Gideon - 03 - Religious Conviction

by Grif Stockley

  Perhaps realizing she has sounded a little more dramatic than the situation warrants, Leigh gets up to cut a slice of cake for herself.

  “Art really wasn’t interested in Christian Life. He joined just to get me to marry him.

  I quit going regularly to please him.”

  I’d like some more cake, but feel I ought to wait until I’m asked.

  “Wasn’t that a natural thing to do for a while?” I ask, sympathizing with the lust of a dead man.

  Who wouldn’t want to skip church to stay home with a woman who looks this good?

  The piece she has cut for herself hardly seems worth the trouble. She moves some crumbs around on her plate. “There is always a choice about how a person lives. I let myself be lulled into believing I could be a Christian outside my family at Christian Life;” So far I haven’t learned anything I didn’t already know, but at least she’s talking. So long as I stay on the topic of religion, she feels safe, but sooner or later, we are going to have to begin talking about his murder.

  “Do you feel somehow guilty about his death?” I ask.

  “I mean, if he had been interested in the church, maybe this wouldn’t have happened?”

  For the first time, Leigh recoils as if she had been hit.

  Ah, guilt. What would we do without it? I have wounded her, but she won’t admit it.

  “Art had every opportunity to stay involved,” she says mechanically.

  “He never intended to.”

  Despite her tone, her face looks sad, as if she has failed someone besides herself. I feel slightly more confident now.

  “Who do you think could have murdered him?” I ask, relishing the last sip of coffee. I’ll take more of everything if I get the chance.

  Leigh folds her arms across her breasts.

  “I have no idea,” she says coolly.

  “I’ve already been over this with Mr. Bracken.”

  I don’t believe her. I may be wrong, but she sounds too defensive.

  “Just so I’m clear,” I say quickly, “my understanding is that you told the police you had been at the church all morning that day you brought a friend home for lunch and found your husband’s body.”

  Her cake is forgotten now. Rigid in her chair, she says, “That’s absolutely correct.” There is not a jury in the world who would fail to read guilt into her body language.

  I hurry, afraid she won’t let me continue.

  “According to Chet,” I say, making him the bad-news messenger, “there is some dispute about this.”

  Leaning into the table between us, she answers, “Which is easily explained. The two women whom I saw and spoke with at Christian Life that morning are in their eighties. They often get their times confused, for obvious reasons. I myself was in error when I told the police I spoke with Nancy Lyons. I probably saw her the day before.”

  Like a hungry dog licking his dish, I scrape at the crumbs on my plate. This is weak even if you blow off the neighbor who remembers her driving past on her way home at nine-thirty. Several members confirm seeing her again at eleven-thirty, but nobody remembers her there between nine and eleven as she says. Since it was undisputed that Wallace died about an hour before an ambulance reached him (a fact confirmed by his autopsy), the police did not suspect Leigh initially, because they thought, with good reason, she had been at the church all morning. Mrs. Sims, the old woman Leigh invited to lunch, had told the cops Leigh had been with her at the auditorium listening to a missionary But after Leigh had become the only suspect, the old woman admitted that she had not seen her since a little before nine, when the meeting began, until it was over at eleven-thirty. The police hypothesize that Leigh set it up to look as if she had been at the church for almost three hours.

  “Is it possible,” I ask, avoiding her eyes so as not to challenge her, “that for a perfectly good reason you wanted to play hooky and stay home with your husband that morning and just didn’t think it was the cops’ business that you were home instead of at the church all morning?”

  She stands and takes my dish and coffee cup to the sink. I should have stayed on the subject of religion until I had gotten my fill.

  “I’m sorry if you think I’m not telling the truth,” she says, turning on the water.

  “Maybe what happened that morning,” I persist, “is that your husband wanted you to stay home, and you went to the church and put in an appearance and turned around and came home and then went back to show your face, and in the interval someone your husband knew came to the house and shot him.”

  Leigh does not speak. She seems to be looking through me. I feel as if I were a vacuum cleaner salesman who lost his customer during the demonstration of the third attachment. Damn. It is not as if I have suggested that she went home to worship a golden calf.

