by Beth Lewis
‘John?’ Pastor Jacobs put his hand on my shoulder. It felt wrong, too heavy, too hard, like an iron bar pressing into my skin. Then he knelt down on his bad knee, stared right into my eyes, just like in the sheriff’s station. Did he see a soul? Was that what pastors did?
‘This was a mistake. I shouldn’t have come here. I need to be at school.’
My breath caught, heart galloped. I needed to get away.
‘Calm down, count to ten with me. Come on, nice and slow, one-one-thousand,’ he nodded at me and I took a deep breath, repeated the number. ‘Good. Two-one-thousand, three-one-thousand …’
All the way to ten-one-thousand. The redness cleared. My fists relaxed. Breathing came easier. Gloria knew how to spell Gettysburg. She would tell Jenny. She would make sure she remembered. I was in a field, the sweet smell of the wheat, on a well-trodden path turned to dust by hundreds of running feet. A picture of Jenny running through the dark corn flashed behind my eyes, then finding her pale and staring down by Big Lake.
‘Do you get upset like that often?’ Jacobs said.
‘No,’ I said. ‘Just when …’ when I’m scared of my sister for wanting to sleep next to a dead body, ‘when I need to help Jenny and I can’t. We have a test.’
‘Next time you feel panicked, before you do anything else, count to ten, just like I showed you. Will you do that for me?’
‘Yes, sir. I will.’
The calm edged back, slowly, as if afraid to show its face all at once. I couldn’t help Jenny now, out here, while she was back there. Something ached inside me at the realisation. Sometimes I wouldn’t be there. Sometimes she would be alone. Like she was alone at Big Lake before I found her. What had she done before I got there? I shivered in the heat.
‘You can call me Frank, you know,’ he said. ‘I’ve never felt much like a “sir”.’
I nodded and tested the word. ‘Frank.’ It felt strange on my tongue. I’d never heard anyone else, young or old, call him that. I smiled. ‘Yes, Frank.’
We carried on toward Barks but he didn’t say anything else. Maybe my panic had scared him, made him think I wasn’t worth helping, and now he wanted to use the hour up as quick as he could so he could be rid of me. John’s fine, Mrs Royal, I don’t need to see him ever again.
As we walked, I prayed not. I wanted to feel what I’d felt in the station, like I had a guardian, something like a father who wouldn’t fly away. Frank – the name sounded odd, even in my head – wanted to talk about Mora but he was dancing about the subject. I’ll talk about it, I decided, if that’s what it takes. I’ll talk, but only to you. I stared up at him, waiting for the questions, studying every bit of him.
He wasn’t an old guy, not really, though everyone is old when you’re thirteen. Much older than Momma, but she’d forced us out too young she said. His hair was still rich brown, he didn’t have all that many lines around his face, not like old man Briggs – Hayton! – or Mrs Lyle from the post office. Momma said Pastor Jacobs had a jaw that could lever open a paint can. That’s how you can tell a man is from good stock, John Royal, Momma said, I should have had you by that pastor so you’d have a jaw that could take a hit. I had a weak chin, Momma said, it’d crack like a peanut shell under a good right hook.
We reached the southern edge of the reservoir. The beach was bigger than it should have been for this early in July. The summer was too hot, too long, drying us all up to husks and draining the reservoir too quickly. A few kids playing hooky splashed about, laid out on towels, a blue cool box full of Cokes between them. I swallowed down dust and ached for one of those Cokes. Hiss and pop of the cap and wonder in a mouthful, fizzing down my throat.
‘Think they’ll share?’ Frank nudged me, sweat shining on his forehead. He didn’t take out his handkerchief, didn’t wipe it away, not even with his sleeve.
He squinted against the sun to make out the truant faces. Then he shouted, ‘Mark Easton, is that you? And Tracy Meadows? You kids have a free period or should I be calling parents?’
The four of them, all juniors a few years up from me, spun around. The two on the beach scrambled up, dusted off the sand, Mark and Tracy. The two in the water ducked down so just their heads showed. One of those in the water was Darney Wills. He wrecked his father’s truck in the post office when he was fifteen but he was on the football team and his father was mayor of Larson, so nobody much cared. Accident. Just kids larking about. No one got killed, after all.
