Revival (3 page)

“I bet you could have quite a battle with your soldiers here, couldn't you?”

“Yeah,” I said. I thought I could fight an entire war there.

He nodded. “That can't happen, though, because in Peaceable Lake, everyone gets along and no fighting is allowed. In that way it's like heaven. Once I get MYF going, I plan to move it to the church basement. Maybe you and your brothers would help me. The kids would like it, I think.”

“They sure would!” I said, then added something my father said. “You betchum bobcats!”

He laughed and clapped me on the shoulder. “Now do you want to see a miracle?”

“I guess,” I said. I wasn't actually sure I did. It sounded like it might be scary. All at once I realized the two of us were alone in an old garage with no car in it, a dusty hollow that smelled as if it had been closed up for years. The door to the outside world was still open, but it seemed a mile off. I liked Reverend Jacobs okay, but I found myself wishing I had stayed home, coloring on the floor and waiting to see if Mom could win the Electrolux and finally get the upper hand in her never-ending battle with the summer dust.

Then Reverend Jacobs passed his hand slowly above Peaceable Lake, and I forgot about being nervous. There was a low humming sound from under the makeshift table, like the sound our Philco TV made when it was warming up, and all the little streetlights came on. They were bright white, almost too bright to look at, and cast a magical moony glow over the green hills and blue water. Even the plastic cows and sheep looked more realistic, possibly because they now cast shadows.

“Gosh, how did you do that?”

He grinned. “Pretty good trick, huh? ‘God said, Let there be light, and there was light, and the light was good.' Only I'm not God, so I have to depend on electricity. Which is wonderful stuff, Jamie. Such a gift from God that it makes us feel godlike every time we flip a switch, wouldn't you say?”

“I guess so,” I said. “My grandpa Amos remembers before there were electric lights.”

“Lots of people do,” he said, “but it won't be long before all those people are gone . . . and when that happens, nobody will think much about what a miracle electricity is. And what a mystery. We have an idea about how it works, but knowing how something works and knowing what it
is
are two very different things.”

“How did you turn on the lights?” I asked.

He pointed to a shelf beyond the table. “See that little red bulb?”

“Uh-huh.”

“It's a photoelectric cell. You can buy them, but I built that one myself. It projects an invisible beam. When I break it, the streetlights around Peaceable Lake go on. If I do it again . . . like so . . .” He passed his hand above the landscape and the streetlights dimmed, faded to faint cores of light, then went out. “You see?”

“Cool,” I breathed.

“You try it.”

I reached my hand up. At first nothing happened, but when I stood on tiptoe my fingers broke the beam. The humming from beneath the table started up again and the lights came back on.

“I did it!”

“Betchum bobcats,” he said, and ruffled my hair.

“What's that humming? It sounds like our TV.”

“Look under the table. Here, I'll turn on the overhead lights so you can see better.” He flipped a switch on the wall and a couple of dusty hanging lightbulbs came on. They did nothing about the musty odor (and I could smell something else as well, now—­something hot and oily), but they banished some of the gloom.

I bent—at my age I didn't have to bend far—and looked beneath the table. I saw two or three boxy things strapped to the underside. They were the source of the humming sound, and the oily smell, too.

“Batteries,” he said. “Which I also made myself. Electricity is my hobby. And gadgets.” He grinned like a kid. “I love gadgets. Drives my wife crazy.”

“My hobby's fighting the Krauts,” I said. Then, remembering what he said about that being kind of mean: “Germans, I mean.”

“Everyone needs a hobby,” he said. “And everyone needs a miracle or two, just to prove life is more than just one long trudge from the cradle to the grave. Would you like to see another one, Jamie?”

“Sure!”

There was a second table in the corner, covered with tools, snips of wire, three or four dismembered transistor radios like the ones Claire and Andy had, and regular store-bought C and D batteries. There was also a small wooden box. Jacobs took the box, dropped to one knee so we'd be on the same level, opened it, and took out a white-robed figure. “Do you know who this is?”

I did, because the guy looked almost the same as my fluorescent nightlight. “Jesus. Jesus with a pack on his back.”

“Not just any pack; a battery pack. Look.” He flipped up the top of the pack on a hinge not bigger than a sewing needle. Inside I saw what looked like a couple of shiny dimes with tiny dots of solder on them. “I made these, too, because you can't buy anything this small or powerful in the stores. I believe I could patent them, and maybe someday I will, but . . .” He shook his head. “Never mind.”