  “I

  think my mother is home,” my hostess announces. She races into the living room as if we were adolescents who had been surprised necking when we were supposed to be doing our homework. I stand up. Since this conversation isn’t going anywhere, I might as well meet the family. As I follow Leigh into the living room, I hear a buzz of angry words. Apparently, her mother had agreed to be out of the house and has returned home sooner than expected.

  As it develops, Mrs. Norman is a friendlier, more vulnerable version of her daughter. Granted, she could lose twenty pounds (I could stand to knock off about ten myself), but the beauty is still there thirty years later in her face even if concealed a bit by the beginnings of an extra chin.

  “I’m Pearl Norman,” she gushes.

  “So glad to meet you, Mr. Page. I hope you can help us.”

  I take her moist hand, feeling there is something deeply familiar about this woman.

  “I would very much like to,” I say, glancing at Leigh, whose expression seems to evidence a slight distaste for her mother’s effusiveness.

  “This has been the most horrible six months in our lives!” Mrs. Norman wails.

  “Why, Leigh’s never harmed a fly!”

  “Mother,” Leigh mutters, loud enough to be heard, “how do you know?”

  Mrs. Norman, whose bulk is well packaged (I imagine an oldfashioned girdle squeezing and firming her soft flesh), positively gasps at such impudence, as tears form in her heavily made-up eyes.

  “You’re our daughter, that’s how!”

  Embarrassed for her mother, Leigh laughs, but the sound coming from her mouth is sour and derisive, as if maybe her mother doesn’t know her very well. Though I haven’t yet met Shane Norman, I surmise that Leigh must be her father’s daughter in temperament. Pearl Norman reminds me of a woman of an increasingly by gone era the ineffectual, weak Southern belle who flutters her hands helplessly and expects a man to save the day. She is a bit of an actress but such a familiar one from my past that I feel right at home with her. She is also drunk, unless I am totally misreading the signs.

  Like any small community, my hometown of Bear Creek had its share of alcoholics, male and female, who went through most days pleasantly (or not so pleasantly) sloshed. She is not offensive; in fact, she is much more pleasant than her daughter, who is plainly distressed at her mother’s condition.

  Leigh forces a smile.

  “I’ll call you later in the week, and we’ll set another time.”

  I’m being needlessly run off. Pearl Norman would stuff a bale of cotton in her ears if I asked her to.

  “When does your father get back in town?” I ask, standing at the door like a suitor who doesn’t want to leave. Maybe the old man can shed some light on his daughter. According to Bracken, I won’t understand Leigh until I talk to him, anyway.

  Halfway across die room, where she is lurking as if she knows she will draw a reprimand if she comes too close, Mrs. Norman pipes up, “My husband gets in day after tomorrow.”

  “Where is he?” I ask her, unwilling to trust her daughter even for a single fact.

  “Peru,” Mrs. Norman calls, edging closer despite the dark looks coming from her daughter.


  “He and about forty members of Christian Life have been there for a week assembling a prefabricated health clinic.”

  At the mention of Latin America’s most troubled country, I feel a grudging respect for the first time for Shane Norman. With the Maoist Shining Path revolutionaries assassinating thousands of Peruvians, I think I’d send a CARE package instead. My own days in the Peace Corps in Colombia convinced me that politics in South America is truly a life-and-death matter.

  “Would you ask him to call me?” I say to Mrs. Norman, who has begun to remind me of the actress who played Aunt Bee on the old Andy Griffith show. Her voice is all quivery and anxious but full of goodwill and probably gin. No mother and daughter could be less alike. What I had interpreted as resigned hopelessness seems almost like hostility in light of Leigh’s attitude around her mother.

  “Certainly,” she says, gratefully coming to the door like a forlorn puppy being punished for shitting on the rug.

  Leigh all but rolls her eyes back in her head.

  “Daddy doesn’t know anything. Mother,” she says.

  “Mr.

  Bracken has talked to him half a dozen times already.

  You know how busy he is right after he gets back from a mission.”

  Now that she is standing next to me, mrs. Norman’s perfume, suggestive of lilacs, overpowers the molecules between us.

  “This is your life at stake!” she says, her voice trembling at the indignity of her daughter’s apparent indifference.

