by Robert Inman
Grace turned back to the choir and they sang the Introit and then the congregation rose as one and launched into the first hymn. “Blessed Assurance.” Appropriate, Trout thought. Alma sang with a clear, strong voice:
Blessed Assurance, Jesus is mine
Oh what a foretaste of glory divine…
Cicero, at her side, chimed in off-key and an octave or so lower. Cicero looked weary and shopworn with bags under his eyes and a rather poor job of shaving. But he sang out bravely.
The sanctuary was packed, the largest crowd Trout had seen since they had moved to Moseley. Those who had not personally seen the front page of the Constitution, he imagined, had at least heard about it. They had come, like the crowd that gathered uptown at the crime scene days before, to see its effect. Alma, to all appearances, bore it with great, calm dignity. Trout was moved. He was tempted to put an arm around her, but he refrained. She seemed, underneath that granite exterior, to be delicate porcelain.
When the hymn was finished, they all sat down and for a moment; no one seemed to know what to do. Joe Pike sat musing in his chair, gaze fixed on the toe of one cowboy boot. Finally, Judge Tandy got up from his chair at Joe Pike’s side and read some announcements and a few verses of scripture and then prayed eloquently but vaguely. As he did, a few late arrivals straggled in, and finding no seats, stood self-consciously along the rear wall of the sanctuary. Ushers brought folding chairs from the educational building while the congregation stood and sang again. “Rescue the Perishing,” one of Joe Pike’s favorites. That, too, seemed to fit the occasion. After the hymn was ended, Judge Tandy called the ushers forward and they passed the collection plates. The choir blessed the collection with song, Judge Tandy placed the stacked plates on the altar, and then he looked up at Joe Pike from the communion railing.
Joe Pike stepped to the pulpit and peered down at the good judge. “Thank you, Judge Tandy. I’ll take it from here.”
Judge Tandy joined his wife Myrtice in his accustomed pew and the congregation settled in their seats -- quiet, expectant. Trout thought of Uncle Phinizy, sunk deep in the bunker of his overstuffed chair, celebrating Sunday with cigarettes, whiskey and Plutarch. Trout had checked on him at mid-morning and found him a bit weak but cheerful. “Ummmmm,” Phinizy hummed when Trout showed him the newspaper. He studied the photo for a moment. “He has Leland’s nose and eyes,” Phinizy said.
“Was Grandaddy Leland gay?” Trout asked, not really knowing why.
“No. He was a prick. That’s enough of a burden for a man to carry. Eugene got his only good qualities. The eyes and nose. He’s a nice-looking young man.”
Trout didn’t know what to think about Eugene. He remembered the boy of his childhood, something of a fascination both because he was older and because he possessed a certain spark, a sense of modulated rebellion. He would not touch that sacred family heirloom, the old Packard, but there was a great deal he would do, including climbing out on the roof outside his second-story room and drinking blackberry wine filched from Rosetta’s supply in the pantry. There had been nothing furtive or odd about Eugene, nothing to indicate he was anything but the most regular of boys. He seemed, even at that young age, to be satisfied with who he was. From the appearance of his smiling, somewhat defiant face on the front page of the Constitution, he still was.
Trout had actually never known anyone who was openly gay. There had been talk about the Agricultural Arts teacher at Ohatchee High School, whose eyes seemed to linger a trifle too long on some of the male students. Trout and his friends antagonized each other with jokes about their own maleness or lack thereof. Gayness was not something any of would admit knowing anything about. It was a condition, it was understood, to be avoided. But this was Eugene. His cousin. Openly and proudly gay. Trout needed some frame of reference other than the snide remarks of teenage boys. But Phinizy was no help. Phinizy went back to Plutarch and Trout went to church.
Where now, Joe Pike stood towering over the deadly quiet of the sanctuary. There was not even a cough or the rustle of a petticoat, even among the scattering of children. He reached inside his robe and pulled out a small newspaper clipping. Oh my, Trout thought. He’s going to rip right into it.
