The Clear Light of Day

by Penelope Wilcock

  She leaned back in her chair and reached across to the shelf her concordance shared with several translations of the Bible, the Constitutional Practice and Discipline manual (volumes 1 and 2) of the Methodist church, its Worship Book, and its Minutes of Conference and Directory. Her favorite translation of the Bible was seriously in danger of losing the cover to its spine, and the cello tape patches holding the concordance together had long since yellowed and lost their grip. Must get a replacement copy—I think I can set that against income tax—darn! I haven’t filled in my tax return form, she thought as she turned the fragile browning pages to the “J” section. She found Jabez in 1 Chronicles, in a complicated genealogy of the lineage of King David. He had only a sentence or two, but it had to do with relief from distress. His mother had so named him because of the pain and distress she experienced in giving birth to him. And Jabez prayed to the Lord asking that the divine hand might be stretched over him—but here the texts differed as to the desired outcome; some making the prayer a plea for protection from distress in his own life, others a plea for his own distress to cease, but one curiously interpreting his words as a prayer for God’s blessing to restrain him from evil, so that he would never again be a cause of pain. How strange, Esme thought, as she pondered the texts; I wonder why Jabez Ferrall’s parents chose …? Or maybe they just liked the name Jabez. Anyway, the prayer of his life seemed to be directed toward healing and peace, and in 1 Chronicles God had granted what he asked.

  On Good Friday, Esme had an afternoon service out at Wiles Green. It was a circuit tradition to hike the four and three-quarter miles across country along the footpaths from Brockhyrst Priory. The walkers were joined at Wiles Green Chapel by the lazy and the infirm and kept watch for an hour in a vigil meditating on the cross and passion of Jesus before emerging into the Sunday school room for a robust bring-and-share tea.

  Along with two or three others, Esme left her car at the chapel and returned as a passenger to the start of the walk. The wind blew chilly but the sun shone, and Esme enjoyed chatting with the various members of her churches, getting to know them a little better as they strolled along the hedgerows or stopped from time to time to admire the pastureland rolling away from the brow of a hill. As they walked together, Esme asked two of her church members, a husband-and-wife couple who ran the newsagency at Brockhyrst Priory, if they knew of Jabez Ferrall. They laughed, saying, “Oh yes, Mr. Ferrall, yes, known him for years.” Before he retired, when Maeve, his wife, was still alive, they said, he’d had a newspaper delivered regularly, but like so many of the old people he had to cut back once he became a pensioner. They asked where Esme had come across him, and she said Marcus had mentioned him to her. They agreed that Mr. Ferrall was a bit of an oddity; then to her excitement Esme spotted a bullfinch, and the conversation moved on to recent sightings of birds.

  On arrival at the chapel, the walkers had an opportunity to refresh themselves with a cup of tea before the service. Esme reflected that the sheer quantity of teacups washed up in the course of the afternoon overall required a stoicism worthy of Good Friday on the part of her Wiles Green congregation, nearly all of them well over seventy. As she came in through the door of the chapel, where the trestle tables ready with teacups and milk jugs and huge brown enamel teapots stood in the Sunday school room that formed an anteroom to the worship space, Esme paused to watch her church treasurer, Miss Lucy Trigg, divesting herself of her felt hat and plum-colored tweed coat. Miss Trigg, local preacher and senior steward at Wiles Green, had the entire congregation under her thumb. Though she was raised as a Strict and Particular Baptist, she had found her way to this chapel when still only a teenager and unstintingly lavished her considerable energies upon its spiritual welfare ever since. The Southarbour circuit preachers’ meeting had neither the backbone nor the foresight to refuse to accredit her as a preacher and had suffered the effect of her extraordinary gospel of chimera and retribution ever since. Esme had heard Miss Trigg preach, on one of the Sundays in August before she had taken up her appointment. Miss Trigg always came in handy for August. Ministers might be moving, preachers with schoolchildren in the family necessarily taking their holiday then; but you always could rely on Miss Trigg.

  Esme remembered the sermon, vividly. Miss Trigg had preached about the Virgin Mary, with reference to the lamentable slippage of traditional interpretation in the credo of the modern church.

  “The Lord Jesus Christ was born of a pure virgin,” she had asserted, more aggressively than was necessary judging by the nods of agreement here and there in her congregation. “He had to be born of a virgin, because if he hadn’t have been, his blood would have been the same kind of blood as yours and mine. And our blood’s no good—no good at all for salvation. Jesus Christ wasn’t born with blood like yours and mine in his veins. He had God’s blood—God’s blood that had to be shed on the cross for our salvation, to save sinners like you and me from the eternal punishment that awaited us. Quite rightly awaited: ‘Deliver us from evil,’ the Lord’s Prayer says, and note that word evil. Evil is not just knocking folks on the head and bumping them off but a hundred and one little things that you and me get up to every hour of every day. We are born evil, sinners from the day of our birth. Little children are evil, however innocent they may look. You leave a child alone in a room with a bowl of sweets on the table, and you can guarantee that child will eat one, for children are thieves and evil by nature until they are saved from the thrall of Satan by the precious blood of the Lamb; and brought to the mercy seat by the free grace of Jesus Christ who gave himself a sacrifice for sin and laid down his life in our place: For the wages of sin is death and only his blood could atone as an acceptable offering to a holy God. ‘Vengeance is mine,’ saith the Lord. We are not called to understand, only to accept. Never be ashamed of the virgin birth.”

