Authors: Richard Price
Not until he heard the sirens coming did Strike become unglued, finally deciding to make himself scarce. He glanced at the benches one last time and saw Horace muttering away, his shoulder blooming red. Tyrone seemed to be jarred loose from his chain by the sirens too, gingerly rising to his feet, still palming his gut as if holding something, looking impassive, almost bored. But as he watched Tyrone head off toward 6 Weehawken, Strike saw the cloudy stain on the kid’s jeans, and even from this distance he could swear he smelled urine.
28
ON FRIDAY
morning, Rocco sat across the desk from Reverend Posse in a wood-paneled office in the musty basement of the First Baptist Church. The reverend was sprawled in his vinyl-covered recliner, swiveling back and forth, looking far off and unhappy as he reflected on Victor Dunham.
The long room was lined with bracketed shelves filled with various Bibles, biblical encyclopedias and almanacs. Sprinkled among the books were National Youth Congress trophies and appreciation plaques from various civic associations. On the wall were framed photographs of the reverend embracing a number of clerics of various faiths, clipping a ribbon on a new bus for the gospel choir, accepting and handing over checks, clasping hands with Jimmy Carter and standing behind Jesse Jackson at a microphone somewhere. In the pictures the reverend appeared confident and spiritually flush, but to Rocco the man sitting across from him looked distant and aggrieved. The can of root beer and the dish of peach cobbler that his secretary had silently placed on his desk five minutes before remained untouched.
The reverend finally opened his mouth with a deep and weighted inhalation, as if the words were costing him dearly. “See, my particular pain here, now, is that I can’t tell you much about him, if you want to know the truth.”
“No, well, anything would help.” Somewhat intimidated by his surroundings, Rocco sat up straight in his hard wooden chair.
“See, a young man comes into this church, nineteen, twenty years old, I’m just glad to
see
him out there, and I don’t want to scare him off.” The reverend leaned forward, elbows on his desk, his dry fingers sliding into one another.
“I don’t want to push unless I am sure a person is ready to jump, but now my particular pain is that I didn’t have enough faith in God, in regards to that kid, didn’t have enough trust in what I was being told by God to
do,
which was reach out, come off the pulpit specifically to go over to that boy and say, ‘Hey, how are you, you enjoying the services?’ I kept feeling, Wait for him to make the first move, this one looks like a bolter, he’ll come to you. But I waited too long on him, didn’t I?”
“I’m sure you’got your hands full,” Rocco said.
“See, lots of people come in here for the first time, they don’t have no concept of God, they’re unchurched. So me up there, / become God because I’m tangible. Now, for a lot of these people that are burdened, they want to be helped. But how do you approach God? So I have to come down and break the ice, put my hand on them, say, ‘How are you? You look a little heavy in the face, sister, brother. You know, anytime you want to talk I’m always available.’ And I do
do
that, don’t get me wrong, but with this Dunham kid, I just blew it, man. I just … I wanted him too. I remember noticing him first time he came in about four months ago. He came into church by himself, wearing a red sweater and a white tie. Yeah, and he sat near the back on the aisle, like in case he needed to make a quick getaway.”
Rocco returned the reverend’s grin with one of his own.
“I guess I noticed him because of that red and white combination, but how many young black men do you think I get in here like that? I got women over men in here seven for every three, sometimes eight for every two, and a lot of the men are older, in their forties and up, so I
want
a young man like that, I
need
him. But that first service he just sat there real quiet. I don’t think he looked at me even one time that morning. I don’t know if you’re at all familiar with the services in a church like this…”
“Me?” Rocco palmed his chest. “No, not really.”
