Читать книгу The Coffins of Little Hope - Timothy Schaffert - Страница 23

Within the thick of a cornfield, the musk of vegetation filled her mouth with breath almost too damp for her lungs to take in, and Daisy feared she’d never get to the outer edge. She felt covered in insects, even tasted them, and as she stomped through the dirt, cutting the skin of her bare feet, she slapped away the spotted, lime-colored rootworm beetles crawling on her arms and neck and legs. She picked them from her tongue and her teeth. The cornstalks, so tall and peaceful, rattling only gently with the slight wind and Daisy’s movement, sliced at her, their smooth leaves leaving paper-cut slashes across her flesh.

When Daisy stepped from the cornfield, she could’ve gone left or she could’ve gone right. If she’d gone right, her story would’ve changed so radically that there might’ve been no story at all. It would’ve been so easy to dismiss her had she gone right, a little less than forty feet down the highway, to one of our town’s oldest institutions: “Peeping” Tom’s Liquor and Discount Cigarettes. “Peeping” Tom’s that fateful day was staffed solely by a twenty-two-year-old who spent his work hours eating Cherry Mash candy and leaving his chocolate fingerprints on the pages of the store’s dirty magazines.

But Daisy didn’t go right; she went left, to the Garden of Gethsemane Lutheran Church, even though it was much farther away, practically a quarter mile, and the black asphalt of the highway felt like a hot iron pressed against her bare, bleeding feet.

The church’s Board of Elders, a claque of old men, happened to be meeting that morning, and they happened to be meeting in the chapel, not the fellowship hall as usual, rendering Daisy’s entrance into their lives all the more dramatic. They’d gone into the chapel, in their finest suits and newest ties, to confront the young minister, who was at the lectern rehearsing his sermon, a particularly rabid piece of fire-and-brimstone in which he intended to blame us all for all the recent acts of God—tornadoes that had decimated area farms in May, more tornadoes that had killed two teenagers who’d parked to neck near a creek in June, a fire that had consumed the north side of our town square in early July.

Had Daisy not arrived to weaken among the pews, Reverend Most may not ever have had a chance to deliver that sermon the following Sunday; the seven men of the Board of Elders had marched up the aisle with the intention of demanding that the minister relinquish his collar right then and there. In the six months that the curly-headed twenty-nine-year-old minister had been at the Garden of Gethsemane Lutheran Church, the congregation had dropped by half. The church had hired Reverend Most to bring a young man’s vigor to the pulpit, but all it had gotten was a young man’s arrogance, and all he’d done was deny and stifle. He’d even, in one sermon, condemned the Miranda-and-Desiree books as “sick lullabies for our children, sung with the devil’s tongue.”

“My wife won’t even come to church with me anymore,” said Elder Dunleavy, his high-pitched, womanly voice scratched from years of puffing on cheap cigars every evening with a juice glass of happy-hour brandy. “She stays home to listen to the preachers on the AM radio.”

Reverend Most, in T-shirt and jeans, just glanced down at the elders from the altar, his hands clutching both sides of the blond-wood pulpit. He stepped from the pulpit, down from the altar, and past the old men, even giving a few of them an impolite and superior shove. The elders’ eyes followed after him, and that was when they saw a woman none of them had ever seen before weaving like a drunkard up the aisle.

A Lutheran church in Nebraska is typically a place where any mad passion for Christ is politely concealed. Men and women recite the various creeds in hypnotic monotone; the hymns, pumped from wheezy organ pipes, are sung with no lilt or musicality. The members of the choirs not only don’t dance, they don’t sway. That’s not to say no one is ever smacked hard with God’s love or filled up to the eyeballs with the Holy Spirit, but when you are, you keep it to yourself. You don’t leap to your feet, your tongue wrapping around the rapid gibberish of glossolalia; ministers don’t slap your forehead to lift you, healed, from your wheelchair. There’s never rending of garments or gnashing of teeth, and no one’s ever dunked, wailing and baptized, into a country river.

So to have Daisy collapse against them, as battered and sweaty as a Baptist, her arms stretched out crucifixion-style, her eyes rolling back into her head, put some extra beats into the elderly hearts of the Board of Elders. Daisy’s strangeness was charismatic; her blood on their hands was beautiful. And, for the first time, if they could admit it to themselves, the men felt their religion. They learned in that moment to love the circus that worship can be. Finally they could save someone from something terrible.