Chapter Four: Pastor Frank

“The end of the world is nigh!” 

Pastor Frank pounds his fist on the lectern that has long served as his pulpit, making the stand tremble. Then pauses, watching for that look they get—rapt; a little terrified; but, much more than that, elated, ready, present—which is the satisfaction that has kept him coming back to Clarkdale’s bare-bones Community Hall Sunday after Sunday… How many Sundays now? 

Just look at this place. Linoleum floor, fluorescent lights, irregular rows of rusted out folding chairs, dust on the window panes, dust on everything, even seeming to settle in the minds of his parishioners as he speaks. 

The air conditioning’s roaring and he’s roaring to be the louder. Outside it’s 110 degrees again, each grain of the desert sand, each red rock a hot coal, roasting the day, the town, the human race. 

“The fire is already here!” 

They nod. 

“The floods are coming!” 

It’s not hard to believe these are the End of Days. Frank surveys the faces of his flock—his Wanderers, he calls them. It’s been standing room only in the Hall for years, but Frank is a good shepherd, he knows each one. And each, he knows, teeters on the edge of a kind of precipice.

“The troubles you have already known—” He thinks of Gregory Oz’s third strike, of Ben Horvath’s Stage Four, of Nancy Hernandez’s seven miscarriages. “—these troubles are but the beginning of Trouble. Next come the quakes, the wars, the famine. Harken to Matthew. He forewarns us: ‘These are the pangs of distress! Nation will rise against nation and kingdom against kingdom. Many will stumble and betray one another and hate one another. False prophets will rise up and mislead many. There will be lawlessness in the land, like a second pestilence. And this will be the great tribulation, such as has not been been seen before, nor will be seen again.’ Hear his warning! ‘No flesh will be saved unless these days are cut short!’” 

Frank is riffing, reciting verse from memory, certainly paraphrasing. He used to write his sermons out by hand, used to plan them down to the last Amen. Back when he’d first founded the The Church in the Wilderness. When he was still working to free himself from the habits of Father Kilpatrick. Now he can’t remember the last time he so much as jotted down a topic before bursting through the double doors in his Sunday black—the same jeans and button down he wears the rest of the week, to be honest, the same black cowboy boots, because you make the rules when you make the Church—charging into this rented house of worship, proclaiming, “Life is a Wilderness!” 

It’s the same subject every week, anyway. Doom! 

They eat up doom. Maybe because Armageddon is worse than their own misfortunes. Maybe because their own misfortunes feel so much like Armageddon. Plus, because the Bible has a way of making woe sound glorious, of suggesting weakness is a strength. It’s heroic to be David! Honorable to be Job. If you’re down on your luck, you only need page through the old Book of stories to find you are not alone. 

Which is the gift Frank gives his Wanderers each week, the assurance: “You are not alone!”

Assurance that their Earthly sufferings are, in fact, a gift from God. 

“The Lord is watching over you. He loves you. He brings down Trouble upon your heads with Intention, that—”

But before Frank can say the purpose trouble serves (Trouble is the trial by which, through your endurance of it, you may prove your love for Him.), there’s a rude knock at the door. Three loud raps, kind of shockingly loud, that pivot the whole attention of the room to the growing shaft of light through which, along with a breath of oven air, steps the raggedy beanpole figure of Ed Wheeler, Man of La Mancha gaunt, plumber by day and drunk by dusk, father at court-appointed hours only, and an irregular churchgoer at best. 

Frank’s first-blush annoyance with the disturbance dissolves into a halo of pleasure. That this frequent holdout has been inspired to attend! Tardy, but present; call it a win. His Wanderers, he knows, are waiting for his reaction to pass their own judgment; he must make the right example of Ed, balance his disapproval with encouragement, first scold, then welcome in. 

