On Sunday afternoon, in record-setting heat, I was lying under a tall bald cypress tree near the bank of the river, my head on Laura’s lap. Her lap was not as comfortable as the soft stack of pillows in the hospital and in my trailer; there were, however, other consolations.
The base of the bald cypress swelled to four times the circumference of the rest of the trunk, and there were cypress knees shooting up all around it. The grayish brown, spiraling base of the tree was normally covered in water, but the summer was dry and the river low.
Dammit, why do I have to die now? Why? How cruel to do this to me now.
She sat there gazing down at me, as if I were the man of her dreams, rubbing her fingers through my hair-the only part of my body that didn’t hurt. Occasionally, she would run her fingers delicately along the edge of my cheek, tracing the beard line. Although she barely touched it, it still hurt. It was, however, worth it.
“I was so scared in the hospital,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper. “I thought I might lose you, and I had just found you. I prayed like I never have before. I remembered some of the things you said at that funeral . . . Anyway, I want you to hang around a while and teach me more, okay?”
“I plan to.”
“You know how you said that stuff about grace, about things being a grace, like dancing with me that night or a good night’s sleep?”
I nodded. Where the hell is my grace?
“You’re a grace for me,” Tears formed in her eyes. She smiled.
“There’s nothing I want more.”
A small breeze rippled the top of the muddy, coffee-colored water, and the moss hanging from the cypress limbs above us swayed slightly. Upstream, a fish jumped and made a loud splash.
We were silent, both fully in the moment. A single small tear fell from her left eye into my right.
“Tears form in my heart, but they fall from Laura’s eyes,” I said.
“That’s beautiful,” she said, and then more tears came.
“It’s from one of Dan Fogelberg’s songs-‘Anastasia’s Eyes’.”
It was a very romantic moment, considering that I looked like a raccoon that had barely survived being hit by a car . . . and was going to die anyway.
The branches of the bald cypress were too high and too small to provide any real shade, but a large live oak about ten feet away shaded the entire area of the bank and part of the muddy river. The water looked like just-stirred coffee as it swirled around the cypress trunks and the edge of the bank. The lapping of the water on the trunk of the trees reminded me of the bow of a boat breaking waves in the Gulf.
“I was a pretty successful pastor in Atlanta,” I said. “When I finished seminary, I served for a short time as an associate of one of the larger churches in the area, and then two years later I was the senior pastor of the second largest Methodist church in Atlanta. I drank like a fish when I was in high school, college, and shortly after that when I was working with the Stone Mountain Police Department, but I stopped when I received my calling. I didn’t seek help or look at why I drank so much. I just stopped.”
“And, stopping like that is always temporary,” she said.
“Yes, it is, especially because I had an extremely horrific case with a very traumatic ending just before I quit the department. I didn’t drink while I was the associate and for two years after I became a senior pastor. I threw myself into my vocation.”
“You exchanged one addiction for another,” she said.
“Yep, I was a classic workaholic. Now, this whole time I’d been living as a dry drunk, and that was okay with Susan, because that’s what she was used to. We had a nice, comfortable, unhealthy relationship. We didn’t see each other that much, and we lived in a glass house, so when we
did, we were usually doing our best to win an Oscar.”
“All the world’s a stage,” she said.
“Uh huh,” I said. “Finally, with all the pressure of being a pastor of a large church, never having gotten over my last case, and no personal life whatsoever, I began to drink again. Small amounts at first, but then I tried to swim in the bottle, and that’s when I drowned.”
“How did Susan respond?”
“Like an old pro at enabling. She was the best. The silence, the secrets, the excuses, and the justification.”
“Sounds like a perfect setup. What happened?”
“Remember that grace we spoke of earlier-she stepped in. I saw that I needed help, and I went looking for it. I started AA, I read the books, I got a sponsor, and I made one fatal mistake-I became honest about my addiction. Susan couldn’t handle it. It’s funny, but it wasn’t my addiction that split us up, but my recovery. And the church, the last thing they wanted was an honest recovering alcoholic for a pastor. I was too real, too much of a reminder of their own needs.”
She nodded encouragingly.
“Things got worse from there. I was faithful during all of this time. To be rigid enough to be a dry drunk meant that it was not a problem to be rigid enough to not be human. However, Susan and I had never been all that human with each other either, if you know what I mean. We were probably down to once a week, sometimes less. So, when the charges came that I was having an affair with one of the wives of a board member, she believed it. She was always so insecure anyway; that was all she needed.”
In the distance, the hollow tapping of a woodpecker started. It echoed off the trees and surface of the water, sounding like a family of woodpeckers at work.
“Why do you think the woman accused you of adultery?” Laura’s eyes were filled with compassion and understanding. Her mouth stayed slightly parted when she wasn’t talking-desirous, it seemed, to drink in my pain.
“She didn’t. Her husband did. She had come to see me because they were both alcoholics. She wanted help. He didn’t. He fixed her. Not too long after that, she committed suicide, and the papers had a field day. It all hurt like hell, but the worst thing was the way the church turned me out to the wolves.”
“Probably a lot of wolves within your fold.”
“Yes, there were. And every one of them had on sheep’s clothing. I didn’t see it coming, and I didn’t know what hit me.”
“So, you moved to this luxurious home,” she said, looking back at my trailer, “in sunny Pottersville, Florida.”
“Right here,” I said. “All of this came on the heels of a disastrous case I worked on with the SMPD. I quit. I ran away. I wanted to die. But, I didn’t drink, and, somehow, I didn’t lose my faith, in myself or in God. So, I’ve been demoted to a convict preacher.”
“You don’t see it as a demotion,” she said. “I can tell.”
“Well, maybe not. But, it was certainly a demotion as far as everyone else was concerned.”
“I think it’s a grace. The inmates at Potter CI have a priest who knows what it’s like to fall from grace.”
“You’re beginning to see grace everywhere, aren’t you?”
“Obi-wan trained me well,” she said and started to laugh.
“There’s just one thing. Grace was the only thing that I didn’t fall from. I actually fell into grace’s gentle embrace.”
“You’re right. But I was using it as an expression, not literally.”
We strolled back to the trailer in no particular hurry. We laced our fingers together and held hands, weary of traveling alone. When we walked into the trailer, the phone was ringing, and I knew it was bad news.
It was.
It was Merrill. Anthony Thomas had been murdered in the infirmary the night before-stabbed and raped with a surgical scalpel, which the murderer had left in the body.
Chapter 40
“You look awful,” Molly Thomas said when she was seated in the only chair in my living room. She was wearing a pair of dark blue jeans, a white oxford button-down shirt, and white leather Keds. The large shirt, probably one of Tony’s, was not tucked in, and the tails were wrinkled. Clasped in her right had was a small wad of tissues that were wrinkled, too.