Every Boy Should Have a Man

by Preston L. Allen

  “Christ is married to the backslider. Barry and I went before God on our knees. We repented of our sin. But you, Elwyn, will you forgive us?”

  “I’m not God. It’s not for me to forgive.”

  “It’s important to me. You are my true friend.”

  “I’m not God.”

  She made a sound somewhere between a gasp and a sigh. My Mazda stalled again. I got out, walked around to the front, and popped the hood. I jiggled as Peachie clicked. Oh God, I prayed, give me grace.

  * * *

  I didn’t feel so holy as I waited for the last remnants of the Missionary Society to leave Sister Morrisohn’s house.

  My grandmother, of course, was the last to go. She stood on the porch with her heavy arm draped over Sister Morrisohn’s shoulder telling the grieving widow a last important something. As my grandmother talked, she scanned the surroundings. East to west. What was she looking for? Did she think I would make my move with everyone watching? She should have known that I would park down the street behind a neighbor’s overgrown shrubbery where I could see and not be seen.

  My grandmother embraced Sister Morrisohn and kissed her goodbye on the cheek. At last, she lumbered down the short steps with the help of Sister McGowan (the mother of Barry!), who often gave her rides now that she was too old to drive. As Sister McGowan’s car pulled off the property, I fired up my engine.

  I left my black funeral jacket and tie in the car. I prayed for courage.

  I rang her doorbell. “Elwyn. Come in.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Sit down. Would you like something to drink? There’s some fruit punch left.”

  “Okay.”

  I was sucked into the plush red-velvet couch. Mounted on the wall across from me was a large oil painting of them on their wedding day. She was chubbier as a young woman. He looked about the same. She had only been twenty-six the day they married. He had been sixty-two. Beneath the painting was the grand piano he had bid me play every time I visited his house. I remembered that two years prior, the youth choir had performed the Christmas cantata right here in their living room. I had played “O Holy Night,” while Barry, on Christmas break from Bible College, had sung. I had foolishly thought that Peachie’s enthusiastic applause was meant for me.

  Sister Morrisohn, still wearing black, returned with a glass of fruit punch and a napkin. I took it from her and she sat down on the couch a few inches away from me. Limb brushed against limb. I drank the better part of my punch in one swallow.

  She cupped her stomach. “I don’t know when my appetite will return. I haven’t eaten but a mouthful of food since I woke up and found him. I knew it would come one day, but I still wasn’t ready for it. We’re never ready for it, are we?”

  “Well,” I said, because I didn’t know what else to say. “Well.”

  “If it weren’t for the church, I don’t know how I would have made it. Everyone has been so nice to me.”

  In a voice that flaked from my throat, I said, “You must have loved him.”

  “Yes. I was a very different person when we met. He saved me from myself. He led me to the Lord.”

  She was different when he met her. I prayed, Lord forgive me, as I glanced at her doubly pierced ears. What was she like before? Could she be that different person again?

  “Before you met him, what kind of sins did you commit?”

  “Sins? I don’t think about them anymore.” She raised holy hands. “Praise God, I’m free.”

  “Praise God,” I said, raising holy hands, careful not to spill the remainder of my drink. “But are you ever tempted?”

  “All are tempted, Elwyn, but only the yielding is sin.” She clapped her hands. “Hallelujah.”

  “Hallelujah” died on my lips as my eyes followed her neckline down to the top button of her funeral dress. Bright flesh showed through black lace like a beacon. All the signs were there: her smell, her touch, her plea that I not forget her. Limb against limb. I would not let her get away as Peachie had. “But do you ever feel like yielding?”

  “What?”

  I folded my napkin under my glass of punch and with trembling hand set the glass on the octagonal coffee table before the couch. I turned and reached for her hand.

  “Elwyn, what are you doing?”

  I kissed her on the mouth. I pressed her hands up against my chest.

  She tore away from me and sprang to her feet. “Elwyn—help me, Jesus!—what are you doing?”

  “You’re a beautiful woman,” I squeaked, but it was no use. She was not to be seduced.

  “Elwyn!”

  I buried my head in my hands.

  “You need prayer, Elwyn,” she said sadly. “You need the Lord.”

  “Yes,” I replied, without looking up. “Yes.”

  Now there was a soothing hand on my neck like a mother’s. I wept and I wept.

  “Serving the Lord at your age is not easy, Elwyn. Don’t give up.” Sister Morrisohn rubbed my neck and prayed. “Christ is married to the backslider. Confess your secret sins.”

