Jeff Fearnside THE PRIEST (an excerpt) Alwyn Powell and his family—his wife, two young children, and two brothers—walked down the dirt path from their cottage to the Calvinist Methodist church. Behind them, the rising sun still lay behind Mount Snowdon, the highest, craggiest peak among the many that formed the surrounding Caernarvonshire Hills; above them, the oaks knitted tightly over the path formed a tunnel softly illumined in bluish-gray light, cool and quiet. Alwyn breathed this in and listened to the trickling of the River Seiont in the woods to his right. Countless rills sprang from Snowdon’s face, pooled in the twin lakes of Llanberis, and fed the Seiont, which worked its way down through the uplands and toward the gently undulating plain on which Alwyn’s cottage stood, running directly on the other side of his pasture and, just a few miles west, draining into the Menai Straits, with bleak, largely treeless Anglesey beyond.      Alwyn listened, heard a faint splash, and smiled, his nostrils flaring as they did when his smile was genuine, broad and full of large, square teeth. Seeing this, his brother Madoc reached out and slapped him on the shoulder.      “How are you doing?” Madoc asked in Welsh. Alwyn glanced over and took a deep breath before nodding several times.      “Fine, just fine.”      “How’s the farm?”      “Fine,” Alwyn said, as if he had just answered the same question twice. “I expect a good catch of salmon this year. The fish are already running.”      Madoc saw his brother look left, at his wife Mona, who held the hand of their two-year-old son Gareth while carrying six-month-old Evan in a basket slung over her shoulders; Alwyn then quickly arced his head up and around as if taking in the vault of the surrounding woods.      “So old Vaughan is still letting you use the weir on his property?” Madoc pressed.      “He’s been good to our family.”      “Is that a ‘yes’ or a ‘no?’”      “Yes. It’s a yes.” This time Alwyn shot a prickly look directly at Madoc, who, while sensing his brother didn’t want to talk about money or politics in front of his wife, couldn’t resist asking one more question.      “I hope that preacher of yours gives as good a sermon as he writes articles for Tyst. How’d you simple country folk get so lucky to keep him?”      “Like us, he doesn’t want any of your industrial ways,” Alwyn said, signaling the end of any conversation on the subject. He still held ambivalent feelings about his brother leaving to become a slate miner in Llanberis and didn’t want to ruin this Sunday visit with his unprocessed thoughts. They walked in silence for a minute before Madoc turned suddenly to his right and threw his arms around Taliesin’s shoulders.      “Ay! Do you think we’ll ever net another catch like our brother here?” he cried. Mona laughed, though Alwyn only slightly smiled. He had been taking care of Taliesin since their parents had died two years before. It troubled him when people made fun of his youngest brother, especially his own relatives, whom he felt should also offer protection, though he knew Madoc would beat senseless any man other than himself who dared taunt Taliesin. After all, he hadn’t chosen his situation, or his name.      “You poor dumb half-wit!” Madoc said affectionately, tousling the dark, wiry hair on Taliesin’s head, which appeared oversized in relation to his short, tightly compacted body. He opened his mouth in a lopsided grin and worked his jaw up and down, thick wrinkles creasing his high forehead, his wide, unblinking eyes gleaming from within deeply recessed, purplish sockets. “Do you remember how our father always used to tell that story?” Madoc asked, turning again to Alwyn.      Alwyn smiled, for it was his favorite memory: his father in woolen trousers and a flannel shirt, his sleeves rolled up, whittling some trinket with his jackknife while leaning forward on a three-legged stool, or idly snapping the blade open and shut, the fire in the hearth casting shadows over Alwyn and Madoc where they sat on the cottage’s dirt floor, shadows in which they could see the story acted out: Read this story in full in the print version of Rock & Sling, Fall 2004. Copyright © 2004 by Jeff Fearnside. All rights reserved.