Sorrow Road

by Julia Keller

  Few people were crying. That did not mean they hadn’t cared for Lillian Pauline Strunk; it probably meant they recognized that tears would freeze on their cheeks.

  How would the grave diggers out at the Baptist Cemetery chisel through the deep-frozen soil? Bell had no idea. She’d heard stories in her childhood about people who died way back in the hollows during fearsome winters, times when the ground was as tough as iron, the roads were blocked up, and there was nothing to do with Grandpa except to keep him in the shed—and on ice—until the spring thaw. She never knew if that was true or not. But it sounded true.

  The last burly SUV had just picked up the last fragile load of mourners at the base of the steps. Now was Bell’s moment to slip inside.

  The one-room church bristled with a thick, insidious cold that had barreled in each time the door opened and squatted in the corners. The requisite altar was at the far end. Six rows of pews were bolted to the dark wooden floor. The windows were regular ones—not stained glass. Stained glass was expensive, and this was plainly not a prosperous church.

  It was empty now, except for a narrow-shouldered, black-suited man who was hunched over in the first row, his back to Bell as she moved up the center aisle. His head was bowed. His right hand fitfully massaged his forehead. He was resting or praying, she thought. Or maybe a bit of both.

  “Reverend Sherrill?”

  He did not jump. He seemed more peeved than startled. He dropped his hand and scowled up at her, blinking. His skin was paper-thin. Wispy white hairs sprouted from his ears and his nose. His eyes were beady, pinched into two slits. His face was severely elongated, as if it had been left too long on a hanger. The shape of that face gave him the look of an old and canny rat.

  “Yeah?” he said.

  “Sorry to interrupt.”

  “What?”

  “I thought maybe I was interrupting you while you…” Bell gestured toward the altar. “You know.”

  He grinned, sending a sea of wrinkles undulating across the thin concave face. “Nope. Nothing like that. I’m just tired, is all. Long funeral. Used to love ’em. No more. Takes a lot outta me. Folks don’t understand that.”

  “I’m Belfa Elkins. I work over in Raythune County. I’m the prosecutor.”

  He blinked again, waiting for more. He did not invite her to sit down. She wasn’t surprised. Most older people she knew were cautious with strangers. They could not defend themselves as they once could. Wariness was their best weapon now.

  “You and I had a friend in common,” she said.

  “That so?” His gaze had drifted away from her by now, toward the altar, which was little more than a raised platform with a book stand and an open Bible.

  “Yes. Darlene Strayer. Harmon’s daughter.”

  Again, no surprise registered on his face. Nothing seemed to rattle him. Is that, Bell mused, what happens when you reach a great old age? Do you just settle back and let life have its way with you, showing no reaction to its twists and its turns?

  “Shame about Harm’s passing,” Sherrill said. His voice was a sort of gravelly grumble. Bell wondered what it would be like to have to listen to that voice for an hour or three every Sunday. “And Darlene,” he went on. “Heard about her, too. Car wreck in the snow. Pretty girl. Once upon a time, she was best friends with my boy, Lenny. They grew up together. Got along real good. Then she went away. College and law school. And then some fancy job. Got a little too big for her britches. Last time I saw her was about three years ago. Right here in Norbitt—she was moving her daddy out of his house and into some institution. He was fading fast. Didn’t know his own name anymore. Couldn’t remember how to tie his shoes. Lenny went by the house, just to say hello. She wouldn’t give him the time of day.”

  He squinted at Bell. “Her accident was real, real bad, way I heard it. Yeah, I guess Little Miss Smarty-Pants was driving too fast. Probably couldn’t handle her car. It was a big one, I bet. She’d have a big one. Had to show off. Had to make sure everybody saw how rich she was.”

  A second voice cut through the gloom of the empty church. “Hey, Pop. Cut that out. Be nice.”

  Bell turned. The voice had come from behind her, from someone who’d just entered the front of the sanctuary. An exceptionally skinny man in an ill-fitting blue suit—it was too big for him, the cuffs flapping around his ankles, the white shirtfront billowing, the cut of the shoulders all wrong for his thin frame—shuffled up the aisle. His gait was so herky-jerky that he looked like a reluctant groom.

