He would not have said that he was ever “called” to the ministry. It wasn’t like that. Instead, he grew up knowing that it would be so. The church was Swain Hammond’s future — unofficially. He got his doctorate at Yale. Then, after one brief stint as an associate minister, he became the pastor at Westside, a good choice for — as he had become — a man of a rational, ethical orientation.
The church, in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, is Presbyterian. It is fairly conventional, though influenced, certainly, by the university community. Swain is happy here. Westside suits him. But it is clearly not the best place to hold the pastorate if you’re the sort who’s inclined to hear the actual voice of God. Up until recently, this would not have been a problem for Swain. But about eight weeks ago, the situation changed. At that time, Swain did indeed hear God.
He and his wife Julie were grilling skewers of pork and green peppers on the back patio of the stone house they chose themselves as the parsonage. They have no children. Julie works. She is a medical librarian at the hospital, though if you met her you would never think of libraries. You might think of Hayley Mills in some of those movies from her teen-age years. She has the same full features and thick red hair. On this particular night, Julie is turning a shish-kabob, which seems to be falling apart. Swain, bare-footed — it is June — is drinking a beer and squinting up the slight hill of their back yard, which they have kept wooded.
“Isn’t that a ladyslipper?” he says. “Was that out yesterday?” But Julie is busy; she doesn’t look. Swain, his long, white feet still bare, carefully picks his way up the hill to examine the flower. It is then, as he stops yards away from the plant — clearly not a ladyslipper — that he hears God for the first time.
The sound comes up and over the hill. One quick cut. Like a hugely amplified PA system, blocks away, switched on for a moment by mistake. “Know that there is truth. Know this.” The last vowel, the “i” of “this,” lies quivering on the air like a note struck on a wineglass.
The voice is unmistakable. At the first intonation, the first rolling syllable, Swain wakes, feeling the murmuring life of each of a million cells. Each of them all at once. He feels the line where his two lips touch, the fingers of his left hand pressed against his leg, the spears of wet grass against the flat soles of his feet, the gleaming half-circles of tears that stand in his eyes. His own bone marrow hums inside him like colonies of bees. He feels the breath pouring in and out of him, through the damp, red passages of his skull. Then in the slow way that fireworks die, the knowledge fades. He is left again with his surfaces and the usual vague darkness within. He turns back around to see if Julie has heard.
She has not. Her back turned to him, she is serving the two plates that he has set on the patio table. A breeze is moving the edge of the outdoor tablecloth. She turns back around toward him, looking up the hill. “Soup’s on,” she says, smiling. “Come eat.” She stands and waits for him, as he walks, careful still of his feet and the nettles, back down to her. Straight to her. He takes her in his arms, ignoring her surprise, the half-second of her resistance. He pulls her close, tight against him, one hand laced now in her hair, one arm around her hips. He is as close as he can get. He has gathered all of her to him that he can hold.
He puts the side of his face against her cheek, so he will not have to see her eyes when he says: “Julie, over there on the grass, I heard something. A voice.”
She pulls back from him, forcing him to see her. She raises her eyebrows, half-smiling, searching his face for the signs of a joke. “A voice?” she says. There is laughter ready in her tone.
“God,” he says. His mouth is dry. “God’s voice.”
She watches him carefully now, her eyes scanning his eyes, ever-so-slightly moving. The trace of a smile is gone. “What do you mean?”
“Standing up there on the hill,” he says, almost irritably. “I heard God. That’s what I mean.” He watches her, his own face blank. Hers is struggling. Let her question it if she wants to. He doesn’t know how to explain.
“So what happened?” she says. “Tell me some more.” She pauses. “What did it — what did the voice sound like?”
Swain repeats the words he heard. He does not say then what happened to him: that hearing the voice, he has felt the mortality of his every cell.
They stand apart from each other now. She reaches over and touches his hair, strokes it. If one of us was to hear God, it should have been Julie, he thinks. But a different God — the one he has believed in until today.
She is looking at him steadily. “I don’t think you’re crazy, if that’s what you’re worried about.” Her uncertainty has left her. “It’s all right,” she says. “It is.”
