by Stephen King
“Yeah,” she said, crying harder than ever. “After that Shiloh guy took his hands and practically pulled him up.”
Con hadn’t said anything, and I realized he wasn’t at the table anymore. I saw him out in the backyard, standing by the elm from which our tire swing hung. He was leaning his head against the bark with his hands clasping the tree and his shoulders shaking.
Unlike Claire, though, he had eaten his dinner. I remember that. Ate up everything on his plate and asked for seconds in a strong, clear voice.
• • •
There were guest preachers, arranged for by the deacons, on the next three Sundays, but Pastor Givens wasn’t one of them. In spite of being calm, comforting, and appropriate at Willow Grove, I expect he wasn’t asked. As well as being reticent by nature and upbringing, Yankees also have a tendency to be comfortably prejudiced in matters of religion and race. Three years later, I heard one of my teachers at Gates Falls High School tell another, in tones of outraged wonder: “Now why would anyone want to shoot that Reverend King? Heaven sakes, he was a good nigger!”
MYF was canceled following the accident. I think all of us were glad—even Andy, also known as Emperor of Bible Drills. We were no more ready to face Reverend Jacobs than he was to face us. Toy Corner, where Claire and the other girls had entertained Morrie (and themselves), would have been awful to look at. And who would play the piano for Sing Time? I suppose someone in town could have done it, but Charles Jacobs was in no condition to ask, and it wouldn’t have been the same, anyway, without Patsy’s blond hair shifting from side to side as she swung the upbeat hymns, like “We Are Marching to Zion.” Her blond hair was underground now, growing brittle on a satin pillow in the dark.
One gray November afternoon while Terry and I were spray-stenciling turkeys and cornucopias on our windows, the telephone jangled one long and one short: our ring. Mom answered, spoke briefly, then put the phone down and smiled at Terry and me.
“That was Reverend Jacobs. He’s going to be in the pulpit this coming Sunday to preach the Thanksgiving sermon. Won’t that be nice?”
• • •
Years later—I was in high school and Claire was home on vacation from the University of Maine—I asked my sister why nobody had stopped him. We were out back, pushing the old tire swing. She didn’t have to ask who I meant; that Sunday sermon had left a scar on all of us.
“Because he sounded so reasonable, I think. So normal. By the time people realized what he was actually saying, it was too late.”
Maybe, but I remembered both Reggie Kelton and Roy Easterbrook interrupting him near the end, and I knew something was wrong even before he started, because he didn’t follow that day’s scriptural reading with the customary conclusion: May God bless His holy word. He never forgot that, not even on the day I met him, when he showed me the little electric Jesus walking across Peaceable Lake.
His scripture on the day of the Terrible Sermon was from the thirteenth chapter of First Corinthians, the same passage Pastor Givens read over the twin graves—one big, one small—at Willow Grove: “For we know in part, and we prophesy in part. But when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away. When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things. For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.”
He closed the large Bible on the pulpit—not hard, but we all heard the thump. West Harlow Methodist was full on that Sunday, every pew taken, but it was dead quiet, not so much as a cough. I remember praying he’d get through it okay; that he wouldn’t break down in tears.
Myra Harrington—Me-Maw—was in the front pew, and although her back was to me, I could imagine her eyes, half buried in their fatty, yellowish sockets and sparkling with avidity. My family was in the third pew, where we always sat. Mom’s face was serene, but I could see her white-gloved hands clenched on her large softcover Bible with enough force to bend it into a U. Claire had nibbled off her lipstick. The silence between the conclusion of the scripture reading and the commencement of what was known in Harlow ever after as the Terrible Sermon could not have been much longer than five seconds, ten at most, but to me it seemed to stretch out forever. His head was bowed over the huge pulpit Bible with its bright gold edging. When he finally looked up and showed his calm, composed face, a faint sigh of relief rippled through the congregation.
