12. One Grain at the Time

THE SANDS OF TIME Part 12

The Reverend Rollo Bandweasel was getting worried. Had he, he wondered, stepped into the forefront of something that had been troubling him for more years than he cared to remember, and maybe gone a bit too far? Was he being guided by powerful forces from the Heavens into righting an ancient wrong, snd might he be judged for it on Earth by an ignorant judiciary?

It had all started in his rather idealistic youth, before he’d found his God. Back then it had been the environment and in particular a patch of ancient woodland that needed saving that had taken his every moment’s thought. He’d been rather devout, but not in a religious sense, back then. He’d even changed his name to one that sounded rebellious… Hobson had been a rather middle-class name and he wanted to have one that attracted the youth of the planet, so he had become Bandweasel and even changed it by deed poll when he could.

He had still lived at home, a terraced house built in the age of Queen Victoria and ready for the scrap heap, but it was comfortable enough and quite good enough for his parents and himself. His own bedroom had been the attic (there only being one first floor bedroom since one of the original two had been converted into a bathroom)

And it was to that bedroom he took his wonderful souvenir of his tree-hugging days. It was s skull that he’d unearthed while digging a hidey-hole for himself and a few other environmentalists to spend dry days and even nights in, and though he knew he should have alerted the police to his macabre discovery he was enough of a rebel not to want to. They might, it crossed his mind, with their simple intellects want to accuse him of killing someone even though it was quite obvious that the skull most likely predated his own birth.

So he made himself a lovely little wooden cabinet (at least he thought it was lovely) and carefully placed his skull inside it, creating a spooky glazed window so that the man or woman who had once owned that skull could see out into the world if they wanted to. He had been, back then, all heart!

But that skull had set his mind into thinking of the mysteries of life. Someone had inhabited that dried out bone, had seen though its orbs and sampled the world via a network of senses. Had thoughts, constructed one notion from another, built a framework of life for him or herself. And all of that was gone. But where to? Heaven? Hell? Nowhere?

And it was via that skull’s influence that he found his God and went off to study until he actually became a qualified clergyman. But all that time he had kept his assumed name of Rollo Bandweasel because he found it attractive and anyway it seemed to be too much trouble to change it back to a boring Hobson.

He was given the church of Burburry Village to preach the gospel from, to bury the dead, greet the newborn and join loving couples in happy wedlock from, and he soon discovered a spooky coincidence that he decided must be his Lord guiding him because it was in that very church that, ages ago, his own uncle and the then vicar had met his death via the gift of a falling statue. His grave was even in the tiny graveyard surrounded by the last corporate remains of half a dozen much more ancient notaries.

Or had that statue been more than merely falling? Might it have been wielded in anger? And if it was, who might have been doing the wielding? And was that why the deity he believed in had ordained him in the church and sent him to be an avenging angel, doing heavenly work by righting a terrible wrong?

At first the thought had flittered around the corner of his mind until a nosy policeman had made it his duty to have his uncle exhumed. He had explained why and his permission had been sought and he had willingly agreed because any answer the police found might equally solve a worry in his own mind. So the exhumation had taken place, the remains of the deceased relative examined under a microscope and no actual conclusion arrived at, but unknown to him a sample of long dead tissue had surrendered its DNA.

And that might have been that until the home he had lived in with his parents who were now long deceased, (though he hadn’t been near it recently, he had a cosy village vicarage to write his sermons in) became unsafe and was demolished along with a row of other equally ancient houses.

Which was when his little glazed and forgotten cabinet had given up its secrets and pointed towards him. Or at least, he thought it would because it had clearly been in his own teenage home and who but a teenager would make a display cabinet for a dead head?

And one of the secrets that emerged from an examination of that old skull was some DNA and even long forgotten dental records, and miracle of miracles it transpired that it had belonged to a woman who had actually been married for a short time to the uncle of his in the graveyard. She had disappeared not long after marrying his uncle, and had not been seen or heard of since. Now it was clear why.

And it was when the above chaos of thoughts was circulating in his head that he was visited by Detective Sergeant Lucy Boniface. The same Detective Sergeant Lucy Boniface who had asked him about the events in the Plaice and Chips of merely days ago.

“This,” she said with a smile, “has got to go down as one almighty coincidence.”

“The Almighty is good with coincidences,” he replied, “just think what a huge coincidence it was that Adam and Eve actually met when they were alone on a mighty unpopulated planet that had just been created.”

“It would indeed be a mighty coincidence if the story was anything more than nonsense invented by ancients in an attempt to give themselves some back-story,” replied Lucy, smiling in such a way that his faith wasn’t shaken by her dismissal of the first book in its holy bible.

“So what has it to do with me?” he asked.

“Nothing or everything,” she replied dryly.

“Pardon?”

“Well, I’ve looked into your background. I hope you don’t mind? It’s too bad if you do, though! And I discovered that you have a colourful youth behind you, that you were, in fact, what the popular press liked to define as a tree-hugger.”

“I never hugged a tree in my life!” he replied.

“Maybe not, but you know what I mean. And anyway I discovered that you were Rollo Hobson before you sought greater street cred by changing to Rollo Bandweasel?”

“What’s in a name, Sergeant?”

“Quite a lot when I recall that my own father, a retired detective, has been troubled by the strange and almost unbelievable demise of the Reverend and Mrs Hobson years ago.”

“So he’s your father is he? I met him, oh, a few years ago, over the exhumation.”

“Exactly. But the man being exhumed was, in actual fact, your own uncle, wasn’t he? And you didn’t think to mention that did you?

“It didn’t strike me as being important…”

“Didn’t it? Well to tell you the truth, my father and I think it might be most important. We might start to ask ourselves why you were so reticent about an important family matter like that. Which brings us to the Plaice and Chips near Oceaneye only the other night… Remember?”

© Peter Rogerson 18.03.22

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