“For you it would be,” he says. He means it as a compliment. He has envied her her imaginings, felt left behind sometimes by the unfocused look of her eyes. Though she will tell him where she is: that she goes back, years back, to particular days with particular weathers. That she plays in the back yard of her grandparents’ house, shirtless, in seersucker shorts, breathing the heavy summer air, near the blue hydrangeas. Swain wants to be with her then. He wants to go: “Except ye become as little children, ye shall not enter. . . .” He wants, and yet he doesn’t want.
She glances at the food on the plates. They move toward the table. The sweat that soaked his shirt has started to chill him.
“I’m going to get a sweater,” he says. “Do you want anything?” She shakes her head “no.” She sits, begins to eat her cooling dinner.
There are no lights on inside the house, only the yellowish glow of the patio light through the window, shining on one patch of floor in the hall. He goes to the hall closet, looking for something to put on. He finds a light windbreaker. He has his hand in the closet, reaching for the jacket, when he hears the voice again. One syllable. “Son.” The sound unfurls down the long hall toward him. He feels the sound and its thousand echoes hit him all at once. He holds on to the wooden bar where the coat hangs, while the shock washes over his back.
He stays where is he is, his back and neck bent, his hand bracing him, waiting. Nothing else happens. Again, it is over. Again he is wet with sweat. He straightens, painfully, as if he had held the position for hours. He walks again out onto the patio. Julie, at the table, squints to see his face against the light beside the door.
“Are you all right?” she says.
He sits, looks down at his plate. He holds the jacket, lays it across his lap like a napkin. He shakes his head. A sob is starting low in his chest, dry like a cough. He feels it coming, without tears. He has not cried since he tore a ligament playing school soccer. He has had no reason. Now he is crying, his own voice tearing and breaking through him. Inside him, walls are falling. Interior walls cave like old plaster, fall away to dust. He feels it like the breaking of living bones. In the last cool retreat of his reason, he thinks: I am seeing my own destruction. Then that cool place is invaded too. He feels the violent tide of whatever is in him flooding his last safe ground. He holds himself with both arms; Julie, on her knees beside his chair, holds him. God has done this to him. This is God. Tears drip down his face and trickle down his neck.
Two days later Swain sits alone in his office at the church. He has a sermon to write. Should he tell the congregation what happened to him? His note pad is blank. He has put down his pen. It is an afternoon with all the qualities of a sleepless night: hot, restless, unending. There are no distractions from what he is unable to do. The secretary is holding his calls. The couple who were to come in with marital difficulties cancelled. The window behind his desk is open; he stares out into the shimmery heat and listens to the churning of a lawn mower. He has already been through the literature and found nothing to reassure him.
Son. He keeps coming back to that one word in his mind. It was not Swain’s own father talking. That was clear. His father would never have been so definite, so terse. The elder Dr. Hammond would have interspersed his words, and there would have been more of them, with long moments of musing and probably the discreet small noises of his dyspepsia. He would have asked Swain to consider whether there was indeed “a truth.” Swain would have considered this, as he was asked. And possibly at some later time they would have discussed it, without conclusion.
Swain, twisting in his chair, resettling his legs, knows he did not create the voice. He did not broadcast that sound out through the pines of his own back yard. He sees again the reddish gold light of the late sun on the bark of those back yard trees. He did not imagine it. His mind does not play tricks.
Though the whole thing seems like a bad trick, a bad dream — divine revelation, coming now. He imagines himself in the pulpit, staring out at the congregation, telling them. He sees the horror waking on their faces, as they understand him. He sees them exchanging glances, glances that cut diagonally across the pews. He would be out. It would cost him the church. Leaders of the congregation would gradually, lovingly ease him out, help him make ‘other arrangements.’ He tries to imagine those other arrangements: churches with marquees that tally up the number saved on a Sunday, churches with buses and all-white congregations. Appalling. It makes him shudder.
