She shook her head emphatically. “It doesn’t matter.”
“It does matter! The truth always matters!”
“Whose truth? Yours or theirs?”
Burton raised his index finger and plopped it down. One more point for Morgan.
Al jumped in, addressing Kyle. “These people are not worshiping an idol! They are waiting and seeking the God the image represents.”
“They don’t need an idol to do that.”
“It’s not an idol!”
“They don’t need any mediator save Christ himself!”
“Judging, judging, judging!” Armond Harrison bellowed. “Of all the arrogance!”
Sid was shaking his head, looking toward heaven. “Our Lord must weep.”
Paul Daley looked at me. “Well Travis, what’s your view on all this?”
“NO!” Sid shouted—and shouting was something he rarely did. “I don’t think—”
“He’s no longer a part of this ministerial!” Armond growled.
“Then let him speak as a layman,” said Bob Fisher.
“You don’t get it,” Morgan lamented, still on her previous subject. “You just don’t get it.”
Burton Eddy said something about my prior record, but by now everyone was talking at once and I couldn’t make it out. Armond heard it and bellowed out his agreement, but Paul was still harping on getting feedback from everyone present while Morgan was still trying to make her point, whatever it was. Howard and Andy had gotten into an argument that somehow drew in Bob Fisher, and Sid was trying to straighten out Kyle on what was and was not acceptable in a ministerial meeting. Nancy Barrons was having trouble taking notes.
I did hear Al Vendetti counter Sid. “I might like to hear what he has to say.”
“Me too,” said Bob, turning from Howard and Andy.
“If he speaks, I’m leaving this table!” said Armond.
“Now, now . . .” Sid tried to calm things.
“He’s my guest!” Kyle objected.
“If either one of you says another word, I’m leaving the table!”
Kyle rose from his chair. I reached over and pulled him down again, but that didn’t keep him from saying another word. “We are commanded by the Word of God to contend for the faith once and for all delivered to the saints, and if there are lies and deception—”
“So now we’re all liars?”
“Has anyone seen Jesus?” I asked.
“In the latter days there shall be false christs and false messiahs showing great signs and wonders!” Kyle was preaching by now.
But Sid heard me. “What?”
Howard and Andy stopped arguing and looked my way. “What did he say?”
“In order to deceive, if possible, even the elect! Read your Bible!
That’s all I’m saying!” Suddenly Kyle noticed how quiet the room was and how everyone was looking at me. He looked at me.
Paul asked, “What was that, Travis?”
I scanned the room, a little jarred by the sudden silence. “I was just wondering, has anyone seen Jesus? That’s what this is all about, isn’t it?”
For a moment, they just looked at each other.
Morgan offered, “Sally’s ‘angel’ spoke about the answer being on his way.”
Al said with emphasis, “The pilgrims here are looking for Christ.”
Bob built on that. “My person said the angel said ‘Jesus’ was coming.”
Suddenly, to the surprise of everyone, Brett Henchle spoke up.
“That’s what an angel said to me!”
Everyone’s head turned so quickly I thought I heard some neck joints crack.
“You saw something?” Sid asked.
“A hitchhiker,” said Brett. He quickly recounted the story and then said, “So there’s one more side to this. It might not be God or the devil or myth. It might be some clever huckster moving in on the town, and he might have some friends in on this with him.
Now I’m not here to downplay anyone’s religion, but I’m not looking for some heavenly vision here, I’m looking for a suspect.
You tell the people in your churches that if anyone sees these guys again, I’d like to know about it.” He rose from the table. “Thanks for letting me sit in. It was interesting.” Then he walked out, his boots clunking on the linoleum in the hall, his portable radio hissing as he clicked it on.
“If Jesus shows up, then we’ll really have something to talk about,” I said.
Silence.
“Well, if I may change the subject,” said Bob Fisher. “As most of you know, we’re having a week-long revival with Everett Fudd.
We expect the Lord to do some great things and we’d appreciate it if you’d pass the word around.”
“What about the softball team?” asked Paul. “When does that start?”
EVERYTHING WENT WRONG on the way home. Kyle, emotionally wounded, kept bleeding all over me and making it sound like my fault, and I was sour and brooding about a conversation I’d just had with Bob Fisher.
“You just sat there!” Kyle huffed as we drove across town.
“These are pastors, ministers, people answerable to the Lord for how they lead their flocks and they get off on this stupid, wishy-washy, tolerance stuff—that’s Morgan Elliott’s bag, right? She and that Burton what’s-his-face. She’s some kind of liberal, feminist, radical, politically correct female pastor type, and all the men in there don’t want to stand up to her, right?”
“She’s a widow, and she made sense.”
“Not if she thinks the truth doesn’t matter!”
“I was talking about the people-having-needs thing. She’s concerned about people, and I think that’s commendable.”
“At the expense of the truth?”
“That’s an entirely different issue.”
He really turned on me. “It should bother you!”
I shrugged. “I’ve already been bothered.”
He shook his head in dismay and disappointment. “Something’s happened to you, Travis.”
I muttered, “Sure it has.”
“What’d you say?”
“Nothing.”
