“My three queens,” Dr. Abernathy informed Pete Sands, “beat your two pairs. Sorry.” He collected the meager pot; Tibor saw that the minister’s little pile of chips was growing: he had been steadily winning.
“Can I play?” Tibor inquired.
The players glanced at one another in a mild way, as if barely conscious of his presence, let alone his request.
“Takes a dollar — in silver bits — to buy in,” Pete said. He tossed one chip to an empty spot on the table. “That represents the dollar you owe the banker. Have you a dollar? And I don’t mean in scrip.”
The priest said mildly, “Show Tibor how you back up your talk, Pete. Show him your arsenal.”
“This is how people can tell I’m never bluffing,” Pete said. He dug down deep into his pocket and brought out a roll of dimes, so marked.
“Wow,” Tibor said.
“I’ve never lost at blackjack,” Pete said. “I just double my bets.” He undid one end of the roll of dunes to show Tibor that within the brown paper actual silver coins existed: genuine money, from the old, old days.
“You sure you want to play?” Lurine Rae said, raising her eyebrow and eyeing Tibor. “Knowing this?”
He had, in his pocket, the one-third initial advance from the SOWers for the proposed murch. He had not spent a bit of it — just in case at some dreadful future hour of reckoning it had to be returned. Now, however, he took out six silver quarters, displayed them in the grip of his right manual-extensor’s claws. And so, as he rolled his cart closer to the table, Pete Sands counted out the red and blue chips which his dollar and a half bought. It had now become a four-person — and hence a better — game.
FOUR
Later that night, after pretty red-haired Lurine Rae and Tibor McMasters on his cow cart had respectively walked and rolled off, Pete Sands elected to discuss his vision with Dr. Abernathy.
Dr. Abernathy did not approve. “If you keep on having visions, I’m going to advise you that you be forbidden to approach the rail.”
“You’d cut me off from the greatest of the sacraments?” Pete could not believe it. Surely the short, roosterlike, red-faced, round little old priest was merely in a temporary — and for him quite normal — dark mood.
“Well, if you’re having visions, you don’t need the intercession of the priest and the saving power of the sacraments.”
Pete said, “You want to know what He –”
“His appearance,” Dr. Abernathy said, “is not a topography which I care to discuss, as if you’d seen a rare butterfly.”
Plunging in, Pete said, “Receive my confession, then. Now.” He knelt, hands clasped together, waited.
“I’m not dressed properly.”
“Balls.”
Dr. Abernathy sighed, departed, and presently returned in the white robes necessary; pulling a chair into place, he seated himself with his back to Pete. Then, crossing himself, after praying inaudibly, he said, “May Thy ears receive the humble confession of this, Thy servant, who has erred and wishes to be received back into Thy bountiful grace.”
“Here’s how He looked,” Pete began.
Interrupting, Dr. Abernathy, slightly more loudly, prayed, “Cause this, Thy servant, now puffed up with vainglory and imagining in his dustlike ignorance that he has direct access to Thy Holy Presence through what is a chemical and magical process devoid of sanctification –”
“He is always there,” Pete said.
“In confession,” Dr. Abernathy said, “do not recount the actions of others, even of Him.”
Pete declared, “I most humbly confess that I deliberately ingested drugs of an intricate nature for the purpose of transcending ordinary reality for a glimpse of the absolute, and this was wrong. Further, I confess that in all honesty. I believed in and still do believe in the veracity of my vision, that I genuinely saw Him, and if I am mistaken, I beg Him to forgive me, but if it was Him, then He must have wished –”
“From dust thou art come,” Dr. Abernathy interrupted. “Oh man, how small thou art. Lord God, open this idiotic fool’s inner heart to the wisdom of Thee: which is that no man can see Thee and announce predicate adjectives as to Thy appearance and being.”
“I confess further,” Pete said, “that I did harbor and still harbor resentment at being told to desist from my personal search for God, and that I believe that one man working alone can still find Him. Without the mediation of the priest, the sacraments, and the church; this I confess most humbly to believe and although I know it is wrong I nonetheless still believe it.”
