“Why do you think it’s going so well?” The bishop’s question seemed more directed to the stack of papers on his desk than to Roy. The old man tugged at his white muttonchops before looking up.
The young priest cleared his throat and puffed up his broad chest. “Well, we keep it simple, I guess. I stick to the Gospel in the pulpit every Sunday, and we pour all that we have into our Alpha Course, which folks have attended from as far afoot as Darlington, Hartsville, and even Florence.”
The bishop patted the left pocket of his pressed purple shirt. He wore a large and ornate gold cross around his neck that he kept tucked in his pocket when he wasn’t decked out in his heavy robe and ruffles.
Roy looked out of the thick glass panes of the third-floor corner office. It was a Holy City view if he ever saw one, with the largest, most historic steeples in the country dominating the skyline—St. Philip’s on Church Street, St. Michael’s on the corner of Meeting and Broad, St. Matthew’s on upper King, St. John’s on Archdale, and the Unitarian church right next door which he had forgotten the name of.
He smiled when he thought of his simple redbrick sanctuary, circa 1967, back in Ellijay, with the lettered marquee in the front. This month it read, Distressed? Try This Address! (Every Sunday at 10 a.m.)
He turned back to the bishop, who watched him steadily as if he wanted him to say more. “It’s my kind of people at Good Shepherd, sir. The kind I grew up with, and we speak the same language, you know?” He tugged at his collar and smiled. “They trust me, and I know just where they’re coming from. Then it’s not long before one or another brings in a friend or a neighbor or coworkers . . .” The chair creaked as he sat back. “And that’s why we’ve grown, I reckon. ’Cause we know and understand each other.”
Bishop Boatwright made a steeple with the tips of his fingers, then he raised his white bushy eyebrows, forming two symmetrical arches. “I called you here because I have a new position I’d like to recommend you for, Reverend.”
The twitch in Roy’s right eye turned into a flutter. He reached up and rubbed it, then he leaned forward, resting his elbows on his wide knees. “Bishop, you know it’s been a tough few years for me personally.”
“Of course I do.” The bishop squinted. His pale blue eyes shot a sharp look that Roy recognized as a complicated blend of love, concern, and most striking of all, appraisal.
He kept on. “And now Rose and I are hunkered down in Ellijay. She loves her school, and my mama sold the farm and bought a house just down the road from us. Plus, my brother is only ten miles away over in Robbin’s Neck.” Roy bit his bottom lip hard. “It’s been real good for me to be back in my old stomping grounds after losing Jean Lee.” He patted the left side of his chest. “I feel like the Lord’s had his hand on my heart, and he’s been binding it up.”
“Undoubtedly.” The bishop balled his right hand into a fist, his large, gold ecclesiastical ring catching the afternoon light. Roy had been a second-string offensive guard for Clemson University before he became an Episcopal priest, and the bishop’s gold band always reminded him of a Super Bowl ring. This made him chuckle a little, imagining Bishop Boatwright at the ten-yard line giving some defender the Heisman before running toward the goal.
Bishop Boatwright held out his fist and leaned forward. “You know what happens after you receive healing, son?”
Roy wasn’t sure how to answer this. Was it a theological question or a personal one? He wasn’t bookish like the bishop; he just knew the Holy Spirit and felt its daily presence like the air his lungs inhaled or the soft light that fell on his face on his morning walk to work.
“Sir?” he said.
“It’s been my experience these short seventy-six years”—the bishop pounded his fist twice on the arm of his chair—“that after you receive healing, the Lord calls you out to a new frontier.” He pursed his pink lips and leaned forward. “He takes that fresh strength and puts it to a new test.”
Roy tilted his square chin. He was a big, handsome fellow with a head full of thick brown hair and dark brown eyes to match. Bishop Boatwright had confirmed him when he was twelve years old. And he’d ordained him the same year his wife died some fifteen years later. Both times he had laid his stubby hands on Roy’s head full of hair, his gold ring rubbing against the boy’s scalp, blessing the holy ceremony with the presence of the Almighty One he represented. The truth was, this man was in authority over Roy, and like Saul on the road to Damascus, there was no use kicking against the goads. He exhaled and uttered a prayer of mercy. “What did you have in mind, sir?”