He turns his chair away from the window, back to his desk. It is too soon. He has nothing to say. Know that there is truth? A half-sentence? He at least needs time to think about it. Then perhaps he can make some sense out of it. Of course he will make “public confession” finally. He will witness. He has to. “Whosever shall confess me before men, him shall the Son of Man also confess before the angels of God.” There is no question. “. . . He that denieth me before men. . . .” It is his mission — to speak. A man could not remain a minister with such a secret.
On Saturday, he has a wedding. He has already put on his robe. His black shoes gleam. He sits at his desk, ready early, signing letters left here in his box by the secretary. Routine business. His sermon for Sunday is written, typed in capital letters. It makes no direct reference to hearing the voice of God.
He does like marrying couples, thinks of it, in fact, as an important part of his ministry. When a couple gets together within the church, it always seems to him a sort of personal victory. As the boy said two weeks ago at the junior high retreat, “Human relations is where it’s at.”
The pair this afternoon is interesting to him in a more particular way. He has been counseling them since Louise, the bride-to-be, found out she was pregnant. She is thirty-eight, roughly his own age. She and Alphonse, a Colombian, have lived together for about three years. They have planned for today a fairly traditional, almost-formal ceremony. She is not yet showing. He remembers her when she was alone. He could see her on Sunday mornings canvassing the congregation with her eyes, picking out the occasional male visitor holding his hymnbook alone. Watching her in those years, he wondered what his own life would be like, without Julie. Whether he would show that same hunger so plainly on his face. He is glad for Louise, pregnant as she is. He caps his pen and stands. It’s time go in.
The feel is different now in the sanctuary, more relaxed than the eleven o’clock. Maybe it’s only the afternoon light, filtered as it is by stained glass. He stands at the chancel steps, the ceremony begins. Alphonse comes to stand beside him. They face the aisle where Louise is to enter on the arm of her sister’s husband. Swain tests the sound of their names, rehearses them in silence — Louise Elizabeth Berryman, Alphonse Martinez Vasconcellos. The twang and the beat of the Spanish — he has resolved to get it right, not to anglicize. He runs through the name again — and a scene unwinds like a scroll inside him. Gerona.
Louise, coming down the aisle now, slowly, slowly, moves in her long pale dress behind the clear shapes of his sudden unsought memory. He is twenty years old, standing in a stone-walled room in Spain. The straps of his backpack pull at his shoulders. It is quiet here, blocks away from the narrow river and the arched bridges. In this room — he read it in his guidebook — there was a revelation. He stands, with his two friends, in a medieval landmark of the Kabbalah. It is the moment, unplanned, when all three become quiet, when he can only hear the muted traffic from the street. He is looking for something in this room. He lays his hand on the grainy stone of the wall. Standing now in the sanctuary, he feels the damp grit of rock against the fist of his palm. He can’t escape it, he can’t shake it off. He wears it — this slight tingling pressure — like a glove. A wet glove that clings to his skin. Louise is now at the front before him.
The couple turns to him. They wait. “Dearly beloved,” he hears himself say. Faces stretch in a blur to the back of the church. He hears his voice — it must be his — float out to those faces, saying, “We are gathered here today. . . .”
He has told Julie everything, about hearing the voice. Not just the words, but how it felt. He has told her about the intrusion of the scene from Spain at the wedding this afternoon. “That was the last thing I needed,” he says. “For that to happen while I’m actually standing at the front.” They are sitting at the kitchen table. It’s late.
She shrugs. The look on her face is the one he tries to cultivate in counseling. She is not shocked. Yet she does not diminish what happened to him. The look is one of sympathy and respect at once. She does it, he knows, without thinking.
She nods toward the typewriter, his old one, standing in its case near the bookshelves. They both use it for letters; neither one of them has a legible handwriting. “You’ve always set the margins so narrow,” she says. “On yourself, on what’s real. You don’t give yourself much room.”
She waits. He thinks about it.
“True,” he says, nodding, looking away from her. “And you give yourself that kind of — ‘room’ you’re talking about.” He looks at her, her chin propped on one hand, her face pushed slightly out of shape. “But do you actually believe in it,” he says, “in what you see and hear, in the things you imagine? You don’t. Of course you don’t.”
