Echo Lake: A Novel (31 page)

People disappear and the police investigate and the
circumstances are always mysterious, the bodies rarely found, the disappearances called runaways, deadbeat fathers and mothers, suicides. Drugs, now, are the most popular explanation.

But we know they aren’t all just the lost, the wicked, the addicted, he said. We know where most of them are, and some of us know exactly how they got there. Levi pointed out into the driveway. But Emily knew where he was pointing. The lake, which lay beyond the road, across fields, and across the main road, across Emily’s property and through the woods behind her house.

Until now, I knew this and ignored it. Like the rest of you, I imagined that we were different, that this place had its own wisdom, a wisdom that worked to flush out trouble. I didn’t think of what that meant or what it did to us as people. I didn’t even think that it bothered God. I thought, in my heart, that God was on our side, that the world would be better if they let people work out their justice amongst themselves. I really believed this, folks. And I bet that some of you do, too.

A faint, but unmistakably disapproving sound came from a man at a table in the back. Levi looked down at his notes again, turning the single page and smoothing it down. He paused, running his hand along the page. Emily had time to glance backwards—everyone watched him. Only the smaller children remained oblivious, playing on the ground, some splashing their toys through the mud puddles that had gathered in the low points of the yard, something that surely would have concerned their parents if they had been watching. The adults, though, looked forward, watching Levi.

I didn’t realize what it did to us until the deaths this year—the woman murdered in the yard, the children missing. Finally, people were paying attention. People were afraid.

The only difference between then and now, brothers and sisters, is that these murders are not just being quietly taken care of. They are out for everyone to see. Our secrets are in the open now and we don’t understand them in the light of day. Make no mistake: these murders are against the will of God, but the ones before them were against the will of God, too. Levi stopped and rifled around under the podium. Emily’s first and strangest thought was that he had a gun, that he would shoot them all and them himself, that she would die here, but then her mind came back. Why would she think this?

He pulled out a a hair net. The kind older women wore over their curlers before bed or cafeteria workers wore as they spooned helpings of mashed potatoes and cobbler onto into the portioned lunch trays at elementary schools. This hairnet was covered in black streaks, as though somebody had broken a pen and spilled the ink all over it.

I found this in my toolbox back home, Levi said. He made small, coughing noises and looked down at the podium. Emily held her hand up to her throat in automatic sympathy—He was crying.

I found this and I know what it is. He breathed in deeply. I know what it is because the Lord showed me in a dream. He showed me what I did and he told me the way. He said to admit it. To admit everything and to get on my knees and ask you all to admit it, too, for the crimes you have committed and the crimes you’ve allowed others to commit.

Emily could hear people speaking now behind her.

Pastor Levi, one of the young men in a Jesus T-shirt shouted from the back. Are you okay? Levi had stepped away from the podium. He unbuttoned his shirtsleeves and rubbed the edges of his sleeves under his eyes.

I am all right, he said. I’m better than all right.

He stepped forward, out in front of the podium, his shoes sinking into the mud.

I killed Frannie Collins, he said. And for that I should be punished. I urge anyone else who has committed a similar act to come forward and admit it to the congregation and beg God for forgiveness as I am.

7

On a particularly warm day in July, before Emily arrived in Heartshorne, Levi had finished his Wednesday afternoon sermon and had left the church almost immediately, saying he had a conference call with the women’s crisis pregnancy center they had partnered with in Keno, the one placed right across from the only Planned Parenthood south of Tulsa, where he and the church bishops had stood in front of the doors of the church with poster-sized pictures of tiny, torn fetuses.

He was lying. He had no call to make.

That day, they had welcomed a new member into their fold—Levi had baptized Derek after several weeks of attendance. Derek was young, under thirty, and unmarried. He had come to Levi for counseling.

I want to commit myself to God, he’d said, but I have so many doubts. Levi had explained that doubts were natural and watched the young man’s hands, how they rested on his knees and how he would lightly clutch the fabric of his pants when he spoke emphatically. He was clean-shaven and had slicked his hair back in what Levi recognized as a desperate attempt to seem older and wiser and more capable than he was.

I have such a hard time believing, he said. I have a hard time believing that a good God would say so many things that are harmless aren’t allowed.

Like what? Levi had asked. Derek had admitted to drinking, drugs, the usual, nothing that shocked Levi. He had heard much

worse from people who looked far less capable of mischief. And he had admitted to sex before marriage.

I don’t think I can stop, he said. Drinking, I could stop. Pot, I could stop. But not that, not sex. Sometimes I want to, you know, I know it would be right. But I won’t. I just won’t. Levi had asked Derek to say more. He offered his advice if Derek wanted to come to him on difficult nights, when he felt urges to do something that he knew would separate him from God.

So Levi became his confidante. The young man would come to him and admit that he had urges toward his girlfriend and he wasn’t sure if they were wrong or right.

Tell me about them, Levi would say. He arranged his face to be dispassionate, to be the face of a man above the petty concerns of lust, like a doctor before a naked human body, interested only in routing out the disease inside of it. He nodded and followed the lines of Derek’s face as he spoke, noting if he had shaved or not, if his shirts were neatly ironed or disordered from haste or carelessness, if he wore an undershirt that covered the sparse hair at the base of his throat or not.

This continued until the night of the Baptism. Derek wore one of the baptism robes. He’d changed from his clothes in the church bathroom and wore only his underpants and a t-shirt under the heavy white robe. It smelled like moth balls and was yellowed from years of use without washing. Still, he looked angelic. Levi glanced at him as he gave the short speech before each Baptism, a speech about committing your life to Christ before the community.

