Maggie didn’t think she had monkeyed about with anything unless it was Mr. Winslow’s files. “I’m not sure I understand,” she said, hoping old Mrs. Farnsworth would come forward with one of her questions about adultery and lust, but Mrs. F. was eyeing the donuts and eavesdropping while she patiently awaited her turn.
“Exactly!” said the pastor. “We run the risk of hubris whenever we think we understand.”
Even though he said “we,” Maggie knew he wasn’t talking about himself. Still, she thought it best to admit she understood very little and would be extra careful of hubris in the future, whatever that was.
“We run the risk of heeding false prophets,” said the pastor, and Maggie merely nodded her head and said she had to follow her heart.
“Don’t get me wrong,” Pastor Price said sternly, “but following your heart can be a tricky business, especially for a woman with a heart as big as yours.”
The next Sunday, the pastor and his wife Tiffany approached Maggie after services. “Lex Lexington told me one of his administrative assistants up at the prison is leaving,” said the pastor. “If you’re interested, I can put in a good word for you.”
“The prison!” Maggie didn’t like to think about the fortress filled with the nameless and forgotten where her father had worked when she was a child.
“If there’s one place on earth that needs someone like you, it’s that prison,” said Tiffany. “Besides, my Mothers of Mercy group is conducting an education outreach for the inmates, and we need a few dedicated people on the inside.”
“On the inside!” exclaimed Maggie. “That makes it sound so dangerous.”
“It’s one thing to avoid doing harm in this big old world,” said Tiffany. “But it’s quite another to do some good. That’s what the education outreach is all about. Believe me, that prison is just crying out for people like you.”
“Just so long as your expectations for what you can accomplish are modest,” said the pastor. “Don’t get me wrong—Tiffany can work miracles when she puts her mind to it. But if you set your expectations low enough, you won’t be disappointed.”
The pastor had a habit of saying “don’t get me wrong” the way Misty Mills said “no offense.” The phrase proved so useful to him that Maggie started using it herself. She said it when she went to collect her final paycheck and the payroll clerk said, “I hear you’re taking matters into your own hands.” She said it when Misty Mills called her high and mighty. And she said it when Mr. Winslow lectured her about patriotism and exploding weapons. “Why, they even talk about shrapnel bombs in ‘The Star-Spangled Banner,’” he said. “They’re as American as apple pie.”
1.6 Pastor Price
Even though he vowed that his growing church and weekly radio show wouldn’t change the way he looked at other people, Houston Price couldn’t deny that he sometimes felt a slight sense of superiority as he watched the solid citizens of Red Bud file into his church every Sunday morning. There was Garner Hicks, pressed and frayed and dying of cancer but hopeful of reprieve, just as they were all dying and hopeful. Behind Garner tiptoed Mrs. Farnsworth, iridescent in her polyester pants suit and squinting about for telltale clues of sexual indiscretion. Her eyes lit on Lily De Luca, who was all dolled up and ready to flirt if the opportunity arose, which, for Lily, it always did. There was the new baby Hollister, born out of wedlock but saved just the week before through the holy baptism of the Redeemer. Edging away from the baby and its mother was Tyler Hicks, who only came to church to snitch from the collection plate, and behind Tyler was Sammi Green, surpassingly sulky and adolescent until things got going and she started to stretch her hands up to heaven and shimmy mightily in a show of what God could do with bodily glory when he chose.
He had outdone himself in that regard when He created the pastor’s wife. Tiffany was the daughter of the largest landowner in the county, so marrying her had turned out to be as much an alliance as a love match. The union had led to the donation of the land the new church building was sitting on, the one condition being that Tiffany would participate in the design consultations and take charge of a healthy budget for good works. And if Tiffany had progressive ideas about the relationship between buildings and the earth, she also had progressive ideas about intimate relations, which more than made up for any architectural compromises the building committee had to make.
