JOSIAH PYKE AND THE ZEN MOMENT

Josiah's story takes a sudden turn one day as he rests after a walk...

“It’s hard to believe that I feel like this,” murmured Josiah to Ophelia.

“Like what?” asked his wife, smiling. They’d been married for exactly one year and were celebrating their first wedding anniversary.

“Like all the good things in life have come wrapped up in a gorgeous woman like you,” he replied, a little self-consciously. He wasn’t given to flowery words or romantic speech even though he often felt the full depth of his love for this wife of his.

“You’re more than generous,” she laughed, “for a man of faith it must seem very strange to say that about life, all the good things and all that, and in the form a woman rather than a god!”

“I sometimes think they’ve got it wrong, the preachers and bishops, the priests and popes, the men of a variety of deities.” He sounded almost morose as he said it. “Maybe we all visit Heaven when we love,”

“Are you having a Zen moment?” she asked, winking at him, “are you starting to believe there might be more to existence than faith? Is your religion starting to melt into a morass of introspection and meditation?”

“I need to think about it,” he muttered, “I joined the church in order to right the wrongs I perceived my father committed in the name of his own perverse comprehension of God, to gainsay some of the absurd things he preached….”

“A son doesn’t have to do that,” Ophelia told him. “A son needs to build on his past, not rearrange it!”

“It’s why I’m here,” Josiah told her, “now that Michael retired to his Lake District cottage and I’ve got his living here in Henstooth where my father preached before him. Everything’s driven my life in this direction. I’m here because some power greater than any on Earth ordained it. And as a reward for what I might end up doing here I’ve been rewarded with the most perfect wife a man could have. That’s the truth, and I can’t for the life of me see why I should think there’s something wrong with it.”

She smiled at him again. “Rewarded before the event?” she asked, “surely that’s asking for trouble! Like giving a child an Easter egg at Christmas because the birth needs rewarding with death.”

“That’s too deep for me,” he grinned back. “I need to do something about my Zen moment. I Suppose I need time to think. When I was a boy I used to need time to think. I’d take myself off for a walk, go sometimes where I’d never been before, deliberately got lost, and then have to find where I was, find my way home, and sometimes hope that I never could.”

“Then do it again, your reverence,” laughed Ophelia, “for I’m off to work, anniversary or no anniversary. But I’ll be back early with a kiss for you!”

“I might even pop down the lane,” h mumbled, and he kissed her goodbye. He didn’t exactly love the idea that she’d kept her job in Brumpton, but knew she had to have an identity other than being the vicar’s wife, and in a way he respected it.

“I think I’ll go past the cottage,” he said.

They’d rented the cottage, Tomm’s Playground, out to an elderly couple on the understanding they didn’t disturb the little graveyard in the garden. It must have seemed strange to the new tenants, but they didn’t actually mind the four mounds with their small gravestones. Maybe it meant there was less grass to be mown because Josiah tended to that plot, fastidiously, once or twice a month.

Almsot straight away, as soon as Ophelia was gone, Josiah set off, down the lane he’d walked as a ten year old. It had been an anniversary then, too, of his birth. He’d been ten years old and the fact hadn’t really registered anywhere but in his own head. Certainly his parents hadn’t been bothered. Now he was a grown man and celebrating, if that was the right word, the anniversary of his marriage, yet he felt that something was wrong. Was that why he called it a Zen moment?

Past the cottage, not too far to walk but far enough, was the river. It wasn’t much of a river, no more than an idle tributary to the bigger one that ran through Brumpton, but it had become quite a refuge from time to time as he had grown up.

Now he was there by its crystal waters, and he sat on a grassy part of what was mainly a stony bank and sighed.

The last time I came here I was with Penny, he thought out of the blue, and he frowned. I wonder what became of her … I did hear she was married with a football team of sons snapping around her ankles … she was beautiful, that hair, how I loved that hair…

But Penny had taken his going to University as a token that their teenage love was over and had gone her own way. It had hurt for a while, things like that, he supposed, always do.

There had been nothing until Ophelia had come along. No love. No kisses. No palpitations, just work and prayer and more work.

And time to wonder whether I was doing the right thing … time to doubt, time to regain my belief, then lose it again, then have enough faith to wade through the deepest waters of uncertainty and emerge at the end as a convinced guide in the village I was born in…

That’s what he was. I guide through the darkness of life for those who might otherwise be lost. And he and Ophelia were a beacon of hope…

He lay back and closed his eyes.

What might life have been like if I’d stayed with Penny? The thought disturbed him, but he carried on thinking it. He was dozing off, his mind leaving the lapping of the crystal stream for a few moments, though he was vaguely aware of its music inside himself. Maybe the ripples and the chattering as the water cascaded over polished stones or skirted baby reeds wove their own pattern into his dreams, but dream he did.

Penny was no Ophelia as she ran along with him, but what was this? He was in his college, in the room he shared with that other boy, and she was there with him, taking her clothes off until in his fantasy he could see every bit of her, taunting him with her long, long hair, see how long it was, and her flesh, that smooth and lovely peaches and cream flesh that was the very substance of her…

Then he was at home, in the Vicarage where he’d been brought up, a bullied snapper of a child, and she, Penny, was there disguised as his mother, his real biological mother with the same genes as he had coursing in his blood and along his nerves, long hair like that of an angel, and eyes that could devour a planet… beautiful eyes, and then she ran away, scarpered like a thief in the night, how he hated her for it, how he despised the bottle of stinking medicine she made from rat’s turds and other toxins, and fed him as if it would cure him of life … maybe that’s what she meant to do, to cure him of life itself.

He stirred as he dozed, and snuffled and the dream faded like dreams do until every vestige of it was gone, every tiny sliver of its memory.

And he opened his eyes and shook his head.

Out of the corner of his eyes he saw her lying there beside her on the sloping river bank, Penny of the long hair, still long but braided and tied in a knot like a lifeless bauble, and attached to it was the head of the girl he might have loved in a different dimension, pale, eyes open like orbs of horror, and spreading from her, soaking into the short grass turves of the river bank, was the red richness of her life, oozing slowly from the bone-handled kitchen knife that stuck from her chest like the handle a soul needs in order to open the door to Hell.

And Josiah Pyke was stretched out next to her, wondering when the dream that wasn’t a dream any more would end. His Zen moment had been rocked to its ending.

Slowly, he sat up.

© Peter Rogerson 04.04.18