by Aaron Gwyn
Hassler never understood what had happened. And in three months time he felt as good as he ever had, the breakdown seeming like a largely jumbled dream. All he remembered was that he had stepped into the pulpit one night, felt the presence of God, and then began to weep. He could not stop to deliver his sermon, nor could he cease when bedtime came, and the following morning when the pastor checked on him, Hassler was weeping yet.
He would later speak about this to his aunt Lorraine. On a late August evening, several years after the occurrence, the two of them sat on the back porch of the ranch house looking out into the woods. It was hot and very dry, and as they spoke the cicadas swelled up in the bushes around them, then went suddenly still.
Hassler leaned into the cane chair and looked at his aunt. She was in her seventies, but did not look it. She was a small woman with doll-like features and clean blue eyes. Lorraine had been talking for half an hour, telling him he had nothing to be ashamed of, that the Spirit of the Lord was a comfort, but the anointing hard to bear.
“I can remember times I’d step into the pulpit,” his aunt told him. “I’d have a sweat break out on me and feel like my legs were going to buckle.”
Hassler smiled.
“I’d get a feeling like I wanted to run, and then another because I knew I couldn’t.”
Hassler moved forward in his chair. He saw a squirrel run the trunk of a black oak and sit with its tail twittering.
“It’s not that I was nervous,” he said. “It was more like when you know it’s going to storm.”
Lorraine began to shake her head. “I never said it had anything to do with nervous.”
Hassler gave her a puzzled look, and she raised a hand to her mouth, kept it there a moment, then glanced toward nothing.
“In the Old Testament,” she began, “the temple priests sewed bells on their hems. They tied ropes to their ankles. They did this because they were the only ones who could walk behind the curtain. If there was sin on them, God would strike them where they stood; people would drag them out by their ropes.”
Hassler nodded.
“I’d be in church, Bobby, waiting to get behind that pulpit, and I’d think how the priests walked past the curtain knowing this. They knew if the sacrifice wasn’t pure, the bells would stop. It must have sobered them. It must have made them wish they were never called.”
The woman quit speaking and cleared her throat. Hassler began to study the ground.
“I know there’s some,” Lorraine continued, “who’ve never felt the anointing, so they wouldn’t understand—those people on Christian television prancing around like a carnival. But those who have felt it, they never step on the platform lightly.” The woman put a hand on his arm. “Do you know what I’m talking about?”
“I do,” said Hassler. “But I don’t see it that way.”
“Which way?”
“We’re not under the Old Law. We’re not sacrificing for our—”
“Bobby,” said the woman, “you can’t tell me that even on the best nights you don’t feel it—like you’re facing something that could turn on you.”
“Of course I feel it,” Hassler told her. “I never step behind the podium but what I don’t feel it. That’s some of the problem. It shouldn’t be that way. The Lord shouldn’t—”
“You think arguing with it is going to help?”
“You know I don’t.”
“It’s going to make you crazy, is what it’ll do. What you have to decide is if it’s worth it.”
“I don’t have a choice,” he said.
“Hush now,” she told him, “Everyone has a choice. Just because you have a calling doesn’t mean you have to answer. Maybe you’ll have to tell the Lord no.”
Hassler sat for a while. The sun had gone down, casting the yard in darkness. “I can’t do that,” he finally said.
Lorraine patted him on the arm and pulled her hand away. She seemed to be speaking to herself. “For the person who can receive,” she told him, “the Spirit of the Lord and the Spirit of the Devil run alongside, and if a man isn’t careful, if he doesn’t respect his calling over its signs, he’ll pick wrong every time. I’ve seen it burn people alive.”
Hassler noticed it had become quiet. He could hear whippoorwills crying to each other and, from some distance, the knocking of woodpeckers. He eyed his feet and his voice surprised him when it came. “There are times,” he said, “I think it’s going to kill me.”
His aunt drew her arms up to her as if she were unexpectedly cold, and both sat watching the sky darken. It seemed a long time before she spoke.
