Dog on the Cross by Aaron Gwyn

lights were dimmed. I went up the center aisle with my dress boots making prints in the carpet. At the front, I squatted and sat cross-legged between the pews and altars. The wood was shining on the pulpit and all along the walls. It was polished, and in its grain there were faces. I sat making faces out of the grain, then turned so I could focus.
    I closed my eyes. The smell of the sanctuary was
strong and the sound of it was quiet. Outside, the night was warm and quiet, like being put under water. I sat there, cross-legged and quiet—not to be touched.
    She, I thought, could have it. The world and sin and death. And me, if I was let, I’d stay here and live off of what I felt burning inside. I’d take my burning, if God asked, and spread it; I’d let my fire burn evil out of everyone. And God, I knew, would strike them if they tried to take the fire away.

TRUCK

    D AY OF U NCLE Kenneth’s funeral. Ceremony in a country church. All around an abundance of wreaths and relatives, people I’ve felt guilty for avoiding. In their thrift store suits they look like straw men, like figures out of dreams. Charles is here with his autistic son; Thomas with his oxygen mask and Bible. For several minutes I watch Ronnie come down the aisle on his walker, wondering how long he’s moved this way, how long he’s been reduced to spectacle. Did it happen gradually, I wonder, his steps growing smaller and smaller until he appears, on this morning, to be walking in place? Jesus, my mother continually reminds me, was sent to heal such folk—the lame and the halt, the browbeaten and troubled of spirit. She bases her life on this conviction, believingher family’s misfortune evidence of trial or punishment. To me, it only seems the Bartletts have been overlooked.
    It isn’t that I think I’m above them. Despite my graduate degree, my editorship at the local newspaper, I feel far from superior. I simply hate to see humans so superstitious, so thoroughly defeated. Ask any of them and they’ll tell you, from the first day until now, Satan has administered a beating: not their wretched health-care system or lack of interest in higher ed, not the conservatives they’re conned into voting for, the evangelists who cash their checks. It’s the Devil they blame—red suit and horns, pitchfork and flames. Over the years, that imaginary threat has become crucial to their sense of doctrine.
Beware of the closet,
it tells them.
Fear sunset and the darkness beneath your bed.
    My mother’s uncle, my great-uncle Kenneth, was the only one to go against this thinking. He was thrice married and divorced, continued smoking unfiltered cigarettes even after his surgeon confiscated a lung. Naturally, our family despised him for it. Even Mother, who underneath her religiosity is a kind and intelligent woman, even she declined to visit him the fifteen years after he moved back to Perser and lived alone on his ranch. Looking at my watch, seeing service will start in a few minutes, I realize that maybe she’s decided not to come. Maybe she’s refused to pay this heathen her respects.
    She wasn’t always this way. My entire childhood she thought church unnecessary, her Christianity composed of the typical clichés about doing unto others. But after Father died—the same autumn Kenneth moved down and bought his ranch—she began to go three times a week: Sunday morning and night, Wednesday evenings for potluck and singing. I thought it was her way of expressing grief. I was sixteen at the time and consoled myself with school-work and grades, applications to college. By my senior year I’d received a scholarship from the Journalism Department at the University of Oklahoma. I walked in to tell Mother and found her sitting at the table, praying over handkerchiefs and putting them in the mail.
    In a way, I felt I lost her then, both parents in the same year. Never mind that she was still