Suddenly he knew what he had seen in her hand. An audio tape.
His mother nudged him and frowned. Obediently, Jim looked towards the front.
“Come spring, as we all know, the sap will run
again. The gold of the fall will have been distilled. We will see it again, taste it again â and, oh, how sweet it is! â that golden syrup of which Lanark County is so justly famous. It is elixir. The elixir of rebirth.”
Jim heard the sentence but there was something wrong. The sound had gone off. He was hearing Father Fisher's voice live. The pastor himself hadn't noticed yet. He went on sermonizing while all over the church people could be seen straining to hear, looking around, wondering what had gone wrong.
And then there was another sound, a hissing sound. And at last Father realized something was wrong. He tapped the mike. There was no sound, just the hissing that seemed to fill the church. Father Fisher strained to see the sexton who was snoring now, oblivious to the commotion.
Then the hissing was replaced by the sound of moaning. The congregation held its breath in hushed anticipation.
The moaning sounded like that of a grown man. What followed was unmistakably a grown man.
“O, God...” groaned the voice.
u
You have revealed Your great plans for me. And I am Your faithful servant. Help me, Lord, I beseech Thee. Keep at bay those who would stop me. Those who, filled with hatred, hound me.”
“Dickie?” cried Father Fisher, straining to see the sexton. “What in tarnation is going on?”
The taped voice gave way to sobbing. “As Thy transfigured Son, Jesus Christ, commanded His disciples on the mountain to keep what they had seen to themselves, may my sins be something just between us, O, most merciful God, I humbly beg of You.”
“Would somebody please wake Dickie,” said
Father Fisher. But his other voice, on the tape, suddenly transformed into the voice of a youngster, and said, “Hub? Hub, it's okay, old buddy. Nobody ever,
ever
is gonna find out.”
A baffled murmur went up from the congregation. Jim felt his mother gasp and tense all over. Father Fisher in the pulpit raised his voice.
“We seem to be having some technical difficulties,” he said. A few people laughed nervously, and Father Fisher called out to his sexton, loudly, so that Jim, straining, couldn't catch the next bit of the tape. But he saw Father Fisher clutch the edge of the pulpit and lean out as if he was a sailor in the crow's nest who had just spotted an iceberg.
“Mr. Patterhew! For heaven's sake.”
One of the church elders who had hurried to the back yelled out. “Hey, what do you think you're doing?”
At which point Jim saw Ruth Rose sprint for the door and barrel into the elder, who grabbed her and held her until she kneed him and he doubled over in pain.
The whole congregation cried out in astonishment. Jim, by now, was kneeling on the pew facing the back. He was astonished, too, but for a quite different reason. He couldn't believe her boldness. His mother's hand was gripping his arm but not to get him to turn around. She was hanging onto him for support. Her face was pale.
If you heard it â heard the stuff he says â maybe you'd begin to understand.
That's what Ruth Rose had said to him.
The tape stopped at last. And there was a sigh of relief from the congregation.
But somebody was not relieved. Nancy Fisher, alone in her wheelchair, suddenly let out a blood-curdling scream.
A flock of church ladies flapped and fluttered around Nancy Fisher. Jim stood up until his mother tugged him back down. Nancy, still blubbering, was wheeled out the front door of the church and around to the side entrance, where there was a ramp that led to the basement meeting hall.
Once Nancy had been wheeled off, attention swung around to her husband. He had come down from the pulpit and stood on the chancery steps, his hands folded together at the waist, watching the hubbub at the back of the church with a look of concern on his face. Jim wondered why he didn't go to his wife.
Then Dickie the sexton shuffled up to the front with Ruth Rose's tape and handed it to Father Fisher, who slipped it through a slit in the side of his cassock into his pants pocket. Dickie's head was bowed in disgrace. He had fallen asleep at the wheel and the good Church of the Blessed Transfiguration had foundered. Father Fisher patted him on the shoulder as if he were a child and sent him back to the control panel. Then the pastor climbed back into the pulpit. Every eye followed him up the stairs, watched him put his papers in order and tap the microphone to make sure that it was on again.
