“Well then, is this Reverend Ernest Cantwell?”
“Yeah, who’s this?”
I told him who I was again. “I think we might have a mutual acquaintance. Would you by any chance have a son named Justin?”
There was silence at the other end, but I could hear a labored breathing.
“Are you there?”
“I don’t have a son named Justin, no.”
“Any relation at all named Justin?”
“No.”
“Do you have a son?”
“No!” The tone of his voice told me otherwise.
“Well . . . I happen to know a Justin Cantwell who hails from Nechville, Texas, and has a mother named Lois.”
“I don’t know any Lois, either.”
Oh? “Uh, excuse me, sir, but you just told me Lois wasn’t home right now. I’m calling a number listed under both your names, Ernest and Lois Cantwell.”
“Don’t call this number again!”
Click.
I hung up and sat back to wait for Kyle and Morgan to journey through the church sanctuary and join me. As they entered the office, I looked up at them for their reaction.
Morgan shrugged a little. “I guess I’m not surprised.”
Kyle patted his pockets symbolically. “Anybody got change for airfare?”
“I could sell my mother’s old watch,” Morgan quipped.
“GILDY!”
The scream rattled the house and made Gildy Holliday jump in her seat. She was already nervous and frightened. She’d been working at the quaint desk just off the kitchen, writing checks to pay the help and compiling a grocery list, when she heard the crashes, tinkles, and rips coming from the guest room. That was Nichols’s room now. He’d decided the main house was more to his liking than the guest cottage, the big kitchen more practical for his parties, the larger, more elegant guest bedroom more conducive to his romantic flings.
But the arrangement also put him under the same roof as Gildy with no walls or bars between them. She didn’t answer him, but clicked off her computer, threw the corporate checkbook into a drawer, and grabbed her coat. It was time to get out of there.
Brandon Nichols was moving through the house like a man possessed, his footsteps quick and pounding, his breath chugging. She headed for the back door— He was there, his eyes like those of a stalking panther, his hair dangling like black lightning bolts across his brow. He moved toward her.
She ran behind her desk to keep it between them.
“Call Brett Henchle!” The voice was low and sinister. “My room’s been vandalized!”
She picked up the telephone receiver on her desk but hesitated to dial, staring at him.
His eyes were darting about the room as if watching a swarm of tiny, invisible demons. “Torn up! Broken! Everything a disaster, a disaster!” He noticed she hadn’t dialed. “Well, call them! Somebody’s been here! It’s a senseless, despicable act of hatred! We have enemies, Gildy! They’re trying to destroy us!” He stopped in the middle of the room, wiping drool from his mouth with the back of his hand. “Trying to destroy us. Hate. It’s everywhere, all around. Notify the staff! We’re going to heighten security tonight! No one comes or goes. We’re locking the place down.”
“I’ll tell them,” she said weakly, still holding the receiver but not calling.
Now he seemed dazed by his own anger, scanning the room, slowly turning as if searching. “That bedroom is swimming with evil. It’s crawling. It’s alive. I can’t sleep there anymore.”
“You can sleep in the third bedroom. No one’s using that room right now.”
He nodded, his eyes still crazy. “Good. Don’t call the cops.” She put the telephone down. “They don’t need to know. Nobody needs to know. Nobody.” He moved toward the hall as she stood behind her desk watching his every move. “You can’t trust them anyway. You can’t trust cops. They stand by and let horrible things happen to you, did you know that? They stand by . . . just stand by . . .”
“I need to check on Mrs. Macon.”
He nodded. “Go ahead. Go.” Then he laughed, apparently at himself. “Don’t mind me. I’m just a child of the devil.”
He headed down the hall to his room and closed the door behind him. She heard him roar like a madman. There was another crash. A piece of furniture hit the door. The house quivered. A window broke.
Gildy buttoned up her coat, went straight to Mrs. Macon’s room, knocked lightly, then went in. In a matter of minutes, she emerged again, carrying Mrs. Macon, now wearing a robe and wrapped in a blanket. The widow’s eyes were open, but she seemed oblivious to the fact that she was being carried hurriedly down the hall and through the kitchen. Gildy went out the back door, put the widow in her car, and drove away.
