Some of the amens that accompanied and followed Reverend Senior Pulliam's words were loud, others withholding; some people did not open their mouths at all. The question, thought Anna, was not why but who. Who was Pulliam blasting? Was he directing his remarks to the young people, warning them to shape up their selfish lives? Or was he aiming at their parents for allowing the juvenile restlessness and defiance that had been rankling him even before that fist appeared on the Oven? Most likely, she thought, he was bringing the weight of his large and long Methodist education to bear down on Richard. A stone to crush his colleague's message of God as a permanent interior engine that, once ignited, roared, purred and moved you to do your own work as well as His-but, if idle, rusted, immobilizing the soul like a frozen clutch.
That must be it, she thought. Pulliam was targeting Misner.
Because surely he would not stand before the bride and groom-a guest preacher asked to make a few (few!) remarks before the ceremony to a congregation made up of almost everybody in Ruby, only a third of whom were members of Pulliam's church-and frighten them to death on their wedding day. Because surely he would not insult the bride's mother and sister-in-law, who wore like a coat the melancholy of tending broken babies and who not only had not chastised God for that knockout blow to everything they dreamed of but seemed to increase in steadfastness as each year passed. And although the groom had no living parents, surely Pulliam did not intend to embarrass his aunts-to put the feet of those devout women to the fire for caring (too much, perhaps?) for the sole "son" the family would ever have, now that Soane's boys were dead, Dovey having had none, and not allowing mourning for either of those losses to tear them up or close their hearts. Surely not. And surely Pulliam was not trying to rile the groom's uncles, Deacon and Steward, who behaved as if God were their silent business partner. Pulliam had always seemed to admire them, hinting repeatedly that they belonged in Zion, not Calvary, where they had to listen to the namby-pamby sermons of a man who thought teaching was letting children talk as if they had something important to say that the world had not heard and dealt with already.
Who else would feel the sting of "God is not interested in you." Or wince from the burn in "if you think love is natural you are blind." Who else but Richard Misner who now had to stand up and preside, over the most anticipated wedding anyone could remember, under the boiling breath of Senior "Take No Prisoners" Pulliam? Unless, of course, he was talking to her, telling her: Cleave unto another if you want, but if you are not cleaving to God (Pulliam's God, that is) your marriage will not be worth the license. Because he knew she and Richard were talking marriage, and he knew she helped him organize the young disobedients. "Be the Furrow."
Rogue mint overwhelmed the flower arrangements around the altar. Clumps of it, along with a phlox called wild sweet william, grew beneath the church windows that at eleven o'clock were opened to a climbing sun. The light falling from the April sky was a gift. Inside the church the maplewood pews, burnished to a military glow, set off the spring-white walls, the understated pulpit, the comfortable almost picket-fence look of the railing, where communicants could kneel to welcome the spirit one more time. Above the altar, high into its clean, clear space, hung a three-foot oak cross. Uncluttered. Unencumbered. No gold competed with its perfection or troubled its poise. No writhe or swoon of the body of Christ bloated its lyric thunder.
The women of Ruby did not powder their faces and they wore no harlot's perfume. So the voluptuous odor of mint and sweet william disturbed the congregation, made it reel in anticipation of a good time with plenty good food at Soane Morgan's house. There would be music by anyone: July on the upright piano; the Male Chorus; a Kate Golightly solo; the Holy Redeemer Quartet; a dreamy-eyed boy named Brood on the steps with a mouth organ. There would be the press of good clothing; silk dresses and starched shirts forgotten as folks leaned against trees, sat on the grass, mishandled second helpings of cream peas. There would be the shouts of sugar-drunk children; the crackle of wedding gift paper snatched from the floor and folded so neatly it seemed more valuable than the gift it had enclosed. Farmers, ranchers and wheat-growing women would let themselves be yanked from chairs and clapped into repeating dance steps from long ago. Teenagers would laugh and blink their eyes in an effort to hide their want.
