by Stephen King
I didn’t know if my question was about the Terrible Sermon or not, I only knew I had to ask it. “Was what Mr. Easterbrook said true? Was she drinking?”
The moving light beneath the car went still. Then he rolled himself out so he could look up at me. I was afraid he’d be mad, but he wasn’t mad. Just unhappy. “People have been whispering about it, and I suppose it’ll get around a lot faster now that that nummie Easterbrook went and said it right out loud, but you listen to me, Jamie: it doesn’t matter. George Barton had an epileptic seizure and he was on the wrong side of the road and she come around a blind turn and pop goes the weasel. It doesn’t matter if she was sober or head down and tail over the dashboard. Mario Andretti couldn’t have avoided that crash. Reverend was right about one thing: people always want a reason for the bad things in life. Sometimes there ain’t one.”
He raised the hand not holding the caged light and pointed a grease-smeared finger at me. “All the rest was just the bullshit of a grief-struck man, and don’t you forget it.”
• • •
The Wednesday before Thanksgiving was a half day in our school district, but I had promised Mrs. Moran that I’d stay to wash the blackboards and neaten up our little library of tattered books. When I told Mom, she waved her hand in a distracted way and told me to just be home for supper. She was already putting a turkey in the oven, but I knew it couldn’t be ours; it was way too small for seven.
As it turned out, Kathy Palmer (a teacher’s pet wannabe if there ever was one) also stayed to help out, and the work was done in half an hour. I thought of going to Al’s or Billy’s house to play guns or something, but I knew they’d want to talk about the Terrible Sermon and how Mrs. Jacobs had gotten herself and Morrie killed because she was shitfaced drunk—a rumor that had indeed gained the credence of absolute fact—and I didn’t want any part of that, so I went home. It was an unseasonably warm day, our windows were open, and I could hear my sister and my mother arguing.
“Why can’t I come?” Claire asked. “I want him to know at least some people in this stupid town are still on his side!”
“Because your father and I think all you children should stay away from him,” my mother said. They were in the kitchen, and by now I was lingering outside the window.
“I’m not a child, anymore, Mother, I’m seventeen!”
“Sorry, but at seventeen you’re still a child, and a young girl visiting him wouldn’t look right. You’ll just have to take my word for that.”
“But it’s okay for you? You know Me-Maw’ll see you, and it’ll be all over the party line in twenty minutes! If you’re going, let me go with you!”
“I said no, and that’s final.”
“He gave Con back his voice!” Claire stormed. “How can you be so mean?”
There was a long pause and then my mother said, “That’s why I’m going to see him. Not to take him a meal for tomorrow but to let him know we’re grateful in spite of those terrible things he said.”
“You know why he said them! He just lost his wife and son and he was all messed up! Half crazy!”
“I do know that.” Mom was speaking more quietly now, and I had to strain to hear because Claire was crying. “But it doesn’t change how shocked people were. He went too far. Much too far. He’s leaving next week, and that’s for the best. When you know you’re going to be fired, it’s best to quit first. It allows you to keep a little self-respect.”
“Fired by the deacons, I suppose,” Claire almost sneered. “Which means Dad.”
“Your father has no choice. When you’re no longer a child, you may realize that, and have a little sympathy. This is tearing Dick apart.”
“Go on, then,” Claire said. “See if a few slices of turkey breast and some sweet potatoes make up for the way he’s getting treated. I bet he won’t even eat it.”
“Claire . . . Claire-Bear—”
“Don’t call me that!” she yelled, and I heard her pounding for the stairs. She’d sulk and cry in her bedroom for awhile, I supposed, and then get over it, the way she did a couple of years ago when Mom told her fifteen was absolutely too young to go to the drive-in with Donnie Cantwell.
I decided to hustle my butt into the backyard before Mom left with her special-made dinner. I sat in the tire swing, not exactly hiding but not exactly in full view, either. Ten minutes later, I heard the front door shut. I went to the corner of the house and saw Mom walking down the road with a foil-covered tray in her hands. The foil twinkled in the sun. I went in the house and up the stairs. I knocked on my sister’s door, which was graced by a large Bob Dylan poster.
