The Solace of Leaving Early (3 page)

“I can’t, I can’t,” she said, and immediately felt desperate, chattery and crystalline. “I can’t bear it, the horror of that church and those tragic, large people and the look on their faces, that stunned look, and I never really knew Alice, did I, we played together
briefly,
when we were very
small,
and the hymns, and the weeping, the handkerchiefs, the eulogy, please. Don’t get me started. I don’t want to hear how Alice is sending us a postcard from heaven saying ‘Wish you were here!’ or how she fulfilled the greatest ambition of a woman’s life, mothering, or how Jesus is waiting to gather us all in like little sheep. No. Absolutely not.” She finally had to sit on her hands to keep from waving them in the air like someone drowning.

Her mother sighed, but didn’t move. “I,” she began, then stopped, taking a deep breath. “I’ve tried to tell you, I’ve begun to tell you half a dozen times about our new minister, Amos. I don’t understand why you won’t
listen
to me, Langston. He’s wonderful, he would never—”

“He would never have come to Haddington if he was wonderful, that’s
a;
and
b,
he’s the minister for a failed nondenominational Christian church that’s become, what? The Brotherhood? Is it some kind of cult? And he—tell me again—he floats around to churches that need him, like a spore? No, thank you. I’ve been to that church a thousand times and I’ve heard the sermons of six different ministers, and they are
soul-sucking,
Mama, they pull my soul right out of my body and devour it with their banality and their, their inability to perform a close reading of a text.”

“Langston, he went to seminary at—”

“I don’t care.”

“He wrote his thesis on—”

“I’m not listening.”

Her mother stood up quickly, more quickly than she usually moved. “It’s ten o’clock now. Two hours, Langston. The funeral is at noon. You have two hours to grow up.” She turned around and stomped down the stairs, slamming the attic door behind her.

“Yes, well,” Langston said to her mother, quite a few minutes after she was gone. “I’d take you a lot more seriously if you ever wore shoes.”

*

The bells rang a dozen times. Langston lay on her back, staring at the unfinished attic ceiling, the old wiring snaking along the lengths of board. Germane studied her some, then slept, then studied her more. At
12:15
she decided she could do with some lemonade, so she wandered down to the kitchen and drank some. The house was strangely still—the
town
seemed still.

At
12:20
she thought she’d feel the weather, so she walked out onto the porch and down to the sidewalk. It was hot, as she’d suspected it would be. Germane followed the progress of a squirrel up a tree, but stayed close to her side. She could see the cars gathered tightly around the church, down on the corner of Chimney and Plum, and the hearse waiting with a grim patience at the bottom of the outside stairs.
A gay, ghastly holiday,
Emily once wrote. Langston headed in that direction, thinking she might wait on the corner and walk her mother home, and at the corner she thought she’d just step on into the vestibule and wait for her there.

She could hear the last strains of the last song, but didn’t recognize it. Someone, a woman, was weeping with abandon. The vestibule felt pressurized—what was that pressure?—such that she held her fingers against her temples and closed her eyes, waiting for it to pass. She decided to open one of the swinging doors between the vestibule and the sanctuary, just a crack, just enough to see her mama. Instead she slipped inside, finding herself in the midst of a standing-room-only affair. The man standing next to her, middle-aged with a black pompadour and a blue polyester suit, smiled at her kindly even though his face was streaked with tears. Langston had never seen him before.

Robbie Ballenger, the owner of the local funeral home, and one of his assistants were just beginning to escort the family out of the church and into the waiting coach. Langston saw Beulah, Alice’s mother, stand, sway, nearly fall. Robbie caught her under the elbow, solidly, and led her down the aisle. Beulah seemed to have aged fifteen years since Langston was home last Christmas. Her hair had gone completely white, and the dark circles under her eyes made her look like her own mother, Alice’s grandmother, who died the year before. Just as Beulah reached her, Langston stepped back and out of the way, but Beulah saw her anyway.

“Thank you for coming, sweetheart,” Beulah said, but her gaze was so unsteady Langston was unsure if Beulah was talking to her. She glanced behind her at the blue-suited man, but he just nodded as if he were thanking her, too.

“Me?” she mouthed to him.
But I didn’t come,
she wanted to say.
I’m not really here.

Then other people were streaming past, the stunned, the shuddering, the sober, and for just a moment Langston caught sight of the man who was surely the new preacher, but he was out the door quickly. He was tall and thin, with dark, unruly hair and a gauntness, a bone structure that reminded her of Ichabod Crane, and the look on his face was so unbridled, his pain was so evident that she had to look away.

