The Covenant (27 page)

He shook Deacon's hand and ignored me, embraced Jenny, picked up Eli and carried him around like a doll while he greeted his constituency filing into the church. I spotted Nathan and the
Elle
model, Mercedes LaGrance, sitting close together in a pew, playfully holding hands. I pointed them out to Jenny.

“Nathan and her mother, Annette, have had this on-again off-again thing for several years.” As though to illustrate her point, the woman appeared with her other two daughters, one older than Mercedes and one younger, and kissed Nathan on the cheek as she slid in beside him. “The girls' names are Bentley and Porsche,” Jenny said with a roll of her eyes. Deacon left to make final arrangements behind a curtain, while somewhere an organ droned mournfully through endless repetitions of “How Great Thou Art.”

Banks of flowers spread out to either side of Ruth's coffin, which rested on a draped table, lid open, recessed lights in the ceiling shining down on her face. I barely recognized her. She didn't look like the same woman. I'd only known her in her final days, but even then her tremendous vitality lent the illusion of youth to her decrepit frame. The woman in this expensive box was old, shriveled like one of those apple-headed dolls you'd find in the hillbilly tourist shops of my childhood vacations. The mortician had powered her face almost white, erasing the deep, earthy coloration of her skin. Her hair, once so luxuriously sable, had turned dull gray in death. They put prosthetics in her cheeks and under her eyelids and lips to keep them from sinking and only succeeded in making her look fat and soft. She had been neither. People don't want to see what death really looks like. They pay a lot of money not to see it.

The woman in the coffin wasn't Ruth Vardry. That woman had gone elsewhere and left this cheap copy for her son to bury.

The last chord of the organ music faded into silence. Jenny and I sat together in the second pew with the kids between us. In the front pew, Virginia Vardry disappeared between her husband and Senator Mickelson. Nathan and Holly had instinctively left an empty space between themselves and their father, where Deacon's headless Iraqi soldier now sat. Holly turned around and whispered, “I'm freezing! There's a cold draft blowing right here.” If she her dress were longer than a handkerchief, maybe she wouldn't be so cold. “And the smell! Ugh!” She rolled her eyes at the back of the church, where Deacon's saints filled the last six rows.

The remaining pews were elbow to elbow with old money and older politicians and their third and fourth wives, stuffed together for one final fleeting grasp at Ruth's patronage. Most had made sure they were seen by Luther and the senator before the service began, posing in front of Ruth's coffin like the junior high prom.

Deacon stood up before the congregation, arms upraised so that his hot pink shirt cuffs and glittering ruby-studded Blood of Christ cuff links dangled a good two inches from the sleeves of his jacket. He looked at me and then at the soldier in the front row. I nodded that I could see him.

Catching his breath, he started into the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, reading the verses from his old, worn Bible—the angels with mysterious powers and Lot's offer to give his daughters to the people of Sodom, so that they might know them, and the final destruction of the city by fire and brimstone, metaphors for the sermon he was about to give.

“On this day, let us remember the lesson of Lot's wife, who looked back to see the destruction of her city. Did she do so out of fascination? Curiosity? Grief for the loss of everything she knew? The Bible doesn't say. All we know is that she violated God's commandment to keep going forward, away from the old life of sin and corruption into a new day of perfection. What has passed is past. We mustn't look behind, lest our eyes be blasted by what we see. Lot's wife looked back, and for her sin was turned into a pillar of salt.

“Today we come together to mourn friend and mother, Ruth Stirling Vardry. Let this not be a time of mourning. Ruth has joined our Lord and Savior in heaven. This I know because the Gospel tells me so. Not the Gospel you have been taught. The true Gospel, the Gospel hidden by the early church, the Gospel that I will reveal to you today.

“Ruth Vardry was a sinner. To hear her tell, she was the worst sinner among us. Yet she died without fear of the grave, because of the Gospel I am about to reveal. She did not fear eternal torment, because of the Gospel I brought to her.

“Jesus Christ was crucified and died for our sins. We all know this. We've heard it all our lives and some of us have accepted Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior and been washed in the Blood of the Lamb.”

“Amen!” Luther cried fervently. His wife began to clap from between the senator's lapels.

