by Tom Robbins
Athaliah lasted six years before a patriarchal assassin took her life. During Athaliah’s reign, the goddess once again held Jerusalem on her lap. In the temple that Hiram and his skilled Phoenician artisans had built for Solomon, Painted Stick and Conch Shell lived among loaves of gold and silver, among ten thousand candlesticks that were nightly lit; alongside forty thousand harps, two hundred thousand trumpets; among countless jewel-encrusted censers, cups, and vials; among alabaster jars of anointing oils and, for the bronze altar at which offerings were burned, shovels, basins, snuffers, and tongs, all of the finest brass. Those showy furnishings, ordered by Solomon, had little to do with the Goddess, except that they were decorated everywhere with images of lotus, fig, pomegranate, and what the historian Josephus called “the most curious flowers” (vaginal symbols, each of them); but the stick and the shell were comfortably at home amidst the splendor, for as long as Astarte was honored there, they were considered as valuable as treasure.
In the housecleaning that followed Athaliah’s homicide, however, they were shunted to an obscure storeroom, where in the company of various golden calves, sperm boats, maternity funnels, tambourines, donkey masks, dance scrolls, and lazy ivory-inlaid vipers, they collected a century’s worth of dust. “We were not put in a trance as we were in the cave back yonder,” explained Conch Shell, “so even for the inanimate, time passed slowly.” She recalled that in the storeroom there were rosewood vials designed to catch the teardrops of women in childbirth, and how the impatient vials filled to overflowing with their own dusty tears. Yet, the talismans were to return to their high station. For centuries, from the time of its completion (962 B.C.) until its destruction by the Babylonians (586 B.C.), the Great Temple swung like a pendulum, back and forth, between Yahweh and Astarte.
Solomon, himself, consorted with the Goddess, a fact so well documented that even biblical revisionists have dared not attempt a cover-up, although they have blamed his “tolerance of paganism” on the influence of his numerous foreign wives. Solomon was said to know the secrets of the plant and animal worlds and how to cast spells that could exorcise demons and heal the ill. Josephus was told that, actually, the king’s wives and concubines performed those deeds in his name. Perhaps the pagan women—there were more than seven hundred of them—were the source of his celebrated wisdom, as well, although the book containing his alleged profundities wasn’t written until six hundred years after his death, and many of its ideas can be traced to the early Greek philosophers.
In any case, when King Manasseh was crowned in 693 B.C., the pendulum swung back to the Goddess with such force that Painted Stick and Conch Shell, dusted and polished, were consulted and employed with a regularity and reverence that they hadn’t experienced since their heyday in the observatory. Painted Stick not only pulled astronomy duty up on the roof (made of Phoenician cedar plated with gold), but joined Conch Shell in the inner sanctum when the priests deflowered privileged virgins, winners of a series of “Miss Judah” contests.
Spoon was as shocked as she could be by this talk of fornication in the Holy of Holies. Conch Shell explained to her that the First Temple had teemed with sexual activity from the night of its dedication onward, even, to some extent, when under strict Levite (Yahwist) control. A famous pair of phallic pillars guarded its entrance, and, like almost all the temples of the ancient world, it was financially supported by the earnings of holy prostitutes.
“Oh dear, oh my,” muttered Spoon. She felt as weak as the stricken bean tin and had to steady herself lest she collapse beside it.
From his/her awkward position, Can o’ Beans tried to comfort her. “As near as I can determine, Miss Spoon, this business had nothing in common with some sordid grinding in a cheap motel or drunken octopusing in the backseat of a car, such as you might have heard the Jesuits condemn. Why, it was even more exalted than marital congress. This was sacred sex, conducted with ceremony and in full consciousness, meant to mime the act of original Creation, to celebrate life at its most intense and crucial moment. We’re not talking the old in-and-out, slip-slap here, Miss Spoon, we’re talking the ignition of the divine spark and . . .” For the first time, Spoon closed her ears (not that she had ears, understand) to the erudition of Can o’ Beans, turning away from him/her, offended and disturbed.
Dirty Sock chuckled under his breath (not that he had breath, understand).
LIKE A NEON FOX tongue lapping up the powdered bones of space chickens, the rising sun licked away at the light snow that had fallen during the night. Ellen Cherry was already out of bed. She was filling a tray with fried egg sandwiches, chocolate doughnuts, and beer: Boomer’s favorite breakfast.
