A Partial List of Things I Remember (Pleasantry, Iowa, July 2007-February 2008)

Anyone who remembered what happened there, anyone who was actually present, kept it to themselves. Like me, they all shared a permanent stance of weary dismay toward others, toward themselves, toward the world, cowering beneath the too wide and unfriendly sky, fearing that it might expose them or worse. And like me they often struggled to string it all together into something coherent. If everything that happened formed a sequence, a pattern, like beads strung into a gaudy necklace, then many of them were by now cracked, missing, rendering the necklace ugly and worthless. Only a few random bright baubles remained intact. If it—all of it—were indeed a necklace, I’d toss it aside. I’d bury it or burn it. Then again, burning is probably something I could not bring myself to do.

I only became aware that that time and that place—Pleasantry, Iowa, summer 2007 to the following winter, a handful of seasons and not much more—held interest to anyone when an old acquaintance of mine linked me to an influencer’s channel. He had a staggering number of followers, perhaps unremarkable among his peers, yet it continues to astonish me that such uncharismatic and uninteresting people can command such vast hordes of viewers. Am I full of contempt, even arrogantly so? I am. To this great number he offered a new set of videos. In snips and snatches, a couple of minutes at a time, he offered his theories about what he described as a cold case in Pleasantry. He spoke with absolute confidence and self-possession, fixing the viewer with a self-serious look and speaking in a studied, smug tone of voice. He had a habit of pausing to nod and stare at the camera, and his self-regard seemed at odds with the subject matter. “There was a weird church there for a while . . . possibly a cult. It’s supposedly one of the most recent cases of spontaneous human combustion,” he said with one of his grand pauses. “But is it really? After looking into the facts myself, let’s just say I have some questions.” I Have Some Questions was in fact the name of his series, which struck me as remarkable given his relative incuriosity.

I watched them all, I could not help it, even though the experience felt like slowly peeling off my skin. He recounted the facts, which anyone could find if they spent enough time digging up old articles across the internet. A summary of those facts, such as they were, took up only the first two installments. Somehow, hearing them all laid out in such a straightforward way made it all seem bleaker and more alien to me, the story—the journey of the congregation of the Holy Assembly from Des Moines to Pleasantry, the briefness of our stay there, the three deaths, and all the money Jackson Wade had amassed (a detail that emerged only later)—like the plot of a movie, something that couldn’t really have happened. And it seems to me that it didn’t happen, not in the way he told it. It rang false, even if I could not have pointed to any specific inaccuracy, at least not initially. I did feel relief that some elements of the story did not make it into the videos. Those, perhaps, would truly never make it out of the memories of those of us who saw it, and there are still others that never even made it that far.

What truly bewildered and infuriated me were the theories cobbled together as his so-called investigation went on, centering on his speculation that Wade was working in concert with a woman, the church’s only female deacon, who murdered him herself to get him out of the way. His theory pointed to the same woman as the culprit behind all three deaths. This woman, Lanelle Morris, was still alive, working as a teacher’s aide in Des Moines, and the last video included recent pictures taken from her school’s website. The theory was wrong, I knew that very well, but I could see the sickly logic that made it both feasible and compelling, twisting the story so that it cohered to familiar beats—but made it into a different story.

To tell it my way would be not to tell it at all. But to tell it in the way I remember it would be to permit my memory to zero in on certain textures, images, scenes—those shining baubles—and to hold them up, one by one, to circle around what happened and never get to the bottom of it. I was there, and this is how it felt and how it appeared, if not how it really was. That part I can never seem to unravel.

Linen

I remember the bolts of white linen that showed up one day in the storage room at the old church. The linen was unprimed and rough to the touch, more pale beige than white. The bolts lined the room that we passed on the way to the children’s classroom, an anomaly that intrigued us. But nobody explained why they were there or what they were for, not at first.

A bolt is not just a long roll of cloth but a stroke of lightning, an arrow, much more. A bolt like those cast down from heaven. One could be smote in an instant, struck, if not by a literal thunderbolt then a bolt from the blue. Heart’s sudden stoppage, lungs’ collapse. It could very well happen. A body could be broken by the whims of fate as easily as a twig snapped underfoot, or an insect, except that there is no fate but God’s will. No whims, only judgment. Our curse is that we know it.

