra decided to take a stab at research, he was given to sweaty bouts of anxiety whenever his future father-in-law started reading his spines. He shuddered now. Just before the man arrived, he had put away the Encyclopedias and wedged Jessamine’s Harvest between Pilgrim’s Progress and Elegant Epistles for the Improvement of Young Persons. It amazed him to see how this secret book stood out like a thistle among lilies.
“There’s a new play causing quite the sensation over seas. Have you heard of it, Morley?” Comstock ran his fat index finger from book to book, frowning or nodding as he saw fit.
Tomato soup turned somersaults in Ezra’s stomach. Why oh why hadn’t he burned Jessamine’s Harvest along with the others?
“It’s called Mrs. Warrens’ Profession. Need I say more?” Comstock scratched at the scar he’d received courtesy of an enraged “Irish smut dealer”. The strange, star-shaped wound on his face was like a badge of honor to Anthony Comstock. It reminded Ezra of stitchwort. “The youth are feverish for Mrs. Warren, of course.”
Title by title, his fat finger drew closer. The Farmer's Land-Measurer, Tillotson’s Sermons, Arizona Ames… After Arizona Ames, Comstock’s finger would be to Pilgrim’s Progress and that would be it for Ezra. He would lose Adele. The society would shun him. He would be fired from Holy Redeemer faster than you can say, “Naughty! Naughty! Naughty!” Comstock, for his part, could put a bullet in Ezra’ head if he decided this was reasonable and no one would blink, for the man had just that much power around town.
Smile. Frown. Frown… Ding dong.
“Oh,” Comstock said, spinning away from the shelf. “That’ll be Bakewell with the play. I’ve asked him to stop in early with a copy.”
While Ezra mopped his forehead, the rest of the group began filing in; Mrs. Ansoro with her stiff bicorne hat. Mister Bland who worked at the post office with Comstock and ought to know filth when he saw it. Travis Peach from the boy’s school. Sisters Mary Immaculate and Mary John Therese. And Adele’s friend, Olive McMurtle, who thought Ezra ought to look to the Old Testament more. Adele herself was off to volunteer at the Eye and Ear Infirmary. She did not, on principal, believe in the benefits of book-burning.
“The matter must be settled in the heart, not the pages of a book.” That’s what Adele believed. “The corrupting forces of this world as well as the inspiring ones, are only as powerful as the human heart allows them to be.”
It was a lovely thought and a pure wonder given the man who raised her, yet on this point alone, Ezra was forced to side with her father. Adele was a sheltered girl, an Innocent who failed to understand that vulgarity was on the rise. Someone must put a stop to it before people completely lost their way. Adele had once accused Ezra of behaving too high and mighty, a notion that thoroughly mortified him until he realized that she was misreading his intent. It wasn’t wrong to fight for moral standards.
“Would you burn a misguided heart then, I wonder?” Adele had demanded to know. “Should we not, instead, strive to heal it and make it strong in preparation of the next battle?”
“How about we inoculate the body before the heart has a chance to grow ill?” Ezra had proposed.
“Do you honestly believe you can dispense with sin, Ezra Morley? You think you can keep evil at bay? It will find you, my dear. It will find me too.”
It was all wasted breath. Adele was born with a nursing nature while Ezra felt called to eradicate the disease. This being the case, she held hands with the blind and peeked into ears while the society worked out what was and was not a disease.
In any case, the members were all there with the exception of Mayor Plunkett but he would be along too, thirty or forty minutes late and smelling of King Leo Peppermint sticks with a hint of Tullamore Dew. “Oh what a day! What a day!” he would sputter and spurt, his tardiness, among other things, tolerated for obvious reasons. Recently, Mayor Plunkett (‘Ole Plunk, as Comstock liked to call him) had helped Adele’s father to become a special agent of the United States Postal Service with police powers up to and including the right to carry a weapon. Comstock always carried his weapon. The only time he took it off was at the meetings and this he would do with such slow percision that Ezra had come to think the man only took it off to remind everyone that he carried it. He was in charge of the society and stood tall as a king in the circle of their chairs, calling the meeting to order even as he cerimoniously unarmed himself.
“I’ve alerted the authorities about Mr. Shaw’s play,” he announced, causing Travis Peach to leap to his feet and burst into applause, and the sisters to nodd, and Olive to turn her pinched face away from Ezra for a change. “As we all know, a single book or a single picture may taint forever the soul of the person who reads it. I should not like to think how many men might be sent to the brothels if this rot opens in our fair city. We must do all we can to stop it!” With a clunk, he dropped his gun beside the binoculars on Ezra’s prayer desk.
