The Lost Church

Nothing brought joy to me like my 1955 chromed-out Chevy Bel-Air with red vinyl interior and whitewall tires. It was the most beautiful car in town and although it was over 65 years-old, it looked as though I had just driven her off the Detroit assembly line, at least, back when they still made cars in Detroit. I was married twice. I had that car through both marriages. Neither wife drove it, of course, as I always hid the keys from them. I have kids, scattered about. The marriages didn’t last, but my love for that car, well, it didn’t go anywhere. The trunk carried all my belongings away from more than one home, more than once. As I left, both ex-wives said to me, in varying degrees of hostility, “Well, at least you got your Black Baby.” That is how she got her name. She was Doris before someone sometime called her Black Baby. They were right. She was all I ever needed.

I get drunk in my loneliness often, in every honky-tonk in the state, except for when I was on paper and the court gave me random piss tests which I either passed, or I lost my freedom to drink for a while. That is how I saw it. Life in a bottle. I was like one of those boats and the only mystery was how I got in there. But this wasn’t one of those times, so I drank freely and sure enough by midnight, I was crocked and by one, I sat in another nameless bar and drank all the black coffee I could drink to sober me up. I couldn’t get another DUI. What few women were in the joint split. They were much too young for a man of fifty, anyway, though one of prettier ones stood too close to me for a while and said this and that and that I looked a lot like Brad Pitt. I think she wanted me to buy her a drink, but I wasn’t in the mood for company. So she and her friends left me and the bartender and a couple old men to close this old bird down. They went away. Squealing out into the hot night to some other bar full of people I don’t generally like. The new drinkers. The dive bar where people go when they haven’t found anyone they want to take home yet. 

“No one drinks this stuff,” the bartender said to me, holding a pot of coffee offering me a refill. The coffee was on the house. Their part to ensure that we drunks sober up and don’t kill anyone on the way home or wherever the hell we are going. “It’s thick as mud.”

“Tastes like it,” I grinned.

“Well, you want anymore?”

I shook my head no. He dumped it down the sink drain where it swirled squalling demonically as it drained. There was something sinister in the sound, but everything becomes sinister when you get a little drunk and you are lonely, just as everything becomes divine when you’re drunk and in love. I got tired of looking myself in the face through bottles of seldom-poured liquor, so I said goodbye to the bartender and went out to Black Baby who sparkled in the bar lights like a beautiful woman naked on a candle-lit bed of cool black silk. Hot summer nights seem to shine up her paint like she sweats under the gloss and I ran my fingers lightly along her fender until I got to her door and she popped open for me as she always does with that wonderful sound that is unlike any other sound in the world. And I sat in her vinyl seat and she groaned as she does. Heaven is the sound of her engine purring. Eight barrels of passion and pure unbridled lust. 

I felt I was sober enough to go for a drive, which probably wasn’t a good idea, but my life is full of such foolish choices, so I thought, what the hell would one more hurt? I drove out of town and took Old Miller Road for a ways and made a right on a road called Pumpkin-something which I’ve never been down before, and another right, and then a left at the end of it. I had to make sure I wasn’t on gravel for fear I’d kick up some rocks and chip the paint on Black Baby’s quarter-panels. But when I got to the gravel road I knew I was eventually going to happen upon, I slowed her to a near crawl and realized I was lost. There was no service on my phone to guide me out so since it was summer I decided to just drive until I saw someplace to pull over and park and sleep until the morning. 

Before long, I found an old church and a nice parking lot and pulled in slowly. My eyes were heavy and the moon was hazy and full and seemed to be staring at me. It was as though the world was conspiring against me, not in a terribly sinister way, but in an inexplicable way that made me feel the best thing I could do is stop and to let whatever the conspiracy was to pass over me the way the clouds wisped by that full moon. In the moonlight, I could see the church was no longer used and was dilapidated. Its white paint was like blistered skin and its windows were boarded up. There was a cemetery next to it with old headstones that each caught their share of the moonlight which made them look a little like basking seals on a night beach of grass. Some were blackened with age and I could see the verdigris in the etchings. Some were broken. It didn’t appear that anyone lives around here, nor that they visit much, if at all. What a terrible sight it was, even to someone like me who had always felt that God was a conspiracy. This was a last indignation that no one deserved. I believe in venerating the dead and preserving their legacy for it is they who created the world today that we live. And it will be us who create the world tomorrow that our children will live. It wouldn’t be too much for someone to mow the grass and repair the broken stones. I thought to get out to do so, but I thought it might be best to wait for tomorrow. A breath of fog moved over them and settled in the thick grass and I reclined my seat and looked out upon the cemetery from my driver-side window with my drunken swollen head on the glass which felt like a goldfish bowl of swirling water absent fish. 

