He paused at the intersection, the arches of his sneakers teetering on the curb. He peered at the DON’T WALK sign for a moment. Then he turned and headed back to the church.
A shopkeeper’s bell jingled when he opened the door. The singers looked around — some fifteen or twenty people, standing in rows with their backs to him — and smiled before they looked away again. They were facing a tall, black-haired man in a tieless white shirt and black trousers. The pulpit was an ordinary store counter. The floor was green linoleum. The lights overhead were long fluorescent tubes and one tube flickered rapidly, giving Ian the impression that he had a twitch in his eyelid.
“Blessed Jesus! Blessed Jesus!” the congregation sang. It was a tender, affectionate cry that sounded personally welcoming. Ian found his way to an empty spot beside a woman in a white uniform, a nurse or a waitress. Although she didn’t look at him, she moved closer and angled her hymnal so he could follow the words. The hymnal was one of those pocket-sized pamphlets handed out free at public sing-alongs. There wasn’t any accompaniment, not even a piano. And the pews — as Ian realized when the hymn came to an end and everyone sat down — were plain gray metal folding chairs, the kind you’d see at a bridge game.
“Friends,” the minister said, in a sensible, almost conversational tone. “And guests,” he added, nodding at Ian. All over again, the others turned and smiled. Ian smiled back, maybe a little too broadly. He had the feeling he was their first and only visitor.
“We have reached that point in the service,” the minister said, “when any person here is invited to step forward and ask for our prayers. No request is too great, no request is trivial in the eyes of God our Father.”
Ian thought of the plasterer who’d repaired his parents’ bathroom ceiling, NO JOB TOO LARGE OR TOO SMALL, his panel truck had read. He brushed the thought away. He watched a very fat young woman heave herself to her feet just in front of him. The width of her sprigged, summer-weight skirt, when she finally reached a standing position, completely blocked his view of the minister. “Well, Clarice as you may have heard is down real bad with her blood,” she said breathily. “We had thought that was all behind her but now it’s come on back, and I asked what I could do for her and she says, ‘Lynn,’ says, ‘take it to Wednesday Night Prayer Meeting, Lynn, and ask them for their prayers.’ So that’s just what I’m doing.”
There was a silence, during which she sat down. As soon as she left Ian’s line of vision, he realized the silence was part of the program. The minister stood with both palms raised, his face tipped skyward and his eyelids closed and gleaming. In his shirtsleeves, he seemed amateurish. His cuffs had slipped down his forearms, and his collar, Ian saw, was buttoned all the way to the neck, in the fashion of those misfits who used to walk around high school with slide rules dangling from their belts. He wasn’t so very old, either. His frame was lanky as a marionette’s and his wrist bones boyishly knobby.
Ian was the only one sitting erect. He bowed his head and squinted at the billow of sprigged skirt puffing out the back of the fat woman’s chair.
“For our sister Clarice,” the minister said finally.
“Amen,” the congregation murmured, and they straightened.
“Any other prayers, any other prayers,” the minister said. “No request is beyond Him.”
On the other side of Ian’s neighbor, a gray-haired woman rose and placed her purse on her seat. Then she faced forward, gripping the chair in front of her. “You all know my son Chuckie was fighting in Vietnam,” she said.
There were nods, and several people turned to look at her.
“Well, now they tell me he’s been killed,” she said.
Soft sounds of dismay traveled down the rows.
“Tell me he got killed jumping out of a plane,” she said. “You know he was a paratrooper.”
More nods.
“Monday night these two soldiers came, all dressed up.”
“Ah, no,” they said.
“I told them I had thought he’d be safe. I said he’d been jumping so long now, looked to me like he’d learned how to stay alive up there. Soldier says, ‘Yes, ma’am,’ he says. ‘These things happen,’ he says. Says Chuckie was a, what do you call, fluke accident. Forgot to put his parachute on.”
Ian blinked.
“Forgot!” his neighbor marveled in a voice like a dove.
“ ‘Forgot!’ I said. ‘How could that be?’ This soldier tells me, it’s the army’s considered opinion that Chuckie had just jumped so often, he’d stopped thinking about it. So up he comes to that whatever, that door where they jump out of, the whole time making smart remarks so everybody’s laughing — you remember what a card he was — and gives a little kind of like salute and steps into empty air. It’s not till then the fellow behind him says, ‘Wait!’ Says, ‘Wait, you forgot your—’ ”
“Parachute,” Ian’s neighbor finished sadly.
“So I don’t ask your prayers for Chuckie after this; I ask for me,” the woman said. For the first time, her voice was unsteady. “I’m just about sick with grief, I tell you. Pray for me to find some deliverance.”
She sat down, fumbling behind her for her purse. The minister lifted his palms and the room fell silent.
Could you really forget your parachute?
Well, maybe so. Ian could see how it might have come about. A man to whom jumping was habit might imagine that floating in space was all his own doing, like flying. Maybe it had slipped his mind he couldn’t fly, so in the first startled instant of his descent he supposed he had simply forgotten how. He may have felt insulted, betrayed by all he’d taken for granted. What’s the big idea here? he must have asked.
Ian pictured one of those animated films where a character strolls off a cliff without noticing and continues strolling in midair, perfectly safe until he happens to look down and then his legs start wheeling madly and he plummets.
He gave a short bark of laughter.
The congregation swiveled and stared at him.
He bowed his head, cheeks burning. The minister said, “For our sister Lula.”
“Amen,” the others said, mercifully facing forward again.
“Any other prayers, any other prayers …”
Ian studied the sprigged skirt while shame slammed into him in waves. He had said and done heedless things before but this was something new: to laugh out loud at a mother’s bereavement. He wished he could disappear. He wanted to perform some violent and decisive act, like leaping into space himself.
“No prayer is unworthy in the eyes of our Creator.”
He stood up.
Heads swiveled once again.
“I used to be—” he said.
Frog in his throat. He gave a dry, fake-sounding cough.
“I used to be good,” he said. “Or I used to be not bad, at least. Not evil. I just assumed I wasn’t evil, but lately, I don’t know what’s happened. Everything I touch goes wrong. I didn’t mean to laugh just now. I’m sorry I laughed, Mrs.…”
He looked over at the woman. Her face was lowered and she seemed unaware of him. But the others were watching closely. He had the sense they were weighing his words; they were taking him seriously.
“Pray for me to be good again,” he told them. “Pray for me to be forgiven.”
He sat down.
The minister raised his palms.
The silence that followed was so deep that Ian felt bathed in it. He unfolded in it; he gave in to it. He floated on a fluid rush of prayers, and all the prayers were for his pardon. How could God not listen, then?
When Ian was three or four years old, his mother had read him a Bible story for children. The illustration had showed a Roman soldier in full armor accosting a bearded old man. “Is that God?” Ian had asked, pointing to the soldier; for he associated God with power. But his mother had said, “No, no,” and continued reading. What Ian had gathered from this was that God was the other figure, therefore — the bearded old man. Even after he knew better, he couldn’t shake that notion, and now he imagined the congregation’s prayers streaming toward someone with long gray hair and a floor-length, Swedish-blue robe and sturdy bare feet in leather sandals. He felt a flood of gratitude to this man, as if God were, in literal truth, his father.