John Shirley - A Song Called Youth

It was a simple chapel of white wood, with stained-glass windows. He couldn’t make out from here what the figures in the stained glass represented.

The chapel stood almost demurely in a stand of oak trees shaggy with moss and mistletoe. Swenson crossed a lawn to reach it, his shoes getting soaked by the dew in the fragrant grass. He shivered. It was a chill, clammy morning. There were wraiths of fog, yet, under the oak trees. Fallen leaves whispered beneath his feet as he walked up to the chapel’s front steps. The chapel was bigger than he’d thought. Room for two hundred.

The oaks creaked faintly in a puff of breeze.

Oaks, he thought. Druidic.

He opened the green-painted chapel door.

There were two Nazis, in full uniform, kneeling before the altar, pig-shaven heads bowed in prayer.

To one side stood Colonel Watson, in a neat gray suit and trenchcoat, his face florid with the chill. On the other was Sackville-West, sitting in a pew, head bowed, hat in hands.

Over the altar was a twelve-by-eight-foot oil-painting, professionally but cornily rendered, showing Jesus sitting on his throne, his face uncharacteristically creased in a scowl of judgment. On his head was a circlet of oak-leaves. Sitting at his feet were Rick and Ellen Crandall, painted with just a little flattery, both in white robes. There was a steel cross on a blond-wood stand under the painting, and imprinted at the intersection of its bars, no bigger than a silver dollar, was an “iron cross.” To either side of the dais area were furled flags—an Old Glory, a Confederate flag, and one he didn’t recognize, its insignia folded away. White tulips stood in a silver vase on the altar, a floral benediction.

The room blushed with rosy light from the stained glass. He looked at the stained-glass figures and didn’t recognize them.

There were paintings along the walls to either side of the pews. He couldn’t make them out from here, except that they were neurotically intricate and allegorical, with figures suspended in the heavens in hallucinogenic clusters.

Swenson couldn’t move. He was transfixed there at the entrance. He told himself, Don’t be stupid. Don’t be a child.

But he stayed where he was until Watson looked over and beckoned.

He walked down the aisle past the empty pews toward the black-coated backs of two Nazis in full, mid-twentieth century SS uniforms, kneeling at the altar in silent prayer.

Watson stepped out of the chancel, and with the exaggerated quiet of a man wary of a sacred moment, walked down the outside aisle, then gestured for Swenson to join him three pews back.

The two men sat down side by side on the hard wooden pews.

“Sackville-West wants you along,” Watson said, more a mutter than a whisper.

“Along on what?”

Watson snorted and nodded toward the two Nazis, figures from a propaganda painting. “We’re going to ‘initiate’ those two nitwits…” He shrugged, and the briskness of the motion told Swenson that the colonel was irritated; irritated just short of fury. “A man named Strawling from Idaho—he attended one of our conventions out in Orange County. By some administrative mistake, this man Strawling was allowed into the SA-Initiates meetings, attended Special Services, the whole bit. Got himself all excited. Turns out he belongs to the National Socialist White People’s Party! We’d had no idea, of course. We don’t need unsubtle dunderheads among the Initiates… But somehow he slipped through the screenings… He told his pal, the one kneeling there beside him, and they came out here… Just drove up to the goddamn gate at dawn, told the guards they wanted to see Rick Crandall. They heard about the assassination attempt—wanted to be his bodyguards!” His voice dripped with contempt. “They were all got up like that! At the gates of Cloudy Peak Farm, dressed like that ! Like old school twentieth century Nazis! Christ, if some reporter was hanging around…” He shook his head. “Naturally we didn’t let them in to see Rick. The guards rang Sackville-West and old Sacks rang me out of a sound sleep and we went to see Rick. He said they should make their peace with God, so here they are. I don’t know why Sacks wanted you along—” Swenson felt Watson look at him. “But I think it’s a kind of initiation for you, too. Not the kind those two are getting, of course…”

Swenson nodded. He sat like something carved into the wood of the pew, remembering the Second Circle, and the Services, the pageantry of it, and how he’d almost lost himself…

Excerpt from a memo

From: Frank Purchase to Quincy Witcher

Thought you would be interested in the following letter from Stisky to Encendez. Father Encendez was in prison at the time of the letter’s composition. The letter was never mailed. We found it when we went through Stisky’s effects.

…the truth is, I never believed. When I entered the Church, I “suspended my disbelief” like you do when you’re reading a novel. You believe in the novel’s subjective world while you’re reading it, but of course you know it’s all made up. But you prefer to believe, while you’re reading, because you love the intricacy, the marvel of it, the sublime distraction of it. I feel the same way about The Church. The Church is a she, and I once fell in love with a woman, and knew that, despite all she said, she didn’t love me back, not really. The love I fantasized was unreal, and I knew it, but I made myself believe in it because it was a delicious reassurance. The Church has a thousand volumes of love letters it has written to itself, in the form of the Apologias and so forth, in all their manifestations. The Church is a beautiful lie. I saw no harm in the necessary casuistry. And it gave me a base to work from, to help the poor. I wanted to get in among the people who needed me, and it put me there. I wonder about my own underlying motives, though. The pageantry of the Church, the patina of glamour on the rituals; the pleasantly musty homeliness of a Jesuitical library; the asceticism so weighty with our self-congratulation. But most of all the pageantry, like the tarted-up garishness of a Parisian whore, the rituals, the accoutrements, all of it seduces me…

As you can see, our “Swenson” has a profound psychological need for ritual. The more dramatic the ritual, the better. Again, his predilections are a double-edged sword. I worry that when he undergoes the SA’s Second Circle training program, and sees the neofascist splendor of their Services, he may fall under their spell. He denied his faith, in private, and he was rebellious, but ultimately his actions bespoke a strong loyalty to the Church, until he was defrocked. If he develops the same neurotic attachments to the rituals of the SA’s inner circle, we may lose his loyalty entirely…

They were walking through the slowly dissipating mists, under the oak trees. An SAISC guard in full mask walked ahead, carrying a rifle, like a platoon patrol’s point man; then came Swenson with Watson and the two Nazis walking to Watson’s left. Behind them were two more faceless SA guardsmen.

They strolled along a trail, under a tracework of damp black twigs having the look of old electrical cords. Winter-withered ferns arced dripping to either side; there was a smell of rotting wood and mushrooms. A single blackbird trilled and warbled and trilled yet again. Swenson was cold. He zipped up his jacket and balled his hands in his pockets.

He thought he could feel the guards looking at his back.

The Nazis were wearing their shiny billed caps now. There was a young one with beetling brows and a weak chin, and an older one with a face like a knot of old tree wood. They both had Western accents; they’d come from northern Idaho. “The panhandle,” they said. They both owned businesses out that way, but they’d decided coming here was more important. A man had to choose between profit and duty sometimes, the young one had said. No matter what they said, Watson acted as if he saw the perfect rightness of it. He nodded and said, “Mm-hmm, oh, I agree,” now and then. Their dress uniforms were knife-creased, neat as a pin, complete with swastika armbands; their boots spit-polished. Swenson saw Watson wince when he looked at the armbands.