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In The Woods Somewhere
I had never seen anger before Jud Duplenticy. I didn’t know that at the time, of course, but when you see a man hit, and keep hitting, knuckles bloodied entirely crimson, eyes unaffected by the ruin he’s wreaking…that’s when you know anger. Hatred.
I’d watched him get pulled off the man and take a desperate gasp as if he was coming up for air, chest heaving with the effort.
I hadn’t know him at all then. But when his eyes met mine through the crowd, I became intimately familiar with his hurt.
I had never had any bent towards religion, but I had understood then, why early Christians had found a suffering Christ. It was holiness within a man who could just as wretched. Because no human could relate to an almighty god, a punitive, omnipotent, father figure, they could only love and hate him in equal measure.
But a man like them? One who could feel rage the way they do, bleed as they do, cry out in pain as they do…that’s was man to love and to follow. That’s what it meant to be human.
He’d vanished after that, of course, and I had thought that was it. That he had left me with a fleeting look that had his agonised fury indelibly etched on my mind.
He was gone and I was acutely aware of my own wretchedness, as if he had held up a mirror but then smashed it before I could get a proper look and reconcile myself with my true nature. Nothing could be found in fragments left behind.
But then, when years had passed and I pushed the memory of him to the back of my mind, no matter how insistent it was to force its way to the front when I was at my most weak, I found myself driving through the middle of nowhere New York, when a dog ran out into the road.
‘Fuck!’
The tires let out an almighty screech when I slammed on the breaks, my body jolting with the force of it.
As the windscreen wipers continued in their futile endeavour to clear my view of the unrelenting rainfall, I caught glimpses of a dog. It was a large, mangy thing, drenched and startled in the middle of the road. After a few seconds it ran off and I was sure I caught a limp, a slight dragging of the back leg.
I didn’t know what I was thinking, only that I had nowhere to be and nothing ahead of me but more unknown road. So I pulled my beaten-up car onto the dirt verge, braced myself for the downpour, pulled up my hood, and ran into the woods.
The wind was bracing, sending rain lashing against me as if it was flagellation. My feet sank and slipped in the mud. Every step without fail. Sink, slip. Sink, slip. I held my hand up in front of myself, as if that did anything other than obscure my view of what I was looking for.
Trees rose around me, uniform in their solidity and slimness, unbowed and unbent in the wind, dark pillars I had to weave around.
Then, there- a flash of tail.
I called out as if the dog would hear my plea and understand and turn back instead of travelling deeper in.
I picked up speed as best I could, but my sneakers, already worse for wear, were weighed down with clumps of mud, and when the ground angled down into a clearing I lost my footing.
My back hit the quagmire, sliding down through the mess the weather had made. It shocked more than hurt, and took me a few seconds of staring up at the canopy, rain icy pinpricks on my face, to sit myself up.
I came face to face with what seemed to me a shining white, monolith, something entirely out of place, as if it had been dropped from a great height, certainly headed for anywhere but here. Then I blinked, and the form acquired some details: carefully hewn stones stacked together with a name carved into it: Wicks.
Just my luck to fall flat on my ass and come face to face with a crypt.
Hands dirtied and bloodied—scratched up from the unceremonious slip and slide—I rose to my feet, weighed down by more than the mud on my clothes.
Then like a beacon, a small light swinging from side to side in my peripheral vision. I turned, pulling back the soaked hood of my sweater that could nothing to shield me, and saw, through the open door of a garage, a tall, lean, back clad all in black, hitting a punching bag. It swung back and forth with the force of his blows.
At once the mud beneath my feet felt like a bog and I was sinking. I won’t kid myself by saying I knew straight away after so many years that I recognised him from the act of swinging his fists alone. But something within me rose to greet him before I did.
I managed to unstick my mind and my feet and trudged closer. The dog had to belong to him, I reasoned, and it had been going home. But I still planned to give him a piece of my mind for letting it out and leaving it in this weather, and by all accounts when it looked injured.
‘Hey!’ I shouted, a weak first attempt. If anything the punches on the bag intensified. Again. ‘Hey, I think you got him. He’s down.’
As soon as he turned, startled, the words that just left my mouth produced an aftertaste of bile.
It was him.
Jud Duplenticy, a man who I had seen fall from a great height and take another’s life, was in the middle of New York woodland hitting his way through a storm. And he was wearing a dog collar.
I knew, right then, that I would never acknowledge having known him- seen him, rather, in a past life.
Jud stepped forward, squinting to see me through the rain. Behind him, the bag kept swinging on its chain.
‘My God, are you alright?’
I scoffed, wrapping my wet arms around myself. ‘Don’t take the almighty’s name in vain on my account, Father.’
He shook his head, and rushed forward out of the garage, holding out a beckoning hand. ‘I take his name in all seriousness. You’re going to catch your death out here. Do you need help?’
I stayed rooted to the spot, as still as the trees, staring at his hand. I had seen those knuckles bloody. His shirt sleeves were rolled up too and on his left forearm a tattoo that attested to his other life, that told me I wasn’t imagining it all.
‘Hey,’ he said softly, but urgently. ‘Let’s get you inside.’
He was beside me then, hand hovering but not touching, trying to guide me into the garage.
He’d only been outside for a few moments, but his shirt was already sticking to his chest and his dark waves were plastered to his head.
Just as I found my feet falling in line with his guidance, I stopped, remembering why I was there.