I stepped behind the pastor as we walked down onto the beach. Wanted to hide from them. The two on the beach whispered, laughed, pointed.
‘Hey there, pastor,’ Mark Easton, the boy on the beach, called out. Even Mark Easton didn’t call him Frank. A tiny bud of pride blossomed in my chest.
Frank got close, me trailing behind. I wanted to speak up, say let’s get the hell out of here, but we were too close now. Contact made. Questions asked.
The girl, Tracy, looked right at me, not even a glance at the pastor. I was a sideshow. Rumours grew up fast and strong in Larson, then went rampaging through town in hobnail boots, leaving marks, making holes, twisting and expanding every time a new idiot jumped on its back. The girl nudged Mark. I wanted to bury myself in the sand, let me get eaten by those hawks, let me be ripped up and devoured. All better than those looks and whispers.
Mark joined Tracy in staring, smiling, a look out to that beast Darney Wills and whatever poor girl he’d dragged into the water.
‘You should all be in class,’ Frank said, ‘and you sure don’t look sick.’
‘Aw come on,’ Mark, said, ‘we’ve only got a week of school left, finals are done.’
‘I tell you what, you give me one of those Cokes and I’ll forget I saw you.’
‘Deal,’ Mark said, reached down into the cool box. So slow, his eyes always on me. Stop it, stop looking at me. I wanted to be home. I wanted the farm, the isolation of the fields, the silence of the corn.
Pastor Jacobs accepted the bottle, twisted the cap and handed it straight to me. I took it but didn’t drink it, not in front of them. In the water, Darney stood, started wading to shore. The girl still cowered beneath the surface.
‘Coach Ray got you back in practice for the summer?’ Jacobs asked Mark.
‘Yes, sir.’
‘You boys best keep that defence tight next season. God loves football but he loves a state champ more.’
Darney whooped on his way from the water. ‘We’ll destroy Trenton next year, pastor.’
Mark smiled, held Tracy’s hand. Mark was a modest hero to the town, never brash like Darney or wild like Perry Buchanan. He was all things to all people. The Light of Larson they called him. Football star. Baseball star. Star grades. Star smile. Star fucking attitude. My teeth ground together the longer I was near him. Larson treated Mark like a god, as if touching him or getting his attention would somehow bless their narrow lives. He was like a son to me, they’d crow, and everyone would listen slack-jawed and gawking.
Mark Easton, the boy with a hundred fathers. John Royal, the boy with none.
Until now. I looked at the pastor.
They kept talking, Mark and Pastor Jacobs. Mark showed off his throwing arm and his form. The pastor lapped it up and I felt my insides shrivel.
‘You boys work hard this summer,’ Frank said.
‘Yes, sir,’ Mark said. ‘We’ll sure do our best to get to playoffs next season. Maybe you can have a word with the man upstairs for us.’
Jacobs nodded, winked, told the four of them that he didn’t want to catch them there again during school hours. I strode ahead, every step away was one less clenched muscle, one less tight heartbeat. I looked back once. The four of them were on the beach, talking, looking, smaller and smaller until we turned and entered the fields again.
My mood lightened the further away we got. The day’s heat cooled and clouds grew over the sky. A few spots of rain hit my forehead, puffed up dust on the path. My teeth clenched. Rain. Nothing worse for corn than too much rain.
I checked the sky. No black storm clouds bleeding their load, no taint of ozone in the air. Just a shower.
And with that, the rain stopped, beat back by the sun. Frank wiped his forehead with his handkerchief and I with my sleeve.
I gave the Coke back to Frank, untouched, and, after frowning at it, he couldn’t resist long. He gulped down a quarter of the bottle and handed it back to me. I took a sip. Wonder. Fizz. Cold on my tongue. Soon the bottle was empty and Jacobs let me keep it to return to the store for the nickel. I held onto that bottle like it was a gold bar.
‘You got nervous around those kids,’ Frank said halfway through another field.
I didn’t say anything.
‘People like to talk in this town, don’t they?’ he said.
‘There’s nothing else to do.’
