The rain quit so I cut off the windshield wipers, let the Fairlane get farther ahead of me. I came over a rise and the Fairlane had already disappeared around a curve. I sped up, afraid I’d lost my father, but coming out of the curve I saw his car stopped in the road a hundred yards ahead, the turn signal on though our Buick was the closest car behind him. My father turned onto a dirt road and I followed, still keeping my distance though I wondered if it were really necessary. He slowed in front of a cinder-block building no bigger than a woodshed, pulling into a makeshift parking lot where our ancient Fairlane looked no older than the dozen other cars and trucks. I eased off the road on a rise above the church and watched my father walk hurriedly toward the building. A white cross was nailed above the door he entered.
I could hear an out-of-tune piano, a chorus of voices rising from the open door and windows into the August evening, merging with the songs of crickets and cicadas. I waited half an hour before I got out of the Buick and walked down the road to the church. At the front door I paused, then stepped into a foyer small and dark as a closet. A half-open door led to the main room. The singing stopped, replaced by a single voice.
I peered into a thick-shadowed room whose only light came from a single bare bulb dangling from the ceiling. Mr. Holcombe stood in front of three rows of metal chairs where the congregation sat. At his feet lay a wooden box that looked like an infant’s coffin. Holes had been bored in its lid. Mr. Holcombe wore no coat or tie, just a white, short-sleeved shirt, brown slacks, and scuffed black loafers. His arm outstretched, he waved a Bible as if fanning an invisible flame.
“The word of the Lord,” he said, then opened the Bible to a page marked by a paper scrap. “And they cast out many devils, and anointed with oil many that were sick, and healed them,” Mr. Holcombe read. He closed the Bible and went down on one knee in front of the wooden box, his head bowed, like an athlete resting on the sidelines.
“Whoever is afflicted, come forward,” he said. “Lord, if it is your will, let us be the instrument of thy healing grace.”
“Amen,” the congregation said as my father left the last row and kneeled beside Mr. Holcombe. Without a word the congregation rose and gathered around my father. An old woman, gray hair reaching her hips, opened a bottle and dabbed a thick, clear liquid on my father’s brow. The other members laid their hands on his head and shoulders.
“Oh, Lord,” shouted Mr. Holcombe, raising the Bible in his hand. “Grant this child of God continued victories over his affliction. Let not his heart be troubled. Let him know your abiding presence.”
The old woman with the long hair began speaking feverishly in a language I couldn’t understand, her hands straining upward as if she were attempting to haul heaven down into their midst.
“Praise God, praise God,” a man in a plaid shirt shouted as he did a spastic dance around the others.
My father began speaking the strange, fervent language of the old woman. The congregation removed their hands as my father rocked his torso back and forth, sounds I could not translate pouring from his mouth.
Mr. Holcombe, still kneeling beside my father, unclasped the wooden box. The room suddenly became silent, then a whirring sound like a dry gourd being shaken. At first I did not realize where the noise came from, but when Mr. Holcombe dipped his hand and forearm into the box the sound increased. Something was in there, something alive and, I knew even before seeing it, dangerous.
Mr. Holcombe’s forearm rose out of the box, a timber rattlesnake coiled around his wrist like a thick, black vine. The reptile’s head rose inches above Mr. Holcombe’s open palm, its split tongue probing the air like a sensor.
I turned away, stepped out of the foyer and into the parking lot. My eyes slowly adjusted to being outside the church’s dense shadows. I stood there until the scraping of chairs signaled the congregation’s return to their seats. They sang a hymn, and then Mr. Holcombe slowly read a long passage from the book of Mark.
I walked back to the Buick, halfway there when I saw the headlights were on. I tried the battery five times and gave up, dragging the jumper cables from the trunk and opening the hood in the hope someone might stop and help me. No cars or trucks passed, however, and in a few minutes people came out of the church, some pausing to speak but most going straight to their vehicles. I sat in the car and waited until I saw our Fairlane leave the parking lot.
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 if 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 a piece of chalk, and it was 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.”