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But it would not go away in his mind. It curled and curled out of its yellow center, billowing out black and thick and choking. He saw it at night. He would wake with a message, the beginning of the Code, and then IT would come, drifting along, sure of itself, blotting out the scene with its thick, black presence.
The Lenten season was altered for him. No longer was it just a time of quiet reflection. Now it became a time of testing: messages at night when he would waken, sweating in the stillness, were now imperiled by smoke. Smoke curled over the numbers, blurring, blocking out. Perhaps it had all come too easily these years, he thought. Perhaps he had been given a gift and had squandered it and now was being judged:
O God, why dost thou cast us off for ever?
Why does thy anger smoke against the sheep of Thy pasture?
Remember thy congregation, which thou hast gotten of old
which thou hast redeemed to be the tribe of thy heritage!
He preached from the Psalter on Sunday. Preached on the trials and on the sense of abandonment and the smoke of the Lord with an earnest, passionate tone, a tone sounding strange even to him, as he heard his voice rolling out through the assembled faithful of the congregation just before Holy Communion.
It was an exhausting sermon. He had risen early and pondered the text as he had Friday night after returning from Coffeyville and all through the day on Saturday. Suddenly he was bereft. He had to struggle through, each word arching its back, prickling that he should find its meaning. Through the commentaries he went. Devotional material. The church fathers when he could track down a reference. Then, sitting in the study, early Sunday morning he had seen the hawk again, drifting over the scene at first light, and his hunting and presence seemed not a glory but a trepidation. The bird was ordinary. Between the potency/ And the existence, Eliot says. Between the essence/ And the descent/ Falls the Shadow.
Strange then that they came more his way, in the narthex by the main doors, then out the side way to Fellowship Hall at the closing. Searching eyes. Warm handshakes. Vigor. A blessing of sorts. He could not understand. This message so tentative. So careful. Just the words before him preached not the surety of special meaning. Even his mother after the coffee hour and back in the parsonage brought it up just as they were taking off their wraps.
“A good sermon, Gilbert,” she had said. “Good and sensitive and clear. Your best this year, I think,” as she made her way into the pantry to scrub the potatoes for Sunday dinner.
At the Frontenac Game on Tuesday he took his usual place. They played hard that night. Real hard. Jerrod pumping elbows and knees like pistons in the engine of his body. Jimmy Lueck caring for the ball. Good passes. In and out of offenses in response to the changing zone-press and man to man of the Eagles. He heard all the old names. White Oak, Bramble again rolled out across the floor and into the minds and bodies of the players who arranged themselves accordingly. But, by the end of the third quarter, it was over. He knew that without even looking at the score, sensing it like the rest of the crowd who saw it in the flagging energy of the players, the failure to block out, the lack of offensive boards, the long, desperate jump shots rattling the rim and falling away. When they got too tired for Gray Hawk, the taller team from Frontenac took the ball into the four corners—and with it they took the clock. They lost by 14, the Eagles going away.
It was two weeks later when he discovered one day, in the midst of thinking about the confirmation lesson, that he no longer had to hide it. What was it that he had often said to himself: Keep it down? With a pang he realized the numbers were diminishing. He slept longer at night, sometimes all the way through. He saw the road better, too, his mother said, with not all that gawking.
He thought perhaps it was his vision. Perhaps he should go on down to Pittsburg and get his vision checked. But it didn’t seem wrong. It was more like the numbers just didn’t jump up at him. The final score of the game was when he first sensed it. Didn’t even look while climbing down from the bleachers. Thought instead of Ira, standing at the far corner with two others, shaking his head. That’s where he had looked. Had to wait for the Chanute Herald on Saturday to get the score. And then, sitting in the parsonage in front of the TV with the paper, splitting the game into quarters, still the numbers didn’t add up.
It must have been that smoke. Billowing out, it was a strange smoke, wiping clean with its heavy black accretion of oil and plastic and tar. He never learned the names of the people who had died, killed instantly. It had been in the paper but he had not looked. Somehow, in a strange manner, the smoke had ended it, coming insistently in his dreams. Whatever it was, it had given him a jolt. And the numbers, like the flood waters that can surge up in late winter, drained off and went the other way.
The call from the Bishop came late Friday afternoon. He was canceling his trip for the last week in February. Then saying something strange about hearing he had been getting better. Better? What was there to recover from? Bishop telling him he had been hearing good things about his recent sermons from the people of the church. How could that be, with all the struggle he had put into them? Wanted just to come down for his annual visit in May. “Don’t look for me until then, Gilbert,” he had said.
So it came down to late one Saturday afternoon, with the last of the month running out under a dreary gray sky, fog covering the river bottoms, moisture heavy, dripping from the trees, with the mercury hovering around the freezing mark. He was sitting quietly in his study with no one around. Quiet. A heavy cold was creeping into the study since the space heater was off. The only light was graying at the window. And now late on this afternoon, he felt himself giving out. He put his head down on the Bible and closed his eyes. His head had ached in the last weeks. But now he felt just kind of soft: Soft and cold and ordinary.
The kingdom of God is not coming with signs to be observed; nor will they say, ‘Lo, here it is!’ or ‘There!’ for behold, the kingdom of God is in the midst of you.
The numbers had gone. The web of connections had vanished, thinning out and then just plain disappearing. Sixty-one year old pastor. He stretched his arms out and felt with both hands the fluted edges of the large desk. He felt the cool pages of the open book on his cheek. He listened to the quiet of the church, an expectant, gathering silence. And then, for no particular reason, he said, in his rich bass voice, his head still down, the full contents of the Lord’s Prayer.
Said it out, alone, and into the waiting silence. Said it out, a simple prayer, not special. Said it out plainly. And when he had finished, this sense of peace. Exile and return, his Old Testament professor had said while doing the theology of Gerhard Von Rad. And now here it was: a memory, not a message.
Gilbert felt finished. He was getting to know himself again in the common-place.
An ordinary man.
GOING FOR THE MAIL