The church bells are clanging away in concert with the approaching thunder. Time to go back in. “I could use some help,” Ted says to the others, flicking his cigarette butt out into the wet street. “Edwards seems to be going through some kind of nervous breakdown, and anything can happen. Before I left him, he’d got into dry clothes and seemed to be getting a grip on himself, but he kept turning his smile on and off like a tic and muttering to himself. When I asked him what he was saying, he said he was practicing his sermon. At one point he blurted out, ‘I’m doing my best!’, but I don’t think he was speaking to me.”
“To tell the truth, he’s been acting pretty weird for weeks now,” Burt says around a final drag. “Almost smart-alecky. Like week before last when he seemed to just sort of blank out and stare up at the rafters when it came time to give his sermon. And what was all that last week about Jesus and the holy ass? Was he trying to be funny, or what?”
“I thought at first it was a dirty joke, but it was probably just craziness,” Baird says, rolling his eyes. “Yesterday, I saw him walking down the street talking to himself and waving his arms about like he was directing traffic.” He imitates this.
“I know. He has to see a doctor. I gave Connie Dreyer a call over at Trinity Lutheran this morning. We’ll move what we can of today’s other events over there and postpone the rest, and we’ll bring in some guest pastors over the next few weeks. We just have to get through this morning’s service somehow. I’ll make an announcement about all the changes during church tidings before the scripture reading, and I’d appreciate having you guys down front. After Edwards gets going, if you see me get up and go to the pulpit, I want you to join me. Ditto, if he doesn’t turn up at all. Be ready to read the Easter story from the Bible to fill the gap.”
“Oh gosh,” Elliott gasps. “Which book is that in?”
“A couple of them. Luke, I think. Or John.”
“That’s in the New Testament, right?”
“Should be. Check the program. Tommy’s reading a few lines from it.” He glances across the lawn, sees that Elliott’s daughter, who has been talking with Tommy, has wandered off. A real handful, that girl, fast and rebellious, her mother’s daughter, but Tommy’s probably up to the challenge. “I’ve had a talk with Prissy Tindle. She understands the problem. If she has to, she can play another number or two on the organ to fill time. I’ll get Ralph to lead us all in a couple of songs and we’ll have a quick prayer and then get everybody out of there.”
“Right,” says Robbins, dropping his cigarette to the sidewalk and crushing it underfoot as they prepare to re-enter the church. It’s starting to rain again. “Roll that stone away.”
I.2 Easter Sunday 29 March
When that bully Cavanaugh, shouldered round by all his fawning scribes and elders, rises in the middle of the opening prayer like a self-righteous Sadducee to silence Reverend Wesley Edwards (was he shouting? Of course, he was shouting, God is deaf as a stump), neither he nor Jesus is surprised. In fact, they welcome it. Such persecutions are to be expected when what is hidden is revealed, and indeed stand as validation of it. What else is the Easter story about — for Christ’s sake? Who concurs: As they persecuted me, they’ll persecute you. A prophet in his own country, and all that, my son. But rejoice and be glad, your reward is great. His immediate reward is to have to sit beside the pulpit, biting his tongue, staring out on the sad blank faces of his congregation, while the banker, having skipped ahead in the proceedings to the tithes and offerings, money being all he knows (and power, he knows power), speaks of the general good health of the church finances, its immediate needs (an assistant minister, for example—urgently!), and Easter as a loving family occasion. No, no, you idiot! It is a time of rejection of family, indeed of all earthly connections! Have you no ears? If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple! Leave everything—everything! — and fol low me! You ignorant fool! Listen to your own son’s scripture reading: “But who do you say that I am?” Do you not know? It’s all Wesley can do to stop another noisy eruption. The indwelling Christ, too, is aboil with indignation, cursing traders and moneychangers and all their abominable progeny. Look at them all up there! Smirking! A den of thieves! They are polluting the temple! Drive them out! He’s in a state, they’re both in a state.
It has been a trying couple of weeks. The Passion of Wesley Edwards. He’s not kidding, he has endured it all in this Passiontide fortnight, from the deathly silence of God and the collapse of his faith, through all the upheavals at home and a plunge into harrowing desolation, a veritable descent into hell, to — finally — a kind of weird convulsive redemption that has left him rattled and confused and not completely in control of himself. Wesley was always a dutiful son and responsible student, and he has tried, all his life long and even now while suffering so, to be a dutiful and responsible pastor and citizen, which is to say a typical West Condon hypocrite, and though the sunrise service didn’t go well (all right, so he forgot to put on one of his shoes, what was so important about that? Jesus said: That you had one shoe on was your undoing…), he got himself dried off and properly dressed and dug up one of his old Easter sermons and was prepared to fulfill his parishioners’ expectations of him for one more day.
And the service began calmly enough. In spite of the storm, there was a large wet-but-festive crowd, a chirrupy twitter of Easter greetings, colorful floral displays banking the brick walls. Priscilla, accompanied by muffled thunder and the drum of rain on the tiled roof, did something peppily Risen-Sonish on the organ to get things started, there was the usual unsingable hymn (“The Strife Is O’er…”), followed by the Doxology and prayer of confession muttered in unison, a cantata (“Was It a Morning Like This?”), and then the weekly welcome and church tidings. This was normally his task (and what tidings he had!), but Cavanaugh took it over, canceling the rest of Easter. No problem with that. In fact, a great relief. He would never have got through it all, the maddening detail of his ministry — all the weddings and baptisms and funerals and christenings, the bake sales and potluck suppers, sickroom visits, board meetings, Girl Scouts, quilters, the obligatory golf foursomes and service clubs, spiritual counseling, breakfast clubs and Bible study, not to mention just keeping the church clean and the pianos tuned and the lights and toilets working — contributing intimately to his crisis. But then the banker’s wiseacre brat read the Easter scripture lesson and reached the part where John says, “In that day you will know that I am in my Father and you in me, and I in you,” and he couldn’t hold back: “You don’t know the half of it!” he cried, and launched into his Job-inspired diatribe in the name of the opening prayer (“I will not restrain my mouth! I will speak in the anguish of my spirit! I will complain in the bitterness of my soul!”) and got sat down.
While Cavanaugh carries on with his family values malarkey, thanking his son for the scripture reading and speaking of the church as one big family — there is a suffocating stench worse than the old family farm in the haying season of wet clothing, damp bodies, thick perfume, musty song books, and dead flowers that seems to be rising from the speech itself — Wesley glances over at Prissy sitting at her keyboard and sees that she is staring at him, clearly in shocked pain, but as if trying to console him with her sorrowful but adoring gaze. Jesus asks who she is. Priscilla Tindle. Wife of the choir director. Used to be a dancer.