Timothy Schaffert
FOLLOW
I.
Before finishing the song he was singing, our Pastor Halliwell, standing bent and sluggish behind his pulpit, became terrified. He'd got as far as the chorus in his dirge-like rendition of "What a Night, What a Moon, What a Girl." Had he thought he was someplace else, with different people? What's he'd been thinking he didn't even know himself, he just knew he'd been confused, he knew that before he'd started singing, he'd been speaking to us, his congregation, of a woman named Sophie. He knew he'd spoken of certain sweet juices, the downy hairs on her peach-shaped ass, her nipple against his tongue. He'd spoken of reefer and a broken rose and a jug of rhubarb wine.
But maybe, he thought, he'd spoken only softly, or maybe he hadn't spoken at all, maybe it had all been words only in his head, a slight movement of his lips. Because half-way into this song "What a Night, What a Moon, What a Girl," we had all, one-by-one, started in singing over his voice, a hymn, "A Mighty Fortress is Our God," in an attempt to save him some embarrassment. We had indeed heard a little of what he'd said about that woman Sophie, and though some of us sat tight-lipped, shocked and scandalized, others of us sang the best we could. We were sad watching this fine man crumble, listening to his pitiful twitter of song. And it was the oldest of us who sang the loudest and the strongest. The old ones were all seated in all their inconvenience and uselessness, in the front pew so the Pastor could bring their wine and wafers directly to them. They seemed to be the most forgiving of us all--maybe they too were long haunted by wicked women and men, by a past of slight deviance or perverted tendencies which caused them to curl-up like that, to gnarl, their skin to dry and crack and spot like worm-eaten leaves.
When Pastor Halliwell saw our mouths moving back at him, when he heard our voices, it was then, half-way into this song, that he realized where he was, and was terrified. The scent of the lilies was potent and thick in the late-spring air, as was the scent of the wicks and the burnt golden wax of the candles at his back, and the wine.
Pastor Halliwell quit with his song, and he stepped from the pulpit and walked slowly down the center aisle. He tried to stand up straight, tried to look firm and dignified, but he failed, his fingers clutching the cuffs of his suit coat. The weak voices of the old in our congregation were like the breaking of a favorite glass, his own mother's glass, that water goblet, carnival glass, the sound of its pieces jingling from the rush of a broom. The hymn began to die away in his path. As he passed each pew, we stopped singing, we craned our necks and shifted in our seats to watch him depart. The music slowly rippled away and he relaxed. But he was at ease only for a moment, only until he met eyes with the woman in the back pew. All of us, our necks stiff from looking back, saw this woman and not one of us had seen her before. She wore a long gray skirt, and an ancient velvet hat with felt flowers, a hat like those left to rot on the heads of mannequins in the window of the thrift, a hat anyone would no no one would buy, and so left to collect dust and to fade and to bend in strange ways from the strength of the sun through the glass.
Her eyes bloodshot with piety were all Pastor Halliwell saw then. Had she been plucked from the grave, her decomposition momentarily arrested, just so she could be there, at that back pew, just then, so she could shoot him this look to further terrify? He wondered this, even though he did not know her, because when he saw her eyes, he knew his thoughts about Sophie had not gone unspoken, he'd said it all, he'd said it all, and more, too. He remembered then other things he'd said, remembered stopping his sermon, stopped speaking of Jesus's healing of the blind and the lame, to talk of Sophie's coital squeaks and hiccps and how she liked to bite at the skin on his hip.
Pastor Halliwell disappeared through the archway and into the vestibule where all our coats were hung. He grasped at a jacket to steady himself, then threw up on a black topcoat.
2.
Pastor Halliwell locked himself in his house behind the church. He spent all week alone, and on Saturday evening we brought soup and carrot cake and a can of coffee to the door, but he wouldn't let us in. We knocked, then watched the knocker, returning the blank stare of the brass lion. "I think I hear his footsteps," one of us said, and we each held one ear close to the door to listen for any sound while looking at each other with expectant half-smiles, looking for certainty and recognition to register on someone's face, waiting for someone to say, "Footsteps, yes, definately, footsteps. He's walking about." But no, someone heard something different. "Not footsteps," someone said, "it's the brush of his pant legs." Then someone said, "No, no, it's a broom. He's sweeping." As we listened, getting closer and closer to the door, we could actually feel on the brink of discovery. Then, bored with careful listening, we left our food on the steps and moved on. We could feel his eyes on our backs as he watched us departing, as he peered through a tiny, unnoticeable rip in the curtain of the front window.
