The Crack in the Lens

by Steve Hockensmith

  Gustav and I headed up the aisle toward him, and the closer we got to the front of the sanctuary, the less crowded grew the pews. Whatever sort of “Assembly” this turned out to be, its members had this much in common with Lutherans and schoolchildren: Nobody likes to sit in the front row. Except for Cuff.

  As we drew up behind the man, a sudden, thunderous blast brought the congregation to its feet—and almost had me taking to mine. As in bolting through the nearest exit. Or, failing that, stained-glass window.

  It was music, though you’d have been excused for mistaking it for artillery fire. The organist was pounding at the keys with such gusto it’s a wonder flakes of chipped ivory weren’t drifting down on us like snow, and a moment later a chorus of booming voices started bellowing out “Come, Christians, Join to Sing.”

  Old Red and I turned to gawp at the source of the din: a choir up in the balcony, beside the organ.

  When Brother Landrigan had called down damnation on us a few days before, he’d had perhaps twenty followers with him. The chorus now was at least twice as large. The members, men and women alike, were garbed in golden robes, and each clutched a big black songbook. All stood with mouths open wide and eyes pointed down at their hymnals.

  All but one, that is.

  It took me a moment to notice him, what with his badge and holster traded in for a flowing gold frock, but the spite on his round baby face—that remained the same.

  Milford Bales was glaring down at us, mouth so scowl-twisted he couldn’t even sing.

  Seeing him there glowering amidst the choir was like gazing up at a cloud and spotting an angel giving you the finger.

  Or maybe a demon.

  27

  The Sermon, Part Two

  Or, Brother Landrigan Fires Up His Followers, and Gustav Sees the Light

  I felt so exposed and vulnerable there under Marshal Bales’s hateful stare I might have ducked for cover behind the altar if Gustav hadn’t hopped into the nearest pew and pulled me with him. We got out of the way just in time, too, for a dark-clad figure was barreling up behind us with all the unstoppable force of a locomotive at full boil. If we hadn’t cleared the aisle, I think he would’ve rolled right over us.

  Nothing was going to keep Brother Landrigan from the pulpit.

  He took the steps up to the altar with big, bounding strides, then whirled around with a spin that set the long folds of his black robes to flapping like bat wings. It’d been too dark to gauge his looks when we’d run across him on the street Thursday, but now I could see how comely the man truly was. Not that he was handsome, exactly. He had one of those blocky heads that looks like it belongs on a totem pole, the features strong and deep and sharp-edged. It was the kind of face that fills men with admiration and women with fluttery awe.

  “My friends,” Landrigan intoned, holding both hands up high, “be seated.”

  We all did as we were told, including Old Red. I turned around first, though, looking up into the choir loft to make sure a certain baritone wasn’t hurrying toward the stairs—and us.

  Bales and I locked eyes, but he made no move to leave his pew. When he sat, I sat.

  With that, the service commenced.

  It followed a general form I remembered well—talk, stand, sing, sit, repeat. But I felt none of the old tedium that had made Reverend Kracht’s services such a trial. Brother Landrigan infused his every action with a thespian’s flair for drama. When he was singing, he looked joyful. When he was listening, he looked thoughtful. When he was speaking, his face seemed to find a new expression—a new emotion—for each and every word.

  I kept dreading the look his face would take on once he spotted me and Gustav. Yet when his eyes did at last pass over us, all he did was smile. If he remembered us from our brief meeting three days before, he didn’t seem to hold our lack of reverence against us.

  Horace Cuff, on the other hand, wasn’t so forgiving.

  The Englishman didn’t notice us for the first hour or so of the service—nor would he have noticed the Battle of Gettysburg in the row behind him, so mesmerized was he by Brother Landrigan. Eventually, though, Cuff was called up to do a reading himself, and when he laid eyes on us, his narrow face pinched with such disgust you’d have thought someone had set a couple dung-smeared pigs loose in the pews. He managed to wipe away his revulsion as he stepped to the lectern, and by the time he was orating from Second Corinthians, he looked so solemn and sanctimonious he could’ve stepped right down from the stained-glass mural filling the wall behind him.

