Junis Lund had been up on the cross in the middle of town for three days when the crows started pecking at him. He was so certain of his revelation and prediction and of the damned trajectory of the souls of the people in town—and the whole world for that matter—that be built the cross out of a pecan tree, paid a few boys to drive nails through his hands and feet, and would hang there in penance for all the people until the stars started falling from the sky and judgment day cracked the heavens open. It would happen on Wednesday, Junis Lund told his congregation, who spread the news all through town. On Wednesday there would come signs and wonders, fires and horsemen, and the end of the age would begin. Being it was only Saturday many of the onlookers became less interested in the looming apocalypse and more curious to see if that skinny, pompous preacher could last five more days hanging up there. June was cruel that year and it was clear Junis hadn’t taken into consideration the angle of the cross as it related to the sky. For a good nine hours that first day the sun lay flat upon his naked bony chest, slowly moving overhead and toward his back, roasting him evenly like a rotisserie bird. The crows made all this worse. When they started landing for brief moments on his outstretched arms, their talons pressed into his burned skin as they pecked at the peeling skin and bits of food that had been thrown at the preacher by a few unsupportive citizens late at night when no one was looking.
No one was quite sure if he felt any pain at all though. The Reverend didn’t make any noise and hadn’t said a single word from up there. The greatest sermon of his life was being lived out right then before them, and should anyone have questions, they need only to look up and let their hearts change.
Many of his faithful followers took his word to heart. They gathered there on the grassy knoll in the center of town, covering the sod grass with blankets, lawn chairs, and tents. Their devotion was fervent in the days leading up to the event, and on that first day, but it seemed to wane as soon as the grotesque spectacle metamorphosed from idea into flesh and blood reality. Like most, they were glad to be zealots of an idea, martyrs who didn’t have to shed blood.
Although the Reverend didn’t say so exactly, many of his church took the coming end times as an opportunity to quit the jobs they hated, to not write checks for the bills that burdened them, to give up on worldly things and align themselves with heavenly thoughts. This brought a certain joyful air to the stirring crowds as they milled about murmuring in the center of town. The end was coming, and they were finally free of mankind’s heavy yoke.
The faithful stood or knelt at the front of the crowd, where those other merely curious souls came and went like peeking in on a freakshow. Some in town who hadn’t stepped foot in a church in decades and only prayed in curses found themselves teetering between dismissing the crazy preacher and making plans to live up the last days on earth. Some in town made endless complaints to the sheriff and mayor, but Junis Lund has paid for all the proper permits and broke no laws. “There will be some dissent and restless hearts of course,” Junis told the sheriff, who was also a faithful member of the reverend’s church. “But that is only because their sins are surfacing. Because they will be forever restless until they rest in Him.” In many ways, Junis Lund’s self-martyrdom and grand penance for all was the culmination of several years of private revelation and public disgust for the shape of the world at hand.
Junis first had the notion that the end was coming a year before. While walking through the woods behind the home he and his wife, Ellinor, had lived in for nearly two decades, there came a soft rain suddenly. He often took walks when he became so agitated at the world and the faithless, hedonistic fools who walked upon it. He prayed but prayers quickly subsided to wrathful orations he spoke to the trees, as his wife was quite sick of hearing about it. On this particular day, he had reached what he felt was the end of his rope. Yes, the pews of his church and the weekly offertory baskets had never been so heavy. Yes, his mind was ablaze with private study and his sermons had never been so good and well-thought out. And yet, every way he looked, he saw only the face of despair. In the smiling couple who sat listening to his every word, he could only think of the wife’s ongoing affair she had told him about in private. Each time Mrs. Tolstoy took his hands in hers leaving the church, asking for his prayers and to come to dinner one night soon, he could only see her cutting the break-line of her husband’s Dodge and sitting quietly at her kitchen table, waiting for the sheriff’s deputy to knock and tell her the sorrowful news. The checks she laid in the baskets each week were meant to relieve some of her guilt, but Junis knew there wasn’t much to be found. “For each man thinketh his way to be right,” Junis thought. “But the Lord weigheth the heart.” And it was the same for every face he saw, each pair of eyes he gazed into. He saw the blackness of the dark. He felt it all and bared it with words of encouragement and hope. Yet as he lay in his bed beside his wife, sleepless, restless, he saw there could be no hope left for many. For what was worse than no belief, was presumption. And as Junis Lund saw it, this was the age of presumption.