“And who in the world is that Armond Harrison character?”
“He’s a cult leader.”
Kyle checked for traffic, jammed on the brakes, and pulled over. “What?”
I did not want to go into it. I didn’t have to go into it. I don’t know why I did go into it. “He came out here from Michigan with about thirty followers, and they have their meetings in his house over on Maple Street. Some of them work in town; I think a few commute to Spokane. They’re just average, hard-working people.”
“But they’re a cult?”
I ran down the list—an old, wrinkled list ingrained in my mind through months of public and private discussion, debate, accusation, counteraccusation, and vitriol. It was a list peeled off a can of worms, and I would have loved to forget it. “The Apostolic Brethren deny the deity of Christ, don’t know diddly-squat about atonement or salvation, and think they’re all going to be christs someday because Jesus was just one of many ‘christs’ one of many ‘sons’ of God. They’re into pop psychology—you know, deep meanings behind bodily excretions and private body parts and whether or not your mother breast-fed you. They consider the whole church one big extended family, so they move the kids around from family to family wherever Armond wants them to go.
Armond usually requires the young women to live with him for a while so he can teach them about sex—whatever his view of it is, anyway. They, uh, they do things.” I wanted to cut this short.
“That’s about the gist of it.”
Kyle’s grip on the steering wheel was so tight I thought he’d bend it. “And he’s on the ministerial?”
“You have eyes.”
“Why isn’t anything done about it?”
“Something was done about it.”
“But he’s still there!”
“End of story.”
“But
he’s a heretic! He’s a pervert!”
“Nobody’s asking you.”
He yelled at me. “What?”
I tried to explain, even though I was pretty sure it wouldn’t do much good. “Kyle, in the long, drawn-out scope of things, it’s really none of your business what the Apostolic Brethren do and believe. You can preach the truth just as God called you to do, but what Armond and his bunch choose to believe is up to them and you’re better off just leaving them alone. If you don’t believe me, just try to break up their little church. See how far you get. After you fall flat on your face, you can thank God you live in a country where heretics like Armond Harrison can still roam free, because his freedom is your freedom.”
Kyle shook his head. “I can’t . . . I can’t be on this ministerial!”
“Oh, you’ll break their hearts.”
“Travis, you’re talking like you’re in agreement with all this!”
I did not need or desire this conversation. I was looking at the door handle, seriously thinking of bailing out of the car. “Not in agreement. Just wiser, that’s all. We did talk about that before we went in, remember?”
“So you just sit and let people like that on the ministerial? You just sit and let me do all the fighting, all by myself? You let me walk right into that wolf pack and don’t lift a finger to defend the truth, to help me out?”
“I warned you.”
He sighed a deep sigh, shook his head, and reiterated, “Something’s happened to you, Travis. I mean, the things I used to hear about you, the great spiritual warrior you used to be. You need to come back to the Lord, Travis. You need to get right with God.”
I grabbed the door handle and just about tore it off. “See you around.”
“What are you doing?”
I flung the door open and practically leaped out. “The ride’s over.”
Kyle leaned over, calling to me. “Travis, I’m just trying to help you. You’re heading down the wrong road.”
I was already walking. “I know my way home, Kyle!”
“You know what I mean!”
I stopped and turned. “Yes, I know what you mean. I know the language, Kyle. I was speaking it before you were born. I used to lay that trip on people! But you’re the man of God now, Pastor Sherman. Fight the good fight any way you want. The cause is all yours. Just stay out of my face!”
I turned and kept walking and did not look back, even as I heard him close the door I’d left open and drive off.
I SUPPOSE WE COULD HAVE AVOIDED our little spat if Kyle had been here two years ago, the first time Everett Fudd came to town to revive us at the Baptist church with a week of special meetings. At least he would have had a better picture of what was eating at me.
I wanted to help Bob Fisher out so I got on board and announced the revival meetings in my morning service. For three of the meetings, I brought some of my choir over. Bob and I even sang a duet one night while I played my guitar.
And every night we listened to Brother Fudd preach his long, rambling string of jeremiads, railing against any and every sin, real or imagined, and continually reminding us how backslidden, selfish, and cold of heart we all were. He came from the “to wake ’em up, beat ’em up” school of preaching, the kind that gave rise to a popular description of the Bible belt: “Punch a hole in the sand and guilt pours out.” I often looked around the room to view the weathered faces of those being revived and wondered how much of this stuff these people really needed.
Bob and I saw these same faces in church most every Sunday.
They were the regular people, the habitual church attenders who viewed the fact that there was something to show up for as reason enough to show up. God bless them, they were many a pastor’s last gasping reason to continue having a midweek Bible study or a Sunday evening service, and now they were, at least in my mind, Bob’s primary justification for scheduling Brother Fudd.
They came every night, and every night Brother Fudd beat them up. He accused and scolded them, then shoved their tattered souls up against the sublime memories of the past for comparison: the great revivals that happened in another place, another time; the things that God used to do; the way it was when they first found the Lord. Wherever they once were, they had strayed. Shame on them. Shame on them!
And the altar call was always the same, a piano-accompanied petition: Come back to where you were. Do the old things again. Turn back and pick up whatever it was you dropped.
