TOWN MEETING ABOUT MURDERS
Looks like it’s the biggest event happening this weekend. He smiled, folding his hands over the newsprint. I think it’s a good idea that we go.
She opened her mouth, but he had already turned to the paper. He went to the comics page, where he found the word puzzle he did daily. To sharpen his mind, he told her, and she had an image of him as an old man, completing the puzzle each morning over coffee, his hairline receeding, his face lined and rough and no longer quite the face she knew. But his mind would be sharp. She wondered if she would still know him then or if he would be a memory: maybe she’d remember him like this, young, still a stranger to her, mostly, drinking her coffee in her small kitchen.
6
Levi asked the church party committee to set out tables full of food—marshmallow-covered sweet-potato slices, carrot cakes with cream cheese icing, fried okra, chicken-fried steaks laid out in slices, a whole tub of white gravy, biscuits, tater tots and ranch dressing, fried chicken, macaroni and cheese made with 50% velveeta and 50% cheddar (which was Colleen’s specialty). and two enormous plastic bowls full of pink ambrosia, the chunks of fruit suspended in pink-stained cottage cheese. Despite the dampness of the ground and the yet-again impending rain (the sky was heavy but ambiguous in intent, still grayer than the blue-black of imminent rain), he expected a large crowd. The rain had kept everyone in for two days, flooding the roads and swelling the creeks up past the barriers. Now that the rain had stopped and the ground was only marshy, not soaked, people wanted to get out of their houses, to open the windows and be in the outdoors.
Inside, his mind rioted and his stomach roiled, but he was surprised at himself: the whole morning and afternoon, his hands had not shaken and his voice had betrayed very little of his fear.
I am a practiced liar, he thought. I have been practicing deception for my entire life. It’s no wonder that even my body knows how to deceive.
He placed the hairnet in the cabinet below the podium, on top of a stack of King James Bibles they had taken from the pews once the NIV came out. The people here had never liked the King James. They thanked him profusely the when the church finally made the switch. Levi missed the cadences of that archaic language, though. How could he abandon As the hart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after thee, O God for As the deer pants for streams of water, so my soul pants for you, O God? The first sounded like a cry out to a lover, the second like a perfunctory bit of metaphor, clumping along in dead, toneless language. But he had exchanged them, and since he prepared his lessons for them, he now read the newer version in its flat, obvious language and sometimes could not remember what he was missing.
Soon, he’d be able to read whatever he wanted. He imagined himself in the cell, reading his King James. So much time. No responsibility to anyone but God.
He took his NIV and went to his study. In this moment, he needed words that they could all understand.
Emily and Jonathan arrived early.
Where’s Pastor Richardson? Emily asked a young man who was pouring drinks at the end of the table.
He went to his study to prepare, he said. The boy had acne along his jawline, the kind of acne that would scar him for life and leave his face lightly pitted, the texture of a palm after being pressed hard against gravel. His hair was slicked up in spikes. Emily watched him and the other teenagers, a group of them gathered around the ambrosia, the girls making faces at the clots of cottage cheese clumped along the edges of the glass bowls.She watched Jonathan spoon sweet potatoes onto his bowl and felt how delicate humans are—to think that something so soft and flimsy as sweet potatoes soaked in sugar syrup could keep us alive. It seemed strange that these perfumed and sauced and cooked to mush collections of colors on our plates could really be the fuel of life. It should take something more substantial to keep humans alive, she thought, like oil, or minerals.
The church, small, only two stories, was tall from her perspective, seated below at one of the long tables. Emily half-listened to Jonathan explain to a youngish deacon in a plain white shirt and black slacks that no, he was not a regular churchgoer, and that he did know about Jesus, thank you. She looked away from the deacon, hoping that he would not try to catch her eye. She looked up at the sky. The small steeple seemed enormous, liable to fall. Emily couldn’t keep her leg from making compulsive little kicks and jiggling her knees when she crossed them, so she put both feet on the ground and leaned her elbows on her lap.
