Part Forty Three

Worshipers search for Kerith Ravine like it’s Brigadoon or something. Preacher purposefully kept its location a secret, not wanting a bunch of ersatz pilgrims in there trashing the place. But it’s not really that hidden. A little bit of leg work, a little bit of research, and anyone could find it using public documents. I found it without too much difficulty. And I went there just to satisfy myself that Preacher didn’t go back there when he vanished. I didn’t think he would – it’s not like him to retrace his footsteps – and he hadn’t. I do think one or two others have found the place since Preacher left, though, because when I got there the windmill was still running smoothly, seven years since Preacher had serviced it last.

Kerith is in the Sierra Nevada Mountains on the Nevada-California line. And it’s not, technically, a ravine – it’s a caldera, a small geological bowl marking the spot where a volcano blew millennia ago. In the 1950s and early 1960s the US Geological Survey and the Agriculture Department sponsored a joint project on desert farming there. There was a tiny spring – not much more than a spot of damp ground – which had probably saved a few Indians foolish enough to get caught in the desert, and which had supplied water for a few other passers-by, too, miners, trappers, outlaws, whatever.

So the feds sank a pipe into the floor of the caldera and built a windmill to pump water the with state-of-the-art 1959 technology, and built a little shack for the research scientist assigned to that lonely duty, and for a few years they tried to prove that the desert could be made to bloom.
It apparently didn’t work and the post was abandoned early in the first Nixon administration. Tricky Dick had other things to worry about, one assumes.

Shortly after that a Korean War vet named David Valdez took up residence there. He was from a nearby town and had, apparently, been one of the local workers hired to set up the base. When it was empty Valdez happened to be sort of between homes – his ex-wife had thrown him out of his last abode some years back, and his veteran’s disability check was entirely committed to fortified wine, leaving no other discretionary income for housing. But when the Princeton-educated, government-employed, clip-board toting farmer moved out of the caldera, Valdez moved in. He showed up in town periodically after that but his benefits check mostly sat in the bank, as the desert seemed to have burned away his taste for alcohol. He would buy a new pair of boots every once in awhile. Some canned goods. Axle grease for the windmill. But he liked going into town less and less and so his visits got pretty sporadic. And then they stopped altogether. And by that time there was nobody left who really remembered where that caldera had been, anyhow.

So now you know what you need to know to find it. Or wait a few decades until the archive is opened, because the specific location is in there, too.

Since most of us have seen Dylan Finch films since 1998, that last blog entry didn’t really create much of a cliffhanger effect, did it? And if you are even a cursory reader of People or US or Entertainment or Premiere, you knew about him getting lost in the desert. You might not have known how close he came to dying, because – to his credit – he didn’t really milk the episode for as much publicity as he could have.

At any rate, when he woke up he was still hot and thirsty and everything still smelled like sand. But he didn’t think for a moment that he was dead because he didn’t think that Cass Harding would be in Hell with him, putting wet rags on his forehead.

“You’re awake,” she said, looking into his eyes. He tried to speak, failed, tried to cough, had a little more success.

“You need to drink,” she said. She helped him sit up and then she put a tin cup to his lips. He grabbed it with both hands and took a few weak swallows. It felt good running down his throat and expanding coolly in his stomach.

“Much better,” he croaked softly, looking around. He was in a small wooden shack and sunlight filtered through the spaces between the planks. The floor was wooden, too.

“We’ve been trying to give you water through a wet rag,” she said, holding onto the one that she’d been putting on his forehead.

“Where the hell are we?” he said. “And, um, where are my pants?"

“We’re in a canyon called Kerith Ravine,” she said, “and your pants are over there.” She pointed with her head and he saw his pant – the legs cut off just above the knees – draped over a dusty metal box that looked like an army footlocker. The footlocker and the green canvas cot were the only items of furniture in the dim shack.

