I’m Not from Here: A Parable

By Will Willimon

With I'm Not from Here, popular writer Will Willimon returns to fiction with a story of spiritual discovery set in a Southern town. Will takes us on a Don Quixote-like journey during which young Felix Goforth Luckie learns a great deal about the world, about other people, and about a God who shows up in the oddest places, in the strangest times, and among the unlikeliest people. On a quest to discover himself, Felix is discovered by the grace of God.
In homage to Dostoevsky, Cervantes, and the Bible, Willimon creates a world that is thoroughly believable, realistic, and ordinary, yet at the same time fantastic, strange, and funny. In Galilee, Georgia, young Felix finds that things are not as they first appear, people are wonderfully mysterious, and God is unavoidable. At times odd, frequently very funny, both satirical and poignant, I'm Not from Here is a rollicking tale, a light-hearted parable with serious intent.
Willimon's first novel, Incorporation, was widely acclaimed for its satire, honesty, and theological depth. While this his second novel differs considerably, I'm Not from Here is equally surprising and entertaining, showing Willimon's gifts as a masterful storyteller. Even as the parables of Jesus reveal things to us that could not be seen except through fiction, so this novel is not only engaging but also revealing.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Release date: Nov 17, 2015
• ISBN: 9781498274326

Will Willimon

Will Willimon is one of the most popular writers on church, ministry, and religion in the United States today. His books have sold over a million copies. He has served as an editor, writer, pastor, and bishop. He currently teaches at Duke Divinity School.

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I’m Not from Here

a parable

Will Willimon

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I’M NOT FROM HERE

A Parable

Copyright © 2015 Will Willimon. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.

Wipf & Stock Books

An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers

199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3

Eugene, OR 97401

www.wipfandstock.com

ISBN 13: 978-1-4982-185-4

EISBN 13: 978-1-4982-7432-6

Cataloging-in-Publication data:

Willimon, William H.

I’m not from here : a parable / Will Willimon.

viii + 106 p. ; 21.5 cm.

ISBN 13: 978-1-4982-185-4

1

.

Fiction.

2

. I. Title.

PS3623.I578 2015

Manufactured in the U.S.A.

Table of Contents

Title Page

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As with Jesus’ parables, my characters are fiction, based neither upon the quick nor the dead. However, you may apply them to yourself.

The man who finds his homeland sweet is still a tender beginner; he to whom every soil is as his native one is already strong; but he is perfect to whom the entire world is a foreign place.

—Hugo of St. Victor

1

By faith Abraham obeyed when he was called . . . and he set out, not knowing where he was going.

—Hebrews 11:8

Felix had dreamed of Atlanta. When I’m done with school, he told anybody who listened as he preached, perched behind the 10 Items or Less cash register at the Salisbury Piggly Wiggly, I’m going up to Atlanta. Felix used up to Atlanta in a way that was spiritual rather than spatial.

Yet he was aimed on this hellish June day through, not to, Atlanta.

Far from the safety of Salisbury, forty-five minutes past Charlotte, Felix marveled at the Peachoid looming over scorching I-85. He had descended to Gaffney. Leaving the highway, he pulled into the View the Peach area. With his Gotcha he took a dozen pictures of the water tower posing as a peach above a barbecue joint, troubled by its realism.

Looks like somebody’s butt with a bad hemorrhoid! shouted a fat man getting into his van.

You a mess! his wife whooped back.

That the Peachoid appeared shortly after Love’s Truck Stop Felix read as an encouraging sign.

It was hot for a late Saturday afternoon in mid-June. His pilgrimage from Salisbury, past Charlotte, Gaffney, and Greenville, had grown more torrid with each mile. With all the windows down in his Corolla, Felix survived, although the interior of the Corolla felt like hell.

Thin and slight of build, Felix’s body helped him handle heat. More importantly, he had done much thinking about the relationship of body to soul (or spirit, as he preferred to call his soul). Our bodies, Felix had decided, are shells, husks, impediments—insignificant. What matters is spirit, not flesh. Odd thoughts for a man under eighty.

He was fairly sure that Plato, whom he’d read seventeen pages of at State, and the Buddha, whom he had seen on WUNC-TV, supported his thinking. Thus Felix attempted to ignore the heat, sweat, and fumes and focus instead on the spirit.

Just after crossing the bridge over Lake Hartwell, shortly before the Villa Rica exit, he pulled into the Georgia Welcome Center. After relieving himself and blow-drying his hands he asked a hostess at the counter, Do you have maps or brochures related to the environs of Galilee, Georgia?

Smacking gum, she responded, Never heard of Galilee and I ain’t got time to look it up on the map but I’m sure we don’t have no brochures about it. Smack. Wouldn’t you rather go to the outlet mall just down the road? Everybody does. They got the best gun store in Georgia.

She leaned to spit out her wad of gum into a nearby trashcan. A plump woman at the counter piped up, Galilee? I know it. Car broke down there onest. Bad fuel pump. Not much to it, far as I could tell. No reason on God’s green earth for a visit, ’cept if your car is tore up or you get bad lost on your way to Valdosta.