But more than joy and children high on wedding cake, they were looking forward to the union of two families and an end to the animus that had soaked the members and friends of those families for four years. Animus that centered on the maybe-baby the bride had not acknowledged, announced or delivered.
Now they sat, as did Anna Flood, wondering what on earth Reverend Pulliam thought he was doing. Why cast a pall now? Why diminish the odor of rogue mint and phlox; blunt the taste of the roast lamb and lemon pies awaiting them. Why fray the harmony, derail the peace this marriage brought?
Richard Misner rose from his seat. Annoyed; no, angry. So angry he could not look at his fellow preacher and let him see how deep the cut. Throughout Pulliam's remarks he had gazed expressionless at the Easter hats of the women in the pews. Earlier that morning he had planned five or six opening sentences to launch the sacred rite of matrimony, crafted them carefully around Revelation 19:7,9, sharpening the "marriage supper of the Lamb" image, coring it to reveal the reconciliation this wedding promised. He had segued from Revelation to Matthew 19:6, "Wherefore they are no more twain, but one flesh," to seal not only the couple's fidelity to each other but the renewed responsibilities of all Morgans and Fleetwoods.
Now he looked at the couple standing patiently before the altar and wondered whether they had understood or even heard what had been laid on them. He, however, did understand. Knew this lethal view of his chosen work was a deliberate assault on all he believed. Suddenly he understood and shared Augustine's rage at the "proud minister" whom he ranked with the devil. Augustine had gone on to say that God's message was not corrupted by the messenger; "if [the light] should pass through defiled beings, it is not itself defiled." Although Augustine had not met Senior Pulliam, he must have known ministers like him. But his dismissal of them to Satan's company did not acknowledge the damage words spoken from a pulpit could wreak. What would Augustine say as anodyne to the poison Pulliam had just sprayed over everything? Over the heads of men finding it so hard to fight their instincts to control what they could and crunch what they could not; in the hearts of women tirelessly taming the predator; in the faces of children not yet recovered from the blow to their esteem upon learning that adults would not regard them as humans until they mated; of the bride and groom frozen there, desperate for this public bonding to dilute their private shame. Misner knew that Pulliam's words were a widening of the war he had declared on Misner's activities: tempting the young to step outside the wall, outside the town limits, shepherding them, forcing them to transgress, to think of themselves as civil warriors. He knew also that a public secret about a neverborn baby poked through the grounds of the quarrel like a fang.
Suitable language came to mind but, not trusting himself to deliver it without revealing his deep personal hurt, Misner walked away from the pulpit, to the rear wall of the church. There he stretched, reaching up until he was able to unhook the cross that hung there. He carried it then, past the empty choir stall, past the organ where Kate sat, the chair where Pulliam was, on to the podium and held it before him for all to see-if only they would. See what was certainly the first sign any human anywhere had made: the vertical line; the horizontal one. Even as children, they drew it with their fingers in snow, sand or mud; they laid it down as sticks in dirt; arranged it from bones on frozen tundra and broad savannas; as pebbles on riverbanks; scratched it on cave walls and outcroppings from Nome to South Africa. Algonquin and Laplanders, Zulu and Druids-all had a finger memory of this original mark. The circle was not first, nor was the parallel or the triangle. It was this mark, this, that lay underneath every other. This mark, rendered in the placement of facial features. This mark of a standing human figure poised to embrace. Remove it, as Pulliam had done, and Christianity was like any and every religion in the world: a population of supplicants begging respite from begrudging authority; harried believers ducking fate or dodging everyday evil; the weak negotiating a doomed trek through the wilderness; the sighted ripped of light and thrown into the perpetual dark of choicelessness. Without this sign, the believer's life was confined to praising God and taking the hits. The praise was credit; the hits were interest due on a debt that could never be paid. Or, as Pulliam put it, no one knew when he had "graduated." But with it, in the religion in which this sign was paramount and foundational, well, life was a whole other matter.