Spirits

By Michael Jesse

Chapter 4

The boy's name was Darryl and he was about a year younger than Johnny.

"Um, play what?" Johnny asked.

"Badminton! It's like tennis, but easier and we don't keep score. C'mon!"

Johnny had never played badminton, but it did look fairly easy, and Darryl's sisters might come out of the house and join them, so he followed Darryl through the side gate and they started swatting the birdie back and forth.

"The way we play is to keep it going as long as possible," Darryl explained, "and not just to beat each other." He popped the birdie into the air over the net.

"Okay," Johnny said as he easily popped it back over the net.

"Because God wants us to work together, not against each other."

It ended up being the most fun Johnny could remember having while playing sports as they both lunged to save plays to keep the volley going. Afterwards, Darryl led him inside the little house where the girls were playing a board game. The middle daughter, whose name he would shortly learn was Millie, had just made a big play and she was squealing in victory and bouncing in her chair. It was in that moment that she looked up and saw him for the first time. Johnny felt their eyes lock together and as Darryl introduced him, Millie declared, "I am SO happy to meet you!" Those were the same words that any other person might have used -- being polite -- but Millie really did seem happy to meet him. She seemed happy about everything.

The boys were brought into a new round of the Game of Life. Johnny did his best not to watch Millie constantly, but it was hard not to, and everyone else seemed to watch her as well. She was by some law of physics the natural center of attention. Even when it wasn't her turn, her little comments, giggles and facial expressions enchanted him. Sometimes she glanced his way with a little winking smile that made him feel as if only the two of them were in on some clever joke.

Soon, it was dinnertime and Johnny was invited to stay -- and to go with them to Sunday evening church service. As much as he wanted to be wherever Millie was going to be, Johnny politely declined and excused himself to leave. He had lost track of how many hours he'd been gone and didn't want to worry his mother. Plus, they had their own Sunday evening tradition involving Ed Sullivan, the Cartwright family and the Impossible Mission Squad. Exiting the bright, boisterous little house, he went up the hill to the back door of his own quieter and darker home. His mother was on the sofa reading a tattered Agatha Christie paperback and holding a cigarette whose drifting plume glittered in the yellow lamplight of the shadowy living room, its blinds drawn down against the setting sun.

"‘Vertigo' is on the ‘Late Movie,'" she noted with a shrug of resignation as she turned a page.

The Late Movie didn't start until 1 a.m. and she had to get up at 5:30 to be at work by 8:00 because she had to take two buses with a half-hour wait in between. On work nights, she went to bed right after Johnny Carson's monologue. Sometimes she would stay up for the first guest if it was someone she really liked, but the Late Movie was just not an option on work nights.

Had it been Friday or Saturday, she would stay up for the Late Movie and then maybe also the Late-Late Movie which did not start until 3 a.m. Johnny often stayed up for the late movies even after his mother went to bed because it was summer and he could sleep in as late as he wanted the next day. At 13, he was too young to get a job except mowing lawns and delivering the paper, neither of which he did. So he could stay up until all the stations signed off for the night with the Star Spangled Banner after which the TV showed only the test pattern until the "Farm Report" came on at 5 a.m. He would turn off the TV and go up to his room in the pitch dark.

Jack took part of the newspaper with him when he left the Essex and made his way to the parking garage. There was a light rain, but the forecast called for sunny skies by afternoon. Although he was driving to the church, and was dressed for church, Jack was not sure he would actually go to church. He probably wouldn't, he knew. He'd have another chance next week or some other Sunday, but today he mainly intended to do a little reconnaissance.

Crossroads Pilgrim Holiness Church was out in the country south of town where two winding roads intersected, and he remembered a dilapidated gas station with a single pump on the opposite corner of the intersection. If some version of it still existed, he could park there and watch the cars arriving at the church parking lot. Maybe he wouldn't recognize anyone, but maybe he would. Maybe he would just watch, or maybe he would go inside. Not likely, but he liked to be prepared either way.

Four weeks after he met them that first time, Johnny saw the Jenkins family return. He had spent a month thinking about it and now here they were again spilling out of the blue van. Johnny was in his backyard, up in the apple tree, but he climbed down and waited at the base of the tree. It was like when Grandma used to tell him to be still and quiet and wait for her. It was like that almost exactly. He just had to be patient and wait and eventually there Darryl was, still working on the last bite of a baloney sandwich from lunch.

"Do you want to play," he asked again.

Yes, Johnny did. This time they played lawn darts and two of the girls joined them. He and Millie were actually on the same team so they stood alone together on one side of the yard. He was nervous and tongue-tied at first, but she talked enough for both of them and asked him lots of questions. She was taller than him with long bare arms and legs that he took the opportunity to observe whenever it was her turn to throw. They were white and freckled with a little fuzz of red hair that glinted in the sun.

