Baptism in Blood(22)

Looking around at this church sometimes, Henry was surprised at how well it had all gone. He could remember getting his call—lying in the back bedroom of a trailer just outside Greensboro, staring at the ceiling and thinking he ought to kill himself, he really ought to, because he’d been out of work for eight months and what was coming up looked like more of the same. His wife had left him and taken their one-year-old daughter with her. His parents hadn’t talked to him since 1976. He could hear the voice now as clearly as he had heard it then—first as a tickle and a whisper in his ear; then growing stronger and deeper and more definite. He could see the face of Christ as clearly as he had seen it then, too. He knew it was the real Christ because it didn’t look like the face of any other Christ he’d ever seen. It wasn’t a long-suffering mask of self-pity. It wasn’t a blank stare under a halo of gold. It was the gnarled, broad-boned face of a Middle Eastern Jew, with dark hair going to gray and a film of sweat along the line of the jaw. The face had filled up every molecule of air in that back bedroom. It had lifted him off the bed and into space. He had felt as if he were floating in water. And water, he knew, was what he needed.

Washed in the blood of the lamb.

Baptized in the Holy Spirit.

Born again.

Now he wiped sweat off his own jaw and surveyed this big open room one more time. His wife, Janet, was seeing to a couple of little old ladies back near the literature rack by the center doors. There were many more people here than actually belonged to the church. There were many more people here than attended services on Sunday, al­though Henry got a pretty good crowd. He filled all four thousand three hundred fifty seats more often than not. There were people downstairs in the basement and parceled out in the classrooms in the Sunday School wing. There were black people as well as white people, too. It was in­credible to Henry how many of his neighbors lived in what were not much better than shanties. Of course, they didn’t look like shanties. They looked like new brick ranches and builder’s colonials. The problem was, they hadn’t been built very well. The Lord only knew how many of those things were going to be washed out in this hurricane.

Janet raised her head for a moment and looked in his direction. Henry motioned to her. He remembered getting her back, after she had left, after he had been born again. He remembered sitting on the bottom step of the porch steps of her mother’s house in Charleston, twisting his baseball hat in his hands, telling her what he would do if she would only give him one more chance. He still had that baseball hat, up in his bedroom sock drawer. It had a Yan­kees logo on it, as if, along with everything else he’d done wrong, he’d decided to be a traitor to the south.

Janet was a small, thin woman with lots of pale blond hair and very big blue eyes. Henry had always been glad that she didn’t have that taste for makeup that so many born-again southern women had.

“What is it?” she asked him, when she reached him. “I’m dead on my feet. The old ladies are frantic.”

“Not surprising.”

“No,” Janet agreed. “Not surprising. Bobby just brought in the Michaelses. He’s having a very bad day.”

“Bad bad?”

“Bad enough that I was thinking we might have to restrain him.”

Henry rubbed the flat of his palm against the back of his neck. “Did you ever get in touch with David Sandler? I tried myself a couple of minutes ago, but the phones are out.”

“The phones were out when I tried, too. Maybe it’s just as well.”

“Why?”

Janet shrugged. “He is an atheist, Henry. He’s a very effective atheist.”

“So?”

“So, you’ve got a church full of old people, not very well-educated old people. Half of them think that this hur­ricane is being caused by the Devil. They’ve told me so.”

“I think this hurricane is being caused by the Devil,” Henry said. “In a way.”

“With the old ladies, there’s no ‘in a way’ about it.” Janet was firm. “I don’t think I could live like that, Henry. Afraid every minute that any little thing that went wrong was the wrath of God. Afraid of Hell and trying to pretend I wasn’t afraid of it.”

“That’s why we try to teach them to know that they’re saved. To really know it. If they really know they’re saved, they have nothing to be afraid of.”

“Maybe. But it doesn’t seem to work, does it? Not with a lot of them. You talk about the love of God and it makes me feel—inspired. But then I look out at the congre­gation and I see all those closed faces, and all that fear. Why is there so much fear?”