October, 1960
The pastor stood at the window in his office, gazing out at the Norway maple that stood across the alley, behind a graying picket fence that needed another coat of whitewash. In the sunless afternoon light, the tree’s dark violet leaves appeared black. For a moment, he imagined that the leaves were sleeping bats that could erupt from the tree all at once, a squeaking, fluttering mass taking flight and leaving the branches empty, clawing at the sky the way barren trees do in winter.
He turned away from the window. He didn’t much care for October; of all the months of the year, October was the most pagan, when people abandoned good sense and modern science and indulged in all kinds of silly, spooky beliefs.
Silvery light illuminated the leather-bound books on his shelf. They needed a good dusting, like everything else in the old part of the church. The original church, with its reddish Sioux quartzite walls, gothic arched windows and tall wooden steeple, had been sitting on the same quiet street corner since 1891. Five years ago, the congregation raised money to add a modern wing, a long rectangle that jutted out into the churchyard, made of blond bricks that didn’t match the old church at all.
He could smell coffee brewing down the hall in the new part of the church, where there was a kitchen with industrial-sized refrigerators and a banquet hall with a shuffleboard court printed on the linoleum tiles. He’d already had two cups that his wife had brewed at the parsonage where they lived, but he was ready for another, even though retrieving it meant he would have to make small talk with two of the gossipping old biddies from the Luncheon Committee. They came to the church every day to brew coffee in the big urn whether there was anyone around to drink it or not.
As he walked down to the kitchen, he could hear the chatter halfway down the hall.
“....as if they didn’t have it bad enough already.”
“What do you mean?”
“You didn’t hear? They shipped the girl off to the Bethany Home.”
“But I thought that place closed down years ago after the city condemned the building.”
“That was the old Bethany Home, the Quaker one. I’m talking about the new Bethany Home. The Catholics opened it down by the train yard.”
“You’re kidding…little Veronica Carlsen is in the mother and baby home?”
“Well, she’s not so little anymore…” The two women cackled.
The pastor frowned. He’d been called to the Carlsen home the night that young Veronica confessed that a boy from a rival school’s football team had gotten her pregnant after he’d crashed the homecoming dance. If they’d seen how white her knuckles were as she gripped the handkerchief that she held to her red eyes, and how Mr. Carlsen trembled with rage as he loomed over her, perhaps they wouldn’t find so much humor in the situation.
He had tried to talk the Carlsens out of sending the girl away. Marriage was best in situations like these -- too many girls were never the same after giving up babies, and too many children grew up yearning for their natural parents. And a boy could become a man if he faced up to his responsibilities. But it didn’t matter. The football player was already on a Greyhound to another state and Veronica’s fate was sealed.
“So, what else is going on in that house?”
“Oh, well, the boy is doing all kinds of bizarre things…”
The pastor didn’t want to hear anymore. He cleared his throat as he stepped into the kitchen. The two women wore rickrack-trimmed aprons over their gingham dresses. They smiled when they saw him. Loaves of Wonder Bread sat on the counter, waiting to be sliced into uniformly-sized one-inch cubes and served with thimble-sized glasses of grape juice at communion.
“Good morning, Pastor Halvorson,” one of them said. He could never keep their names straight. “Here for your coffee?”
He nodded silently. One of them was wearing a strong perfume: iris and vanilla. His nose itched. He thanked them and walked back to his office with his coffee in hand.
An hour later, the assistant pastor rapped softly on his office door.
“I had a chance to review your sermon for today…” the young man said, his hazel eyes wide with panic. He wore pomade in his hair that kept it slicked back, except for one little piece that always fell right between his eyes and drove all the girls in the confirmation class crazy.
“And? Out with it.”
“Are you sure this is what you want to say? I mean, it’s very left-wing…”
“Left-wing?”
“You know, very liberal. Don’t get me wrong, I agree with most liberal positions --”
“Well, I should hope so. A young man like you should be at least a little idealistic.”
“-- but the congregation…”
“What about the congregation?”
“Aren’t you afraid they might…”
“They might what?”
“Revolt?”
Pastor Halvorson laughed. “Revolt? We’re lucky they stay awake.” He patted the young man on the shoulder and they both made their way to the sacristy and put on their vestments.
In the sanctuary, the organist pumped the strains of “Ye Watchers and Ye Holy Ones” into the air as the congregants milled about in the new wing of the church, hanging up their trench coats and fur stoles before slowly filing into the red-cushioned pews.