  He stumbled once. His shoes, Bell saw, also were too large for him. He had slicked-back brown hair and a red complexion.

  “I’m Lenny,” he said, extending a bony hand. Up close, Bell saw that the redness in his face was the adult version of what must have been an almost operatic case of acne in his youth—florid, vigorous. “You’ve met my dad. So how can we help you?”

  Bell shook his hand. Lenny’s skin had a slimy feel to it, an adhesive unpleasantness.

  “Belfa Elkins. As I was telling your father, I was a friend of Darlene’s. We were law school classmates. He tells me that you and Darlene grew up together.”

  “Sure did. Real sorry to hear about what happened to her.”

  Bell looked down at Reverend Sherrill. “You visited Harmon Strayer quite frequently, isn’t that right? At Thornapple Terrace?”

  “Fair amount.” The old man smacked his lips. “Whenever Lenny here’d take a notion to drive me over. I stopped driving in 1999. Well—no, I didn’t stop. I was prevented from driving anymore. Forcibly prevented.” He glared at his son, an old grudge smoldering in his eyes. “You help win the war and you save the U-S-of-A and the rest of the free world. But they still don’t trust you behind the wheel of a car.”

  Lenny patted his father’s shoulder. “Settle down, Pop.”

  Quick as a flash, Alvie Sherrill slapped away his son’s hand. “Don’t you touch me. You keep your dirty hands to yourself, you hear?”

  Bell was taken aback. The good reverend’s nasty take on Darlene was one thing, but humiliating his own son in front of a stranger? At first she wanted to laugh—this was the same old man who had just wound up a Bible-infused eulogy in a sacred space not ten minutes ago?—but then she remembered. Age could function like a floor-stripper, scraping away layer after layer of social graces, of politeness, digging down until it exposed a grim grain of resentment and irritation at being old and tired and weak. Alvie Sherrill was no different from a lot of the old people she dealt with as a prosecutor: bitter and crotchety. Even a preacher would feel the cold in his clicking old bones.

  “Okay, Pop,” Lenny murmured. “Okay.” He turned to Bell. His tone was brusque now. The brusqueness, she understood, was there to cover up his embarrassment, his wounded pride at how his father had treated him.

  Some observers, Bell reflected, might wonder why a grown man like Lenny Sherrill stuck around, waiting to be bullied by his father, doing the old man’s bidding, but she got it. Bullies started when their victims were very young, and their first order of business was to persuade the victim of his utter and absolute unworthiness. Baby elephants, she had read, only have to be chained for a few short months; they quickly come to believe they can never break free. Even after the chain is removed, they do not leave. They never wander outside the pinched circumference of their former captivity. For Lenny, she thought, the hook must have been set early, and the tether just got stronger over the years.

  “So what did you need to know?” Lenny said. “We’re in a hurry here. Got to get my dad back home. More snow coming, they say. Maybe lots of it.”

  She aimed her question at the minister. “Just a few quick things. Did Harmon Strayer seem upset to you, the last few times you visited him?”

  Alvie Sherrill looked at her with almost as much scorn as he had recently visited upon his son. “News flash, lady. Harm had Alzheimer’s, okay?” While he spoke his next sentence, he pointed to the side of his head. “Wasn’t much going on up there. Big old empty sp
ace. Did he get upset? Well, sometimes he got upset when somebody walked by or hummed a tune or turned the page of a newspaper. Other times, he’d ignore everything. No way to predict. Different every time I visited.”

  During this speech, Lenny had moved into the row just behind the one in which his father was sitting; he was picking up hymnals that the mourners had left on their seats, slotting the leather-bound books, one by one, into the shallow wooden tray hooked to the pew in front of it. The activity distracted his father, and Alvie Sherrill called out: “Land sakes, boy, leave it be! We pay a janitor good money to take care of that.”

  Lenny stopped abruptly. “Okay,” he said. He turned around, almost tripping; he grabbed the back of the pew to steady himself.

  “And what’s the matter with your damned shoes?” Alvie Sherrill muttered.

  “Couldn’t find the right ones. Had to borrow some.”

