Revival

III

On a warm and cloudless midweek day in October of 1965, Patricia Jacobs popped Tag-Along-Morrie into the front seat of the Plymouth Belvedere that had been a wedding present from her parents and set out for the Red & White Market in Gates Falls—“She gone groceryin,” the Yankees at that time would have said.

Three miles away, a farmer named George Barton—a lifelong bachelor known in town as Lonesome George—pulled out of his driveway with a potato digger attached to the back of his Ford F-100 pickup. His plan was to drive it a mile or so down Route 9 to his south field. The best speed he could manage with the digger attached was ten miles an hour, so he kept to the soft shoulder, thereby allowing any southbound traffic to pass safely. Lonesome George was considerate of others. He was a fine farmer. He was a good neighbor, a member of the school board, and a deacon of our church. He was also, as he would tell people almost proudly, “a pepileptic.” Although, he was quick to add, Dr. Renault had prescribed some pills that controlled the seizures “just about perfect.” Maybe so, but he had one behind the wheel of his truck that day.

“Probably shouldn’t have been driving at all, except maybe in the fields,” Dr. Renault said later, “but how can you ask a man in George’s line of work to give up his license? It’s not as if he has a wife or any grown kids he can put behind the wheel. Take away his driving ticket, you might as well ask him to put his farm up for sale to the highest bidder.”

Not long after Patsy and Morrie set out for the Red & White, Mrs. Adele Parker came down Sirois Hill, a tight and treacherous curve where there had been many wrecks over the years. She was creeping along, and so had time to stop—barely—before striking the woman staggering and weaving up the middle of the highway. The woman had a dripping bundle clasped to her breast with one arm. One arm was all Patsy Jacobs could use, because the other had been torn off at the elbow. Blood was pouring down her face. A piece of her scalp hung beside her shoulder, bloody locks of hair blowing in the mild autumn breeze. Her right eye was on her cheek. All her beauty had been torn away in an instant. It’s fragile, beauty.

“Help my baby!” Patsy cried when Mrs. Parker stopped her old Studebaker and got out. Beyond the bloody woman with the dripping bundle, Mrs. Parker could see the Belvedere, on its roof and burning. The stove-in front end of Lonesome George’s truck was pushed against it. George himself was slumped over the wheel. Behind his truck, the overturned potato digger was blocking Route 9.

“Help my baby!” Patsy held the bundle out, and when Adele Parker saw what it was—not a baby but a little boy with his face torn off—she covered her eyes and began to scream. When she looked again, Patsy had gone to her knees, as if to pray.

Another pickup truck came around Sirois Hill and almost slammed into the back of Mrs. Parker’s Studebaker. It was Fernald DeWitt, who had promised to help George with the digging that day. He jumped from the cab, ran to Mrs. Parker, and looked at the woman kneeling in the road. Then he ran on toward the site of the collision.

“Where are you going?” Mrs. Parker screamed. “Help her! Help this woman!”

Fernald, who had fought with the Marines in the Pacific and seen terrible sights there, did not pause, but he did call back over his shoulder, “She and the kid are gone. George might not be.”

Nor was he wrong. Patsy was dead long before the ambulance arrived from Castle Rock, but Lonesome George Barton lived into his eighties. And never got behind the wheel of a motor vehicle again.

You say, “How could you know all that, Jamie Morton? You were only nine years old.”

But I do know it.

In 1976, when my mother was still a relatively young woman, she was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. I was attending the University of Maine at the time, but took the second semester of my sophomore year off, so I could be with her at the end. Although the Morton children were children no more (Con was all the way over the horizon in Hawaii, doing pulsar research at the Mauna Kea Observatories), we all came home to be with Mom, and to support Dad, who was too heartbroken to be useful; he simply wandered around the house or took long walks in the woods.

Mom wanted to spend her final days at home, she was very clear about that, and we took turns feeding her, giving her her medicine, or just sitting with her. She was little more than a skeleton by then, and on morphine for the pain. Morphine’s funny stuff. It has a way of eroding barriers—that famous Yankee reticence—which would otherwise be impregnable. It was my turn to sit with her on a February afternoon a week or so before she died. It was a day of snow flurries and bitter cold, with a north wind that shook the house and screamed beneath the eaves, but the house was warm. Hot, really. My father was in the heating oil business, remember, and after that one scary year in the mid-sixties when he looked bankruptcy in the face, he became not just successful but moderately wealthy.

“Push down my blankets, Terence,” my mother said. “Why are there so many? I’m burning up.”

“It’s Jamie, Mom. Terry’s out in the garage with Dad.” I turned down the single blanket, exposing a hideously gay pink nightgown that seemed to have nothing inside it. Her hair (all white by the time the cancer struck) had thinned to almost nothing; her lips had fallen away from her teeth, making them look too big, and somehow equine; only her eyes were the same. They were still young, and full of hurt curiosity: What’s happening to me?

“Jamie, Jamie, that’s what I said. Can I have a pill? The pain is awful today. I’ve never been in such a hole as this one.”

“In fifteen minutes, Mom.” It was supposed to be two hours, but I couldn’t see what difference it made at that point. Claire had suggested giving her all of them, which shocked Andy; he was the only one of us who had remained true to our fairly strict religious upbringing.

“Do you want to send her to hell?” he had asked.

“She wouldn’t go to hell if we gave them to her,” Claire said—quite reasonably, I thought. “It isn’t as if she’d know.” And then, nearly breaking my heart because it was one of our mother’s favorite sayings: “She doesn’t know if she’s afoot or on horseback. Not anymore.”

“You’ll do no such thing,” Andy said.

“No,” Claire sighed. She was closing in on thirty by then, and was more beautiful than ever. Because she was finally in love? If so, what a bitter irony. “I don’t have that kind of courage. I only have the courage to let her suffer.”

“When she’s in heaven, her suffering will only be a shadow,” Andy said, as if this ended the matter. For him I suppose it did.

The wind howled, the old panes of glass in the bedroom’s single window rattled, and my mother said, “I’m so thin, so thin now. I was a pretty bride, everyone said so, but now Laura Mackenzie is so thin.” Her mouth drew down in a clown-moue of sorrow and pain.

I had three more hours in the room with her before Terry was due to spell me. She might sleep some of that time, but she wasn’t sleeping now, and I was desperate to distract her from the way her body was cannibalizing itself. I might have seized on anything. It just happened to be Charles Jacobs. I asked if she had any idea where he’d gone after he left Harlow.

“Oh, that was a terrible time,” she said. “A terrible thing that happened to his wife and little boy.”

“Yes,” I said. “I know.”

My dying mother looked at me with stoned contempt. “You don’t know. You don’t understand. It was terrible because it was no one’s fault. Certainly not George Barton’s. He simply had a seizure.”

She then told me what I have already told you. She heard it from the mouth of Adele Parker, who said she would never get the image of the dying woman out of her head. “What I’ll never get out of mine,” Mom said, “was the way he screamed at Peabody’s. I didn’t know a man could make a sound like that.”