He'd been standing there, afraid, despite the locked door, that we would just walk in. He'd been afraid one of us might have remembered that Elder Lawrence had a key to the house for emergency purposes. But how could we have known that? Not een Elder Lawrence remembered. The key was on a ring with hundreds, maybe thousands of others--Elder Lawrence was an old and once-responsible man, with whom anyone would entrust a key. This key ring was locked away in a small safe hidden behind a false panel in his dining room wall, and the old man could not even remember which panel was false, let alone the combination of the safe.
"Sophie...," one of us said, drawing the name out in a slow, speculative whisper. The name was barely adible above the creak of locusts, but we all took it up. "Sophie," someone else said, a little louder. "Sophie, yes," said someone else. It was the name Pastor Halliwell had spoken last Sunday morning. Together, we determined who this Sophie must be, and what she must mean to him.
Sophie was not a woman he'd known well. He'd known her for only one night. She had let him sing old songs to her, songs he'd barely remembered. He'd met her on the other side of town, where we'd all gone to man the soup kitchen. We couldn't help but to notice her sitting on the front stoop of a condemned building. Pastor Halliwell shook her hand, muttered some blessing and slipped her a paper cross with Exodus 16:18 written across it: "He who had gathered much had no excess, and he who had gathered little had no lack." She wore a blue-dyed stole around her shoulders though it was the hottest day in June. A long slit worked up the side of her dress, revealing a tattoo that ran down from her hip to her knee--four dragons wrestling with four fish, all rolling and flummoxing down her leg. Pastor Halliwell didn't return to the church with us that might; he offered to help make up some beds in the shelter, to help put some bums down to sleep. We were not suspicious at the time.
That day he met Sophie he was tired and weak from the heat, from the stink of alley garbage and the sight of an old beggarwoman's gray breast flopped out of her wool coat. Perhaps any other day, Sophie would not have seemed so provocative, but that day even her charm bracelet glinting on her wrist as she shook her hand, even that tempted him, even her yellow broken teeth and bags beneath her eyes. She wore shoes of cracked purple with little plastic daisies near the toes. They were tasteless shoes, yet so obviously designed with the inspiration of spring they caused Pastor Halliwell to take a deep breath of fresh air. He returned to her that night with a bottle of gin swiped from the pocket of a hobo.
With each day that passed after his affair with Sophie, he doubted himself a little more, questioned his purpose and authority. Our expectations of Pastor Halliwell had begun to burden him, our trust in his peace with the world and his intimate knowledge of life and its workings. Lately the Bible seemed to him nothing more than the leather of which it was made, and its wisps of paper, its tissue pages, its columns of ink. Pastor Halliwell now shouted his sermons in an attempt to be convincing, but to him they were just grotesque tales of beheaded men and fertile serving-girls and city-wide orgies, sudden floods and deliberate locusts, of begetting and begetting and people living well into their hundreds. Standing at the pulpit, Pastor Halliwell felt as though he stood at the slightly open flap of a sideshow tent, with his cane and straw hat, gesturing and barking, inviting us all for a walk through the necropolis, this waxwork of whores and thieves and snakecharmers. INFANTICIDE! DANCING GIRLS!
No one looked back to see the smoke rising from the pastor's house; we were too deep in our discussion of Pastor Halliwell and his state of mind. In the middle of the dark that night, we rushed out in slippers and housecoats, down to the blackened rafters and ashened flakes of wallpaper--all that remained of the pastor's house. The whole town had gathered at the call of sirens, even the fast-running boys who never slowed down for stop signs. Even they stood still in the street, gawking at the firemen and the ruined house. The boys leaned back against their black cars with color spits of flame painted along the sides. Their little girlfriends stood with them, most of them in bare feet, their toenails painted. It bothered us that all these strangers to our church should spectate at our Pastor's fall.