  “Would to God ye could bear with me a little in my folly and indeed bear with me,” he began in a voice that trilled and warbled with exaggerated quavers. “For I am jealous over you with godly jealousy: for I have espoused you to one husband, that I may present you as a chaste virgin to Christ. But I fear, lest by any means, as the serpent beguiled Eve through his subtlety, so your minds should be corrupted from the simplicity that is in Christ. For if he that cometh preacheth another Jesus, whom we have not preached, or if ye receive another spirit, which ye have not received, or another gospel, which ye have not accepted, ye might well bear with him.”

  Cuff peered down at the page, pausing a moment as (I learned with later research) he skipped over a long passage delving into the particulars of some obscure pissing match betwixt the ancient church elders.

  “For such are false apostles, deceitful workers, transforming themselves into the apostles of Christ,” he went on. “And no marvel; for Satan himself is transformed into an angel of light. Therefore it is no great thing if his ministers also be transformed as the ministers of righteousness; whose end shall be according to their works.”

  It seemed a strange choice for a reading, given that Brother Landrigan—a maverick preacher without affiliation with a big denomination—might have struck some folks as a “false apostle” himself. It made sense, though, when Cuff retook his seat (after another long glower at us) and Landrigan finally launched into his sermon.

  I can’t remember all of it word for word. There were a lot of words to remember—great torrents gushing out as Landrigan shook his fists and banged on the pulpit and threw his arms up to heaven. I’ve seen plenty a street-corner sky pilot preach up a storm, but this was a regular typhoon, a hurricane fit to rival the deluge Noah rode out.

  The theme was indeed false prophets, but not the ones you might expect: the pope or Joseph Smith or the other usual targets when preachers start throwing around the word “heresy.” No, the blasphemy Brother Landrigan railed against wasn’t religious at all.

  “My friends, what cursed mankind?” he asked at one point, brow furrowed. “What unleashed evil upon the world? What did the serpent offer Eve?”

  He paused, scanning the congregation, pretending to search for an answer he already had tucked away like the proverbial card up the sleeve.

  “Knowledge!” he bellowed. “‘For God doth know that in the day ye eat of the fruit of the tree in the midst of the garden, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods!’ And who is telling us this now? Where do we hear this sweet solicitation, this seduction, this flattering, foul lie?”

  Brother Landrigan was obviously a big believer in rhetorical questions. I could see why, too.

  One row up from us, Cuff was nodding rapturously, knowing the answer but content—thrilled, in fact—to let the man in the pulpit toss it down to him. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see a woman across the aisle from us nodding, too, and from somewhere just beyond her I heard a man hiss out a half-whispered “Yes!”

  I didn’t have to turn and stare. I could feel the frenzy building up in that church. It was like being on the trail with a herd right before a stampede or squall. There’s a million tiny pinpricks all over your skin, as if your whole body’s fallen asleep. Except it’s the opposite—your body’s so awake it hurts, because it senses something’s coming your mind hasn’t grasped yet.

  Then it came, there in the Shepherd of the Hills Assembly of the Living God. Broth
er Landrigan leaned forward, seeming to loom so far out into the pews I was almost afraid he’d fall on us, and he brought the storm.

  “I’ll tell you who’s lying to us, my friends! The serpent Thomas Edison! The serpent Nikola Tesla! The serpents George Westinghouse and Alexander Graham Bell and Charles Darwin! All the serpents who tell us that with logic and science we can see all! Know all! These are the angels of a false light…the light of electricity and wire and ‘progress.’ Well, I say unto them: Take heed, serpent! Take heed, liar! Your end shall be according to your works! You will get exactly what you deserve!”

  “Take heed,” Cuff blurted out. He’d finally unlocked his stiff body, and it was rocking slightly, the wood of the pew creaking beneath him. “Take heed!”

  Somewhere behind me, a man called out, “Amen!”

  “Hallelujah!” a woman threw in. Then a man, too. Then another woman.

