“And don’t forget,” concluded Zephora Hainey. “You’ve got another secret weapon.”
Bo quickly self-scanned his known and unknown qualities.
“Kate,” Zephora said, before he guessed something embarrassing. “Everyone likes Kate, and most anyone with any sense will love her.”
And that prediction, Bo had much time to reflect, proved that even the great Zephora Hainey could be wrong and underestimate the malice of Stallings Presbyterian. His wife had her fans but she was as much a target for their fractured, malcontent church as he was. No, honestly, she was more so because she had never once, never once, thought to withhold her opinion on anything.
“You got yourself a Hillary Clinton there,” old Jim Harker kept telling him, feeling Bo needed to hear it every week after service, pointedly not shaking hands at the door, not touching the minister as if he were a leper. Oh nothing was worse than having a Hillary Clinton as a wife. “What do you propose I do, Jim?” Bo unwisely asked him one week, when he was just testy enough to challenge the old coot. “Chain her up in the basement, put a gag in her mouth?”
“Women should be silent in the churches. They are not allowed to speak, says Corinthians,” he answered back without looking.
Kate thought there was nothing lower than a politician. But Bo really felt for them, understood them. Like a presidential candidate, everything Bo ever said, every stray absent comment, every mild loss of temper, every aside to a trusted congregant, was known, passed around, pored over, analyzed by the whole church—and often wildly misquoted and misinterpreted, too. “A church this rich,” he once said at a planning session, “has to make an answer to God why it is spending so much money on retreats and playground equipment when there are people in need of food within two miles of this church across the city line in Charlotte.” That spread around the church winning him shaken heads, disgusted comments, a there-they-go-again look. “You wanna go preach at a black church, be my guest,” said Hettie Bessemer, one of his chief detractors.
To want to feed the poor as Jesus commanded, to Hettie meant “wanting to do something for the blacks and Mexicans,” which meant you had no business at a white church, particularly a white church which threw a set amount of money to a consortium of churches’ charities which no doubt, surely, ended up doing some good for all those blacks who insist on being poor and undereducated and living in bad neighborhoods.
And if the all-white congregation wasn’t an emblem of something amiss in the church, the fierce, unthinking, blind homosexual-hatred was dazzling, breathtaking in its breadth and completeness. As Katie noted, “It’s not like there’s any shortage of old gay bachelors, lesbian spinsters, and gay kids galore in that church.”
“Yes,” Bo said, “but some of them are old homosexuals who denied themselves all their lives, and they figure if they could fight off the demon and go through life without a single moment of sexual fulfillment then these kids can, too.”
Bo and Kate knew about the kids. They came to talk about being gay, or thinking they were gay, or knowing they were gay having done something, something shameful, something with an adult in the church, a time or two. Bo saw the glory of Christ’s taking a stick and writing the sins before the condemners among the people who would execute the woman taken in adultery. He wished at times he could borrow Jesus’s gift, to show this congregation to itself, what lists of damnable offenses he could sketch out in front of some of the pious. No wonder so much of the Bible centers around inconvenient prophets or begrudging emissaries speaking truth to power, revealing the sins of the ones who would throw the stones—and no wonder they’re driven mad by it all.
Which reminded Bo of the second thing the minister has in common with the politician, that nothing surrounding his life was secret.
“I know you got a gay under your roof, Reverend,” said Ray Crutchfeld, even patting him aggressively on the shoulder, poor thing, to have a gay in your own family—imagine! “But that don’t permit you to go all soft on the Bible now, do it? Sin is sin, remember that.”
Bo’s heart skipped a beat. Crutchfield couldn’t know about … No, it had to be Joshua who he meant. Katie, when she was in the Peace Corps in Honduras, working in a remote village with one other woman, did have a loving and committed lesbian affair with her coworker. Once back in the States, the other woman reverted to heterosexuality, indeed, seemed to shun and resent Kate for their affair. Kate had hoped to launch an inner-city women’s shelter with this woman, but that was long ago, and there was no way Ray could find any of that out. No, Bo supposed that Joshua’s being gay was somehow public knowledge.