Old Comstock had eyes that crackled like a lit match and few people, least of all Ezra, were ever given to cross him. There was something of the devil in the hot wild sulpher of his pupils. Ezra did not like to bow down to the devil but Comstock seemed to have an easy time of it whenever there was the smallest of guilts to be enflamed. In fact, the man often bragged of the fifteen weak-minded deviants he’d driven to suicide. The Weeder in God’s Garden, he called himself, for he felt honor-bound to rid the world of all its libertines, pulling them up by their dirty diseased roots like so many unruly clumps of quackgrass. Such was his vigor, he’d once received a box of smallpox scabs from an admirer to go along with his stitchwort Although Ezra did not care for the fellow, whether he agreed with him or not was quite beside the point. When Comstock passed around a petition stating offense to Mrs. Warren’s Profession, Ezra signed his name long-side the man’s.
As a boy, Ezra had longed to be visited in a dream and experience something like what Mary or Gidion or Mortecai had experienced in the Bible. He wanted to see angels and talk to God. He wanted the sun and the moon and eleven stars to bow down before him. He wanted to be turned into a cake of barely bread and smite the Midianites. On the night he brought the Burn Book home, Ezra had just such a dream. The vision seemed so real, God must have had His hand in it.
Instead of the desert, Ezra found himself in an over-grown garden, preaching to woodruff and catmint. “Did you forget about me?” a flower whispered. The whisper was coming from the yellow heart of a purple cosmos bud. Curious, Ezra knelt by the flower and worked the petals open.
“Jessamine?” he said.
Then he sat up in bed awake.
He plucked the book off the shelf and carried it back to bed, dripping nickel-sized crimson drops in his wake like a crumb-trail left by the lost. His cut had reopened but he didn’t notice.
God is good, Jessamine said.
“So what do you think, dear? Father swears the mince isn’t all it’s cracked up to be and yet, I’m not altogether sure how I feel about Scotch Broth.”
Ezra rubbed his eyes. He hadn’t slept a wink all week. Mince?
Whenever Ezra thought about his bride-to-be, he thought of a needle and thread in a handy little carrying case and a purse brimming with hankies. If you had a runny nose, Adele was your girl. In need of a mint? A Freligh’s tablet? A pencil? Adele came prepared. They’d met at an ice cream social over scoops of Black Walnut and it had felt like the perfect match. She liked his noble chin and suffered a deep longing to press the wrinkles from his cheap suit. He was fascinated by her ability to pin her hair up in so tidy a fashion, not a single silky strand had a prayer of popping free. They became engaged a month later.
“You don’t care how the lamb is cooked, do you?” Adele said.
“I’m sorry, darling. I think I’ll make more coffee. This stuff is weak as water.”
“Oh poo! Forget the coffee and forget the lamb. Something tells me you’ve got bigger things weighing on your mind.”
“I just need coffee, that’s all.”
The book was propped up behind the Post Toasties next to the coffee pot. Just one quick peek, he promised himself.
To make up for putting Adele off lately, he’d picked up a little shell cameo she’d had her eyes on for months. Now if he could just remember where he’d put it…
Touch me today like you touched me yesterday, Jessamine beckoned.
Ezra’s hand shook so much, he tore the word “touch” between the “o” and the “u” and tears sprang to his eyes. Jessamine didn’t like for him to be sloppy.
Do it nicely, she whispered. Gentle. Gentle.
He laid his hand against her spine, stroking it with his thumb. Gently.
That’s better.
“Why do you do this to me?” Ezra asked, stepping into the farthest corner of the kitchen and speaking against her grapes.
You’ll always take care of me, won’t you, she answered?
“Last chance to say how you feel about Scotch Broth,” Adele called from the other room.
Ezra barely heard her. He was too busy promising to take care of Jessamine forever.
Outside of a nervous tussle a few years earlier with his first fiancée, Lillian Pendlebury, Ezra had not touched a woman in all his twenty-eight years. He tried to do right and more often than not, he succeeded. Lillian had liked to tease him and put her hand on his thigh. One night, she drank too much champagne and touched more than his thigh. The next day, they’d come to the mutual agreement that she was not meant for the role of a young minister’s wife, a circumstance that left Ezra itchy and distracted until Adele came along. Adele was different. One could remain under control with a girl like Adele.
Self-control was of the utmost importance to Ezra. His father had failed to keep a good head and Ezra and his mother had nearly starved because of it. Instead of having a father, Ezra had a broken pair of binoculars and an old pocket-watch, the only things the man had left behind when he disappeared. In Ezra’s opinion, those two items spoke volumes about the sort of damage a lack of self-control could do. Though they no longer worked, the binoculars had moved from desk to desk with Ezra through life as a reminder of what can happen when one fails to look at the bigger picture. Since Jessamine had come into his world, he had taken to putting the binoculars away.
This wasn't the only change.
Lately, when he was forced to leave Jessamine’s Harvest for an hour or two and have a walk with Adele or pray at the bedside of a sick parishioner, Ezra would look down at his shoes and say to God, “I promise I’ll stop reading the book.” He would mean it too, with every drop of blood that was in him, and every breath and heartbeat and thought in his head. It even felt like it might be easy.
