Ironic Witness

Glancy

• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781498270465
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

A minister's wife finds herself in hell. The story of Lazarus and the rich man in Luke 16:19-31 gives a chilling insight into the afterlife. It is a story that is not often addressed because it makes clear the separation of people upon death. Frank Winscott, a retired minister, works at comparing translations of the Bible. Eugena has ignored her husband's work and his sermons all her life. Instead, she finds meaning in her potter's shed, where she makes different forms of ziggurats that she places in her kiln, a little symbol of hell. Though Eugena rejects Frank's insistence that there is a heaven and hell, she finds that she has worked with the shape of both and never knew it. In the end, she realizes that heaven and hell are in the shape of ziggurats, one rising and the other sinking. Her beloved ziggurats become the ironic witness of what her husband preached. Meanwhile, Frank and Eugena struggle to make sense of their lives after the death of their addict son, Daniel. When he is killed in a car accident, Frank and Eugena argue over whether Daniel's death was truly an accident, or whether his car may have been pushed off the road. The novel begins, "Another letter from the afterlife, you might say. But this one starts before the afterlife and continues into it." When Eugena dies, she travels through hell to find her son, Daniel. Frank sends the last chapter from heaven. The novel was influenced by Dante's The Divine Comedy and begins with an epigraph from The Inferno, "What I was living, that I am dead."

The Visit

Another letter from the afterlife, you might say. But this one starts before the afterlife and continues into it. I would implore you to make the effort. It’s for you, as much as for me—maybe more, for eventually, I am no longer in the place you call here.

At first, there was distancing of what I knew. There was Frank’s death. Daniel’s before that. The sound of the mower in our yard. The buzzing, always buzzing, at the window of my work shed. I think Daniel mowed because he needed the repetition—going back and forth over the same ground. Other times, a friend of Daniel’s mowed while Daniel stood in the drive and watched him as if part of his mind were caught there in the mowing.

Daniel was not our only child. We have two other children, Winifred and Warren. But Daniel was the focus, and all that followed him. I leaned on Frank, my husband, a retired minister and professor of biblical studies, as we traveled through the turmoil of the Daniel years.

—

Christianity. The sweet tangle of my life. I could shred it with my teeth. It was ever before me. As a young woman, I married a minister. Forty-two years later, what did I expect? Certainly not a son staked on drugs. Dead on arrival with an ear chewed by broken glass or an animal in the night, and an assurance from Frank, my husband, that Daniel was in heaven because he’d accepted Christ as a boy, though Christ was never a consideration to Daniel as far as I knew. Daniel seemed never to stop running from him. Or he acted like he wasn’t there at all. I expected Frank to say, “like his mother” in his despair, though he never did. Did Frank blame me and my indifference to what he preached? He never said so to my face, even when he went in by himself to identify Daniel’s gobbled body. It was a holy calling—a calling of the holy Christ to bear up as Frank did. It was as if Daniel, our son, had had enough and would spare himself and us further exasperation, and begging, and warning, and failure after failure, and use and reuse and reuse until we knew it would not change, not even by a blazing miracle of a high God, though I’m sure Frank held out hope to the end. Daniel wouldn’t have been in my heaven for all the grief he caused.

This is about the terror I faced. Evident in the weather—in attacks of other sorts, both from inside and out—in attacks of despair—in attacks of terrorists—in attacks of aging, which are terrorists in themselves.

I can look back at myself and say, “a gulf separates us.” Often I retreated into my work as if the upheaval could be terminated in the kiln, where I fired the clay as if it was the circumstances Daniel handed to us.

I was a maker of ziggurats. I shaped clay into the likenesses of ziggurats. I was a maker of their clay forms. The various gradations that climbed from them. I worked mainly with shape. There’s an edginess that comes when I’m working—a vision of sorts—a zigzag line or the jump of a lightning bolt, jagged as the jaws of life and as disconcerting as tearing a car open to extricate what is caught there.

I kept journals of my work on ziggurats in my work shed, which I titled, The Ziggurat Journals, or Ziggurats and Me, volumes 1 through 7. I was now in my eighth journal. All of them massive, sagging the shelves in my work shed where they sat. Sometimes I spent more time writing notes on the making of ziggurats than I did on the actual making of the ziggurats. The journals were about how I stepped into what I think now was hell—or the beginning of it.

From the start, Daniel showed up in my journals.

—

Journal entry, May 2: I hear Daniel on the stairs at night. I hear him in the yard. I think he’s talking to someone I can’t see.

“If you hadn’t named him Daniel—a man crazy with visions,” I said to Frank when we visited the cemetery with a bundle of wildflowers. Daniel, who died in a car accident at thirty-eight, zagged on drugs, as he had been for years.

