Читать книгу Over the Plain Houses - Julia Franks - Страница 8

CHAPTER ONE

IT WAS THE WEEK BEFORE EASTER WHEN THE LADY agent first showed up to church. When the gray coupe rolled past, the first thing Irenie Lambey noticed wasn’t that a woman was driving but that a sculpted angel leapt straight out from the grill, her head raised and her back arched, silvery wings sweeping behind her as if she were about to take flight.

Later, after the agent and her husband were dead and the Department of Agriculture had closed its extension office for good, there were those who held out that her first day had been sometime in the summer.

But Irenie knew different. She knew on account of the birds. It was that moment in the year when winter still tightened the earth but spring snuck in from overhead. Robins and warblers and purple martins were back, and the flax birds had switched out their gray feathers for yellow. The trunks of the sassafras and sourwood ran wet and black with sap, and the fingers of the service trees had swelled but not budded. It had to be the Last Supper service because her sister wore her blue muslin, and there were those who turned out for the first time since the fall, and the whole fray about how close was too close to park the automobiles to the horses and mules started up all over again.

And Irenie Lambey felt alive, unfurled.

The deacon Haver Brooks must have seen that the lady agent meant to park the motorcar and that there was no room for her to do so, because he waved her on just the way he would a man, and Irenie knew he meant to show her the place where the road bent and widened enough for a pull out. Moments later the two of them came slow-picking their way over the frozen ruts, Haver with his hat in his hands and circles darkening his armpits despite the cold, the USDA agent craning up at the trees, pressing the top of her small-brimmed hat with one hand while shielding her eyes with the flat of the other. Haver followed her gaze as if her curiosity had already infected him some too.

Irenie’s sister Elizabeth leaned in to her ear. “Four churches in Eakin and she comes up here?”

It was true. Other women wouldn’t have done that way, especially not without their husbands.

Elizabeth jogged her infant up and down on her hip. “I wonder what it is she wants.”

Irenie didn’t say a thing. If she had, it would have been something like this: how in the world did it feel to drive your own automobile to a place you’d never set eyes on and arrive there full of wonder and questions and not caring one whit what the people there said about you?

Her sister shifted George Junior from one side of her pregnant belly to the other. Without thinking, Irenie raised her arms and took him, the infant miffling against her collarbone until the wet soaked through the cotton to her skin. She was glad he wasn’t hers. She had raised one and buried one, and now, at thirty-two, it seemed enough.

Her son had told her something of the lady agent, how she’d visited the school at Christmas time, handing out a donated toy and a bristled toothbrush to each child in the class, how she’d taught a reading program after school. She was the new wife of Roger Furman, who also worked for the Department of Agriculture. But today she looked for all the world like she’d stepped from the pages of a catalog, her suit cut to the shape of her plumpish body, her hat tilted over her forehead, a wave of pretty dark hair curled against her collar.

George Junior pushed his arms against Irenie’s sternum to examine her face.

Across the yard, Haver was introducing the newcomer around, sweat shining across his forehead and chin.

But George Junior had noticed that his mother was out of sight and began to lean away, twisting his head and torso in an effort to locate her. To distract him, Irenie opened her eyes wide and mouthed, “Wah, wah, wah,” until the baby’s attention swiveled back to her. She extended him a finger, and he wrapped it in his own, his eyes searching her features.

She looked to check the newcomer again and caught up her breath. Mrs. Virginia Furman from the USDA extension office was already studying her.

She panicked. Dropped her eyes to George Junior’ red red face. The stranger knew. Of all the women in the churchyard, she’d picked her right off.

But what? What could she know? There was nothing to know, save that Irenie Lambey wondered what it was like to be her.

The proper thing would be to nod or wave or make her way through the clusters of churchgoers to introduce herself. But Brodis was somewhere behind her now, perhaps watching, perhaps not. Her husband didn’t think much of the government extension office. And the fact that they’d sent a woman up the mountain on her own. . .Well.

Now the lady agent stood by herself among the clusters of worshippers that broke and shifted and recombined. The youngest Hogsed boy stopped to talk to her, and the woman stooped down so that her face was the same level as his. And when he wandered off, she stood up, alone again, examining the outside of the clapboard church or brushing her hands against the naked branches of the ninemark bushes. Or looking at Irenie Lambey.

Irenie put on like she didn’t notice.

