Gideon - 03 - Religious Conviction (7 page)

Like a professor who won’t let a student off the hook with a general answer to a specific question. Trey asks again, “Do you accept Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior?” His face is as open and friendly as if he had asked about my favorite baseball team. Yet there is a rote sound to the words, as if he has been practicing them.

Feeling trapped and resentful, I push back from the table, telling myself that it is not this child’s fault. His parents should know better than to let him conduct an inquisition. If I have to endure a religious litmus test given by a child in order to work on a murder case, I’ll pass.

“When I was about your age. Trey,” I say, trying to sound friendly, “my mother told me it was rude to ask questions about politics or religion.”

Trey’s face reddens, as if he is stung by my refusal to answer him, and he looks at his father for confirmation.

“Nobody’s trying to embarrass you. Page,” Bracken says.

“It’s a sign Trey likes you.”

This child is worried about my soul and whether his father and I (I must seem about to die to him, too, since I’m older than his father) will be friends in heaven. I have an almost overwhelming desire to lie to please this child, but I am irritated by his parents’ behavior. I look at Wynona’s bland face, hoping for a last-second rescue, but it isn’t coming. Finally, I say, “I don’t know what I accept. Trey.” As brutal as it sounds, even this is a lie.

I don’t accept anything. And if his father weren’t dying, he wouldn’t be going to church either, I am tempted to tell this kid, but don’t. I feel myself blushing furiously.

Who am I to question the sincerity of Bracken’s conversion? He obviously is already a changed man. The old Bracken wouldn’t have any more let a rabbit into his garden (planted or not) than he would permit a prosecutor to badger one of his witnesses. Just because I’m in capable of change doesn’t mean the rest of the world has the same problem.

“It’s okay, Gideon,” Bracken says, calling me by my first name for the first time.

“That’s what we’re taught to do at Christian Life,” he says, laying a napkin beside his plate.

“But that question is supposed to come much later. Since my cancer was discovered, Trey understands there isn’t much time.”

As I sit there trying to sort through my feelings, the phrase “end times” rings in my brain. The world may be ending soon for everybody (it is for his father), and if his kid can’t stop that, at least he can make sure we are ready for it.

“I know it’s hard to be asked that,” Wynona says, her voice gentle, “but it would be confusing and dishonest to get on to him.”

I push my knife around on the table.

“Oh, I’m not upset.” But I am. Nothing is more obnoxious than someone pushing religion on you, especially if it’s an innocent kid. And with Rainey bleating on about it last night, I’ve had enough door-to-door salesmen to last a lifetime. The arrogance of it. Trey is watching me as if an ax murderer had declared himself. Still, I feel a grudging admiration for him. Even with your parents egging you on, it can’t be easy being a little Billy Graham. My own failures with Sarah stand in stark relief.

This kid is practically an evangelist; Sarah was lucky if I dropped her off at the front door of the church. It wouldn’t have killed me to attend Mass more. It’s not as if I were developing a cure for cancer and was just too busy to tear myself away.

Bracken begins to clear the table.

“Would you like some blackberry cobbler,” he asks cheerfully, “and some coffee?”

“Sure,” I say. How can I be rude to someone who’s dying? Wynona springs up to help him, leaving Trey and me to stare around each other. It is as if I had farted and everyone was determined to ignore it. How odd this all is, I think. After Bracken dies, what a story I will have to tell. Chet Bracken stories are legion, but nobody will be able to top this one.

Again, blushing furiously. Trey asks, “Maybe you can come to church with us this Sunday.”

I look at the boy, astounded that a child so young would be this relentless. His eyes are somewhere on the middle button of my shirt. Doubtless, his parents have overheard him, but it is as if we were discussing base ball cards. Opening the refrigerator freezer. Bracken says, “Come on and go with us. It’ll make your investigation go easier.”

Extremely uncomfortable now, I lift the crystal water glass to my lips to give myself time to think. What can it hurt?

“Actually, I’ve already been invited,” I fudge, adding specificity to Rainey’s open invitation, “by a friend to attend your church this Sunday, so maybe I’ll see you there.”

“Who?” Trey asks, a little suspiciously. This is too easy. Yet his parents let him continue as if I were a prisoner of war in a country that knew nothing of the Geneva Convention.

