Part Forty Four

OK, so I begin recounting Finch’s visionary experience with some… trepidation. This is really where it begins, not with the story of the tree in Virginia, which I can chalk up to fatigue and hunger and the sort of bullshit for which Preacher apparently became famous. But when I get to these otherwise sincere and rational people uttering this kind of crap I don’t know whether to simply ignore it as raving or dutifully record it without comment and let its absurdity speak for itself.

The former would be unfaithful historiography and the latter would be far too subtle for the likes of me. Hence the trepidation.

Keep in mind that what I’ve been writing about – Finch and Harding and the desert and everything – is garnered from two primary sources, namely, Dylan Finch and Cassidy Harding. Both of whom seem like eminently normal human beings. They're both rich, but I don’t hold that against them. Finch went on to do some good work after he got out of the desert – dying, or at least thinking you’re dying, apparently sharpens one’s artistic sensibilities. Harding was proven prescient in the way she avoided the dot-com collapse and she is still making a fortune designing software interfaces. They both credit Worship in a modest, off-hand way, although it is certainly clear that both of them had achieved success in very competitive industries long before they fell into the clutches of a deranged desert hermit with a degree from St. John’s.

So when they tell me soberly and casually of miracles…

At any rate, back to the desert.

Finch groused about wanting to go home even as he hobbled around the little shack, and Harding floated about the green patches with a beatific smile as if she was on drugs, and Preacher continued almost as if they weren’t there – working his garden plot, patching a hole in the roof of the shack, pounding out cornmeal with a stone mortar and pestle. And he said to Finch: not tonight, but the next night, we will walk out of here.

Finch snorted. “Which one of you is going to carry me? I couldn’t make it to the end of the ravine without resting right now.”

Preacher squinted up at the sky. It was late afternoon. “I want to show you something,” he said. “Come on.” He stood and started walking toward the hills at the end of the caldera, opposite the entrance.

Finch just watched him for a moment, but curiosity got the better of him and he started hobbling after Haywood. Cass looked up from where she was teaching herself how to roll out a tortilla from his stone-ground meal.

“I want to take a bath,” she said.

Finch raised an eyebrow and prepared a caustic remark.

“Use the trough,” Preacher said. “You know where the soap is.” It was homemade liquid soap that Preacher concocted from boiled pine boughs and carrion. It smelled like ammonia and probably had twice as much lye as was safe. “The trough needs to be cleaned out anyhow. When you’re finished scrub it out with sand.”

She nodded and went back to rolling the tortilla. She had already, Finch noticed, picked up Preacher’s deliberate, thorough approach to the chores of the place. He didn’t know what she was like before the desert. Maybe she was always like that. But he suspected not, and he understood that part – even he, who was much more skeptical of Haywood than she was, found himself unconsciously emulating Preacher’s silences. Mimicking his easy, diligent approach to simple tasks would be an obvious next step.

“So what is this thing you want me to see?” he said, struggling to keep up. Even before he said it he knew Haywood would ignore him. He said it more out of defiance than anything, the words coming on the heels of his unwelcome recognition that he had been reflecting Preacher’s Zen silences.

They went into the low hills and the terrain grew rockier and harder to navigate and the incline grew rapidly steeper.

“Wait up,” Finch gasped after a bit. Haywood ignored that, too, angering the actor, and he struggled with the cane, stomping it down harder than necessary to make his point. “Wait up,” he said again, “my leg is killing me, and I have to drag this fucking thing.”

Haywood kept on walking.

When they were about three-quarters of the way up the mountain that marked that boundary to the caldera Preacher led them out onto a ledge and sat down. Finch stumped up to him shortly thereafter, panting, sweaty, furious. “What in the fuck are you trying to prove, Haywood?” he demanded. “My leg hurts. I’m not used to this desert nomad bullshit anyhow. It’s hotter than hell. Christ, there’s no way I’ll be in shape to make that walk tomorrow night now. I don’t even know how I’m going to get off the mountain tonight. And isn’t it going to be dark before we’re down? I don’t know about you but I’m not in the mood to get bitten by another snake. I…”

Preacher just pointed to the spot next to him on the ledge.

“What?” Dylan demanded.

“Sit. Quiet. Watch,” Haywood said softly.

Finch sat down, more clumsily and noisily than he really had to, just to make a point. The caldera stretched out below them, unobstructed. The sun was almost at the peaks to their right, and shadows stretched almost to the shack. Peering closely, he could see Harding sitting in the tub. At that distance, it was hard to tell she was naked.

“All that just to watch her take her clothes off?” Finch said. “Jesus, Haywood, I know you’ve been out here a long…” and his voice trailed off.

The sun touched the ridgeline to the west and golden twilight was suddenly refracted around and down into the little canyon. It was as if the light trickled down the mountainside and into the valley, filling it from the bottom up as slowly as the sun sank; golden light covered the valley floor, so that the ground vanished into a golden haze, and then slowly the squash vines vanished under the tide, then the water trough and with it, Cassidy; the cornstalks went away, the roof of the cabin sank beneath the slowly rising tide of gold and fire. And as Finch peered wordlessly into the optical illusion it seemed to him that he saw currents in the light beneath his feet, and within the currents things moving and taking shape. He peered into the caldera, fascinated. The shapes and eddies and specks within the light took form before his eyes and the light – sun-lava, he called it later – filled the valley until it was just below his feet, and then suddenly the effect ended and it was just a dark desert night.

He was aware of a pressure on his arm and suddenly realized that he was leaning far, far over the ledge, the better to peer into the light. Haywood was holding onto his arm to keep him from plummeting over the ledge.

