“I didn’t. My parents might have,” Bill said, stirring his creamer in.
“Have you heard from her since she left?”
“No, none of us have. I know she’s a published poet, but she uses a totally different name. Her first name, Sinclair, was our grandmother’s maiden name, and then her husband’s last name is… it escapes me right now.”
“Goldman,” I said. A mind’s-eye view of our living-room shelves in Minneapolis had supplied the name, Sinclair Goldman, to me. It was the name on one of the slender books of poetry that Shiloh owned.
“Yeah,” he said. “Goldman. I used to know her husband’s first name, too. Something with a D. He was a Jewish guy.” He paused, then let go of that train of thought. “It’s funny, if a friend of a friend hadn’t told me about her poetry, I could’ve walked past her book in a store and never guessed it was my sister who wrote it.”
“Other than the drug issue, do you remember your sister as being wild?” I asked.
“Wild?” Bill repeated. “Not really. But she was… immovable. If she wanted to see friends, she’d do it, even if it meant sneaking out of the house. I think it scared my folks as much as it made them angry. She was deaf. That made her vulnerable, even though she didn’t want to acknowledge it. And then there was the signing-or-speaking thing.”
“Meaning what?”
“Sara was working on her vocal skills at school, and then she just stopped. It frustrated my folks, because it would have made things much easier if she could speak. But she decided she didn’t want to speak, so she didn’t. That was just the way she was. It was nothing personal, but she’d made up her mind and that was it.”
I nodded. “Was your father a strict disciplinarian?” The coffee was watery and joyless, worse than any I’d had at any rural sheriff’s substation. I set it aside.
Bill shook his head. “No,” he said. “When we’d done something wrong, we got talks. Very long talks, about God’s will for our lives. With plenty of quotation from the Bible.” He smiled, fondly. “If there were actual punishments to be handed out, particularly when we were younger, my mother had to do that part. Why?”
I tried to think of the right way to say what came next. “It just seems extreme to me, that such a long estrangement would grow out of adolescent drug use.”
Bill lifted a shoulder. “Well,” he said, “I don’t think it was so much drugs as it was…” He trailed off.
I raised my eyebrows.
“You’ve got to understand my father to get it,” he explained.
“Tell me,” I said.
Bill hesitated. “I’m not the most articulate person in the world.”
“Neither am I,” I said, smiling a little. “Relax, you’re not addressing the UN General Assembly.”
“Okay.” Bill tapped a pen against the desk, composing himself. “My father was a winner of souls. I know that phrase may sound extreme, but if you knew my father, you’d know it wasn’t. Before he became a pastor, he used to travel to do his evangelical work. All around the country. Those were the best days of my father’s life.”
A light flashed on Bill Shiloh’s phone, and he glanced down at it, but the phone didn’t ring. He’d set it to go automatically into voice mail.
“When he and my mother got married, she went on the road with him. She was a part of that life. But when they had Adam, and then me, they realized they had to settle down somewhere. I don’t think it was easy for my father to make the change from evangelist to pastor. A congregation has more complex needs than simply salvation.”
“Marryings and buryings,” I said.
“And ongoing spiritual nourishment, and annual budgeting, and committee meetings. All but the smallest of churches have those things. My father gave himself to that kind of role, but he made it as much of a challenge as possible. Or God did. My father felt a calling to come to northern Utah, right to the heart of Mormon country. He didn’t want to go anywhere where he’d be ‘preaching to the choir.’ My father liked uphill battles.”
That sounded familiar.
“He used to go into Salt Lake City and preach on street corners. He’d hand out tracts near the Temple. He bought an old school bus for the church. When he was finished overhauling it, there was a cross bolted to the front grille, ‘New Life Church’ painted on the sides, and ‘I am the Resurrection and the Life’ on the back.” Bill laughed. “Oh, yeah. You definitely saw us coming down the road.
“The thing is, my dad bought that bus when our own family car needed eight hundred dollars’ worth of transmission work.” Bill smiled. “Mom just put up with it. She understood what evangelism meant to him. It wasn’t just a job. It was his life. He got a phone call once, in the middle of the night, from an unsaved friend. This guy, Whitey, had been stiff-arming him for months, brushing off invitations to come to church. Then he called up in the middle of the night, wanting to talk about Jesus. My dad dressed and put on his jacket, picked up his Bible and car keys, and drove across town. Like an ER surgeon. He came home and said Whitey had found Christ at four-thirty in the morning.” He shook his head, looking fond again.
“None of us kids have really followed in his footsteps. We’re all Christian, of course. My wife and I go to a Presbyterian church now, and take my kids every Sunday, pray with them. But I didn’t feel any calling to lead a church or be an evangelist. And neither did Adam. Maybe that disappointed my father, too, but I think he knew from fairly early on it was going to turn out that way. I think he felt if any of us were going to follow him into the ministry, it would be Mike.”
“Are you serious?” I said.
“Yeah,” Bill said. “Mike used to read the Bible for hours on end. He knew the word of God backward and forward.” He paused. “You know what snake-handling is?”
“I’ve heard about it,” I said, thrown off by the shift in the conversation.
“It comes from the Gospel of Mark, where Christ says his apostles will handle poisonous serpents and not be harmed. When Mike was fourteen, a couple of families joined the church who’d moved up from north Florida. They were into snake-handling; they had prayer meetings where they’d pass poisonous snakes between them. We didn’t realize it right away, but Mike was doing that with them.”
“Shiloh did that?”
Bill looked amused. “Yup. He never told you?”
I shook my head.
“Well, he did. When my mother found out, she just about had a heart attack. She and Dad had a hard time talking him out of it. I think he finally gave it up just so our mother wouldn’t worry.” Bill lifted a shoulder. “What I’m trying to say is this: My father recognized in Mike a part of himself that his other kids didn’t seem to inherit, and I think that’s why it hurt him so much when he lost Mike.” He paused. “For years, my father just never mentioned him.”
“What about Sinclair?” I asked.
“Sara? I think she was different,” Bill said. “She went to a secular school-for the deaf, I mean-and from the time she came home we all realized she wasn’t a believer. Right from the beginning she started… acting out, I guess you’d say. Wearing makeup, sneaking out to see boys, coming home smelling of alcohol. It wasn’t easy on my folks, but it did give them time to adjust to losing her. It was like- Do you know the parable of the sower?”
I shook my head.
“It’s about different kinds of seeds. How some never sprout, others spring up right away and look promising but ultimately die, and then others start slow but eventually become healthy and fruitful plants. It’s a metaphor.”
“For evangelism,” I said.
“Yeah, a metaphor for the different kinds of people who turn to Christ, or don’t. Sara was like the seed that lands on rocky soil and never sprouts at all, but Michael was the one who looks promising but fails in the end to fulfill that promise. Mike was there, and then all of a sudden he wasn’t. It would have been less painful if he had never lived in Christ at all. I think that’s why my father never talked about him. Afterward.”