And you’re filled with shame for being called out about something so obvious.
“Parents often take things out on their children,” he says carefully. “Have you ever taken your frustration out on Toby?”
“What? No. I never touched him! I’ve never hit him, never touched him. Ever.”
“That’s good.” He nods. “He’s a sweet boy. And you have a wonderful family. You’re so much luckier than you believe, Keeper.”
“Yeah? Cuz I got a girl and a kid I can’t feed?”
“You have people who love you. You have a church, a community that cares about you. You have me and Ginna.”
“Yeah,” you mutter.
“You don’t think that’s true?”
“Why’re you doing this?” you demand. “Why’re you always helping me?”
His face remains calm. He leans forward to cup his palms on one knee. “You’re a member of my church. And my friend.”
“Sure. Sure, I am.” You feel a bubble of rage rising inside you, and you know you can’t control it, and you don’t even want to control it. “You groom me nice and good, help me out, give me your gracious fucking charity, and then when I really need you that’s when you ask, right? That’s when you tell me I need to do something for you. Ain’t that right?” He simply stares back at you, expressionless. Then you scream. “Ain’t that right, you fucking FAGGOT!”
Your leg kicks out, and the small coffee table is airborne. It crashes into the bookshelf beside the reverend, who cannot help but flinch. The words exploded out of you, and the sound rings in your ears. Your pulse beats in your head, in your arms. Still bundled into your winter jacket and toboggan cap, you’re suddenly very hot. You stand, poised to either walk out or hit this man in the face.
“Keeper.” Andrade has recovered from his flinch. “Did something like that happen to you when you were young?”
“I gotta go.”
“Why don’t you stay.” He’s looking at you with that maddening calm. “Or why don’t we go for a walk instead.” He stands and goes to the coatrack for his jacket. “C’mon, let’s get some air. Plus, it’s too cold out there for me to lure you into performing fellatio.”
For a moment, this lands like a punch to the ear, and then you realize it’s a joke. Fucking Reverend Andrade just made an actual joke, and despite yourself, you snort one true laugh. And you realize you can’t even remember the last time you laughed.
Andrade has a box of breakfast bars in his desk and gives you one. As the two of you make your way outside, you bite into it, and your jaw is flooded with that tight ache of chewing when you are particularly hungry.
He leads you behind the church, up the crest of the hill, and through a smattering of woods that separates his church’s land from the farm behind it. You walk along the ridge, trudging through the snow. The fallow edges of the field are rimmed with solar panels that glint in the bright sun while the woods beyond gather darkness in the space between the trunks. Ice coats the trees so they look crystallized, like sculptures. You step through some battered, fallen fencing, and he leads you along a trail through the field.
“We bought this property back when we had more parishioners,” he tells you. “Ginna wanted to build a farm, which would be nice right now. Obviously, those plans are on hold. Still, I love it. It’s so peaceful.”
“I went to see the APL folks up in Sugarcreek,” you confess. “That’s how desperate I been lately.”
He looks at you more with curiosity than fear. “How was that?”
“About what you’d expect.”
Your voices sound too crisp. Even as it renders the sunlight brighter, the packed snow makes the sound too precise, like the crack of Casey’s rifle. You brace your body against a freezing burst of wind.
“I certainly understand the allure,” says Andrade. “Powerlessness causes us to seek power any way we can. We’d sacrifice anything, particularly our conscience, to feel it. There is nothing more dangerous than the excitement of those suffering from a lack of agency and great bitterness of soul.”
“The day you saved me—’member that?”
“How could you even ask? Of course.”
“I had this feeling like, ‘This is it. This is where it all starts to turn around. I got this now.’ And then…” You wave your gloved hands in front of you like you’re signaling that a receiver didn’t catch the football. “It was all gone within a couple of weeks, and I was in a little eight-foot cell. You can tell yourself God is always with you, but… Empty is so much bigger.”
The reverend considers this.
“Not to get on one of my rants here, but let’s just say that many Christians these days have a deeply impoverished view of the notion of a Creator.” He waits for you, but you say nothing. “What do you think?”
“What do I think? I don’t think nothing. I think all this talk of Jesus and salvation, it’s just a way to keep us all in line. I saw it while I was inside. Guys like me, we ain’t nothing but a walking dollar sign to most people. Probably to you too.”
“That’s a cynical way to look at it.”
You shrug, spit in the snow. “Never really got a chance to see it from any other vantage.”
Andrade nods like he takes this very seriously. He directs his gaze at the ground, thoughtful, vexed, searching. “Think about it this way, Keeper, about what God must actually be—a power vibrating in our every atom, built into the explosions of distant stars, and circling the dust of worlds you and I will never be able to contemplate. We are part of some vast, mysterious, eternal Whole set in motion by a force so awesome that it is ultimately unknowable. Do you feel me? We can’t always see the direction or meaning of it all, but to even glimpse this tiny corner of the Whole—what an incredible opportunity. What a grave responsibility.”
You glance back at your tracks. Four lonely boots leaving their tread marks in the pristine blanket. You keep walking. The clouds move in. A grim, milky cast falls over the field, the trees, the sky. You hock up buttery snot, bringing it from your throat and blow-darting it into the snow.
Finally you say, “That sounds very pretty. But it’s hard to square with… with what I been through.”
“I know you feel it, man. Maybe when you see your son laugh or when you get your arms around Raquel or even just when you’re alone, walking through a beautiful patch of Ohio.” He gestures to the snowy woods. “To save one life is to save all of humanity. Ever heard that? And now it’s simply time to save yourself.”
You know Andrade is trying to make you feel like you are this infinitely precious thing, but you can’t bring yourself to get past the opposite sense: that you are narrow and corporeal and alone.
“If you knew what… the things I done…”
You stop, and the reverend stops beside you. There’s a shard in your throat, so you choke on every other word to keep it at bay, to keep your voice hard.
“I’ve done so many awful, awful things. Horrible things, man. I’ve—I’ve hurt people. People I don’t even know or couldn’t even find again to tell ’em I’m sorry. Tell ’em what I did was evil. How am I supposed to believe God can forgive me? That’d just be me wishing there was a way I could even get forgiven.” Your voice cracks and you swallow this lump of grief yet again. The next words come out in a snarl. “We were in Georgia and Florida after the hurricane. That big one, Rose. And in one of these collapsed buildings, we hear this baby crying somewhere down in the rubble. Of course, no one really wants to get down into that shit, but I do it. I go. And it takes me forever. I’m crawling down into this hole, crawling on my belly, and there’s slime everywhere, and it smells like shit. But then finally, the hole opens up into this little space. Freezing water up to my thighs. No sign of the parents, but I could smell them, somewhere nearby. But there was this little girl still in her crib because this one room didn’t collapse, and she’s shrieking and shrieking, so I go over to her and pick her up, and then…” Your voice cracks again, and you let a small sob escape. “As soon as I pick her up, she stops crying. Just goes totally silent. And she’s just staring at me with these huge brown eyes, looking so scared, and I swear to God when I picked her up…”