I tell them about Rainey, but, not surprisingly, in a church with a cast of thousands, they have not heard of her. Wynona has a way of listening sympathetically, and I tell more about Rainey than I intended, managing only to leave out my consternation that she has joined Christian Life. No matter. As she fills my coffee cup, she re marks, “You must feel she’s deserting you because she’s gone so much.”

“Exactly,” I say, glad that someone understands.

“She might as well put her house up for sale.” Wynona reminds me of someone’s grandmother. I wonder how she and Bracken hooked up. A plain Jane if there ever was one, she wouldn’t have caught Bracken’s eye on a crowded street. Since she is perhaps a decade older than Bracken, she surely thought she had a husband for the rest of her life. As Julia, my secretary, says, “Even if you can find one halfway decent, he’ll wear out so fast and die you won’t even remember what he looks like.”

Chet, who has said little during the meal, sits back in his chair.

“There’s only one cure for that. You’ll have to start going, too.”

Damn. I look at Wynona, who nods.

“She probably can’t tell you what it means to her. When you first start getting to know your family, there’s a kind of glow.

That’s how me and Chet met. Trey and I were assigned to be part of his family when he began coming regularly six months ago.”

My head spins to look at Chet, who gives a confirming nod and a sheepish grin. I guess I should have figured, but I’d never heard about Chet having a wife or family before. With those ears. Trey couldn’t look any more like Chet if he’d had plastic surgery.

“How long have you been married?” I ask, incredulous.

“Three months,” he says, beaming at his bride. The kid calls him Dad, and Chet and Wynona look as if they have been married forever. Everyone seems happy. How can they stand it? The Lord’s will? I suppose if you believe it’s all for a purpose, you can endure anything, although I can’t quite buy that.

As Wynona clears the table and does the dishes with Trey, we take our dessert and coffee and adjourn to the square, lodge like room to sit in front of the huge fire place and continue our discussion of the case. Chet gets a fire going easily, and yet it is obvious that he is tired and is not able to concentrate as I ask him questions about the case. Talk to Leigh tomorrow is his only ad vice. I drive home wondering if the only reason I was invited out to dinner was to have his kid browbeat me into going to church. Bracken is preparing for the next world; I’ve still got to live in this one.

As I drive I am thinking how hard it is to know an other person. Chet Bracken the lawyer is one hundred and eighty degrees opposite from Chet Bracken the man. He was positively docile tonight. Was it the cancer Clearly, he was exhausted. After dinner it was as if he were waiting for me to take charge. Perhaps that’s what he really wants but is too proud to say it. Yet nobody was too proud to put me on the spot about religion. My skin crawls as I remember the kid’s face. Are you saved? And they let him get away with it! Why am I reacting so strongly to this incident? It seems a matter of bad taste. Almost a matter of class differences.

It hits me that I am reacting as my mother probably would have. Nice people don’t get in your face like that. It wasn’t as if she were the Queen of England, but for the first time in a long while I remember that she and my father, before he went crazy, considered them selves and their friends far above the ordinary residents of Bear Creek. Her father had been a doctor, and she saw herself as a member of the eastern Arkansas aristocracy, with its disdain for emotional outbursts and theatrics of any kind. This wasn’t so bad, actually. She and her friends weren’t taken in by the demagoguery of Orval Faubus, who, as governor, on the pretext of preventing violence incited the state to wage a guerrilla war against school desegregation. How much of my mother’s sense of who she was would have rubbed off on me if Daddy hadn’t gone nuts and become a source of embarrassment? Yet perhaps tonight I saw vestiges of her emotional fastidiousness in my reaction to Trey. I know nothing of Chet’s background, but in any case, he is way beyond a feeling of distaste for what is socially and aesthetically incorrect. Death, or the fear of it, I realize as I hit the outskirts of town, will do that to you.

“it’s all a crock,” Dan Bailey says cheerfully, “and you know it.”

Dan, who became my best friend almost immediately after I moved into the Layman Building nine months ago, is obese, obscene, and remarkably immature. He stands at the window of my office, dreamily staring at the women in the Adcock Building across the street.