“I always felt like that in the presence of the Lord,” she told him. “Part of me glad of the anointing. Part of me waiting for the bells to stop.”
THE REVIVAL ENTERED its third week, and Hassler became ill in both body and mind. Over the past fifteen days, he had seen signs and wonders, salvations and healings, slayings in the Spirit. He had seen people run the aisles and people lie in the floor trembling and people walking the backs of pews. Just a few evenings before, he watched an elderly man fall to the carpet and die, taken in an instant to his reward.
But Hassler remained without blessing. He remained dry as a bone.
The pastor would sit late into the night, flipping determinedly through his Bible. The pages were dogeared and crumpled—most of the passages underlined in various colors of ink. He read about the kingdom of Heaven suffering violence, about Jacob wrestling with the Lord, about Abraham’s dispute with God. Hassler began to see these as precedents. Perhaps, he thought, this was a trial.
He watched Snodgrass very closely, the way the boy approached the pulpit, the way he knelt and prayed. Hassler saw that there was no concern over whether the Spirit would come when called on; the boy would as soon believe there would not be oxygen when he drew his breath. Snodgrass came toward the altar gracefully and with a look of obedience, the doomed look of the terminally ill.
Hassler would lie in bed at night going over these things till his mind was tired and hazed, and he seemed very close to breaking. Whenever he considered that the revival could only last so long, he felt as if someone had placed an iron on his chest. He knew he’d a dwindling number of opportunities to embrace the Spirit, and each evening he forced all his energy toward regaining his gift. He sat with his mind straining toward it, every thought a supplication.
Finally, his thoughts began to turn darker, and he reckoned ways to bring the revival to a close. He could no longer sit watching the Spirit descend on all but him. But when he spoke to his deacons, each responded that to end the revival in such a state would be tantamount to blasphemy. One did not, Emmanuel Beauford reminded him, simply put an end to God’s workings. Indeed, Beauford and the evangelist’s grandmother had already found themselves of one mind regarding this; she’d called and spoken to him of the matter several nights before. Grudgingly, the pastor agreed, replacing the receiver in its cradle, staring at the floor.
It had been close to a week since Hassler had slept. His mind was blurred, his vision grainy. Out of the corners of his eyes, shapeless shadows jerked and shifted, and when his wife touched him at breakfast one morning, he started as if bitten by a snake.
“Bobby,” she said, “what’s wrong with you?”
Hassler smoothed both hands over his face, held them at his temples. He rose from the table and went into the bathroom, locking the door behind him.
THAT EVENING THE revival reached a pitch not even the elders could recall. So strongly did they feel the presence of God that the song service was interrupted by preaching, the preaching by a rush to the altars. People could not wait, and they needed neither hymn nor sermon to persuade them.
Hassler looked around the room, seeing that all—they had counted attendance at 227—had joined the evangelist in prayer. They knelt at the altars, and where they’d formerly sat, and some sprawled on the carpet. A commotion arose, cries of remorse and appeal and thanksgiving. There were people standing and some bent doubl
e, some with hands uplifted and others holding theirs clasped to the backs of their heads. A great number, men and women alike, were speaking in tongues.
Hassler watched all of this, and there was such longing in him that he had to lower his eyes. He heard the various voices—some fast and loud, some slow, and rhythmic, and melodious. His stomach turned and his heart drummed harsh, tinny as a snare.
He sat for a while, trying to count himself fortunate, thinking that, after all, his material needs were provided for: he had a wife and a congregation who loved him; he was doing what he had been told was his calling. There were very few, he thought, who made it so far.
He closed his eyes, tilted his head, and attempted to express gratitude. But as he did this, the fluorescent light filtering his lids caused the darkness to take a reddish tint. It seemed he was trying to peer through a thin veil, one so frail it could be torn away with no effort at all.
He thought of those Scriptures he’d recently read, passages dictating that he who wanted a blessing must surely demand it. The curtain of the Old Covenant was thick, accessible to few. Christ, he thought, had thinned it, made it the consistency of paper. He had thinned it and placed within each the agency to tear it to shreds.