Then he’d go home and he’d look at the book and he’d want the book more than he wanted his blood, his breath, his heart, his brain. He’d hold it to his breast in the black of night, as if God couldn’t see what he was doing. Somehow, the mere act of holding it inspired many things, guilt not the least among them.
But what was a poor simple man to do, after all? Even the book’s leaves were enchanted; their deckle edge causing paper cuts that bled like red raindrops. Jessamine’s Harvest did not open with a common crinkle of paper, but rather like phlox petals unfolding to the moon. Jessamine did not crinkle. She spread.
On Saturday, Ezra took every encyclopedia off the shelf and, beginning at the end, stacked them on the floor in backward order Z, Y, X,W… . He opened the safe, shoved the book in, and closed the safe. Beginning at the beginning, he lined up the encyclopedias on the shelf in forward order A B C D…
That done, he climbed in bed. He said his prayers. He felt proud of himself.
Z, Y, X,W… he stacked them on the floor. Two minutes later, Ezra climbed in bed with Jessamine.
Even though he’d not eaten a proper bite in days, when he opened the book on the hollow cradle of his empty stomach, his hunger disappeared. He read the words, as if for the first time, understanding them better than his own thoughts.
On the underside of the book, where the plate rested hot against his skin, Jessamine’s velum flesh moved up and down, riding the waves of his breathing. Blackberry thorns pricked him as her hair fanned out across his diaphragm. A moth fluttered. Grapes burst. A slender thread of pomegranate juice slid down his ribs.
Ezra had studied the bouquet she carried under a magnifying glass and decided it looked like a bundle of foxtail, at best. More likely ragweed. He wondered why Jessamine would choose to gather ragweed in a garden brimming with Dianthus and Sweet Peas.
That Sunday, Ezra couldn’t help but notice that Samuel’s gaze, for all its sparkly light, appeared a little pompous. Breaking with habit, he decided not to waste time dallying beneath the Teaching Window. He had forgotten to finish writing his sermon and had to scribble the rest down in the vestry while people were squeaking about on restless bottoms in the pews.
For every four words he wrote, Ezra would stop and nibble at his pen, his mind muddled like a man on his honeymoon.
If only his congregation wasn’t so needy, he might have found the opportunity to explore the book more fully by now. Sleep was becoming a bother too, as was food. He wanted no part of either. When he did eat, the meal was never as good as he imagined it might be. This mattered very little to him during those precious hours when he could be with Jessamine. It was only when they were apart that he began to notice how his life had taken on the subtle tinge of dishwater.
This week, there were no pats on the back in the handshaking line for Ezra after his sermon, only Anthony Comstock glaring at him over the heads of pokey parishioners, his mouth sneering a venomous sneer.
The old grouch was not even a member of Holy Redeemer but that didn’t stop him from checking up on Ezra. “I have two words for you,” he said, passing without a handshake. “MYRA. CLAYTON.”
Normally, Comstock’s look alone would have had Ezra shaking in his boots. Now he was having trouble pretending he gave a flying fig. This sense of newfound bravery might have seemed like more of a victory if only the flying fig part didn’t extend to everything else that a man was meant to feel. When Adele had given him a kiss for buying her the cameo, her lips had all the effect of putting a sardine in one’s mouth. If pushed, Ezra could eat sardines but the taste hardly made up for the feel of them, which he found oily and unpleasant. It was his opinion that it was best to be quick with sardines and Ezra had hurried through Adele’s kiss in like. He couldn’t wait to chew her up and swallow her down so he could get on to his sponge cake pudding.
When the church was empty, he stood alone, rubbing his weary eyes. His stomach rumbled. He fell down on the chancel steps and used his arms to make a pillow for his head on his knees. Ah, to close his eyes for just one minute! It would be like dipping one’s head into the cool baptismal depths of Jordan. Better than a pat on the back! Or steak and gravy. Or a kiss…
He closed his eyes.
They itched. They burned. He opened them. He closed them.
It was hardly steak and gravy.
Above him, on the third panel of the Teaching Window, the Ark of the Covenant gleamed in sun-lit hues of cranberry and gold. Little sunlit Samuel curled up beside the gold. “Speak, Lord,” Ezra whispered, “for your servant is listening.”
Ezra wanted to hear the voice of God, he truly did, and yet, he couldn’t even climb to his feet, his knees were so wiggly at the thought that God might ask him to burn the book.
Indeed, the only sound that Ezra heard was the wheeze of that old furnace.
Myra Clayton was confused. “Honestly, Reverend, I don’t know what to say.” She looked offended, as one might expect, and Ezra didn’t like to offend her, especially since she seemed so determined. She shook her head. “I’ve never met a man who could withstand this for more than five minutes. Most of them don’t last one.”
He stared down at the top of her head. “It might help if you stop calling me Reverend.” But even as he said the words, Ezra knew he’d just complicated his sin by telling her a lie. With a sigh, he flipped open his father’s pocket-watch, reading it through the natty swath of her hair. Sixty-seven minutes. “You can stop now.”