Now the woman bent at the knee and sat right back on her heels to make herself as short as the Hackett twins, who were both turned out in red scarves. The two little girls seemed to have plenty to tell the government worker, and she let them, nodding at something one of them said, or knitting her brow and holding an index finger against her chin, as if sorting out the best points of the conversation. The twins’ presentation gathered force, and soon they were interrupting one another and throwing their stick arms and shrieking with wild laughter, little girls still young enough to blurt the truth without questioning the way the world would receive it. (When, Irenie wondered, had she and her sister and the rest of them lost that freedom? Was it something their parents had taken away, or a thing they had given over of their own accord?)

The lady agent was laughing too, throwing her head back to show white rabbity teeth, and then slapping her hand on her thigh, really and truly slapping it, the way only old men ever did. And then one of the Bledsoe boys ma’amed her and touched his hat, but none of the adults shook her hand nor waved in recognition. No one made room for her in their conversation, and soon she was by herself again.

Irenie made up her mind that one day she’d introduce herself to the new agent from Eakin, whenever the earth had warmed and people went to socials and singings, whenever Brodis had left off standing behind her, and things were easier between them. When the time was right, she’d introduce herself as Preacher Lambey’s wife, and Brodis would be glad to see her neighbor the newcomer.

The sound of the bell lolled through the yard. Irenie’s sister Elizabeth lifted George Junior from her arms. The clusters of churchgoers loosened and drifted toward the entrance. Once inside, Irenie’s eyes and ears adjusted to the dark and the din. The coal stove at the front glowed hot, and the new electric bulb illuminated a circle above the sinner’s bench, the wire serpenting along the beam of the ceiling. Behind the pulpit box, Jesus at the Last Supper spread his arms, portraits of the church’s elders at either side of Him. Below the bench sat the twenty or so saved members of the church, facing the congregation.

Then the woman from the Department of Agriculture was at her side, quiet and brimming with intention. Irenie gave a little nod and moved toward the platform behind the pulpit, where she always sat. The woman kept pace with her. Irenie willed herself not to turn her head. She was halfway there. Then, unbelievably, a touch on her arm, insistent. The woman spoke, but not to introduce herself. Instead she pronounced the name of Irenie’s thirteen-year-old son.

“Matthew. He’s yours?”

Irenie stopped. So that was it. A problem with Matthew.

“Yes.” Her voice came out more brittle than she’d intended. Something had happened in the school. He’d disappeared during recess or daydreamt in class. Or the other boys had stolen his lunch bucket or peed on his composition book. Or the woman had noticed that her son wasn’t included in marbles or climbing trees after school. That he walked on his own. She braced for the pity-heavy comment or the too-polite question, marshaling the regular defenses. Or maybe the woman was wanting to talk about his bodily frailty. Years ago there’d been ladies from another brought-on organization who’d staged lectures in the county courthouse about nutrition. But Matthew was never short of food. Even in the worst winters, Brodis put meat on the table. There was no one could say her husband didn’t provide.

“I’m sorry to intrude. I’m Virginia Furman.” The woman was even younger than Irenie had figured her for, her face unlined and flushed, her lips and nose full, her eyes as big and brown as a spaniel’s. Except she wasn’t a spaniel. Anyone could see that. She was a woman who kept her own privilege.

“I know who you are,” Irenie said. “I’ve got to—my husband is the—excuse me.” Dee Dawson brushed past her. Elizabeth watched from across the aisle.

The other woman touched her arm again. Her voice was urgent. “I’m sorry to be so forward. It’s just that. . . he’s so intelligent, so much keener than anyone else in his class. . .”

Irenie felt an unbidden rush of affection. People didn’t describe her son that way. What they mostly did was describe his peculiarities. Then, if the speaker were feeling charitable, she might say, “But he does seem clever.”

Mrs. Furman kept talking, her words coming fast and unbroken. “The boy knows the Bible like the back of his hand—he found every passage he heard, and he found them within seconds—he kept handing me the book with his finger on a line.”

It was true. Matthew had learned early on that the best way to please his father was to study on the scriptures. Like many people, he could quote chapter and verse, but unlike most, he had an uncanny ability to link the passages to other stories he’d heard. It was a certain kind of skill, even if it wasn’t useful in the way people thought of useful. Her father had it too, that ability to collect ideas from lots of places and then put them together to build something new and unexpected.

But Mrs. Furman had noticed it.

Irenie wanted to hear more about her son’s talents, but the two of them had followed the flow of worshippers toward the pews. The other parishioners were settling in, shrugging out of coats and scarves. She extended her hand. “It was a pleasure to meet you, Mrs. Furman.”

