I grip the foot rail. Cold to the touch.
“I said some things to you,” he begins, “the last time we met-”
“It’s fine, Reverend. There’s no need to apologize. I can’t think of anything you said that wasn’t justified under the circumstances. I’m just sorry he ended up this way.”
“You’re just doing your job, I’m sure. The Bible talks about that, you know.” He reaches to the chair for his book. “The magistrate, I mean. The civil authority. ‘He beareth not the sword in vain.’ ”
“Romans thirteen,” I say, surprising him. It’s a conversation I’ve had before, with Carter.
He cracks open the book. “ ‘He is the minister of God to thee for good.’ ”
“If he wakes up, Reverend, I’d appreciate a call.”
“Let me pray for you,” he says, setting the book aside and moving toward me.
He puts a hand on my forearm and raises the other high, like he’s about to swear an oath in court. He utters a few lines in an incantatory monotone, speaking of my being lifted up and granted wisdom and kept safe on the mean streets. When he finishes, the man in black hugs me, his silver belt buckle dinging the foot rail.
Out in the hallway, the high-pitched gasoline reek strong in my nostrils, I run my hand down the wall for guidance. Past the nurses’ station and into the elevator. Then home, home at last, into the arms of a woman who can say as much as I can about suffering and loss.
CHAPTER 30
SUNDAY, DECEMBER 20–10:29 A.M.
The man onstage wears a black robe. He stands behind a table of bread and wine. I watch through the winking flame of the advent candles, seated next to Charlotte near the front. I glance over my shoulder at the dimly lit congregation, hundreds of faces glowing from the spotlights onstage. His eager voice gives the ancient, dusty words an electric charge. Even a reluctant observer can’t help being a little moved.
Smiling toward us, his easy manner cutting against the grain of the formal liturgy, he speaks the lines written before me in the program, which Charlotte tilts for my benefit.
“Let us proclaim the mystery of faith.”
She joins the people seated around us in responding:
CHRIST HAS DIED.
CHRIST IS RISEN.
CHRIST WILL COME AGAIN.
A tremor goes through me. Recognition, maybe. Nostalgia. My strict and beautiful aunt lining us up in the family pew, Moody and I in our short-sleeved shirts and clip-on ties. Mouthing the words at the right times, or at least a rough approximation of them.
Behind us and to the left, Carter and Gina are holding hands. Young parents-to-be. Earlier in the service, when the strangers all around suddenly came to life, shaking hands and greeting each other, a small throng gathered around the couple, who’d just revealed their news. They’d swarmed me too, and all but killed the fatted calf, happy to see Charlotte’s prodigal husband in attendance, however awkwardly.
This is what she’d wanted. This above all things.
So I obliged, even to the point of donning another of her father’s tailored tweeds and letting her straighten my tie until the dimple was just right.
On the far side of the auditorium, a piano plays. There’s a cello, a violin, even a flute. The congregation sings and the mood is very different than I remember from childhood. More joy than morbid introspection.
The worshipers in front of us rise by row, filing toward the aisle and then forward. Up front, the waiting elders and deacons dispense first the bread-“The body of Christ broken for you”-then the wine-“The blood of Christ shed for you.”
As one row clears, the next rises. The people just in front of us get up, putting hymnals and programs down on their seats before going forward.
Charlotte leans closer. “I’ll stay here with you.”
“It’s okay.” I squeeze her bare knee. “You go ahead.”
She glances at the Robbs, then takes my hand, only dropping it when it’s her turn to go.
I watch as she edges toward the waiting sacrament. Carter and Gina follow behind her. Alone in my now-empty row, feeling more concealed than conspicuous, I see my wife cup her hands together to receive the bread. She places it in her mouth. She moves to the short line of people awaiting the wine, reaches the front, then accepts the little plastic thimble from the man in the black robe, drinking it down, her eyes fixed on the backlit cross above the stage.
She returns with a glow that has nothing to do with the reflection of stage lights, scooting her chair closer to me, taking my hand in hers. She says nothing. She doesn’t have to.
In the time it takes for the whole congregation to go forward, commune, and cycle back to their seats, several verses are sung. I watch them all, the men and women, old and young, white and black and brown, perhaps with nothing in common but this. It’s enough to make me forget the television hucksters and the paranoid conspiracists and the smiling, feel-good hypocrites, enough that I can almost see why Charlotte takes comfort in being here.
The minister ends the service with a benediction, his hands elevated. The gesture brings back Curtis Blunt’s strange prayer over me. If he could see me now, in church for the first time in ages on the heels of his incantation, would he claim credit? I smile at the thought.
Afterward, lunch at the Black Labrador, where Carter casts a few loaded glances in my direction, uncertain what my presence this morning might mean. They all know about the fire that consumed David Bayard, about the flames that nearly caught me. Maybe he’s telling himself that a near-death experience brought me round. Maybe he’s thinking there are no atheists in foxholes.
What he doesn’t know-what none of them do-is that a week ago today I chased a man to his death. If he did, if he knew that Bayard’s melted face and the crushed skull of Wayne Bourgeois have coalesced in my mind as a kind of bogeyman, hidden behind the curtain of sleep, he might make something of that, just as the psychologist would if I were foolish enough to share. But I won’t, and personally I don’t know what to make of it. I don’t know what to think of a policeman more haunted by the fate of the guilty than their victims.
“You’re quiet,” Charlotte says. “What are you thinking?”
What I didn’t tell my uncle, what I’ve never told anyone, is that the day my cousin Moody stole that gun and ran away, the boys he was with threw me in the trunk. They did it as a joke, Moody egging them on, and after running me around the block a few times, letting me stew in the sweaty darkness, he’d pulled me out again, pushing me down on the curb next to his abandoned bicycle. When he reached out, I shrank away.
Come to me, kid. Don’t be scared.
He had the gun in his waistband. The others looked on. I didn’t know what was happening and I still don’t.
You can go here and you can go there, but you can’t go away.
But I didn’t understand. Moody smiled an old man’s smile.
You just tell him I said that, okay?
When I did tell my uncle, finally working up the nerve, he made me repeat the words back to him several times over. He never told me what they meant. Only that it was a song.
“Roland,” Charlotte says. “What are you thinking?”
They all pause over their plates, silverware suspended, waiting.
And waiting.
“I was just thinking there’s something I need to do.” I check my watch. “If you can spare me for the afternoon.”
“O-kay,” Charlotte says, probing.
“I’m gonna drive up to Huntsville again. There’s a guy in the hospital I’m gonna try and talk to. A loose end to wrap up.”
Her knife and fork clink to the plate.
“Don’t worry,” I say. “I’ll come home. No side trips to New Orleans this time.”
Carter takes a bite of fish, chewing, staring at the knots and grain in the rustic table. Gina slides her hand across to Charlotte’s, clasping it in a show of sympathy. I pretend not to notice.