I scanned tapes from 1985, 1984, and finally 1983. Within the span of a minute I’d found the tape labeled “The Devil’s Orchard, 1983.”
“Let’s go, Woodson. You drive. We’ll listen to this in the car on our way.”
* * *
Farview was only twenty-five minutes away. I called Faraday and confirmed that my sister and the girls were okay.
I was still unable to reach Raritan or Parkman by phone.
Woodson urged me to call the local police departments in Farview.
“No way.”
“What do you mean, no way?”
“Kinsey’s in a ‘final gambit’ mode now,” I said. “We’re talking about my father, Woodson. I have to try and save him. If a squad of police cars arrives at the church, Kinsey is going to simply pull the plug, play his endgame. I can’t risk it. You saw the note he left me.”
Woodson narrowed her eyes, weighing the validity of my argument. Finally she spoke. “What do you propose we do, then?”
“I’m not sure yet. All I can hope to do is get to that church before it’s too late. Beyond that, I don’t know.” I held up the tape of my father’s sermon. “Maybe this will give us a clue of what the hell is going on here.”
I inserted the tape into the tape recorder just as big drops of rain began to once again pelt the window. As the tape played, warbling organ music came over the speakers, playing a gospel hymn I hadn’t recalled in twenty years. The notes pulled me instantly back in time. In my mind’s eye I could see my father walking to the pulpit to face the congregation. I could see my mother in the choir behind him, seated with the rest of the blue-robed Sunday morning singers.
I could recall Tyler and Katie sitting quietly beside me in the second pew, waiting for the sermon to start.
I remembered how I could look over my right shoulder and always find Mara sitting with her mother on the other side of the church, a few rows back, usually casting me a furtive smile.
I let myself go back. How could I have forgotten this sermon? My father’s disembodied voice came over the tape recorder, sounding far off and muffled, as if preaching from the bottom of a pit.
“Someday there’s going to be a resurrection. Many people think that only those who are saved will be resurrected to everlasting life. But I’m here to tell you, everyone will be resurrected. The good, the bad, the followers of God, the haters of God.”
The vision in my mind’s eye became even clearer. I could remember how my father, preaching to the congregation in his white robes, would use his hands, pointing at the parishioners, pointing down to the Bible for effect. I had forgotten how much he pointed, for how long I felt that finger bearing down on me over and over in my youth, always pointing at me, pointing out my own endless fallibility.
On the tape I listened to my father speak of the resurrection of the body, when the end of the world would come. He said that most people only thought about the resurrection of the elect.
My father envisioned another resurrection, a resurrection of the damned.
“Everyone. For some, those who believe, those who follow in the footsteps of Christ, it will be a resurrection to life everlasting, a return to the Garden of Eden. But for the rest of us, the ones of us who sit here and listen, let the message, the good news, the gospel go in one ear and out the other, the ones who don’t believe, the ones who reject the good news, the ones who stare at a suffering Christ and turn their faces, there will be another resurrection. Yes, another resurrection.”
My father paused long enough to take a sip of water at the pulpit as a number of amens lifted from voices in the crowd.
“But this is an unwelcome resurrection, friends. It’s a resurrection you want no part of. It’s a resurrection to pain everlasting, the torment of hell, separation from God and the ones you love. If the believers in God, the followers of God, are to find eternal life in paradise, in the re-created Garden of Eden, then the haters of God, the liars, the murderers, the betrayers, will find banishment to the devil’s orchard. An orchard of eternal death. Don’t be part of it. You only have a short time to choose. It’s your choice. Life everlasting, or torment everlasting. You decide. Will you join the son of God, or the son of perdition?”
I suddenly remembered the way my father could become lost during a sermon, a faraway look in his eyes as he stared up into the heavens then back down at the congregation, sweeping his hands across them all.
“Children. Come to God. He doesn’t wish anyone to come to harm. Your sins are in the past. That’s what God is. He’s love, the Bible tells us.” He paused, and I could hear through the tape that he was smiling as he spoke. “Yes, folks! The Beatles had it right, my friends!” A loud chorus of laughter arose from the church, then died down.