“Ed,” he says, “now, Edward, hear the word of our Lord: ‘there is an appointed time for everything, a time for all activities under the heavens.’ And the appointed time to arrive for this service was,” he makes a show of holding his wrist high, though there’s no watch on it, “twelve minutes ago. You’re late! Do you desire to make the Lord question your devotion? You cannot come to Him when it suits you, when it’s easy, without discipline, without sacrifice.

“You’ve erred, Ed. But you stand before us. Mark that, also. We go astray, yet, time and again, He leads us back to His embrace. Therefore, come join us. The Lord is going to forgive you. He sees—” 

“Not here for the service, Frank.” Ed lets the door slam, rattles the tool chest he’s carrying. Rattles Frank’s resolute calm. “Got a call about the shitter.” 

The Ladies of Propriety, Frank’s nickname for the grandmothers who sit, religiously, in his front row dressed in a Sunday Best fit for Easter service, make their disapproval known, turning and tsk’ing, but Frank figures it’s best to brush past this profanity. He reminds Ed today is the day of rest. 

“Can’t all of us be resting, Frank. Not when duty calls.” Ed actually winks, and more than a few stifled snickers break loose from the cheap seats.

“Pastor Frank, if you don’t mind, Ed. Surely the work can wait until our service has concluded. Don’t you think? Why don’t you take a seat? Take this opportunity to reacquaint yourself with the Good Lord’s word. Consider, that call you got might have come from above, might have brought you here, at this hour, on this day, not by accident, not in error, but with divine Intention.”

“Don’t think so, Frank. Call came from Miss Millie.” Millicent Thrush, the timid but meticulous creature tasked with the Hall’s maintenance and scheduling, seated now in Frank’s third row and blushing furiously, shakes her head to suggest there might be more to the story. “Message she left said SOS.” Ed is advancing down the aisle as he speaks. “All them weavers was too much for the system, I guess.”

Here Frank’s flock betrays him utterly and laughs. Even one of the Ladies! Is he losing his touch? Is Doom loosing its terror? Never mind that he doesn’t believe; they’re supposed to believe! What, a joke walks into the room and the End of the World just slips their minds? 

This wouldn’t be happening, he considers as he fixes a mask of impassivity over his heart, if he’d built a proper church, as he briefly considered doing. By dint of their many misfortunes, his Wanderers’ tithes have always been modest. But, over the years and with the expansion of the flock, the church funds have accumulated. Indeed, he has amassed the pretty penny he dreamed of when he first hatched this scheme and headed west. 

When he decided not to cut and run, decided to stay and take seriously the joke of a congregation he’d founded, he’d had the plans drawn up. The building would be his secret symbol. Not a monument to the Glory of God, as it appeared, but a sign of his commitment to them, these hapless, lonely, earth-bound bodies—his flock, whose blind devotion, whose innocent trust, had put to shame his craven plot, impelled him to recant his cynical thoughts, and, as watching over their welfare became his new mission—not to devour but guard over these sheep—had become, in a twist of sweet irony that made him smile, something quite like God: his new reason for being.

As befits a god, he thought, he would honor them with a spire and stained glass. But with the architect’s blueprints unrolled before him, as he imagined his scrappy band of misfits filing down the marble aisle, lining polished oak pews, raising their eyes to the frescoed windows, he understood it would be a mistake.

Because, wasn’t it the sense they got, piling into this dingy, hot Hall, of coming to Him by any means; the sense of being what he called them, Wanderers in Wilderness, that granted and sustained their faith? Beauty and order and comfort could only ruin the illusion. He’d set aside the plans and left the cash in the account, calling it their rainy day fund. 

It had been the right choice to sustain their faith. But if he had built that immaculate hall Ed Wheeler wouldn’t be cutting through the rows now, “‘scuse me, pardon me,” stepping on toes, stealing the show, angling awkwardly to his destination, then tossing off a cute salute before disappearing into the Ladies’. 

Leaving Frank faced with his flock and a question: How will he win his Wanderers back? How weave this interruption into his sermon, as if nothing can trouble the Lord? As if everything proves His point?