“Our curse is that we can come to know it,” Father Jackson told us. “Our curse and our blessing. Through a process of deep reflection and prayer, we can come to know the truth, and sometimes that truth is a burden and sometimes it is gladly borne. The truth,” he went on, “exists already. It is like the most beautiful and highly detailed statue that exists at the heart of a marble block. It is the core of the marble. Our task is to whittle away all that is irrelevant and allow that core to emerge.”

He was standing at the pulpit in faded black slacks and an ugly striped shirt. He raised his arms as he spoke, gesturing with force. He spoke in a stentorian tone that, I could tell even then, he desperately wished were more authoritative, more convincing. Instead he was simply loud and hectoring. His speech was like his manner of speaking: not quite there, attempting to seem more and better than it was. His odd metaphor conveyed an unusual interpretation of the artist’s work. Then again, the true artist—he would have said—works not from the delusions and lies of the bewitched or addled mind but from inspiration; the true artist is inspired by the proper source. And we should have known what inspired could mean, could encompass.

Father Jackson did not say what the bolts of linen were for. At that time, I am not sure, either, how many knew. An inner circle must have met to talk things over, and one of them, not Father Jackson, had obtained the supplies, the linen, the wood, the food, and everything else. But I imagine that he alone, through a process of deep reflection and prayer, had come to know the plan—his special dispensation from the divine.

The baggy linen clothes were uncomfortable to wear, and ugly, but by the time we began to wear them, and to use the same scratchy linen for our beds, lined up in rows in separate rooms for boys and girls, we had accepted that anything else was tainted by the scum of the world.

Tree

The first time I heard the name “Pleasantry,” I misheard it as “pleasant tree” and pictured a gentle cartoon oak tree with bark gnarled into the semblance of a friendly smile. The image remained even after we got there and encountered the building. There was no tree in sight save for one scraggly elm, which seemed to scrape against a too-wide sky that would have done better to swallow it whole. At times, I would gaze at that sky and wait for it to swallow not just the tree but all of us. I would imagine us tipped headlong into that vast swirl of blue, tumbling forever.

On the building, faded, chipped paint barely covered scuffed and worn brick. An abandoned grocery store sagged behind us. The building had been empty for years. The dust and grit on the floor of every room, the cobwebs in all the corners, were a testament to its long abandonment. And did it welcome us, did it gladden as the paltry gleam of dim electric bulbs filled those corners, as we children scrubbed wooden floors and scoured bricks, as warm bodies filled the rooms we began to claim as ours?

The name of Pleasantry had caught Father Jackson’s attention on the evening news—a minor incident of some sort, a crime of little consequence. But the name stuck, and as he continued his reflection, he explained shortly before we left, it dawned on him that it had lodged in his head for a reason, that it was a sign of our intended destination.

I remember nothing of the journey there, only the fact of our arrival. Midday in winter—the way the light lurches out of the gray and seems so incongruous with the cold and in its failure to warm us. Some might find pleasure in the light, but to me it has always seemed somehow mocking. The light within that awful gray sky, shining behind the scraggly elm, seemed the leering gaze of an unknown menace.

Of course, these details are superimposed; I can dredge them up now from any given winter of my life, which has never taken me very far from Pleasantry. My memory does not need to exert itself. But I remember the tree we had in all its ugliness, along with the strange and pointless hope I had that we might find a tree more like the one I imagined and that it might give me something I wanted.

In addition to the pleasant tree in my mind, I remember the immense tree in the garden, an illustration in one of the few books in our shared library. Technically, all of us children were transferred to a homeschooling program. In practice, this meant listening to the older kids read aloud from workbooks. Most of the stories centered on foolish children, scattered all over the planet, who failed to listen to kindly missionaries who offered them escape and salvation. Even then I knew there was something off about the stories, in their narrative and moral clumsiness, their logical gaps, though I passively listened along with everyone else.

Whenever our new collective routines granted me a private moment—not often over the course of several months that, in retrospect, might well have been a decade, while the time before and after it has telescoped into nothing—I would steal to the library. I would sit before the single crooked wooden bookcase, painted white, and look at the illustrations. Reading held little appeal for me, because I knew all the stories, and we were allowed little besides that illustrated Bible and the didactic capsule stories in the workbooks. But I looked at the tree, which was not pleasant but the source of all ills to come. It loomed in my mind, a sort of counterpoint to the pleasant tree, and even now I struggle to picture the rooms in which we lived but can picture both trees precisely.