“Claire?”
“Go away!” she shouted. “I don’t want to talk to you!” The record player went on: the Yardbirds, and at top volume.
Mom came back about an hour later—a pretty long visit just to drop off a gift of food—and although Terry and I were in the living room by then, watching TV and jostling each other for the best place on our old couch (in the middle, where the springs didn’t poke your bum), she barely seemed to notice us. Con was upstairs playing the guitar he’d gotten for his birthday. And singing.
• • •
David Thomas of Gates Falls Congo was back for a return engagement on the Sunday after Thanksgiving. The church was once more full, maybe because people wanted to see if Reverend Jacobs would show up and try to say some more awful things. He didn’t. If he had, I’m sure he would have been shut up before he got a running start, maybe even carried out bodily. Yankees take their religion seriously.
The next day, Monday, I ran the quarter mile from school instead of walking. I had an idea, and I wanted to be home before the schoolbus arrived. When it came, I grabbed Con and pulled him into the backyard.
“Who put a bug up your butt?” he asked.
“You need to come down to the parsonage with me,” I said. “Reverend Jacobs is going away pretty soon, maybe even tomorrow, and we should see him before he goes. We should tell him we still like him.”
Con drew away from me, brushing his hand down the front of his Ivy League shirt, as if he was afraid I’d left cooties on it. “Are you crazy? I’m not doing that. He said there’s no God.”
“He also electrified your throat and saved your voice.”
Con shrugged uneasily. “It would have come back, anyway. Dr. Renault said so.”
“He said it would come back in a week or two. That was in February. You still didn’t have it back in April. Two months later.”
“So what? It took a little longer, that’s all.”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “What are you, chicken?”
“Say that again and I’ll knock you down.”
“Why won’t you at least say thanks?”
He stared at me, mouth tight and cheeks red. “We’re not supposed to see him, Mom and Dad said so. He’s crazy, and probably a drunk like his wife.”
I couldn’t speak. My eyes shimmered with tears. They weren’t of sorrow; those were tears of rage.
“Besides,” Con said, “I have to fill the woodbox before Dad gets home or I’ll get in dutch. So just shut up about it, Jamie.”
He left me standing there. My brother, who became one of the world’s most preeminent astronomers—in 2011 he discovered the fourth so-called “Goldilocks planet,” where there might be life—left me standing there. And never mentioned Charles Jacobs again.
• • •
The next day, Tuesday, I ran up Route 9 again as soon as school let out. But I didn’t go home.
There was a new car in the parsonage driveway. Well, not really new; it was a ’58 Ford Fairlane with rust on the rocker panels and a crack in the passenger side window. The trunk was up, and when I peeped in, I saw two suitcases and a bulky electronic gadget Reverend Jacobs had demonstrated at MYF one Thursday night: an oscilloscope. Jacobs himself was in his shed worksho
p. I could hear stuff rattling around.
I stood by his new-old car, thinking of the Belvedere, which was now a burned-out wreck, and I almost turned tail and beat feet for home. I wonder how much of my life would have been different if I’d done that. I wonder if I’d be writing this now. There’s no way of telling, is there? Saint Paul was all too right about that dark glass. We look through it all our days and see nothing but our own reflections.
Instead of running, I gathered my courage and went to the shed. He was putting electronic equipment into a wooden orange crate, using large sheets of crumpled-up brown paper for padding, and didn’t see me at first. He was dressed in jeans and a plain white shirt. The notched collar was gone. Children aren’t very observant about the changes in adults, as a rule, but even at nine I could see he’d lost weight. He was standing in a shaft of sunlight, and when he heard me come in, he looked up. There were new lines on his face, but when he saw me and smiled, the lines disappeared. That smile was so sad it put an arrow in my heart.
