Dog on the Cross (14 page)

“Absolutely. Whatever makes you comfortable.”

He helped the boy carry his bedding to the living room, wished him good night, told him if he needed anything to come and wake him. Snodgrass thanked him and Hassler went back down the hallway.

He closed the door to their bedroom, pulled off his trousers and socks, climbed in between the covers. Anita was there waiting. She turned off the light and scooted across the bed toward him.

“What do you think?” she whispered.

“About what?”

“Our evangelist. What do you think about Leslie?”

“He seems like a very sweet boy.”

“You think he'll make it a week?”

There was silence and then the sound of Hassler exhaling a long breath.

“Be lucky,” he told her, “if he makes it through the night.”

R
EVIVAL BEGAN THE
following evening. Hassler and Snodgrass stood in the foyer greeting people as they entered—the pastor warm and affable, the evangelist quiet and tense, utterly out of place. It was a Tuesday, and there was not a large crowd, only a third of the congregation in attendance. At five after, they closed the doors and came down the center aisle. They stepped onto the platform, crossed it, and sat on the pew at the auditorium's rear wall—the boy very straight in his dark brown suit, the tips
of his loafers just brushing the ground. His grandmother had taken a position at the front—a small, virtually wrinkleless woman, with a long-sleeved dress and hair woven into a great gray bun. She looked familiar to Hassler, but the preacher could not reckon how. He'd seen a thousand Pentecostal matrons in his time, but none quite as statuesque, none with an expression denoting greater purpose or will.

As people took their seats, Hassler noticed Snodgrass surveying the inside of the building. The sanctuary was done up in burgundy: burgundy carpet and pew cushions and great burgundy drapes over the windows. The walls were wood-paneled, matching the altars in color and grain. A piano stood on one side of the platform, an organ on the other, the enormous oak podium resting center stage. They had constructed the new building only a few years before, the money donated by Hassler's uncle, a horse rancher prominent in that area.

Snodgrass told the pastor he had a beautiful church, and Hassler gave him an uneasy smile, wondering if the boy would be able to step behind the podium when the time came.

In a few minutes, Hassler rose from the pew, approached the pulpit, and began the service. There was song and offering; there was prayer request and testimony. Jimmy Osage and his wife sang a special with Carol Fortner playing accompaniment.

At forty-five minutes in, Hassler introduced Snodgrass, and the boy moved toward the pulpit. Hassler went back to his seat, watched the evangelist greet the audience and ask them to bow their heads in prayer. The pastor, nodding in feigned compliance, saw Snodgrass's grandmother press the record button on the tape player she'd brought, noted also that her grandson placed his hands below the podium to conceal their shaking. Hassler closed his eyes, praying that Snodgrass would be able to make it through his sermon.

Then the boy raised his head and began to preach. His tone grew firm, and he spoke in a voice biblical and commanding. Indeed, it seemed as if it was not he who was speaking at all. Hassler sat incredulous, as did the audience. The boy's sermon was an urgent cadence, a voice almost in song, and Hassler knew it was neither affected nor rehearsed. He felt relieved beyond comparison, both for his congregation and himself, assured that the evangelist could be the one to help restore his gift.

As Snodgrass preached, the sincerity of his words cut his audience to the quick, for listening to the boy minister was like hearing a prophetic utterance, and those who had begun to doubt the very truth of God were shaken to their foundations. Elders who had been close to mute shouted amens, the younger and more demonstrative among them stricken dumb. The
longer the sermon, the less his audience could wait to fall into the altars, and when this happened, Hassler found himself among them, kneeling in their midst like the commonest reprobate. All around him the congregation cried out to God in voices loud with shame.

Bent over the altar, his eyes tightly clenched, Hassler tried to summon the Spirit. In former days it took very little coaxing. It seemed that when he closed his eyes, there would be a mist waiting just above him and all he had to do was inhale. His face would grow hot and wet, his hands would tremble, and soon his tongue would be released. It was like being emptied of all need for life, and if he could have lived and died that way, he would have.