Doreen DeWitt, Fernald’s wife, called my mother and gave her the news. She had a good reason for calling Laura Morton first. “You’ll have to tell him,” she said.

My mother was horrified at the prospect. “Oh, no! I couldn’t!”

“You have to,” Doreen said patiently. “This isn’t news you give over the phone, and except for that old gore-crow Myra Harrington, you’re his closest neighbor.”

My mother, all her reticence washed away by the morphine, told me, “I gathered up my courage to do it, but I was caught short as I was going out the door. I had to turn around and run to the toidy and shit.”

She walked down our hill, across Route 9, and to the parsonage. She didn’t say, but I imagine it was the longest walk of her life. She knocked on the door, but at first he didn’t come, although she could hear the radio inside.

“Why would he have heard me?” she inquired of the ceiling as I sat there beside her. “The first time, my knuckles barely grazed the wood.”

She knocked harder the second time. He opened the door and looked at her through the screen. He was holding a large book in one hand, and all those years later she remembered the title: Protons and Neutrons: The Secret World of Electricity.

“Hello, Laura,” he said. “Are you all right? You’re very pale. Come in, come in.”

She came in. He asked her what was wrong.

“There’s been a terrible accident,” she said.

His look of concern deepened. “Dick or one of the kids? Do you need me to come? Sit down, Laura, you look ready to faint.”

“All of mine are all right,” she said. “It’s… Charles, it’s Patsy. And Morrie.”

He set the big book carefully on a table in the hall. That was probably when she saw the title, and I’m not surprised that she remembered it; at such times one sees everything and remembers it all. I know from personal experience. I wish I did not.

“How badly are they hurt?” And before she could answer: “Are they at St. Stevie’s? They must be, it’s the closest. Can we take your station wagon?”

St. Stephen’s Hospital was in Castle Rock, but of course that wasn’t where they had been taken. “Charles, you must prepare yourself for a terrible shock.”

He took her by the shoulders—gently, she said, not hard, but when he bent to look into her face, his eyes were blazing. “How bad? Laura, how badly are they hurt?”

My mother began to cry. “They’re dead, Charles. I am so sorry.”

He let go of her and his arms dropped to his sides. “No they’re not,” he said. It was the voice of a man stating a simple fact.

“I should have driven down,” my mother said. “I should have brought the station wagon, yes. I wasn’t thinking. I just came.”

“They’re not,” he said again. He turned from her and put his forehead against the wall. “No.” He banged his head hard enough to rattle a nearby picture of Jesus carrying a lamb. “No.” He banged it again and the picture fell off its hook.

She took his arm. It was floppy and loose. “Charles, don’t do that.” And, as if he had been one of her children instead of a grown man: “Don’t, honey.”

“No.” He banged his forehead again. “No!” Yet again. “No!”

This time she took hold of him with both hands and pulled him away from the wall. “Stop that! You stop it right now!”

He looked at her, dazed. A bright red mark dashed across his brow.

“Such a look,” she told me years later, as she lay dying. “I couldn’t bear it, but I had to. Once a thing like that is started, you have to finish it.”

“Walk back to the house with me,” she told him. “I’ll give you a drink of Dick’s whiskey, because you need something, and I know there’s nothing like that here—”

He laughed. It was a shocking sound.

“—and then I’ll drive you to Gates Falls. They’re at Peabody’s.”

“Peabody’s?”

She waited for it to sink in. He knew what Peabody’s was as well as she did. By that time Reverend Jacobs had officiated at dozens of funerals.

“Patsy can’t be dead,” he said in a patient, instructional tone of voice. “It’s Wednesday. Wednesday is Prince Spaghetti Day, that’s what Morrie says.”

“Come with me, Charles.” She took him by the hand and tugged him first to the door and then into the gorgeous autumn sunshine. That morning he had awakened next to his wife, and had eaten breakfast across from his son. They talked about stuff, like people do. We never know. Any day could be the day we go down, and we never know.

When they reached Route 9—sunwashed and silent, empty of traffic as it almost always was—he cocked his head, doglike, toward the sound of sirens in the direction of Sirois Hill. On the horizon was a smudge of smoke. He looked at my mother.

“Morrie, too? You’re sure?”

“Come on, Charlie.” (“It was the only time I ever called him that,” she told me.) “Come on, we’re in the middle of the road.”

They went to Gates Falls in our old Ford wagon, and they went by way of Castle Rock. It was at least twenty miles longer, but my mother was past the worst of her shock by then, and able to think clearly. She had no intention of driving past the scene of the crash, even if it meant going all the way around Robin Hood’s barn.

Peabody’s Funeral Home was on Grand Street. The gray Cadillac hearse was already in the driveway, and several vehicles were parked at the curb. One of them was Reggie Kelton’s boat of a Buick. Another, she was enormously relieved to see, was a panel truck with MORTON FUEL OIL on the side.

Dad and Mr. Kelton came out the front door while Mom was leading Reverend Jacobs up the walk, by then as docile as a child. He was looking up, Mom said, as if to gauge how far the foliage had to go before it would reach peak color.

Dad hugged Jacobs, but Jacobs didn’t hug back. He just stood there with his hands at his sides, looking up at the leaves.

“Charlie, I’m so sorry for your loss,” Kelton rumbled. “We all are.”

They escorted him into the oversweet smell of flowers. Organ music, low as a whisper and somehow awful, came from overhead speakers. Myra Harrington—Me-Maw to everyone in West Harlow—was already there, probably because she had been listening in on the party line when Doreen called my mother. Listening in was her hobby. She heaved her bulk from a sofa in the foyer and pulled Reverend Jacobs to her enormous bosom.

“Your dear sweet wife and your dear little boy!” she cried in her high, mewling voice. Mom looked at Dad, and they both winced. “Well, they’re in heaven now! That’s the consolation! Saved by the blood of the Lamb and rocked in the everlasting arms!” Tears poured down Me-Maw’s cheeks, cutting through a thick layer of pink powder.

Reverend Jacobs allowed himself to be hugged and made of. After a minute or two (“Around the time I began to think she wouldn’t stop until she suffocated him with those great tits of hers,” my mother told me), he pushed her away. Not hard, but with firmness. He turned to my father and Mr. Kelton and said, “I’ll see them now.”

“Now, Charlie, not yet,” Mr. Kelton said. “You need to hold on for a bit. Just until Mr. Peabody makes them presenta—”

Jacobs walked through the viewing parlor, where some old lady in a mahogany coffin was waiting for her final public appearance. He continued on down the hall toward the back. He knew where he was going; few better.

Dad and Mr. Kelton hurried after him. My mother sat down, and Me-Maw sat across from her, eyes alight under her cloud of white hair. She was old then, in her eighties, and when some of her score of grandchildren and great-grandchildren weren’t visiting her, only tragedy and scandal brought her fully alive.

“How did he take it?” Me-Maw stage-whispered. “Did you get kneebound with him?”