He closed the top of the pack again, and carried Jesus to the Peaceable Lake landscape. “I hope you noticed how blue the water is,” he said.

“Yeah! Bluest lake I ever saw!”

He nodded. “Kind of a miracle in itself, you might say . . . until you take a close look.”

“Huh?”

“It's really just paint. I muse on that, sometimes, Jamie. When I can't sleep. How a little paint can make shallow water seem deep.”

That seemed like a silly thing to think about, but I didn't say anything. Then he kind of snapped to, and put Jesus down beside the lake.

“I plan to use this in MYF—it's what we call a teaching tool—but I'll give you a little preview, okay?”

“Okay.”

“Here's what it says in the fourteenth chapter of Matthew's Gospel. Will you take instruction from God's Holy Word, Jamie?”

“Sure, I guess so,” I said, starting to feel uneasy again.

“I know you will,” he said, “because what we learn as children is what sticks the longest. Okay, here we go, so listen up. ‘And straightaway Jesus constrained his disciples'—that means he commanded them—‘to get into a ship, and to go before him to the other side of the water, while he sent the multitudes away. And when he had sent the multitudes away, he went up into a mountain to pray—' Do
you
pray, Jamie?”

“Yeah, every night.”

“Good boy. Okay, back to the story. ‘When evening was come, he was there alone. But the ship was now in the midst of the sea, tossed with waves, for the wind was contrary. And in the fourth watch Jesus went unto them, walking on the sea. And when the disciples saw him walking on the sea, they were troubled, saying, It is a spirit; and they cried out for fear. But straightaway Jesus spake unto them, saying, Be of good cheer; it is I; be not afraid.' That's the story, and may God bless his Holy Word. Good one, huh?”

“I guess. Does
spake
mean he talked to them? It does, right?”

“Right. Would you like to see Jesus walk on Peaceable Lake?”

“Yeah! Sure!”

He reached under Jesus's white robe, and the little figure began to move. When it reached Peaceable Lake it didn't sink but continued serenely on, gliding along the top of the water. It reached the other side in twenty seconds or so. There was a hill there, and it tried to go up, but I could see it was going to topple over. Reverend Jacobs grabbed it before it could. He reached under Jesus's robe again and turned him off.

“He did it!” I said. “He walked on the water!”

“Well . . .” He was smiling, but it wasn't a funny smile, somehow. It turned down at one corner. “Yes and no.”

“What do you mean?”

“See where he went into the water?”

“Yeah . . .”

“Reach in there. See what you find. Be careful not to touch the power lines, because there's real electricity running through them. Not much, but if you brushed them, you'd get a jolt. Especially if your hand was wet.”

I reached in, but cautiously. I didn't think he'd play a practical joke on me—as Terry and Con sometimes did—but I was in a strange place with a strange man and I wasn't completely sure. The water looked deep, but that was an illusion created by the blue paint of the reservoir and the lights reflecting on the surface. My finger only went in up to the first knuckle.

“You're not quite in the right place,” Reverend Jacobs said. “Go a little bit to your right. Do you know your right from your left?”

I did. Mom had taught me:
Right is the hand you write with
. Of course that wouldn't have worked with Claire and Con, who were what my dad called southpaws.

I moved my hand and felt something in the water. It was metal, with a groove in it. “I think I found it,” I told Reverend Jacobs.

“I think so, too. You're touching the track Jesus walks on.”

“It's a magic trick!” I said. I had seen magicians on
The Ed Sullivan Show
, and Con had a box of magic tricks he got for his birthday, although everything but the Floating Balls and the Disappearing Egg had been lost.

“That's right.”

“Like Jesus walking on the water to that ship!”

“Sometimes,” he said, “that's what I'm afraid of.”

He looked so sad and distant that I felt a little scared again, but I also felt sorry for him. Not that I had any idea what he had to feel sad about when he had such a neat pretend world as Peaceable Lake in his garage.

“It's a really
good
trick,” I said, and patted his hand.

He came back from wherever he'd gone and grinned at me. “You're right,” he said. “I'm just missing my wife and little boy, I guess. I think that's why I borrowed you, Jamie. But I ought to return you to your mom now.”

When we got to Route 9, he took my hand again even though there were no cars coming either way, and we walked like that all the way up Methodist Road. I didn't mind. I liked holding his hand. I knew he was looking out for me.