Now, Hassler struggled among the voices to his right and left, feeling that just beyond the black screen covering his eyes there was something pressing toward him, putting forth impressions as through a bolt of velvet. Whether a face or other shape he could not tell, though there was nothing he would not have forfeited to learn.

But this night, Hassler could not tear aside the veil. He made steady appeal, pleaded, spoke promises. He tried to recall images of himself ten and twenty and thirty years previous, tried to remember the precise feel of the language that had possessed him, the shape of its vowels. He even thought that
if he began speaking, began mimicking the voice, perhaps it would return.

Yet, as his congregation began to stand and approach their pews, Hassler realized the Spirit would not come. He rose and returned to his seat, trying to fend away thoughts of desertion.

Anita was sitting there wiping mascara from her eyes. After a while, she placed her head on her husband's shoulder.

“Bobby,” she whispered, “this is what we've needed.”

He looked at her, then to where the evangelist knelt just to the left of the platform, the boy's face uplifted, his lips stammering.

W
ORD OF
S
NODGRASS
quickly spread. In three days time numbers at the First Pentecostal swelled to over two hundred, and Hassler was forced to borrow folding chairs from the Assembly of God down the road. People came from far away as Okemah, Guthrie—one family from western Arkansas—all saying it was a true revival. Folks were saved and filled, and there was even talk of using Pete Cochran's pond for a baptism. Night after night, Hassler sat watching the evangelist, wondering what would become of his soul.

It did not seem long since he had been the young man, full of fire and conviction, and during those
days he did not think it could be otherwise. Before he could drive, his uncle Jess would take him from church to church to hold revivals or single-night meetings. Neither of his parents would darken a sanctuary's door: his father was bad to drink, his mother dead at forty.

Jess drove into town every afternoon to take his nephew fishing or for ice cream or to church. Having no children of their own, he and his wife all but adopted the boy, and after his sister died, they moved him into their guest room.

Hassler could remember sitting between his aunt and uncle in their step-side Buick, watching the fields scroll past. Jess was a tall man with a sculpted face, Lorraine his physical opposite; in the early twenties they were converted when Pentecost swept the Midwest. He had no call upon him, but in her younger days Lorraine had been an evangelist and even now possessed the gift of prophecy.

During prayer meeting one night—Hassler would have been about eleven—Lorraine began to prophesy over the boy. The woman held his head to her breast and told how God had placed a great anointing on his life, how He had things in store for him the like of which Hassler could never imagine. She said he would grow to be mighty in the Spirit, would evangelize and pastor a church, would lead many toward the path of righteousness. She said that as long as he kept his eyes fixed on his calling, his way
would be certain. Lying in bed, Hassler would repeat the prophecy, picturing the face of his mother as he mouthed the words.

The next summer he was baptized in the Holy Ghost with the evidence of speaking in tongues. Until then, Hassler had been possessed of a longing and an emptiness. As a child, he would watch the evenings come with a feeling that someone had thrown a blanket over the face of the world. But when the Spirit descended and the tongues began, Hassler knew that something had altered in the very pit of him. It was as if the part that sought consolation, the thing that needed peace and reassurance, had been covered with a soft, thick material. Not that it had been excised; Hassler was certain it had not. It had merely been covered, wrapped like a ball of spiders into a velvet sack.

Hassler began preaching several years after. It was not the matter of preparation and nerves he thought it would be. He took to it naturally and what he had to say fell from him with the same ease that sweat fell from his brow. All said he was under the sincere anointing of God.

Years passed and Hassler grew both in reputation and confidence. Then one night—Hassler had been holding a three-week revival in Little Rock—Jess and Lorraine received a call. Their nephew was weeping, had been for two days straight.

Jess drove to Arkansas and retrieved the young
man—he sat in the front seat nearly catatonic—and the next week was forced to take him to a psychiatric hospital in Norman. The doctors said Hassler was suffering from a psychosis they hoped would soon disappear.

