This Side of Jordan Read online

  “They ought to at least paint it,” Alvin remarked, giving the church a good once-over from across the road. “Don’t seem right to let it go like that.”

  “I suppose they haven’t the resources,” the dwarf replied. “I painted our back porch one day when Auntie was off on errands and was shocked to discover how much everything cost. Had Auntie seen the bill, I doubt she’d have allowed it.”

  “I guess a church’d be able to afford it,” Alvin said. “They don’t do nothing except collect money.”

  “Do you attend often?”

  “Not if I can help it.” He hated church and didn’t ever read the Bible. It was all baloney.

  Alvin listened to the singing.

  There’s a land that is fairer than day, and by faith we can see it afar

  For the Father waits over the way, to prepare me a dwelling place there

  In the sweet (in the sweet) by and by (by and by)

  We shall meet on that beautiful shore (by and by)

  Rascal said, “Auntie and I attended services every Sunday morning together until I turned twenty. We went by hired carriage and greeted each of our fellow Christians by name along the route. It made for quite a spectacle, I must admit.”

  To our bountiful Father above, we will offer our tribute of praise,

  For the glorious gift of His love, and the blessings that hallow our days.”

  The dwarf added, “It was also one of the few occasions where she allowed herself to be seen with me out of doors. At the church, we had our own special place reserved in the front pew and two fine leatherbound volumes of the hymnal.”

  In the sweet (in the sweet) by and by (by and by)

  We shall meet on that beautiful shore (by and by).

  In the sweet (in the sweet) by and by, (by and by)

  We shall meet on that beautiful shore.

  “Singing’s the worst part of going to church,” said Alvin, listening to the hymn. “Any old bunch of billygoats’ll sound about as good as most folks trying to carry a tune.”

  “I was elected to the choir,” Rascal said, “though, of course, Auntie did not permit me to perform for fear I’d embarrass myself in front of our neighbors.”

  “I hope you thanked her.”

  “In fact, her fears were quite unfounded. My voice back then possessed near perfect pitch and I’d long since committed all our hymns to memory. I’m sure my performance would have been memorable.”

  We shall sing on that beautiful shore, the melodious songs of the blest

  And our spirits shall sorrow no more, not a sigh for the blessings of rest.

  In the sweet (in the sweet) by and by (by and by)

  We shall meet on that beautiful shore (by and by).

  Alvin stuck his suitcase in the weeds and crossed the road to the side of the church and looked in through the yellow windowpanes. The pews were packed with people dressed in their Sunday finest. At the pulpit, the preacher was lecturing hellfire and brimstone while the choir behind him nodded grimly. It didn’t seem all that different from services Alvin had attended in Farrington. Singing and shouting. Lots of old people acting drowsy, small children getting pinched by their mothers for fidgeting too often. Who paid any mind to what some dumbbell preacher had to say? When Alvin first caught the consumption, Reverend Newbury came to the farm and took his hand and told him Jesus dwelt in his lungs and if he kept faith in the Lord, Jesus would do his breathing for him until the Holy Spirit healed that awful disease. A month later Alvin was in the sanitarium, nearer to heaven than health.

  The farm boy stepped down from the window and looked around. He and the dwarf seemed to be the only people nearby not inside the church. Somehow it made him feel truant and guilty, like he ought to go indoors and sit down, maybe sing along for a few minutes or so. Rascal walked along the road a little further, studying a patch of Arkansas rose growing at the foot of the fence that bordered the fields next to the church. Probably the dwarf wouldn’t be allowed inside a church with normal folks, Alvin thought, on account of a case like his would make the Lord look bad. Then again, maybe the preacher would just hold Rascal up as an example of what can happen if you don’t go to church or say your prayers at bedtime. Being born a dwarf might even be the mark of Cain, for all anyone knew, God’s judgment on a wicked man or woman for sins unforgiven. Aunt Hattie always said the Lord worked in sly and secretive ways. He knew everything you ever did, and everything you planned to do, and though you might fool Him now and then, when the last card got thrown down, you’d always know His hand was the strongest. Alvin watched the dwarf pick a handful of purple asters and fold them into his fist for carrying alongside the small suitcase. Somewhere along the line, Rascal’s family must have earned the Lord’s attention in a powerful way. How well we bear our burdens, Aunt Hattie had told Alvin, marks us in the Lord’s countenance, for it was He who bestowed them, after all.

