He shuffled that card to the bottom and looked at the next.
"Some of you may remember this one. In August of last year, a man and his two sons set out on Lake Winnipesaukee in a rowboat. They had the family dog with them. The dog fell overboard, and both boys jumped in to rescue him. When the father saw his sons were in danger of drowning, he jumped in himself, inadvertently overturning the boat. All three died. The dog swam to shore." He looked up and actually smiled for a moment--it was like the sun peeking through a scrim of clouds on a cold January day. "I tried to find out what happened to that dog--whether the woman who lost her husband and sons kept it or had it put down--but the information wasn't available."
I snuck a look at my brothers and sister. Terry and Con only looked puzzled, but Andy was white-faced with horror, anger, or both. His hands were clenched in his lap. Claire was crying silently.
Next file card.
"October of last year. A hurricane swept onshore near Wilmington, North Carolina, and killed seventeen. Six were children at a church day-care center. A seventh was reported missing. His body was found a week later, in a tree."
Next.
"This item concerns a missionary family ministering to the poor with food, medicine, and the gospel in what used to be the Belgian Congo and is now, I believe, Zaire. There were five of them. They were murdered. Although the article did not say--only the news that's fit to print in The New York Times, you know--the article implied that the killers may have been of a cannibalistic bent."
A disapproving mutter--Reggie Kelton was at the center of it--arose. Jacobs heard and raised one hand in what was almost a benedictory gesture.
"Perhaps I need not go into further details--the fires, the floods, the earthquakes, the riots, the assassinations--although I could. The world shudders with them. Yet reading these stories provided some comfort to me, because they prove that I am not alone in my suffering. The comfort is only small, however, because such deaths--like those of my wife and son--seem so cruel and capricious. Christ ascended into heaven in his body, we are told, but all too often we poor mortals here on earth are left with ugly heaps of maimed meat and that constant, reverberating question: Why? Why? Why?
"I have read scripture all my life--first at my mother's knee, then in Methodist Youth Fellowship, and then in divinity school--and I can tell you, my friends, that nowhere in scripture is that question directly addressed. The closest the Bible comes is this reading from Corinthians, where Saint Paul says, in effect, 'It's no good asking, my brethren, because you wouldn't understand, anyway.' When Job asked God Himself, he got an even more blunt response: 'Were you there when I made the world?' Which translates, in the language of our younger parishioners, to 'Buzz off, Bunky.'"
No chuckles this time.
He studied us, a faint smile touching the corners of his lips, the light from our stained glass window putting blue and red diamonds on his left cheek.
"Religion is supposed to be our comfort when the hard times come. God is our rod and our staff, the Great Psalm declares; He will be with us and bear us up when we take that inevitable walk through the Valley of the Shadow of Death. Another Psalm assures us that God is our refuge and our strength, although the people who were lost in that Oklahoma church might dispute the idea . . . if they still had mouths to dispute with. And the father and his two children, drowning because they tried to rescue the family pet--did they ask God what was going on? What the deal was? And did He answer, 'Tell you in a few minutes, guys,' as the water choked their lungs and death darkened their minds?
"Let us say plainly what Saint Paul meant when he spoke of that darkened glass. He meant we're supposed to take it all on faith. If our faith is strong, we'll go to heaven, and we'll understand the whole thing when we get there. As if life were a joke, and heaven the place where the cosmic punchline is finally explained to us."
There was soft feminine sobbing in the church now, and more pronounced masculine rumblings of discontent. But at that point, no one had walked out or stood up to tell Reverend Jacobs he should sit down because he was edging into blasphemy. They were still too stunned.
"When I tired of researching the seemingly whimsical and often terribly painful deaths of the innocent, I looked into the various branches of Christianity. Gosh, friends, I was surprised at how many there are! Such a Tower of Doctrine! The Catholics, the Episcopalians, the Methodists, the Baptists--both hardshell and softshell--the C of Es, the Anglicans, the Lutherans, the Presbyterians, the Unitarians, the Jehovah's Witnesses, the Seventh-day Adventists, the Quakers, the Shakers, Greek Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox, the Shilohites--mustn't forget them--and half a hundred more.