  “Of course he’ll call you. He’ll be back to preach this Sunday, and I’ll make sure he calls you Monday. I’d like to talk to you, too.”

  Grateful for any cooperation in this case, I smile at mrs. Norman. Drunk or not, she is the kind of mother who would stick pins in a voodoo doll if she were asked. To her, Christianity, as it surely is to many of its adherents, may be like medicine. If it doesn’t cure, I doubt if she would be averse to trying another prescription, preferably one with a little alcohol in it. A practical people, most Americans demand results from their dogma. I drive back downtown, wishing I were defending the mother instead of the daughter.

  “are you washed in the blood of the Lamb I wait in front of the mirror in the living room. I am standing alongside Sarah, knotting my tie as she applies her lip stick.

  “Don’t make fun,” she says crossly, her lips flat against her teeth.

  “It’s probably a lot more interesting than Mass.”

  Either my shirt is shrinking, or my neck is growing.

  I tighten the noose around my neck, dismayed by the turkey wattle I have created above my collar. The worry lines in my forehead, I tell myself, are a sign of character; my neck, increasingly a road map of cross-stitches to nowhere, is devoid of such nobility. I need to break down and buy some new shirts before I strangle myself.

  I probably deprive myself of ten I.Q. points every time I fasten the top button.

  “I’m just reciting from “General William Booth Enters into Heaven.” I can’t shake the feeling we’re going to an oldfashioned revival meeting.”

  Sarah frowns, uncertain whether I am serious. When I came home for the summer after my freshman year at Subiaco, a Catholic boarding school in northwestern Arkansas, my older sister, Marty, went around the house reciting Vachel Lindsay’s poetry untH I learned k my self. Sarah probably thinks Vachel Lindsay is a rock group. Odd bits of my memory surface from time to time like debris washed onto a largely barren reef.

  Sarah pats her hair.

  “Let’s go. I don’t want to be late.”

  I goose-step out the door, leaving Woogie to wonder what is going on. I’m not supposed to be leaving the house on a Sunday morning unless it is with a tennis racket in my hand.

  “With a cast in the thousands,” I say, gulping in the perfect spring day, “I doubt if they’ll stop the service and hoot at us.”

  Heading for the driver’s side, Sarah explains, “I don’t want to have to sit in the front row.”

  Inside the Blazer, I hand her the keys.

  “Me neither.

  They’ll probably be able to tell we’re Catholics and make us stand up and denounce the Pope.” Sarah must feel some guilt or maybe is nervous. Do they wave their arms and speak in tongues? Full immersion for baptisms? We have been remarkably sheltered from the peculiarities of other faiths. I feel a little nervous myself.

  Rainey is not reassuring when we pick her up.

  “Wait and see,” she says, grinning, when I ask her what to expect She looks great in a peach sweater over a blue skirt, pearls, and heels, dressed up in a way I don’t usually see.

  “They have these giant spotlights in the ceiling that crisscross the congregation looking for people who’ve been identified as sinners. I’ve told ‘em your dad’s coming,” she tells Sarah.

  Sarah doesn’t believe this, but asks, turning up Damell Road, “Do they really know we’re coming?”

  Rainey leans forward from the backseat and places her hand on my shoulder.

  “No,” she says and gives Sarah are assuring smile she does not see.

  “Not really.”

  By my willingness to attend, I have earned some points.

  She and Sarah know I am more curious about Shane Norman than his message, but women have been trying to reform men so long it is almost a genetically programmed response.

  “I met Pearl Norman the other afternoon,” I say to Rainey, risking her newly reacquired goodwill, “and if I’d struck a match, we wouldn’t be worrying about a trial. Does she have a reputation for getting snookered, or is this a recent phenomenon?”

  Sarah groans (here I go again), but Rainey reluctantly admits, “I hear it’s a problem that’s persisted for most of the marriage.”

  I wince, feeling a degree of sympathy. I might get drunk too if I had married a saint and my daughter was about to be tried for murder.

  “That’s tough,” I say sincerely

  “She seems like a very warm person.” Unlike her daughter, I don’t add.

  “She’s warm all right,” Rainey says, her voice cold with disapproval.

