Anne Tyler - A Slipping-Down Life

“I wish we hadn’t come,” she said.

“Told you so,” said Drum.

“Well, I forgot how creepy these places are. I don’t like the smell.”

David was the only one who stayed cheerful. “Smells all right to me,” he said, and he took a deep breath of the air — dry wood, hand-me-down hymnals, and dust. “Yonder is the photographer,” he told Evie.

“What’s he doing way up front?”

“He has to be far enough away to photograph us.”

“Us?” Evie said.

“Who else?”

“Well, yes, of course,” Evie said, but she wished she had thought this thing through before she came.

Brother Hope appeared on a small raised platform up front. He was red and knotty-faced, like a man swelling with anger but choking it down. His hair was plastered sleekly across his skull; and he wore a long black robe with a striped woolen scarf hanging from his shoulders. “All rise,” he said. His voice was thin and stifled.

Everybody rose. Forty chairs creaked and snapped.

“I was glad when they said unto me, let us go into the house of the Lord. ‘In the Garden.’ ”

“In the Garden” sounded strange without a piano. The women sang in high, sliding voices, as if they were complaining, and the men made muttering sounds beneath the tune. Evie, who disliked hymns, stayed silent. When all the verses had been sung they sat down again, and Brother Hope gripped both sides of the pulpit.

“We are gathered here,” he said, “as lone survivors on a sinking ship. Only you and I know that ship is sinking. Only you and I seek to find the rotting planks. Art thou weary? Art thou languid? Then thou art smarter than thy neighbor, for thou hast seen the water rising beneath the planks. Last month, my friends, I was in Norville. A man buying a popular magazine was told that the price had gone up, and I heard him ask, ‘What next?’ ‘What next?’ he said. Well, that started me thinking, my friends. What next for us , in the life beyond, I thought, if things continue like they’re going now? Today there are women wearing the garb of men, men in stupors from the fumes of alcohol and the taste of foreign mushrooms, dancers dancing obscenities in public and everywhere, on every corner of the earth, sacrifices made to false gods and earthly idols. What next? What next?”

His voice stitched in and out of Evie’s thoughts, rising above them sometimes as a new topic jolted into view and then submerging while she decided whether to go to school tomorrow, planned a menu, wondered what Drum was thinking with his mouth so straight and set. At her left, David shifted his weight but kept his eyes pinned on Brother Hope. The congregation commented on the sermon during each pause. “It’s true. It’s true.” “Amen.” “Ain’t that so?” Like poor listeners in an ordinary conversation, they seemed likely to jump up at any moment and interrupt to tell experiences of their own. Only none of them did. Instead, Evie began to worry that it would be she herself who interrupted. Pauses between paragraphs grew longer and quieter, swelling until they might burst forth with her own voice saying something terrible. Ordinary ministers picked a single, narrow theme for each sermon; Brother Hope tried to cover the world in an hour. Faced with the leap from one topic to another, from the evils of pre-teen dating to the inevitability of death and from there to the unnaturalness of working mothers, he kept taking a breath and hesitating, as if he worried about the abyss he had to span; and every time it happened Evie drew in her breath too. She was not certain what would burst forth. She gripped the chair in front of her, and the man who sat in it turned to show her the expectant, circular eyes of a baby.

“Our children are no longer safe,” said Brother Hope. “Golden nets are cast to reel them into evil and we say, ‘It’s only music. We had music,’ we say, but we had the waltz and ‘Mairzy Doats.’ My friends, I say unto you, go into your parlors some night and watch your children dancing. Is that innocence? I can cite chapter and verse. A young man driving home from a jukebox joint crashed into a Good Humor truck and died; marijuana in his glove compartment. His name was Willie Hammond, if you care to check on that. A young girl living within your own town limits slashed her forehead with the name of a rock-and-roll singer; ruined her life for nothing. If you don’t believe me, her name was Eve Decker; the singer sang at the—”

“Wait,” Evie said. “That’s me.”

She stood up, still gripping the chair in front of her, and looked around at all the upturned faces. Hearing her name in public, even when she had expected it, gave her a ripped-open feeling. She couldn’t think why David was smiling at her and nodding. “You take that back,” she told Brother Hope.

“We are all friends here,” said Brother Hope.

“Well, I’m not. You’re speaking libel. Slander. I did not ruin my life, it was not for nothing. How can you say such a thing?”

Brother Hope was fiddling with the ends of his scarf and staring at her forehead. “Please, now, please,” he said. “Any burden you have—”

“I don’t have any burdens!” Evie shouted. “I didn’t ruin my life, I married him!”

A flashbulb snapped in her face, an explosion of light that faded to a squirmy green circle. It took her a moment to remember about the photographer. She watched the circle drift over to Brother Hope’s face, and then she let go of the chair.

“Well,” she said finally. “The place he was talking about is the Unicorn, out on the south highway. The singer is Drum Casey, who is my husband and just got fired for—”

“Sit down,” Drum said.

“—for the last day of the week he was working. Just got his working time cut day by day, raising his hopes and then lowering them again, and if anybody really cared about Christian love they would call up the Unicorn and say, ‘Where is Drum Casey? Why isn’t he there? We want—’ ”

Drum rose. “I don’t have to allow this,” he said.

“Why, Drum.”

“Shut up,” Drum told her. “Sit down.”

“Please, my friends. Please,” said Brother Hope, and he looked over either shoulder although there was nothing but a blank wall behind him.

“Drum, I am only trying—”

“She’s doing great, Drum,” David said.

“You shut up too,” said Drum. “I have had enough publicity tonight to put me six feet under. And you—” he said, turning suddenly on Brother Hope, who opened his mouth and took a breath, “you and your sacrifices to false gods, that’s a bunch of bull. It’d been a hell of a lot more sacrifice if she’d been prettier to begin with. Get going, Evie. We’re through here.”

He took hold of her arm just above the elbow. He pushed her out ahead of him and Evie went, boneless and watery, knocked sick by what he had said. David had her by the other hand. “Now, then,” he kept whispering. “Now, wait.…”

They rode home in a swelling, suspended silence, as if this were just another pause in Brother Hope’s sermon. David kept clearing his throat. Evie expected to cry but could not. Drum sat beside her with his face set straight ahead, his hands on his knees. Once he drew in his breath as if he meant to speak, but he said nothing.

That week’s newspaper carried a photograph of Evie hunched forward behind a seated man, as if she were pushing him in a wheelchair. Her face looked surprised. “Evangelist Ends Sojourn in Pulqua,” the caption read. “Brother Evan Hope left Pulqua yesterday after two weeks at the Tabernacle of God. He described his stay as ‘heartwarmingly successful.’ Above, a local teen-ager protests his attack on rock music.” Evie threw the newspaper aside, not bothering to show Drum. But the next day David drove all the way out to their house to tell them that Drum had been re-hired at the Unicorn. “You can thank Evie for this,” he said. “Word of mouth spread what she did all over town. People kept calling Zack and asking where Drum Casey was.”