But the other woman ignored her hand and kept talking. “Mrs. Lambey, I don’t think your son is getting what he needs from that school.”

There were only a few people standing now. Irenie was supposed to make her way up to the front of the church, where the saved members sat behind the pulpit box. It was certain that Brodis was watching her now. No doubt he was already seated, waiting for her. She heard the deacon Haver Brooks step up. Everyone in the church, sinners and saints alike, had begun to quiet.

Virginia Furman whispered, “Mrs. Lambey, please, there’s a new school in Asheville, for exceptionally intelligent children.”

Irenie stopped. Mrs. Furman’s face was inches from her own, her cheeks flushed red and her long front teeth as straight as board and batten. “He could get in. I just know it.”

For once Irenie didn’t want to sit in front. She wanted to hear what the woman from the Department of Agriculture had to say. For once she couldn’t recall a good reason not to sit with the regular congregation. There, in the pews, her own mother sat among the sinners—now catching her daughter’s eye and patting the seat at her side. How long had it been since she’d spent the day with her mother’s full hip against her own, the squeeze of her hand upon her knee, her sister’s gossip chittering past her ear? Irenie cast a quick glance toward the bench behind the pulpit, where the saved sat, rock-faced and proper. On impulse, she took a place next to her mother and sisters and motioned Virginia Furman into the pew beside her.

Mrs. Furman leaned into her ear and whispered, “There are scholarships.”

The choir commenced singing, “I Heard my Savior Speak to Me.” Irenie picked up the other woman’s hand and squeezed it in her own.

Brodis glanced to the raised platform behind the pulpit where the saved members sat in U-formation, the women in calico store dresses, their hair fastened in biscuits at the napes of their necks. She wasn’t there. He turned toward the congregation. There, at the door, two women filled the dipper at the water bucket—but not her. People were settling themselves, the men next to the window in the square of morning light, the women on the other side of the aisle shadowed in gloom. And Irenie. Right there, in the pews among the sinners. She was supposed to be sitting on the platform behind the pulpit. She was supposed to be sitting among the saved. She, more than anyone, belonged to the Lord.

Why wasn’t she sitting among the saved?

But there was no time. Haver Brooks was making his way to the front of the room. Brodis stepped up and found his own place among the church members and the fellowshipping preachers. His wife didn’t look at him. In place of meeting his eye she untied the strings of her bonnet and stared at the pulpit as if her behavior didn’t matter a thing in the world.

She had an obligation to the congregation, especially on this day, the sacrament of the Last Supper. It was her mother’s habit, this sitting among the congregation, not hers.

But his wife was an inside-herself woman. Even when he’d first met her, and told her about the accident that had crippled his foot, she’d listened without saying a word. She’d looked at him and in him, as if she had the self-experience to understand the lull and fester of despair. But she’d been younger than him by ten years, narrow-shouldered and slim, her hair the color of ancient pennies. The big freckles on her face and arms were coppery too, and he’d wondered right away how much of her body did they cover.

But these days her private thinkings vexed him, like a walnut a man carried in his pocket. He couldn’t leave off touching it, rolling it between his fingers, worrying and working it until the thing loosed itself and the two halves fell away as they’d been meant to do all along.

Now Irenie’s mother leaned in and said something to her, both of them laughing in response. Next to them, a raft of aunts and nieces whispered and giggled.

And something else. The woman from the extension office was sitting at her right. Why? And why had she come all the way across the river to get into this church, and by herself?

Furman, that was her name. They had two agents to work at the USDA office now, two men and now the woman. The men had come five years ago, in ’34, then commenced holding meetings and visiting farms in both counties. From the get-go they’d been selling the idea of tobacco. And there were people that had switched. Rickerson was the first to get shed of his wheat and rye and cane. Brodis was the last, even though he didn’t use the tobacco for himself and had to sell every leaf. After that, the push was for separate pens for the animals. Build more fences and paddocks and leave the crops free in the open, they said. Never mind that the deer and raccoons would get them.

Not that any of the agents had ever farmed a day in their lives. And you couldn’t trust their interest. It was the looking-down kind, the kind that made a body to take in a stray dog or an idiot child. The kind born of vanity.

But Isaiah had told that the crown of pride would be trodden under feet. And it was sure Irenie believed that way too. She wouldn’t be swayed by a stranger come from across the river for some kind of charity visit. Most likely the outsider was happenstance. Just that his wife had for some reason chosen this day to cozy up to her mother.

