Chapel of Ease

by Alex Bledsoe

  “So are you,” I said. A cup was set out by the coffeemaker, so I assumed it was mine. I sat down at the opposite end of the table. “Wherever he is, I’m sure Ray really enjoyed that.”

  “I’m sure he did, too,” she said.

  “What time does C.C. come around to start work? He said he’d take me to the chapel of ease today.”

  “Did he, now?”

  “More or less. Why?”

  She put down the cup and looked at me seriously. “Matt, you seem like a nice guy. But let me ask you something: Did you see any churches on your way here?”

  “I didn’t really notice.” Church, and religion in general, had not been part of my life since I was a small child. Once my grandmother passed away, no one else stepped in to make sure I felt guilty and damned. “I’m not very religious, and I remember Ray saying there weren’t many here.”

  “He wasn’t being quite honest.”

  “No?”

  “No. There’s none. Zero. Not a single operating church in the whole county. Closest one’s across the county line in Unicorn. Doesn’t that seem a little strange? We’re in the Bible Belt, after all. And while we may not be the actual buckle, we’re definitely that little loop that keeps the end from flopping all over the place.”

  “Is it because the town is so small?”

  She barked a laugh. “There’s a place called Frog Jump that’s got a population of less than fifty and three churches.”

  “So what are you telling me?”

  “Churches don’t go here, Matt. Religion doesn’t. What we believe … well, it goes back long before churches. So not only will you not find any Baptists or Methodists, that chapel of ease is … well, it ain’t exactly welcome, either.”

  “How did it get there, then?”

  She sipped some more coffee and stared out the window. “There’s always been people who think they know better’n everyone else. People who’re so smug and certain that they think they can do what they want. Helps if they’re rich, too. Well, one a’them decided us heathen Tufa needed some churchin’ whether we wanted it or not. So he built that chapel, and started sending his own people over to attend services there. He thought the sight of such good, upstanding Christian folk would shame us Tufa into joining them.”

  “I take it that didn’t work?”

  “Not too well,” she said with a chuckle. “So then he sent some of his people around with guns, to give us a little more incentive.”

  “He tried to make you go to church at gunpoint?” I said, and made no effort to hide my disbelief.

  “You ain’t never spent much time around Southern Christians, have you?”

  “No, and I’m glad, if they’re like that.”

  “Well, on that day, they couldn’t find a single one of us.”

  “You hid from them?”

  “I ain’t sayin’ that. I’m sayin’ they couldn’t find us.”

  That seemed needlessly enigmatic, but I didn’t comment. “So what happened?”

  “The fella behind all this dropped dead of a heart attack from all the frustration we gave him, and the chapel just kind of fell apart over time. Most people don’t even know where it is.”

  “But you do?”

  “Me?” she snorted. “You couldn’t get me near that damn thing. I got enough bad luck without courtin’ more.”

  “So it’s bad luck to go to the chapel?”

  “It’s bad luck to even mention it.”

  “You’re mentioning it.”

  She smiled at me. “No, you mentioned it. So I’d be watching my back for a while if I was you.”

  “I don’t believe in that kind of thing.”

  Her smile grew wider, and darker. “Neither did Rayford.”

  With that she got up and left me alone in the kitchen. The sun was up enough that it backlit the clouds of tiny flies hovering in the yard between the house and the barn.

  I turned at the sound of heavy footsteps. Gerald came in, fully dressed down to his boots, and poured himself some coffee. He grunted, “Morning,” then sat down.

  “Good morning,” I said.

  “You have a good time at the dance last night?”

  “Well, actually, yes.”

  “Good. That’s what it’s for.”

  Keeping in mind what Thorn had told me, I asked, “Will there be any kind of … service for Ray? Other than that, I mean?”

  “Service to do what? Like a funeral?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Ain’t our way,” he said.

  “You don’t do funerals?”

  “Not unless it’s somebody we want to make sure stays in the ground.”

