The Visitation Part 3

She picked up her pen again. "So, do you think this is going anywhere?"

The question made me laugh. "In Antioch?"

She winced and snickered. "Sorry."

"Well, to be fair, I think the people who've had these experiences are hoping it'll lead to something, that somehow it'll change things.

You know this town. Somebody has to get restless eventually."

"But you don't think it'll lead anywhere or develop into anything?" I felt cynical, which saddened me a little. "I've seen it before.

It'll come, it'll go."

She clicked her pen and put it away. "Thanks for your time, Travis. You too, Brett."

"Think you have a story?" I asked.

She stood and had to think a moment before answering. "Well, it's interesting. Maybe that's reason enough to print it."

"Anything interesting is news in this town."

She laughed. "That it is. See you."

"Bye."

Brett Henchle watched her go out the front door, and then told me quietly, "You might be wrong, Travis."

I looked at him, expecting a punch line to reveal he was kidding. There was no punch line, only his troubled eyes boring into me. "What do you mean?"

"I'm not in pain. I'm not religious. I'm not restless. I like my job, I like living here. I didn't make up what I saw today."

That stopped me cold. Brett Henchle saw something? "You?"

"You want to hear about it?" he asked in a traffic ticket tone of voice. He was challenging my cynicism, I could tell.

I gathered my composure, pried my mind open again, and said, "Yeah. Tell me about it."

He glanced around the room, clearly on edge, and then spoke in a lowered voice. "For a while I thought I was going crazy. I was coming back from Spokane on Highway 2, and there was this guy hitchhiking."

Uh-oh.

"I was feeling pretty good, I wasn't in a hurry, so I figured, hey, I'll pick the guy up-if he doesn't mind riding in a squad car. He looked a little weird anyway, so better a cop gives him a ride than some innocent citizen-"

I interrupted. "Hey Brett."

"Hm?"

I held my hand up, just trying to keep the peace as I offered my question. "Did this guy get in the car, ride with you a while, say *Jesus is coming soon,' and then disappear?"

I regretted the question the moment I asked it. He's never going to talk to me again, I thought. I've insulted him, I've- He froze, his face turned pale, and he stared at me as if I'd told him Martians had landed. "How did you know?"

This just couldn't be happening. "I . . . uh . . ."

"Did someone else run into this guy?"

Now we were in a face-off, staring at each other as if each was waiting for the other to crack into a smile, confess the whole thing was a gag, and break the tension. Was Brett trying to outlast me? If so, he was an incredible actor playing a role vastly different from his nature. I finally broke the freeze-up by asking, "You've never heard that story before?"

"What story?"

No. Brett wasn't a Christian; he wasn't part of the culture. I could be reasonably sure he'd never heard that popular rumor that circulated around Christendom every few years.

"Well, we'll, uh, get to that. You say he looked a little weird. What did he look like?"

"Long blond hair, like a hippie, about five-seven, early twenties, wearing a white sweats.h.i.+rt and jeans. He looked a little ghostly- you know, pale and skinny like he was sick. Couldn't have weighed more than 120 pounds. He got into the car, the pa.s.senger seat right next to me, fastened his seat belt, and rode with me for a couple of miles."

"Did he say anything besides . . ."

"He said he was coming to Antioch to visit some friends. He didn't say who. I talked a little bit about the town, the weather, you know, just making conversation, and then he said, right out of the blue, *Jesus is coming soon,' and then-" He took a moment to watch the memory play through his mind. "Out of the corner of my eye, I thought I saw him make a quick movement. I turned and he disappeared. There wasn't any sound or anything. His seat belt was still buckled. He just wasn't there anymore. I slammed on the brakes and pulled over and checked every inch of that car. I looked up the highway, off the shoulder, drove back the way I came. The guy was gone.

"Then I talked to Nancy this afternoon-and listen, I haven't said a thing about this to anyone except you-and she starts telling me about people seeing angels and a crying crucifix and Jesus in the sky." He looked at me intensely. "Now that tells me I'm not crazy, but it also tells me there could be a blond, five-seven suspect in town that I need to question before he pulls this little stunt again."

