Abide With Me

  Moving past him, Charlie thought the man smelled a little; his hair was uncombed and his white shirt so rumpled it looked like he had slept in it. “Come in, Charlie,” the minister said politely. “Come right in,” and Charlie had a sudden urge to push the man hard, so he would tumble to the floor. Fleetingly, he imagined this—the blankness of stupidity that would cross the man’s face as he fell backward, his big limbs hitting the furniture.

  “Where’s the child?” Charlie asked. Crayons and a coloring book lay on the floor.

  “It’s past midnight, Charlie. Are you all right? Sit down.” The minister gestured toward the couch.

  Charlie turned, surveying the room. The only light came from the lamp near the rocking chair, and a creepy darkness seemed to crouch in the corners. The ceiling was so low, he felt like he was a huge mushroom that had just sprouted in the house’s dank midst. A sweater and a pair of child’s red shoes were on the floor nearby. The melting snow from the tread of his boots was moving toward the sweater, and he walked to the other end of the couch and sat on the very edge, keeping his hands in his pockets. He’d be a lunatic to tell this man about the woman in Boston, crazy to say that he was scared to go home. He said, “Pledges could be down.”

  Tyler stood with his hands loosely on his hips. “Early to predict, isn’t it? We have to the end of the year.”

  Charlie raised a shoulder in a small shrug. “Maybe so. But there’s rumors.” When Tyler didn’t respond, Charlie said, “I don’t give a shit myself. But they say you’ve got something going on with that Hatch woman.”

  “That’s ridiculous.” Tyler said this with little expression.

  “They say you gave her a ring.”

  Tyler said nothing, only took his seat in the rocking chair.

  “Where is she?”

  “I don’t know what Connie’s up to right now,” Tyler said.

  “And what does your good friend Bonhoeffer say about lust?” Charlie pushed his chin up and thought a look of defensiveness passed over the man’s face. But Tyler squinted his eyes at him, and Charlie looked away.

  “Are you in any trouble, Charlie?”

  Charlie sat back, thrusting his feet forward. He looked up at the ceiling. “I’m not. But you may be.”

  “Why?” Tyler finally asked. “Because of a rumor?”

  Charlie closed his eyes. “Sure. People get antsy. They need to go after someone, especially when they sniff weakness under what’s supposed to have been strong.”

  It was some time before Tyler spoke. He finally said, “There’s usually a reason to go after someone.”

  Charlie opened his eyes, gave a snort of disgust. “Well, you’ve given them one. After being Mr. Wonderful. You’ve acted stuck-up and standoffish and they hear about a ring you’ve given your housekeeper—and it’s off to the races they go. Whether they believe you’ve mixed yourself up with Connie Hatch or not, they’re just glad to have a reason to go after you.” He hoisted himself to his feet. His distress from the phone call to Boston was so great it seemed to be a physical illness that had overtaken him. He walked toward the door.

  “How are you in trouble, Charlie?”

  Charlie turned and walked back so he stood in front of Tyler. He bent his face down close to the man’s. “You haven’t noticed, Caskey,” he said loudly. “We’re talking about you.”

  Tyler rocked back in the rocking chair.

  “Oh,” Charlie said, turning away, “you poor son of a gun. You poor fucking turn-the-other-cheek son of a gun.” He suddenly turned back and took a step closer to the man, who was looking up at him with an expression of forced equanimity. “I bet I could knock you in the head right now, and you’d just say, ‘Okay, Austin, do it again.’ Wouldn’t you?” Charlie walked away, looked down at his boots. “Boy, Caskey, you could drive a person nuts.” He looked up. “You drive your wife nuts?”

  Tyler’s eyes seemed exhausted, tiny pins of light half buried in earth.

  Charlie shook his head. “You stink, too. Don’t you have hot water in this place?” He looked around. “This is one shithole.”

  After a moment Tyler said quietly, “To answer your question, Bonhoeffer believed that lust moves us away from God.”

  Charlie felt too ill to keep standing. He went to sit on the arm of the couch. “Moves us away from God. I see.”

  “Which is a terrible place to be.”

  “What is?”

  “Away from God.”

  “Well, I’ll let you in on a little secret, Caskey. You can preach until the cows come home, but the whole goddamn world is away from God.”

