John D MacDonald - One More Sunday

by One More Sunday(Lit)

  "Just tell me what it used to feel like to you, to have faith."

  "I can't tell you exactly. It's a kind of knowing. It's such a great big sureness about things. You know the Lord is watching over you. You feel a kind of warmth and glow of His presence. Sometimes it's so wonderful you can't take a breath deep enough. It makes you want to live your life the best way you can and then you can be certain of your reward in heaven.

  But I've been losing it. It's been going away from me, Joe Deets.

  Like in a drifting boat, looking back up the river where you've been, where it was so nice."

  "Maybe all I've got is some kind of brain tumor giving me flashes of light."

  She reached quickly and touched the back of his hand.

  "I

  shouldn't hate you like I do. I'm sorry. I was a sinner too. I was a real mess. It was just luck I ever landed on my feet, and found jGod."

  "Can you remember what it felt like? Was it some kind of sudden thing, Annalee?"

  "I walked down the aisle to the preacher man feeling foolish every step. I went down to the altar rail because my friends were going down there. I thought I would go through the motions and I knew they didn't mean anything at all. The preacher man looked into my eyes and he was looking right on through them, right down into my black heart. He put his hand on my head and he told me my soul was in great pain because it felt lost forever. If I would give myself to God I would be healed forever. And I did and I was. I mean, I thought I was. I thought I was, right up until recent."

  "Can you pray for me?"

  "I'll try."

  "I mean here and now."

  "Now? I don't know. I don't know if I'm worthy to pray for anybody. Last Sunday she was close up on the screen again, singing, looking so beautiful it could have broke my heart. And I watched her, thinking about you and her, and about how I could feel everything slipping away from me. I don't think I can pray for your soul."

  "There's nobody else who can, Annalee. Try. Please."

  She seemed ready to decline. There were two deep frown lines between her brows. Her lips were compressed. And then her face changed. He could think of it only as a calmness, a look of peace and of rest. She nodded.

  They bowed their heads.

  "Lord God, please forgive me for what has been happening to me lately. I've been trying to hold on, but it's been getting away from me. It's like a big door shutting, real slow. It's half closed now, and nothing I can do to stop it moving. I don't know if You can help me, and I would appreciate it if You would, but this man here, Joseph Deets, he has been leading a mean and sorry life and he has just now started to feel Your presence, and he is scared. He is scared sick all the way through and he needs to find his way to You somehow. He's probably more than halfway through his life and it has all turned to ashes for him, and he is beginning to learn he has been the pawn of Satan, and his soul will roast in the roaring fires of hell forevermore. He thinks he can find his way to You through me, but he should have found somebody who's in closer touch lately than I am. I need You, but he's more needy than me, and if You can show him the way, I would surely appreciate it. Amen."

  When he lifted his head and opened his eyes, the tears ran down his face.

  "I... I just..."

  "Hush now," Annalee said.

  "Hush up." She handed him a tissue from her purse.

  "Everything is okay."

  "For you to do that means... so much."

  "What did it cost me? Three minutes out of my life."

  "Speaking of cost, I told you on the phone I'd pay the plane fare. Here."

  "That's more than it was. Like twice more."

  "Please take it. Buy something for Doreen. I promise on my word of honor that after we split up she'll be okay. I've got some other things to... to mend also. I don't know why the tears. It's not like me at all. I've felt so strange lately. I thought I had the world figured out. But it isn't the way I thought it was."

  She put the money away.

  "Thank you. If I helped, I'm glad.

  But it's hard to believe I did. Funny, you being right in the middle of things up there, and being ordained and all, and never realizing God was watching you every minute, waiting for you to come around."

  "I'll walk you over there."

  "If you don't mind, I'd just as soon you wouldn't. Lots of people from down our way come up here a lot. It would just make me more nervous than I am already." She slid out and stood up and looked down at him.

  "Good luck to you anyway.

  I'm going to try not to think about you with hate anymore. I think I'm more like ashamed for you."

  "So we both are. Okay. And thanks."

  He watched her leave and watched her come by the window on her way out to the sidewalk. She had a sturdy and determined walk, just like her daughter, chin high, head and shoulders back. He blew his nose. It had worked. He had been in the light for a little longer this time. And he was going to have to learn how to make it happen by himself. And then his life would begin to have some kind of meaning that he could not even guess at. And he could not imagine what kind of man he was going to become. All he was sure of was that he would be nothing like the man who sat here.

  He studied the bus schedule and decided he had time to walk to the bus station. But he would have to walk slowly, because of the heat.

  Roy Owen phoned Peggy Moon from Hartford in the early afternoon of Friday, August twenty-sixth. She took it at the little office switchboard, leaning back in the battered old oak swivel chair, smiling with pleasure.

  "How's it going?" he asked.

