The Covenant

by Jeff Crook

  “Today we come together to mourn friend and mother, Ruth Stirling Vardry. Let this not be a time of mourning. Ruth has joined our Lord and Savior in heaven. This I know because the Gospel tells me so. Not the Gospel you have been taught. The true Gospel, the Gospel hidden by the early church, the Gospel that I will reveal to you today.

  “Ruth Vardry was a sinner. To hear her tell, she was the worst sinner among us. Yet she died without fear of the grave, because of the Gospel I am about to reveal. She did not fear eternal torment, because of the Gospel I brought to her.

  “Jesus Christ was crucified and died for our sins. We all know this. We’ve heard it all our lives and some of us have accepted Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior and been washed in the Blood of the Lamb.”

  “Amen!” Luther cried fervently. His wife began to clap from between the senator’s lapels.

  “Amen!” Deacon echoed. “But that’s only part of the Gospel. The part they kept. The rest they hid from us, until today. Jesus died for our sins, but not just our old sins. All our sins. The sins we have committed and the sins we have yet to commit. The price has been paid. Forever. For everyone. You. Me. Catholics. Baptists. Muslims. Jews. Everybody. You don’t even have to want it. It’s done. Nothing more is required of you and me, for as it says in the book of Micah, chapter 6, verse 8, ‘What does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?’ Why would Jesus die for our sins, but only save us if we beg for forgiveness? If your children were drowning, would you only save the ones who asked for help? How is this any different than the old pagan religions and their demand for sacrifices and donations?”

  Luther wasn’t amening anymore. He sat with his chubby hand on the back of the pew, quietly knocking a three-carat diamond ring into the soft pinewood.

  “I’m telling you this is not the Gospel of Jesus. Men made these laws, the early church fathers, to secure their power, and then they hid Jesus’ true Gospel, the lost Gospel of the Good News, so you would keep giving them money and coming to their churches and begging for forgiveness over and over again. But what did Jesus say to the adulterous woman? Your sins are forgiven. Go and sin no more.”

  Luther stood up, furious, and stalked out. At the end of his pew he paused and looked back at his wife, but she hadn’t moved. She didn’t even look at him. Her eyes were closed, streaming with tears, her lips quivering in whispered prayer. He impatiently snapped his fingers a few times, then started up the aisle toward the back of the church. I noticed a few others rise to join him, but probably nowhere near as many as he hoped.

  Deacon thundered onward as though he hadn’t noticed. “This is the Good News, friends. You are forgiven. You are going to heaven. So is the person sitting next to you, and behind you, at the back of this church, down the highway, even those plying their trade in the whorehouses and crack houses of Memphis. You don’t need to be afraid anymore. Not of your fellow man. Not of your vengeful and jealous god. You are free. Free to leave this church and never return.”

  The doors closed behind Luther and his handful of acolytes. Eugene Kitchen remained at the door, his face nearly black with rage.

  “You don’t need me anymore, not to save your soul. I can’t save your soul. You can’t save your soul. The Church can’t save your soul. Only Jesus can do that, and He has done it. The price has been paid. Go and live a life of goodness and obey his Law, not because you’re afraid of dying and going to hell, but because you love the Lord and His Law and the world and the people He made.

  “That’s not to say there’s nothing left to do. Jesus said, go and sin no more. Death was defeated in the tomb. The sin of Adam was forgiven on the cross. But evil is real. There are demons among us, possessing us, trying to destroy all that is good and beautiful in this world. I know some of you have been possessed by the demons of lust, of greed, of addiction, of pride. You and I know these demons are real. Some of you have seen demons face to face, have wrestled with them in the dark places. You know what I’m talking about. I see the scars you bear. I bear those scars myself.”

  He grasped the microphone and ripped it from its stand, flung the cord back and strode forward, swinging his open Bible like a sword.

  “We have a job to do. We have battles to fight. Wherever there are people suffering, there are demons causing that suffering. Wherever some company is pouring their industrial filth into a river or fouling a beach, polluting our earth, our one and only earth, with the poisonous by-products of their profits, we will take our stand against evil.”