  Tyler nodded slowly.

  Charlie felt like his windpipe had turned into sponge; in a minute he might stop breathing. He didn’t like the dark corners of this room, but he was afraid to go back out into the cold. He didn’t want to go home. In his head, dark images exploded, blood poured from the neck of a man. “Who thought up all this religion crap?” he heard himself say. “Oh, I’ll tell you why it’s good—sure. It lets people feel superior, and boy, people love that.” Charlie laughed. “I’m so much better, I’m not even going to say I’m better. God, it makes me puke. Goddamn miscreants.” Charlie felt a slight buzzing in his head. He peered into the dining room. On the wall was a picture of a baby deer, the spotted hindquarters aimed at him. “So, Caskey. What do you have to say? Thou sapient sir?”

  He looked back and saw Tyler resting his arms on the wooden arms of the rocking chair. Tyler gazed at his knees, and finally said in a tired voice, “Only what I’ve said before. That it’s not the fault of Jesus Christ, Charlie, that Christianity, or any religion, can be used to make a mockery of God.”

  “Fancy words. Fancy Nancy. There’s something else I never understood, Caskey. This cheap grace and costly grace crap you’re always serving up.” Charlie’s knee was trembling. He pressed down hard with his foot. “It’s gobbledygook, but you carry on about it like it means something.”

  Tyler said with coldness, “It means something if you think how we live our lives means something.”

  “Yeah, well—I don’t get it,” Charlie wanted to shout. He said, keeping his teeth together, “Stupid crap,” and spray came from his mouth.

  Quietly, in a kinder voice, Tyler said, “The question is—how do I live my life? Do I live my life as though it matters? Most of us believe it matters. That our relationship to God, to one another, to ourselves—matters.”

  Charlie crossed his arms, stared at his boots, shook his head.

  “And if it matters, then to say, ‘Oh, I’ve sinned but God loves me, so I’m forgiven,’ is cheap.”

  “Why? What’s wrong with that? You know what I think? I think you guys just love to keep our balls pinched.”

  “It doesn’t cost anything, that’s why. Costly grace is when you pay with your life.”

  “Like your friend Bonhoeffer. Mr. Martyr.”

  “Well, no. Repentance and the cost of discipleship can take many forms.” Tyler opened his hands, palms up. “You, for example, teach young people the beauty of language—”

  “Oh, no. Leave me out of this friggin’ baloney. I just asked. Nothing more.”

  Tyler nodded, put his hands to his face and rubbed hard.

  “The men at that deacons’ meeting last night,” Charlie said meditatively, “they’re sitting around talking about cars and snow tires and Cuba’s revolution and how many washing machines Russia’s making. And the women, far as I can tell, sit around talking about the minister maybe screwing his housekeeper. Both conversations mean nothing to me.”

  “What does mean something to you?”

  The question seemed confrontational to Charlie. He couldn’t remember what he had just said, only that he had talked too much. He gave Caskey a hard, cold stare. “Figuring out why you’re such a smug jackass. That would mean something to me.” Charlie stood up. “I’ve got to get out of here before I smack you senseless.”

  FOR THE FIRST TIME since moving into the farmhouse, Tyler locked both
doors. He picked up the sweater that was on the floor of the living room, glanced at the puddles left by Charlie’s boots. He switched on another lamp in the living room: The walls glowed in two circles of pink. That he was alone in the house, that Katherine was staying the night at the Meadowses’ home, caused an eeriness to swoop through the room like the large wings of an enormous bat. He had not known until now how much he depended on the child, her silent presence, her cautious glances. He would call her in the morning before she left for school with the Meadows kids.

  He left a light on in the kitchen and went to lie down on his couch in the study. He did not get out of his clothes, not even his shoes. He could not have said what worried him most: Connie, or Charlie, or his future. He wished Charlie would resign as head deacon; it would make things easier. He’d let the board know that he would support the decision of a new organ; now was certainly not the time to take a stand against that. But it was Connie, her sad presence earlier in the church, which rolled around within him. What should he have done? What should he do tomorrow? When he remembered the comfort he had received from her presence in this house—why, it made his soul shrink in a kind of sickness. When he remembered that first autumn afternoon, returning home after the conference about Katherine at school, he wondered now what it was he had seen when he’d looked into Connie’s green eyes. What was that look of recognition?