“Not now, Myra,” Mom said. “I’m done up. I only want to close my eyes and rest for a minute.”

But there was no rest for her, because just then a scream rose from the back of the funeral home, where the prep rooms were.

“It sounded like the wind outside today, Jamie,” she said, “only a hundred times worse.” At last she looked away from the ceiling. I wish she hadn’t, because I could see the darkness of death close behind the light in her eyes. “At first there were no words, just that banshee wailing. I almost wish it had stayed that way, but it didn’t. ‘Where’s his face?’ he cried. ‘Where’s my little boy’s face?’”

Who would preach at the funeral? This was a question (like who cuts the barber’s hair) that troubled me. I heard all about it later, but I wasn’t there to see; my mother decreed that only she, Dad, Claire, and Con were to go to the funeral. It might be too upsetting for the rest of us (surely it was those chilling screams from Peabody’s preparation room she was thinking of), and so Andy was left in charge of Terry and me. That wasn’t a thing I relished, because Andy could be a boogersnot, especially when our parents weren’t there. For an avowed Christian, he was awfully fond of Indian rope burns and head-noogies—hard ones that left you seeing stars.

There were no rope burns or head-noogies on the Saturday of Patsy and Morrie’s double funeral. Andy said that if the folks weren’t back by supper, he’d make Franco-American. In the meantime, we were just to watch TV and shut up. Then he went upstairs and didn’t come back down. Grumpy and bossy though he could be, he had liked Tag-Along-Morrie as much as the rest of us, and of course he had a crush on Patsy (also like the rest of us… except for Con, who didn’t care for girls then and never would). He might have gone upstairs to pray—go into your closet and lock your door, Saint Matthew advises—or maybe he just wanted to sit and think and try to make sense of it all. His faith wasn’t broken by those two deaths—he remained a die-hard fundamentalist Christian until his death—but it must have been severely shaken. My own faith wasn’t broken by the deaths, either. It was the Terrible Sermon that accomplished that.

Reverend David Thomas of the Gates Falls Congo gave the eulogy for Patsy and Morrie at our church, and that caused no raised eyebrows, since, as my Dad said, “There’s not a dime’s worth of difference between the Congregationalists and the Methodists.”

What did raise eyebrows was Jacobs’s choice of Stephen Givens to officiate at the Willow Grove Cemetery graveside services. Givens was the pastor (he did not call himself Reverend) of Shiloh Church, where at that time the congregants still held hard to the beliefs of Frank Weston Sandford, an apocalypse-monger who encouraged parents to whip their children for petty sins (“You must be schoolmasters of Christ,” he advised them) and who insisted on thirty-six-hour fasts… even for infants.

Shiloh had changed a lot since Sandford’s death (and is today little different from other Protestant church groups), but in 1965, a flock of old rumors—fueled by the odd dress of the members and their stated belief that the end of the world was coming soon, like maybe next week—persisted. Yet it turned out that our Charles Jacobs and their Stephen Givens had been meeting over coffee in Castle Rock for years, and were friends. After the Terrible Sermon, there were people in town who said that Reverend Jacobs had been “infected by Shilohism.” Perhaps so, but according to Mom and Dad (also Con and Claire, whose testimony I trusted more), Givens was calm, comforting, and appropriate during the brief graveside ceremony.

“He didn’t mention the end of the world once,” Claire said. I remember how beautiful she looked that evening in her dark blue dress (the closest she had to black) and her grownup hose. I also remember she ate almost no supper, just pushed things around on her plate until it was all mixed together and looked like dog whoop.

“What scripture did Givens read?” Andy asked.

“First Corinthians,” Mom said. “The one about how we see through a glass darkly?”

“Good choice,” my older brother said sagely.

“How was he?” I asked Mom. “How was Reverend Jacobs?”

“He was… quiet,” she said, looking troubled. “Meditating, I think.”

“No, he wasn’t,” Claire said, pushing her plate away. “He was shell-shocked. Just sat there in a folding chair at the head of the grave, and when Mr. Givens asked him if he’d throw the first dirt and then join him in saying the benediction, he only went on sitting with his hands between his knees and his head hanging down.” She began to cry. “It seems like a dream to me, a bad dream.”

“But he did get up and toss the dirt,” Dad said, putting an arm around her shoulders. “After awhile, he did. A handful on each coffin. Didn’t he, Claire-Bear?”

“Yeah,” she said, crying harder than ever. “After that Shiloh guy took his hands and practically pulled him up.”

Con hadn’t said anything, and I realized he wasn’t at the table anymore. I saw him out in the backyard, standing by the elm from which our tire swing hung. He was leaning his head against the bark with his hands clasping the tree and his shoulders shaking.

Unlike Claire, though, he had eaten his dinner. I remember that. Ate up everything on his plate and asked for seconds in a strong, clear voice.

There were guest preachers, arranged for by the deacons, on the next three Sundays, but Pastor Givens wasn’t one of them. In spite of being calm, comforting, and appropriate at Willow Grove, I expect he wasn’t asked. As well as being reticent by nature and upbringing, Yankees also have a tendency to be comfortably prejudiced in matters of religion and race. Three years later, I heard one of my teachers at Gates Falls High School tell another, in tones of outraged wonder: “Now why would anyone want to shoot that Reverend King? Heaven sakes, he was a good nigger!”

MYF was canceled following the accident. I think all of us were glad—even Andy, also known as Emperor of Bible Drills. We were no more ready to face Reverend Jacobs than he was to face us. Toy Corner, where Claire and the other girls had entertained Morrie (and themselves), would have been awful to look at. And who would play the piano for Sing Time? I suppose someone in town could have done it, but Charles Jacobs was in no condition to ask, and it wouldn’t have been the same, anyway, without Patsy’s blond hair shifting from side to side as she swung the upbeat hymns, like “We Are Marching to Zion.” Her blond hair was underground now, growing brittle on a satin pillow in the dark.

One gray November afternoon while Terry and I were spray-stenciling turkeys and cornucopias on our windows, the telephone jangled one long and one short: our ring. Mom answered, spoke briefly, then put the phone down and smiled at Terry and me.

“That was Reverend Jacobs. He’s going to be in the pulpit this coming Sunday to preach the Thanksgiving sermon. Won’t that be nice?”

Years later—I was in high school and Claire was home on vacation from the University of Maine—I asked my sister why nobody had stopped him. We were out back, pushing the old tire swing. She didn’t have to ask who I meant; that Sunday sermon had left a scar on all of us.

“Because he sounded so reasonable, I think. So normal. By the time people realized what he was actually saying, it was too late.”

Maybe, but I remembered both Reggie Kelton and Roy Easterbrook interrupting him near the end, and I knew something was wrong even before he started, because he didn’t follow that day’s scriptural reading with the customary conclusion: May God bless His holy word. He never forgot that, not even on the day I met him, when he showed me the little electric Jesus walking across Peaceable Lake.