Pastor Halvorson looked over his sermon again. He understood the younger man’s concern; it could inflame some passions, but only if people paid attention. Every Sunday, at least one congregant came up to him after the service, grasped his hand, and praised him for giving whatever sermon the congregant had heard in his head. The pastor would smile and nod, never bothering to let the person know that he’d said nothing of the sort and the sermon they thought they’d heard was all in their mind.
He could stand at the pulpit and extoll the virtues of prostitution and he’d have people shaking his hand after.
Once the pews were full, the assistant pastor led the first hymn and gave a reading from Matthew 8:28.
“And when he was come to the other side into the country of the Gergesenes, there met him two possessed with devils, coming out of the tombs, exceeding fierce, so that no man might pass by that way.
“And, behold, they cried out, saying, What have we to do with thee, Jesus, thou Son of God? Art thou come hither to torment us before the time?
“And there was a good way off from them a herd of many swine feeding.
“So the devils besought him, saying, If thou cast us out, suffer us to go away into the herd of swine.
“And he said unto them, Go. And when they were come out, they went into the herd of swine: and, behold, the whole herd of swine ran violently down a steep place into the sea, and perished in the waters.”
The pastor glanced out at the congregation. Four pews back, three of the girls from the confirmation class stared at the young man, their cheeks bright and their eyes shining. Had they even been listening, or were they smitten by the thought of demon-filled pigs charging into the ocean?
The choir director gestured for the choir to rise and sing “Blow Ye the Trumpet Blow,” to the congregation who sat in stony silence. The sleeve of his shiny blue robe flapped as he waved his hand in the air. No one applauded when the choir was done.
Pastor Halvorson got up and took his place in the pulpit, switching on the small electric light that cast a yellow glow over his notecards.
“Friends, you heard the assistant pastor’s reading about demons, and I invite you to think about who you consider to be a demon. Is it your neighbor who lets his dog roam through your yard, leaving messes behind? Is it your boss who passes you over for a promotion? Is it the musicians on television who make your children scream and gyrate their hips?”
He paused and scanned the faces of the people in the congregation. Nothing. The same glazed eyes, the same waxy faces.
“Or,” he continued, “is it the Jew? Across the river, there’s a synagogue with a congregation very much like this one. Are they your neighbors, or are they demons to you?”
He made another sweeping glance around the sanctuary and went on. “Hatred of Jews is older than Christianity. Since the Romans became Christians, we have enjoyed centuries of supremacy, and yet many of us still hate Jews. Why?”
This time, he caught them looking back at him. “Do we hate Jews because they killed Christ? Never mind the fact that it was Roman soldiers who nailed him to the cross. Never mind that the Romans had a habit of hanging people on crosses as a visual reminder to the rest of their subjects of what might happen to them if they stepped out of line. Never mind that -- the Jews wanted Christ to die instead of Barabas, so it was their fault, right?”
A few people in the pews nodded silently.
“But, friends, we believe that Christ’s blood washes away our sins, do we not? We believe in the resurrection, do we not? Without the resurrection, what does the Christian have? A handful of miracles? Without the resurrection, there is no Christian salvation. And without death, there is no resurrection. If the Jews killed Christ, then the Jews gave us our salvation.”
“That’s BLASPHEMY!” a voice shouted. All the heads in the congregation swiveled to the rear of the church. Up in the balcony, an old woman stood up, her white-knuckled hands gripping the wooden rail. Her wrinkled cheeks matched the salmon pink of her dress, but he couldn’t tell whether it was rage or cheap rouge.
He waited. On the bench behind him, he could hear the assistant pastor fidgeting. The girls from the confirmation class grinned and whispered to one another behind gloved hands.
Slowly, the old lady sat down, and the pastor finished his sermon.
After the service, the congregation filed silently to the new wing of the church for cookies and coffee, but a small group had skipped the line altogether and gathered out on the church lawn, standing in a tight circle.
“I don’t like the looks of that,” the assistant pastor said. The young man’s reflection in the glass entryway made him look tired.
“It’s nothing to worry about,” Pastor Halvorson said. “They’ll leave eventually.”
On Monday, the pastor received a phone call from the bishop.
“What the devil were you thinking?” the bishop asked. Before the pastor could respond, the bishop went on: “My office has been flooded with calls all morning! You ought to thank God they didn’t come back with torches.”
“I stand by what I said,” the pastor replied.
“Well, fine, just don’t say it again.”
“Or?”
“What the devil do you mean, ‘or’?”
“You said, ‘Don’t say it again.’ I’m assuming there’s an ‘or else’ involved. I’d like to know what the ‘or else’ is.”