“I saw a vision that made me afraid, and the thoughts on my bed and visions in my head troubled me,” Frank said. “From Dan 4:5, the twenty-seventh chapter of the Old Testament.”

I took Frank’s arm as we walked back to the car. My accusation wasn’t a reproach as much as a manner of conversation between us.

“Daniel in the Bible survived his visions, unlike our Daniel,” Frank said as we drove back to our place, and I returned to my work shed.

Journal entry, May 23: I write to you foreclawed in Christ our Lord.

Sometimes, I read to Frank at the breakfast table before I went to my work shed. His eyes were not what they had been, and he read most of the day on his own, often with a magnifying glass. I started with the Bible that was not his favorite translation.

“‘You keep my eyelids from closing’ (Ps 77:4),” I read from the New Revised Standard Version.

Frank looked at his Bible. “‘You hold my eyes waking,’” Frank said. “That’s the King James Version, the one I prefer.”

“It means I can’t sleep because of your snoring, your voyages at night. The troubled waters of your sleep. You call out from your rowing. I can’t sleep, Frank. I think I’m moving to the other room.”

“Hopefully, Winnie or Warren won’t return.”

“It happens.”

“Yes, more all the time. But it doesn’t look like ours will be back soon,” Frank said. “They’d give us warning if they were coming.”

“They just have.”

“When?”

“I opened the e-mail before I fixed breakfast,” I said.

“For a visit or permanent?” he asked.

“A visit.”

“Short or long?”

“Winnie didn’t say,” I said.

“You didn’t ask?” he questioned.

“I haven’t answered her,” I said.

“Don’t make it seem like they aren’t welcome, or that we’re wondering how soon after their arrival they’ll leave,” he said. “What’s the purpose of their visit?”

“To see us. To make sure we’re all right. To see if we need to be put away. I’ll get Mrs. Woodruff to clean before they come.”

“You’re the only woman I know who calls her help by her formal name,” Frank said.

“I’ll have Edna Woodruff clean the house, so they know we’re still with it.”

“Don’t make them too comfortable.”

“Don’t drive them away too soon with your ranting,” I told him. “If they think you’re off, they might stay to corral you into some sort of reasonable presentation of yourself.”

“I won’t scare them.”

“I don’t know why it’s so hard for you to make yourself presentable,” I said.

“Because I’m looking at the lightings,” Frank continued, with his nose glued to his Bible. “‘His lightings lightened the world; the earth saw it and trembled’ (Ps 97:4, KJV).”

I looked at the Bible. “His lightnings, Frank. Not lightings.”

“I misread that for a purpose,” he said. “I wasn’t thinking of lights in the heavens. I was thinking of the lightings of the Word. I think God speaks with fire. There’s a physical light of sorts in the biblical language. I think I see it at night. I dream sometimes there’s a bright light blinding me. Each reading is a visit from God. In Scripture, there was light before there was the sun. There’s a mystery there.”

“Your children don’t like to hear your emanations,” I said. “I wouldn’t have them while they’re here. Our independence depends on their assurance that we’re still functioning. You can’t go on about his lightings lighting the world. You sound like you’ve not quite landed this morning.”

“No, I haven’t,” he agreed. “But it’s not from a voyage. It’s from somewhere in flight.”

“Don’t I know it.”

“You won’t be moving from the room until after the children leave?” he asked.

“No, maybe not then—if you’d stop your snoring.”

—

Once, I had asked Winnie and Warren how they had been affected by Daniel’s death. They were sorry, they said. They still grieved for him. As the oldest, Daniel had been the front-runner. They were closer in age, more friends with one another than Daniel. H...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• The Visit
• My Work
• Soundings
• At Its Deadliest
• Sparses
• Several Nights after Daniel Died
• What Is There in Ziggurats That Words Cannot Say?
• A Ziggurat Is a Funeral Umbrella
• Ziggurats Are the Figmentor of Imagination
• If I Start to Nap, I Growl
• Casting Doubt
• What Had I Understood?
• The Spiral of the Galaxy—the Spiral of My Ziggurats
• A Freak Snow
• Grounding
• The Prophecies of Ziggurats
• Daniel’s Visions
• A Collapse
• Lot’s Wife
• Rock City
• Flaw
• Daniel’s Funeral
• Back Flash
• A Brief Confrontation
• Ironic Witness
• The Blue Scarf
• Off the Road
• Uncle John Winscott’s Funeral
• Frank’s Years in the Ministry
• Frank’s Death
• Another Visit to the Cemetery
• Wired
• A Sign on the Road
• In Hell There Is No Night
• Fragments Came to Me and Patterned Themselves as Ziggurats
• How Could A Minister’s Wife Be Found in Hell?
• Far
• Daniel in Hell
• Ziggurats for Sale
• Frank in Heaven