  “Amen,” several in the congregation said, Jenny among them.

  Deacon’s voice rose a notch in volume and intensity, so that I could feel it moving through me, like the thrumming of an engine deep below decks. “Wherever a man or woman sits in prison, wrongly accused or unjustly punished, so that some other man may profit by his suffering, we will fight the demons that torment him.” He pounded the rostrum and the crowd shouted Amen!

  “Wherever a child is beaten or starved or raped, or a woman lives in fear of her husband, or a man contemplates taking his own life so his family can collect his life insurance, we will succor them.”

  Amen! Now they were standing, lifting their hands into the air. Jenny’s face was wet with tears.

  “Wherever a grandmother rots in her own filth, or a grandfather dies alone in his bed, trapped in the corporate medical prisons that are our nursing homes, we will bring them peace.”

  Amen! They moved out into the aisles. Virginia Vardry staggered forward and slumped to her knees at the altar rail.

  “Evil surrounds us. Every day it grows stronger while the good do nothing. Will we do nothing?”

  No!

  “What will we do?”

  Fight!

  I didn’t know whether this was a funeral, a revival, a political rally, or a rock concert. Some of those women looked ready to fling their underwear on the altar. All I knew was that Luther had lost them forever. If Deacon had rolled out the Kool-Aid carts right then and there, they would have drank it and lain down, arm in arm in the jungle with him.

  He beamed across the shouting masses, his arms raised in victory until his eyes fell upon me, still sitting in the pew, and the headless Iraqi soldier sitting just in front of me. Neither of us had been moved by his words. He took a few long breaths and looked around him like a man bewildered by what he saw.

  “No,” he said, stepping back, distancing himself from the adoration. He laid his Bible on top of the lectern and returned the microphone to its stand. “No, my friends, Ruth Vardry was a good woman. She lived a long, full life. In her last days upon this earth, she tried to do some good with the riches God placed in her hands. Should we weep at her passing, or should we not make a joyful noise unto the Lord? Lift up your voices in praise. Serve the Lord with great gladness, and come before Him with song.”

  As he spoke these last words, the curtain behind the pulpit parted, revealing a seven-piece rock band. An electric hum of amplifiers preceded the first thundering power chord as they ripped into a metal version of the “Dies Irae” from Mozart’s Requiem in D Minor. They followed with an assortment of traditional hymns, modern Christian Rock horrors, spirituals, and old-timey country songs of praise, to which Deacon’s unwashed saints and Luther’s lost converts danced in the aisles together, clapping, shaking tambourines, and singing in half a dozen languages. It looked like a Hare Krishna convention. Eugene finally fled, lest the unholy sight blast his eyes.

  Finally the music died down. Deacon wiped the sweat from his face with a towel and lifted up his trembling hands. “Jackie Lyons!” he cried. I groaned and tried to slide down in the pew. Jenny pulled me up by the elbow. “Jackie Lyons, you only knew Ruth a few weeks, but in that time she opened her heart to you. Those of us who knew her well know that she didn’t give her friendship easily.”

  “Amen,” Jenny intoned.

  “Ruth Vardry admired you. She admired your spirit. She admired your independence.”
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  He descended two or three steps, walking toward me with his hand outstretched. “We spoke quite often about the arrangements for her funeral. She knew her days were numbered, so she chose every song we have sung today, and she asked me to personally sing the benediction. Unfortunately, she passed before she made up her mind what song I should sing. So I’m going to ask you to pick something to close out her service.”

  “Help me out here,” I whispered to Jenny. She shrugged. I groped around for the name of a hymn, something I had heard in church when I was a kid, anything. The only one I could remember was something my mother used to sing. “What about ‘Peace in the Valley’?”

  “The old Thomas Dorsey standard, that’s a good one,” Deacon smiled.

  He nodded to the band, they tuned up and started to play, softly now, just the keyboard, bass, leading with an acoustic guitar. Deacon had a tremendous singing voice, powerful and deep, and the words, so simple and traditional, moved him to a depth of emotion I’d never seen in him. His tears began to flow as he sang, his face lifted heavenward. And not just his tears.

