James Burke - Light of the World

The discrepancy between the real world and how the world is reported by the media is enormous, and I’ve always believed this is why most newspeople drink too much. People like Wyatt Dixon understand how Frankenstein works and speak in metaphors that come out of their experience. Unfortunately, most of them have fried their SPAM, and their symbols and frame of reference don’t make much sense to the rest of us.

I grew up in the Deep South in an era when institutional cruelty was a given. I have never met one person in normal society who would admit knowledge of the cast-iron sweatboxes on Camp A in Angola Penitentiary. Nor have I met anyone who wasn’t shocked when I mentioned that there are more than a hundred convicts buried in the prison levee along the Mississippi River. Normal people will tell you they have never known a criminal, although they have sat in church pews next to slumlords, zoning board members on a pad, and defense contractors who have contributed to the death of thousands of human beings.

Here’s the biggest joke of all: Wyatt Dixon was probably a genuine believer. He may not have believed in God, but no one could deny he hadn’t been on a first-name basis with the devil. Maybe that’s a pathetic cachet, but as Clete would say, who’s perfect?

Where do you go on a Sunday if you want to find a man like Wyatt Dixon? I saw Albert working in his flower bed and asked him. “There’s a holy roller meeting up on the rez this afternoon,” he replied. “You might try there.”

“Thanks,” I said.

“What do you want with Dixon?”

“Information.”

“The boy had a hard life. Don’t be too rough on him.”

“Dixon doesn’t impress me as a victim.”

“That’s because you don’t know anything about him. You loved your parents and your parents loved you, Dave. Dixon didn’t have that kind of luck.”

“You’re a good man, Albert.”

“That’s what you think,” he replied.

The holy roller meeting was held at a pavilion on the Flathead Indian Reservation not far from the Mission Mountains. It involved what people down south call dinner on the ground and sometimes devil in the bush. At five P.M. Clete and I drove in the Caddy up a long grade through wooded hills that were a deep green from the spring rains into a valley that rose higher and higher as the road progressed toward Flathead Lake. The sky was clear and blue, and fresh snow had fallen on the tops of the Missions during the night; in the sunlight, you could see the ice on the waterfalls melting. The mountains were so massive, the rock chain they formed against the sky so vast, that you lost perspective and the forests growing up the sides resembled green velvet rather than trees. It was one of those places that seemed to reduce discussions about theology to the level of folly.

The service was almost over when Clete parked the Caddy in a pasture lined with rows of cars and pickup trucks. Someone had extended a huge vinyl canopy from the pavilion over the grass, where at least a hundred people were seated in folding chairs, listening to a minister preach into a microphone. The sunlight looked like hammered bronze on the surface of the Jocko, the wind cutting serpentine lines through the fields, the canopy ballooning and popping overhead. The work-worn faces of the congregants were like those you would expect to see in Appalachia, the eyes burning with a strange intensity, and either awe or puzzlement or vulnerability, that reminded me of the paintings of Pieter Brueghel’s Flemish peasants.

The real show wasn’t the preacher. When it was time to give witness, he paused and held on to the sides of the podium, lifting his chin, sucking in his cheeks, his mouth puckered, as though he were teetering on the bow of a ship bursting through the waves. “Paul and Silas bound in jail!” he called out.

“That old jailhouse reeled and rocked all night long!” the congregation shouted.

“Hebrew children in the fiery furnace all night long!” the preacher shouted.

“Lord, who will deliver poor me?” the congregation shouted back.

“There’s worse bondage than the jail. It’s bondage of the spirit,” the preacher said. He pointed his finger into the crowd. “There’s a man here gonna give witness to that, too. A man who had to be struck dumb in order to speak, and by heavens, each of you knows who I’m talking about. Come on up here, Wyatt.”

“These people vote in elections,” Clete whispered.

“Be quiet,” I said.

Dixon faced the crowd, his eyes close-set, the sleeves of his cowboy shirt rolled above his elbows, the veins in his forearms pumped with blood. Then I witnessed the strangest transformation I had ever seen take place in a human being. He looked briefly at the canopy rippling and snapping in the wind, then his mouth went slack and his eyes rolled up into his head. He began to speak in a language I had never heard. The syllables came from deep down in the throat and sounded like wood blocks knocking. He held his arms straight out from his sides, as though about to levitate. I would like to be able to say his performance was fraudulent, nothing more than a manifestation of tent-show religious traditions that go back to colonial times. Except the glaze in his face was not self-manufactured, nor was the energy that seemed to surge through his body as though he had laid his hand on a threadbare power line. Had I been a neurologist, I probably would have concluded he was having a seizure. I was not alone in my reaction. The congregation was transfixed, some pressing their hands to their mouths in fear. When Dixon finished his testimony, if that’s what it could be called, there was dead silence except for the wind popping the canopy.

Dixon balanced himself on the side of the podium, his pupils once again visible, a crooked smile on his face, like a man who was sexually exhausted and trying to recover perspective. Clete screwed a cigarette into the corner of his mouth and flipped open his Zippo.

“Are you crazy?” I said under my breath.

“You think these guys are paying any attention to us?” he replied.

“I don’t care. Show some respect.”

He slipped the cigarette back into his shirt pocket. “Check out the broad in the last row.”

She was wearing a hat and dark glasses, but there was no mistaking the creamy white skin and the mole by her mouth and the demure posture. “What is Felicity Louviere doing here?” I said.

“Maybe she thinks Dixon was mixed up in her daughter’s death.”

“You see the husband anywhere?”

“He’s probably getting laid.”

“We don’t even know the guy. Why be so critical?” I said.

“He’s a piece of shit, and you know it.”

We were standing at the back of the crowd. A fat woman in a print dress with lace on the sleeves turned around and stared at us. “Sorry,” I said.

“Here comes our man,” Clete said. “I hope you’re up to dealing with this crazy bastard.”

“Clete, will you stop it?” I said.

Dixon worked his way through the congregants while they folded and stacked their chairs, returning congratulations, shaking hands, even though his eyes never left our faces.

“I declare, it’s Mr. Robicheaux, fresh up from the bayou,” he said. “Or is it a swamp or a cesspool and such as that where you live at?”

“More like an open-air mental asylum. Is that Aramaic you were speaking?” I said.

“Some people say it’s Syriac. Some says Aramaic and Syriac is the same thing. I couldn’t comment, ’cause when it’s over, I don’t have no memory of it.”

“I really dug it,” Clete said. “It put me in mind of one of those Cecil B. DeMille films. You know, Charlton Heston up on the mountain shouting at the people down below in the middle of an electrical storm.”