Finch turned his head and looked at Haywood, and moved his mouth a few times, but nothing came out. Nothing seemed right.

“Did… did you see…?” he gasped, finally.

“Nice sunset,” Haywood answered.

“No, no… In the light. I saw – I mean there was a…”

“Just an optical illusion,” Preacher said, dismissively, and started back down the hillside.

Years later, in a Beverly Hills coffee shop, Dylan Finch said to me “He didn’t want me to say what I was in that scrying-tank. It was for me alone, I suppose. And I haven’t told it to anyone, and I’m not going to tell you. But it was something I had to see. Things I wanted to see and things I didn’t want to see. Wonderful and terrible and welcoming and horrifying. And I’ve tried to tell myself that it was fatigue and hunger and that maybe Preacher even hypnotized me but I don’t think it was any of those things.”

“What was it?” I asked him.

And he just smiled, quietly, powerfully. As if possessed of secret knowledge. I report this here because him smiling doesn’t come across on the taped interview that’s in the archives.

I should have used video, I suppose.

At any rate, Finch followed Preacher back down the mountain, moving carefully in the dark, and it wasn’t until they were back amongst the green growing things and a newly washed Cassidy was smiling at them that he realized he’d left his cane up on the mountain. And that his leg didn’t hurt at all.

That night Preacher disappeared after they ate. Fire-roasted peppers and black beans in the tortillas that Cass had made. The discussion they had seems silly, even to them, safe and secure in the civilized world, but they both recall that they were dead serious about it at the time – whether their speedy recovery from their injuries was from Preacher or from the water. She thought the former. He thought the latter. He tried to tell her about what had happened on the mountain. She said the same thing had happened to her when Preacher stood with her in the garden at dawn and showed her a bean blossom opening to the first light. He was certain that what he’d seen was nothing like that at all.

“When we get back to the world,” she said, suddenly tired, “how much of this is going to stay with us?”

“Nothing, I hope,” Finch said. “I will never set foot in the outdoors again.” He laughed.

“Seriously,” she said. “I mean if we had never met Preacher – if a rescue helicopter had found us instead of Preacher – we would have gone home, and we would have talked about the effects of a near-death experience, and after a few days or weeks it would have worn away and we would be back to the same old bullshit that we did day-to-day before all this happened. But will it be different with Preacher? I mean… can I still make everything I do a prayer, the way Preacher does? Will the sight of a blossom opening suddenly give me an insight on the nature of God? Will watching the sunset erase any phantom pains and obstacles that are plaguing you? Or will all of this fade away?”

“Fade away,” Dylan said, thinking he was being honest.

She looked at him. “You wish,” she said. “I think that the next time you are in a film we’re going to see you praying. I think you’re as impressed with him as I am, only you don’t want to admit it.”

Finch looked into her eyes and said nothing for awhile. Then, slowly, he answered her.

“I think,” he said, “I need to be away from him and you and all of this for awhile before I can answer that question. Because I don’t know how much of it is him, and how much is me, and how much is just the situation.”

They talked about Preacher and the things he’d said and the way he acted until they could no longer keep their eyes open. Finch insisted that she have the cot, now that he was feeling fine.

When he awoke at first light, on the porch, Haywood was sitting next to him in the lotus position with his eyes open. Finch hadn’t felt a board tremble, hadn’t heard a squeak.

The rest of the day Finch set about preparing the place for his absence. Banking the embers, he called it – being ready for the next unlucky traveler who stumbled across it, whether it was two weeks or twenty years later. He stripped down the entire windmill turbine, slathered a thick coat of axle grease on everything, and put it back together. Put good seed stock in bags in the metal footlocker in the shack. Made sure the handles on his tools were in good shape, and that there was cornmeal in a rat-proof ammo box, and before they left he restocked the tiny woodpile with sticks and logs he scavenged from a deadfall up in the mountains.

They ate well. Preacher was, for him, loquacious. They were laughing at his stories as the sun sank and they all headed out of the caldera. Haywood, Finch noticed, didn’t even glance over his shoulder; just walked out nonchalantly. For his part Dylan couldn’t help but look back as the sun his the peaks to the west, wondering what it was like to see the caldera fill from the bottom. But he didn’t see anything but deepening shadows.

They walked for a few hours, keeping the ridge to their left. With plenty of water and their feet wrapped tight it didn’t seem nearly as difficult, but Cass again wondered how Haywood had managed to carry Finch all that way. At one point they stopped and there was a metal canister of water half buried in the sand.

“You put that here last night,” Finch realized.

“I hated to take it out of the valley,” Preacher said. “The next person might need it. But we need it now.” He refilled their canteens – more army surplus – and carried the canister with them until it was empty. The ridgeline was, at long last, easing back down to the desert floor.

“How far have we walked?” Cass asked. “In miles?”

Haywood shrugged. Dylan had no idea. I do. I told you, I found the place. They walked twenty miles that night. Something there was no way they could have been strong enough to do. So I’m not sure who’s bullshitting me on this one.

When the ridge faded to nothing, Preacher made a left and they walked for another twenty minutes before finding something Dylan and Cass had despaired of ever seeing again – asphalt. With telephone poles strung out along side it. They walked on the interstate for maybe fifteen minutes before getting a ride in the back of a pickup truck filled with migrant workers. Haywood chatted with one of the men in Spanish, and started laughing suddenly and loudly and – judging by the startled reaction of the man he was speaking to – inappropriately.

“What’s so funny?” Finch demanded.

“I just asked him the name of the nearest town,” Haywood said. “It’s Gethsemane.”

The Worshipers will be pissed that I revealed the name of the town, but it is pretty funny that Preacher spent time there before going back into the world.