Revival (7 page)

Dad hugged Jacobs, but Jacobs didn't hug back. He just stood there with his hands at his sides, looking up at the leaves.

“Charlie, I'm so sorry for your loss,” Kelton rumbled. “We all are.”

They escorted him into the oversweet smell of flowers. Organ music, low as a whisper and somehow awful, came from overhead speakers. Myra Harrington—Me-Maw to everyone in West Harlow—was already there, probably because she had been listening in on the party line when Doreen called my mother. Listening in was her hobby. She heaved her bulk from a sofa in the foyer and pulled Reverend Jacobs to her enormous bosom.

“Your dear sweet wife and your dear little boy!” she cried in her high, mewling voice. Mom looked at Dad, and they both winced. “Well, they're in heaven now! That's the consolation! Saved by the blood of the Lamb and rocked in the everlasting arms!” Tears poured down Me-Maw's cheeks, cutting through a thick layer of pink powder.

Reverend Jacobs allowed himself to be hugged and made of. After a minute or two (“Around the time I began to think she wouldn't stop until she suffocated him with those great tits of hers,” my mother told me), he pushed her away. Not hard, but with firmness. He turned to my father and Mr. Kelton and said, “I'll see them now.”

“Now, Charlie, not yet,” Mr. Kelton said. “You need to hold on for a bit. Just until Mr. Peabody makes them presenta—”

Jacobs walked through the viewing parlor, where some old lady in a mahogany coffin was waiting for her final public appearance. He continued on down the hall toward the back. He knew where he was going; few better.

Dad and Mr. Kelton hurried after him. My mother sat down, and Me-Maw sat across from her, eyes alight under her cloud of white hair. She was old then, in her eighties, and when some of her score of grandchildren and great-grandchildren weren't visiting her, only tragedy and scandal brought her fully alive.

“How did he take it?” Me-Maw stage-whispered. “Did you get kneebound with him?”

“Not now, Myra,” Mom said. “I'm done up. I only want to close my eyes and rest for a minute.”

But there was no rest for her, because just then a scream rose from the back of the funeral home, where the prep rooms were.

“It sounded like the wind outside today, Jamie,” she said, “only a hundred times worse.” At last she looked away from the ceiling. I wish she hadn't, because I could see the darkness of death close behind the light in her eyes. “At first there were no words, just that banshee wailing. I almost wish it had stayed that way, but it didn't. ‘
Where's his face?
' he cried. ‘
Where's my little boy's face?
'”

 • • •

Who would preach at the funeral?
This was a question (like who cuts the barber's hair) that troubled me. I heard all about it later, but I wasn't there to see; my mother decreed that only she, Dad, Claire, and Con were to go to the funeral. It might be too upsetting for the rest of us (surely it was those chilling screams from Peabody's preparation room she was thinking of), and so Andy was left in charge of Terry and me. That wasn't a thing I relished, because Andy could be a boogersnot, especially when our parents weren't there. For an avowed Christian, he was awfully fond of Indian rope burns and head-noogies—hard ones that left you seeing stars.

There were no rope burns or head-noogies on the Saturday of Patsy and Morrie's double funeral. Andy said that if the folks weren't back by supper, he'd make Franco-American. In the meantime, we were just to watch TV and shut up. Then he went upstairs and didn't come back down. Grumpy and bossy though he could be, he had liked Tag-Along-Morrie as much as the rest of us, and of course he had a crush on Patsy (also like the rest of us . . . except for Con, who didn't care for girls then and never would). He might have gone upstairs to pray—go into your closet and lock your door, Saint Matthew advises—or maybe he just wanted to sit and think and try to make sense of it all. His faith wasn't broken by those two deaths—he remained a die-hard fundamentalist Christian until his death—but it must have been severely shaken. My own faith wasn't broken by the deaths, either. It was the Terrible Sermon that accomplished that.

Reverend David Thomas of the Gates Falls Congo gave the eulogy for Patsy and Morrie at our church, and that caused no raised eyebrows, since, as my Dad said, “There's not a dime's worth of difference between the Congregationalists and the Methodists.”

What
did
raise eyebrows was Jacobs's choice of Stephen Givens to officiate at the Willow Grove Cemetery graveside services. Givens was the pastor (he did not call himself Reverend) of Shiloh Church, where at that time the congregants still held hard to the beliefs of Frank Weston Sandford, an apocalypse-monger who encouraged parents to whip their children for petty sins (“You must be schoolmasters of Christ,” he advised them) and who insisted on thirty-six-hour fasts . . . even for infants.

Shiloh had changed a lot since Sandford's death (and is today little different from other Protestant church groups), but in 1965, a flock of old rumors—fueled by the odd dress of the members and their stated belief that the end of the world was coming soon, like maybe next week—persisted. Yet it turned out that our Charles Jacobs and their Stephen Givens had been meeting over coffee in Castle Rock for years, and were friends. After the Terrible Sermon, there were people in town who said that Reverend Jacobs had been “infected by Shilohism.” Perhaps so, but according to Mom and Dad (also Con and Claire, whose testimony I trusted more), Givens was calm, comforting, and appropriate during the brief graveside ceremony.

“He didn't mention the end of the world once,” Claire said. I remember how beautiful she looked that evening in her dark blue dress (the closest she had to black) and her grownup hose. I also remember she ate almost no supper, just pushed things around on her plate until it was all mixed together and looked like dog whoop.

“What scripture did Givens read?” Andy asked.

“First Corinthians,” Mom said. “The one about how we see through a glass darkly?”

“Good choice,” my older brother said sagely.

“How was he?” I asked Mom. “How was Reverend Jacobs?”

“He was . . . quiet,” she said, looking troubled. “Meditating, I think.”

