Dog on the Cross (9 page)

S
OME OF THIS,
he said, had been his own nature and failing. It came from looking at catalogs and from hearing others on the school bus and from thinking on lust. It was sin carving him out, hollowing him so he'd be useless to God.

But a great deal had been because of Amy. Since nine years old she'd cast her widened eyes at him.
She was one year older—large in the bosom and hips. No makeup, homemade dresses draping against her ankles and wrists, she had waist-long hair braided in a thick, blond rope down the middle of her back. She'd watch him at the altars while he was praying and often would stop him in the foyer to talk about his faith.

There were times he would labor to understand why it was she bothered him, whether the way she looked or the way she looked at him or the expressions of others when she walked along the pews, unaware. Always with Amy the sense that she did not know, did not want to impress, could only be impressed upon, like thumbprints in candle wax. Whatever she was or felt, he knew it before she spoke, and there was a softness about her, as if seen constantly through a smeared pane of glass.

He tried to tell her how she tormented him. He'd tried at camp meeting and church camp and at dinner on the grounds. One afternoon—it was the summer he turned fourteen—while out in the parking lot waiting for their families, he decided he would explain how he needed to be left alone.

“Amy,” he said, leaning against the trunk of his mother's car.

She turned to face him, and he began playing with the zipper on his Bible case.

“What do you think we are to each other?”

“We?”

“Me and you.”

She smiled, squinted her nose. “What'd you mean?”

“Like—”

“Like a couple?”

He nodded.

“I don't know,” she said. “What do you think?”

“About us?” he stalled.

“Mm-hmm.”

“Being a couple?”

“Right.”

He dropped his eyes to his feet and stood a few seconds, neither of them saying a word. When he looked at her again, she had leaned back her head, the sun lighting the transparent hair along her neck and cheeks.

He zipped his Bible shut, told her he had no idea.

I
N HIS SPIRIT,
he knew he shouldn't be entertaining such conversation. His mother said Amy was sweet and dedicated now but, like any woman, could one day turn loose and follow the path of sin. They'd talk about it when he was helping her fix dinner. His father had left a few years before. Since then, it was just he and Charlotte.

He could remember sitting on the kitchen step stool after church, chopping vegetables for stew: celery and carrot slices stacked alongside the cutting board like coins.

“Gabriel,” his mother was telling him, “you need to watch that sort of girl. I've seen them ruin men. Completely
ruin
them.”

He kept chopping.

“Your uncle Richard married a woman who seemed nice. After six months, none of us could be around her.”

He quit chopping and looked up. “Aunt Connie?”

“No,” she said. “This was his first marriage. This was Donna.” Charlotte took the cutting board away from him and scraped celery into the pot. Frowning, she gave it back.

“I didn't know Uncle Richard was married before Connie.”

“It wasn't good for him,” she said. “When Richard got saved, we all decided not to talk about it. There's no need to bring up the past once it's under the blood.”

“How long were they together?”

“Once it's under the blood it does not even exist.”

“How long?” he asked.

“Three years,” his mother told him, stirring the pot. “It nearly drove him to the madhouse.”

He reached over, got several more carrots out of the bag, and started cutting.

“She'd come to the house in short shorts, whining around in that voice. Your uncle Keith and I tried to say something, but he wouldn't listen.”

“How come?”

Charlotte stopped stirring and looked at him over the rims of her glasses. She taught English at a Christian high school, had cautioned her son about using incorrect grammar.

“Why not?” he said.

Gabriel's mother picked up the wooden spoon resting on a paper towel beside the stove. The spoon was wet and the towel clung to it. She snatched the towel away, smoothed it, and set it back on the counter.

“It was because of lust,” she said. “I hate to say so, but it is only the truth. Your uncle Richard was afflicted by demons of lust.” She walked over to the refrigerator, opened the door, stooped. “We couldn't have been more thankful when he divorced her and got his deliverance.”