Levi stepped out at the appointed time, spooned his food onto his plate, said hello to the people that required hellos. He nodded at Emily and the man she’d brought, a young man of around thirty who wore smart, wire-framed glasses and spiky, short hair. He wore silvers and grays and blacks and Levi found his stomach hurt to look at this man. This was the kind of man that Levi had admired from a distance for years. A kind of intellectual type, somebody who might bring a book along to a doctor’s appointment so he wouldn’t get bored in the waiting room.
He’d thought that Emily would be the barrier, the thing he would have to overcome in order to give his speech, to say the thing he had to say to make the town realize what it needed, realize that it needed a reckoning. But this man made his hands shake. Now, everything inside of him that he wanted to hide was close to being laid bare. And here was this new person, somebody he would have hoped to impress, here to witness the lowest moment of his life.
He could be in the presence of men who worked the oil fields, with their tattoos and their muscles and their hard beer guts and hair that peeked out from the edges of their ball caps: they did not do much for him. But this was the kind of man who made his knees weak.
In the moment, he was more afraid of this man than of what he’d done, what he had to tell them. The feeling was even worse, wasn’t it? Not a heat-of-the-moment thing, but a stain he’d always had, something that couldn’t be absolved away or cured by time.
He didn’t look at Emily and the man. He turned his back to them and ate his food quickly. He ran through three napkins in his haste, wiping up the loose confetti of coleslaw and bloody lumps of ambrosia from his lap. He imagined the teenagers noticed him fumbling, as lidless-eyed as they were, always watching for something to point out and repeat amongst themselves later.
When he finally finished eating and mopped away the mess, he nodded to the youth pastor, who was waiting for his signal.
When he stood up at the podium and looked out at them, he saw their faces opened—not just in the metaphorical sense, open to the Lord or The Word or open to his ideas and his thoughts. He really saw their faces open and their thoughts pouring out—Colleen, her knotted hands working beyond her control, hoping that the speech would be over soon so she could get home, he could see it in the pinch of her face. The teenagers were thinking of each other, of how to please each other by being the most God-fearing, by loving Jesus the most (soon, they would realize that other avenues were the best route to the heart, but for now, they seemed to be in a cocoon of safety). The families worried about themselves, their little units. They worried about their safety and hoped he had something to say that would make them fear less or help them to know what they could do. We are all so small, he thought, so concerned with our own safety, our own appearance, our own ability to impress. We don’t understand that something larger than us might come and sweep all of that away.
Emily waited for Levi to speak. At the podium, he seemed larger, and she remembered the feeling she’d had at church, that he was better at what he did than she’d taken him for, that he had a natural authority that she hadn’t understood. He was not just a lonely man who clung to religion for some anchor, a man who couldn’t stand to keep a dirty dish in his house because of some pathology that religion served to escalate, as she’d thought before. That man dissolved as he stood before them. He looked out at the crowd, half-smiling, one hand casually on the podium, the other in his pocket. He watched them until they grew quiet. He made them wait for his words, and they w
aited in silence until he spoke, the only sound the shuffling of feet under chairs and the tiny clicks and clinks of plastic cutlery against cardboard and teeth.
He cleared his throat. He had only one piece of paper, which he had taken out of his breast pocket. The paper was lined and folded into a small square, which he unfolded and smoothed on the podium.
Welcome, everyone, he said, leaning forward, the staticky mike squealing lightly.
I’m happy to see so many of you here—people from the community, regular churchgoers, and newcomers to our community. We’ve had a church meeting about this subject before, but I thought it appropriate to work with our local community leaders to gather up more people, to work together to take back Heartshorne for the Lord.
But you might wonder why I invited people outside of church families, too. The community of people who do not attend, and even unbelievers. I’ve called you all here today. Levi paused and, for the first time, looked down at the paper he had smoothed out on the pedestal before him.