He let out a small laugh. ‘You’re not wrong there. But hey, those guys are gone now. Just you and me. The talk will die down eventually. I’ve heard some of it myself. Like the kind of questions Samuels was asking you.’ He paused, raised an eyebrow to see if I knew what he meant and the gossip echoed in my head, I heard John Royal killed that girl.
I flinched and tried to smile.
‘Don’t you worry,’ he said. ‘Everyone knows you didn’t do anything.’
I’d have to prove it. Rumours were as good as a signed confession in this town. I clutched the bottle. A mix of feelings inside me, like when you throw too many colours together and get muddy brown. I was full of different measures of relief and embarrassment and sadness and guilt for thinking bad of myself and Jenny for what we did and something close to admiration for this pastor, even a dash of enjoyment at being here and talking to someone who talked back to me like a grown-up and painful anger that anyone thought I could have killed Mora. All those colours churned up in my stomach and made me feel sick.
‘You know,’ he said after another long silence. ‘I saw a dead body once, when I was about your age. My father.’
He waited for my reaction but I didn’t know what it should be. I barely remembered my real pa. I wished I’d seen him dead, at least then I’d know for sure where he was.
‘He died of liver cancer when I was twelve,’ the pastor kept going. ‘Back in Virginia, where I’m from.’
I turned to him then. I knew where Virginia was. Miss Eaves quizzed us on all the states. I didn’t do all that well, though Jenny and Gloria aced it. Jenny would have been fifty for fifty but she mixed up the Dakotas. The pastor didn’t have the voice of Virginia. Virginia was tobacco and moonshine and you could hear both in their words. Frank spoke carefully, each syllable said as it was written down, didn’t cut off any ends or soften his Ts. I wondered if he was lying but as soon as I thought it, guilt shot through me. Frank was a man of God and the Bible and people like that don’t need to lie. I wasn’t sure, at thirteen, if I truly believed in Heaven or Hell but I believed in Pastor Jacobs. Believed his goodness and accepted his help, his attention. Bathed in it, soaked it in.
‘John, are you listening?’
I nodded and he resumed. The body looked like his father but it wasn’t truly him. His soul was with God. Death is just a journey. He looked so peaceful at the end. My head filled up with pictures of Mora, forever sleeping by Big Lake. I saw the way Jenny had looked and smiled and calmed, the electricity in her bones dulling for a time, like the lights in a thunderstorm, dimming and flickering out, then flaring wild when Samuels woke us. Seeing the body brought my sister peace, like seeing his father had given the pastor peace. Hadn’t it?
‘Why were you in the valley?’ Frank asked and I only then realised we were almost back at the church.
‘It’s where our Fort is.’
‘Why were you there so late?’
I shrugged. I couldn’t say it, not out loud, not to a grown-up, not yet.
‘Do you sleep there often?’
‘Sometimes.’
‘When things are bad at home?’
‘No,’ I said quickly. To a question like that, a moment of hesitation meant yes. I wouldn’t let him think badly about my family. Things weren’t roses and cream but that didn’t mean he could take guesses and think the worst.
Jenny thought the worst, thought Momma would hurt her one day.
I shuddered, and shook my head.
‘Momma sometimes gets a temper. It’s just the drink, that’s all. It doesn’t mean anything. It’s always forgotten about the next day.’
I was telling myself, and Jenny, as much as I was telling the pastor.
Jacobs nodded, picked another length of wheat from the field. ‘Does she hurt you?’
‘She just shouts sometimes is all. She gets mad at Jenny if her dress is too short or if she gives back-talk or sass, but Momma just tells her off.’
She’d never really hurt her, I knew it like I knew my name. I’d agreed with Momma a few times in the past. Jenny’s dresses and shorts were sometimes too high on her legs, especially after we’d been swimming. She had Momma’s lip that was for sure and didn’t have to be drunk to use it. Besides, Momma was being kind, tending wounds and kissing foreheads and driving us to school. Any hurt or darkness was gone for now.
I put aside thoughts of Momma, changed the subject back to Mora, which suddenly felt more comfortable. Besides, Gloria would kill me if I didn’t find out all I could.
‘Do they know the girl’s name yet?’
Jacobs narrowed his eyes at me before answering. ‘No. The sheriffs are doing all they can to find out who she is.’