The boy thought he knew his uncle Richard; he used to pull Gabriel's wagon behind his lawn mower when Gabriel was small. He had a difficult time thinking his uncle had been afflicted by anything.

Turning on the stool, he looked at his mother. Her head was stuck inside the refrigerator, one arm braced against the door, fog rolling out from between her legs. He cut a slice of carrot, put it in his mouth and crunched.

“Gabriel,” her voice echoed.

“Yes?”

“Don't spoil your supper.”

I
T WAS EARLY
that summer, around the middle of June, that the Reverend Bobby Hassler announced their church would be starting revival. They hadn't had one in years, and he'd decided to bring in an evangelist, named Leslie Snodgrass, who was only fifteen. Hassler told them he would set the church aflame.

By that time, it'd become bad with Gabriel. He was sinning twice a day, and even when he'd ask forgiveness he knew it was useless. He told God it was too large for him, like the apostle's thorn. He copied out the passage in red ink, taped it to the mirror above his dresser:
My grace is sufficient for thee, my strength is made perfect in weakness.
Some nights when the moon was coming through his window, he'd lie in bed, scanning the words till he fell asleep.

The first night of revival, he was so tired he could hardly hold open his eyes. He'd been dreading the services, knew they only meant more time around Amy. When he walked into church that evening, he went and sat on the opposite side of the building but could not keep his eyes from creeping across the sanctuary, watching the smooth spot behind the girl's ear where her skin turned to hair. It took effort to shake his attention from it when the evangelist began to speak.

Leslie Snodgrass was short and pale, and his eyes were sunken into their sockets. He had the look of one who didn't spend time around others, and Gabriel
caught himself questioning whether he'd undergone the same trials or whether he'd already overcome them. The evangelist's grandmother, with whom the boy lived, sat on the front pew with a tape recorder, pressing its red button whenever Snodgrass began to speak. She was a small, elderly woman, but she had a muscular look about her, and Gabriel's mother said she was a blessing because she reminded them of the way women used to be in the church—wise and sturdy, unshakable in the faith. For a reason Gabriel did not understand, Delores Snodgrass frightened him.

Snodgrass began that night by reading a verse in Hebrews, having everyone stand to acknowledge the Word. His voice did not sound small and shrill like they'd expected. It sounded much older, deep and firm, a little sad.

“For if,” Snodgrass began to read, “we sin willfully after we have received knowledge of the truth, there no longer remains a sacrifice for sins, but a certain fearful expectation of judgment, and fiery indignation which will devour the adversaries. Anyone who has rejected Moses' law dies without mercy on the testimony of two or three witnesses. Of how much worse punishment, do you suppose, will he be thought worthy who has trampled the Son of God underfoot, counted the blood of the covenant by which he was sanctified a common thing, and insulted the Spirit of grace?”

With that, he bowed his head and started to lead them in prayer. Before Gabriel closed his eyes, he glanced across the room, noticing for the first time how small Amy looked. He could have picked her off the ground and held her.

Snodgrass finished praying, asked them to be seated, and started to preach. The first thing he said was that his sermon was not addressed to sinners in the audience. A revival, he told them, wasn't for sinners.

“Revival,” he said, “is for those who have one time been awake and then, through carelessness and temptation and a lack of attention, have fallen back asleep. It isn't for those who've never been awake. Revival is for the backslider.”

He went on like that, his voice becoming louder and more commanding as he went. After he'd been at it for fifteen minutes, preaching about falling away from the Spirit and the special punishments reserved for those who'd blasphemed, people began growing excited. Gabriel could see it moving among them like a wave, folks becoming agitated, shifting in their seats. And the longer Snodgrass spoke, the louder the elders shouted, the more Gabriel felt a pain growing deep in his stomach. His eyes started to ache, and by the end of the sermon he wanted to crawl between the pew cushions.

When Snodgrass gave the altar call, asking all of them to come in and rededicate their lives, Gabriel
went up and knelt beside Thomas Campbell. He told God he was sorry for his sin and reprobation. He asked him to rebaptize him in the Spirit, to give him the strength to withstand the trial he was under. He prayed so fiercely that sweat beaded his forehead and neck; so long that when he looked up he and Hassler were the only ones left.

