Authors: Robert Ashcom
Each time I enter the church I look for the galvanized pulley still nailed into the rafters high above the nave, which my father put there in 1948 for the Christmas pageant. They tried to make the pageant a Broadway show with a stage. The pulley was to pull up the curtain. But my father only got as far as running a rope through it before Will jerked him back to reality and to the fact that it was a church and not a theater—curious for one of High Church persuasion. So no more theater—obviously not necessary to salvation. But the little galvanized pulley remained as a memory for me of my father and Will, a mark of their passing, hung high above the nave—having survived the latest remodeling and expansion—to hold up the curtain that time they all got so carried away over Christmas.
Until the last time. It was gone. The shock was physical. My gut tightened. Well, I suppose I always knew it would happen, knew that one day I would walk into the church for a funeral to discover that my little symbol for them was gone, that all that was left of the old church seemed to be the nave, somehow
dwarfed by the rest: the choir loft and the little pipe organ my father spent so many hours on and the clear chancel. There is one other thing left: the reredos behind the altar, carved from oak stained black, with the wheat sheaves for the bread on one side of the cross and the grapes for the wine on the other. But as for the nave, the pine pews are too small, the wood too soft with too many scratches, too primitive. The next time the pews would be gone, too. I was sure. And as if to put it into some dusty archive in my mind, I looked across and back, thinking of the people who from custom used the same pew, year after year.
And then toward the back on the Gospel side, I saw him as clear as day. It was from a time when just the two of us were there, Will standing with his hands resting on the pew in front of him, smiling and then suddenly that laugh, a horse laugh I always called it. Being a kid, I had been shocked and had rebuked him. Laughter in church! He gave an absolutely straight-faced answer: “This is God’s house and I’m at home here.” Then, in spite of everything, he smiled.
And at the smile the scene in my mind’s eye suddenly shifted back to the Sunday morning of the moccasin, with the snake turning back on himself to miss the root as he crawled away from us, me waiting for the lecture, and Will, smiling, asking me in his serious funny way if I wanted to learn to serve at the altar—and feeling the lurch of my heart at the unexpectedness of the thing. And me thinking—now,
not then—that in spite of my inclination to symbolize, that that snake was not the ancient symbol, not the creature of the garden. No, just
Agkistrodon piscivorus,
the cottonmouth, the water moccasin, crawling quickly away after interrupting our Sunday morning. Just a snake, but dangerous, and not something to step on barefoot on any day, no matter how tight his circles or great your need to know.