by Amy Sorrells
“—wouldn’t mind having a piece myself someday.”
Noble heard the man’s words slide out of his mouth like slime. “A piece of what?”
The man startled and stepped back, and Shelby stared at Noble blankly as if in shock. Then Noble recognized him. Cade Canady’s father, Silas Canady.
“You talkin’ to me, boy?” Silas’s bottom lip was swollen full with chewing tobacco.
“I wasn’t talking to myself.” Noble turned to Shelby. “He bothering you?”
She shook her head and Noble noticed the color had drained from her face.
Noble, surprising even himself, shoved the cart into Silas’s knees, causing him to stumble and knock over a stand of beef jerky with a clatter.
“Noble, don’t—” Shelby said.
“Don’t, Noble,” Silas mocked. “’Sides, whatcha gonna do with that goon of a brother by your side?”
With that, Noble knocked over the cart between them and was on top of Silas, holding him by the neck of his shirt so tight he was gagging.
“You know you want a piece of that too,” Silas choked out, nodding toward Shelby and spitting tobacco juice in Noble’s face.
Noble felt his arm rear back as if it was working on its own and saw his fist fly into Silas’s face, the tobacco and spittle flying back into his own.
Shelby came around the counter and tried to put herself between the two men. “Stop it! Just stop it!” she wailed, then shocked Noble by turning to him and hissing, “I don’t need you or anyone else protecting me. Mr. Canady was just checking out. Weren’t you, Mr. Canady?”
Silas scooted away from them both and rubbed his jaw, which was split open and already swelling, and a trickle of blood oozed out of his nose. He stood and brushed himself off. “That’s right, sweetheart.”
Noble felt himself tense again, but out of the corner of his eye he saw Eustace, his arms flapping and face contorted with worry. When he turned, he saw that at least a half-dozen customers had gathered around to stare.
“Everything alright up here, Shelby?” Brock was breathless from running up from the back of the store, along with a couple other employees. “Noble?”
“It’s fine, Brock,” Shelby said, and Noble thought she appeared unusually composed. “It was an accident. Stand got knocked over by a cart.”
Silas slunk out the front doors while Noble and Eustace cleaned up the packs of beef jerky and began to set all the little plastic animals in their rows.
Shelby came beside them and helped.
“Why’d you do that?” Noble said to her. “Why’d you protect him?”
A tear slipped down Shelby’s face, and she shook her head. She looked over at Eustace, white hat crooked on his head, lost and jittery as he tried to fix the display that held the miniature tractors and farm machinery. Then, barely moving her lips, she whispered, “I’m so sorry.”
Noble sat back on his knees. “It’s Cade, ain’t it?”
She kept on picking up plastic farm animals and beef jerky and didn’t respond.
“You’re afraid if you stood up to Silas, you’d have to stand up to Cade.” He put a hand on her shoulder and she jumped. “Shelby, what’s he doin’ to you?”
She stood briskly, brushed off her knees, and tugged at the shirt as if now self-conscious about her bare midriff. She met his eyes, and in them Noble saw flashes of fear and pain like lightning on the horizon. “You better mind your own business, Noble.”
“I think I can be the judge of that.”
“You think you know everything, don’t you?”
“I know what the eyes of a woman look like when she’s bein’ treated wrong by a man.” He thought about how Mama’s eyes had gone from green to gray, to match the bruises on her arms and face, whenever Dad beat her. “I know what a girl looks like when she’s bein’ beat and is too scared to talk about it.”
“You have no idea.”
“Neither do you. But if you’ve got any sense left in you, you’ll leave him. Or—”
“Or what, Noble? This ain’t pretend anymore like when we were kids. You don’t have a magic sword you can wave and make it all go away.”
She started to head toward the register, where Brock had temporarily filled in for her and eyeballed the two of them, concerned.
“Wait,” Noble said.
She stopped but didn’t turn around.
