Behind the Book: MLPR—"Ghost Riders"

A WRITER'S WIT
The oldest books are still only just out to those who have not read them.
Samuel Butler
Born December 4, 1835

MLPR-"Ghost Riders"

A feature on the TV news—about young people standing atop driverless cars, mostly in California, allowing them to float beneath them like big surfboards—became the impetus for this story. I was also intrigued by an actual newspaper headline: "Woman Wrecks Car Teaching Dog to Drive." I altered it to read "Vet Crashes Car Teaching Dog to Drive" and pared the narrative’s use way down in the final draft. While one editor loved that narrative in a premature draft I’d sent out, “Ghost Riders” seemed to fail until the absurdity of the dog narrative was limited to a single headline.

The youngish minister in this story is the kind I wished I could have been if I were going to have been one in the first place. He’s with it: cites current statistics on pollution to goose up a sermon about protecting and repairing God’s crumbling Earth. And yet, as we see, he’s human, as well. He pops one of his young sons on the arm when the boy doesn’t obey him, right as the father needs to be going out the door on a Sunday morning. The man is so irritated with his wife and sons that he doesn’t even eat breakfast—and his behavior is an echo of how his father treated him and his brothers when they were young.

More important, this man of God challenges his parishioners to live up to the ideals of the Church: loving those whom it is difficult to love, in this case, a street person and documented sex offender who decides to make his church home with this pastor’s congregation. Yikes. The man smells to high heaven (pardon me), but worse, has an unnatural attraction to adolescent boys. Don’t worry. Nothing bad happens. I couldn’t go that far. I found that delivering this man to the altar of a smug, liberal congregation of forward-thinking believers creates quite enough tension for any reader!

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A PASSAGE FROM THE STORY:
"In the reflection of late sunlight, his gums were gray and sad. Every time I saw Brewster I had a great desire to embrace him, as if doing so would restore him to his former glory. In part I felt that way about most of my parishioners and maybe the world at large. I wished to restore it to some kind of normalcy, though it would have been difficult to describe such a state. War or no? Clean air or smog? Paper or plastic? I suppose I saw ministry differently than most pastors. My father had heard one of my sermons, one in which I’d urged people to forgive our president his adultery, as well as the men in Congress who had persecuted him for it; after that my father never spoke. My mother sent Christmas cards from them both, but her signature only confirmed a certain complicity with my father" (25-6)

This story first appeared in The Gihon River Review (now called Pamplemousse) out of Johnson State College of Vermont.

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NEXT TIME: New Yorker Fiction 2014
NEXT WEEK: BEHIND THE BOOK, "The Best Mud"

CATCH UP WITH EARLIER POSTS OF BEHIND THE BOOK:
11/13/14 — Introduction to My Long-Playing Records
11/20/14 — "My Long-Playing Records" — The Story
11/27/14 — "A Certain Kind of Mischief"