“Me too,” he said. He turned and walked back into the front room. I followed him, but we both stopped when we saw that Jess had left his seat on the sofa in the corner of the room and opened the front door without us hearing him. He stood in front of it now with his back to us looking through the screen door. We could all see that the paramedics had strapped Ben’s body onto a gurney that was being loaded into the last ambulance. Although the blue sheet still covered Ben’s body, his bare white feet stuck out from under it.

Jimmy put his hand on Jess’s shoulder and turned him away from the door, and then he closed it softly, its hinges barely making a sound as it shut. He put his arms around Jess and pulled him toward him. Jess’s shoulders heaved, and although I couldn’t see his face, I figured he was crying. I heard the ambulance’s engine crank outside in the driveway, and then I listened as it rolled down through the gravel toward the road.

I thought about how I’d meant what I’d said to Jimmy, that I wished it all could’ve been different. I stood there and watched the two of them hold on to each other, and I found myself praying that maybe this time it would be.

Adelaide Lyle

T

WENTY

-F

IVE

IT WAS JUST A SAD DAY WHEN THEY HAD THAT FUNERAL FOR Ben at the cemetery outside of Marshall. A whole big crowd of people were there, some of them from the church he’d never stepped a foot into, some of them folks he’d known from town and from growing up and living in this county for so long. I hadn’t seen Jess since the Sunday night they’d brought Christopher’s body out to my house, but I saw him there standing with his grandfather by his daddy’s graveside. His little button-down collared shirt and his tie made him look even younger than nine years old, especially with all those adults standing around him in their black funeral clothes. He had his hair combed over to one side and his hands in his pockets. I could tell that he’d been crying.

Jess’s grandfather had brought him. His mama wasn’t there, which didn’t really surprise me too much. I reckon Julie’s heart had already left Ben behind while he was still alive, and his dying wasn’t about to make that leaving no different. As for Jess, she’d already tried to leave him once, and I reckon she just decided to stay gone for good.

Jimmy Hall had on him a nice clean shirt and a tie just like his grandson’s, and I could tell that he’d gone and bought new clothes for him and Jess both. He had his hair combed down too and a whole mess of Brylcreem keeping it in place. He’d shaved, and even though his face was just as red as a beet it looked like he hadn’t been drinking. I watched his hands during the service, especially when he raised them and let them drop onto Jess’s shoulders, his fingers closing around them gently and pulling that boy back against his body, holding him there, letting Jess lean against him while he bowed his head during the prayer. Jimmy Hall kept those hands steady, even as he lifted one of them to his eyes, even as he shook the hands of the other men who’d come to pay their respects to his boy.

One of those men was the sheriff, but you wouldn’t have known who he was just by looking at him. He wore a tie just like most of the other men did, but still, it seemed strange not seeing him in his uniform. I think he might’ve been ready to give it up by then, and he would give it up altogether not long after. I reckon he lost his will for the job after what all had happened, after what he’d had to do. But it was something to see him standing there by Jimmy Hall, both of them just a few feet away from Ben’s graveside, and even then only twenty or thirty yards away from where Jeff had been buried twenty years before. These two men who’d hated each other for so long stood there side by side with nothing but their dead sons in common between them, both of them having believed, at least at one time or another, that the other man was to blame. They’d hated each other until they were both broken, and I reckon that’s when they decided it was time to leave all that behind and get on with their healing.

It’s a good thing to see that people can heal after they’ve been broken, that they can change and become something different from what they were before. Churches are like that. The living church is made of people, and it can grow sick and break just like people can, and sometimes churches can die just like people die. My church died, but it didn’t die with Carson Chambliss; it was dead long before that. But I can tell you that it came back to life once he was gone. A church can be healed, and it can be saved like people can be saved. And that’s what happened to us. At one time we were like a frostbitten hand that’s just begun to thaw. First the tips of the fingers come alive, and suddenly they can open and close. And then the palm begins to feel again. Upturned. Waiting. Witnessing. We began to feel again too.

It started on the Sunday somebody got to the church early and tore that old newspaper off the windows. I never found out who’d done it; I didn’t ask, and nobody ever volunteered to say it was them. But I could see through the windows of my church for the first time in more than ten years, and from inside the church I could turn and see the world that had been kept out for just as long. The river across the road still ran under the bridge toward downtown Marshall, and I knew from there that it still ran clear on to Tennessee. It was the same world that we’d left behind, and it was a good thing to see it again.

That next Sunday I brought the children into the church for Sunday school for the first time in years. We held it in the back of the church while the adults held theirs down toward the front. I took the children outside during the service, but some of them wanted to stay in the church with their parents, and that was just fine with me.

A good many folks left the church after what happened to Carson Chambliss, and I reckon just as many stayed away after hearing about it. But others came, slowly: young folks mostly, people who’d moved in from outside of Madison County and hadn’t had time to hear a word, good or bad, about the little church out by the river. Jess came back to us too.

Jimmy Hall brings him down for church just about every Sunday now, but he never comes with him. He’s more like his son than his grandson in that respect, and while Jess is inside the church or out by the river Jimmy sits out in his truck and smokes cigarettes and reads the newspaper. But that’s all right with me. He don’t ever have to step a foot inside this church if he doesn’t want to. It’s enough for me to know that he’s out there if Jess needs him. I think it’s enough for Jess too.

This is a good place now, without no snake boxes, no musty smells of shed skin, no noisy rattles kicking up from places you can’t see. At times I thought we’d been cast out into the wilderness, led there by a false prophet who was blind to any will except his own. Although a couple of folks take turns preaching and leading the service, we still don’t have a full-time pastor. The Israelites had a Moses to lead them out of the wilderness. We’re still waiting on ours.

But in the Old Testament, when God’s chosen people called out, “Save us, Lord!” He heard them, and they were saved. He was there for them because they believed. We still believe.

I think the good Lord has it in His plan to save us too.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I WISH TO THANK THE FOLLOWING PEOPLE FOR THEIR CONTRIBUTIONS to this book and my writing life:

Nat Sobel, Judith Weber, and all the amazing people at Sobel Weber Associates, Inc. Nat, thank you for finding me three years ago; thank you even more for remembering me two years later. Your guidance has been invaluable. David Highfill, Jessica Williams, and everyone at William Morrow. David, when I heard North Carolina in your voice I knew I was in good hands. Thank you for loving this book and its people as much as I do.