But he didn’t. Joe Pike cleared his throat. “Maybe you saw this item in the paper a couple of weeks ago. I clipped it out because I thought it was sort of curious. It’s about the Salem witch trials.” His gaze swept the congregation, lingering now and then on a face. No one moved. Trout cut his eyes over at Aunt Alma. Her forehead creased a bit, but that was all.
“You’ve probably heard the story. In Salem, Massachusetts back in the 1700’s, a number of young women were charged with practicing witchcraft, tried and executed. The good people of Salem thought there was ample evidence. The young women had been acting strangely -- speaking gibberish and the like. And in that unenlightened time, it was enough to convince the Faithful that the girls’ bodies and souls had been possessed by the Devil. They were different, in a way that scared people. So, nothing to do but dispatch them summarily, to keep the evil from spreading and contaminating the entire community. Any reasonable person would do the same, don’t you think?”
He waited, but there was no response. The congregation seemed in no mood to engage Joe Pike in Socratic dialogue this June morning. In fact, they seemed in no mood at all, only a state of expectant puzzlement.
“Well,” Joe Pike held up the clipping, “modern scientific thought and method have shed some new light on the Salem witches. In short, researchers have found good evidence that what actually happened was this: the girls ate some bread that was contaminated by a parasitic fungus. They became physically ill, and the illness manifested itself in part in disorderly behavior, delusions and convulsions. In the Salem of the 1700’s, that amounted to evidence of witchcraft. Ignorance, you say. How sad that twenty innocent young girls died because they ate bad bread.”
Joe Pike folded the clipping neatly and tucked it back beneath his robe. Then he leaned forward on the pulpit, hands gripping its sides, and looked out across the congregation again. “Why do you think God made people who are different?” He waited for an answer. None came. None except from Aunt Alma. She stood up slowly, tucked her purse underneath her arm, and walked out. She had to climb over Cicero to get to the aisle. He sat there for a moment, looking stricken, and then he got up and followed Alma out the door. Trout stayed put.
In the pulpit, Joe Pike waited while the door to the sanctuary stopped swinging. Then he took a breath and plunged ahead. “Why did God make people who are blind or deaf or lame or retarded, people with horrible disfigurations -- not because of accident or war, but from birth -- little babies who emerge from the sanctity of the womb with arms and legs missing, with brains so ill-formed they have no hope beyond being vegetables. Why? Why?” There was true agony in Joe Pike’s rising voice, at once a lamentatation and a diatribe. He lifted both hands toward the ceiling. “Why? Why?” he thundered. “What the dickens are You up to?”
A shudder passed through the congregation. They held their breaths, watching Joe Pike’s fists clench, seeing the raw, naked anger and grief that contorted his face, expecting the lightning bolt which might consume them all. They all, Trout included, shrank from his rage and blasphemy. But nobody moved. They were paralyzed, both by fear and fascination.
Joe Pike lowered his arms. “I don’t know,” he said. “I just don’t know. I don’t know why the innocent suffer. I don’t know why God creates or allows people to be so different that we hide our eyes in shame and shrink from contact in fear and revulsion and even make jokes to reassure ourselves and prove to the world that THANK GOD WE AREN’T LIKE THAT, and then secretly suffer agonies of guilt because we know in our hearts we’ve been cruel. I don’t know why,” he said, his voice sinking almost to a whisper, “God creates or allows a state of mind so bleak that a person cannot see beyond a curtain of despair. I don’t know.”
There was a long, painful quiet. Trout thought for a moment that Jo
e Pike might end it there, give a great bewildered shake of his head and retire from the field of battle. It seemed such a final, irretrievable sadness, an abject admission of failure. But he was not finished. He looked out across the congregation again, and when he spoke, they sat and listened in absolute stillness. “I don’t know,” he said, “and don’t expect to. Ever. But there is one small thing I believe, and another that I guess. I believe that God’s special grace is upon those who are different, that whatever temporal, earthly misery they endure is compensated tenfold when they stagger and crawl in their wretchedness to the gates of eternity. I believe they will be made whole and that they will sit on the right and left of God’s throne and be His elect.”