  As he launched into the chorus, peace in the valley, I was lifted on a wave of grief so near to joy it left me shaking and sobbing. Jenny pulled me into her arms and I lost my soul to that sanctimonious bastard.

  38

  I DIDN’T KNOW I COULD still feel. I thought I had been broken of all sentimentality by the dead I witnessed on an almost daily basis. I thought my heart a callus, a calcified scar that barely beat enough to keep me alive. That stupid little gospel tune completely broke me down. Maybe it was the magic, the magnetism of Deacon’s voice, or the moblike intensity of the congregation that swept me up.

  Or maybe it was because now I knew why my mother’s funeral had seemed unfinished. She had loved that song like no other. She had a collection of covers sung by Elvis, Johnny Cash, Randy Travis and a dozen other people I couldn’t remember. She had cross-stitched its lyrics and hung them in a gilt frame beside her bed. There’ll be no sadness, no sorrow, no trouble, trouble I see. There’ll be peace in the valley for me. When I was a kid, growing up and hating everything about my mother, that song was just another reason to treat her as a stupid bumpkin blindly chasing a cartoon Jesus to church every Sunday in the misplaced hope of reforming me. It never occurred to me before that maybe her hopes and fears didn’t involve me at all. Maybe she was just as scared, alone and tired of it all as I was.

  But my father hadn’t played this song, her song, at her own funeral. It had escaped his memory as easily as it did mine.

  * * *

  While we waited outside for them to put the coffin in the hearse, Deacon took me aside and pulled me close, his fingers laced behind my back, his chin resting on top of my head. His hair was still damp from his exertions on stage, but he had recovered nicely enough from his tears. My eyes were still swollen, my nose dripping into the tissue I held to it. He kissed my hair and whispered, “Jackie, do you long for death?”

  The way he said it almost sounded like an invitation. I pulled back, momentarily alarmed, all my original Jim Jones suspicions reawakened. One of the religious charlatan’s most powerful tools was his ability to seduce women and make them his staunchest defenders. “Not particularly. Why do you ask?”

  “‘Peace in the Valley’ is about laying down your burdens and going to your reward. Are you tired of this life?”

  “Are you offering me your Kool-Aid?” I asked, and immediately regretted it. He slid his sunglasses onto his nose and stepped out into the sun, away from me. I tried to apologize, but his thoughts were already elsewhere. He had already shaken my dust from his feet. I wondered if I had lost him, reminded myself that I had never had him.

  Eugene approached, a smirk on his face below his still-swollen nose. Most of the bruising had faded to a dull yellow, like an old mustard stain around his eyes. I longed to crease his smug face with the knuckles of my right hand. “Is this the kind of church you’re planning to build, preacher?” he asked.

  Deacon folded a stick of gum into his mouth and balled up the foil wrapper before answering. “No, I plan to build a much louder one.”

  “I’ve never heard anybody preach a sermon at a funeral.”

  Deacon smacked his gum and smiled. “That’s what Mrs. Ruth wanted. She says to me, preacher, I want you to preach the bastards a sermon. What about, Mrs. Ruth? I says. I don’t want to hear any that resurrection shit, she says. I want some God-damn fire and brimstone. Preach them the story of Lot, she says. She picked it out in particular. Lot, all the way through, from the angels in the city to Lot’s daughters fucking their drunk daddy in the cave. Let it be a lesson to them all, she says to me.” He laughed derisively and stuck his hands in his pockets, and I wondered if some of his words hadn’t been meant for me.

  Scowling, Eugene pulled a folded piece of paper from his jacket and handed it to Deacon. “Here’s a little something to remember her by,” he said, then strolled away.

  * * *

  I rode with Deacon in his pickup. He listened to the country music radio station. The concrete highway under the wheels went ku-chuk ku-chuk ku-chuk in time with the music. The wind whistled through the side window, which I had lowered to let out the smoke from my cigarette.