“No offense, but this is the shittiest hospital room I’ve ever seen.” He took another gulp of water, his hands a little steadier on the cup at this point. It struck him that his right hand felt OK. He stretched it out and peered at it in the shadowy room.

She laughed. “You’re in the only bed for many miles around,” she said, “so relatively speaking, you’re in the lap of luxury here. No roads, no telephone, no radio, no electricity. Haywood says that when you’re strong enough to walk for eight hours, he’ll lead us to the highway where we can probably get a ride.”

“Haywood?”

“The man who’s bed you’re in. The man who saved our lives, too.”

“I was bitten by a snake.”

“He told me. Your arm was red and puffy before, but it looks OK now. How does it feel?”

“OK,” he said, surprised. But there was a pulsing ache in his right leg just above the ankle. A pain he was only then aware of. “But the leg still hurts.” He looked down. There were bruises and an ugly-looking scab where the bone had jutted through the skin. But in the gloom he couldn’t see the large bump where the break was.

As he looked at his leg the shack door opened, letting in a square of bright white daylight that hurt Finch’s eyes. He squinted at the figure who came in and the door closed quickly, quietly behind him.

“You must be Haywood,” Dylan said, proffering his hand and waiting for his eyes to readjust.
There was a pause and the other man hesitantly, clumsily took Finch’s hand and shook it. It was as if, Finch said, he’d never heard of shaking hands before. As if it was something he’d read in a book once a long time ago and wasn’t entirely sure how to execute.

“Dylan Finch,” Finch said into the silence.

The dazzle of daylight faded and Preacher Haywood came into Finch’s view. He was a little under six feet, rather thin, but not in a starved-hermit sort of way; just thin. His hair was long but he was beardless and looked reasonably clean and well-groomed. At the time Finch didn’t think anything of this, but later it struck him as incongruous.

“Preacher Haywood,” the man said, after a slight pause. To Dylan it again seemed as if Haywood had to struggle to remember the words, as if he hadn’t spoken English very recently.

“Thank you so much for… for bailing us out,” Finch said, feeling a little awkward at the way Haywood’s eyes searched his. Haywood stared at him a moment later, and then bent to look at the leg. He ran his callused hands lightly across the skin.

“There are still some bruises,” he said. “Don’t bang it when you get up.”

“I’m not planning on getting up anytime soon,” Finch said, lying back down on the cot. “It hurts like hell. I mean I saw it, before. I saw the bone coming through the skin.”

“Preacher set it while you were still out in the desert,” Cassidy offered.

“That needed a – what’s it called – a – I had a friend who broke his leg. Not nearly as bad. Something Reduction and Fixation,” Finch said. “Pins holding it together. X-rays to make sure it’s positioned right. No offense, Haywood, but the longer I wait to have that operation, the more work they’re going to have to do to get set right. I don’t want it healing crooked. I don’t want a limp.”

“It’s set right,” Preacher said, rather distractedly, tipping the tin cup up to Finch’s mouth. Dylan swallowed reflexively to avoid drowning.

“Are you an orthopedist?” Finch said, when he could breath again. “I don’t want to seem ungrateful, but the sooner I can get this looked at, the better.”

Haywood shrugged. “Soon as you can walk to the road, I’ll show you the way.”

“How far is that?”

Preacher paused on this longer than usual. As if, Finch recalled, he was not only trying to recall the words, but also the concept of time.

“About as long the moon stays up,” he said finally.

“A night?” Finch said, sarcastically. To be fair, there is a difference -- moonrise to moonset can be less than an entire night.

Haywood shrugged again.

“I’m supposed to walk an entire night on a broken leg? Can’t you just walk out yourself and… and…” and he stopped talking. Then gasped. “Oh, hell, I have to…”

Preacher grabbed him under one arm and Cassidy grabbed him under the other and got him two steps out the door before his bladder let go. He didn’t pee much but it burned and it looked dark and cloudy running down his leg.