I wasn’t afraid of ghosts. Thinking of them brought me peace, but having never had an encounter, I suppose I was simply naïvely ignorant and so I had a childlike belief of them. I thought of them suddenly. Maybe it was the nearby graves or the fact that at 50, drinking the way I did, I realized that one night I would die. Probably alone such as I am now. Possibly asphyxiated on my own vomit. I wondered when my soul left my body if I would have a last view of myself and if my soul would look anything like my body or would it be a wraith-like mist. I was drunker than I thought and my head began to spin wildly and the three or six shots of Wild Turkey on the twelve or fifteen beers started to rebel in my stomach and I opened the door to vomit, but nothing came out except for crystal streams of phlegm which looked like thick spider webs. And staring down into the old gravel of the lot I saw a whole another universe of people and places I’d never before seen between those lusterless rocks and all that dirt. I must have been that way for an hour or more until I passed out.

Her feet woke me up. The sight of her bare feet on the gravel. I wondered how it did not hurt her. She had beautiful feet and legs which I followed up to her white dress that came down properly just below the knee. I realized I still had streams of crystalized phlegm hanging down my cheek to the ground and my head felt full of blood and alcohol so I straightened myself up and dizzily wiped my mouth.

“You look like that one fellow. The actor.”

“Excuse me?” I replied groggily.

“I said you look like that actor. Forget his name though.” Birds chirped loudly behind her and the sun replaced the moon and streamed through an enormous oak which was over by the graveyard.

“Brad Pitt?”

“No. I ain’t never heard of him. I meant that one fellow. James Dean. Only you look about fifty years older.”

I squinted and glowered at her. “Gee, thanks kid. I’m flattered.”

“Well, he’s good lookin’ so you ain’t got no right to be sore about it.”

“Maybe it was the plus fifty years part. And James Dean has been dead for 60 years so – ”

She looked at me bizarrely. “I don’t think we’re talkin’ about the same fellow.”

I didn’t want to talk. My head hurt and my mouth was dry as a desert. I wanted to go home to my air-conditioned apartment and take some Tylenol and sleep it off. My head ached and she just stood there as though she was waiting for an explanation for me being drunk and passed out in a church parking lot. I rubbed my eyes to get a better look at her. Her white dress caught the morning sunlight and I reveled at how beautiful she was. Her face the soft-white color of a cloud and her hair pinned up and under a fancy white hat with a peacock feather pinned to it in a fashion of an age gone by. I reckoned she was one of those Mennonites or something like that. There are a lot of them out this way. Them and Amish. They come to town in their horse-drawn buggies and wagons now and then and I always stop and stare at them like some people stare at me in Black Baby.

“You some kind of greaser?” she asked. 

“No,” I chuckled. “I’m not a greaser.”

“Well, you’re wearing a leather jacket with the zippers and such. You look like a greaser to me.”

“Well, I’m not a greaser. It’s – just a jacket.”

She didn’t seem satisfied with my answer and she stood there staring at me, maybe thinking I’d change my mind and confess.

“You some kind of Puritan?”

She giggled. “No. Baptist.”

“Oh,” I grunted.

Her mouth was small but her lips were full and her features were all delicate and she reminded me of a porcelain doll or some old movie actress. My eyes burned in a violent struggle with the sun, but she mercifully stood between the warring factions keeping the peace. Then I caught a glance of the church behind her, and of the brightly-painted red doors which were open like some holy mouth, and the people who were mingling on the steps, shaking hands and laughing, all dressed nicely. The windows were open and a little boy was tossing things out of one of them to another boy below until his mother snatched him up by his britches and the other boy hid in the holly bushes. The walls were nicely painted and the grass of the graveyard was mowed and none of the markers were busted which nonplussed me. But the difference could be logically explained in the darkness and in my drunken perception. Things look much creepier in the night than they do in broad daylight. But I didn’t have time to consider it for the young lady waited patiently for her explanation for a question I didn’t hear her ask.

