A Good and Happy Child (31 page)

Before us stood the Jubal Early Memorial Church. Its blocky, rough-hewn stone walls seemed almost to fade into the gray day, as if the building had risen out of the ground and its front were the mouth of a cave. This forbidding place seemed nearly as ominous as the appearance of any poltergeist.

“I hope it’s not because of what Clarissa and the others told you,”

she persisted. “Remember, I want you to keep your distance from them. Do you hear me?”

We sat in silence for another moment in the pale morning light.

“Will you come with me?” I asked finally.
If she says yes, and comes,
I told myself,
everything will be okay; it means she still loves my father; it
means the poltergeist will go away; it means my Friend will leave me alone
because everyone in our house believes in God and we will be like a tight,
well-defended fort. It will mean my mother can believe me, if she tries.
I hoped all this fervently, recited it to myself like the prayer that had failed me the night before.

My mother wavered. “Kurt offered to help move some of our things out of the house,” she said at last. “He needs help.”

I slumped. Always the good reason.

I glumly received my mother’s kiss and her reminder,
I’ll pick you
up at 12:30,
and entered the courtyard. As I climbed the familiar steps, I took a program from the usher.
Last Sunday of Pentecost,
it read, with a spidery line drawing of the Jubal Early spire.

The habitual mix of church folk made their way up the broad stone stairs. Widows in hats and elbow gloves, clutching the cast-iron rail; professors in herringbone jackets and khaki pants, their wives’

graying hair cut in sexless mop-tops; their daughters behind them, selfconscious before the eyes of their friends, some fluffed and hairbanded, others chunky, in braces, praying for invisibility. Fort Virginia cadets a g o o d a n d h a p p y c h i l d

237

marched to their seats in a dress uniforms with black-billed officers’

caps under their arms; and alongside them, the Early students in their own uniform: blue blazers, pale blue Brooks Brothers shirts with button-down collars and red ties. Some were slim-waisted, lacrosse-y, heroic figures from a Housman poem drawing glances from their professors’ daughters; others were red-eyed and puffy with beer fat, carrying an air of smug debauchery as if they were even then hatching their first white-collar crimes. Finally came the Episcopalian oddballs, the loners: Uncle Freddie, hulking in a thick tweed jacket, fidgety and formal; Mr. Newton, the languid and asexual organist; Dr. Patricia Burke, the first lady medical doctor of Preston, prematurely widowed (car accident) but beatifically kind; and giant Tom Harris, laboring in cast and crutches under his greatcoat, assisted by Clarissa and Lionel Bing, whose daughters, already bursting with boredom and underutilized IQ, trudged behind with shifting eyes and fingers like radicals searching for something to bomb. We all stood. The Lord be with you.

And also with you.

Lift up your hearts.

We lift them up to the Lord.

Let us give thanks to the Lord our God.

It is right to give him thanks and praise.

It is meet, right, and a joyful thing, always and everywhere to give thanks to you . . .

So it began, and warmth and relief spread through me. Was it enough to banish the lingering sensation of my Friend’s fingers on my chest? I was not sure. The church’s vault of dark beams rose above us, the choir sang, and the messy-haired acolytes shuffled at the rails. I had missed the ancient and mysterious movements of the clergy,
passed
down,
as my father had told me,
from the first days of the Temple in Jeru-
salem. Actual cattle were sacrificed back then,
he told me;
slaughtered
behind the screen. Their blood ran into a gutter at the priests’ feet.
Our rector, a high-church Anglican, made certain the altar was draped in some rich fabric every week—embroidered, my father told me, by two sisters
238

J u s t i n E v a n s

in Blacksburg—that was studded with ornamental beads and scales, and stitched with Latin formulations, VENIAT REGNUM TUUM or simply GLORIA GLORIA GLORIA, on top of which shimmered the silver Eucharistic plate. The priest and assistants, arrayed in the same fabric—today a warm, silky pink with gold lining—prepared the altar for the Eucharist. They trundled in a row, from one end to the other, the rector in the center carrying the censer and bathing the altar in sweet smoke, the assistants on either side holding his robe. Then an acolyte took the censer and gently swung it toward the rector, three times; to the assistant priest, twice; to the deacon, once. The assistant bowed to the choir; they bowed in return; then he swung the thurible toward them on its long chain. The motions were repeated for the congregation, and the clanging censer left a cloud of smoke whose pungency lingered, crawled under the pews, and faded. The grandness and nobility of this exchange again reminded me of my father, and the incense seemed to carry with it another set of smells: powder, shaving lotion, and mothballs. These were my father’s Sunday odors, the whiff of pocket handkerchiefs and stored suits. I felt indescribably lonely. I had never been to church alone before. I turned and spotted Uncle Freddie just a few rows away and got up and pushed my way into his pew.

