Centerville

Chapter 4

33 Chapter 4 Reverend Edwards sat writing his sermon in his church office. Because the church itself was small, the brick house next to it that had once served as a parsonage was used to hold church meetings and the minister’s office. When Reverend Edwards had first arrived in Centerville as the newly appointed minister of the Methodist church, the congregation hadn’t filled the pews, but now some mornings they had to set up metal folding chairs at the back and along the sides to fit everyone. The growth of the congregation was his pride, and even if pride was a sin, he allowed himself the surge of it each Sunday morning as he looked out over the sanctuary. Recently the church members had discussed fundraising for the main building’s expansion. These facts were part of what brought the minister such ease as he sat in the square of light writing the final notes for the sermon he would deliver the next morning. His calling had arrived when he was a sophomore at a small religious college intending to major in chemistry. That fall he’d enrolled in a required religion course with the Reverend Dr. Fleming, and in the high-ceilinged room where the class met two afternoons each week, Dr. Fleming’s words had moved him. Other students had 34 complained about the professor who recited long passages of Scripture from memory, but the words had caught inside Reverend Edwards and he’d looked forward to those afternoons. Later he wasn’t sure whether it had been those recitations that had convinced him to become a minister, or the debates held on topics like good and evil in the modern world, or the time he’d spent in Dr. Fleming’s office. Dr. Fleming had alternately made him question his beliefs, then filled him with a certainty in both God and himself. Suddenly that year, the struggle of his parents to make ends meet during his years of growing up in the Depression had come into focus. His parents had let that struggle define their lives, when what mattered was not the daily toil but that one’s life found meaning from within, despite the hardships the world sent. His decision to enter the seminary at the college had brought with it an immense relief, so much so that when his mother had worried that a minister’s salary would be considerably less than a scientist’s, he’d brushed her aside. The Korean War was being fought, and his decision meant he could end up without a draft deferment after college, but that hadn’t deterred him either. Even before he’d learned he wouldn’t have to go and fight, he hadn’t felt any fear or hesitation. Instead, he’d been filled with the solid sense of having found his way. After graduation, he’d married his college sweetheart, and everything had fallen into place. The draft for the war had ended, and a few years later, after serving under another minister, he’d been sent to Centerville to pastor his own church. The small town felt idyllic after the city where he’d grown up. In the relative peace and prosperity of the nineteen fifties and early sixties, his optimism had evolved naturally. Compared to previous wars, the Cold War was a quiet, faraway threat. Neighborhoods expanded, and all across town his parishioners sat around the supper table each night in their houses to say grace. When his daughter was born and his congrega- 35 tion began to grow, the minister felt he’d been handed the world. Nothing had threatened his sense of easy optimism, not the recent racial discontentment in the large cities, nor even the more particular but possibly ubiquitous threat portrayed in the widely publicized, upcoming movie release of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. Reverend Edwards was a quiet man who enjoyed equally sitting alone in his sunny office writing or holding meetings with his parishioners. A good listener, he found the right words that would direct, or reveal, or cause someone to see the other side of an argument or situation without his seeming too preacherly. Standing at the pulpit had been the only part of his office that had initially felt strained. He’d stepped up behind it, looking out through the thick lenses of his glasses at the sparsely populated church...