Hell on Church Street (13 page)

Nick cocked his head to the side, “Well, Dr. Sam, I’m not disagreeing with you, but the Lord’s work marches on. Seems to me that the Cards are in heaven now, and we have to carry on the Lord’s work.”

“I have to agree,” I said. “Brother Card would certainly have put the work first.”

Dr. Samuels scratched his liver spots and muttered something, but he didn’t say anything else because Brother Herschel slowly sat up and slipped on his glasses.
 
Everyone grew quiet. The chairman let Nick run the meeting, but his voice still carried more weight than anyone else’s in the room. He said, “Perhaps we
should
wait a while. People need time to heal. We don’t want to hamstring the new man before he’s even chosen. We need time to heal as a church.”

Nick shook his head. For once, things weren’t really going his way. I didn’t feel too much pity for him. While he was as shocked and horrified at what had happened as anyone, I don’t think he’d ever really liked Card, whom he seemed to regard as a well-meaning dullard. Deep down (and he never would have
said
this) he probably saw the Cards’ demise as a hard, but necessary, step in the evolution of the church. I was sure he was going to lead the pastor search, and I was sure he was going to be looking for an active administrator, a real fire-breather who was politically active and aggressive in terms of outreach. That was Nick’s vision for the future—what he saw, I’m sure, as the Lord’s vision. But he was going to have to wait for the old men to die off or step down before he could get some fresh blood into the pulpit. And despite what I might
say
about the need for a new preacher, I certainly wasn’t going to help the pastor search along.

“While I completely agree with Nick about the need to start looking for a man to assume the leadership of the church,” I said, “I also think that our primary focus in the days and weeks ahead will be to minister to the people of this church. We’re all called to be ministers, not simply the pastors. I think choosing a pastor should be a top priority, to be sure. But we shouldn’t hurry into anything. Brother Card’s absence leaves a vacuum not easily filled, but more importantly it leaves pain and fresh wounds. It’s my feeling—and I have been praying about this since I heard about the Cards—it’s my feeling that we should set as our top priority the healing of this church body from this terrible event.” Nick started to say something and I held up my hand to stop him. “We should be working
toward
the search for a new pastor. We should be striving toward that goal, praying on it, searching our hearts, and searching the hearts of this church body, searching for the Lord’s will in this terrible time. That’s the conviction of my heart.”

Everyone was quiet. Nick nodded slowly—rather glumly, actually—and Brother Herschel said, “Amen to that, brother.” And then that tired old man smiled, and I could tell he’d be happy if I turned out to be the pastor of the church.

I grinned politely to Nick, who was nodding and trying to repress his heartfelt objection to what I’d said. Finally he stopped nodding, and all he could muster up was, “We should pray about it.”

“Indeed,” Brother Herschel said and announced that we should adjourn with a word of prayer. Then he asked me, and not Nick, to say the prayer.

I smiled as I prayed. The church was mine for the taking.

Chapter Fourteen

Days passed and I heard nothing from Doolittle Norris. The papers carried the story and made a big deal of it, but they didn’t say anything I didn’t already know. A local minister and his wife had been brutally murdered in their home, and the home burnt to the ground, by an unknown intruder or intruders. One thing the paper did say was that investigators had determined the intruder had come in through a window in the living room because the charred remnants of the window revealed it had been left open. They’d also found a distinct—albeit mashed up—footprint on the ground nearby.

I went on about my work. I was nervous, of course, and I knew Doolittle Norris was a shaky foundation to build my future on, but I trusted him to be greedy enough to do what had to be done. After all, all I wanted was the girl; I wasn’t asking for a piece of his pie. I’d made it clear I knew the stakes were higher for me than they were for him, and besides, what good would it do him to cross me? As long as he didn’t find another angle, I’d be okay.

I avoided Angela as much as I could and stuck to the business at the church, going over the books, visiting the nursing home crowd and shut-ins, dropping by the hospital to see one of our teenagers who had fallen off a four-wheeler and messed up his knees. I also stayed in contact with Brother Herschel, the chairman of the deacons, and let him know, ever so subtly, that I was out there working my ass off for the church. Brother Herschel was impressed as hell and told me, “I thank the Lord for you every day, brother. I praise him for sending you here to us.”

I said I was just doing what the Lord led me to do.

I even preached the Cards’ funeral. That was an eye opening experience. The church was crowded and weepy, with grown men—middle-aged men in business suits—standing along the back wall, sobbing like children. I didn’t even look at most of them, but the sobbing filled the sanctuary and you couldn’t escape the palpable anguish, the true, ragged grief that was pouring out of people.

Did I feel guilty?

Well, let’s say I felt bad. I felt bad the Cards were dead. I felt bad that people were crying, that the love of my life was crying on the front row, holding onto her brother, Gabe. He was a quiet looking guy in glasses and a dark suit. He was crying as much as she was. Everyone was crying. Hell, I cried a little, too. So, yeah, you could say I felt bad. But people were acting like the Cards were perfect, which they were not. In life, they were loved by some, tolerated by some, and loathed by the rest. It’s not as if Higher Living Baptist Church had been a fucking playground before the Cards died. There’d been a fair share of backstabbing and gossip and bitching and moaning. Sister Card had pissed people off. Brother Card had pissed people off. It wasn’t all hugs and kisses.

