With a rod of iron a par.., p.15
With a Rod of Iron: A Parable, page 15
“I suppose you’re Grandpa?” Morvan asked, even though he already knew the answer. With the shock somewhat past, he could discern what had always lain obscured behind the wrinkles and gray, the glasses and the weary expressions he had known. Suddenly, he recognized his grandparents.
He gasped. “It really is you!”
“Of course, dear,” said Grandma.
* * *
The voice on the other end of the phone was familiar. Her name was Lori, and she worked with his wife. For the past three months, she’d been calling him twice a week, carefully timing her calls to when Christa was not home yet. Of course, working with Christa and knowing how long it would take her to get home, it wasn’t so very difficult for her.
Morvan had only met her once, at a Christmas party, and hadn’t really given her a second thought, until the phone calls started.
“Hello,” he said coldly. “I’ve told you I don’t want to talk to you.” And he put the phone back in its cradle.
“Who’s that?” asked his grandmother, still cooking in the other room. His grandfather was seated in the recliner, the television switched to CNN where a panel discussion pontificated over events in Jerusalem. Occasionally, his grandfather would laugh.
“Just a prank call,” he responded, not wanting to get into it. He hadn’t told Christa about it, either. She had to work with the woman and there was no reason to cause unnecessary strife. He could handle a stupid bimbo by himself.
Secretly, the thought that some woman—particularly a woman as attractive as Lori, found him irresistible was somewhat flattering. At the same time, he felt guilty for such feelings and wished the chick would simply disappear. He didn’t know how he could put it any more firmly to her than he had the first time she’d called.
“I’m married, remember?” he’d told her.
And her response was still unfathomable to him: “So?”
As if it didn’t matter. He’d tried reasoning with her, pleading with her, and now had taken to just hanging up on her. Nothing seemed to work. In the back of his mind he wondered if maybe he should confide in his wife, anyhow.
The phone rang again.
“I told you I don’t want...” he began.
“Don’t you dare hang up on me!” Lori shouted, startling him into temporary silence.
“I don’t want to have anything to do with you,” he said, quickly recovering. “Please, please, please leave me alone. I’m a happily married man.” He whispered, hoping that his grandfather would be too busy watching television to notice what he had just said.
“Really? And what if I were to tell your wife about us?”
“There’s nothing to tell,” he snapped. “I hang up on you when you call...” And he started to pull the receiver away from his ear to slam it back into its cradle.
“But what if I told your wife we’d been sleeping together?”
His hand stopped.
“That got your attention, didn’t it? Yes, I’m going to tell your wife we’ve been sleeping together for the last three months.”
“It’s not true.”
“Will she believe you, or will she believe me? I can come up with some details—give her times and places which she could check out. I’ve got a story carefully crafted here. Do you think she’d believe you or me?”
Morvan sucked in his breath. Of course his wife would believe him. He hadn’t done anything! How could the lies of someone he hardly knew...
“I’ll tell her we’ve been sleeping together for the last three months, unless you agree to have an affair with me.”
“What?!”
“You heard me. Sleep with me, or I’ll tell everyone we’re lovers. I’ll tell your wife, I’ll call people at your bank...and, if that doesn’t work, I’ll call the police and tell them we had sex; but I’ll tell them I didn’t agree to it—wasn’t cooperative.”
Morvan felt the blood draining from his face. This couldn’t be happening to him.
“Think about it. I’ll call you tomorrow.”
There was a click on the other end and he was left holding the phone, staring out into space.
“Want to talk about it?” asked his grandfather. He was standing right beside him.
“What? No!” His eyes widened in horror.
“I think you should talk about it. It’s part of the reason we’re here, you know. Ordinarily, we’d have gone to your parents first, but with this hitting the fan, we thought we should be here.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about...”
“Come on Morvan, you shouldn’t be lying. We know you’re in trouble with this woman, Lori.”
His eyes bugged. “How...”
“Jesus came back Saturday night.” It was his grandmother.
“But...”
“The world is not going to be the same place it used to be,” she said. “Obviously, you can’t give in to her blackmail—though it’s the sort of thing she, in her somewhat irrational state, thinks will drive you into her arms. She’s not expecting to have to actually call Christa, you know. She imagines that this little threat is enough to make you do what she imagines you naturally want to do. She’s obsessed with you, and doesn’t care how she gets you—but she genuinely believes you feel the same way about her, but are just too afraid to take the step. So she’s goading you.” She paused. “That’s what’s in her mind.”
Morvan felt his knees weakening. He quickly reached for a chair and plopped down.
“But you don’t need to be afraid,” said his grandmother. “We’re here and we understand. So we’ll tell your wife, and then everything will be okay.”
“But...”
“I overheard your phone call, after all,” said his grandmother.
“What?”
“I was on the other extension. And I set your answering machine to tape; I hope you don’t mind, but I recorded your call.”
* * *
“I’ll scratch her eyes out!” Christa’s voice rose angrily, her fingers clenching and unclenching. His grandmother had just finished playing the tape recorded message.
