The Chaplain's War (5 page)

CHAPTER 8

CARRYING ON WITH BUSINESS AS USUAL WAS A STRANGE EXPERIENCE. Knowing what was to come left an aftertaste of dread in my mouth each morning. But there was always the same routine maintenance work on the chapel to be done. Rather than neglect my chores, I hurled myself into them with as much energy as I could muster. Keeping busy on productive tasks was just about the only sober way to take my mind off The Wall.

I suddenly found myself welcoming every little crack in the mortar, hole in the roof, or rotted slat of wood in the doors and shutters. Fixes that might have taken me only minutes before, now took hours. Not because I half-assed them. Far from it. I gave them the attention of a craftsman. Carefully patching and replacing as I went, so that for much of the day my mind was directly occupied.

A few of the regulars began helping me, and then, more people too. Before long everybody was in on the action. And quite quickly the chapel looked sharper than it ever had before. The place almost hummed with energy—everyone displacing his or her fear into the work itself. Including the grounds surrounding the chapel, as well as my garden.

We didn’t talk about it, of course. I don’t think we needed to. We could each see it in each other’s eyes. To speak our thoughts would have burst the fragile, necessary bubble of suspended disbelief that seemed to be keeping our manners and our sanity intact. So we discussed our work, and patted each other encouragingly on the back when it seemed a job had been well-done, and at night I huddled on my cot and tried to console myself with the idea that even though the end was near, at least I could say I was approaching the end with dignity.

Which was more than could be said for others.

One night I saw a bearded figure shuffle through the chapel entrance. He’d not shaved in weeks and had grain alcohol on his breath.

That was one rule I chose
not
to break: no drunks in my building. People who wanted to drown their sorrows in a mug or bottle were welcome to do it somewhere else. I politely approached the man and began encouraging him to go, when I stopped cold.

“Major Hoff,” I said quietly, recognizing him.

“How do you do it?” he slurred at me.

“Do what, sir?”

“How do you believe?”

“Sir?”

“God, damn you! How do you believe in God?”

I thought back to the first time the Professor had entered the chapel. I’d not had a very good answer for him then, and I didn’t have a very good answer for Hoff now. The major’s eyes squinted angrily up at me as I fumbled my way through an explanation, then he waved me off.

“Crap,” he said. “It’s all a lot of crap. Always has been.”

I looked behind me to see that a small crowd of the chapel’s inhabitants had gathered to see what all the fuss was about. Recognizing that he had an audience, Hoff drew himself up to as dignified a stance as he could muster and began holding forth.

“The damned bugs always did have us by the balls,” he said in the too-loud volume of the generally intoxicated. “If there really was a God up there, He’d have made it so that the game was
fair.
No advantage for the mantes. Instead, they were so far ahead of us when the war started, we never really got our shot. Humanity, a day late and a dollar short. Or maybe a few hundred or a few thousand years late. Well, put your heads between your legs and kiss your butts goodbye. It’s been nice knowing you assholes.”

With that, Hoff turned and stepped out of the chapel.

Someone who came in later told me that the major kept walking well into the night, right up until he hit the wall.

Then,
crackle-poof.
He was gone.

By the time The Wall was clearly visible from the doorway of the chapel, people were giving themselves up to it on a regular basis. My parishioners, others from around the valley, anybody who’d just gotten tired of the waiting and decided to end it. I began to be able to tell who those people were. The pews would be packed, and someone would just stand up and slowly walk out, a look of remarkable calm on his or her face. Like Hoff, they’d keep going like that—calm, quiet, no running, right up and into The Wall. Flash. One moment, a human being. The next, a cloud of carbon molecules, decaying to submolecular nothingness.

I heard that the other church leaders began railing against this practice. Deacon Fulbright especially. Suicide was sin, and for those who walked into The Wall, it was said, there would be damnation.

“You know the rules as well as I do,” she told me one night as we stood outside the packed confines of the chapel. The Wall was ghostly bright in the distance—a reminder of our coming mortality.

“I serve other people besides Christians,” I reminded her. “The chaplain was very specific about his chapel being a place where everybody could come to seek spiritual solace.”

“You don’t have to be a Christian to see that throwing away what He gave you—a life—is a slap to His face.”

“I’m not so sure about that,” I told her. “I can’t believe in any God that would curse a soul who picks freedom from this place, especially since we’re going to die regardless. I’ve even considered it a few times myself: just getting up, walking out, and ending it.”

“So why don’t you?” she said, her voice hard and bitter.

“The only thing that stops me is my flock,” I replied. “They need the chapel, and the chapel needs me, so I stay where I am.”

The Deacon didn’t have a response to that.

She just stared at the Wall as it rippled like a curtain.

Within a few days, she’d joined the teeming congregation already at the chapel, bringing everyone in her attenuated religious circle with her.

Every night she and I made a point of meeting outside to consider our fate—watching The Wall creep toward us.

When I could sleep I dreamt odd dreams of flying away from Purgatory on a gust of warm ether, floating to another world far, far away from anywhere I’d ever been before.