Credo in unam sanctam et pathologicam ecclesiam
The church was coming along nicely, we all thought it was. The town of Ferington had its own opinions but we always let it. It were never our business to judge no one’s character, not a person’s nor a community’s, but Ferington? The town cast its own judgement in the same mould it cast its bullets in.
Only 6 months ago, we’d started. Rhett and Fitzroy had cleared the grounds immediately to the west. Churchless, Ferington was still only a half town now, but when we were done, it’d be a bona fide village. Mayor Stetson had commissioned us himself. There was misconstruction, already, in his arm’s gesture as he paid us. And his face, static as a police sketch. As though the church had materialised already, just by the thrusting-forward of money. As though he’d personally completed Ferington then and there. What, then, were we?
We’d dug trenches, four feet into God’s earth, and marked the places for the granite post footings, spaced six feet apart on centre. Puck had spent a tender moment with the first of the footings, rolled in like a millstone yet unlaboured.
“It’s a commun’ty, will be a-resting on ye”, he’d said. “From the moment of consecration, ’til the day of judgement, there ain’t no moment’s recess from yer job. Be good.” Easing his palm over the smooth rounded stone, he’d kissed it as though it were the footing of the crucifix itself.
In days, four-and-twenty footings lined the edges of the structure, like so many guards to the soil. We set up four-and-twenty structural posts of solid-sawn wood, collared in wood cleats to improve uplift resistance, and backfilled the trenches.
This was always a delicate moment in construction. The last wooden post fixed upward in place, the ensemble rising from the ground, bare as a pecked-clean skeleton.
“Why, look at you”, Drew whispered at it. “Rendering of a carcass, leviathan, a-resting on yon ground already after a death-time of stillness…”
The sun lowered, chopped to juliennes between the poles. Gazing, squares of cornbread in our hands, we had to remind ourselves. “This here’s a beginnin’”, we whispered at the structure. “Ain’t none advanced stage of decomposition. Ain’t no vultures nor maggots done eaten away at you.”
No. That was all still to come.
Coals still glowed from lunch, and now Wyatt nestled in them a cast iron skillet. He’d washed and slit a bucketful of sweet chestnuts, and proceeded to roast them in batches on the skillet.
“You guys took long enough”, Mayor Stetson said, his pen-and-ink face appreciating the structure of naked posts. “Going on a chestnut break now, are you? This is Ferington’s time, but I guess you earned it.”
We extended the skillet with some chestnuts toward him but he wouldn’t take them. He left us alone with only the hissing of fluids through the shells and tender clicks of the peeling.
Fitzroy, Drew and Rhett bolted bearing blocks to the tops of the posts, that the trusses would be fixed upon. We spaced the work between breakfasts of corn bread with beef tartare and minced shallots. Lunches and dinners of barbecue clams with a rich Middle Eastern spice blend. We set up temporary support posts on the gable ends and the drop gable end trusses took their virgin flight. A ladder on each end. Wyatt hauling up one end and Puck the other, the first gable truss soared, the affixed cross pricking the fragrance of the lunchtime air. Xander was nowhere in sight. Was he watching the birth of the roof’s shape from a distance? Somewhere we couldn’t see him cry?
No. 20 still minutes later, Xander came striding over the land with his rifle over one shoulder and two jackrabbits over the other. We skinned and gutted the rabbits, chopped them up and stewed them with olive oil, parsley, capers and saffron. Puck supplied a red wine vinegar of his own making. Whatever it was that folk smelled in the blood of blood relatives, that elusive reason why we treat our own kin so much more kindly, Puck’s wine vinegar contained the same redness.
Townsfolk didn’t get that. “Wine vinegar”, they asserted, “is just you trying and failing to make wine”.
Puck, in response, built a clay oven beside the firepit. We called it Sal, our clay oven. Sal proved itself with prosciutto pizzas, and answered our love with flaxseed meringues. We built a jam roly-poly with Drew’s special brandy-infused custard; and Sal dried chunks of mango, which we ate with thyme and chilli flakes.
Ferington was surprised at the sprouting of that oven.
