Living Witness(3)

Nick took one last look at Annie-Vic, going by the hardware store, and Mr. Radkin stepping out to talk to her. That ought to be a conversation, he thought. But there was no conversation. Annie-Vic didn’t stop moving. Nick looked up at George Radkin and back at Annie Vic and then around at his own new church, built from scratch less than ten years ago, from money made by the people who had once had to send their children to school with beach buckets. Then he turned his back to the town and went inside. There was a time in his life that he’d thought that he was turning his back on this town for good. He’d thought he would get himself ordained and go to work in a church in a place he’d never seen, an exotic place, like Florida. He didn’t know why he’d decided, in the end, to come back home, but he had this to hold on to: he believed in God the way most people believed in their own left shoulders. He could feel the presence of the Almighty with him at every hour of the day and night. He knew that God understood him better than he understood himself, and that God wanted only good things for him. Nick was not the kind of preacher who promised hellfire and destruction. He wasn’t even the kind of preacher who believed in it.

Inside the church, two of the men from the Men’s Study Group, Harve Griegson and Pete DeMensh, were painting the front of the new choir box. Nick hadn’t been sure about putting in a choir, but some of the women had really wanted it, and he didn’t think it would do any harm. Still, it was a lot different from the Holiness Church he remembered from his childhood, which had been in the old minister’s ten-by-twelve-foot living room in a house where the “driveway” was nothing but mud ruts dug by the minister’s big pickup truck. It had been a blessing to get to the summer and be able to worship in a field, no matter how hot it was. It had been a blessing when no more than two people had to be taken to the hospital, too, and not just because there was a legitimate worry about somebody dying from the rattlesnake venom. Dear Lord, the way the nurses at the emergency room had looked at them, every time.

“Nick?” Harve Griegson said.

“I was thinking about the snakes,” Nick said. He had turned his back on the two men while he was thinking, and he didn’t turn around now. He was looking at the row on row of shiny wooden pews, every one of them planed and sanded and stained and waxed so that they looked like something out of a Hollywood movie about church. Was there something wrong with that? America had moved on since the days when his father had been a boy. It had moved on in the days since he himself had been a boy. Wasn’t it right that the hill people should be moving on too?

“You’re not thinking about bringing back the snakes, are you, Nick?” Harve Griegson asked. “Because, you know, I thought that was one of your better changes. My daddy died from one of those snakes. You got to wonder what people were thinking.”

“They were thinking that God keeps his promises,” Nick said, but then he was sorry he’d said it. Harve Griegson had a house with indoor plumbing, two trucks, and a big flat-screen TV, but he’d still never gone beyond his sophomore year in high school, and he barely got through that. It was one of the few things that could make Nick really angry after all these years. It was a joke, what the town used to call an “education” for the hill kids. It was worse than a joke. The only way Nick himself had been able to overcome it was that he was a natural reader. He read everything and anything, and he sat in the library one afternoon for six hours until they broke down and let him have a library card. The hill kids he’d grown up with had barely learned to read at all, and barely learned to figure, and as soon as they got within shouting distance of their fifteenth birthdays they’d gotten the message that everybody would be glad if they would just go.

“Nick,” Pete said, sounding worried, “are you all right?”

“He’s thinking about bringing back the snakes,” Harve said. He sounded worried.

Nick turned around to look at them. “I’m fine. I’m not thinking about bringing back the snakes. I just saw Annie-Vic have a run-in with Alice McGuffie.”

“Annie-Vic,” Harve Griegson said.

“I still don’t get it,” Pete said. “I don’t get why we aren’t part of that lawsuit.”

“We’ve got no reason to be part of that lawsuit,” Nick said. “Our children don’t go to the public school. We’ve got our own school.”

“She thinks she’s better than everybody,” Harve said. “Just look at her. Fancy college. Going off all over the place. She thinks the rest of us are brick stupid.”