“Honestly friends, they did. He is love. And He’s forgiveness. Love is all you need. Whatever you’ve done, God will forgive you. He only asks that you repent, that you come clean, that you desire to do those hurtful things no more. Hurtful to you, hurtful to others, hurtful to God himself.”
There was another pause on the tape as I assumed my father looked out at the sea of people before him. “The heat of hell is evident all around us. A kitchen stove, a soldering tool, the flame from a match. That’s only a taste of the pain everlasting. Will you be like Lazarus, the wicked man who died, went to hell, then begged God for one drop of water, just one drop of water, to cool his tongue? How he begged and pleaded with God—to just let him tell his still-living brothers that they may avoid the searing flames of hell! The fires of hell; they’re so real!”
His voice had risen to a fevered pitch, a loud and thundering oration that held everyone in the congregation transfixed. I closed my eyes, still recalling those kinds of sermons. I remembered how during those types of sermons I would always look back at Mara, but she would no longer be looking at me and instead would be focusing on my father, the fear in her eyes. Tyler and Katie would sit paralyzed beside me, silent as lambs. During those kinds of sermons I put my arm around them both, tickling Katie’s shoulder, trying to keep her comforted.
My father’s voice on the tape descended again. “The bad you’ve done. It can all be washed away. White as snow. It’s gone. God promises He’ll forget. But you have to ask for His forgiveness. You have to reject your own pride and ask for forgiveness. Can you?”
After a brief prayer the entire church congregation sang the closing hymn.
I knew that my father would have been standing with his head bowed and eyes closed, facing the front of the congregation. On the tape he extended an invitation to belief, an invitation to salvation.
Suddenly there was a discordant note on the piano as the entire congregation seemed to stumble in unison during the hymn “Just as I Am,” the same song that ended every Billy Graham crusade. It was as if the entire church, like a single organism, was suddenly perturbed all at once.
On the tape a heavy pair of boots could be heard walking along a creaking wooden floor, and suddenly I remembered this specific sermon with complete and utter clarity. How could I have forgotten? At that moment in the car with Woodson, I suddenly remembered it as though it happened yesterday.
* * *
A large shape sweeps past me, walking toward my father. A man, a hulk of a man, in navy blue work pants and a light blue short-sleeved shirt. Tattoos on both forearms. Not typical dress for a church down South; the man is an outsider. A sensation of fear passes through me, until the gargantuan man collapses against and down with my father, his tremendous broad shoulders racked with heavy sobs.
The congregation continues to sing, and sing, and sing.
The long brown hair belongs to a man known as Mean Jim, a two-time penitentiary convict for armed robbery and assault with a deadly weapon and intent to kill; a man who frequented the bars and was always getting thrown out; one time beat a prostitute so badly that she died a few days later, but nobody could ever prove it was him; knifed two black men, but said it was self-defense and got off. A man who used to make fun of my father and the other preachers in town when they’d come out of the Holiday Inn after prayer breakfasts on the first Monday of every month, up in Pontotoc. A man who’d call out to God in front of them and ask if God was out there, then why didn’t He strike him down dead with a bolt of lightning.
Go ahead, God,
he’d laugh.
I hated him, and I didn’t even know him. I’d only heard about him when I overheard adults having conversations. No wonder the church had trouble keeping its collective voice in rhythm when Mean Jim had walked down the aisle that day.
* * *
Woodson shook me. “Hey. Which way?”
I stared up at her as she materialized in the car seat beside me and the terrifying clarity of the memory receded. “What?” I ejected the tape momentarily.
“Which way, Lucas? I’ve already asked you twice.”
I looked outside and struggled to see through the rain. I became cognizant of everything in the real world again. The pouring rain, the driving wipers on the windshield, the headlights illuminating the forest all around. Finally I recognized our location.
“Left, Woodson. Left ahead. It’s about another three or four miles up Hickory Road.”
“Got a plan, by the way?”
“Not yet.”
Woodson turned left, and the car moved off the paved road and onto gravel. “You might want to start thinking one up,” she said, as she straightened out the wheel and kept driving forward.