 • • •

Mrs. Jacobs and Morris
arrived a few days later. He was just a little squirt in didies, but she was pretty. On Saturday, the day before Reverend Jacobs first stood in the pulpit of our church, Terry, Con, and I helped him move Peaceable Lake to the church basement, where Methodist Youth Fellowship would meet every Thursday night. With the water drained, the shallowness of the lake and the grooved track running across it were very clear.

Reverend Jacobs swore Terry and Con to secrecy—because, he said, he didn't want the illusion spoiled for the little ones (which made me feel like a big one, a sensation I enjoyed). They agreed, and I don't think either of them peached, but the lights in the church basement were much brighter than those in the parsonage garage, and if you stood close to the landscape and peered at it, you could see that Peaceable Lake was really just a wide puddle. You could see the grooved track, too. By Christmas, everyone knew.

“It's a big old fakearoonie,” Billy Paquette said to me one Thursday afternoon. He and his brother Ronnie hated Thursday Night School, but their mother made them go. “If he shows it off one more time and tells that walking-on-water story, I'm gonna puke.”

I thought of fighting him over that, but he was bigger. Also my friend. Besides, he was right.

II

Three Years. Conrad's Voice. A Miracle.

Reverend Jacobs got fired
because of the sermon he gave from his pulpit on November 21, 1965. That was easy to look up on the Internet, because I had a landmark to go by: it was the Sunday before Thanksgiving. He was gone from our lives a week later, and he went alone. Patsy and Morris—dubbed Tag-Along-Morrie by the kids in MYF—were already gone by then. So was the Plymouth Belvedere with the push-button drive.

My memory of the three years between the day when I first saw Peaceable Lake and the day of the Terrible Sermon are surprisingly clear, although before beginning this account, I would have told you I remembered little. After all, I would have said, how many of us remember the years between six and nine in any detail? But writing is a wonderful and terrible thing. It opens deep wells of memory that were previously capped.

I feel I could push aside the account I set out to write and instead fill a book—and not a small one—about those years and that world, which is so different from the one I live in now. I remember my mother, standing at the ironing board in her slip, impossibly beautiful in the morning sunshine. I remember my saggy-seated bathing suit, an unattractive loden green, and swimming in Harry's Pond with my brothers. We used to tell each other the slimy bottom was cowshit, but it was just mud (
probably
just mud). I remember drowsy afternoons in the one-room West Harlow school, sitting on winter coats in Spelling Corner and trying to get poor stupid Dicky Osgood to get
giraffe
right. I even remember him saying, “W-W-Why sh-should I have to suh-suh
-spell
one when I'll never suh-suh-
see
one?”

I remember the webwork of dirt roads that crisscrossed our town, and playing marbles in the schoolyard during frigid April recesses, and the sound the wind made in the pines as I lay in my bed, prayers said and waiting for sleep. I remember my father coming out of the garage with a wrench in his hand and his MORTON FUEL OIL cap pulled low on his forehead, blood oozing through the grease on his knuckles. I remember watching Ken MacKenzie introducing Popeye cartoons on
The Mighty 90 Show
, and how I was forced to give up the TV on the afternoons when Claire and her friends arrived, because they wanted to watch
American Bandstand
and see what the girls were wearing. I remember sunsets as red as the blood on my father's knuckles, and how that makes me shiver now.

I remember a thousand other things, mostly good ones, but I didn't sit down at my computer to put on rose-colored glasses and wax nostalgic. Selective memory is one of the chief sins of the old, and I don't have time for it. They were not all good things. We lived in the country, and back then, country life was hard. I suppose it still is.

My friend Al Knowles got his left hand caught in his father's potato grader and lost three fingers before Mr. Knowles could get the balky, dangerous thing turned off. I was there that day, and remember how the belts turned red. I remember how Al screamed.

My father (along with Terry, his faithful if clueless acolyte) got the Road Rocket running—God, what a gorgeous, blasting clatter it made when he revved the engine!—and turned it over to Duane Robichaud, newly painted and with the number
19
emblazoned on its side, to race at the Speedway in Castle Rock. In the first lap of the first heat, the idiot rolled it and totaled it. Duane walked away without a scratch. “Accelerator pedal must have stuck,” he said, grinning his foolish grin, only he said it
ass
-celerator, and my father said the only ass was the one behind the wheel.

“That will teach you to ever trust anything valuable to a Robichaud,” my mother said, and my father stuffed his hands so deep into his pockets that the top of his underwear showed, perhaps to ensure they would not escape and go someplace they weren't supposed to.

