Something Rich and Strange: Selected Stories (42 page)

My father pulled off the road in front of the Buick, hood to hood as though he already knew the problem. I stepped out of the car.

“What happened?” he asked.

I wasn’t sure how to answer his question, but I gave the simplest answer.

“The battery’s dead,” I said, holding up the jumper cables as if to validate my words.

He opened the Fairlane’s hood. We clamped the cables to the batteries, then got back in and cranked the engines. My father unhooked the cables and came around to the Buick’s passenger side. He dropped the jumper cables on the floorboard and sat down beside me. Both engines were running, the cars aimed at each other like a wreck about to happen.

“Why did you follow me?” my father asked, looking out the window. There was no anger in his voice, just curiosity.

“To find out why you come here.”

“Do you know now?”

“No.”

The last two cars left the church. The drivers slowed as they passed, but my father waved them on.

“Dr. Morris says I’ve got too much salt in my brain, a chemical imbalance,” my father said. “It’s an easy problem for him with an easy solution, so many milligrams of Elavil, so many volts of electricity. But I can’t believe it’s that simple.”

Perhaps it was the hum of the engines, my father looking out the window as he spoke, but I felt as though we were traveling although the landscape did not change. It was like I could feel the earth’s slow revolution as August’s strange, pink glow tinted the evening’s last light.

My father shut his eyes for a moment. He’d aged in the last year, his hair gray at the edges, his brow lined.

“Your mother believes the holy rollers got me too young, that they raised me to see the world only the way they see it. But she’s wrong about that. There was a time I could understand everything from a single atom to the whole universe with a blackboard and piece of chalk, and it was as beautiful as any hymn the way it all came together.”

My father nodded toward the church, barely visible now in the gloaming.

“You met Carl Holcombe. His wife and five-year-old daughter got killed eleven years ago in a car wreck, a wreck that was Carl’s fault because he was driving too fast. Carl says there are whole weeks he can’t remember he was so drunk, nights he put a gun barrel under his chin and held it there an hour. There was nothing in this world to sustain him, so he had to look somewhere else. I’ve had to do the same.”

Though the cars still idled, we sat there in silence a few more minutes, long enough to see the night’s first fireflies sparking like matches in the woods. My father’s face was submerged in shadows when he spoke again.

“What I’m trying to say is that some solutions aren’t crystal-clear. Sometimes you have to search for them in places where only the heart can go.”

“I still don’t think I understand,” I said.

“I hope you never do,” my father said softly, “but from what the doctors at Broughton told me there’s a chance you will.”

My father leaned over, switched on the Buick’s headlights.

“We need to get home,” he said. “Your mother will be worried about us.”

The pill bottles remained unopened the rest of the summer, and there were no more attempts to cauterize my father’s despair with electricity. Which is not to say my father was a happy man. His was not a religion of bliss but one that allowed him to rise from his bed on each of those summer mornings and face two classes of hormone-ravaged adolescents, to lead those students toward solutions he himself no longer found adequate. I did not tell my mother what I had seen that Wednesday evening, or what I refused to see. I have never told her.

My father died that September, on an afternoon when the first reds and yellows flared in the maples and poplars. We’d driven up to the lake house that morning. My father graded tests until early afternoon. When he’d finished he went inside and put on his diving gear, then crossed the brief swath of grass to the water–moving slow and deliberate on the land, like an aquatic creature returning to its natural element. Once on the dock he turned toward the lake house, raised a palm, and fell forever from us.

My mother and I sat on the porch playing Risk and drinking tea. When my father hadn’t resurfaced after a reasonable time, my mother cast frequent glances toward the water.

“It hasn’t been thirty minutes yet,” I said more than once. But in a few more minutes half an hour had passed, and my father still had not risen.

I ran down to the lake while my mother dialed the county’s EMS unit. I dove into the murky water around the dock, finding nothing on the bottom but silt. I dove until the rescue squad arrived, though I dove without hope. I was seventeen years old. I didn’t know what else to do.