"Here in Harlow, we're all on party lines, and it seems to me that religion is the biggest party line of them all. Think how the lines to heaven must get jammed on Sunday mornings! And do you know what I find fascinating? Each and every church dedicated to Christ's teaching thinks it's the only one that actually has a private line to the Almighty. And good gosh, I haven't even mentioned the Muslims, or the Jews, or the theosophists, or the Buddhists, or those who worship America itself just as fervently as, for eight or a dozen nightmare years, the Germans worshipped Hitler."
Right then was when the walkouts started. First just a few at the back, heads down and shoulders hunched (as if they had been spanked), then more and more. Reverend Jacobs seemed to take no notice.
"Some of these various sects and denominations are peaceful, but the largest of them--the most successful of them--have been built on the blood, bones, and screams of those who have the effrontery not to bow to their idea of God. The Romans fed Christians to the lions; the Christians dismembered those they deemed to be heretics or sorcerers or witches; Hitler sacrificed the Jews in their millions to the false god of racial purity. Millions have been burned, shot, hung, racked, poisoned, electrocuted, and torn to pieces by dogs . . . all in God's name."
My mother was sobbing audibly, but I didn't look around at her. I couldn't. I was frozen in place. By horror, yes, of course. I was only nine. But there was also a wild, inchoate exultation, a feeling that at last someone was telling me the exact unvarnished truth. Part of me hoped he would stop; most of me wished fiercely that he would go on, and I got my wish.
"Christ taught us to turn the other cheek and to love our enemies. We pay the concept lip service, but when most of us are struck, we try to pay back double. Christ drove the moneychangers from the temple, but we all know those quick-buck artists never stay away for long; if you've ever sat yourself down to a rousing game of church bingo or heard a radio preacher begging for money, you know exactly what I mean. Isaiah prophesied that the day would come when we'd beat our swords into plowshares, but all they've been beaten into in our current dark age is atomic bombs and intercontinental ballistic missiles."
Reggie Kelton stood up. He was as red as my brother Andy was pale. "You need to sit down, Reverend. You're not yourself."
Reverend Jacobs did not sit down.
"And what do we get for our faith? For the centuries we've given this church or that one our gifts of blood and treasure? The assurance that heaven is waiting for us at the end of it all, and when we get there, the punchline will be explained and we'll say, 'Oh yeah! Now I get it.' That's the big payoff. It's dinned into our ears from our earliest days: heaven, heaven, heaven! We will see our lost children, our dear mothers will take us in their arms! That's the carrot. The stick we're beaten with is hell, hell, hell! A Sheol of eternal damnation and torment. We tell children as young as my dear lost son that they stand in danger of eternal fire if they steal a piece of penny candy or lie about how they got their new shoes wet.
"There's no proof of these after-life destinations; no backbone of science; there is only the bald assurance, coupled with our powerful need to believe that it all makes sense. But as I stood in the back room of Peabody's and looked down at the mangled remains of my boy, who wanted to go to Disneyland much more than he wanted to go to heaven, I had a revelation. Religion i
s the theological equivalent of a quick-buck insurance scam, where you pay in your premium year after year, and then, when you need the benefits you paid for so--pardon the pun--so religiously, you discover the company that took your money does not, in fact, exist."
That was when Roy Easterbrook stood up in the rapidly emptying church. He was an unshaven hulk of a man who lived in a rusty little trailer park on the east side of town, close to the Freeport line. As a rule, he only came at Christmas, but today he'd made an exception.
"Rev'run," he said. "I heard there was a bottle of hooch in the glovebox of your car. And Mert Peabody said when he bent over to work on your wife, she smelt like a barroom. So there's your reason. There's your sense of it. You ain't got the spine to accept the will of God? Fine. But leave these other ones alone." With that, Easterbrook turned and lumbered out.