  "Let me see. Thunderstorms this morning but they didn't last long. Cooled the air and now it's back where it was, unbearable. What else, let me see. Three rooms rented already. Lots of people coming down here with their kids before school starts again. Fred is prowling around, spraying for roaches. I've been catching up on the books. And I've been missing you something terrible."

  "And I miss you, and the heat and the bug sounds."

  "I almost forgot. Somebody shot at Moses and missed.

  People think it was because somebody believes he was the one killed Lindy. The deputies are keeping an eye on him and on his place. What's with your kid?"

  "Janie is okay. She's happy to have me back, I think. But it is a little hard to tell. She's playing the whole scene very mellow and laid back. I think she's being somebody on television, but I can't figure out who."

  "Hug her a lot."

  "I try, but she scuffles. Elbows and knees. She resists hugging like you wouldn't believe."

  "Roy, you keep at it, hear? Hang on to her and one of these times the dams will bust and she'll cry her eyes out. The laid-back thing is a pose. I remember how it was with me. I didn't want anybody to know how torn up I was inside. It seems as if it happened to me a hundred years ago. But I'll never forget it. When her mother left her and went to New York which to a kid can be the other side of the moon she wondered if it was because there was something wrong with her and her mother didn't really love her. That it was all just pretend. But Mother came back with hugs and presents. Now she is gone for good and Janie is wondering again if she is unlovable. So she is keeping people at arm's length. Okay, so that's parlor psychology, but give it a try. Okay?"

  "Okay. I'll try it. Lindy's mother is pretty down, of course, and so I've left Janie with her maybe more than I should have.

  But she has a married brother in Toronto and they are coming _ down for the memorial service and they've asked her to go P back up there with them for a while before the cold weather starts. I'm going to encourage her. Then Janie and I will have a lot more time together."

  "When's the service?" it "A week from tomorrow. A lot of the magazine people will be coming up for it. I really miss you, Peg. It doesn't seem to be letting up at all."

  "I wouldn't want it to. If I go through it, I want you going through it too."

  "When I promised Janie a trip down there for Easter vacation, she just raised one eye
brow and looked at her fingernails and said, "How terribly nice!" Big reaction, huh? Easter seems too far away from where I sit."

  "What we got to do is both hang in there."

  "On the way back up here I decided you are right about holding off until the spring."

  "How goes your work?"

  "I kept in pretty close touch, you remember. A few loose ends. Not too many. We jumped a little too soon on some things, and a little too late on others. Name of the game. All three funds look very solid right now, and down at the shop they smile at me whenever they see me. Listen, would it bother you if I called you up quite a lot? Even when there isn't much to say?"

  "I would like that quite a lot, Roy."

  "Good. Got to go. Consider yourself kissed."

  "Likewise. Bye."

  In the middle of the afternoon, John Tinker Meadows ordered a car from the vehicle pool and drove down to where he had failed to keep that final date with Molly Wintergarten. The gate had been destroyed. It seemed to have exploded outward.

  He got out to examine the pieces and he found the small shards of headlight lens glass in the dirt and realized then how angry she had to be when she drove out. She had driven right through the gate. He had a mild sense of wonder.

  The double-wide had been shoved off its foundations by the high water. It was unlocked, the door ajar. He climbed up to the door and looked into the shadowy interior. He smelled wet rot and mildew. He jumped down and dusted his hands and strolled about under the trees, picked up a few stones and tossed them out into Burden Pond. He had the habit of thinking in terms of symbols and how they could be worked into sermons. The house off its foundations. The shattered gate. The smell of decay. The ripples that spread from the small stones he threw.

  He could interpret them as symbols, and figure out all the sad and touching ways they could be used, but they were without impact upon him, just as her funeral service and burial service had touched him no more than would a public television special about coming of age in Samoa. It seemed to him as if there was some sort of membrane stretched across his mind. It had a springiness about it. Everything dented the membrane imperceptibly and bounced away, leaving what was underneath quite untouched. He saw that the importance or un importance of the event made no difference in the degree of penetration and the height of rebound. A bug song was as significant as thunder, a hangnail equivalent to death. Perhaps, he thought, the membrane is stretched across nothingness.

  Perhaps, without knowing I was doing it, I have used myself up. So now there is nothing left to feel any emotion with.

  Perhaps I have achieved true holiness in the Hindu sense a person who is not affected by anything and who has no effect whatever on his environment, who lives in a holy condition of total indifference to time and space. And he remembered, without surprise, from his study of the history of religions, that the truly holy man in the Hindu religion used total sexual debauchery as one of the tools for attaining the ultimate holiness.

  It is, he decided, a kind of warped freedom. I can stay or go, live or die, laugh or cry, and it will not mean anything of any importance to anybody, ever. I have used everything up.

