Feast for Thieves (22 page)

Bobbie drove me back to the parsonage in her jeep. She didn’t even ask if I wanted a ride. She just climbed behind the wheel, and I climbed in next to her on the passenger’s seat, and we didn’t say another word all the way home.

A million thoughts coursed through my mind after she dropped me off. Of chief concern, of course, was still my meeting with Crazy Ake come that evening. I still didn’t see a way out of the plan, but one thing I did have to my advantage now was the Springfield. The sheriff and Deputy Roy had been bustling about caring for Cisco, and I’d plumb held on to that old rifle, I had. I kept the weapon in my hands all the time Bobbie and I talked,
and the rifle felt unnatural but necessary. When I’d climbed into the jeep, I kept it across one knee and pointed down toward the road. I took it inside the parsonage and hid it underneath my bed.

I milled about the parsonage by myself for ten minutes or so until it dawned on me that I had another meeting I needed to make this day. It was nearing lunchtime already and I hadn’t eaten yet this morning, but I reckoned I’d better get to this meeting as quick as possible. It was with the one person who wouldn’t be friendly with a missed meeting. I jogged over to the main church building.

“You’re late!” Mert Cahoon said when I walked into her office. “Mighty late! Don’t you know I needed to run through the entire attendance chart by myself?!”

“Well, we had some trouble in town, ma’am—” I started to say, but she was having none of my lip.

“You sit right down, Reverend Rowdy. We got work to do, and I’m already late for my mail route. Today of all days is when I needed you here the most, and you failed me, boy. You failed me good.”

I sat in the chair opposite the church secretary and set one boot on my knee. I was in no mood for her feisty ways today and I probed for the real reason behind her hurt. “What’re you talking about, Mert?”

She shut her mouth tight, and that same mysterious expression appeared on her face, the same I’d seen the day she counted the money from the building campaign. Only this time it wasn’t near to a smile like it was then. Again, she looked to have reached a decision in her own mind, but I didn’t know what that decision might be. This time I chose to press the matter.

“Mert.” I looked her straight in the eyes. “Come clean. What aren’t you telling me?”

A long lump went down her throat. “I couldn’t believe you’d be late this morning, that’s all.”

I leaned forward. “I know I’m late. But what’s really eating you, Mert?”

She swallowed again. “I wanted to tell you something today—just as soon as I could. I’d made my mind up to tell you, and then you weren’t there, so I couldn’t.”

“I’m here now.”

Mert sniffed. “You know my husband, Clay?”

“Of course.”

“He’s been ailing real bad, you know.”

“I know.”

“He went for his medical treatments yesterday. I drove him up to Rancho Springs, and he had an operation yesterday afternoon. They needed to fly in a specialist and everything. I couldn’t stay with him in the clinic on account of the mail route, but the doctor telephoned Martha at the switchboard early this morning and relayed a message to me. Clay came through the operation fine.” She nodded for emphasis but still wasn’t smiling.

“That’s good news, then, yeah?”

“Of course it’s good news!” she snapped. “But this is why I needed you here this morning, Reverend.”

I gave her a quizzical look.

She sighed in annoyance. “It’s because of the building campaign money.” She shuffled in her chair, not finishing her thought.

“Mert?”

“I stole that money,” she said. “I stole it all! I stole it to pay for his dang-nabbed hospital bill!”

NINETEEN

M
y mouth hung open.

I stared at this morally upright woman, my church secretary who’d selflessly worked to serve the church for the past eighteen years. “It was you who stole the twelve thousand dollars?” I said.

“I’m not proud of it, Reverend, but it needed to be done. I lied to Clay—told him the money came from an encyclopedia sweepstakes I’d won. I know what I did was wrong, but I can’t go to jail. Clay’s going to need a heap of nursing when he comes home, and there’s nobody around here who can do that except me. I’m sorry for stealing, and that’s why I’m confessing my sin before you and God. I don’t know what else to tell, so that’s all I got to say about the matter.” Mert shut up entirely.

I exhaled sharply and leaned back in my chair. I could feel my body sagging. The weight of what the woman was telling me was almost too much to wrap my mind around. “I honestly don’t know what to do right now, Mert.”

“You going to tell the sheriff on me?”

“No.”

“That’s good. How come not?”

“Because you’re correct—Clay will need a heap of nursing. And if you go to jail, that won’t help anybody right now.”

“That’s what I reckoned you’d say.”

“Still, you can’t go around stealing money.” I sat forward in
my chair and stared at the woman. The irony of my words did not escape me, but all I could think to add was, “Let’s give it a week. A few days more maybe. We’ll both set ourselves to studying the situation. Maybe we can come up with a better plan forward—a plan that satisfies both justice and mercy.”

Mert nodded. “I best be off, Reverend. Mail’s waiting.” She patted me on the shoulder, not unkindly, and walked out of the office.

I knew the real reason I wasn’t going to tell on her. I’d been in the exact same position as her once—in fact, my secret crime still burned within me. Oh, I was fairly certain Halligan Barker knew the truth, or at least he had a solid hunch it was me who robbed the bank. But I’d never paid in jail time for that crime—not specifically, not in how Lady Justice was bound to see the matter. All I’d done was grown remorseful, confessed the crime to myself and God, and then escaped punishment because of Halligan’s bargain. How could I, in good conscience, turn Mert in to the law for doing much the same thing?