Hassler began to grow eager; this was the end of his trial. God Almighty was instructing him in the ways of a new covenant. All these months he had been approaching the restoration of his gift like one unfamiliar with the things of the Spirit. He had, he decided, been a fool.
Hassler looked down from the platform. The congregation was still around the altars; not even the musicians had stood to perform hymns, as they were accustomed to at this point in the service. Often, Hassler would lead them. After communing with the Spirit, he took great pleasure in standing there emptied, providing music for those who still prayed.
It occurred to him that if he were to approach the pulpit and begin singing, this would compel the tongues. He could even begin speaking, forming random words, and if he made such a step, surely God would transform this into heavenly speech.
Hassler rose from his seat, went down from the platform to where the pianist knelt, tapped on her shoulder, and motioned her to the stage. The woman wiped her face, stood, and obediently walked to the piano, weaving her way among the kneeling bodies. Hassler followed, and soon found himself behind the podium. He looked at Carol.
“‘Blessed Assurance,’” he told her. “Key of E-flat.”
The woman began to play, Hassler to sing, and they made it through the first and second verse, the chorus. They finished the song and started another. The congregation did not seem to notice; each was in a different state of meditation or repentance or blessing.
When they came to the bridge, Hassler gripped the edges of the podium in either hand, leaned against it, and shut his eyes.
His thought was simply to begin speaking—anything that might sound like tongues. He would not scrutinize the syllables or their effect; he would speak out of faith and await his voice’s conversion. As he heard the song turn once again toward the verse, Hassler opened his mouth, paused for a moment, and began. He did not consider his words. He stood with eyes shut, forcing his speech into the light beyond.
AT SOME POINT, Hassler was aware the music had stopped. He could not remember it having happened and wondered how much time had passed. He opened his eyes, then lowered them to the altars. His congregation was still there, but there were none praying. They were silent and perfectly still, each casting him a curious expression. Snodgrass knelt in their midst with a fitful look on his face. The boy appeared to be witnessing a slaughter.
Hassler stepped away from the podium. It was only then that he realized his lips were still moving, an unassisted speech leaving his mouth. But this was not the speech that Hassler had begun to speak moments before in the hopes that God would transform it. Nor was it the one he had known most his life, the vowels that had come upon him at the age of twelve. This language was guttural and hard, slightly metallic. It was abrasive, a fast and repetitive cough.
The pastor tried to shut his mouth, but he could not. He clenched his jaw and pressed his tongue against his palate, but the words came regardless. Catching his tongue between his teeth, he held it there, but it came loose and flapped inside his mouth like an ailing bird. Hassler began to tremble and his mind rushed all directions. He looked at the ceiling and he looked at the floor, and he shut his eyes to bring darkness to them. He did this to restore the veil, but there was no veil, and even with his eyes clenched the room seemed very bright. Everywhere the light poured. His eyes were full of it, his ears loud with the unclean speech.
Hassler moved off the platform and walked toward his congregation. People rose, backed away. He walked before them like an infant, and there was part of his mind that spoke this foul tongue and part that watched it speak. The latter wanted very badly to tell them something, particularly the boy who still knelt at the altars, frozen on his knees in an attitude of panic. But Hassler could not remember what he wanted to tell them, and he could not make his tongue comply with his wishes. His glance swept briefly over the evangelist’s grandmother, on whose face he seemed to detect the creases of a grin.