I couldn't believe I was even having this conversation. "Have you talked to Sally Fordyce?"

"Is she the other person who offered this guy a ride?"

Oh brother. What could I say to that? "No. Brett, the story about the hitchhiker, it's a rumor, a legend."

"Was."

I stared. It happened to him-not to a friend of a friend who told a lady who was aunt to the woman who was married to the man who used to work for the guy who last repeated the tale. It happened to Brett Henchle, the man sitting right across from me. "From what I understand, the man Sally saw had a totally different description."

That news did not cheer him. "Oh great. So there might be two." He thought aloud as if bouncing his theories off me. "He said he was coming here to visit friends. What friends? Who else are they going to play tricks on?" He sniffed in frustration. "You see the problem I'm up against? This whole thing is so religious, it's not going to look good for a cop to be poking around interfering."

Finally I thought of something worthwhile to say. "Brett, I understand the Antioch Ministerial is meeting tomorrow morning to talk about all this. Since it's a religious thing, if anyone is going to know the latest details, the ministers will. Maybe you ought to drop in and find out how extensive this stuff is and if anyone else has seen either one of these . . . whatever they are."

"Are you going?"

G.o.d works in wondrous ways. "Yeah, I'll be there."

I called Kyle when I got home, told him I would go with him to the ministerial meeting, then braced myself. To his credit, he didn't gush all over me as I feared he would. After four months, he was starting to learn.

IMAGINE A TIRED OLD DOG, lying in the road, suddenly finding itself wrapped around the axle of a speeding truck. That's how I felt my first five minutes with Kyle Sherman. I was tired and feeling old, I hadn't shaved, the place was a mess, I was planning on a quiet session of journaling. And suddenly, there he was.

"Praise G.o.d, brother! I'm Kyle Sherman! Just came by to share the love of the Lord!"

His greeting had the same effect on me as that soup kettle they used to bang on to wake us up at summer camp. He was standing on my front porch in brown slacks, tan sport jacket, blue s.h.i.+rt, and Looney Tunes tie, and had a big, gold-edged Bible in his hand. His brown hair was slick with mousse, he was grinning like a Ches.h.i.+re cat, and he was in high gear.

I knew he wasn't a Jehovah's Witness; they always travel in twos and compliment you on your house.

He couldn't be a tax a.s.sessor because he wasn't carrying a clipboard with the plot plan on it.

He wasn't a salesman because he carried no samples.

But like all three, he hadn't called first. He just showed up. I wanted to kill whoever told him where I lived.

"You're the new pastor?" I asked. I wasn't curious. I was amazed.

"Guilty as charged, brother!" He was so jubilant, so on top of it, so young.

I let him in because it was the right thing to do and invited him to have a seat wherever he could find one. He stepped around the model airplane I was working on, dug a man-sized s.p.a.ce in the magazines and newspapers that covered the couch, and had a seat.

"Nice place you have here."

I'd left the pastorate a month before and had not returned to Antioch Mission since. Call me picky, call me a grouch, but I expected Kyle Sherman to know there had to be a reason. The moment he opened his mouth I knew he didn't have a clue.

When I ate dinner at Judy's, n.o.body I met there talked about church. We talked about fis.h.i.+ng, baseball, country music, cars and trucks, and the condition of the roads. We argued about politics and local issues. We even talked about religion and spiritual matters, which I didn't mind, not at all.

But we did not talk about Sunday school attendance, the church van, the outreach program, or the Blessing Barrel. We didn't haggle over the Sunday morning song list or whose job it was to change the sheets in the nursery. We didn't talk about the budget and the offerings or the need for an ongoing children's ministry, or whether we should allow Dee Baylor to fall on the floor every time we prayed for her. Potlucks and men's fellows.h.i.+ps and ladies' Bible studies and the struggling youth program never came up.