She puts her hand down, on the table, away from her face. She takes a breath and holds it a second before she speaks. The look she has had, of authority, is gone. “In a way,” she says. She searches his face. “I don’t think too much about it. But — yes, in a way, I do.”
Interior walls cave like old plaster, fall away to dust. He feels it like the breaking of living bones. In the last cool retreat of his reason, he thinks: I am seeing my own destruction. Then that cool place is invaded too. He feels the violent tide of whatever is in him flooding his last safe ground. He holds himself with both arms; Julie, on her knees beside his chair, holds him. God has done this to him. This is God. Tears drip from his face and trickle down his neck.
There is no joy in it. That’s what bothers him. He is lying on the living room floor, still thinking about it, though he hasn’t mentioned any of it, even to Julie, for almost a week. Maybe silence will make the whole thing go away. Julie is in the armchair reading, her feet in old white tennis shoes, her ankles crossed near his head. He watches her feet move, very slightly, in a rhythm, as if she were listening to music instead of reading. Maybe she hears music and never mentions it. She likes music. Maybe she’s hearing Smetana’s “Moldau,” close enough to the orchestra to hear between the movements the creakings of musicians’ chairs. She would do this and think nothing of it. She has been patient with his days of silent turmoil.
As a kid, he wanted something like this to happen. Some sign. He did imagine though that it would bring with it pleasure — great happiness, in fact. He had a daydream of how it would be, set in the halls and classrooms of his elementary school, where he first imagined it. A column of warm pink light would pour over him, overpowering him with a sensation so intensely sweet it was unimaginable. He tried and tried to feel how it would feel. The warmth would wrap around his heart inside his chest, like two hands cradling him there. He would be full of happiness, completely at peace. The notion stayed with him past childhood, though certainly in his earlier years he didn’t talk about it.
But he did what he could to have that experience. Divine revelation. He wanted it. He lay on the floor of his bedroom at home, later his dorm room at Brown, and he waited. He stared at rippling creeks and wind-blown leaves and the deep chalky green of blackboards until his mind was lulled into receptive quiet. The quietness always passed, though, without interruption, at least by anything divine.
The search must have ended finally. Only now does he realize it, lying here with the front door standing open and moths batting against the screen. He doesn’t recall any such preoccupation during divinity school, though there was that one thing that happened in his last year. It hardly qualified him as a mystic, though it was reassuring at the time.
He was sitting out on the balcony of his apartment, a second-floor place he shared with two other students. He and Julie, not married then, were in one of their “off” times. He was feeling bad. The concordance, the notepad had slid off his lap. His legs were sprawled, completely motionless, in front of him, hanging off the end of the butt-sagged recliner. He had lost Julie; he was bone-tired of school; he wouldn’t have cared if he died.
He was staring at the scrubby woods behind the apartment complex, behind the parking lot and a weedy patch of mud and three dumpsters. Nothing mattered. Nothing at all. Then while he watched, everything — without motion or shift of light — everything he saw changed. He stared at the painted stripes on the asphalt, at water standing on the yellowish mud. It was all alive. Alive and sharing one life. The parking lot, the bare ground had become the varied skin of one living being. In the stillness, he waited for the huge creature to move, to take a breath. Nothing stirred. Yet he felt the benevolence of the animal, its power, rising off the surface before him like waves of heat.
What he felt then was a lightness, a sort of happiness. This was so important. It was at least a hint of what he had once imagined.
That afternoon he was buoyed. He finished the work he had sat with the whole afternoon. He fried himself a hamburger and ate it and was still hungry. He watched a few minutes of the news. He did not die or think further of dying since that day, other than for the purposes of sermons, counseling, and facing the inevitable facts.
Facts. He is lying on the floor of his living room. Julie is reading in the chair. God has spoken to him, in English, clearly, in an unmistakable voice. He is not glad.
“What would you do, Julie?” he says. He is looking at the ceiling, he does not turn his head. “Would you stand up in that pulpit and tell them, ‘I have heard the voice of God’; would you do it?” He rolls over on his side and looks at her. Her foot has stopped moving. She has put her book down.
“I’ve been thinking about that,” she says.
“What did you decide?”
