I decided to hustle my butt into the backyard before Mom left with her special-made dinner. I sat in the tire swing, not exactly hiding but not exactly in full view, either. Ten minutes later, I heard the front door shut. I went to the corner of the house and saw Mom walking down the road with a foil-covered tray in her hands. The foil twinkled in the sun. I went in the house and up the stairs. I knocked on my sister’s door, which was graced by a large Bob Dylan poster.
“Claire?”
“Go away!” she shouted. “I don’t want to talk to you!” The record player went on: the Yardbirds, and at top volume.
Mom came back about an hour later—a pretty long visit just to drop off a gift of food—and although Terry and I were in the living room by then, watching TV and jostling each other for the best place on our old couch (in the middle, where the springs didn’t poke your bum), she barely seemed to notice us. Con was upstairs playing the guitar he’d gotten for his birthday. And singing.
David Thomas of Gates Falls Congo was back for a return engagement on the Sunday after Thanksgiving. The church was once more full, maybe because people wanted to see if Reverend Jacobs would show up and try to say some more awful things. He didn’t. If he had, I’m sure he would have been shut up before he got a running start, maybe even carried out bodily. Yankees take their religion seriously.
The next day, Monday, I ran the quarter mile from school instead of walking. I had an idea, and I wanted to be home before the schoolbus arrived. When it came, I grabbed Con and pulled him into the backyard.
“Who put a bug up your butt?” he asked.
“You need to come down to the parsonage with me,” I said. “Reverend Jacobs is going away pretty soon, maybe even tomorrow, and we should see him before he goes. We should tell him we still like him.”
Con drew away from me, brushing his hand down the front of his Ivy League shirt, as if he was afraid I’d left cooties on it. “Are you crazy? I’m not doing that. He said there’s no God.”
“He also electrified your throat and saved your voice.”
Con shrugged uneasily. “It would have come back, anyway. Dr. Renault said so.”
“He said it would come back in a week or two. That was in February. You still didn’t have it back in April. Two months later.”
“So what? It took a little longer, that’s all.”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “What are you, chicken?”
“Say that again and I’ll knock you down.”
“Why won’t you at least say thanks?”
He stared at me, mouth tight and cheeks red. “We’re not supposed to see him, Mom and Dad said so. He’s crazy, and probably a drunk like his wife.”
I couldn’t speak. My eyes shimmered with tears. They weren’t of sorrow; those were tears of rage.
“Besides,” Con said, “I have to fill the woodbox before Dad gets home or I’ll get in dutch. So just shut up about it, Jamie.”
He left me standing there. My brother, who became one of the world’s most preeminent astronomers—in 2011 he discovered the fourth so-called “Goldilocks planet,” where there might be life—left me standing there. And never mentioned Charles Jacobs again.
The next day, Tuesday, I ran up Route 9 again as soon as school let out. But I didn’t go home.
There was a new car in the parsonage driveway. Well, not really new; it was a ’58 Ford Fairlane with rust on the rocker panels and a crack in the passenger side window. The trunk was up, and when I peeped in, I saw two suitcases and a bulky electronic gadget Reverend Jacobs had demonstrated at MYF one Thursday night: an oscilloscope. Jacobs himself was in his shed workshop. I could hear stuff rattling around.
I stood by his new-old car, thinking of the Belvedere, which was now a burned-out wreck, and I almost turned tail and beat feet for home. I wonder how much of my life would have been different if I’d done that. I wonder if I’d be writing this now. There’s no way of telling, is there? Saint Paul was all too right about that dark glass. We look through it all our days and see nothing but our own reflections.
Instead of running, I gathered my courage and went to the shed. He was putting electronic equipment into a wooden orange crate, using large sheets of crumpled-up brown paper for padding, and didn’t see me at first. He was dressed in jeans and a plain white shirt. The notched collar was gone. Children aren’t very observant about the changes in adults, as a rule, but even at nine I could see he’d lost weight. He was standing in a shaft of sunlight, and when he heard me come in, he looked up. There were new lines on his face, but when he saw me and smiled, the lines disappeared. That smile was so sad it put an arrow in my heart.
I didn’t think, just ran to him. He opened his arms and lifted me up so he could kiss me on the cheek. “Jamie!” he cried. “Thou art Alpha and Omega!”
“Huh?”
“Revelation, chapter one, verse eight. ‘I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end.’ You were the first kid I met when I came to Harlow, and you’re the last. I’m so very, very glad you came.”
I started to cry. I didn’t want to but couldn’t help it. “I’m sorry, Reverend Jacobs. I’m sorry for everything. You were right in church, it’s not fair.”
He kissed my other cheek and set me down. “I don’t think I said that in so many words, but you certainly caught the gist of it. Not that you should take anything I said seriously; I was off my head. Your mother knew that. She told me so when she brought me that fine Thanksgiving feast. And she wished me all the best.”
Hearing that made me feel a little better.
“She gave me some good advice, too—that I should go far from Harlow, Maine, and start over. She said I might find my faith again in some new place. I strongly doubt that, but she was right about leaving.”
“I’ll never see you again.”
“Never say that, Jamie. Paths cross all the time in this world of ours, sometimes in the strangest places.” He took his handkerchief from his back pocket and wiped the tears from my face. “In any case, I’ll remember you. And I hope you’ll think of me from time to time.”
“I will.” Then, remembering: “You betchum bobcats.”
He went back to his worktable, now sadly bare, and finished packing up the last items—a couple of big square batteries he called “dry cells.” He closed the lid of the crate and began tying it shut with two stout pieces of rope.
“Connie wanted to come with me to say thank you, but he’s got… um… I think it’s soccer practice today. Or something.”
“That’s okay. I doubt if I really did anything.”
I was shocked. “You brought his voice back, for criminey sakes! You brought it back with your gadget!”
“Oh yes. My gadget.” He knotted the second rope, and yanked it tight. His sleeves were rolled up, and I could see he had awesome muscles. I had never noticed them before. “The Electrical Nerve Stimulator.”
“You ought to sell it, Reverend Jacobs! You could make a mint!”
He leaned an elbow on the crate, propped his chin on one hand, and gazed at me. “Do you think so?”
“Yes!”
“I doubt it very much. And I doubt if my ENS unit had anything to do with your brother’s recovery. You see, I built it that very day.” He laughed. “And powered it with a very small Japanese-made motor filched from Morrie’s Roscoe Robot toy.”
“Really?”
“Really. The concept is valid, I feel sure of that, but such prototypes—built on the fly, without any experiments to verify the steps in between—very rarely work. Yet I believed I had a chance, because I never doubted Dr. Renault’s original diagnosis. It was a stretched nerve, no more than that.”