“Listen. You come out to our place tomorrow. We’re transferring those cows of Frank Whitmore’s to our place and could use some help.”
She turned her head toward Noble. “I—”
“That’s what I thought.” He wasn’t about to let her finish. “Ten a.m. sharp. The girls and I don’t take no for an answer.”
23
James sat in his office at the church, a desk lamp brightening only the corner of the dark room. He’d only planned on spending a couple of hours cleaning out his office after Gertrude left, but it was 10 p.m. and he still had a couple of boxes half-full of files he wanted to go through before he went home. The file drawers were like scrapbooks of his twenty-some years—old sermons, bulletins from baptisms and funerals, Christmases and Easters, and flyers from congregational meetings and picnics, youth gatherings and other celebrations. There were folders full of failed programming efforts recommended by online and in-person consultants specializing in preventing the demise of small churches, along with brochures, catalogs, and articles torn out and given to James with lists of things a small-town church should do if it finds itself dying.
What disheartened James most about the church closing was that there was nothing tangible he could blame, and so he could of course only blame himself. There’d been no infidelity or embezzlement. No church split or eschatological divide. But then he knew enough from two decades of Indiana weather that it wasn’t necessarily the big storms that ruined a pasture. It was day after day, week after week of rain and overcast that killed the spirit of the farmer and caused the flock to get stuck in the mud or the seeds to drown before they could sprout and take hold.
Folks had left slowly, and guilt poked at his heart as he was reminded again of Dr. Wilcox and Ezekiel 34, of his call to seek lost sheep. He’d never gone after the ones who left. For a while, he had a piece of paper torn from a yellow legal pad taped on his desk where he’d recorded names of people who hadn’t been attending. He’d pray over the names every morning when he came to the office. But he’d stopped when the page was filled, the names representing failure rather than faces. He knew he should have torn up the town running after them like missing coins. He knew he should have stopped them when he’d seen them in town. But instead, he’d begun avoiding them in the grocery as much as they avoided him. He couldn’t bear to hear another reason—ridiculous or not—why someone left or wouldn’t or couldn’t come.
“Do not be slothful in zeal, be fervent in spirit, serve the Lord.”
“I hear you, Lord. But how?”
He put a few more files in a box and a few framed pictures from the shelves behind him, including a large, two-sided one which had a picture of him with Tilly at the church barbecue celebrating Tilly’s retirement and the commencement of James’s tenure, and on the other side a brief letter of encouragement from Tilly:
Dear James,
Never forget your calling. When the storms and trials of the pastorate come, keep these things in mind:
A crisis doesn’t mean the end. More often than not, it signals a beginning.
Critics usually aren’t heretics. They are, however, usually hurting.
You’re not in this alone, so don’t try to do this alone.
The grass isn’t greener at the church down the road.
Culture changes.
The gospel stays the same.
God never leaves.
Your friend,
Tilly
He set the frame aside and turned to the folder in his lap. He’d been avoiding this one most of all, since it contained all the details of Molly’s funeral, including a stack of
photos someone had scanned to make a video for the service. There was Molly in her wedding dress, Molly and him at their wedding, on their honeymoon on the Alabama Gulf Coast, at their engagement on the Furman campus. A photo of Molly standing sideways, pregnant with Shelby. Photos of Shelby, just learning to walk and running to Molly’s outstretched arms. Photos of the three of them on hayrides and in pumpkin patches, at Shelby’s concerts and Christmas. Of an anniversary spent in Savannah. Tears in James’s eyes blurred another picture of Molly with a paintbrush in her hand, her cheeks flushed with joy and life.
Where are you, God?
The thought that had been shadowing every other thought and prayer for as long as he could remember became clear. He wondered if the realization had been the same for Frank Whitmore.
He couldn’t do it anymore.