“Probably,” she says. “I think I would.” She is not smiling. She looks at him steadily. Her eyes are tired.
“Oh?” he says. There is an edge in his voice. “What else would you say? How would you explain it? Explain it to me, if you understand so well.” He pauses, waits.
“Say as much as you know,” she says.
“What is that? One piece of a sentence: know that there is truth. It isn’t enough. I have nothing to say.”
“It’s your job, isn’t it?” she says. “To tell them. Isn’t it?” He sees the fear flickering across her face now. She needs to say it, but she’s scared. It’s the way he would be, standing before his incredulous congregation. Fearing the cost. What would it cost her to say this?
“You’re afraid to tell me,” he says. His voice is weary, dull.
She nods.
“Why?”
She swallows, looks away from him. “Because I’m saying you need to do something that may turn out bad. It would be the most incredible irony — but it could happen. They might decide you’re losing your marbles. They might call it that, when really they don’t want a minister who says this kind of stuff — about hearing God. It’s not that kind of church. You know?”
He ignores the question. “We could have to move,” he says. “We could wind up somewhere we would hate. Is that what you’re worried about?”
“Some,” she says. “But mostly that you would blame me, if it happened — that you would always feel like I pushed you into it.”
“And then the marriage would fall apart,” he says.
“Yeah,” she says. Her voice shakes. Her mouth has the soft forgotten look it gets when all of her is concentrated elsewhere. In this case, on fear. He is not in the mood to reassure her.
“And what if I don’t do it?” he says. “What if I never say a word and you spend the rest of your life thinking I’m a shit — a minister who denies God? What would happen to us then?”
She shakes her head. She is close to tears. “I don’t think that will happen,” she says. It comes out in an uneven whisper.
Swain stands, straightens his pants legs. He looks at her once without sympathy, but her face is averted, she doesn’t see. He leaves the room, goes into the kitchen. He gets out a small tub of Haagen Dazs and a spoon, stands near the fridge, eating from the container. There is no sound from her in the other room. Pink light — what a joke. “Suppose ye that I am come to give peace on earth? I tell you, Nay; but rather division.” The voice didn’t warn him, didn’t remind him. He shakes his head. He digs and scrapes at the ice cream.
He is turning his car into the church parking lot when it happens again. He hears God. His window is open. The car is lurched upward onto the incline of the pavement. The radio is on, but low. From the hedge, a few feet from his elbow on the window frame, a sound emerges. It clearly comes from there: a burst, a jumble of phrases, scripture, distortions of scripture: “He that heareth and doeth not . . . for there is nothing hid . . . the word is sown on stony ground . . . he that hath ears . . . he that hath. . . .” A nightmare. A nightmare after a night of too much reading. A spilling of accusation, reproach. Swain is staring straight ahead. A hot weight presses into him, into the soft vee beneath the joining of his ribs. It hurts, it pins him to the seat. It passes like a cramp, leaving only a shadow, a distrust of those muscles.
Another car is waiting behind him, easing toward his fender. He pulls into the parking lot, into a space. He does it automatically. His face feels as hot as the sun-baked plastic car seat. He looks at the hedge, running between the sidewalk and the street. Tear it out — that’s what he wants to do. Pull it up, plant by plant, with his hands. He is a pastor. Not a prophet. Not a radio evangelist. He does not believe in gods that quote the King James version out of bushes and trees.
He gets out of the car, goes into the church, into his office. He kicks the door shut behind him. He tosses a new yellow legal pad onto the bare center of his desk. There has to be something in this room to smash. He looks around: at the small panes of the window; at the veneer on the side of his desk; at the cluster of family pictures, framed; at the bud vase Julie gave him, that now holds two wilting daisies and a home-grown rose. Something to break. He grabs the vase by the neck and slings it, overarm, dingy water spilling, into a pillow of the sofa. A soft thump, and the stain of water spreads on the dark upholstery. He looks away from it, looks at the yellow pad on his desk. His career. That’s what he’ll smash. That ought to be enough. He walks around behind the desk, sits, red-faced, breathing audibly through parted lips. He stares at the lined paper with the pen in his hand. Say as much as you know. He begins to write. Beyond writing it down, he tells himself, he has made no decision.