The rest of the afternoon was a loud confusion of divers and boats, rescue squad members and gawkers. The sheriff showed up and, almost at dusk, the coroner, a young man dressed in khakis and a blue cotton shirt.

“Nitrogen narcosis, sometimes called rapture of the deep,” the coroner said, conversant in the language of death despite his youth. “A lot of people wouldn’t think a reservoir would be deep enough to cause that, but this one is.” He and the sheriff stood with my mother and me on the screened porch, cups of coffee in their hands. “If you go down too far you can take in too much nitrogen. It causes a chemical imbalance, an intoxicating effect.” The coroner looked out toward the reservoir. “It can happen to the most experienced diver.”

The coroner talked to us a few more minutes before he and the sheriff stepped off the screened porch, leaving behind empty coffee cups, no doubt hoping what inevitable calamity would reunite them might wait until after a night’s sleep.

Once he had no further say in the matter, my father was again a Presbyterian. His funeral service was held at Cliffside Presbyterian, his burial in the church’s cemetery. Mr. Holcombe and several of his congregation attended. They sat in the back, the men wearing short-sleeve shirts and ties, the women cotton dresses that reached their ankles. After the burial they awkwardly shook my hand and my mother’s before departing. I’ve never seen any of them since.

In my less generous moments I perceive my mother’s insistence on Presbyterian last rites as mean-spirited, a last rebuke to my father’s Pentecostal reconversion. But who can really know another’s heart? Perhaps it was merely her Scots-Irish practicality, less trouble for everyone to hold the rites in Cliffside instead of twenty miles away in the mountains.

After my father’s death my mother refused to go back to the lake house, but I did and occasionally still do. I sit out on the screened porch as the night starts its slow glide across the lake. It’s a quiet time, the skiers and most of the fishermen gone home, the echoing trombone of frogs not yet in full volume. I listen to sounds unheard any other time—the soft slap of water against the dock, a muskrat in the cattails.

I sometimes think of my father down in that murky water as his lungs surrendered. I think of what the coroner told me that night on the porch, that the divers found the mask in the silt beside him. “Probably didn’t even know he was doing it,” the coroner said matter-of-factly. “People do strange things like that all the time when they’re dying.”

The coroner is probably right. But sometimes as I sit on the porch with darkness settling around me, it is easy to imagine that my father pulling off the mask was something more—a gesture of astonishment at what he drifted toward.

T
he day after it happened, and Cliffside’s new Jesus and my old husband was in the county hospital in fair but stable condition, Preacher Thompson, claiming it was all his fault, offered his resignation to the board of deacons. But he wasn’t to blame. He’d only been here a couple of months, fresh out of preacher’s college, and had probably never had to deal with a snake like Larry Rudisell before. A man or a woman, as I’ve found out the hard way, usually has to get bit by a snake before they start watching out for them.

What I mean is, Preacher Thompson’s intentions were good. At his very first interview the pulpit committee had told him what a sorry turn our church had taken in the last few years, and they hadn’t left out much either. They told him about Len Deaton, our former choir director, who left his choir, wife, and eight children to run off to Florida with a singer at Harley’s Lounge who wasn’t even a Baptist. And they told about Preacher Crowe, who had gotten so senile he had preached the same sermon four weeks in a row, though they didn’t mention that a lot of the congregation hadn’t even noticed. The committee told him about how membership had been slipping for several years, how the church was in a rut, and how when Preacher Crowe had finally retired in November, it had been clear that some major changes had to be made if the church was going to survive. And this was exactly why they wanted him to be the new minister, they told him. He was young and energetic and could bring some fresh blood into the church and help get it going in the right direction. Which was exactly what he tried to do, and exactly why Larry was able to talk his way onto that cross.

It did take a few weeks, though. At first Preacher Thompson was so nervous when he preached that I expected him to bolt for the sanctuary door at any moment. He wouldn’t even look up from his notes, and when he performed his first baptism he almost drowned poor little Eddie Gregory by holding him under the water too long. Still, each week you could see him get a little more comfortable and confident, and by the last Sunday in February, about two months ago, he gave the sermon everybody had been waiting for.

