despite my desire to be pious - a desire i have since discovered was doomed - i was also curious about the way things worked; i had yet to learn that curiosity and piety are bitter enemies. naturally, then, a question that arose in my mind soon after my arrival in the assembly was the nature of the relationship between sister gooch and rev. weal. the latter was married, as a good protestant minister should be, the institution of marriage providing both a façade of respectability and an antagonist on whom to inflict one’s daily venom - functions critical for christian society to maintain its dogmas intact. sister gooch reputedly had a husband, but it was deemed improper to speak of him. nevertheless, christians being people too, improprieties occurred. from the pleasurable furtive guilty leaks i was granted, not always consistent, from sources sometimes foul, i pieced together a boggy patch of knowledge.
peggy gooch had been born to a drunken womanizer and a saint sometime before anybody else, in either shelby montana under the amtrak station, wuxi china to migrant and failed missionaries, or in a godly abode not fully of the earth. not one given to formal education, she didn’t. not particularly pretty, she refused fashion’s tinctures. not invested with wit, she followed god. without siblings, with neither beauty nor intellect, she drew, as only the dispossessed can, power from god’s deep well and became holy. taking after her mother, she married a nogood churchhating motherfucking godcursing couchbeering bastard, a polemic to her holiness, a mirror to define herself. in and out of everything but her, mr. gooch was a man of prepositions. above the gods, below decency and order, alongside the devil, with and by and for himself. if the gooches had had any children, he had eaten them. if he had had parents, he had roasted, carved, and frozen them. if he believed in anything, there was no indication. intimations of grand felonies and deep incarceration abounded. it all added enormously to mrs. gooch’s reputation.
rev. weal and sister gooch were like yahweh and lilith orbiting around planet assembly, vaguely symbiotic, feeding on each other across the conduits of darkness, sources and reflections of light and heat … but never in direct contact. and if they would be, the planet would surely implode. they were the northern and southern poles, hamlet and rosalind, midnight and noon: it was imperative for efficient operations - for the very continuation of life - that they remain apart, at the unspoiled pinnacles of their respective domains.
i imagined of course, as everyone must have, trysts in the makeshift baptismal tank - a secondhand whirlpool left the assembly by a deceased member who once lived the good life in california - febrile trysts late, late on the lord’s day, the copulating celebrants consummating the day’s ecstasy, an outlandish union of opposites. indeed, there were rumours that wanda naught, the pudgy dimpled 6-year-old whose singing was thrust into the spotlight far too often, was a product of such a union. but who could say? who among us truly knows their origins? who dares inquire?
in the absence of certitude, conspiracy theories obsessed me. rev. weal was an agent for the cia, sister gooch a double agent for whatever axis of evil dominated the day, trading secrets through codewords: thank you jesus meant 400 tanks next tuesday, praise the lord, bomb melbourne. i invented archaeologies of dark deals made, betrayed, remade, below the white sand of sunday’s choruses. nobody was safe.
but the only collaboration these two hollywood superpowers revealed was indirect dialogue, some conversation mediated by rules beyond routine comprehension. in the services, sister gooch was the lead respondent, shouting with more gusto and authority than anyone else, the chief violinist, interpreter, and amplifier of rev. weal’s conducting. for such effort and affirmation, she was acknowledged, praised, and apotheosized from the pulpit. yes, sister gooch, say it sing it, sing the lord, oh yes yes, sister gooch can sing … for her part, gooch would refer obliquely to her testosteroned rival. he who is most frequently behind the pulpit, she would say, pausing dramatically, is not believed to think the lord is behind brother budd’s enterprise. or - god’s servant who blesses us with words was revealed not to enter into that fellowship in times past. if questioned for clarity - a mistake only made by novitiates - she would close her thick lids, bow her reptilian head, and remain motionless and silent until everyone, from fear or boredom, had left.
there was something between them, but it didn’t follow any protocol i’d been exposed to.
no one spoke with rev. weal, one was spoken to. one was not spoken to one-on-one but from god’s stage in unholy audience. when the moon is a waxing sliver, showing a crack of light in the dark bowl of the sky, and its round black outline visible against that bowl, it looks as if the world were encased in darkness and behind it a vast warm desirable world of light. as if a sewer cover has been slipped slightly aside from the bowl, to give us mortals an intimation of the light we’ll never see. rev. weal was the sewer cover operator who lived on the heaven side of the bowl, slipping it aside to show us distant glimpses of the eternal vat of god.
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