“Probably not the best idea,” suggested Morvan’s grandfather.
“I know,” Christa pounded her fist onto the table with a jarring crash. “I knew she was a cheap slut, but I never suspected she’d go after my husband!” Her eyes moved toward Morvan. He dropped his gaze and stared at his shoes.
“I’m so sorry I ever introduced you,” she said. “I never knew. You should have told me!”
“You’re colleagues; I thought if I could turn her down, then that would be it and life would go on; you wouldn’t have to be bothered and there wouldn’t be any friction...” he paused. “It seems really stupid, now.”
“No it doesn’t.” She gave him a hug and kissed him on the cheek. He didn’t feel like he deserved any such affection. “But what should I do? I want to kill her—as slowly and uncomfortably as possible.”
“Jesus won’t allow that,” pointed out Morvan’s grandfather.
“But he can’t look favorably on adultery, either, can he?”
“Of course not. But that’s why we’re here: to keep it from happening—and to keep you from doing anything you shouldn’t.”
Christa was lost in thought. “What should we do?”
“I just had an idea,” said Morvan.
Christa looked at him.
“I could scare her.”
“Scare her?”
“Sure. Agree to what she says, but with conditions that she wouldn’t like. So she decides to end the relationship even before it starts.”
Christa raised her eyebrows, as if to suggest he had now lost his mind.
“No, really. Make her think I’m sick—suggest something really perverted so that she’ll thank God she got away from me.”
Christa shook her head. “I think it would be better just to play the tape for her. It’ll serve the same purpose—getting her out of our lives. Besides, you don’t have a good enough imagination to come up with anything that would scare her away.”
Morvan considered that and then decided she was right. He’d heard talk about perversion and sick, kinky sex, but he really had no clue what might be involved.
“Besides,” added Christa, “She might like sick, perverted sex and all you’d do is get her excited.”
* * *
Lori listened to less than a quarter of the tape before she hung up the phone with a sudden click. Christa grinned at Morvan, then shut it off and put the phone back on the receiver.
“That’s that,” she said. Then she smiled at Morvan’s grandmother. “Thanks so much for taping it for us. I’m so glad this is over.”
“Over?” Morvan’s grandma looked surprised. “Oh, it’s far from over. Now we need to talk about you.”
“Talk about me?”
“Not just you,” corrected Grandpa. “The two of you. We have to beg your forgiveness.”
“What?”
“We should go into the other room, sit down, be comfortable...”
They settled into comfortable seats in the living room. The soft cushions welcomed them. They looked at each other, then Grandpa nodded at Grandma.
“We never made use of the opportunities God gave us,” said Grandma slowly. “There was so much more we could have done with our children and didn’t. But instead of teaching them about the love of God, about mercy, we taught them rules about being good instead of bad, so that when they got out on their own, church and God were the last things they wanted to hear about.” There was a tear at the corner of Grandma’s eye.
“I don’t understand,” said Morvan. “Wasn’t it a good thing that you made them go to church? Church was the right idea all along, wasn’t it? I mean, Jesus came back and God’s real and...and all that stuff in the Bible, it was true and important...”
Grandpa nodded. “But we didn’t do it right.”
Morvan was becoming confused. Not surprising: it wasn’t every day that Jesus Christ came back and your dead relatives started showing up for dinner. CNN had been running interviews with formerly dead people, asking them about heaven, about what they were going to be doing now. No one could quite believe it was happening, though there was no way of getting around it.
Like one theologian on television had said: “All my adult life, I’ve believed in God—most people do. But for me, God was like the spirit of Christmas—you know—like that one newspaper editor wrote: ‘yes Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. As long as people give gifts and are good to each other’ and so on. That’s what God was to me—the goodness in people, the best that we could do for one another. But God as a person?” He shook his head. “When the Bible talked about Jesus coming back, I just thought it was a metaphor for death. I could show you how the early church had developed the concept of resurrection from the mystery religions rampant in the Roman Empire. So many religions talked about gods dying and coming back, so I thought the concept tied back to the cycle of nature, of winter and spring time—and that Jesus’ Second Coming was not something Jesus himself had ever taught, and that it was a later addition, designed to rally hope to the fledgling religion...” The theologian shook his head again. “God knows, I was more surprised than anyone when I saw him really come back; and I’m not ashamed to say I was wrong. I mean, how can I say anything else? I’m not an idiot and I always prided myself on scientific objectivity. When you’re confronted with new data, you have to adjust your theories accordingly. In this case, I have to just toss them all out and start over. Jesus is God, he’s come back to rule, and I’ve been wrong all my life and everything I’ve been thinking and teaching all these years is really, really stupid.” And then he started crying.
Morvan could identify with his attitude, one shared by just about everyone on the planet. But life would go on, and everyone would adjust. It was kind of nice, actually, to finally know the truth without the least little bit of doubt. Made you wonder why God hadn’t done this a long time ago.
Not that he was going to question God. No way! God could do anything he darn well pleased. Wasn’t wise to question the person who’d created the universe. Probably be pretty easy for God to make Morvan turn into a disgusting nematode if he asked the wrong question.