“Whew!” he said.

“What?”

“You smell to high heaven,” he said. “Have you bathed?”

“I need to talk to you,” I whispered.

But Uncle Freddie frowned, then shushed me.“You can’t sit here,”

he said. “Your mother’s forbidden it—
no contact.
She called all of us.”

I drew back from him. My mother had telephoned everyone?

She meant it, then, about staying away. I cast a nervous eye around the church. It held two dozen folks who knew both my mother and Uncle Freddie—and Clarissa, and Tom Harris—who might report us. I fought back a frantic, weepy feeling. Now who could I turn to?

I looked for Tom Harris, whom I saw in the back, next to the Bings. He appeared to listen to the service attentively, but I sensed a deeper scowl on his face than usual. My mother had called him, too. a g o o d a n d h a p p y c h i l d

239

“But something’s happened,” I said. “
The visions came back.
”

Uncle Freddie ground his jaw—his way of digesting unwelcome information. “Wait for me in the side court after the service. We’ll talk then.” Then he scrunched up his face. “You really are ripe, sonny,” he whispered, fanning himself with the program.

The courtyard, a twelve-foot circle of slate paving stones between the church and the church office building, had been speckled with the rotten remains of horse chestnuts and ginkgo leaves. I sat waiting on its single bench, an ornate, cast-iron affair under the black boughs of several trees. My watch read 12:11. Only a few minutes until my mother returned for me. Where was Uncle Freddie?

At last he appeared, cheeks puffing, as if he had been growing more and more flustered about my news over the past hour.

“As I say, I can’t talk to you,” he declared. “I’ve been expressly forbidden.”

I opened my mouth to tell the story when Tom Harris appeared on his crutches, followed by Clarissa. They soon surrounded me—a wall of wool coats and somber expressions.

“Is it true Mom called you?” I asked them.

“It’s true,” said Uncle Freddie. “And if we interfere again, there will be consequences.”

“She’s going to punish me?”

“Not you, ass,” boomed Uncle Freddie. “Us. For one, she’s talked of calling the state agency that oversees licenses for clinical psychology. That is no laughing matter.”

I looked at Clarissa and my heart sank.

“I’m a grown-up and I make my own decisions,” remarked Clarissa stolidly, eyes fluttering in her usual way. Tom Harris spoke: “Freddie tells us the visions have returned.”

I nodded.

“Tell your doctor right away. And Richard,” said Clarissa. “That’s the way things have to be now. Promise you’ll do that?”

240

J u s t i n E v a n s

“You can’t help?” I said, incredulous.

Uncle Freddie shook his head. “It’s impossible.”

My eyes shot all around the courtyard—anywhere but into the eyes of the family friends who could no longer speak to me. I had put Clarissa’s job in jeopardy. My mother had forbidden my own godfather to speak to me. It was worse than being unpopular at school—it felt like exile. I looked up and saw Tom Harris studying me.

“You’ll be all right, George. Your mother’s a smart woman.”

I nodded, miserable.

A pause followed. They shuffled in their places. But no one left.

“Is there more to it, George?” asked Tom Harris.

“Yes.”

He sighed. “Go on.”

Reluctantly, haltingly—was I breaking rules even now by telling them?—I recounted our clash with the poltergeist.

“Your mother saw this, too?” inquired Clarissa, when I had finished.

I insisted she had.

“Then it’s up to her to deal with it,” interjected Uncle Freddie. Tom Harris eased himself onto the bench alongside me, as if suddenly weary. “Freddie,” he said, “you know what a poltergeist really is.”

Uncle Freddie turned red. “It doesn’t matter, Tom. It’s no longer our affair.”

“You don’t believe that.”

“A poltergeist is a racket ghost,” I offered.