“Amen!” Deacon echoed. “But that's only part of the Gospel. The part they kept. The rest they hid from us, until today. Jesus died for our sins, but not just our old sins. All our sins. The sins we have committed and the sins we have yet to commit. The price has been paid. Forever. For everyone. You. Me. Catholics. Baptists. Muslims. Jews. Everybody. You don't even have to want it. It's done. Nothing more is required of you and me, for as it says in the book of Micah, chapter 6, verse 8, ‘What does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?' Why would Jesus die for our sins, but only save us if we beg for forgiveness? If your children were drowning, would you only save the ones who asked for help? How is this any different than the old pagan religions and their demand for sacrifices and donations?”

Luther wasn't amening anymore. He sat with his chubby hand on the back of the pew, quietly knocking a three-carat diamond ring into the soft pinewood.

“I'm telling you this is not the Gospel of Jesus. Men made these laws, the early church fathers, to secure their power, and then they hid Jesus' true Gospel, the lost Gospel of the Good News, so you would keep giving them money and coming to their churches and begging for forgiveness over and over again. But what did Jesus say to the adulterous woman? Your sins are forgiven. Go and sin no more.”

Luther stood up, furious, and stalked out. At the end of his pew he paused and looked back at his wife, but she hadn't moved. She didn't even look at him. Her eyes were closed, streaming with tears, her lips quivering in whispered prayer. He impatiently snapped his fingers a few times, then started up the aisle toward the back of the church. I noticed a few others rise to join him, but probably nowhere near as many as he hoped.

Deacon thundered onward as though he hadn't noticed. “This is the Good News, friends. You are forgiven. You are going to heaven. So is the person sitting next to you, and behind you, at the back of this church, down the highway, even those plying their trade in the whorehouses and crack houses of Memphis. You don't need to be afraid anymore. Not of your fellow man. Not of your vengeful and jealous god. You are free. Free to leave this church and never return.”

The doors closed behind Luther and his handful of acolytes. Eugene Kitchen remained at the door, his face nearly black with rage.

“You don't need me anymore, not to save your soul. I can't save your soul. You can't save your soul. The Church can't save your soul. Only Jesus can do that, and He has done it. The price has been paid. Go and live a life of goodness and obey his Law, not because you're afraid of dying and going to hell, but because you love the Lord and His Law and the world and the people He made.

“That's not to say there's nothing left to do. Jesus said, go and sin no more. Death was defeated in the tomb. The sin of Adam was forgiven on the cross. But evil is real. There are demons among us, possessing us, trying to destroy all that is good and beautiful in this world. I know some of you have been possessed by the demons of lust, of greed, of addiction, of pride. You and I know these demons are real. Some of you have seen demons face to face, have wrestled with them in the dark places. You know what I'm talking about. I see the scars you bear. I bear those scars myself.”

He grasped the microphone and ripped it from its stand, flung the cord back and strode forward, swinging his open Bible like a sword.

“We have a job to do. We have battles to fight. Wherever there are people suffering, there are demons causing that suffering. Wherever some company is pouring their industrial filth into a river or fouling a beach, polluting our earth, our one and only earth, with the poisonous by-products of their profits, we will take our stand against evil.”

“Amen,” several in the congregation said, Jenny among them.

Deacon's voice rose a notch in volume and intensity, so that I could feel it moving through me, like the thrumming of an engine deep below decks. “Wherever a man or woman sits in prison, wrongly accused or unjustly punished, so that some other man may profit by his suffering, we will fight the demons that torment him.” He pounded the rostrum and the crowd shouted
Amen!

“Wherever a child is beaten or starved or raped, or a woman lives in fear of her husband, or a man contemplates taking his own life so his family can collect his life insurance, we will succor them.”

Amen!
Now they were standing, lifting their hands into the air. Jenny's face was wet with tears.

“Wherever a grandmother rots in her own filth, or a grandfather dies alone in his bed, trapped in the corporate medical prisons that are our nursing homes, we will bring them peace.”

Amen!
They moved out into the aisles. Virginia Vardry staggered forward and slumped to her knees at the altar rail.

“Evil surrounds us. Every day it grows stronger while the good do nothing. Will we do nothing?”

No!

“What will we do?”

Fight!