  I’d never experienced anything like it. The services of my youth were so sedate they’d have made your average quilting bee look like a night at the Phoenix. The most spontaneous thing that ever happened was an occasional snore or the eruption of an insufficiently clinched fart, and the majority of both came from Reverend Kracht himself. Just singing with too much enthusiasm was enough to get you stares.

  Here, though, the whole point was enthusiasm, passion, sensation. I heard feet thumping the floor, spontaneous praisings to the Lord, wails, cries, snippets of song. Walking in, the congregation had looked as straitlaced as any other, but those laces weren’t just loosening up now. They were being ripped clean away, and something bound up tight inside—something wild—was breathing free.

  Brother Landrigan knew just when to slip the leash back on, though.

  “The truth is,” he said, suddenly calm and dryly amused, “no man, no matter how clever, could ever hold a candle to God. Or even a lightbulb.”

  A ripple of chuckles spread through the sanctuary, followed by sighs and the sound of a hundred numb fannies shifting on hard wooden benches. The sermon’s climax was past now, and Brother Landrigan’s deep voice turned tender—yet with an undercurrent of soft, almost sad menace.

  “Any light but the Lord’s is puny and impure. At its heart will be a shadow, a darkness only He can penetrate. That darkness is Eve’s curse—the stain of sin upon us all—and there’s only one way to wash it clean.”

  Landrigan stepped from the pulpit and walked to the altar, then turned to face his parishioners again. Behind him, stained glass stretched all the way to the ceiling, a thousand jagged shards of color arrayed to display Jesus on a grassy hillside, a crock in one hand, a lamb cradled in the other.

  The preacher stretched out his arms.

  “The blood of the Lamb,” he said.

  A cannon blast of a chord exploded out into the sanctuary, and everyone leapt to their feet for the song some of the choir had treated me and Gustav to a few days before.

  There is a fountain filled with blood

  Drawn from Emmanuel’s veins.

  And sinners plunged beneath that flood

  Lose all their guilty stains.

  Lose all their guilty stains.

  Lose all their guilty stains.

  After but one verse, though, the music came to a stop.

  “Friends,” Brother Landrigan boomed out even as “guilty stains” reverberated in the rafters, and he looked straight at me and Gustav. It wasn’t some passing glance this time. It was a gaze, one he held and held and kept holding so long it made my eyeballs itch.

  “If there be any among us today called by the Holy Spirit to renounce sin and accept the salvation of Jesus Christ our Lord, let them come forward now!”

  I peeked over at my brother, thinking I’d flash him a jesting “Shall we?” waggle of the eyebrows. He hadn’t acknowledged my presence in any way throughout the service, being too busy eyeing Cuff, pretending to sing (him being unable to actually read from the hymnal, of course), and watching Landrigan with a fascination that bordered on fixation.

  And he kept right on ignoring me—even as he pushed past me out of our pew.

  “What the hell are you doin’?” I whispered.

  Gustav didn’t answer. He just headed up the aisle, climbed the steps to Brother Landrigan, then fell to his knees and wept.

  28

  Dirty Little Secrets

  Or, Old Red Is “Saved” in More Ways Than One

  Let us pause here for a brief moment of sacrilege.

  God, to me, is like Sherlock Holmes. I’ve read about Him. I’ve heard a lot of talk about Him. But I’ve never seen Him myself, and His existence I have to take on faith based on published reports. In Harper’s Weekly, say. Or the book of Genesis.

  At least with Holmes, I’ve met folks who knew the man personally. Jehovah, on the other hand…Well, while I’d never be so bold as to say the Man Upstairs isn’t home, I’ve also never known him to answer when any of my friends or family came around looking for help.

  I’ve always assumed Gustav shared my uncertainty on matters ecclesiastic. My brother neither hosannaed in the highest nor looked askance at those who do, and his problems he always chose to meet head-on without any bowing on bended knee.

  So you can imagine my dismay seeing him down on both knees before an altar, nodding tearfully as a preacher asked him if he repudiated Satan and accepted Jesus Christ as his lord and savior.

  “Hallelujah!” a man proclaimed.

  “Praise Jesus!” a woman called out.

  “Holy shit,” I whispered.