“Where was I,” he said.
The congregation burst into nervous laughter. There was even a scattering of applause.
Jim didn't laugh; Jim didn't clap. Glancing sideways, he noticed that his mother was not laughing, either.
“In my humble home,” continued Father, “I have a small corner, a room of my own, where I say my prayers. Praying, you see, is not only my day job.”
Jim felt the congregation smile with pride at Father's recovery, the way he was turning the interruption around.
“Folks,” said the pastor, “I take my work home with me. It is always unfinished.
We
are unfinished. Without the Lord to talk to, to bring our sins and sorrows to, we would be wretched beyond hope,”
A few parishioners mumbled, “Amen.”
Fisher looked regretful, repentant. “We all have our crosses to bear,” he said. Jim saw a few chins quiver with emotion. Everybody was nodding. Jim wasn't sure if he meant Ruth Rose or Nancy or, maybe, someone else altogether. But Fisher was quick to make his point clear.
“My daughter needs so much. Needs attention in the worst way, as you have witnessed this morning. She needs us! Needs you and me and needs the Lord who has so much to give her if she could but open her heart to Him.
“And if she were here right now, I would say to her, Ruth Rose, if you want to hear some praying, sneak up to my door tonight, sneak up with your tape recorder and âcatch me out,' and you will hear me sob and whimper and, yes, moan. That moaning is the sound the door of the heart makes as it opens wide. It will be
your
name I will be uttering,
your
name I will
be drawing His attention to,
your
name I will be honouring in my secret prayers.”
He went on for another ten or fifteen minutes, folding the startling incident into the batter of his sermon, as if it were a surprise ingredient, but one that would only make the final dish all thÄ more tasty. He even managed to pour over his concoction the golden maple syrup with which he had begun the sermon.
Jim heard with half a mind. He was thinking of Ruth Rose. She was crazy, all right, foolhardy, but she was right about one thing. There was something in Father Fisher's secret praying voice that was as guilty as sin.
He looked for her at the beaver dam Monday and again Tuesday. She wasn't there. He called out her name.
“I want to talk!” he shouted to the woods.
The only response he got was the screeching of blue jays and Gladys grinning at him with her crooked smile.
Tuesday night, after his mother had gone to work, he plucked up his courage and called Ruth Rose. Father answered the phone and Jim hung up quickly.
Shopping day rolled around again and this time Jim went to Ruth Rose's house. It was beside the church in the east end of town. The train tracks, Ruth Rose Way, passed by the foot of her garden. The Godmobile was not around.
He waited, glancing nervously up and down the quiet little street, afraid that at any moment the van would appear. He knocked.
Finally the door opened and there was Nancy
Fisher. She looked at him but made no move to open the screen door. Her hair was neat, all in bubbly curls. She was wearing bright red trousers and another vibrant blouse. But her eyes looked washed out, vacant.
Jim opened the screen door. “Hello, Mrs. Fisher. I was looking for Ruth Rose.”
He wasn't sure whether she recognized him or not.
“She's gone.”
Jim remembered Father Fisher's threat about sending her to an institution. “Gone where?”
Nancy shook her head. “Don't know.”
“You mean she ran away?”
Nancy shrugged. “Can't say.” Then she peered into Jim's eyes, and an idea seemed to flood her face. “Wait here,” she said.
She turned her wheelchair around and rolled off down the hall into the darkness. There seemed to be no lights on anywhere.
Jim waited, growing more tense by the minute. The hallway smelled of furniture polish and fried onions. There was a cross on the wall above a small table with a bowl of colourful gourds. But there were no coats or keys or signs of anyone living there.
At one point Nancy reappeared at the end of the hall and wheeled across his vision into another room. He wondered if she had forgotten all about him.
“Mrs. Fisher?” he called out.
“Coming,” she said. But she didn't. He suddenly wondered if she was phoning Father. He stepped back out onto the porch and stared up and down the block, ready to run.
“Here,” she said, wheeling up behind him, startling him.