That evening, he got on the bus with the Jenkins family and went to church for the first time in his life. He had told his mother where he was going and she said it was nice that he'd made a friend. Johnny's mother was not a churchgoer herself, but she believed in God and had a story she often told about why she was sure that God looks after us. It had happened when Johnny was two years old so he knew he could not have a memory of it, and yet he felt that he did.

She had lost her job, and couldn't make her rent, and the two of them had been turned out of their apartment, their belongings stacked up on the sidewalk in the rain. He was too young to understand, holding his mother's hand as she sobbed and prayed to God for help as they wandered aimlessly through the downtown city streets. Then a car stopped. A woman held an umbrella over them and asked if they needed help. It was this moment that Jack could swear he remembered, though he was only two. Looking up at his mother crying in the rain, and then the umbrella over them, the woman's hand in a white glove holding the handle. Her name was Mrs. Mary Catherine Foster and her husband's name was Hank. Johnny and his mother lived with the Fosters for almost three months until his mother could get back on her feet and pay rent again. And for several months after that, Mrs. Foster would come by now and then with groceries or clothes she had found for Johnny. Like Mickey Wymer, she eventually stopped appearing.

That story had been the extent of Johnny's theological preparation when he walked through the doors of Crossroads Pilgrim Holiness Church and took a seat in one of the pews next to Darryl and behind Millie, who sat with two other girls and whispered in each others' ears for most of the service. Johnny did not hear anything the preacher said, distracted by the bare necks and delicate earlobes of Millie and her friends.

Soon Johnny was a regular at the church. He would go over to Grandma Jenkins' house on Sunday mornings and wait for the church bus, which Darryl rode to keep him company even though his family drove to church in their wood-paneled station wagon. They went to church on Sunday morning, Sunday evening and also on Wednesday evenings. The pastor was the main speaker for the Sunday services, but parishioners filled in for him on Wednesday evening prayer services. Hanging on a wall inside the sanctuary was a marquis-style sign with letters and numbers slid into slots that each Sunday recorded the morning's attendance. Usually this was in the 35-45 range, but in another row the record attendance was listed as 88.

The pastor's name was the Rev. Bud Jenkins and Johnny soon noticed that many in the congregation had the same last name. Bud Jenkins was the son of the previous pastor, the Rev. Harland Jenkins, whose portrait still hung in the vestibule. The two looked almost exactly alike except that the elder Rev. Jenkins had a cleft in his chin that the younger Rev. Jenkins did not inherit. Johnny gradually realized that nearly everyone in the congregation was related to each other. Darryl's grandmother (whose name was Hazel though everyone, including Johnny, called her Grandma Jenkins), was the Rev. Harland Jenkins' widow, and their five children all married and had their own children, and all of those families were part of the congregation. Most of the 30 or 40 people who made up the congregation were part of the sprawling Jenkins clan -- and about a third of those were younger than 18. They invited other kids they knew from school or their neighborhoods, and these — like Johnny — would get picked up by the church bus.

Johnny's mother didn't have a car and his entire world had been within walking distance. The church was farther out from the city than Johnny had ever been, and he was amazed by the green, wide-open countryside as it whizzed past the bus window. It seemed magical to see a horse grazing in a pasture by an old barn. He looked up country lanes winding into the woods and imagined he would live down such a road one day.

For the youth of Crossroads Pilgrim Holiness Church, going to church had little to do with the actual service, which they generally ignored as they whispered and passed notes and played tic-tac-toe on the little donation envelopes tucked into a wooden pocket in the back of each pew next to the hymnals. After church, while the adults mingled, the kids would run outside, usually splitting off into groups according to age, gender and who had a crush on whom -- a variable that could change weekly. Occasionally, one of the girls took an interest in Johnny, but he did not pick up on their signals and realized it only in retrospect years later.

He, of course, was infatuated with Millie, whom he knew he could never be with because she was three years older and light years out of his league regardless of the age gap. She was so pretty and so funny and so . . . alive. Most of the time. Most times he saw her, she was laughing and joking and making faces. Sometimes, though, she was more low-key, as if something worrisome was on her mind -- though she always said there wasn't. Other times, she wasn't there at all. Her parents would say she was "not feeling well," as if she had a cold or flu, but it seemed to happen too frequently for that to be the reason. Johnny tried probing Darryl about it, but he would only say that sometimes she was sick and had to stay in bed for a few days until she got better.

For the first several months he was going to the church, Johnny paid no attention to what the preacher said. At every Sunday morning and evening service there was an altar call during which a few congregants would come up to the front of the church to kneel and pray (and sometimes cry audibly). Darryl explained to him that the person had just been "saved," or sometimes "sanctified," which was the next step after saved. Johnny wasn't sure what these things meant, but he assumed they were things that adult church people might do, but did not affect him. But sometimes one of teenagers would go to the altar.