She wasn’t kidding herself. She was trying to assuage her guilt, pure and simple. Intellectually, she knew that she had done nothing about which to feel guilty, yet emotionally it was so deeply embedded in her that a woman’s job was to tend to her husband that she was compelled to do penance for having allowed the most important thing in her life to momentarily interfere with the trifles of tending. That’s just the way it was. No sense fighting it.
“Did I get enough mayonnaise on the bread for you, sweet darlin’?”
“Yes ma’am, and I thank you for that.” He licked a squiggle of excess off his upper lip. “I also thank you for talking that cop outta locking me up last night.”
“You weren’t exactly Miss Manners with him, Boomer. He only wanted you to identify yourself.”
“He wanted me to be afraid of him. All cops want that. I’m a terrible disappointment to policemen.”
Watching him dunk a doughnut in his beer mug, she said, “You aren’t a particularly fearful person, are you?”
“Long as you’re not afraid, nobody can run your life for you. Remember that. Hell is being scared of things. Heaven is refusing to be scared. I mean that literally.” He took a bite of soggy doughnut. “Now you know my religion.”
“Yeah, but can people really choose not to be afraid?”
“Damn right.” Staring into the nude Buddha colors of his beer, he chewed quietly for several minutes, then abruptly looked up at her. “I’m lying like a dog,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“I am afraid of something. I’m afraid of you.”
“Aw, come on.” She issued a laugh so dry it was almost a cough. “How could you possibly be afraid of me?”
“You have my heart.”
“Honey!” She was astonished to find him blurry-eyed and openmouthed, like a child about to cry. “Why, I would never intentionally do anything to—”
“You have my rough ol’ welder’s heart, and you have your art. I don’t know if you’re big enough for both of us.”
“Oh, baby, of course . . .” Even as she was protesting, however, she was gazing past him, through an Airstream window, at the sun climbing above the lightly dusted hills, and thinking how she would like to paint it as a neon fox tongue licking up the powdered bones of angels.
"ONE OF THE HILLS on which Jerusalem sprang up had a threshing floor atop it, a threshing floor being a large flat rock where farmers mugged wheat, beating and shaking down the harvested sheaves until the grain spilled out. Well, the story got around that this particular threshing floor was actually crowning Mount Moriah, the place where in the myth of Abraham and Isaac, the father was ready to slit his son’s throat to prove his devotion to Yahweh. Talk about your loyalty oaths. Consequently, by design or arbitrariness, that flat rock became to the Hebrews a sacred spot, a power center—enlarging the folktale, some claimed the rock had come from Eden and that Adam was buried under it—and when Solomon decided to have a great temple built, this alleged Mount Moriah was the site he selected.
“To hold the massive complex that Solomon had in mind—a Superdome of faith—the hill had to be topped, leveled, and terraced. It was time-consuming, and it wasn’t cheap, but Solomon, or his harem, was at least wise enough to realize that when you’re out to erect the most holy building on earth, a sanctuary that must help yo
u unify and control a large imperial nation of mixed race and religion, you don’t just stick it in a handy vacant field like you would a new shopping mall. Your building lot has got to have some magic about it.”
(At this point, Can o’ Beans, who had been pumping Conch Shell and Painted Stick for background information about the First Temple, would have liked to interrupt their account [and his/her silent reiteration of it] to inquire about the nature of magic—he/she suspected that the shell and the stick, considering their origins in an age when such things were not held up to ridicule, were well versed in the magical arts—but like many a timid or hidebound novelist, he/she dared not still the narrative flow.)
“Once the top of Mount Moriah had been transformed into a wide plateau and its slopes recontoured to accommodate roads and steps, Solomon, through Hiram, got down to the nitty-gritty of erecting his extravaganza. Solomon was the producer, you might say, and Hiram the director. They commanded a cast of thousands. All nonunion. For openers, there were a hundred and fifty thousand Canaanite slaves, laboring to avoid the lash, plus thirty thousand Israelites drafted into the Temple job corps and not even earning falafel money. There were three thousand straw bosses barking orders, and probably an equal number of skilled masons, metalworkers, and master carpenters from Hiram’s Phoenicia. The Phoenicians dressed in purple and got the pick of the chick-peas from the company store.
