Somebody hit a coyote and I pulled over to the shoulder to take a look at it.
I’d watched it bounce off a minivan twenty yards ahead of me. A gold smudge. At first I thought it might have been a paper bag tossed out the window, or maybe an old T‐shirt, until I saw its big yellow eyes and tail flop‐ ping around as it skittered onto the gravel, rolling like a stuntman on fire.
By the time I walked up to it on the shoulder, it was lying on its side, taking quick, shallow breaths and staring up past my head. One of its legs looked like it had an extra joint.
I reached out to touch it, and it didn’t bite. I ran my finger along its hind leg, and it didn’t move.
With a spare blanket from the trunk, I wrapped him up (I could now see he was male, for whatever that’s worth), then stuck him in the back seat, next to the bucket, the books, and my duffel bag.
I grabbed two of the books and shoved the rest into the footwell so they wouldn’t shift onto him. I set the coyote’s head on the selected writings of Origen of Alexandria and wedged my collection of the Venerable Bede’s homilies between the seat belt and the blanket to brace the animal’s ribs and diffuse the pressure of the strap when I buckled him in. He was panting hard, so I poured some water into his mouth and, after I’d made sure his tongue had drawn it in, poured a little more on the blanket for him to suck on if he got thirsty soon. Before I drove off, I stuck half a Niravam in his mouth and heard it fizzle on his tongue.
Origen, that spiritual genius of the second and third centuries, says we can go up or down from age to age. Someone could be a monk, and then, after a snobby life of chastity and starvation, come back as an angel. Or you could go backward—you might come to as an animal (a pigeon, a rat, a coyote), and then drop to demon, or go down to whatever is below that. The idea behind this being that at the beginning of time we were all made of fire and turned toward God in constant, sizzling contemplation, burning up His divine fumes. Most minds (with the sole exception of Jesus, he says) turned from Him, became distracted, and cooled, and from then on we were stuck with our husky bodies. Now we can go up or down. But eventually even those at the bottom will climb their way back up to God, when time calls it quits.
I haven’t read Origen in a while, admittedly, but I’m pretty sure that’s the gist of his cosmic scheme. Which he would say is somewhat metaphorical anyhow.
Thanks to a couple first‐millennium controversies among the monasteries of Lower Egypt, Origen was never canonized. There are pictures of him standing at the pulpit, preaching to a congregation of saints (Augustine, Ambrose), a haloed crowd in which he’s the only one with no light shooting out of his head.
Somewhere in Illinois, I changed the blanket. The coyote had pissed and shit in it. A good sign, I figured, but the car was beginning to smell. He left a foamy stripe of puke on Origen, and some of it smeared onto Bede.
I wrapped him in one of my towels at a rest stop. He was as light as a throw pillow. He didn’t move at all.
The back leg looked pretty bad, bent slightly the wrong way. When I touched it, he jerked out of his daze and snapped his jaws. I’d need to set the bone.
A woman stepped out of the van parked next to me.
“Got yourself a little buddy there, Father?”
She walked over, and before I could stop her she stroked his nose.
“Doesn’t like to travel. I gave him one of those pills. He’s a little out of it.”
“I can tell. Well, I hope he gets there safe. You too. God bless.”
I buckled him back in and threw the blanket into the trash.
Bede joined the monastery of Monkwearmouth when he was seven. As an oblate. A puer oblatus. Literally, a “child offered,” part of a practice of dedicating prepubescent boys to monastic life. It probably wasn’t the best for child development, but the monks who did this moved through scripture like fish in water, my theology professor used to say.
I went to the minor seminary at fourteen. St. John Bosco’s. This was in Indiana, in the sixties, but there are still a few places like that. It’s the closest thing to being an oblate you can get in recent memory. There were a lot of oblates in the Middle Ages—it simplified inheritance to send off a second‐born son (or ninth‐born, in my case) to a monastery before he reached puberty. Many of the best medieval scholars were oblates. William of Ockham was an oblate. So was St. Boniface, I think.
I roomed with three other boys, and we were far from little Bedes or Ockhams. We found the room where the older priests kept their whiskey, gin, and cartons of cigarettes and broke into it all the time. Sometimes we’d hitchhike into Indianapolis and try to meet girls. More than once a couple of us brought some back to the seminary and made out in the grounds’ charitable shadows. The priests didn’t object to this as much as you might think. The boys were trying to get one last look at what they’d be giving up, should they graduate to the major seminary and go through with ordination. I don’t know what the girls were trying to get. The seminary was not a romantic place. Everywhere you looked, a saint or an angel was there watching you—staring up and to the side, the way they always do.
Last night, a couple hours after I picked up the coyote, I stopped at a campground off the highway. I parked the car near a tree inscribed with the message “jb was here fuuck ron!” I almost stepped on a Kentucky Fried Chicken bucket. Some animal had torn it apart. The colonel’s face stared back at me, mutilated and sinister, like a zombie’s.
I unloaded my supplies from the Camry. They’d given me two weeks to move out of the rectory, and in that time I ran a number of tests. I took a bucket and one of those circular cushions they make you wear when you break your tailbone, and with these I’d made a kind of chamber pot. I soldered together a foldable grill. I have a master’s in art, and I’ve always been pretty good at making things. Over the years, I kept picking up new crafts. I’ve worked with pewter, clay, wood, PVC pipe, and (in one disastrous project) human hair. So it was fun for me to put these things together.
Something in my knee popped when I reached in to grab my tent. It was so loud even the coyote turned his head to see what was going on. But it didn’t hurt too bad. I’d be all right as long as I didn’t fully extend my leg.
Despite his curiosity about my knee, the coyote was still pretty dazed. I put on a pair of leather driving gloves and bound him up in the towel, leaving his broken leg sticking out like a kettle’s spout. I buckled him back in so he couldn’t turn and bite me. And then I took some plaster gauze from my first aid kit and started wrapping the broken leg with it. The coyote didn’t like this and started wriggling, but then he passed out—because of the pain, I think. With him lying still, I managed to get the leg set pretty straight, and used up most of the gauze, because it seemed likely he’d chew through it if there wasn’t enough. I drizzled water on the wraps so they would hold and then turned up the air so the plaster would set faster. Once he came to, I gave him the other half of the pill.
When I was done, he looked like one of those mummified cats you see pictures of in National Geographic.
With the coyote bundled up, I pitched my tent. Lying there in the dark, I thought I heard something or someone moving through the trees about fifty yards away. I pulled out my flashlight and shined it into the brush, but there wasn’t anything. If you’re alone long enough, your mind begins to populate the world. I think that’s why the Desert Fathers—St. Antony, Arsenius—were always battling demons. I’m not saying those demons weren’t real; I just think you have to be alone for a long time if your brain is going to be able to see anything special.
I grabbed one of the books from the car and tried to read it by flashlight. After mindlessly skimming a few pages, I felt something sticky on the spine. Some of the coyote’s bile had caked onto it. I wiped it off on the side of the tent.
I fell asleep about an hour after that.
An extract from VIA NEGATIVA, by Daniel Hornsby, published by Knopf. Hornsby was born in Muncie, Indiana. He holds an MFA in fiction from the University of Michigan, and an MTS from Harvard Divinity School. His stories and essays have appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Electric Literature, The Missouri Review, and Joyland. He lives in Memphis, Tennessee.