It stopped Jacobs cold. He stood gripping the pulpit, eyes blazing in his white face, lips pressed together so tightly his mouth had disappeared.
My dad stood, then. "Charles, you need to step down."
Reverend Jacobs shook his head as if to clear it. "Yes," he said. "You're right, Dick. Nothing I say will make any difference, anyway."
But it did. To one little boy, it did.
He stepped back, glanced around as if he no longer knew where he was, and then stepped forward again, although there was now no one to hear him except for my family, the church deacons, and Me-Maw, still planted in the first row with her eyes bugging out.
"Just one more thing. We came from a mystery and it's to a mystery we go. Maybe there's something there, but I'm betting it's not God as any church understands Him. Look at the babble of conflicting beliefs and you'll know that. They cancel each other out and leave nothing. If you want truth, a power greater than yourselves, look to the lightning--a billion volts in each strike, and a hundred thousand amperes of current, and temperatures of fifty thousand degrees Fahrenheit. There's a higher power in that, I grant you. But here, in this building? No. Believe what you want, but I tell you this: behind Saint Paul's darkened glass, there is nothing but a lie."
He left the pulpit and walked through the side door. The Morton family sat in the kind of silence people must experience after a bomb blast.
*
When we got home, Mom went into the big back bedroom, said she did not want to be disturbed, and closed the door. She stayed there the rest of the day. Claire cooked supper, and we ate mostly in silence. At one point Andy began to quote some scriptural passage that completely disproved what the Reverend had said, but Dad told him to shut his piehole. Andy looked at our father's hands shoved deep into his pockets and zipped his lip.
After supper, Dad went out to the garage, where he was tinkering with Road Rocket II. For once Terry--usually his loyal assistant, almost his acolyte--did not join him, so I did . . . although not without hesitation.
"Daddy? Can I ask you a question?"
He was under the Rocket on a Crawligator, a caged light in one hand. Only his khaki-clad legs stuck out. "I suppose so, Jamie. Unless it's about that goddam mess this morning. If that's the case, you can also keep your piehole shut. I ain't going there tonight. Tomorrow'll be time enough. We'll have to petition the New England Methodist Conference to fire him, and they'll have to take it to Bishop Matthews in Boston. It's a fucking mess, and if you ever tell your mother I used that word around you, she'll beat me like a redheaded stepchild."
I didn't know if my question was about the Terrible Sermon or not, I only knew I had to ask it. "Was what Mr. Easterbrook said true? Was she drinking?"
The moving light beneath the car went still. Then he rolled himself out so he could look up at me. I was afraid he'd be mad, but he wasn't mad. Just unhappy. "People have been whispering about it, and I suppose it'll get around a lot faster now that that nummie Easterbrook went and said it right out loud, but you listen to me, Jamie: it doesn't matter. George Barton had an epileptic seizure and he was on the wrong side of the road and she come around a blind turn and pop goes the weasel. It doesn't matter if she was sober or head down and tail over the dashboard. Mario Andretti couldn't have avoided that crash. Reverend was right about one thing: people always want a reason for the bad things in life. Sometimes there ain't one."
He raised the hand not holding the caged light and pointed a grease-smeared finger at me. "All the rest was just the bullshit of a grief-struck man, and don't you forget it."
*
The Wednesday before Thanksgiving was a half day in our school district, but I had promised Mrs. Moran that I'd stay to wash the blackboards and neaten up our little library of tattered books. When I told Mom, she waved her hand in a distracted way and told me to just be home for supper. She was already putting a turkey in the oven, but I knew it couldn't be ours; it was way too small for seven.
As it turned out, Kathy Palmer (a teacher's pet wannabe if there ever was one) also stayed to help out, and the work was done in half an hour. I thought of going to Al's or Billy's house to play guns or something, but I knew they'd want to talk about the Terrible Sermon and how Mrs. Jacobs had gotten herself and Morrie killed because she was shitfaced drunk--a rumor that had indeed gained the credence of absolute fact--and I didn't want any part of that, so I went home. It was an unseasonably warm day, our windows were open, and I could hear my sister and my mother arguing.