“What’s this?”, Mayor Stetson asked. “Fastest-growing thing I’ve seen in a long time.”
“Yeah”, another said. “This a part of the church we’re paying you for?”
Well, Sal, though not strictly a part of the church, greatly assisted our cooking in the months to come.
Between installing the gable end trusses, at the peak and overhangs, Drew had gotten his hands on a few live octopuses, which Puck kissed and slaughtered, and we ate raw with celery, lemon juice and olive oil.
To celebrate the positioning of the last roof truss, we brewed ourselves a rhubarb basil juice, after Drew’s secret recipe. We dry rubbed ribs with sugar and powdered chilli, and slow cooked them for a whole day so they’d be ripe for grilling that evening, with a sauce from apricot jam, worcestershire sauce, butter and peppercorns. We danced to calibrate the cooking time; the stew pot hours maturing those ribs. Xander calibrated the dance with the six registers of his piano accordion. Eighty bass keys sat in neat rows like as many members of a choir. We even cut a few roof purlins at the appropriate length.
The following day, as we measured and cut the rest of the purlins, Drew cut three beautiful cabbages to thin strips, mixed them with fennel and sea salt and committed them to a mason jar. They fermented for 3 days, during which, admittedly, our work on the purlins was slow and townsfolk looked on us wearily.
When at last Drew’s sauerkraut had finished fermenting, it was the perfect accompaniment to our venison burgers, graced in a pumpkin sauce, fashioned from brown sugar, coriander and nutmeg, and fermented quickly; 2 quiet days only.
Each passing week was marked by more frequent visits from Ferington, and each visit less cordial than the last. They demanded of us to work quicker, they did, or otherwise to justify “the amount of cooking in proportion to the amount of building”. We held out mozzarella sandwiches to them, grilled in our own clay Sal; the building of churches, after all, is a work of love; but these folk could not share a love measured in mozzarella. They were waiting for Ferington’s transsubstantiation. To be an entry in God’s atlas. But something was missing from their conception of it. They couldn’t tell a church from a rushed church; the necessary sensory organs they would need to make that distinction had crumpled in disuse.
Through the fermenting of those days, we weren’t completely idle neither. We collected wood for the wall girts and flooring joists also, to be cut to size and fixed perpendicularly to the subflooring in an alternating pattern to maximise load resistance. Also, Rhett had come dashing over with a few pails of grapeskin marc he’d stolen from Jackson’s winery. Wyatt brought in his distillation column, and we set to shining our grappa, Piedmontese style. It was a hidden talent, Wyatt displayed, heating up the marc according to a slow, deliberate temperature trajectory, and removing the head and tail sections of the distillate. He stripped off the more caustic aromatic substances, the noxious methyl alcohol and the odd fatty, oily components. What was left, the “heart” of the distillate,was that godly mixture of alcohol and delicate aromatic substances from the grape skins. High-potency joy. A magnification of the elements.
At night, Rhett spoke quietly to the church’s skeleton.
“Y’knows what we is a-doin’ere, right, sweetheart? It’s called life, for it’s only life that builds churches.”
We lit candles in one corner of the construction. Whole evenings rung with Xander’s accordion and pulsed with dance. Evenings the colour and heaviness of gold. Through the work days the sun hammered at us and heaps of lumber looked us on, so much wood yet waiting to be molded into the house of God. The heat sublimated from the lumber a wood scent that would not diffuse and we never numbed to.
The afternoon came that townsfolk awakened us on the ends of their boots and kicked us out of our hammocks. They poured sand over our firepit and spat in our weck jars of rose petal jam.
“You’ve had plenty of warning now!” Stetson brandished a hammer, “We’ll hear the sounds of hammers on nails this minute, or we’re withholding your wages and removing you lot from this site.”
We needed no words, only our faces. We each of us knew. A haste had taken possession of this half town. They anticipated their spiritual completion, but such eagerness is not a matter of spirit. If Ferington didn’t yet know how to be a half town, then what ground could it offer a church to stand upon?
A church was better off consumed by the elements. Now, in the preparation of food, the elements could be a friend or a devourer; and in that, church building was just the same.