Recycle the old-time religion.
Come back to the Lord. Get right with God.
As the memories came back, I quickened my step, hurrying down the quiet house-lined street. I was dreading the possibility that Bob Fisher might drive by, offer me a lift, and invite me to the Fudd revival meetings again.
He was my friend. He meant well. But when he approached me after the ministerial with his invitation—“Hey Travis, come to the meetings. It’ll be good for what ails you”—I could hear the message coming between the lines: You need to come back to square one and do it all over again, just do it harder. You need to come back to the Lord.
Come back to the Lord.
Come back to the Lord.
Just what did that mean, really? I chuckled. I could vow never to eat devil’s food cake again, or deviled eggs, as Brother Fudd instructed us two years ago. I could think of all kinds of things to do to please God.
I whispered as I walked, “Lord, we are okay with each other, aren’t we?”
There was no booming voice from heaven, nor was there any quickening in my soul. There was only the same silence I’d endured for months.
I kept walking, anger fueling my steps. Spiritual Band-Aids from friends, silence from heaven, and the same, unshakable sense of being on the outside of it all. The story of my life.
Four
ON THURSDAY, Nancy Barrons sold a bumper crop of Harvesters, her biggest print run since the brush fire of ’95, and the town became officially informed regarding the “Antioch Phenomenon.” The story about Arnold Kowalski worked well because Nancy had a real Arnold to interview and photograph, as well as a doctor from Davenport to render his opinion about the arthritis mysteriously disappearing. I thought the accounts of the angelic sightings had a strange, groping tone, trying to be a story about something that might become news if it ever happened. No matter. News that might become news was still news enough. The photocopier at Prairie Real Estate got a lot of use that day, and single households were buying multiple copies of the paper. This news was definitely going to travel.
Their fervor renewed, Dee, Adrian, and Blanche returned to the church parking lot with a more favorable weather forecast— morning low clouds, but partial clearing in the afternoon. Blanche brought her camera and notebook to record whatever signs might appear, noting that they saw Jesus riding a white horse from 2:05 to 2:15, and then a big fist that could have been the hand of God. Dave White stopped by briefly to check the sky for himself, but he was the only person other than the three ladies to do so. This particular aspect of the Antioch Phenomenon hadn’t made the paper yet.
Of course, the Phenomenon had no regard for Nancy’s publishing schedule. Even as the Harvester was hitting the vending boxes around town and the checkout counters at Mack’s Sooper Market, it happened again, to a person no one would have expected.
One look at Bonnie Adams and you just knew she couldn’t have been born and raised in Antioch by parents who were born and raised in Antioch. It may have been Marc and Greg who first pointed her out to me and called her the “hippie woman.” She was the one who lived on Birch Street with the “PEACE BEGINS WITH ME” bumper sticker on her car and the “KEEP OUT, NO TRESPASSING” sign on her fence. I was never sure how she made a living besides being an artist who created bizarre nudes and animals out of sheet metal and scrap aluminum. She had long, frizzy hair, granny glasses, loose clothing that had to have come either from India or Berkeley, and a particular scent about her, a strange combination of incense and burning hemp. The first tim
e I met her, she was playing old Grateful Dead and Bob Dylan songs at a local jam for acoustic musicians. I did some lead fills on my banjo and we hit it off fine, but she turned a cold shoulder to any mention of the Lord. I quickly gathered she was into energy and vibrations, maybe a little karma, and that was about it. She was pragmatic, however, and that was why she showed up Thursday morning at Our Lady’s with her daughter, Penny.
Penny was seventeen, had no memory of her father, and up until a year ago was constantly in trouble. Brett Henchle and his two cops had run Penny in several times for shoplifting, drug possession, and truancy, but her mother always seemed either helpless or indifferent, and Penny showed no signs of changing.
Until the accident.
Many folks were surprised the single-vehicle wreck hadn’t happened sooner. Penny was out with two friends late at night, drinking and driving, when the car went off the road and rolled several times down an embankment. Penny was thrown from the vehicle and the open door landed on her right forearm, crushing it and mangling the nerves. The two friends recovered from their injuries, but Penny’s hand was ruined and soon withered, curled back on itself like a broken bird foot.
After that, we didn’t hear too much about her.
“Well,” Jack McKinstry told me once, “she just can’t be the thief she used to be.” He ran Mack’s Sooper Market, and Penny used to be a regular visitor who cost him a lot of money. Brett Henchle confided that things had indeed quieted down as far as Penny was concerned. “Maybe she’s learned her lesson.”
When Al Vendetti opened the church doors for the pilgrims, Bonnie was there with Penny in tow. Penny looked a lot like her mother, except that her frizzy hair had green streaks in it, her clothing was quite a bit tighter, and her face was pierced in far more places than Bonnie’s. They took a seat in the second pew from the front, directly behind the young couple from Moses Lake. Bonnie had brought some granola bars and took her first bite as she gazed at the crucifix, waiting. Penny just slouched in the pew, bored and scowling.
After no more than five minutes, Penny snarled, “Can we go home?”
“No!” Bonnie answered.