“Phil Rainey is retiring this spring.”
Phil Rainey, Phil Rainey, Phil Rainey. Roy ran the vaguely familiar name through his mind as he thought about the other churches in the middle part of the state. The only Phil Rainey he knew was the rector of St. Michael’s in the center of downtown Charleston. The fancy old church on the corner of Meeting and Broad where his Aunt Elfrieda used to drag him during his miserable summer visits.
Roy reached up to steady his right eyelid again. “I’m . . . you don’t mean . . . ?”
Bishop Boatwright nodded. “Yes. St. Michael’s here in Charleston. I’d like to recommend you to their search committee.” He looked toward his desk as if his mind had already concerned itself with his next appointment. “I think you could be the man for the job, Reverend Summerall.”
Roy felt the burn of perspiration beneath his arms. He blinked several times and set his jaw. “With all due respect, Bishop, I’m not the kind of fellow that can lead a Charleston church, especially a South of Broad one.” He looked around the room at the shelves and shelves of books as if to find proof. Then he pointed to his mouth. “Just listen to my accent.”
The bishop turned back and cocked his head in curiosity.
“Or this.” Now that Roy had the bishop’s attention, he smiled and pushed a little bit of his tongue through the gap between his two front teeth. “I need braces.”
The bishop furrowed his bushy brows and Roy continued, counting off the examples like a verdict.
“I drive an all-terrain vehicle on the weekends, I go to the races for fun, I wear gold jewelry. Heck, I even vacation at Myrtle Beach by my own choice.” Then Roy said with a firm whisper, “Bishop, did you know that I have a tattoo of a Clemson tiger paw on my right shoulder?” He rolled his shoulder forward at the mention of it. He had dislocated it his junior year, and his senior year he had torn so many tendons that he had to have an operation. It still gave him a fit. “Sir, I wouldn’t know the first thing about ministering to those ‘mind your manners’ and ‘just where do your people come from?’ folks.”
The bishop took his time standing up, then ambled over to his desk where he thumbed through his stack of papers. “You spent your boyhood summers in Charleston, as I recall.” He glanced toward Roy, who was peering out of the window at St. Michael’s massive white steeple with its clock tower and weather vane and one-ton bells that had called the city to worship since before the Revolutionary War. He remembered reading about how the steeple was painted black during those days so the British ships wouldn’t spot it. Only it backfired. The black made the church all the more noticeable from the harbor, and the troops were quick to ransack it.
“They were the worst summers of my life.” Roy rotated his right shoulder again. “My brother, Chick, and I were treated pretty harshly by the local kids.” Roy could still hear Heyward Rutledge calling him a “Neanderthal” when he asked the fellow’s crush to dance at one of the Friday night parties at East Bay Playground. He’d had to go home and look that word up in Aunt Elfrieda’s encyclopedia, and then he had to take the scientific definition and translate it into the slang.
The bishop chuckled. He sniffed the air and scratched his muttonchops.
Then he looked down at Roy and whole seconds passed before he nodded once. “You might be just the man for the job, Reverend. I want you to be open and trust me in this. I’m going to recommend you to the search committee and the vest
ry, and you’ll be hearing from them.”
Roy sat back in his chair as though he had been hit by a three-hundred-pound nose guard. The chair seemed to waver, and for a moment, he thought it might collapse under his weight. He pictured Rose, his five-year-old daughter, curled up in Mama’s lap on the front porch this morning. Charleston was the last place he wanted to raise her. Jean Lee was gone. Why in the world would the bishop, why would the Lord even, want him to entertain this outlandish idea?
The bishop bowed his head and started to pray, but Roy didn’t hear the words. When he heard the old man say, “Amen,” he stood and firmly shook the bishop’s hand. Then he got back in his pickup and drove quickly down Interstate 26 toward Interstate 95 where the live oaks and palmettos gave way to the scrub pines and the flatlands of the only place, this side of heaven, he ever wanted to call home.
The story continues in Love, Charleston.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Beth Webb Hart, a South Carolina native, is the best-selling author of Grace at Low Tide and The Wedding Machine. She serves as a speaker and creative writing instructor at schools, libraries, and churches throughout the region, and she has received two national teaching awards from Scholastic, Inc. Hart lives with her husband and their family in Charleston.
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