Before each service, Tiffany arranged a clean surplice on the back of a chair and set out the scented powder that kept the pastor’s feet from sweating. “Sealed with a kiss” was always the last thing she said before he walked out into the swoop-ceilinged nave, and thrusting her tongue in his mouth was always the last thing she did. She did it, they both agreed, in order to free his spirit from his body for the task ahead, and it always worked—if he could resist Tiffany, he could resist anything.
“Bless you my child,” he always said when she handed him his prayer book and leaned in for the freeing kiss, careful not to stand where people passing by the door to the sacristy could see them.
“Sealed with a kiss,” she always said, but sometimes instead of kissing him, she just gazed into his eyes as she put his fingers on her breast, right where the nipple poked through the lacy cloth of the undergarments she wore beneath her choir robe. All of that added spice to the weekday humdrum of his job: the marital spats he had to adjudicate, the patient explication of texts to people who wanted to use the Bible to prove this or disprove that, and the more delicate approach he needed when the town scions he depended on for his livelihood sought his support for their favorite political causes.
It was six minutes to ten on a bright spring morning, but now, instead of Tiffany rushing into the sacristy and apologizing for her tardiness, it was August Winslow who filled the doorway. Winslow, who was not only civilian director of the munitions plant and husband to the Woodford oil fields heiress, but also a senior member of the pastoral council, now came charging in demanding to talk about Maggie Rayburn and how a reporter from the Sentinel wanted to write a story about her. “I called the publisher and put a stop to it,” bellowed Winslow. “There’s no sense giving the woman a megaphone. There’s no sense giving all of my other employees ideas.”
“I hope you handled the reporter carefully,” said the pastor. “That kind of thing can backfire.”
“Of course I handled him carefully. It was the publisher’s nephew who apparently had the bright idea for the article, but I have no doubt we can count on the Fitches to do what’s right for the town.”
“I’ve already had a talk with the Rayburn woman,” said the pastor, who had come to rely on what Tiffany called his pre-game routine and who was sweating because things were sliding off track. According to the sunburst-shaped clock on the wall, there were less than five minutes left, and if the pastor was known for anything, it was for exploding through the curtain at exactly ten o’clock on a crescendo from the organ, just when the stage lighting went from an expectant blue to a pulsating blaze of silver magnificence, and once his lighting manager had surprised him with giant sparklers and another time with a crazy purple fog. His entrance was hardly the most important part of the service, but it pleased him when Tiffany said he got a ten for showmanship on top of his ten for execution.
Winslow was saying, “She’s a loose cannon. She worries me, to tell the truth.”
“She’s lost her way, but with a little help and understanding, she’ll be back on track before you know it.”
Back on track is where the pastor wanted to be. Three minutes to showtime, and his body was still fused to his spirit. His feet weren’t the only thing sweating. Even his tongue felt coated and thick.
“Excellent, excellent. But I was hoping you could talk to Fitch.”
Winslow showed no signs of leaving, so the pastor said, “Call me tomorrow. We can talk about it then.” Panic was gathering in his bowels in spite of the fact that another thing he was known for was what Tiffany called his grace under fire.
She must have been detained. The women of
the parish were always coming up to her with ideas for the ladies’ outreach, and the men were always coming up to her because even standing next to Tiff was its own reward. With less than sixty seconds left, he’d have to oust all bodily concerns himself. He could do it—Tiffany hadn’t always been there to help him. They hadn’t even celebrated their three-year anniversary.
Winslow finally said, “Okay, okay,” and backed out the door, leaving the pastor with the troublesome notion that his talk with Maggie hadn’t seemed to resolve things. He had forty-five seconds to clear his mind. He closed his eyes. He kept a mental box for occasions like this. In his imagination, the box was made of inlaid precious materials like lapis lazuli and ivory and rare endangered woods from the Brazilian rain forest. Now he put his earthly concerns into the box so he could take them out again later. It was a beautiful box, but strong as steel, and once a worry had been locked inside, nothing could let it out again except the pastor himself. He was ready. The crescendo came. The flash of lights.