KYLE, MORGAN, AND I put our heads together, pooled our bank accounts, and called the travel agent. She could get me into Dallas/Fort Worth where I could rent a car to drive to Nechville, and fit it into our waning budget if I flew out of Spokane that night and out of Seattle at one in the morning. I had to brace myself before agreeing, and then it was settled. Kyle left for home. I remained with Morgan in her office.
“What is it?” she asked.
After months of playing Justin Cantwell’s strange game, things were becoming clear. “I know what I’m going to find in Nechville.”
She nodded.
“You know what Marian said when we found out she had lung cancer?” I was still sitting at Morgan’s desk. She sat down across from me and listened as she always did. “I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know what to tell her or what to do, and she just said, ‘Travis, take me ice-skating.’” The vision flashed across my mind: We were kids in our twenties, I had my arm around her waist and her hand in mine, and the world was rushing by us—we were in our forties, on the ice again, and she was giving me that one, special look.
A wave of emotion hit me and I could hardly speak my confession. “I could barely remember how. It’d been so long. . . .”
Morgan heaved a troubled sigh. “I should have gone fishing with Gabe. He asked me so many times, but always ended up going with his buddies. I had to stay here, studying, fulfilling some counseling appointments I could have scheduled for another time. Hey, it was ministry. I was doing it for God. And now I’ve never been able to understand why I never got it through my head: I was his first choice for a fishing buddy. His first choice, and I never went!”
I found a smile somewhere, passed it on to her, and wiped the corners of my eyes. “I think Marian and I enjoyed ministering together. We lived it, we talked about it, we spent our days and nights immersed in it. But now I’m afraid . . .”
“Mm-hm.”
“I’m afraid that, that maybe it was the ministry that defined us, that somehow it was church that summarized what we were. We were the program, the preaching, the Sunday school, the youth choir, the bus, the building, but were we ever us? When Marian died, it hit me so hard and so cruel: all the church stuff was still there—the service schedule, the song sheets, the visitation committee, it was all still there. But Marian was gone. The church stuff would always be there in one form or another, always needing, always demanding—but there was only one Marian, only one chance to know her, and that was over.
“You know, we prayed around the clock for Marian’s healing. The whole church fasted and we had people assigned to twenty-four one-hour shifts. Dee and her friends tried to speak a healing into existence. I got a note from somebody who said they had a dream: If I’d dip Marian seven times in the baptistry she’d be healed.” My little laugh was sad. “I almost tried that.
“I took her to some faith healing meetings. You know the kind: You go in there and some loud, flamboyant evangelist with big hair starts laying hands on people and they start falling over while the organ player runs his finger down the keyboard. It was strange, I guess, kind of hokey. But when you’re grasping . . .
“I believe God could have healed Marian. I still believe the Lord heals—I mean, look
at Joe Kelmer. Bang! Healed, just like that.
“But can you figure God out? All the things we tried, all the faith and the methods . . . and the shadows on her x-rays just kept getting bigger, kept spreading. They took out her left lung and the shadow spread to her right, and then the cancer started popping up other places.
“I think she knew—I mean, clear back when she wanted to go ice-skating again. She always had a special intimacy with God, an inside line or something. I think she knew. But she stuck by me: She hoped right along with me, and we fought together against the whole idea of her dying, and we both tried to faith our way out of it. But we, uh, we finally got a clue—or I got a clue. God has his ways. He just plain has his ways. By the time she died it was almost a nonevent, we were so ready for it.
“She was holding my hand, and I could feel the moment she slipped away. It was June 12, 1997, just five months after we saw those first x-rays.” I drew a deep breath and sighed it out, bringing my recollections to a close. “God will do what God will do.”
Morgan studied me a moment, then asked, “Do you still trust him?”
I had no trouble nodding yes.
“Then you’re one up on Justin Cantwell.”