  Tyler sat partway up, his elbows pressed into the couch. Could it have been some dark camaraderie? As though they were joined by a private, deliberate, acquaintanceship with death? Was that what had been seen in their glance that day?

  No. He would not accept that.

  An icicle thundered to the ground outside the window, and Tyler stood up, his heart beating furiously. He walked through the house, peering out the windows, and saw nothing. Seated back on his couch, he watched as daylight spread ever so slowly across the dark, and he had a sense of how there was no beginning and no end, just the ever-turning world. Tyler thought, then, of his thick-chested father-in-law telling him years earlier how he hated to hear someone say, “The sun has set,” or, “The sun has risen,” because it wasn’t true, and the man had looked at Tyler hard, as though Tyler alone were responsible for such an egregious misuse of the language. “It’s an illusion,” the man had said. And Tyler had said, “Well, yes.” Remembering now, Tyler felt disgusted and he wished he had said, “Oh, stop it. You’re an idiot philistine.”

  Staring beyond the birdbath, watching the gray become lighter and lighter on the faraway fields, watching the old stone wall emerge, he became acutely aware that it was merely a pile of rocks arranged a hundred years ago; the labor that had gone into it, the quiet beauty it had supplied him for years, seemed now to have disappeared with the starkness of the tiredly increasing morning light. He turned back to his desk, and thought it was not a good thing to stay awake through the night.

  “They need to go after someone, especially when they sniff weakness.” Charlie’s words caused small bubbles of anxiety to rise steadily, and, returning to his couch, Tyler once again lay down.

  What did Charlie mean?

  He awoke as though from anesthesia, and heard a knocking on the door. It was the Carlson boy, holding a mittened hand up to squint through the window of the door. “I’m so sorry,” Tyler said, the cold air causing his breath to be seen right there. “Katherine stayed at the Meadowses’. Tell your mother I’m awful sorry I forgot to call.” The boy ran down the steps, and Tyler waved to Mrs. Carlson, mouthing to her the words “I’m sorry.” She nodded, the exhaust from the tailpipe swirling forward and partly obscuring her, but it seemed to Tyler she did not look pleased to have been kept waiting.

  He called out, “I’m sorry about that,” as she backed the car up. The wintry air seemed to be taking little bites of him through his white shirtsleeves. He thought, with a sudden fierceness, I am so sick of saying I’m sorry.

  The telephone was ringing. Almost, he said, “Connie?” But it was Mr. Waterbury, wanting to know if he could come in for a conference tomorrow afternoon at the school with Mary Ingersoll and Rhonda Skillings. “Why, of course,” Tyler said. “I’d be happy to.”

  MRS. MEADOWS HAD found one of her girls’ old dresses for Katherine to wear to school. Kneeling, straightening the little white collar, Mrs. Meadows said to Katherine, “What a pretty girl you are.” Katherine looked into the woman’s large brown eyes. “Just like your mother.” Mrs. Meadows’s cheeks were smooth and a little pink up toward her eyes. She smelled like baby powder. Katherine took a tiny step closer, hoping there was still more stuff to be done to her collar. “Let me brush your hair. You tell me if that hurts. Am I tugging too hard?”

  Katherine shook her head.

  “Oh, my. Don’t you look nice.”

  The older Meadows girl was walking past, so big she had schoolbooks. She stopped and watched, and smiled at Katherine. “Ma, don’t you think Katherine should keep that dress?”

  “Yes, I do.” Mrs. Meadows smoothed Katherine’s hair behind her ear. “If you don’t mind a hand-me-down.”

  Davis Meadows moved by. His gray trousers had cuffs. Katherine watched him open a drawer in the front hall table, take out his gloves, put his hat on. He said, “Katie’s a nice-looking girl all on her own. Hand-me-down dresses or not.”

  Mrs. Meadows had made her a lunch, and found an old lunch box. Katherine held it a little high and forward, because it was one of the prettiest things she had ever seen. There was a picture from Alice in Wonderland on its side. As Mrs. Meadows was zipping up her coat for her, she said, “Did your mommy ever give you a little gold ring?”