But Kyle started right in talking about all that stuff as if I'd asked him for an update. I wouldn't go near the church, so he brought it to me. "The youth group's going to have a lock-in this weekend/Dave White and Brother Norheim showed up for men's prayer breakfast. Is it always just those two?/I'm thinking about painting the van/Bruce Hiddle still smokes. I wonder if he should be on the deacon board?/Emily Kelmer wants us to sing *Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,' but I don't think that's a wors.h.i.+p song/Did you know Jeff Lundgren doesn't want to do the Young Explorers anymore?/How often did you preach on giving?/We need to develop the children's ministry-"

He was out to cover everything. He talked fast, he talked loud, he got more and more excited, and I just sat there trying to gauge if my nerves could last longer than this seeming catharsis. I could feel a lingual tonsil starting to swell up. I began to feel a gnawing pain in my stomach.

Then it came: the one sentence predestined from all eternity for this moment, this place-exactly what it would take to set me off: "Travis, we're going to take this city for Christ!"

"We?!?" My voice came so loud and sudden it made him jump. It also made him stop talking. I leaned forward in my chair, so far I almost stood up. "Now you listen to me." I said it slowly, and I know I sounded downright vicious. "Have you even asked this town if it wants to be taken for Christ? Have you even met the folks down at Judy's or working at Kiley's Hardware or Anderson's Furniture and Appliance and gotten their input? I guarantee you, Kyle, I know some people around here who do not wish to be taken for Christ." He looked like he was about to interrupt, but I didn't give him a chance. "No one . . . has ever . . . taken a city for Christ. Not Paul, not Peter, n.o.body. Not even Christ took a city for Christ."

Now I did stand up, too upset to hold still. "You come cruising into this town throwing that big, glorious claim around as if it were some kind of mandate from the throne of G.o.d, but who's going to do all the work in the real world? I suppose you think everyone in town has his own transportation, so you won't have to organize a car and bus route and deal with people who don't want to come that Sunday but didn't call, or people who aren't ready on time so you have to sit there waiting for them while all the other people on the route are wondering where you are, and everybody ends up getting there late.

"And once you take this town for Christ, what are you going to do with all the kids? Is Judy Milton still breast-feeding Baxter right out in the open during the service?"

"I was going to ask you about that."

"Ah! Aha! That boy's old enough to unb.u.t.ton her blouse himself. Want some more? Of course, babies don't just nurse. They scream too, and there are plenty of mothers out there who are going to sit there with that kid and let him drown out your sermon- during the most important part, I might add. You might ask them to take the kid out, and some might, but they'll be back with the same kid the next week. Either that, or they'll get huffy and not come back at all.

"Which brings me to the nursery sign-up sheet. Keep that puppy circulating or somebody's going to get stuck in there doing the job alone and forever while all the parents dump their kids on them. Same goes for children's ministry. Be careful you don't find anyone too good at it, because they'll get stuck with the job until they burn out. And then the parents will start to mutter about who's going to take charge of the kids, and maybe some of them will step forward to do something about it, and some of them will just go elsewhere.

"Youth ministry? It's the greatest, but don't you dare make a mistake. Because after you've done anything and everything to disciple those kids, it's your mistakes the parents will tell you about.

"How's your car running? Once you take this town for Christ you're going to have to visit every person, every family, until you run yourself ragged and your wife starts to complain that you're never home. You'll be so busy visiting that folks will start complaining that you never come to visit.

"In the meantime, you'll always have a contingent in the church that wants to dance in the aisles and fall on the floor and have battles of the prophets and insist that leg lengthening services are the answer to everything, and if you try to bring some balance to all that stuff they'll start their own faction and accuse you of *quenching the Spirit.'

"When you take this town for Christ you're going to get all this stuff with it. It's all going to be right in your lap."

By now I was thinking I'd better stop before I outtalked the young man I thought talked too much. I took a breath. "Pastor Kyle Sherman, dreams and goals in ministry are fine and good, but spare me this *take the town for Christ' stuff. I've been taking as much of this town as wants to go for the past fifteen years. I've been there, done that, got the tee s.h.i.+rt, and the town and I are sick of it."