He thought of things such as this on his walks, and on that particular day as the soft rain fell, he gazed up at the clear sky through the trees. There wasn’t a cloud in sight that could bring such rain, the branches were bone dry from day without rain in fact. There was nothing that could have brought it, save an answer to his petition just moments before. “Please, just a sign, give me a sign and tell me something!” he had said. And that was when the rains came and fell for a good three minutes before ceasing just as quick and strange as they had arrived. And at once, he heard that small, soft voice tell him that the end was coming. That all would be made new again.
As he looked down now upon the crowds below him, at those eyes and moon faces gazing up at him, he thought of all this, of all the dust they carried on their souls that he would wash clean for them; of all the myriad tendrils of sin that wrapped around them with tentacular precision, holding their heart fettered and chained to those banshees that haunted them like shadows.
Junis turned his head and looked at the little trickle of blood spilling from his hand. He smiled at the sight, at the pure knowledge of knowing what he was doing was good. Yes, it was good, he told himself. It couldn’t be otherwise. The Lord would not give me such clear thoughts and make me capable of such actions if they were wicked. No, he told himself. I am anointed. Blessed. Through me, these ones too shall be redeemed.
“You all right, Junis?” a voice called from the crowd.
“He’s smiling,” someone else said. “Of course, he’s all right.”
“It’s disgusting’s what it is,” said another.
A few boys started throwing stones and sticks at the birds each time they landed. They missed them with each throw, and Junis glared down briefly.
Just below his feet, Junis saw the wife of one of his congregation members come into view. He looked down at her as she stared up with bitter disgust.
“Listen Junis,” she said, adjusting the baby she held higher on her hip. “I don’t give a shit what you think God told you, my Paul up and quit his job and is off drinking for two days straight. Says he wants to live before it’s all over.”
Junis’s smile vanished.
“He’s left me and the baby to go off living it up for himself,” she screamed. “So you’d better climb down from there and make this right! You son of a bitch, you come down and make this right!”
Her screams were muffled by the crowd and waned to a whisper as a few men quickly escorted her away from the scene.
Junis raised his eyes heavenward and sighed. Yes, for her too, I must do this, Junis whispered to himself.
By nightfall, most everyone had gone home, except for the few people who had pitched tents there on the grass (permits were gotten for this too) to there with the preacher through it all.
As the solemn glow of the yellow-sphere streetlights came on one-by-one, Junis watched as the evening came down and the summer night fell with warm quietude upon everything. Given the restless nature of the day, of what he was doing and causing among the people, the quietus that came with night was much welcomed to his ears. But though the voices and staring eyes were gone, the pain of nails in his hands and feet, of his lungs slowly filling with fluid and his muscles stretched and becoming exhausted began to resound in his ears. He looked down at the foot-flattened grass, at the empty lawn chairs left sitting there among trash and cigarette butts and the soft fury of fireflies dancing above it all. The little boy stood in the dim light—shirtless and dirty from rolling down the hillside all day—and stared up at the reverend. The boy gazed long at him, as casting into the soft folds of his memory every detail of the preacher’s face, ever curve of his ribs rising beneath his raised arms. The boy sucked on the plastic wrapper of an icy-pop still speckled with the fluorescent blue-green of dyed ice. He suddenly turned and looked at the sky behind him, at the clouds rising like cathedrals against the stars being nailed up one by one. He brought his eyes back to the preacher, and smiled a little, then shook his head, as if to say “nope” to some question that only he was asked.
Junis widened his eyes in the dark. “What?” the reverend murmured.
The boy just shook his head again, sucking loudly from the long wrapper. “Nope,” the boy said suddenly, then walked off toward the call of his mother’s voice from inside a tent.
