III.
III. What was left of the snow melted in the shallow pools that surrounded the El Shaddai Temple of the Holy Ghost. Malcolm was late—the sound of singing came through the cinder block walls—but that was a good thing; he didn’t want to speak to anyone. To be here was enough. They would see him. They would know. Here was their wayward child come home at last, the light they had sent out into wider world to collect degrees and wisdom and a wealthy congregation in a state most had never visited. That wider world had broken him, of course, burned away his fat and arrogance as perhaps they had known it would, so that he was reduced, stripped bare—they might believe—for his trip through the Eye of the Needle. He knocked the ice from his boots and slipped into the back pew. Most of the church was gathered at the front singing from hymnals or playing instruments , piano, three guitars, an autoharp, everything just as Malcolm had left it: the wood paneling, the glowing space heater, the painting of Christ knocking on a closed door. When the choir sang I’ve got a mansion, just over that hillside he knew they were irreconcilable with the world, square pegs in the round hole of existence . They were dreamers, fools for Christ. The elderly in Velcro tennis shoes; the young families who sat closer to the rear behind a row of severe-looking Hispanics, father and mother, daughter and son, faces fixed as if awaiting sentence ; the single elderly black couple; the small girl who crawled along the 92 The Dark Corner floor showing the tarnished buckles of her plastic shoes. Near the front, the old man sat stiff and silent, hands resting—Malcolm knew—across the Bible his wife had carried for better than forty years. It was only after his mother had passed that the old man had put away his Early Times and combed his hair. Before she died, Sundays had been for cutting brush or plowing, running his antique Cub Cadet through the morning fields, then sitting in his shed drinking tallboys and sharpening mower blades. There was always something to file or paint, a worn fitting, a bushing gone soft. Malcolm saw the old man in his blue coveralls diving into the wreck of his Impala, the Braves on the radio. Look at me here, son. Rising from the engine block to scratch his nose on a greasy forearm. I don’t need a preacher to tell me there ain’t a thing new under the sun. When the singing was over a man began to pray and hands went up as if for balance, palms open to the Lord. A woman raised both arms and the loose skin swayed like a sheet drying on a line. Oh, Jesus. There were the sick and unchurched. The shut-ins. The lost jobs and heart attacks. Meth-addled children glassy-eyed and adrift. Pray for them. Pray for the tired parents who had stroked out walking from the Coke machine back to the weave room at Piedmont Quilting. Pray for the cousin whose trailer had burned to its cinders. Pray for brother Tillman still down in his back and bad hurting. Malcolm saw the black woman stagger into the aisle, hands aloft, and realized the man beside her was the man who had stopped for him last night, Malcolm’s discarded angel. Good way to get yourself hit, he had said. When the prayer was complete the hands came down and the preacher stood and moved not to the pulpit but to the orange carpet in front of the altar . He carried a Bible but did not open it, a muscular, white-haired man with long sideburns and thick-rimmed glasses named Clyde Dell. He had been the preacher as far back as Malcolm could remember. He had also been one of the janitors at Malcolm’s high school. “I don’t know where the Lord has something for me today or not,” he began. “I woke up this morning with a tiredness down in me, something that lay deeper than sleep, and I just lay there staring up at the ceiling with Annabelle there beside me, all tired and worn out. Like the Lord didn’t have no use left for me.” He raised the Bible slightly and for a moment it trembled [3.145.15.205] Project MUSE (2024-04-25...
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