The Preacher

by Ted Thackrey, Jr.

  Winter is a close-to-home time in the little mountain town where I live when I’m not on the road, a snow-on-the-ground time that generally keeps the people who live there out of some of the more usual kinds of mischief.

  A few of them go cabin-crazy, of course, but there is wood to split and there is ice to fish through and there are snowplows to run and even winter game to hunt if you’re in the mood and need the food, and that can take some of the edge off the isolation.

  Not that I ever get a chance to feel much isolation myself.

  Sometimes I have to leave the town in winter. If we’re short of money or if there is someone down-the-hill who might be ready to join us, I’ll be gone for a while. But this was a fat year. An easy year, with the bank account full and the tempers even and the woodpile stacked head-high.

  I was loose and contented, looking forward to the holidays in a way I hadn’t for a long time, and sometimes skipping the morning t’ai chi workout, when the phone rang and I spent a few minutes talking to the Reverend Harold Jacob Spence.

  Then I locked up my cabin and told Margery, my electronic-genius secretary, that I would be away for a few days, and caught a ride down-the-hill and bought an airline ticket to Amarillo and rented a car for the drive across the line into the next state.

  The town of Farewell is on the far eastern side of New Mexico, about ten miles from the Texas border, and I think it might be a hard place to love.

  A brochure put out by the chamber of commerce says it was established about a century ago as a five-way division point on the Santa Fe railroad and has been growing ever since. But the time that I spent there never gave me a single clue as to why.

  East New Mexico and west Texas are a part of the country that God must have made as an afterthought, or while He was busy doing something else. It is not a desert; the land is fertile, and for a few days in late summer when the wheat is ready for harvest, I am told it can be as beautiful a spot as you will find anywhere on earth. But the people who say things like that live there, and so are apt to be biased.

  Seeing it first in mid-November and recording that first impression for all time, I was left with a memory of featureless desolation. Bare land. Flat land. Damp land recovering slowly from one of the torrential rains that occur with unpredictable predictability at that time of year.

  It is a landscape with missing details. No trees. No houses. No animals or crops in the fields. A red-brown canvas bisected at its base by the asphalt straightedge of the highway and topped by a sky of diamondlike intensity. Empty and hungry and waiting.

  Driving in from the east that morning, I found myself wondering how Jake Spence had lasted so long in a place like Farewell.

  I remembered him as a sensitive soul, a closet romantic who responded to beauty—physical, spiritual, or moral—in the way a desert bedouin responds to water, or a starving man to food. Clear skies could turn him near-manic, and gray ones send him scurrying to a proctor to confess sins of the imagination.

  His vocation to the priesthood had been clear enough, but I’d wondered privately how he would survive the day-to-day grittiness of parish work. Somehow he seemed better fitted for a monastery.

  Which is just one more unneeded proof of how wrong I can be when I really try.

  The Reverend Harold Jacob Spence was that very rarest breed of cat, the born parish priest, capable of juggling the financial, social, and civic responsibilities without once compromising or losing sight of those inner considerations that bring a certain kind of man—the very best kind—to the ministry in the first place.

  Jake was a winner, and it showed from the very first.

  Ordained, claimed, and assigned to a circuit of three starveling congregations in darkest Kansas, Jake had closed one down and turned the other two into prosperous bastions of the faith in less than a year, which earned him a cordial smile from the bishop of Salina—and a call from a newly priestless congregation in New Mexico that could afford to pay the kind of salary that would permit him to marry the pretty girl he’d been engaged to since his first year of seminary.

  I was anxious to see him and anxious to see her and curious to find out what on earth had kept him in a place like Farewell for all these years. But I never had to ask for an answer to the latter question; it was staring me in the face the moment I saw the church and the lawn around it.

