To Hell and Back

“On days like this, I wish there was more room back here,” Gruff said to Travis. “Then we could just burn everything.”

They were shoveling the overflow of trash that had poured over the big drums kept in the back as far away from the house as possible. All the usual suspects—coffee grounds, egg shells, banana peels and the like—had slipped out of the paper bags they had sogged and split. Night creatures had come by and helped the process along.

“That’s what we do up in Maine,” Travis said, as he exchanged his shovel for a rake to gather up the smallest bits of detritus. “We don’t have garbage men up there. It’s too remote.”

Gruff pivoted one of the barrels on its edge to role it back and forth down the side alley to the truck in front of the house. He stopped to swat a horsefly digging into the back of his neck.

"Spawn of Satan," he said as he slapped the fly down.

“Why doesn’t the house have garbage pickup?” Travis asked.

“Too expensive,” Gruff said.

“The city doesn’t collect the trash?”

Gruff set the drum to rest at the entrance of the alley and wiped his brow with his massive gloved hand. Sweat was already soaking his white Italian undershirt. Travis had never seen anyone in real life who had such a physique. You only saw those kinds of muscles in cartoons or on the covers of body builder magazines in a general store like the one back home. The man was huge!

“The city’s been fighting the union for years,” Gruff said. “Carla won’t have anything to do with a city service if we have an alternative.”

“And that alternative would be—us, right?”

“Grab your barrel, partner,” Gruff said over his shoulder as he hoisted the barrel right off the ground and headed down the alley.

Travis duck-walked his to the street, where he was met by Louise.

“I hear you like driving this beat-up shit bag of a truck,” she said, pointing to the old GBU jalopy that Travis and Jonah had first driven to Jack’s farm.

“Yeah,” Travis said. “It was cool.”

“Most excellent,” Gruff said and handed him the keys.

Louise got in on the passenger’s side and slid along the bench seat to Travis. The smell of stale cigarette smoke wafted into his face.

“I need to be aired out,” Louise said, as if she had a direct line to Travis’s nostrils. “Goin’ along for the ride.”

They drove up the hill into the country in silence. At one point, Louise made to shake a cigarette out the pack she carried around like a rabbit’s foot, but a glance from Gruff and she thought better of it.

“You ever in the service?” Travis asked Gruff, partly to make conversation but also because this man fascinated him.

“Nope,” Gruff said. “Too old.”

“Old?” Louise said. “You ain’t forty.”

“Well, I beg to differ,” he said. “I turn forty-three this fall.”

“Shit,” Louise said. “You’re pretty well pickled.”

To Travis, forty-three qualified as, if not antique, then surely old. He had grown up with multiple warnings about trusting anyone over thirty. He dismissed that idea, of course. Most of the older people he knew were pretty wise. But they were also, well, old.

It was early afternoon on the one day of the week that Travis had no classes after 10:00am. The fall air was heavy with the last humid heat of Indian summer. Once again, he was in this battered old truck driving in the country, and once again he was loving it. It reminded him of home, of the drives he and his buddies took in late summer the year he graduated from high school. The light in the air brought with it a sense of impending autumn, with its beauty and its endings. Some of the trees were starting to turn their leaves into fire.

“So, how did you excape the draft?” Louise asked Travis.

“I’m deferred while I’m in college,” he said. He was a little surprised by the question. Everyone knew college kids were deferred, didn’t they?

“Enjoy it while it lasts,” Gruff said. “It’s a hell hole over there.”

“And to no good purpose,” Louise added.

Travis was beginning to understand what the odd collection of characters he had met at the house had in common. Most of the people he hung out with on campus were in favor of the war. Greenbush University wasn’t Berkeley or NYU. It attracted the traditional, patriotic sons and some daughters of rural upstate New York and northern New England. This crowd with LIA was something else all together. He was comfortable with them in most ways, but their political views were still a stretch for him. When hot topics came up, the war and all, he kept his mouth shut, not because he was afraid they would reject his views, or him, but because he had the good sense (he prized his good sense!) to realize that, whatever position these people had on the big issues of the day, those positions had been formed by experiences he could not even begin to imagine.

