Willie Doright, protector of minor goddesses

　

The goddess of the grove was a minor deity, gentle, humble, and unassuming. Women prayed to her, not for fertility or to protect them in child birth, but, rather, for relief from PMS. She didn’t raise the dead or heal the sick, but petitions to her were helpful in cases of mild anxiety – she helped ameliorate fear of speaking in public and shyness at wedding parties, baptisms, or other celebrations. If properly propitiated, she could cause minor officials to misplace traffic tickets or misdemeanor complaints. You could pray to her for assistance in locating lost objects and pretty much expect that, within a day or so, you would find something – but most typically it wasn’t the item that you lost but something misplaced by another. Bigger gods and goddesses demanded burnt offerings and inhaled the stench of blood by the gallon. But this goddess was content with a libation of Diet pop poured from a plastic cup or a few M & M’s scattered on the greensward or, perhaps, a rice-cake placed on a flat stone near the tiny leaf-littered ooze where her spring seeped up from the ground.

I won’t profane the goddess by naming her. In fact, most of the people living in the village a half-mile from her sacred grove weren’t sure of her name themselves. She was just the goddess in the wood, a spirit sensed sometimes when the moist, spring breeze blew through her forest, almost imperceptibly cooling the streets and sidewalks of our town. The sacred woods were owned by everyone and no one – that is, another way of saying that they were proprietary to the goddess. Twice a year, the poor were admitted to the woods to gather for firewood twigs and boughs and branches that the storms had knocked from the trees. Midwives and other State-certified practitioners of the healing arts were afforded access for several days in late Spring and, then, again during the harvest, to collect medicinal herbs and fungi. The goddess accepted visitors on her trails just about any time during good weather and, at the summer solstice, the women in town marched in a solemn procession to her spring in the middle of the woods where they placed small twig dolls upright around the muddy edges of the seep. The clearing at the little ooze of water was raucous with frog-songs. Men were not supposed to attend this ritual and, in fact, generally stayed at home in town, watching baseball or late-night comedians on TV. But, during the preceding decade, women had used their cell-phones to video-tape the ceremonies and posted them on the goddess’ web-site. So, everyone, knew, more or less, the hymns that were sung in her honor, the four ancient obscene jokes told at her fountain, and the ritual of setting the twig dolls next to the ooze shadowed by the great, old-growth trees towering over the wet place in the woods.

Of course, no one really believed in the goddess. People thought of her the way that they imagine Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny. But her woods remained intact, a green cathedral soaring over the sugar cane thickets extending to all four horizons. From time to time, the owners of the sugar cane plantations petitioned the officials at the county seat for the right to cut down the woods, banish the goddess, and plant their crops where the sacred grove had been located. But the women in our village opposed these measures, more out of nostalgia than piety and each effort to destroy the wood and cultivate sugar cane on its hundred hectares foundered and, ultimately, were abandoned. Even when the sugar mill in the capitol, Sucrose-Azucaria, Ltd., elected a plantation owner to congress, measures to bulldoze the sacred grove were filibustered by our representatives and came to naught.

Then, about 18 months ago, a strange man appeared in our town. He said that his name was Willy Doright and that he was the son of the goddess. No one had seen him before and he wasn’t related to anyone in town as far as we could determine. He zipped about the streets on a small, poorly tuned Vespa that chugged and puffed and stuttered when it was started. Small pennants and banners fluttered from elastic rods inserted into the frame of the Vespa so that the flimsy little motorbike would be visible to pedestrians and other traffic. The man vanished at nightfall and said that he spent his evenings camping in the grove sacred to his mother. When he preached in the city park, he said that it would be a crime for people to spy upon him, because he wandered naked as the day he was born in his mother’s forest where she comforted him by shedding leaves on his shoulders and showing him the way to fruit and berries that he could eat and that, at night, he slept under a warm blanket made from the soft fur of tiny bats, voles, and field mice. And, indeed, when a couple of men hid at the edges of the forest to see the holy man when he returned to the sacred grove, they waited until dawn’s dew gladdened the grasses without seeing him. Some people thought that he was invisible so long as he wandered within his mother’s sacred grove.