As the deacons came forward, trying to escort him out the back, Hassler fixed his eyes on Snodgrass. The two of them shared a look, but no one could tell whether there was understanding between them. The men continued walking their preacher toward the door, calmly, as if ushering a drunk. Hassler stumbled between them, still mouthing the unfamiliar speech. And yet, by the time he reached the parking lot, he no longer heard it. Neither did he hear the cicadas nor the two men pacing beside him. Hassler heard nothing, and as his deacons assisted him into the backseat of a car, he grew dizzy and again closed his eyes: one man pushing gently at his right, the other on the opposite side of the vehicle, leaning inside and over the seat, tugging his pastor slowly across. Hassler lost all sense of whereabouts, pulled gradually, though he did not know how—perhaps by means of a rope. The preacher was certain his deacons had heard, the silence unmistakable, not so much a void of sound but a quiet with its own distinct tenor, a vibration that rang noiselessly in his ears, indicating to those outside that the bells had stopped.
THE BACKSLIDERS
SHOULDERING HIS DUFFEL and a large canvas sack, the boy stepped out onto the porch of his grandfather’s trailer, knuckling sleep from his eyes’ corners, glancing about in the predawn. The sky was just gathering in the east, shades of rose and crimson, and the oaks surrounding the residence stood blurred against it. As Jonathan watched, they began slowly to articulate: trunks and limbs and then smaller branches, individual leaves, their edges downturned and crumpled. At the barbed-wire fence marking the property line was a large elm, and the boy looked for, then found, the swollen knot that had over the years grown around the fence’s top strand. He’d wondered over this phenomenon with a sick feeling, curiosity and an attendant revulsion, as he tugged the rusted wire emerging from either end of the gnarl. One afternoon, he went to attack the eyesore with cable cutters, but his grandfather found him at the task and warned him away with a switch. Now Jonathan observed the tree from a distance, impatient to understand how such an oddity might be allowed.
He was a stocky child—ten years of age, black hair, arms dark from a summer of fishing. In many respects, he looked a miniaturized opposite of his grandfather, Emmanuel Beauford, local rancher and deacon of the First Pentecostal. Beauford was thin and well built, angular, his skin drawn tightly across his skull. Seen in a proper light, the man’s face appeared almost skeletal, his eyes deep-set, alert. While the sternness of younger days had faded somewhat, he remained, nonetheless, determined, committed to his notions of holiness. Jonathan would often beg to stay with Beauford on weekends, and on occasion the man would awaken to find his grandson gone from the pallet he’d made him, curled at the side of his bed. Removing the quilts, Beauford would kneel on the floor, work his hands under the boy’s torso, and lift him to the mattress.
This
morning, Beauford had roused his grandson early, for they were to meet a group of men in the woods five miles south; Jonathan had been allowed to invite a few of his friends as well. Jude McCoin, a fellow deacon, had been diagnosed with esophageal cancer, and though their church had been in revival for over two months, his condition had grown steadily worse. Led by Beauford, the men had decided a retreat was in order, that worshiping in a mixed congregation prevented the deacon from being restored. Jonathan had heard his grandfather say that a man was never so close to God than when alone with his brethren, away from the impurities of the rival gender.
“It is women,” he’d pronounced the Sunday previous, “that permit the Devil to work.” He cleared his throat, proceeded in a somber tone. “I’m not talking about a godly woman like Sister Snodgrass who submits herself to the sanctity of Christ. I’m talking about the other kind: those who confess to giving over their hearts and then reserve a portion of it for the flesh. It is a thing Paul brings before us time and again: the carnal nature of the female. Whether they intend it or they don’t—in God’s mind, it does not matter.” Pausing, he lent each man a look, swept his eyes over the three boys who were sitting with them in the fellowship hall. “You take what they bring of the luxuries, their hair combing and prancing in the mirror—you take that away and you’ll have given the Spirit room to work.”
Pete Cochran, a disciple of Beauford’s since the early sixties, affirmed this, looking toward the others to read their opinion. They—Jim Fortner and Thomas Riley, Lucas Kesterson and Timothy Sweet—were also in agreement.
“So,” Beauford continued, “we go out to the camp and settle in, get down to business. I mean really down to business—not sit around the fire visiting. We do that, we might see Jude beat this thing.” Beauford tightened his mouth, gave a series of nods. “I believe that,” he said, pressing his hands together. “I believe the Lord will spare him.”