When Haver ran out of announcements, Brodis stood, his bad foot prickling in his boot, his mind overstrung. He said, “Let us pray,” and the sound of fifty heads bowing was like a communal sigh, or the swing-out of a gate. He felt something inside him give way then too. The first voice, Mary Higdon’s: “Dear Jesus, be with my mother. . .” Then another voice joined in, a man’s. “Lord, I know. . .” And then another and another, each with its own plea. The jumble of sound rose above them until it was a needful cloud kept aloft by the pleas on either side, a communal swell of voices, some soft and insistent, some shy, some strident, all rising together in a bubble of hope, and then floating up toward the ceiling, where it dissipated in a scattering of Amens and Thank-yous and faded in a murmur and a sigh. The room had warmed, and the prayer evaporated in the smell of burning wood and warm bodies. Then the voices of the choir spilled over their heads.

Haver strode out and began lining the words.

“I heardan-old-oldstory.”

The congregation sang the words back majesty-slow. I Heard an Old Old Story. . . .

“Howasavior-camefrom-glory.”

How a Savior. Came From Glo-ry. . . .

Haver led the swaying congregation through three times, the chorus at first mournful and rich as the droning of bagpipes, but each rendition more vigorous than the last, until the singers pounced on the final notes. Beneath the. Cleansing. Flood.

With the last word hanging yet above them, Haver boomed, “Let us join hands in fellowship.” Women hugged, men embraced, and sound bubbled up again. Brodis turned to Haver, and for a moment, their caviling and jockeying fell away. For a moment all he saw was a vulnerable old man with a ring of fat around his belly and sweat mizzling the armpits of his white shirt. Brodis squeezed the deacon’s shoulders in a tight bear hug and Haver Brooks squeezed him back. It would be a good service, he could see, never mind his wife’s shenanigans.

He hadn’t planned what he was going to preach on. He never did. To do that would have been to rob the Holy Spirit of an opportunity. Every time he’d ever stood up without a pre-thought sermon, the Lord had given him the words. The trick was to step aside and get out of the way, to lay down whatever other thing you figured needed saying and let the Spirit through. Now he gripped the pulpit block and surveyed the congregants. His mind was a blank. He listened. The room was still, expectant. The lady from the extension office was sitting very close to his wife. She regarded him with no expression at all, but he had an idea of her thinking. Like every other person from every other brought-on organization, she saw them as curiosities. That’s how come she kept her hands folded careful in her lap and her face unlined. She was young, even pretty, her hair full and auburn-colored, gold light winking from her ear lobes. She was the only woman in the room to wear jewelry. Even the sinners left their fancy things at home on church day. The lines that came to him then were from Peter. Let it not be the outward adorning of plaiting the hair, and of wearing of gold, or of putting on of apparel.

But that wasn’t from the Spirit. That was him. He set it aside and kept his mind loose. The faces in front of him seemed pure and childlike, and in that moment he too felt peeled-back, young. From somewhere inside him the sermon rose up.

“The Jews,” he said, and the words were a gift, the surest proof he had of the Lord’s favor. “The Jews were waiting for a king with a fancy gold crown to sit above everyone and rule the people and tell them what to do.” He paused to let the picture lay down in people’s minds. “But that ain’t what happened.”

There was a shift of appreciation in the congregation.

“Instead the King came plain. Wearing rough clothes and talking simple talk.” Just like you and me.

The audience said yes without saying yes, all eyes on him, a few nods. “And on that last night, He knew that someone He loved would betray him.”

Irenie and Mrs. Furman were sitting straight up now, alert, brows slightly raised. There was something similar about their posture that Brodis found troubling, even though they didn’t seem aware of one another’s presence. Only him. Only Jesus. But there they were, among the sinners, where they both of them had chose to sit, even for some reason his own true wife, as if she didn’t know how that choice would cast a doubt on the status of her soul.

He willed his mind back to the image of Jesus. “He knew His neighbors and His loved ones would pierce His flesh with nails and spit upon Him while His blood soaked the earth.” He paused to let the image take. Then he bellowed. “And what did He do about it?” The question suspended itself above the congregation, an enormous glass balloon that would either float or crash, depending on what Brodis said next. “He lowered himself, that’s what. In place of getting angry, in place of shouting and making threats, He lowered himself, ladies and gentlemen.”