“I’m sorry, miss,” I apologized. “What’d you say?”

“Is this a 55 Chevrolet Bel-Air?” she returned. “How’s some ragamuffin like you afford a beautiful new car like this?”

“Ragamuffin?”

“No offense, mister. But you are the very definition of a ragamuffin if I ever saw one. Look at your hair. Your clothes. That jacket. If you ain’t a greaser, you’re certainly a ragamuffin. Who comes to church like that? Dressed in black? In a leather jacket?”

“Johnny Cash.”

“Johnny who?” she asked with a painful look of consternation on her face.

“You got to be kidding me, kid. You don’t know Johnny Cash?”

She shook her head no. “Who’s he?”

“Me. I’m Johnny Cash.”

“Well, pleased to meet you, Mr. Cash. I’m Ms. Eleanor Joyce.”

 I nodded. She was still marveling at the car. Her insults were playful and she grinned all the while. She took the fingertip of her white-gloved hand and ran it along the lines of Black Baby while she bit her lip in a sinful kind of way that looked very awkward on her.

“Well,” she replied returning her attention to me. “You coming in to church or ain’t you?”

“Look, I got lost last night and I ended up here. I didn’t pull in here to come to church. I pulled in to sleep it off.”

“Well, you’ve slept it off. And you were lost, but now you’re found. Ain’t you? Get on out of this vehicle and come on inside. The Lord is waitin,’ but He ain’t gonna wait forever. You get caught out here like this on Judgment Day and you’ll be in for it.”

“Oh, no, kid. I got to get back home. I’m not feeling well.”

“Mister! I ain’t no kid. I’m 22 years-old. A grown woman. And the only kind of sickness you got can be cured inside those doors. Now come on!”

She was as relentless as a Doberman. I tried to start the car but the battery was dead from me leaving the door open all night and the headlights on.

“Well, if that ain’t a shame? She ain’t gonna start. The Lord works in mysterious ways. Come on, now! Will give you a jump after church. You can come in with me so you ain’t gotta feel out of place. No excuses! We are warm welcoming folk and they’d all be happy to meet you. Except maybe my father, but never you mind him. He’s the preacher. So he has the Lord’s business to be concerned with this morning anyhow and don’t have time to think over no ragamuffin like you.”

I smiled at her playful attitude and left the keys in the ignition and obliged. What would sitting through a Sunday service hurt me any, I figured. It had been years since I went to church. The last time was to baptize a daughter I don’t see anymore. But Lord, how I miss her if that counts for anything at all. She’d be about six or seven now. Her mom moved to Wyoming or somewhere like that. I didn’t get a forwarding address. 

Eleanor took my hand and walked me across the lot. The cicadas in the trees chanted and the morning was hot and the sun was already proving to be quite merciless. I noticed an array of classic cars in the lot on the other side of the church where everyone else parked beneath a line of mature elm trees, but I didn’t have time to consider them because Eleanor, fastidious in her Christian duty, dragged me along. Her hand felt small and tender beneath the white glove and I walked in the church with her while I tried to fix my hair and tuck in my shirt with my free hand. 

Everyone turned to look and a hundred faces were upon me just as the bell rang and the preacher stood at the pulpit gripping both sides with large pink hands. I thought he looked a lot like Herman Munster, but my eyes were adjusting from the sunlight to the old soft lights inside the church. Eleanor smiled at her father and then at me and nodded at folks as she pulled me through the aisle to the first pew where she had a place saved for herself between an elderly woman who smelled like palmetto cheese and a young wiry boy who looked antsy and uncomfortable in high-water pants and a shirt and tie. He was sweaty from playing outside and had a frog in his pocket which he proudly showed me. He was the same mischievous boy I saw in the holly bushes earlier. They were some kind of family of hers, I gathered, though we were too late for proper introductions. Her father looked down upon us and had a stern look upon his face, but one that soon melted into the cordiality of a smile. Once he got into the Word. I could tell in his big green eyes how much he loved his daughter, but how skeptical he was of me, even though he was a preacher.