  He looked at the time. Mary Margaret wanted him to join her in more preliminary discussions with the Reverend Tom Daniel Birdy. The boys had taken a Gulfstream down and picked him up and brought him back this morning, and Mary Margaret had been guiding him all day, and no doubt answering a few thousand questions. He hoped the Reverend Birdy would jump right in, hopping and whirling with energy, ready to take a big preaching load as soon as the audiovisual people smoothed some of the rough edges.

  He walked over to the car and it looked curiously unfamiliar to him. Had not the one he had driven down been a darker color, a deeper maroon? This two-door was red. The interior did not look the same. The dashboard array had that same unfamiliar look. Yet he knew he drove it down. It had been standing in the shade in the corner of his vision, and he was totally alone.

  It gave him a feeling of apprehension which he quickly shook off. Little things had been happening for at least a year.

  Maybe longer. One of the office women would bring him a letter transcribed from a tape he had dictated, and he would not be able to remember saying any of those things he read in the letter. But it would be a letter so bland and unimportant it could not possibly be any part of some kind of conspiracy. He would find himself in front of a bookshelf with no idea of what book he was after, or why he was looking for it.

  He got into the strange car, started the engine, turned up the air conditioning and slammed the door. He drove back to the gate and stopped and got out and stared blankly at where the gate had been, at the shards of wood spread about, and the glitter of glass, and suddenly remembered that Molly had driven right through it. She had been very angry. He decided to tell Finn Efflander to unload this piece of land for whatever they could get. It was too far from the Center to be of any possible future use to them.

  He was back on the Interstate before he remembered that Finn was gone for good. So he would have to tell that Harold Sherman to sell the property which had been given to the Church in a codicil to a will. It depressed him to think of talking to Harold Sherman. The man seemed forever on the verge of bowing to him, or dropping to his knees. Please, sir.

  Yes, sir. No, sir. And he had an irritating habit of dry-washing his hands while talking. Though he seemed competent, he did not have Finn's knack of summarizing the operations in a brief verbal report. When asked about anything, Sherman brought in pounds of paper, ring binders, printouts. And Sherman kept telling him not to worry about anything, not to try to get into the trivia of operations, telling him he had far more important work as the spiritual leader of the worldwide flock. He kept saying everything was under control, that he was busy installing new controls and procedures which would make everything run more smoothly than ever before.

  He slowed down at the place where Molly had been fatally injured, but he was not certain it was the right place. There was no remaining sign. He pulled off onto the wide shoulder and got out. Trucks slammed by, gusting hot air and diesel stink at him, an instant gale that rocked his car on its springs. He walked a hundred yards north, waited for a gap in traffic and then walked back on the grass of the median until he was opposite his car. The sun was a weight upon him. He walked the same approximate distance south and as he was waiting to cross back over to the side where he had parked, he saw a metallic glint in the grass another fifty feet further south. As he approached it he saw that it was a chrome door handle. He picked it up. There seemed to be a certain familiar contour to it, the way it fit his hand. He had opened the door of her little yellow car for her many times. It had been ripped off the door.

  He then noticed the ruts in the soft turf where probably the ambulance and the tow truck had driven onto the median. The door handle was sun hot, almost too hot to hold comfortably.

  He flipped it away. It was tangible, but not a bridge to memory of her. In eulogy, all he could think of was the trite and borrowed "Alas, poor Molly!" More tangible than the door handle was the memory of the sweat-tang scents of her body, fresh from the contrived misdirection of the tennis club.

  He was almost across the highway when he heard the shocking blare of air horns, scream of tires, and he dived to safety as the lumber truck thundered by, a man up in the high cab shaking his fist. It upset John Tinker Meadows to realize he had crossed without even looking for northbound traffic. He could have died more quickly than she, and very near the same place. Everything today seemed to be turning into symbols and hidden messages. He remembered to look for a long gap in the traffic before he drove back into the right-hand lane.

  Twenty The Reverend Tom Daniel Birdy was nothing like what Mary Margaret Meadows had expected, and in fact was not like anyone she had ever met anywhere. He was much larger, for one thing. Six foot five, she guessed, and weighed at least two-fifty. When they walked together he made her feel dwindled. He wore a white suit so wrinkle proof it pres
ented a smooth and dazzling expanse of back and chest. He wore a blue shirt with blue lace ruffles, and a starched ministerial collar. He wore a broad-brimmed planter hat with a blue bandanna band. The white cuffs of his trousers were tucked into dark blue boots of western style.

  His head was huge, his face broad and brown, the features thickened by time and weather, from potato nose to scarred jutting brow. The wide lips lay firm and level, showing nothing, asking nothing. He moved slowly and with a ponderous courtliness, stepping way back with extravagant half bow to let her precede him. He made so little comment on what he was told she began to hear her own voice in her ears, prattling along, full of empty little nervous giggles. He was not content to ride past anything in the air-conditioned limousine. He asked politely each time if he could get out.