  “Had to borrow some. Had to borrow some.” Alvie’s singsong repetition was deliberately mocking. Bell watched Lenny; he hunched over even more, as if trying to shrink the target as his father made fun of him.

  “That boy,” Alvie went on, turning back to Bell with a sneer of disgust, “would lose his damned head if it wasn’t attached.” He leaned closer to her. “Want to know something funny? There was a time—way back when he was still in school—when folks around here thought Lenny might take over for me here at the church. Just like I took over for my daddy. But that didn’t work out. No, that did not work out.” He slid an annoyed glance over at Lenny, for whom Bell was now feeling distinctly sorry. “You either have what it takes—or you don’t. My boy couldn’t hack it. So I had to stay on. Way past when I wanted to. Way, way past.” He heaved a weary sigh.

  “I appreciate your time,” Bell said. She wanted to leave before Alvie Sherrill was inspired to share more of his son’s failings with her.

  “Come on, Pop. We’ve got to be going, too.” Lenny took Alvie’s arm to help him up. The old man let him. “That meeting’s going to start pretty soon.”

  Alvie’s face collapsed into a frown. “Meeting?”

  “To plan the celebration. To honor you, Pop. Sixty years of service to the church.”

  Relief eased itself into Alvie’s face, smoothing out some of the wrinkles. “That’s right. That’s right.” He gave Bell a sly grin. “You hear that, lady? They’re gonna honor me. Sixty years in the pulpit. Longer’n any pastor before me, including my own father. Come spring, there’s going to be a big party right here in the sanctuary. Speeches and music and all kinds of refreshments. And a parade, right down Main Street. All for me. Norbitt won’t know what hit it.”

  She let Alvie and Lenny Sherrill leave the church first, the old man clinging to his son’s arm. It was slow going. Every few steps, Alvie paused to tell his son that he wasn’t doing it right, that he was holding his arm too tightly, or too loosely, or that his pace was wrong.

  So how would a child learn to put up with that kind of abuse from a parent, year after year, decade after decade? What would he become in the wake of it? Bell did not like the answer that occurred to her: He would get hard himself. He would become his father times ten—shifty, selfish. And empty. Or he would feel, if he were lucky and brave, the shadow of another kind of life, a life he might live if he were ever able to break free. It would be an odd kind of shadow—one that projected out in front of him, in the direction he was heading, and not behind him, in the direction from whence he had come.

  Bell had almost reached the Explorer when she heard a voice calling out to her. When she turned, a heavy woman bundled up in a jumbo brown parka and red plaid hunter’s cap—the fleece-lined earflaps clamped her face, giving her a slightly demented look—was crossing the street toward her, moving as fast as she could on stubby legs weighed down by thick wool pants.

  She handed Bell a shiny white brochure. On the front were the words THANK YOU REV. SHERRILL FOR SIX DECADES OF SERVICE TO THE LORD!!! in glaring red letters. Below that was a Bible verse.

  “Hi, there! I’m Mary Alice McGruder. I saw you coming out of the church. I live right over there and I never miss a thing!” The woman was almost breathless from her brief scamper in the cold. “You must know Reverend Sherrill. Saw you coming out the door right behind him. So I thought you might like to hear about our little shindig. We’ve been planning it for over two years! It’s not for a few months—but we want a nice big crowd! Big as we can get.”

  Bell took the brochure. She folded it and put it in her coat pocket. “Thank you,” she said. No need to let Mary Alice know what she really thought of the grouchy preacher and his skinny disappointment of a son.

  Over the years Bell had met many women like this one, women who were not attractive in the only ways that counted in the world, a sin for which the world made them pay in loneliness and isolation. Such women often looked to places like the church to give their lives meaning and purpose.

  There were, Bell supposed, worse vessels in which to pour your passions, although she had never personally been tempted by organized religion. She had seen too many scoundrels—politicians, mainly, although a good number of lawyers and judges also made the list—play the God card when it suited them. She found it hard to forgive religion for the slimy things done in its name.

  “Oh, yeah,” Mary Alice continued, oblivious to Bell’s tepid response. “We’re pulling out all the stops. There’s even gonna be a parade!”

