Deus Absconditus

 

Everything changes.

Court Street (now First Street) ran from the town’s center, among buildings of rust-brown brick occupied by immigrant restaurants and thrift shops, used book places, and the offices of financial advisors and insurance agents.  The old courthouse had once occupied a small plaza next to the street.  The building previously had a mushroom-shaped dome mounted precariously atop a structure that looked like an old Carnegie Library.  (The actual Carnegie Library had been a block to the west among several churches.)  Both the courthouse (and the Carnegie Library) were too small and they were razed.  The new courthouse had no windows and was shaped like a mausoleum with bare, unadorned walls and a flat roof, someone’s idea of modernism on a small budget.  Around the time, the courthouse was leveled, the City Council voted to rationalize the street names in our town – on Elm Street, for instance, Dutch Elm disease had slaughtered all the trees and so the thoroughfare could be named 4th Street.  Similarly, avenues once named for Presidents or local Indian tribes that the pioneers had exterminated were re-named with numbers.  It was thought that this innovation would make it easier for ambulances to find the homes where our increasingly elderly population was slowly dying by degrees, decimated by slips and falls, brain aneurysms, and coronary infarctions.

So it was that Joester was walking in the predawn darkness along First Street (once Court Street) with the third dog of his adult life, enjoying the cool morning just before Halloween.  About a block from his home, one of Joester’s neighbors had enclosed his lawn with an unpainted picket fence.  A withered crab apple tree that had ceased bearing fruit pressed up against the fence-line where Joester and his dog were walking on the sidewalk.  Joester had the sense that something had changed with respect to the house and the fence made of raw picket-shaped planks.  But he couldn’t exactly put his finger on what was changed – it was more a matter of an absence then something affirmatively different.  

He turned the block musing, and let the dog take him where she wanted to walk.  The dog’s feet were a  flutter of motion as the animal tracked right and left in front him, pulling on her leash as she snuffled at the ground.  Joester’s first dog as an adult had been an ungovernable pit-bull and labrador mix, a very loyal animal but one that was unpredictable except in one respect: whenever that dog encountered another animal, it immediately lunged at the creature’s throat.  This was instinctive with that dog, but disconcerting.  After that beast died, Joester’s wife bought him a yellow labrador that he named after a much beloved dog that had been his companion when he was a small boy.  After 12 years or so that dog died, breathing her last on the kitchen floor when Joester was trying to urge her to go outside.  Then, Joester’s wife bought him the third dog, the canine that he was presently walking, also a yellow labrador.  Joester thought back about these dogs and remembered adventures with them and, then, he recalled that the fence that he had just passed displayed a picket nailed into the wood horizontal to the stakes making up the enclosure.  The picket was painted in white paint, somewhat childishly applied to read:  “I LOVE YOU – god”.  Recalling to mind his first dog, the aggressive pit bull and lab mix, Joester remembered pausing to inspect that message written on the picket hammered sideways into the fence.  That was more than 25 years ago.  Was it missing?  Had someone torn it down?

Joester retraced his steps to the fence and, standing on the sidewalk, surveyed the upright, unpainted pickets.  The message from God was missing.  Joester thought that if he looked closely at the fence, he might detect nail holes showing where the sign had been posted.  He removed his cell-phone from his pocket to aim the flashlight app at the fence.  Dawn was rousing the birds and they began to sing and the leaves fallen from the trees twitched on the lawns, rising and falling in small leaps with the wind.  He couldn’t see the nail-holes but he knew they were present.

Then, he remembered that another slat had been nailed onto the crab apple tree whose branches reached over the fence and hung, heavy with rotting fruit, over the sidewalk.  That slat was also painted in round, uncouth letters: ACCEPT ME JESUS!  The sign on the tree was also missing.  Joester looked around him, wondering whether the signs had simply fallen during a wind-storm that he couldn’t quite remember.  But both signs were gone, absent after twenty-six or -seven years – not fallen, it seemed, but intentionally taken down.  What did this mean?

The light spilling up over the horizon made the world seem cold and grey.  Colors hadn’t yet emerged and landscape was dim and stony with hues of granite and gniess.  The house behind the lawn was large with a porch running along its front side, two-stories and a steep roof rising over grey shingles to a bony ridgeline.  Although the driveway was crowded with parked cars – the kids were grown now and had their own vehicles – no one was stirring in the dwelling: a yellow-light was burning in the kitchen and Joester could see through the window into the empty room, long and narrow and lined with cupboards and shelves.  In the absence of the two signs, Joester couldn’t help but see the house as forlorn but this impression wasn’t based on anything visible.  It was a change in the atmosphere, a chilling breath of cold that seemed misplaced in the day all gaudy with autumn’s leaves dancing across the sidewalks and lawns.

Joester walked along the sidewalk to an intersection.  A car slid up to the stop sign, came to a halt, and, then, moved forward.  In several trees across the street, a big flock of tiny birds began to sing.  Dawn’s light gilded the tops of the trees.  The birds made a high-pitched squeaking and chattering sound, sometimes percussive like popcorn popping, a continuous noise that reminded Joester of a factory.  What kind of factory was it?  Joester imagined the surge of sound as machines making small clockwork gears, tiny sharp objects in the shape of stars with five or six points.