  “I’ve been told she gets out of control on occasion.”

  Out of control enough to waste her son-in-law? I doubt it. Damn, women can be tough on each other. For a social worker, Rainey isn’t showing much empathy.

  Pearl isn’t pulling her weight on the road to the kingdom so a pox on her. Chet didn’t mention Pearl Nor man. Nor has Rainey. The party faithful always want to hide their warts.

  “How’d she handle her daughter’s murder charge?” I ask, knowing Sarah will revolt if I keep pumping Rainey too much longer.

  My girlfriend shrugs.

  “About like you’d expect. Poor Shane has a lot on his shoulders.”

  I square my shoulders to the seat, so my daughter won’t explode at me. Shane, you saint, you!

  To give the man his due, Norman does not disappoint. For all our fears, the service is hardly exotic, though a little unusual for a Catholic fed a more formal diet. Sarah is instantly captivated by the music and amazes me by singing out from the printed song sheets as if she were Amy Grant. An electric guitar, drums, and a trumpet accompany the songs, which are up tempo with soaring melodies that even I can follow.

  There are, of course, no hymnals, no official dogma to choke down. The words (on the order of “You Light Up My Life”) don’t matter as much to the two song leaders a boy and girl barely older than Sarah, as the enthusiasm with which the audience sings them. The first fifteen minutes of the service are given over to this couple, who seem right out of the cast of “Up with People which performs occasionally in Blackwell County.

  Seated in comfortable theater seats toward the back, we are too far away to see faces (I wish I had brought my binoculars, but I didn’t have the guts at this point it feels a lot like a concert). The mood of those around us is happy, even joyful. The men in our section are wearing suits or sports jackets and the women suits or dresses (we are, after all, in affluen
t west Blackwell County), but I see a conspicuous absence of furs and lavish jewelry. The rare times I’ve been in an established Protestant church in Blackwell County, many of the women looked as if they were auditioning for a fashion show.

  Though at this distance I can’t tell if Shane Norman has contributed to his daughter’s spectacular looks, the man impresses me with his apparent humility. I had expected him to come strutting out like some superstar.

  Instead, he is restrained, even perhaps a trifle shy, as he stands with his head bowed while the youth minister, a kid in his twenties, prays and then reads from the Old Testament. Dressed in a dark business suit, Norman comes forward and reads the familiar text from St.

  Paul’s letter to the church at Corinth. ” “Though I speak with the tongues of Angels …” ” There is none of the pleading, almost whining, tone of the TV evangelist in Norman’s voice, which has a tenor’s pitch. It is pleasant, sincere, and without the heavy-handedness I feared. Rainey, to my left, whispers, “Don’t expect a stirring sermon. That’s not what this is about.”

  Indeed, it’s not. Norman gives us a brief account of his just completed mission trip and impresses me by how much credit he gives to the crew of Peruvian workers that assisted them.

  “They worked themselves silly, a lot harder than we did….”

  The formal sermon, taken from the Scripture, is on the power of love. It is the love of God, Norman asserts that makes faith possible.

  “We Christians have difficulty believing the Bible is the word of God,” he says gravely, standing beside the pulpit, “because we haven’t grasped God’s commitment to us. We don’t feel it; we’re scared to death of it. We want to live free of God’s love as if it doesn’t exist, because we don’t want the intensity and the personal challenge of a relationship with God. We want to live floating on the surface of life, avoiding risk and pain. But it is God’s love that makes all things possible….”

  I cut my eyes to the right and see that Sarah is so focused on Norman’s words it’s as if he and she were the only ones in the building. Ever since Sarah began to write me letters from the campus of Hendrix College where she attended a summer program for gifted and talented high school students, I have begun to notice an intense desire for some kind of spiritual bond. The Ro man Catholic church may have just lost a member, I think, as she twists at a lock of her hair, a characteristic sign of anxiety. What will I do if she joins? Norman’s words, which have an appeal even to a hard-bitten agnostic like myself, don’t make sense. If there is a God, where is the evidence that He, She, or It loves us? I know Norman’s answer. It’s in the Bible. Free will not withstanding, my eyes and ears tell me a different story.