When the women marched to the spring on the longest day of the year, the preacher was there, waiting for them. At first, it was a scandal because men were not allowed at the ceremony, but soon this gave way to wonder because the man knew by heart the ancient hymns, some of them sung in a language no one could speak any more, and could recite from memory the four obscene jokes told in honor of the goddess. When the moon rose and floated through the treetops, the preacher said that his mother, the goddess, was very sad that she had to live in the middle of these old, ragged trees and that she desired that a temple made by human hands be built to house her in the village.

Some of the women protested that the goddess had always dwelt in the sacred woods and that it was unseemly and strange that she now wanted to live elsewhere. Willie nodded to them as if he agreed. But, then, he spoke.

"It’s inconvenient for her," Willie proclaimed. "The place for a goddess is amidst those who love and revere her."

Willie said a generous patron had donated a little tract of land on the edge of our town. The goddess remained humble and discrete – she had whispered to Willie that she didn’t need a big church or a gaudy temple but would be content to reside in a small structure. "She is a very old, old goddess," Willie said, "and it is hard for her to come to town to be among her worshipers. Besides, she says that this grove of trees is a drafty, wet place to live and that a small dwelling in town would be much better."

As Willie spoke, clouds shifted in the sky and, before he had finished his sermon, some rain fell, dripping through the treetops to soak the women. They shuddered a little and sympathized with goddess who had complained to her son about this discomfort.

At this time, the village had become more modern and many of the housewives now had up-to-date conveniences in their homes and, so, the goddess’ request seemed reasonable to them. Willie had a friend who built garden gazebos at the estates of wealthy people in our town. Indeed, his friend had recently constructed several ostentatious gazebos for one of the sugar barons who lived on the hillside overlooking our river. A collection was taken up and the gazebo-carpenter was hired to erect a home for the goddess on a sliver of land between the Walmart and the Dollar Store.

The temple was built on a slab of reinforced concrete. The structure was octagonal with a shingled roof surmounted by a cupola. Silver mylar curtains were hung just inside the wire-mesh walls of the gazebo. The goddess required only a little furniture. She was content with some pillows on which worshipers could kneel, a flower-pot to hold offerings made to her, and wind-chimes that made the temple melodious when the silver-foil curtains were raised and breezes admitted into the structure.

Once the temple was complete, bulldozers made swift work of the sacred grove. The ancient yew trees with their elephantine buttress roots and great-bellied trunks were toppled onto their sides and the willows around the sacred spring were knocked down. The dense rhododendron shrubbery was rooted-out and towering dhup trees with their upper canopy majestic with flowers were smashed. The graders ripped open the seep and tore a round hollow that filled with muddy water. When the blades of the bulldozers shredded the leaf-litter on the pond, several of the workers thought they saw the air briefly shimmering, a presence that fled tremulously upward like the heat haze over an asphalt road in the summer.

Willie Doright consecrated the new temple to the goddess. After the ceremony, someone handed him a fat envelope and patted him on the back. Then, he slipped away. The local reporters followed his Vespa with its fluttering pennants to a vacant lot on the edge of town. Two burly men loaded the Vespa in the back of a van placarded with the name Sucrose-Azucaria Ltd. The van sped away from town at such high speed that the police pulled it over just outside the village. The goddess must have intervened because the ticket for speeding was lost and never processed for payment.

A year later, the same reporters researched invoices paid for work on the gazebo-temple. The charges were paid by Sucrose-Azucaria, Ltd. Other documents on file at the courthouse showed that the same firm that had purchased the little, barren wedge of land where the temple was located.

The women in our village were appalled and they marched in a procession at the summer solstice. Sugar cane grew where the sacred grove had been. The fields of sugar cane were featureless, a great sea of grass twice the height of a man. Several worshipers using machetes cut tunnels in the sugar cane and found the goddess’ pond. Fertilizer run-off from the fields had poisoned the water. The stinking green algae carpeting the pond was so dense that it had asphyxiated all the frogs. Some gaunt-looking dragonflies buzzed over the green ooze, erring this way and that.