+++++++++++++++

The dump was set back from the road about a quarter of a mile and well before Travis could see it, he could smell it. It was a still day and the air on the dirt road was fetid with noxious smells: the sweet, sickly odor of decaying food mingled in equal parts with the acrid smell of smoke. They rounded a last turn and drove up to the edge of an enormous pile of trash. But that was just the dumping off point; beyond it lay a plain of unsettled ground, much of it burned and melted plastic and metal strewn in a huge bed of smoldering ash. For a little town the size of Greenbush, he was amazed at the size of the place.

They joined a short line of vehicles, trucks mostly, waiting to be relieved of their own reeking and seeping burdens. Blessedly, no effort was made to sort any of what they brought. Gruff got out and heaved their refuse onto the edge of the pile and in short order they were out of the place.

He didn’t know why, but Travis was shaken by the experience of so much smoldering stench. Maybe it was the maggots he saw on some of the garbage closest to him in the truck. He hated bugs, and worms, he was sure, were created by God only for the purposes of skewering on the end of a fishhook.

“Gehenna on earth,” he mumbled as Gruff climbed back into the truck and slammed the tinny door shut behind him.

“What’d you say?” Gruff asked.

Travis shifted the truck into gear and steered them out of the parking area.

“I’ve never seen anything like that,” he said. “We always burn our stuff.”

He reached the main road and turned left, heading back to the city.

“You ain’t the queasy kind, are you?” Louise asked him.

“Nah, you know I’m not,” he said. “You’ve seen me corralling the trash at the end of a meal and taking it out back. It’s the shear size of the place, I think, and it reminded me of Gehenna.”

“What the hell is that?” Louise asked.

“Actually,” Travis said, “you got it right there. Gehenna is hell.”

“So why not just call hell ‘hell,’” Gruff said. “You ain’t aiming to impress us, are you? Being college educated and all.”

“He knows better than to try that shit,” Louise said.

“No, not at all,” Travis said. “Jonah was just talking about Gehenna in class the other week, and I remembered what he said.”

Travis went on, explaining to them that in Jonah’s New Testament class someone had tried to corner their priest-professor by asking him if he believed in hell and the eternal damnation of sinners. It was a question that Travis had thought of, too, but was afraid to ask. He was growing in respect and even love for this gentle man who had saved him from ruin after the affair of the mermaid, and dreaded the possibility that someone who was so good would confirm what he had learned in grade school catechism class, with some degree of horror, about the implacable judgment of God.

“So what’d he say?” Gruff asked.

“I’m thinking I can’t tell you,” Travis said, “without sounding like some college-educated punk.”

That got a laugh from both of them, and he continued.

“I don’t remember all the details,” he said, but went on to tell them about the biblical origins of the fire and brimstone of hell: Jesus was approached in the gospels with questions about hell on a number of occasions by people who, Travis suspected, were as trepidatious as he was about how the kind master would respond. This was because on occasion Christ would warn his followers about avoiding the fate of the wicked, which he described as consignment to “hell,” a place of unquenchable fire where the worm never dies.

Jonah explained that in the Greek original of the gospels, the word interpreters translate as “hell” is “Gehenna,” and that Jesus probably got the word—and its associations with fire and worms—from the Hebrew prophets, particularly Jeremiah and Isaiah, whose poetry is rife with threats against those who do evil, thundering that they would be killed and their bodies thrown into Gehenna.

“Sounds pretty straightforward to me,” Gruff said. “You sin, you die, you burn. Just like we were taught.”

“It’s actually not what most people think, though,” Travis said.

The prophets were referring to an actual place outside Jerusalem: the valley of Hinnom. This valley seems to have been a site that was sacred to the people who controlled the area before the arrival of the Israelites at the place that would become their capital city. When the previous occupants were routed and banished, the new owners turned the Hinnom valley into a garbage pit to desecrate what had been a pagan shrine.

“So, when the prophets talk about throwing a body into Hinnom—the Greek form of the word was ‘Gehenna’—they weren’t talking about eternal damnation,” Travis concluded.