His chest and throat tightened and he pushed himself away from the desk, away from the files and stacks of memories, and stepped outside. The moon was high and the night was cool and still so that he heard his heart pounding in his ears. He opened the trunk of his car and felt for the leather bag he kept tucked in the wheel well. He’d bought it in case coyotes came too close to the house, and he had only shot it at a practice range a couple of times. It was a small gun, but it felt heavier than he remembered. He tucked it between his belt and pants and walked toward the back streets of town, where the last row of homes stood at the edge of the corn and soybean fields surrounding Sycamore.
Along the way, James could not think, could not pray, could not rationalize the steps he took any more than he could rationalize why he’d removed the gun from his trunk. He was beyond the point of praying. He stepped carefully along the sidewalk and avoided an entire section of concrete upheaved by the roots of an enormous oak tree. The leaves on the branches above seemed plastic, cold, unmoving.
One out of every two or three homes he passed was well cared for, yard trimmed neat, black-eyed Susans and daisies blooming, planters bursting with bright-red geraniums and a flag flying above the front stoop.
The rest of the homes were terribly dilapidated. Town folks struggled as bad as the farmers. The big auto factory which had, in the late twentieth century, helped build many of the homes, had been through nearly half a dozen layoffs in as many years. The homes that hadn’t been built during that era were relics from the Sears catalog. Fewer and fewer people chose to live far from malls and hospitals and convenience. Fewer and fewer wanted to live the rest of their lives with people they’d known all their lives.
After two decades, James knew which homes contained shut-ins and which ones contained drunks, which ones had young, struggling families and which ones contained folks who had once attended his church.
He slowed his pace as he reached the last street on the back edge of town and stopped when he reached a driveway bordered by a rusted wrought-iron fence tangled with brown and viny weeds. Beyond and up on a hill stood an abandoned, worn, two-story house, windows black and without signs of life.
The place must have been majestic in its prime, but now the curved driveway was overtaken with scraggles of bushes. Most of the windows had lost at least one shutter, and the shutters that remained were missing slats or hung crooked, reminding James of rotten, crooked teeth. Alongside the once-gated entry stood a sign erected by the Indiana Historical Society indicating the home had once been a site of the Underground Railroad. Partially because of its history, and partially because of the cemetery that took up the plot of land next door, residents of Sycamore had long been passing down stories of ghosts of the original owners and the slaves who’d died there of dysentery or typhoid or exhaustion before fully realizing their emancipation. Some of that was true, and many were buried in wind-worn graves which were only sporadically maintained. The place was notorious for Halloween pranks, teens driving by or bullying some unsuspecting classmate into their trucks, blindfolding them, and leaving them on the property to find their way back alone.
James stared at the home, which held no significance to him except that he felt as worthless as it looked. The palm of his hand was damp against the handle of the gun, and he felt sweat drip down the middle of his back. He leaned against the granite top of the old gatepost on the right side of the driveway, the same gray granite that marked Molly’s grave a quarter mile down the road at the Sycamore Cemetery. The tightness in his chest and throat turned to sobs as he slid to the ground, let the gun fall to the ground at his side, and held his face in his hands.
What good would it do to shoot himself?
Shelby would be an orphan.
Then again, what difference would that make?
Shelby’s grandparents, Molly’s parents in Atlanta, would take her in and give her everything he never could. It’d be her ticket out of Sycamore. She’d have college and freedom and money, plenty of money. The town wouldn’t miss him, and the church was all but dead anyway, so they wouldn’t need a pastor.
He straightened and wiped his face with his sleeve. The sweat on his back had soaked through his shirt and he shivered from the chill.
As he began to reach for the gun again, the lights of Sheriff Tate’s cruiser turned the corner onto Maple Street and shone on him. Tate pulled his car up to the curb. James could see him speak something into his handset, and then he turned the car off and got out.
“Reverend?” Tate stepped toward him. “You alright?”
“Sheriff.” James’s voice cracked with emotion.
“What’s goin’ on here?” Tate crouched down next to him in the grass, already damp with dew.
“I’m not sure I know.”
“That a gun?”
James followed Tate’s gaze to the spot in the grass where he’d dropped the gun.
