Soil & Sacrament by Fred Bahnson

Author:Fred Bahnson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

We drink what is now our third cup of coffee. The beans are roasting, for the moment there’s nothing to do, and suddenly Zach does something he has not done since I entered the basement an hour ago: he stops moving. He’s pondering something, turning inward. I find myself in awe of this man, of his struggles to embrace life after seventeen years of being mired in death. The more I talk with Zach the more I realize he is perhaps one of the gentlest souls I have ever encountered. When he tells me that people are attracted to the love that is in him, he says it without guile or pride, and I believe him.

“Jesus is a fisherman, and we’re the lures, so we need to be attractive lures. Jesus uses us to hook people, then he reels them in, but not before. There’s no coercion with Jesus’s love. It’s all attraction. That’s what drew me to Tierra Nueva—the love I received. Saint Francis said, ‘Preach the gospel every day, and use words when necessary.’ That’s my gig right there, man.”

He leans over the drum on the roaster and listens, like a gentle doctor putting an ear to his patient’s chest. Despite his gargantuan size he dances about the room with a natural grace and efficiency, hopping over fifty-pound coffee sacks to adjust some dial, whirling around to reach his Big Gulp while opening the door of the roasting drum. Zach’s talk leaps with ease over tall fences that keep most subjects cordoned off from one another, and we travel from the Underground up to Bellingham (his home) back to the Skagit County Jail, then to the hospital and this one house where his friend Steve got shot in the face and then back to their cupping scores for the very first batch of beans, which was 85, which is really good, and then a story about cooking meth, so that present tense blends with past tense, which is all overlaid with future tense—the life he wants to live—and after a while I’m not sure what the subject is or the point, but it doesn’t matter. We’re all enjoying the ride. But no, there is a point. Jesus saved his ass, man. Jesus saved him. “I’ve always had the light of Christ in me,” he says at one point. “I just didn’t know it back in my wilder days.” I could sit drinking coffee and stay high with this unlikely apostle all day long.

He heads over to check on the roaster and touches the drum. “Ow!” He laughs at himself. “That machine is nearly 400 degrees. Why do I keep doing that? That’s the uncomfortable part of coming into the Holy Spirit’s fire. You get burned.”

Zach turns the fire up to 460 degrees. This will be a dark roast. He thinks a minute, slowly nodding his head, then says, “I think with us, though, there’s not just a first or second crack that happens, but lots of cracks. We need to be cracked over and over.

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