This Side of Jordan (25 page)

“Hey there,” said Alvin, easing between two of the horses. The girl looked up, squinting her eyes against the sun. The farm boy asked, “You watching these horses?”

“They ain't watching me.”

“How come you ain't in church with them other folks?” Alvin noticed a purple birthmark behind her ear, a sign of misfortune. Also, she had a nose like a russet potato. Poor thing.

She cocked her head. “Why ain't you?”

“I got business out here, that's why.” He puffed himself up for her benefit.

“Me, too.”

The girl completed the cat's cradle and sat still on the wooden bucket. The morning breeze blew lightly through her hair. Within the church, organ tones accompanied the plaintive voices of men and women joined in song. Alvin studied the girl. She looked drowsy and dim-witted. She was stick thin, but had soft little titties on her chest, so he figured she wasn't more than four or five years younger than himself. Her eyes were cloudy, her face expressionless as a cow's. Maybe she was sick, too. A girl her age had died in the sanitarium the morning Alvin was released, drowned in her own blood. He'd never heard a peep out of her.

“You from around here?” he asked, shuffling his feet in the dust. It was all he could think of to say. For some reason, he grew shy. Maybe she was a little pretty. He'd seen worse.

“'Course,” she replied, fooling with the yarn. “I been adopted by the Lord.”

“Where do you live?”

“Inside the church,” she said. “Down in the basement.”

“You like sleeping in a church?”

“I don't mind. They's worse places.”

He nodded. “Yeah, I guess so.”

“Jesus didn't never live in any big old mansion,” said the girl, unraveling her yarn out through the palm of one hand. “He didn't need all that fanciness to get by.”

Inside the church, the organ quit and the singing stopped. Shortly after, Alvin could hear the preacher's voice echoing within, as if everyone listening to him was half-deaf.

“Maybe I ought to go in there and sit down,” Alvin said to the girl. “I guess nobody'd mind.”

“Don't you love Jesus?” the girl asked, squinting up at Alvin in the glare of the morning sun. Something with her eyes caught Alvin's attention, how they flicked about like squirrels in a tree.
This girl's not right in the head,
Alvin thought.
She's suffered some peculiar condition whereby she can sort of talk all right and even make a little sense now and then, but some part of her is cracked and not even sleeping in a church can fix it.

“I guess Jesus got enough to worry about.” Alvin stroked the mane of the horse harnessed to the buggy. “He probably don't care what I do or where I go. I could get inside there and sit down in a corner somewhere, He might not even notice me.”

“His eye is on the sparrow and I know He's watching me,” the girl said, quoting from a hymn Aunt Hattie sang in the kitchen on Sundays. “We all been adopted by Jesus, and He loves us no matter what we do 'cause we're His children.”

“You get that from a preacher?” Alvin heard the doxology,
Praise God, from Whom all blessings flow,
as the collection plate was being passed through the congregation.

“Nobody had to tell me,” said the girl. “I knowed myself it's true.

I trust Jesus.”

“Good for you.”

“You better, too.”

“Oh yeah?”

“All sinners need Jesus.”

“What would you know about sin? You're just a girl.”

He was losing patience now, and decided she wasn't anything worth looking at, after all.

“Why ain't you scared of Jesus?” she asked. “Didn't nobody tell you He's coming soon?”

“Jesus don't scare me as much as some other things,” said Alvin, taking a look down the road toward Allenville. He felt a bad cough coming on, maybe even a dizzy fit.

“What other things?” the girl asked.

“That ain't no concern of yours.”

“There ain't nobody's business that ain't Jesus'.”

“Well, you ain't Jesus now, are you?”

Alvin let go of the horse and walked out toward the edge of the field where the last buggy was parked. Why had he even bothered trying to strike up a conversation with a stupid girl obviously afflicted by some dumbpalsy? He'd just wanted to be a little friendly, and ended hearing another sermon. People weren't nice anywhere these days. He looked for Rascal. Last he had seen him, the dwarf was digging around by the roadside for more wildflowers. The organ had started up again with another hymn.

Alvin walked along the fence until he came around to the church front and climbed the ten steps (one for each of the Lord's Commandments) to the landing and eased open the large wooden door. With the preacher's voice raised once more to his congregation, nobody noticed Alvin slip inside and take a seat by himself on the far end of the rear pew. He removed his cap and looked for Chester and saw him in the front row on the aisle, felt hat in hand, attention rapt and focused on the preacher perched above him. He didn't notice Alvin. The surrounding congregation wasn't much different from those who sat in the pews back in Farrington. The ladies wore the same frilly sunbonnets and the men smelled of Wildroot and Saturday night liquor. Not one of them did anything but sit like boards and listen to a fellow who looked like every country preacher Alvin had seen in his life: stony-faced, a plain black suit that might've been shared with the local undertaker, eyes like hot-fire.

