“Just one little misstep in a long, hardworking life in the service of the Lord,” Reverend Martin said cheerfully, “but God kept him out of the Promised Land for it. Joshua led em across the river-nasty, ungrateful bunch that they were. — This conversation had taken place on a Sunday after-noon in June. By then the two of them had known each other for quite awhile, and grown comfortable with each other.
David had fallen into the habit of going to church in the morning, then walking over to the Methodist par-sonage on Sunday afternoon and talking with Reverend Martin for an hour or so in his study. David looked for-ward to these meetings, and Gene Martin did, too. He was immensely taken with the child, who seemed at one moment an ordinary boy and at the next someone much older than his years. And there was something else: he believed that David Carver had been touched by God, and that God’s touch might not yet have departed.
He was fascinated with the story of Brian Ross, and by how what had happened to Brian had caused David, a per-fect late-twentieth-century religious illiterate, to seek an-swers.
… to seek God. He told his wife that David was the only honest convert he had ever seen, and that what had happened to David’s friend was the only modem miracle he’d ever heard of that he could actually believe in. Brian had turned out fine and dandy except for a slight limp, and the doctors said even that might be gone in a year or so.
“Marvellous,” StelIa Martin replied. “That will be a comfort to me and the baby if your young friend says the wrong thing about his religious instruction and you wind up in court, facing child-abuse charges. You have to be careful, Gene-and you’re crazy to be drinking around him.”
“I’m not drinking around him,” Reverend Martin had replied, suddenly finding something interesting to look at out the window. At last he had returned his eyes to his wife. “As to the other, the Lord is my shepherd.”
He went on seeing David on Sunday afternoons He was not quite thirty himself, and discovering for the first time the pleasures of writing on a perfectly blank slate. He didn’t quit mixing Seagram’s with his tea a Sunday-afternoon tradition of long standing, but he left the study door open whenever he and David we;e together. The TV was always on during their conversa tions, always punched to Mute and tuned to the various Sunday—afternoon athletic contests-soundless football when David first came to Reverend Martin, then sound-less basketball, then soundless baseball.
It was during a soundless baseball game between the Indians and the A’s that David sat mulling over the sto—y of Moses and the water from the rock. After awhile he looked up from the TV screen and said: “God isn’t very forgiving, is he.”
“Yes, indeed he is,” Reverend Martin said, sounding a little surprised. “He has to be, because he is so demanding.”
“But he’s cruel, too-isn’t he.”
Gene Martin hadn’t hesitated. “Yes,” he said. “God is cruel. I have popcorn, David—would you like me to make some.”
Now he floated in the black, listening for Reverend Martin’s cruel God, the one who had refused Moses entry into Canaan because Moses had one single time claimed God’s work as his own, the one who had used him in some fashion to save Brian Ross, the one who had then killed his sweet little sister and put the rest of them in the hands of a giant lunatic who had the empty eyes of a coma patient.
There were other voices in the dark place where he went when he prayed; he heard them frequently while he was there-usually distant, like the dim voices you some times heard in the background when you made a Ion distance call, sometimes more clearly. Today one of then was very clear, indeed.
I/you want to pray, pray to me, it said. Why would you pray to a God who kills baby sisters. You’ll never laugh at how funny she is again, or tickle her until she squeals, or pull her braids. She’s dead and you and your fblks are in jail. When he comes back, the crazy cop, he’ll probably kill all three of you. The others as well. This is what your God did, and really, what else would you expect from a God who kills baby sisters. He’s as crazy as the cop, when you get right down to cases. Yet you kneel before him. Come on, Davey, get a life. Get a grip. Pray to me. At least I’m not crazy.
He wasn’t rocked by this voice-not very, anyway. He’d heard it before, perhaps first wrapped inside that strong impulse to give his folks the impression that he had called Brian back from the deep reaches of his coma. He heard it more clearly, more personally, during his daily prayers, and this had troubled him, but when he told Rev-erend Martin about how that voice would sometimes cut in as if it were on a telephone extension, Reverend Martin had only laughed. “Like God, Satan tends to speak to us most clearly in our prayers and meditations,” he said. “It’s when we’re most open, most in touch with our pn euma.
“Pneuma. What’s that.”
“Spirit. The part of you that yearns to fulfill its God—made potential and be eternal. The part that God and Satan are squabbling over even now.
He had taught David a little mantra to use at such times, and he used it now. See in me, be in me, he thought, over and over again. He was waiting for the voice of the other to fade, but he also needed to get above the pain again. It kept coming back like cramps.
Thinking about what had happened to Pie hurt so deep. And yes, he did resent God for letting the insane cop push her down those stairs. Resented, hell, hated.
See in me, God. Be in me, God. See in me, be in me.
The voice of Satan (if it was indeed him; David didn’t know for sure) faded away, and for awhile there was only the dark.
Tell me what to do, God. Tell me what you want. And if it’s your will that we should die here, help me not to waste time being mad or being scared or yelling for an explanation.
Distant, the howl of a coyote. Then, nothing.
He waited, trying to stay open, and still there was noth-ing. At last he gave up and spoke the prayer-ending words that Reverend Martin had taught him, muttering them into his clasped hands: “Lord, make me be useful to myself and help me to remember that until I am, I can’t be useful to others. Help me to remember that you are my creator. I am what you made-sometimes the thumb on your hand, sometimes the tongue in your mouth.
Make me a vessel which is whole to your service. Thanks. Amen.”
He opened his eyes. As always, he first stared into the darkness in the center of his clasped hands, and as always, the first thing it reminded him of was an eye-a hole like an eye. Whose, though. God’s. The devil’s. Perhaps just his own.
He stood up, turned slowly around, looked at his par-ents. They were looking back at him, Ellie amazed, Ralph grave.
“Well thank heaven,” his mother said. She gave him a chance to reply, and when he didn’t she asked: “Were you praying. You were down on your knees almost half an hour, I thought you must have gone to sleep, were you praying.”
“Yes.”
“Do you do it all the time, or is this a special case.”
“I do it three times a day. In the morning, at night, and once somewhere in the middle.
The middle one I use to say thanks for the good things in my life and ask for help with the stuff I don’t understand.” He laughed-a small, nervous sound. “There’s always plenty of that.”
“Is this a recent development, or have you been doing it since you started going to that church.” She was still looking at him with a perplexity that made David feel self—conscious. Part of it was the black eye-she was developing a hell of shiner from where the cop had hit her-but that wasn’t all of it, or even most of it. She was looking at him as if she had never seen him before.