Drowning of Stephan Jones (13 page)

Stephan thrust his hands, palms up, mere inches above the clergyman’s abundant waist. A casual observer might come to the quick, but terribly wrong, conclusion that a surprisingly well dressed beggar was pleading for a little bread, instead of the absolutely correct conclusion that a young man was fervently begging for a few crumbs of understanding. “What we want you to understand, Reverend Wheelwright, is that come August fifteenth, Frank and I will have been together for five years. Hey, I bet that’s longer than some of those marriages that you officiate at in your beautiful sanctuary.”

Suddenly, the minister’s cheeks puffed and his face reddened as though his internal temperature was rapidly heating up to a combustibly high level. “You
dare
to compare the sanctified love of a man and a woman with the sodomy of two men? That’s blasphemy! Blasphemy, I tell you!” The preacher shouted. With his hamlike hands he grasped each man’s head, knocking the men off balance and sending them to their knees.

“Dost thou,” he cried, his eyes staring wildly at the ceiling of the Rachetville Baptist Church’s social hail. “Dost thou renounce the devil and all his works, the vain pomp and glory of the world, with all covetous desires of the same, and the sinful desires of the flesh, so that thou will not follow, nor be led by them?”

“What
are
you doing?” Frank asked as first he and then Stephan stumbled to their feet.

The preacher’s forehead exuded sweat, cold sweat. “Can’t you see? Can’t you tell? I’m washing you in the cleansing blood of Jesus Christ Our Savior! I’m giving you Holy Baptism so that you both may be born again!”

Frank vigorously shook his head. “But we’re not here for that, not here for salvation!”

“Then what!?” asked the clergyman, allowing his veiled eyelids to again raise themselves, only this time maybe even higher than they had ever been raised before.

Stephan sighed wearily and audibly before attempting his answer. “For one of the most precious things that any human being could ever ask of another: compassion.”

“
Compassion!
” shrieked the minister, his complexion now taking on a bluish-purplish hue. “There is
no
compassion for sodomites! And there certainly is
no
compassion for those who commit the worst sin of them all. Read your Bible, because there it is written that the one sin that can never be forgiven is the sin of blasphemy.”

“Blasphemy, is it?” taunted Frank. “You would really call it blasphemy because Stephan makes the undeniably true observation that not all marriages entered into at this church of yours have lasted as long as our relationship? Well,
Reverend
, it so happens that I may not have read the Bible, but I have read my history and that’s why I can tell you this: If Stephan is guilty of blasphemy, why then, he’s in damn good company because both the Bible and history teach of two men who have been tried, convicted, and finally put to death for the crime of blasphemy. Maybe you know them? Their names were Socrates and Jesus Christ.”

Chapter 14

W
ITH A PRACTICED
hand, Carla brushed her auburn hair, which shone with an inbred luster reserved for the young, the healthy, and the beautiful. By the time she had slipped the saffron party dress over her head, she looked as though there were nothing she could possibly add or subtract that would make her look more radiantly beautiful than she looked right at this moment.

And as she inserted a pearl earring into her lobe, she became aware that Judith was standing at the threshold of her room. “You know, you were right, Mom,” she said with a quick toss of her head. “The pearls really do work better than the rhinestones.”

Judith smiled because she found her daughter’s words resonating through her: ...
you were right, Mom
. She
really
liked savoring the moment while trying to remember exactly how long it had been since she had heard her daughter speak those words. Not for quite a while. For way too long a while.

However, there used to be a time, and not all that long ago, when Judith would come home brimming with her stories of the never-ending struggle at the library against too many demands on too few resources. Even when she was able to foster an uneasy peace on that front, there was always the second front to contend with! That was the force that was inevitably led by a sincere and vocal group who fought tirelessly for what they believed. What they believed was that it was the duty of the library to reflect only the values that were
their
values. After all, weren’t they the ones, the only ones, with a personal relationship to Christ Jesus?

Judith often found comfort in telling
real
behind-the-scenes stories to Carla because her daughter was absolutely therapeutic when she’d cheer her mother’s victories and rail against her
defeats.

