[Father Smith] hitched a ride up the Step Road with Oscar Jimenez, partner in a greenhouse with Keith Gette that marketed fresh greens to gourmet restaurants and wholesale food stores as far away as New York City and cut peonies in bulk to florists worldwide. Rumor had it that they were partners in the carnal sense as well, which made them unnatural, godless freaks of nature and unclean to boot, not to mention no prospect as sons-in-law.

However, he did notice that Oscar was driving a brand new Ford Super Duty Super Cab F350 V8 Turbo Diesel long bed pickup. Their business must be doing very well indeed. He wondered if perhaps it wasn’t his duty to try to help Oscar and Keith through the difficult task of accepting their true identities, to lead them from the homosexual wilderness into the heterosexual Promised Land. God wanted to heal them. Marriage was a part of that healing process. He himself was God’s humble servant.

These musings were interrupting by the sudden realization that the leather seat felt very warm beneath his hindquarters. He grabbed the dash, half rising, panicking at the thought that he’d wet himself.

“Sorry,” Jimenez said. “Should have warned you. Heated seats.” He flicked a switch, and Father Smith subsided into the seat again, trying to hide his embarrassment. He kept his hand on the door handle as a precaution against any assault on his virtue, as who knew what else could be expected from someone so self-indulgent as to own a vehicle with heated seats, and he debarked the truck with dispatch at the turnoff to his homestead. He raised his hat and gave polite thanks for the lift, because there was no excuse for bad manners, and lost no time in hoofing it down the trail before Jimenez could offer to take him to his very doorstep.

The trail had been blazed out of the wilderness around bogs and rises to search out the most level ground with a D-6 Caterpillar tractor. Today, around the second rise, Father Smith came upon a pickup truck parked in the middle of the trail.

This was odd, as ‘trail’ was something of a misnomer for the route into the Smiths’ homestead. It wasn’t two years old, it had been maintained even less often than the main road, and its surface was not an invitation to regular traffic. Parts of it were constantly under water, other parts had been retaken by belligerent alders determined not to be dispossessed. To find a strange vehicle on the trail argued one of two possibilities, that its driver was either very lost, or was poaching game on the Park lands that abutted the Smith homestead.

It was an elderly Ford Ranger three-quarter ton, the bed empty, dark blue paint rusting beneath a solid layer of grime that appeared to have been accumulated during the life of the vehicle. It had Washington state plates. Father Smith approached with caution, pushing himself between the encroaching thicket of diamond willow just beginning to bud and the driver’s side of the truck. “Hello?” he said.

The cab was empty. He looked around. Sparrows and chickadees were singing, crows and ravens were cawing, in the distance he heard the incongruously cheery chirrup of an eagle. In the distance brush crunched beneath the feet of some larger animal.

He suppressed the unworthy wish for something heavier in the way of defense than the aged hunting knife in the worn leather sheath strapped to his belt. He reminded himself that God was on his side. “Hello?” he said, raising his voice. “Anybody around who belongs to this truck?”

No answer.

He put a tentative hand on the door handle. It wasn’t locked.

“Hello?”

Still no answer. He opened the door and peered inside.

There was a handwritten note taped to the steering wheel.

He contemplated this in silence. The truck, parked on the trail to his homestead, was in itself an anomaly. A note taped to the steering wheel was bizarre.

He would have been less than human if he had not yielded to curiosity and read it.

The note had been written in black ink with a broad nib, printed on a blank eight and a half by eleven inch sheet of paper, in large block letters, neat, upright, legible. The content was direct and to the point.

I am returning my body to nature.
I do this of my own free will.
Please do not look for me.