“Good thing I’m not the… modest sort,” he said, looking away from Cassidy. His good leg wobbled underneath him. He kept his bad leg bent up.

Around him he saw Kerith. It was a bowl set in the mountains, with a small garden plot and a windmill near the shack. Farther from the windmill the desert mingled back in with the green and the mountains around them seemed sere and lifeless. Finch had a sense of concentric circles going from green to brown, radiating out from the spring in the center.

The sky was blue and cloudless and hot.

“How long have you lived out here?” Finch said, as Preacher marched him wordlessly back to the shack.

“Not sure,” Haywood said slowly. “Cass said it was August of 1998. As near as I can tell, I got here in January of 1995.”

“Three and half years? What’s the nearest town?”

Haywood shrugged and eased Dylan back onto the couch.

“You don’t know?”

“Never been there,” Haywood said.

“Where do you go for supplies?”

Haywood said nothing, and Cass laughed. “I already had this conversation with him,” she said. “We’ve been saved by a genuine old-fashioned hermit. Hasn’t talked to another human being in over three years.”

“Horseshit,” Finch snapped.

“Solid food,” Haywood said. “When you’re strong enough, you can leave.”

Finch did suddenly feel exhausted. “Steak and eggs,” he said. “And… orange juice. And a latte. Skim milk.”

With that he fell asleep as if he’d been drugged.

Haywood drank from the tin cup.

“He’s not usually like that,” Harding apologized. Not that she would know. “But… I mean, he’s a movie star.”

Preacher said nothing.

“More water for him?” she said.


Two days earlier: she’d collapsed a hundred yards from the shack, and Preacher had scooped her up and carried her effortlessly to the trough – a 55-gallon drum cut in half, lengthwise. She had tried to tell him about Finch but he didn’t seem to hear her. Just carried her to the steel basin and dumped her in. The water was sun-warmed but clear and she could feel it rehydrating her one pore at a time. He took a crude clay cup from a hook on the nearest leg of the windmill and drew some cooler water from the spout, and helped her drink it. She gulped it greedily and then told him about Finch as the stomach cramps hit her. She struggled and managed to keep from vomiting and when the spasms passed he gave her another cup of water. Then he carried her into the shack, her dress sopping and clinging to her. He deposited her onto the cot in the welcome shade and disappeared. He returned a moment later with a ewer of water – made from the same unglazed red clay of the cup – and put it on the footlocker next to the cot.

“He’s by a tower of rocks,” she wheezed, referring to Finch. Haywood – although she didn’t know that was his name, yet -- turned and walked out without saying a word. It occurred to her that he hadn’t said anything at all the entire time.

If it was a hallucination, she thought, it came with the sweetest, clearest water she’d ever had.
She slept, and was awakened by the sound of a splash outside. It was still daylight, but the sun seeped through the chinks in the shack at a longer, lower angle. She sat and felt lightheaded, took another drink, and stood. She felt weak and thirsty and famished but all-in-all, much better. Her dress was dry, her long, dark hair was dry. How long, she thought, was I asleep? How long would it take me to dry out in this desert air?

She took a few steps toward the door and the man who’d saved her burst into the room with a soaking wet Dylan Finch in his arms. Even though Finch was the same height, and probably 20 pounds heavier, than the long-haired man, he carried the actor as if he were light as a feather.

“How…” she said, trying to decide which question to ask first. “Is he OK? How did you get him back here? Where are we? Who are you?”

The man placed Finch gently on the cot.

“He’ll… be… OK,” the man said, his voice even more halting and uncertain than it would be when Finch spoke to him later. “I… carried him back. You are in a caldera I call Kerith. And my name is Preacher Haywood.”

“You’re a preacher?” she said. She didn’t know why this was the first thing that popped out. Certainly she was more curious about how he’d managed to carry a man weighing 180 pounds across the desert – an expanse of desert that she’d nearly died crossing, unburdened.

