A little boy in the warm buzz of a Sunday morning at church,
dressed in his starchy fragrant best, used to trace the carving in
the wood of a pew. Grooves, chiseled by hand, ran down each pew arm
to a scroll at the end, and the little boy would run his finger
along the grooves, tracing the slow curve down from the top, and
then into the scroll, and around and around to infinity, and a
stop. The wood was golden and warm and had been waxed by hand twice
a month for 125 years. The boy’s father would lay a hand on the
back of the boy’s neck and stroke him gently and watch as the
preacher’s voice boomed out. It was warm, and across the
congregation people in white gently fanned themselves. The boy’s
father had traced those grooves himself when he was a boy.
Sometimes the boy would raise his head and look at the church’s
ceiling, very far away. Across the vaulted ceiling ran beams, the
same color as the wood under his hand. The beams were carved, too,
with scrolls, and the boy wished he could be up there, looking down
at the congregation. The people, he imagined, would look like
pigeons lined up in brown crescent rows, the pews curving across
the floor, pigeons dressed up grandly in white Sunday feathery
clothes, starched, lacy, proper, grand, and plump. He imagined
running his fingers along the grooves in the beams, and wondered
briefly how he would stay out of the way of the rattan ceiling fans
lazily stirring the warm air. It would be hot up there, he thought,
knowing enough to know that hot air rose. Why push the hot air
down, he would wonder, as he always did.
The boy would turn over and rest against his father’s warm body
and rub his cheek against the satin fabric of his father’s vest. He
would look at the church’s stained glass windows, six of them,
three along each side of the sanctuary. They were tall, each of
them a skinny gothic pair with the pointed arches on top, and they
told stories. Here, in stormy colors brooded old Abraham with his
gray beard, a knife in one hand and the hand of a dewy-cheeked boy
in the other; light was just breaking through the clouds. Here was
Joseph, bound in chains and borne away by a gang of men in short
white dresses, while in the background his brothers counted a bag
of money. Daniel, with golden tresses, stood amid a pride of
transfixed lions. And so forth.
The boy looked at Daniel, with his serene blonde visage, and
thought about the time an Egyptian man had come to visit a church
supper. (He always thought about the same thing when he looked at
that window.) A skinny, agile fellow, nut-brown, he leaped up on
the stage in the parish hall and told them stories about Christians
in Egypt and Ethiopia and the Sudan.
“You look at him, now,” the boy’s Aunt Ginnie had said,
whispering in his ear. “That’s probably just the color Jesus
was.”
THEN THE LITTLE BOY’S AUNT ELLA began to play the piano. The sermon
was over. It was time to stand up, which the whole congregation
did, with a grand rustle, and then came the sound of heavy hymn
books pulled from the racks in the backs of the pews, a kind of
mute thunder.
“Softly and tenderly, Jesus is calling… Calling for you and
for me…” the piano played, and the congregation sang. No one
needed the hymn books, really. Oh, it was magnificent. Everyone
knew their parts, and it sounded so big, so fat, so warm. There
were little old ladies singing wiggly soprano, and big ladies who
had deep alto voices, and men in tenor and bass, and some of them
could ornament the melody, too.
“Come home,” sang the altos and sopranos, and the basses and
tenors answered “Come home.” Then all together, “Come ho-o-ome…
Ye who are weary, come ho-o-ome…”
The little boy knew the piano well. He had come to the empty
church with Aunt Ella when it was time to practice. From when he
was very little, when he used to sit on the floor by Aunt Ella’s
feet and watch her work the pedals and thrill to the vibration from
under the body of the grand, till now, when he would wander
different parts of the sanctuary and listen to the sound from
different angles, he knew that piano. It was a Boesendorfer, carved
like the pews, a massive thing brought at colossal trouble and
expense to the church before World War I. It sounded different when
the church was empty, when Aunt Ella practiced, than it did now,
with a full congregation behind her. She watched the pastor and the
congregation through a rectangular wood framed mirror that sat
alongside the music rack. Occasionally, she would catch the boy’s
eye during church and wink at him in that mirror.
THE REVEREND PAT ACTUALLY STARTED the evacuation at Friday night
prayer meeting. And in spite of the groans and cries from many in
the congregation, everybody agreed. It would not be the end of the
world, the Reverend Pat said. “The Lord said a fire, not a flood
next time.” He had arranged to have the congregation of their
sister church in Baton Rouge take many of them in, those without
families. Joe and Pete, who drove the church’s school bus and van,
saw to picking up those without cars and the shut-ins. Everybody
met in the church’s parking lot on Saturday morning for a final
prayer under a sky already angrily spitting wind and rain.
Everybody came, even old Elmer the sexton who waxed the pews every
two weeks, and he even brought a bottle, which everybody knew
about, because old Elmer always had a little buzz on.
Staying at his cousins’ house the next week, the little boy
thought about the church and about what his mother had said when
they finally knew how bad it had gotten.
“I’d feel better if a bomb had just blowed it up,” Ma had said.
The boy, thinking about the lovely church ruined, knew what she
meant. It was crueler, somehow, to spoil than to destroy.
(*This is a work of fiction.)
Lawrence Henry writes every week from North Andover,
Massachusetts.
