Part Three of Three

This is the final piece of a three-part story. For those keeping score, this story takes place in 1999 when Foy Davis was married and the rector of a small Episcopal church in San Antonio.

Part one.

Part Two

The alarm went off at 4:30 am on Sunday morning. Foy was already awake, laying on his back staring up into the darkness and listening to the gentle sound of the ceiling fan. He flopped his right arm onto the nightstand and fumbled around for the clock. He turned it off and sat on the side of the bed. A feeling of sorrow and dread came over him. It was a heavy feeling. He tilted his head back and relaxed his jaw so that his mouth popped open. He exhaled slowly, blowing air from his lungs with an audible sound.

He shuffled into the bathroom and got in the shower. He moved through the motions of bathing with robotic precision. His face was completely slack and showed no emotion. He shaved, dressed, and stooped to tie the laces on his shoes. The last pull on the laces always marked a strange transition.

It’s time to be thinking right. It’s time to get where you need to be.

Foy stood in the door of the bathroom, a dark figure against the light behind him. Light spilled onto the lower half of the bed. His eyes followed a series of lumps that resembled a small mountain range, leading up out of the light, bending and turning to end in a mass of hair pressed into a pillow. He watched Jenny in silence. She breathed in silently but exhaled with a heaving force, each breath like a deep sigh. She was huddled in a fetal position with her back toward the center of the bed. Foy felt a momentary flash of emotion because she looked so child-like. But then her posture made him think that she was trying to get as far away from him as possible, even in her sleep. He quickly left the bedroom. Those thoughts weren’t getting him where he needed to be.

The house was dark and quiet. He felt his way through the living room furniture and into the kitchen. He opened the door to the refrigerator, and the light made him squint. He scanned the contents, subconsciously hoping for some unexpected treat to be there. Then he realized that he wasn’t hungry, and he didn’t even know why he had opened the refrigerator in the first place. He closed the door, picked up his briefcase, and left the house. Summer was passing and the air was surprisingly cool for San Antonio. Orion was up in the early morning, along with all the winter constellations. He stared at them and felt himself relax. The stars were his silent, watching friends. Never changing. Neither his birth nor his death, not his life, his sorrow, or his joy would move them. This was religion in its oldest and purest form. No rules. Just this reality: you are very small and insignificant. He nodded briefly at the stars, finding a strange pleasure in their total disregard of his life. This primitive act of worship helped him. It got him a little closer to where he needed to be.

“It’s going to be okay,” he said out loud.

As he pulled his car onto the street, he turned on the radio. One of the stations had an early morning infomercial on. They were selling some herbal pills that were supposed to help your joints. He listened but didn’t pay much attention. He just liked the voices in the background. He drove through the dark streets until he turned into the parking lot of the church. He shut off the engine, and the voices from the radio died along with the the motor. The sound of his car door closing was so harsh in the quiet cool of early morning that he winced. His shoes crunched through loose bits of gravel and asphalt as he walked toward the church. When he stepped onto the sidewalk the sound of his footsteps grew softer. He fumbled briefly with his keys and put one into the lock of an old wooden door that opened directly into the back of the sanctuary. It was not a door that many people used, but the church was so old that ministers coming and going a few times a week had worn the door over many years. The wood and the hinges and the stone frame had been anchored together for so long that they seemed fused into one substance. The door was heavy. He pushed it inward, and the smell of an old church building hit him. A slightly musty smell mixed with wood and stone and aging fabric and a thousand other things. Foy paused and drew the smell into his nose deliberately. He liked the smell, and it got him another step closer to where he needed to be. For a moment he felt like a shaman priest of old, standing in the darkness amidst the pleasing odor of ancient things. The tiny glow from the Christ candle was the only visible light. It throbbed gently casting a faint pattern on the back wall. Foy turned on a light that shone down from the rafters onto the pulpit area. He never turned on all the lights in the sanctuary at once. The very idea of a sudden burst of light in this place was horrifying to him. Even this small amount of light was bad. The magic was broken.

“Get busy, hired man,” the lights seemed to say. “You have work to do, and you are nowhere near the place you need to be.”

Foy made a rumbling sound in his throat as a general expression of displeasure.

He walked down the center aisle toward the back of the church, looking right and left between the pews. He put a few hymnals and Books of Common Prayer back into their holders and picked up a few sheets of discarded paper. He checked the bathrooms in the foyer to make sure they were clean. Then he headed through the hall back to his office. He made some final changes to the order of worship and printed it. He stood by the printer looking at the first copy of the order of worship while the rest of the pages shot out with a rhythmic noise. He folded each one in half on a large work table near Judy’s desk. He folded paper with the casual ease of a task worked deep into muscle memory over many years. When the entire stack was folded, he bounced it on the table a few times to bring the sheets in line, then laid them flat on the table. He pressed the heels of his hands down on the folded side, forcing a perfect crease into the entire stack. Then he got his sermon notes from his office and headed back to the sanctuary. He put the orders of worship on a table in the foyer.