  And confess I did.

  And then I wept some more because the more she rubbed my neck, the more forgiveness I needed. For when she got down on her knees beside me and began to pray against my face, the very scent of her expanded my lungs like a bellows, and her breathing—her warm breath against my cheeks, my ear, into my eyes burning hot with tears—was everything I imagined a lover’s kiss might be.

  End of Excerpt

  Praise for Jesus Boy

  “Heartfelt and occasionally hilarious, Jesus Boyis a tender masterpiece.”—Dennis Lehane, author of Mystic River and The Given Day

  “Generations of illicit sex run through this clever and wide-ranging book [about religious addiction] in which the flesh always triumphs . . . Surely no one does church sexy like Allen . . . Allen’s writing by turns is solemn and funny . . . It would be easy for Jesus Boy to become fluffy satire but Allen keeps his characters real.” —New York Times Book Review

  “Allen has created a consummate tragicomedy of African American family secrets and sorrows, and of faith under duress and wide open to interpretation. Perfect timing and crackling dialogue, as well as heartrending pain balanced by uproarious predicaments, make for a shout-hallelujah tale of transgression and grace, a gospel of lusty and everlasting love.” —Booklist

  “Jesus Boy is one of those books that makes you sit up and go . . . WHAT? No novel should be this enthralling. With a mesmerizing style, Preston L. Allen offers sentences that you reread because of their sheer enchantment and sense of wonder they invoke . . . in magical prose that lights up the pages. This is a novel unlike any I’ve ever read and among the very best of the decade. What a joy to read a book you can truly call a contemporary classic.” —Ken Bruen, author of Sanctuary and The Guards

  “Ten More Titles to Read Now: Think African American Romeo and Juliet, as played out in a devout Christian community.” —O, The Oprah Magazine

  “This latest from Allen is hilarious . . . Scenes of preaching and singing in the church convey the boisterous fervor of African American gospel music and religious practice in a soulful, vibrant style . . . This is a very enjoyable and well-done novel; highly recommended."—Library Journal

  “A riveting story of star-crossed love, Jesus Boy plumbs the hypocrisies and impossible stringencies of evangelical America with humor and no small amount of pathos. This novel is definitely a guilty pleasure.” —Cristina García, author of Dreaming in Cuban

  Also by Preston L. Allen

  and available from Akashic Books,

  at bookstores, and from e-book vendors everywhere.

  ___________________

  All or Nothing

  “As with Frederick and Steven Barthelme’s disarming gambling memoir, Double Down, the chief virtue of All or Nothing is its facility in enlightening nonbelievers, showing how this addiction follows recognizable patterns of rush and crash, but with a twist—the buzz is in the process, not the result . . . A
s a cartographer of autodegradation, Allen takes his place on a continuum that begins, perhaps, with Dostoyevsky’s Gambler, courses through Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano, William S. Burroughs’s Junky, the collected works of Charles Bukowski and Hubert Selby Jr., and persists in countless novels and (occasionally fabricated) memoirs of our puritanical, therapized present. Like Dostoyevsky, Allen colorfully evokes the gambling milieu—the chained (mis)fortunes of the players, their vanities and grotesqueries, their quasi-philosophical ruminations on chance. Like Burroughs, he is a dispassionate chronicler of the addict’s daily ritual, neither glorifying nor vilifying the matter at hand.” —New York Times Book Review

  “Dark and insightful . . . The well-written novel takes the reader on a chaotic ride as . . . Allen reveals how addiction annihilates its victims and shows that winning isn’t always so different from losing.” —Publishers Weekly

  “A gambler’s hands and heart perpetually tremble in this raw story of addiction. ‘We gamble to gamble. We play to play. We don’t play to win.’ Right there, P, desperado narrator of this crash-’n’-burn novella, sums up the madness . . . Allen’s brilliant at conveying the hothouse atmosphere of hell-bent gaming. Fun time in the Inferno.” —Kirkus Reviews

  PRESTON L. ALLEN is a recipient of a State of Florida Individual Artist Fellowship and a winner of the Sonja H. Stone Prize in Fiction for his collection of stories Churchboys and Other Sinners. His work has appeared in various literary anthologies and journals including Las Vegas Noir, Miami Noir, the Seattle Review, 1111, Drum Voices, and Black Renaissance Noire. His novels All or Nothing and Jesus Boy have received rave reviews from O, the Oprah Magazine, Library Journal, Feminist Review, and the New York Times. He teaches writing in South Florida.

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