by Aaron Gwyn
IN TONGUES
He shall wear them when he ministers, and their sound shall be heard when he goes into the holy place before the Lord, and his sons shall wear them when they come near the altar to minister in the holy place, or they will bring guilt on themselves, and die.
—EXODUS 28:35, 43
REVEREND HASSLER WAS a plump man, his hair just graying around the ears, his eyes kind and sad behind thick glasses. By no means common, Hassler was one who possessed what older generations call the gift of tongues. Since the age of twelve the Spirit had come upon him daily, and in the afternoons when he knelt at his couch, a peculiar speech would stammer from his lips.
Hassler began preaching at sixteen and by twenty-one had evangelized across Oklahoma, Arkansas, and much of Missouri. After a nervous breakdown one summer, he spent time in a hospital and then, in the early seventies, settled in Perser, married Anita Etheridge, and began pastoring a rural holiness church.
The First Pentecostal was not large—150 when the sanctuary was filled on Easters—but Hassler’s congregation adored him. He stood at the pulpit on Sundays and Wednesday evenings, fervent, effusive, and strangely animate. In either pocket he carried a handkerchief to wipe the sweat from his brow, and often, in the middle of a sentence on Jeremiah or an admonition to repentance, Hassler would begin to speak in the tongues of angels.
It was after just such a night that he awoke and found his gift gone. There was no warning, nor did there seem to be cause. He’d come in the afternoon, knelt in his study, and heard his voice ascend in plain and unbroken English. He remained on his knees till the light grew red in the west window, then rose and walked to the parsonage across the lawn.
At first, this change did not trouble him. Over the years he’d become very content. He knew such things were governed by God, not man, and that the Spirit could not be forced. He did not attempt to compel the tongues, and when his wife asked him what was the matter, he did not mention their ceasing.
Then a week went past, a dry month following. Hassler began to grow anxious, and lying in bed one night, he convinced his wife that they needed to cleanse their home so the Spirit might return.
They took their television to Perser Gun and Pawn, their radio and record player, their collection of blue-grass albums. Hassler persuaded Anita to throw away her drawers of costume jewelry, and himself took his silver-and-turquoise belt buckle and the matching pocket watch and pitched them in the burn barrel.
In two weeks they’d rid their home of magazines, knickknacks, and sugared confections: chocolate and coffee, iced tea and cocoa, the tin of caramel corn neighbors had sent the past Christmas. One evening Hassler went out to his pickup, scratched up the ends of the pinstriping with his pocketknife, and stripped it from the sides of his bed and cab.
Yet, for all this, for all Hassler’s supplication, his willingness to divest himself of material possessions, when he knelt at his couch to pray, his speech remained in an earthly tongue.
The weather became hot and dry, and the local paper cautioned residents not to throw cigarettes out their car windows. Hassler walked through his days with an uneasy look, perpetually casting his eyes as if searching for a message in the clouds, a face in the wood paneling to pronounce his deliverance. It was along this time that news came of Leslie Snodgrass.
Snodgrass was an evangelist of fifteen, but everyone who saw him said that being in the presence of the Baptist himself could not have been more remarkable. They told how the boy laid hands on the sick, preached Christ and fire, gave tongues and interpretation both. All believed he was anointed, and when Hassler heard of this, he knew if anyone could help him recover his gift, this boy was he.
He contacted the evangelist’s pastor, a Brother Danforth of Tishomingo, and arranged for Snodgrass to hold a revival at the First Pentecostal for as long as he wished. Danforth said Hassler and his congregation were in for a treat.
“You wouldn’t believe how God blesses that boy,” Danforth told him.
“I don’t doubt it,” said Hassler, scrawling the word revival in enormous letters across the following week of his calendar.
SNODGRASS ARRIVED a few evenings later with a duffel in either hand. He was skinny and very pale. He stood on the green plastic turf of Hassler’s front porch and rang the doorbell, an older woman waving to him from the golden LTD he’d just climbed out of.
Hassler and his wife greeted the boy and brought him into the living room. They had always been told their home was inviting, but Snodgrass appeared as if he’d stepped into another world. He stood looking at the indentations in the carpet where the television and stereo had formerly sat, then studied the matching recliners and ceiling fan, the walls where wildflowers hung in imitation brass frames. Finally, he glanced toward the dining room. Ringed by wicker chairs, the glass table was set with bowls of mashed potatoes, green beans, corn. A pork roast rested in the center on a ceramic platter.
The boy turned to them. “Your house is nice,” he said.
Hassler looked out his screen door to where the automobile was making a three-point turn. He gestured toward it and asked Snodgrass whether his mother was coming in.
“Grandmother,” the boy corrected. “She has a room ready for her at the Fairmont.”
The Hasslers looked briefly toward each other; this particular hotel was less than a mile’s distance.
“But you’re staying with us, aren’t you?” Anita asked.
“Yes ma’am.”
“We have plenty of space,” Hassler began to object, rushing at the door to see the gold car pull back onto the highway and remove itself from view. “The bed in the guest room’s a queen. She could have slept in there with you or out here on the—”
“Nana wanted it this way,” Snodgrass explained. “She said if I’m going to evangelize, I need to learn how to stay with people. She said she won’t be around forever.”