Hassler never understood what had happened. And in three months time he felt as good as he ever had, the breakdown seeming like a largely jumbled dream. All he remembered was that he had stepped into the pulpit one night, felt the presence of God, and then began to weep. He could not stop to deliver his sermon, nor could he cease when bedtime came, and the following morning when the pastor checked on him, Hassler was weeping yet.

He would later speak about this to his aunt Lorraine. On a late August evening, several years after the occurrence, the two of them sat on the back porch of the ranch house looking out into the woods. It was hot and very dry, and as they spoke the cicadas swelled up in the bushes around them, then went suddenly still.

Hassler leaned into the cane chair and looked at his aunt. She was in her seventies, but did not look it. She was a small woman with doll-like features and clean blue eyes. Lorraine had been talking for half an hour, telling him he had nothing to be ashamed of, that the Spirit of the Lord was a comfort, but the anointing hard to bear.

“I can remember times I'd step into the pulpit,”
his aunt told him. “I'd have a sweat break out on me and feel like my legs were going to buckle.”

Hassler smiled.

“I'd get a feeling like I wanted to run, and then another because I knew I couldn't.”

Hassler moved forward in his chair. He saw a squirrel run the trunk of a black oak and sit with its tail twittering.

“It's not that I was nervous,” he said. “It was more like when you know it's going to storm.”

Lorraine began to shake her head. “I never said it had anything to do with
nervous.
”

Hassler gave her a puzzled look, and she raised a hand to her mouth, kept it there a moment, then glanced toward nothing.

“In the Old Testament,” she began, “the temple priests sewed bells on their hems. They tied ropes to their ankles. They did this because they were the only ones who could walk behind the curtain. If there was sin on them, God would strike them where they stood; people would drag them out by their ropes.”

Hassler nodded.

“I'd be in church, Bobby, waiting to get behind that pulpit, and I'd think how the priests walked past the curtain knowing this. They knew if the sacrifice wasn't pure, the bells would stop. It must have sobered them. It must have made them wish they were never called.”

The woman quit speaking and cleared her throat. Hassler began to study the ground.

“I know there's some,” Lorraine continued, “who've never felt the anointing, so they wouldn't understand—those people on Christian television prancing around like a carnival. But those who have felt it, they never step on the platform lightly.” The woman put a hand on his arm. “Do you know what I'm talking about?”

“I do,” said Hassler. “But I don't see it that way.”

“Which way?”

“We're not under the Old Law. We're not sacrificing for our—”

“Bobby,” said the woman, “you can't tell me that even on the best nights you don't feel it—like you're facing something that could turn on you.”

“Of course I feel it,” Hassler told her. “I never step behind the podium but what I don't feel it. That's some of the problem. It shouldn't be that way. The Lord shouldn't—”

“You think arguing with it is going to help?”

“You know I don't.”

“It's going to make you crazy, is what it'll do. What you have to decide is if it's worth it.”

“I don't have a choice,” he said.

“Hush now,” she told him, “Everyone has a choice. Just because you have a calling doesn't mean you have to answer. Maybe you'll have to tell the Lord no.”

Hassler sat for a while. The sun had gone down, casting the yard in darkness. “I can't do that,” he finally said.

Lorraine patted him on the arm and pulled her hand away. She seemed to be speaking to herself. “For the person who can receive,” she told him, “the Spirit of the Lord and the Spirit of the Devil run alongside, and if a man isn't careful, if he doesn't respect his calling over its signs, he'll pick wrong every time. I've seen it burn people alive.”

Hassler noticed it had become quiet. He could hear whippoorwills crying to each other and, from some distance, the knocking of woodpeckers. He eyed his feet and his voice surprised him when it came. “There are times,” he said, “I think it's going to kill me.”

His aunt drew her arms up to her as if she were unexpectedly cold, and both sat watching the sky darken. It seemed a long time before she spoke.

“I always felt like that in the presence of the Lord,” she told him. “Part of me glad of the anointing. Part of me waiting for the bells to stop.”