“Snotnosed kid,” Junis whispered. “What does he know of the heart in conflict with itself? What does he know of the fall into damnation, of the delicate nature of salvation! Nothing! None of them know nothing!” Junis moved his eyes toward the dark sky. “You’ve allowed me to show them and save them all! But they don’t deserve nothing. Let them all fall, let them all feel those unquenchable fires! Ungrateful, ungrateful is what they are!” Junis looked at the tents, at the shop and restaurant lights going out across down, at the traffic dying and now ceasing altogether. “And they couldn’t keep watch even one hour! The damned fools! They’ll see. Lord, give me patience. But I know it, they’ll see their wicked, feckless ways.”
He found himself suddenly looking around for Ellinor, for her kindly, gentle smile amid such night. He swallowed at the parched roughness in his throat. She wasn’t there. She wouldn’t be there.
“What are you doing now, Junis?” she’d asked, coming to check on him in the basement that night.
He didn’t answer, his hands continuing to sand and smooth the length of raw board laid on his worktable.
“Can you even hear me, Junis?”
“I can,” he said.
“Sure. You can hear but you can’t listen.” She stood on the bottom step watching her husband as he bent under the flickering pale bulb of light. “You probably think you’re something of Jesus himself now, don’t you. A carpenter shaping his own cross.”
Junis said nothing.
“You talk on and on with such hatred about how everyone is so wicked. You talk about salvation and redemption. But you know, Junis. You can preach all day about repentance, but you still wouldn’t know a thing about grace or mercy. I hope that cross wakes something in you.”
She started back up the stairs.
“Will you be there? Tomorrow?” he asked.
“You know I won’t. You know I won’t be here when you crawl down either.”
“So you’re just gonna leave, right as I need you most?” he said.
“No, Junis. You’re the one who’s left us.”
The soft echo of the rough paper on the wood washed over the damp basement air like dead waves. Shuck shuck shuck and Junis’s mind focused on the thinnest grains of the wood as the giant beam lay silent before him like a corpse he didn’t dare look at.
*****
It was nearly dawn on Wednesday when Junis saw the dark figure walk across the lawn and stand before his blood dappled feet. In the early light, Junis saw the woman’s face titled toward him, half grinning as her tongue traced the line of crooked teeth in her jaw.
“Aw, Junis, Junis,” her faint voice echoed.
He said nothing.
“They don’t understand, do they? You’ve never been understood, my poor Junis.”
“Go away,” he said, breathless as he accidentally pulled his hand and the nail tore deeper into his palm.
“Away? To whom should I go, Junis? For you have the words, don’t you? You have the promise, isn’t that right? These sorry fools, they don’t know. But you’ll show them.”
Junis hung there as his spine writhed against the wooden beam. He cried and the salt of his tears dribbled onto the wounds of his feet.
“Why can’t they see! I’m going to save them all! And they don’t see it!”
“Of course, you will, Junis.”
“I’ve taken their sins upon my back and they can only gawk like idiots.”
“They don’t deserve you. They deserve punishment, Junis.”
“When those stars fall, they’ll see. Then they’ll know.” He bit at his dry lips, his eyes gazing at the dawn crawling rosy and quiet across the tops of the buildings.
The woman giggled in the shadows. “Yes, of course, they will, Junis. My Junis.”
Junis wept. Not for his congregation, not for those sinners whom he hung upon the cross for, but for himself. “They’ll see,” he said.
When he opened his eyes again to the morning light, she was gone, a shadow slipping back to shadow, and memory caught fire in him once more.
“There’s no place in this world for the meek and humble, Junis,” his father said. “Blood of iron and heart of fire, that’s what makes a man, Junis.”
“No . . . no,” he mumbled, alone among the dawn.
“Vengeance may be God’s, but you will be its herald . . .”
He saw his father’s weathered, life-beaten face before him. Raw earth staining his hands, cold blood coursing in his veins.
“Meekness is weakness, son,” he said. “Never forget it.”