"Why can't I come?" Claire asked. "I want him to know at least some people in this stupid town are still on his side!"
"Because your father and I think all you children should stay away from him," my mother said. They were in the kitchen, and by now I was lingering outside the window.
"I'm not a child, anymore, Mother, I'm seventeen!"
"Sorry, but at seventeen you're still a child, and a young girl visiting him wouldn't look right. You'll just have to take my word for that."
"But it's okay for you? You know Me-Maw'll see you, and it'll be all over the party line in twenty minutes! If you're going, let me go with you!"
"I said no, and that's final."
"He gave Con back his voice!" Claire stormed. "How can you be so mean?"
There was a long pause and then my mother said, "That's why I'm going to see him. Not to take him a meal for tomorrow but to let him know we're grateful in spite of those terrible things he said."
"You know why he said them! He just lost his wife and son and he was all messed up! Half crazy!"
"I do know that." Mom was speaking more quietly now, and I had to strain to hear because Claire was crying. "But it doesn't change how shocked people were. He went too far. Much too far. He's leaving next week, and that's for the best. When you know you're going to be fired, it's best to quit first. It allows you to keep a little self-respect."
"Fired by the deacons, I suppose," Claire almost sneered. "Which means Dad."
"Your father has no choice. When you're no longer a child, you may realize that, and have a little sympathy. This is tearing Dick apart."
"Go on, then," Claire said. "See if a few slices of turkey breast and some sweet potatoes make up for the way he's getting treated. I bet he won't even eat it."
"Claire . . . Claire-Bear--"
"Don't call me that!" she yelled, and I heard her pounding for the stairs. She'd sulk and cry in her bedroom for awhile, I supposed, and then get over it, the way she did a couple of years ago when Mom told her fifteen was absolutely too young to go to the drive-in with Donnie Cantwell.
I decided to hustle my butt into the backyard before Mom left with her special-made dinner. I sat in the tire swing, not exactly hiding but not exactly in full view, either. Ten minutes later, I heard the front door shut. I went to the corner of the house and saw Mom walking down the road with a foil-covered tray in her hands. The foil twinkled in the sun. I went in the house and up the stairs. I knocked on my sister's door, which was graced by a large Bob Dylan poster.
"Claire?"
"Go away!" she shouted. "I don't want to talk to you!" The record player went on: the Yardbirds, and at t
op volume.
Mom came back about an hour later--a pretty long visit just to drop off a gift of food--and although Terry and I were in the living room by then, watching TV and jostling each other for the best place on our old couch (in the middle, where the springs didn't poke your bum), she barely seemed to notice us. Con was upstairs playing the guitar he'd gotten for his birthday. And singing.
*
David Thomas of Gates Falls Congo was back for a return engagement on the Sunday after Thanksgiving. The church was once more full, maybe because people wanted to see if Reverend Jacobs would show up and try to say some more awful things. He didn't. If he had, I'm sure he would have been shut up before he got a running start, maybe even carried out bodily. Yankees take their religion seriously.
The next day, Monday, I ran the quarter mile from school instead of walking. I had an idea, and I wanted to be home before the schoolbus arrived. When it came, I grabbed Con and pulled him into the backyard.
"Who put a bug up your butt?" he asked.
"You need to come down to the parsonage with me," I said. "Reverend Jacobs is going away pretty soon, maybe even tomorrow, and we should see him before he goes. We should tell him we still like him."
Con drew away from me, brushing his hand down the front of his Ivy League shirt, as if he was afraid I'd left cooties on it. "Are you crazy? I'm not doing that. He said there's no God."
"He also electrified your throat and saved your voice."
Con shrugged uneasily. "It would have come back, anyway. Dr. Renault said so."
"He said it would come back in a week or two. That was in February. You still didn't have it back in April. Two months later."
"So what? It took a little longer, that's all."
I couldn't believe what I was hearing. "What are you, chicken?"