“Or else I can think of a small town with one stoplight and an abandoned mine shaft that needs a new pastor. And if you don’t want to spend every Sunday in front of the saddest congregation in the state, you’ll mind your Ps and Qs.”
The bishop hung up. Pastor Halvorson sighed. In the doorway, the assistant pastor appeared.
“What did the bishop say?”
“Oh, he just said he’d ship me to Bumfuck, Egypt if I don’t mind what I say.”
The young man blushed and Pastor Halvorson smiled inwardly. Unlike Pastor Halvorson, the young man hadn’t spent any time in the service. During World War II, Pastor Halvorson was a chaplain in the Army and heard soldiers use a rainbow of colorful language.
“That doesn’t worry you?”
Pastor Halvorson shrugged. “My wife keeps saying she might like a house in the country.”
A few days later, the women from the Luncheon Committee were in the kitchen again, getting treats ready for the teenagers who came in for the mid-week confirmation class.
“A Catholic president. Can you imagine?” one of them said as she sliced a sheet of brownies into small pieces.
“Oh, I can’t imagine that Kennedy will win. Nixon has so much more experience.”
As the pastor entered the kitchen, they both turned and smiled. While he was sure they had not been the ones who called the bishop, he couldn’t help but wonder if they knew who did. One of them handed him a cup of coffee.
“The Carlsens didn’t come to church again,” one of them said.
“Oh, of course not. I heard the boy was thrown out of school and they don’t even let him out of the house anymore.”
“I can’t imagine keeping a boy like that in the basement. It has to be a full-time job.”
“Oh, come on,” Pastor Halvorson said. “They don’t keep their son in the basement. Nobody does that.”
The two women exchanged glances but said nothing.
That Sunday, only half of the congregation showed up, the once-packed pews now dotted with people who left several feet of empty red cushion between them. In the front row, the three girls from the confirmation class sat, eagerly waiting for the assistant pastor’s reading. If the church was worried about dwindling congregations, perhaps it needed to invest more time and energy into recruiting boys who resembled Frankie Avalon and Bobby Darin. Or was it Frank Sinatra that had all the girls swooning? It was impossible to keep up with the ever-shifting tastes of the day.
During the first hymn, the blend of voices that usually filled the sanctuary was now a smattering of individual voices, quavering as if he were hearing them from the other side of a lake. When it came time for the sermon, the pastor stepped up the pulpit, looked out at the congregation, then down at his notecards, and sighed.
That evening, he ate his wife’s roast chicken even though he wasn’t hungry, and took a long walk around the neighborhood, past old cottages with deep porches and gable roofs, fences guarding the outermost edge of every yard. Acorns crunched under his feet. He noticed an eerie, amethyst-colored light pouring from one house’s parlor window, illuminating the mess of dead oak leaves on the lawn. He heard teenage laughter and Fats Domino on the hi-fi; the purple light was a scarf draped over a lamp. A girl’s idea of something romantic.
They were lucky it didn’t start a fire.
He stuffed his hands in his pockets as a breeze picked up, making all the dry leaves on the sidewalk tumble over each other. He smelled the rotting flesh of Jack O’Lanterns that had been put out a week too early, their caved-in smiles grinning at him from the shadowy recess of a porch that leaned ever so slightly.
These houses were unfashionable -- ugly, some people said. Pastor Halvorson wouldn’t be surprised if some developer came along, flattened them all, and built modern, ‘ranch-style’ homes, with Space Age convenience all on one efficient floor.
A flutter of wings and a tiny squeak made him shudder as a bat flew overhead. He looked up and saw an ancient Second Empire house, complete with a tower and iron cresting on the roof. Long fingers of light stretched across the yard from the elongated, arched windows. A tall, rusted wrought-iron fence edged the lawn, its arrow-shaped finials thrusting through the tendrils of a withered clematis.
The Carlsen family lived in this house. The Carlsens, who had sent their pregnant daughter away, and who, allegedly, kept their son in the basement. Those Luncheon Committee ladies had no idea how ridiculous they sounded.
In spite of himself, he glanced at the basement windows before he moved on: no light.
“I can’t believe this doesn’t worry you,” the assistant pastor said. He sat in the pastor’s office, opposite his shelf of old books, more silvery light outlining his pomaded head.
“So the congregation was smaller on Sunday. So what? It’s temporary. They’ll come back.”
“Do you think we’re the only Methodist church in town? Those people will be members at another church before the month is out.”
The pastor shook his head. “This church has been serving the neighborhood for more than sixty years. People have come here for weddings and funerals and christenings. They have memories here. They’ll be back.”
