by Jake Hinkson
“Angela’s in the back there,” she said.
“How is she?” I asked.
The woman pressed her fist to her lips and bit down on a sob. “She won’t say nothing,” she told me. “I’m glad you’re here.”
I gave her a hug and went back to see Angela.
She was in her cousin’s room on the bed. Surprisingly, she wasn’t crying. Her face was locked in a thoughtful scowl. Indifferently wearing jeans and a sweater, she just sat against the wall like someone had placed her in timeout.
“I’m so sorry,” I said. I went to her and took her in my arms—‘took her’ being the operative words there. She lay limp against me.
Slowly she pulled away and leaned against the wall.
I patted her knee.
“Is there anything I can do?” I asked.
She examined her thumb and pressed down on a cuticle, and I noticed her freshly painted nails. I supposed she’d painted them at the sleepover, thinking of when she’d show them to me.
“The Lord loves you very much,” I said. “And so do your parents. They’re in heaven now, looking down on you. Do you know that? They’re at peace. They’re not in any pain at all.”
She pressed harder, wincing a little.
“You know I’m here for you,” I said, leaning in. I touched her knee. She looked at my hand like it was something she’d never seen before. “I love you very much,” I told her. “You know that I’ll be here for you. I love you and I always will.”
I stood up and moved toward the door. There was a poster tacked to it of By His Stripes. I thought of the poster in her room peeling off the wall in flames.
“I’ll come by and see you tomorrow,” I said and opened the door. Then I closed it and asked, “You didn’t have a diary did you?”
She shook her head. Then she frowned and asked, “Why do you want to know?”
I told her, “Well, I don’t want to be at all callous right now, but I was thinking of how bad it would be, you know, if someone found it.”
She shook her head. “I don’t have a diary.”
“Okay. I just had to ask, you know.”
She nodded almost imperceptibly.
I said, “You know, there’s no reason we can’t talk all the time now. Anytime at all, you know where I am.”
She raised her head and looked queerly at me for a moment. Then she nodded again and went back to her thumb.
Chapter Thirteen
The meeting with the deacons went well. If a preacher is like the president of a church, the deacons are like Congress. Our deacons were mostly a bunch of old men, and they’d been serving the church for years. Now they just seemed tired. The whole meeting was run, more or less, by Nick. He’d only been a deacon for a year, but he was obviously the star of the show, everyone’s bright young man. The chairman of the deacons was named E.W. Herschel. He was a retired pharmacist pushing eighty, and I don’t know if he was exhausted or if he simply believed in the younger man, but he pretty much sat back chewing on his eyeglasses and let Nick control things.
After we’d prayed and sat around canonizing the Cards for an hour, Nick turned to me and said, “There’s been some discussion of having you run the church in the interim.” He didn’t say it as if it was the greatest idea in the world.
I took a deep breath. “That’s an awesome responsibility,” I said.
The deacons nodded, but Nick added, “We’ll need to start a pastor search after the funeral. You’d just have to handle things until we could get a new man in the pulpit.”
Dr. Samuels, a retired dentist with a bald head and a booming voice, asked, “I wonder if starting the pastor search that soon won’t look like we’re jumping the gun a little.”
Nick cocked his head to the side, “Well, Dr. Sam, I’m not disagreeing with you, but the Lord’s work marches on. Seems to me that the Cards are in heaven now, and we have to carry on the Lord’s work.”
“I have to agree,” I said. “Brother Card would certainly have put the work first.”
Dr. Samuels scratched his liver spots and muttered something, but he didn’t say anything else because Brother Herschel slowly sat up and slipped on his glasses. Everyone grew quiet. The chairman let Nick run the meeting, but his voice still carried more weight than anyone else’s in the room. He said, “Perhaps we should wait a while. People need time to heal. We don’t want to hamstring the new man before he’s even chosen. We need time to heal as a church.”
Nick shook his head. For once, things weren’t really going his way. I didn’t feel too much pity for him. While he was as shocked and horrified at what had happened as anyone, I don’t think he’d ever really liked Card, whom he seemed to regard as a well-meaning dullard. Deep down (and he never would have said this) he probably saw the Cards’ demise as a hard, but necessary, step in the evolution of the church. I was sure he was going to lead the pastor search, and I was sure he was going to be looking for an active administrator, a real fire-breather who was politically active and aggressive in terms of outreach. That was Nick’s vision for the future—what he saw, I’m sure, as the Lord’s vision. But he was going to have to wait for the old men to die off or step down before he could get some fresh blood into the pulpit. And despite what I might say about the need for a new preacher, I certainly wasn’t going to help the pastor search along.
“While I completely agree with Nick about the need to start looking for a man to assume the leadership of the church,” I said, “I also think that our primary focus in the days and weeks ahead will be to minister to the people of this church. We’re all called to be ministers, not simply the pastors. I think choosing a pastor should be a top priority, to be sure. But we shouldn’t hurry into anything. Brother Card’s absence leaves a vacuum not easily filled, but more importantly it leaves pain and fresh wounds. It’s my feeling—and I have been praying about this since I heard about the Cards—it’s my feeling that we should set as our top priority the healing of this church body from this terrible event.” Nick started to say something and I held up my hand to stop him. “We should be working toward the search for a new pastor. We should be striving toward that goal, praying on it, searching our hearts, and searching the hearts of this church body, searching for the Lord’s will in this terrible time. That’s the conviction of my heart.”