He didn’t remember August Winslow or Maggie Rayburn until that evening over hot compote and potpie. “What does it mean,” he asked his wife, “that some of my own parishioners have heard the Truth and rejected it? What does it say about them, but more importantly, what does it say about me?”
“Not everything is about you, baby,” said Tiffany, and she was right. Hubris was an occupational hazard, and the pastor vowed to guard against it. But first, he had to reconnect his body to his spirit, and he needed Tiffany for that.
1.7 Lyle
It was the information age, but Lyle Rayburn had been left behind by it. He had dropped out of school just before his fifteenth birthday, which had left him with deep insecurities about his ability to know or understand.
“I won’t try to convince you,” Maggie told him. “I have my reasons, that’s all.”
Lyle was happy to let silence do the work of words, to stare open-mouthed through the windshield and express his injury by lingering at the Main Street intersection long after the light had changed and the cars behind them had started to honk. It was Will who piped up from where he was pressed against the passenger-side door. “If you really wanted to make a difference, Mom, you’d have to convince other people. That’s what they tell us in church. That we have to witness to other people if we want to be saved.”
“This isn’t about saving myself,” said Maggie. “This is about saving other people. This is about doing the right thing.”
“But what makes you right and everybody else wrong? What if other people know something you don’t?”
“Those are good questions. But if I had to have answers to everything, I’d never even get out of bed.”
“Are you sure you won’t change your mind?” asked Lyle over the efficient sound of the turn signal and the crunch of gravel under the tires as they made the final turn toward the high school. “We can’t afford to buy another car, and we’ll need one if you’re going off in some completely different direction every day.”
“I have the bicycle, and if I get the job at the prison, I can take the bus.”
“What if it rains?” Lyle wanted to know. And then he added gravely, “What if it snows?”
“I haven’t worked out all the details yet,” said Maggie.
“Well, don’t you think you should?” The closest Lyle ever came to getting angry was to suggest there was something that was not being done. He liked things to be squared away and he counted on Maggie to square them, even though he usually stopped short of assigning actual blame.
Lyle had known Maggie Sterling since before he had dropped out of school. He had been friends with her older brother and had taken to stopping by in the afternoons, not so much on the brother’s account or even on Maggie’s, but because of the rambling house where no shouting was allowed. “My mother is allergic to shouting,” Maggie’s brother told him. “It literally makes her sick.”
Lyle, who thought he might be allergic to shouting too, started going there regularly to escape his own household, which was so full of siblings and cousins that Lyle was never missed. He took to showing up at dinnertime and standing at the screen door until the old flop-eared dog awoke from its nap and barked at him before going back to sleep or until one of the four Sterling children noticed him and let him in. He was careful not to let the screen door slam behind him, for when he did, Maggie’s mother would scurry from the quiet depths of the house with an alarmed expression on her face and ask in a hoarse whisper what all the commotion was about.
Over the years, Lyle came to associate the comfortable chairs and steaming bowls of spaghetti with Maggie, and one day, instead of going to sit on the corner chair in the TV room after dinner, he had gone into the kitchen to help with the dishes, and Maggie had pushed her sister out of the way and said, “Isn’t it your night to clear?” Their hands had bumped under the soapy water, and Maggie had splashed some bubbles into Lyle’s hair. “Where would you go if you could go anywhere?” she had asked him.
“Niagara Falls,” replied Lyle without hesitation. He had heard about a man going over the falls inside a rubber ball named the Plunge-O-Sphere. It seemed like a crazy thing to do, but also brave, and the idea of doing something like that on purpose filled him with curiosity and dread. “What about you?” he asked Maggie.
“The Grand Canyon,” said Maggie. “I want to see what’s inside the earth—what you’d find if you dug deep down.”
“I hear you can ride donkeys all the way to the bottom,” said Lyle.
“Donkeys!” cried Maggie, her eyes sparkling as if Lyle had said something shocking or funny or wise—he had never been sure which, but his heart soared to know he could have such an effect on her.