Lenny Macintosh, the postman's son, lost an eye when he bent down to see why the cherry bomb he'd put in an empty pineapple tin didn't go off.

My brother Conrad lost his voice.

So, no—they weren't all good things.

 • • •

On the first Sunday
that Reverend Jacobs took the pulpit, there were more people present than had been there in all the years fat, white-haired, good-natured Mr. Latoure had kept the church open, preaching his well-meant but obscure sermons and reliably welling up at the eyes on Mother's Day, which he called Mother's Sunday (these details came courtesy of my own mother, years later—I barely remembered Mr. Latoure at all). Instead of twenty congregants there were easily four times that number, and I remember how their voices soared during the Doxology:
Praise God from Whom all blessings flow, Praise Him ye creatures here below
. It gave me goosebumps. Mrs. Jacobs was no slouch on the pedal organ, either, and her blond hair—held back with a plain black ribbon—glowed many colors in the light falling through our only stained glass window.

Walking home from church
en famille
, our good Sunday shoes kicking up little puffs of dust, I found myself just behind my parents, so heard Mom expressing her approval. Also her relief. “I thought, him being so young and all, we'd get a lecture on civil rights, or banning the draft, or something like that,” she said. “Instead we got a very nice Bible-based lesson. I think people will come back, don't you?”

“For awhile,” my father said.

She said, “Oh, the big oil baron. The big cynic.” And punched his arm playfully.

As it turned out, they were both sort of right. Attendance at our church never slumped back to Mr. Latoure levels—which meant as few as a dozen in winter, huddled together for warmth in the drafty, woodstove-heated church—but it dropped slowly to sixty, then fifty, and finally to forty or so, where it hovered like the barometer on a changeable summer day. No one ascribed the attrition to Mr. Jacobs's preaching, which was always clear, pleasant, and Bible-based (never anything troubling about A-bombs or Freedom Marches); folks just kind of drifted away.

“God isn't as important to people now,” my mother said one day after a particularly disappointing turnout. “A day will come when they'll be sorry for that.”

 • • •

During those three years
, our Methodist Youth Fellowship also underwent a modest renaissance. In the Latoure Era, there were rarely more than a dozen of us on Thursday nights, and four were named Morton: Claire, Andy, Con, and Terry. In the Latoure Era I was considered too young to attend, and for this Andy sometimes used to give me head-noogies and call me a lucky duck. When I asked Terry once what it was like back then, he gave a bored shrug. “We sang songs and did Bible drills and promised we'd never drink intoxicating liquor or smoke cigarettes. Then he told us to love our mothers, and the Catlicks are going to hell because they worship idols, and Jewish people love money. He also said to imagine Jesus is listening if any of our friends tell dirty jokes.”

Under the new regime, however, attendance swelled to three dozen kids between six and seventeen, which necessitated buying more folding chairs for the church basement. It wasn't Reverend Jacobs's mechanical Jesus toddling across Peaceable Lake; the thrill of that wore off rapidly, even for me. I doubt if the pictures of the Holy Land he put up on the walls had much to do with it, either.

A lot of it was his youth and enthusiasm. There were games and activities as well as sermons, because, as he pointed out regularly, most of Jesus's preaching happened outside, and that meant there was more to Christianity than church. The Bible drills remained, but we did them while playing musical chairs, and quite often someone fell on the floor while searching for Deuteronomy 14, verse 9, or Timothy 2:12. It was pretty comical. Then there was the ball diamond, which Con and Andy helped him create out back. On some Thursdays the boys played baseball and the girls cheered us on; on alternate Thursdays it was the girls playing softball and the boys (hoping some of the girls would forget it was their turn and come in skirts) cheering
them
on.

Reverend Jacobs's interest in electricity often played a part in his Thursday-night “youth talks.” I remember one afternoon when he called our house and asked Andy to wear a sweater on Thursday night. When we were all assembled, he called my brother to the front of the room and said he wanted to demonstrate the burden of sin. “Although I'm sure
you're
not much of a sinner, Andrew,” he added.

My brother smiled nervously and said nothing.

“This isn't to frighten you kids,” he said. “There are ministers who believe in that kind of thing, but I'm not one of them. It's just so you'll know.” (This, I've learned, is the kind of thing people say just before they try to scare the living crap out of you.)