There was a long pause. “No,” the man said. “That’s my name.”

She looked over his shoulder. Preacher had pushed up Finch’s pants leg and was running his hand along the black-and-blue expanse of his shin.

“How’s his leg?”

“Bad break,” Preacher said. “I reset it out there while he was still unconscious. Less… screaming that way.” He didn’t look as if he was making a joke.

“What happened to his arm?”

“Snake bite,” Preacher said. He stood. “Take his pants off.”

He came back in with a knife and cut the legs out. “Keep out of the sun,” he said to her. “I’ll bring you some food. Soak these rags and keep his skin moist. Use this bit of cloth to let him drink – keep it saturated, and he’ll suck on it reflexively.”

“How will I know when to stop?”

“When he wakes up, or stops sucking,” Preacher said.

And so the last two days. She nursed Finch, and Haywood seemed to keep to his own schedule – tending the garden, making food, and disappearing entirely for short periods.

“Is he going to be OK?” she said to him after Preacher shook his head “no” in response to her watering question.

“Yes. Leg and hand are fine, kidneys are working. He’s drinking on his own. A little food for strength, he’ll be fine.”

Cassidy was a little nervous still around Haywood. They hadn’t spoken much while nursing Finch. Initially, he said so little she wondered if he had some sort of mental disability. Later, she realized that he only spoke if he felt there was some important and non-obvious piece of information to give her – he would respond to direct questions, tersely, and usually with the most obvious and narrow answers imaginable.

But as time had gone by Haywood had seemed to remember the art of, well, if not conversation, at least speaking to other human beings. She had spent most of the time in the shack, and he had spent most of the time out of it; nights she spent sleeping on the floor with a rag pillow, days she spent keeping Finch as hydrated as possible. He worked in the rather dense and tangled garden mornings and evenings, avoiding the midday heat, and prepared two meals a day, and what he did at night was a mystery to her. She was aware of him sitting on the tiny plank deck in front of the shack – about three feet wide and uncovered, it was exaggerating to call it a porch, although he referred to it as such – when she woke up in the middle of the night the first night. And she was aware of his absence when the same thing happened the next night.
But she’d managed to get some information out of him when their paths crossed. That he was born in 1967. That he’d been there since 1995 without any outside contact. And sometimes – rarely – he spoke on his own. About living in the desert. About tending to his garden. About a growing awareness of being just a small link in a big chain.

Even about cooking. Her first night there he gave her a tamale that was exquisite. He showed her the stones he used as a mortar and pestle. She could see the corn stalks behind him. The twining vines of pumpkins and squash. Bean plants on trellises made of steel rebar, leftover from one of the prior occupants.

He told her his story of arriving at Kerith. An abbreviated version. He said, “I left Chicago with some demons. Decided to go back to San Diego. The closest thing I have to a home town. Catch up with some old friends, you know, try to figure out where things went wrong. Hitchhiked my way to a rest stop in Nevada and decided, what the hell, I’d take a little hike in the desert. Couple days later and I woke up face-down in about two inches of water in the trough. Leaky pipe. Saved my life. Of course I fixed it later. Probably shouldn’t have. Anyhow I got the hand-pump working – the windmill was nearly frozen – and went into the shack and found the previous owner. Been dead awhile, I guess. A few years. Pretty well mummified by the desert.” He stated this very matter-of-factly. Cassidy recalled that she had slept on that cot – the cot upon which, apparently, some guy had died, the cot upon which his remains had dry-rotted for a couple of years – and had a strong urge to go writhe in the sand until the cooties got off of her.

“At any rate,” he said, “there were some canned goods. All gone now, but enough to keep my alive then. And lots of seeds. And a garden gone wild, pretty parched. At one point there was some sort of drip-irrigation system to keep everything alive, which probably worked until the windmill seized up. I strip it down and lube it pretty good every six months or so, but I imagine that it ran for a year or two after the last guy died.”