The preacher's voice bellowed between the pitched and narrow walls of the small church, “FRIENDS, YOU MIGHT THINK YOU CAN CHOOSE YOUR RELIGION, BUT IN TRUTH IT ALWAYS CHOOSES YOU. THE LORD
PRO
VIDES WHILE SATAN
DI
VIDES. IGNORING THAT FACT CAN BE THE GREATEST MISTAKE OF YOUR LIVES! FRIENDS, I AM NOT HERE TO OFFER YOU SALVATION! ONLY THE LORD CAN DO THAT! I AM NOT HERE TO LEAD YOU PAST WORLDLY TEMPTATIONS! ONLY JESUS CAN DO THAT! ONLY THROUGH HIS EYES WILL YOU BE ABLE TO SEE THE SHADOW THAT'S BEEN STALKING YOU SINCE THE DAY YOU WERE BORN! YOU CANNOT MAKE RESTITUTION TO ME FOR ERRORS OF FAITH OR JUDGMENT! I AM NOT YOUR REDEEMER! JESUS IS! BUT I AM HERE TO WARN YOU TODAY: SINCE THE FALL, OUR HEARTS HAVE BEEN BLACKENED BY SINS CONCEIVED AND CONCEALED! ALONE, WE HAVE NO HOPE OF REDEMPTION! ALONE, WE ARE ALREADY LOST AND GIVEN OVER TO THE FIERY PITS! OUR FATES ARE SEALED, OUR AGONY DELIVERED! THE ROPE ABOVE THE GALLOW SWINGS IN A TROUBLING WIND!
YEA, THE LIGHT OF THE WICKED IS PUT OUT, AND THE FLAME OF HIS FIRE DOES NOT SHINE!
TRUSTING IN THE CERTAINTY OF OUR ANGUISH, WE WALK DEAF, DUMB AND BLIND TOWARD THE PIT! YET, JESUS DOES NOT FORSAKE US! EVEN AS WE HAVE FORSAKEN OURSELVES, HIS GRACIOUS HEART WAITS TO REDEEM US, TO RESTORE OUR SOILED—”

Alvin got up and walked out.

Disgusted with sermons, he sat down on the top step of the porch and watched the breeze wash across the fields of wildrye to the south. The sun was hot now and Alvin unbuttoned his shirt cuffs and rolled up his sleeves. What the hell had Chester brought them here for? What was his plan? The farm boy walked down to the bottom of the steps to look for the dwarf. He guessed that Sunday services were almost done and soon the organ would play its final hymn. He wandered out to the road and discovered Rascal sitting astride the suitcase once again, his bouquet of purple asters in one hand, a black leatherbound Bible in the other.

“What's that you're reading there?”

The dwarf looked up from the page. “The Book of Job. I thought that, as we are not allowed inside the church, and seeing it is Sunday, after all, I ought to study.”

“Where'd you get that?” Alvin asked, pointing at Rascal's bible.

“From a thoroughly delightful young lady I just met.”

“I hope you don't mean that ugly little thing sitting over there behind the church looking after the horses.”

“Oh, did you meet her, as well?”

“Sure,” Alvin replied. “She talked my ear off about Jesus. I think she's afflicted.”

“Oh? Why, she seemed quite enlightened to me. I was impressed by her command of Scripture.”

“She says she been adopted by Jesus,” said Alvin, “but she don't hardly know nothing about anything, especially her own self. She thinks she's smart, but she don't begin to fool me.”

“I found her quite well-versed in the Scriptures. I wouldn't be surprised if she teaches Sunday school somewhere. She's very bright.”

“I think she's dumb as ditchwater,” said Alvin. “The day she starts teaching folks about Jesus, Billy Sunday'll be singing polkas with the devil in Hades.”

“Well, I wouldn't worry about that,” said the dwarf. “Our Lord only calls those He deems most capable.”

Inside the church, the organist began playing and Alvin heard the front doors swing open. The dwarf closed the Bible and jumped up, grabbing his suitcase. As the first people flooded the staircase, Alvin followed the dwarf across the road and behind the church where the homely girl was still perched on her wooden water bucket, the cat's cradle yarn in her lap. When she saw Alvin and Rascal, she swiveled on the bucket to face them.