The church was warm and the women fanned themselves with accordion-like hand fans of all kinds. The men just took the heat in some show of pride. I was thankful I had left my jacket in the car. I looked around some and marveled at the church’s bones and the curious old-style fashion of the people. I figured they were a purist-type of Baptist. The men were all in suits and had thin neckties. Eleanor elbowed me when she noticed my eye wandering and I Straightened up and smiled at her and looked back at her father. She sat there angelically with that white peacock-feathered hat on her lap. Her hair was perfect and her lips were full and her posture and demeanor were prideful. She was a beautiful young woman who I thought I would have liked to meet years ago. But had I met her years ago, it would have been just like it was with all of my exes because everything I touched died. The sun shined through a stained-glass window that depicted Jesus talking to someone I thought to be Peter who was holding some fish, and Jesus and Peter and those fish painted her face several different hues when she looked over at me, grinning in the assurance of my purpose and her delight in my unanticipated company. I relaxed and listened to her father deliver his fiery and eloquent sermon, which finished with a final reading.

“Our Old Testament scripture for this glorious day comes from Deuteronomy 33:27: The eternal God is thy refuge, and underneath are the everlasting arms: and he shall thrust out the enemy from before thee; and shall say, Destroy them.”

We sang several songs and each time we were to sing, Eleanor grabbed my hand and I rose with her. She sang like a bird. Between songs, she whispered to me. Once to tell me that she is a music teacher, and another time to tell me that there was a picnic afterward and I was welcome to stay, and another time to clarify that I was expected to stay. She held the hymn book for us and glanced over at me to make sure I was singing as I read along in the hymnal, chasing her pretty finger with my eyes across the page. In a short time, I forgot about the heat. The preacher spoke of the unrelenting heat and told the congregation if they didn’t like the warmness of the sanctuary, they are certainly not equipped to endure the unalloyed heat of Hell. So he suggested that we all repent.

After services, we all mingled outside the church and several men and women set up tables in the shade beneath the elm trees near where those classic cars were parked and old women plotted covered dishes, pitchers, and plates of food down as efficiently as a parade of ants. The skirts of the white tablecloths swayed in the relief of a breeze that passed through which cooled the sweat on the skin and made the early afternoon much more agreeable than what it was otherwise. And the kids played ball in a rye field and the older folks sat in lawn chairs and I looked through all the old cars as Eleanor helped the older ladies set up for the afternoon feast before she stopped to introduce me to her father who looked more like Joe DiMaggio than Herman Munster. 

 “Daddy, this is Johnny Cash,” she grinned.

“Johnny, this is my father. Reverend Percival Joyce.”

I looked at Eleanor for a moment and smiled, then at her father who must have got the joke of my name, but he didn’t appear to think it was funny. He extended his hand to me and shook it firmly.

“Pleasure to meet you, Reverend Joyce. It was a wonderful sermon.”

“You can call me Percy, son.”

“Sir.”

He was still shaking my hand when he asked me if I believed it. When I asked him to clarify, he asked me again if I believed it.

“Yes,” I affirmed, not having the feeling that he was referring to his sermon, but of something grander, perhaps of God himself. “I do.”

“Very good,” he smiled, relinquishing my hand. “Let’s eat.”

Over lunch, I stopped questioning anything. I watched the clouds overhead give and take mercy from us. I watched the leaves of trees blow in the cool forgiving breeze that seemed to come on time. And it was as though while sitting there with a plate of good food in my lap, I was forgiven. I was baptized on kindness and wind and sunshine and hope. It was as though the obsessive curiosity of everything simply left me and in its absence, I was content. As if all were pardoned by that long handshake or by Eleanor’s smile, and suddenly I didn’t wish to leave.

“Your father has a strong grip,” I mentioned with a grin to Eleanor.

“Yes. His grip is strong, but the Lord’s is stronger. Before the War, he was a baseball player in the farm leagues. He’ll never speak of it. But he was really good.” She smiled watching him play baseball with a group of children. “Look at him. He’s a boy at heart.”

 I realized in that moment that the Lord hadn’t gripped me that way for a long time because I hadn’t reached out my hand to Him. Eleanor and I sat down on a blanket in the shade of one of those luxurious elms. They were all such wonderful and pleasant people, I was happy to be among them in the fortuitous way as it had been so arranged, as though choreographed by God Himself. My hangover was beaten back by four cobs of sweet corn and smothered in potato salad and drowned in sweet tea. Then Eleanor spoke of herself, which seemed to be a topic of discomfort for her. She told me about her mother who died when she was a little girl and a boyfriend who joined the army and died recently in war.