The room was perfectly still. The little boys in the last row had stopped passing whatever object it was they’d been sharing. Next to them, his son Matthew stopped looking out the window. He’d grown up ten inches over the winter, gangly and loose-jointed and full of the Kingdom of Heaven.

“And what did he say to those gathered around him? And what did he say to the fellow who was going to betray him? He said, ‘Let us give thanks.’”

“Now.” Brodis scanned the congregation. “All are invited to take part in the washing of feet.” At his side, Haver Brooks had prepared two trays, on each a row of saltine crackers and a glass filled with grape juice.

About half the adults stood. The woman from the extension office moved her legs to one side to let Irenie pass, and it seemed to him that there was some acknowledgement or comment that passed between them. Then the congregants and the members were milling at either side of the pulpit. Haver broke in, “Will the older members be seated first.” There was nervous joking about who might be considered older. Brodis let the jitters and awkwardness settle some, until the grayhaired had seated themselves in the front pews, women on the right side with their feet crossed at the ankles and tucked under the pews, men on the left with their feet planted block-like in front of them. Most of them were farmers. A few, like the Rickersons, had bottomland, but most were like Brodis: tilling the watersheds and the ridges and every slope in between. The people who owned valley land anymore went to the Free Will church in town.

Brodis felt calm. There was no one made a move to touch his footwear. Instead, faces pointed toward him, waiting for the instructions they heard every year, the silence stuffed with an energy that would have embarrassed him under other circumstances. Haver gave each of the standers a terrycloth cutting. Some of the men tucked it into the galluses of their overalls, and some draped it over a shoulder. There was no one looked at the enameled pans resting on the oilcloth on the table next to the pulpit. The two Hogsed boys stood next to it, waiting. The kettles steamed on the coal stove, and the hiss was the only breath in the room.

Lem Thompson took the pulpit, his skin creased and lined as an old saddle and his gaze pointing in two directions at once. Since birth, the wandering left eye had empowered him with seeing and knowing more than he saw and knew. Now the old man set to reading with an energetic chant, each phrase punctuated with an intake of air that in another preacher would have been a rest but in Lem was the tightening of a ratchet wrench. “‘Now-when-Jesus-knew-that-his-hour-was-come, ah.” Each quick breath cranked the sermon up. “He-began-to-wash-the-disciples’-feet, ah.” The sentences constricted, sped, tightened, until Lem stepped away from the pulpit and from the printed word, and his eyes drilled down on the congregants and the foot washers both at the same time. “And-do-you-think-he’s-feeling-shame?”

The voice of the congregants was immediate, members and sinners alike. “No!”

Brodis stole a glance at his wife. She had closed her eyes the way she did when she was trying to figure out what she was feeling.

Meantime Haver raised up the hymn, and Lem didn’t even acknowledge it. If anything, the old man began shouting louder.

“Jesus-Christ-got-right-down-on-his-knees!”

Blessing and honor, glory and power. . .

“And-bowed-down-before-the-disciples!’’

Bow unto the ancient of days. . .

“And-took-up-their-feet-and-bathed-them!”

Spontaneous voices rose up from the crowd, as if cheering Lem on. That was the way it started. Always with Lem. A sudden resentment bared itself naked in Brodis’s soul, a rusty artifact uncovered of its own accord. He willed himself to look at it and dust it off, ancient and corroded as it was. Then he willed himself to set it aside.

The music swelled. “The-scriptures-say-that-a-Christian-is Christlike, ah. But-what-does-that-mean?”

Murmurs from the congregation. Brodis saw that Joe Rickerson was crying.

Meanwhile the older Hogsed boy took the first kettle from the stove and began pouring the hissing water into the pans. The younger followed with a pitcher of cold.

Now Lem spoke with deliberation. “Brothers and sisters, all who are seated, as you are servants of the Lord, you may remove your shoes.”

It was the instruction they’d been waiting for. Eleven heads and eleven torsos moved forward to untie eleven pairs of boots. Each man’s full attention went to the unlacing, as if the task were new to him and required his full concentration. None gawked down the row at his neighbors’ feet, blue-veined and exposed like genitals. None joked about ugliness or fust the way they would in the logging camps or any other place where men lived together too close. But Brodis knew these men. Like him, they worked on the mountains, uphill, through creeks and branches and snake-infested forest. They worked for every piece of food they put on the table. And yet, they had come here, of their own accord, in their puniness, with their feet naked and red-wrinkled, looking to be better men. And he was kin with them.