He decides: they want comedy? He’ll give them comedy.

“Did you doubt me when I spoke of the Trials?! You cannot doubt me now!” 

They laugh, as he intended. They chuckle, a quieter, more appreciative sound than the one Ed’s antics elicited. 

Frank smiles, then pivots. “They will not be, all, so harmless! So easily overcome. In the End, they will not be overcome at all.” 

And just like that, they’re back on track to Armageddon. 

How did this become his life? As he resumes his sermon over the sound of Ed rattling around in the stalls, Frank finds himself questioning more than just his choice not to build a church. Questioning every choice he’s made. Sigh! He sighs. Not physically, but in his soul. Or, wherever. The place he used to confuse for some eternal essence. He wasn’t expecting this. Ed’s interruption, for one, but especially, what it’s making him feel. Which is, let’s face it, desolation. Like the god damn desert outside. Like, he’s got nothing. Or, he’s got some sweet flowering potential locked inside, there in that not-soul, but it’s never going to rain. He can’t make it. So, he’ll never feel it: bloom. Never see his labors’ fruit. 

He’s on auto-pilot, describing the End of Days and their attendant horrors, which he could certainly do in his sleep, and meanwhile he’s thinking, looking out at this roomful of folks, trusting and tortured, his Wanderers, his, that they are Ed Wheelers, every one of them. Who can’t, or won’t, get their shit together. In spite of the promise of their presence here, their attendance, the attention they seem to pay to his instruction, when they go out, every other day of the week, into the world, to live their lives, they just keep fucking it up.

It’s a bummer that this bums him out. When he rolled into town in his Volvo wagon, eight years ago and counting; when he descended, like a coyote down from the mountains, skulking into this sleepy town with his priestly scant collection of earthly goods and a mean dream of getting more, he couldn’t have imagined such an outcome. Caring so much for the people he’d come to fleece? 

“Do you know what this is?” cutting short his catalogue of catastrophes, he puts the question to them.

They are silent, waiting for his answer. And isn’t that the problem? They are always waiting to be told what’s true; then they gobble up his lies. Of course, he’d hope to foster such a dependance. This had been his whole design. To part them from their good sense first, however much they had, then to part them from their cash. But now, now that he wants to help them, their meekness prevents him. 

“Do you know what this is?!” he says again, shouts, wishing someone would feel as cut-loose as he does, would break free from propriety and call out an answer. But, they wait. 

So, he tells them: “We have come to a Crisis!” 

Faith is wonderful thing. Perhaps it’s the best thing of all. When you believe—in whatever you believe in—you wear an armor no word or deed can penetrate. But where does this armor come from? It can’t be bought. It can’t even be forged. Instead, it is bestowed. By whom or what? And for what reason? For any reason? What’s reason got to do with it?

Frank had been born with his first faith, granted that protection along with his consciousness. As a child, he could recall no time before he trusted in the truth of his conviction, nor could he imagine the day when it would desert him. But he understood, from what he saw of those around him—his family, his classmates, even too many members of the clergy—that the certainty he experienced was rare. His parents’ churchgoing was a matter of course, a matter of culture and community, but outside of Saint Mary’s, the other six days of the week, they were not thinking of the Lord. 

This difference made Frank feel proud. Feel chosen. And he took his election seriously. Took every opportunity to prove his devotion. Served as an alter boy and a chorister and a lector, joined summer missions to Belize and Brazil. 

And because of the constancy of his faith, his was an easy road to priesthood. Doubt, about which he learned to council his parishioners with talking points borrowed from seminary courses, was to him an academic concern. Until—

“A Crisis,” he tells the Wanderers, “is a turning point. A tipping point. Whether you like it or not! A Crisis isn’t polite. It doesn’t knock at the door, wait for your invitation in. It rides a wrecking ball through your walls. And, whoops! There goes everything you called your life. Except you. You’re still here, and you have to face it.” 

