Abide With Me

  “There’s some person out there wanting to hurt you, Tyler, and you need to find out who it is. Perhaps Connie started it herself before she ran off to God knows where.”

  “That’s rubbish, Mother.” His mouth was dry.

  “It’s hardly rubbish. This could cost you your job. Sometimes I think our ancestors had the right idea by putting liars in stocks and pillories, right in the center of town, where people could jeer at them.”

  Katherine, listening to this at the top of the stairs, huddled against the banister, felt black circles of darkness rolling over her. It was like she’d stepped into the picture on the Sunday-school wall—a small child in a dark cave waiting before they came to get her, to have a lion eat her up. Even though she would have crossed her fingers and said she didn’t believe in Jesus so they wouldn’t take her away, it was like that hadn’t worked, it was her time to go, and there was no one in the cave to pray with her; it was like when Connie told her about being locked in the outhouse with her brother when they were young, cobwebs in the stinky dark; but she didn’t have a brother—she was alone and it was happening; the darkness of her deceit had rolled up to get her, and she was so frightened she was dizzy, couldn’t even stand up, though she tried, clinging to the banister, and then she was tumbling . . . it went on and on, slow and fast together, bump, bump, upside down, one stair after another, her grandmother’s scream, her father’s big hand. Finally, there she was in his arms. “I did it,” she sobbed. “I did it, Daddy. It was me, it was me. I didn’t mean to.”

  She was placed on the couch, her arms and legs checked. “Move this,” they said. “Can you move this?” And then her grandmother standing over her. “Did what, Katherine?” Katherine turned her face away, heard her father in a big voice: “Mother, go to bed.”

  “I am not going to bed.”

  A bigger voice. “Mother. Go to bed.” The silence that followed as Mrs. Caskey walked up the stairs. Katherine turned her head. Her father, so tall, high up, was watching her.

  “I did it,” she whispered, crying.

  He checked her again for bruises and broken bones, then took her into his study and closed the door, which scared her—she had never seen the door closed before. She cried and cried. Her father sat her on his lap behind his desk.

  “Tell me, Kitty-Kat,” he said.

  SUNDAY MORNING THE sky was clear, the air cold. The snow along the edges of the road seemed shrunken and crusty, and the morning sunlight hit the trees at an angle, causing long shadows to fall across the road. It was too cold for the sun to moisten the little patches of ice or soften the scoops of snow caught in the arms of bare trees. In the gully by Upper Main Street, the small creek that fed into the river was a gray, swollen bump of muscular-looking ice. Alongside were frozen ferns, shriveled and broken, as though someone had opened packages of frozen spinach and flung them into the woods.

  Tyler’s eye took this in; he saw, too, his mother’s bony, gloved hand pressed against the dashboard as they turned the corner; he saw the dust on the dashboard, the bump in her glove where she wore her wedding ring. In the backseat Jeannie giggled, as Katherine whispered to her. “I hope you’re not telling secrets,” her grandmother said.

  Tyler spoke quietly. “Leave her alone.” Glancing in the rearview mirror, he caught Katherine’s eye and winked. She smiled back so widely her mouth opened, and she raised her shoulders inside her coat.

  He had stayed up with her way into the night, while she sat sideways in his lap, her small hands moving as she spoke. He had explained to her that answering Mrs. Skillings’s question was not gossiping—that she had done nothing wrong in telling her he had given a ring to Mrs. Hatch; she had been mistaken, and people often got mixed up and said mistaken things. “What are stocks and pillories?” she asked. “What Nana was saying.”

  He drew a sketch. “Awful things,” he said. “People don’t do that anymore.”

  “That was in the olden days?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Are you going to lose your job, like Nana said?”

  “Oh, no.”

  “There’s a Raggedy Ann doll in the Meadowses’ backyard. In a house underground. When the bomb comes, will it hurt?”

  “There won’t be a bomb, Pumpkin.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because no one wants to destroy this earth. Russia, just like us, wants the world to keep on going.”

  “Don’t the Meadowses know that?”

  “Well, sometimes people get frightened.”

  “I get frightened.” She looked up into his face.

  “What do you get frightened of?”

