It was still weeks before the full potency of spring thickened the hills in decadent green. For now, the oaks and hickories only brushed the thin ridges with a watercolor verdancy as plumes of white sarvisberry, lavender redbud, and pink sugar maple buds completed the palette of pastels. The creek shouldered through the hollows below with purpose, its gray-blue currents swollen by the season’s surplus.
Pines and still bare post oaks jutted from the mountaintop where Elmer had been perched with a bottle and the pantheon of his own peculiar gods since just after daylight. The bottle had run dry a few hours ago. Angry pangs gnawed incessantly at his hollow stomach.
Mostly he had sat and mostly he had pondered.
He fingered a rust-colored stone on the ground before lifting it to his eyes. Elmer turned it over with dry cracked fingers and it glittered like a red galaxy of stars. The grit of a million grains of sand from an ocean hundreds of million years dead massed, mashed, and held together by forces he did not understand hissed against his skin as he rolled it through his hands.
Elmer reached into his jeans pocket and pulled out his bone-handled folding knife. He opened a scarred blade; its tip broken, its edge dulled by the thousand times he’d used it as something it was not. Elmer slid the blunted blade into a tiny crack in the rock and pried a bit, producing a thin crumbling flake of sandstone. He clenched the flake in his fist, squeezing until he thought it might slice his palm, but the grains pressed together by eons of time and pressure yielded to his flesh and bone.
Elmer tossed the sand over his head as a blue scoundrel breeze swooped down, grabbing then scattering the grains in the hollow below. He thought about how the grains were forever separated but the sand was still forever one.
Elmer was not sure when he would leave.
He was not sure if he would ever leave.
It takes a while, an indeterminate amount of time, to hash out half a century's worth of shit with the hills and your deities. And even if Elmer eventually hiked down this physical place of reckoning, he figured he would never leave it in a spiritual sense.
He thought back to an early memory of Sunday School, the story of Jacob wrestling with God—not just grappling with Him, but besting Him. Elmer remembered a sharing of Jacob's belligerence, how even as a young boy he felt as though he had some business with the Almighty that could not be resolved with folded hands.
But fists might do it. He’d wanted a go at Yahweh, too. Maybe this mountain was Elmer’s Penuel.
The animal cravings roused his body, stronger this time, threatening to carry him somewhere with food and water by their sheer primal power. But Elmer steeled his mind and soul, sat resolute upon his impulses as the wind soaked through his flannel shirt like cold river water.
The malleable mind of the boy he was so long ago had been shaped by the stories and set by the years. It produced an understanding of the sacred embroidered with old hymns and underpinned with hardwood pews. But Elmer’s notions of the Most High were pixelating, his hard ideas dissolving.
He couldn't leave, not when he was this close to something that had forever felt unattainable, undefinable, and ineffable.
It was at the core of every Bible lesson he’d ever been taught, every religion he knew anything about, every quest for metaphysical truth he’d ever set out on. But it was something much older than any of these manmade constructions. To Elmer’s mind, it was best described as the spark touching off creation of any sort—the fuel of evolution and change in every realm of the abstract as well as the tangible. It was the spirit freed from dogma, the mind unchained, the frenzied thrusting, pulsing, convulsing of orgasm, birth, and death—all in cadence. It was the eternal chaos tamed by the soothing caresses of a rhythm almost as old.
Elmer thought it might be the pulse of divinity.
What he saw and felt so clearly and convincingly as the sun sank and he grappled with the holiness was that even in the throes of those seemingly uncontrollable moments of utter pandemonium there was an order. There was purpose. Release, liberation, metamorphoses, life—all delivered by controlled chaos, the harnessing of frenetic energy. Madness but with a steady beat.
He’d been struggling to find his steps, to keep time with the omnipotent throbbing. And he had never felt it while kneeling on his mortal knees.
So he came to the mountain. So he sat.
Early stars sparked in the deepening blue. Still, Elmer sat. Rasping the sandstone on his calloused palms, he felt the grains roll loose, watched as they tumbled one by one through his grip back to the forest floor.
And somewhere within the arc of the cosmic immensity above and the earthy smallness in his hands, the rhythm came to Elmer. The soft patter of sand pebbles on post oak leaves, the deep thrum of the mountains, and the thudding of Elmer’s own heart reached singularity—indistinguishable. One.
With the sighing pine trees as witness, he realized divinity was never "up there" or "back then" or in "a great day a-coming." Divinity was right here and right now. It was in the vibration of every electron in every atom throughout the universe. It was in the vibration of every electron in every atom of Elmer.