“This has been a hard and troubled time for me,” he said. “I hardly need to tell you that; this is a close-knit community, and we all know each other. You folks have reached out to me in every way you could, and I’ll always be grateful. I want especially to thank Laura Morton, who brought me the news of my loss with such tenderness and gentle regard.”
He nodded to her. She nodded back, smiled, then raised one white-gloved hand to brush away a tear.
“I have spent much of the time between the day of my loss and this Sunday morning in reflection and study. I would like to add in prayer, but although I have gotten on my knees time and again, I have not sensed the presence of God, and so reflection and study had to do.”
Silence from the congregation. Every eye on him.
“I went to the Gates Falls Library in search of The New York Times, but all they have on file is the Weekly Enterprise, so I was directed to Castle Rock, where they have the Times on microfilm—‘Seek and ye shall find,’ Saint Matthew tells us, and how right he was.”
A few low chuckles greeted this, but they died away quickly.
“I went day after day, I scrolled microfilm until my head ached, and I want to share some of the things I found.”
From the pocket of his black suit coat he took a few file cards.
“In June of last year, three small tornadoes tore through the town of May, Oklahoma. Although there was property damage, no one was killed. The townsfolk flocked to the Baptist church to sing songs of praise and offer prayers of thanksgiving. While they were in there, a fourth tornado—a monster F5—swept down on May and demolished the church. Forty-one persons were killed. Thirty others were seriously injured, including children who lost arms and legs.”
He shuffled that card to the bottom and looked at the next.
“Some of you may remember this one. In August of last year, a man and his two sons set out on Lake Winnipesaukee in a rowboat. They had the family dog with them. The dog fell overboard, and both boys jumped in to rescue him. When the father saw his sons were in danger of drowning, he jumped in himself, inadvertently overturning the boat. All three died. The dog swam to shore.” He looked up and actually smiled for a moment—it was like the sun peeking through a scrim of clouds on a cold January day. “I tried to find out what happened to that dog—whether the woman who lost her husband and sons kept it or had it put down—but the information wasn’t available.”
I snuck a look at my brothers and sister. Terry and Con only looked puzzled, but Andy was white-faced with horror, anger, or both. His hands were clenched in his lap. Claire was crying silently.
Next file card.
“October of last year. A hurricane swept onshore near Wilmington, North Carolina, and killed seventeen. Six were children at a church day-care center. A seventh was reported missing. His body was found a week later, in a tree.”
Next.
“This item concerns a missionary family ministering to the poor with food, medicine, and the gospel in what used to be the Belgian Congo and is now, I believe, Zaire. There were five of them. They were murdered. Although the article did not say—only the news that’s fit to print in The New York Times, you know—the article implied that the killers may have been of a cannibalistic bent.”
A disapproving mutter—Reggie Kelton was at the center of it—arose. Jacobs heard and raised one hand in what was almost a benedictory gesture.
�
��Perhaps I need not go into further details—the fires, the floods, the earthquakes, the riots, the assassinations—although I could. The world shudders with them. Yet reading these stories provided some comfort to me, because they prove that I am not alone in my suffering. The comfort is only small, however, because such deaths—like those of my wife and son—seem so cruel and capricious. Christ ascended into heaven in his body, we are told, but all too often we poor mortals here on earth are left with ugly heaps of maimed meat and that constant, reverberating question: Why? Why? Why?
“I have read scripture all my life—first at my mother’s knee, then in Methodist Youth Fellowship, and then in divinity school—and I can tell you, my friends, that nowhere in scripture is that question directly addressed. The closest the Bible comes is this reading from Corinthians, where Saint Paul says, in effect, ‘It’s no good asking, my brethren, because you wouldn’t understand, anyway.’ When Job asked God Himself, he got an even more blunt response: ‘Were you there when I made the world?’ Which translates, in the language of our younger parishioners, to ‘Buzz off, Bunky.’”
No chuckles this time.
He studied us, a faint smile touching the corners of his lips, the light from our stained glass window putting blue and red diamonds on his left cheek.