  “It’s a beautiful day, don’t you agree?” said the dwarf, walking toward Alvin. He offered a wildflower, but the farm boy declined.

  “I already told you, I’m allergic.”

  “Then I’ll keep them myself for luck,” Rascal said, tucking a blossom into his romper before scattering the remaining handful into the wildrye next to the church. “God smiles on Sundays. I can hardly recall one where it rained.”

  “Maybe we ought to go inside,” Alvin said, tired of waiting around outdoors. He’d like to have been able to stretch out in the back row on a long pew and have a nap. Truth was, he was beginning to think he would have to see a doctor sooner than later.

  “Do you think that would be wise? Chester was most specific in his request that we wait until service lets out.”

  “Well, I ain’t standing here all morning.”

  “I don’t mind waiting,” the dwarf replied. “Impatience is the devil’s lure.”

  “Shut up.”

  The dwarf crossed back over the road and picked up his suitcase. Alvin walked around to the rear of the church to look for the back door. Most of the conveyances people had used to travel to the church were parked there, scattered about in no particular order, old buggies and motorcars—including Chester’s tan Packard. There was only a short section of fence along the north end of the church separating the lot from the surrounding fields, and most of the horses hitched to the buggies stood in the morning sun, grazing where grass was long enough. As Alvin drew nearer, he saw a homely young girl with stringy brown hair sitting on a wooden fifteen-gallon water bucket, a tattered Bible in her lap. She was fiddling with a partially unraveled ball of lavender yarn, a cat’s cradle. The girl’s plain thin face was pale as powder and her print dress thread-worn and dull.

  “Hey there,” said Alvin, easing between two of the horses. The girl looked up, squinting her eyes against the sun. The farm boy asked, “You watching these horses?”

  “They ain’t watching me.”

  “How come you ain’t in church with them other folks?” Alvin noticed a purple birthmark behind her ear, a sign of misfortune. Also, she had a nose like a russet potato. Poor thing.

  She cocked her head. “Why ain’t you?”

  “I got business out here, that’s why.” He puffed himself up for her benefit.

  “Me, too.”

  The girl completed the cat’s cradle and sat still on the wooden bucket. The morning breeze blew lightly through her hair. Within the church, organ tones accompanied the plaintive voices of men and women joined in song. Alvin studied the girl. She looked drowsy and dim-witted. She was stick thin, but had soft little titties on her chest, so he figured she wasn’t more than four or five years younger than himself. Her eyes were cloudy, her face expressionless as a cow’s. Maybe she was sick, too. A girl her age had died in the sanitarium the morning Alvin was released, drowned in her own blood. He’d never heard a peep out of her.

  “You from around here?” he asked, shuffling his feet in the dust. It was all he could think of to say. For some reason, he grew shy. Maybe she was a little pretty. He’
d seen worse.

  “’Course,” she replied, fooling with the yarn. “I been adopted by the Lord.”

  “Where do you live?”

  “Inside the church,” she said. “Down in the basement.”

  “You like sleeping in a church?”

  “I don’t mind. They’s worse places.”

  He nodded. “Yeah, I guess so.”

  “Jesus didn’t never live in any big old mansion,” said the girl, unraveling her yarn out through the palm of one hand. “He didn’t need all that fanciness to get by.”

  Inside the church, the organ quit and the singing stopped. Shortly after, Alvin could hear the preacher’s voice echoing within, as if everyone listening to him was half-deaf.

  “Maybe I ought to go in there and sit down,” Alvin said to the girl. “I guess nobody’d mind.”

  “Don’t you love Jesus?” the girl asked, squinting up at Alvin in the glare of the morning sun. Something with her eyes caught Alvin’s attention, how they flicked about like squirrels in a tree. This girl’s not right in the head, Alvin thought. She’s suffered some peculiar condition whereby she can sort of talk all right and even make a little sense now and then, but some part of her is cracked and not even sleeping in a church can fix it.

  “I guess Jesus got enough to worry about.” Alvin stroked the mane of the horse harnessed to the buggy. “He probably don’t care what I do or where I go. I could get inside there and sit down in a corner somewhere, He might not even notice me.”

