Darcey Steinke - Jesus Saves

Ginger remembered Ruth Patrick's face in the window, her frosted hair pulled back into a pony tail, the Chinese neckline of her bathrobe exposing her pale throat. She wished she could will Sandy home, make her materialize on the lawn and hover toward the door. But Ginger saw Sandy lying in the woods, her hair pasted to her head with dew and spidery vermilion veins starting to fester like splattered blood on snow. Red ants crawled into her nostrils, along the bottom rows of lashes and between her parted purple lips.

The church was drenched in tawdry, multicolored light. Rich washes of red and yellow soaked the walls and long green angles of light fell over the front pews and red carpet. In the old church the altar's guild — a handful of serious, middle-aged ladies, all with a reverence for good silver and table linens — took down the altar clothes and stored each ceremoniously in a carved cedar chest. But since the move to the new building, the women used plastic covers that Mrs. Mulhoffer ordered from a church catalogue, slipped them over the fabric on the altar, the pulpit, and the baptismal font so everything was dust proof and hermetically sealed.

Behind the altar was the sacristy, a little kitchen with a sink and spigot, a bar of new soap beside a dried-up sponge. Cabinets above and below were the same poppy red color as the countertop and though she never turned them on, overhead there was a row of fluorescent lights. She set the box of fliers on the counter near the silver-tone tray of tiny individual communion glasses. Each held one sip of wine. The trustees said in winter everyone got the same cold and that they wanted to replace the common cup with this tray of plastic glasses, but Ginger knew they suspected that Mark Rutland was gay. A few times she'd seen him with a thin man resting on a cane by the waterfall in the mall. To the trustees, AIDS was just another bad curse come to them from the city, like crack and high taxes.

She opened the cabinet over the sink where the long wax paper containers of unblessed wafers lay in rows like Ritz crackers. When she was little she'd found a whole pack in the backseat of her father's car and eaten everyone. Alongside the wafers stood bottles of Manischewitz grape wine. Downtown, homeless men drank Manischewitz in wrinkled brown bags. On Sundays, the wafers on the sterling plate and the wine in the medieval-style goblet took on aura and import, became what they called holy, but backstage their glamour was diminished, no more important now than saltine crackers and Boone's Farm wine. Holiness was like that, you could never trap it or examine its uncanny elements.

She liked the old church better, but knew no place was really any more holy than any other. Once at Christmas, she went with her father to visit the old man who lived in a tin shack behind Mulhoffer's factory. Beside his bed hung a paint-by-numbers picture of Christ, a dirty silk scarf, and a gold dime-store locket that he said held a curl of his sister's hair. She took down a bottle, her hand hot on the cool curve of glass, and broke the seal, unscrewed the top, and drank, one mouthful, then another, until she could feel the fermented liquid warming her stomach, edging out the dull ache of her cramps.

If her father's office was locked, she'd leave the box of fliers in the Bible study room where the trustees counted money after the service. Her father told her a good Sunday was when every adult gave twenty dollars and the wealthy ones forty. Then he could pay the mortgage on the new building, his own salary, hers, the organist's, and buy supplies for Sunday school and communion, then put some money into a savings account for the computer, the new hymnals, and a swing set the ladies’ guild wanted for the Sunday school children.

As she turned the knob, the door opened and she walked into the office toward his desk. Rudolph Mueller had acquired the set of stoic mahogany office furniture at the same time as the stolen common cup. Carved along the bottom of the desk was a chain of roses and the bookshelves were buttressed and bridled like a cathedral. Every shelf was filled with books by obscure German theologians, their names embossed in gold on cracked leather bindings. On the walls were two portraits of beloved former ministers. One was of Reverend Dunheinzer, who, along with his angelic wife, started the church. He'd been famous for his commonsense sermons and his love of flowers and small children. The other, painted in a photorealistic style, was of a minister who'd had the church in the ‘50s, an overweight man with the fat face of a butcher. Fellowship was his forte and Klass told how in those days social events went on in the church basement almost every night. There was no portrait of the minister who owned a speedboat and had an affair with the organist, or the young man from Wisconsin who told so many lies he had to put his head in the oven and gas himself. Because the room was only half as big as the downtown office, with low ceilings made of corkboard, the furniture looked as if a crazy man had piled up file cabinets and bookcases, barricaded the door in fear of intruders or the great flood. The desk lamp showed a messy pile of yellow legal pads with her father's handwriting scribbled all the way down the pages. Her eyes continued to adjust in the murky light. His robes, both the cream-colored linen he'd worn yesterday and the sashes for Advent and Lent, lay scattered in a heap by the side of his desk. Hairs stood up on the back of her neck as the material shifted; gathers of cloth split and fell to one side and her father leaned up, his robes falling around him.

His face, which was usually taut and ruddy as a pilgrim, was pockmarked and lined from pressing into the ceremonial robes. The outline of a dove branded his cheek and the braided pattern of brocade indented one temple.

“Goodness,” he said, “I fell asleep.”

“Are you sick?” She assumed he came in late last night and left before her this morning, but she could tell by his beard stubble that he'd been here all night.

“No, no,” he said jumping up, lifting the robes onto the leather wingback chair where he began hanging each on a wooden hanger. His long-fingered hands trembled as he smoothed out the materials. “Did you see those hillbillies from Deerpath Creek sitting in the back pews yesterday? They talked throughout my sermon and held their hands up during the closing hymn.” A stole slipped off the hanger and he stooped over to retreive it. “This is not a tent revival, where toothless cowboys handle rattlesnakes and people run out of their seats to be healed by some charlatan. What would Luther say? He wouldn't like it,” her father calmed himself, “though ultimately it is his fault. With his fat hand he swept the virgin mother, all the saints, anything exotic and mysterious, right into the trash can. If only he hadn't made it clear that before God everyone who's been baptized is equal, if he hadn't turned God's rituals into a communist meeting of brothers, into a circle of friends, then there'd be no personal savior, no born again. " He said these last words with profound disgust. “But it's not all Luther's fault. There was that horrible old hippie Karlstadt, with his imminent apocalypse and his low church love-ins.” His robes hung now, he walked wearily to the leather chair and fell into it, moodily unlatching his clerical collar.

“The trustees came yesterday with several requests. They want me to cancel Klass's minibus. It's not economically viable according to them, and they want me to be more sensitive to the entertainment side of the service. Deerpath Creek has four thousand members and they said if we'd liven things up, use more modern church music, get a drummer and a couple of ladies who can really sing, we'd get more people and they'd be willing to give more too.” Her father was clearly disgusted. “They even went so far as to ask for aerobics classes in the basement.” He looked at her, his lips wet with saliva, and in his eyes she could see already what he was about to say next. “They even had the gall to tell me you're a bad example for the girls in the parish. They don't like how you dress and that you're seen with that boy. They call him a satanist.”