“Goodness! I must be losing my touch.”
He zipped his pants. “Believe me, it’s not you.”
“But you looked so ready, honey.”
“Getting ready isn’t my problem.”
Myra Clayton scratched her nipple. “I guess I could knock two bucks off the price, given how things worked out.”
Ezra threw his money on the table. “Could I ask another favor instead?”
“Name it.”
“Sit on the Liturgist’s side of church next week.”
They shook hands much as they did every Sunday, but inside himself, where no one could see, Ezra’s heart was breaking.
How could it be that Myra’s mouth, for all its notoriety, offered no more pleasure than anything else in his dishwater world?
It was the following Saturday and someone was thumping on the door. “Open up, Ezra! I know you’re in there.” Thump. Thump.
Ezra came awake with Jessamine under his lips and hurried to hide her on the shelf. Adele scurried in and looked around. “Are you alone?” she asked.
Ezra was aware of Jessamine one row down from the top but he didn’t look at her. “Just me and the books,” he said. The buttery feel of calf skin lingered on his mouth. He licked his lips and stole a quick taste, even as Adele frowned.
He used to think of hankies when he looked at her. Now he thought of sardines.
Adele laid a cool hand on his cheek and frowned at the criss-cross of red highways that mapped his deceit from his ear down to his chin. Without meaning to do it, Ezra shot a glance at Jessamine.
“You spend too much time reading for leisure these days,” Adele chastised, her eyes wandering with his to the book case. “When’s the last time I saw you up late with The Good Book? You can’t give the Slippery Foot sermon again this Sunday, you know. Everyone’s talking about your lack of originality. They say you’re distracted because of the wedding, but something tells me I’ve got nothing to do with it.”
She gazed at him hopefully, wanting to be made over, but Ezra didn’t have it in him. “I haven’t been sleeping good,” he told her, and this much was certainly true.
“Are you getting cold feet?”
He scratched his unshaven chin. “Maybe.”
The hurt in her eyes made his heart seize with pain. He loved Adele. Of course he did, but even as he looked on, her hurt dissolved to anger.
“Well I’m tired too, Ezra. Tired of being ignored. Have we decided what the real trouble is yet or would these last five minutes be better spent putting on a clean shirt for the party?”
Party? He’d completely forgotten about Olive’s birthday. “I’ll get the shirt.”
While he was changing clothes, Adele let out a cry in the other room;
“Ouch! For Heaven’s sake, Ezra, have a care how you put up your books. Pilgrim’s Progress just cracked me on the skull.”
Jessamine’s Harvest was written by a fellow called Augustine de Bellomante in 1252, making her nearly seven hundred years old and in certain light, she showed it. Her hinges were cracked and her frontis water-spotted. A rust-red thumbprint sullied her shelfback. Many of her pages were stained in like. But she was unbearably beautiful too. Where there should have been mold, there was honey. Must failed to touch her. If one pressed their nose deep into the crevice between recto and verso, a human scent clung to the folds like perfume dabbed on the bend of an arm.
As promised, Ezra had done his research and learned that de Bellomante had been imprisoned by Pope Clement the IVth for casting figures and charmes and interfering with the conflict between the Holy See and Manfred, the usurper of Naples. His books were proclaimed a disgrace by papal loyalists and systematically destroyed. Nonetheless, De Bellomante went off to his fate kicking and screaming; declaring at the top of his lungs: “You may destroy me but my words will live on long after you’ve burned everything else to ash!”
Ezra could see it too; the whole charred planet cold with death, and Jessamine lying untouched among the ashes. It made him smile to think of it. She would be spared and, in small part, he would be too; his fingerprints on her every page outlasting Armageddon. Recently he’d begun to suffer grave concern for his immortal soul and this blackened world where Jessamine lived on was slowly becoming his vision of eternity. Heaven was a curl of smoke, and Jessamine alone went unscorched into the void. Ezra wanted her to survive. It was his job to help her do it.
“How could you do it?” Adele wanted to know. “The Slippery Foot? Honestly, Ezra.”
Sad to say, it was one of those rare days when Ezra minded his dishwater life and longed to do more than preach the same old tired sermon. He was panicked, in fact, yet when he stood at the pulpit, the same old tired words were all he had left to give. The queasy feeling in his stomach was the exact queasy feeling that had driven him to seek help from Myra the Mouth. On this day, his sights were set on Green’s Chop House rather than a middle-aged strumpet with over-blown skills.
Guilt as much as hunger had driven Ezra to propose that they dine at one of the most expensive restaurants in town.
“Extravagant,” Adele muttered, ordering the cold ham because it was the cheapest dish on the menu. Her father grumbled too, though he ordered the chops at double the price.
Ezra slapped his menu shut. “I’ll have the porterhouse with the German fried potatoes and a white fish salad.”
“You will not,” Adele said.
“I will too. I’ve always wanted to try it. I hear it’s delicious.”