But ever since Andy Harris had charged into Carla’s life, Judith noticed that the only time she seemed to gain her daughter’s complete approval was when she waved high her personal white flag of compromise or defeat.

Although Judith’s last tension-filled conflict had taken place a few weeks earlier, she was too afraid of Carla’s recent lack of empathy for her feelings to even mention it. It started innocently enough when the library in celebration of Earth Day put up a display titled, “In the Beginning ...” On the display table were a collection of books by renowned physicists, geologists, social anthropologists, archaeologists, and others giving their most current and reasoned explanation of how life evolved on this planet. The paint wasn’t yet dry on the poster-board sign when Mrs. Wooten stormed in demanding that the “unholy” display be taken down and the books returned to the back library stacks “where they’d do less harm.” Mrs. Wooten’s problem was that these “tainted” books were at odds with the two-thousand-year-old explanation that had already been offered in Genesis.

When Judith had refused to either take down the sign or break up the display, Hilda Wooten temporarily retreated to the comfort of her long and luxurious ranch-style home to dial a few choice phone numbers from her well-turned Rolodex. Before the day was over, Judith was paid an unexpected visit by Mr. Randall McDowell, the chairman of the library’s board of trustees. His straight-to-the-point ultimatum was delivered in agonizingly plain view and clear hearing of the library’s staff.

What he said was, “
You
go or
it
goes! It’s one or the other!” Mr. McDowell threatened, shaking his stern index finger at a humiliated and speechless librarian. “Can’t you get it in your head, can’t you finally understand, Mrs. Wayland, that this is a God-fearing community that doesn’t want to read anything
that will dilute their faith!?”

At that moment, Judith was convinced that she could physically feel each and every one of those dozen or so pairs of eyes devouring her
and
her privacy. She made it a point—perhaps a small, but still and all, a very important point—to lift her chin before walking erect, without a word, back to her own private office and quietly closing the door.

As Judith entered her book-lined office with its drab mustard-and-black floor tiles, she was struck by one fact, the one and only thing at that moment she was completely certain of. The simple fact was that by the time she left her room, she’d be different. Changed forever by the decision that she had had thrust upon her. But how could she live with herself if she scuttled science and learning in favor of religion and superstition? Then again, how could she live at all if she didn’t? Because who would hire a forty-two-year-old head librarian who had been fired by the Rachetville Library’s board of trustees for insubordination? Particularly at a time when library jobs were being cut everywhere.

Fifteen minutes later, Judith marched out of her office straight to the front of the building where the display books were now being examined with consummate interest by a twelve- or thirteen-year-old boy. She reached up to remove the offending poster-board sign and saw that her hands had begun to tremble.

Although this incident had happened a few weeks ago, Judith still had not found the “right” time to speak to Carla about her situation. What she needed was for the one person she loved more than anyone else to share her pain at her loss of autonomy as well as her constantly mourned loss of integrity. Even though she had hated the bargain she had struck, taking the sign down but not getting rid of the books, she wondered if she wouldn’t have hated even more losing her livelihood precisely five days before her mortgage payment was due?

Maybe, she reasoned, if Carla could understand exactly why she had done what she did and forgive her, then maybe she could learn to forgive herself.

Judith fastened the clasp of Carla’s pearl necklace. “You look lovely,” she whispered while her whole being resonated with pride as well as with thoughts of the long-gone Roy Wayland. Did he, she wondered, at least from time to time, have any conception of what he was missing? What pleasures could he have possibly found amid uncaring strangers that could conceivably compare with the joy of seeing your own child turn into a woman, a woman both lovely and loving?

“Tell me,” Judith asked with a smile, “are you really that same little person who I used to play with in your sandpile, building sand castles not so very many years ago?”

Carla twirled around to give her mother a hug of such intensity that Judith understood at once that some special feelings were being unleashed. Finally in a voice raw with emotion, the girl whispered, “Thank you.”

“For what?” Judith asked, as much surprised as she was overwhelmed.