On her lap she carried a gym bag. She seemed to want him to take it.
“It's some things for her,” she said. “I've been so blind,” she added, as if that somehow explained anything.
Jim wasn't sure what to do. “I don't know where she is,” he said. Nancy handed him the bag anyway. He took it. “I hardly know her,” he added.
It was the first time he saw her smile. “Welcome to the club,” she said.
At the library waiting for his mother, he opened the bag and looked inside. It was mostly underclothes and socks. But there was something rolled up in a piece of paper held with an elastic band. He opened it. There was a note, three twenty-dollar bills and a container of pills, a prescription in Ruth Rose's name for something called Diazepam. The note simply read, “I love you,” and was signed, “Mom.”
Jim's mother somehow didn't seem surprised when he placed the gym bag in the truck alongside the groceries and told her where he had picked it up. He told her about the note and the money and the pills.
“I tried to tell her I didn't know where Ruth Rose was,” said Jim. His mother looked hard into his eyes, but he had nothing to hide and her eyes softened. She sighed as she turned on the ignition and the old truck shuddered to life.
“Poor Nancy,” she said.
Jim lay in bed that night, unable to sleep. He kept listening for a knock at the door, a tap on the window. All he heard was the wind in the maples, the rattling of the window glass with every gust. Several times he
crawled to the end of his bed and pulled back the curtains to stare out into the yard. They had never bothered with curtains before the media people started coming around. There were no neighbours, no one to spy on them.
There was no one out there now, as far as he could tell. He crawled back under his eiderdown. He found his mind drifting, going over what he had heard in church on Sunday, the tape of Father Fisher praying. He could still hear the voice in his head, so eerie, like someone in a trance. But some of the words seemed vaguely familiar.
As Thy transfigured Son, Jesus Christ, our Saviour, commanded His disciples on the mountain to keep what they had seen to themselves, may our secret sins be something just between us.
It was cold outside the covers; Jim didn't want to leave his bed. But curiosity got the better of him. He climbed out and made his way down the creaking stairs to the parlour. He flipped on a light, blinked in the brightness of it. In a corner by the front window stood a lectern with a large Bible sitting on it. The passage was somewhere in the synoptic gospels, he seemed to recall. It was a special passage for any parishioner of the Church of the Blessed Transfiguration. He flipped through Matthew, scanning the headings.
And there it was. Chapter Seventeen, the Transfiguration of Christ.
“And after six days Jesus taketh Peter, James, and John, his brother, and bringeth them up into a high mountain apart, and was transfigured before them: and His face did shine as the sun, and His raiments were white as the light.”
The transfiguration was a story well known to Sunday schoolers at the Blessed T., for the church was dedicated to the mysterious happening on the mountain when God came down in a great bright cloud and told the disciples that Jesus was His Son and to listen to Him and do what He told them.
Jim thought about the passage. His father had read the Bible, a fair bit. He was interested in Biblical history, too, and he kept a few books, companion volumes, on a shelf near the lectern.
Jim turned there now. He took down a
Dictionary of Christian Lore and Legend.
Suddenly the rooster crowed, startling him.
He went to the window, peeking out through the curtains towards the barn. It was a long way until morning. A floodlight illuminated the yard almost to the doors of the barn. The wind picked up and leaves danced but he saw nothing else move. The rooster crowed again.
“Stupid bird,” Jim muttered to himself. His father had once told him that roosters dreamed of sunrise and that was why they sometimes crowed in the middle of the night. But the sound disturbed Jim. He flipped off the light and took the dictionary up to his bedroom, where he perused it by flashlight.
It didn't take long to discover what he was looking for, but it stunned him all the same. Another bit of the puzzle. He turned off his bedside light and lay there listening to the dark.
He closed his eyes and prayed she would come around. And into the darkness he whispered, “Ruth Rose, have I got news for you!”
The fall rains came, hard as sticks, churning up the front yard until it looked like a muddy battlefield. Leaves in soggy wavelets lapped against the steps of the farmhouse.