Separated from us by the width of the avenue and the illusions of youth and middle age, they deliberately tease us, coming to the window and sticking their tongues out at Dan when he won’t go away. I push Leigh’s file into my briefcase.

“If you’d seen Bracken’s face at the dinner table,” I say, “you might not think so.”

“Acceptance, the final stage,” Dan says, literally pressing his nose against the glass as he ogles my neighbors.

“More power to him. If there is a God, Bracken ought to be punished for all the murderers and dope dealers he’s gotten off.”

I pull a yellow pad from a drawer and shove it into the case. The valise is bulging, like Dan. His neck, crammed into a too tight shirt collar, seems about to explode.

“There’s an inner peace about the entire family,” I say.

“Even Rainey.”

Dan sticks out his tongue in the direction of the Adcock Building, a sign that he’s been made to understand his staring is not appreciated. I come around my desk to see what’s going on. A blonde in a tight sweater closes the blinds. I’ll probably be arrested for sexual harassment, and I barely saw her.

“The mountaintop experience,” Dan sighs.

“It never lasts. Highs never do.

Physics 101. What goes up eventually sinks like a lead balloon. They’re able to sustain it longer because of the group. New people coming in keep the fires burning for everybody, but eventually they will go out. We all return to our evil ways, sooner or later.” Smiling happily at the memory, Dan cackles, “You should have seen that blonde’s chest. Just before you got over here she turned sideways to the window just so I could check her out.

Julia looks like she got a couple of marbles put in compared to her.”

I stand by Dan and look down at the street. Deserted.

Everyone is inside pretending to be working.

“You don’t even believe there’s a God behind the Big Bang?”

Dan bumps his swollen stomach against the window ledge.

“What we don’t understand we call God. That’s why you don’t ever read about preachers filing for patents.”

Dan’s zinc gingham broadcloth shirt has a grease stain on it. Probably from the croissant he carried into my office. By his own admission, he drives his rich society wife crazy. According to Dan, Brenda, by her choice of a totally unsuitable marriage partner (himself), proves irrefutably the perverseness of the human species.

Accustomed to his logic, I cross my office and flip the light switch. Dan will stay and talk forever if I let him.

“I don’t read about many lawyers filing for patents either.”

“A complete lack of imagination is our only redeeming virtue,” he says, silhouetted against the window. He is beginning to develop the profile of Alfred Hitchcock, double chin and all.

“We’re totally opposed to progress, creativity, and ingenuity. Once the human vocal cord was developed, unborn lawyers everywhere rejoiced, knowing the species had no further need to evolve.”

I laugh, knowing that Dan, down deep, is one of the good guys, his cynicism a defense mechanism to deal with the chaos closing in around him. A man who has put up with as many divorce cases as he has can’t be all bad. Brenda complains because they call him all night and on the weekends, In the office his patience is legendary, money no object. What could be worse than the pain of divorce? he asks, when I kid him about how many women are stacked up in the waiting room. The only bad thing about women, he says, is that they persist in marrying men. Nothing is more damaging to their self-esteem. My phone buzzes, and it is Julia with a message for Dan. I listen and sigh.

“She says,” I say to Dan, “tell Butterball it’s Mr. Tatum again. His landlord has cut off his electricity, and he’s having an asthma attack.”

Dan looks at me in horror.

“Will you let me take it here?” he asks, reaching for the phone.

“It’s the second time that son of a bitch has done this. By the time I get to my office, he might have hung up. The poor guy’s on SSI, and every time he gets behind on his rent, he gets his heat turned off.”

“Sure,” I say, handing the telephone to him.

“I was just leaving.” I pick up my briefcase, leaving Dan to tilt at another windmill. Arkansas has, Dan tells me, (he worst landlord-tenant laws in the nation and the distinction of being the only state in the country literally to criminalize the nonpayment of rent. Charles Dickens would have loved us, Dan has said on more than one occasion after cataloging our situation. In addition to the “criminal eviction law,” Blackwell County has other delights for debtors—hot-check laws whose enforcement turns our overcrowded jails into debtors’ prisons, a recent law that allows landlords to consider tenants’ property abandoned and subject to seizure after nonpayment of rent, and now we are practically the only state that does not recognize either judicially or by statute an implied warranty < habitability in rental property.