* * *
My mind, however, traveled back to Mean Jim.
Nobody ever thought that his “conversion” that day, into the ranks of Christianity, would last. But everyone had been wrong. He never reverted to his old ways. Never again a scrape with the law, never again touched a drink. He became a deacon in my father’s church and remained there faithfully long after my father moved our devastated, motherless family on to a new church a few years later.
Mean Jim experienced a rarity, in my estimation: a conversion experience that stuck. He was a modern-day Saint Augustine in small-town Mississippi.
Mean Jim remarried afterwards. One of the reasons he later testified that he came to God that night was because his wife finally left him, filed for divorce, moved to the next county. Wouldn’t put up with him anymore; last straw sort of thing.
I tried to remember his wife.
Back then he was married to a skinny little lady … Flora, that was it. Flora McKinsey. A tiny lady, as I remembered. They had a kid, a little boy, about four or five years older than I. I only saw him a couple of times. My mother had once confided to me that she thought Jim McKinsey used to beat that boy.
What was that boy’s name? Jamie?
Jamie Mc—
My thoughts, the sum total of my brain processes, froze. Jamie McKinsey.
* * *
“Woodson,” I said, out of the blue. “We have to hurry.”
“Don’t worry, I am.”
“But we have to hurry. Kinsey hasn’t been using my father to get me.”
“What are you talking about? Of course he has.”
I shook my head, still stunned by the realization myself. “No. He hasn’t.”
“Then what has he been doing?” Woodson asked.
The flow of blood seemed to slow in my veins as I said it, as I finally understood what everything had been about all along. Not me. Not me. “He hasn’t been using my father to get to me, Woodson. He’s been using
me
to get to my
father.
”
* * *
I peered through the window a few minutes later and realized we were close. The old pond where my father had baptized Jim McKinsey rolled past on our left as we ascended the long hill leading up to the church. We drove another mile or two through the kudzu-smothered landscape, and our old church finally came into view, perched atop the hill on the left-hand side. The white steeple glowed in the stormy night, the lightning every few seconds illuminating the building and the cemetery landscape beyond as bright as day.
My father’s face filled my mind, and I wondered if he was still alive.
I had Woodson cut the lights halfway up the final hill, as lightning illuminated the church in the distance and we pulled into the driveway of my childhood home. It hadn’t been inhabited for decades, and the desolate building at the end of our driveway looked more like a forgotten crypt than a home anymore.
Woodson shifted into neutral and cut the engine as she turned into the driveway, and we coasted into the carport without a sound. Emerging from the car, I batted a cobweb from my face. “Here’s where we split up,” I said.
“We’re not splitting up.”
I pulled my Luger free of its holster. “Yes, we are. I have to go in there alone. Kinsey said he’d kill my father otherwise. There’s no way I’m risking it.”
“And I have strict orders from Jimmy Raritan to never let you go into any situation alone again since what happened to you in Mara’s grandmother’s basement.”
I shrugged. “At this point, technically, you’re under strict orders to take me to the Jackson field office with the evidence box from the SWK investigation for my brother’s arraignment, and you aren’t doing that, either.”
“There’s no way you’re going in alone, Lucas. Sorry.” She stared at me defiantly. “Unless you’re going to shoot me.”
I knew it was no use. “Okay, okay. But you have to give me a head start. I have to show up alone, at least at first. I don’t know what Kinsey’s planning, but he has to believe I’m alone.” I saw her begin to protest and made a final plea. “It’s my father, Woodson.”
Her lips tightened, but she relented. “Okay. Five minutes. If I don’t hear from you, I’m coming and I’m bringing the entire Mississippi police force with me. You understand?”
“Ten, Woodson. It’ll take me five minutes just to get up the hill to the church.”
She stepped close, and I thought she was about to bargain further. Instead, she reached up, took my neck in one hand, and kissed me with force. When she pulled away, she looked at her watch. “Nine minutes and forty seconds,” she whispered.
I gave her one last look of gratitude, then ran into the night to find my father.