I didn’t think, just ran to him. He opened his arms and lifted me up so he could kiss me on the cheek. “Jamie!” he cried. “Thou art Alpha and Omega!”
“Huh?”
“Revelation, chapter one, verse eight. ‘I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end.’ You were the first kid I met when I came to Harlow, and you’re the last. I’m so very, very glad you came.”
I started to cry. I didn’t want to but couldn’t help it. “I’m sorry, Reverend Jacobs. I’m sorry for everything. You were right in church, it’s not fair.”
He kissed my other cheek and set me down. “I don’t think I said that in so many words, but you certainly caught the gist of it. Not that you should take anything I said seriously; I was off my head. Your mother knew that. She told me so when she brought me that fine Thanksgiving feast. And she wished me all the best.”
Hearing that made me feel a little better.
“She gave me some good advice, too—that I should go far from Harlow, Maine, and start over. She said I might find my faith again in some new place. I strongly doubt that, but she was right about leaving.”
“I’ll never see you again.”
“Never say that, Jamie. Paths cross all the time in this world of ours, sometimes in the strangest places.” He took his handkerchief from his back pocket and wiped the tears from my face. “In any case, I’ll remember you. And I hope you’ll think of me from time to time.”
“I will.” Then, remembering: “You betchum bobcats.”
He went back to his worktable, now sadly bare, and finished packing up the last items—a couple of big square batteries he called “dry cells.” He closed the lid of the crate and began tying it shut with two stout pieces of rope.
“Connie wanted to come with me to say thank you, but he’s got . . . um . . . I think it’s soccer practice today. Or something.”
“That’s okay. I doubt if I really did anything.”
I was shocked. “You brought his voice back, for criminey sakes! You brought it back with your gadget!”
“Oh yes. My gadget.” He knotted the second rope, and yanked it tight. His sleeves were rolled up, and I could see he had awesome muscles. I had never noticed them before. “The Electrical Nerve Stimulator.”
“You ought to sell it, Reverend Jacobs! You could make a mint!”
He leaned an elbow on the crate, propped his chin on one hand, and gazed at me. “Do you think so?”
“Yes!”
“I doubt it very much. And I doubt if my ENS unit had anything to do with your brother’s recovery. You see, I built it that very day.” He laughed. “And powered it with a very small Japanese-made motor filched from Morrie’s Roscoe Robot toy.”
“Really?”
“Really. The concept is valid, I feel sure of that, but such prototypes—built on the fly, without any experiments to verify the steps in between—very rarely work. Yet I believed I had a chance, because I never doubted Dr. Renault’s original diagnosis. It was a stretched nerve, no more than that.”
“But—”
He hoisted the crate. The muscles in his arms bulged, veins standing out on them. “Come on, kiddo. Walk with me.”
I followed him out to the car. He set the crate down beside the back fender, inspected the trunk, and said he’d have to move the suitcases to the backseat. “Can you take the small one, Jamie? It’s not heavy. When you’re traveling far, it’s best to travel light.”
“Where are you going?”
“No idea, but I think I’ll know it when I get there. If this thing doesn’t break down, that is. It burns enough oil to drain Texas.”
We moved the suitcases to the back of the Ford. Reverend Jacobs hoisted the big crate into the trunk with a grunt of effort. He slammed it closed, then leaned against it, studying me.
“You have a wonderful family, Jamie, and wonderful parents who actually pay attention. If I asked them to describe you kids, I bet they’d say that Claire is the motherly one, Andy’s the bossy one—”
“Boy, you’re right about that.”
He grinned. “There’s one in every family, boyo. They’d say Terry is the mechanical one and you’re the dreamer. What would they say about Con?”
“The studying one. Or maybe the folk-singing one since he got his guitar.”
“Perhaps, but I bet those wouldn’t be the first things to pop into their minds. Ever notice Con’s fingernails?”
I laughed. “He bites em like mad! Once my dad offered him a buck if he stopped for a week, but he couldn’t!”