It’s because this problem, what’s happening, requires all of our attention. It isn’t a chance event, not something that was visited upon us for no reason. And I think we all know this.
Emily wanted to turn to see the faces behind her. She could feel them staring and shuffling, no longer scratching at the paper plates with their forks.
Emily held her breath. He was going to bring down the Tower.
In this town, people disappear, he said. Probably more than in other places.
Emily sat up straight and touched Jonathan’s knee under the table. He placed his hand on hers and squeezed.
People disappear and the police investigate and the circumstances are always mysterious, the bodies rarely found, the disappearances called runaways, deadbeat fathers and mothers, suicides. Drugs, now, are the most popular explanation.
But we know they aren’t all just the lost, the wicked, the addicted, he said. We know where most of them are, and some of us know exactly how they got there. Levi pointed out into the driveway. But Emily knew where he was pointing. The lake, which lay beyond the road, across fields, and across the main road, across Emily’s property and through the woods behind her house.
Until now, I knew this and ignored it. Like the rest of you, I imagined that we were different, that this place had its own wisdom, a wisdom that worked to flush out trouble. I didn’t think of what that meant or what it did to us as people. I didn’t even think that it bothered God. I thought, in my heart, that God was on our side, that the world would be better if they let people work out their justice amongst themselves. I really believed this, folks. And I bet that some of you do, too.
A faint, but unmistakably disapproving sound came from a man at a table in the back. Levi looked down at his notes again, turning the single page and smoothing it down. He paused, running his hand along the page. Emily had time to glance backwards—everyone watched him. Only the smaller children remained oblivious, playing on the ground, some splashing their toys through the mud puddles that had gathered in the low points of the yard, something that surely would have concerned their parents if they had been watching. The adults, though, looked forward, watching Levi.
I didn’t realize what it did to us until the deaths this year—the woman murdered in the yard, the children missing. Finally, people were paying attention. People were afraid.
The only difference between then and now, brothers and sisters, is that these murders are not just being quietly taken care of. They are out for everyone to see. Our secrets are in the open now and we don’t understand them in the light of day. Make no mistake: these murders are against the will of God, but the ones before them were against the will of God, too. Levi stopped and rifled around under the podium. Emily’s first and strangest thought was that he had a gun, that he would shoot them all and them himself, that she would die here, but then her mind came back. Why would she think this?
He pulled out a a hair net. The kind older women wore over their curlers before bed or cafeteria workers wore as they spooned helpings of mashed potatoes and cobbler onto into the portioned lunch trays at elementary schools. This hairnet was covered in black streaks, as though somebody had broken a pen and spilled the ink all over it.
I found this in my toolbox back home, Levi said. He made small, coughing noises and looked down at the podium. Emily held her hand up to her throat in automatic sympathy—He was crying.
I found this and I know what it is. He breathed in deeply. I know what it is because the Lord showed me in a dream. He showed me what I did and he told me the way. He said to admit it. To admit everything and to get on my knees and ask you all to admit it, too, for the crimes you have committed and the crimes you’ve allowed others to commit.
Emily could hear people speaking now behind her.
Pastor Levi, one of the young men in a Jesus T-shirt shouted from the back. Are you okay? Levi had stepped away from the podium. He unbuttoned his shirtsleeves and rubbed the edges of his sleeves under his eyes.
I am all right, he said. I’m better than all right.
He stepped forward, out in front of the podium, his shoes sinking into the mud.
I killed Frannie Collins, he said. And for that I should be punished. I urge anyone else who has committed a similar act to come forward and admit it to the congregation and beg God for forgiveness as I am.
7
On a particularly warm day in July, before Emily arrived in Heartshorne, Levi had finished his Wednesday afternoon sermon and had left the church almost immediately, saying he had a conference call with the women’s crisis pregnancy center they had partnered with in Keno, the one placed right across from the only Planned Parenthood south of Tulsa, where he and the church bishops had stood in front of the doors of the church with poster-sized pictures of tiny, torn fetuses.
