Thread by @JuliusGoat

CHAPEL—4

“Great,” said Julius a long pause, perhaps less enthused about the notion of bad trouble on the way than Tennessee had hoped.

“So. What do I have to do?” Tennessee asks.
“Do?”

“To join up. Stay here with your gang. Huddle up under your roof.”
“The same thing everybody else who’s joined had to do,” Julius says. “Which is to want to join, and then to do it.”

“I don’t follow.”
Julius smiles. “Few do.”

“I have to do *something,* Captain. I have to show my value. I know how I’m perceived.”

“How are you perceived?”

“*And* I’m afraid.”

“Right. ‘Bad trouble after you.’ I know.”

“But no, but what if they’re, what if they’re rye rye *right?*”

“About … ?”

“When they say I’m crazy. What if I *am* crazy?”

Julius stifles a sigh, thinks—I guess it’s going to be a conversation, then. If you don’t mind watching me eat while I talk, buddy, I don’t mind talking while I eat.

He’s somebody, clearly. He’s in need, clearly. Since when have you required a person to present any other qualifications, in order to get your time and attention?

To Tennessee he says: “Does it make you afraid, the idea of being crazy?”

The loony pulls a face. “Who *wants* to be crazy, Captain?”

“OK. So what is it makes you worry about your sanity?”

Tennessee gives a sleeve-flapping gesture toward the unseen crowd on the other side of the chapel doors. “*They* say my story sounds crazy.”

“What else?”

“No no no no no *nobody* believes me, Captain. Sometimes I don’t even believe mice mice mice mice myself.”

Julius smiles, sadly and knowingly. “That’s a lonesome meal sure enough, buddy,” he says, beginning to suspect he’s talking to himself as much as Tennessee.

“But having people agree with a delusion doesn’t make it less a delusion. And having nobody agree with a truth doesn’t make it any less a truth.”

“So you think I’m not crazy?”

“The question for me about you isn’t one of crazy or not. It’s this: Do I think you’re crazier than the baseline usual crazy the rest of us live in?”

“Well?”

Julius, having reached the limitations of fork and knife, picks up the ribs. “That’s a toughie, Sterl… Tennessee. I won’t lie to you; you’re stranger than most. But strange isn’t crazy, and normal isn’t sane.

What I’ve heard of your story strikes me as *unlikely,* but look—let’s think of something else unlikely. For example, if you said to me, I think I can eat two dozen potatoes in an hour, I’d find that unlikely, but we could test it and you might surprise me.

But even if you failed, well, we’d only know you weren’t able to eat twenty-four potatoes that particular time. So that would suggest only probabilities.

It wouldn’t prove you couldn’t do it. For your situation, I don’t see the scientific remedy, short of going to Pigeon Fork and poking around for evidence.”

“Pigeon *Forge,* and I’m not never going back there, there’s bad trouble there.”

“Well then, there’s your answer. You have all the proof you’ll ever get, and maybe all you’ll ever need. Just stay away from that part of earth, and live as happy as you can.”

“What, then? You believe me?”

Julius tosses shinyclean rib bones to his plate, sucks smackingly upon sauce-soiled fingers, dabs with his napkin. “I don’t go that far.

But I don’t disbelieve you, either. And I will say this: Your story isn’t the strangest one I haven’t disbelieved. You wouldn’t *believe* what I’ve failed to disbelieve. And you wouldn’t believe what I’m about to ask somebody else to believe. So stick around.

And, if you find you can’t live a sane life, be encouraged. I haven’t managed that trick yet myself, nor have any of your new roommates—” what the hell, thinks Julius, I suppose we have a new Neon Brother— “nor did Elvis Presley ever manage it ...

... , nor Napoleon, nor Cleopatra or Marilyn Monroe, either, and neither have any of the kings or peasants who crawled and fought and died on the earth since lungs were first invented by an over-ambitious mudfish—which is also science, I think.”

Seized by an urge he can’t explain, he reaches out and places a benedictory hand on Tennessee’s head. “Go. Live a peaceful life. Let sanity worry about sanity.”

He sees the loony’s eyes go wide with … what? Wonder? Confusion? He seems on the verge of something unpredictable: speaking in tongues, screaming, weeping, yodeling, confessing the hidden truths of the universe, barking like a dog, purring like a—

“And get yourself back inside Monseigneur Ex,” Sister Nettles calls, unseen, from her cell nearby, breaking the spell. “No more bothering Jules with your story when there’s a perfectly good confessor around to hear it.”

To Julius’s surprise, this interjection doesn’t make the jitterbug jump. Instead he just calls: “yes, ma’am!” and scoots over to Monseigneur Ex, closing the door behind.

“I guess you’ve met Tennessee already, then,” Julius says to the open air.

“I guess I have, Jules,” comes the mellow voice from behind him.

“I think I just recruited him,” Julius says.

“I’m certainly glad you realized it,” she says. “Because he recruited himself hours ago. Come over and sit a while.”

-A.R. Moxon, THE REVISIONARIES bookshop.org/books/the-revi…