She sighed.
'We're in a mess here, my Friend. I hope You understand it, because I sure don't. But we both know this place is going to be full of people tomorrow, looking for heavenly disaster assistance:.'
It was quiet inside the church, and quiet outside. 'Too quiet,' as they said in the old movies. Had she ever heard The Mill this quiet on a Saturday night? There was no traffic, and the bass thump of whatever weekend band happened to be playing at Dippers (always advertised as being DIRECT FROM BOSTON!) was absent.
'I'm not going to ask that You show me Your will, because I'm no longer convinced You actually have a will. But on the off chance that You are there after all - always a possibility, I'm more than happy to admit that - please help me to say something helpful. Hope not in heaven, but right here on earth. Because...' She was not surprised to find that she had started to cry. She bawled so often now, although always in private. New Englanders strongly disapproved of public tears from ministers and politicians.
Clover, sensing her distress, whined. Piper told him to hush, then turned back to the altar. She often thought of the cross there as the religious version of the Chevrolet Bowtie, a logo that had come into being for no other reason than because some guy saw it on the wallpaper of a Paris hotel room a hundred years ago and liked it. If you saw such symbols as divine, you were probably a lunatic.
Nevertheless, she persevered.
'Because, as I'm sure You know, Earth is what we have. What we're sure of. I want to help my people. That's my job, and I still want to do it. Assuming You're there, and that You care - shaky assumptions, I admit - then please help me. Amen.'
She stood up. She had no flashlight, but anticipated no trouble finding her way outside with unbarked shins. She knew this place step for step and obstacle for obstacle. Loved it, too. She didn't fool herself about either her lack of faith or her stubborn love of the idea itself.
'Come on, Clove,' she said. 'President in half an hour. The other Great Not-There. We can listen on the car radio.'
Clover followed placidly, untroubled by questions of faith.
5
Out on Little Bitch Road (always referred to as Number Three by Holy Redeemer worshippers), a far more dynamic scene was taking place, and under bright electric lights. Lester Coggins's house of worship possessed a generator new enough for the shipping tags still to be pasted on its bright orange side. It had its own shed, also painted orange, next to the storage barn behind the church.
Lester was a man of fifty so well maintained - by genetics as well as; his own strenuous efforts to take care of the temple of his body - that he looked no more than thirty-five (judicious applications of Just For Men helped in this regard). He wore nothing tonight but a pair of gym shorts with ORAL ROBERTS GOLDEN EAGLES printed on the right leg, and almost every muscle on his body stood out.
During services (of which there were five each week), Lester prayed in an ecstatic televangelist tremolo, turning the Big Fellow's name into something that sounded as if it could have come from an overamped wah-wah pedal: not God but GH-UH-UH-ODD! In his private prayers, he sometimes fell into these same cadences without realizing it. But when he was deeply troubled, when he really needed to take counsel with the God of Moses and Abraham, He who traveled as a pillar of smoke by day and a pillar of fire by night, Lester held up his end of the conversation in a deep growl that made him sound like a dog on the verge of attacking an intruder. He wasn't aware of this because there was no one in his life to hear him pray. Piper Libby was a widow who had lost her husband and both young sons in an accident three years before; Lester Coggins was a lifelong bachelor who as an adolescent had suffered nightmares of masturbating and looking up to see Mary Magdalene standing in his bedroom doorway.
The church was almost as new as the generator, and constructed of expensive red maple. It was also plain to the point of starkness. Behind Lester's bare back stretched a triple rank of pews beneath a beamed ceiling. Ahead of him was the pulpit: nothing but a lectern with a Bible on it and a large redwood cross hanging on a drape of royal purple. The choir loft was above and to the right, with musical instruments - including the Stratocaster Lester himself sometimes played - clustered at one end.