After Nils died, Max had stomped on his hands with his boots. He had wrapped them in medical-grade bandages until his fingers could not get free. The doctor sent him home with slings for the sprains, once with a cast for a broken bone. They were not safe, the hands. Max longed to stop the power they had over him. If he ran and did not heal, he could cope. He could forget what they could do. But here in Alabama, he could not forget. His cravings were out of control. His old balms did not work as they once did. And now the Judge’s touch. How to describe its magic? How to put words to the first thing to soothe him since he’d stepped off the plane?
You have to learn to love the heat, said the Judge. You have to like to get a little burned. It feels good to burn. I used to love the first few minutes getting into my car in August after a day spent swimming. My car would have been out baking, all day, and I’d just sit in it for a moment before cranking on the engine, rolling down the windows. I’d just sit in that heat, let it wrap itself around me. Like a hug, you know? I used to need a hug so bad. Never knew how to just ask for it. I left it to the heat to touch me.
Max nodded.
Anyway, son, it’s going to cool down quick enough. Just wait. This ain’t the Bahamas. It’ll cool down soon.
The Judge let go of Max. More people came to stand near him, but he kept staring right at Max, as if he had something more to say. Max pictured the Judge’s younger body twisted, panting, barely alive at the bottom of the cliff from which he had once fallen. Barely alive and then completely dead. He had broken his arm during the fall and still couldn’t use the thumb of his left hand. Max glanced at the Judge’s thumb now. It looked normal.
Germany, the Judge said. You’re from Germany, is it? Fine country. Fine country indeed. You can stay, he said, making his hands into imaginary guns and cocking them at Max’s chest.
Boom.
Christians, right? asked the Judge. That a Christian nation?
Christians? asked Max.
They worship the Lord? Try to do right by him?
Max didn’t know how to answer this question. There were big, beautiful churches in the German cities and small villages, and all of Germany closed down each Sunday. But Max’s parents were atheists, and he knew nothing of what Christians did or didn’t do in Germany, if they did or didn’t do right by the Lord. Whatever that meant.
They try, Max said. I think they try for the right way.
Good, good, said the Judge. That’s what I thought. What I’d heard. Good.
The fund-raiser had a theme and the theme was freedom and life. It sounded American to Max. When it was time for his speech, the crowd gathered on the trampled yard before the Judge and the flag. The Judge remained on the porch above and the people circled around a few steps below, listening attentively as if he would tell them the secret that would bring the win. The Judge had a way of making Max feel special for a reason that was so hidden even Max didn’t know what it was. But it seemed the Judge deposited this feeling into everyone gathered. His posture told the crowd that he saw something in each of them and if they stayed close enough to that gaze, they might see it one day, too.
Freedom, the Judge said, is absolutely under threat right now. Freedom is something you have to fight for every day so that other people can take it for granted. You hear? People want to take our freedom. They want to write the rules for us. But brothers and sisters, they don’t know us. And they sure don’t know our God.
The man who looked like Max’s father said, Amen.
Life will win, the Judge said. In the end, life will win. Know why?
The people stared on. Max, too, stared on.
Why, Max heard himself say.
The Judge looked at him.
Because, son, we are doing the Lord’s work. Jesus is the way the truth and the light. Jesus himself is life. Jesus will win. No one ever said following him would be easy. No one said it would make sense. That is what faith is—it’s mystery. It’s being content with half knowledge. With living in the dark. Faith is believing in mystery even when the rest of the world tells you that you are wrong. You are crazy. You are lost. Even when the rest of the world says you are evil. We, brothers and sisters, are not those things. The rest of the world says, We know the answers. They say, We’ve solved the question. Science told us this or that. Well, listen. Science has been wrong before, and science will be wrong again. Once upon a time, science told us the world was flat. That the sun revolved around the earth. But we know more now than we did before, and such will be the case again. But do you know who has never been wrong? Do you know who knows the answer to any question our hearts or minds could ever hope to ask?
The crowd nodded. They knew, and Max, in that moment, felt that he knew it, too.
Well, listen everyone. There is an answer to the question. To every question. There is an answer you can know.
The smiling faces went still.
I don’t have to tell you. Because you know it in your hearts. God. God and our Jesus. That is the answer.
The Judge spoke about war. First, he said there was a war on Christianity. A war on our kind of people. He talked in fragmentary paragraphs and nestled interesting verbs into interesting sentences. He spoke in a cadence that drew emotion from a place Max couldn’t see. It intrigued Max, how easily the Judge could increase his pulse, how in just a few minutes he could cause his mouth to dry up. His mind to spin. The Judge spread out his arms to silence the people’s moans. He bent his head, so Max could see the dip at the top of his black cowboy hat.
The Judge told the story of his anointing. He’d been high on paint with his friends in the forest before the healing occurred. His awakening. He spoke of it as both. The Judge and his friends had set up a moonshine distillery out of a few dozen fermentation barrels they hid under pitched tarps near the Gulf.
I did shameful things, said the Judge. I am here to show my shadow to you, so that you might have the faith to expose yours, too. Integrate into yourself so you’ve got nothing to hide. There’s nothing so low-down that the Lord cannot lean in and meet you there. When you expose your shadow to yourself and to your God, you are set free.
The Judge told how he and his friends had huffed paint, shot squirrels with BB guns and roasted them for dinner. One night, the Judge wandered off in search of berries, something raw and fresh to add to the rodent feast. But he found something else.
He woke up at the bottom of an overhang without a memory of how he got there. His head hissed. His eyes shown back into the blackness of his brain. Blind. Or, as he discovered later—dead. The hospital ran tests that confirmed the Judge had been dead for three whole days in the woods before he woke up and found his way back to the moonshine distillery, his truck with keys still in the cup holder, and the country road that led to safety.
Before he found his way out, the Judge had had a vision. He had come upon a shed covered in mirrors. The mirrors caught the sun and the glint called him. In the shed sat a can of poison. The voice of God said to him, Drink it. Gulp it down. Swallow the magic.
A crazy thing, the Judge said. Faith can be a crazy thing. Faith can ask impossible things. I had none of it until that moment. But suddenly, I had faith entire. I picked up the jug of poison. I held it to my lips, and I swear to the Lord on high, I have never felt more alive. The poison went through my veins. It touched my heart. And I did not die but live.
I walked through myself and found God in the thing that should kill me. I trusted God, and he revealed himself. I saw him in all things—in the weeds and the bushes and the dirt, in the big blue morning that opened up just enough to let me breathe. In the cracked red mud. In the wet black trees. In the silence of space. In the salt-brined soil of the land that was soggy from its closeness to the coast. The moon was full when I finally found my truck. That same moon that pulls the ocean toward it and breaks men only to heal them. It lit my path, the moon did. God’s lantern. His clear way. His eye on me always. I have never felt freedom more than I did in that moment, drinking that poison and living. It’s freedom that we all want in the end.