  Saint Luke’s Church (Episcopal) was like its rector, a rare and collectible item. I have since discovered that it is the only true adobe church building of its denomination in North America, but I didn’t know that at the time and I didn’t care. Jake’s aesthetic sense had found the right workshop. From the handmade bricks of the walls and buttresses to the carefully tended tiles of the roof to the obviously amateur-designed and lovingly crafted pattern of the stained-glass window, it was a jewel. One of a kind, amen. But the real explanation—complete and satisfactory, needing no embellishment—was outside the building, on a scuffed and battered expanse of green hopefulness that ended abruptly at the edge of a fallow wheat field.

  Some kind of game seemed to be in progress there. About a dozen youngsters, the eldest perhaps five years old, were galloping, swatting, evading, and whirling at a breakneck pace, laughing like maniacs as they pursued a man in black canonicals.

  I parked the rented car and watched them for a moment in silence. Then I looked at my own transparent reflection in the rolled-up window. “Dummy,” I said to the man I saw there. He didn’t seem to have an answer for that. I cranked him down, out of sight, and stepped into the chill brightness of a New Mexico winter afternoon.

  Reunions with old friends can be awkward, even when it’s a friend like Jake.

  We shook hands and clapped backs and asked banal questions and walked into his office and closed the door and stood for a long moment in silence, stuck for conversation and trying not to be too obvious about sizing each other up. Twelve years is a good round dozen, and the occasional letters we’d exchanged were a bridge no thinking man would trust for a second.

  Jake and I are only a month or two apart in age, and the framed seminary graduation picture on the wall behind him was a reminder and a reproach.

  Had we ever really been that young?

  Well, he had. And looking at him again, in the here and now, I could see that he still was. The Reverend Harold Jacob Spence was still easily recognizable as the smiling ordinand in the color photograph. The hairline had receded a bit, and I suspected that the clerical dickey was concealing five or ten more pounds than he’d carried then. But the face was still unmistakably Jake—fresh and eager and ready to believe that he could change the world. A prize and a wonder.

  I wondered what he saw, looking at me.

  A discerning man might just have been able to connect my face with the one in the seminary photograph, but it would have taken a lot of looking and a fair amount of luck. The left side was still much the same. But a mortar round at Khe Sanh had stirred a few items on the right, and the surgeons who had gone to work to repair the damage had moved a few more. That was only the surface, though. Other changes, the kind that don’t show up on a photographic plate, were the important ones, and they were the part Jake would be noticing now.

  “Long time,” I said, to break the silence.

  “Too long.”

  We stood another moment, thinking thoughts we would never confide to each other, and then he laughed. “Will you look at us!” he said. “Will you look at the two of us, acting like new kids on the block. You still take your coffee black?”

  “And hot and strong.”

  “Good! So do I…”

  He busied himself with a pot and cups from the table behind the desk, and I looked around the room where he worked. You can tell almost as much about a man by the kind of books he keeps near to hand as you can by getting him into a game of poker. Jake had always been a solid player—discounting a tendency to go after inside straights—but far too readable to make a living at the game. Now the books I saw told me that there were no m
ore basic changes in him than appeared on the surface.

  Moby Dick was there on the shelf, hard by Churchill’s World War II series. The Imitation of Christ was shoulder to shoulder with More’s Utopia, jostled by a clutch of Agatha Christie paperbacks and something by Luke Short.

  Same old Jake.

  I thought of the disorderly shelves at my place in the mountains and wondered what my old friend would think about the juxtaposition of Cruden’s Concordance with the People’s Anglican Missal, Asimov’s guides to the Old and New Testaments, Scarne on Cards, The Modern Witch’s Spellbook, and Arthur Orrmont’s Love Cults and Faith Healers. Being Jake, he would probably give silent thanks that he hadn’t found a grimoire or the Necronomican, and send out for someone to assist him at the exorcism.

  “How’s Helen?” I asked when we were looking at each other again from chairs on either side of the desk.

  “Blooming!” he said. “Blossoming, and very eager to see you again.”

  I smiled a little.