“Religion is supposed to be our comfort when the hard times come. God is our rod and our staff, the Great Psalm declares; He will be with us and bear us up when we take that inevitable walk through the Valley of the Shadow of Death. Another Psalm assures us that God is our refuge and our strength, although the people who were lost in that Oklahoma church might dispute the idea . . . if they still had mouths to dispute with. And the father and his two children, drowning because they tried to rescue the family pet—did they ask God what was going on? What the deal was? And did He answer, ‘Tell you in a few minutes, guys,’ as the water choked their lungs and death darkened their minds?
“Let us say plainly what Saint Paul meant when he spoke of that darkened glass. He meant we’re supposed to take it all on faith. If our faith is strong, we’ll go to heaven, and we’ll understand the whole thing when we get there. As if life were a joke, and heaven the place where the cosmic punchline is finally explained to us.”
There was soft feminine sobbing in the church now, and more pronounced masculine rumblings of discontent. But at that point, no one had walked out or stood up to tell Reverend Jacobs he should sit down because he was edging into blasphemy. They were still too stunned.
“When I tired of researching the seemingly whimsical and often terribly painful deaths of the innocent, I looked into the various branches of Christianity. Gosh, friends, I was surprised at how many there are! Such a Tower of Doctrine! The Catholics, the Episcopalians, the Methodists, the Baptists—both hardshell and softshell—the C of Es, the Anglicans, the Lutherans, the Presbyterians, the Unitarians, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Seventh-day Adventists, the Quakers, the Shakers, Greek Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox, the Shilohites—mustn’t forget them—and half a hundred more.
“Here in Harlow, we’re all on party lines, and it seems to me that religion is the biggest party line of them all. Think how the lines to heaven must get jammed on Sunday mornings! And do you know what I find fascinating? Each and every church dedicated to Christ’s teaching thinks it’s the only one that actually has a private line to the Almighty. And good gosh, I haven’t even mentioned the Muslims, or the Jews, or the theosophists, or the Buddhists, or those who worship America itself just as fervently as, for eight or a dozen nightmare years, the Germans worshipped Hitler.”
Right then was when the walkouts started. First just a few at the back, heads down and shoulders hunched (as if they had been spanked), then more and more. Reverend Jacobs seemed to take no notice.
“Some of these various sects and denominations are peaceful, but the largest of them—the most successful of them—have been built on the blood, bones, and screams of those who have the effrontery not to bow to their idea of God. The Romans fed Christians to the lions; the Christians dismembered those they deemed to be heretics or sorcerers or witches; Hitler sacrificed the Jews in their millions to the false god of racial purity. Millions have been burned, shot, hung, racked, poisoned, electrocuted, and torn to pieces by dogs . . . all in God’s name.”
My mother was sobbing audibly, but I didn’t look around at her. I couldn’t. I was frozen in place. By horror, yes, of course. I was only nine. But there was also a wild, inchoate exultation, a feeling that at last someone was telling me the exact unvarnished truth. Part of me hoped he would stop; most of me wished fiercely that he would go on, and I got my wish.
“Christ taught us to turn the other cheek and to love our enemies. We pay the concept lip service, but when most of us are struck, we try to pay back double. Christ drove the moneychangers from the temple, but we all know those quick-buck artists never stay away for long; if you’ve ever sat yourself down to a rousing game of church bingo or heard a radio preacher begging for money, you know exactly what I mean. Isaiah prophesied that the day would come when we’d beat our swords into plowshares, but all they’ve been beaten into in our current dark age is atomic bombs and intercontinental ballistic missiles.”
Reggie Kelton stood up. He was as red as my brother Andy was pale. “You need to sit down, Reverend. You’re not yourself.”
Reverend Jacobs did not sit down.