He smiled, and they could see that he took a small measure of comfort and peace from this thing he had come to believe. He went on. “I can only guess at why they have to endure what they endure. But is it possible,” he paused and looked upward again, “that God just wants to see how the rest of us will treat them?”
And with that, he did leave. After he had gone, the congregation -- drained and weak, as if they had been through Joe Pike’s valley of shadows with him -- got up quietly and went home. There seemed nothing worth saying.
* * * * *
It was a quiet Sunday night at the Dairy Queen. The afternoon traffic had been intense, long lines at both windows stretching out into the crowded parking lot, more people than they had ever seen in one blindingly hot stretch of summer day. Herschel and Trout and Keats worked frantically, filling the orders and passing them through the window and going on to the next and the next and the next. Finally, about seven o’clock, it ended abruptly. Trout shoved a cardboard container with a strawberry shake, two Mister Mistys, three foot-long hotdogs and an extra-large order of fries through the window, along with change for a ten-dollar bill, and when the man who had ordered it all turned away, there was no one else. They hunkered behind the counter for several minutes like battle-weary soldiers, expecting another assault. But no one came. Finally Herschel said, “Sweet Jesus.” It took another half-hour of hard work to clean up the mess and litter, indoors and out. At eight, an hour earlier than usual, Herschel turned off the lights and they all headed home.
Trout dropped Keats off at the mill village, both of them exhausted beyond conversation. A minute later, as he passed the mill, he noticed the gate standing wide open, the Packard in Aunt Alma’s parking space next to the office door, and the glow of a light from one of the tall windows of the mill itself. He was well past, turning onto Broadus Street toward the parsonage, when curiosity caught up with his work-dulled mind, and he turned around and went.
When he pushed open the door to the weaving room he heard the splash of liquid, somewhere on the other side of the sprawl of silent machines. He followed the sound and found her, walking along the far wall and pouring kerosene on the floor, the air pungent with the smell of it. She looked up, saw him, but said nothing and went back to her work, walking slowly, tilting the can and letting the silver liquid gurgle from the long spout, leaving a reeking trail behind her. The last drops spilled out as she reached the end of the wall and she stopped and put the can down. She straightened and looked at him again. She was wearing the same blue dress she had worn to church that morning. Her hair and makeup were still perfect. But her eyes were now dull and lifeless.
“Aunt Alma…” Trout said tentatively.
“It’s finished,” she said, her voice mechanical.
“What do you mean?”
“There’s nobody left.”
“Left to do what?” he asked.
Then she sank slowly down to her knees on the battered wooden floor, pitted and stained from all those years of grime and dust and oil, trod by the weary feet of generations of mill workers who had tended the machines. She spoke softly, almost to herself. “Did you see them today in church? Did you see how they looked at me, all there in their Sunday best, every seat filled to see the Moseleys brought down.” Then her face shattered and she began to cry quietly. Trout went to her, stood awkwardly for a moment, then knelt with her. He put a hand on her shoulder.
“I was supposed to be the pretty one,” she said. “Daddy said I was so pretty. I was supposed to dance and play tennis and wear pretty things. Not,” she passed her hand through the stale, close air of the weaving room, “this.”
She leaned against him then and sobbed into his shirt and he held her and let her cry for a long time. And he understood how desperately lonely it had made her, quite beyond Cicero’s love and devotion. It was a terrible thing, trying to live up to something, to have your life shackled by your history, or at least your notion of your history.
All of them, it seemed, were trapped in lives they no longer wanted, whether they had freely chosen them or not. Alma didn’t want to be the keeper of the Moseley myth. Irene didn’t want to be a preacher’s wife. Joe Pike didn’t want to be a preacher, not in the sense he had originally intended. And Trout didn’t want to be sixteen, lost and wretched. Only Cicero and Phinizy seemed to have any peace about them. And even with them it seemed as much resignation as anything.
