Southernmost

by Silas House

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “You’re older than they think you are,” she said. “Your daddy’s fixing to lose his job at the church. I want you to know what’s going on. But you can’t tell them I told you.”

  “I won’t.” Justin sounded like he was just fine with the notion of Asher losing his job. Maybe he hoped that Asher would so he wouldn’t have to go to church every time the door was cracked.

  “I’ve spent my whole life listening to everybody else,” she said. She had always talked to Justin like he was an adult. “First my daddy, and then your granddaddy, and then your mother. But inside, I only listen to myself. Does that make sense?”

  “I guess.”

  “What the church is doing to your daddy—it’s not right. They’re going to fire him because he wouldn’t turn people away. And if there’s one thing I know for sure it’s that you never shun somebody because you don’t agree with them. We’re ever one of us children of God. You remember that. Alright?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Justin said again.

  Asher came up the porch steps and opened the screen door. “Y’all ready?”

  12

  The windows were open, only letting in heat and loud birdsong. Church programs from last Sunday had been turned into fans, and women dotted their foreheads with Kleenex. The air conditioner had stopped again and the church was packed because they all wanted to hear what Asher would have to say. Jimmy and Stephen were not there.

  The congregation had been assembled, given slips of paper, and cast their votes. Caleb Carey and a couple of the other deacons had made a big show of going into the church office to count the votes and a hum had arisen over the whispering crowd while they waited. Asher stood by the door at the back of the church, looking out the glass doors onto the parking lot and didn’t move until Caleb stood in the pulpit. “The vote is final: five to stay and forty-one to terminate,” Caleb read in his monotone way. “The deacons will start a new pastor search. That concludes our meeting today.”

  “I want to say something,” Asher said, striding up the aisle. A few people had stood up but now they sat back down.

  Caleb had his right hand up, waving it. “The church bylaws don’t specify that the outgoing pastor be allowed a response.”

  “I’ve pastored this church for ten years and served it a lot longer than that,” Asher said, and Caleb threw his hands up. He sat down heavily in the front pew, shaking his head.

  Asher faced the congregation. “I’ve served it all this time and you’ve voted me out because I welcomed two men to our congregation. Because I refused to turn them away.”

  Flap flap flap went the church programs as they fanned.

  “My brother and I had it pretty rough when we were boys. Our mother was a hard woman and she lived a hard life. Some of you helped us when she was so sick, and I thank you for that. But it’s easy to help somebody you agree with. If you had known Luke was like Jimmy and Stephen I wonder if you would’ve helped us at all.”

  A breeze slithered through the windows. A girl was holding up her phone to take a picture of Asher. Far off down the road he could hear a car passing, playing a rap song, the bass thump th-thump thumping until the ridge came between the car and the church.

  “Ten years ago Luke came and told me about his struggle and asked me for my support. I reacted the way I’d been raised to: I called him an abomination. Being afraid of somebody who’s different’ll make an awful meanness come over you. I said a lot of things I’m ashamed of now.”

  He felt tears on his face but didn’t wipe them away.

  “We’ve got to quit this judgment!” he implored, louder than he intended, the last word caught in the height of his beseeching cry. He was surprised by the sound of himself, the release of a grief that had been living within him for years now. As instantly as the words had burst forth he saw how startled some of them were, drawing back in disbelief. He put his hand out to steady himself against the pulpit.

  He dropped his head to gather himself and again caught sight of the teenaged girl holding up her phone. She was filming, he realized. Well, let her.

  “All he wanted was for me to love him for who he was, and I couldn’t give it to him.” He drew in a ragged breath. “I never knew of my brother to lie. But when he told me he was born that way, I accused him of lying. I told him he had been turned over to a reprobate mind. Because I had been taught that. And I lost my brother. Not because of a choice he made, but because I chose to turn my back on him.”

  He plucked his Bible up from the pulpit and held it in the air.

  “You can use the Word to judge and condemn people or you can use it to love them. The day I turned Luke away, I felt that doubt pulsing inside me. Sometimes I wonder if that doubt isn’t God, giving us a little nudge.”

  A couple stood up and shuffled out with their children. Caleb Carey arose, one hand up before him, signaling that Asher had said enough.

  “When those two men came into this church to be part of a congregation,” Asher continued, “after a flood took everything they had, you refused to speak to them. All their lives, people have told them they’re no good, that they’re abominations, that they don’t deserve God’s love. They came here seeking it. But you couldn’t find the decency in yourself to be good to them. So I don’t want to be your pastor. You had your meeting and you fired me, but I’m here to tell you I had already quit you.”

  Zelda let out a heaving sob. No one else flinched.

  Caleb took a step forward. “That’s enough, now, Asher—”

  “I’ve been with you when your people died, when they were sick. I’ve visited you in the hospital. I barely slept for three days after the flood so I could tend to each one of you who lost a home. And I’m afraid that you are going to let this hatred take you over.”