“Even with all those grunts and gofers, it took seven years to complete construction—an additional three years had been spent getting the materials together. Ever thus with government projects, I suppose. When it was done, though, it was a sight to behold. With its tiered walls and hierarchical courtyards, one inside the other like Chinese boxes, it covered several acres. As Miss Shell describes it, the outer walls, like the buildings, were made of stone, Israel’s lone natural resource. Inside, the stone was planked with good old Phoenician cedar, and then to the cedar they affixed plates of silver and gold, many of them set with gemstones. At today’s prices, the Temple’s structural precious metal bill alone would run upward of six billion dollars. Makes you appreciate aluminum siding. Wonder what the insurance premium would’ve run Solomon on a spread like that?
“Of course, vain King Solomon had been dead for more than a century before Miss Shell and Mr. Stick arrived on the scene. They learned about the Temple’s construction from the stones themselves. The place was a bit beat-up and stained by the time our friends landed there, but it still was a compound of considerable glory, especially on national holidays, when thousands would stream up its steps, chanting, banging tambourines, grappling with their bleating sacrifices, so blinded by the shine and sparkle of their surroundings that they couldn’t look directly at them. Oops. Hold on a minute, bean can. I said Sol had been dead for more than a century. Wrong. Solomon died in 933 B.C., Miss Shell and Mr. Stick were first employed in the Temple in 843 B.C. That’s ninety years, not a hundred and ten. This backward counting gets confusing. But think what it must have been like for the folks who were around when Baby Jesus was born. They’d been counting backward all their lives, their ancestors counted backward as far back as anyone could remember; and, scheeech, all of a sudden they woke up one morning, skidded to a halt, and had to start counting in the opposite direction. I tell you, that switch from B.C. to A.D. must have driven people nuts. I bet more than a few Israelites missed their dental appointments.”
BLUE LIGHTS flashing like a mutant shoppers’ special at a postnuclear Kmart, a squad car forced a smoke-spewing, rust-freckled, tailpipe-dragging old Chevy wagon to the curb.
“I’m the Reverend Buddy Winkler,” the driver announced hopefully.
“And I’m Officer Dishman. Let me see your driver’s license.”
Buddy had only been going twenty-nine miles an hour, but the speed limit on the Strip was twenty-five and not an internal combustion more. When the shock of recognition he’d been expecting proved not forthcoming, the preacher pulled out his wallet. An empty gum wrapper came out with it, fluttering like an anorectic moth to the blue-lit pavement at the policeman’s feet.
“God spoke to me tonight, officer,” said Buddy. “I nodded off after supper, and God come to me and showed me a vision and gave unto me a mission.” He was warming up his saxophone. “You can’t be completely holden to man’s speed limits when you’re on a mission for the Lord.”
In many cities, he would have been hauled to the station for a Breathalyzer test, but this was Colonial Pines, Virginia. The policeman not only let Buddy drive away without a citation, but he also donated five dollars to the cause. “Remember my little Jimmy in your prayers. He’s got allergies right awful.”
Oddly elated, Buddy didn’t feel like going straight home. He poked the five-dollar bill, which he saw as a sign of blessings to come, into his shirt pocket, and, for some reason, circled back past the Charles house, site of his epiphany. Through the living room window, he glimpsed his cousin and his cousin’s wanton wife. Verlin was still trying to fold that blamed road map, but Patsy had finished crocheting her bikini. That hadn’t taken long. Of course, the thing was so teeny a couple of silkworms could have knocked it off on their lunch break.
Although by now he had chugged past their house, Buddy pushed down hard on his horn. “Make a joyful noise unto the Lord!” he cried through the worm-eaten crucifixes of his dental Golgotha.
"THE PENDULUM SWUNG yet again. This time a ramrod named Josiah took control, and during the thirty years of his reign, Miss Shell and Mr. Stick had to lay low, shuttled by night between the various clandestine shrines that dotted the desert near the Dead Sea. In human celebrity terms, it was as if they were reduced to playing small suburban clubs after a career of headlining in the likes of the Hollywood Bowl—yet dear Conch Shell and Painted Stick suffered no ego contusions. Oh, to the contrary. The First Temple, after all, served its nation as treasury, academy, seminary, council chamber, and talk-show set, and was so boisterous with political, economic, and theological debate (not to mention sexual shenanigans) that it threatened to engulf the Holy of Holies in institutional jabber. The crude desert shrines, although always in danger of Yahwist attack, provided our shell and stick welcome respite from the plots and intrigues that invariably poison the honey in the hives of the powerful.