“No, no!”
“Always keep your fists up, son. Lest they think you’re broken and done in. Never back down, Junis . . .”
“Blood of iron, heart of fire,” he whispered.
In a daze of pain and sleeplessness, he watched from on high as the town came to life. The people came in long streams, carrying lawn chairs and picnic baskets. They gathered in the early light and the grassy knoll became a carnival waiting for the final show. Every so often someone would wander beneath the cross and stare up at the reverend.
“Is he dead?” someone asked.
“Nah, you can see his breaths.”
“Whatcha say, Junis? What time you think this show’ll get going?” another said, laughing.
“Say, Junis, think I got time to have a few drinks?”
“What’s the Holy Ghost tell you now, Junis? Does he know the lottery numbers?”
“Say, Junis, if I don’t get raptured and am stuck here like you say, mind if I get that new truck of yours?”
The laughter rose and fell like waves across the crowd.
“Do not forgive them, Lord, for they know exactly what they do,” Junis said, his voice murmuring like an open wound.
The day was warm and clear. Children ran and played across the closed grass and closed streets of the town. A teenage boy threw a vanilla ice cream cone at the preacher, and an old woman slapped the boy’s face.
“Have you no respect for what is holy?” she yelled.
“No, I just ain’t got respect for lying preachers,” the boy said and ran off.
Junis remained silent above the people. Higher still, the sunlight began to wane. The wind conjured clouds, building them higher and higher.
The voices of the crowd hushed as eyes tilted toward the sky. Soon the land was darkened and claps of hot thunder caromed in the hills far off.
“It’s just a storm sweetie,” a mother reassured her daughter.
“This is it, this is the end, oh God, it’s the end! Have mercy on us, God!” someone shouted. Many fell to their knees in anguished petition. Others tilted bottles of beer higher against their lips. Eyes turned to the preacher on the cross.
“Tell us, Junis, is this the end? Is our judgment upon us?”
The preacher turned his head to the sky as the rain fell.
“Some will be saved,” Junis said, his voice deep and bellowing out over the people. “But many of you will perish in the fires!”
“Oh God!”
“I sacrifice myself for you now, that you might be spared, but pray! Pray that my sacrifice will pay the price!”
“That’s blasphemy, Junis!” someone yelled.
The rain fell harder, and the people gathered together. Others ran back to cars and fled in fear. The storm broke across the sky with great cracks of thunder. The wind tossed branches and umbrellas through the air. Junis looked at his hands and watched the water fall on his warm blood.
“I was right,” he said to himself. “Lord, you have redeemed me. You have seen my plight and smiled upon me! And they shall all get what they deserve. They will now come to praise me for all I’ve done on their behalf!”
He closed his eyes to the rain and let the water wash across his burned skin.
When he opened his eyes he saw the crowds dispersing, leaving in twos as they splashed back to their cars and into shops.
“Where are you going!” Junis shouted. “Where is your faith!”
Junis looked down at the empty lawn chairs and the wind-scattered trash left behind. Below him, the little boy stood there alone, gazing up at the preacher. The boy held his hands out in the rain and smiled at Junis. He shook his head again, smiling. “Nope. Not like this, mister,” he said, and ran off at his mother’s call.
The rain subsided and the clouds dismantled in the warm sultry air. Junis remained there, his eyes wide with confusion. Slowly, the sun came out again. No stars fell. No horsemen came blaring trumpets through town. Cars drove around the barricades. People went back to work.
“I have atoned for nothing,” he whispered.
When he eventually pulled his hands and feet from the nails, the pain was numbed to the shame that washed over him. People watched from afar, silent, as he climbed down and started walking home. No martyr, no savior. The end had come and gone. He stopped along the sidewalk and stood in a puddle. The water mixed with blood and saw his rippled reflection under his feet.
It was evening by the time he reached his house. He wrapped his hands and feet with bandages. He went into his study and lay down on the floor. On the wall above, the evening threw bars of light across the wooden crucifix that hung there. He stared at it for a long time until his eyes closed in the warm evening silence.