I didn't know whether this was a funeral, a revival, a political rally, or a rock concert. Some of those women looked ready to fling their underwear on the altar. All I knew was that Luther had lost them forever. If Deacon had rolled out the Kool-Aid carts right then and there, they would have drank it and lain down, arm in arm in the jungle with him.

He beamed across the shouting masses, his arms raised in victory until his eyes fell upon me, still sitting in the pew, and the headless Iraqi soldier sitting just in front of me. Neither of us had been moved by his words. He took a few long breaths and looked around him like a man bewildered by what he saw.

“No,” he said, stepping back, distancing himself from the adoration. He laid his Bible on top of the lectern and returned the microphone to its stand. “No, my friends, Ruth Vardry was a good woman. She lived a long, full life. In her last days upon this earth, she tried to do some good with the riches God placed in her hands. Should we weep at her passing, or should we not make a joyful noise unto the Lord? Lift up your voices in praise. Serve the Lord with great gladness, and come before Him with song.”

As he spoke these last words, the curtain behind the pulpit parted, revealing a seven-piece rock band. An electric hum of amplifiers preceded the first thundering power chord as they ripped into a metal version of the “
Dies Irae
” from Mozart's Requiem in D Minor. They followed with an assortment of traditional hymns, modern Christian Rock horrors, spirituals, and old-timey country songs of praise, to which Deacon's unwashed saints and Luther's lost converts danced in the aisles together, clapping, shaking tambourines, and singing in half a dozen languages. It looked like a Hare Krishna convention. Eugene finally fled, lest the unholy sight blast his eyes.

Finally the music died down. Deacon wiped the sweat from his face with a towel and lifted up his trembling hands. “Jackie Lyons!” he cried. I groaned and tried to slide down in the pew. Jenny pulled me up by the elbow. “Jackie Lyons, you only knew Ruth a few weeks, but in that time she opened her heart to you. Those of us who knew her well know that she didn't give her friendship easily.”

“Amen,” Jenny intoned.

“Ruth Vardry admired you. She admired your spirit. She admired your independence.”

He descended two or three steps, walking toward me with his hand outstretched. “We spoke quite often about the arrangements for her funeral. She knew her days were numbered, so she chose every song we have sung today, and she asked me to personally sing the benediction. Unfortunately, she passed before she made up her mind what song I should sing. So I'm going to ask you to pick something to close out her service.”

“Help me out here,” I whispered to Jenny. She shrugged. I groped around for the name of a hymn, something I had heard in church when I was a kid, anything. The only one I could remember was something my mother used to sing. “What about ‘
Peace in the Valley
'?”

“The old Thomas Dorsey standard, that's a good one,” Deacon smiled.

He nodded to the band, they tuned up and started to play, softly now, just the keyboard, bass, leading with an acoustic guitar. Deacon had a tremendous singing voice, powerful and deep, and the words, so simple and traditional, moved him to a depth of emotion I'd never seen in him. His tears began to flow as he sang, his face lifted heavenward. And not just his tears.

As he launched into the chorus, peace in the valley, I was lifted on a wave of grief so near to joy it left me shaking and sobbing. Jenny pulled me into her arms and I lost my soul to that sanctimonious bastard.

 

38

I
DIDN'T KNOW I COULD
still feel. I thought I had been broken of all sentimentality by the dead I witnessed on an almost daily basis. I thought my heart a callus, a calcified scar that barely beat enough to keep me alive. That stupid little gospel tune completely broke me down. Maybe it was the magic, the magnetism of Deacon's voice, or the moblike intensity of the congregation that swept me up.

Or maybe it was because now I knew why my mother's funeral had seemed unfinished. She had loved that song like no other. She had a collection of covers sung by Elvis, Johnny Cash, Randy Travis and a dozen other people I couldn't remember. She had cross-stitched its lyrics and hung them in a gilt frame beside her bed.
There'll be no sadness, no sorrow, no trouble, trouble I see. There'll be peace in the valley for me.
When I was a kid, growing up and hating everything about my mother, that song was just another reason to treat her as a stupid bumpkin blindly chasing a cartoon Jesus to church every Sunday in the misplaced hope of reforming me. It never occurred to me before that maybe her hopes and fears didn't involve me at all. Maybe she was just as scared, alone and tired of it all as I was.