  “Dying.”

  He nodded.

  “Mummy died because God was ready for her?”

  He nodded again.

  “Why was he ready for her?”

  “We don’t know.”

  “Does God know?”

  “God knows everything.”

  “Does God know once when I was playing in your office Mrs. Gowen came in and showed me how she could take out her teeth?”

  “Did she?”

  Katherine nodded. After a moment she asked, “How come Nana doesn’t like me?”

  “Pumpkin, Nana loves you.”

  Katherine kicked her feet, then was still. “She doesn’t act like it.”

  “Well.” Tyler put both arms around Katherine’s tiny torso, and squeezed her in a hug. “Nana worries a lot,” he said, “and sometimes people have so much going on in their heads, they get their wires crossed.”

  Katherine appeared to think about this for some time. “Connie Hatch got her wires crossed.”

  “Yes, I think she did.”

  Again, Katherine pondered this. “Boy,” she said, sighing, “God must be awful busy.”

  Past midnight he put her to bed. A crack of light shone beneath the door of his mother’s room, but he went back downstairs to work on his sermon. He kept standing up, putting his hands to his face, sitting back down. Finally, he wrote and wrote. He felt like an athlete who had trained for years, and the race was now here. Strength rose in him, then fell, then rose again. He had never before delivered a sermon of sternness.

  The Scripture reading would be from 59 Isaiah, ending with the words and justice standeth afar off: for truth is fallen on the street, and equity cannot enter. Then he would pray, saying, “Only the infinite mercy of God can meet the infinite pathos of human life.”

  Before the offering he would read the 26th Psalm, Lord, I have loved the habitation of thy house, and the place where thine honor dwelleth. . . . My foot standeth in an even place: in the congregations will I bless the Lord.

  And then he would deliver a sermon unlike any he had delivered before.

  “Do you think,” Tyler wrote, “that because we have learned the sun does not go down, that in fact we are going around at a dizzying speed, that the sun is not the only star in the heavens—do you think this means we are any less important than we thought we were? Oh, we are far less important than we thought we were, and we are far, far more important than we think we are. Do you imagine that the scientist and the poet are not united? Do you assume you can answer the question of who we are and why we are here by rational thought alone? It is your job, your honor, your birthright, to bear the burden of this mystery. And it is your job to ask, in every thought, word, and deed: How can love best be served?

  “God is not served when you speak with relish of rumors about those who are poor in spirit and cannot be defended; God is not served when you ignore the poverty of spirit within yourselves.”

  The sky was growing light by the time he put his pencil down. Reading the pages over, he saw that he had broken a cardinal rule of homiletics; he had used the word “you” instead of “we.” He sat for a long time wondering about this. Then he washed his face and fell asleep on the couch.

  When he woke, Katherine was standing before him. She had dressed herself; her red turtleneck was inside out, the tag that said BUSTER BROWN sti
cking out like a little white tongue at her throat. “Daddy,” she whispered, “are you still not mad at me from what I told you last night?”

  He reached to put his arm around her. “I’m the opposite of mad.”

  “What’s opposite of mad?”

  He sat up, rubbed his face. “Not mad, I guess.”

  Her laughter, genuine and sudden, made her seem older. But then she spun around like the little girl she was. “So you still love me,” she said in a singsong way.

  Now he glanced at her once more in the rearview mirror, and saw she was holding both of Jeannie’s hands in her own.

  He pulled into the parking lot of the church. There was the Austin car, and the Chase car, and the Gowens’. He drove past them, down the small hill, to park near his office. How many times had he driven here? A pang of nostalgia squeezed at his heart; the scene, in its familiarity, seemed to disorient him. How tired he was came to him as he turned the engine off, a certain aching of his legs, and the sense that a piece of a screen door was implanted behind his eyes. He kissed the girls, and his mother took them off to the classroom. In his study he sat on the edge of his chair. Consider and hear me, O Lord my God: lighten mine eyes . . . lest mine enemy say, I have prevailed against him; and those that trouble me rejoice when I am moved. But I have trusted in thy mercy.

  Be with me now.