“Well, there’s a point in the service, many points actually, when I’ll say in so many words, ‘If you believe that Jesus has been good to you, if you think Jesus is on your side, shake your neighbor’s hand and let him know.’ That’s where I want the congregation to make a physical connection to each other, and most everybody does too, because there’s that contact high you get in sharing the spirit. But Dunham, he was…”
The reverend drew his shoulders close, put his chin on his chest, shrinking himself. “Well, he wasn’t about that, and I tell you I was a little amazed to see him come back the next week, the week after that, and
every
week. He’d be all shelled up but every week there he was, and at the end of the service here I always do what is called opening the church, you know, invite people to come up and accept Jesus. I got my deacons up there like a welcoming committee, and I’m looking for people who want to take the next step, commit to the spirit inside them. I usually know who’s gonna come up too, who’s struggling to make that commitment. I’m real good at reading faces out there, and if I see someone struggling? I’ll hang in until they feel me feeling them, until they feel God using me like a mirror catching the sun, you see?”
The reverend pointed up to the ceiling, his other hand thrust straight out from his chest to illustrate the angle of spiritual beaming. “And I’ll look right out at them eye-to-eye, say, ‘Jesus, there’s someone out there who wants
so
bad to come into your arms. Lord, I’m just a mailman delivering your letter, and there’s somebody
out
there who wants to come up here and read it, read the good news, someone who knows that next week might be too late, someone who wants to get sentenced to
life,
Jesus.’”
He lowered his voice, talking to Rocco as if he was giving away secrets, but he winked as he did so, his look gently self-parodying. “So then I tell them, ‘Come on up, come on up, and if you can’t make it all the way, I’ll come down, meet you halfway.’ And I come down to the aisles, stand right there in the pews…”
The reverend spread his arms and smiled. Rocco smiled back, enjoying the man, feeling the sweetness in him, the bigheartedness.
“And every week I get two, three new people to commit, and every week I looked out to that kid. I wanted him, he was definitely in my thoughts, but I guess I just wanted that
eye
contact first, I wanted to see an invitation there.” The reverend ran a hand across his mouth and his face became clouded again.
“Did he ever bring anybody with him to a service?”
“No, always by himself.”
“Never came in with his kids? His wife? His mother?”
“I thought he was all alone in this world until he came to me that day.”
“Did he make any friends here?”
“Not really, but I’ll tell you, every week he always sat behind this one particular family, nice people, a young couple with two kids and a grandfather. They usually sit in the same pew every week and he always sat behind them. At first I thought nothing of it, but one week they came late and their customary spot was taken up, so they had to sit somewhere else. And then I saw Dunham get up and change his seat too, so he could
still
sit behind them. See what I’m sayin’?” The reverend smiled and opened his hands, and Rocco thought of the family photo under the scotch bottle at Hambone’s.
“See, this is what I’m thinking right now.” The reverend hesitated, picking his words. “This church, it’s a middle-class church. We got parishioners here, not that they don’t have their troubles, not that they don’t have their memories of poverty, of drugs, of any and every kind of human misery out there—and not just memories either, OK? But most people are doing pretty good out there now. I got policemen, educators, businessmen, social workers. We have us a large body of accomplishment in here, and I know Victor Dunham, he’s a working man, he was doing everything he could for himself, for his family, but I’m thinking now, maybe what this church, what the church experience was about for him was just
being
in here on a Sunday morning, coming in nice and early, everybody looking fresh, feeling glad to be here, dressed nice. There’s always this rush of something when people come here for services, especially right before we start_excitement, hopefulness, people saying hello to each other everybody all powdered and sharp I got to tell you, that’s
my
favorite time of the day maybe because I haven’t done no work yet, but right then the spirit is like pure oxygen.”
The reverend’s secretary ducked in to see if he was finished with his snack, made a face at Rocco as if he was keeping the man from his nourishment. “I’m good, I’m good,” said the reverend. His hand hovered over the dish and soda can, waiting for her to close the door.
Rocco realigned himself in his chair and raised his chin to signify a shift in focus. “So, what happened that day he came to you?”
The reverend shook his head. “Well, the ironic thing is, I opened up the service talking about that boy, that Adams boy that got killed.”
“Yeah? What you say, you remember?”
“Well, he had just got killed at the beginning of that weekend, so I asked people, ‘Do you think that that boy
knew
when he woke up Friday morning that this was his day to die? He was probably fit as a fiddle—young, strong, healthy. But you never know when it’s going to be too late to get in on God’s lifetime guarantee. You never know, so you best be ready, because night is coming, night is coming for us all.’”