AnnaLee saw her from across the church. She had changed into a dark dress and all of her hair was in place, for once. Her eyes were bright with tears, and when she saw Langston in the doorway she pressed three fingers against her lips and kissed them, and Langston did the same.

Chapter 3

GENIUSES

“God is of two minds about the world,” Amos wrote, trying to prepare the sermon for the coming Sunday. He scratched it out, filing it in the category of pure projection, and started again. “God has two minds.” “God
is
two minds.” He dropped his pen and rested his forehead in his hands. Every week was the same; he began writing his sermon in faith he would be able to say what he meant—or more importantly, say what he believed, and what he felt should be said—and every week the whole enterprise fell apart, and early on. The desk chair, an old wooden captain’s chair that both rocked and swiveled, groaned as he leaned back. Amos worked at his father’s desk, which had been
his
father’s desk, as befitted a succession of preachers. When he was a young man Amos had been moved by such things as heirlooms, and by continuity, the march of certain objects or inclinations across time, but now he wished, as he always wished while sitting at this desk trying to write, that if continuity were something truly to be desired, his father had been a miner or a stonemason or a grocer.
Anything
but a minister. It was a
dreadful
profession.

He recalled an evening at dinner when he was twelve or thirteen; his father had seen a nature program on herding dogs the night before. “There are two varieties, apparently,” his father said, while Amos’s mother sat tucked in and enthralled, and Samuel, already half-gone from their lives, moved his peas around on his plate. “One herds by running at the sheep and nipping at their heels—he commands, he stands apart, he declares his authority with his teeth, if you will—while the other simply pretends to be one of the sheep.” His father sat back in his chair, a scarecrow of a man, all angles and laugh lines, his head tilted slightly to the left, as it did when he was either genuinely taken with a notion or wished to appear so. “It put me in mind of my own profession,” he then announced with his rueful smile, which brought instant relief to Amos and his mother. The punch line had been delivered, the analogy successfully revealed. The meal was concluded with good feeling all around, because the Elder Townsend was no heel-nipper; absolutely not. He was the sort who patrolled the edge of the herd, pretending to be one of the sheep.

*

“When we consider the universe, we believe we’re encountering a dualism: the material and the ephemeral, or the seen and the unseen, but in fact, all we see and all we know are One in the mind of God.” Amos wrote at night, in his study where two tall windows faced Plum Street. His desk sat in front of one of the windows, and the streetlight cast shadows of the old maple tree on the wall beside him. “The wall, and the shadow on the wall. Plato’s cave. Memory. Immortality. Image. Which is causal; which the initial aim?” Gibberish. He marked it out.

As a child he had loved
The Dick Van Dyke Show;
years later, in seminary, he had watched the reruns and found, to his delight, that he loved it just the same. He chose his favorite episode unwittingly, the way children do: Rob Petrie, trying to write a novel, found himself with writer’s block and decided to go to a mountain cabin alone, to get some work done. He needed space, freedom from disturbance. The only scene Amos could remember was toward the end: the wooden crate on the cabin floor overflowing with discarded sheets of paper; Rob wearing a cowboy hat, smacking a ball on a string against a paddle over and over. Rob didn’t put on the cowboy hat or pick up the paddleball at the beginning—oh, no. He tried hour after hour to get something written. The cowboy hat came on by degrees. Amos laughed aloud in his study, thinking of the scene. The
slipping down
of it was so delicious, so cathartic. Because for that half hour the slide was happening not to Amos, who thought himself a humble man edging toward some everyday lunacy, but to Dick Van Dyke, who could take it. A man of rubber. That wide, sweet smile.

“Perhaps I have suffered some right-brain injury,” he wrote, “because I look at my hands and they don’t appear to belong to me.” It was true, Amos’s fingers were so long they seemed comically unfamiliar. Each knuckle had a will of its own. What he wanted to explicate (in his unwritten sermon) was Amos’s favorite, most fundamental understanding of God—it was Whitehead’s idea, but he was trying to avoid Whitehead’s language because it simply didn’t, well, it didn’t
preach
—namely: the Primordial and Consequent Natures. What might be, what is, what has been. In God’s Primordial Nature there exist all the pure possibilities for every moment (every actual occasion, Whitehead would say) of concrescence; in the Consequent Nature is the world as we chose to make it: every actual occasion and every actual entity,
every single moment,
rendered objectively immortal. Amos still felt a chill when he considered the reach of this idea, and how he felt when he first heard it discussed in seminary.