  “His eye is on the sparrow and I know He’s watching me,” the girl said, quoting from a hymn Aunt Hattie sang in the kitchen on Sundays. “We all been adopted by Jesus, and He loves us no matter what we do ’cause we’re His children.”

  “You get that from a preacher?” Alvin heard the doxology, Praise God, from Whom all blessings flow, as the collection plate was being passed through the congregation.

  “Nobody had to tell me,” said the girl. “I knowed myself it’s true.

  I trust Jesus.”

  “Good for you.”

  “You better, too.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “All sinners need Jesus.”

  “What would you know about sin? You’re just a girl.”

  He was losing patience now, and decided she wasn’t anything worth looking at, after all.

  “Why ain’t you scared of Jesus?” she asked. “Didn’t nobody tell you He’s coming soon?”

  “Jesus don’t scare me as much as some other things,” said Alvin, taking a look down the road toward Allenville. He felt a bad cough coming on, maybe even a dizzy fit.

  “What other things?” the girl asked.

  “That ain’t no concern of yours.”

  “There ain’t nobody’s business that ain’t Jesus’.”

  “Well, you ain’t Jesus now, are you?”

  Alvin let go of the horse and walked out toward the edge of the field where the last buggy was parked. Why had he even bothered trying to strike up a conversation with a stupid girl obviously afflicted by some dumbpalsy? He’d just wanted to be a little friendly, and ended hearing another sermon. People weren’t nice anywhere these days. He looked for Rascal. Last he had seen him, the dwarf was digging around by the roadside for more wildflowers. The organ had started up again with another hymn.

  Alvin walked along the fence until he came around to the church front and climbed the ten steps (one for each of the Lord’s Commandments) to the landing and eased open the large wooden door. With the preacher’s voice raised once more to his congregation, nobody noticed Alvin slip inside and take a seat by himself on the far end of the rear pew. He removed his cap and looked for Chester and saw him in the front row on the aisle, felt hat in hand, attention rapt and focused on the preacher perched above him. He didn’t notice Alvin. The surrounding congregation wasn’t much different from those who sat in the pews back in Farrington. The ladies wore the same frilly sunbonnets and the men smelled of Wildroot and Saturday night liquor. Not one of them did anything but sit like boards and listen to a fellow who looked like every country preacher Alvin had seen in his life: stony-faced, a plain black suit that might’ve been shared with the local undertaker, eyes like hot-fire.

  The preacher’s voice bellowed between the pitched and narrow walls of the small church, “FRIENDS, YOU MIGHT THINK YOU CAN CHOOSE YOUR RELIGION, BUT IN TRUTH IT ALWAYS CHOOSES YOU. THE LORD PROVIDES WHILE SATAN DIVIDES. IGNORING THAT FACT CAN BE THE GREATEST MISTAKE OF YOUR LIVES! FRIENDS, I AM NOT HERE TO OFFER YOU SALVATION! ONLY THE LORD CAN DO THAT! I AM NOT HERE TO LEAD YOU PAST WORLDLY TEMPTATIONS! ONLY JESUS CAN DO THAT! ONLY THROUGH HIS EYES WILL YOU BE ABLE TO SEE THE SHADOW THAT’S BEEN STALKING YOU SINCE THE DAY YOU WERE BORN! YOU CANNOT MAKE RESTITUTION TO ME FOR ERRORS OF FAITH OR JUDGMENT! I AM NOT YOUR REDEEMER! JESUS IS! BUT I AM HERE TO WARN YOU TODAY: SINCE THE FALL, OUR HEARTS HAVE BEEN BLACKENED BY SINS CONCEIVED AND CONCEALED! ALONE, WE HAVE NO HOPE OF REDEMPTION! ALONE, WE ARE ALREADY LOST AND GIVEN OVER TO THE FIERY PITS! OUR FATES ARE SEALED, OUR AGONY DELIVERED! THE ROPE ABOVE THE GALLOW SWINGS IN A TROUBLING WIND! YEA, THE LIGHT OF THE WICKED IS PUT OUT, AND THE FLAME OF HIS FIRE DOES NOT SHINE! TRUSTING IN THE CERTAINTY OF OUR ANGUISH, WE WALK DEAF, DUMB AND BLIND TOWARD THE PIT! YET, JESUS DOES NOT FORSAKE US! EVEN AS WE HAVE FORSAKEN OURSELVES, HIS GRACIOUS HEART WAITS TO REDEEM US, TO RESTORE OUR SOILED—”

  Alvin got up and walked out.