“You have some nerve speaking to me this way, Ray,” he said quietly. The impertinence of being told “sin is sin,” from Ray Crutchfeld of all people, on his third wife. Christ said of marriage what God has brought together let no man put asunder, so we know what he thinks of divorce but he doesn’t say a word about homosexuality, Ray, so little it concerns him— But of course he didn’t say that. “Sin is sin, Ray,” Bo said, after faltering a moment. “And we’re all sinners, with God finding no one sinner worse than another, but loving us all anyway and extending redemption through Christ Jesus. You believe that, don’t you?”
“Well, yes—”
“Are you in the judgment business, Ray? Jesus doesn’t say one thing about gays but I can give you a dozen quotes about judging and condemning and presuming to speak for God. Are you gonna be one of those with judgment and condemnation in your heart or will you have Christ’s love in your heart?”
Ray met his gaze without a blink. “Ain’t no fags in heaven, Reverend. And you and I both know that.”
Bo knew that this exchange would be replayed and wrongly interpreted throughout the church, too. More evidence for the Katie-is-a-lesbian rumor (maybe she and Hillary Clinton…), more demerits which would lead inevitably to them leaving this church, being asked to leave at some meeting of the elders, some whispered-about humiliation that the whole church would know and support before it would be presented to him and Kate as an irreversible fait accompli.
Babies, teenagers, old white men, black people. But there was one more subset of humans that the Reverend Beauregard Johnston did not and could not particularly come to terms with: his own family.
His decision to be a minister was not exactly embraced. He could see it in his mother’s eyes, a pall, a loss of some kind, a small distinguished settling for a lesser calling than law, business, politics. His father was always warmly supportive but even here too there was an effort behind his soft smile. “I’m sure you’ll be the best minister you can be,” he said, clasping his son’s shoulder. God, almost any profession might be substituted in that statement (“I’m sure you’ll be the best street juggler that you can be…”); it reeked of disappointment.
Did they think he took up the vocation lightly, as a lark, something to major in at Duke University, like Geography? He was sitting in the beautiful Duke Chapel, feeling tired but not despairing, not broken in some way, although the prospect of law school did not enliven him. And suddenly there was this bright light. He looked around in a panic to see its source, but it was all around him and nowhere else and this strange calm then suffused him, this immense peace and resolution welled up that made him wonder if his heart had stopped and that this were, unexpectedly, his death. If this were death, he remembered thinking, then let it come; he had no fear. And then a voice: You are mine. You have always been mine. And then gradually the gloom of the chapel returned and he was breathless, again looking around him for some source of it all. Okay, if he had been weeping or on the ropes, suicidal or despairing about life, yes, you might have thought it was a trick of the mind. But it was a Tuesday, for Christ’s sake! He staggered from the chapel, into the daylight, deciding to think about it later, even deciding to ignore it … but he couldn’t, and didn’t. And soon he knew, after a bit more prayer, what was expected of him.
Annie was savage. “You can’t possibly really want to peddle that claptr
ap about the Mean Old Man in the Sky, who created this world fifteen billion years ago so we could evolve over the last million, so that a percentage of the planet could know Jesus Christ for the last two thousand years as our personal savior and know that our every wayward orgasm and lustful thought is being tabulated by His Father who is prepared to send His imperfect children to a Hell which will last for fifteen times fifteen times fifteen billion years to the zillionth power because … He loves us.”
“Please Annie, just save it.” She had cornered him at a Sunday dinner and was stalking him as he walked steadily to his car and eventual escape.
“Here’s the thing, big brother. You’re gonna wake up in a few years and not believe it yourself, but by then you’ll be stuck, flogging these myths and fairy tales to all the pathetic death-fearing childlike people who long to have their bigotries in common so they can go through the pearly gates while the others go to the fiery lake. You’re going to resent them for needing you to believe it, for needing your complicity in the scam.”