“They were talking about garbage disposal,” Gruff said.

“Yuch. I can be a pretty vindictive bitch,” Louise said. “But even I wouldn’t throw my enemy’s body in a dump.”

“Oh, yes you would,” Gruff chuckled. “Where the fire is never quenched and the worm never dies.”

“So, when Jesus refers to Gehenna—hell—as the eventual destination of the wicked,” Travis said, “he may have just meant that when evil people die they don’t go to heaven to enjoy eternal happiness with God. Instead, they just die and are tossed into a pit to rot in oblivion.”

The three of them drove in silence for a while. They were heading down Red Mill Road past GBU and it was easy to be distracted by the view that opened up ahead of them: the tops of the biggest buildings across the river poking up out of the city’s shroud of smoke and dust.

“Camus said that hell is other people,” Louise said.

“What?” Travis said, surprised once again at what came out of the woman sitting next to him.

“It was Sartre, not Camus,” Gruff said, and he leaned forward to face Travis at the other end of the seat. “And I know what you’re thinking .”

Travis blushed.

“Well,” he said after a moment, “how DO you know about Sartre and Camus.”

They were nearing Fourth Street and Louise was back at it with her pack of cigarettes.

“Oh, there’s much you don’t know about us,” she said.

“That’s for sure,” Travis said.

“You haven’t been at the house on a Friday night yet, have you?” Gruff asked.

“True,” Travis said, but was beginning to get the picture. On Fridays after supper, the group gathered for sessions called “Clarification of Thought.” They were modeled after the program originally set up by the Catholic Workers in New York back at the beginning, when Peter Maurin was still around.

“You talked about existentialists on a Friday night?”

“Hey,” Gruff said as Travis pulled up to the curb outside the house. “We’re anarchists, aren’t we?”

Right, Travis thought, anarchists.

The usual collection of people had lined up along the street under the storefront sign, “Love in Action.” They hurried out of the truck and through the front door into the building. They had a meal to serve.

[Up next: The Key]

The Devil's Daybook: On the Absolute Mystery of the Great High God

Carla defies description.

I mean that literally. She would not describe herself for my daybook. I told her, how am I going to document the origins of Fourth Street if you won’t be a source for the story? But beyond the bare minimum, I got nothing.

I even warned her: are you sure you want to leave your part of the saga in my hands? Nothing.

I even went mechanical with a reel to reel tape recorder from GBU. I told her to just talk into the microphone and of course she didn’t want to talk into the microphone but I said go ahead try it. This is as far as we got:

++++++++++++++++

“Is that thing on?” Carla asked.

“I think so,” I said. “But a master of these things, I am not. As you know.”

We were sitting in the tiny courtyard behind the House catching some of the precious mid-afternoon quiet and sun, though I wasn’t sure how long our backsides would last out there, sitting as we were on wrought iron patio furniture designed for, but not outfitted with, cushions. David and Jonathan, the cats from hell, uncharacteristically leave us alone and lie asleep in the sun at our feet, content and oblivious.

“There,” I said, satisfied that the equipment was ready. I started to feel as though I could get into the groove with this interviewing thing.

“This is my first interview,” I told her. “Let’s get started.”

“Go for it.”

“Well.” I moved the microphone closer to her face. “Tell me about yourself.”

She paused and stared at me. I thought she was going to get up and leave, but she surprised me.

“Give me that thing,” she said, pulling the microphone closer. “And don’t interrupt.”

++++++++++++++

“I arrived here,” she began, “actually you and I both arrived here, we all arrived here in this place because, when I first came out east to the university, I chanced to meet Gertrude in the library one afternoon.”

“That old bitch,” I said.

“Don’t interrupt. I’d started college in San Francisco, not far from the Mission District where I grew up. I was a commuter; my parents didn’t dare let me live in the dorms. I was pretty wild back then”.

“Back then,” I couldn’t help myself.

She paused at me. Carla had a way of looking a pause.

“Well, it was the sixties,” I said to prompt her. “And you were in the City That Knows How.”

