So far as I could tell there was no official order to the service, no usual rigmarole of a few hymns, announcements, and readings. They didn’t even print a bulletin, instead feeling the service out. Pastor Eli had a surprisingly deep voice for a thin man, a voice with a soothing timbre, rising and falling as the moment called for it. He opened by talking about a corpse, the body of a Buddhist that some “hippy” claimed hadn’t rotted for a week after death, the congregation muttering and shaking their heads when he asked, “Is that some kind of wonder? One week before the devil’s own stench settles in? Does it even compare to what our God can do?”
Then he read to us from the Book of Matthew about a little girl everyone writes off as dead before Jesus happens along and says, “She is not dead, only sleeping,” and the child revives and her parents rejoice. He paused after reading the passage. “What do you think I said to that hippy?” There was laughter now, along with scattered amens. “Do you think he had the eyes to see, the ears to hear? What do we tell the world with our own lives about what our God can do? What do we say to them?”
He rocked on the balls of his feet to some music he heard inside himself. He had them now, leaning toward him, his voice lowering and softening. Hell, I was drawn in like the rest of them, even if I kept thinking of Maura. Here now, I could see why she had fallen for him. He was charismatic, handsome, hardened by the world in ways I couldn’t understand yet, his voice promising currents of wisdom. “Have you wondered what it feels like to be dead? To be laid out on the cold metal table of the undertaker? Each of us here knows that feeling. To be dead. To feel like inside you will never know warmth again.”
Are you dead, Maura? Is your body somewhere at the bottom of Ursine Lake, naked and lashed to stones to keep you under the ice? Are you buried in an unmarked grave in this barren cemetery? Or have you only gone away?
His gaze found me once more as he stalked among the rows, moving down the aisle, the Bible now tucked under one arm like a running back holding a pigskin so it would not be fumbled. Be calm, I reminded myself, he’s never met you before. He never visited the bank, never attended the office Christmas party. He doesn’t know what you’ve done. Yet, I couldn’t hold his gaze. “We know what it feels like to be dead inside. Empty. And all the world can give you is a week before the rot sets in. Like that’s something to crow about. That’s all the world has to offer. A week before you stink like a dead fish. Is that all you want?”
He was looking right at me as if I was the only one in the room and we were having a conversation. No, I thought. My aim was to go out with as much stink as possible. “No,” I said, in a raspy voice, and my face flushed with heat, for the question had been rhetorical.
“No,” he repeated gently before lifting his voice again. “Jesus has so much more to offer. So much more. We were dead in our sin. Every one of us. Dead and cold in the grave. In the devil’s own grip. But there is not a thing we have said or done that Jesus doesn’t know. He knows everything. Our darkest sin. Our deepest shame. And still he comes to us. He comes and finds us in the grave we have dug for ourselves, and he says, ‘You are not dead, only sleeping.’” He turned, releasing me from the heat of his gaze, and strode back up to the front, pausing to touch some of the elderly members on the top of their heads or their shoulders as he moved among them. Like he could heal them, wake them with a touch. I couldn’t help noticing that for a white supremacist he seemed to have borrowed many of his speaking patterns from African-American preachers.
He paused last at the front, laying hands on a dark-haired girl. The girl lifted her chin, her look adoring. A girl so small I could see her legs swinging under the chair. Sarah. Maura’s daughter. His daughter. I knew her immediately, even though the girl sat beside a blond woman who wore a bold, blood-colored shawl that made the rest of her pale features look bleached out. The woman had her left arm around the back of Sarah’s chair, and she tilted her chin up with the same look of adoration. Pastor Eli ignored the woman as he continued up to the front. I tried to figure out how Maura could abandon her daughter. I still couldn’t believe she would leave her behind.
Where are you, Maura?
“We have to die to this world, leave behind the stench of our sins. We are called out of the darkness of our own grave. And we wake and we rise and there is such a singing in heaven when we walk again.”
I tugged at my collar, pinpricks of heat needling up my spine, like I had been touched by a fever. I wanted to mock him, but in truth I was moved by his words. Deep down, I was the very dead man he had just described. I should be dead. I hated myself for not dying. I vaguely remember rising once more to sing another hymn along with Roland and then the pastor was talking again, but I completely lost the thread of whatever he was saying. He kept calling the devil “The Enemy” and growling warnings about a force of evil besieging us all. It sounded like some scary stuff, but I couldn’t follow any of it. If you crack a front windshield with your forehead it does things to your concentration, even a month after the stitches have been removed and your hair has grown in over the scars. If I stood too suddenly the dizziness overcame me, a glittering wave of nausea that could knock me from my feet.
I had not expected this. I had expected crazy talk about the “agents of ZOG” and how the UN was the “One World Government” trying to put the “Mark of the Beast” on our bodies. Blood moons and blood seas. I had plenty of time during my convalescence to read up on white supremacists and skinheads, though I had to read it in snatches because of concussion protocol. But except for Clint Eastwood here sitting next to me with his holstered Saturday night special, these people seemed kind of normal.
On our last day working together Maura had been remote for most of her shift, maybe sick with some kind of premonition. Alone in the break room, when I tried asking her what was wrong, she shook her head. She hadn’t been eating or sleeping well, couldn’t keep her food down. She was so frightened her husband had figured it out. “It’s going to be okay,” I tried reassuring her.
“No,” she said. “It won’t. It won’t ever again.” Her eyes, so round and shining most days, looked pink and bloodshot under the fluorescent lights, the skin pouched and bruised beneath the sockets. She looked lost, her face ashen. Later that night after closing the bank and locking the doors, she excused herself to the bathroom and when she came back out, she said, “You’re going to have to drive me to the hospital, Lucien,” her breathing shivery as she described fainting in the bathroom after a dizzy spell and hitting her head on the sink.
Had I been driving so fast because I was angry with her? Dangerous driving like that in the rain. “Slow down,” she said, but I had acted as if I hadn’t heard. If the car hydroplaned, if I had to brake suddenly. No way to know what might loom out of the storm ahead of us. But nothing happened on the way to the hospital. I got her there safe. I just didn’t know I wouldn’t ever see her again when I dropped her off at the emergency room entrance. I just didn’t know there was five thousand dollars missing from the vault back at the bank.