But Pastor Halliwell was nowhere around. A woman who lived across the street, who worshipped with Baptists, her hair now up in curlers and curler paper, told us Pastor Halliwell had knocked on her door earlier. "So, I said, 'What exactly's going on over there?' and he said, 'I was baking a custard to settle my nerves and I fell asleep.'" He offered her ten dollars for any booze she had in the house, and she sold him a half-empty bottle of creme de menthe. He then jumped on his bicycle and rode away.
The house smoldered all night and into the next morning. As we waited for the church service, we held out our hands, pressing our palms through the waves of heat, imagining we could divine the fire's true source. Something scented the burnt air, some sweetness like of purple toilette, of the creams and powders Sophie had used on herself. Pastor Halliwell had slept with one of Sophie's slips draped across a pillow. But it tormented him. He threw the slip into the old broken fireplace and set a match to it.
We waited in the church yard for one Pastor Twillinger, a temporary replacement, and none of us were aware of being watched by Pastor Halliwell. He hid behind the plaster Jesus, wearing a soot-covered shirt and trousers. When the bell pealed, we went inside to wait. Pastor Halliwell, peering from around Christ's waist, was the first to see Pastor Twillinger marching down the walk. Twillinger wa a broad, tall man, who seemed all billowing white cassock and scarf. He clutched his Bible beneath his arm as though carrying a football.
Twillinger stormed down the aisle and up to the pulpit where he shouted and shrieked, throwing his arms about in the air. He found the openings in our hearts left by Pastor Halliwell, and he rushed in, inviting in phantoms and demons and flames from hell. During his sermon he walked among us, pointing at the men's chests, at the women's throats, accusing us of sings we hadn't committed, or at least, hadn't committed in some time. Did he blame us for the demise of our minister? Or did he know, somehow, that we did not condemn Pastor Halliwell, and would probably forgive him anything? More than just a few of us longed for his return. When the service ended, we left the church, shaken and sweaty and weak, as though climbing from the wreckage of a train.
4
We searched for him, calling his name down back alleys and side streets. Beneath an open window of the old Peacock Hotel and Apts., we stopped to hear a song. In the song, a rose-cheeked woman is out picking heather, and the rocking shadow of a hanged man drifts across her shoes. "She looked up and back at a tree / a beautiful, dead stranger to see." This woman in the song drops to her knees and cries because she thinks she could have loved him had she met him when he was alive. We should have known it was Sophie singing to Pastor Halliwell, known from the slight whistle of broken teeth and from the whiskey-scratch of the voice. Pastor Halliwell lay near the very window we stood beneath, listening to Sophie. He lay atop the covers of Sophie's bed, wearing a smoking jacket that reeked of someone else's cigars.
If we'd waited beneath that window a little longer, we'd have seen Sophie herself out on the fire escape collecting the wash she'd draped along the railing. In her hands, her underthings became things practical, impersonal; she'd hung them out--the nylons, the slip, the panties--with no embarrassment. The silky garments had shivered in the breeze. They swayed and waved and beckoned overhead.
If we'd waited, we'd have heard Sophie ask Pastor Halliwell, "Is there someone I should call for you?"
"There's no one," we would have heard him reply in a voice revealing how tired he was, tired of all of us asking for his advice and sympathy. Never once had even one of us said What are your pains, Pastor. What are youur disappointments. What is it you don't understand. Let me tell you how I see your life and its predicaments.
5.
We would catched sight of Pastor Halliwell that summer, every now and again. Sophie found a suit in her closet, the sit we'd see him wearing--the white linen jacket and pants, powder-blue shirt, pink-and-silver tie. She found lots of men's clothes in her closet, in boxes and suitcases, clothes all different sizes, and she tailored them and fixed their rips and frays on a sewing machine borrowed from a neighbor. On a shelf, in a tin covered with thick dust, she kept needles and thread, tape measure, pin cushions, as though she'd long waited for someone to men and straighten.
Evenings, they'd sit on their fire escape sipping rum-and-Cokes and playing checkers. Because the Pastor liked to sing, Sophie rented a piano. It was too big for her small front room, and it sat inconveniently just a few feet from the door. Had we been invited in, we would have been careful to open the door slowly, so as not to slame it into the back of the piano.