  “So what will you do with Ray’s remains?”

  He nodded at the mantel. “Reckon they’ll stay right there. Can’t think of a better place for my son to be, can you?” Then he started putting sugar into his coffee.

  Well, that was that. I wished fervently that I was back on West Forty-seventh Street, walking into Joe Allen on Forty-sixth Street for a normal lunch, and not among these strange and slightly frightening hill folk.

  Then I remembered the reporter. I said, “Mr. Parrish, I need to ask you something. A newspaperman came up to me at the wake and asked if he could talk to me about Ray. I said yes, but if you and Mrs. Parrish don’t want me to, I won’t do it. I don’t want to be disrespectful.”

  “At the barn dance? Fella named Swayback?”

  “I think so, yeah.”

  He made a dismissive gesture. “Talk all you want. He’s one of us.”

  And that was it for Gerald’s morning conversation. He finished fixing his coffee and took it out the back door. The cloud of gnats parted for him, then re-formed behind him. Ladonna came in whistling to start breakfast, and I went to take a shower.

  When I’d cleaned up and returned to the kitchen, C.C. was there, looking out the back window. I stopped before he saw me and just looked at him, appreciating the way the morning sun backlit his tall, strong body. I knew a lot of gym rats—and, of course, a lot of dancers—but there was something unbelievably attractive about simple physical strength that was the result of just living, not narcissistic exercise. Dancers danced; it was basically all they knew. What might C.C. know?

  “Good morning,” I said.

  He glanced back at me. “Howdy. Did you have a good time last night?”

  “I did.”

  “Good.” He resumed looking out the window. I tried to guess what he watched so closely, but saw nothing. After a moment, I said, “Do you think you’ll have time today to show me the chapel of ease?”

  He turned to look at me fully. He was backlit, so I couldn’t quite make out his expression, but he mumbled, “Yeah, sure, why not?”

  “Great,” I said. “When?”

  He looked at his watch. “Right now suits me.”

  “Okay.”

  And with no more than that, I found myself riding in his truck along bumpy gravel roads, immense thick forests on either side. C.C. drove in silence, his radio playing what seemed to be the same country music station Bliss had put on before. Again, all the songs had a flat similarity to them, which helped them become white noise to my racing thoughts.

  “You ever been down South before?” he asked.

  “What? No. Not unless you count Orlando.”

  “Huh. Well, no, I wouldn’t count that.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s a big city, and people from all over—”

  “No, I mean, why were you asking?”

  He didn’t speak for a moment. In profile, he was even more handsome. At last he said, “You met some good people last night. They were friends of Ray’s, and his family. But not everybody around here is like that.”

  I suddenly grew tense. Was he about to tell me that he knew I was gay, and that I liked him? Had I just walked into a redneck homophobe’s trap?

  “The chapel of ease belongs to the Durant family,” he continued. “We call them the Durocs. Do you know what a duroc i
s?”

  “Never heard of it.”

  “It’s a kind of hog. It’s known for being bad-tempered, and for having giant balls. The Durants are kind of like that.”

  “Ah.”

  “This early in the morning, they should all be sleeping off whatever they got into last night, so it shouldn’t be a problem.”

  “They weren’t at the wake?”

  “No. They’d never show themselves at our barn dance.”

  “So … they’re not Tufa?”

  “No, they’re Tufa. But they’re not our people. I wanted you to know that if we run into them, you might not want to mention that you’re gay.”

  “Okay.” So he knew. How? Had he spoken to Thorn? Had she sought him out to tell him? Was it because of how I sang, or danced? He didn’t look at me, so I couldn’t see if there was any belligerence in his eyes, let alone sympathy or, dare I hope, interest. I forced myself to stay as calm as I could. I began, “Maybe we should—”

  “You’re here for, what, three more days, counting today? There ain’t gonna be a better time. If you want to see it, we need to do it now.”

  “Okay,” I said again.