These small tasks had driven away most of his emotions. It felt good to feel nothing. Now he could turn his full attention to the sermon, which was the only thing he felt he could control on a Sunday morning. He went up the steps to the platform and stood in the pulpit. He looked out into the pews, but it was too dark. The lights in the sanctuary had a dimmer switch. Foy raised the lights just enough so he could see the pews. But the room was still dim enough to feel soft. Everything needed to be soft in the beginning. That helped him get where he needed to be.

Standing behind the pulpit, he breathed deeply and began his sermon.

“Today’s text is a wonderful story from the gospels. If you’ve been in church for many years, you’ll recognize it of course. And like all the gospel stories, it brings out the humanity of the disciples with a wonderful and simple clarity. For they struggled with the same things we struggle with. In this case they were wondering how many times we should forgive people who constantly hurt us. And that is a very real question, especially for those of us who have been hurt and wounded and find ourselves both desiring love and friendship, but also afraid of the inevitable pain that comes with it.”

Foy stopped speaking and looked out at the pews, thinking intently. He bent his head and wrote on his sermon notes. He pulled a clean sheet of paper from a stack he kept behind the pulpit and wrote more things there. He spoke and wrote and walked back and forth, mumbling to himself and occasionally speaking aloud to an imaginary congregation. He worked his way through the entire sermon. Pausing and writing and changing and memorizing. Eventually the light of dawn shone through the windows, revealing dust in the air and details of the room. The clock on the back wall was now visible. It was 7:55.

Foy had been completely lost in his sermon preparation. Lost in the talking and thinking and performing of it. The peace of that absolute focus had gotten him almost to the place where he needed to be. Sorrow was gone; so was fear. What could be done was done. What could not be done was left undone. There was a certain peace that came with accepting this.

He strode purposefully back to his office and made changes to his sermon notes on the computer, printed a fresh copy, and put it between the pages of his Bible, marking the location of the text.

“It is finished,” he said with an audible sigh of relief. A smile crept onto his face. He was just about where he needed to be.

Foy sat in his office, waiting for the arrival of the early comers. He took deep breaths and enjoyed the silence. The clock on his desk ticked away. Outside he could hear cars driving by as the world came alive. His breathing grew soft and regular. He lost all feeling in his hands and body as he floated in a prayer-like state. He closed one eye and held his thumb in front of his face until it blocked his view of the clock. He opened that eye and shut the other one, watching his thumb jump to the left. The clock said 8:30. He did this a number of times, watching his thumb jump back and forth. Suddenly he stood up and ran to the sanctuary. He walked among the pews until he found his Nerf football laying on the floor where it had landed on Friday. He threw it through the open door at the back.

“Yes, Johnny Unitas. Johnny U.”

Foy ran up the center aisle and into the foyer. He scooped up the ball and tucked it under his arm. He dodged back and forth as he ran down the hall and burst through the door to the office area. He feinted hard to the left and then ran by Judy’s desk, swiveling his hips away as if it were trying to tackle him. He slowed down and trotted into his office. He stood there, breathing hard and smiling. He dropped the football to the floor and sat back down. The words of the text came to him and he spoke them aloud.

“How many times shall you forgive your brother? Not seven times, I say, but seventy times seven.”

He spoke the text again, but this time the words were different, and he did not know where they came from.

“How many times can you bind the strong man and plunder his house? Seven times? No, but I say to you, seventy times seven and every Sunday morning until the end of the ages.”

Foy heard the main door to the church open. There were faint voices and rustling people noises.

It’s probably the Camerons.

He listened and caught the sound of the Cameron children fighting over something. Foy grabbed a handful of hard candy from a box near his desk and stuffed it into his pocket. He walked out of the office area and around a corner. As he turned, a smile appeared on his face. He held out his arms and Hannah Cameron came running to him. She wrapped her arms around his knees and looked up. Foy pulled a piece of candy from his pocket and gave it to her. Steven was older and more subdued, but he wanted the candy too. He gave Foy a hug and was rewarded with a piece.

Doris Cameron saw him and said, “Good morning.”

Foy watched her face intently. Her good morning seemed a little forced to him. He knew It was hard to get children dressed and off to church, especially for a single mom.

Foy put his arms around her arms and gave her a respectful, sideways hug.

“I am SO glad to see you this morning,” he said.

And as far as he could tell, he really was.

rlp