“Believe it or not—and this is starting to make me dizzy—the Yahweh-Astarte round-robin still wasn’t over. After Josiah’s death, his successor, King Jehoiakim, immediately undid his reforms (the pull of that old goddess was pretty strong, obviously), and Miss Shell and Mr. Stick, patinaed now by brine and sandstorm and bonfire, were carted out of the boulder-strewn wilderness to be displayed in the Great Temple once again. From 609 until 586 B.C., they sat among priestly paraphernalia, acting as rods that might attract Astarte’s capricious lightning, any bolt of which was said to jolt a human psyche temporarily free of the chains that bound it to a mundane life of tears and toil. Then . . .
“One evening, as twilight was buttering the stones of the city, as smoke from the cookfires trailed like the beards of ascending prophets in the dimming sky, Painted Stick was carried to the Temple roof. All Jerusalem lay below him, as much in squalor as in splendor; a thorny, windy, sun-baked hill town, stiff of roofline, elastic of spirit; knocked a little cockeyed by all the comings and goings of armies and superstitions, cults and caravans, plunderers and philosophers, saviors and destroyers; but a habitat in spite of everything, a shelter, sinking now into a night of small and simple pleasures: wineskins and pita breads, snores, prayers, and embraces—its stone eyelids already closed to the singular debt that I’m afraid it must someday settle with eternity.
“Beyond the Jaffa Gate, Gaza swallowed the sun like quicksand swallowing a flamingo, and the priests finally turned toward the eastern quadrant, which was now dark enough to entertain a star or two. At once they noticed an unfamiliar dull red glow clinging to the northeast horizon line the way that a stray spark would cling to a woolen cloak, winking, smoldering, unsure of whether to flare or fade. Thei
r eyes automatically fell on Painted Stick, but the stick registered nothing. One of them held the stick aloft, pointing it like an accusing finger at the distant ember. Nothing. They wagged the stick then, coaxing it the way a dowser must sometimes coax a divining fork. Neither a twitch nor a vibration. The instrument was totally unresponsive. The red spot glowed on. Very strange.”
THERE WAS A FAMOUS LANDSCAPE PAINTER, Russell Chatham, who lived in Livingston, Montana, and Ellen Cherry had hoped to pay him a courtesy call. Under the circumstances, however, she decided against it. No sense slipping another art burr under Boomer’s saddle, especially when she couldn’t make up her mind whether or not she wanted him bucked off. Surely, there were other women in the world who were confused about their feelings for their husbands. Otherwise, there would be no excuse for Burt Reynolds. The question was, were there other women who were confused about their feelings for their husbands after one week of marriage? She concluded that there must be. Probably some women, maybe a lot of women, walked down the aisle asking themselves, “Who is that man in the tuxedo? Why is he looking at me like that? How much better do I really want to know him?” At any rate, Ellen Cherry thought it better that she shove art on the back burner until they reached New York. When the subject did arise, later that same day, it was Boomer who brought it up.
Leaving the last snowfall of spring to melt in the Crazies, leaving the famous landscape painter, Russell Chatham, to go through life without ever meeting his colleague, Ellen Cherry Charles, they goosed the turkey northeastward and late in the afternoon crossed the Missouri River. “You know who loved this here Missouri River?” Boomer asked. “You know who lived along it and loved it well?”
Thomas Hart Benton, thought Ellen Cherry. However, since she didn’t want to mention an artist, she answered, “No, hon, I don’t.”
“The outlaw Jesse James,” said Boomer. “That’s who.” Boomer was quiet for a while, as if the river had taken his tongue and carried it to some faroff place. Then he said, “Jesse James robbed beaucoup banks and near as many trains. He was in shoot-outs, ambushes, what have you, there was a posse big as an army on his tail around the clock, including Christmas. But, you know, ol’ Jesse never got a scratch. One day, though, he turned reckless and went to hang a picture on the wall. He was standing on a chair just hanging and admiring that pretty picture, and Robert Ford snuck up behind him, blew a hole in his skull. So much for art, I reckon.”