Directly, the pastor rose, went to the podium, and dismissed service. People stood, walked over, and began crowding around the evangelist, telling him how much they'd enjoyed his preaching, how strongly they could feel the anointing. Gabriel saw that his mother was waiting in line to talk with Snodgrass too, so he threaded his way down the aisle, went back to the foyer. He wanted to keep the burning of God's Spirit inside him.

He walked outside and sat at the bottom of the handicapped ramp. The night was warm and the noise of cicadas swelled in the field across the fence. He sat listening to them, hugging his knees to his chest.

In a few minutes they stopped, and he heard gravel crunch. Turning, he saw Amy coming toward him across the parking lot. She walked up, stood beside him.

“Isn't he good?” she said.

“Who?”

“The preacher.”

“Yes,” Gabriel said, “he is good.”

She stood for a while on one foot. Then the other.

“Do you mind if I sit?” she asked.

Gabriel looked at the ground, hoping she'd go away, but she did not. She squatted and sat next to him.

He didn't know what else to say, so they sat in silence. A few people came out, got in their cars, and left, but most were still inside. Gabriel was debating going back in, finding an empty room, when he felt Amy's hip brush up against his.

It was the first time a girl had sat so close, and it felt like electricity moving down his throat, into his stomach and hips. Part of him wanted to get away, save himself for the Lord and His Spirit, but the other part was on fire.

Gabriel was unsure how long he stayed like that, hip to hip with Amy on the ramp, never even glancing to his side. He sat thinking about how if they were man and wife, he'd undress her slowly at night, brush her hair like a china doll. He thought how they could lie in bed, reading aloud the Scriptures, that when they coupled it would be an act of worship.

The door opened. He turned and saw that Snodgrass had come out onto the porch. He looked over, noticed the two of them, turned and walked back inside.

“He's so good,” Amy whispered. “I hope he stays longer than a week.”

Later that night, Gabriel stood in the center of his room with dress pants shucked around his ankles, her voice going through his head like something hot and sharp.

T
HE NEXT WEEK,
service for Gabriel was excruciating. Night after night, he'd sit listening to Snodgrass preach, watching folk crowd the altars to receive their blessing. The Spirit continued dealing with him, beckoning him to repentance, and he'd often kneel at his seat, asking God to spare his life and soul, the smell of his own sweat rising from the pew.

There was a darkness, he said, that covered you in the midst of sin. The deeper one goes, the cloudier it becomes, like walking through a world of ash. You begin to hate yourself, despising the weakness of the flesh, its wants and desires. Soon when the voices come to torment, you start wishing to be dead.

Gabriel was always unsure why he did not then repent, why he didn't make certain his salvation. Perhaps it was because he did not want to embarrass himself in front of the congregation. They'd known him as a somber young man, serious about his faith; to confess that he'd been living with sin would have made him look a fraud. Perhaps, and he said he was more ashamed to admit so, it was on account of his desire for Amy. He knew that the further he moved from God, the closer he would come to her.

Lying in bed after service was worse. It was there,
among the quiet of the house, that the Spirit would work hardest. His family had been known for visions, through his mother's line down. She had related many of these revelations, how his great-grandmother once fistfought the Devil when he came to her in the figure of a lion.

Being far from sanctified, Gabriel did not see the actual images that his forebears had. But in his mind the portrait of Hell was vivid, as if thrown against a screen. He saw endless dark beneath caverns of rock, torment of nail and tooth and flame.

One night, he became so frightened he walked down the hall to his mother's room and climbed into her bed. She allowed her son to get close, put her arm around him.

“Gabriel,” she said, “are you okay?”

“I don't think so,” he told her.

“What's wrong?”

“I don't know.”

They lay there, listening to the crickets outside the window, a green light coming in, moonshine off the leaves.