The Hasslers, forcing oddly identical grins onto their faces, told him they understood, that his grandmother seemed to have given sound advice.
They made small talk for a while longer, and then Anita ushered Snodgrass and her husband to the table. The plates rested on place mats imprinted with corn of all sizes. The handles of the forks and spoons were plastic cornstalks, and there was corn on the salt and pepper shakers as well. Anita saw the boy examining all of this and laughed nervously.
“I collect corn,” she told him. “Anything with corn.”
Snodgrass smiled, pulled back a chair.
Hassler said grace, and the three of them ate without exchange, no sounds but the scraping of their forks. He observed the evangelist from the corners of his eyes. He looked frail, Hassler thought, almost elderly. His eyes were darkly circled, the whites slightly pink, and seeing this, Hassler decided there was something otherworldly about him.
When he could no longer bear the silence, the pastor wiped his mouth and pointed to a scar that ran just above the knuckle of the boy’s left index finger.
“Where’d that come from?” he asked.
Snodgrass looked at the scar for a moment, then at Hassler.
“Go-cart,” he said.
“Go-cart?”
“Yes sir. A friend and I were riding go-carts in the pasture a few years back. The chain came loose and cut off my finger.”
“Clean off?” Hassler asked.
“It was dangling by skin,” Snodgrass told him, and took a long drink of water.
Hassler winced, shook his head in sympathy, but could think of nothing further to say. He found this strange, for he was comfortable with others and could easily draw conversation from them. He looked at his wife, and she began to provoke what discussion she could. But the boy would speak only to answer questions or express gratitude when a dish was passed. After he’d finished eating, he told Anita that dinner was very good and thanked them both.
They rose, sat a few uncomfortable hours in the living room, and then Hassler showed Snodgrass the guest room. He stood in the doorway watching the
boy unpack his things, set them in neat rows on the mahogany dresser. The pastor asked if there was anything he needed, if the room was all right, if the bed would be comfortable to sleep on.
Snodgrass smiled. He looked about embarrassedly. “This,” he said, faltering, “is the first night I’ve spent away from home.”
“Is that right?”
“Yes sir.”
Hassler stood there, not knowing what to say.
“Would it be okay if I slept on the couch?”
“Of course,” the pastor told him, “wherever you’re—”
“Are you sure?”
“Absolutely. Whatever makes you comfortable.”
He helped the boy carry his bedding to the living room, wished him good night, told him if he needed anything to come and wake him. Snodgrass thanked him and Hassler went back down the hallway.
He closed the door to their bedroom, pulled off his trousers and socks, climbed in between the covers. Anita was there waiting. She turned off the light and scooted across the bed toward him.
“What do you think?” she whispered.
“About what?”
“Our evangelist. What do you think about Leslie?”
“He seems like a very sweet boy.”
“You think he’ll make it a week?”
There was silence and then the sound of Hassler exhaling a long breath.
“Be lucky,” he told her, “if he makes it through the night.”
REVIVAL BEGAN THE following evening. Hassler and Snodgrass stood in the foyer greeting people as they entered—the pastor warm and affable, the evangelist quiet and tense, utterly out of place. It was a Tuesday, and there was not a large crowd, only a third of the congregation in attendance. At five after, they closed the doors and came down the center aisle. They stepped onto the platform, crossed it, and sat on the pew at the auditorium’s rear wall—the boy very straight in his dark brown suit, the tips of his loafers just brushing the ground. His grandmother had taken a position at the front—a small, virtually wrinkleless woman, with a long-sleeved dress and hair woven into a great gray bun. She looked familiar to Hassler, but the preacher could not reckon how. He’d seen a thousand Pentecostal matrons in his time, but none quite as statuesque, none with an expression denoting greater purpose or will.
As people took their seats, Hassler noticed Snodgrass surveying the inside of the building. The sanctuary was done up in burgundy: burgundy carpet and pew cushions and great burgundy drapes over the windows. The walls were wood-paneled, matching the altars in color and grain. A piano stood on one side of the platform, an organ on the other, the enormous oak podium resting center stage. They had constructed the new building only a few years before, the money donated by Hassler’s uncle, a horse rancher prominent in that area.
Snodgrass told the pastor he had a beautiful church, and Hassler gave him an uneasy smile, wondering if the boy would be able to step behind the podium when the time came.
In a few minutes, Hassler rose from the pew, approached the pulpit, and began the service. There was song and offering; there was prayer request and testimony. Jimmy Osage and his wife sang a special with Carol Fortner playing accompaniment.
At forty-five minutes in, Hassler introduced Snodgrass, and the boy moved toward the pulpit. Hassler went back to his seat, watched the evangelist greet the audience and ask them to bow their heads in prayer. The pastor, nodding in feigned compliance, saw Snodgrass’s grandmother press the record button on the tape player she’d brought, noted also that her grandson placed his hands below the podium to conceal their shaking. Hassler closed his eyes, praying that Snodgrass would be able to make it through his sermon.