They sat in silence for an interval and then Pete Sands said, “Funny you should say that ‘dust to dust’ thing. It reminds me of what Ho On said about being made from the clay of the ground.”
Dr. Abernathy stared at him fixedly.
“What’s the matter?” Pete said uneasily.
” ‘Ho On’?”
“Yes. In my vision — the ceramic pot gave that as its name. Silly pot, silly name. Must have been a silly hallucinogenic; probably had some of those wartime disorientation chemicals in it that –”
Dr. Abernathy said, in a surprisingly grave voice, “That is Greek.”
“Greek!”
“I’m not positive of precision, but it’s a name God gave Himself in the Bible, in the Greek part. Yahweh, as a Hebrew verb, means something in the older part, when He talks to Moses. . . it’s a form of the verb ‘to be’; it describes His nature. ‘I am He Who causes to be,’ is what Yahweh literally means. So that Moses could report back to his people the nature — that is, the ontology — of his God. But Ho On. . .” The priest pondered. “The Essence of Essence. The Most Holy? The On High? The Ultimate Power?”
Laughing, Pete said, “This was a little clay pot. Anyhow, as you say, I was tripping out on drugs. At first it said, ‘Oh Ho,’ and then it went, ‘Oh, oh, oh,’ and finally ‘Ho On.'”
“But that is Greek.”
Pete asked, “Who was St. Sophia?”
“There never was any St. Sophia.”
At that, Pete started laughing in the fashion of a man joyfully flashing back to what had been a good drug trip. “No St. Sophia? A pot that calls itself God, and a revelation about a non-existent saint — that was some mixture I took. Once in a lifetime. You’re right; it is black mass. A saint is going to be reborn –”
“I’ll look it up,” Dr. Abernathy said. “But I’m sure there was no such saint. . .” He departed for a time, then, abruptly, returned carrying a large old book with him, a reference book. “St. Sophia,” he declared loudly, “was a building.”
“A building!”
“A very famous building, destroyed of course during the smash. The emperor Justinian had it personally constructed. The name for it, Haggia Sophia, is Greek. Also Greek, like Ho On. It means ‘the Wisdom of God.’ She — it — is going to be reborn?”
“That’s what Ho On told me,” Pete said.
Seating himself, Dr. Abernathy said carefully, “What else did this Ho On, this ceramic pot, say to you?”
“Nothing important. It complained a lot. Oh yes: it said that St. Sophia hadn’t been acceptable before.”
“And you derived nothing more?”
“Well, nothing that –”
” ‘Haggia Sophia,’ ” the priest said, “can also refer to the Word of God, and hence by extension is a cypher for Christ. It is a cypher within a cypher: Haggia Sophia; St. Sophia; the Wisdom of God; the Logos; Christ; and therefore, according to our Trinitarian beliefs, God. Read, ahem. . . ah: Proverbs 8:22-31. Most fascinating.”
“A saint that never even existed,” Pete said. “The pot put me on. It was a gag. It was pulling my leg.”
“Are you still sleeping with Lurine Rae?” The priest’s voice had a sudden, hardly expected sharpness to it; he blinked.
“Um, yes,” Pete muttered.
“So this is the road our converts travel to reach us.”
Pete said, “When you’re losing you’re losing. I mean, you take them as they come.”
“I order you,” Dr. Abernathy said, “to stop sleeping with that girl, whom you are not married to.”
“If I do that she won’t join the Christian Church.”
There was silence. Each man regarded the other, heavily breathing; faces flushed, the two of them glared disapproval and masculine authority, with overtones of some deeper, higher mandate, obscurely articulated but nonetheless there.
“And the visions,” Dr. Abernathy said. “It is time you gave them up as well. You confessed the use of vision-inducing drugs. I am instructing you to turn all such drugs over to me.”
“Wh-wh-what?”
The priest nodded. “Right now.” He held out his hand.
“I never should have confessed.” His voice trembled and he could not, for the life of him, keep it steady. “Listen,” he said, “how about a deal? I’ll stop sleeping with Lurine, but you let me keep –“