Well does he know of what he speaks. Well does he remember the sound of splintering. The wreckage everywhere he turned. 

It had been a beautiful day. Of course it had. Late spring, late morning, sitting on a bench in Depot Park, the farmers’ market at his back, the slow commotion of community, his Gill’s grinder ready on his lap, his Saturday indulgence. He was saying a quiet Grace, feeling there was nothing wrong with the world, when she, walking behind him, the woman he never saw but certainly heard, said—and it could have been to him or herself or someone walking with her—“Ain’t that the way it is?”

He knew she was speaking of the sculpture to their left, Patrick Farrow’s “Leash,” atop a long rectangle of verde marble, on one end stood a parking meter, on the other crouched a dog—maybe a pointer or a ridgeback or a Weimaraner, large and lean—collard, straining with all its might against the invisible leash tethering it to the meter. 

Kind of unpleasant for a piece of public art, was all he’d thought when he first saw it, when he first arrived in Rutland. But at the woman’s prompting he considered it again. Ain’t that the way it is? What’s your meter? What’s your leash? That was one way to think of the human experience. It wasn’t even that he thought it was wrong. But he did think he was exempt. Saved from such degradation by his devotion. Until—he looked again and felt it. Felt for the collar around his own neck. Felt the tether. Felt he couldn’t breathe. His devotion was the leash! 

What came next wasn’t even doubt. It was an opposite certainty. In place of God is all—God is naught. A light snuffed out. An end that, mercilessly, left him still alive. 

“An ending that precedes The End, that’s what a Crisis is. That is what we face!” 

He’d stood right up, he’d walked right out. He’d packed all his earthly possessions into the back of the wagon that belonged to the Church. Without a word to Bishop Abott. Without a word to anyone. 

He’d just started driving, he hadn’t had a plan. Driving, with every furious thought he’d never had swarming through his mind. Thinking, above all: faith is a terrible thing. Probably it’s the worst thing of all. Because, as easily as it is given, it’s gone. And who are you now? And which way is up? And what the fuck is anything? 

It’s happening again. Meaning falters. Purpose skitters off its tracks. He recognizes the signs that blindsided him eight years ago. And his first reaction is to brace himself. Prepare to be cut loose, made to begin again, forced to start from scratch. He starts to mourn: The futility of his words! The waste of his life! The big fat nothing of it all! 

But his mind or his spirit or his, dare he say, soul surprises him. It says, No. Last time, first Crisis, he got swept away. But this time? He’s not going down, he won’t be dragged under, not without a fight. 

Is that what the last eight years have taught him? Is that how living out in the open, without the shelter of the idea of God, has changed him? 

With a measure more of control than he began this rant he tells them, “Listen! I know you work hard to live in the Light of the Lord. To hear Him when He speaks. To see the signs He is showing you. You have been good sheep to the almighty Shepherd. He loves you not because you are perfect but because you are devoted. That is why he has led you here. With a Purpose! That is why he has given you this Crisis. Not to pain you. To prepare you! For you are not ready to face the End. And by this Trial he will make you ready.” 

Frank thought the End of the World was a useful idea. That its terror and extremity would inspire something in his Flock. Yes, dependence was his first goal. But as he came to care about their lives, about improving them, he assumed he could turn the threat of Armageddon into a rallying cry. Doesn’t a ticking clock demand a response? 

But the evidence is irrefutable now: his threat didn’t activate, it pacified. All his thundering rhetoric? Was a lullaby to them. 

Maybe if he’d taken more time to consider it, instead of letting his emotion write the sermon. Letting his love of their attention become his North Star. Maybe it would have been obvious, as it now seems: a somewhat distant but certain Doom? What reason would that promise give anyone to change their lives? 

The question that follows is: what would accomplish it? He’d like this new idea, of the Crisis, to be different. He’s told them it’s different. But, so what? It’s still only an idea. And what they need is reality. Not the promise of a Crisis, but a Crisis underway. Isn’t this, after all, the thing that changed him? The rock bottom, the pitch black of disillusionment. Isn’t this what’s changing him now, even as he speaks?