  Brother Landrigan helped my brother to his feet, and the two exchanged a few quiet words as the choir launched back into “There Is a Fountain Filled with Blood.”

  Dear dying Lamb, Thy precious blood

  Shall never lose its power

  Till all the ransomed church of God

  Be saved to sin no more.

  Be saved to sin no more.

  Be saved to sin no more.

  Till all the ransomed church of God

  Be saved to sin no more.

  E’er since, by faith, I saw the stream

  Thy flowing wounds supply,

  Redeeming love has been my theme,

  And shall be till I die.

  And shall be till I die.

  And shall be till I die.

  As these cheerful sentiments shook the walls, Old Red wobbled weak-kneed back to our pew and stepped in next to me, eyes downcast. I had a lot to say to him, though you could boil it all down to a simple “Huh?” Now obviously wasn’t the time even for that, though, and I just passed him a handkerchief so he could wipe the tear tracks from his face.

  He dabbed at his cheeks, blew his nose, and handed the hanky back to me, all without meeting my gaze.

  “This is a joyful day for you,” Horace Cuff said, turning around to offer Gustav a bony hand. “Congratulations, brother.”

  It chilled me in a way I can’t quite explain, hearing someone else—someone like Cuff—call Gustav “brother.”

  Old Red just nodded and shook the man’s hand, attempting a smile that never got past a quiver of the lips.

  Then, once again, the hymn came to a sudden halt, and Brother Landrigan took a step out toward the pews and raised his arms, the palms turned downward. He bowed his head as a signal for the rest of us to assume an attitude of prayer, and the congregation—and my brother—did as directed. I kept my eyes on Landrigan. With his long black robes dangling from his outstretched arms, he looked like a big buzzard alighting on a fresh carcass.

  “Dear Lord,” he said, “we humbly beseech thee to watch over your disciples as the shepherd keeps watch on his flock. Strike down the wolf, drive away the wicked, and always, in everything, guide us toward righteousness. In Jesus’ name we pray. Amen.”

  Landrigan dropped his arms and went swooping up the aisle to the strains of “The Son of God Goes Forth to War.” Once he’d left the sanctuary, the music stopped, and there was a moment of complete and utter silence. Then the organist eased into a quiet, s
low-tempoed tune I didn’t recognize, and gradually, as if blinking their way out of a deep sleep, the congregation started to murmur and stir.

  “Alright, Brother,” I whispered as the pews behind us began to empty, “would you mind tellin’ me what you’re—?”

  “Were you raised Christian?” Cuff asked, turning to face Gustav again.

  “Yessir,” Old Red said. “Lutheran. It didn’t really stick, though. Howzabout yourself, if I may ask?”

  “I’ll share my dirty little secret with you.” Cuff leaned toward my brother and lowered his voice. “I was raised Catholic.”

  He said “Catholic” the way some folks might say “cannibal.”

  He straightened up again, smirking. “I suppose I could say the same you do of Lutheranism: It ‘didn’t stick.’ I wandered godless through this dark world for many a year before Brother Landrigan brought me to the light.”

  “Yes, Brother Landrigan’s quite…”

  My brother rubbed his chin, hunting for the right word and finding nothing in his sights.

  “Overwrought?” I suggested.

  “Rousing,” Gustav growled before turning back to Cuff. “Was that a typical sermon for him?”

  “Oh, yes! That’s what’s made Brother Landrigan such a powerful tool for the Lord.”

  I was about to agree that the preacher did indeed seem to be quite the tool, but Old Red jumped in first.

  “Well, he sure got to me. I’m just grateful y’all are so openhearted here. For a saddle bum like myself to wander in and find himself welcome…”

  Cuff smiled smugly. “We are all God’s children.”

  “You’re right, sir. You’re right. That’s how Jesus Himself went about it, ain’t it? He didn’t look down on the lepers, the tax collectors.” My brother shrugged casually, carelessly, but his eyes were sharp as razors. “The whores. He didn’t judge, did He?”

  “Oh, Jesus judged,” Cuff said. “‘If thy hand offend thee, cut it off. If thy foot offend thee, cut it off. If thy eye offend thee, pluck it out.’ That was Jesus, too.”