He looks at the hedge, running between the sidewalk and the street. Tear it out — that’s what he wants to do. Pull it up, plant by plant, with his hands. He is a pastor. Not a prophet. Not a radio evangelist. He does not believe in gods that quote the King James version out of bushes and trees.
On the following Sunday, he walks forward into the pulpit. He has received the offering. He has performed the preliminary duties with a detached methodical calm. Now he stands with his hands on the wooden rail, his fingers finding their familiar places along the tiered wood. “Friends,” he says. He looks at no one in particular. “I have struggled with what I have to say to you today.” They are waiting, with no more than their routine interest. “I have come to say to you that I have heard the voice of God.” He says it to the rosette of stained glass at the back of the sanctuary. He cannot look at Julie in the third row. He cannot look at the McDougalls or Sam Bagdikian or Mary Elgar, as he says it. In the ensuing silence, his eyes sweep forward again, from the window back across 300 faces. They are blank, waiting still, mildly interested. No one is alarmed. They have not understood.
He begins again. As much as he knows. “I think you know that I believe in an immanent God. I think you know that I believe in the presence and power of God in all our lives. I have come to tell you today that something has happened to me in recent days which I do not understand.
“A voice has spoken to me. I know that it is God. A voice has spoken to me that was a chorus of voices. I know that they are God.” He pauses. “My wife Julie and I were cooking dinner on the grill on our back patio. . . .” The faces grow taut with attention. Sudden stillness falls over the church to the back pews of the balcony. There is no flutter of church bulletins. There are no averted faces. It is not a metaphor, not a parable he is telling. His wife Julie, the back patio — they are listening. He proceeds, with a trembling deep in his gut. He begins with the ladyslipper and voice that came over the hill.
He tells them about the word “son” and the windbreaker and his own tears. “I asked myself whether I should bring this to you on a Sunday morning,” he says. He looks from face to face in the rows in front of him. What are they thinking? It’s impossible to tell. The shaking inside him has moved outward, to his hands. He feels them damp against the wood of the pulpit rail. He does not trust his voice.
“I asked myself how you the members of this congregation would react. Would you think that I’ve —” he tries to say this lightly, with a wry laugh — “that maybe I’ve been under too much stress lately.” The laugh is not convincing. He himself hears its false ring. “But I will tell you,” he says, “that that is not what has happened. I have not taken leave of my senses.”
He looks at Julie. He can see her wrists, before the back of the pew breaks his vision. He knows her hands are knotted together, moving one against the other. He pulls his eyes away.
“I asked myself whether you would want a pastor who hears voices. Or even whether some of you might come to expect wisdom from me, because of what has happened, that I do not have.” He pauses. “I don’t know what to expect,” he says, “from you or —” he hesitates — “from God. But I will tell you that my heart is now open. I will listen.” He steps back, hearing as he does so the first note of the organ reliable Miss Bateman is playing. The congregation stands, hymnbooks in hands. The service ends without incident. Swain stands as usual at the front steps afterwards to shake hands and greet people. Three of all those who file past him tell him that the Lord works in wondrous ways, or something to that effect. Miss Frances Eastwood squeezes his elbow and tells him to trust. Ed Fitzgerald lays one hand on his shoulder, close to his collar, and says, “I like what you did here today.” The rest make no mention of what has occurred. The line moves quickly past him, handshakes, heartiness, veiled eyes.
It is not over, of course. Julie keeps her hand on his knee as he drives home, though they say little. During the afternoon, he receives several phone calls at home, of an encouraging and congratulatory nature. Coming back into the kitchen, where Julie is cleaning out drawers to keep busy, he says, “It’s the ones who don’t call, who are calling each other. . . .”
What does occur happens gradually. Swain is given no answer, no sense of having-got-it-over on that Sunday afternoon. First, as he surmises, conversations buzz back and forth, on the telephone, at get-togethers, in chance meetings on the street. People inside and outside the church talk about what happened, about Swain Hammond’s sermon.