He caught himself getting into a pulpit rhythm and smiled at Rocco. “See, maybe you don’t have a condition, but you
might
have a situation.”
“How did he react to that?”
“I didn’t notice, but later on, well, the sermon I gave that day was on Caleb, Caleb and the mountain.”
Rocco caught an appraising look from the reverend and nodded encouragingly, hoping his ignorance wasn’t too obvious.
“See, Caleb was one of Moses’ spies that went into Canaan to check out the Promised Land. The first year in the desert, the children of Israel came upon Canaan and Moses sent in twelve spies, and ten of them came out saying forget it, we can’t go in there, we can’t conquer the land. They had brought out giant grapes, grapes so big they had to carry them between two men on a staff, and they said the people are too strong, the cities are walled, you got”—the reverend counted off on his fingers—“Amalekites, Hittites, Jebusites, Canaanites, Amorites,
and
you got the Anakites, and the Anakites were giants, physical giants eleven to thirteen feet tall. And ten out of the twelve spies came out saying”—the reverend drew himself up for the quotation—“‘We were in our own sight as grasshoppers, and so we were in their sight.’”
Rocco shifted his weight, nervous about Bible stories.
“Ten out of twelve came out saying, ‘We be not able to go up against the people,’ came out saying, ‘It is a land that eateth up the inhabitants thereof.’ But the two
other
spies, Joshua and Caleb, they waved that nonsense off, and Caleb said, ‘Let’s go up at once and possess it, for we are well able to overcome it,’ because Caleb kept faith in God’s promise not just to deliver them from Egypt but to deliver them to the Promised Land. See, it’s pick up
and
deliver.”
The reverend winked at Rocco again, then continued. “Well, the children of Israel turned their backs on Canaan. They ignored Caleb, they despaired of God. They even wanted to return to Egypt, and God became so angry at them, and at these ten other spies that thought Canaan could not be taken, that he sent them back out into the desert for thirty-nine more years, until every one of them over the age of twenty had died. God said, ‘Your carcasses shall fall in the wilderness.’ But he spared Caleb, saying, ‘Because he had followed me fully, him I shall bring into the land and his seed possess it.’ And when Joshua conquered the land like God had promised, Caleb was eighty-five years old the spy who kept his faith and when Joshua’s warriors were dividing up the conquered territory, they turned to Caleb and asked him “Old man what do you want, some nice rich bottomland?’ Caleb said Give me that mountain’ there Hebron.’ And all the young bloods turned to him and said ‘Why do von want that mountain? There’s nothing but trouble on that mountain. There’s Amalekites still fighting and Anakites
giants
in there Why don’t you take so me nice rich easy parcel old man? You “earned it.’ But Caleb turned to these young men and said T want that mountain because it would please God for me to tame it ‘see, Caleb old as he was was still ready to fight to roll up his sleeves and do God’s work, just as he was thirty-nine years before. ‘We were in our own sight as grasshoppers, and so we were in their sight.’
He paused, savoring the passage’. “And then I tell my congregation of Caleb’s commitment, his ever-readiness to do battle with the giants, an eighty-five-year-old senior citizen, and I ask them how about us, how many of
us
are willing to roll up our sleeves and do battle with the giants right outside our own church, the giants of drugs, alcoholism, poverty—how many of
us
have the commitment to bring peace to the mountain that is this city, because it would please God, because it is doing battle
for
God.”
He looked at Rocco expectantly. Rocco nodded, surprised to find himself moved by the story. “Yeah,” he said awkwardly, “it’s like I guess people sometimes feel like grasshoppers against the drug problem out there, right?”
The reverend aimed a finger at Rocco’s face. “Exactly! Hey man, you got some preacher in you!”
Rocco blushed. This guy was good.
“See, with my congregation, it would be easy to turn this church into some fortress of gratitude, but it ain’t just about coming together and giving Him thanks. No, it’s going out and doing His work because, man, if this city ain’t Caleb’s mountain, I don’t know what is, and those giants out there are just stomping people into the ground.”