“And what do we get for our faith? For the centuries we’ve given this church or that one our gifts of blood and treasure? The assurance that heaven is waiting for us at the end of it all, and when we get there, the punchline will be explained and we’ll say, ‘Oh yeah! Now I get it.’ That’s the big payoff. It’s dinned into our ears from our earliest days: heaven, heaven, heaven! We will see our lost children, our dear mothers will take us in their arms! That’s the carrot. The stick we’re beaten with is hell, hell, hell! A Sheol of eternal damnation and torment. We tell children as young as my dear lost son that they stand in danger of eternal fire if they steal a piece of penny candy or lie about how they got their new shoes wet.
“There’s no proof of these after-life destinations; no backbone of science; there is only the bald assurance, coupled with our powerful need to believe that it all makes sense. But as I stood in the back room of Peabody’s and looked down at the mangled remains of my boy, who wanted to go to Disneyland much more than he wanted to go to heaven, I had a revelation. Religion is the theological equivalent of a quick-buck insurance scam, where you pay in your premium year after year, and then, when you need the benefits you paid for so—pardon the pun—so religiously, you discover the company that took your money does not, in fact, exist.”
That was when Roy Easterbrook stood up in the rapidly emptying church. He was an unshaven hulk of a man who lived in a rusty little trailer park on the east side of town, close to the Freeport line. As a rule, he only came at Christmas, but today he’d made an exception.
“Rev’run,” he said. “I heard there was a bottle of hooch in the glovebox of your car. And Mert Peabody said when he bent over to work on your wife, she smelt like a barroom. So there’s your reason. There’s your sense of it. You ain’t got the spine to accept the will of God? Fine. But leave these other ones alone.” With that, Easterbrook turned and lumbered out.
It stopped Jacobs cold. He stood gripping the pulpit, eyes blazing in his white face, lips pressed together so tightly his mouth had disappeared.
My dad stood, then. “Charles, you need to step down.”
Reverend Jacobs shook his head as if to clear it. “Yes,” he said. “You’re right, Dick. Nothing I say will make any difference, anyway.”
But it did. To one little boy, it did.
He stepped back, glanced around as if he no longer knew where he was, and then stepped forward again, although there was now no one to hear him except for my family, the church deacons, and Me-Maw, still planted in the first row with her eyes
bugging out.
“Just one more thing. We came from a mystery and it’s to a mystery we go. Maybe there’s something there, but I’m betting it’s not God as any church understands Him. Look at the babble of conflicting beliefs and you’ll know that. They cancel each other out and leave nothing. If you want truth, a power greater than yourselves, look to the lightning—a billion volts in each strike, and a hundred thousand amperes of current, and temperatures of fifty thousand degrees Fahrenheit. There’s a higher power in that, I grant you. But here, in this building? No. Believe what you want, but I tell you this: behind Saint Paul’s darkened glass, there is nothing but a lie.”
He left the pulpit and walked through the side door. The Morton family sat in the kind of silence people must experience after a bomb blast.
• • •
When we got home, Mom went into the big back bedroom, said she did not want to be disturbed, and closed the door. She stayed there the rest of the day. Claire cooked supper, and we ate mostly in silence. At one point Andy began to quote some scriptural passage that completely disproved what the Reverend had said, but Dad told him to shut his piehole. Andy looked at our father’s hands shoved deep into his pockets and zipped his lip.
After supper, Dad went out to the garage, where he was tinkering with Road Rocket II. For once Terry—usually his loyal assistant, almost his acolyte—did not join him, so I did . . . although not without hesitation.
“Daddy? Can I ask you a question?”
He was under the Rocket on a Crawligator, a caged light in one hand. Only his khaki-clad legs stuck out. “I suppose so, Jamie. Unless it’s about that goddam mess this morning. If that’s the case, you can also keep your piehole shut. I ain’t going there tonight. Tomorrow’ll be time enough. We’ll have to petition the New England Methodist Conference to fire him, and they’ll have to take it to Bishop Matthews in Boston. It’s a fucking mess, and if you ever tell your mother I used that word around you, she’ll beat me like a redheaded stepchild.”