Revival

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 di

 • • •

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.”