  ONE AFTER ANOTHER, cars pulled in slowly and parked near the church, their long, smooth hoods nose-to-nose in the middle of the parking lot. Women emerged, tying scarves around their throats, while over one arm they held their pocketbooks, and they waited for their husbands, who were fumbling with keys and wallets, then headed up the walkway, nodding silent greetings to others. More cars arrived, station wagons and sedans low to the ground. There was no room left in the parking lot, and some had to park on the road.

  “Like a funeral,” Jane Watson murmured to her husband, who raised an eyebrow in response.

  Tyler, in his basement study, was only vaguely aware of an increase of commotion overhead as children were taken over to Sunday school, as the women ducked into the kitchen off the activities room to make sure coffee hour would be ready. He was busy reading Bonhoeffer. In a letter from prison, Bonhoeffer had written to his friend Eberhard Bethge that we should not allow psychotherapy and existentialist philosophy to be God’s pioneers. “The Word of God is far removed from this revolt of mistrust, this revolt from below.” Tyler wrote this in the margin of his sermon. And then, as he started to close the book, his eye fell on a line Bonhoeffer had written to his parents, “Now the dismal autumn days have begun and one has to try and get light from within.”

  Overhead Tyler heard the organ prelude starting, and he put on his black robe, snapping it closed down the front, and climbed the stairs. As he stepped through the side door to enter the chancel, the prelude seemed very loud to him, and, without looking up directly, he could sense the church was full. He sat on his “throne” waiting, his eyes cast down, but not closed. “One has to get light from within.” He pictured how light-filled Katherine was after their talk last night, and how in that way, she had reminded him of Lauren. He shifted his legs, and they felt filled with cement. That these people today in church had been, behind his back, accusing him of foolishness while his daughter had been caught in sadness, his housekeeper caught in her lonely sins, seemed to him to be contemptible.

  The organ prelude stopped.

  Tyler stood and walked to the pulpit. Never, in his tenure here, had the church been this full. People sat shoulder-to-shoulder in every pew, including the third row. There in the back was Susan Bradford, her hair combed very neatly, her face carrying a guarded, pleasant look of vague surprise. His mother sat not far from her, pale, erect. His eye caught the figure of Mary Ingersoll sitting beside her young husband. For a moment he had an image of them all dressed in colonial clothes, here to watch a public hanging. He looked down at his sermon, the words from Isaiah. He looked back up. They waited. He walked away from the pulpit to the center of the chancel. He would say, “Why have you come today to the house of the Lord?” But no words came from his mouth.

  He walked back to the pulpit. He was angry, but the anger seemed to be not inside him, but rather around him. Nothing was inside him. No light. Nothing. Tyler raised an arm, lowered it. The faces looking up at him appeared oddly unfamiliar, although there was his mother with so much tension on her face that he had to look away. He walked back to the center of the chancel. He heard the church get very quiet. He looked down at the carpet, turned, and looked at the plain wooden cross hanging on the wall. He looked again at his parish. Rhonda Skillings had her mouth partly opened.

  Infantile grandiosity. Tyler swallowed. They were waiting. He went back to the pulpit. All he had to do was read the lines from Isaiah, read a prayer, read anything he had written. Lord, I have loved the habitation of thy house. But he could not speak. He thought of Katherine: “Why is the moon following us?” Infantile grandiosity. Tyler leaned an arm across the pulpit to steady himself. Oh, Mr. Freud, we are all big-headed babies, and strangely, the image of Khrushchev, red-faced and shaking his fist, came into his mind. He’d been planning to shake his own fist at these people, and yet he could not even speak. I am shut up, and I cannot come forth.

  In the silence of the church, it arrived. The tiny hut of failure that had sat on the horizon came toward him with a silent certainty. He leaned forward. His mouth tugged down, like a spasm of his heart. He said softly, “Oh, I am sorry. I can’t do this anymore.”

  He heard a gasp from a back pew, then another gasp, and even another. Bertha Babcock put a hand to her throat and cried out, “No.” From the choir loft above came a muted sob. Tyler walked to the middle of the chancel, raised his hands just slightly forward, as though to plead with them, but what he saw was fear on people’s faces. They did not look angry, Jane Watson, Fred Chase, Rhonda—no, they looked like children who had gone too far with a prank, and they were afraid. He did not want anyone to be afraid.