But how can he bring it about? How break the spell that he himself cast? He can’t bus them to Rutland, Vermont and ask them to look at a statue of a dog and feel the same suffocation he felt. But—the idea that comes to him is so comical he nearly laughs—what if he left? Like God left him, he can vanish on them. He can do exactly what he once intended, cash out their rainy day fund and ride off into the sunset. Make visible the leash that has held them in place. He has been their tether. He can be their Crisis, too. 

If you love them, set them free. The silly old line occurs to him. And it’s the first time he names this thing he feels for the roomful of fools before him. These deadbeats, these burnouts, these addicts, these losers. He fucking loves them. More fiercely than he ever loved God.

A moment ago he almost laughed, but now tears threaten his composure. Because, he sees how it’s true, though there’s no guarantee: this plan is his only hope of giving the Wanderers, finally, what they need. He understands: this sermon has to be his last. 

It’s been a real hodgepodge. But now, as any ending will do, this one sharpens his attention. He has to leave them. But he wants to leave them with something, with a good idea that could possibly guide them after he cannot. 

“Here’s the good news,” he tells them, “a Crisis is a choice. When you think you have lost everything, think again. In place of what was once your life, you have been given a chance. A chance such as will not come at the End, which is final. A chance to change what yet remains, a chance to change yourself. So, the question is: will you take it?”

They look worried. And is it this new responsibility that overwhelms them? Or are they more concerned about the sound of muffled curses coming from the Ladies’, of metal colliding against metal? Is that what’s drawn their features low?

He raises his voice. “Do not be cast down! I say none of this to scare you. I say it to prepare you. Hear me! A Crisis is not cause for fear—or, only appropriate fear. It is not cause for grief—or, only appropriate grief. For all things on Earth are by the Lord’s design. Be emboldened by this Truth! Recognize: what looks like devastation is His Love! Take joy in the challenge that lies before you! Take heart, and I will tell you the secret of change: you do not need to know where you are going. All you need is the star that will guide you. Find that star, and you can never go astray. Do not look at this wreckage all around you and despair. Look up! Find your point of light. Why do you think there are so many? There is one for each of you! Your guide, your Mission. The work that you must do, that you alone can do. Your Mission! Which will banish every doubt, which will conquer every fear. And all you must do to know it is: pray. Ask the Lord, What would you have me do? and He will tell you. And when His Answer comes you will know it by the soaring of your soul.”

He is soaring himself now, flying high, feeling his power and their attention, wondering if maybe he ought to stick around after all, see how this new rhetoric of Crisis and Mission serves them. Could his words alone suffice? Now that he’s named this antidote to the Doom. Do something! Save something. He doesn’t want to get too specific, wants to leave them room to make the Mission fit their lives, but he knows—from his own life he knows—“Only once you have saved something other than yourself, saved someone, will the Lord consider—Now what?!”

Upstaged again. Ed has emerged from the Ladies’, a wrench in each hand, and he’s drenched, he’s dripping, and he’s grinning. He’s got everyone’s attention. He leans in the doorframe and savors the spotlight for a beat. 

“Seems we’ve got what you might call a bit of a crisis unfolding over in here, your Pastor-ship. I’d recommend you clear the hall. Unless the Lord can staunch this flood.” 

The Wanderers do not wait for his permission. As one they rise, and as quickly the room is cleared. 

Frank stands alone at the lectern, staring at where they were but are are no longer. His God, gone again. He sighs, audibly now that there is no one to hear him. His shoulders slump. Who will he be next? He can’t begin to contemplate it.

“Sorry about that, Frank.” 

He’s forgotten about Ed, who still lounges in the doorframe, apparently in no rush to face his Crisis. And who could blame him?

“That’s fine, Edward,” Frank says. “I had to stop talking sometime.”