by Stephen King
"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 workshop. 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 h
elp 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 indeed. 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.
He said, "If you go up the road from Longmeadow, you come to the Goat Mountain Resort gatehouse . . ."
". . . where they won't let you in unless you're a member or a guest."
"Right. The class system at work. But just before you get to the gatehouse, there's a gravel road that splits off to the left. Anyone can use it, because that's all state land. About three miles up, it ends at an outlook called Skytop. I never took you kids there, because it's dangerous--just a granite slope ending in a two-thousand-foot drop. There's no fence, just a sign warning people to keep back from the edge. At the Skytop summit there's an iron pole twenty feet high. It's driven deep into the rock. I have no idea who put it there, or why, but it's been there a long, long time. It should be rusty, but it's not. Do you know why it's not?"
I shook my head.
"Because it's been struck by lightning so many times. Skytop's a special place. It draws the lightning, and that iron rod is its focal point."
He was looking dreamily off toward Goat Mountain. It was certainly not big compared to the Rockies (or even the White Mountains of New Hampshire), but it dominated the rolling hills of western Maine.
"The thunder is louder there, Jamie, and the clouds are closer. The sight of those stormclouds rolling in makes a person feel very small, and when a person is beset by worries . . . or doubts . . . feeling small is not such a bad thing. You know when the lightning's going to come, because there's a breathless feeling in the air. A feeling of . . . I don't know . . . an unburned burning. Your hair stands on end and your chest gets heavy. You can feel your skin trembling. You wait, and when the thunder comes, it doesn't boom. It cracks, like when a branch loaded with ice finally gives way, only a hundred times louder. There's silence . . . and then a click in the air, sort of like the sound an old-fashioned light switch makes. The thunder rolls and the lightning comes. You have to squint, or the stroke will blind you and you won't see that iron pole go from black to purple-white and then to red, like a horseshoe in the forge."
"Wow," I said.
He blinked and came back. He kicked the tire of his new-old car. "Sorry, kiddo. Sometimes I get carried away."
"It sounds awesome."
"Oh, it's way beyond awesome. Go up there sometime when you're older and see for yourself. Just be careful around the pole. The lightning has chipped up all kinds of loose scree, and if you started to slide, you might not be able to stop. And now, Jamie, I really do have to get rolling."
"I wish you didn't have to go." I wanted to cry some more, but I wouldn't let myself.
"I appreciate that, and I'm touched by it, but you know what they say--if wishes were horses, beggars would ride." He opened his arms. "Now give me another hug."
I hugged him hard, breathing deep, trying to store up the smells of his soap and his hair tonic--Vitalis, the kind my dad used. And now Andy, as well.
"You were my favorite," he said into my ear. "That's another secret you should probably keep."
I just nodded. There was no need to tell him that Claire already knew.
"I left something for you in the parsonage basement," he said. "If you want it. Key's under the doormat."
He set me on my feet, kissed me on the forehead, then opened the driver's door. "This caa ain't much, chummy," he said, putting on a Yankee accent that made me smile in spite of how bad I felt. "Still, I reckon it'll get me down the road apiece."
"I love you," I said.
"I love you, too," he said. "But don't you cry on me again, Jamie. My heart is already as broken as I can stand."
I didn't cry again until he was gone. I stood there and watched him back down the driveway. I watched him until he was out of sight. Then I walked home. We still had a hand pump in our backyard in those days, and I washed my face in that freezing-cold water before I went inside. I didn't want my mother to see that I'd been crying, and ask me why.
*
It would be the job of the Ladies Auxiliary to give the parsonage a good stem-to-stern cleaning, removing all traces of the ill-fated Jacobs family and making it ready for the new preacher, but there was no hurry, Dad said; the wheels of the New England Methodist Bishopric moved slowly, and we would be lucky to have a new minister assigned to us by the following summer.
"Let it sit awhile," was Dad's advice, and the Auxiliary was happy enough to take it. They didn't get to work with their brooms and brushes and vacuums until after Christmas (Andy preached the lay sermon that year, and my parents almost burst with pride). Until then, the parsonage stood empty, and some of the kids at my school began to claim that it was haunted.
There was one visitor, though: me. I went on a Saturday afternoon, once more cutting through Dorrance Marstellar's cornfield to evade the watchful eye of Me-Maw Harrington. I used the key under the doormat and let myself in. It was scary. I had scoffed at the idea that the place might be haunted, but once I was inside, it was all too easy to imagine turning around and seeing Patsy and Tag-Along-Morrie standing there, hand in hand, goggle-eyed and rotting.
Don't be stupid, I told myself. They've either gone on to some other place or just into black nothing, like Reverend Jacobs said. So stop being scared. Stop being a stupid fraidy-cat.
But I couldn't stop being a stupid fraidy-cat any more than I could stop having a stomachache after eating too many hotdogs on Saturday night. I didn't run away, though. I wanted to see what he had left me. I needed to see what he had left me. So I went to the door that still had a poster on it (Jesus holding hands with a couple of kids who looked like Dick and Jane in my old first-grade reader), and the sign that said LET THE LITTLE CHILDREN COME UNTO ME.
I turned on the light and went down the stairs and looked at the folding chairs stacked against the wall, and the piano with the cover down, and Toy Corner, where the little table was now bare of dominos and coloring books and Crayolas. But Peaceable Lake was still there, and so was the little wooden box with Electric Jesus inside. That was what he had left me, and I was horribly disappointed. Nonetheless, I opened the box and took Electric Jesus out. I set him at the edge of the lake, where I knew the track was, and started to reach up under his robe to turn him on. Then the greatest rage of my young life swept through me. It was as sudden as one of those lightning strikes Reverend Jacobs had talked about seeing up on Skytop. I swung my arm and knocked Electric Jesus all the way to the far wall.
"You're not real!" I shouted. "You're not real! It's all a bunch of tricks! Damn you, Jesus! Damn you, Jesus! Damn you, damn you, damn you, Jesus!"
I ran up the stairs, crying so hard I could barely see.
*
We never did get another minister, as it turned out. Some of the local padres tried to take up the slack, but attendance dropped to almost nothing, and by my senior year of high school, our church was locked and shuttered. It didn't matter to me. My belief had ended. I have no idea what happened to Peaceable Lake and Electric Jesus. The next time I went into the downstairs MYF room in the parsonage--this was a great many years later--it was completely empty. As empty as heaven.
IV
Two Guitars. Chrome Roses. Skytop Lightning.
When we look back, we think our lives form patterns; every event starts to look logical, as if something--or Someone--has mapped out all our steps (and missteps). Take the foul-mouthed retiree who unknowingly ordained the job I worked at for twenty-five years. Do you call that fate or just happenstance? I don't know. How can I? I wasn't even there on the night when Hector the Barber went looking for his old Silvertone guitar. Once upon a time, I would have said we choose our paths at random: this happened, then that, hence the other. Now I know better.