Ferington watched us don our gloves with reserved satisfaction, and looked on at the first couple of nails we sank between the wood fibers. Yes, they did not distinguish the church from the rushed church; or, worse, they did and saw in the rushed church the very thing they desired.
“Sorry love”, We whispered to the construction, as we fixed onto it several slapped-together wall frames. A contamination, it was, and nobody noticed it. Even the darkening of the day at sunset swallowed up every part of the construction indiscriminately.
“It’ll be over soon”, we promised it. “We ain’t a-leaving you at Ferington’s rationed mercy.”
The town’s attention waned and dusk pulled together. A wholegrain darkness. We blew life into Sal again. No cumin lamb skewers, no stuffed vine leaves, no nothing to our stomachs, not tonight. Tonight just the rosy glowing gems in Sal’s belly. We gathered four-and-twenty iron pails and divided the coals among them. Wyatt took this last chance to baptise each of the church’s structural posts with high-potency joy; strong grappa, that is.
“You’s an infant, still a-gestating”, Wyatt crooned. “Still vulnerable to a fate in Limbo, that home fer the perished-yet-unbaptised. But no, me grappa and I wouldn’t allow you none of that.”
He swished the bottle, uncorked, at the wooden posts. One after the other.
“In nomine pathos et filii et spiritus.”
Then? Then it was four-and-twenty handfuls of ruby coals to as many posts of solid-sawn wood, soaked superficially in grappa.
Flames feasted that night. The church-to-be never saw dawning.
The blackening of wood spread through the structure, as did the surrender of brittled fiber to the shear stresses, but only the visible part of the church. Those four soily feet reaching for the stone footings carried perhaps a dull pain, but never knew of what blazed aboveground.
“Me dearest!” Puck called at that first footing he’d touched months ago, and clawed at the soil with his bare hands. Xander’s hands came on his shoulders and soothed. Digging the rounded stones up would accomplish nothing, and it was by far the kindest thing to leave them down there in the illusion of supporting a church.
“Misters?”, Asked a little voice. Joey, a child from the village, sneaked out of bed and attracted to the flames. “Can I ask you a question?”
Puck looked at the child, its face quivering in the fire light.
“Do you… do you misters ever speak? I’ve never heard you speak.”
We spoke to our church. Wyatt eased the child away from the gushing flames. Words were the only tools that’d do the job. But between us, the answer was no. We would speak, but so far there ain’t never been no need. Go quietly back now, dear Joey. Sleep.
“This… is the end then?”
Sleep, little one.
Ferington, if unable to recognise a church built of haste and ambition, would probably still recognise a church burnt down in its conception. After all the slow-building anger, we anticipated a wild outrage come morning. We hoped we were wrong, but Ferington would likely not understand and hate to see the church smouldering. Before dawn, then, we packed our essentials and readied to leave, if leave we must.
Indeed, a delegation of townsfolk, woken by the unconsecrated fumes, already came dashing at us through the grey, pricking that fish paste-coloured morning with shouts and weaponised wine bottles. Stetson and the police chief and all the countless rifles between them. We each of us kissed Sal goodbye, our lips burning and tears evaporating on its hot clay shell. We slung our satchels, gave the half-villagers a salute, and paced off over the land.
It was all we could do, to leave Ferington alone in dear Joey’s care.
We travelled light and soon outpaced the posse. Drew carried matches and an axe for firewood, some sacks of beef and our last goose eggs. Xander carried the pans and the slow cooker and most of the spices. Fitzroy carried cheese and jars of mustard, pickles and conserves and chicken gristle. Wyatt carried sacks of flour and parts of the distillation column, and some lengths of pig intestine for the making of sausages. The others carried the rest and everyone bore lips still Sal-burnt and this is how we took to touring the land. Church building for any half town that would hire us. There were places where we succeeded, and places where we did not, which we had to leave behind like we’d left Ferington, to be saved on another timescale.
Perhaps there was a building crew of greater love out there, that could perform the labours where we fell short. Perhaps one day we’d meet them and work together and transcend all we’ve done so far.
Just imagine the sauces.
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