His scripture on the day of the Terrible Sermon was from the thirteenth chapter of First Corinthians, the same passage Pastor Givens read over the twin graves—one big, one small—at Willow Grove: “For we know in part, and we prophesy in part. But when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away. When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things. For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.”

He closed the large Bible on the pulpit—not hard, but we all heard the thump. West Harlow Methodist was full on that Sunday, every pew taken, but it was dead quiet, not so much as a cough. I remember praying he’d get through it okay; that he wouldn’t break down in tears.

Myra Harrington—Me-Maw—was in the front pew, and although her back was to me, I could imagine her eyes, half buried in their fatty, yellowish sockets and sparkling with avidity. My family was in the third pew, where we always sat. Mom’s face was serene, but I could see her white-gloved hands clenched on her large softcover Bible with enough force to bend it into a U. Claire had nibbled off her lipstick. The silence between the conclusion of the scripture reading and the commencement of what was known in Harlow ever after as the Terrible Sermon could not have been much longer than five seconds, ten at most, but to me it seemed to stretch out forever. His head was bowed over the huge pulpit Bible with its bright gold edging. When he finally looked up and showed his calm, composed face, a faint sigh of relief rippled through the congregation.

“This has been a hard and troubled time for me,” he said. “I hardly need to tell you that; this is a close-knit community, and we all know each other. You folks have reached out to me in every way you could, and I’ll always be grateful. I want especially to thank Laura Morton, who brought me the news of my loss with such tenderness and gentle regard.”

He nodded to her. She nodded back, smiled, then raised one white-gloved hand to brush away a tear.

“I have spent much of the time between the day of my loss and this Sunday morning in reflection and study. I would like to add in prayer, but although I have gotten on my knees time and again, I have not sensed the presence of God, and so reflection and study had to do.”

Silence from the congregation. Every eye on him.

“I went to the Gates Falls Library in search of The New York Times, but all they have on file is the Weekly Enterprise, so I was directed to Castle Rock, where they have the Times on microfilm—‘Seek and ye shall find,’ Saint Matthew tells us, and how right he was.”

A few low chuckles greeted this, but they died away quickly.

“I went day after day, I scrolled microfilm until my head ached, and I want to share some of the things I found.”

From the pocket of his black suit coat he took a few file cards.

“In June of last year, three small tornadoes tore through the town of May, Oklahoma. Although there was property damage, no one was killed. The townsfolk flocked to the Baptist church to sing songs of praise and offer prayers of thanksgiving. While they were in there, a fourth tornado—a monster F5—swept down on May and demolished the church. Forty-one persons were killed. Thirty others were seriously injured, including children who lost arms and legs.”

He shuffled that card to the bottom and looked at the next.

“Some of you may remember this one. In August of last year, a man and his two sons set out on Lake Winnipesaukee in a rowboat. They had the family dog with them. The dog fell overboard, and both boys jumped in to rescue him. When the father saw his sons were in danger of drowning, he jumped in himself, inadvertently overturning the boat. All three died. The dog swam to shore.” He looked up and actually smiled for a moment—it was like the sun peeking through a scrim of clouds on a cold January day. “I tried to find out what happened to that dog—whether the woman who lost her husband and sons kept it or had it put down—but the information wasn’t available.”

I snuck a look at my brothers and sister. Terry and Con only looked puzzled, but Andy was white-faced with horror, anger, or both. His hands were clenched in his lap. Claire was crying silently.

Next file card.

“October of last year. A hurricane swept onshore near Wilmington, North Carolina, and killed seventeen. Six were children at a church day-care center. A seventh was reported missing. His body was found a week later, in a tree.”

Next.

“This item concerns a missionary family ministering to the poor with food, medicine, and the gospel in what used to be the Belgian Congo and is now, I believe, Zaire. There were five of them. They were murdered. Although the article did not say—only the news that’s fit to print in The New York Times, you know—the article implied that the killers may have been of a cannibalistic bent.”

A disapproving mutter—Reggie Kelton was at the center of it—arose. Jacobs heard and raised one hand in what was almost a benedictory gesture.

“Perhaps I need not go into further details—the fires, the floods, the earthquakes, the riots, the assassinations—although I could. The world shudders with them. Yet reading these stories provided some comfort to me, because they prove that I am not alone in my suffering. The comfort is only small, however, because such deaths—like those of my wife and son—seem so cruel and capricious. Christ ascended into heaven in his body, we are told, but all too often we poor mortals here on earth are left with ugly heaps of maimed meat and that constant, reverberating question: Why? Why? Why?

“I have read scripture all my life—first at my mother’s knee, then in Methodist Youth Fellowship, and then in divinity school—and I can tell you, my friends, that nowhere in scripture is that question directly addressed. The closest the Bible comes is this reading from Corinthians, where Saint Paul says, in effect, ‘It’s no good asking, my brethren, because you wouldn’t understand, anyway.’ When Job asked God Himself, he got an even more blunt response: ‘Were you there when I made the world?’ Which translates, in the language of our younger parishioners, to ‘Buzz off, Bunky.’”

No chuckles this time.

He studied us, a faint smile touching the corners of his lips, the light from our stained glass window putting blue and red diamonds on his left cheek.

“Religion is supposed to be our comfort when the hard times come. God is our rod and our staff, the Great Psalm declares; He will be with us and bear us up when we take that inevitable walk through the Valley of the Shadow of Death. Another Psalm assures us that God is our refuge and our strength, although the people who were lost in that Oklahoma church might dispute the idea… if they still had mouths to dispute with. And the father and his two children, drowning because they tried to rescue the family pet—did they ask God what was going on? What the deal was? And did He answer, ‘Tell you in a few minutes, guys,’ as the water choked their lungs and death darkened their minds?

“Let us say plainly what Saint Paul meant when he spoke of that darkened glass. He meant we’re supposed to take it all on faith. If our faith is strong, we’ll go to heaven, and we’ll understand the whole thing when we get there. As if life were a joke, and heaven the place where the cosmic punchline is finally explained to us.”

There was soft feminine sobbing in the church now, and more pronounced masculine rumblings of discontent. But at that point, no one had walked out or stood up to tell Reverend Jacobs he should sit down because he was edging into blasphemy. They were still too stunned.

“When I tired of researching the seemingly whimsical and often terribly painful deaths of the innocent, I looked into the various branches of Christianity. Gosh, friends, I was surprised at how many there are! Such a Tower of Doctrine! The Catholics, the Episcopalians, the Methodists, the Baptists—both hardshell and softshell—the C of Es, the Anglicans, the Lutherans, the Presbyterians, the Unitarians, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Seventh-day Adventists, the Quakers, the Shakers, Greek Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox, the Shilohites—mustn’t forget them—and half a hundred more.

“Here in Harlow, we’re all on party lines, and it seems to me that religion is the biggest party line of them all. Think how the lines to heaven must get jammed on Sunday mornings! And do you know what I find fascinating? Each and every church dedicated to Christ’s teaching thinks it’s the only one that actually has a private line to the Almighty. And good gosh, I haven’t even mentioned the Muslims, or the Jews, or the theosophists, or the Buddhists, or those who worship America itself just as fervently as, for eight or a dozen nightmare years, the Germans worshipped Hitler.”

