Stephen King - Revival

It stopped Jacobs cold. He stood gripping the pulpit, eyes blazing in his white face, lips pressed together so tightly his mouth had disappeared.

My dad stood, then. “Charles, you need to step down.”

Reverend Jacobs shook his head as if to clear it. “Yes,” he said. “You’re right, Dick. Nothing I say will make any difference, anyway.”

But it did. To one little boy, it did.

He stepped back, glanced around as if he no longer knew where he was, and then stepped forward again, although there was now no one to hear him except for my family, the church deacons, and Me-Maw, still planted in the first row with her eyes bugging out.

“Just one more thing. We came from a mystery and it’s to a mystery we go. Maybe there’s something there, but I’m betting it’s not God as any church understands Him. Look at the babble of conflicting beliefs and you’ll know that. They cancel each other out and leave nothing. If you want truth, a power greater than yourselves, look to the lightning—a billion volts in each strike, and a hundred thousand amperes of current, and temperatures of fifty thousand degrees Fahrenheit . There’s a higher power in that, I grant you. But here, in this building? No. Believe what you want, but I tell you this: behind Saint Paul’s darkened glass, there is nothing but a lie.”

He left the pulpit and walked through the side door. The Morton family sat in the kind of silence people must experience after a bomb blast.

When we got home, Mom went into the big back bedroom, said she did not want to be disturbed, and closed the door. She stayed there the rest of the day. Claire cooked supper, and we ate mostly in silence. At one point Andy began to quote some scriptural passage that completely disproved what the Reverend had said, but Dad told him to shut his piehole. Andy looked at our father’s hands shoved deep into his pockets and zipped his lip.

After supper, Dad went out to the garage, where he was tinkering with Road Rocket II. For once Terry—usually his loyal assistant, almost his acolyte—did not join him, so I did… although not without hesitation.

“Daddy? Can I ask you a question?”

He was under the Rocket on a Crawligator, a caged light in one hand. Only his khaki-clad legs stuck out. “I suppose so, Jamie. Unless it’s about that goddam mess this morning. If that’s the case, you can also keep your piehole shut. I ain’t going there tonight. Tomorrow’ll be time enough. We’ll have to petition the New England Methodist Conference to fire him, and they’ll have to take it to Bishop Matthews in Boston. It’s a fucking mess, and if you ever tell your mother I used that word around you, she’ll beat me like a redheaded stepchild.”

I didn’t know if my question was about the Terrible Sermon or not, I only knew I had to ask it. “Was what Mr. Easterbrook said true? Was she drinking?”

The moving light beneath the car went still. Then he rolled himself out so he could look up at me. I was afraid he’d be mad, but he wasn’t mad. Just unhappy. “People have been whispering about it, and I suppose it’ll get around a lot faster now that that nummie Easterbrook went and said it right out loud, but you listen to me, Jamie: it doesn’t matter . George Barton had an epileptic seizure and he was on the wrong side of the road and she come around a blind turn and pop goes the weasel. It doesn’t matter if she was sober or head down and tail over the dashboard. Mario Andretti couldn’t have avoided that crash. Reverend was right about one thing: people always want a reason for the bad things in life. Sometimes there ain’t one.”

He raised the hand not holding the caged light and pointed a grease-smeared finger at me. “All the rest was just the bullshit of a grief-struck man, and don’t you forget it.”

The Wednesday before Thanksgivingwas a half day in our school district, but I had promised Mrs. Moran that I’d stay to wash the blackboards and neaten up our little library of tattered books. When I told Mom, she waved her hand in a distracted way and told me to just be home for supper. She was already putting a turkey in the oven, but I knew it couldn’t be ours; it was way too small for seven.

As it turned out, Kathy Palmer (a teacher’s pet wannabe if there ever was one) also stayed to help out, and the work was done in half an hour. I thought of going to Al’s or Billy’s house to play guns or something, but I knew they’d want to talk about the Terrible Sermon and how Mrs. Jacobs had gotten herself and Morrie killed because she was shitfaced drunk—a rumor that had indeed gained the credence of absolute fact—and I didn’t want any part of that, so I went home. It was an unseasonably warm day, our windows were open, and I could hear my sister and my mother arguing.

“Why can’t I come?” Claire asked. “I want him to know at least some people in this stupid town are still on his side!”

“Because your father and I think all you children should stay away from him,” my mother said. They were in the kitchen, and by now I was lingering outside the window.

“I’m not a child , anymore, Mother, I’m seventeen!”

“Sorry, but at seventeen you’re still a child, and a young girl visiting him wouldn’t look right. You’ll just have to take my word for that.”

“But it’s okay for you? You know Me-Maw’ll see you, and it’ll be all over the party line in twenty minutes! If you’re going, let me go with you!”

“I said no, and that’s final.”

“He gave Con back his voice!” Claire stormed. “How can you be so mean?”

There was a long pause and then my mother said, “That’s why I’m going to see him. Not to take him a meal for tomorrow but to let him know we’re grateful in spite of those terrible things he said.”

“You know why he said them! He just lost his wife and son and he was all messed up! Half crazy!”

“I do know that.” Mom was speaking more quietly now, and I had to strain to hear because Claire was crying. “But it doesn’t change how shocked people were. He went too far. Much too far. He’s leaving next week, and that’s for the best. When you know you’re going to be fired, it’s best to quit first. It allows you to keep a little self-respect.”

“Fired by the deacons, I suppose,” Claire almost sneered. “Which means Dad.”

“Your father has no choice. When you’re no longer a child , you may realize that, and have a little sympathy. This is tearing Dick apart.”

“Go on, then,” Claire said. “See if a few slices of turkey breast and some sweet potatoes make up for the way he’s getting treated. I bet he won’t even eat it.”

“Claire… Claire-Bear—”

“ Don’t call me that! ” she yelled, and I heard her pounding for the stairs. She’d sulk and cry in her bedroom for awhile, I supposed, and then get over it, the way she did a couple of years ago when Mom told her fifteen was absolutely too young to go to the drive-in with Donnie Cantwell.

I decided to hustle my butt into the backyard before Mom left with her special-made dinner. I sat in the tire swing, not exactly hiding but not exactly in full view, either. Ten minutes later, I heard the front door shut. I went to the corner of the house and saw Mom walking down the road with a foil-covered tray in her hands. The foil twinkled in the sun. I went in the house and up the stairs. I knocked on my sister’s door, which was graced by a large Bob Dylan poster.

“Claire?”

“Go away!” she shouted. “I don’t want to talk to you!” The record player went on: the Yardbirds, and at top volume.