He looked up at me from the couch. His face seemed so different, so tranquil, when his mouth wasn't moving. "You seem bitter."

Well, I could let this young buck start counseling me or I could get back to my journaling. "Thank you for coming to visit. I'm pretty tired." I moved toward the door, and to his credit, he followed my cue.

THUS ENDED MY FIRST MEETING with Kyle Sherman. I did not go out of my way to encounter him again, but it happened on several occasions anyway, either by G.o.d's hand or by Kyle's. As I've mentioned before, Kyle has no fear of thin ice.

That's one reason-among the others-that I accepted his invitation to go with him to the next morning's ministerial meeting. It was the first time I'd taken him up on any invitation to do anything, but I knew those ministers. If Kyle stepped out on thin ice this time, he was sure to break through, and there were sharks waiting below to eat him alive.

3.

KYLE PICKED ME UP a little before ten the next morning and we rode together. In a town the size of Antioch there isn't much time to discuss anything while on the way somewhere, so I found myself talking fast.

"Morgan Elliott's the only female minister. She used to copastor the Methodist church with her husband, Gabe, but he was killed in a car wreck three years ago. Nice gal. I wouldn't call her a liberal, but she's definitely not a fundamentalist, either.

"Paul Daley's a kidder, and he likes being Episcopalian as much as you like being Pentecostal. He'd genuflect at a light pole if it had a cross piece on it.

"Al Vendetti is as Catholic as the Pope himself. His father was Catholic, his father's father was Catholic, his oldest sister is a nun in Philadelphia. I got into a religious argument with him once and he finished it in Latin. But listen, you respect him and he'll respect you. You get yourself into a sc.r.a.pe he'll be the first one there, and besides that, he plays a mean first base on the softball team.

"Bob Fisher's Southern Baptist, so he's sound and solid. Just don't get into a doctrinal dispute with him. He doesn't like being disagreed with."

There was no more time. We had arrived at Our Lady of the Fields.

Thanks to the underground spring that had undermined the old church, Our Lady of the Fields now had one of the newest buildings in town. It was sand-colored brick, traditional with its tall spire and arched, stained-gla.s.s windows. It sat on a solid foundation ideally located on the main thoroughfare through town. Father Al always posted the t.i.tle of his sermon on the illuminated, covered sign that sat in the front yard.

As Kyle pulled into the parking lot, I recognized some of the cars already sitting there. "That's Morgan Elliott's Jeep Cherokee. And I think that Ford belongs to Sid Maher, the Lutheran pastor." There were plenty of other cars, including Nancy Barrons's Volvo and Brett Henchle's squad car. This meeting of the Antioch Ministerial was going to be unlike all the others: well attended. I kept telling myself I was only a visitor now, but that didn't take away the tremors deep inside me.

We walked along the sidewalk toward the front door.

"I haven't been in too many Catholic churches," Kyle said quietly.

"I've only been here once, for a funeral," I admitted. "I don't know that the ministerial's ever met here. But Kyle . . ." I stopped, he stopped. I had to get this said before we went in. "I'm never going to tell you to compromise your convictions. But remember what the Bible says about being sly as a serpent and harmless as a dove."

He wasn't quite getting my message, I could tell. He gave me a suspicious look. "What do you mean?"

"I mean . . ." Suddenly I found it hard to form an answer with him looking at me like that. "I mean, there's a time to speak out and there's a time to just listen and, you know, stay cool."

"Stay cool?"

Something else came to mind. "With this bunch, it's easy to get into a discussion that just goes around in circles, and take it from me, if you really want to go around in circles, it's best to find a merry-go-round somewhere, you follow me?"

"A merry-go-round." Now the look in his eyes had to be something he normally reserved for Mormons at his front door.

"Think of it as two gravel trucks going opposite directions on a one-way street. Sure, one of them is wrong, but both of them are going to get smashed when they hit, right?"