Right then was when the walkouts started. First just a few at the back, heads down and shoulders hunched (as if they had been spanked), then more and more. Reverend Jacobs seemed to take no notice.

“Some of these various sects and denominations are peaceful, but the largest of them—the most successful of them—have been built on the blood, bones, and screams of those who have the effrontery not to bow to their idea of God. The Romans fed Christians to the lions; the Christians dismembered those they deemed to be heretics or sorcerers or witches; Hitler sacrificed the Jews in their millions to the false god of racial purity. Millions have been burned, shot, hung, racked, poisoned, electrocuted, and torn to pieces by dogs… all in God’s name.”

My mother was sobbing audibly, but I didn’t look around at her. I couldn’t. I was frozen in place. By horror, yes, of course. I was only nine. But there was also a wild, inchoate exultation, a feeling that at last someone was telling me the exact unvarnished truth. Part of me hoped he would stop; most of me wished fiercely that he would go on, and I got my wish.

“Christ taught us to turn the other cheek and to love our enemies. We pay the concept lip service, but when most of us are struck, we try to pay back double. Christ drove the moneychangers from the temple, but we all know those quick-buck artists never stay away for long; if you’ve ever sat yourself down to a rousing game of church bingo or heard a radio preacher begging for money, you know exactly what I mean. Isaiah prophesied that the day would come when we’d beat our swords into plowshares, but all they’ve been beaten into in our current dark age is atomic bombs and intercontinental ballistic missiles.”

Reggie Kelton stood up. He was as red as my brother Andy was pale. “You need to sit down, Reverend. You’re not yourself.”

Reverend Jacobs did not sit down.

“And what do we get for our faith? For the centuries we’ve given this church or that one our gifts of blood and treasure? The assurance that heaven is waiting for us at the end of it all, and when we get there, the punchline will be explained and we’ll say, ‘Oh yeah! Now I get it.’ That’s the big payoff. It’s dinned into our ears from our earliest days: heaven, heaven, heaven! We will see our lost children, our dear mothers will take us in their arms! That’s the carrot. The stick we’re beaten with is hell, hell, hell! A Sheol of eternal damnation and torment. We tell children as young as my dear lost son that they stand in danger of eternal fire if they steal a piece of penny candy or lie about how they got their new shoes wet.

“There’s no proof of these after-life destinations; no backbone of science; there is only the bald assurance, coupled with our powerful need to believe that it all makes sense. But as I stood in the back room of Peabody’s and looked down at the mangled remains of my boy, who wanted to go to Disneyland much more than he wanted to go to heaven, I had a revelation. Religion is the theological equivalent of a quick-buck insurance scam, where you pay in your premium year after year, and then, when you need the benefits you paid for so—pardon the pun—so religiously, you discover the company that took your money does not, in fact, exist.”

That was when Roy Easterbrook stood up in the rapidly emptying church. He was an unshaven hulk of a man who lived in a rusty little trailer park on the east side of town, close to the Freeport line. As a rule, he only came at Christmas, but today he’d made an exception.

“Rev’run,” he said. “I heard there was a bottle of hooch in the glovebox of your car. And Mert Peabody said when he bent over to work on your wife, she smelt like a barroom. So there’s your reason. There’s your sense of it. You ain’t got the spine to accept the will of God? Fine. But leave these other ones alone.” With that, Easterbrook turned and lumbered out.

It stopped Jacobs cold. He stood gripping the pulpit, eyes blazing in his white face, lips pressed together so tightly his mouth had disappeared.

My dad stood, then. “Charles, you need to step down.”

Reverend Jacobs shook his head as if to clear it. “Yes,” he said. “You’re right, Dick. Nothing I say will make any difference, anyway.”

But it did. To one little boy, it did.

He stepped back, glanced around as if he no longer knew where he was, and then stepped forward again, although there was now no one to hear him except for my family, the church deacons, and Me-Maw, still planted in the first row with her eyes bugging out.

“Just one more thing. We came from a mystery and it’s to a mystery we go. Maybe there’s something there, but I’m betting it’s not God as any church understands Him. Look at the babble of conflicting beliefs and you’ll know that. They cancel each other out and leave nothing. If you want truth, a power greater than yourselves, look to the lightning—a billion volts in each strike, and a hundred thousand amperes of current, and temperatures of fifty thousand degrees Fahrenheit. There’s a higher power in that, I grant you. But here, in this building? No. Believe what you want, but I tell you this: behind Saint Paul’s darkened glass, there is nothing but a lie.”

He left the pulpit and walked through the side door. The Morton family sat in the kind of silence people must experience after a bomb blast.

When we got home, Mom went into the big back bedroom, said she did not want to be disturbed, and closed the door. She stayed there the rest of the day. Claire cooked supper, and we ate mostly in silence. At one point Andy began to quote some scriptural passage that completely disproved what the Reverend had said, but Dad told him to shut his piehole. Andy looked at our father’s hands shoved deep into his pockets and zipped his lip.

After supper, Dad went out to the garage, where he was tinkering with Road Rocket II. For once Terry—usually his loyal assistant, almost his acolyte—did not join him, so I did… although not without hesitation.

“Daddy? Can I ask you a question?”

He was under the Rocket on a Crawligator, a caged light in one hand. Only his khaki-clad legs stuck out. “I suppose so, Jamie. Unless it’s about that goddam mess this morning. If that’s the case, you can also keep your piehole shut. I ain’t going there tonight. Tomorrow’ll be time enough. We’ll have to petition the New England Methodist Conference to fire him, and they’ll have to take it to Bishop Matthews in Boston. It’s a fucking mess, and if you ever tell your mother I used that word around you, she’ll beat me like a redheaded stepchild.”

I didn’t know if my question was about the Terrible Sermon or not, I only knew I had to ask it. “Was what Mr. Easterbrook said true? Was she drinking?”

The moving light beneath the car went still. Then he rolled himself out so he could look up at me. I was afraid he’d be mad, but he wasn’t mad. Just unhappy. “People have been whispering about it, and I suppose it’ll get around a lot faster now that that nummie Easterbrook went and said it right out loud, but you listen to me, Jamie: it doesn’t matter. George Barton had an epileptic seizure and he was on the wrong side of the road and she come around a blind turn and pop goes the weasel. It doesn’t matter if she was sober or head down and tail over the dashboard. Mario Andretti couldn’t have avoided that crash. Reverend was right about one thing: people always want a reason for the bad things in life. Sometimes there ain’t one.”

He raised the hand not holding the caged light and pointed a grease-smeared finger at me. “All the rest was just the bullshit of a grief-struck man, and don’t you forget it.”