“Lube it with what?”

“That other shed on the other side of the garden has all kinds of stuff. Most of it government issue, but not all of it. The axle grease is plain old Mobil, but none of the cans are dated. I think the last person here probably had a little more contact with the outside world than I do. Maybe not, because nobody came looking for him when he died... but I think he was getting supplies from somewhere.”

There was more. About living in the desert. About feeling connected to the natural world, and at the same time being acutely aware of his intellect – of self-awareness setting him apart qualitatively from everything around him, even as he felt so physically interconnected with it. I can’t tell you, he said, why the corn grows, or how. It is a sort of natural miracle. But the corn wouldn’t be planted at all if I wasn’t here to do it. It wouldn’t get the water it needs to sprout if I didn’t direct it there. When it sprouts and produces kernels of its own its genetic survival is not ensured unless I agree to help – and the trade-off is, I will eat most of the kernels it produces. So do I exist because of the corn? Does the corn exist because of me? Both. But I am aware of this. The corn isn’t.

The next morning Finch awoke with the sunrise, just as Cassidy did. She brought him a thin corn gruel.

It wasn’t bad, Dylan had to admit. The gruel, that is. There were little bits of fire-roasted squash in it, and salt, and some sort of desert sorrel. Plus, he said to Harding, I am so damn hungry that I am ready to start eating the cot.

But within 30 minutes he has Cassidy and Haywood help him hobble to the little lean-to outhouse a couple hundred feet from the house.

Haywood insisted that Finch’s leg was fine. Finch just needed food and water for a couple of days to get his strength back. Finch disagreed. His leg had been badly broken and he needed professional medical help. Haywood didn’t argue with him. But he didn’t give in, either. Just walked away. Came back with a bent piece of rebar that was left from the windmill construction. “Cane,” he said. “Use it, if you want.”

Finch spent his first awake-day inside the shack. Gruel for breakfast, panbread for lunch, some sort of tamale for dinner. He was convinced that it wasn’t actually delicious. That its deliciousness was an illusion caused by his hunger.

Harding was a little more accepting. “This guy,” she said, “is like the hermit Wolfgang Puck. He’s got a cast iron skillet, a big stew pot, and his garden. That’s it. I don’t know how he does it. But everything he makes has been delicious.”

“He’s full of shit,” Finch opined as he finished dinner. “There is salt in that. And some sort of seasoning. Where does he get salt unless he goes into town? Leftover salt from three years ago?”

“Salt lick in the hills, over there,” Haywood said. They hadn’t known he could hear them. “All natural. Got a little potassium in it, I suspect.”

He sat down on the narrow deck with them outside the shack.

“So how do you stay out here for three and a half years without getting completely nuts?” Finch said, rather accusingly. He figured if he was obnoxious enough, Haywood would go get help just to be rid of him.

“Do you know if you’re nuts?” Haywood countered. “If I was really nuts, I probably wouldn’t realize it. For all I know, you two are hallucinations.”

Finch and Harding looked at each other nervously and Preacher laughed. It was the first time either of them had heard it, a full, deep, cheerful laugh. Rather infectious; Cassidy laughed with him, and even Finch smiled.

“The truth is that I was worried about that when I got here, too,” Haywood said. “I thought about the fact that there are two types of hermits – the ones who get wiser and the ones who get crazy. I wasn’t so much searching for wisdom as I was trying to avoid psychosis. And it occurred to me that the ones who didn’t go nuts had one thing in common, which was a very disciplined, tightly scheduled approach to each day. You know, latins, matins, vespers, nones – the religious hermits worked hard, had prayers at regular hours, adhered to a strict rule. And it seemed to help them keep from getting nuts. At least I thought it did.”

“Are you religious?” Finch said. “I thought you said Preacher was just your name.”