Everyone was quiet. Nick nodded slowly—rather glumly, actually—and Brother Herschel said, “Amen to that, brother.” And then that tired old man smiled, and I could tell he’d be happy if I turned out to be the pastor of the church.
I grinned politely to Nick, who was nodding and trying to repress his heartfelt objection to what I’d said. Finally he stopped nodding, and all he could muster up was, “We should pray about it.”
“Indeed,” Brother Herschel said and announced that we should adjourn with a word of prayer. Then he asked me, and not Nick, to say the prayer.
I smiled as I prayed. The church was mine for the taking.
Chapter Fourteen
Days passed and I heard nothing from Doolittle Norris. The papers carried the story and made a big deal of it, but they didn’t say anything I didn’t already know. A local minister and his wife had been brutally murdered in their home, and the home burnt to the ground, by an unknown intruder or intruders. One thing the paper did say was that investigators had determined the intruder had come in through a window in the living room because the charred remnants of the window revealed it had been left open. They’d also found a distinct—albeit mashed up—footprint on the ground nearby.
I went on about my work. I was nervous, of course, and I knew Doolittle Norris was a shaky foundation to build my future on, but I trusted him to be greedy enough to do what had to be done. After all, all I wanted was the girl; I wasn’t asking for a piece of his pie. I’d made it clear I knew the stakes were higher for me than they were for him, and besides, what good would it do him to cross me? As long as he didn’t find another angle, I’d be okay.
I avoided Angela as much as
I could and stuck to the business at the church, going over the books, visiting the nursing home crowd and shut-ins, dropping by the hospital to see one of our teenagers who had fallen off a four-wheeler and messed up his knees. I also stayed in contact with Brother Herschel, the chairman of the deacons, and let him know, ever so subtly, that I was out there working my ass off for the church. Brother Herschel was impressed as hell and told me, “I thank the Lord for you every day, brother. I praise him for sending you here to us.”
I said I was just doing what the Lord led me to do.
I even preached the Cards’ funeral. That was an eye opening experience. The church was crowded and weepy, with grown men—middle-aged men in business suits—standing along the back wall, sobbing like children. I didn’t even look at most of them, but the sobbing filled the sanctuary and you couldn’t escape the palpable anguish, the true, ragged grief that was pouring out of people.
Did I feel guilty?
Well, let’s say I felt bad. I felt bad the Cards were dead. I felt bad that people were crying, that the love of my life was crying on the front row, holding onto her brother, Gabe. He was a quiet looking guy in glasses and a dark suit. He was crying as much as she was. Everyone was crying. Hell, I cried a little, too. So, yeah, you could say I felt bad. But people were acting like the Cards were perfect, which they were not. In life, they were loved by some, tolerated by some, and loathed by the rest. It’s not as if Higher Living Baptist Church had been a fucking playground before the Cards died. There’d been a fair share of backstabbing and gossip and bitching and moaning. Sister Card had pissed people off. Brother Card had pissed people off. It wasn’t all hugs and kisses.
I preached a nice service, though. It was my first funeral, of course, but I did, I thought, a superlative job. I talked about God’s will, and the mystery of suffering, the presence of evil in the world, and the plan of salvation. I talked about Sister Card’s cooking and her dedication to her husband’s ministry. I talked about Angela and how she was dear to all of us in the church, how God was looking out for her, how he had a wonderful plan for her life. I trumpeted Brother Card’s faithfulness, and his vision for the church, and all he had done in the service of the Lord.
It was a hell of a talking I gave them that day.
But the whole time I was thinking, why can’t they see what a bunch of bullshit this is?
The Cards were dead, deader than Bonnie and Clyde. Someone had murdered them. Had it really been God’s plan? That day, I told the weeping congregation that everything was in God’s hands, and evil and hatred and loss and suffering would all be wiped away in the blink of an eye when Christ returned. But the whole time I wondered: do they really believe this? They seemed to. They cried and held onto each other and stared up at the cross on the wall behind me and nodded their heads. They seemed to feel comforted.
Maybe that’s all that counts to people. If there wasn’t suffering, men would feel no need to believe in God. The sick part is, if there is a God, he must have planned it that way.
After the graveside service, I ran into the chairman of deacons and Nick. They were standing by the cars, hands in their pockets, staring at the grass.
Brother E.W. Herschel had the face of a Confederate general. He was a creased-skinned old man with deep eye sockets and a stern mouth that was always pulling back into a grimace. Thick bifocals rested on a heavy nose full of gray hair, and his sideburns extended down to his jowls. He shook my hand and held it. “Powerful sermon, brother. Very fitting.”
Nick nodded his assent.
“I was honored to do it,” I exclaimed. “My first funeral to preach. I never thought it would be under these conditions. I appreciate your support, your example.”
The old man patted my hand.