  Esme had listened to this in some amazement but had over the months come to a workable relationship with her Wiles Green senior steward. Miss Trigg disapproved of her appointment because Esme was not only a woman but also a divorced woman. But she was gracious enough to relinquish none of her offices and maintain her usual grip on the life of the chapel at Wiles Green. Sometimes Esme felt that grip amounted to a stranglehold and was occasionally tempted to the view that if the congregation justified its existence in nothing else it did so by the community service of keeping Miss Trigg contained in the chapel. Still, she kept the books well enough, lived nearby, and was always willing to let in the builders and the man from the electricity board. She terrorized the leaders of the Mothers and Toddlers group that met in the Sunday school room every Thursday and the cleaner employed to come in on a Friday (not today, Good Friday, but that lady was expected to attend the act of worship instead).

  Once free of her coat, Miss Trigg got busy with the teapot. Her scones were her own recipe and her tea hot and powerfully strong. Much like the gospel she preaches then, Esme thought as she approached the trestle table, saying, “Lovely day, Miss Trigg—thank you for all this; I know what hard work it is. Half a cup will be plenty, I’ll add some hot water from the urn in the kitchen.”

  Sometimes Miss Trigg remembered that smiling was her Christian duty; today she was concentrating on pouring the tea. Age made her hands a little unsteady, but she scorned to acknowledge this. She wanted the Lord to find her at her post when he came again. The second coming caused her a certain amount of consternation because of the amount of traffic on today’s roads, which would inevitably be thrown into mayhem by the selective nature of the rapture. She walked to church when she could, on the days when her sciatica didn’t play her up too badly.

  Silently, she held out a half-filled cup to Esme. Their eyes met. “Nice day,” said Miss Trigg gruffly, prompted by the requirements of Christian charity. “Enough?”

  Esme knew that shameless flattery and many expressions of solicitous concern for her health could melt that seemingly implacable exterior, but today she felt disinclined.

  “Yes. Thank you very much,�
� she said, taking her drink with her to the refuge of the small and spotless kitchen where some of the ladies of her congregation stood chatting, with dishtowels at the ready.

  “I’ve got some neat tea here, needs diluting,” Esme said as she made her way to the urn. They laughed. Esme thought it an undeserved kindness that her church members would usually laugh at her jokes, however feeble. They had many ways of surrounding their ministers with tacit encouragement. She stayed with them, enjoying their good-humored company, while she drank her cup of tea. It occurred to her to ask them about Jabez Ferrall, whom all of them knew. They told her how his wife had died some five or six years ago, and how they thought the bereavement had aged him. They agreed on his devotion to her, especially in nursing her through three or four years of grueling illness; terrible, they said; started in her breast and went to her liver in the end, poor woman. They mused for a little while on his avoidance of chapel people; they said his mother used to be a member at Wiles Green Chapel, years ago, and Mr. Ferrall’s name must surely be in the baptism register somewhere. But they thought there’d been some kind of upset with members of the prayer group while his wife was ill—not that that had stopped him coming because he never came near the place anyway. They agreed that he was a funny old so-and-so and that the old lady who lodged with him was even funnier than he was, and they chuckled as they considered the household. But they all agreed that Mr. Ferrall would be the man to go to if she had any household repairs needing attending to—“He’s handy is Mr. Ferrall, and very honest,” they concluded. Then they took Esme’s cup to wash up as she went into the church to prepare for worship.

  They sang the passion hymns of mourning and told again the terrible story of Christ’s betrayal and agony, and this year as every year, despite the resolute habits of ordinary cheerfulness that conditioned their lives, the dark narrative took them down with itself into the eerie dank silence of the tomb.

  It was right to remember, Esme thought afterward, but right also to restore people afterward with the conviviality of a chapel tea. This annual event was well supported by all the chapels in the circuit and was an important highlight of the year for Wiles Green.

  Eventually, having circulated well and spoken to almost everyone, and having thanked the ladies in the kitchen, Esme slipped away to her car, parked out on the road where others could not box it in.

  “Home to finish my Easter sermon,” she said to herself, but she knew she wasn’t going home quite yet.

  She could have driven out along Chapel Lane down the back way to Southarbour, but instead she drove into the village, as far as the Old Police House, where she drew up, parking carefully to keep well out of the way of passing traffic but leaving enough space for any pedestrians to pass on the inside as well. For a moment she sat in the car, undecided, unwilling to intrude where she felt unwelcome, aware that such a short time had gone by since last she had called in.

  She put her hand on the keys still in the ignition, almost went to turn them and fire the engine again, but instead took them out and got out of the car.

  The cottage had all the enchantment of her first visit. She hesitated on the path, wondering whether to knock at the front door, choosing instead to follow the way around to the backyard and the workshop. As she came around the house, she heard the clank and scrape of metal on stone and coming around the corner into the yard, she found Jabez squatting on the ground brushing clean the underneath of a rotary mower that lay on its side in front of him.