“It’s not a scam.”
“Good, then don’t take a salary. Let God find a way to provide for you.”
“I’m not ashamed to say I believe in something.”
“No, it is I who believe in things, material things, corporeal demonstrable empirical things, and many ideals—art, clean politics, a generous social state, hatred of war. I am full to the brim with beliefs. You are the one hiding behind some two-millennia-old road show that has only recently stopped burning witches and wiping out Jews and leading crusades and inquisitions. And believe me, if the North Carolina rednecks you’ll be preaching to had their way, there’d be inquisitions all over again. Having failed to keep their slaves and the black men from dating the white women in the name of Jesus, they’ve turned their attention to hounding knocked-up teenagers and persecuting suicide-prone gay kids. And the Moslems of course—there’s an old chestnut. Do you think you’re anointed, called by God to keep company with yokels?”
“Goodbye Annie,” he said. And to annoy her, “I’ll pray for you.”
“Like George W. Bush, put by God into the White House for his Christian goodness and ready to enact God’s divine plan for civilian death in Iraq and Afghanistan. And the big U.S. blank-check plan for Israel too, I guess, since the Jews are scheduled to be converted by the Second Coming of Jeeeezus before too much longer.”
“I’m leaving.”
“It’s just typical of you—the whole thing.”
He stopped walking toward his car. “What’s typical? Being a minister is the very last thing one might have thought I would do.” Bo Johnston, valedictorian, scholarship to Duke University, following in his father’s footsteps, law school applications at one time in the mail, maybe an elected office as his father attained.
He would never forget that look Annie had perfected: of simultaneous disgust and barely contained laughter. “Oh Bo, I grew up with you. You cleaned up the abandoned lot with your troop of Webelos—it was in the paper. You made Eagle Scout—call the Observer. You wrote some dumb essay about how much you loved being an American and you won some VFW-sponsored fellowship, which got you in the paper. All our life you needed attention and approval. You got to Mecklenburg Country Day, you ran for class president and won. You played lacrosse and had to be team captain, too. You go to Duke and then find the Lord and you just can’t say, ‘Ah well, religion will shape and focus my life.’ Nope. You’ve got to be religious in front of everyone, you need the grandstand of the pulpit. No one can be your minister, you have to be everyone else’s minister, in control, dishing out God where everyone can see you doing it. Have you ever done anything that you didn’t try to get some kind of public adulation for? If you did something wonderful, like work quietly at men’s shelters or go abroad with the Red Cross, but you didn’t get an article written about you, would you self-destruct? Would it be worth your while to do good without the cameras running?”
He had replayed that speech a number of times and he knew what he should have said. That being a minister was precisely the humbling that his overachieving, Duke grad, law-school-bound self needed. Ministry was a thousand small humiliations and failings a day as you could do nothing better for people than simply hold their hand, or pray for them, or spout bromides in the face of life’s real tragedies. There were sermons that fell flat. There were reachings-out to the lost souls that were rejected, community projects that fell apart, moments of leadership that proved faint and insufficient to the crisis. Hours at old folks’ homes and in hospitals and with tragic teenagers, abandoned wives, broken men, and the legions, legions vast and innumerable, of the lonely-in-life … so much imperfect service at their behest and none of it, Annie, none of it, known to anyone but God.
* * *
A Johnston family Christmas tradition was goose for Christmas Dinner. Everyone wanted goose hot from the oven, bits of seared fatty skin and velvety dark breast or wing … but no one had ever wanted goose the next day. Goose casserole, chipped goose à la king, goose surprise, all inevitably scraped into the trash bag under the sink. So an edict went out unto all the family from Caesar—er, Jerene—that for Christmas 2007 there shalt be no leftovers. The refrigerator would evince no signs of there ever having been a 7,000-calorie-per-person Christmas feed of goose, an auxiliary glazed ham, five vegetables, a congealed salad, trays of pickles and chutneys and condiments, black pumpernickel rolls (irresistible, and a recipe passed down from the German Jarvis ancestors), and too many lard-enriched pies, chocolate chess, mincemeat, German chocolate-coconut, cheeses, petits fours, everything but the Roman slave holding a basin to throw everything up into. There was a bottle of champagne to begin the meal but after that temperance ruled. We’re not going to drink our way through the holidays, was Jerene Johnston’s edict on that.