“Con is the nervy one, Jamie—that’s what your folks would say if they were to be completely honest. The one who’s apt to turn up with ulcers by the time he’s forty. When he got hit in the neck with that ski pole and lost his voice, he started to worry that it would never come back. And when it didn’t, he told himself it never would.”
“Dr. Renault said—”
“Renault’s a fine doctor. Conscientious. He turned up here Johnny-on-the-spot when Morrie had the measles and again when Patsy had . . . well, a female problem. Took care of both like a pro. But he doesn’t have that air of confidence the best GPs have. That way of saying ‘Bosh, this is nothing, you’ll be fine in no time.’”
“He did say that!”
“Yes, but Conrad wasn’t convinced because Renault isn’t convincing. He’s able to treat the body, but the mind? Not so much. And the mind is where half the healing takes place. Maybe more. Con thought, ‘He’s lying now so I can get used to having no voice. Later on he’ll tell me the truth.’ That’s just the way your brother’s built, Jamie. He lives on his nerve endings, and when people do that, their minds can turn against them.”
“He wouldn’t come with me today,” I said. “I lied about that.”
“Did you?” Jacobs didn’t look very surprised.
“Yeah. I asked him, but he was scared.”
“Never be angry with him for that,” Jacobs said. “Frightened people live in their own special hell. You could say they make it themselves—like Con manufactured his muteness—but they can’t help it. It’s the way they’re built. They deserve sympathy and compassion.”
He turned to the parsonage, which already looked abandoned, and sighed. Then he turned back to me.
“Perhaps the ENS did something—I have every reason to believe the theory behind it is valid—but I really doubt it. Jamie, I believe I tricked your brother. Or, if you don’t mind the pun, I conned him. It’s a skill they try to teach in divinity school, although they call it kindling faith. I was always good at it, which has caused me to feel both shame and delight. I told your brother to expect a miracle, then I turned on the current and activated my glorified joy buzzer. As soon as I saw him twitching his mouth and blinking his eyes, I knew it was going to work.”
“That’s awesome!” I said.
“Yes indee
d. Also rather vile.”
“Huh?”
“Never mind. The important thing is you must never tell him. He probably wouldn’t lose his voice again, but he might.” He glanced at his watch. “You know what? I think that’s all the powwow I have time for, if I’m going to make Portsmouth by tonight. And you better get home. Where your visit to me this afternoon will be another secret we’ll keep between us, right?”
“Right.”
“You didn’t go past Me-Maw’s, did you?”
I rolled my eyes, as if to ask if he was really that stupid, and Jacobs laughed some more. I loved that I could make him laugh in spite of everything that had happened. “I cut through Marstellar’s field.”
“Good lad.”
I didn’t want to go, and I didn’t want him to go. “Can I ask you one more question?”
“Okay, but make it quick.”
“When you were giving your . . . um . . .” I didn’t want to use the word sermon, it seemed dangerous, somehow. “When you were talking in church, you said lightning was, like, fifty thousand degrees. Is that true?”
His face kindled as it only did when the subject of electricity came up. His hobbyhorse, Claire would have said. My dad would have called it his obsession.
“Completely true! Except maybe for earthquakes and tidal waves, lightning is the most powerful force in nature. More powerful than tornadoes and much more powerful than hurricanes. Have you ever seen a bolt strike the earth?”
I shook my head. “Only in the sky.”
“It’s beautiful. Beautiful and terrifying.” He looked up, as if seeking one, but the sky that afternoon was blue, the only clouds little white puffs moving slowly southwest. “If you ever want to see one up close . . . you know Longmeadow, right?”
Of course I did. Halfway up the road leading to Goat Mountain Resort, there was a state-maintained public park. That was Longmeadow. From it you could look east for miles and miles. On a very clear day, you could see all the way to the Desert of Maine in Freeport. Sometimes even to the Atlantic Ocean beyond. The MYF had its summer cookout at Longmeadow every August.
