Heaven & Earth Holding Company

On Hardly Ever Hearing Anyone Say Boy, Howdy Anymore

62 on Hardly ever Hearing Anyone Say Boy, Howdy Anymore for Bill Holshouser Who knows more about the panic and ache, the half-baked rolling thunder of the human condition, than the moonies, the loonies, the krishnas and witnesses, those long-suffering wanderers in their Sears & Roebuck suits, door after door being closed in their faces? Hell, Lassie would have chased them out of the yard, Timmy and his family in rocking chairs on the porch, laughing the way they did at the end of each episode. Lot’s wife would have shut them out too, turning her back, salt on her tongue, Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. Even Jesus might have wondered about opening the door, sitting quiet as hell in the reading room of Joseph of Arimathea’s cave when they came like angels and rolled the stone away. Most likely He’d have lit out for the territory when they had given up and crossed the street, His copy of The Watchtower sticking up in the mailbox like a drowning man’s hand, like a rattler on a fencepost when the river overflows. I knew a man once who got up from the game, opened his door to a couple of witnesses, wild-eyed, dreamy, Scotch tape on their glasses, scuffs on their shoes. He accepted a pamphlet, then asked for them all, said he knew that his friends would all want one too, took them in a clump to his wood-burning stove (we all had them then, and Ginsu knives, sump pumps, satellite dishes), 63 then threw them inside, like Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, walked back to the door, slammed it so hard the pictures fell down from the walls. Still they keep coming, trudging like hoboes, wayward Christian soldiers, sitting sometimes with a little old lady who offers them cookies and tea. The worst of them know as they put down their cups that she’s not the one they are witnessing for. The best of them turn, though, mid-Deuteronomy, as if they know for a minute where Moses was buried, as if the Red Sea were closing around them, knowing at that point, knowing full bore, that she is the Jesus, she is the Jesus, she can’t help be anything else but the Jesus, so lonely for anything close to a Jesus, a man in a suit, a knock on the door. ...