Dog on the Cross (13 page)

L
ARGE OAKS AND CEDARS
stand on either side of the road. The morning sun filters through them, their limbs casting wild-patterned shadows
along the pavement. From time to time I look away from the blacktop and over at Mother sitting beside me, thumbing the pages of her Sunday school lesson, pages of her Bible. Light and shadow strobe her face and her complexion seems to alter between the two, between leaf shade and sunlight. I attempt for several moments to secure it in my mind the way she actually looks. I've studied her all my life and should be able to conjure something, but the shadows are coming so swiftly that as soon as an image appears, the darkness blurs it. I try slowing the car, speeding up, but the effect is much the same: mother's face flickering and odd.

We emerge from the trees, make it on to the highway, and in several minutes are pulling into the church's gravel parking lot.
FIRST PENTECOSTAL
, the sign says.
VISITORS WELCOME
. I find a place close to the front and we enter the sanctuary, sit at the back watching people file in. Mother waves to each, beaming, this morning, to have her prodigal son beside her. Some walk over to greet us, but others simply go to their seats, the same ones, I assume, as the week before. When the room fills and the hands of the clock move to nine thirty-five, the man who performed Kenneth's funeral approaches the pulpit.

In several minutes we are singing. I don't know the words, so my eyes shift between the hymnal and the backs of people's heads, the minister above us belting out the song. By the time we reach the second
verse, I've given over the pretense altogether, having become a mere spectator. I hear Mother's voice beside me, so foreign-sounding that I glance at her mouth,
possession
describing this much better than I'd thought. When she catches me looking, she turns toward me slightly, grins.

It was the day before yesterday I found the pictures, and still I haven't spoken of them. Finally, what is there to say? Ask my mother what happened to her at the lake, why her sister committed suicide, the reason she avoided Kenneth all those years? Or perhaps I should suggest she go into counseling, tell her religion is, as Marx said, an opiate to prevent her from facing reality. Finding my place in the songbook, I shake my head at such thoughts and mouth a few words, begin searching to find the chorus.

When it's turned over in my head, I know very little, just segments of a story that barely connect. I can conjecture all I want about Kenneth's motives for giving me his truck, surmise that he did so as confession or payment, a last effort at retribution. Or I could decide it was all intended, that my family's notion of a cartoon devil is not so wide of the mark. But whatever my hypothesis, the pieces of this narrative don't exactly fit, and finally, I'm not sure if I want them to, if I could handle it if they did. After all, as a means of coping, understanding is greatly overrated. There has to be, I think, a better way of dealing with such things, a better way of growing
numb. It's hard not to look around me and see that these people have found theirs. Heading toward the final verse, I hear my mother's strong, clear voice, and I know what's just beneath those syllables, know also that they cause her to feel it less. That, I suppose, is something of an accomplishment: finding a cure you can live with, one that doesn't gnaw away at your soul.

After all, there's pain of my own I'd like to assuage. After Father died, I thought education would expand my consciousness, give me a means of comprehending my grief. But, in many respects, it only clouded my awareness all the more. I'll never know the simple abandon I see in my mother, her head tilted and her hands raised, a look on her face as of total assurance. No doubt these people are deluded, their worship little more than a drug. But were it possible, if I could allow my mind to stop churning, it's one I'd consume without hesitation—open my arm to the needle, widen my mouth for the eye-dropper or pill. There are even times when I'm convinced I could accept the brainwashing gladly. Provided, of course, it would stand between my eyes and the blindfold, the descending strip of black that, as the years progress, threatens to turn my vision to darkness.

He shall wear them when he ministers, and their sound shall be heard when he goes into the holy place before the Lord, and his sons shall wear them when they come near the altar to minister in the holy place, or they will bring guilt on themselves, and die.

—
EXODUS
28:35, 43

R
EVEREND
H
ASSLER WAS
a plump man, his hair just graying around the ears, his eyes kind and sad behind thick glasses. By no means common, Hassler was one who possessed what older generations call the gift of tongues. Since the age of twelve the Spirit had come upon him daily, and in the afternoons when he knelt at his couch, a peculiar speech would stammer from his lips.

Hassler began preaching at sixteen and by twenty-one had evangelized across Oklahoma, Arkansas,
and much of Missouri. After a nervous breakdown one summer, he spent time in a hospital and then, in the early seventies, settled in Perser, married Anita Etheridge, and began pastoring a rural holiness church.

The First Pentecostal was not large—150 when the sanctuary was filled on Easters—but Hassler's congregation adored him. He stood at the pulpit on Sundays and Wednesday evenings, fervent, effusive, and strangely animate. In either pocket he carried a handkerchief to wipe the sweat from his brow, and often, in the middle of a sentence on Jeremiah or an admonition to repentance, Hassler would begin to speak in the tongues of angels.

It was after just such a night that he awoke and found his gift gone. There was no warning, nor did there seem to be cause. He'd come in the afternoon, knelt in his study, and heard his voice ascend in plain and unbroken English. He remained on his knees till the light grew red in the west window, then rose and walked to the parsonage across the lawn.

At first, this change did not trouble him. Over the years he'd become very content. He knew such things were governed by God, not man, and that the Spirit could not be forced. He did not attempt to compel the tongues, and when his wife asked him what was the matter, he did not mention their ceasing.

Then a week went past, a dry month following. Hassler began to grow anxious, and lying in bed one
night, he convinced his wife that they needed to cleanse their home so the Spirit might return.