The dwarf gave the Bible back to her. “I'm sorry that I did not get the chance to finish studying Job's plight. I promise to try and locate a Bible of my own very soon and complete my lesson.”

The girl smiled. “You been teaching this one here about the Lord?”

Before Rascal could reply, Alvin stepped forward and snatched the Bible out of the girl's hand. “Looky here, sweetheart: he don't need to teach me nothing about nobody! I already learned about Jesus Christ Almighty when I was half this tall, and only dumbbells ever believed there was such a thing, and I don't need no ugly little girl telling me nothing to the contrary! You get me?”

Then Alvin threw the Bible into the dirt and took the dwarf by the crook of his arm and hauled him up to the fenceline on the north side of the church where people filing out to their buggies or automobiles couldn't see them.

“I don't know why you waste your time like that,” Alvin said, giving the fence a good shake.

Rascal laid his suitcase against one of the posts and growled back, “I have no idea what you mean.”

“That ugly girl.”

“Well, you were very rude.”

“She wouldn't understand nothing else.”

“Nevertheless.”

“How long do you figure we're supposed to wait out here?” Alvin asked, taking a look out toward the rear where people were beginning to depart. He felt jittery as hell now. A motor roared to life nearer the road and the backfire caused some commotion with the horses. Alvin heard the girl yapping like a barking dog as she tried to calm them down.

“We just ought to take care not to be seen, I suppose,” the dwarf said, down on both knees studying the weeds growing along the rotting plank foundation of the church. “We're to be entirely inconspicuous.”

“Pardon?”

Rascal looked up, glee drawn on his face. “I believe there may be field mushrooms growing underneath here!”

“Oh yeah?”

“I tried for so long to grow them under our washroom, but even where our plumbing leaked, the soil conditions were simply unsuited for their purposes. Here, though, even in midsummer, the dirt is moist and sweetened by shadow, ideal for waxy caps.” He frowned. “If we only had time to crawl under for a look.” Rascal stuck his arm under the foundation.

“You get yourself spider-bit sticking your hand under there like that,” Alvin said, having a quick peek of his own. “A black widow'll kill you in nothing flat.” He snapped his fingers for emphasis, then coughed.

“I'm quite careful not to disturb their webs.”

“That don't matter much to them that like to bite you.”

“In fact, most spiders aren't at all aggressive by nature,” the dwarf replied. “They're shy to the point of cowardice. They attack only when prodded to action. That includes the black widow. I've never had any trouble.”

“Just the same, I wouldn't be poking around underneath there like that, if I was you.”

“Well, seeing as you have little or no interest whatsoever in learning about the natural world, I'm sure you wouldn't.”

Alvin looked back toward the rear of the church. Buggies and automobiles were rolling off down the road, people heading home for Sunday dinner. Soon, only the homely girl remained out back. While Rascal dug for mushrooms at the north wall, Alvin watched the girl stroll about humming some hymn to herself. After a few minutes, she disappeared. Hearing the door close with a soft thud, Alvin nudged the dwarf with the toe of his boot. “Maybe we ought to go in.”

The dwarf swiveled his head to look up. “Pardon me?”

“I think we ought to go inside now.”

The dwarf pulled his arm out emptyhanded and wiped the dirt off onto his sleeves. “I'd rather wait out here until we're called.”

“I bet he's sticking up the collection plate.”

“Oh?” Rascal stopped hunting in the black dirt. “Is that what he told you?”

“He didn't tell me nothing,” Alvin replied. “I just figured it out on my own. Why else'd we be here at a church?”

“It doesn't seem to me as though heisting the collection box from a country church would prove all that worthwhile.”

“Maybe he knows something we don't.”

“I'd assume so,” said the dwarf, starting back in again with his one-armed digging. He didn't appear much interested in what was occurring inside the church. Alvin noticed how most of the trip Rascal had been like that, talking about everything under the sun, except what they were doing day after day in these towns they visited. Alvin felt guilt and fear daily, while the dwarf's conscience seemed not to trouble him. It was a plain mystery how Rascal managed to avoid confronting the truth of the crimes they'd helped Chester commit. At night Alvin wondered if perhaps the dwarf actually enjoyed all the misery they'd inflicted, or if everything the dwarf had endured in his former life had frozen his heart to the suffering of others.