Lorrie Moore - 100 Years of the Best American Short Stories

Dobson blinked, and his fine little mouth pursed, suggesting that David was making difficult things more difficult. The faces of the other students went blank, as if an indiscretion had been committed.

“No, I suppose not,” Reverend Dobson said.

“Well, where is our soul, then, in this gap?”

The sense grew, in the class, of a naughtiness occurring. Dobson’s shy eyes watered, as if he were straining to keep up the formality of attention, and one of the girls, the fattest, simpered toward her twin, who was a little less fat. Their chairs were arranged in a rough circle. The current running around the circle panicked David. Did everybody know something he didn’t know?

“I suppose you could say our souls are asleep,” Dobson said.

“And then they wake up, and there is the earth like it always is, and all the people who have ever lived? Where will Heaven be?”

Anita Haier giggled. Dobson gazed at David intently, but with an awkward, puzzled flicker of forgiveness, as if there existed a secret between them that David was violating. But David knew of no secret. All he wanted was to hear Dobson repeat the words he said every Sunday morning. This he would not do. As if these words were unworthy of the conversational voice.

“David, you might think of Heaven this way: as the way the goodness Abraham Lincoln did lives after him.”

“But is Lincoln conscious of it living on?” He blushed no longer with embarrassment but in anger; he had walked here in good faith and was being made a fool.

“Is he conscious now? I would have to say no; but I don’t think it matters.” Dobson’s voice had a coward’s firmness; he was hostile now.

“You don’t?”

“Not in the eyes of God, no.” The unction, the stunning impudence, of this reply sprang tears of outrage in David’s eyes. He bowed them to his book, where short words like Duty, Love, Obey, Honor were stacked in the form of a cross.

“Were there any other questions, David?” Dobson asked with renewed gentleness. The others were rustling, collecting their books.

“No.” He made his voice firm, though he could not bring up his eyes.

“Did I answer your question fully enough?”

“Yes.”

In the minister’s silence the shame that should have been his crept over David; the burden and fever of being a fraud were placed upon him , who was innocent, and it seemed, he knew, a confession of this guilt that on the way out he was unable to face Dobson’s stirred gaze, though he felt it probing the side of his head.

Anita Haier’s father gave him a ride down the highway as far as the dirt road. David said he wanted to walk the rest, and figured that his offer was accepted because Mr. Haier did not want to dirty his bright blue Buick with dust. This was all right; everything was all right, as long as it was clear. His indignation at being betrayed, at seeing Christianity betrayed, had hardened him. The straight dirt road reflected his hardness. Pink stones thrust up through its packed surface. The April sun beat down from the center of the afternoon half of the sky; already it had some of summer’s heat. Already the fringes of weeds at the edges of the road were bedraggled with dust. From the reviving grass and scruff of the fields he walked between, insects were sending up a monotonous, automatic chant. In the distance a tiny figure in his father’s coat was walking along the edge of the woods. His mother. He wondered what joy she found in such walks; to him the brown stretches of slowly rising and falling land expressed only a huge exhaustion.

Flushed with fresh air and happiness, she returned from her walk earlier than he had expected, and surprised him at his grandfather’s Bible. It was a stumpy black book, the boards worn thin where the old man’s fingers had held them; the spine hung by one weak hinge of fabric. David had been looking for the passage where Jesus says to the one thief on the cross “Today shalt thou be with me in paradise.” He had never tried reading the Bible for himself before. What was so embarrassing about being caught at it was that he detested the apparatus of piety. Fusty churches, creaking hymns, ugly Sunday-school teachers and their stupid leaflets — he hated everything about them but the promise they held out, a promise that in the most perverse way, as if the homeliest crone in the kingdom were given the prince’s hand, made every good and real thing, ball games and jokes and big-breasted girls, possible. He couldn’t explain this to his mother. Her solicitude was upon him.

“David, what are you doing at Granpop’s Bible?”

“Trying to read it. This is supposed to be a Christian country, isn’t it?”

She sat down on the green sofa that used to be in the sun parlor at Olinger, under the fancy mirror. A little smile still lingered on her face from the walk. “David, I wish you’d talk to me.”

“What about?”

“About whatever it is that’s troubling you. Your father and I have both noticed it.”

“I asked Reverend Dobson about Heaven and he said it was like Abraham Lincoln’s goodness living after him.”

He waited for the shock to strike her. “Yes?” she said, expecting more.

“That’s all.”

“And why didn’t you like it?”

“Well; don’t you see? It amounts to saying there isn’t any Heaven at all.”

“I don’t see that it amounts to that. What do you want Heaven to be?”

“Well, I don’t know. I want it to be some thing. I thought he’d tell me what it was. I thought that was his job.” He was becoming angry, sensing her surprise at him. She had assumed that Heaven had faded from his head years ago. She had imagined that he had already entered, in the secrecy of silence, the conspiracy that he now knew to be all around him.

“David,” she asked gently, “don’t you ever want to rest?”

“No. Not forever.”

“David, you’re so young. When you get older, you’ll feel differently.”

“Grandpa didn’t. Look how tattered this book is.”

“I never understood your grandfather.”

“Well, I don’t understand ministers who say it’s like Lincoln’s memory going on and on. Suppose you’re not Lincoln?”

“I think Reverend Dobson made a mistake. You must try to forgive him.”

“It’s not a question of his making a mistake! It’s a question of dying and never moving or seeing or hearing anything ever again.”

“But”—in exasperation—“darling, it’s so greedy of you to want more. When God has given us this wonderful April day, and given us this farm, and you have your whole life ahead of you—”

“You think, then, that there is God?”

“Of course I do”—with deep relief that smoothed her features into a reposeful oval. He was standing, and above her, too near for his comfort. He was afraid she would reach out and touch him.

“He made everything? You feel that?”

“Yes.”

“Then who made Him?”

“Why, Man. Man.” The happiness of this answer lit up her face radiantly, until she saw his gesture of disgust.

“Well that amounts to saying there is none.”

Her hand reached for his wrist but he backed away. “David, it’s a mystery. A miracle. It’s a miracle more beautiful than any Reverend Dobson could have told you about. You don’t say houses don’t exist because Man made them.”

“No. God has to be different.”

“But, David, you have the evidence . Look out the window at the sun; at the fields.”

“Mother, good grief. Don’t you see”—he gasped away the roughness in his throat—“if when we die there’s nothing, all your sun and fields and what not are all, ah, horror ? It’s just an ocean of horror.”