“He was shot and killed a month after he left. It’s funny in a way,” she chuckled in pity. “Earl was so klutzy and had such bad luck. If there was a bucket, he’d step in it. He was always spilling things and tripping. So I knew when he left, he wasn’t ever going to be coming home. I even gave him a lucky rabbit’s foot and a four-leaf clover. He is the last man who should have gone to war. He wanted to be a doctor.” She then took a deep breath. “War made a spinster of me and a diet for foreign worms of thee. I with no reprieve of my agony. But still in love we are, and forever we shall be. Gloriously. Death does not overcome love, because what lies beneath shan’t conquer what awaits above.”

“You’re a poet?”

She grinned. “I only fiddle, Mr. Cash.”

“Me too.”

Then I relaxed and watched the birds and listened to her sing the beautiful hymnal that we sang earlier in church, “Leaning. Leaning. Leaning on the Everlasting Arms.”

“What a fellowship, what a joy divine, leaning on the everlasting arms; What a blessedness, what a peace is mine, leaning on the everlasting arms. Leaning, leaning, safe and secure from all alarms; leaning, leaning, leaning on the everlasting arms.

O how sweet to walk in this pilgrim way, leaning on the everlasting arms; O how bright the path grows from day to day, leaning on the everlasting arms. Leaning, leaning, safe and secure from all alarms; leaning, leaning, leaning on the everlasting arms.

What have I to dread, what have I to fear, leaning on the everlasting arms? I have blessed peace with my Lord so near, leaning on the everlasting arms. Leaning, leaning, safe and secure from all alarms; leaning, leaning, leaning on the everlasting arms.”

I took a deep breath and she sat there in the quiet. I knew that whatever I said would be a woefully inadequate compliment, but I offered something so she knew how it moved me. “I have never heard anything as beautiful as that.”

“You’re too kind,” she replied.

“It’s the truth. Listening to you sing that song brings me peace.”

“Singing it brings me peace. I am glad my father chose it. He did so because he knows how much I love it. We sing that more than any other hymnal. I have to go help the children with something. You’re welcome to join me.”

“I think I am going to sit here for a few moments and just breathe.

She smiled getting up. “Okay.”

I later joined a group of men and the preacher introduced me to them all as Johnny Cash. No one batted an eye. I watched Eleanor grin at me from across the lawn where she stood with a group of excited kids helping them poke wood sticks into apples to dip into a crockpot of hot caramel. I didn’t feel drunk anymore. I felt at home. More at home than I ever felt. But sometimes good feelings of home and love can be as frightening as bad feelings of loneliness and of being lost. Some of us are more comfortable in being lost, I suppose. Like dogs who run away any chance they get. I am such a person. I realized it then. As much as I wanted to change, I hadn’t. So I smiled to say goodbye to everyone and shook a few hands and walked quickly to my car.

“Wait! You’re just going leave?” she asked quickly walking up behind me.

I opened Black Baby’s door and stood there in the gap for a moment. 

“You don’t have to go. You know. You can stay.”

“I have to, Eleanor.”

“Why?”

“Ah. I just do. This is wonderful. But it’s too good for me. You’re too good for me and too young. I know myself. I don’t – I don’t belong here.” I got in the car and reached for the ignition to turn the key.

“You’re running away, you know? You’re a fish who refuses to be caught. But this is a net you might want to be in. Believe me.”

I turned the key and Black Baby turned over and rumbled awake. I wouldn’t need that jump after all.

“You can stay, Johnny. I’d like it if you did. It’s more glorious than you can imagine. I promise you.”

“I’m sorry, Eleanor. I got to go home.”

“But you are home. Don’t you see?”

“I’ll come back next Sunday. I promise. I really had a wonderful time. And you’re – you’re something, Eleanor. You’re truly wonderful. Thank you. Thank you for everything.”

She shook her head and her mouth shaped in the form of a smile but there was no smile there. She waved goodbye. I drove away before I changed my mind. I could see everyone looking at me. Reverend Joyce waved and I waved back and I slowly rolled by the field where the kids were playing ball in the high grass. The kids that noticed me leave all waved and I honked to say goodbye and caught a glance of Eleanor in the rearview mirror watching me go.