My mind whirled—this crazy preaching job was getting harder by the minute. Undoubtedly I had a legal responsibility as a reverend to report an actual crime—which this was, but … somehow I couldn’t bring myself to report this one. It was too much like my own. Besides, I figured, the church money was gone now anyway, spent on Clay’s operation. The church wouldn’t get the money back neither way.

I walked outside Mert’s office and around to mine. The door was unlocked, same as always, and I sat behind the desk I seldom sat at and took out the big old Bible I kept there. Bobbie had lent me a smaller one to use for study that I kept in the parsonage. But this one held a warm place in my heart. It was the first I’d preached out of, so many months ago now. I flipped to any old random page. My finger landed at the beginning of Jonah. The entire book of Jonah was only two pages long, and right then and
there I read it straight through in ten minutes. All seemed like a big fish story to me.

Sure, I got the point of Jonah’s story—it wasn’t hard to get—but I didn’t quite know what to do with that information. Jonah was a prophet of old who was told by God to go preach against a wicked city named Nineveh. Jonah didn’t want to do it—fulfill his calling, I mean. He wasn’t an eager preacher; he was a reluctant reverend, same as me. So he sprinted the other direction, got tangled up with some sailors, launched himself into a storm, and got tossed overboard from the deck of a ship. A big fish swallowed him whole, and there the man sat and stewed in its juices. I liked how the second chapter began in my King James. “Jonah prayed unto the Lord his God out of the fish’s belly.” Well, in all the history of literature, that was undoubtedly its crowning understatement.

But then good things began to happen. God heard the prayer and ordered the fish to puke Jonah onto dry land where Jonah got his marching orders again. This time Jonah obeyed. He hiked to Nineveh, told all the folks they was about to be destroyed, and then—this is where Jonah the man turned peculiar in his ways—all Jonah did was sit back with a big grin on his face.

Peculiar indeed. There sat Jonah condemning folks right and left, waiting on God’s justice to strike them all dead. But those same folks got busy with their confessions. They turned real humble, dressed in sackcloth to mourn their failings, and dumped ashes on their heads to show sorrow. God saw the city turn from its evil ways, and instead of throwing justice at them, God showed mercy. In the end, those city folks didn’t get a lick of what they deserved.

Maybe that’s what I was doing now with Mert Cahoon—trying to hold forth mercy to her. She was genuinely sorry for what she’d done. At least I think she was. She was sorry like I was sorry, and the sheriff having mercy on me was similar to me having mercy on Mert.

But, oh that Jonah. That wasn’t all there was to his story, for he continued his fussed-up ways. He was like Deputy Roy, wanting nothing except law. A crime was committed, Jonah reckoned, and even now, in spite of the city folks’ repenting, God needed to call down wrath on the Ninevites. Jonah got plain mad and worked up a big head of steam. He went outside the city and sat near a wall to sulk. It must have been hotter than a Texas summer afternoon because a vine grew over his head, one that provided a relief of shade, but right away that vine withered and died. Jonah grew so irate he declared a desire to die.

“Well, look at you in all your huff and puff,” God said, or words to that effect. “You’re so fired up about a dead vine, Jonah. If that’s how you feel about something so small as a vine withering, then why aren’t you concerned about all the folks in the city? There’s a hundred and twenty thousand people living in Nineveh, and you and your outrage want to bury them all.”

Jonah didn’t have a smart answer to that, I guess, because that’s where the book ends—with God’s thoughts and not Jonah’s. God’s question is left hanging, jagged and without a conclusion, a question raised without an answer received. I closed up the Bible, and right then I got a small idea what to do about Crazy Ake.

The vine provided a clue. Not in any mystical way. It was just that the wood of the vine made me think of the wood of the tree stand. One of the jobs I applied for months ago was with the Angelina County Lumber Company out of Keltys, Texas. For years they was known for their selective cutting of high quality Southern yellow pine.
It’s the forest behind the mill that counts most
, was their motto.

Well, we could log the tree stand and pay our debts. Replant trees and keep the forest growing. We could pay back whatever Mert took to keep her husband alive, and somehow I could get the church folks to pay back what I owed Crazy Ake too.

Hoo boy. I sat back in instant deflation and rubbed my face
with my hands. It was a foolish idea, and I knew it already. There were a trillion holes with the plan and Crazy Ake would never go for it. Shoot—the church folks wouldn’t neither. How would I ever explain to them why I needed to pay Crazy Ake.
He robbed your bank, see, and now I still owe him
.

I put that foolish plan far out of my mind, then ran back over to the parsonage and clattered up the front steps. It was only 1 p.m., and Crazy Ake wasn’t set to come around until dark. I wanted to get my rifle ready, to put it in a position where I could reach it easy. If it came to a showdown, then I wasn’t going down without a fight.

Now, if I was truly watching over my shoulder for the evil that was following me, I would have noticed that the handle to the parsonage doorknob was warm. Too warm. But I was in too much hurry to reach the rifle. Straightaway through the front door I heard a voice that wasn’t mine and knew I’d made a deadly mistake.

“Wasn’t expecting you so soon.” The voice came from out of the front bedroom, the one with the crib and cots.

I whirled to face the man.

“Take it easy, boy,” Crazy Ake said. “I ain’t gonna shoot you without my money in hand first.” He laughed and emerged from the shadows. “Maybe we could cook up a little grub first. You hungry?”

My heart pounded in my chest. “I … I don’t keep any food in the parsonage.”

“Well, that’s a shame. A crying shame. No food except coffee? How about brewing me a cup?”