Adele began rooting in her purse as if all her worries might be set to rights if only she could find the proper size button in her kit. Or a pill for curing wayward men. Ezra said; “Bring us a bottle of Moet and Chandon White Seal too. We’re getting married a week from Tuesday.”
“You know I won’t have any,” Adele said.
“Then I’ll drink yours along with mine.”
Ezra pretended to come up with the champagne off the top of his head when actually he’d asked around. He tucked his napkin under his chin and felt his stomach rumble with joy. “The best porterhouse in all the city,” Mr.Hugeford had assured him.
Ezra prayed that this was so.
When the waiter brought the tray, the smell alone made Ezra want to cry. Off came the tin dome and there it was. “Beautiful,” Ezra gasped.
Adele was still picking through her buttons.
It was all he could do to wait until the others dug in. “How’s that ham?” he asked Adele.
“Cold,” she replied.
Ting. Ting. He ting-ed his knife and fork together and cut off a tender pink sliver of steak. He wanted it like nothing else and, eyes closed, popped it in his mouth, smacking the juice off the fork.
“It’s lucky for you, I’ve brought some Happy Digestives,” Adele said.
But there had been a terrible mistake.
Ezra scrambled for another bite. This time he mixed the meat with the potatoes and ran it around his tongue.
“Waiter,” he shouted, scooping up another bite as the little man scurried back to their table. “This steak has no taste. No taste at all!”
“Don’t be silly, Ezra,” Adele said.
Ezra threw down his fork with a clang. “I’m not being silly. Bring me another one.”
The waiter looked around at the other patrons who in turn looked back at him. “Right away, sir.”
“I hope you’re proud of yourself, Ezra. Everyone is staring.”
Ezra wiped his mouth on his napkin. His stomach ached with emptiness. The waiter brought more meat. “Nothing,” Ezra said, fighting back tears. He could understand it about his soft-boiled eggs or the cheese sandwich he sometimes made for his lunch, but this was the finest, most expensive meal in all the Lower East Side. He pushed his plate away and, even though he didn’t taste a thing, polished off his wine. He drank Comstock’s cup too, then drained the bottle dry.
Not a twinge.
“I’m sober as a judge,” he growled.
Adele did not believe this.
At home, he tried giving her a kiss, something that had failed to arouse him in far too long now. He kissed her harder than he ever had, his fingers digging into her waist.
“That’ll do,” Adele said, righting her hat.
At least this much did not surprise him. If Myra the Mouth couldn’t stoke the fires, it was doubtful his chaste young Adele could. “When you sober up, I hope you’ll remember that Olive is coming by for the Scriptures at eleven o’clock tomorrow.”
“Scriptures?”
“Yes, Ezra. You promised to pick out two for her to read during the wedding. You do remember the wedding we’re planning, don’t you? You promised something poignant.”
“Poignant, yes. Fine.” He slammed the door behind her. “Nothing. I feel nothing!”
Only one thing made his blood pound.
Ezra raced into the library and pulled her down. “Jessamine,” he groaned.
I’m here, she said. I’m always here.
It was a particularly sweaty night. Ezra’s eyeballs ached but he could not close the book. His heart was charging like a rabid beast. Here was his fire, his food, his God! When the bell chimed, he still did not fully come into himself. He staggered to the door with his finger in the page. “Yes?”
It was Olive. She reached for the book. “Are those the passages?”
Ezra whipped Jessamine behind his back, snapping suddenly awake.
“You look like a corpse,” Olive grunted. She didn’t care for Ezra.
“I don’t feel well.”
Olive was staring at his arm, the one he bent behind his back. Ezra felt forced to relax it or risk looking guilty. “Why are you here, Olive?”
“The scriptures. Remember? Or shall I be reading from…” She tipped her head sideway and read: “Jessamine’s Harvest?”
“God damn it,” he cursed. “I did forget. Come in then.”
“Where I come from, men of God do not take the Lord’s name in vain,” Olive informed him.
“Sorry, Olive, but there are men of God and then there are men about to marry. Now where did my Bible get to?”
“You don’t know?”
“Not a clue.” He went to the shelf and slid Jessamine in between Cooke’s American Arithmetic and Birds of Paradise on the top shelf. “Would you like coffee?”
“I’d prefer tea.”
“Of course you would. Sit down. I’ll find my Bible.”
Olive sat down.
“The Minutes from the last meeting are there on my desk. Would you mind looking them over and checking for errors?” Satisfied that this would keep her busy, he hustled off to the kitchen for tea; riffling through Bible passages in his mind as he went.
He filled the kettle and threw it on the burner.
“You’ve misspelled insipid,” Olive called from the other room.
“Thanks for noticing.”
“Twice.”
“Circle it, will you? I’ll change it after you leave.”
He rushed into the bedroom and grabbed his Bible off the nightstand. Now to pick out something poignant…
“There is no ‘s” in damnation,” Olive reported.
“Circle it.”
