I emptied my pipe on the banister and readied my ass for the trip into town. He seemed annoyed that I woke him, like he wanted to tell me to close the barn door and extinguish my lantern. But he was kind and only glared, keeping his words to himself, and we went.
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We arrived at Willy’s Pub near 10pm. People were outside, glassy-eyed from their night of drinking, leaning on the weathered outer walls, smoking and chatting in pairs. The pub was an older building, one of the first to be built in our town. It was constructed as if it were a church, with a vaulted roof topped with a cross, that rusted over time and squeaked ominously in the wind. Below the cross was a place one could stand and look over the whole town, and on a clear day, the whole world, all the way to my family’s farm. People were no longer allowed up there due to a few reasons, the most important of which was the frequency of drunks accidentally falling over the side and sliding down the building’s high roof to their demise. But that was not what people told the children of the town, for it seemed grim and inappropriate to have them associate the cross with such gruesome deaths. So the adults devised a little lie, one they all agreed upon as to not cause one of the more astute children to see through the guise. It was said, whenever a little one would request to go up to the high point below the cross, that that part of the pub was abandoned due to it being taken over by angry crows.
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The color of the building was a light, worn, red, with a white outline running along the bottom and top and around its saloon style front door. On the front, the pub’s name was painted sky blue, done in a fancy, sweeping writing.
I tied my ass near the front where there were other horses patiently waiting for their masters to return. One man, wearing a long coat of thick, dark colored leather, noticed I had arrived and made way to greet me. He was a childhood friend of mine that my mother forbade me to spend time with after we got into some trouble. But that was years ago now, and he was grown, no more wicked than any other man. In fact, by rumour, I heard that he was making way to become a holy man at the local church, and, from how I hear it, was a very talented one indeed.
“Peter!” he shouted, already drunk and having a good time, “What a surprise, I don’t think I’ve seen you in some time, how are you?”
Embarrassed to be greeted so kindly, I blushed and avoided his eyes by petting my donkey. “Samuel, It really has been too long,” I said, “as you may know, I have been busy with my mother. She’s been ill since my father died of the flu.”
He stumbled down the steps, grappling with the railing to gain his footing. I rushed to his side and embraced him. He steadied himself, brushed the dust from his knees, and threw himself lovingly onto me.
“Oh! Praise God!” he shouted in my ear, “you hear that Peter, Praise Him! For He has brought you here tonight of all nights.”
I politely distanced myself, fingering my ear to clear it of the ring his shouting had caused, “Yes, I suppose we should. It’s a coincidence… one that I’m happy to see unfold.”
Samuel wrapped his arm around my shoulders and guided me into the pub, using me to support him as we went. “You know,” he said with a wet burp, “there really are no coincidences, not when you know God, not when you understand Their work like I do.”
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We sat at a table near the door and he waved down a waitress to bring over two pints. She arrived quickly, with two glasses full of a urine colored drink with a foamy head bubbling past the brim and onto the side.
I was perplexed to hear this once hellion speak of God so gleefully, so I asked, with a sinister smile, “So, after all these years in the gutter, living in spite of God, you've come to know Them?"
He sipped his drink and gave himself a frothy mustache. He placed his pint down hard then wiped his mouth with the whole of his sleeve, a flash of excitement in his eyes as if my question had ignited in him a passion. He began to speak as if completely sober, with a lower tone in his voice, like that of a fire lit story teller. “Well Peter… let me begin by saying that one does not truly know light unless they have lived without it, unless, my friend, they have witnessed darkness, lived amongst darkness, and made bed with it like it was the thing that kept them warm.”
I drank and nodded, then said jokingly to my once mischievous friend, “oh, so now you’re not just a man of God, but a wiseman as well.”
He smiled at my words and broke eye contact to clean beneath his thumb’s nail, “Between you and me Peter--” His words then came hushed, as if what he was about to tell was shameful, “despite all the learning I’ve done in the house of God, I am no man of God.”
“What?” I asked, taken aback by his readiness to renounce such an achievement, “why am I hearing from the old women at the market that you are blessing them and their grandchildren, that you are near to become the holiest of men in our town?”
His cheeks reddened as he sipped once again from his pint, this time avoiding the foam entirely. “Ah,” he said with a dismissive wave, “Ignore what you hear at the market. You know the birds just love to hear themselves sing.”
I rolled my eyes, “no my friend; you know there is something special here, so go, explain away. Like you said to me when I first parked my ass, ‘it's been too long’... and if I am honest with you Samuel, I am starved for good news. Starved. My life has gone untouched by God for quite some time now. My story, it seems to be that of a tragedy. So quit with this… this resistance and tell me how it is that you have gone from the dirty kid my mother forbade me from playing with after class, to this bashful monk.”
He was reluctant to speak, looking at me drunkenly, with a slight, playful smile.
“Go on,” I continued, waving him to speak, “tell me the good news so that I might leave the pub with a smile and a bit of hope in my belly, like it was full of warm soup on a cold night.”
“And what if I have no good news?” he said.
I leaned back in my chair and folded my arms, “then lie to me. Lie to my face. Tell me a story of Samuel the Holyman, so that I may go home to my sick mother and whisper to her all the amazing things you have done with God in your heart. Lie to me Samuel, or tell me the truth, just keep the purpose all the same; I want to leave here with hope in my heart like how you have God in yours. For if you can grow from what you were… if you may change into something greater, like how I have heard from the birds in the market, what more can a man desire? What more, Samuel?”
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and then Add to home screen.