It was all about commitment and the need for new ideas, about how a church was like a car, and our church was in reverse and we had to get it back in forward. You could tell he was really working himself up because he wasn’t looking at his notes or his watch. It was 12:15, the first time he’d ever kept us up after twelve, when he closed, telling us that Easter, a month away, was a time of rebirth, and he wanted us all to go home and think of some way our church could be reborn too, something that would get Cliffside Baptist Church back in the right gear.

Later I wondered if maybe all the car talk had something to do with what happened, because the next Sunday Preacher Thompson announced he’d gotten many good suggestions, but there was one in particular that was truly inspired, one that could truly put the church back on the right road, and he wanted the man who had come up with the idea, Larry Rudisell, to stand and tell the rest of the congregation about it.

Like I said earlier, once you’ve been bitten by a snake you start looking out for them, but there’s something else too. You start to know their ways. So I knew right off that whatever Larry was about to unfold, he was expecting to get something out of it, because having been married to this snake for almost three years, I knew him better than he knew himself. Larry’s a hustler. Always has been. It was as if he came out of his momma talking out of both sides of his mouth, trying to hustle her, the nurse, the doctor, whichever one he saw first.

Larry stood up, wearing a sport coat he couldn’t button because of his beer gut, no tie, and enough gold around his neck to fill every tooth in Cleveland County. He was also wearing his sincere “I’d swear on my dead momma’s grave I didn’t know that odometer had been turned back” look, which was as phony as the curls in his brillo-pad hairdo, which he’d done that way to cover up his bald spot.

Then Larry started telling about what he was calling his “vision,” claiming that late Friday night he’d woke up, half blinded by bright flashing lights and hearing a voice coming out of the ceiling, telling him to recreate the crucifixion on the front lawn of Cliffside Baptist Church, at night, with lights shining on the three men on the crosses. The whole thing sounded more like one of those UFO stories in
The National Examiner
than a religious experience, and about as believable.

Larry looked around and started telling how he just knew people would come from miles away to see it, just like they went to McAdenville every December to see the Christmas lights, and then he said he believed in his vision enough to pay for it himself.

Then Larry stopped to see if his sales pitch was working. He was selling his crucifixion idea the same way he would an ’84 Buick in his car lot. And it was working. Larry has always been a smooth talker. He talked me into the back seat of his daddy’s car when I was seventeen, talked me into marrying him when I was eighteen, and talked me out of divorcing him on the grounds of adultery a half dozen times. I finally got smart and plugged up my ears with cotton so I couldn’t hear him while I packed my belongings.

Larry started talking again, telling the congregation he didn’t want to take any credit for the idea, that he was just a messenger and that the last thing God had told him was that he wanted Larry to play Jesus, and his mechanic, Terry Wooten, to play one of the thieves, a role, as far as I was concerned, Terry had been playing as long as he’d worked for Larry. When I looked over at Terry, the expression on his face made it quite clear that God hadn’t bothered to contact him about all of this. Then I looked up at the ceiling to see if it was about to collapse and bury us all. Everybody was quiet for about five seconds. Then the whole congregation started talking at once, and it sounded more like a tobacco auction than a church service.

After a couple of minutes people remembered where they were, and it got a little more civilized. At least they were raising their hands and getting acknowledged before they started shouting. The first to speak was Jimmy Wells, who had once bought an Olds ’88 from Larry and had the transmission fall out not a half-mile from where he had driven it off Larry’s lot. Jimmy was still bitter about that, so I wasn’t too surprised when he nominated his brother-in-law Harry Bayne to play Jesus.

As soon as Jimmy sat down, Larry popped up like a jack-in-the-box, claiming Harry couldn’t play Jesus because Harry had a hearing aid. When Jimmy asked why that mattered, Larry said they didn’t have hearing aids back in olden times and Jimmy said nobody would care and Larry said yes they would care and it’d ruin the whole production. Jimmy and Larry kept arguing. Harry finally got up and said if it meant that much to Larry to let him do it, that he was too hungry to care anymore.