  Asher stood before them, scanning the congregation, touching eyes with each one of them who had the decency to look at him. The teenaged girl—he had baptized her himself, in the Cumberland, on a day heavy with bruised, stormy skies, but in this moment he couldn’t think of her name—was still filming him.

  Some were struggling to not break down now. Asher knew of at least one couple that had turned their backs on their son. There were undoubtedly others.

  “All I ask of you is to search your hearts.” He was pleading with them. “Don’t make the mistakes I’ve made.”

  That was all he had to say. He wiped his face with the back of his hand and walked down the aisle, pausing at the pew where Lydia sat with Zelda and Justin, waiting for them to join him. Zelda struggled to get up, and Justin scrambled past, sliding over the legs of others until he reached his father. He took Asher’s hand. Lydia set her eyes on his, but didn’t budge.

  They walked out, Asher and his boy and his wife’s mother who was like his mother. When he reached the door and looked back on the congregation he could see that several women had surrounded Lydia, praying with their hands on her head, speaking in tongues now, the strange words curling through the air.

  13

  They sat there in the car, the engine and air conditioner running, while everyone else left. Asher kept his eyes on the dashboard. “Kathi’s waving at you,” Zelda said, quietly, but he didn’t look up. “The Turners looked this way,” she said after a minute. Justin sat in the back seat listening to music on his earbuds, looking out on the green pastures.

  Then there was a startling rap on Asher’s window and he jumped, looking up to see Lydia leaned in close to the glass. “Bring Justin back to the house,” she said, and turned to her own car, her shoes crunching on the gravel.

  “I should have rode with her,” Zelda said. “She’ll say I was choosing sides for staying in here with you.”

  “I don’t know why I’m so upset,” he said. “I was going to quit them anyway, so I shouldn’t be mad they fired me.”

  “Well, nobody wants to be turned away,” Zelda said, patting him on the shoulder.

  “It’s the why that burns me up.”

 
; They rode the rest of the way in silence, the radio playing country songs low between them. Asher was struck by what a perfect summer day lay out before them. The trees were a lush, dark green and the river shone alongside the road. Cumberland Valley was about the prettiest place he’d ever seen. Everything looked new to him.

  At the house Zelda said for him to go on in. “We’ll go down here to the riverbank and skip us some rocks.”

  Lydia sat on the couch, tucked in as close to the arm as she could get, her legs and arms crossed. “You just destroyed everything we’ve worked for our whole lives. Building a congregation. A church that mattered.”

  “I can’t go on doing it, Lydia. I’ve told you.”

  “You could’ve just walked away. But you had to ruin it for me, too. How am I supposed to show my face in there?”

  “I had to stand up for what I believed in.”

  Only now did she look up at him and her face was crumbling with sorrow. “I’m so afraid, Asher. The way you acted in there. I don’t know you at all.”

  She rose from the couch, left him standing there in the living room, and disappeared down the hallway. He stood there and took in everything he had known over the last dozen years. This room. The scent of it (cinnamon), the way the light slanted through the picture window in a perfect rectangle this time of day in summertime. The three little dogwoods he could see from the picture window, the glint of river beyond them, and farther still, the ridge. The clicking of the old mantle clock’s pendulum. The remotes lined up on the coffee table. The recliner with the worn patches on its arms.

  Lydia came back with two black garbage bags weighed down with clothes. She sat them down by the front door and fumbled for the knob, opening it wide. He could see how powerful she felt in this moment. “This is what you’ve wanted all this time,” she said. “Go.”

  He had not realized it, but some part of him had always thought that she might change, that she might see his way of thinking and try to come round to it. He knew now that wasn’t going to happen. He could see this on her face, but also in the set of her shoulders, by the tense of the muscle in her arm as she held on to the doorknob, her eyes hard on him. “Go on,” she said.

  “Don’t keep my boy away from me,” he said, knowing she would try.

  “We’re going to be laughingstocks now.”

  “That church doesn’t make up this whole place,” he said, “this whole country.”

  “Go on.” She swiped her hand through the air, pointing to the door.

  Zelda and Justin were coming up the hill from the river as he stepped from the porch. Justin dared his granny to race him and she tried for only a second to keep up with him before she stopped, laughing, hands on her knees. Then Justin ran into Asher’s leg and caught hold of it, out of breath.

  “I’ll see you in a couple days, buddy,” Asher said.

  “I want to go back out to the lake, with you.”

  “No, now, Justin,” Lydia said, trying to steady her voice, “you’ve got school.”

  “Not till Monday.”

  Asher put his hand on the boy’s back. “I’ll bring him back tomorrow evening. Let him go with me for tonight.”

  “You’ve given up your family because of this,” Lydia said. She took hold of Justin’s shoulder and he pulled away from her. “No judge in this state will even let you have joint custody after the stunt you just pulled.”

  Asher thought of the way he had lost control of his temper, the way he had yelled and cried. Folks in the audience recoiling. And the girl, filming every bit of it.

  “Just go, Asher,” Zelda said, finally drawing near. “For now.”