Eventually, Johnny found himself actually listening to the sermon. Pastor Bud was a good storyteller and often talked about his own experience as a young man -- drinking and playing cards and smoking cigarettes. Johnny assumed the Bible must be filled with scriptures about the sins of drinking and playing cards and smoking cigarettes.

One Sunday, Pastor Bud told a riveting tale about when he was in his 20s and newly saved. He had given up his bad habits and got a job painting a house.

"I was way up on a scaffold," he told the congregation, "up on the second floor of — this very big house, and one of the windows was propped open, no screen. And right there on the window sill they was an ashtray, a pack of matches and an open pack of cigarettes. One of them was sticking out a little like they do in the magazine ads and friends, it was even my brand!

"Well folks, I knew -- oh yes, I knew -- that the Devil himself put them cigarettes there, and I knew he was right up there on that scaffold with me, though he was invisible. And he was a-tempting me." At this point, Pastor Bud took a dramatic pause (he was very good at dramatic pauses), and then continued as the whole congregation leaned forward to hear. "So I'll tell you what I did. I started singing hymns at the top of my lungs, tears rolling down my cheeks. Pretty soon I seen that window get shut from the inside. I reckon they didn't like my singing, but those cigarettes was now out of my reach and the Devil, well, he lost that round."

In his morning and evening Sunday Sermons, Pastor Bud preached for about 45 minutes and then had a brief altar call for anyone who needed to get right with the Lord. That timeframe was doubled during Revival meetings. Revival was a week in which there was a church service every night, always during the hottest time of the summer, the windows of the sanctuary propped up on wooden sticks to let in a faint breeze.

Pastor Bud was harder to ignore during Revival as he stomped back and forth, his jacket tossed aside and his shirt wet around the armpits. "Are you ready?" he shouted on one particularly sweltering evening. "Jesus could come back this very night to raise the dead and judge the living for their sins." Johnny tried to listen as Pastor Bud read some scriptures about God destroying Sodom and Gomorrah because its people were so sinful. Pastor Bud did not go into detail but to the extent that Johnny could make out what exactly the residents of those cities had been doing to each other, he was sure those were things he himself had not done.

Johnny's confidence in his salvation would be challenged a few minutes later when the sermon moved on to "lust of the flesh," a topic which seemed to strike a chord because several people were going up to the altar. Johnny had not been fully paying much attention to the sermon because he was busy actually committing the sin of lust of the flesh at that moment.

The specific flesh in question was the back of Millie Jenkins' neck. Johnny and Darryl always tried to sit directly behind Millie and the other girls so they could irritate them during the service. Because Darryl was a blood relative to all of the girls, his interest in tickling the backs of their necks with the corner of a donation envelope was simply adolescent teasing. Johnny pretended to have the same motivation, but for him it was a disguise for his real motivation -- lust. Millie wore a sleeveless summer dress with thin shoulder straps so there was a lot of freckled white skin for Johnny to look at.

"The Sin of Lust," Pastor Bud intoned in his deep voice, "is not about sinful things you actually do, but sinful things you imagine you are doing." Uh-oh. "Like looking at a woman and picturing what she might look like under her clothing." Bullseye. "And then touching yourself in an unclean manner."

The preacher was going into his home stretch as Sister Connie gently played a few chords on the organ. "Are you ready if Jesus comes back tonight? Will He welcome you through the pearly gates of glow-ry, or will He see the sin in you and cast you into the fires of Hell?"

As it happened, this was the moment when one of the sticks holding up the sash windows slipped from its position and the window slammed shut with a bang. Several more congregants rushed up to the altar as Johnny looked out one of the still-open windows into the black night, imagining Jesus flying across the sky like Superman but with a flaming sword in his hand.

"It may be tonight!" the preacher exclaimed. "It may be right now!" Johnny scooted past Darryl out of the pew, but just as he stepped forward someone came out from the pew in front of him. It was Millie, tears running down her cheeks. Johnny walked behind her up to the altar and could not stop his brain from noticing the shape of her behind beneath her thin cotton dress.

The intersection was surrounded by farm fields so Jack could see from some distance that a modern-day Marathon station had replaced the vintage gas station he remembered. He was about to pull into the station's parking lot to watch the churchgoers arrive when he saw what was left of the church. He turned instead into its empty gravel lot. There would be no Sunday morning church service here this morning, nor likely ever again from the looks of it. The spire was entirely gone with blackened wood remaining as evidence of a long-ago fire. Plywood sheets were nailed over the doorway and some of the windows. Jack got out of the car and walked around the building to the side where some of the windows were still unbroken. Peering in, he saw that the pews had been removed, but that the little marquis sign remained on the wall and still showed a record attendance of 88.