Nick said, “The Lord gives us what we need, I guess.”
I let go of Brother Herschel’s hand and said, “Absolutely.”
Brother Herschel told me, “I think we’ve all been pleased to see how hard you’ve been working these past days. Incredibly difficult. Incredibly trying circumstances to find yourself thrust into leadership.”
Nick looked at the grass some more.
I told Brother Herschel, “We can only do what we can. We can only supplicate ourselves to the Lord and allow the Holy Ghost to work through us.” And on and on. You see how it went.
Nick couldn’t take much more. “I need to go say a few words to Gabe and Angela,” he said. “I’ll talk to you all later.”
“Take care,” I said.
He walked off.
“That’s a fine man,” I told Brother Herschel.
“Mm,” he said. “He is. He’s young.”
“Older than me,” I said.
“Mm. But you’re an old soul. Nick’s as fine a man as we have in the church. I was the one that nominated him for his deaconship, did you know that?”
“I didn’t,” I lied.
“Mm. I did. And he hasn’t let me down. Not by a long ways. But he’s young, always in a hurry. Being in a hurry is a characteristic of the young, I reckon.”
“I reckon it is.”
“I don’t see that in you, though.”
I said something about wanting to go at the Lord’s speed, whatever that speed may be.
Brother Herschel was wearing a red flower in the lapel of his dark suit coat, and he took it out and rubbed its stem between his thumb and forefinger. “Men in a hurry change the world. But the world they change has to be run by men with a steady hand on the wheel. Would you agree with that?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Mm. Like players in a symphony. Everybody playing his part, all led by a conductor. You’re a man with a steady hand.”
“I hope so. That’s my true hope.”
He put his flower back in his lapel and patted me on the shoulder. “You keep up the good work, brother. You just keep it up.”
As he walked off, I smiled and thought, Any day now. Any day now.
It took about three weeks. I kept my nose to the grindstone in the interim. I preached both the morning and night services on Sunday and combined the youth and adult service on Wednesday night in the guise of “Letting the kids know we’re all still a family.” The Wednesday night service in particular was a smashing success because it let the adults feel that they were involved with the youth. I arranged a mission trip down to Mexico for the following year, kept up my visitation at the hospitals and nursing homes and made the rounds on Monday night visitations, which involved me and Nick going to the homes of a bunch of deadbeats and backsliders and trying to get them to come to church.
One Monday night, after we’d wasted an hour in a trailer with a shirtless man who swilled beer and stared numbly at us while we read him Bible verses, Nick and I rode back to the church in his car.
“That went well,” I muttered.
Nick shrugged. “We planted some seeds, anyway.”
“He was watering them with beer,” I said.
Nick grinned curiously as he kept his eyes on the road. “You have a unique sense of humor sometimes,” he said. Nick was the sort of man for whom the word unique was always an insult.
“I suppose it’s my way of dealing with grim circumstances,” I said.
“I suppose,” he said.
That fucking drunk back there didn’t give two shits about the plan of salvation, I wanted to say. I didn’t say anything, of course, and just sat there.
Nick finally blurted out, “I was thinking about the pastor search committee. I think we should start looking soon. How would you feel about that?”
“The sooner the better,” I said. I saw no point in telling him something he didn’t want to hear.
“Really? I thought you might be opposed to the idea.”
“Why would I be opposed to it?”
“Oh,” Nick said. “I don’t know. It seemed to me as if you had your eye on the job. I don’t mean that in a bad way. I just thought you had your eye on the job.”
“I don’t see why. I’v
e never expressed anything along those lines.”
“Are you saying you don’t want the job?”
“Nick, my philosophy is to stay open to the Holy Spirit. I certainly wouldn’t rule out looking for a new pastor. I wouldn’t rule out taking the job if the church wanted me to. I wouldn’t rule anything out. It’s about God’s will, not mine.”
“Well, I certainly agree with that, but—”
“Good.”
“—I’m just looking at the situation and trying to get a feel for what you have in mind. I’d like to proceed in as organized a way as possible.”
“I’ve tried to be clear about what I’m thinking. I think we should bend ourselves to the will of the Lord. If you feel his prodding, if the deacons feel his prodding, and if the church seems ready for it, then I say the sooner the better.”
Nick said, “I don’t feel like you’ve answered my question.”
“What is your question?”
“What do you want?”
“The will of God.”
Nick took a deep breath.
“I’m sorry if that exasperates you, Nick,” I said. “But honestly, I’m trying to keep all options open. I’m not sure why you’re having a hard time accepting that.”
“I feel as if your actions are giving me a different answer than your mouth.”
“I’m sorry you feel that way. It really grieves me that you feel that way, and I don’t know what I’ve done to deserve that. I’ve just tried to do my job the best I could. Really. Honestly. Outside of doing my job as well as I can, I don’t know what my ‘actions’ have been.”
I had him there. Nick couldn’t name what I’d done wrong because I hadn’t done anything wrong.
He took another deep breath. “Look, maybe that was out of line. I don’t mean to act as if I don’t appreciate the work you’ve done, just…I think you’re skimping on your true ambitions. I just want to know what you want.”