  Disgusted with sermons, he sat down on the top step of the porch and watched the breeze wash across the fields of wildrye to the south. The sun was hot now and Alvin unbuttoned his shirt cuffs and rolled up his sleeves. What the hell had Chester brought them here for? What was his plan? The farm boy walked down to the bottom of the steps to look for the dwarf. He guessed that Sunday services were almost done and soon the organ would play its final hymn. He wandered out to the road and discovered Rascal sitting astride the suitcase once again, his bouquet of purple asters in one hand, a black leatherbound Bible in the other.

  “What’s that you’re reading there?”

  The dwarf looked up from the page. “The Book of Job. I thought that, as we are not allowed inside the church, and seeing it is Sunday, after all, I ought to study.”

  “Where’d you get that?” Alvin asked, pointing at Rascal’s bible.

  “From a thoroughly delightful young lady I just met.”

  “I hope you don’t mean that ugly little thing sitting over there behind the church looking after the horses.”

  “Oh, did you meet her, as well?”

  “Sure,” Alvin replied. “She talked my ear off about Jesus. I think she’s afflicted.”

  “Oh? Why, she seemed quite enlightened to me. I was impressed by her command of Scripture.”

  “She says she been adopted by Jesus,” said Alvin, “but she don’t hardly know nothing about anything, especially her own self. She thinks she’s smart, but she don’t begin to fool me.”

  “I found her quite well-versed in the Scriptures. I wouldn’t be surprised if she teaches Sunday school somewhere. She’s very bright.”

  “I think she’s dumb as ditchwater,” said Alvin. “The day she starts teaching folks about Jesus, Billy Sunday’ll be singing polkas with the devil in Hades.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t worry about that,” said the dwarf. “Our Lord only calls those He deems most capable.”

  Inside the church, the organist began playing and Alvin heard the front doors swing open. The dwarf closed the Bible and jumped up, grabbing his suitcase. As the first people flooded the staircase, Alvin followed the dwarf across the road and behind the church where the homely girl was still perched on her wooden water bucket, the cat’s cradle yarn in her lap. When she saw Alvin and Rascal, she swiveled on the bucket to face them.

  The dwarf gave the Bible back to her. “I’m sorry that I did not get the chance to finish studying Job’s plight. I promise to try and locate a Bible of my own very soon and complete my lesson.”

  The girl smiled. “You been teaching this one here abo
ut the Lord?”

  Before Rascal could reply, Alvin stepped forward and snatched the Bible out of the girl’s hand. “Looky here, sweetheart: he don’t need to teach me nothing about nobody! I already learned about Jesus Christ Almighty when I was half this tall, and only dumbbells ever believed there was such a thing, and I don’t need no ugly little girl telling me nothing to the contrary! You get me?”

  Then Alvin threw the Bible into the dirt and took the dwarf by the crook of his arm and hauled him up to the fenceline on the north side of the church where people filing out to their buggies or automobiles couldn’t see them.

  “I don’t know why you waste your time like that,” Alvin said, giving the fence a good shake.

  Rascal laid his suitcase against one of the posts and growled back, “I have no idea what you mean.”

  “That ugly girl.”

  “Well, you were very rude.”

  “She wouldn’t understand nothing else.”

  “Nevertheless.”

  “How long do you figure we’re supposed to wait out here?” Alvin asked, taking a look out toward the rear where people were beginning to depart. He felt jittery as hell now. A motor roared to life nearer the road and the backfire caused some commotion with the horses. Alvin heard the girl yapping like a barking dog as she tried to calm them down.

  “We just ought to take care not to be seen, I suppose,” the dwarf said, down on both knees studying the weeds growing along the rotting plank foundation of the church. “We’re to be entirely inconspicuous.”

  “Pardon?”

  Rascal looked up, glee drawn on his face. “I believe there may be field mushrooms growing underneath here!”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “I tried for so long to grow them under our washroom, but even where our plumbing leaked, the soil conditions were simply unsuited for their purposes. Here, though, even in midsummer, the dirt is moist and sweetened by shadow, ideal for waxy caps.” He frowned. “If we only had time to crawl under for a look.” Rascal stuck his arm under the foundation.