One day, after delivering some cast-off clothes to Children's Relief, a few of us ate our lunch in the park. Pastor Halliwell and Sophie walked past our bench, the pastor carrying an open umbrella to keep the sun from Sophie. He didn't greet us--he hid his eyes behind the paperback novel held open in front of his face. Whenever he saw members of his congregation, he could think only of that pious woman in the broad velvet had, the withered hag who'd sat in the back pew that Sunday of his collapse. He was convinced that woman had glided in on the winds from hell, or heaven, of wherever, to haunt him and ruin him. After passing us, he thought he could hear the cracking of opening wings and their heavy flutter, thought he could smell a foulness, an acrid breath, could sense fingers touching lightly at the back of his neck. She would lift him by the scruff and carry him off over the town.
Pastor Halliwell, distracted, nearly stepped on a broken nest--two baby birds, frightened by their blindness, their open beaks shivering. Sophie held a finger above their mouths.
"Tragic," we heard her say as she looked up sadly to the trees.
When Sophie and the pastor left the park, Mrs. Whit, the oldest woman in our congregation, said, "I remember her, from when she was a little girl." Mrs. Whit claimed she could recognize people by the way they carried themselves, or by the backs of their heads, or even sometimes their shadows. "She used to have a twin sister. The twin was killed when they were very small. They were out walking, and she got up on the edge of a well, on the bricks. Sophie simply tickled the back of her knee with a little pussy willow." Mrs. Whit picked the caraway seeds from her Jewish rye. We waited for her to tell more, but when we realized there wasn't more to tell, this image in our minds of Sophie's sister giggling at the tickle of the pussy willow shifted to that of the girl's falling. Mrs. Whit said, "They were alike as two peas. For years she only saw her dead sister when she looked at herself."
6.
At the county fair, we saw Pastor Halliwell one last time. At the edge of the fairgrounds he suffered a heart attack. He swaggered, and clutched at his chest. A few buttons of his tight shirt popped open as he fell to his knees. Sophie screamed and grasped his arm to pull up at him. If he could only stay on his feet, he'd be fine, Sophie thought in her confusion. Three Czechoslovakian women in folk skirts and aprons and square hats, who'd been dancing on a platform, stepped over to the dead body. They chattered foreign words, their tone conspiratorial and conclusive like that of a Greek chorus.
It was no surprise that Twillinger, our temporary pastor who never left, would not preside over Pastor Halliwell's funeral. Twillinger had spent all summer, sermon after sermon, preaching about Pastor Halliwell's Sunday morning collapse (which he himself had not even witnessed!). He clenched his fists as though squeezing ever drop of corruption from the story. A member of our congregation presided instead, and the others of us stood around the open grave. It was strange seeing Sophie in our cemetery. Though she stood away from us, we could hear her sucking on a cinnamon candy, could smell its hotness. She left long before the end of the eulogy, swinging her black purse at her side, plucking a plastic flower from a grave. We admired her, really. Despite all her tragedies and guilts, she expected no answers or forgiveness. She did not hope to give over any burden, or to implicate anyone else in her wrongs, or her crimes.
And as we watched Sophie leave, we noticed the pious woman in the velvet hat standing among us. The crags and wrinkles of her face seemed even deeper, more severe. She was not a ghost and we wondered about her. She, like Sophie, like the Pastor Halliwell, had probably been tormented by some transgression. Maybe this woman could not forgive even herself, and this made her vindictive. She'd thought she'd seen it all, understood all, and believed her present ways were the ways to be followed. When she stormed away from Pastor Halliwell's funeral in disgust, some of us actually did follow, actually stormed off with her same sense of indignation. Some of us sneered, spat, kicked at clods of dirt as we marched in that woman's path--her rustling sounding like crows thrashing beneath her skirt. But others of us stayed and as we watched the coffin, we could feel a weight in our shoulders, could feel ourselves sinking. The more we concentrated on that lowering box, the more we could feel ourselves in it--could feel the ruffle of silk lining at our wrist and cheek, the back of our neck scratched by the lace pillow.