  Katherine lowered the lunch box and stared at her.

  “No? Probably Daddy’s keeping it for you for when you get a little older. Your mother had a little gold ring with a tiny red stone in it that she was going to give to you.”

  Katherine whispered, “Mommy’s in heaven.”

  “Yes, honey. Watching you and loving you just like when she was here. And wanting me to give you a real big hug.” Mrs. Meadows put her arms around Katherine and squeezed. Katherine’s mouth trembled. It horrified her to think she might cry in front of these wonderful people. She turned her face away.

  “Go out and wait in the car with Daddy,” Mrs. Meadows said to one of her kids. “Get the others buckled in—we’ll be right there.” Sounds of clumping, of kisses so close they had to be on Mrs. Meadows’s other cheek, and then the house emptied out. Mrs. Meadows stood up. “What do you think, Katie? Would you like to come here more often? It would make us happy.”

  Katherine nodded.

  “I’ll speak to your father.”

  “Could Jeannie come?”

  “Oh, yes! Wouldn’t that be fun? Run along and get in the car. One of them will show you how to use the seat belt.” Briefly, Katherine felt the cupping of a hand on her head.

  RHONDA SKILLINGS HAD told both Mr. Waterbury and Mary Ingersoll that her brief conversation with Katherine Caskey indicated there might be something going on between Tyler and his housekeeper, there had even been, apparently, some gift of a ring. And while Rhonda was unsure as to whether the situation was as serious as Katherine might think, she told Mary and Mr. Waterbury that it was certainly important—for the time being—to hold the information in the strictest of confidence. But Mary Ingersoll went home and told her husband, except that didn’t count—he was her husband; you can tell your husband anything—and soon she telephoned a friend. “Don’t tell anyone,” she said, and believed the assurance she heard, because this, after all, was an old and trusted friend. After that, with the sense of facing a box of chocolates and thinking—Oh, just one more—she called another friend. “Don’t tell anyone,” she said.

  Rhonda Skillings herself, having telephoned Alison Chase regarding contaminated cranberries, found it impossible not to let the news slip.

  “I just get so tired,” Alison had been saying. “Hold on—let me close this door.” Alison had a telephone with a cord long enough that she co
uld walk into her kitchen closet and have a private conversation in there, and Rhonda, picturing this, felt a pull toward secrecy. “I don’t give a damn if the cranberries are contaminated,” Alison said. “I’ll use the canned jelly—who cares. I get so tired of being a cook and bottle washer, cleaning up after everyone.”

  “I get tired, too,” said Rhonda, who felt the vague rumor about Connie and Tyler was like a piece of cake in her mouth that she had to speak around. “Sometimes I dream of living in an English mansion with a house full of maids.”

  “I’m the maid,” Alison said. “And the house is a mess.”

  “Oh, I’m sure that’s not true,” said Rhonda, but she knew it was. “Does Fred complain?”

  “He doesn’t. But he says nicely, ‘Let’s see if we can keep the house picked up.’ It’s a criticism. Picking up doesn’t help, anyway. The furniture’s all nicked—”

  “Here’s a trick. Mix instant coffee with just a little water till it’s a paste, and rub that over the nicked spots. It works—I swear. And are you making the beds first thing in the morning? Remember how Jane always says that—just make the beds.”

  Alison, in her dark kitchen closet, made a small noise of disgust. “I wish they’d make their own beds.”

  “Boys won’t,” said Rhonda, who had one boy and one girl. “Boys are pigs, Alison. Maybe there’s hope for the next generation, but right now they’re pigs.”

  Alison leaned against the closet door. “With Jane, it’s floors,” she said.

  “That’s right,” Rhonda agreed. “Jane does her floors each day and then she feels better.”

  “What are you going to do about the cranberries?” Alison asked.

  “I don’t know. Remember that scientist who said he’d have to eat fifteen thousand pounds of berries a day for years in order to get thyroid cancer?”

  “No,” Alison said. “Fifteen thousand pounds a day? Then why should we worry?”

  “Because the scientist worked for the chemical company producing the chemical. The weed killer. Aminotriazole. Something.”