The Wednesday before Thanksgiving was a half day in our school district, but I had promised Mrs. Moran that I’d stay to wash the blackboards and neaten up our little library of tattered books. When I told Mom, she waved her hand in a distracted way and told me to just be home for supper. She was already putting a turkey in the oven, but I knew it couldn’t be ours; it was way too small for seven.

As it turned out, Kathy Palmer (a teacher’s pet wannabe if there ever was one) also stayed to help out, and the work was done in half an hour. I thought of going to Al’s or Billy’s house to play guns or something, but I knew they’d want to talk about the Terrible Sermon and how Mrs. Jacobs had gotten herself and Morrie killed because she was shitfaced drunk—a rumor that had indeed gained the credence of absolute fact—and I didn’t want any part of that, so I went home. It was an unseasonably warm day, our windows were open, and I could hear my sister and my mother arguing.

“Why can’t I come?” Claire asked. “I want him to know at least some people in this stupid town are still on his side!”

“Because your father and I think all you children should stay away from him,” my mother said. They were in the kitchen, and by now I was lingering outside the window.

“I’m not a child, anymore, Mother, I’m seventeen!”

“Sorry, but at seventeen you’re still a child, and a young girl visiting him wouldn’t look right. You’ll just have to take my word for that.”

“But it’s okay for you? You know Me-Maw’ll see you, and it’ll be all over the party line in twenty minutes! If you’re going, let me go with you!”

“I said no, and that’s final.”

“He gave Con back his voice!” Claire stormed. “How can you be so mean?”

There was a long pause and then my mother said, “That’s why I’m going to see him. Not to take him a meal for tomorrow but to let him know we’re grateful in spite of those terrible things he said.”

“You know why he said them! He just lost his wife and son and he was all messed up! Half crazy!”

“I do know that.” Mom was speaking more quietly now, and I had to strain to hear because Claire was crying. “But it doesn’t change how shocked people were. He went too far. Much too far. He’s leaving next week, and that’s for the best. When you know you’re going to be fired, it’s best to quit first. It allows you to keep a little self-respect.”

“Fired by the deacons, I suppose,” Claire almost sneered. “Which means Dad.”

“Your father has no choice. When you’re no longer a child, you may realize that, and have a little sympathy. This is tearing Dick apart.”

“Go on, then,” Claire said. “See if a few slices of turkey breast and some sweet potatoes make up for the way he’s getting treated. I bet he won’t even eat it.”

“Claire… Claire-Bear—”

“Don’t call me that!” she yelled, and I heard her pounding for the stairs. She’d sulk and cry in her bedroom for awhile, I supposed, and then get over it, the way she did a couple of years ago when Mom told her fifteen was absolutely too young to go to the drive-in with Donnie Cantwell.

I decided to hustle my butt into the backyard before Mom left with her special-made dinner. I sat in the tire swing, not exactly hiding but not exactly in full view, either. Ten minutes later, I heard the front door shut. I went to the corner of the house and saw Mom walking down the road with a foil-covered tray in her hands. The foil twinkled in the sun. I went in the house and up the stairs. I knocked on my sister’s door, which was graced by a large Bob Dylan poster.

“Claire?”

“Go away!” she shouted. “I don’t want to talk to you!” The record player went on: the Yardbirds, and at top volume.

Mom came back about an hour later—a pretty long visit just to drop off a gift of food—and although Terry and I were in the living room by then, watching TV and jostling each other for the best place on our old couch (in the middle, where the springs didn’t poke your bum), she barely seemed to notice us. Con was upstairs playing the guitar he’d gotten for his birthday. And singing.

David Thomas of Gates Falls Congo was back for a return engagement on the Sunday after Thanksgiving. The church was once more full, maybe because people wanted to see if Reverend Jacobs would show up and try to say some more awful things. He didn’t. If he had, I’m sure he would have been shut up before he got a running start, maybe even carried out bodily. Yankees take their religion seriously.

The next day, Monday, I ran the quarter mile from school instead of walking. I had an idea, and I wanted to be home before the schoolbus arrived. When it came, I grabbed Con and pulled him into the backyard.

“Who put a bug up your butt?” he asked.

“You need to come down to the parsonage with me,” I said. “Reverend Jacobs is going away pretty soon, maybe even tomorrow, and we should see him before he goes. We should tell him we still like him.”

Con drew away from me, brushing his hand down the front of his Ivy League shirt, as if he was afraid I’d left cooties on it. “Are you crazy? I’m not doing that. He said there’s no God.”

“He also electrified your throat and saved your voice.”

Con shrugged uneasily. “It would have come back, anyway. Dr. Renault said so.”

“He said it would come back in a week or two. That was in February. You still didn’t have it back in April. Two months later.”

“So what? It took a little longer, that’s all.”

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “What are you, chicken?”

“Say that again and I’ll knock you down.”

“Why won’t you at least say thanks?”

He stared at me, mouth tight and cheeks red. “We’re not supposed to see him, Mom and Dad said so. He’s crazy, and probably a drunk like his wife.”

I couldn’t speak. My eyes shimmered with tears. They weren’t of sorrow; those were tears of rage.

“Besides,” Con said, “I have to fill the woodbox before Dad gets home or I’ll get in dutch. So just shut up about it, Jamie.”

He left me standing there. My brother, who became one of the world’s most preeminent astronomers—in 2011 he discovered the fourth so-called “Goldilocks planet,” where there might be life—left me standing there. And never mentioned Charles Jacobs again.

The next day, Tuesday, I ran up Route 9 again as soon as school let out. But I didn’t go home.

There was a new car in the parsonage driveway. Well, not really new; it was a ’58 Ford Fairlane with rust on the rocker panels and a crack in the passenger side window. The trunk was up, and when I peeped in, I saw two suitcases and a bulky electronic gadget Reverend Jacobs had demonstrated at MYF one Thursday night: an oscilloscope. Jacobs himself was in his shed workshop. I could hear stuff rattling around.

I stood by his new-old car, thinking of the Belvedere, which was now a burned-out wreck, and I almost turned tail and beat feet for home. I wonder how much of my life would have been different if I’d done that. I wonder if I’d be writing this now. There’s no way of telling, is there? Saint Paul was all too right about that dark glass. We look through it all our days and see nothing but our own reflections.

Instead of running, I gathered my courage and went to the shed. He was putting electronic equipment into a wooden orange crate, using large sheets of crumpled-up brown paper for padding, and didn’t see me at first. He was dressed in jeans and a plain white shirt. The notched collar was gone. Children aren’t very observant about the changes in adults, as a rule, but even at nine I could see he’d lost weight. He was standing in a shaft of sunlight, and when he heard me come in, he looked up. There were new lines on his face, but when he saw me and smiled, the lines disappeared. That smile was so sad it put an arrow in my heart.

I didn’t think, just ran to him. He opened his arms and lifted me up so he could kiss me on the cheek. “Jamie!” he cried. “Thou art Alpha and Omega!”

“Huh?”

“Revelation, chapter one, verse eight. ‘I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end.’ You were the first kid I met when I came to Harlow, and you’re the last. I’m so very, very glad you came.”