‘I don’t think she was from Larson. We’d know her face.’
Pastor Jacobs tilted his head to the side like he was considering what I’d just said. ‘You’re right. Cross your fingers and toes, John, we’ll catch whoever did it.’
‘Do they have any ideas? Could it have been someone from here?’
‘I’m not all that sure. But they’re working on it. We have to let the sheriffs do their job and keep out of their way.’
I scuffed my shoes in the dirt, didn’t move when he started walking again.
‘What’s the hold-up?’ he asked.
I looked up at him, squinting against the sun. ‘They don’t really think I did it, do they?’
He dropped down for a third time onto his bad knee. His black pant-leg turned orange with the dust. ‘No. They don’t. And if anyone, Samuels, Miller, anyone, accuses you, they’ll have me and the big man,’ he pointed to the sky, ‘to deal with.’
His eyes were wide and I believed every word. I nodded, thanked him, and helped him to his feet. I walked beside him in silence, my cheeks and insides glowing.
We reached the back of the church and Frank checked his watch. ‘Time flies, hey? We’re done for today, you’re free.’
Too soon. An hour a week wasn’t enough to spend with your father.
Whoa there, John. Frank isn’t your father. He’s a friend, that’s all. You’ll come back next week and he’ll be happy to see you and you’ll see him at church on Sunday and at Bible Study and that’s it.
At church with a hundred other people.
Stop it. You have Jenny and Momma to take care of.
Yes.
Yes. Time to go back to Jenny.
Frank stepped up to the trailer door, then turned back to me, held out his hand for me to shake. Always smiling.
‘See you next week, John, we’ll talk some more. Maybe we’ll see another harrier, hey?’
Wait. One more minute. ‘Can I ask you another question?’
His hand hung from the door handle. ‘Fire away.’
‘Why did you help me and Jenny at the station? You could have left us until Momma showed up.’
‘Nobody could get a hold of your mom. I believe everyone deserves to have someone in their corner. You’re a good kid, John, and you can always come to me.’
‘Thank you. And thanks for waiting with Rudy too. His dad can get real rough, you know.’
Pastor Jacobs smiled again. ‘That’s my pleasure.’
He stretched
out his arms and inhaled deeply, gazing over the church green, onto the streets and folk strolling toward the school to pick up their children.
‘This town,’ he said, then looked down at me, wide grin on his face. ‘And all its people, they’re my flock, John, and it’s my job to be a good shepherd to them all. You youngsters, I have a fondness for. You’re our future and your spiritual and emotional wellbeing are top of my chore list. I’ve got to set your souls on the straight, bright path.’
He laughed, shook his head. ‘Listen to me, babbling, giving you the hard sell. See you next week.’
He ended our first session with a nod and I turned, started toward school.
As I was walking away, Pastor Jacobs called out, ‘Don’t forget to count. When you get worried, just count.’
‘Yes, sir – Frank. I will.’ And then he was inside his trailer and I was on my way, lighter than I’d felt in a long time.
At the front of the church, as I was crossing the lawn to the sidewalk, still strewn about with red, white and blue ticker tape, I stopped. Heard it almost before I saw it, a low rumble. An idling car. On the corner of Munroe and Main sat a pale grey Ford. My stomach turned cold and I knew it was the same car, the one I’d seen driving behind Samuels’ patrol car when we found Mora. I saw it clearly now. A Mustang, old one by the look of the paint job. Momma called them pony cars for pony boys. But that grey, so pale it stole the sun, dulled the glorious summer light to nothing. The windows were like mirrors against the light but I thought I saw a shadow of a driver. My insides began to squirm. I felt, deep in my gut, it was watching me. Waiting for me.
The Ford crawled forward. Toward the church, toward me. The sound of its thick, clunking engine filled up the street and my ears and I backed away, until I bumped against the church wall. My Lord, protect me, I thought, Pastor Frank protect me. Some sinister force, some energy, bled from that car and I wanted to run but my legs were iron rods, unbending, unmoving. It didn’t seem real. The heat haze followed it, made it shift and I thought I was seeing things. Seeing ghosts. But ghosts weren’t real. Just memories people were afraid of, right, John?