I spent the entire week thinking of that country church and realizing I never knew its name, nor what road it was on. I sat in another bar on a Thursday night and got drunk and thought of driving out just to see it again. I kept seeing Eleanor’s face in the liquor of my glass, and I could hear Percy as though he sat down the bar from me. He was giving a sermon. I wished I hadn’t ever left.

Sunday couldn’t come soon enough and I dressed up for the occasion. I found an appropriate suit at the thrift store and I thought I looked sharp. Like I belonged. I brought flowers for Eleanor and decided I’d ask her to take a ride in Black Baby, with her father’s permission, of course. I wasn’t going to say I was in love with her, as the feeling had been so foreign to me for so long, or unknown to me forever, but if it wasn’t love, than it was something unnamed and undefined which would rival love. 

I expected to have difficulty finding it, but I closed my eyes at several points and followed my instinct. I took a few rights and a left and before I knew it I was there. I pulled into the lot with great anticipation, but there were no cars around the elm trees where they had been before. And once more, the white walls of the church were blistered and the windows were boarded up. And where there was a field with kids playing ball, there was only rye. And there was a long graveyard full of the headstones I had seen the night I was drunk. The only thing that remained the same was the form of the church itself, the chattering of the cicadas in the trees, and the sweltering morning air which would not relent being that there was no merciful breeze. I got out of Black Baby and stood there in the parking lot holding Eleanor’s flowers, wondering desperately if I had dreamt the entire thing, or if my mind was fractured to the point of such aberrations. Do the insane realize they are insane? Had I all that I could stand on this earth? Had I spent all of my sanity or traded it for the comfort of delusions.

Over the chatter of the cicadas I heard a mower rounding the church and I walked over to it and an old man was riding along in shorts and sunglasses and black tennis shoes and socks. He wasn’t wearing a shirt and the ghostly body of a once fit and youthful man had seemingly melted in the sun to the collection of leathery bags of skin. He saw me coming and idled the mower. He used his hand as a visor and squinted at me in a scrutinizing way as I spoke.

“What happened to this church? Where are the people who go here?”

“People? Well, mister, I’m afraid you’re about 60 years too late. Ain’t been no people here since – oh – let’s see – nineteen hundred fifty-six or fifty-seven when Reverend Joyce closed the doors and moved away. His daughter was kilt that year in an automobile accident. Pretty thing, too I was a boy then. It’s for sale though, if you’re lookin’ to buy it. Might cheap. Thought you were one of them realtors.”

I stood there as he pulled away on that puttering mower and was lost again. As quickly as I was found, as strong as that handshake was, I was released and at the mercy of a wave I have rode most of my damn life. Like one of them insects that get bounced across the rye with each breath of life. I walked around the beautiful old church and looked up and saw the stained-glass window I recalled which glowed off Eleanor’s perfect face. But it wasn’t as I recalled it before – Peter and Jesus and some fish. It was Jesus walking on the Sea of Galilee and Peter and Andrew casting a net from their fishing boat. And though I had to read it in reverse from the outside, at the bottom it read, “Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men.”

In the cemetery there were headstones as early as 1804 and as late as 1988. The old ones were closer to the church and the new ones were back further away. Generations of Baptist churchgoers. Husbands. Wives. Children. I walked through them and read all the names aloud. It was as though I was being drawn. And towards the back, there were three modest headstones together that I stood in front of and looked upon reverently. I read the names and I think I stood there for quite a while longer than I knew. Long enough for the sky to turn from blue to orange to pink and to purple. Long enough to hear those cicadas become crickets and to feel that breath of life come upon me.

 Esther Joyce, 

Wife and Mother, 1914-1940

Reverend Percival Joyce, 

Husband and Father, 1912-1988

   Eleanor Joyce, 

Beloved Daughter, 1933-1956 

Some graves are woefully insufficient to a person’s spirit and beauty, but rather they seem to be a fitting testament to their modesty. A few weeks later, I sold Black Baby for 27,000 dollars to someone that had been eyeing her for a while. I took him by surprise when I showed up at his door with the title in my hand and a pen to sign her over. A onetime offer, I said. I hired a real estate agent and took 10,000 and put it down on that old church. I bought an old truck for five and with the other twelve thousand and some savings, I repaired that dilapidated church and turned her back into the church I remembered. My bedroom was in the office behind the sanctuary. I cleaned, polished, and did a lot of woodwork, priding myself in the carpenter I had become by the time it was finished. I planted flowers and trees and mulched the flowerbeds. I brought stones up from the creak and bordered those beds. I pulled the weeds in the parking lot and brought in new gravel. I made a proper baseball field where I remembered those children playing and maintained the lawn and the cemetery. I adorned Eleanor’s family’s graves with red and white rose bushes, coneflowers, and black-eyed susans.

