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“I’m not really religious anymore,” Sam Canaday said, gesturing with one finger for another bottle of whiskey. “Not like I used to be. What about you, Mike? Are you religious? It’s not the same thing as being a believer, you know.”

“I don’t know,” she said slowly. “No, no more for me. I can’t quite talk now. I think all writers are a little bit religious, at bottom. There’s too much that goes on that you can’t explain; like your best work always coming from outside of you somehow. Your mind leaping to connections where none exist. If I am, it’s for a kind of mystery, or mysticism. I’ve always thought I might have been drawn to the Roman Church, or some very high one … for the sheer mystery. That seems to me to be at the very heart of it. But Lytton had to explain it all, tidy it up, simplify it down to doggerel with the ‘thou-shalt-nots.’ Run your entire life with it.”

He was drinking steadily, but he did not seem any longer to be tipsy.

“But it is at the heart of life,” he said. “It
is
life, in Lytton, the church is. Kind, compassionate, helping, always there in trouble. The church in Lytton and little towns like it is far more than just thou-shalt-nots, Mike. Or bigotry, though it undoubtedly has its share of both. It’s the machinery by which the necessary human things get done. It’s better than the sum of all its members. It only makes mischief when things are too uneventful or its members come to depend on it for virtually everything in their lives. Then, like a bored child, it sometimes stirs up stuff it really doesn’t need to. But you mustn’t forget the real use and goodness. Throw out the baby with the bath water.”

“But the narrowness, the
censure,”
Mike protested. “I don’t know how you can take it Sunday after Sunday. All in the name of religion. I don’t know why it just doesn’t kill something in you.”

He was silent so long that she leaned closer across the table and peered into his face. In the guttering light from the candle stub jammed into the grimy Chianti bottle, it seemed to shift and change, as though different muscles than any she had ever seen were coming into play. He looked up, and a stranger looked out of the green eyes: unformed, austere, painfully young.

“It did,” he said. “It did indeed. Want to hear about what of mine religion killed, Mike?”

She realized that he was not a little drunk.

“Yes,” she said. “I want to hear.”

“Well,” he said, settling back into the booth and propping a foot up on it, “I was a preacher once. Still am, I guess; I haven’t been un-ordained yet. A bona fide, Bible-toting, ordained minister of the Southern Baptist Church, graduate of Marian Breathitt Bible College in West Tennessee, shepherd to the good flock of the Mount Moriah Baptist Church in Ottley, Mississippi, population nine hundred eighty-eight after I got there, twenty miles west of Greenville in the Mississippi Delta. Good preacher, too. Baptized eleven people at my first revival. Started the country’s first Christian preschool program. In demand all over Washington County for weddings and baptisms and funerals. Does any of this surprise you?”

Mike stared at him across the burn-scarred Formica, slowly shaking her head. A part of her was speechless with surprise, but an older, deeper part was not. She could imagine his stocky figure in a stark country pulpit; see the coiled power in his arms as he gestured, the fervor in the narrow green eyes, the light on the slant-planed, sunburnt face.

“Well, it didn’t anybody else, either,” he went on,
tossing down a swallow of Canadian Club and grimacing. “Least of all my mother. My mother was a saint, Mike. You don’t want to mess with one of those. Loretta Jasper Canaday, born, lived, and died a saint in Birmingham, Alabama, without ever leaving home to go anywhere but the company store and church. Married my dad to reform him, had my older brother and sisters and me, much later, and then threw him out when I turned six and he wouldn’t give up the booze. I guess you couldn’t blame her … he used to beat up on her some. I remember the bruises and the Band-Aids. She’d never complain about them, but we’d all get down on our knees and pray for Daddy an extra hour after one of those sessions. I don’t remember much about him. I heard later from my aunt Doreen that he died in Texas after my mother did. Anyway, my brother was old enough to go into the mill when Daddy left, and so there was a little bit of money, and the girls helped out some, and Mother made cakes and pies and things for neighborhood affairs. All so little Samuel could be a preacher. I don’t know how it got into her mind that that’s what I should be, or why I went along with it, but I was so accustomed to praying and being prayed over that it seemed to me the natural thing to do. I got used to thinking of myself as special and sanctified. Besides, I had no desire to go into the mill like Daddy and Frank, my brother. Godalmighty, but Tennessee Coal and Iron cast a long and dirty shadow over my childhood. I remember the stink and the burns and the filthy clothes when they came in. Uh-uh. No way. Not for little saint Sammy. I took a job as assistant to the sexton in our church when she decided I was old enough to do a little seemly labor, and that’s what I did until I got out of high school. The Lion’s Club sent me to Marian Breathitt on a scholarship, and since Mama died right after I graduated, I didn’t go back to Birmingham. Not for a long time.