He blew up a number of balloons and told us to imagine that each one weighed twenty pounds. He held the first up and said, “This one is telling lies.” He rubbed it briskly on his shirt a few times, and then held it against Andy's sweater, where it stuck as if it were glued there.

“This one is theft.” He stuck another balloon to Andy's sweater.

“Here's anger.”

I can't remember for sure, but I think it likely he stuck seven balloons in all to Andy's homemade reindeer sweater, one for each of the deadly sins.

“That adds up to over a hundred pounds of sin,” he said. “A lot to carry! But who takes away the sins of the world?”

“Jesus!” we dutifully chorused.

“Right. When you ask Him for forgiveness, here's what happens.” He produced a pin and popped the balloons one after another, including one that had drifted free and needed to be stuck back on. I think we all felt that the balloon-popping part of the lesson was quite a bit more exciting than the sanctified static electricity part.

His most impressive demonstration of electricity in action involved one of his own inventions, which he called Jacob's Ladder. It was a metal box about the size of the footlocker my toy army lived in. Two wires that looked like TV rabbit ears jutted up from it. When he plugged it in (this invention ran on wall current rather than batteries) and flipped the switch on the side, long sparks almost too bright to look at climbed the wires. At the top, they peaked and disappeared. When he sprinkled some powder above this device, the climbing sparks turned different colors. It made the girls ooh with delight.

This also had some sort of religious point—at least in the mind of Charles Jacobs, it did—but I'll be damned if I remember what it was. Something about the Divine Trinity, maybe? Once the Jacob's Ladder wasn't right there in front of us, the colored sparks rising and the current fizzing like an angry tomcat, such exotic ideas had a tendency to fade away like a transient fever.

Yet I remember one of his mini-lectures very clearly. He was sitting on a chair that was turned around so he could face us over the back. His wife sat on the piano bench behind him, hands folded demurely in her lap, head slightly bowed. Maybe she was praying. Maybe she was just bored. I know that a lot of his audience was; by then most of the Harlow Methodist Youth had begun to tire of electricity and its attendant glories.

“Kids, science teaches us that electricity is the movement of charged atomic particles called electrons. When electrons flow, they create current, and the faster the electrons flow, the higher the voltage. That's science, and science is fine, but it's also
finite
. There always comes a point where knowledge runs out. What
are
electrons, exactly? Charged atoms, the scientists say. Okay, that's fine as far as it goes, but what are atoms?”

He leaned forward over the back of his chair, his blue eyes (they themselves looked electric) fixed on us.

“
No one really knows!
And that's where religion comes in. Elec­tricity is one of God's doorways to the infinite.”

“I wish he'd bring in a lectric chair and fry up some white mice,” Billy Paquette sniffed one evening after the benediction. “
That
would be in'dresting.”

In spite of the frequent (and increasingly boring) lectures on holy voltage, most of us looked forward to Thursday Night School. When he wasn't on his hobbyhorse, Reverend Jacobs could give lively, sometimes funny talks with lessons drawn from Scripture. He talked about real-life problems we all faced, from bullying to the temptation to cheat answers from someone else's paper during tests we hadn't studied for. We enjoyed the games, we enjoyed most of the lessons, and we enjoyed the singing, too, because Mrs. Jacobs was a fine pianist who never dragged the hymns.

She knew more than hymns, too. On one never-to-be-forgotten night she played a trio of Beatles songs, and we sang along with “From Me to You,” “She Loves You,” and “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” My mother claimed that Patsy Jacobs was seventy times better on the piano than Mr. Latoure, and when the minister's young wife asked to spend some of the church collection money on a piano tuner from Portland, the deacons approved the request unanimously.

“But perhaps no more Beatles songs,” Mr. Kelton said. He was the deacon who had served Harlow Methodist the longest. “The children can get that stuff on the radio. We'd prefer you to stick to more . . . uh . . .
Christian
melodies.”

Mrs. Jacobs murmured her agreement, eyes demurely cast down.

 • • •

There was something else
, as well: Charles and Patsy Jacobs had sex appeal. I have mentioned that Claire and her friends were gaga for him; it wasn't long before most of the boys had crushes on her, as well, because Patsy Jacobs was beautiful. Her hair was blond, her complexion creamy, her lips full. Her slightly uptilted eyes were green, and Connie claimed she had witchly powers, because every time she happened to shift those green eyes his way, his knees turned to water. With those kind of looks, there would have been talk if she had worn more makeup than a decorous blush of lipstick, but at twenty-three, that was all she needed. Youth was her makeup.