  “So I heard.” Bell turned, a hand on the door handle of the Explorer. Maybe Mary Alice would get the hint and leave.

  No such luck.

  “And that’s not all!” the woman said. She was practically gushing now. “Maybe you already knew this—but Reverend Sherrill was a war hero. World War II. He was right there on D-Day. We’re gonna honor him for that, too. For what he did in the war—him and his two best friends. They’re also from Norbitt. We were hoping to have them here to help us celebrate.” She shook her head and sighed. “That’s not gonna happen now. His friends died. Both of them. They were old, so I guess it wasn’t much of a surprise, but still—it’s too bad.”

  “Yes. Well, good luck with the festivities,” Bell said, in her best Let’s wrap this up tone. She was, in addition to being bored, freezing cold. “Have a nice afternoon.”

  “Oh, it’s not just the festivities! We’re also having some booklets printed up. With the whole story.” Mary Alice’s enthusiasm, Bell decided, was keeping her warm, in ways that even those fleece-lined earflaps could not manage. “The story of how three boys from Norbitt went out and sent that old Hitler straight to hell, which is where he came from in the first place, you ask me. We’ve been interviewing a lot of folks who have known Alvie Sherrill his whole life. Shame we can’t include his two best friends. Woulda been really special.”

  “How nice,” Bell said. Now she really did have to go. Thornapple Terrace was on her way home from Norbitt, and she planned to stop in. Bonita Layman had called that morning. New information, the director said. Might be relevant.

  Mary Alice was still talking. “Of course, we won’t bring up much about his daddy.”

  Bell released the door handle. A few extra minutes in the cold wouldn’t matter. “Why not?”

  “Oh, everybody knows about that.” For the first time, Mary Alice seemed a little reluctant to go on.

  “Remind me.”

  “Well…” The woman looked around. The snow-packed street was deserted, but she wanted to make sure. “Nobody much talks about him anymore. But my mother told me all about it before she passed. See, Reverend Sherrill’s father was the pastor here back in the 1930s. Until the scandal. It must’ve been hard for the family—that kind of disgrace.”

  Gossip was still irresistible, Bell thought, even if it was eighty years old.

  “What scandal?” she said.

  After another furtive look around, Mary Alice plunged in. “Reverend Sherrill’s father was the first Leonard Sherrill. Our pastor named his own son after the man. Anyway, way back in the day, the first
Reverend Sherrill had an affair with a girl who’d come to him for counseling. She got pregnant. And this was the 1930s, of course, so it was unforgivable. That girl lost the baby, which was a terrible shame, but in the meantime, once word got out, the church board fired Leonard Sherrill. Based on what my mother told me, things got real hard for the family after that. Nobody would hire him to do anything around here. Reverend Sherrill’s mother took in washing and ironing to keep food on the table for Alvie and his brothers and sisters.” She redid her grip on the stack of brochures, a thoughtful look on her round red face. “Sometimes I wonder if that’s why our pastor became a minister himself. To make up for what his daddy did to this town. Preaching wasn’t something that came natural to him, that’s for sure. He had to work real hard, way I hear it.” She arched her eyebrows. “Wish that kid of his was half that ambitious. But Lenny—well, he’s got his issues.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Always in some kind of trouble. Reverend Sherrill’s done everything he can do for his boy, but it’s no use. Lots of folks say he’s part of that gang that’s been holding up gas stations. Oh, sure, you’ll see Lenny at the church a lot—but that’s just to make himself look good.”

  Bell patted the pocket in which she had stowed the brochure. “Thanks for this,” she said.

  “So you’ll come to the parade?” Mary Alice’s voice rose in hopefulness, like a kid standing up on tiptoes to reach the cookie jar.

  Not a chance in hell, Bell thought. Out loud, she said, “I’ll check my calendar.”

  * * *

  Bonita Layman was waiting for her in the lobby. The director of Thornapple Terrace stood by the reception desk, her hands clasped in front of her brown wool skirt. She was frowning. The frown bit deep. It was the kind of frown that came not from simple displeasure, but from dark and troubling thoughts.