“But before she departed, Mama picked my wife out for me. Oh, yeah, Mike, I was married; it was almost a scandal for a young Southern Baptist minister to take his first church without a wife. People might get to wondering if he was spilling his seed upon the ground like Onan, or worse. And God knows I had the seed. I met Jackie at Marian Breathitt when I was a junior and she was a freshman, and Mama approved, and we got married the day I graduated. Jackie was a pretty thing then, little and round and red-haired with a little turned-up nose and crinkly blue eyes and almost as many prayer calluses on her knees as Mama. It was a marriage made in heaven. Me, Jackie, and Mama. I guess she felt like she could go on and die after she got our knot tied, and that’s just what she did. We went to Memphis to the Peabody Hotel for a weekend on our honeymoon, and of course little Jackie got pregnant the first time she took off her panties, and so by the time I was settled in Ottley and knew my way around town, Frannie, our little girl, was born, and we were the perfect little preacher family. Looked like we ought to be on the top of a wedding cake, all of us. Cute little cusses. It was 1961 and I was twenty-one years old and she was nineteen. We had a tiny little asbestos-siding house right by the church, not much more than a shack, really, but it was ours, and neither of us had ever even had a room of our own before, and we thought we were in grown-up heaven. She planted flowers and tomatoes and beans and a row or two of corn, and I built a little fence and got a barbecue grill from the A&P and a push lawn mower, and Frannie grew a head of curls that the Gerber people would have killed for, and her first word was Dee-sus. For Jesus. Really. They could have hung a Pray-TV series around us.”

He fell silent, lost in some 1960s idyll that Mike had not known actually existed; it was so alien from her own first days of marriage. It was hard for her not to
Stare at him. His air of stolid aloneness was almost complete, had been since she had first met him. She could not imagine him kissing a small, round wife or fondling a little curly-haired daughter. She thought he was not going to continue, but finally he did, looking up and smiling at her. It was not a pleasant smile.

“I don’t guess I have to tell you what happened,” he said. “The same thing happened to you, and in Mississippi, too. Except I didn’t go looking for the Civil Rights Movement. Lord God, no. Outside agitators down here stirring up God’s order of things? What would the Southern Baptists say? What would Mama say? So the movement came to me. There wasn’t anything on the order of Freedom Summer in Mississippi in 1961, but there were advance people down there starting a voter registration program, college kids from the North and East, and some young blacks from King’s organization in Atlanta. You might even have been in jail with some of them a couple of years later. Well, they were just my age, and it was inevitable that they’d seek me out and try to enlist me. A young, white southern preacher in their ranks? I would have been a perfect agent in place. I was morally outraged, but I decided that the only Christian thing to do was hear them out; guess I thought I could convert
them
. Hell, I thought I could have converted Genghis Khan in those days. So I met with a few of them at the parsonage.

“Jackie carried on like they were devils out of hell. Took Frannie and went in the bedroom and locked the door. Prayed the whole time they were there. At least they had the good sense not to bring a Negro with them. Not then, anyway. The first time they came, I had the Bible out, all ready to match them Word for word. Only it never came to that. They didn’t even need to fire a shot across my bow. I was in the ranks after two hours.”

He looked at her intently. “Do you remember what
it was like, Mike? Those early days in the movement? You must. It got you too. The camaraderie, the sense of yourself as part of a small, elite band of idealistic revolutionaries; the exhilaration of danger; the … sensuality of it, somehow; the sheer charisma and force? Do you remember?”

She nodded wordlessly. She remembered.

