“Marryings and buryings,” I said.

“And ongoing spiritual nourishment, and annual budgeting, and committee meetings. All but the smallest of churches have those things. My father gave himself to that kind of role, but he made it as much of a challenge as possible. Or God did. My father felt a calling to come to northern Utah, right to the heart of Mormon country. He didn’t want to go anywhere where he’d be ‘preaching to the choir.’ My father liked uphill battles.”

That sounded familiar.

“He used to go into Salt Lake City and preach on street corners. He’d hand out tracts near the Temple. He bought an old school bus for the church. When he was finished overhauling it, there was a cross bolted to the front grille, ‘New Life Church’ painted on the sides, and ‘I am the Resurrection and the Life’ on the back.” Bill laughed. “Oh, yeah. You definitely saw us coming down the road.

“The thing is, my dad bought that bus when our own family car needed eight hundred dollars’ worth of transmission work.” Bill smiled. “Mom just put up with it. She understood what evangelism meant to him. It wasn’t just a job. It was his life. He got a phone call once, in the middle of the night, from an unsaved friend. This guy, Whitey, had been stiff-arming him for months, brushing off invitations to come to church. Then he called up in the middle of the night, wanting to talk about Jesus. My dad dressed and put on his jacket, picked up his Bible and car keys, and drove across town. Like an ER surgeon. He came home and said Whitey had found Christ at four-thirty in the morning.” He shook his head, looking fond again.

“None of us kids have really followed in his footsteps. We’re all Christian, of course. My wife and I go to a Presbyterian church now, and take my kids every Sunday, pray with them. But I didn’t feel any calling to lead a church or be an evangelist. And neither did Adam. Maybe that disappointed my father, too, but I think he knew from fairly early on it was going to turn out that way. I think he felt if any of us were going to follow him into the ministry, it would be Mike.”

“Are you serious?” I said.

“Yeah,” Bill said. “Mike used to read the Bible for hours on end. He knew the word of God backward and forward.” He paused. “You know what snake-handling is?”

“I’ve heard about it,” I said, thrown off by the shift in the conversation.

“It comes from the Gospel of Mark, where Christ says his apostles will handle poisonous serpents and not be harmed. When Mike was fourteen, a couple of families joined the church who’d moved up from north Florida. They were into snake-handling; they had prayer meetings where they’d pass poisonous snakes between them. We didn’t realize it right away, but Mike was doing that with them.”

“Shiloh did that?”

Bill looked amused. “Yup. He never told you?”

I shook my head.

“Well, he did. When my mother found out, she just about had a heart attack. She and Dad had a hard time talking him out of it. I think he finally gave it up just so our mother wouldn’t worry.” Bill lifted a shoulder. “What I’m trying to say is this: My father recognized in Mike a part of himself that his other kids didn’t seem to inherit, and I think that’s why it hurt him so much when he lost Mike.” He paused. “For years, my father just never mentioned him.”

“What about Sinclair?” I asked.

“Sara? I think she was different,” Bill said. “She went to a secular school-for the deaf, I mean-and from the time she came home we all realized she wasn’t a believer. Right from the beginning she started… acting out, I guess you’d say. Wearing makeup, sneaking out to see boys, coming home smelling of alcohol. It wasn’t easy on my folks, but it did give them time to adjust to losing her. It was like- Do you know the parable of the sower?”

I shook my head.

“It’s about different kinds of seeds. How some never sprout, others spring up right away and look promising but ultimately die, and then others start slow but eventually become healthy and fruitful plants. It’s a metaphor.”

“For evangelism,” I said.

“Yeah, a metaphor for the different kinds of people who turn to Christ, or don’t. Sara was like the seed that lands on rocky soil and never sprouts at all, but Michael was the one who looks promising but fails in the end to fulfill that promise. Mike was there, and then all of a sudden he wasn’t. It would have been less painful if he had never lived in Christ at all. I think that’s why my father never talked about him. Afterward.”

“After what?” I said. His words sounded so stark, drawing an absolute line.

“After Mike left,” Bill said simply. “Maybe my parents sound harsh to you, not worrying about where Mike and Sara were and how they were living. But my father didn’t worry about physical well-being, just the health of the soul. When he’d talk about Michael and Sara at all, he would say that they couldn’t go anywhere that God didn’t know where they were, and that was the most important thing. Likewise, he said, it didn’t matter if they lived in the house across the street if they had turned their backs on God. If they were lost to God, they were lost to my father as well.” Bill looked at me closely, as if to see whether his words were reaching me. “My father told us God could forgive anything, but not until He is asked.”

A silence fell between us. It wasn’t exactly uncomfortable, but within a minute I broke it, changing the subject. “And you?”

“What about me?” he asked.

“Did you like your brother?”

“Mike? Yeah, I guess so.” Bill was surprised at the question, but he was thinking about it. “When he was a kid, he used to want to tag along with Adam and me. We used to jump freight trains to get across town when we didn’t want to walk somewhere, and Mike could always keep up with us. We never had to slow down for him. We’d swim at this lake up in the hills, with steep bluffs on one side, and Mike used to jump from the heights, totally fearless. Even I only did that once, but he did it all the time.

“And he knew all this stuff, even as a kid. It was cool to talk to him. When he was older, it started to get under my skin. It wasn’t that he showed off his IQ.” Bill wrestled with a thought. “But he was just real smart, and you could tell that he knew, even though he didn’t say anything. He knew he was different.

“I guess that’s why I was angry when I thought he had a girl in his room on Christmas Eve. Like he felt it was okay for him to do that, because he was Mike. Since then, I’ve wished I’d covered for him.” Bill shook his head. “I didn’t know then he was going to up and leave home because of what happened.”

After a moment of silence, I realized Bill Shiloh was done. There was no moral to the story, no coda, other than his expression of mild regret.

I had one last question, but I thought I already knew the answer. “I don’t think Mike’s in trouble,” I said. “But if he were, do you know of a friend he’d go to?”

“To Sara,” Bill said. “He’d go to her.”