Logically Serial

He's not a paragon of man, sure, but who is? He’s hard-working, stoic and proud of the work he does. He didn't hit him - except for maybe a few times when he was too young for it to make much of an impression. He goes to church every Sunday in his shirt and tie, and his heifers place year on year at the Custer County Fair, and he's raised four strapping children who are following in his footsteps, raising strapping young Nebraskans of their own, who will grow up with the wind in their hair, soil in their blood and the Lord in their heart.

Dennis wouldn’t self identify as strapping, so much. He knows he’s strong enough - can carry a calf halfway across an acre - but he’s always been bookish . That’s the one his grandma liked to use. Bookish and sensitive from her, and runt and fag from his brothers - all in good fun, of course, all with a knee pinioning him on the living room floor and a race to the dinner table after. And after Chris had set up family a hundred meters down the road, and then Adam had soon followed suit, there wasn’t much need for him to join the family business, what with the lineage so nicely established. So they’d left him to his books. 

It was the Good Book, at first - church issue Holy Bible, bound in faux green leather, embossed in glittering gold, handed to him by Father Peterson after he’d raced through the Sunday school worksheets in record time. You’re a bright one he’d said, Try this, with kind brown eyes and hands that were soft, so unlike those of his father - worn and weather beaten - as he took the Bible from him, and cracked it open. The pages were velvet to the fingers of a seven year old, impossibly thin and crammed with dense text - stories of magic and miracles, and shepherds and farmers, just like his father, and sinners and saints, and - now he comes to realise it - stories of healing. He’d always liked those ones best.

Father Peterson had taken a liking to him - not in any kind of sinister manner (or at least, none that ever manifested in any harm) - but he’d certainly paid him more attention than the other kids. Maybe it was cause he was bright. Maybe he could sense there was something wrong with him. Dennis always used to think that - that people could tell that deep down, underneath it all, he was fundamentally different from everyone else - made wrong, in some way. Now that he’s older, he thinks that most teenagers feel that, most of the time and that the church didn’t exactly set him up for success.

It’s the rules that did it. But at the same time, he thinks the rules were what he liked most about church. Rules keep you safe - so they’d say, so he’d believed - they keep you right and good for the Lord. Rules about being kind to others, rules about your body, your mind, keeping yourself in good pure shape, about all of it belonging to God. Dennis' body hadn't been his own in a long time and that, for the most part, made it easy. 

If he’s being truthful, neither of his parents paid much attention to him. Once you reach kid number five, there’s not many more ways you can split your attention, between God, the cows and now the grandkids, too. When they’d waved him off to college (Omaha, centre of civilisation) it was with the understanding he’d come back, with the deepest understanding of the word of the Lord that student debt could buy, and he’d set up parish right back where he started, give or take a few miles. They didn’t know he’d learn a hundred names for God, and realise that there’s no use in knowing all of it if it can’t help anyone.

They didn't know he'd come home after three years of it when the world shut down, would move back into his childhood bedroom and finish up his lectures online, and realise that this shit - the stuff they’d passed back and forth across seminar rooms - is real, real in the out-country, something that is clung onto in the face of death, disease and plague, turned sharp and weaponised. They didn’t know - none of them did - that he would see this kind of God used to justify cruelty and isolation, selfishness and ignorance. He knew it happened, sure, but not here . When his grandma had died from respiratory failure in the sheets she’d slept in for the last 60 years, he’d dusted off his AP Biology and applied for a pre-med conversion from his plaid-sheeted twin bed. His parents didn’t wave him off the second time around.

And still, despite all this, he misses his family: the noise and warmth of the house at home, the sounds of his nieces and nephews eating at the kitchen table. Most of all, the quiet of the field when you step outside. The city is loud - loud inside and out, and there’s nowhere to escape from it. He misses the clean air (save the runoff from the feedlot) and the quiet (save the hobbyist pilots from the domestic runway). He misses the bandstand and the midges and the winter storms and the blight, even - city meetings of people trying to come together and find a way to survive, back when that was something people did together.

And he misses church. Still has that little green book with the velvet pages tucked up in the bottom of his Jansport rucksack. Not so weird, he supposes - all things considered. He’d tried to go in the city - had found a service not far from where he lived in his first year - but it wasn’t the same. Where was Father Peterson, with his kind eyes and big hands? Where were  the neighbours from down the road? Where was the open sky when you stepped out from two hours in the pews - the wide expanse there to remind you of the power of the Almighty? Thinking about the youth ministry feels like a hundred years ago, rather than a mere ten. He misses the order, the certainty. The knowledge that his fate isn't his own, that denying his body is for some noble, spiritual reason. That there's a reason for all this hunger to sit inside with nowhere for it to go. That someone can tell him what to do. How to live, who to be. Without that it's built and built into some unwieldy, unholy want .

Dennis wants someone to tell him what to do, and how to be good. Dennis thinks that’s what most people want, really, unless he’s wrong and there actually is something really, specifically wrong with him . Everyone wants a father figure, and the more time Dennis spends in the Pitt, the further he feels from God. He hasn’t called his family in weeks. It only makes sense that he starts worshipping Dr Michael Robinavich instead.