Then the boy raised his head and began to preach. His tone grew firm, and he spoke in a voice biblical and commanding. Indeed, it seemed as if it was not he who was speaking at all. Hassler sat incredulous, as did the audience. The boy’s sermon was an urgent cadence, a voice almost in song, and Hassler knew it was neither affected nor rehearsed. He felt relieved beyond comparison, both for his congregation and himself, assured that the evangelist could be the one to help restore his gift.
As Snodgrass preached, the sincerity of his words cut his audience to the quick, for listening to the boy minister was like hearing a prophetic utterance, and those who had begun to doubt the very truth of God were shaken to their foundations. Elders who had been close to mute shouted amens, the younger and more demonstrative among them stricken dumb. The longer the sermon, the less his audience could wait to fall into the altars, and when this happened, Hassler found himself among them, kneeling in their midst like the commonest reprobate. All around him the congregation cried out to God in voices loud with shame.
Bent over the altar, his eyes tightly clenched, Hassler tried to summon the Spirit. In former days it took very little coaxing. It seemed that when he closed his eyes, there would be a mist waiting just above him and all he had to do was inhale. His face would grow hot and wet, his hands would tremble, and soon his tongue would be released. It was like being emptied of all need for life, and if he could have lived and died that way, he would have.
Now, Hassler struggled among the voices to his right and left, feeling that just beyond the black screen covering his eyes there was something pressing toward him, putting forth impressions as through a bolt of velvet. Whether a face or other shape he could not tell, though there was nothing he would not have forfeited to learn.
But this night, Hassler could not tear aside the veil. He made steady appeal, pleaded, spoke promises. He tried to recall images of himself ten and twenty and thirty years previous, tried to remember the precise feel of the language that had possessed him, the shape of its vowels. He even thought that if he began speaking, began mimicking the voice, perhaps it would return.
Yet, as his congregation began to stand and approach their pews, Hassler realized the Spirit would not come. He rose and returned to his seat, trying to fend away thoughts of desertion.
Anita was sitting there wiping mascara from her eyes. After a while, she placed her head on her husband’s shoulder.
“Bobby,” she whispered, “this is what we’ve needed.”
He looked at her, then to where the evangelist knelt just to the left of the platform, the boy’s face uplifted, his lips stammering.
WORD OF SNODGRASS quickly spread. In three days time numbers at the First Pentecostal swelled to over two hundred, and Hassler was forced to borrow folding chairs from the Assembly of God down the road. People came from far away as Okemah, Guthrie—one family from western Arkansas—all saying it was a true revival. Folks were saved and filled, and there was even talk of using Pete Cochran’s pond for a baptism. Night after night, Hassler sat watching the evangelist, wondering what would become of his soul.
It did not seem long since he had been the young man, full of fire and conviction, and during those days he did not think it could be otherwise. Before he could drive, his uncle Jess would take him from church to church to hold revivals or single-night meetings. Neither of his parents would darken a sanctuary’s door: his father was bad to drink, his mother dead at forty.
Jess drove into town every afternoon to take his nephew fishing or for ice cream or to church. Having no children of their own, he and his wife all but adopted the boy, and after his sister died, they moved him into their guest room.
Hassler could remember sitting between his aunt and uncle in their step-side Buick, watching the fields scroll past. Jess was a tall man with a sculpted face, Lorraine his physical opposite; in the early twenties they were converted when Pentecost swept the Midwest. He had no call upon him, but in her younger days Lorraine had been an evangelist and even now possessed the gift of prophecy.
During prayer meeting one night—Hassler would have been about eleven—Lorraine began to prophesy over the boy. The woman held his head to her breast and told how God had placed a great anointing on his life, how He had things in store for him the like of which Hassler could never imagine. She said he would gr
ow to be mighty in the Spirit, would evangelize and pastor a church, would lead many toward the path of righteousness. She said that as long as he kept his eyes fixed on his calling, his way would be certain. Lying in bed, Hassler would repeat the prophecy, picturing the face of his mother as he mouthed the words.
The next summer he was baptized in the Holy Ghost with the evidence of speaking in tongues. Until then, Hassler had been possessed of a longing and an emptiness. As a child, he would watch the evenings come with a feeling that someone had thrown a blanket over the face of the world. But when the Spirit descended and the tongues began, Hassler knew that something had altered in the very pit of him. It was as if the part that sought consolation, the thing that needed peace and reassurance, had been covered with a soft, thick material. Not that it had been excised; Hassler was certain it had not. It had merely been covered, wrapped like a ball of spiders into a velvet sack.
Hassler began preaching several years after. It was not the matter of preparation and nerves he thought it would be. He took to it naturally and what he had to say fell from him with the same ease that sweat fell from his brow. All said he was under the sincere anointing of God.
Years passed and Hassler grew both in reputation and confidence. Then one night—Hassler had been holding a three-week revival in Little Rock—Jess and Lorraine received a call. Their nephew was weeping, had been for two days straight.
Jess drove to Arkansas and retrieved the young man—he sat in the front seat nearly catatonic—and the next week was forced to take him to a psychiatric hospital in Norman. The doctors said Hassler was suffering from a psychosis they hoped would soon disappear.