“I’m beginning to think we’re lucky to be where we are.”
“It’s not wrong, me being here with you, is it?”
“I wouldn’t want you to think so.”
“I won’t then,” she said. “I’ll think something else. I’ll think its fortunate.”
“That may be a good way to think about it. For both of us.”
Britney sat quietly for a while, gazing into the braided rug between the chair and the bed. I could see a pulse beating in the pale skin at her right temple, next to where little wisps of lightcolored hair curled above her ear.
“Oh, there’s something else we were wondering about,” she said eventually.
“What?”
“Sarah wonders if you can teach her how to play the fiddle.”
“I can try.”
“I would be very grateful if you would.”
She continued to sit there in the chair. I didn’t know what to say. I felt increasingly paralyzed by her presence. A little breeze blew through the open window and made the candle flame shudder. It also carried traces of her scent my way. Then Britney stood up, letting the bathrobe fall off her shoulders onto the floor as she did. Her nakedness was shocking. Though small, she was a perfectly formed woman.
“Can I lie beside you?” she said.
“Yes,” I said, surrendering consciously.
She came around the bed and slipped in under the top sheet, which was all I used during the hot nights of the summer. She pressed against my side. I put Albert Speer down on the night table and extended an arm so she could nestle more closely under it. Her fragrance and the silkiness of her skin next to mine shredded what remained of my thoughts. What followed seemed driven by mindless instinct. Soon she was on top of me, all wetness, and youth, her breasts swaying in the candle light. She assisted me inside her, and I felt as though I was crossing a frontier into a dangerous wilderness where the animals would never learn to speak and might not be so friendly. When we finally subsided, she came back under my arm, and we lay there silently with the flickering candlelight playing on the ceiling. At some point, I blew it out. We fell asleepat least I did-and woke up some time later-I have no idea how much later-and repeated our exertions slowly and deliberately the second time.
Before I fell back asleep, I thought I heard her say, “You have a family now. What do you think of that?”
“It could be I’m extremely fortunate.”
Fifty-three
Loren and I went over to the high school in the morning. We just walked in the front door. Nobody asked what we were doing. I hadn’t been inside the place since my boy Daniel was a student there. We had to shut it down after that. That was the year of the flu, which took so many young lives, and also there was no way to run the furnaces anymore. New Faith had done an impressive job of cleaning it up, though it was still recognizably institutional. The hallways were still lined with dreary sea-foamcolored ceramic tiles, but the lockers had been removed. The place was strikingly busy at that hour, men and women bustling around the corridors, here and there a few children scurrying along. They ignored us as if we were invisible, and it was only when Brother Elam happened by, and I hailed him, that anyone would pay attention to us.
Elam directed us to Brother Jobe’s headquarters which, if I remembered correctly, had been the principal’s office, a suite of several rooms, actually. He was working at a small round table in the outer office where the secretaries used to sit, scribbling furiously with a steel pen and an inkwell, blotting his lines with a rag as he scratched away on the paper. He sat in a pink upholstered chair under a slightly water-stained framed portrait of George Washington that must have been part of the original decor. But otherwise, he had transformed the rooms into something that resembled an Edwardian hotel suite. I could see that the inner office had been converted to a bedroom and that a woman was in there making the bed. When she went around to the far side of the bed, I saw that it was the same girl who had been sitting next to Brother Jobe the night we first met.
“What a surprise,” he said without looking up. “Mornin,’ Mr. Mayor, Parson Holder. Do you know what it means to be full of the Holy Ghost?” Without waiting for an answer, he continued. “How important is it for God’s ministers to be continually at prayer? To know the power and the nature of God you got to partake of his inbreathed word. Morning and night, at every meal, at work, at bathing, whatever chance you got. The Psalmist said that he hid God’s word in his heart, that he might not sin against him. And you will find that the more of God’s word you hide in your heart, the easier it is to live a righteous life.”
Brother Jobe looked up at us with an impressively toothy smile.
“Have you prepared your Sunday sermon yet, Parson?” he said to Loren.
“Not yet.”
“You going to get around to it or speak extempore.”
“I usually make some notes beforehand.”
“Do you? Well, listen up to this here.” He cleared his throat. “You people who are seeking the baptism are entering a realm of illumination by the power of the Holy Ghost. He reveals the preciousness and the power of the blood of Christ. I find by the revelation of the spirit that there is not one thing in me that the blood does not cleanse. I find that God sanctifies me by the blood and reveals his power in the work of the spirit. Oh, this life in the Holy Ghost! This life of grace growing and knowledge increasing in the power of the spirit, the life and the mind of Christ being renewed in you, and of constant revelations of the might of his power. It is the only kind of thing that lets folks stand.”
He glanced up again.
“Ain’t that some sermonizing?”
“It’s very musical,” Loren said.
“Well, if you don’t mind talking shop a moment here, Parson, don’t you find that to be effective-you got to connect with a different part of the congregation’s brain? You’re right, it is a kind of music. But is it an accident that the spirit finds our people most often in the act of singing?”
“No,” Loren said.
“And wouldn’t you say the singing region of the brain is different from the digging-a-ditch part?”
“Probably.”
“One of these days I’ll have to come by and listen to you hold forth,” Brother Jobe said. “Would you mind?”
“Not in the least.”
“And you can bring your whole dadblamed congregation to our Sunday service any old time-we got the whole goldurned auditorium and it must seat seven hundred.”
“Thank you.”
“Now what-all you boys come to see me about?”
“Actually, I’m here to place you under arrest,” Loren said.
Brother Jobe’s face registered shock at first, but slowly dissolved into a grin of even vaster amusement and satisfaction than the one he had shown at reading his own sermon.
“Ain’t this one for the books,” he said. “What’s the charge going to be?”
“Either disturbing the peace or criminal mischief or battery, third degree,” Loren said. “I haven’t quite decided. Maybe we’ll mix and match.”
“Hey, that’s good. Sounds like you been boning up. But what for exactly?”
“Cutting people’s beards off against their will.”
“I see. Okay, why don’t you boys pull up a seat, let’s powwow on this. First off: you got a jail?”
We did have a jail. It was on the second floor of the old town hall, and Loren and I had checked it out earlier that morning. I don’t think it had been used in thirty, forty years. It was cluttered with old file cabinets and other junk. We would have to spend a couple of hours mucking it out and mopping it up, and we had no idea where the keys to the locks of the two cells might be found.