  A tear filled his right eye. He felt it grow, slip down his face. From both eyes now, tears came over his cheeks as he stood there. He wept, and wept, his shoulders shaking slightly. He did not hide his face; it did not occur to him to do so. He felt only the wet splash from his eyes, blurring the faces before him. Every few moments, he held his hands forward, as though trying to say something.

  And then the organ burst into sound. Doris Austin was playing “Abide with Me,” and Tyler turned to look up at the choir loft, then turned again to his congregation; they were standing now, some of them singing, and here was Charlie Austin walking up the aisle toward him, Charlie looking right at him, nodding his pink head slightly as though to say, It’s all right. And Charlie taking his arm, helping him through the chancel’s door, helping him down the few steps.

  THE MINISTER’S STUDY was surprisingly messy. The books were put in the shelf at odd angles, some piled on top of others, many with pieces of paper sticking out from them. Charlie hated to see a bookshelf like that. The top of the desk was not visible, so many papers were spread across it. The small window looked out directly onto the snow-covered ground; you couldn’t even see a tree from down here.

  Charlie looked back at the man. He had thought he would not ever want to watch such a thing, or that he would have kept his gaze turned away out of politeness. But there seemed no shame in watching what was before him. Tyler wept freely and with little sound. His eyes seemed very blue as he looked at Charlie. There was a kind of innocent bafflement on his face, and Charlie would always remember the way the tears jumped from the minister’s eyes, little drops of clear water, and how blue his eyes stayed all the while. The man wept, but smiled at Charlie, too. It was an odd smile, with a kind of childlike forthrightness that suggested friendliness in the midst of all that was happening. Occasionally, Tyler would raise his hand in a gesture, as though to say something—then let his hand fall back on his lap.

  Charlie only nodded. He wondered what Tyler would remember of this
moment. He put his hand on Tyler’s shoulder, over the black draping robe the man still wore. “Listen,” Charlie said.

  Tyler nodded, smiling, his eyes big and blue and splashing tears.

  “Listen,” Charlie said again. But he didn’t know, really, what to say. He thought if he had done something as naked and public as Tyler had just done, he would want to kill himself from shame. He didn’t want Tyler to feel that. He said, “You’re not to worry, Tyler.”

  “How’s that?” said Tyler innocently. He sat with his hands folded on his lap, making no attempt to wipe at his face. When Charlie didn’t answer, Tyler said, “I don’t know as I can go on as a minister, Charlie. I think I’m not well.”

  “You’re tired. There’s no shame in being tired.”

  “No?”

  “No.”

  Tyler stared toward the window with his blue eyes. Then he looked back at Charlie and said, “You’ve been in some kind of trouble, haven’t you, Charlie? You’ve had a hard time.”

  “I’m all right. Do you suppose you could do me a favor and blow your nose?”

  “Oh, sure.”

  For a moment Charlie was afraid he’d have to pull out a handkerchief and hold it to the man’s nose like he was a child, but Tyler rummaged around beneath his robe and pulled out a handkerchief and wiped at his face. “Say,” the minister said, his blue eyes still glistening and wide, “Doris played my favorite hymn when I was up there having trouble. Lovely, wasn’t it? Lovely how she did that.”

  Charlie nodded.

  A sharp rap was heard on the door, and Charlie rose to open it. Margaret Caskey stood there. “I’m taking him home now,” she said. “The children are waiting in the car. I can’t leave Jeannie alone for long.”

  “Certainly,” Charlie said, stepping back.

  HIS MOTHER DROVE, the children in the back. No one spoke. Tyler sat with his hands in the pockets of his coat, a tear still slipping now and then from his eyes, so that the wide expanse of blue sky seemed to shimmer, as well as the bare trees that grew by the river, whose edges were frozen over with tucked-in blankets of blue-shadowed snow. The weak noonday sun cast a gentle light over the fields they passed by, the crusty covering of sinking snow radiating a soft brightness that stretched to the horizon, or to a barn, or to the woods nearby.