My dopey, friendly tree grew in importance as I longed for the world it belonged to, apart from this one. We had no rooms of our own and no privacy, any longing for which suggested questionable proclivities. Our time was Father Jackson’s and the deacons’ for the molding, for doing whatever they wished us to do.

Ash

Six months had come and gone when the first fire happened. All those days that immediately became so rigid in their patterns, the time that was endless because so little changed.

It would be impossible not to remember the flames: there was nothing, or rather there was only Calvin, a quiet boy my age, and then he was on fire and screaming. Nothing like a match, struck against a matchbox to cough up a puny flicker of fire. No: the proper word for what happened to Calvin, or what Calvin did, is combustion, fire springing up from his skin. Or, as Father Jackson said, from the evil that resided in his soul, which might as well have been flint struck against the shining steel that was the goodness of our new society. So he swore in the sermon that followed.

Neither I nor any of the rest of us helped Calvin. Instead, he caught fire and yelped at the pain of it, and we sat and watched, and, later, Father Jackson told us it was good, because we were learning who really belonged there.

Calvin’s sister Sally cried for two entire days, slumped in one corner in the basement. Nobody could reach her, nobody could speak to her, and she neither ate nor spoke nor even moved, except for the soft rise and fall of her chest and shoulders as her sorrow continued. It made a certain kind of sense—as, again, Father Jackson pointed out—that, when someone went to check on her sometime in the second night, they found a pile of ashes that resembled her brother’s.

Father Jackson collected the ashes and placed them in a box. They became a tool, a prop, for his sermons over the next few weeks. He promised us that we could be purified, unlike the dirt that Calvin had become.

Their mother, Lanelle, stoically maintained her deaconly duties. I remember how everyone, myself included, would watch her face as Father Jackson continued to suggest that her children must have been evil incarnate and how her expression did not flicker. She stared straight ahead as Father Jackson explained that our society would continue to purify itself, that others would reveal themselves as time went on.

I could never figure it out. For a time I thought Father Jackson was responsible somehow for both deaths, and I have wracked my memory but can remember few details save for the facts of the fires, one of which happened before my eyes. It is not that I ever absolved him but, rather, that despair and confusion conspired and forced me to put it all away.

It was not long before Father Jackson himself combusted. Officially—I think—he died of incineration. No cause could be identified. But we were all there in the pews, watching, his face puffy and red, as he delivered another sermon about the wickedness of the world. His deacons sat in a row toward the front. He was speaking of changes. He was explaining what he and the deacons had been working on. “For the good of our souls and our society,” he said. “There will be no more waste whatsoever.” He was telling us about the fates of the dead, “of the vessels, which are distinct from the souls housed within.” He paced back and forth, arms held up high. The rest of the room remained still, forming a tableau or a backdrop for his movement. I couldn’t understand what I was hearing and now I could scarcely tell you more than what I have said already.

All at once, bright tongues of fire burst all along his body. He stopped and then, realizing what was happening, began to pace back and forth, to slap his arms, wail, gesture at the deacons, who did not move.

We all sat, patient and quiet and even tranquil, as he screamed, far louder than Calvin, and as I watched him die I thought he looked neither surprised nor hurt but furious.

Sky

To empty myself, to cease the labor of attention, is surely a kind of gift. It would indeed be a gift if I could manage it. But the sky offers no such solace. When I look up, what I see is the white-hot wrath of the world. The same appalling sky from then to now, unceasing constant, unceasing reminder of the boy I was and the cowardly man I am now. The same sky, the same white-hot wrath, pressed down on us who sought shelter from everything.

Somebody must have pierced the shroud that covered us, must have ventured out into the wilderness, which is to say, everywhere not within those walls, but I don’t know who. As the police arrived at the building, as the families broke up and scattered—not far, all of us remaining quite close to where we were from, if not so close to Pleasantry—as the investigations continued and the journalists clamored at our doors, none of it seemed altogether real. Somehow, we had to learn, or learn again, that the world outside was there and full of other people, and the shared world we made would have to be pulled apart. But even as that process of pulling apart had begun, all that seemed real was the sky, which did not change, which was too open, too wide by far. Whatever others might see in these events, they could never see any of that, nor know the pressure of the sky upon them, nor the wish for something as stupid as a smiling tree, nor the horrible anger of someone who knew himself to be dying, as some sort of judgment swiftly worked to undo us.

Daniel David Froid

Daniel David Froid is a writer who lives in Arizona and has published fiction in Lightspeed, Weird Horror, Black Warrior Review, Post Road, and elsewhere.