After going up to the second floor to hang up his coat and drop the briefcase in his office, Edward decided to spend time in prayerful solitude. He used to do that quite often in the mornings before the church secretary arrived for the day, and he hadn’t realized until now how little of that he’d done lately and how much he missed that time. How much he needed it.
Edward stood in the sanctuary of Faith Community Church, the double wooden doors swinging closed behind him. The first thing people noticed when they stepped beyond the doors and into the sanctuary was the imposing pulpit at the front. Maurice ‘Big Mo’ Thompson, a long-standing congregant, current board member, and master woodworker had done a fine job creating the mahogany pulpit, making the entire congregation proud. It was a magnificent piece that contrasted beautifully with the white walls and ceiling and at the same time complemented the lighter-colored wooden pews. Arranged behind the pulpit were two rows of choir benches with an organ to the right and a piano to the left. On a good Sunday the sanctuary could comfortably fit three hundred souls.
Edward hobbled down the center aisle and sat in the front pew on the right. He set the cane between his legs and ran his hands along the polished wood. He thought of all the times he’d sat in church services in the front pew next to his mother while his father stood behind the pulpit and preached to his own congregation back in Albany.
Closing his eyes, he remembered sitting next to his mother. He could see her dressed in black, a veil hanging over her face, the tears flowing freely down her cheeks. He heard his father’s baritone voice rising and falling and choking with emotion as he recited the 23rd Psalm. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for thou art with me, thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me. His father had looked directly at Edward as he’d said that line, and in his father’s glistening eyes Edward saw the inner struggle of a man who had pledged his loyalty to a God who had done nothing to prevent his newborn daughter, Edward’s baby sister Ruth, from dying three days after she was born. Seven years old at the time, too young, perhaps, to understand all the nuances and complexities of such a struggle for a man of faith like his father, Edward was certainly old enough to recognize that the man he loved and respected was going through a very real valley of death.
Up to that point in his life, Edward had never felt so sad, scared, alone, and angry as he had that day sitting next to his mother, watching his father. He had told God how angry he was for letting his little sister die and for causing his mom to cry and his dad to be the way he was up there in the pulpit. He told God it wasn’t fair. Later that day, after all the finger sandwiches were eaten and all the talking and crying had—temporarily—ceased, when Edward was lying in his bed in the dark, his mother nudged his bedroom door open and asked how he was doing. He didn’t answer her, so she came into his room and sat on the edge of his bed. That was when Edward told his mother what he told God. And his mother, bless her sweet soul, had saved his faith in the Almighty that night. Edward, she had said, that’s quite all right. The Lord, he knows what you’re going through. He knows all about unfairness. And he’s just as sad and angry as you are, probably more so. You go ahead, Edward, and you tell God just how you feel. I assure you, he’s big enough to take it.
When he was seven years old, after crying with his mother and talking to her in the quiet darkness of his bedroom, Edward realized that he would never in his life meet anyone as smart as his mother.
Edward opened his eyes and stood. He gripped his cane and climbed the three steps that brought him up to the pulpit. He stood behind it and looked down at the pews. A wave of uneasiness swept over him as he thought of his congregants having to look up to him every Sunday when he preached to them. The days of people looking up to him were over. He pictured in his mind the people that he had come to know and love and where they sat every Sunday: the Petersons on the right and half-way back with their two little girls; the Wilburs, the oldest couple in his church, a few rows behind the Petersons; the still childless Roths on the opposite side of the sanctuary, Lucy Roth making numerous trips to the ladies’ room while Edward preached.
Edward hooked his cane over his right wrist and held on to the sides of the pulpit, a captain at the helm of his ship in the eye of a storm, knowing the deceptive quietness would not last long and that the worst of the storm was yet to come. “I will fear no evil.” Even though his voice reverberated throughout the empty sanctuary, it lacked the authority and power of his father’s. That man had been gifted with the ability to silence a crowd whether he was reading from the book of Psalms or from the Yellow Pages of an AT&T phone book. Edward relied on technique—clever phrases, timing, alliteration, and humor—to command an audience’s attention. Style, words, and feeling the pulse of the crowd. Is that what it had all come down to for Edward? He doubted his father ever preached that way, relying on human talent and effort to deliver a divine message from God.
