Lamb |
Issue 5
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The dusty floors he swept were untread by human feet not his own for longer than the dying town could recall. He was a flesh-and-blood ghost doomed to haunt the hallowed halls of the abandoned church. Even the Pastor left before him. He had been the church’s last communicant, and when the Pastor shook his hand that final Sunday, he reminded the old janitor that the church was closing and there was no need to continue cleaning an empty building.
But he didn’t leave. He kept the final set of keys and continued cleaning the church in defiance of the Pastor’s suggestions and in defiance of the window boards installed to prevent damage from vandals and break-ins from vagrants and in defiance of any logic that dictated the church would never see another mass held inside again. He entered each night to dust the pews and mop the floors and clean the toilets for congregants who would not attend a dead church in a dying town. Most of the town’s residents evaporated with the lake, including his children who begged the old janitor to migrate to a town less lonely than a decaying desert waystation. Their pleas went unanswered. Lack of funding left the church abandoned. No other parish took its place. No interest developed in remodeling it for commercial purposes in a town whose numbers barely exceeded five hundred, and demolishing the building was viewed as an expense from which little could be gained. So the church stood as a fossil, a graveyard of a bygone age like the Puebloan cities and Anasazi paintings hidden in the desert’s interior. Residents speculated on the janitor’s reasons for remaining, but all agreed that the sudden death of his final child followed by the self-inflicted passing of his wife had left the man broken. Both were buried in a nearby cemetery that he so rarely visited that the flowers he had left years prior continued to wilt against the punishing sun with every passing summer. Following their deaths, he buried himself in church affairs, attending mass daily, twice daily, thrice daily, forsaking sleep between his graveyard shifts in favor of attending each service. His voice always boomed over the other congregants, never in key but always exceeding all others in the pious passion of his singing that it often seemed that God’s light shone upon him. His devotion outlasted the church and it eventually outlasted the town. He remained one of the few permanent residents, the employees of the remaining gas station migrating from nearby towns for work. Attempts to remove him from the church went unenforced by the deputy sheriff who drove fifty miles from the nearest substation to provide water, food, and a human conversation. Isolation stunted the old janitor’s conversational skills, which centered almost entirely around the church and the town as if the previous thirty years of downturn never occurred. Occasionally the deputy would join the janitor at his request for a morning service in which the old man would pray towards an empty altar and recite the daily readings from a book ten years out of date and sit and nod and “amen” to a silent sermon the deputy pretended to hear. The old janitor would sing on cue, his voice would echo across the church and when the deputy left, the old janitor’s voice could still be heard across the empty streets where the gas station clerks would sit and listen to the man’s voice violate the silence of the ghost town. No one knew how long he had been left lying there when they found him. The deputy assumed that he had finally moved away when he didn’t answer his door until he found the janitor’s truck parked at the church on his way out. The inside of the church had collected weeks of dust and the old janitor lay prostrate below the altar. The holiness of his final pose clashed with the horrific condition of his lifeless husk, the sacred and profane distilled into a single body. The deputy was no stranger to such sights. Transients and tweakers left to their devices in the desert often turned up in abandoned buildings in similar states, but he had reduced those dead men to stiffs to be reported, bagged, and buried. He had known the old janitor long enough to put a soul to his face, and that soul had vanished. He called in the death over the radio and continued his impersonal routine with a heavy heart. The fate of the old janitor’s body became a battleground to his children. They resented their mother and baby brother’s burial in an isolated cemetery but conceded that their father would have been horrified to be buried so far from those he mourned for many years. The children fought over whether to exhume and rebury the bodies, and their fighting became so fierce that they finally passed responsibility for their father’s body to the one man who understood the old janitor’s needs better than his own children, the Pastor. The Pastor agreed but lamented that the decision fell on his knees. His inability to convince the janitor away from that church had proved his greatest failure as a shepherd, and he abandoned his new flock four states away to bury the lamb who wouldn’t leave his old pasture. Memory directed him off the highway into a town almost unrecognizable to his aging eyes. He saw to the janitor’s burial beside his wife and child and recited a benediction to the man’s children, as well as to the deputy sheriff who arrived out of some strange need to seek personal closure over his own guilt that his compassionate decision to not remove the man had condemned him to a lonely death. The Pastor remained at the cemetery until dark and visited the abandoned church. He remembered his first Sunday there when he heard a loud voice he later located as belonging to the evening janitor. When that mass had ended, the janitor vigorously shook his hand and welcomed him into the small community. For many years after, he had been the only real friend the janitor had. The Pastor left the church and while he drove down the dark road he could hear the janitor’s voice travel from the building. The voice followed him past the gas station and onto the lonely two-lane road until the flickering neon of the gas station faded into the night and the singing voice vanished with it. |
STEVEN MCFANN is a carpenter and writer from sunny, smoggy Southern California. He has published articles with the entertainment news outlet ScreenRant and is currently working on a novel and a stage play that he writes on the company dime. Follow him on Twitter @SadCowboiVibes.
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