“Why you got a gun, Reverend?”
James sighed. “Not sure I know that, either.”
“How ’bout you give that to me for safekeepin’, and I’ll give you a ride home?”
James considered the sheriff’s offer, and he began to understand it was more of Tate’s kind way of telling him what was going to happen than a choice James had.
Tate was a large man with a round face and ruddy complexion, broad shoulders, and a wide middle indicative of many hours behind the wheel. His knees crunched as he jimmied himself down and sat against the granite post next to James, so close their shoulders touched. Tate moved the gun from between where they sat, made sure the safety was on, and tossed it toward the grassy edge of the road beside his cruiser.
James felt the warmth, the life, of the sheriff even through his thick, stiff uniform shirt.
“Wanna talk about it?” Tate took his hat off, extended his legs, and crossed them at the ankles as if prepared to stay awhile.
James rolled the hem of his shirt between his fingers and shivered again, lacking the energy and willpower to reply.
“It’s alright. You don’t have to say nothin’. I think I understand.”
Tate had never been a member of their congregation, but he’d always been a friend. He’d been a first responder to Molly’s accident. He’d been a pallbearer for her funeral. He was the sort of person James counted on not because of conversation and time spent together, but because he was the sort of person who was always there. The two of them sat silent for a long while, bugs zapping against the streetlight nearby, their breath thick and illuminated as it caught on the damp night air, until eventually James broke.
“I’m a pastor,” James said finally, laughing.
“Yes,” Tate said, in a voice that sounded as much an attempt to confirm James’s obvious statement as it was a question about why James was laughing.
“How is it, then—” the laughter caught in his throat—“that a pastor of over two decades cannot . . . feel . . . God?”
He felt Tate eyeing him.
The emotion in his throat turned into a sob. “All these years I’ve been telling people God is with them, that he makes a way, that he never forsakes us, that everything works for good if we love and trust him. He feels so a
bsent I’m afraid I’ve lost my faith.”
Tate turned his hat in his hands in a way that indicated he knew James needed a soft, empty place for his words to land more than he needed attempted answers.
“Is it a lie, Sheriff? Have I been lying to these good people all these years? Is that why the church died? Is that why Molly died? And if it is, then what reason do I have to keep on living? What use am I to anyone now?”
“You know,” Tate began, his eyes lifted to the stars, glimpses of them visible through the leaves of the ancient oak above them. “I’m a Baptist, so I can’t be sure what I think is worth much.”
James wiped his face with his sleeve and chuckled through his tears. “I won’t hold that against you.”
“Would it be trite to mention Job?”
“Maybe so.”
“David?”
“Ahhh, the consummate manic depressive.”
“Paul?”
James shook his head. He was so tired of platitudes about proverbial thorns in the side. “Don’t bring up Romans 8:28, either.”
“Okay then, what about Balaam and his talking donkey?”
James looked at Tate. “You serious?”
Tate pushed gently against James’s shoulder. “Nah, I’m just playin’. Trying to lighten the mood. Although—”
“Don’t say it. I know . . . I’m acting like a donkey.”
“No, it’s not that. But you know, if God wants to do something, or wants something done, there ain’t a whole lot anyone can do to stop him. And if he needs to use a donkey to talk some sense into us . . .”
“Oh, so you’re the donkey.”
“Let’s forget about the donkey, okay?”
They both chuckled.
Tate drew in a long breath. “Whole town knows you’ve had more than your fair share of hurt, Rev. No one blames you for anything—not Molly, not the church.”
James shot him an exhausted look of skepticism.
“Look, I don’t know what I’m trying to say. All I know is I’ve seen a lot of bad things happen to a lot of good people over the years. Wasn’t anything any of them did or didn’t do that led up to it. But I’ve also seen God with them in ways they never would’ve realized if the bad hadn’t happened. It took a while, but once they figured out there was still some good in the world, they started looking for it, and the more good they saw.”