  Luther had originally planned to bury Ruth at Memorial Park in Memphis, but at Deacon’s urging, he agreed to put her in the cemetery in the woods. We turned off the highway into the church construction area, drove over the gravel track past the half-empty camp of Deacon’s saints and parked under the trees between two bulldozers.

  We walked in single file across a meadow at the edge of the woods where the bulldozers and graders hadn’t gone. The sun was really up now and the heat was like a breath of hell. Grasshoppers as big as your finger sailed out ahead of us as we pushed through the tall sunburned grass, the coffin held aloft on the shoulders of six strong men. Deacon led us to an old wooden bridge over the creek that ran out of the lake. It was as dry as the creek in the woods.

  Deacon’s workers had used cutting torches to remove the old rusted gate from the crypt and replaced it with a new one. They carried her inside. Luther stood at the entrance and read the funeral service like he was reading a menu, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, cuppa joe ninety-nine cents for seniors on Sundays. He closed the gate, locked it, dropped the key into his inside jacket pocket and patted it like a man whose ship had finally come in.

  39

  JENNY AND I WALKED HOME through the woods well before dark, well before the children began to play their reindeer games. She opened a bottle of wine and we sat on the couch. There was nothing to watch on television. Eli sat on the floor in front of the fireplace and banged toys together. Cassie was upstairs reading a book.

  Jenny crossed her legs into a lotus posture, her glass of wine resting on her knee. “Sam used to send Reece emails,” she said out of the blue.

  “What kind of emails?”

  “After she was gone, you know? He’d send her emails. He said he could almost pretend she was away at camp and too busy to respond. But he sent them anyway.”

  “What did they say?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You never read them?”

  She took a sip of wine and held it in her mouth for a while. “I couldn’t. He loved her that much.”

  Eli toddled over and showed her one of his toys, ran it up and down her leg making brumm! noises, and she smiled and said Wow! until he was satisfied that she was thoroughly entertained. I stared at the fireplace, waiting for a girl to appear. She never did, but Jenny followed my gaze and seemed to read my mind.

  “One winter night—this was a few years after Reece died and I think I had just found out I was pregnant with Eli. Sam and I were sitting here reading. We had a fire going because it was the coldest night of the year. For some reason, we both looked up at the same time. A black butterfly suddenly appeared from the flames and clung to the fire screen, fluttering, and we looked at each other, like, to make sure we weren’t crazy. I
was like, Am I seeing this? Sam got up and opened the screen. The butterfly flew across and landed on this lampshade.” She indicated the lamp on the table beside her. “Sam said, look, it’s Reece. She’s come home.”

  People are very good at lying to themselves. I was living proof of that.

  “Reece always loved butterflies. And pigs. Sam took it outside and let it go, but it was so cold I doubt it survived.” She finished off her wine and stood up, took my empty glass. “I don’t think it was real, anyway.”

  While she was refilling our glasses in the kitchen, I asked, “Did Sam have a camera?”

  “Sure. It’s upstairs. Do you need to borrow it?”

  “No. Is that the only one?”

  “He had another one at the office that he used for his landscaping business.” She returned, handed me a full glass, folded her legs up like a fawn and settled on the couch. “I’ll see if Bert can bring it by.”

  * * *

  Jenny went to bed. With the house mostly asleep, I took my glass of wine and sat outside by the pool. Bats dipped in and out of the light over the boat dock, feeding in the halo of bugs. I needed a quiet moment to cogitate, try to put everything together. What I knew wouldn’t fill an empty wineglass. Somebody had killed Sam. That person had then cleaned up after themselves quite nicely, probably burning every diary and journal, deleting every photo and email that might have pointed to a motive in his murder. The only thing they missed was that suitcase in the attic.

  I didn’t like where this line of thought was taking me. My cigarette burned down almost to the filter. I thumped it straight up into the air, as high and hard as I could. The glowing red cherry hung for a moment at the top of its flight, then sailed off across the lake as if by magic, scribbling a dizzy red trail across the stars. The bat finally dropped the butt and it vanished into the water.