Finally, Alma pulled back from him. “It’s over,” she said. “It’s finished.”
“Why?” he asked. “You’ve always said you’re saving it for Eugene and me.”
“Don’t speak to me of Eugene,” she said.
“Then me.” And as he said it, he felt utterly crazy, knowing it was a lie, that if he stayed here that this would all devour him as surely as it had devoured Alma. But he lied to save…what? He wasn’t quite sure, but he knew it shouldn’t end as smouldering ruin and ashes. It had to be worth more than that.
“You?” she said. “You really mean that?”
“Of course.”
She started to say something else, but fell silent. He helped her to her feet and took her back to her office. She leaned heavily on him like an invalid. He helped her sit in the chair behind the big desk, where she slumped, dull and vacant-eyed. And then he called Cicero.
An hour later, when he and Cicero had washed down the wall and floor where the kerosene had been poured and Cicero had taken Alma home, Trout went back to Keats’ house. It was after nine when he knocked on the door and the porch light came on. He heard the clanking of Keats’ crutches inside and then she opened the door and peered out. When she saw who it was, she came out on the porch and closed the door behind her. They stood there looking at each other for a moment.
“Will you come with me?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said without hestitation.
FOURTEEN
They followed Highway 278 as it wandered through farmland and pine forest and small towns -- Crawfordville and Greensboro, Union Point and Covington -- traffic sparse in the towns, lights winking off in the farmhouses as they passed, Georgia drifting to sleep and girding itself for Monday.
Trout avoided the Interstate. It was no place to be late at night on a motorcyle with a girl hanging on behind and two aluminum crutches sticking out over the handlebars. He stayed on the older road because it was mostly two-lane and he knew that it led unerringly to Atlanta. He need only follow the signs. Stars overhead, the air cool but not uncomfortable at fifty miles an hour, the steady drone of the engine, the singing of the tires. There was a kind of hypnotic peace to it, a suspension of time in which the minutes folded back on each other in a rush of wind.
At first he tried to empty his mind of everything but the business of guiding the motorcycle. He was not yet in any sense a skilled rider, though he grew more sure of himself as miles passed without incident. By the time they reached Madison he was more confident and his thoughts began to wander. He thought of Joe Pike, riding west on this same motorcycle, fleeing from one set of demons and pursuing another, with the Holy Ghost occupying the seat where Keats nestled now, her arms comfortably about his midsection. It had not been long before, but it seemed a lifetime and he felt a great deal older, if not wiser, than he had the Easter morning Joe Pike abandoned the pulpi
t in Ohatchee. Certainly not wiser, because things seemed more muddled than ever, questions more persistent, answers nonexistent. One great difference between Joe Pike’s journey and his was that Trout didn’t have to go so far. Atlanta might offer refuge, and that was all he asked at the moment. Joe Pike was proof that you could ride a lot farther than that and not find any answers.
They stopped at a little crossroads grocery store outside Madison. It was closed, no lights on except a single bulb at the back of the store and a security light on a pole at one end of the building that bathed the small parking area and gas pumps out front in stark bluish-white. Trout counted change from his jeans pocket. He had taken everything he had found in Joe Pike’s pants while Joe Pike snored, oblivious, in his parsonage bed. He had a twenty and six one’s in his billfold and enough change for a Pepsi from the soft drink machine. They shared it, Trout leaning against a gas pump while Keats lurched about the parking area getting the kinks out of her legs and back, returning to him to take a sip and then clattering off again. There was an awkward grace to it, he thought. He remembered the first time he had seen her, blitzkrieging through the hallway at Moseley High School, blasting everyone and everything out of her way.
“What?” she asked now, catching him watching her.
A week ago, he would have stammered and blushed. But things had changed, a subtle shift in wind direction. “How old were you when it happened?” he asked.