I started to cry. I didn’t want to but couldn’t help it. “I’m sorry, Reverend Jacobs. I’m sorry for everything. You were right in church, it’s not fair.”

He kissed my other cheek and set me down. “I don’t think I said that in so many words, but you certainly caught the gist of it. Not that you should take anything I said seriously; I was off my head. Your mother knew that. She told me so when she brought me that fine Thanksgiving feast. And she wished me all the best.”

Hearing that made me feel a little better.

“She gave me some good advice, too—that I should go far from Harlow, Maine, and start over. She said I might find my faith again in some new place. I strongly doubt that, but she was right about leaving.”

“I’ll never see you again.”

“Never say that, Jamie. Paths cross all the time in this world of ours, sometimes in the strangest places.” He took his handkerchief from his back pocket and wiped the tears from my face. “In any case, I’ll remember you. And I hope you’ll think of me from time to time.”

“I will.” Then, remembering: “You betchum bobcats.”

He went back to his worktable, now sadly bare, and finished packing up the last items—a couple of big square batteries he called “dry cells.” He closed the lid of the crate and began tying it shut with two stout pieces of rope.

“Connie wanted to come with me to say thank you, but he’s got… um… I think it’s soccer practice today. Or something.”

“That’s okay. I doubt if I really did anything.”

I was shocked. “You brought his voice back, for criminey sakes! You brought it back with your gadget!”

“Oh yes. My gadget.” He knotted the second rope, and yanked it tight. His sleeves were rolled up, and I could see he had awesome muscles. I had never noticed them before. “The Electrical Nerve Stimulator.”

“You ought to sell it, Reverend Jacobs! You could make a mint!”

He leaned an elbow on the crate, propped his chin on one hand, and gazed at me. “Do you think so?”

“Yes!”

“I doubt it very much. And I doubt if my ENS unit had anything to do with your brother’s recovery. You see, I built it that very day.” He laughed. “And powered it with a very small Japanese-made motor filched from Morrie’s Roscoe Robot toy.”

“Really?”

“Really. The concept is valid, I feel sure of that, but such prototypes—built on the fly, without any experiments to verify the steps in between—very rarely work. Yet I believed I had a chance, because I never doubted Dr. Renault’s original diagnosis. It was a stretched nerve, no more than that.”

“But—”

He hoisted the crate. The muscles in his arms bulged, veins standing out on them. “Come on, kiddo. Walk with me.”

I followed him out to the car. He set the crate down beside the back fender, inspected the trunk, and said he’d have to move the suitcases to the backseat. “Can you take the small one, Jamie? It’s not heavy. When you’re traveling far, it’s best to travel light.”

“Where are you going?”

“No idea, but I think I’ll know it when I get there. If this thing doesn’t break down, that is. It burns enough oil to drain Texas.”

We moved the suitcases to the back of the Ford. Reverend Jacobs hoisted the big crate into the trunk with a grunt of effort. He slammed it closed, then leaned against it, studying me.

“You have a wonderful family, Jamie, and wonderful parents who actually pay attention. If I asked them to describe you kids, I bet they’d say that Claire is the motherly one, Andy’s the bossy one—”

“Boy, you’re right about that.”

He grinned. “There’s one in every family, boyo. They’d say Terry is the mechanical one and you’re the dreamer. What would they say about Con?”

“The studying one. Or maybe the folk-singing one since he got his guitar.”

“Perhaps, but I bet those wouldn’t be the first things to pop into their minds. Ever notice Con’s fingernails?”

I laughed. “He bites em like mad! Once my dad offered him a buck if he stopped for a week, but he couldn’t!”

“Con is the nervy one, Jamie—that’s what your folks would say if they were to be completely honest. The one who’s apt to turn up with ulcers by the time he’s forty. When he got hit in the neck with that ski pole and lost his voice, he started to worry that it would never come back. And when it didn’t, he told himself it never would.”

“Dr. Renault said—”

“Renault’s a fine doctor. Conscientious. He turned up here Johnny-on-the-spot when Morrie had the measles and again when Patsy had… well, a female problem. Took care of both like a pro. But he doesn’t have that air of confidence the best GPs have. That way of saying ‘Bosh, this is nothing, you’ll be fine in no time.’”

“He did say that!”

“Yes, but Conrad wasn’t convinced because Renault isn’t convincing. He’s able to treat the body, but the mind? Not so much. And the mind is where half the healing takes place. Maybe more. Con thought, ‘He’s lying now so I can get used to having no voice. Later on he’ll tell me the truth.’ That’s just the way your brother’s built, Jamie. He lives on his nerve endings, and when people do that, their minds can turn against them.”

“He wouldn’t come with me today,” I said. “I lied about that.”

“Did you?” Jacobs didn’t look very surprised.

“Yeah. I asked him, but he was scared.”

“Never be angry with him for that,” Jacobs said. “Frightened people live in their own special hell. You could say they make it themselves—like Con manufactured his muteness—but they can’t help it. It’s the way they’re built. They deserve sympathy and compassion.”

He turned to the parsonage, which already looked abandoned, and sighed. Then he turned back to me.

“Perhaps the ENS did something—I have every reason to believe the theory behind it is valid—but I really doubt it. Jamie, I believe I tricked your brother. Or, if you don’t mind the pun, I conned him. It’s a skill they try to teach in divinity school, although they call it kindling faith. I was always good at it, which has caused me to feel both shame and delight. I told your brother to expect a miracle, then I turned on the current and activated my glorified joy buzzer. As soon as I saw him twitching his mouth and blinking his eyes, I knew it was going to work.”

“That’s awesome!” I said.

“Yes indeed. Also rather vile.”

“Huh?”

“Never mind. The important thing is you must never tell him. He probably wouldn’t lose his voice again, but he might.” He glanced at his watch. “You know what? I think that’s all the powwow I have time for, if I’m going to make Portsmouth by tonight. And you better get home. Where your visit to me this afternoon will be another secret we’ll keep between us, right?”

“Right.”

“You didn’t go past Me-Maw’s, did you?”

I rolled my eyes, as if to ask if he was really that stupid, and Jacobs laughed some more. I loved that I could make him laugh in spite of everything that had happened. “I cut through Marstellar’s field.”

“Good lad.”

I didn’t want to go, and I didn’t want him to go. “Can I ask you one more question?”

“Okay, but make it quick.”

“When you were giving your… um…” I didn’t want to use the word sermon, it seemed dangerous, somehow. “When you were talking in church, you said lightning was, like, fifty thousand degrees. Is that true?”

His face kindled as it only did when the subject of electricity came up. His hobbyhorse, Claire would have said. My dad would have called it his obsession.

“Completely true! Except maybe for earthquakes and tidal waves, lightning is the most powerful force in nature. More powerful than tornadoes and much more powerful than hurricanes. Have you ever seen a bolt strike the earth?”

I shook my head. “Only in the sky.”

