Death Comes for the Deconstructionist. Daniel Taylor
signing up for a senior citizen bus tour of Waterloo. I mean, why spread out your picnic blanket on the freeway? You’re just begging the universe to notice you—never a good thing.
I don’t do too well with the past. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s that the past is never actually past. Nothing is ever over, ever finished, ever gone. It’s like with garbage. There’s really no “away” in “throw away.” Everything goes somewhere—“away” just means out of sight, not out of existence. You can stick something in a barrel, or cover it up with dirt, or drop it in an ocean canyon. But it’s still there. Even burning something up doesn’t really make it go “away”; it merely changes its configuration, rearranges atoms.
And if it’s true with candy bar wrappers and toxic waste, how much more so with toxic memories?
During the ride back to the houseboat, Judy is basking in the afterglow of her new friendship.
“Brianna reminds me of my … my Sunday school teacher of mine.”
I know Judy hasn’t been to any Sunday school since she’s been back with me, so I’m prepared for her to dredge up any of the dozen teachers she must have had as a girl. For her the saying “It’s like it was yesterday” is literally true. Her mind makes no significant distinction between earlier today and thirty-five years ago. She cannot remember that three plus four equals seven, but recalls every word our mother said to her when the ice cream fell out of her cone when she was five.
“Which Sunday school teacher was that, Jude?”
“Miss Sinclair. You remember her, Jon. She is my favorite. I … I like her very much.”
I don’t remember Miss Sinclair, of course. I do remember Sunday school. Sunday school marked one of the first encounters with the problem of evil for little fundamentalist children like me. How can a good God have created a world in which innocent kids have to go to Sunday school? Was God just not powerful enough to prevent Sunday school, or was he not totally good?
Sunday school in my day was low-tech flannel board presentations by high-anxiety teachers like Mr. Ring: “Here, children, is Joseph in his coat of many colors. You all have a picture of Joseph wearing his coat in your workbooks. I want you to take that home and color it and bring it back next Sunday and you will get twenty points. Now remember that the two students who earn the most points this quarter get to go with me to play putt-putt golf and have a hamburger at The Flame. But I don’t want to see any of you coloring that coat in the service next hour. You are old enough now to listen to Pastor Patterson’s sermon. Barry, I saw you laying your head in your mother’s lap last week. Don’t you think you’re a little too big for that? Now here is the well Joseph’s brother threw him in. Why do you think they did that, children? Why did they throw Joseph in the well? Yes, Barry… . No, Barry, it wasn’t because he didn’t believe in Jesus. Jesus comes later. Yes, Cecil… . That’s right. They were jealous of him. What does it mean to be jealous, children? Are you ever jealous? When might you be jealous? That’s right, Arnie—when your brother hits a home run in Little League and everybody thinks he’s so great. Yes, Barry? … Why yes, the Bible does say God is a jealous God. No, Barry, it doesn’t mean God has sinned. It’s different. God doesn’t sin. Yes, I understand that if something’s wrong, it’s wrong. But it isn’t the same thing. It’s … well, something you boys are too young to understand right now. We can talk about it later.”
It wasn’t Mr. Ring’s fault. All week long he sold auto parts. It was nothing but tie rods and head gaskets and spark gap setters. How was he supposed to know why God was allowed to be jealous when we shouldn’t be? And how was he supposed to teach eight kinetic third-grade boys the Bible on Sunday when he didn’t know anything about teaching and had only volunteered because the Sunday school superintendent had made him feel guilty that no one else would? And maybe because his own son had died at age four and would have been the same age as these boys, and there was an empty spot in his heart that some unconscious part of him thought they could fill.
It amazes me now that we never questioned the whole enterprise. We went to Sunday school the way salmon go home to spawn—relentlessly, unreflectively, as part of our nature. It’s spawning season—the salmon must get home. It’s Sunday morning—I must hie me to Sunday school. I must be here with Mr. Ring and Joseph’s coat of many colors. I must figure out, somehow, what this story has to do with me—with playing outside, and school, and my dark, secret thoughts.
secret for now
It’s hard for me to believe I was ever part of such a world. I wonder if Sunday school even exists anymore. It’s been so many years since I’ve gone to church that I have a hard time remembering exactly what goes on there. Can little kids, somewhere, still be singing, “Red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in his sight”? Are there still cannibals in the world?
“Miss Sinclair is very nice to me.”
I keep driving.
“She said I looked … looked pretty in my Easter dress of mine.”
I feel a stab in my stomach. Now I remember Miss Sinclair. She was a high school girl who was very active in the church and was later killed in a car wreck. She had been especially good to Judy.
I remember that Easter dress, too. She must have been ten or eleven. It was an archetype—or parody—of the genre of cute, petticoated, wavy-rufflely little girl dresses. Judy loved the showers of praise and admiration from Dad when she walked down the steps from her bedroom wearing it, Mother trailing behind and clearing her throat to make sure the men of the house took proper note. Dad claimed not to recognize her.
“Where’s Judy? Miss Princess, could you tell me where my daughter Judy has gone?”
Judy immediately struck a pose, aloof and regal.
“Why, I … why, I am your very own daughter, Judy.”
“No, my daughter is very pretty, of course, but you are the most lovely woman in the world. You cannot be my daughter.”
“Yes, I … I am lovely. But I am also your daughter … Judith Anne Mote. How do you like my … my new dress of mine?”
If Judy got praise for her dress at home, she got a few stares at church. In those days you didn’t call attention to a tragedy, maybe even to a judgment of God. For some it was a scandal that she still lived at home, a situation that would change soon enough.
By the time we get home from the university, I can feel the first dimming of the light. I refuse it the encouragement of direct attention. I tell myself I am simply tired, which is true enough. I know for sure I shouldn’t have agreed to look into Pratt’s murder. Too many ghosts at the university. They linger in the seminar rooms and library stacks—patient, vaporous, not quite sinister, not quite friendly. At best they wish me no particular good. They are better left alone and at a distance, like the rumor of faraway disaster.
we wish you no particular good either
I try talking to Judy to keep my thoughts from turning inward, but I’m having a hard time paying attention. While her words pile up on her tongue like rush hour traffic, I am drawn to the dark edge of the mind where thought descends into randomness and randomness into emptiness and emptiness into oblivion. I feel an overwhelming need to escape the press of judgment and evaluation. I don’t exactly want to sleep. I want to absent myself from the world for a while. It isn’t a new feeling, but one I haven’t felt this strongly for a long time. It is a feeling I have never been good at resisting, or even wanting to resist. I tell Judy I am going to lay on the couch for a few minutes. She looks alarmed.
SIX
The next day I go down to the Minneapolis police headquarters between Fourth and Fifth streets to introduce myself to Detective Wilson, the lead detective on the case. The headquarters are in city hall, which looks appropriately authoritative, like a cross between a grand French chateau and the witch’s fortress in The Wizard of Oz. Mrs. Pratt called Detective Wilson after our meeting to let him know about me, and it has had the effect I expected. When I appear in his office he looks