He flipped to 1 Corinthians 13. Lots of people used this one. It was about love being patient and kind. He decided that might be rubbing salt in the wound, given how patient Adele had been forced to be of late.
John 15 suggested they love one another as God loved them, but Ezra didn’t feel quite up to that anymore. He made his way through Psalms and Proverbs. No. No. Maybe. The kettle whistled. He was dropping in the tea ball when it occurred to him that Olive was no longer shouting out mistakes.
His strode into the library.
There she was, his beloved Jessamine, being helplessly probed by the sanctimonious spit on the tip of Olive McMurtle’s finger as it flipped from page to page.
“What are you doing?”
She bobbled the book in her surprise, but recovered quickly. “Ezra!” she admonished, clucking her tongue. “How could you? This is filthy!”
“Give her to me.”
“Her? Oh Reverend. Does Adele know what you read behind her back? Does Special Agent Comstock know?”
Olive always called Comstock Special Agent Comstock, lest anyone forget.
Fear gripped Ezra like a fist. “Give me that book.”
“No. It’s not fit for a Christian world. We must burn it.”
“Never.”
Her eyes grew round. “Never?”
Ezra made a grab for it but Olive was a spindly thing. “I’ll not let you come to ruin over this,” she declared, and now she placed it behind her stiff spine and darted around the sofa.
“It’s my book, Olive.”
“Then shame on you! I need only read ten words to see how depraved it is.”
He held out his hand. It shook. “Don’t make me take it from you.”
“I have your best interest in mind.” She backed up toward the fire place. She must have stoked the flames because they’d all but fizzled before she arrived. Ezra could hear them roaring now. Heat blew against his face.
In Olive’s fingers, Jessamine squirmed, trying to get free. He could feel it! She didn’t like having that woman’s sour slobber all over her. She didn’t like the way Olive gripped her in her bony claws.
The bony claws moved, as if to hurl his beloved into the fire. Ezra moved too. He sent Jessamine flying from her grasp, his fist cracking the side of Olive’s face as it completed its stroke.
Olive screeched and grabbed her cheek. Ezra only heard the painful thud of Jessamine landing on the hearth stones. He grabbed her up and brushed her off and held her against his chest. Only then did he see the fury flaming in Olive’s eyes.
Her hand was on her face. “You hit me!”
“It was an accident.”
“You hit me because of a book? You’re lost, Ezra Morley. Lost!”
“I didn’t mean to hurt you. Let me get you some ice.”
She leapt away. “You’ve done quite enough. When the special agent hears of this, he will demand your resignation from the society and from the church. As for Adele… I shouldn’t think she’d put up with such nonsense from a callous brute like you. And you call yourself a man of God?”
Ezra saw the welt he’d made on her face and his own skin burned with shame. Olive was right. This had gone too far. He didn’t deserve Adele anymore.
Olive grabbed her handbag. “I might not be able to wrestle it from you but Special Agent Comstock will. There won’t be a single ash left once I’ve told him what I’ve seen.”
“No.”
Olive laughed. “Yes! You have let yourself come to disgrace because of a book. A book!”
They did it together; Ezra and Jessamine – their desires working in unison. Moving as one, they lashed out at that pointy vindictive face; his hand the muscle, Jessamine’s body the weapon. One whack and she was on the floor.
“Does this feel like an ordinary book to you?” Ezra wailed.
They did it again. And again. Olive cowered from the blows but Ezra and Jessamine were too strong. He didn’t like that Olive was getting her blood all over the book. He didn’t like that, some day, when the world was a cold dead flame, Olive McMurtle would be printed all over Jessamine’s fine calf skin too; out-living time its self. It wasn’t pleasant watching her blood speckle the rug, the table, the Society Minutes, but it was worse seeing her bitter, hypocritical juices sullying Jessamine.
“Stop it,” Olive begged, but they did not stop. They bludgeoned the woman until she no longer begged. They bludgeoned her until she was as entwined in the fibers of Jessamine’s Harvest as the very words themselves. Like it or not, Olive McMurtle became part of the story. Part of the glue.
It’s not wrong to fight for the things you care about.
Ezra’s face was in his hands and he shook his head from side to side. “This is not right! I’ve killed her.” He lifted his eyes and glared at the book. “We’ve killed her.”
Some amount of sacrifice will always be required when it comes to preserving art for future generations.
“I can’t live with this,” he cried. Every time he looked around the room, his stomach heaved. He would have gotten sick, had there been anything left in him to vomit up. “They’re going to find me and everything is going to be ruined. They’re going to find you.”
You should not be afraid of what others might see.
As he read, Jessamine’s words seemed to grow an actual voice, and it was bigger than the bloodied furniture and the bloodied floor and the bloodied walls.
“He’s going to destroy us, Jessamine. Do you know what he calls himself? The Weeder in God’s Garden. He’s going to murder us with poison, pluck us up by our roots, and incinerate us in the stove!”
A good man will search inside himself and find the strength to face down evil.