That came as a revelation, and it made me chuckle. “When did that happen?”
She had a playful delight in her eyes. “Sometime after Justin got here. As you said, God has his ways. Maybe it took a bitter man not having to show you what you did have—and to show me.” She reached across the desk and took my hand as tears filled her eyes. “Jesus was hiding, that’s all. Hiding in the memories—all the places you’ve been, all the people you’ve known, all the paths he’s walked with you, whether you understood it all or not.” She paused to reflect, then told me, “What Justin Cantwell wouldn’t give for just one good memory.”
I PACKED A SMALL BAG with enough clothes and necessities for an overnight in Texas, and drove to Spokane to catch an eleven o’clock flight to Seattle. The flight from Seattle to Dallas/Fort Worth would arrive around six-thirty in the morning, Dallas time. The drive to Nechville would take about three hours, which meant I’d be arriving in that little town just in time for Sunday morning services. Needless to say, I wouldn’t be sleeping much.
ARMOND HARRISON finally left Anderson’s Furniture and Appliance after bickering over the price of a television and whether or not the stand should be included or be extra. Now Don Anderson was alone in his big glittery store, surrounded by washers, dryers, televisions, CD players, VCRs, DVD players, all shapes and sizes of radios, telephones, toys, CDs, cassettes . . .
And he had to get a handle on his new ability. He had to control it, channel it, rein it in, and use it in some orderly, controlled fashion. If he didn’t . . .
He could hear the lights overhead humming at him like a swarm of bees, so loud it was hard to hear someone talking to him from across the store. Well, okay, he could always stand closer to someone talking.
When he started up a kerosene heater to demonstrate for a customer, it roared like a toilet refilling after a flush. He had to ask the customer to repeat himself a few times. Well, it only made that noise when it was running. He could always turn it off—and hope he’d never need the heat.
But the CDs—oh, the CDs! All he had to do now was touch the plastic cases and they would start playing in his head, right through the shrink-wrap! He put one of the girls in charge of stocking the CD rack and left it to her to sell them as well.
And now there were the radios! He could hear them all over the room, wailing and thumping the rock stations, crooning the easy listening stuff, or garbling out the news and sports, no less than fifty of them at once—and they were all turned off! Maybe he could tune them all to the same station, something sweet and relaxing. He went to the first radio, a portable CD/Cassette/AM-FM Virtual Surround Sound unit. All he did was touch the tuning knob and he could hear the station as if he were wearing headphones.
He twirled the knob until he heard the kind of music they play in elevators. Ah. He could live with that. He went to the next unit, another portable stereo, but this one bigger, with more bells and whistles. He set the station.
Hey, this was going to work!
See there, Don? One step at a time! We’ll get a handle on this—I hope, I hope!
Then it occurred to him. Sure, there were no less than fifty radios on display in the store. He could get to them easily. But there were at least a hundred more in unopened boxes stacked under the shelves and in the back room, and he could hear them too!
Oh, man. This was going to be a long night.
As he headed for the counter for a carton knife, he passed by the washing machines. Oh no, now what? It sounded like a squadron of B-17s flying overhead. He leaned on a washer— The rumble made him jump. He could feel it all through his body.
“NO!” He faced the washing machine, staring it right in the control knob, and pleaded with it, “You’re not running! You’re not turned on! You’re not even plugged in!”
It rumbled at him. Its companion dryer rumbled too. The whole row of washers and dryers rumbled like circus lions in a cage.
He backed away. The rumbling quieted a little. They seemed to be consulting one another, rumbling and mumbling. Could he live with this too?
“You don’t scare me,” he muttered.
They RUMBLED at him.
It scared him to death.
MATT KILEY burst through the door of his hardware store, startling Bev Parsons, his soft-spoken right-hand gal. “How’s it going?”
She was checking out a customer, and held her peace until the customer stepped out the door. Then she showed a sour side he’d never seen before. “If you expect me to run this store all by myself, I expect to be paid accordingly.”
He brushed past her. “You’re not running it all by yourself!”