“That sermon you gave --”
“It was right.”
“I agree, but --”
A soft knocking at the door interrupted their conversation. The two ladies from the Luncheon Committee stood on the other side of the door, their eyes wide and mouths puckered.
“What is it?” the pastor asked.
“You’ve got to get over to the Carlsens’ house. That boy needs an exorcism.”
Pastor Halvorson glanced at the assistant pastor, who rose from his chair.
“An exorcism?”
“There’s no other explanation for it,” one of the women said. “He’s possessed by an evil spirit.”
The pastor sighed. “John Wesley believed that there was no demon-possessed person who couldn’t be cured by a little bit of mental rest and maybe a better diet, and that was 200 years ago.”
“Please, Pastor Halvorson,” one of them said, her lipsticked mouth trembling, “you’ve got to come. No one’s ever seen anything like this.”
“Christ did drive demons out of people, sir,” the young man said.
Pastor Halvorson sighed. “Alright, Junior, why don’t you go over there and perform an exorcism?”
He hadn’t meant for the young man to take it seriously. But the boy put on his suede jacket, grabbed a pocket-sized bible and followed the women out of the church.
Alone, he heard the silence unfolding all around him. He went down to the new wing of the church and poured himself a cup of coffee.
It was dark by the time the assistant pastor returned to the church. His jacket was ripped, his hair stuck out every which way and his face was red and sticky from crying.
The pastor stared in disbelief as the young man collapsed into a chair, his body trembling.
“I couldn’t do it,” he said. “I tried, but I couldn’t….you’ve got to…you’ve got to go over there.”
“You couldn’t do what?” he asked.
“Drive the demon out. I couldn’t…”
The pastor sighed and reached for his jacket. The boy probably didn’t have anything that a straightjacket and a ride in a padded wagon wouldn’t fix, but the pastor realized that nobody else was going to make that call if he didn’t get over to the Carlsen’s house and make it for them.
As he walked through the streets, past houses silhouetted against the fading sunset, he kicked leaves out of his way and thought about the Catholic church a few blocks away. He knew the priests there and considered stopping to ask for their help. After all, the Catholics had a rite for exorcism, a pre-written, centuries-old speech that thousands of other priests had delivered before.
When a protestant confronts a demon, he walks alone.
It didn’t matter, though. The demon-possessed were sick, that was all. John Wesley knew it. Modern science knew it. The pastor knew it. And once he got the Carlsen boy the care he needed, and probably a bed at the state hospital, his congregation would know it too.
As he approached the Carlsens’ house, he heard a metallic rattling sound but realized it was just the wind pushing against the iron cresting on the roof. The rounded, elongated windows in the house’s tower were dark, but light spilled from the parlor window and one of the windows in the basement.
He pushed past the wrought iron fence and walked up to the house. As he rang the doorbell, he noticed that the wooden double doors seemed weatherbeaten. In the dark, he could just barely make out a stag in the etched glass panels that adorned each door.
He heard footsteps within, and a young girl opened the door. The pastor took off his jacket and hung it on a wooden peg. A footprint muddied the tiled entryway; it was about the same size as the assistant pastor’s feet. The pastor wiped his feet and followed the girl into the parlor where the Carlsens and some of the ladies from the Luncheon Committee sat. In the parlor, an old gasolier which had long ago been converted to electric, cast a soft glow over the wood floor, a Turkish rug and the elaborate fretwork that decorated the oak room divider that separated the parlor from the dining room. The delicate wood pieces fit together like a spider web.
Mrs. Carlsen was always so put together with her department store suits and her Dior perfume. The pastor was surprised she didn’t mind living in such an old house. Didn’t she want something newer with pink appliances and a fallout shelter under the garage?
“Thank God you’ve come!” said one of the Luncheon Committee ladies as she got up from her spot next to Mrs. Carlsen on a settee.
“The boy tried, he really did, but he just couldn’t —”
Pastor Halvorson was confused for a moment until he realized the boy she was referring to was the assistant pastor.
“Mrs. Carlsen,” he said, ignoring the Luncheon Committee, “wouldn’t it be much simpler to call for an ambulance?”
Mrs. Carlsen gripped a mascara-stained handkerchief. Her dark eyebrows, beautician-plucked to match Elizabeth Taylor’s, slanted inward as she frowned, her painted mouth hardening.
“You can’t say that before you’ve seen him,” she said. She raised a trembling hand and pointed toward a door that led to a dark hallway. The pastor glanced at Mr. Carlsen.
“Lead the way,” he said.