The answers to the travel game had changed over the years, and now it was Will who was apt to choose somewhere dangerous or impossible, while Maggie and Lyle were drawn to major cities and beach resorts. Now and then Lyle would catch Maggie’s eye and say, “Where would you go?” not because he wanted an answer, but to remind her about how the game had started and about everything that had happened since. Six months after they first washed dishes together, Lyle dropped to his knees during a commercial break to ask her to marry him, and right in front of her gaping family, she said yes.
When they reached the school, Will clambered out of the car, grabbing his backpack and sack lunch out of the truck bed as he did five days out of seven. Also as usual, Maggie blew him a kiss good-bye and Will ignored her, hoisting the pack to his shoulders and hunching slightly under its weight. Now that Will had been safely delivered and he didn’t have to concentrate so hard on the road, Lyle was able to glance across at Maggie, who still could melt his heart with a look.
“Oh, Lyle!” cried Maggie. “It’s just that…” But instead of finishing her thought, she laughed, filling Lyle with the hope that his wife had been playing a practical joke on him or that she saw something he didn’t see, and that if Lyle didn’t see it now, he soon would—the way Maggie always heard the freight train coming before Lyle did, or said what he was thinking before he could find the words and get them out. “We’re on the same wavelength,” they liked to say whenever that happened, but sometimes, lately, he wondered if they were.
1.8 Maggie
I haven’t worked out all the details yet,” Maggie said again at dinner. Again she burst into laughter, partly because Lyle looked so sad and funny and partly because the crushing weight of indecision had finally lifted from her soul.
But Lyle only turned his face, still sagging with disbelief, toward Will, as if he might find the answer there. He bumped his glass up and down on the varnished tabletop and asked again, “Well, don’t you think you should? Before certain actions are taken, I mean? Actions, I mean, that can’t be taken back?”
Maggie had seen it many times before: Lyle’s anger short-circuiting before it could gain steam and the passive voice pointing a vague finger while absolving everyone present from responsibility, because the minute he started to criticize someone e
lse, he would be reminded of his own shortcomings, which invariably caused him to think, Who am I to say! Sometimes he said it out loud: “Who am I to say!” On those occasions Maggie would stroke his hair and croon, “You have as much right as anyone, honeybun.” Humility was one of the things she had always loved about her husband, but now all she felt was irritation. “If your car was headed at a crowded sidewalk, you wouldn’t work out all the details before you turned the wheel!” she exclaimed.
But Lyle said thoughtfully that yes, he would. “There’d be no sense turning it toward a more crowded sidewalk, now, would there?”
He laid his heavy hands on the table and examined his fingernails, which were dirty and chipped. Maggie had never before noticed how blocky his hands were, how his fingers were all nearly the same length, as if they had been cut from the same chunk of wood as the table and never properly shaped. “If I was headed toward the sidewalk outside the Multiplex on a Saturday, I’d turn the wheel toward the Merry Maid, but if I was on Main Street during the homecoming parade…”
“You wouldn’t aim it at a more crowded sidewalk!” said Maggie impatiently. “You’d aim it at a less crowded one!”
“Exactly which sidewalk are we talking about?”
Lyle was like one of the heavy hand trucks they used to move ordnance at the plant—slow moving and hard to turn. Maggie could tell from his expression that he was trying to come up with some way to justify doing nothing, some way to put himself in the passenger seat and so be absolved of having to steer. She tried to catch Will’s eye the way Will always caught hers when the subject of the conversation was Will. The boy was poking at his uneaten vegetables when, suddenly, he came out with a justification of his own. “It’s the lesser of two evils,” he said slowly, looking up from under his pale eyebrows at his dad.
Maggie swelled with pride in her first and only born. How many times had she stuck up for Will to Lyle or the teachers at the school? And now, just when she needed him, Will was sticking up for her. “You see!” she crowed. “Will knows what I’m talking about!”
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