She ignored that and continued. “I managed to get into some pretty sophisticated trouble even without the convenience of dorm life, and after two semesters my folks packed me off back East to live with my mother’s sister in Albany. (This, of course, backfired on them when my younger brother and only sibling, who presented them with no trouble in high school, insisted on joining me two years later, leaving them three thousand miles away from either of us).

“For the first time in my life, in the hills around the campus, I had the time to just be quiet, and I realized that I didn’t know who I was or where I wanted to be or what I wanted to do. All the usual questions you’re supposed to ask in your late teens and early twenties. And of course I didn’t have to worry about the draft, like the guys did.

“At just this time of day, mid-afternoon, Gertrude walked by as I was paging through some magazine in the library. I remember I was staring at a patch of sun on the orange plastic seat next to me. I must have been fidgeting quite a bit because she stopped at my side and asked if there was something wrong.

“She was wearing a short veil and despite the fact that the college was a Catholic one, I had never shared more than two words with a nun in my life, and certainly not while sitting in shorts, with my legs hanging over the seat of the chair.”

“It’s amazing she didn’t throw you out,” I said.

“True,” Carla said. “Especially since Gertrude was one of the more traditional sisters at the College.”

“So, what happened? Did she give you the old heave-ho?”

“Nothing happened,” she said. “She just looked at me.”

“I know that stare,” he said. “She hated my guts back then.”

Carla smiled. “Her eyes give away nothing, but they weren’t judging me as she gave me the once over in the library that day. Which, I should add, was remarkable, considering how hard we would vex this woman who was by nature anything but non-judgmental.”

“So, what did she say?”

“I don’t recall her actual words, but she offered me a job,” Carla said. “And we became colleagues, you and I.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s it for now,” she said, as she looked down at Luke’s bigboy wristwatch. “I have to go cook.”

“Now what?” I asked her.

“Hey, it’s your book,” she said as the legs of her wrought iron chair scraped against the flagstones of the garden.

+++++++++++++++

I was actually surprised that I got that much out of Carla before she split and left the rest of the tale for me to tell.

I met her within a week of her hiring at the library. I’d been hired around the same time (not by Gertrude, since that never would have happened. For the Ster, as I call her just to aggravate her, I was an acquired taste). I was a charity case, enrolled at GBU as part of the school’s outreach to worthy locals and I was a local they considered, for a time, to be worthy. I think that meant I had a pulse and had actually read a whole book before I applied for admission.

I was barely at work a week in the library myself when I was asked—told, really, the nuns didn’t ask—to orient this kid, Carla Dunbar, into the work of the library page. She presented well—short as me but the right height for a girl, with dirty blond hair that had a tendency to curl when she let it grow out. When I met her, her hair was short, though, and that went with her athletic, wiry body type. She was boyish in some ways but not manish, with pale skin (like her brother’s), the kind you don’t mind touching because it always looks smooth and clean and lightly dusted with blond hair. She wasn’t overly strong physically, but she had a strong, determined face with very pale blue/green eyes, much lighter than her brother’s startling cerulean blues.

I couldn’t get her to talk much then, either, as I showed her around the library (a converted coach house for the original estate). But we found ourselves later that week in the same theology class with Father Jonah Lutes. It was an introduction to the New Testament, one of eight (eight!!) required theology classes to which every student at the university was sentenced, without hope of parole.

This meant we had to take a theology course every semester during our sojourn on the campus on Mount Reisendorf, and that meant that there was a strong incentive for people like us to get creative. Both Carla and I had strong reservations about the foundations of the theological enterprise, a/k/a “God, though neither of us had the courage and come on out and self-identify with the godless.

Our creativity consisted of relentlessly badgering Jonah (we saw him as the weak chink in the priestly wall of the theological and philosophical fortress [don’t get me going on all the philosophy we had to take!]). We convinced him to offer a course more suitable to our intellectual palate: he created his most popular course because of us, “War, Justice, and the Common Good.” The war, the draft, and the radical idea that Catholics were toying with—that being a conscientious objector might have been something Jesus would have approved of—all of this made the course one of the must-takes on campus, and Jonah got a name for himself as a radical. Hardly deserved, though he did know a lot of people in town who were working the justice and poverty line.