“I am not a good man!” Ezra screamed. “I used to be a man of God but look what I’ve become.” He stared down at his sticky hands.
A bad man will search inside himself and find inspiration of a different nature.
“No. I’m done, do you hear me? Done!”
Then it falls on me to help you find your nature so that we both may live.
“No!” He slammed the leaves shut.
Silence followed. Silence so complete, he could hear the earth turn.
Ezra’s finger inched forward and flipped open the book. “Jessamine?”
The destruction of art should never be tolerated.
Ezra had read this somewhere before. It was an oft quoted line by Augustine de Ballomante, Jessamine’s creator. It was chiseled on a marble block in the Third Street Library right above the fiction.
“Look at this place!” he yelled, taking in the mess all over again.
People will see what they want to see.
“Well, when they see what I’ve done to Olive, they’ll think I’m a monster.”
That doesn’t mean it’s the truth.
He looked at the book. She was right. No one would ever think him capable of murder.
He could clean things up. There was a lot of blood but it could be done. It wasn’t too late to start fresh. Spiteful people like Olive were the weeds in God’s Garden. Not his precious book. But Ezra would do right by Olive anyway. He could try and make things up to her family somehow. Complimentary funerals for all, perhaps? An offering-free year for each and every McMurtle. Ezra would happily foot the bill. He petted Jessamine’s leather, rubbing it on his cheek. “I can do this.”
Two seconds after he set the book down, however, doubt began to worm its way into his heart again and he wept as he rolled Olive up in the And-Whatever-Ye-Do-Do-It-Heartily-As-To-The-Lord carpet. He prayed as he dragged her down the steps. He cursed God as he wiggled and wedged and pushed Olive McMurtle into the furnace flames. Not until he returned to Jessamine, did he stop weeping and praying and cursing.
She waited for him on the prayer desk; obedient and dutiful. With Jessamine, no tender stroke received an angry slap. No embrace was ever rebuffed, no matter how rough or how hard or how much it stirred him. If he shivered when he drew near, she rewarded him with words of love. His desire fed her.
He turned her over in the fading light, admiring her all over again; her golden hair, the fruit beneath her foot, the garden swarming with wild beauty. To lose such a book would be a sin. Ezra put her in the communion plate safe. Then he conducted his own little burning, feeding the blood-spattered minutes for The New York Society for the Suppression of Vice into the fire.
Due to the unspeakably rude sound of Mr. Hancock’s snoring, Ezra was forced to speak much louder than was comfortable for him. “The verse I have chosen for my text today is Their foot shall slide in due time.”
There were only twenty people in church this Sunday compared with the usual ninety. Adele’s sad face was among them. He didn’t care. He could hardly keep his eyes open.
“…for it is said, that when that appointed time comes, their foot shall slide and they shall be left to fall by their own weight.”
Ever since he’d turned Olive McMurtle into coals in the church furnace, sleep alluded Ezra. He was so tired, he could hardly stand. He rubbed his eyes. He looked out over his dwindling congregation.
Why was Adele’s hair gray?
He blinked fast several times but nothing changed. Her skin was gray too. Gray as the pew. The floor. The candlelight.
Ezra cleared his throat. Fortunately, his tongue knew the words so well, he didn’t need his brain. “God will not hold them up in these slippery places any longer…”
Samuel looked at him across the nave, his eyes the color of tears. Somehow, the prophet’s stained-glass flesh had become a puzzle of lead. Ezra’s mouth dropped open. How could he have let it happen, he asked himself? How could he have let his church turn to ash?
Ezra closed his eyes so as not to see the gray anymore. “With a heavy heart, He will let them go; and they shall fall into destruction.”
Was Jessamine’s Harvest magic? The work of Satan? Or was it only him? Until he saw those moonlit eyes, Ezra had been the very model of piety.
No. It wasn’t true. He’d bitten a hole in his fist one time after Lillian spilled Ladyfinger pudding down her dress and asked him to mop her up. He’d mopped a bit too thoroughly, then promptly took himself home to gnaw. But that was just one moment of weakness.
Another time he hit his head on the bathhouse wall; banging his way to three stitches after his cousin Agatha lost part of her bathing costume while they were swimming at Lloyd Neck. But he was seventeen then. Did that count?
He’d ignored the playing cards, every single one, there was no disputing that. He took himself off to seminary. He gave up Lillian even though he wanted her more than anything.
He sat in a cold tub for two hours after the ice cream social, never mind about Adele’s prim bun.
Never mind. Never mind. Never mind.
***
Someone was thumping on the door. “Open up Ezra Morley! I know you’re in there.”
Thump. Thump.
“Come on now, son. I’ve come to help.”
Ezra laughed at the thought of that. He answered the door laughing.
Comstock fingered his stitchwort and sneered. “Sit down, Morley,” he said. “I think I know what’s going on here.” Making the usual ceremony of it, he began unarming himself.
“Do you?”