“So tell me,” said Morvan suddenly. “How do we stay on God’s good side?”
Grandma smiled. “Funny you should ask.”
* * *
“You’re kidding!” Morvan exclaimed when his grandparents got done talking. “I thought I had to stop swearing or something.”
His grandfather shrugged. “Most everyone thought that. Even me. It’s a wonder I made it, myself, but I guess I knew better...anyhow.”
“Let me see if I’ve got this right,” began Christa. “All we have to do is tell Jesus, ‘sure, I can’t be good, and it’s all up to you if my life is going to work out?’”
“In essence.”
“But isn’t that kind of passing the buck? I mean, if I’m screwing things up, shouldn’t I have to be in trouble for it?”
“Of course,” said Grandpa.
“It’s only fair,” agreed Morvan.
“But do you really want what’s fair?” Grandpa continued. “Wouldn’t you like to get out of it if you could?”
“Well sure.”
“Like the time when you were seven?” asked Grandpa.
“When I was seven?”
Grandpa chuckled. “You were seven years old and it was at the end of summer.”
All at once, Morvan felt as if he’d gone back. The years faded away...
* * *
Summertime was the best of all on the farm. The air was warm and the grass in the field was fragrant, interspersed with mint plants. Morvan paused on his way down to the creek to pick a couple leaves and stuff them into his mouth. Despite his disappointment that the plants were not sweet, he’d gotten past that and learned to like them anyhow, chewing them for a few minutes until his mouth tired and he swallowed them. Grandpa said something about spitting the leaves out, but it was so much easier just to swallow; same as gum.
The grass rose to his shoulders and in places even poked above his head. Morvan imagined he was in a jungle, far from civilization: the mighty hunter, tramping through unexplored regions, where no one but pirates had ever been before. Who knew what treasure, what wonders he might discover? So many places to wander, so much to see that no one had ever seen before.
The grasses opened finally upon his goal, the creek. Narrow here, it would be easy to hop across to the far side, where no one ever went. Backing up, he hit the edge running, then pushed off with his right foot. He sprang into the air, sailed skyward, and then came down with a splash, landing directly in the water.
The rocks were slippery beneath his feet, and the water was cold; immediately it filled his black leather shoes; his pant legs were soaked to his knees. Stumbling among the loose stones, he slipped and fell again just as he reached the bank; he plunged his right knee into the water, then, scrambling madly, he pulled himself up the muddy bank and back to fresh grass.
Soaked and chilled, he looked down at himself and was reminded that he had made a desperate mistake.
“Don’t you go out in that field!” His mother’s command sounded fresh in his ear.
But that had been hours ago, and she had seen him wander out the front door without barking another word to him. The adults were all busy talking: his parents and Grandma and Grandpa, and Uncle Boswell and Aunt Dotty, too, and his older cousin Jedd and a couple other people he didn’t recognize. They were drinking coffee and jabbering about nothing in particular. So boring; so he went outside, and the pasture had been right there, just the other side of the fence, and from the front porch, where he’d been standing, he could see the bright ribbon of the creek making its way across the field, bouncing over rocks and emptying into the pond where sometimes they went to fish.
But not this trip. They were all dressed up and mom had said to stay around the house.
But she hadn’t said anything when he went outside.
And she didn’t say anything when he went into the front yard and crouched down, looking at the rocks along the driveway—crushed limestone, where sometimes he could find fossil shells. Once he’d even found a trilobite.
And there were really good rocks down by the creek.
So next thing he knew, he was in the field eating mint.
And now he’d gotten his shoes all wet. His feet squished when he walked.
Well, the sun was out and maybe if he stayed away long enough he’d get dry. But his pants were muddy.
Only one answer to that.
He followed the creek toward the pond, where the water got deeper and wider. Reaching out carefully, he tried dipping his feet, one at a time, into the water.
But the grass was slippery, and down he went.
Now the water came to his shoulder—and it was murky. The stories his grandpa had told about water snakes rushed into his mind. He scrambled back for the shore and with a heave of superhuman exertion, he tossed himself onto the bank.
Soaked from neck to foot, he lay still a moment, then leapt to his feet with a yelp when he noticed the little bugs in the grass. Shuddering, he shook himself, wondering what kind of creatures might have been in the water, ready to gobble him.
He saw a swirl on the surface, as something came from below, snapped at the air, and disappeared back into the gloom. A chirrup from a rock on the edge of the pond made him jump.
He’d have to stay out in the field for a long time to dry off, or else his mother would yell at him—worse, would give him a spanking. So he had to stay out there. Hadn’t she said not to go to the field?
Well, I didn’t go to the field, he told himself. Just the front yard.
Why are you so wet?
The sprinklers—or...I just fell in a mud puddle; I wasn’t doing anything, it just happened. I didn’t go in the field—just to the fence, and then the sprinklers got me wet and I fell down and got a little muddy, but I didn’t go into the field...
He repeated the story to himself as he started the long trek back toward the farm house.