Carla shook her head as though she were at a loss to commit such a surge of feelings to the scrutiny of words. But finally she took a stab, “I don’t know... for this dress—so much expense just so I’d look nice for the prom. And also for that compliment. I guess I needed that.”

“You
needed
that?” Judith looked taken aback. “I thought you’ve been sitting on top of the world ever since Andy started dating you regularly and invited you to be his prom date!”

“Well ... I am. Only I wouldn’t want him to have second thoughts or anything now that he’s stuck with me.”

“Oh, really!” interjected Judith, impatient with her over-ripened sense of humility or lack of self-esteem. “Why do you have to be constantly reminded that you’re bright and pretty—and, if I may add, a hell of a lot more mature than your rabidly
homophobic boyfriend?”

“Oh, no, Mom, Andy’s not like that anymore! Nowadays he leaves those guys strictly alone. You know, I really think he’s a lot more grown up than he used to be.”

“Hmmm,” murmured Judith, looking a long way from being convinced.

“Yes, he really is! He’s stopped bothering them. Doesn’t that prove something?”

“Well, it might prove it somewhat more convincingly if I hadn’t noticed that there are more floodlights focused on the Forgotten Treasures Antique Shop than on the Parson Springs Savings Bank.”

“Can’t you for once ever give him the benefit of the doubt?” Carla implored. “Andy hasn’t done any pranks for weeks and weeks, and I know
that
for a fact.”

This time it was Judith who looked perplexed. “But I thought they—didn’t you tell me that Andy was warned that their phones were tapped?”

Carla went back to carefully following the line of her lips with the lipstick brush. “I really think that knowing that merely gave him the excuse to stop doing what he was already feeling pretty ashamed of doing. I doubt they really had their phone tapped anyway.”

At seven-thirty, the doorbell at the Wayland home chimed. Carla and Judith spontaneously turned to look at each other as though neither had a clear idea what to do next. “I’ll let him in,” Judith offered.

As she swung open the front door, Judith was, in spite of herself, taken aback with how handsomely resplendent Andy looked. Standing in his white dinner jacket with the scarlet cummerbund, he seemed like a young and valiant prince, and she saw how her daughter could find his looks so appealing. She felt strangely stupid having to fight off feelings of insecurity. Why hadn’t she thought to put on fresh makeup, or at the
very least, to comb her hair?

Self-consciously, Judith tucked her blouse inside her skirt as she glanced around the living room. When had the furniture become so old and worn? Pointing toward an oversized chair with a flowered chintz slipcover, she beckoned to him to sit down. “Oh, please come on in, Andy. Carla will be ready in a minute.”

“Oh, here,” he said, offering Judith an orchid inside a see-through box. “Probably she’ll want to pin it on her dress.”

“Yes, I’m sure she will,” she agreed, returning with it to Carla’s bedroom.

When Judith returned to the living room, she looked prettier, after the quick addition of a little powder and paint. She smiled, wondering what she could say to make him feel comfortable. “Congratulations, Andy, on being accepted to Duke University. That’s a fine school!”

Andy nodded, showing his pleasure that Judith was aware of his accomplishment. “My dad wants me to get a degree in business administration, but ... I’m not sure. ...”

Judith looked interested, and that in itself was encouragement enough to spur him on. “Dad thinks that the opportunities for business right here in Atkins County are nothing short of miraculous!” He laughed. “If it were up to him, he’d already have calling cards printed saying Lawrence Harris and Son.”

“Well, whatever you do, don’t knock being in business for yourself.” She thought of her own fears of being fired, which she controlled so nicely during her waking and working hours. But at night—ah, the nights, now wasn’t that a very different story?

A minute later Carla swept into the room. Andy smiled with such sweet yet shy appreciation that Judith felt ashamed for so long being critical of the boy. A few sentences passed back and forth between the couple—how pretty the orchid was, how
crowded the backseat would be because of Doug and Donna. Mike and Lisa. It wasn’t the words, but the timid smiles and gracious glances they exchanged that spoke far more meaningfully than their ordinary, everyday words.