The pastor followed Mr. Carlsen, a tall man in a green sweater and a pink scalp showing through his hair, down a dim hallway, past a series of closed doors until they reached the back of the house. Mr. Carlsen tugged on the door and it opened with a shudder. A sole naked lightbulb cast wan light over the narrow, unvarnished wooden staircase. The pastor gripped a wooden railing as he descended into the basement.
The air in the basement was slightly cooler and smelled of camphor and old carrots. In the weak light, he saw a stack of empty wooden crates, outdated fashion magazines bundled with twine, the chrome fender of a bicycle.
He heard the sound of bare feet slapping against the floor.
“Come on out,” the pastor said. “No one wants to harm you. We just want to get you the help you need.” The pastor took a few steps forward as his eyes adjusted. He noticed an old train set with dust on the tracks, a porcelain doll with a missing leg, a teddy bear with stuffing popping out of his face where his eye should’ve been.
Suddenly, the pastor fell backward against the milk crates. The boy stood inches away from his face, his breath reeking of some strange substance, like gasoline, or matches, or some combination of the two. Wet, sticky sores covered the boy’s face and knuckles. His eyes were almost completely black and he growled.
It wasn’t the sound of a human pretending to be a dog or even the sound of a normal dog. The pastor had heard that growl only once before, when he was twelve years old and his father had taken him down south to visit an old army buddy who lived in a bayou. An alligator lifted its head from the murky water and let out a loud rumbling sound. At first, he thought it was an old car until his father pointed at the beast, whose massive snout was just a few feet away from their boat.
The pastor shut his eyes. Even if he had a rite to follow, he wouldn’t have remembered it.
“Dear God,” he said, “please release this young man from his torment. I call upon your son, Jesus Christ, to —”
Before the pastor could finish, the boy threw a haymaker with his left hand. The pastor ducked out of the way and the boy struck the wooden crates, which crashed to the floor. The pastor suddenly found himself facing the boy’s back, and without thinking, he wrapped one arm around the boy’s neck and the other behind his head, compressing the boy’s carotid arteries.
The boy thrashed and kicked his feet, the growl crescendoing and then fading as the effect of the choke took hold. As soon as the boy’s body went limp, the pastor let him fall to the floor and placed his knee across the boy’s chest in case he came out of his stupor and became violent again. He reached for the boy’s wrist and exhaled with relief when he felt a pulse.
After a few minutes, the boy opened his eyes and his lip trembled. Tears bubbled up in his eyes and ran down his scabbed cheeks. Loud, childlike sobs racked his body.
Pastor Halvorson stood up and helped the boy to his feet. With an arm around his back, he helped the boy up the stairs. He sat the boy down on a step stool in the kitchen. In the brighter light, he saw that the boy’s shirt was half shredded and the cuffs of his jeans were streaked with filth.
As the family rushed into the kitchen, the pastor went down the hall to use the telephone. Twenty minutes later, an ambulance took the boy away.
A week later, chrome-finned cars ringed the block near the church and people in their Sunday best streamed into the sanctuary. As the two men stood in the sacristy, the pastor listened to the rising din of the voices in the sanctuary.
“I can’t remember the last time we had so many people here,” he said. “We didn’t even have this many last Easter.”
“It’s because of the exorcism,” the assistant pastor said. “They all want to hear from the pastor who drove the demon out of the Carlsen boy.”
“There was no exorcism,” the pastor said. “I didn’t do anything.”
“That’s not what his parents believe. And that’s not what those people out there believe.”
“I didn’t do anything, except almost kill the kid.”
The assistant pastor took his embroidered stole off a hook and draped it around his neck.
“You saved him,” he said. “That’s what matters.”
When it came time for the sermon, Pastor Halvorson stood in the pulpit and scanned the congregation. The woman who’d called him a blasphemer was there, along with everyone else who’d stayed away after his sermon about Jews. There were new faces too, people he only recognized from the grocery, or the diner, and people he’d never seen before in his life. Mr. and Mrs. Carlsen sat in the front row. Next to them sat a teenage girl with her blond hair in a tight chignon and a round pregnant belly. She stared up at him and smiled.
The congregation was silent, save for a cough here and a rustle of leaflets there. He cleared his throat but before he spoke he heard a low rumble, a growl, and he flashed back to the basement, to the coal-eyed boy and his sulfur breath, to the bayou and the alligator making ripples in the water just a few feet away.
Sweat gathered on the pastor’s forehead. The sound faded and it dawned on him that it was just an old car this time. He exhaled and looked down at his notecards.
They were blank.