  “If I thought there was a real danger, I wouldn’t have suggested it,” he added. “I just wanted to be honest with you, and have you know this wasn’t entirely risk-free.”

  “I appreciate that.”

  The road grew rougher, and I sensed we were ascending higher into the mountains. The nature of the trees changed as well, from the thick forests around the Parrish house to gnarlier, sparser ones that gave glimpses of the mountains around us. We were as high as some of the clouds now, which clung to the treetops like wisps of smoke or steam.

  “They built the church way up here?” I asked.

  “Oh, no. This is just the back way in.”

  “Are we sneaking?”

  “We’re discretin’.”

  We hit a bare spot of road—well, a pair of ruts with a grass strip between them that I assumed passed for a road around here—and I got a long look at the mountains, their rolling slopes receding into the distance. Those farther away appeared gray, then blue, and finally dissolved into the misty horizon. It was breathtaking, and I either gasped loud enough to be heard over the engine and road noise, or C.C. was used to this response.

  “Yeah, it’s something, ain’t it?” he said. “Probably feel about it the way you do about skyscrapers.”

  “Skyscrapers don’t…” I trailed off as I realized I didn’t have the words for what I felt. Whatever it was, though, I never got it from looking up at buildings in New York. They just made me feel tired, and small. The mountains, though, they made me feel …

  C.C. was smiling at me. “Yeah,” he said. “I bet they don’t.”

  Then we descended again, into a valley with even thicker woods than the one we’d just left. The trees were huge here, and at ground level, the weeds and vines between them were thicker. Even from inside the truck, there was something spooky about them. They closed around and over the road like the passageway into a dark, enchanted, and dangerous land.

  C.C. abruptly slammed on the brakes, and the truck skidded to a stop. The dust behind drifted over us, momentarily obscuring whatever it was that prompted such a reaction.

  Then I saw what he’d seen. Two four-wheelers, their bodies painted in a camouflage pattern, were parked right off the road.

  “I take it they mean something?” I said after a moment.

  “Yep,” he said, still looking at them. The only sound was the engine’s uneven rumble.

  “They belong to those people you mentioned? The Duponts?”

  “Durants. Yeah. They must be up in here hunting.”

  “What do they hunt?”

  “Deer. Bear. Pigs. Anything they want. You won’t see no game warden up in here telling ’em something’s out of season.”

  “Should we go back?”

  “This might be the only chance you get. It’s your call.”

  “Are they seriously dangerous?”

  “They are seriously dangerous. But this is a big valley, and chances are we won’t be anywhere near ’em.”

  “Then let’s do it.”

  We drove on, deeper into the valley, and the sky grew more and more narrow above us, until it was merely a bright blue strip between treetops. C.C. turned off this road onto one that was even less traveled, and the passage repeatedly bounced me high off my seat despite the shoulder belt. At last we topped a rise and traveled almost vertically down until we hit bottom. We stopped, he put the truck in park and said, “Well … we’re here.”

  14

  Through the dirty windshield, past the trunks of intervening trees, I saw the shape of a building in a small clearing directly ahead. I couldn’t move. I’d lived with the image of the chapel we constructed onstage, as well as the one I built in my head, for so long that the thought of seeing the real thing was somehow paralyzing.

  After a moment C.C. asked, “You all right?”

  “Did you ever bring Ray out here?” I asked softly.

  “No. He’s the one who showed it to me, back when we were around twelve or so.”

  I thought about the distance we’d traveled from Ray’s house. “That’s a long way for a couple of twelve-year-olds.”

  C.C. chuckled, as if he was in on a joke I didn’t catch. “Yeah. Well, come on, let’s take your pictures and get out of here.”

  We got out of the truck and hiked the short distance to the clearing. It felt like the trees conspired to keep me from getting a clear view of the chapel. C.C. kept glancing around us, looking for signs of the Durants, I supposed. His eyes were narrowed, and his lips drawn tight. Was he more worried than he’d admitted?