He was lying. He had no call to make.
That day, they had welcomed a new member into their fold—Levi had baptized Derek after several weeks of attendance. Derek was young, under thirty, and unmarried. He had come to Levi for counseling.
I want to commit myself to God, he’d said, but I have so many doubts. Levi had explained that doubts were natural and watched the young man’s hands, how they rested on his knees and how he would lightly clutch the fabric of his pants when he spoke emphatically. He was clean-shaven and had slicked his hair back in what Levi recognized as a desperate attempt to seem older and wiser and more capable than he was.
I have such a hard time believing, he said. I have a hard time believing that a good God would say so many things that are harmless aren’t allowed.
Like what? Levi had asked. Derek had admitted to drinking, drugs, the usual, nothing that shocked Levi. He had heard much
worse from people who looked far less capable of mischief. And he had admitted to sex before marriage.
I don’t think I can stop, he said. Drinking, I could stop. Pot, I could stop. But not that, not sex. Sometimes I want to, you know, I know it would be right. But I won’t. I just won’t. Levi had asked Derek to say more. He offered his advice if Derek wanted to come to him on difficult nights, when he felt urges to do something that he knew would separate him from God.
So Levi became his confidante. The young man would come to him and admit that he had urges toward his girlfriend and he wasn’t sure if they were wrong or right.
Tell me about them, Levi would say. He arranged his face to be dispassionate, to be the face of a man above the petty concerns of lust, like a doctor before a naked human body, interested only in routing out the disease inside of it. He nodded and followed the lines of Derek’s face as he spoke, noting if he had shaved or not, if his shirts were neatly ironed or disordered from haste or carelessness, if he wore an undershirt that covered the sparse hair at the base of his throat or not.
This continued until the night of the Baptism. Derek wore one of the baptism robes. He’d changed from his clothes in the church bathroom and wore only his underpants and a t-shirt under the heavy white ro
be. It smelled like moth balls and was yellowed from years of use without washing. Still, he looked angelic. Levi glanced at him as he gave the short speech before each Baptism, a speech about committing your life to Christ before the community.
This is a whole new step in the life of the believer, he said. You are telling the rest of the church that your heart is with Christ, that you are willing to be a true brother and sister, a soldier for Christ not only for yourself, but also for everybody else in the congregation.
Derek stood in the hallway between the stage and the back rooms, his hands folded before him, listening.
The Baptismal pool was rolled out, a portable tub with wheels. Levi placed the stepladder by the lowest lip and held out his hand. Derek came forward.
The step was unsteady, so Levi held Derek’s shoulder and he stepped into the pool.
He spoke the words he always spoke and then put his hand on the young man’s chest.
For a moment, Derek looked confused, his eyes afraid—it must have been instincts kicking in, the part of the human mind that riots against anyone holding one’s head underwater.
Close your eyes, Levi said. You’ll be fine.
The man closed his eyes and Levi pushed his chest. He could feel his bone underneath the heavy fabric, imagined he could feel the young man’s heart beating. He plunged his body down, and then his head, and whisked him back up again, holding him by the arms until he had recovered from the cold and shock and could stand up alone.
You are reborn in Christ, Levi said as Derek sputtered.
Thank you, he said. Thank you, Pastor, for giving me this gift.
After the Baptism, after Derek had shaken hands with the congregation and had rested, tearful, in the space between Levi’s elbow and throat, saying that he loved Christ, that he wanted to give himself to the church, that this was the best day of his life, Levi left.
He drove not home, but to the lake, to the place where he had swam as a boy, an unofficial swimming hole carved out of the woods on a rocky but shallow shore. Few people knew about it now, and Levi was careful to replace the mouth of the path with a tangle of fallen branches, as everyone else seemed to, since it was always there when he came here, covering the tracks in the grass.
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