The night the church operations committee meets, Swain and Julie stay home and play Scrabble. Swain can’t concentrate, but Julie protests every time he wants to quit. The call comes at 11:15. It’s Joe Morris. “Between you and me,” Joe reminds him, “this is all unofficial. . . .”
The upshot of it is that the committee voted five-to-four to recommend privately that Swain get professional help. The chairman Bill Bartholomew, who made the motion, comes to Swain’s office to tell him. “Of course,” he says, “this is something which is not easy to say. But we all go through times when we need. . . .”
“Thank you for your prayers and concern,” Swain says. He is accustomed to assuming a look of gratitude when it is called for. It only fails him in the last minutes of the conversation.
“Are you so sure I’m crazy, Bill?” he says. The two of them are standing now in the office doorway, there is no one in the hall. “Doesn’t it seem contradictory?” Swain says. Bill is watching him carefully. “It’s okay to believe in God, but only if God is distant. A presence in history. Is that the idea?”
“I’m sure I don’t want to debate this with you,” Bill says. “It’s only the will of the committee —”
“I understand your position,” Swain says. He does not seek counseling.
When news of the committee’s action leaks, a petition circulates and the members take sides. This time the vote is with Swain. The letter, signed by the majority of the members, affirms that Dr. Swain Hammond is in his right mind and will continue to be welcome as minister. These are not the exact words, but this is the meaning.
Swain mentions this decision from the pulpit, but only as a brief comment among the day’s other announcements. “Thank you for your love and support,” he says. Unexpectedly, as he says it, he feels a tightness in his throat. He looks from face to face. He won’t be leaving. If he thinks about it, he’ll lose his composure. He summons a bit of the anger that has sustained him through the last few weeks. It works, he manages to keep the wave of love at bay.
“Besides,” he tells Julie later that day, “I don’t completely trust it.” They are taking a late afternoon walk through the neighborhood around their house. “I feel like all this could change, if the balance shifted just a little. I’m reasonably secure for the moment,” he says. “I suppose that will have to do.”
She doesn’t say anything. She has said her part several times already: that she is proud of him, that she is proud of what he did.
“I’m also disappointed,” he says. They stop for a moment to avoid the arc of spray from a sprinkler cutting across the sidewalk. “I thought maybe a few people would be curious about what actually happened. Would want to hear more.” He shakes his head. “They don’t.” It makes him mad to think about it. They’ve decided to put up with him — that’s what they’ve made of all this. They’re being broad-minded and tolerant, that’s all.
Swain does hear the voice of God again. This time — last Tuesday morning — it is as a note of music, as he is just waking up. Julie lies beside him asleep. It is early, still twenty minutes before the alarm is set to go off. He knows before it happens that it’s coming. He does not move. He waits, while the note emerges from a sound too deep to be heard. Then it is audible, filling the room, humming against his bare stomach, like the live warm touch of a hand. In the same moment, it begins to diminish, a dwindling vibration of piano strings.
Swain lies still. He does not cry this time, or soak the sheets with his sweat. He does not wake Julie, whose breath he can feel on the curve of his shoulder. He looks at the morning light on the far wall, shifting with the shadows of tree branches. He watches the triangle and splinters of light, forming and re-forming, and feels the slow rise and fall of his own chest. Everything is quiet: the room, the yard beneath the window, the street out front. He can see it all in his mind now, one surface, connected, breathing with his same slow breath. What he feels then, flooding the whole space of his being, is joy, undeniably joy, though it has not come as he would have expected. It is not what he looked for at all.
I discovered “The Pure In Heart” in Cardinal, a superb new collection of North Carolina fiction and poetry edited by Richard Krawiec.
Intrigued by the title, I started reading Peggy Payne’s story and couldn’t put it down. Not surprisingly, it’s been nominated for several prestigious awards.
The story first appeared in Crescent Review (P.O. Box 15065, Winston-Salem, NC 27113; $7.50/year for two issues) and was then published in Cardinal (Jacar Press, P.O. Box 4, Wendell, NC 27591; $14.95 less twenty percent for Sun readers). This is its third publication and I’m sure there will be more.
— Ed.