She was never one to be forward, but today she was angry enough. She followed directly behind him, down the aisle past the lawn sprinklers and garden sprayers, talking to his back, but getting it said. “I’ve kept track of the hours I’ve been here running this whole operation while you’ve been up at the ranch, and let me tell you, I might as well own this place!”
He stopped and turned so fast she ran into him. “You think you’re the only one who has problems? If anything happens to Brandon Nichols, we could all be out of work!” He continued toward the back of the store.
She followed him. “What do you mean?”
“I mean he has enemies! Somebody came right into the house and trashed his room!” He reached the gun counter. “Barney!”
“Yeah?” Barney Myers replied from the automotive section.
“Let’s have the key to the gun cabinets!” He turned to Bev. “Happens every time. Somebody starts doing the right thing and somebody else decides they have to harass him. Well nobody’s gonna harass Brandon Nichols, not if I’ve got anything to say about it!”
Barney brought the key, and Matt opened the gun display case. He reached for a semiautomatic pistol, ripped off the price tag, and slipped it in his coat pocket. “Get me two cases of 9 mm rounds, those hollow points, and two boxes—no, make that four boxes of 12-gauge shells, 00 buckshot.” Barney selected the ammo cartons while Matt took a shotgun from the rack behind the counter.
Bev’s voice quavered with fear. “But you can’t just shoot somebody!”
Matt took the boxes of shells from Barney. “Well they don’t have to break into Brandon’s house either, now do they? Thanks, Barney.” He hurried around the counter and up the aisle again. “They don’t have to get near him, they don’t have to come on the property, they don’t have to come nose to nose with me. It’s all up to them. Close up tonight, same as usual. I’ll be back sometime tomorrow.”
26
IWAS DRIVING across Texas in the early morning, covering miles and miles under a golden dawn, and feeling continually deceived by the crumpled, wrongly folded road map on the seat beside me. Maps of Texas still have to fit in your car, so they mak
e Texas look smaller than you first assume. Twice I was sure I’d missed a town or a turn, only to find it thirty or forty more miles down the road. Nechville looked like a quick trip, but it was three hours at legal speeds, as promised.
The lady who rented me my car told me I would probably smell Nechville before I saw it, and she was right. At first, I thought something in my car was overheating or shorting out, but I soon discovered it was just the wind coming through my vents after blowing through Nechville’s stockyards and oil rigs. It smelled like a herd of cattle tarring a roof, the scent of manure and ammonia interlaced with the stench of black crude. Undoubtedly the people of Nechville had long ago learned to live with it, since the town wouldn’t be there at all without it.
I drove by the stockyards, the ground trampled and fertilized to a thick, gamy black under hundreds of hooves, and saw the oil wells on the right and the left nodding slowly, emphatically, yes, yes, yes. Slowing to twenty-five miles per hour, I passed the city limit sign—NECHVILLE, population 2,125. It was not a bad little town at first glance, almost a Texas version of Antioch. They had a feed store, a tractor and implement dealer, a True Value Hardware, even a local appliance store—only it wasn’t Pepto-Bismol pink.
So here I was, a stranger in a strange town in the middle of the vast state of Texas and feeling like it. Now what?
I pulled over at a service station to top off the tank and check the yellow pages of a phone book. As I flipped the phone book open, I was praying for help and guidance. I could feel butterflies in my stomach.
Churches, churches . . .
I would know it when I saw it. It wouldn’t be Catholic, Methodist, Lutheran, or Baptist. I was guessing it would be—how shall I say it?—hyper-Pentecostal. Judging from Justin Cantwell’s bitterness and the reception I got from the Reverend Ernest Cantwell, it would be stridently, strictly, inflexibly, legalistically, pharisaically Pentecostal. There would be a long list of complex, tangled, sometimes contradictory, often hypocritical, but absolutely essential requirements and taboos defining what it meant to be a Christian. I was familiar with that kind of church and glad I never had to attend one. I was guessing that Justin Cantwell did.
The Visitation Page 41