“Whitehead’s not for me,” Mike had said, shaking his head with great skepticism. “I’m an Aquinas and Luther sort of guy. Anybody who takes God’s thumbprint off the world? Huh-uh, no way.” Amos had smiled at him, unable to respond. God’s thumbprint on the world? It was an inelegant description, but if Mike couldn’t see it in Whitehead, he was dreaming.

The fine people of the Haddington Church of the Brethren, newly designated, would kill for some immortality just about now, Amos thought, and he would love to give it to them. Perhaps he would say, “Eternally, immortally, Alice Baker-Maloney is held in the Consequent Nature of God; God recalls her rising up and her lying down. She is safer there than she ever was among us.” But that wouldn’t do, would it? because the congregation would be reminded not just of her rising up—not just the little girl with flat blond hair who looked like she’d never be memorable—but of her lying down, those final minutes. Amos closed his eyes and pressed against them with his thumbs until he saw stars. What might comfort him theologically would provide no comfort to his flock, and it was there, again and again, that he failed. He failed to give comfort. He failed to say the words that normal, heartsick people needed to hear: Death is not a cosmic accident, not a nightmare, not evidence of a punishing, all-powerful God. Instead he said almost nothing, and ground his teeth against his desire to tell them the truth: God is helpless. We are at the mercy of our own radical freedom, and all God can do is take into God’s self the grief, the violence, the sublime acts of kindness, the good sex. God comes to us from the future, and has only one godlike gift: the
lure
. We are lured toward truth, beauty, and goodness . . . the lure is pulling at our hearts like some lucid joy inside every actual occasion and all we have to do is . . .

Say yes. He stared out the open window at Plum Street, where nothing had been happening but a little wind and few shadows, and saw, suddenly, a girl walk into the arc of the streetlight. No one in Haddington walked after dark, although it seemed to Amos to be one of the safest places left in the world. He pushed his glasses farther up on his nose and leaned forward, greatly interested. She had a dog with her, a big shepherd mix, from the look of him. The girl stopped and looked up at Amos’s window. She was not such a girl, he realized, but full grown, and all long lines: long, dark hair in a braid down her long, straight back. A white T-shirt that held the light. Blue jeans. Heavy black shoes. A narrow face, so different from most of the faces in Haddington. Walt Braverman, that was who she looked like—this must be— She turned abruptly and walked on, into the darkness on Plum Street. Without a word from her, the dog turned and walked beside the girl, like something from a myth of companionship. Long after she was gone, Amos raised his hand in a greeting.

*

After Mechanicsville and before Haddington, Amos was sent farther south, to an even smaller Ohio town called Mt. Moriah. The parsonage was a mobile home that smelled like cats; the Mount in the town’s name was ironic, and the church had approximately eleven members, with a collective age of nearly a thousand years. But the church itself was beautiful and spare, a clapboard church in the wildwoods, as the song went, outside what was left of a failed farming town. The Mt. Moriah cemetery lay behind the church, and part of Amos’s duties included the caretaking of the cemetery grounds. It was the most peaceful job in the world. There were no Wednesday night or Sunday night services, because the Survivors, as Amos liked to call them, had such a hard time getting to church on Sunday morning. The woman who had played the piano, Esther, was so overcome with arthritis that she could no longer lift the piano lid, and the one remaining deacon, Brother Roy, had glaucoma and so had abdicated the passing of the collection plate. On Sunday morning Amos just chose what he felt like singing and stood in the pulpit and belted it out. The game congregation sang the songs they knew and nodded when they forgot the words and didn’t seem to mind that Amos didn’t use the hymnal.

“Friends, let’s sing ‘Home of the Soul’ again,” Amos said almost every week. It had become his favorite song, and the old people were beginning to pick up on the words. In the beginning he’d had a hard time with it, given that it was written in overlapping parts and he had to sing all of them, but finally he’d worked out how to get Esther to hold the soprano part (tremulous and tuneless) and James to mumble the tenor while Amos threw his body into the bass line.
Home of the soul / Blessed kingdom of light
.

Amos would be the last minister Mt. Moriah saw; at the annual conference the year before, the vote had been, memorably, “to allow that body to lie down.” There were 1,100 Brethren congregations in the U.S., and they were kind enough to see that one through to the end. The assignment suited Amos fine.