It wasn’t long before I had that old church perfectly restored as I remembered her, only without Eleanor. The final touch was an old piano that was left in the sanctuary. I figured I would get to it last in that it was not the most pressing issue I had, plus, I knew nothing about pianos. I repaired what I could. The wood body of it. Made a new bench seat. Repaired a leg. Sanded and polished it. Then I hired someone to come out on a Saturday and tune it. Then I hired someone to give me piano lessons. And in all my free time, other than when I was sitting on the stoop, drinking sweet tea, and looking out over the rye field that at a certain time of evening turned a brilliant hue of auburn and seemed to melt into the sky. I was so busy with the church that I stopped drinking, realizing I once drank because it was a habit, a way to occupy time or to quell boredom. And I didn’t think it was right for a man to drink in church, whether it was his home or it wasn’t.

I couldn’t take credit for how beautiful it turned out. The antiques that I decorated it with that all seemed to fall in my lap or that I found at flea markets or curio shops that were perfect but ridiculously underpriced. It all came together so seamlessly that I knew that God had a hand in it and that it pleased Him that I repaired His home for it was His home and I was but a tenant. I paid my rent in goodness and in sobriety. In respect and solace. In quiet and reverence. And beneath the Edison bulbs in the pendulous light fixture overhead with the doors and windows open and the white sheer curtains wafting around like dancing ghosts after midnight on some endless July night, I sat there at the piano having played and practiced so many songs for three years. Then I pulled out the sheet music I had found at one of those flea markets a few weeks earlier and I opened it and set it above the keys and played. Slowly. It never sounded as good as it did and I played the opening refrain over and over thinking of her. Slowly. They play it too fast in all the renditions I’ve heard. They play it much too fast. Without the patience that a song like it requires.

And between notes, I heard her. I heard her bare feet tread across the hardwood floor though they hardly made a sound. I heard her breath as she came in with a gust and parted the curtain. I could hear her smile as she walked up behind me and I smiled with her, but I didn’t stop playing for it was the song that conveyed her. I played so that she could sing to me again just as I had bought the church and repaired it so that I might have this moment, to be haunted by her. Spirited by her. Visited by her. Loved by her. Three years of work and tedious piano lessons paid off that July night and she sang as she had that time before, but more softly for there was no other noise but for my gentle strokes of those ivory keys, precisely struck without flaw, for her. But the song ended.

“….Leaning on the everlasting arms.”

I turned and smiled at her. She wore that same white dress. The same hat with the small peacock feather pinned to it.  

“You play lovely,” she said, beaming at me.

“Not as lovely as you sing.”

She looked around and smiled beautifully, her face and eyes full of the amber light of those Edison bulbs. Her mouth agape. Swirling there in the middle of the church on those bare feet wet from a late night or early morning dew. The wind ceased and the sheers on the windows stopped swaying. And at that moment when all was still, it was as though God held His breath.

“They buried me without shoes because seldom did I ever wear them. I have never been a fan of constriction, Mr. Cash. So do pardon my intrusion but that earthen bed is far from emancipation. And I heard the music. It was the music that awoke me.”

“You’re welcome to haunt this chapel,” I joked.

She beamed in gratitude.

“There is no need for a precipitous departure,” I implored. “Or to ever leave. This is your home as well. I did this for you.”

“As I recall once saying to you.”

I shook my head in agreement, noticing that I was also barefoot. “Fair to say that you did.”

“If God pardons me of death and grants me the latitude of such a trespass on life, I will remain. For this, to me, is Heaven.”

          I took her in my arms and kissed her before she had a chance to vanish. I asked her to marry me before she no longer could hear me. But she remained, day after day. Year after year. And so it was, that God favored us.