“I’ve seen it a hundred times. You’re a young man and you’re eager to wed, but you’ve been keeping secrets, haven’t you?”
“Have I?” Ezra sniffed the air, wondering if Comstock could smell the leftover stench of Olive’s cooked bones. Ezra could.
“For Adele’s sake, I pretended not to see it.”
“It?”
He set the gun on the prayer desk. “Canterbury Tales.”
Ezra was speechless.
“I won’t ask you where you got it. I won’t ask about Tom Sawyer either”
“Thank you, sir.”
“But the problem goes deeper than that, doesn’t it? It’s not just Adele who’s worried. The parishioners have asked me to speak with you as well.”
Ezra couldn’t help himself. He stared past Comstock to the safe. He wished the old fool would go away and leave him to Jessamine.
“By my experience, there are two sorts of backsliders; those who drift for a moment and then come to their senses, and those who are lost forever.” Comstock sighed deeply. “I won’t ask you which you are, Morley, but I do beg on behalf of Adele that you find it in yourself to do the right thing.”
“The right thing? Yes sir.”
“If you like, I could take over as secretary for you.”
Ezra agreed this would be best.
“Don’t drag others down with you,” Comstock told him, raising his finger in the air. “Check! If you’re going to leave her, do it swiftly.”
“Check!” Ezra said, making his own check mark with his finger. He giggled.
Comstock frowned. “I had high hopes for you, I must say.”
“Me too.” He thought of all those pretty playing cards sitting on his shoes. He rubbed the scar on his fist.
At the door, they shook hands. The man didn’t even seem to recognize the smell of toasted Olive. He walked away clueless. Or maybe he was only pretending, like with Canterbury Tales?
In any case, it was not until Comstock had driven away that Ezra noticed he’d forgotten his gun.
Laughter filled the room.
Then tears.
“Would you burn a misguided heart?” Adele had once asked him.
Ezra, of course, always did as Old Comstock wanted. He lifted the gun to his chest and fired, wondering what they would make of it when they realized his blood was made of dishwater.
***
As a matter of necessity, every stick of furniture in Tingleton’s Library had been replaced, but Adele wasn’t going to think about that. This was the last day before the house officially became Reverend Percy’s and she didn’t want to miss her opportunity.
Unlike the sofa, the encyclopedias remained and Adele stacked them on the floor one at a time, her efforts growing more feverish with each new volume. A through D formed a proper tower but by the time she got to Q, the room looked burgled. Oddly, when the shelf was finally cleared and the moment was at hand, she stood before the bookcase, frozen with fear.
She could see him knocking on the door of the little compartment like it was yesterday. “What secrets shall we stow here?”
Adele reached for a hanky. First her dearest friend in all the world had disappeared, and now she’d lost the man she loved. On the day of their intended wedding, she’d buried Ezra instead or marrying Ezra. For three weeks now, she had been asking herself why.
What secrets shall we stow here?
She swallowed hard and peaked in the cabinet Two objects had been placed toward the back, the first being a book.
Jessamine’s Harvest it was called and it was beautiful. The woman on the cover was haloed in a nimbus of black and gold light and held a bundle of wheat to her breast. Adele opened to the front page and read the words out loud:
I’ve been waiting for you, Jessamine whispered…
Adele turned to the cover, examining it again. Like the tablet of Margaret of Antioch in the lobby at the Eye and Ear Infirmary, Jessamine posed against a backdrop of leafy green scales, a dragon’s heart crushed beneath one foot.
Adele opened to Ezra’s bookmark and read some more:
Some amount of sacrifice will always be required when it comes to preserving art for future generations. You should not be afraid of what others might see. A good man will search inside himself and find the strength to face down evil. A bad man will search inside himself and find inspiration of a different nature. It falls on me to make the most of your nature so that we both may live.
The destruction of art should never be tolerated. People will see what they want to see. That doesn’t mean it’s the truth.
Adele smiled. There was nothing so wonderful as a book offering good practical advice. She liked to think that Ezra had changed his tune before he passed. Reaching into the safe again, she pulled out his other secret.
It was a pair of binoculars; the ones he used to keep on his desk. Adele tried looking through them but she couldn’t get them to focus. Still, Ezra had thought enough of his father’s binoculars to keep them around for all these years and that was good enough for her. Something definitely told her she should take them home and keep them with the book.
“Ouch! What the devil?”
One of the brass corners on the book had come loose and was in need of repair. In her clumsiness, Adele had cut her finger and dropped the old binoculars, splitting them in two.
Grabbing adhesive tape and a roll of gauze from her handbag, she wrapped up her finger and used the left-over adhesive to tape the sharp corner back in place. She tried to tape the binoculars too but one of the lenses had cracked and fallen out and the broken pieces resisted mending. A tear ran down her cheek as she dropped them in the waste basket. She turned back to the book.
There was something rather dear about the way the bandaged corner soaked through with her blood. In that moment, it felt almost as though they shared the injury.