dress (the closest she had to black) and her grownup hose. I also remember she ate almost no supper, just pushed things around on her plate until it was all mixed together and looked like dog whoop.
“What scripture did Givens read?” Andy asked.
“First Corinthians,” Mom said. “The one about how we see through a glass darkly?”
“Good choice,” my older brother said sagely.
“How was he?” I asked Mom. “How was Reverend Jacobs?”
“He was . . . quiet,” she said, looking troubled. “Meditating, I think.”
“No, he wasn’t,” Claire said, pushing her plate away. “He was shell-shocked. Just sat there in a folding chair at the head of the grave, and when Mr. Givens asked him if he’d throw the first dirt and then join him in saying the benediction, he only went on sitting with his hands between his knees and his head hanging down.” She began to cry. “It seems like a dream to me, a bad dream.”
“But he did get up and toss the dirt,” Dad said, putting an arm around her shoulders. “After awhile, he did. A handful on each coffin. Didn’t he, Claire-Bear?”
“Yeah,” she said, crying harder than ever. “After that Shiloh guy took his hands and practically pulled him up.”
Con hadn’t said anything, and I realized he wasn’t at the table anymore. I saw him out in the backyard, standing by the elm from which our tire swing hung. He was leaning his head against the bark with his hands clasping the tree and his shoulders shaking.
Unlike Claire, though, he had eaten his dinner. I remember that. Ate up everything on his plate and asked for seconds in a strong, clear voice.
• • •
There were guest preachers, arranged for by the deacons, on the next three Sundays, but Pastor Givens wasn’t one of them. In spite of being calm, comforting, and appropriate at Willow Grove, I expect he wasn’t asked. As well as being reticent by nature and upbringing, Yankees also have a tendency to be comfortably prejudiced in matters of religion and race. Three years later, I heard one of my teachers at Gates Falls High School tell another, in tones of outraged wonder: “Now why would anyone want to shoot that Reverend King? Heaven sakes, he was a good nigger!”
MYF was canceled following the accident. I think all of us were glad—even Andy, also known as Emperor of Bible Drills. We were no more ready to face Reverend Jacobs than he was to face us. Toy Corner, where Claire and the other girls had entertained Morrie (and themselves), would have been awful to look at. And who would play the piano for Sing Time? I suppose someone in town could have done it, but Charles Jacobs was in no condition to ask, and it wouldn’t have been the same, anyway, without Patsy’s blond hair shifting from side to side as she swung the upbeat hymns, like “We Are Marching to Zion.” Her blond hair was underground now, growing brittle on a satin pillow in the dark.
One gray November afternoon while Terry and I were spray-stenciling turkeys and cornucopias on our windows, the telephone jangled one long and one short: our ring. Mom answered, spoke briefly, then put the phone down and smiled at Terry and me.
“That was Reverend Jacobs. He’s going to be in the pulpit this coming Sunday to preach the Thanksgiving sermon. Won’t that be nice?”
• • •
Years later—I was in high school and Claire was home on vacation from the University of Maine—I asked my sister why nobody had stopped him. We were out back, pushing the old tire swing. She didn’t have to ask who I meant; that Sunday sermon had left a scar on all of us.
“Because he sounded so reasonable, I think. So normal. By the time people realized what he was actually saying, it was too late.”
Maybe, but I remembered both Reggie Kelton and Roy Easterbrook interrupting him near the end, and I knew something was wrong even before he started, because he didn’t follow that day’s scriptural reading with the customary conclusion: May God bless His holy word. He never forgot that, not even on the day I met him, when he showed me the little electric Jesus walking across Peaceable Lake.
His scripture on the day of the Terrible Sermon was from the thirteenth chapter of First Corinthians, the same passage Pastor Givens read over the twin graves—one big, one small—at Willow Grove: “For we know in part, and we prophesy in part. But when that which