Thanking them, Felix resumed his journey. The simmering steering wheel had become white-hot in the afternoon sun. Atlanta appeared two hours later as he inched his way past the Peachtree Road exit. Intense, steamy humidity made the city glimmering, gilded, and sweltering. Felix lifted up his eyes from the car in front of him. He beheld The Varsity drive-in (which he duly photographed with his Gotcha). Shortly thereafter he gaped at the gilt capitol dome peeking among towers of iridescent glass and steel. His spirits rose. As I-85 channeled its way through Atlanta, the fuming Saturday traffic and broiling, dead air made him sort of faint. Felix kept on.

His sole traveling companion was a reader who sounded like Charlton Heston in The Ten Commandments: Speak to us of Clothes. And he answered: Your clothes conceal much of your beauty . . . you may find in them a harness and a chain. Would that you could meet the sun and the wind with more of your skin and less of your raiment. Felix switched off his iPod, wiped sweat from his face, and attempted to repeat. He recollected something about meeting the sun and the wind with fewer clothes, a congenial thought in this inferno.

The rest of the way he drove without words, hot wind swirling through the sweltering Corolla. Thoughts of clothes as a harness and a chain almost made him sail past the I-20 merge to Macon. More meditation on raiment, skin, and wind and he would have been bound for Birmingham.

The sea that calls all things unto her calls me, and I must embark.

* * *

I guess you think I’m punishing you by sentencing you to Georgia, his new boss had told him the week before. True, Galilee is a dogshit town.

Until Mr. Quattlebaum put it that way, Felix had not thought about his first assignment as punitive. His dream was Atlanta because, as he often said, Salisbury never felt right for a hometown. God willing, Felix would one day go up to Atlanta, capital of the New South, home of the Braves. Today, however, he was happily resigned to Galilee.

Only good thing ever to come out of Galilee, Georgia, was Homer Wisencock, pronounced Quattlebaum. Remember him? Course you don’t. Homer had two great years with the Orioles until steroids took him down. Messed up his liver. They found Homer in the gutter covered in his own vomit. But trust me. A guy like you would get tore up in Atlanta. The big boys got there first. Well, fine for them. I say fine for them. Great town for a convention; lousy place to live. Har! If the traffic didn’t kill you, the whores on Peachtree would pick you clean as a chicken! Look, you ain’t got family to speak of. You twenty-one, alone, no prospects of getting laid in Salisbury, business virgin, free as a bird. Un-a-ttached, gesturing with his cigar. Why shouldn’t you be our man in the Peach State?

Why not indeed? Felix had now adjusted his mind to Galilee, Georgia. He saw it as a venture.

A mission.

A vocation.

An . . . assignment.

Course, nobody wants to go to Georgia—cultural desert. Breeding ground for the dumbest politicians on God’s earth. Get on TV and announce the world is six thousand years old. Look like fools to people from Connecticut. So I guess damn Darwin never happened, huh?

Quattlebaum threw his arms up in despair, exposing patches of underarm sweat, even though his office was excessively air-conditioned.

But look at it this way, son—Trinity is giving you the chance to learn this business from the ground up. Your area is undeveloped. Untouched. Eden. You the first wave of a commun-i-ca-tion re-vo-lu-tion, Quattlebaum said, punctuating the air with his chewed, unlit cigar on each syllable. Felix prized his boss’s penchant for the poetic, except for the profanity.

The fields are white. Reap the harvest. There’s a bundle to be made down there from salt-of-the-earth country people. And you are just the guy to do it, I say, thou art the man. Your hour has come. Quattlebaum slapped him hard on the arm, which Felix received as encouragement, though it may have been intended as threat.

Our business plan is to swoop down into these jerkwater towns, tell them that the communication revolution has come near, and scoop up the business that’s ignored by the big boys. Sign them to eternal contracts as tough to break out of as for a pregnant bride to get into her wedding dress. Give it your forty days and nights and then we’ll see what’s next for you with Trinity.

Felix wanted the spiritual depth to look at the project in just that way, though Trinity Communications at this point wasn’t as extensive as it appeared in Mr. Quattlebaum’s imagination. The company called Trinity was named for the North Carolina town of Quattlebaum’s nativity, inspired by the triune of cell phones, data delivery, and e-marketing. Nobody to whom Felix explained the name got it.

Felix’s wing of Trinity Communications assembled communications packages for businesses, particularly very small ones—a farmer, wife, and unmarried-adult-son-on-a-tractor sort of businesses.

On his way out of the office, Felix had tried to express to Mr. Quattlebaum his genuine resolve for the mission ahead, his disinterest in the paltry salary, and his eagerness to make exodus in Georgia. Quattlebaum glared and said, Don’t play cute with me, son. I don’t take to smartasses. You go down there, do your work, show what you got. I say, show what you got. Do that, and Trinity is your oyster, I say Trinity is your oyster.

Mr. Quattlebaum’s business aspirations exceeded Trinity’s achievements. Trinity Communications consisted of Quattlebaum, Felix, and three alleged salespersons rumored to be wandering in North Carolina and Virginia. Felix had yet to meet them.

* * *

Thus it was on the sixth day in the sixth month that Felix Goforth Luckie, Jr.—called Kicks among the Spiritual Trailblazers Discussion Group at State—at last came to the exit to Galilee (six barren miles after the exit to Hope, Georgia). Here he would establish a beachhead for Trinity Communications. On the left side of the highway he saw the first traces of Galilee—a weedy, defunct Esso gas station next to a former sock factory, both boarded up. Across the road was a one-time vegetable stand, padlocked. Two scrawny chickens free-ranged in the dust. The only functioning business between Hope and