  “For true?” I said.

  “For true, of course. Why wouldn’t she be?”

  I could think of a couple of reasons. And so could Jake, now that I mentioned it, but I could see the idea was new to him. Same old Jake.

  “Oh,” he said. “Well…”

  Helen had been Sara’s best friend in college. She had introduced us, included us on double dates with her and Jake, been matron of honor at our wedding, and stopped speaking to me when I joined the army instead of the peace movement. Sara had moved in with the Spences when I went overseas, and Helen had been there—but I hadn’t—on the day Sara was killed.

  “It was a long time ago,” Jake said. “People change. They forget.”

  “It was yesterday,” I said, “and nobody has forgotten anything. I haven’t, anyway.”

  He looked at me out of those achingly young eyes of his.

  “You didn’t remarry,” he said, pronouncing it more as an accusation than the mere fact that it is. Jake was giving me both barrels.

  “No,” I said.

  “But Sara would have…”

  “Sara’s dead, and we never will know what she would have or wouldn’t have,” I said in a voice that was colder than I wanted it to be. “I’m not a monk, not a hermit, not a constitutional celibate, not a professional bachelor, and I haven’t turned gay on you, but marriage is for the young and hopeful, not for one-eyed high-binders who play poker for a living.”

  He started to speak and then shut up, looking like an abandoned basset pup. It almost broke me up. The years fell away and we were back at Sewanee, and Jake had just discovered that beer-bust hangovers are just as prevalent among divinity students as among the laity. No wonder his congregation thought he was the greatest invention since the McCormick reaper. I wanted to pick him up, scratch his ears, and tell him all would be well in this best of all possible worlds.

  “So,” I said then, when the moment finally got too heavy to hold, “so…life isn’t yak butter?”

  The ancient joke and the need to communicate got a very small laugh and brought us back to square one.

  “This garden spot.” I glanced toward the dank, fallow field visible outside his office window. “It suits you? It’s where you want to be?”

  His face gave me the answer with no need for words, but he added a few just in case I’d missed the point.

  “It’s raw,” he said. “It’s lonesome, and the weather can make you wonder if the good Lord is having a fit of ennui. The people are decent enough—no different from most—but sometimes I think their potential for meanness, perversity, and plain wrongheadedness is rooted in the soil hereabouts. Like stinkweed.”

  “And you wouldn’t be anywhere else.”

  He grinned and shrugged. “And I wouldn’t be anywhere else.”

  “So,” I said, finally working the conversation around to business, “the land is empty, the people are average, you’re happy…and you call me down off my hill in the middle of winter because the stinkweed is growing faster than the wheat.”

  There was a double-beep from something inside the cabinet behind him, and Jake swiveled his back to me, dealing with it instead of answering. I heard pouring sounds, and he turned back a few moments later holding two mugs of coffee with one hand.

  “Still no sugar?” he asked.

  I nodded, accepted one of the mugs, and settled it on my side of the desk, warned against taking an immediate sip by the esscurve of steam curling from the surface.

  “I called you,” Jake said, putting his own mug down within easy reach and picking up a pencil to keep his hands busy, “because you’re an old friend, and because I may have abetted a mortal sin, and because I need a professional poker player to find out whether I need a refresher course in canon law and ethics. Old friend…you are just about my last hope.”

  A SERMON

  (CONTINUED)

  Yet, total isolation is death for most human beings.

  Each of us spends a major portion of his time and substance in an effort to close these spaces, to achieve a unity of mind and body with others of our species.

  Togetherness is more than the mere buzzword of a generation now passing its prime.

  We seek friends, kindred souls, allies upon the face of the earth, as we seek food and shelter and clothing—not as luxuries, but as the necessities they are.

  Why, then, this contradictory concern with space…?