“No, he wasn't,” Claire said, pushing her plate away. “He was shell-shocked. Just sat there in a folding chair at the head of the grave, and when Mr. Givens asked him if he'd throw the first dirt and then join him in saying the benediction, he only went on sitting with his hands between his knees and his head hanging down.” She began to cry. “It seems like a dream to me, a bad dream.”

“But he
did
get up and toss the dirt,” Dad said, putting an arm around her shoulders. “After awhile, he did. A handful on each coffin. Didn't he, Claire-Bear?”

“Yeah,” she said, crying harder than ever. “After that Shiloh guy took his hands and practically pulled him up.”

Con hadn't said anything, and I realized he wasn't at the table anymore. I saw him out in the backyard, standing by the elm from which our tire swing hung. He was leaning his head against the bark with his hands clasping the tree and his shoulders shaking.

Unlike Claire, though, he had eaten his dinner. I remember that. Ate up everything on his plate and asked for seconds in a strong, clear voice.

 • • •

There were guest preachers
, arranged for by the deacons, on the next three Sundays, but Pastor Givens wasn't one of them. In spite of being calm, comforting, and appropriate at Willow Grove, I expect he wasn't asked. As well as being reticent by nature and upbringing, Yankees also have a tendency to be comfortably prejudiced in matters of religion and race. Three years later, I heard one of my teachers at Gates Falls High School tell another, in tones of outraged wonder: “Now why would anyone want to shoot that Reverend King? Heaven sakes, he was a
good
nigger!”

MYF was canceled following the accident. I think all of us were glad—even Andy, also known as Emperor of Bible Drills. We were no more ready to face Reverend Jacobs than he was to face us. Toy Corner, where Claire and the other girls had entertained Morrie (and themselves), would have been awful to look at. And who would play the piano for Sing Time? I suppose someone in town could have done it, but Charles Jacobs was in no condition to ask, and it wouldn't have been the same, anyway, without Patsy's blond hair shifting from side to side as she swung the upbeat hymns, like “We Are Marching to Zion.” Her blond hair was underground now, growing brittle on a satin pillow in the dark.

One gray November afternoon while Terry and I were spray-stenciling turkeys and cornucopias on our windows, the telephone jangled one long and one short: our ring. Mom answered, spoke briefly, then put the phone down and smiled at Terry and me.

“That was Reverend Jacobs. He's going to be in the pulpit this coming Sunday to preach the Thanksgiving sermon. Won't that be nice?”

 • • •

Years later—I was
in high school and Claire was home on vacation from the University of Maine—I asked my sister why nobody had stopped him. We were out back, pushing the old tire swing. She didn't have to ask who I meant; that Sunday sermon had left a scar on all of us.

“Because he sounded so
reasonable
, I think. So
normal
. By the time people realized what he was actually saying, it was too late.”

Maybe, but I remembered both Reggie Kelton and Roy Easterbrook interrupting him near the end, and I knew something was wrong even before he started, because he didn't follow that day's scriptural reading with the customary conclusion:
May God bless His holy word
. He never forgot that, not even on the day I met him, when he showed me the little electric Jesus walking across Peaceable Lake.

His scripture on the day of the Terrible Sermon was from the thirteenth chapter of First Corinthians, the same passage Pastor Givens read over the twin graves—one big, one small—at Willow Grove: “For we know in part, and we prophesy in part. But when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away. When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things. For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.”

He closed the large Bible on the pulpit—not hard, but we all heard the thump. West Harlow Methodist was full on that Sunday, every pew taken, but it was dead quiet, not so much as a cough. I remember praying he'd get through it okay; that he wouldn't break down in tears.

Myra Harrington—Me-Maw—was in the front pew, and although her back was to me, I could imagine her eyes, half buried in their fatty, yellowish sockets and sparkling with avidity. My family was in the third pew, where we always sat. Mom's face was serene, but I could see her white-gloved hands clenched on her large softcover Bible with enough force to bend it into a
U
. Claire had nibbled off her lipstick. The silence between the conclusion of the scripture reading and the commencement of what was known in Harlow ever after as the Terrible Sermon could not have been much longer than five seconds, ten at most, but to me it seemed to stretch out forever. His head was bowed over the huge pulpit Bible with its bright gold edging. When he finally looked up and showed his calm, composed face, a faint sigh of relief rippled through the congregation.

“This has been a hard and troubled time for me,” he said. “I hardly need to tell you that; this is a close-knit community, and we all know each other. You folks have reached out to me in every way you could, and I'll always be grateful. I want especially to thank Laura Morton, who brought me the news of my loss with such tenderness and gentle regard.”

He nodded to her. She nodded back, smiled, then raised one white-gloved hand to brush away a tear.

“I have spent much of the time between the day of my loss and this Sunday morning in reflection and study. I would like to add
in prayer
, but although I have gotten on my knees time and again, I have not sensed the presence of God, and so reflection and study had to do.”

Silence from the congregation. Every eye on him.

“I went to the Gates Falls Library in search of
The New York Times
, but all they have on file is the
Weekly Enterprise
, so I was directed to Castle Rock, where they have the
Times
on microfilm—‘Seek and ye shall find,' Saint Matthew tells us, and how right he was.”

A few low chuckles greeted this, but they died away quickly.

“I went day after day, I scrolled microfilm until my head ached, and I want to share some of the things I found.”

From the pocket of his black suit coat he took a few file cards.

“In June of last year, three small tornadoes tore through the town of May, Oklahoma. Although there was property damage, no one was killed. The townsfolk flocked to the Baptist church to sing songs of praise and offer prayers of thanksgiving. While they were in there, a fourth tornado—a monster F5—swept down on May and demolished the church. Forty-one persons were killed. Thirty others were seriously injured, including children who lost arms and legs.”

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.”