It suited him fine at the beginning, that is, when he first got to Mt. Moriah and took the full measure of his new constraints. Working in the cemetery in the summer mornings, trimming around the crumbling tombstones and white crosses erased of their bright messages by wind and weather, Amos used to periodically tip his head back and laugh aloud.
Dear Father,
he would write in his head, although his father was by that time three years gone,
you would be so proud if you could see my new assignment. I have lowered my standards almost to the grave
. He’d even felt waves of bleak amusement pass over him during Sunday services, faced with the steadfast eleven, their blindnesses and hearing aids and tremors, their walkers and catheter bags. He’d wished for some clever, sardonic sibling to share this story with, a clear-eyed sister, or a brother born too late to really be a part of the family. (But all he had was Samuel, an ear, nose, and throat doctor in California. Samuel had responded to his Anabaptist, social-gospel-based upbringing by becoming conservative, marrying an anorexic, and severing all ties to the Midwest, to his past. The last time the brothers had seen each other was at their mother’s funeral, two years ago, and then they’d had nothing to say.)

But it hadn’t lasted long anyway, had it, that amusement? It ceased to be funny almost immediately, as soon as he realized that every member of his church, to a person, had a plot in the Mt. Moriah cemetery reserved in his or her name. The grounds were just waiting to swallow them. And then he began to notice strange things about his flock, like the way Esther had just the trace of an English accent. He learned that she was British, and had an M.A. from Oxford in economics. She’d moved to the Midwest with her husband, a native, after the Second World War. She was widowed and had outlived all three of her children.

Amos had called on James once at home, when James was ill and couldn’t come to church, and had found James’s farmhouse, which sat down a short lane lined with dogwoods, to be one of the most beautiful houses he’d ever seen; the starkest, sanest aesthetic. Singular care. The light in the entryway ceiling, for instance, was surrounded by yellow roses that swirled out in a tangle. James had painted them himself, years before, when he could still hold a brush and climb a ladder. Amos had brought dinner, and James’s kitchen was like something in a painting by Chardin; every object was resonant with its own usefulness and nothing was out of place. In the center of the oak table, handmade and shining like glass, there sat a single lime with a leaf still attached, and a pewter salt cellar that probably dated from the Revolutionary War.

The more he knew the less he could look at them, Esther and James, and Brother Roy, who in his day could tame a wild horse, deliver a baby, and play bluegrass mandolin. Lila, who had a secret and wept through every service. Israel, the last of eight brothers, who wore braided leather suspenders and who, as a boy, had memorized most of Tennyson. Ralph, who prayed every week that his right arm, which he’d lost to a thresher fifty years before, would stop itching. All of them, all of them, the hobbled and the grieving, Amos loved them all, and watching them arrive on Sunday was an assault against his very nature. They sat in the first two pews as patient as saints; they weren’t waiting for him to tell them anything they didn’t know; they sang whatever he asked.

He wrote to his mentor and begged to be transferred, and received a gentle but firm no, and then they began to go, one at a time, James first, in his sleep. Amos would do anything to forget those years, the way Lila groaned in her dreams and reached out to him in panic from her hospital bed. And it wasn’t so different with the others, was it? their confusion, their tears, their humiliation. He stayed until the very end, putting a final coat of paint on the church before locking it up the last time, until the three in the nursing home four miles down the county highway were dead, and the Mt. Moriah cemetery was lush and green and busier than it had been for years. He began every funeral the same way:
This poor, sweet world has lost another of Her geniuses. Let us pray
.

*

Amos began writing his sermons on Monday night, and, invariably, finished them late on Saturday night. He worked on them every evening. The days were busy in Haddington, the largest town he’d been assigned to (population
3,062
); his little church alone had forty members who attended full-time. There were shut-ins to visit, and people in the hospital. Babies got born. Amos engaged in more pastoral care than ever in his professional life: marriage and premarital counseling, career advice, and sometimes, real and interesting conversations about religion. Along the way something admirable must have happened in this town, because the people were generally kind and intelligent and good-humored. Their intentions were honorable. (There was the usual small-town Indiana mix, of course, no different from small-town Ohio: hunters and alcoholics, men nearly a decade past adolescence still driving hot rods, vicious gossips, lonely families addicted to drama; on the whole, though, Amos was happy there.) He gardened when he could, and wished for more hours to read.