“No, I’m not particularly religious,” Haywood said. “But I admired that discipline. So I adopted my own schedule. Gardening, washing, cooking, things like that. And time for meditation during the day. I tried to stick to the schedule and it helped. It helped keep me focused on the tasks at hand and… and it didn’t keep the demons at bay so much as it forced them to approach in single file. Where I had a better chance against them.”

Finch wasn’t sure they were all defeated. Haywood seemed more than a little weird.
The next afternoon he opened the footlocker and found Haywood’s wallet. There was a dust outline around it. Inside was an expired Florida driver’s license and $120 in small bills. None of them were dated later than 1993.

No photos. An expired insurance card from the federal government.

Almost against his will he started to be convinced.

When Preacher said they would be walking out to the road in two days neither of them believed him, because Finch was still leaning heavily on the cane. And both Finch and Harding remembered the desert too vividly. Feared it too much, still.

But the night he said that, he and Harding sat up talking until the moon was high overhead, and whatever they spoke about changed her mind. When Finch awoke and came outside he found Cass wandering around the entire valley in a sort of euphoric daze that he found more than a little unsettling.

“Did she find some peyote or something?” Finch asked, as he and Haywood ate a breakfast of beans and corn tortillas.

“It’s an epiphany,” Haywood said, not paying much attention to her. “I’m going to take the windmill down and service it. It’s a few weeks ahead of schedule but it should be done before I go.”

“You can do it when you get back. We don’t want to mess up your sanity-saving schedule.”

There was a pause.

“I might not come back,” he said. “It’s time. It’s time to go.”

Finch didn't know how to respond to that. So he looked out across the caldera. Cassidy walked languidly between the cornstalks, letting her fingers trail upon the leaves. They could hear her laughing.

“Seriously, what’s wrong with her?”

“It’s an epiphany,” Haywood repeated. “A sudden awareness of the presence of the Divine. She doesn’t have that one-ness, yet, but she can sense that it’s nearby. All around her. It’s good. She’s not ready to understand that she’s it, too.”

“What the hell are you babbling about?” Finch said.

Haywood laughed. “Nothing,” he said. “Just babbling.”

He went out into the garden while the morning sun was still manageable and gently hoed away weeds and let the irrigation tubes drip small amounts of water onto the plants before the scorching sun was high enough to evaporate it instantly. Finch sat there in front of the shack looking at them both suspiciously. I think, he thought, that I need to get better fast, or Cassidy will be as crazy as he is.

Finch’s classical education was… well, lacking. For a graduate of Akron’s public school system it wasn’t too bad, I suppose, but it wasn’t good enough for him to instantly think of the lotus-eaters. He thought, instead, wasn’t there that story, about that Greek guy, where they ate something and wanted to stay on the desert island?

Close enough.

Cassidy sat down next to him with a beatific smile.

“What are you so delighted about?” Finch asked her.

“Everything,” she said. “Let me tell you, I don’t know if it was the near-death experience, or the fresh air, or the healthy diet, but I am seeing things a lot more clearly now.”

“I can tell,” Finch said. “Haywood thinks you can see God.”

“No,” she said, “but I can feel Him holding me at the moment. I mean… I mean look. Look.” She pointed at what seemed to be random spots around the caldera.

“I think your sunstroke has returned,” Finch said.

In the end the best she could explain it is this:

“Preacher says,” she said, “that when you realize that there is no distinction between the Divine and the non-Divine, then you realize that your every action should be an act of worship. And right after he said it I took a breath and then suddenly all this was obvious.”

I double-checked this. Dylan Finch distinctly remembers that she told him that. She remembers telling him that, and remembers that Preacher told her that. The semi-official motto of the Worshipers is “let every act be an act of worship,” and as near as I can figure, that started with a throw-away line he laid on Cassidy Harding when she was still under the effects of dehydration and sunstroke back in 1998.

For what it’s worth, I guess this makes Cassidy Harding was the first Worshipper. Before anyone called it that.

Finch was the second, of course. Much more reluctantly.