“That’s just a translation,” said Uncle Freddie impatiently. “A translation of a misnomer. What does a poltergeist do?”

“Breaks things.”

“Is that what ghosts do?”

I thought about this. “I don’t know.”

“Ghosts are apparitions. Echoes of the malcontented dead. They don’t smash up your bathroom,” he exclaimed. “Only a demon can do that.”

a g o o d a n d h a p p y c h i l d

241

I looked to Tom Harris for confirmation. “Don’t you remember?”

he said patiently. “They have power over matter. No ghost has that. Freddie’s right.”

“Of course I’m right,” huffed Freddie.

“We’ve got to do it.”

The three of us looked at Clarissa. She wore an odd expression: chin in the air, lips in a tight line, face pale, but firm.

“Do what?” Freddie asked her.

“The exorcism,” she stated.

“Are you
mad
?” said Uncle Freddie. “You’ll lose your license—at best. At worst, we’ll lose our souls, or get shredded with a mattress spring like that young priest in Manassas. When is your friend, Finley Balcomb, coming?” he demanded of Tom Harris. “George needs someone experienced. Not
us.
”

“Finley, I’ve discovered,” said Tom Harris archly, “is on a cruise in the Turks and Caicos with members of his conversation club. He is unreachable. And when it comes to experience, speak for yourself.”

“Well, we can’t ask the rector here, or any priest for that matter,”

continued Freddie, undeterred. “Any clergy will ask for Joan’s permission. And quite rightly.”

“Why do I need an exorcism all of a sudden?” I asked, controlling the tremor in my voice.

“Because the demon wishes to kill you,” said Tom Harris evenly.

“This is how it happens. The obsession, the visions, the penetration of the mind. Breaking physical objects. Then . . . breaking the body.”

I thought of the twisted curtain rod in Grace’s bedroom. Her body transforming into a snake. Sound seemed to drain out of the air. All I heard was the echo of Tom Harris’s voice in my head:
kill you.

“That’s enough,” snapped Clarissa, tough again. “It’s a simple solution. We do it or we don’t. And we have to do it. Right now.”

“The time is right,” Tom Harris said quietly.

“Isn’t there a practitioner available?” I squeaked.

“Reval Dumas is in Chicago. We can’t go through the church. But we do have Clarissa,” he smiled. “Our personal deacon.” He reached
242

J u s t i n E v a n s

over, put a long finger under my chin, and lifted it until I looked him in the eye. “We’re all in this together now, George. Will you trust us one last time?”

My breath made a mist in the damp winter air, then faded among the blue-gray stones of the church and the stink of rot from the ginkgo leaves. I looked from face to face: pale, puffy, and, except for Tom Harris, frightened.

“George?”

Someone was calling my name. The others heard it, too. I rose, passed between the three friends, and peered into the churchyard. Kurt stood there, in baggy blue jeans and a wrinkled cotton shirt, among the congregation’s stragglers. They eyed him curiously. He couldn’t see me.

“George.”

I wanted to run to him: my hero and my buddy. Kurt who was brave enough to touch the shower door before it smashed. Kurt who had rescued us from the poltergeist. But then I remembered last night: the sticky smacking of kisses. The murmured phrases:
You’re a beauti-
ful woman.
My mother’s giggle. I felt the boil of a jealous anger: they didn’t want me anyway. They didn’t need me. Maybe Kurt was searching for me because the call had finally come: it was time to take me away; a bed had come open at last at Forest Glen. Or maybe the game had changed. Maybe my mother’s arguments had cost us my spot—

Dr. Gilloon was punishing us—and our sights were now fixed on Commonwealth Juvenile Correction Center, where I would see my mother once a week, during a sixty-minute visiting period; where I would be limited to five-minute calls home; have no personal property; and where I would certainly no longer have contact with Tom Harris, Clarissa, or my godfather. And if my confinement was not today—

well, it might be tomorrow, or the next day. Clarissa was right. The only time to do this was now.

“We’ll leave the back way,” I said. “So no one sees us.”

Tom Harris held out his hand to me. He did not smile, but his eyes shone bright and clear. I took his hand, helped pull him to his feet. Then a g o o d a n d h a p p y c h i l d

243

we turned away from the street and walked among the blackened trees and soggy, snow-covered leaves, down the slope to Uncle Freddie’s waiting car.