  He didn’t look up at first, when Esme said hello. For a few seconds, he continued brushing the odd corners and the bottom of the engine without speaking. Esme began to wonder if he had heard her, when he said, “You’re back. Welcome. I can well do with a second pair of hands in a moment when I’m sharpening these blades.”

  He glanced around at her briefly. “Unless you’d rather not. You’re not really dressed for stripping down a lawnmower.”

  Esme smiled. “I’d like to help,” she said, perching on the edge of a kitchen chair standing out in the yard. She felt a bit self-conscious in her clerical collar and her neat black skirt but was pleased to be not entirely superfluous.

  She watched Jabez lay aside the brush and reach for the metal key to undo the nut holding the blade in place. “You got to have it turned this way so the oil doesn’t run into the carburetor,” he remarked, as he laid the blade aside with the nut placed carefully beside it and began to loosen the sump plug under the engine.

  “Been at church?” He shot a glance of friendly inquiry at her as he got to his feet and lifted the lawnmower upright over a battered enamel pudding basin to bleed away the old oil.

  “Yes,” she said. “It’s Good Friday.”

  He looked up at her. “I do know,” he said. “I thought about you in the service.”

  He had an old glass meat dish handy for his next task, which was flushing out the sump, after which he set the machine on the ground again and squatted down to dismantle the air filter attached to the carburetor on the side of the engine. “Excuse me a minute,” he said, and carried the outer gauze of the filter in through the open door of his kitchen. She could hear him at the sink, not far within the door, the tap running, and scrubbing, the tap running again, and then he reemerged patting it dry with a dishtowel, and propped it against the house wall at an angle so the air could finish the drying.

  He blew the dust off the cardboard section of the filter and set it aside with the gauze. Then, moving light and quick, he crossed the yard to his workshop from where he returned with a big box wrench for the spark plugs.

  As he bent over the machine, examining the plugs, he remarked, “I sit in the porch sometimes and listen to the hymns. Even to the service in the summertime if they leave the doors open. I don’t come in, but I sit in the porch sometimes.”

  He cleaned off the carbon deposits carefully, fishing in the back pocket of his trousers for a piece of fine sandpaper to rub everything clean.

  Esme watched his face, bent over his work, giving nothing away. She felt the by now automatic response of her soul going on alert. This happens to ministers, she had discovered. There is a professional interest that sends a shaft down into the fabric of a minister’s being as tenacious as a dandelion root. “Why don’t you come in?” she asked, with what she hoped was a casual air.

  Jabez smiled at the transparency of her proselytizing but continued to concentrate on resetting the gap using his thumbnail as a gauge as he replaced the clean plugs. He dusted the terminals, brushed them lightly with his sandpaper, and refitted the high-tension lead.

  “Because I don’t like the church,” he said.

  Esme watched him as he checked and blew clean the carburetor jets before he began to reassemble the filter. She liked the composure and focus of his face as he worked.

  “But you believe in God?” she ventured.

  He glanced up at her momentarily.

  “I believe …” he hesitated, searching for the words to say what he wanted. He turned aside and reached for the sump plug, replaced it. “You got to make sure this is tight.”

  He paused in what he was doing, rested his weight forward on his knees on the stone flags of the yard. “I believe in the stories you hear of people who died and were resuscitated. Those stories about a long tunnel leading up to the light. And the light is full of love and truth. I believe that. Light that sears and light that dances, exquisite to take your breath away, blinding bright. Light that could cut like a laser but also nourish and heal and clean like sunshine. I believe in that. And that one day I will find my way home there. Or maybe not. Is that God—what I believe in?”

  Esme stared at him. “Jabez, that’s beautiful!”

  Irritation twitched somewhere in his look, because he hadn’t meant beauty, he’d meant truth.

  “You ready to help me with this blade, then?” he said, reaching down for it without looking at her, getting to his feet again, and crossing the yard.

  He showed her how he wanted her to turn
the handle on the grindstone that revolved in a water bath supported by a cast-iron frame. As she did so, he held the blade against it for sharpening.

  “But it doesn’t matter what I believe, I still don’t like the church,” he said, with a sort of stillness of determination that Esme guessed ran very deep.

  “Did we hurt you?” she asked, gently. She hoped her tone sounded ingenuous. It wouldn’t do to let him know she’d had the gossip of several church members about him, but she wanted to know about his wife and what it was the prayer group had done to upset him.

  Jabez looked suddenly very tired. Sharing his soul had become unfamiliar. He felt unsure about this intrusion.

  “That’s fine, you can stop,” he remarked, as he lifted the blade and turned back to the lawnmower again.

  Esme wondered if her question would be left unanswered, but as Jabez knelt to reposition the blade on the mower, he glanced at her narrowly from under the wiry silver eyebrows, saying, “I think you may know a bit more about me than you pretend.”

  That moment was a crossroads for them. Esme had to decide then whether she wanted Jabez to be an acquaintance or a friend, whether she was to be the minister of the chapel to him, or just herself, Esme.