Which is how we wound up meeting the founder of the Catholic Worker movement, Dorothy Day herself, when she came to Albany one semester to speak at a local union hall.

Well, I say we met her, but really, we sat in the third row and paid attention. She was talking, as she always does, about Jesus and the gospels, but for once this wasn’t a turn-off. I found Miss Day a rather indifferent speaker, untrained in public speaking and kind of monotoned. And she drifted a bit in what she was talking about. I wondered if she was prepared.

Of course, this was quick-tongued Jason the college student critic at work. Later, when Jonah forced us to read some of her work, I came to appreciate the woman for what she had done, practically reinventing service to the poor at a time—the 1930s—when just about everyone was poor, or so it seemed. Hell, my father, whose father was a carpenter with a job, used to hunt woodchucks with a shotgun to put meat in the gravy they sprinkled over the daily macaroni. I admit it: her words may have lacked a suitable rhetorical flourish, but it really was hard to be too critical of a woman who had inspired houses of hospitality all over the country that were serving thousands of meals every day. It didn’t hurt that she was a self-proclaimed anarchist and a pacifist against war in all its forms. That was attractive, for sure.

Anyway, that night, something shifted inside Carla. We all saw it soon enough. I’m sure Gertrude was thinking it was a religious conversion, but it wasn’t. But something did happen with Carla. I date it to that night, but it probably also involved the arrival of her younger brother Luke, and her having to be a role model for him and all.

Carla began to pester Jonah all over again, this time to introduce her to his connections, pro-union stiffs who were leafleting the mills in Troy and others who were demonstrating against the war on and off campus. The other priests gave lip service to Miss Day as a modern saint but didn’t much approve of the details of her program, like opposing the war, so there were some interesting confrontations on campus over the war, and Carla began to get it on with that scene.

She was the one who first spotted the “to let” sign on the house on Fourth Street and she continued to badger Jonah without mercy until he convinced his benefactors—people he met in the parish where he worked on weekends, as well as some of the better off lay faculty at GBU—to bankroll the deal and get a lease signed.

I’m not sure how Carla managed to graduate, but she did—we did—and when she headed downtown to begin her house of hospitality, I followed along. I’d been rejected by the draft board—I’m sure you will have guessed the reason—and was footloose and fancy free, as they say.

Well, hold on. I did say I was going to be honest here.

I did follow Carla to Fourth Street, true. But the reason was not really to work with the poor, not then it wasn’t. I mean, why would I return to the very city, the very part of the city that I had so wanted to escape? I was sure, when I got accepted at GBU and even got a room on campus, that I was Broadway bound! Once I got an education I would be able to make enough money to get my ass to New York City. Instead, here I was, donating a year or so of my precious young life to setting up a house of hospitality. Why? Was it Jesus after all, slipping into the back door of my heart?

Hell, no. It was Carla’s delightful, delectable brother Luke, who slipped into the back door of my . . . life. And yeah, my heart.

But that’s a story for another day.

In any case, it was good that I went along for the ride, since Carla had this problem that did not go away.

When Miss Day founded the Catholic Worker movement, the “Catholic” part was no last-minute add on, like a marketing tool or something. She was a Catholic first, she said, and a worker with and for the poor second. The work came from an identification with Jesus Christ, and a complete devotion to Christ and the Church, which she understood—as a Catholic does—to be the Body of Christ. She worked priests and the princes of the Church to get what she needed for her movement, but she insisted that if the Cardinal Archbishop of New York commanded her to close up shop, she would do it on the spot.

However, our beloved Carla, even as she swooned over the woman and her mission, and deepened her own devotion to the poor, Carla was still—is still—though perhaps somewhat reluctantly, an atheist.

Go figure.

I was the one that got faith.

[For more information about Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker movement, still flourishing today almost thirty years after Miss Day’s death in 1980, see the link below among my favorite sites. Jason’s description of Dorothy Day as a speaker is taken from an early account of her lecture style by Dwight MacDonald in The New Yorker from October of 1952. Up next: “To Hell and Back.”]