I preached a nice service, though. It was my first funeral, of course, but I did, I thought, a superlative job. I talked about God’s will, and the mystery of suffering, the presence of evil in the world, and the plan of salvation. I talked about Sister Card’s cooking and her dedication to her husband’s ministry. I talked about Angela and how she was dear to all of us in the church, how God was looking out for her, how he had a wonderful plan for her life. I trumpeted Brother Card’s faithfulness, and his vision for the church, and all he had done in the service of the Lord.

It was a hell of a talking I gave them that day.

But the whole time I was thinking,
why
can’t they see what a bunch of bullshit this is
?

The Cards were dead, deader than Bonnie and Clyde. Someone had murdered them. Had it really been God’s plan? That day, I told the weeping congregation that everything was in God’s hands, and evil and hatred and loss and suffering would all be wiped away in the blink of an eye when Christ returned. But the whole time I wondered: do they really believe this? They seemed to. They cried and held onto each other and stared up at the cross on the wall behind me and nodded their heads. They seemed to feel comforted.

Maybe that’s all that counts to people. If there wasn’t suffering, men would feel no need to believe in God. The sick part is
,
if there is a God, he must have planned it that way.

After the graveside service, I ran into the chairman of deacons and Nick. They were standing by the cars, hands in their pockets, staring at the grass.

Brother E.W. Herschel had the face of a Confederate general. He was a creased-skinned old man with deep eye sockets and a stern mouth that was always pulling back into a grimace. Thick bifocals rested on a heavy nose full of gray hair, and his sideburns extended down to his jowls. He shook my hand and held it. “Powerful sermon, brother. Very fitting.”

Nick nodded his assent.

“I was honored to do it,” I exclaimed. “My first funeral to preach. I never thought it would be under these conditions. I appreciate your support, your example.”

The old man patted my hand.

Nick said, “The Lord gives us what we need, I guess.”

I let go of Brother Herschel’s hand and said, “Absolutely.”

Brother Herschel told me, “I think we’ve all been pleased to see how hard you’ve been working these past days.
Incredibly difficult.
Incredibly trying circumstances to find yourself thrust into leadership.”

Nick looked at the grass some more.

I told Brother Herschel, “We can only do what we can. We can only supplicate ourselves to the Lord and allow the Holy Ghost to work through us.”
And on and on.
You see how it went.

Nick couldn’t take much more. “I need to go say a few words to Gabe and Angela,” he said. “I’ll talk to you all later.”

“Take care,” I said.

He walked off.

“That’s a fine man,” I told Brother Herschel.

“Mm,” he said. “He is. He’s young.”

“Older than me,” I said.

“Mm. But you’re an old soul. Nick’s as fine a man as we have in the church. I was the one that nominated him for his deaconship, did you know that?”

“I didn’t,” I lied.

“Mm. I did. And he hasn’t let me down. Not by a long ways. But he’s young, always in a hurry. Being in a hurry is a characteristic of the young, I reckon.”

“I reckon it is.”

“I don’t see that in you, though.”

I said something about wanting to go at the Lord’s speed, whatever that speed may be.

Brother Herschel was wearing a red flower in the lapel of his dark suit coat, and he took it out and rubbed its stem between his thumb and forefinger. “Men in a hurry change the world. But the world they change has to be run by men with a steady hand on the wheel. Would you agree with that?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Mm.
Like players in a symphony.
Everybody playing his part, all led by a conductor.
You’re a man with a steady hand.”

“I hope so. That’s my true hope.”

He put his flower back in his lapel and patted me on the shoulder. “You keep up the good work, brother. You just keep it up.”

As he walked off, I smiled and thought,
Any
day now.
Any day now
.

It took about three weeks. I kept my nose to the grindstone in the interim. I preached both the morning and night services on Sunday and combined the youth and adult service on Wednesday night in the guise of “Letting the kids know we’re all still a family.” The Wednesday night service in particular was a smashing success because it let the adults feel that they were involved with the youth. I arranged a mission trip down to Mexico for the following year, kept up my visitation at the hospitals and nursing homes and made the rounds on Monday night visitations, which involved
me and Nick going to the homes of a bunch of deadbeats and backsliders and trying to get them to come to church
.

One Monday night, after we’d wasted an hour in a trailer with a shirtless man who swilled beer and stared numbly at us while we read him Bible verses, Nick and I rode back to the church in his car.

“That went well,” I muttered.

Nick shrugged. “We planted some seeds, anyway.”

“He was watering them with beer,” I said.

Nick grinned curiously as he kept his eyes on the road. “You have a unique sense of humor sometimes,” he said. Nick was the sort of man for whom the word
unique
was always an insult.