Recent widower and Catholic deacon J. Kerry Logan spends his nights alone in his church engaged in a drunken one-way dialogue with the wooden jesus who lives on the crucifix three stories up the altar wall. As a six-foot-eleven seventy-year-old Irishman, he is only the third oddest creature in The Church of St. Thomas the Doubter once it is invaded by two strange boys. Built of broken fragments of the Christian faith he feels dying in him, they claim ownership of the church and make a declaration: Night is falling—Sondown is near!

As their encounter lasts and a friendship takes root, Deacon Logan feels himself drawn further and further out of his old world and into What Comes After, which is either the deepest betrayal of his faith or a desperate attempt at its renewal. His identity as a deacon, his church, and even Christianity itself seem to depend on the appalling yet beautiful way these boys destroy and transform the thousand crucifixes they collect from the small lumber town down the hill. 

A book of comedy, fantasy, theology, and joy in the Word, immersed in the tradition of the classics of Western literature, Treee is a meditation on the gallows that is the Cross and the humor that springs eternally from our traumatic recognition of the end of this life and our dwindling hope in a second. 

J. P. P. Pofus is a retired English teacher and still technically a Roman Catholic deacon, though he was never much better at it than the deacon in this book; he was never an astronaut. He loves the Yahwist, Homer, Vergil, Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Dante, the Gawain poet, Julian of Norwich, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Milton, Goethe, Dostoevsky, Kafka, Joyce, C.S. Lewis, and Bugs Bunny. He lives with his wife, who is not dead, the two of them surrounded by grandchildren. He prays every night that God will forgive him for everything, including the worst parts of Treee.