  THREE

  Jake Spence is a gentle soul, and there is a kind of innocent haplessness about the surface he usually shows to the world that can lead strangers to draw false conclusions about him. In point of fact, the Reverend Mr. Spence is a clear, cool head, and far from ineffectual. Listening as he set forth the facts of his problem, I saw that the flinty core I remembered from another time was intact and functioning at full strength…with, perhaps, a seasoning of experience and understanding that I suspected might have made its owner something of a surprise to more than one member of his parish.

  “You recognize the name Orrin Prescott?” he asked me.

  I didn’t.

  “Try Pres Prescott,” he said. “Think of the sports pages…”

  Oh. “Wide receiver, first with the Steelers, then with the Jets…uh…after a two-year break for service in ’Nam.”

  Jake looked at me, waiting for me to go on. I culled my memory.

  “About our age. Made All-American his last year at Michigan. Played quarterback there, but the pros retrained him…”

  I shrugged. That was all I had.

  “In ’Nam”—Jake took up the slack when he was sure I was through—“Pres was a helicopter pilot. Decorated twice. Came back without a scratch, married his childhood sweetheart the day he got home. Went back to pro ball as though he’d never been away. Played eight seasons. Made himself a millionaire and quit when the doctors said it was time. Used the money to start a good business back in his hometown…in Farewell.”

  Jake took a sip of his coffee, and it was still too hot. He grimaced, not just from the heat, and stood up. The east wall of his office was covered with photographs. Jake removed one of them, handed it to me, and went back to his chair.

  It was a wedding party.

  The groom—looming and bulking over the rest, including Jake—had one of those pleasant-ugly faces that make you smile to yourself without knowing exactly why. Pres Prescott, undoubtedly. The pretty girl in the bridal veil was…a pretty girl. I wondered who she had grown up to be.

  I glanced briefly at the other faces and was about to put the picture down when something else caught my attention. The maid of honor. A blonde, like the bride, probably a sister or first cousin, judging from the soft-focused similarity of features. Something about her, though. I looked away for a moment. Looked back. No. And yes. The face was familiar somehow, but it had no name. I looked at Jake, but he was gazing out the window.

  Okay.

  He had handed me the picture for a reason, and he would tell me about it in his own good time. I put
it down on his desk and waited for him to go on.

  “The business Pres went into here made a lot of sense,” he said. “He had inherited a full section of land out west of town, land that his father had farmed as long as he was able and rented out to other farmers when he got too old. Good land: A lot of it is still growing wheat for some renter. But Pres fenced off part of it to set up an office and a couple of steel hangars to house a brand-new Bell JetRanger helicopter and the kind of equipment you need to maintain one. He thought he could make a good thing of crop dusting, air taxi, and air ambulance work here, and for a while it looked as though he was right…”

  Sipping coffee and staring into the middle distance, Jake told the rest of the story in a cool monotone that I could remember was his defense against emotional nudity. I made a mental note that the helicopter jockey might have been a pretty good man.

  One of the drawbacks to setting up a new whirlybird operation, Jake explained, is the expense. Those things don’t come cheap. But Pres Prescott had started with plenty of money in hand, and the banks were only too happy to set up the kind of revolving credit line any going business needs in order to survive, and to increase it as soon as there were enough steady customers to warrant expansion. Within a few years, Prescott Helicopters, Inc., had added a hefty LongRanger to the initial equipment, plus a little Robinson training bird for the locals who thought they’d like to learn to fly and had the price. A secretary, a bookkeeper, and a second pilot had been hired to help with the chores.

  “Pres was a success in every way,” Jake said. “He had no competition in the county, no need for elbowing or jostling. Besides, he was a hometown boy…the nice kid you’re glad to see succeed. He and Marilyn, his wife, were members of my congregation from the time they got back to Farewell. If there was any major trouble in that marriage, I never could spot it.”

  And there he seemed to run out of gas.

  “So,” I said, picking up the ball, “they all lived happily ever after. And you just got me out here for a couple of drinks, a barbecue, and a little auld lang syne.”