Page 70 - WTP Vol. XIII #1

Witches (continued from preceding page)
of us who remember the Old Scratch eighties have
been here before.
~
Recently I flew back to Washington and stopped in at Gonzaga College High School, a place of learn- ing in the Ignatian tradition where both I and the demon-possessed Roland Doe had been students. (A classmate tells me he saw him years ago at a smoker, an elderly man, but didn’t want to say anything. What would you say?) It was good to be back; I live and work in New England now, site of America’s original fascination with the midnight arts, and the suspicion that some of us may be darkly other than they seem. Toward evening I made my way into Georgetown to sit at the top of that narrow flight of stone steps that drops pre- cipitously from Prospect to M Street, where the dying Father Karras ends his story crumpled in a crimson splash.
Eventually one gets over The Exorcist, though wheth- er the same can be said for an adolescence in the Catholic Church is less clear. Children of Christ and the city both, my own circle grew up in the deep shadow of this particular movie, perhaps in a way only possible to altar boys coming of age in the na- tion’s capitol. I remember how, reunited after gradu- ation in a Georgetown bar, we would dip fingers into our beer and flick them at each other, saying, “The power of Christ compels you! The power of Christ compels you!” I remember—in my twenties at this point, and having entered the work force—being made to wear one of those dreadful Hello! My Name Is lapel stickers at an office function and filling it
in Legion... for We Are Many. Humor, of course, is halfway to freedom, and while there are parts of a capitol childhood I still regard with tenderness, the Devil I have left firmly behind.
Or I hope so. Sitting on those cold steps, with the sounds of traffic idling below, I wondered. And I won- dered whether he is through with us.
The Exorcist turned 50 last year, having officially out- lasted Roe v Wade and the furor that ushered them both in. Ellen Burstyn, after refusing for half a centu- ry, finally reprised her role as Chris MacNeil for a bad sequel directed by David Gordon Green, fresh off his bad sequels to Halloween. The hurly-burly is new, yet familiar: defund the police, “Dominionists,” a Catho- lic-heavy Court whose Dobbs decision cites Sir Mat- thew Hale, a 17th century Puritan who, among other achievements, put to death women for the crime
of practicing witchcraft. And the re-emergence of Satanic conspiracy claims, after all this time, brings a shiver of the long-ago. Like Father Merrin in his Iraqi dig, we find ourselves facing a danger long thought laid to rest.
I looked up the demonologist who went around visit- ing Catholic high schools in writing this article, but found he had passed away; one of the Jesuits, with whom I have remained in contact across the years, couldn’t even remember the lecture that so chill- ingly impressed itself on my adolescence. He was acquainted, of course, with the Roland Doe case, and the time the Dark One was said to have taken over a Gonzaga boy.
No one knows what the Devil is, really, he told me when I asked what he made of the whole thing— witchcraft, the solemn rite of exorcism, unholy at- tacks on dewy adolescents. Different thinkers have given different definitions. Is evil, real evil, inside the human heart, or does it originate somewhere else? This is part of the mystery.
I thought about that question on Prospect Street, with the sun falling low over as the Potomac River, as I rose and dusted off my jeans. In middle age, of God’s presence or absence in our lives I am uncertain, but there is one thing I do know, without question. Wher- ever the Devil himself may be located—inside our nation’s fabric, as Hawthorne suspected; in extremist ideologies; in the recurring cycle of political fury; or somewhere else, in the darkness beyond all of that— he’s never really gone.
Never really. He’s only waiting.
Something broke off my thoughts. At the base of the stair, a black-clad motorcyclist had pulled up and was looking my direction, visor obscuring the face. We watched each other for a moment longer, and then, slowly, the rider drove on.
Orem’s first collection of stories, Zombi, You My Love, won the GLCA New Writers Award, and his his second, Across the River, the Texas Review Novella Prize. His first novel, Killer of Crying Deer, won the Eric Hoffer Award and has been optioned for film. His first collection of poems, Our Purpose in Speaking, was awarded the Wheelbarrow Books Poetry Prize at MSU Press; the Rubery International Book Award in poetry, and was chosen Book of the Year. His second novel, Miss Lucy, won the Gival Press Novel Award; Kirkus listed it as one of the Best Books of 2019. He has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize five times. His short plays were awarded the Critics’ Prize and Audience Favorite Award at Durango Theatre Fest, and thrice nominated for the prestigious Heideman Award at Actors Theatre of Louisville.
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