He glanced at the women on the other side of the aisle. Irenie’s feet were pale and freckled. He turned his head. Did his wife submit her soul to the Lord? What was she thinking about right now? Why hadn’t she taken her rightful place among the saved?

Lem’s voice: “Let us commence to washing the feet of the Lord’s servants.” The younger men dropped to one knee, and there, like suitors, knelt before their elders. Without thinking, Brodis kneeled at the pan of water in front of Haver Brooks, as his conscience had called him. Haver’s feet had troll-like knobs at the sides of the toes and sprouts of black hair at the center of each digit. Brodis had forgotten how they appalled him. It wasn’t his own filth, but worse, the wretchedness of someone else’s. But the feet were also old, and the heels had cracked so deep that he could spy the red insides, like the split hooves of horses. It had to hurt. Brodis cupped a fissured heel in his left hand and scooped the water in his right. Embrace the ruin of the physical. A fellow had to pass through it to get to the other side. The lighter grace-lit side.

Lem called for the washers and the washed to switch places, and now the elderly knelt before their younger neighbors. Then Lem Thompson stepped in front of Brodis, steadying himself with one hand on Haver’s shoulder, grunting. He rested on one knee, and Brodis found himself looking at the top of Lem’s bowed head, his white hair transparent, the pink scalp showing beneath. The old man breathed heavy. Brodis wondered had Lem seen the corrosion of his childish resentment. Lem lifted his foot and began washing. And maybe it was the warmth of the water that started it. The swell came from his toes, an effulgent good will like the effect of blockade whiskey rising up his legs, energizing his thighs and into his torso and his heart.

And there. Beyond Lem’s bent head, the lady agent sat pin-straight, her head cocked to one side, as if she were watching a pair of rabbits japing. And the Spirit rose right up and spoke through Brodis. “There may be some who haven’t let Him into their hearts. For those people, now is the opportunity.” The government agent didn’t blink. He let his gaze sweep the rest of the sinners. “Is there anyone here who is ready to walk the aisle?”

There was a movement in the back, near the boys, a slight figure in overalls. Howard Gooch. No obvious signs of drunkenness this morning. Today Mr. Gooch walked steady, then eager. Then he was throwing himself at the mourner’s bench, his knees hitting the wooden floorboards so hard that the chair Brodis was sitting in quivered too. Mr. Gooch looked straight up at the electric bulb. Brodis stood then, never mind his wet feet. Mr. Gooch was breathing, “Aaahh, please help me, please help,” the loose skin of his neck trembling. Brodis reached for the man’s hands, the skin light and crumbly in recent years, as if his body were sloughing away. Mr. Gooch had come under conviction years before, but the Lord had not yet seen fit to save him, probably because he hadn’t succeeded in changing his life for more than a couple weeks at a time. His backsliding was famous. To Brodis, the man’s temptations seemed puny. For Brodis, giving up music and swearing and drink had been easy. But that was him. He pressed Howard Gooch’s flaking hands and understood that if he was to squeeze them too hard he would crush them. The man was weeping and muttering for help.

“Lord grant it,” someone called from the men’s side, and others echoed with prayers that threaded among and across them, the weft of them supporting the slight weight of Howard Gooch. Leastways for now.

Haver began singing, “Just as I am without one plea, but that Thy Blood was shed for me.” The other voices joined in, “And that Thou bidst me come to Thee, O Lamb of God, I come.”

Mr. Gooch closed his eyes and muttered something, but Brodis couldn’t make out the paper-whisper. Then, out of the blue, he did. “Oh, Lamb of God, I come.” And the sound was so frail that some part of Brodis that had been frozen loosened, and he forgot about the leprous feel of Howard Gooch’s skin and raised their four hands aloft, and his own soul rose up too, breaking a little free from the beastly shape he’d been born to, and from that small height he saw that his own challenge was different. He saw himself for what he was, a man who figured to outsharp the God that had made him. His task was his own: to lay down the questions and the pride because here was Howard Gooch, a drunk with a mountain to climb, willing to throw down his body and his soul for God. Again.

The congregation held them up, the voices welling as if in one accord, and soared, and glided, the cadence rising and falling in waves of sound that carried away pettiness and grief, now weaving together again, now carrying the promise of the Holy Spirit, and the richness of life, and the nearness of joy, and Brodis became once again his younger stronger self. Here in the church, among these white enameled pans and this tender flock kneeling in the blanched light, he was his best self. This was the meaning of Grace. These were his people, and this was what Heaven must be like.