“Hm, tell that,” Kate noted to her husband, “to your Uncle Gaston.”
It used to be Annie was the sole advocate for wine throughout the meal, Presbyterian continence be damned, but in recent years Jerilyn and Skip Baylor, now newlyweds, were equally devoted to the cause (Skip would bring a flask, so they had been cheating); Joshua and Dorrie seemed to be mildly inebriated already when they arrived, and they, too, had joined the chorus for wine throughout the meal. Bo wondered aloud to his mother if maybe this year they should accompany at least the goose with red wine, if only for health reasons—
“Beauregard, we end up fighting and saying horrible things to each other most years without aid of wine,” she said. “I fear what would become of us fueled by demon alcohol.”
Last year there were so many leftovers, a gallon of brown-sugared yams, a barely touched cauldron of collard greens, halves of uneaten pies, so this year Bo and Kate were bringing a variety of Tupperware containers to take away all the leftovers for the Five Churches Soup Kitchen. Bo carried an ice chest from the garage and met Kate in the driveway who was carrying a cardboard box filled with empty Tupperware bowls and lids, run through the dishwasher that morning, likely none of them matching up.
Bo noticed that his wife had chosen to wear a man’s red dress shirt and dark denims—perfect for the soup kitchen and the menial labor to come, but terrible for the impression it would make on Bo’s mother. He could have said Are you wearing that to Jerene Johnston’s house? And she might have gone inside and changed but … why should she change? Kate had a pageboy haircut, honey brown going gray, and her usual costume was tomboy wear, always had been. For church she had a sleeveless black frock which was just formal enough, but at most church functions, she wore a Duke sweatshirt and jeans. The youth group loves her; they barely detect an age difference. There is the fantasy fueled by afternoon women’s TV shows that if you fancy someone up, do a makeover, find the right dress and personal style, they can be a fashion knockout. Not Kate. He had seen her fixed up, makeup and beauty-parlor hair, a lovely dress from one of the better stores, and she always looked like the fourteen-year-old tomboy forced into her Sunday clothes. But still, not to make an effort
… It would be entered in Jerene’s silently compiled list of grievances.
“We don’t have to go, you know,” Kate said, a few miles from the Johnston residence.
“We have to.”
“We have the perfect excuse. We’re ministering to the homeless, helping them know the love of Christ on the weekend before his birthday. When you give a luncheon or a dinner, do not invite your friends or your brothers or your relatives in case they may invite you in return, and you would be repaid. But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind. And you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you—”
“You want to use Jesus to hide behind?”
“Minister’s—and minister’s wife’s—prerogative.”
They would take the Stalling Presbyterian Church van. Last year they picked up Joshua and Dorrie, then swung by for Aunt Dillard, then went by Bo’s grandmother, Mrs. Jarvis. This year was a Gaston year so Mrs. Jarvis would be staying put in the Lattamore Acres Retirement Community, by mutual consent. As they drove to the house, he wondered why no one this year wanted a ride. Kate knew: “After last year’s donnybrook, everybody’s driving their own cars so they can escape.”
Bo sighed. “I asked Mom to sit us down near Uncle Gaston and Norma and Dad. Annie will be up on Mom’s end.”
“Last year I had Annie on one side of me reviewing Richard Dawkins’s atheism book, point by point, and Jerilyn on the other side of me, sitting there like a lump. Oh good God, we’re first,” Kate muttered as they rounded the hilltop curve of Providence Road. As Bo turned for the driveway, she cried, “Park in the street! Park in the street!”
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