  He drove away. At the curve in the road at the bottom of the hill he stopped his Jeep and looked back. There was the home he was leaving. But already gone inside were the people he had known and loved so well.

  14

  For a time Lydia agreed to let Asher take Justin every other weekend and one night a week. Asher cooked him grilled cheeses and fried baloney sandwiches. As long as it was warm enough they swam in the green, still waters of Cheatham Lake. There was an abundance of treasures for Justin’s nature collection on the lake’s shore: tiny white mollusk shells, cardinal flowers he dried between the pages of book, a small gray trilobite. Often Asher sat on the bank and watched Justin’s determined reverence as he studied leaves or rocks, wondering what this divorce would do to his little boy.

  Then he received the notice by registered mail: Lydia had gone to court with the video of him in church.

  Asher didn’t know any lawyers so he chose the first one he found online and drove to her office on the square in Choctaw. In the waiting room he sat looking out the window at the tall war memorial topped with a Confederate soldier. The receptionist apologized that the attorney was late for their appointment; twice he caught her staring at him from behind the screen of her computer. She was playing music there—a string of country songs that all sounded like the same young man singing about fishing, and his truck, and his girl. The receptionist looked too young for this job—like she had just graduated from high school—and spoke with a babyish voice, her eyelashes spidery with clumped mascara. The lawyer hustled in, wiping her hands on a paper towel and still chewing the remnants of her lunch.

  She shook Asher’s hand. “I’m Jane Fisher, but you can call me Fisher,” she said, then belched quietly into the cup of her palm. “Let’s go on into my office.”

  She settled herself behind her desk and offered no small talk. “So tell me what’s going on, Mr. Sharp.”

  “I’m terrified I’m going to lose my son,” he said.

  “Why would that happen?”

  He told her all about Jimmy and Stephen, being fired from the church, the video. She kept her eyes on him and listened silently until he was finished, then perched her reading glasses on her nose and tapped at her laptop’s keyboard, hunting and pecking. She watched the screen for a moment before speaking.

  “Well, they’re going to say the video proves you had a nervous breakdown—”

  “But it’s just tears in my eyes, just a plea to the congre—”

  “—and that you’re unstable. And honestly, Mr. Sharp, you’re demanding that your church welcome a gay couple to their congregation. In a county where the court clerk is refusing to give marriage licenses to gay couples. In a state that believes traditional religion is under attack.” Fisher seemed amused by the whole situation. She stifled her laugh and pulled at the lapels of her blazer and leaned forward on her desk. “I’m not laughing at you, Mr. Sharp, but at how ridiculous all of that is. And remember that we’re in a county where both the family court judges ran on”—she thrust both hands into the air to make air quotes—“ ‘family values’ campaigns and used Bible verses on their posters. Not to mention that there are actually people around here who honestly believe the flood was God’s response to the Supreme Court decision.” The attorney let out a big breath and ran a hand over her face. Asher noticed that she didn’t wear a single ring. Her nails had been painted with a clear polish that caught the light from the window. “I mean—good Lord. Sometimes you have to laugh to keep from crying, you know?” She shook her head. “You have seen the video, haven’t you?”

  Asher shook his head, no.

  “Well, everybody else has,” Fisher said, turning the screen toward him. “It’s gone viral.”

  There he was, face contorted, tears in his eyes. The lawyer had the video muted but Asher could read his own lips when he yelled out “We’ve got to quit this judgement!” Even without the sound he could see how bad it would look in court, out of context. Then Fisher tapped her finger on the bottom right corner of the screen. “Look at that. It’s gone from fifty-some thousand this morning to a million views. In less than five hours. That’s not good for our case.”

  “Why would it go up so much in one day?”

  “Some celebrity probably tweeted the link,” Fisher said, shrugging. “Who knows? I don’t even try to understand how the world works to
day.”

  Asher put his face in his hands for only a second, then locked his eyes on the lawyer’s. “I can’t lose my little boy.” He searched for the right words and could land only on a cliché. “He’s my whole world.”

  “Well, it’s my job to make sure that doesn’t happen.” Fisher swung the laptop back around to face herself. There was a kind of determination in every move she made, an announcement that she didn’t put up with any BS from anyone. She kept her eyes on the video as she scrolled through the comments. She paused to dig in her desk drawer and withdrew an orange, which she peeled in silence as she read her screen. The mouthwatering smell bloomed between them. At last Fisher drew the membranes of orange apart and held a couple out on her palm. “Want one? I just washed my hands.”

  “No,” Asher said with more exasperation than he intended to reveal.

  “But I need you to know right now that you’ll never get equal custody, Mr. Sharp,” she said, the chewed orange flashing on her tongue. “It doesn’t work that way. Even under normal circumstances a man rarely gets that unless the mother has been proven to be on drugs or to be abusive. And mostly with good reason.” She took the glasses from her face and looked at Asher. “The deadbeat dads make it bad for the occasional good ones. Unfortunately, there are plenty of those.”

  On the other side of the door the receptionist had turned up her country music.