“It’s beautiful. Beautiful and terrifying.” He looked up, as if seeking one, but the sky that afternoon was blue, the only clouds little white puffs moving slowly southwest. “If you ever want to see one up close… you know Longmeadow, right?”

Of course I did. Halfway up the road leading to Goat Mountain Resort, there was a state-maintained public park. That was Longmeadow. From it you could look east for miles and miles. On a very clear day, you could see all the way to the Desert of Maine in Freeport. Sometimes even to the Atlantic Ocean beyond. The MYF had its summer cookout at Longmeadow every August.

He said, “If you go up the road from Longmeadow, you come to the Goat Mountain Resort gatehouse…”

“… where they won’t let you in unless you’re a member or a guest.”

“Right. The class system at work. But just before you get to the gatehouse, there’s a gravel road that splits off to the left. Anyone can use it, because that’s all state land. About three miles up, it ends at an outlook called Skytop. I never took you kids there, because it’s dangerous—just a granite slope ending in a two-thousand-foot drop. There’s no fence, just a sign warning people to keep back from the edge. At the Skytop summit there’s an iron pole twenty feet high. It’s driven deep into the rock. I have no idea who put it there, or why, but it’s been there a long, long time. It should be rusty, but it’s not. Do you know why it’s not?”

I shook my head.

“Because it’s been struck by lightning so many times. Skytop’s a special place. It draws the lightning, and that iron rod is its focal point.”

He was looking dreamily off toward Goat Mountain. It was certainly not big compared to the Rockies (or even the White Mountains of New Hampshire), but it dominated the rolling hills of western Maine.

“The thunder is louder there, Jamie, and the clouds are closer. The sight of those stormclouds rolling in makes a person feel very small, and when a person is beset by worries… or doubts… feeling small is not such a bad thing. You know when the lightning’s going to come, because there’s a breathless feeling in the air. A feeling of… I don’t know… an unburned burning. Your hair stands on end and your chest gets heavy. You can feel your skin trembling. You wait, and when the thunder comes, it doesn’t boom. It cracks, like when a branch loaded with ice finally gives way, only a hundred times louder. There’s silence… and then a click in the air, sort of like the sound an old-fashioned light switch makes. The thunder rolls and the lightning comes. You have to squint, or the stroke will blind you and you won’t see that iron pole go from black to purple-white and then to red, like a horseshoe in the forge.”

“Wow,” I said.

He blinked and came back. He kicked the tire of his new-old car. “Sorry, kiddo. Sometimes I get carried away.”

“It sounds awesome.”

“Oh, it’s way beyond awesome. Go up there sometime when you’re older and see for yourself. Just be careful around the pole. The lightning has chipped up all kinds of loose scree, and if you started to slide, you might not be able to stop. And now, Jamie, I really do have to get rolling.”

“I wish you didn’t have to go.” I wanted to cry some more, but I wouldn’t let myself.

“I appreciate that, and I’m touched by it, but you know what they say—if wishes were horses, beggars would ride.” He opened his arms. “Now give me another hug.”

I hugged him hard, breathing deep, trying to store up the smells of his soap and his hair tonic—Vitalis, the kind my dad used. And now Andy, as well.

“You were my favorite,” he said into my ear. “That’s another secret you should probably keep.”

I just nodded. There was no need to tell him that Claire already knew.

“I left something for you in the parsonage basement,” he said. “If you want it. Key’s under the doormat.”

He set me on my feet, kissed me on the forehead, then opened the driver’s door. “This caa ain’t much, chummy,” he said, putting on a Yankee accent that made me smile in spite of how bad I felt. “Still, I reckon it’ll get me down the road apiece.”

“I love you,” I said.

“I love you, too,” he said. “But don’t you cry on me again, Jamie. My heart is already as broken as I can stand.”

I didn’t cry again until he was gone. I stood there and watched him back down the driveway. I watched him until he was out of sight. Then I walked home. We still had a hand pump in our backyard in those days, and I washed my face in that freezing-cold water before I went inside. I didn’t want my mother to see that I’d been crying, and ask me why.

It would be the job of the Ladies Auxiliary to give the parsonage a good stem-to-stern cleaning, removing all traces of the ill-fated Jacobs family and making it ready for the new preacher, but there was no hurry, Dad said; the wheels of the New England Methodist Bishopric moved slowly, and we would be lucky to have a new minister assigned to us by the following summer.

“Let it sit awhile,” was Dad’s advice, and the Auxiliary was happy enough to take it. They didn’t get to work with their brooms and brushes and vacuums until after Christmas (Andy preached the lay sermon that year, and my parents almost burst with pride). Until then, the parsonage stood empty, and some of the kids at my school began to claim that it was haunted.

There was one visitor, though: me. I went on a Saturday afternoon, once more cutting through Dorrance Marstellar’s cornfield to evade the watchful eye of Me-Maw Harrington. I used the key under the doormat and let myself in. It was scary. I had scoffed at the idea that the place might be haunted, but once I was inside, it was all too easy to imagine turning around and seeing Patsy and Tag-Along-Morrie standing there, hand in hand, goggle-eyed and rotting.

Don’t be stupid, I told myself. They’ve either gone on to some other place or just into black nothing, like Reverend Jacobs said. So stop being scared. Stop being a stupid fraidy-cat.

But I couldn’t stop being a stupid fraidy-cat any more than I could stop having a stomachache after eating too many hotdogs on Saturday night. I didn’t run away, though. I wanted to see what he had left me. I needed to see what he had left me. So I went to the door that still had a poster on it (Jesus holding hands with a couple of kids who looked like Dick and Jane in my old first-grade reader), and the sign that said LET THE LITTLE CHILDREN COME UNTO ME.

I turned on the light and went down the stairs and looked at the folding chairs stacked against the wall, and the piano with the cover down, and Toy Corner, where the little table was now bare of dominos and coloring books and Crayolas. But Peaceable Lake was still there, and so was the little wooden box with Electric Jesus inside. That was what he had left me, and I was horribly disappointed. Nonetheless, I opened the box and took Electric Jesus out. I set him at the edge of the lake, where I knew the track was, and started to reach up under his robe to turn him on. Then the greatest rage of my young life swept through me. It was as sudden as one of those lightning strikes Reverend Jacobs had talked about seeing up on Skytop. I swung my arm and knocked Electric Jesus all the way to the far wall.

“You’re not real!” I shouted. “You’re not real! It’s all a bunch of tricks! Damn you, Jesus! Damn you, Jesus! Damn you, damn you, damn you, Jesus!”

I ran up the stairs, crying so hard I could barely see.

We never did get another minister, as it turned out. Some of the local padres tried to take up the slack, but attendance dropped to almost nothing, and by my senior year of high school, our church was locked and shuttered. It didn’t matter to me. My belief had ended. I have no idea what happened to Peaceable Lake and Electric Jesus. The next time I went into the downstairs MYF room in the parsonage—this was a great many years later—it was completely empty. As empty as heaven.