“Well, I’d never been a part of anything attractive in my life. Never been a self-activator, but only a follower. Followed my mother, Jackie, my teachers, the Lord. And here came this bunch of self-assured, immensely attractive, Ivy League kids who brought with them a world of books and ideas and cities and easy manners and smart talk and good clothes; who came down there following a cause so noble and selfless that you’d have to be made of iron not to want to fall in behind it. Like your Richard. I’d have probably followed that dude clear back to Cambridge. And there was the sheer physical glamour of the danger. The electricity in your gut. It didn’t take long for them to show me a Sam Canaday I never knew was in there. Fearless, reckless, committed, passionate, dashing …
me
. Dashing. I learned to smoke cigarettes and drink, Mike, and not the way an Elyton Village mill hand smoked and drank, either. I learned to really read; I read constantly, night after night, till dawn, and got up without being the least bit tired. I learned to say shit and fuck and squint through cigarette smoke. Pretty soon I was marching and working for the poor, shit-scared blacks in Washington County, who only wished I’d shut up and the Yankees and city niggers would go home, and then I started putting up the visiting blacks who came over to Mississippi in the parsonage. I worked with SNCC and CORE, and I traveled around Mississippi with one of the advance teams for a week one summer, setting things up and saying shit and fuck and squinting through smoke. Jackie was terrified and furious. She was at the point of
leaving me and taking Frannie back to her folks in Tennessee, but by that time she was pregnant again, and had gained almost fifty pounds, and she just couldn’t get around very well. Of course, the church was ready to throw me out, but I was oblivious to all of it. I was doing God’s work; I had found me a new God, one the country Baptists didn’t know existed, one who said it was all right to say shit and fuck, one who said it was meet and right that Sam Canaday from Elyton should be a charismatic and fearless freedom fighter. Looking back, I really believe I thought I was immortal in those days.”

“We all did,” Mike said. “It was pretty heady stuff. Stronger and older heads than yours got turned in those years. And after all, Sam, if a pastor can’t be in the vanguard of a fight that’s so obviously for the right, who can?”

“I wasn’t a pastor by that time, Mike. I didn’t give a shit about the welfare of my congregation. I hardly even spent any time in the church. And I’m not sure the movement itself mattered all that much to me. I spent all my time sitting around in curtained rooms late at night, with the lights turned off so the Klan wouldn’t get suspicious. Drinking and smoking and saying shit. What I was was a world-class, monumental, pain-in-the-ass romantic. The movement itself was romantic in the extreme. All revolutions are. Christ, we were like the RAF, such little elitists … but what we really were was killers.”

“Come
on
, Sam …” Mike broke in.

“Yes.” His voice overrode hers. “Killers. Romantics are the ultimate killers. I read something in
Esquire
just last week; a guy from Harvard being quoted as saying, ‘Romanticism can lead to Dachau.’ It’s true. A romantic refuses to look at things as they are, and that’s the most dangerous thing in the world. I know. I was one, and I killed my wife and child.”

“Sam!”
Mike’s breath hissed out in cold, pure shock.

“Oh, I didn’t beat ‘em or shoot ‘em or anything like that, Mike. I just preached one too many sermons about the blacks in a white county in the Mississippi Delta in the early 1960s, or took in one houseful too many of blacks and Yankee agitators. I’ll never know which it was. Jackie kept telling me it was dangerous. God, she was scared; she was terrified, cried all the time, wouldn’t go out of the house. I remember that I felt nothing for her but a kind of holy contempt, for her blubbering, and anger for making a coward out of my daughter. Frannie was cringing at her shadow by that time. I should have listened to her. One night a carful of night riders came easing by the parsonage, vroom-vroom-vroom, and pitched a little old homemade bomb into the house, and blew fat little Jackie Jefferson and her curly-headed kid into very small pieces. Hardly even found a chunk of either one big enough to bury. They never got the guys.”

“Oh, Sam,” she whispered. “Oh, my God. I had no idea …”

She remembered only the night before, her own voice saying, “If you’re such an expert on loving, where’s
your
family?” She closed her eyes in pain. Salt burned behind them.

“How could you know?” he said, in a normal, even cheerful voice. “No reason you should or could have known. Listen, Mike, I’m not telling you things to make you feel sorry for me, so save the tears. It was a very long time ago, and I’ve done what atoning I can for it. There’s no grieving left for me to do. Come on, now. Don’t you want to hear how I overcame my sorrow and became a world-famous legal advocate?”