He looked slightly exasperated, fingers flexing anxiously. Indecision was clear in his gaze. Let me go at my own pace and ‘catch my death’, or force me in and potentially spook me.
As a man of the cloth I suspected it was not a new dilemma for him, practically an occupational hazard.
‘Do you have a dog?’
He blinked furiously, wiping the water out of his eyes.
‘A dog? No, I- look would you please come inside? Whatever has happened I promise I’ll listen.’
‘There was a dog in the road.’ I continued, ignoring his urging. ‘It was limping, it came this way.’
He took a moment to regard me. ‘You came out in this to find a dog?’ Then his eyes dropped low, taking in my mud covered state. ‘Did you fall? Are you hurt? Christ, I really- I don’t want to overstep, but it’s really important to me to get you out of this weather.’
I almost laughed then. An absurd thing. I saw him take a life and now he was unnecessarily, acutely concerned with mine. And he didn’t know what I had seen.
I looked up at him cautiously, only then realising how close he had moved to me. Holding his gaze, I stepped around him and made for shelter.
I heard his sigh of relief even through the torrent.
The punching bag hadn’t yet stilled, still swinging from side to side.
‘A pugilist priest,’ I remarked, only then realising how my teeth were chattering.
‘A remnant of a past life, it channels emotions that are destructive when kept in.’
‘Like hatred?’ I asked, not really a question. My eyes stayed on the punching bag.
I felt him step closer behind me. ‘It’s mostly hatred,’ he admitted quietly.
‘I suppose it’s refreshing, meeting a man of the cloth who will admit to nastiness.’
I turned then and found the corner of his lip quirking.
‘Do I hear some healthy antipathy for the clergy?’
I scoffed again, feeling true amusement. ‘You call my suspicion of you and all you do, healthy?’
He shrugged, muscled arm’s crossing over his chest. ‘Any caution is healthy. You’re protecting yourself. Now, is there someone I can call for you? You must need a change of clothes?’
‘I don’t see any point.’ I said turning to look outside, rain still coming down furiously. The crypt stood defiant and unaffected, a marker of death as infallible as death itself.
‘There’s no point in getting dry?’
I looked at him, impatient. ‘I need to find the dog.’
‘No,’ he answered quickly.
‘No?’
He looked a little embarrassed then, caught being a little authoritarian in the way I had just made clear I was suspicious of.
‘I- I’m sorry but that’s madness, you can’t go back out there with it like this. If anything, you’ll lose your way and end up falling in a ditch.’
I gave him a flat look and gestured down to myself, he took me in once more, fully registering all the mud and the fall it implied.
Too late, my face said.
He winced sympathetically. ‘Still, you shouldn’t go out there. Are you sure you saw a dog?’
‘Are you sure you believe in a god?’ I shot back petulantly. The gall for someone who believed in a being in the sky and he was questioning if I’d imagined a dog?
he broke out into a full smile, dimples showing, skin around his eyes creasing. ‘Doubt is healthy too. I take it you don’t believe?’
‘I believe, that faith is a human coping mechanism and religion is a power structure used to abuse.’
‘You feel differently about believers than you do the church?’
‘Do you feel you need a body of authority, influence, and power to believe? To do what you do for others?’
‘As a priest, or as man?’
‘There’s no difference.’
‘Well, actually-‘
‘Take off that dog collar and you would still want to listen to others, to understand. Dogma and doctrine, and men in slightly different robes to yours didn’t make you that way, the life you’ve lived has. You understand pain, anger, loss and being lost. Empathy is not institutions power, least of all the churches. It conditions, categorises, condemns, all while convincing people it is a place of safety and esteem. A safe harbour rather than an emotional gallows.’
I stopped, cheeks slightly flushed, unsure where that had come from and feeling that I’d laid myself bare.
Jud took in what I’d said as if it was physical thing seeping in.
Then, ‘An emotional gallows.’
‘Convincing people they were ever in a state that they needed saving from, that they, or anyone else could ever be deserving of devastation through divine will, or even just inaction…that’s abhorrent to me. It’s a kind of death of something vital to a person if you get them to truly believe that.’
‘You sound like you speak from experience.’
‘Experience of what? The abuse of faith, that’s human experience, Father. Human history.’
‘You’re right. The church- religion, is about power. People are faith, just as they are redemption, love, and even hatred. But the church gives me four walls-‘
‘Build it and they will come.’
His eyes dropped, nodding as he smiled. ‘Something like that. Come on, let’s get to the rectory. I can start a fire.’
It was how I ended up coaxed into the warmth of a room, heated by a blaze in the hearth. Showered, In a baggy shirt and sweatpants and a mug of hot chocolate in my hands, warming frigid skin.
I had been staring into the flames and startled when thick, soft fabric fell around my shoulders. I had hardly begun to turn to look at him when he appeared in front of me, crouched down, lined by firelight and tipped some whisky into my hot chocolate after he had hesitated long enough for me to protest.
I couldn’t help but smile. ‘Isn’t that frowned upon for you?’
‘I imagine many things are, but I don’t let myself be shamed from on high anymore. I am a man of faith before I am a man of the church.’
‘Using my words against me.’
He hummed. ‘No-no, I’m agreeing with them. You put the feeling more eloquently than I ever could.’
I looked into his shining eyes, the same and yet harbouring something so different to the man I’d seen all those years ago.
Maybe if I stayed, I would tell him that we had met-seen each other-before. Or maybe I wouldn’t, and would stay anyway.
We never did find that dog.