This is a whole new step in the life of the believer, he said. You are telling the rest of the church that your heart is with Christ, that you are willing to be a true brother and sister, a soldier for Christ not only for yourself, but also for everybody else in the congregation.

Derek stood in the hallway between the stage and the back rooms, his hands folded before him, listening.

The Baptismal pool was rolled out, a portable tub with wheels. Levi placed the stepladder by the lowest lip and held out his hand. Derek came forward.

The step was unsteady, so Levi held Derek’s shoulder and he stepped into the pool.

He spoke the words he always spoke and then put his hand on the young man’s chest.

For a moment, Derek looked confused, his eyes afraid—it must have been instincts kicking in, the part of the human mind that riots against anyone holding one’s head underwater.

Close your eyes, Levi said. You’ll be fine.

The man closed his eyes and Levi pushed his chest. He could feel his bone underneath the heavy fabric, imagined he could feel the young man’s heart beating. He plunged his body down, and then his head, and whisked him back up again, holding him by the arms until he had recovered from the cold and shock and could stand up alone.

You are reborn in Christ, Levi said as Derek sputtered.

Thank you, he said. Thank you, Pastor, for giving me this gift.

After the Baptism, after Derek had shaken hands with the congregation and had rested, tearful, in the space between Levi’s elbow and throat, saying that he loved Christ, that he wanted to give himself to the church, that this was the best day of his life, Levi left.

He drove not home, but to the lake, to the place where he had swam as a boy, an unofficial swimming hole carved out of the woods on a rocky but shallow shore. Few people knew about it now, and Levi was careful to replace the mouth of the path with a tangle of fallen branches, as everyone else seemed to, since it was always there when he came here, covering the tracks in the grass.

In his glove box, he kept a pack of menthols. Cigarettes were a dirty habit, one that he couldn’t stand in others, but he found himself buying a pack of menthols every time he ran out. They felt cleaner than other cigarettes, like smoking mint.

Smoking was the one vice he allowed himself, and he smoked here at the lake almost exclusively. It was where he came when his mind was confused and prayer and fasting could not clear it.

He parked his car in an empty parking lot for a convenience store that had mysteriously closed, as most new attempts at stores did around here. Only the oldest buildings were still standing, and they traded ownership between different families in town. Now, the store’s windows were broken, the inside dusty and wrecked. The gas pumps had been vandalized, the plastic tubing ripped from the pump and strewn on the ground.

His hands shook as he lit the cigarette. It was getting dark—would be almost completely black outside in an hour—but he sat down on the flat, dry rock closest to the water. He knew his way out, and the moon was full anyway, leaving enough light for him to at least make his way back to the car and the wrecked gas station.

His stomach churned. He listened to the sound of his body reacting with curiosity. He had left church because his hands wouldn’t stay still after he had baptized the boy (the man, the young man. That was the trouble, of course. If he’d really been a boy, there would be no problem), his stomach angry and churning loudly, his brow sweating. He had watched Derek, wet-haired and smiling, standing at the front of the church, shaking hands with each person in a row, and he had had to leave. What was in his head seemed so incongruous in that simple, holy place, everyone else with their thoughts firmly in the right place. Oh, but his thoughts, they could not be borne in that place of God.

His loneliness in that moment, too, was unbearable. He was not often reminded of the things he could not have because of the way he was made. He would not have a family. He would not sleep beside another person every night. Usually, he could distract himself from these thoughts, remind himself that he was serving a far greater purpose, that he was giving up a sinful life of pleasure for a pure life of service to the Lord, but tonight, he could not stop himself from mourning his own missed opportunities.

You are a fool, he said out loud, the cigarette a red point of light in his hand.

He had become a pastor because he knew what it was to sin, to want what you should not have, and he thought that helping others would cure him of the disease in himself. This was not the first time.

If Derek had known what you were thinking when he described his nights with those women, Levi thought. The clutching and sweat and shame. Levi shook his head. He was worse than a sinner, he was a deceiver, just like Lucifer himself.

As a boy, Levi had not known himself so well. He thought he was just lonely and his desire for touch only the result of being the only boy, of having no cousins close to the family. He thought he wanted friends. Strange how when you are young, you confuse friendships and sex, you do not understand the barriers and the kinds of loves that would please God and the kinds of love that would anger God. Then, it had seemed quite simple: he only wanted people, anyone, near to him. He preferred other young men, but wasn’t that normal?

But later, he knew, and he accepted, that it was not normal. Christ could forgive all things. As long as he did not give in, as long as he kept his intentions pure, he’d be cured. Levi lay smoking cigarette after cigarette until his throat burned. It had not been true. He wouldn’t be cured, and he should never had thought so.

God had not made him to be cured. God wanted him to be what he was, a walking wound, to test him. He was like a saint, unable to touch people like others touched people, unable to let himself be free. And that was what God wanted. Maybe God had made him this way to keep him separate, to sanctify him for higher purposes.

The sky above him was completely clear, the stars pinpoints in the sky, the moon so bright it almost hurt his eyes. He imagined the creatures in the forest around him, the snakes coming up on the shore from the water, the possums in the woods and each rustle—which could be anything from a stray dog to a coyote to a panther—slinking through the darkness to find the soft place in his throat.

But he wouldn’t move. He let the fear sweep over him and then recede. If he died tonight, maybe that would be for the best. He had prayed for forgiveness. He had done his duty as best as he could. Maybe he was reaching the point at which he was no longer useful to God, the point when he was bound to give in to the devil and ruin himself and the church.