autobiographical fragment #5

The last night of summer camp, the preacher slammed his fists into the pulpit to dramatize the force with which the Romans had driven nails through Jesus’ hands and feet. First one hand. Bam! The nail was halfway through, splitting bone. Bam! The nail broke through to the other side as the bones in the center of the hand shattered completely. Bam! The nail had had punctured wood now. Bam! The nail was driven through tattered flesh and splintered bone deep into the wood. Bam! The head of the nail now pinned the bloody pulp firmly, irrevocably to the cross.

He repeated his routine for the other hand, then the feet. He spent the longest time on the feet, because feet were a lot thicker and denser than hands, and a single nail had to go through both of them.

“And Jesus, God’s only begotten son – his only son -- did this for you.” His voice rose in pitch as he repeated “his only son”, as if this notion pained him more than any other, as if he were thinking about his own son.

A thick man with large, watery eyes, the preacher wore a red and white tablecloth of a shirt and a pair of jeans with an enormous silver belt buckle that, from time to time, flashed back the glint of stage lights from underneath his belly. He patted his forehead with a white handkerchief that had gone gray with sweat.

“And when I say you, I don’t just mean mankind, I don’t just mean all of you, together. I mean you.” He paced back and forth on the stage, stopping occasionally in his tracks to point at one of us directly. “You, sitting down there in front of me. You, sitting in these pews. Each one of you. He died for you, personally, for your sins.”

He staggered back to the pulpit, leaned on it for support, patted his forehead, and took a deep breath.

“Those were your sins!” he bellowed. “That should have been you up there on that cross!”

He swung his right arm outward, pointing violently behind him, as if we should have seen a cross materializing out of the blackness at the back of the stage.