Rebecca Makkai - Music for Wartime

They sang “our shelter from the stormy blast” as thunder shook the roof. They sang “There Shall be Showers of Blessings,” and some of them laughed.

Stanley Tack had come every Sunday that whole year, but always sat quizzical and silent through the prayers, the hymns. He never carried the stick anymore. He was always alone; the Beedleman girl worked the Sunday shift at the hospital. He never put anything in the offertory and he never took Communion. Reverend Hewlett started to see this as a personal challenge: Someday, he would give the sermon that would bring Stanley to his feet, that would open his blue eyes to the light shining through above the altar, that would make him pause on his way out of church and say, “Do you have a minute to talk?”

They planned, as soon as the rain let up, to pour cement into the old pool and dig the hole for the new one. But the rain never let up. On the fortieth day of rain, folks stopped Reverend Hewlett at the pharmacy and the gas pump to joke: “Tomorrow we’re due our rainbow, right? Tomorrow we get our dove?” At least no one much minded not having a pool that summer.

The Millers brought little Eloise to church, and she was baptized as Stella Blunt looked on from the choir. Reverend Hewlett poured water on the baby’s head and marveled at her angry little eyes. The daughter of a fire eater, born into a land of water.

Despite the tarp, the pool had filled around the elephant and the hay and the gravel, and if you walked by and peered through the chain-link fence, you’d see how the tarp was now sort of floating on top, how the whole pool deck was covered in an inch of water that connected with the water in the pool. The children dared each other to reach through the fence and touch the dirty elephant juice. Mrs. Thoms wondered aloud if the elephant water would go through the pool drains and into the town supply.

One day, Reverend Hewlett braved the rain to visit Stanley Tack’s restaurant. After the downstairs had flooded, Stanley had taken over the vacant apartment upstairs, cooking out of its small kitchen and serving food in what used to be the living room. On an average Saturday you’d find three or four families huddled around the tables, eating soup and listening to the rain hit the windows, but today the Reverend was the only one in the place. It seemed people were leaving their houses less. The spokes of their umbrellas were broken, and their rain boots were moldy, and they realized there wasn’t much they truly needed from out in the world. A lot of sweaters were knit that summer, a lot of books read.

The Reverend sat, and when Stanley brought his cheese sandwich and potato soup, he sat across from him. He said, “I believe this is my fault.”

The only “this” anyone in town was talking about was the rain.

Reverend Hewlett said, “My child. This weather is the will of God.”

“You preached — you gave a sermon, right after I chose to stay. And I couldn’t help thinking it was intended for me. The story of Jonah trying to sail away from Nineveh. Of God sending the storm and the whale.”

The Reverend tried his potato soup, and nodded at Stanley. The soup was good, as always. Never great, but always good. He said, “I was thinking of many things, but yes, one of them was you. The way the Lord sends us where we need to be, regardless of our plans. I was reflecting on my own life, as well. I ended up in Little Fork by chance, and in my first year, when I felt doubt, I’d think of Jonah in the belly of that fish. It was preaching, you know, that he was meant to do in Nineveh. That’s what he was running from.”

“Yes. But”—Stanley looked out the window, where the rain was slicing sideways—“what if this isn’t my Nineveh? What if this is the place I’ve run away to , and all this, all the rain, is God trying to wash me out and send me on my way? Just as he sent that storm for Jonah.”

This troubled the Reverend. He bought some time by biting into his sandwich, but then it troubled him even more. Stanley had reminded him of Annette, on the day he left Chicago, fixing him with dry eyes: “I don’t see how you’re so sure ,” she’d said. And he’d said, “There’s no other way to be.” And whether or not he was truly sure back then, he’d grown sure these past three years. Or at least he’d been too busy counseling others to foster his own concerns. He’d broken down in doubt a few times — not in God so much as in his plan — when he’d had to bury a child or when soldiers came home in boxes, but he’d always returned to a place of faith. Look at little Eloise, for instance, growing plump at the Millers’ house. Exactly as it was meant to be. But somehow the elephant trainer’s question had hit a sore spot in his own soul, a bruise he hadn’t known was there.

He said, “All we can do is pray, and ask that God make clear the path.”

“And how, exactly, would He make it clear?”

“If you listen, God will speak.”

Most always, when he said something like this, his parishioners smiled as if assured they’d hear the voice of God that very night. Sometimes he even had to clarify: “This is not the age of miracles, you realize. His voice won’t boom from the clouds. You’ll have to listen. You’ll have to look.” And they’d leave to await the message.

What Stanley said was, “God doesn’t talk.” It wasn’t something Reverend Hewlett was used to hearing in this town. And then, in all seriousness, he said, “I think I’ve broken the universe.”

Reverend Hewlett looked at his own hands, the veins and creases. He imagined they might crack open like the parched earth had last summer. Or at least, he felt a small crack somewhere inside, one that didn’t hurt but was letting in a bit of air. All he could think to say was, “It’s raining in the next town over, too. And in the next town beyond that.”

Reverend Hewlett’s name was Jack. This was increasingly easy for him to forget. He’d become John, and then — in the bulletins and on the sign outside the church — Rev. J. Hewlett, and since there was no one in Little Fork who didn’t know him as the Reverend, since even the few Catholics who drove to services in Shearerville greeted him as “Rev” or sometimes, slipping, as “Father,” he hadn’t heard his own name in three years. Annette no longer wrote to him at all, no longer extended the tail of the J down like the first letter of a chapter.

And why had he left her? And why had he come here? Because he was needed. Because his mentor at seminary had said, “God is calling you there. God is calling me to send you there.”

And that man, with his great beard, his walls of books, his faith in the hand of God, could not have been wrong.

That night there was a dance at the Garden Club, on the east end of town. It was Little Fork’s version of a debutante ball, the same youngsters debuting themselves each year, in the same white dresses, until they were too old for these things, or married. Only tonight they were soaked through. Reverend Hewlett stood against the wall watching — his mere presence, everyone agreed, was salubrious — and observed the boys in their sopping bowties, hair plastered to their heads, and the girls wrapped against their will in their mothers’ shawls. No boy would see through a wet dress tonight. Heaps of galoshes and umbrellas by the door.

They coupled and uncoupled in patterns that seemed casual, chaotic, but of course were not. Every move, every flick of the eyes, was finely orchestrated. There were hearts being broken tonight. You just couldn’t tell whose.