  Then we stepped around the final tree, emerged into the open space around the chapel, and I got my first clear look at it. A bright ray of sunshine shone down onto the building, and a burst of the “Hallelujah Chorus” wouldn’t have been out of place.

  I had a shock I totally didn’t expect: the chapel before me looked almost exactly like the one on our stage. It was larger, but the design was the same down to the lone column outside the entrance, which once supported the porch overhang. The contours of the walls, the places where major sections were missing and huge cracks rent the stone down to the foundation, were identical. Sure, there were differences in the details, but Ray had ensured that the overall outline was the same.

  Our chapel was this chapel.

  I wondered at this amazing similarity, then realized: of course Ray had pictures of it. I mean, he had to, right? Even if he’d described it in excruciating detail in the script (which he didn’t), there was no way the designer could’ve gotten it so right without visual references. But why had we never seen those photos?

  Oh, who was I kidding? Actors never saw things like that. We only saw the results.

  The walls appeared to be made of stones about the size of cinder blocks, cut into rectangles and held together with some kind of cement or plaster. All the wooden parts were gone: there was no roof, no door, not even any window frames. Grass and weeds grew up all around it, inside the walls as well as outside, and vines climbed the walls at one end.

  “Don’t touch that,” C.C. said when he noticed the vines. “That’s poison ivy.”

  “It is?”

  “Yep. Gives you a hell of a rash. You ever had it?”

  “No. Never even seen it before.”

  “Well, you don’t want it. I knew a fella who threw a stick into a campfire once. He was a little drunk, so what he thought was tree leaves turned out to be poison ivy wrapped around it. Whatever that chemical is that makes you itch, it got into the smoke, and he breathed it in. Got poison ivy in his lungs, man.” He shook his head. “They had him sedated in the hospital for a week.”

  I stared at the innocuous-looking vine. “Thanks for the warning. Anything else here that might kill me?”

  “Oh, that won’t kill you. It’ll just make you wish you were dead.”

&
nbsp; I took several pictures with my phone as we approached the open, vine-free end. C.C. perused everything but the chapel, watching the woods with quick, darting eyes. He looked so hot standing in a shaft of sunlight, his broad shoulders straight and his feet spread defiantly, that I snapped a quick shot of him.

  He caught me. “Did you just take my picture?”

  “Yeah. Hope that’s okay.”

  “Yeah, well, you can take a picture of me anytime. This is your one chance to see this place.”

  I belatedly realized that, whatever he’d said earlier, he really was worried, perhaps even scared, at the prospect of meeting these Durants. And that scared me. I went to the chapel entrance and peered inside.

  The floor of the real chapel was all dirt, with weeds sprouting wherever they could. Sunlight bathed the whole area, eliminating shadows and making everything pop in high-def clarity. A few big chunks of the wall had fallen off and remained where they landed, and a snake basked across one of them.

  Our set was different: we had a platform at the back for the ghosts to stride so they’d be above the other actors onstage. And yet in the center of the real chapel’s floor, where we had our ghosts burying something, there was in fact a clear spot, bare of weeds and stones, where the hard-packed dirt lay naked.

  “Watch out for snakes,” C.C. said, and threw a rock at the one stretched across the piece of wall. It slithered rapidly away. “Copperheads and rattlesnakes love this sort of place.”

  “Which one was that?”

  “That was just a spreadin’ adder. It won’t hurt you. But you gotta watch for those others.”

  “I had no idea the woods were so dangerous.”

  “Yeah, good thing nothing bad ever happens in the big city.”

  I crept carefully closer to the empty spot in the center of the chapel floor, watching for snakes as instructed. I saw none. When I reached the spot, I said casually, “Wonder what’s buried under here?”

  “Where?”

  “In the center. This clear spot.”

  “What makes you think something’s buried there?”

  “Ray’s play says there is. Says a woman named Byrda buried something there.”

  “What did he say it was?”