Perhaps that was Edward’s problem. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d delivered a message he knew to be divine, to be directly from God. Yes, his sermons were taken from the Bible, and yes, he prepared for them, but divine messages directly from God? He remembered his father spending hours in prayer throughout the week preparing for his Sunday messages. When was the last time he had spent an hour—a half hour?—praying for one of his sermons? Edward spent years watching his father deliver personal, deeply felt messages from God, and had come away learning how to preach stylish, doctrinally accurate, yet perhaps ultimately hollow sermons.
As a teen, like most boys who thought their fathers knew absolutely nothing, he had vowed he would never grow up to be like his father. At least that was one vow Edward had managed to keep.
He stepped out from behind the safety of the pulpit and limped up the middle aisle. He was going to sit in the rear pew in quiet reflection for a little while. Perhaps he would even—. Something in the middle of a pew on the left caught his attention. He side-stepped his way between the pews. It was an open Bible. He picked it up and flipped the pages to the 23rd Psalm, hoping to find comfort in the words of King David. He knew the words to it—he’d memorized it decades ago in Miss Slattery’s Sunday school class—but reading it off the page, seeing the words in black, feeling the weight of the Bible in his hands, added weight to the words. He turned a page and a folded piece of paper fell out from between the pages and landed on the wooden pew in front of him. He reached over and picked it up. It was a church bulletin that had been handed out to the congregation yesterday, listing this week’s meeting times, locations of home Bible studies, current prayer requests, and upcoming events. He was about to tuck it back into the Bible when he noticed a drawing on the back of it.
It felt like a punch to the gut. Nausea roiled through his stomach and up his throat. He dropped the Bible and the drawing and latched on to the pew in front of him for fear of collapsing. The drawing lay face-up on the pew. Two anatomically-correct stick figures, drawn in black, blotchy ink, lay horizontally, one on top of the other. ‘Pastor Graham’ was written next to the one on top, ‘Mrs. Sanderson’ next to the one on the bottom. The artist left nothing to the imagination as to what he or she had wanted to portray in this crude piece of obscenity.
All Edward could do was sit in the pew and fight back the bile from rising in his throat. Minutes passed before he was able to steady his breathing and feel confident he wasn’t going to vomit if he moved. He reached over the pew, grabbed the drawing, ripped the obscenity in half, ripped it again, and ripped it again, until he could no longer rip the shreds he held. He stuffed them into his pants pocket, pieces falling to the floor, and heaved the Bible across the room. The pages fluttered, scraps of notes escaped and drifted to the floor like feathers from a bird that’d been shot in mid-flight. The Bible crashed into a table at the rear of the sanctuary and landed in an empty metal offering plate.
Edward stood. He held on to his cane and shuffled out of the pew and limped up the aisle, and the only thought in his mind was that he should have called his father; he should have called him when it all started. He should have called him when he’d first felt the temptation. He should have called a long time before that, back when there had still been hope that they could have rebuilt the bridges that they had burned. That Edward had not only burned but blew to smithereens with the explosive words he’d said.
The last time the two of them had talked had been the day after Lynne shot Edward in the hip and turned the gun on herself.
Edward clenched his jaw and shoved open the doors that led out of the sanctuary. He hadn’t taken two steps when he felt like he’d run straight into a brick wall. The man, his back to Edward, stood at one of the display tables on the far side of the foyer, the one with stacks of gospel tracts for congregants to take and hand out to the lost during the week. The man, one hand removing a New England Patriots hat from his head, the other lifting toward the pocket of his blue mechanics work coat, turned around.
Carl Sanderson did not smile as he dropped the gospel tract he’d been reading and reached into his coat pocket.