They took their television to Perser Gun and Pawn, their radio and record player, their collection of blue-grass albums. Hassler persuaded Anita to throw away her drawers of costume jewelry, and himself took his silver-and-turquoise belt buckle and the matching pocket watch and pitched them in the burn barrel.

In two weeks they'd rid their home of magazines, knickknacks, and sugared confections: chocolate and coffee, iced tea and cocoa, the tin of caramel corn neighbors had sent the past Christmas. One evening Hassler went out to his pickup, scratched up the ends of the pinstriping with his pocketknife, and stripped it from the sides of his bed and cab.

Yet, for all this, for all Hassler's supplication, his willingness to divest himself of material possessions, when he knelt at his couch to pray, his speech remained in an earthly tongue.

The weather became hot and dry, and the local paper cautioned residents not to throw cigarettes out their car windows. Hassler walked through his days with an uneasy look, perpetually casting his eyes as if searching for a message in the clouds, a face in the wood paneling to pronounce his deliverance. It was along this time that news came of Leslie Snodgrass.

Snodgrass was an evangelist of fifteen, but everyone who saw him said that being in the presence of
the Baptist himself could not have been more remarkable. They told how the boy laid hands on the sick, preached Christ and fire, gave tongues and interpretation both. All believed he was anointed, and when Hassler heard of this, he knew if anyone could help him recover his gift, this boy was he.

He contacted the evangelist's pastor, a Brother Danforth of Tishomingo, and arranged for Snodgrass to hold a revival at the First Pentecostal for as long as he wished. Danforth said Hassler and his congregation were in for a treat.

“You wouldn't believe how God blesses that boy,” Danforth told him.

“I don't doubt it,” said Hassler, scrawling the word
revival
in enormous letters across the following week of his calendar.

S
NODGRASS ARRIVED
a few evenings later with a duffel in either hand. He was skinny and very pale. He stood on the green plastic turf of Hassler's front porch and rang the doorbell, an older woman waving to him from the golden LTD he'd just climbed out of.

Hassler and his wife greeted the boy and brought him into the living room. They had always been told their home was inviting, but Snodgrass appeared as if he'd stepped into another world. He stood looking at the indentations in the carpet where the television and stereo had formerly sat, then studied the
matching recliners and ceiling fan, the walls where wildflowers hung in imitation brass frames. Finally, he glanced toward the dining room. Ringed by wicker chairs, the glass table was set with bowls of mashed potatoes, green beans, corn. A pork roast rested in the center on a ceramic platter.

The boy turned to them. “Your house is nice,” he said.

Hassler looked out his screen door to where the automobile was making a three-point turn. He gestured toward it and asked Snodgrass whether his mother was coming in.

“Grandmother,” the boy corrected. “She has a room ready for her at the Fairmont.”

The Hasslers looked briefly toward each other; this particular hotel was less than a mile's distance.

“But
you're
staying with us, aren't you?” Anita asked.

“Yes ma'am.”

“We have plenty of space,” Hassler began to object, rushing at the door to see the gold car pull back onto the highway and remove itself from view. “The bed in the guest room's a queen. She could have slept in there with you or out here on the—”

“Nana wanted it this way,” Snodgrass explained. “She said if I'm going to evangelize, I need to learn how to stay with people. She said she won't be around forever.”

The Hasslers, forcing oddly identical grins onto
their faces, told him they understood, that his grandmother seemed to have given sound advice.

They made small talk for a while longer, and then Anita ushered Snodgrass and her husband to the table. The plates rested on place mats imprinted with corn of all sizes. The handles of the forks and spoons were plastic cornstalks, and there was corn on the salt and pepper shakers as well. Anita saw the boy examining all of this and laughed nervously.

“I collect corn,” she told him. “Anything with corn.”

Snodgrass smiled, pulled back a chair.

Hassler said grace, and the three of them ate without exchange, no sounds but the scraping of their forks. He observed the evangelist from the corners of his eyes. He looked frail, Hassler thought, almost elderly. His eyes were darkly circled, the whites slightly pink, and seeing this, Hassler decided there was something otherworldly about him.

When he could no longer bear the silence, the pastor wiped his mouth and pointed to a scar that ran just above the knuckle of the boy's left index finger.

“Where'd that come from?” he asked.

Snodgrass looked at the scar for a moment, then at Hassler.

“Go-cart,” he said.

“
Go
-cart?”

“Yes sir. A friend and I were riding go-carts in the pasture a few years back. The chain came loose and cut off my finger.”

“Clean off?” Hassler asked.

“It was dangling by skin,” Snodgrass told him, and took a long drink of water.

Hassler winced, shook his head in sympathy, but could think of nothing further to say. He found this strange, for he was comfortable with others and could easily draw conversation from them. He looked at his wife, and she began to provoke what discussion she could. But the boy would speak only to answer questions or express gratitude when a dish was passed. After he'd finished eating, he told Anita that dinner was very good and thanked them both.

They rose, sat a few uncomfortable hours in the living room, and then Hassler showed Snodgrass the guest room. He stood in the doorway watching the boy unpack his things, set them in neat rows on the mahogany dresser. The pastor asked if there was anything he needed, if the room was all right, if the bed would be comfortable to sleep on.

Snodgrass smiled. He looked about embarrassedly. “This,” he said, faltering, “is the first night I've spent away from home.”

“Is that right?”

“Yes sir.”

Hassler stood there, not knowing what to say.

“Would it be okay if I slept on the couch?”

“Of course,” the pastor told him, “wherever you're—”

“Are you sure?”