Chapter 13: The Sunday Pew
The bells of the Oakhaven Baptist Church weren't the bronze ones they had in the valley towns; they were cast iron from an old logging locomotive, cracked slightly on the rim so they gave off a flat, dull clang that rolled across the pine flats every Sunday at half-past ten. Clara had taken it upon herself to drag us both out of the garage by quarter-to-ten, armed with a pair of scissors and a bottle of bay rum that smelled like a barbershop in 1974. She’d spent twenty minutes working a dab of it into Leo’s cowlick until his hair lay flat against his skull like a wet mink, and she’d made me button a flannel shirt that still had the creases from the cardboard box it came in.
"If you don't take that boy inside a proper room with a roof that doesn't leak on him once a week, the state’s going to think you’re raising a wildcat instead of a human being," Clara had said, standing on our front porch with a grease-stained Tupperware container of cold chicken in her left hand. "And put those boots on the scraper. I don't want twenty years of crankcase drippings on the church carpet."
We walked the four blocks from Maple Street in the pale autumn sunshine, the leaves crunching under our soles like dry bone. Leo kept his hands jammed deep into the pockets of the old jacket I’d sewn a new zipper into on Friday night, his eyes darting sideways at every porch we passed. Oakhaven wasn't a big town—three hundred people if you counted the ones living in trailers out past the gravel pit—but everybody knew every other person’s business by the time the morning coffee was poured.
When we pushed open the heavy oak doors of the chapel, the smell hit us first: old floor wax, damp wool, and the sweet, heavy scent of stale peppermint from the baskets on the back benches. The service had already started; Brother Thomas’s voice droned on from the front like a distant tractor engine idling in a field. The moment the hinges squeaked, twenty-two pairs of heads turned in unison. I knew every one of those backs. I’d hauled their firewood, fixed their alternators, or shared a six-pack with their sons behind the bowling alley.
For a second, the breathing in the room seemed to stop. Mrs. Gable, who sat three rows from the back with her hymnal held open in her liver-spotted hands, stared straight at Leo, her sharp eyes traveling from the boy’s scuffed sneakers up to his bright hazel eyes, then across to the scars on my knuckles where the primary chain had bitten me back in July. Then she looked down at the empty space beside her on the oak bench, reached out her hand, and patted the worn velvet cushion twice.
Clara gave me a sharp little shove between the shoulder blades that nearly sent me sprawling into the baptismal font, and we moved down the aisle. The boards groaned beneath our boots, loud in the quiet room. Leo slid into the pew beside Mrs. Gable, his knees knocking against the hymnal rack, while I squeezed in on the end, my shoulders feeling too broad for the narrow wooden space, my knees jammed hard against the back of the pew in front of me.
Brother Thomas didn't miss a beat. He lowered his Bible two inches, looked over his steel-rimmed spectacles straight down the center aisle at the two of us sitting there in the middle of Oakhaven society, and changed his text mid-sentence without looking down at the page.
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"And a little child shall lead them," the old man said, his voice echoing off the pine rafters with a dry, gravelly resonance that reached every corner of the room. "Provided they've got someone willing to walk behind them when the road gets steep."
Leo looked up at me, his small brow furrowed in that familiar three-line crease, and reached out his small, cold hand to find mine where it rested on my knee. His fingers were rough at the tips from the steel wool he’d been using to clean the carburetor parts, but his grip was steady. I closed my hand around his, feeling the small bones and the warmth of him against my skin, and for the first time in twenty years, the space inside my chest didn't feel quite so empty.
