Chris Bohjalian - Secrets of Eden

As soon as Heather’s car had disappeared down the road to Ginny’s, I went to my office at the church and sat down with the church secretary, a remarkable woman named Betsy Storrs who had been working at the church a full decade before I arrived and had the demeanor of a grandmother (which she was) and the efficiency of a presidential secretary. At fifty-eight she learned to design websites, and our church’s site was the envy of the Baptist churches in our corner of New England. Together Betsy and I determined which meetings I should attend in the coming days and which ones I could miss, as well as which parishioners were most needy at the moment-the most distraught at what had occurred, the most shaken-and which ones were merely whiners hoping to leverage a murder-suicide for a little extra TLC.

I should note that although Betsy helped with the triage, she never viewed her fellow parishioners in quite so misanthropic a fashion, especially in those days before I disappeared. I should also note that I was not always such a brooding, unsympathetic soul. Did I always have exactly the wrong constitution for a country pastor? Perhaps. Perhaps not. Though I had slid into my calling, that doesn’t mean it wasn’t the right path. At least initially. At least for a time. The fact is, it would be a very long while before I would view anyone in my flock as a whiner.

When I was about to leave the church, I peered into the sanctuary and saw Joanie Gaylord kneeling alone in prayer before the chancel rail. We don’t kneel in prayer in my church, but Joanie-seventy-three that summer, an age and a birthday I knew well because Joanie was a prayer warrior and I never once missed one of her birthday parties-was on her knees that evening. I found this interesting and went to kneel beside her. The Women’s Circle had met that week at her home.

“Would you pray with me?” she asked.

“Of course I will,” I said softly, and I took her arthritic hand in mine while she prayed in silence beside me. We stayed like that for easily ten minutes, my mind straying into its more despairing alcoves despite my efforts to focus, before she cleared her throat and I opened my eyes.

“I wish I had known,” she said.

“About George?”

“Yes. I wish she had told us. I wish Ginny had told us. I would have done something.”

“Do you think it might have ended differently?”

She reached for the rail and with what looked like a great effort pushed herself to her feet, and so I stood up as well. “I do. I really do.”

“You were there for her in more ways than you know,” I reassured her. “You meant a lot to her.”

“Do you think?”

“I know,” I said, drawing the verb out with practiced pastoral emphasis. The last thing Joanie Gaylord either needed or deserved was to shoulder the sort of guilt that would be mine for as long as I lived.

TOWARD DINNERTIME, WHEN I thought Ron Dobson and Illa Gove would be back from their jobs in Bennington and Manchester, I phoned each of them. Ron chaired the Church Council and had been one of my closest friends since I’d come to Haverill. He had been my assistant coach those years I’d coached Little League, and his older son-now a shortstop on the high-school team and an active leader in the church Youth Group-had been our lone athletic bright spot. Good hitter, good fielder, good speed. Our team was never especially talented, and we never won more than four or five games a season, but I believe we always had massive amounts of fun. Illa was the leader of the Board of Deacons and Stewards that met at the church on Wednesday nights and a counselor by day at the shelter for teens at risk, in Bennington. I told Ron I’d like to drop by his house after supper, if it wouldn’t be an inconvenience, and then I asked Illa if she’d mind leading her board meeting alone. I explained that I would be greeting guests at the funeral home about that time. She said she would be happy to.

Later, while Ron’s wife was upstairs reading aloud to their young son and daughter, I told him without preamble that I was going to leave Haverill. I told him I was having a breakdown of sorts-not exactly a nervous breakdown, but a spiritual one. And in my profession a spiritual breakdown was every bit as debilitating as a nervous one. Maybe more. And so I was taking an emergency leave, I was going away. It might be for a week, it might be for a month. It might be forever. But I would be gone not long after the last of the mourners had left the sanctuary on Thursday.

At first Ron simply listened and nodded, occasionally rubbing his lantern of a jaw or adjusting the massive inner-tube-size doughnut that stretched tight the thin fabric of his short-sleeved summer shirt. He asked, more as my friend than as a trustee, whether I was planning to check myself into a hospital or a retreat, and then he wanted to know how to reach me when I told him I wasn’t. It was clear that he was struggling with his dual role as friend and church leader, and he began to worry about the concrete logistics that affected the congregation.

“I’ll make sure there’s a substitute pastor in the pulpit on Sunday,” I said. “And I’ll make sure there’s someone here in town on a more permanent basis by early next week.”

“Permanent?”

“Interim, I guess. Someone who can be here for a… while.”

“What about Ken?” he asked, referring to the deacon who was dying of cancer. “What if he dies when you’re gone?”

“If there’s a heaven, I’ll see him there. If there isn’t? Well, then, it doesn’t matter, does it?”

“I meant the funeral. The family will need you to do it, not some substitute they don’t know.”

He was right, and I found myself wondering if, when that time came, I would have it in me to do what I had to do and not let down that kind and pious family. “We’ll see,” I said simply.

“That’s not very helpful.”

“I’m sorry. I’m more sorry than you know. But that’s my point. I can’t be very helpful right now. I can’t be helpful at all.”

“Look, I just don’t want you to burn any bridges. I just don’t want there to be any hard feelings when you decide to come back.”

“And if I don’t?”

“One return at a time,” he said, shrugging. Dobson was an accountant with a small firm of his own. “One return at a time” was his mantra in March and April, when he and his partner were swamped by wave upon wave of returns. “My guess is we won’t put anybody else in the parsonage while you’re gone.”

“I will understand if you do.”

He shook his head. “This Hayward thing is tough on everyone. For all you know, you’re just tired.”

“Perhaps.”

“I’ll bet if you thought about it, you’d realize you felt a lot like this when some other people had died.”

“You’d lose that bet,” I said, and the moment the words were out there in the air between us-harsh words, needless and abrupt-I knew it was time to leave. I apologized, but it was too late. We stood almost at the same second, embraced awkwardly, and when I walked into the still-balmy night air, the only emotion I felt was relief.

IF, ON THE surface, I was not at my best the rest of that week, I was adequate. I did my job. I found time after the calling hours at the funeral home to meet with a half dozen teens in the Youth Group who wanted to talk, and though the group was somber and troubled, by the time they left my living room near eleven P.M., their faith was on considerably surer footing than mine. I had two breakfasts that Thursday morning, an early one with the deacons to make sure that the transition to the interim pastor would be smooth and then a later one with Katie Hayward, her grandparents, Ginny and Harry O’Brien, and the Cousino family. The purpose of that meal? Comfort and connection and communion of a more secular sort.